04/11/2026
THE SHAKESPEARE-RA!
As you may know, we are on the cusp of releasing the vinyl 35th Anniversary Edition of our first album SHAKESPEARE MY BUTT…
It ships with a bonus 5-song EP called LIMBO TOWN REVISITED. On that EP you will find three songs from the SHAKESPEARE era that didn’t make it onto the finished album.
These songs are ANOTHER YEAR IN LIMBO TOWN, RIGHTEOUS and MARROW & BONE. They were recorded in late 2025 by the band’s current lineup at Union Sound Company in Toronto by Chris Stringer and mixed to ragged perfection by Michael McKenzie.
Why didn’t these songs make it onto SMB back in the day?
It has 17 songs. What more do you want?
Ron Hawkins was an absolute writing machine in 1990/91. So many songs came all at once as the band Popular Front metamorphosed into something new called Lowest of the Low. Some gems were left on the cutting room floor.
These three are probably the last of them that will see the light of day. (There were others that will be discussed in a later post.)
The LIMBO TOWN REVISITED EP also includes recently unearthed demos of ETERNAL FATALIST and SALESMEN, CHEATS and LIARS. These were recorded in 1991 by Andy Koyama at Comfort Sound and Film House in Toronto as a sort of proof-of-concept for the album that was to follow — drums recorded in a proper music studio and the overdubs done after hours in a Foley booth at a film and television post-production house.
The multitracks for these demos were found a few years ago in Steve Stanley’s basement on the same 2-inch tape reels that contained all the tracks for SMB. They were mixed by Lawrence Nichols in early 2026 and are presented publicly here for the first time.
