Andy Shauf shared his charming record The Neon Skyline at the beginning of the year, the entirety of which details one tumultuous night at a local dive bar. Shauf previously said he wrote upwards of 50 songs for the record before whittling the tracklist down to a more digestible 11. Now, Shauf is opening up his songwriting vault and sharing a pair of songs that didn’t make it to the final record.
Shauf debuted The Neon Skyline B-sides “Judy” and “Jeremy’s Wedding” Thursday. Both songs emanate Shauf’s soft-rock sound, but the singer described them in a statement as “outliers to the narrative” of his record. “They fit a little bit outside the timeline, as I was trying to keep everything to a single night,” he said. “They were also slightly different arrangement wise, so I decided that they might be best released together, apart from the album.”
In an interview with Uproxx, Andy Shauf described how he shifted from writing love songs to penning a concept album:
“I was kind of getting tired of just framing songs around love. I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to sit down and I’m going to write a song about a guy who gets mugged.’ And that was the first song that I made that was intentionally a story about someone. That was a different kind of rewarding experience, so I just kept digging away at that, and seeing what I could do with stories. Eventually it was like, ‘Oh, you can connect these stories,’ rather than just putting a bunch of one-off stories together. Now, I’m obsessed with doing that.”
Listen to “Judy” and “Jeremy’s Wedding” above. Get the 7-inch vinyl here.