Andy Shauf released his highly-anticipated concept record The Neon Skyline at the beginning of this year. While each of the songs on his eleven-track record flows smoothly, there were a handful of other tracks that didn’t make it on the original record — 39, to be exact. Shauf has now shared one of his The Neon Skyline demos exclusively through Amazon Music.
Titled “You Slipped Away,” the newly-released demo stands out on its own. In a statement, Shauf described how he rediscovered the “forgotten” song: “‘You Slipped Away’ was an early demo during The Neon Skyline sessions, but as the album storyline evolved, this song lost its place in the narrative. I’d forgotten about it until fairly recently, and realized it sort of worked on its own.”
Ahead of sharing the new track, Shauf chatted with Uproxx about how his old-school influences informed his songwriting on The Neon Skyline: “I was kind of getting tired of just framing songs around love. I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to sit down and I’m going to write a song about a guy who gets mugged.’ And that was the first song that I made that was intentionally a story about someone. That was a different kind of rewarding experience, so I just kept digging away at that, and seeing what I could do with stories. Eventually, it was like, Oh, you can connect these stories,’ rather than just putting a bunch of one-off stories together. Now, I’m obsessed with doing that.”
Listen to “You Slipped Away” below.
The Neon Skyline is out now via Anti. Get it here.
