The Orange Peels To Reissue 1997 Debut Album “Square”

The Orange Peels chatted with LA Weekly about the Square reissue (aka Square³ aka Square Cubed aka Square x 3) as well as the band's upcoming double-album of all-new material, scheduled for release in the fall of 2020. Click through to read more and to hear "Thank You," the band's first new single in over two years.

"For many artists, music is never complete," says American Songwriter in its piece on the "evolution of a song," in this case, the 4-track demo, scrapped California version, and re-mastered album mix of "Everybody's Gone," taken from 1997 debut album Square by The Orange Peels. "The band is paying tribute to one of its go-to and most endearing songs, "Everyone's Gone" by releasing the various versions of the song that have existed since its inception, thus documenting how it's grown alongside the band."

Allen Clapp explains: It's 1995. The musical landscape is littered with bands drowning in self-loathing, feigned rage, and a decidedly non-literal definition of irony. The timing couldn't be worse to embark on recording sessions for a collection of earnest, melodic pop songs.

But it's exactly what happened. Little did I know that the project would have me and my bandmates jumping between three different record labels and two producers, or that it would wind up being released under a band name I couldn't have imagined.

Everything that happened in the next two years would redefine my concept of making music and what it meant to be in a band. It's how and why we became The Orange Peels.

So why are we here in the early light of 2019, revisiting this album that came out in 1997? Three reasons.

Square Cubed?

First, the album never came out on vinyl, and we've always talked about the idea of eventually releasing it as a 12" LP. We sequenced the original release in two halves, and have always thought of it as having a Side A and a Side B (with "Spaghetti-O Western" as the end of the first side, and "She is Like a Rose" kicking off the second).

Second, there are two unreleased versions of the album that tell the story of how we got where we were going and how we became a band in the process (there's a whole version of the record recorded on a 4-track, and there's a whole version of the album we recorded and mixed in California and finished in 1996).

Third, we want to re-master the original tapes and collect all this stuff to make the ultimate edition of our debut album. Ultimately, it would be great to put all of this on vinyl and release it as a triple album-and if there's enough interest, that could still happen-but realistically, we're hoping to release a re-mastered version of the original album on heavy, 180-gram vinyl with a double CD holding all the bonus materials.

Ok, we know it's not really Square³-it's really more like Square x 3. Poetic license invoked.

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