Hi all,
I’m reviving on here a thread from an old forum, with one of my favourite games… creating our own tracklists of Lifehouse (and LH-adjacent) albums!
If you were the band or manager during any of their albums, and were in the room during the tracklist creation, how would you have approached it? How can rearranging an album or swapping songs change the mood, or bring out a different thesis from the body of work?
The rules are simple: any song that we know was written during or prior to a given session is fair game to include. For instance, we know Central Park and Sink or Swim were written on a 2007 songwriting trip to NYC, so they wouldn’t make it onto WWA but could have been on Smoke & Mirrors. Unless… you decide to push WWA back a year, in which case those tracks, FWYA, and the single version of Broken would all be allowed for inclusion. Hope this is clear.
Despite being one of my least favourites when I became a fan of the band, in recent years SCf has become one of my most-played albums by Jason & co. My big beef at the time was that it sounded too intense and harsh for the album thesis of ‘everything is happening in the world at once and it’s crazy and feels off the rails but all we can do it exist through it’. I needed a few more tender moments, but there was little respite from the brashness. Thus, in recent years I’ve reworked it (and adjusted the metadata in my iTunes library haha) to create a version with a few more ups and downs, which to my ears sounds just about perfect.
Spin
Wash
Am I Ever Gonna Find Out
Stanley Climbfall
Sky Is Falling
Anchor
Wish (acoustic demo)
How Long
Take Me Away
My Precious
Winds of Change (acoustic demo)
The Beginning
My first move was taking out Just Another Name, my least favourite song from these sessions, and replace it with How Long, which is my favourite. I revised the front of the album to bring AIEGFO and the title track up, and push back Sky Is Falling to be the ‘track five ballad’. Anchor ends the first half, where we dive from the heaviest-sounding song into the softest: the palette-cleansing Wish.
The OG demo version of Wish perfectly transitions into How Long, so that goes next, and after the acoustic outro of the song we have the epic Take Me Away. My Precious has grown dramatically on me over the years; now that Wish is here, it’s no longer the softest song, so it can really lean into its weird and cool production without having to handle the ‘most introspective song on the album’ duties alone.
Now that Jay has released the demo for Winds of Change, I felt it was perfect to go as track 11, another moment of stillness before The Beginning ends the album. I ended up removing Out of Breath and Empty Space – love them both, but they didn’t fit in this list and feel like they work well as bonus tracks here. I always thought the studio recording of ES was too hard-rock for the song anyway.
If anyone has these and wants to give this a listen, lemme know what you think! I’ve done this with many albums I have and will post more of them later. Would love to see others’ takes on this album, or another!
Hi all,
Gonna try to post these on a weekly basis, as I have a lot of em:)
As we know, Jason wrote a wild amount of songs from 2002-2004. SCf came out in the fall of ‘02, but he had enough to make probably three or four albums between it and the yellow self-titled recorded in summer ‘04. As such, I sometimes wonder what would’ve been if the band had released an album in ‘03, and another in ‘04. I’ll start with the latter, which I call the Butterfly LP:
It would’ve been released to CD in the summer of 2004, as the band was recording the yellow album (more on that later). Singles from this fictional album would include Butterfly and Willing to Try.
Playing with the final song titles of early Lifehouse records, we have “The Beginning” and “The End” from 2002 and 2005. This 2004 album closer would be “Goodbye”, while the 2003 album (next week) would be…
That’s an excellent set of songs @robert. Would add Songs for Pete as a bonus track but not sure if the song is already written by then.
I’m gonna give this a try. I always feel Smoke and Mirrors had potential but let down by being too overproduced. Here’s my take on the album
Nerve Damage
Crash & Burn
Halfway Gone
It Is What It Is
Smoke & Mirrors
Near Life Experience
From Where You Are
In Your Skin
Don’t Wake Me When It’s Over
Best of Me
By Your Side
All That I’m Asking For
*Here Tomorrow Gone Today & Wrecking Ball as bonus tracks
I took out Falling In and Had Enough because I always feel they’re the worst song there. Falling In is catchy I’ve to say but the lyrics is a letdown. Had Enough I feel like a Daughtry song feat Lifehouse instead of the other way around.
Anyway love this thread. Looking forward to the weekly entry
This is soooo so so cool Snowfist:) I love this version! S&M was going to be an upcoming one of mine but I’ll give it a bit and settle into your version first - really like starting with Nerve Damage.
I agree with all your decisions here… All In, Had Enough, and Falling In are my three least favourites and I’m glad you swapped them out. Your list is very close to mine actually!
Alright all, following up last week’s 2004 LP ‘Butterfly’ with a 2003 LP, titled ‘Twisted Lullabies’. Jason was working on a body of work with this title during the Dreamworks-Geffen transition, as he mentioned when he released Shiny Silver Beast in 2017. The phrase is in the lyrics of Never Going Back, and there are some rather lullaby-like songs from that era that fit together nicely.
I present my take on this decidedly dark album, to be released shortly after Stanley Climbfall in late 2003 or early 2004:
The asterisk tracks have a lullaby feel to them, that makes me think they were contenders for this original EP/LP. Goodbye and Midnight in Philly were probably in there too, but I felt they fit the Butterfly album better.
I believe that these songs were written in 2003 or prior, as the yellow album was recorded in July 2004 and those tracks really feel like they were written during a different time. This group clearly has a darker tone than anything else the band had or has done to date, so I added Goodnight as an uplifting ending that I think really concludes the other songs well. This would make the ending tracks be The Beginning, Goodnight, Goodbye, and The End (but more on the yellow album next time).
Hi all,
After much delay, I’m here to continue the tracklist game from a little while back. This time, it’s Lifehouse’s 2005 “yellow album”, which I title Into the Sun:
Given that they’ll have already released Twisted Lullabies and the Butterfly LP that primarily contain the b-sides from this record, this record sees only light adjustments. I’ve slightly reorganized the tracklist, bringing All in All up and pushing Days Go By a little further. Undone is removed, and The Place That I Fit In is slotted in after We’ll Never Know.
As for the title, I always thought that if the album were to be named after a song on the record, it would be Into the Sun. Perhaps just The Sun, but I made this cover ten years ago for fun and don’t have the editable file anymore, so oh well.
In a few days, I’ll post the 2006 follow-up, titled Who We Were. And yes, in my alternate timeline, I’ve cobbled together a release for every year. Some would be smaller no-singles records, while others might be mailing list freebies for fans. But nevertheless: more LH coming!
Definitely a darker record, this serves as the first half of the Who We Are sessions and precedes the hopeful optimism it brings. A lot of the late-2005 and early 2006-era Lifehouse songs seem to have been about the end of a relationship (Crash & Burn, WHN, If This Is Goodbye, I Want You To Know, and Keep the Change for sure). I included several yellow-era tracks to build the record out. Keep the Change and Chapter Two inject some energy into an otherwise more somber group, while Good Enough and Signs of Life (my two personal favourites) bringing a real humility to the album.
Sonically, this really bridges the gap between the '05 and '07 records. Some songs lean towards the pop of WWA (If This Is Goodbye), while others really lean into the Elliott Smith folk and adult alternative of the former (I Don’t Know, Chapter Two, T2LIG).
Had some fun with the cover for this one:) since this album would’ve had several songs from films soundtracks (marked with asterisks), it would intentionally have had no radio singles or tour associated with it. Y&M was still big on the radio in mid-2006. The CD would’ve been available from the band’s website, while the album would have been released direct-to-iTunes.
Lemme know your thoughts on this one! WWA coming up next.
For starters, I always thought the European cover was more thoughtful than the North American version. The album is called ‘Who We Are’, and having it look like a poster for a circus or a show really plays into the idea of facades and authenticity that the title suggests (as well as on S&M a few years later). Super cool.
A few placement swaps, bringing Whatever It Takes to the fifth spot, and adding FWYA (the record would’ve come out in the fall to allow that song to be added). WWA and The Joke move up, and the record ends with Broken, which I think would’ve been a killer finale.
I took Storm out of the group here, because I’ve thought for a long time that it would’ve been better on NNF. Doing a little bonus tracklist for that record here too, to drive my point home:
Hanging By A Moment [single 1]
Sick Cycle Carousel [single 2]
The Edge [single 3]
Somebody Else’s Song
Trying
Only One
Simon
Storm
Breathing
Quasimodo
Somewhere in Between [single 4]
Everything
Cling & Clatter is removed, as is Unknown (that was a hard one, but The Edge would’ve made a killer third single). The Blyss-style Storm is added here, so that the 2007 piano and acapella version can make it onto an upcoming 2008 release. Stay tuned…
