(click on any song title to get more information on that song, and to download it individually).

Notes from Walter, August 2017:

In early 1999, the Austin band Snipe Hunt put out its first album, "We'll Be Right Back!" (available on this website). While I feel like we captured some powerful performances in an album made up of all original songs, the process opened up some deep fissures between some of the band members. In September of the same year, the rhythm section told Vic and I "We don't want to gig anymore, and we don't want to practice anymore." This was partially a relief to me, since I was the only one to ever get us any gigs or even attempt it (a process that isn't that much fun in a musician-saturated town like Austin).

So I replied, "Well, what is it that you actually want to do?". They told me they wanted to record, but they didn't have any material. I said "We only have two of my songs that didn't fit on the first album.....what else would we record?". They said that they wanted to record the cover songs we had been doing in our live sets. I had never considered doing that but given that the alternative seemed to be breaking up the band on the spot, Vic and I agreed.

And so you have the results before you now, the rare second Snipe Hunt album "Dirty Ditties and Cover Tunes: 9/99-2/00", the final album of the four-piece version of the band. This was only ever intended to be something that we made available, in VERY limited quantities, at live shows. As it turned out, there WERE no more live shows with the four-piece.

With relationships strained, we were able to do six months of recording before everything exploded in acrimony. At that point, Vic and I continued the band as a (very harmonious) duo and released one more Snipe Hunt album--"I Saw the Future (But the Damn Train Hit Me Just the Same)" in 2002 (also available on this website).

Listening back to "Dirty Ditties....." now, it's amazing that the songs have so much power and passion, given the very bad feelings in the band at the time. Then again, maybe that was the engine for the record. Quien sabe? At any rate, I'm proud of these recordings and how they don't pursue obvious versions of the cover songs. There's a lot of raw emotion here, and I think they hold up well today.

I used the opportunity of this album to include five bonus tracks of cover songs that I had recorded by myself in the studio back then. In my musical career I have very rarely recorded cover songs, but these were just spur-of-the-moment projects I did on rainy Sunday afternoons for the sheer fun and challenge of it.

Also included is a final bonus track that is a real rarity by the four-piece version of the band. I had written and recorded a song called "The Alien Nematode" for my 1996 solo album The Blue Shoat Special!, and Snipe Hunt had performed it live once or twice. The song was about an incident I had read about concerning a Taiwanese company that wanted to farm eels on the Texas coast and allegedly used political influence to ram the environmental permit through when it was reported that the eels were infested with nematodes that were non-native to Texas waters and would become a problematic invasive species.

Yeah, I know, a weird subject for a song......

As we were recording the Dirty Ditties album, the bass player unexpectedly said one night "let's record a new version of 'The Alien Nematode', but using all Rush cliche's." That was such an off-the-wall idea that we set aside the other song we were going to record that night and instead dove into doing a radical reinvention of my song using what we considered to be the trademark elements of the Canadian band Rush throughout their long career.

We finished the whole song that night, and I can testify that my early-period Geddy Lee vocals might have been more persuasive had we not done so many re-takes. That's a awfully high falsetto......I had more luck with the mid-period Geddy vocals that I emulated in the break section of the song. The outro steals from ELP for reasons that escape me now.

And so that's the story of the album. It's offered here as a historical record, downloadable for free. You can get a feel for how that band interpreted the songs of others, and thus see a different side from the all-original material on the first album. Plus, they're fun songs to crank at a party.