New Songs / Label / Record Plans Update

Good question. She has some things that at some point we would release as archive recordings but it’s not as extensive as what Bob is doing. He has had the luxury of recording as much as he wants whenever he wants and as a result he seems to have an endless wealth of archives. It seems almost staggering how much he has -I personally have (or had as I can’t seem to find them) three bootleg 4 cd sets of which I recall have very little of what he has released so far. I have also been told that there might be a project coming where is going to give some unreleased and apparently in some cases unfnished songs to other artists to finish. But that was a year ago and the person who told me is of somewhat dubious credibility.
Anyway in regards to Lucinda -the way she works is that there are a lot of songs that are always in progress so to speak and many of them stay unrecorded until she feels they are finished. There is at least one song that she is working on now that she has been working on for a long time- and it was recorded on the portable home recorder at the same time as the Kitchen Tapes recordings when she worked on Blessed. The version she is working on now is 100% different than what she working on two years ago. That is just one example. She is definitely working on more things in recent years than she did in the past. In some ways she kind of writes in binges. When she put down the home version of the songs of what became Blessed they all just came pouring out at once -I remember thinking at the time and wondering how anyone could possibly carry all those songs around in her head. It apparently was the same with West -when i met first met her she invited me to come down the studio and here what she had been working on and I’ll never forget it. There 20-25 songs that were recorded with her band at the time- known as the Love Band. Almost all of that ended up on West and Little Honey. In fact on West the vocals from those recordings were kept and different musicians were brought in to record to the original vocals -essentially West was made backwards. On Little Honey the songs that were from those original 20-25 songs were all new vocals and in many cases new arrangements also. I guess you could say that are alternate version of both those albums. Basically there are alternate versions of almost every one of her records. Everyone knows about about the legendary original version of Car Wheels, but there is an alternate version of Essence with just her and Bo Ramsey on guitar, as well as demos from World Without Tears where many of the songs are very different –Bleeding Fingers started out as a ballad. There are also alternate versions of most of the songs on Sweet old World also. I also have hours of cassette tapes-she calls them work tapes that she made from probably 1988-90 or so. The way she used to write was that she would get a portable cassette recorder and just turn it on and record everything she was doing as she was working on the song -there is one where the phone rings in her apt. and she forgot to turn the recorder off so you can hear her end of the conversation with her then mgr. -and then she hangs up and gets back to work. There are hours of these cassettes -she worked on the songs for Essence and West the same way- but they will probably never see the light of day because there are long periods where she’s just humming and strumming etc. On the other hand at times they can be fascinating to listen to -she basically recorded her entire writing process -songs change titles -Sweet Old World started out as It Won’t Be The Same Old World- other songs split into two different songs, a few didn’t make the cut. These tapes hold a majority of the songs that became the Rough Trade record, Sweet Old World and Car Wheels which is pretty amazing now. When she started working on Essence she did the same thing- as well as West.
One of the more interesting recent finds was handwritten lyrics to probably 25 songs that were written between Happy Woman Blues and the Rough Trade record. 90% were never recorded and only a handful of them were played live (early 80’s) and even then only a couple times. I look at these as the “lost songs” they are what would have been the missing record or records. By the time she got a break and got a record deal she was working the Rough Trade songs and just forgot about the other ones. I have given serious thought to just having her record those now -maybe just her solo.
So I guess that’s the long answer to your question -the short answer would be no there are not trillion unreleased complete recordings like Bob D. but there are a lot of really interesting things -and some things still being discovered.