Besides was a record that was released initially as part of a “Rhinelander” fan club membership. Linford and Karin wanted to take a whimsical romp through the early years of the band, do something breezy, a little out of control, but with real substance, and teeth.

Linford explains further:

Folks had been bugging us to fire up a fan club of some kind. We wanted to make our version of a fan club CD to end all fan club CD’s.

And we felt that we had definitely been blessed with the sort of devoted following that was hungry and wanted to go deeper into the band’s music, root around in the closet, uncover stuff. Why not?

So we revisited the early music of the band and put some ground rules in place, tried to set the bar high, tried to mix as many metaphors as we could, trot out the cliches and reinvigorate them:

In short, the tracks had to:

1) Stand alone as compositions in their own right -- songs which had never previously seen the light of day as recordings (Miles, Lucy, Last Night, Murder, Dead Weight etc) or 2) Shed radical new light on an existing recording (The People Here Are Not Shy, Bothered, My Love Is A Fever etc) or 3) Embody some defining musical moment for the band (If I’m Drowning, All I Need Is Everything)...”

We wanted any “Live” recordings to sound way better than a typical bootleg, and we wanted to flaunt our overachiever tendencies a bit I suppose, come up with playful, lavish artwork, give our best fans something good, make people grin. (The booklet for Besides is the most expensive one we’ve ever printed…)

But the important thing at the end of the day is we’ll stand by this music. We were young and hungry and most importantly as any writer will tell you, we were showing up. Every once in a blue moon, God surprised even us, and walked through the room.

**

The first run of the CD was packaged with a small book called Northern Spy #1 (now a collector’s item) a metaphysical tour diary and more.

We’ll see if we can track down those words sometime and make them available here…

In the meanwhile, take a little ride. We think you’ll like it.