‘It had a beautiful melody’: Two new songs from Boston’s Brad Delp due in June

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The Brad Delp Foundation is set to issue two never-before-heard songs on vinyl this summer, both collaborations with Steve Baker. Titled Two Days a Week, this new limited-edition 45 is due in June, just in time for the late Delp’s birthday on June 12. Both songs have a Beatlesque feel, fitting in that Delp had a beloved side project devoted to the Fab Four called Beatlejuice.

“Sunday in the Dark” evolved from a writing session with Baker in the mid-1990s, and was originally recorded straight to cassette at Winterwood Studios, Baker says. The plan was to finish it at a later date, but Baker subsequently lost the song — inspired, he says, by the Beatles’ historic appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show some 50 years ago — and the tape remained missing until 2012. The attached version is one that Baker completed, once he rediscovered the original demo.

Charlie Farren, a friend of Delp’s, still remembers the first time he heard “Tuesday”: “One day, we were at a radio station, judging a song-writing contest, Farren says, “and when we were through, he said: ‘Charlie, come to my car, I want to play you something, a song I’m working on.’ So, we got in the car and he turned up the radio, and this song ‘Tuesday’ came on. The first second I heard it, I loved it. It reminded me of the great Beatles hit, ‘Yesterday,’ in that it had a beautiful melody, and it really didn’t go to a chorus. It was a storyline type of a song.”

Delp, who committed suicide in 2007, last recorded with Boston on 2002’s Corporate America. Some leftover and reworked recordings featuring Delp were included on the band’s most recent album, 2013’s Life Love and Hope. His last major release was 2003’s Delp and Goudreau, recorded with fellow Boston alum Barry Goudreau. In 2012, the Brad Delp Foundation began offering a stream of “Alone,” another previously unreleased tune dating to the 1970s.

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