Jon Varner's demos

This is the songheap!

I used to be in the Detainees, Syntax Error, the Tremors, the Red Squares, and the Brand New Broken Homes. Up until 2003, these were songs rejected by, or never submitted to, those bands. The more recent songs are products of my current goofing around.

I'm On Auto (August 2005)
This is the second song I've written since moving to Chicago, but the first I've finished. Sound inspired by Syntax Error, singing inspired by Gary Numan, lyrics inspired by current events.

L'Anamour (January 2004)
Local drone-rockers Tone Rodent inspired me to try out some production tricks. Serge Gainsbourg's "L'Anamour" seemed like good fodder for the Jesus & Mary Chain treatment. Unfortunately, since I don't know French, this meant I'd have to spend more time learning how to sing it than actually recording it. The headphones I used while mixing have quite a bass boost, so it came out much thinner than I wanted. It still turned out pretty good, though, despite my painfully amateurish drum fills.

Antonio Diavolo (aka Automata) (December 2002)
This was my attempt to write a Wire rip-off (Chairs Missing era). By the end of 2002, the Tremors were trying to get our CD wrapped up. We were so sick of hearing those songs and were trying to get away from the power pop stuff. In retrospect, our best songs were the poppiest ones. We practiced this a few times and Andy came up with a good complementary vocal part, but then he had to go to Baghdad. As always, my vocals are the weakest aspect of the demo. Name the drum sample and win a prize!

Dog Chorus (March 2002)
Here's a song I've had around for a little while. At first, it was an attempt at something like Robyn Hitchcock's "Acid Bird" and "Meat." I gave it several different treatments and eventually realized there wasn't enough there to keep trying to salvage it. On this version, I resorted to a VU pastiche, which I seem to do when all else fails. You can hear me run out of ideas about a minute in. I'm putting it up here, though, because I like the clangy guitar sound, particularly toward the end, as well as the "drums" (standing in for the kick drum is a guitar case being struck by a drum stick with a t-shirt duct taped around it [heavily EQed]).

Always Blow Me Away (circa Oct. 2000)
Our first selection was played briefly by the Brand New Broken Homes. It will probably never be recorded or played live again. For this demo version, I was going for a cross between the Stones and the Electric Eels. I prefer the sound here to any of the full band versions we attempted.