Love Bites: The Intimacy of Demos & Outtakes

I know the sound of David Bowie’s laugh. I know what Randy Rhoads, Ozzy Osborne’s guitarist, sounds like when he’s telling the studio engineer that he fretted his chord wrong. I know the sound of Graham Nash saying, “Shit,” as he messes up on piano and Joni Mitchell giggles beside him.

These moments are all on my Demos and Outtakes playlist, in songs that would become masterpieces: Queen Bitch; Dee; Our House. Something feels so intimate, so beautifully transgressive, about the fact that these recordings were never meant for the likes of Spotify. They’re an undeniable privilege; a window into the artist’s process. A studio outtake is proof of a song being perfected and a demo is a document of its very conception. 

But there’s one that has a particular hold on me. One song that, since it was taken off Spotify a year-or-so ago, often has me holding up the queue in Greggs while my Apple Pay has a tiff with the open YouTube app on my phone. I get told to hurry up, but I don’t mind, because I have my three essentials: my headphones, my rapidly-cooling sausage roll, and a low quality upload of what would go on to be The Strokes’ 2006 single You Only Live Once. 

It’s so different to the eventual release, right down to the lyrics. I listen to it with my girlfriend, who rolls her eyes when I tell her I think it’s one of the most beautiful songs ever written; I listen to it after we break up; I listen to it as I lug my books into a new flat, in a new city, that I found on SpareRoom. When Julian Casablancas gets to the end and whispers to himself, “Okay, one more time,” I scrub back to the start to listen to it once more. And suddenly, in February 2023, it reappears on Spotify with a name of its own, one I had forgotten. Alexa, play I’ll Try Anything Once.