As songwriters, we're conditioned to believe that every song has a destination. We write it, record it, refine it, and eventually release it into the world, hoping it finds an audience. That's the natural progression we imagine from the moment an idea first appears. For years, I believed that too. If I invested enough time into a song, surely the end goal was to share it. Looking back now, after more than three decades of writing music, I've realized that assumption isn't always true.
Some songs become singles. Others quietly become album tracks. A few end up forgotten on old hard drives because they were never finished. But there's another category that doesn't get talked about very often—songs that are finished, or at least finished enough, yet never need to be released. Not because they aren't good enough, but because they've already fulfilled the purpose they were written for. Those songs don't exist for an audience. They exist for the artist.
That realization is what inspired From the Vault, an occasional series where I'll share unreleased demos, unfinished songs, alternate ideas, and the stories behind music that never made it into the world. Some of these songs helped me grow as a songwriter. Others were simply too personal to release. And a few quietly accomplished exactly what they were meant to accomplish without ever needing an audience.
For this first installment, I'm sharing two songs from very different seasons of my life. They're separated by more than twenty years, yet they have one thing in common: neither one ever needed the world to hear it.
8th Wonder
I wrote 8th Wonder sometime around 2001 or 2002, during one of the more uncertain chapters of my musical journey. I had recently left Strange WayZ and was beginning the next phase of my career with ForeKast. It was an awkward period creatively because I found myself somewhere between two musical identities. The style of songwriting that had become natural to me no longer fit the direction I was moving toward, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kind of songwriter I was becoming.
Even though I felt uncertain about my direction, I never stopped writing. In fact, I probably wrote more songs during that period than I ever had before. Looking back, I wasn't necessarily writing because inspiration was overflowing. I was writing because I didn't want to lose my "pen game." I believed that if I kept writing, eventually I'd find my footing again. Most of those songs came and went, but one of them refused to leave me alone.
That song was 8th Wonder.
I've always enjoyed coming up with song titles that make people pause for a moment. While many songs wear their meaning on the surface, I've always been drawn to titles that spark curiosity before a single lyric is heard. "8th Wonder" was one of those ideas. To this day, I couldn't tell you exactly where the title came from, but the moment I thought of it, I knew there was a song hiding somewhere inside those two words.
The problem was that I could never seem to find it.
Every time I opened the session, there was something I believed in. Maybe it was a verse, a melody, or simply the concept itself. But there was always another piece that didn't feel right. I'd rewrite a lyric, record another vocal, make a few production changes, and convince myself I was getting closer. Then I'd save the session, close it, and move on to something else. Months became years, and years quietly became decades.
No matter what else I was working on, I always found my way back to 8th Wonder. It became what I can only describe as unfinished business. Not because anyone was waiting to hear it, but because I couldn't accept leaving it incomplete. As my songwriting matured and my production skills improved, I kept believing that maybe this would be the version where everything finally clicked.
Eventually, it did.
More than twenty years after writing it, I finally finished the song. What surprised me most was what happened next. I didn't feel excited about releasing it. I didn't start thinking about streaming platforms or adding it to a future project. Instead, I felt something much simpler: relief. I realized I had never been chasing a release. I had been chasing closure. Finishing the song had already accomplished everything I needed it to accomplish, and for that reason, I have no desire to release it. Some songs don't need an audience. Sometimes finishing the work is enough.
Listen to "8th Wonder"
Hear the demo here: [Link]
If I Was
If I Was comes from a completely different chapter of my life. Unlike 8th Wonder, this isn't a song that followed me for decades. It's one of the newest songs I've written and, in many ways, feels like an extension of two deeply personal songs I did choose to share with the world: Can I Be Honest, written after losing my father, and Faded Polaroid, inspired by the loss of my uncle.
Those songs helped me express grief.
If I Was came from what grief leaves behind.
As I worked through losing two of the most important people in my life, I found myself asking questions that probably have no real answers. Was I enough? Could I have done more? Did they know how much they meant to me? Could I have been the person they needed during moments I'll never get back? Those thoughts became the foundation for the song. It wasn't written to provide answers or even closure. It simply became a place where those questions could exist.
The version you'll hear is still a demo. The vocal is rough, the production is minimal, and under normal circumstances I probably would have continued refining it. This time, though, I never felt that urge. The imperfections somehow became part of the honesty. There's a vulnerability in a demo that can disappear once every note has been polished and every vocal perfected. In this case, the rough edges feel truthful.
People often assume that songs remain unreleased because the artist doesn't believe in them. In this case, the opposite is true. I believe in If I Was completely. I simply don't believe it was written for an audience. It's a song I wrote because I needed to hear those words myself. If someone asked me five years from now whether I planned to release it, my answer would probably still be no. Some songs exist to connect with listeners. Others exist to help the songwriter process something they can't express any other way. For me, this is one of those songs.
Listen to "If I Was"
Hear the demo here: [Link]
Not Every Song Needs an Audience
One of the things I've learned over the years is that we often measure creative work by what happens after it's finished. Did people buy it? Did they stream it? Did it receive good reviews? Did it reach the audience we hoped it would? Those are fair questions, but they're not the only way to measure whether something mattered.
Some songs teach us how to become better writers. Some help us navigate seasons of uncertainty. Some allow us to process grief, celebrate joy, or simply understand ourselves a little better. Their value isn't determined by the number of people who hear them. Sometimes their greatest value is found in what they change within the person who created them.
Looking back, I find it fascinating that these two songs were written more than twenty years apart. One belongs to a younger songwriter trying to rediscover his creative identity. The other belongs to an older songwriter learning to live with loss. On the surface, they couldn't be more different. Yet both ultimately served the same purpose. They helped me move forward.
The Songs Behind the Songs
When we listen to a finished album, we're hearing the end of a much longer story. We don't hear the abandoned ideas, the forgotten melodies, the songs that almost worked, or the demos that quietly taught the artist something important. Those songs rarely receive any recognition, but without them many of the songs we eventually hear would never have existed.
I wanted to share these two demos because they've played an important role in my journey, even if that role happened entirely behind the scenes. They're reminders that creativity isn't only about what we release. It's also about what we learn, what we overcome, and what we carry with us as we continue growing.
If you've ever held onto an unfinished project, an old journal, a painting tucked away in a closet, or a dream that never became public, I hope this encourages you to see it a little differently. Not everything we create has to be shared to have value. Sometimes the most important audience for a piece of art is the person who created it.
These songs never needed the world to hear them.
They simply needed me to write them.
