What's up with these songs?

SLM has spent most of its professional life recording material for demos and the eventual debut album, first at Hoboken's fabled Waterfront Studios, working with Greg DiGesu; at Mark Dann's World Studio in Tribeca, with Tim Hatfield engineering; then at SAE, with Joe Ford at the board; and then at Tim and Roscoe Ambel's Cowboy Technical Services Recording Rig in Brooklyn, again working with Tim, resulting in the band's 2002 three-song CD (contact Bill for info on that)... and now -- the real thing, the album sessions -- with Nick Miller at Sherman Ewing's Casa de Perros, Upper West Side, building on a set of amazing basic tracks done at a studio that'll remain anonymous for now, since a) it no longer exists and b) we mostly did it after hours, legally but not quite officially. Spectacular place, though. We miss it. Everybody in the biz misses it.

Shanghai songwriter/singers Bryan Brown and Bill Millard. Photo: Jim Morgan, July 1999.

"King of Memory" is a big aggressive rocker from Bryan. As with many upbeat SLM songs, what he's actually singing about is both energetic and extraordinarily sad.

In "The Universal Skeptical Anthem" Bill waxes both poetic and political. (And wroth. Don't forget the waxing-wroth part.) The last line is a famous benediction from the Herero language by way of Gravity's Rainbow.

"Strong, Silent Type" brings Bryan to the piano and is probably as close as SLM gets to Nick Drake. SLM neither encourages nor discourages the waving of lighters during this song.

The one nobody seems to be able to figure out is "How's Dr. Ving?" (but the video, should there ever be a video, ought to be directed by either Michel Gondry or Terry Gilliam). An earlier recording of this one used a MIDI sitar, but for the album version, Bill stopped resisting the urge to invite helicopters into the studio.

Bill knocked out "Flip in Style" pretty rapidly one night a few years back after having some things thrown at him. Dating the clinically psychotic is something he no longer does and cannot recommend.

"Almost Gone" is rumored to exist in several recorded versions. This may have to stay mysterious for a while.

On "I Was the Dog" Bill moves to fretless bass, sticks with only two chords (an SLM rarity), and is honestly not trying to go out of his way to insult anybody.

"Forbidden Love" showcases SLM's moody jazzy side and may eventually be developed into a neo-film noir (not just part of the soundtrack for a film, but the whole screenplay).

"Hollywood, Please" puts SLM right in the front row, spilling popcorn, delighted not to be squinting at subtitles this time. The album version has electric piano by Bill and organ by both Bryan and a terrific ringer, Ben Cohen.

"This End Up" is the first tune Bryan and Bill have co-written and the first studio recording with Adam. The organ here is a real one, the honest-to-Booker Hammond B2 at Cowboy, played by Bryan within inches of its life.

"All of These Wires" is Bill's post-Luddite paean to technologically mediated romance.

The feral creatures of southern California make a cameo in "A Man Demanded," Bryan's latest version of a recurrent and unsettling story.

"Fährenheit 451" is a sprightly upbeat power-pop version of the sort of thing you always wanted to say to . . . well, to somebody, or probably to several somebodys.

"Potboiler" has always been a crowd favorite, in part for its basic punk-pop crunchiness and in part for telling the story of a guy who lives a pulp-fiction life so that you don't have to.

Bryan's "A Family Way," perhaps the most emotionally direct of all SLM songs, features a sophisticated through-composed arrangement marked by shifting rhythms and evocative key changes.

"The Guilty Man" is even more Costelloid, from its jazz-chord vocal harmonies to its anguished, obsessive lyrics on themes of marital meltdown.

In "Hollywood Supine," over breakneck rhythms and angular guitars, Bryan tells a spooky tale of inhumane contacts in the land of silk and money. We're all very glad he got out alive.

"Ruined California" travels from country to anthemic punk as its story moves from heartbreak to revived romantic hopes. (Somewhere in the SLM vaults there's a studio track of this one with contributions by two highly regarded ringers, Hoboken folk-rock recording artist Kate Jacobs and slide guitarist Kerryn Tolhurst, formerly with Australia's Dingoes and the Hoboken/New York band The Health and Happiness Show.)

In "A Hammer Song" (not to be confused with the Spencer Davis Group's "The Hammer Song" or "The Hammer Song" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) Bryan sings of fathers, sons, Sears Craftsman tools, the Mets, and other things that break.

In another SLM country song, "Pawnshop Prize," a singer at the end of a long road meets the Hornéd Gentleman who often turns up when people reach the ends of long roads. Bottom line: be careful whom you buy used guitars from. (This one's a collaboration between Bill and Memphis music aficionado Dave Weil.)

Bill nicked the title line for "If This River Was Whiskey" from a well-traveled Muddy Waters tune, just as T. Coraghessan Boyle apparently did, but the song and its well-soaked narrator really have nothing to do with Boyle's fine stories under the same title. It's a death song.

The straight-up rock song "Yeah, Right" will strike a chord (probably a nice filthy distorted seventh) with anybody who's ever had reasons to be skeptical about anything.

Skepticism also rears its head on Bryan's "Industrial Park," which is unlikely to be mistaken for a valentine to anyone's employer.

If you're a human being and a New Yorker, you will probably, eventually . . . on the unlikeliest of evenings, when you least expect it . . . take the long walk down "The Bleakest Street of All."

There are more, lots more . . .