- LC
SEPTEMBER 30th, 2010 - THE LOST DEMO TAPES OF VACANT DAYBREAK
Updated: Jul 25
So you’re at a party with a bunch of your college friends, and this one guy in the corner keeps telling anyone who’ll listen about this super weird song that’s been going viral lately - a song no one’s ever heard. What a hipster, you think, rolling your eyes, but you keep on listening, and he tells his rapt audience about a mysterious demo track by an indie band that doesn’t exist. The song is a murder confession, he reveals (cue the gasps) but no one knows for sure what it says, as the track has yet to leak in full.
Total bullshit, you think, until you’re bored at 10pm the next night and you happen to do a little Googling. Turns out the hipster guy wasn’t making things up. The mysterious demo track is called “Confessions of a Heartbreak King,” the mysterious indie band is called Vacant Daybreak, and the controversy surrounding both has stirred up all sorts of internet drama. Intrigued, you venture further down the rabbit hole.
It turns out that the lost demo track was found at a yard sale by Twitter user “Hella Robella,” who claimed the song lyrics described her own murder, using her full legal name and all. No info about the band seemed to exist online. Various internet sleuths scoured every garage sale, record store, and bargain bin looking for the elusive EP, until, at last, one of them was successful: a Facebook user who went only by “MTSunrise.” He posted a short instrumental clip as proof, but never delivered on the juiciest bits, as the EP supposedly melted in his stereo.
The lost demo tapes of Vacant Daybreak captured the imaginations of many an internet musician, and even though you’re tone deaf and have never picked up an instrument in your life, you’re officially obsessed with this mystery. You join the online discussions, you watch the reimagined cover versions on YouTube, you browse the CD rack in the shops downtown, hoping to find some answers. And when the next party rolls around, you’ll be the one sharing the story.
*****
For me and Tom, the Vacant Daybreak case is an itch we’ve always wanted to scratch, ever since the song went viral a few months back. Sure, it’s not a haunted boarding school or a local cryptid or an unexplained natural phenomenon, but it sure is weird, and that’s our thing, you know? Luckily our fans feel the same way, as we’ve gotten plenty of requests to look into the lost demo tapes ourselves.
It’s a tall order, since we’re talking about a mysterious song that seems to have no origin. We couldn’t interview the band at the heart of it all, and Hella Robella (the first person to uncover the EP) has vanished from the internet since the whole drama started. The only other person we knew for sure had handled the demo tapes was MTSunrise, and his account hadn’t been active for a couple of months. Still - we had to try. The Weird Brothers sent him a message, asking for an interview, and we were pleasantly surprised when he agreed to sit down with us.
That’s what brought us to sunny San Francisco, a place we’d always been hoping for an excuse to visit. We met MTSunrise in his parents’ garage, where he was pounding and crashing his way through an improvised drum solo. To our surprise, the budding musician was no older than 19. He finished up his routine with a loud cymbal crash, then flashed us a big grin, ready to start the interview.
SHAUN: So you’re not just a rare music collector, huh? You’re a musician yourself?
MTSUNRISE: Yup. Been playing since I was a kid. I can play drums, guitar, and sing a little too.
TOM: How did you get your hands on the Vacant Daybreak demo tape?
MTSUNRISE: I’d heard all the stories about it, you know, like everyone, but I didn’t really go looking for it. I kinda figured it was either a myth or some dark web thing that had gone mainstream. Like a snuff tape, you know, except it was a song instead.
But anyway, there’s this record store down in Haight-Ashbury, it’s called Frobisher’s. I was picking up the latest Fall Out Boy CD and I guess it was indie music day or something because the cashier threw in another CD for free. I didn’t realize until I got home that he’d actually given me the Vacant Daybreak EP.
SHAUN: So it was real, then? It wasn’t some kind of hoax?
MTSUNRISE: It was real. I listened through the first track and it was everything the stories said. Kind of an indie vaporwave sound, with this electronic drum beat, and the lyrics were definitely talking about a murder. That girl’s name was in it and everything. I was kinda freaking out, so I posted that I’d found the lost demo tapes, and everyone started asking me for proof.
TOM: Why’d you only post ten seconds of the song?
MTSUNRISE: Well, I told everyone it was because I didn’t want to get a copyright strike on my channel, but honestly that was all I could get. My computer kept glitching out whenever I tried to rip the audio.
SHAUN: You eventually told people the CD melted in your disc drive.
MTSUNRISE: Nope, that’s not how it went. I don’t know why people keep messing that part up. The CD didn’t melt, my computer did. I kept trying to play the stupid thing and eventually my laptop just got super hot and droopy and melted right there on my desk.
SHAUN: Wait, seriously?
MTSUNRISE: Yup. It was a cheap laptop, but still, those things don’t just melt. I don’t know how but the CD did it.
TOM: That’s bizarre.
SHAUN: What happened to the CD itself?
MTSUNRISE: I took my melted laptop to the repair shop and they were able to get the disc out from inside. They saved my hard drive, too, thank god. I had tons of songs I’d written on there. The ten second snippet was there too, but I was done trying to rip that thing, so I went back to Frobisher’s and returned it.
TOM: You found this legendary piece of lost media and just… gave it back?
MTSUNRISE: It didn’t feel right, you know? Even aside from the whole “melting my computer” thing. The murder stuff in the lyrics made me super uncomfortable. And honestly… fuck, I’ve never told anyone this, but…
SHAUN: It’s okay.
MTSUNRISE: Fuck. Okay. So, the girl in the song? I recognized her name. I went to school with her. She moved last year, so I don’t know where she is, and no I’m not telling you who she is either. If some psycho stalker is writing songs about how he wants to kill her, I don’t want to put her in danger. It’s not just a fun internet story anymore, you know? It’s real now. Too real. And I don’t want to be a part of that story anymore.
SHAUN: We totally get it. Thanks for taking the time to tell us what you could.
*****
We still had more questions than answers, but at least we had a lead. Tom and I hopped on a trolley and made our way over to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, where we hoped to locate Frobisher’s. Finding the record store was surprisingly difficult. The whole street was overflowing with vintage shops and colorful local businesses - everything from restaurants to bookstores to dive bars to clothing boutiques. It was a real hopping joint. The people on the streets were just as colorful and welcoming as the shops they frequented, and one of them was generous enough to point us in the general direction of Frobisher’s. Who needs maps, am I right?
The record store, when we finally found it, was tucked between an antique shop and a dusty, boarded-up storefront that might have sold touristy knicknacks in a former life. Frobisher’s had such a small entrance that we almost missed it. The lights were off inside, but there was no CLOSED sign hanging from the door, so we shrugged and took our chances.
The door was jammed pretty tight, but it wasn’t locked, and a little jimmying got us inside. The shop wasn’t all that huge. Two shelves of vinyl records took up most of the interior space, with a few CD racks lining the walls by the register. Everything had a bit of a musty smell, and I wondered if the store had been closed for much longer than a day. Tom and I are used to exploring spaces we probably shouldn’t (it’s not “breaking and entering” if you don’t break anything, I always say) so we wandered around the dark little shop, searching for clues.
The CD racks were almost bare, and the Vacant Daybreak EP wasn’t among the stragglers. It wasn’t hidden somewhere in the vinyl stacks, it wasn’t wedged inside the register, it wasn’t buried in the boxes full of tape cassettes behind the checkout counter. “It’s never in the first place you look,” as my good ol’ grandma likes to say, but the second and third and twentieth places we looked weren’t any better. I would have suggested cutting our losses and beating it if Tom hadn’t discovered the secret door.
Okay, maybe I’m overselling it a bit, but it sure was a door all right. It was hidden behind a series of faded band posters, so we hadn’t noticed it when we’d first walked in. Behind it was a Ddim7, narrow staircase that led up to a second-floor landing, where the late afternoon sunlight streamed through some unseen window.
We climbed it, of course. The stairs were sturdy and didn’t creak under our steps. The room at the top was a studio apartment, so crammed with instruments and boxes and furniture and all sorts of old, dusty objects that I couldn’t imagine anyone using it for living space. It seemed more likely that the storeowners had converted it into a storage room. The sounds of laughter and chattering shoppers floated through the open window on the far wall. Tom and I wandered through the clutter, taking the time to sift through boxes and pick up fallen instruments, just in case the elusive demo tapes were hiding somewhere in all that mess.
I’d fully expected this little jaunt of ours to be a dead end, so when I actually found the Vacant Daybreak EP tucked inside a dresser drawer, it didn’t register with me at first. Then I saw the cover, the band’s name, the image of an eerie hand bursting through the clouds into a pink and blue cosmic landscape: the same design from MTSunrise’s original Facebook post. The CD was covered in half-peeled shrink wrap, and the colors had faded with age. I flipped it over and read the four song titles on the back:
Confessions of a Heartbreak King
Jump Into the Sunrise
This Hollow Heart
I Never Said Goodbye
“I found it!” I exclaimed - a bit too loudly, because not only did I attract Tom’s attention, I also alerted the as-yet-unnoticed third person in the room. The pile of blankets in the corner (which I’d skimmed right over before) shifted suddenly, and a man emerged from under them, tall and stooped and squinting suspiciously at us in the sunlight. I couldn’t make out too many of his features in the glare, but he had deeply tanned skin and a mop of wild black hair.
Okay, so, whoops. We’d just barged into this guy’s apartment unannounced and started snooping through his stuff. If I hadn’t been so startled, I think I might have stammered out an explanation, dropped the CD, and made a hasty (yet polite) retreat. But the man’s sudden appearance had spooked me real good, and before I knew it, I was booking it out of there, with Tom right on my heels.
“Hey!” the man shouted, but we didn’t stop. We ran through the front door of Frobisher’s and out into the crowded streets, almost colliding with a young couple taking photos. The girl let out a little surprised cry, and a few people stopped to look at us, and it hit me, then, that we had just burst out of a seemingly closed record store with what looked an awful lot like stolen merchandise (and really, isn’t that what it was?). Running would make us look guilty, but not running would risk the guy from the apartment catching up with us, and neither option was particularly great.
So we ran. We hurried down one street, then another, only stopping when a trolley pulled up to us and we hastily jumped on board. I tucked the Vacant Daybreak CD into my backpack and tried to calm my racing pulse. The trolley was pretty crowded, so Tom and I had to cling to the side railings, our bodies half in the street.
“Oh shit,” Tom said under his breath. I twisted around, and immediately recognized the man from Frobisher’s clinging to the other side of the car, his eyes locked on us. He was wearing a faded blue t-shirt and had the kind of disheveled stubbly look that my uncle calls “bachelor beard.” I couldn’t read the expression on his face very well, but ten bucks he wasn’t happy with us.
By that point we were on a downhill slope, making our way toward the water. It was almost sunset, and orange light glittered off the vast stretch of ocean, nearly blinding us. Tom and I looked at each other, making a decision without voicing it. Then, together, we leaped off the trolley, somehow managing not to stumble or break our ankles. We let the momentum carry us down the slope and down another side street, making our haphazard way toward the waterfront.
I’m not sure where we intended to go from there. But we were committed to our fugitive routine, dammit (the things we do for our fans!) and there was no turning back now. We fled down street after street, until the pavement turned to sand and we were running along the water, mingling with the crowd of beachgoers. There were kids burying their dads in the sand and couples sunbathing and seagulls swooping around looking for fallen scraps of food, and it was chaotic enough that I think we started to let our guard down. Surely, we reasoned, we’d put enough distance between us and that scary man from the record store; there was no way he would find us here.
“Hey,” a voice said suddenly. “There you are.”
Surprise surprise, he’d been following us the whole time. Tom and I must have looked like we were about to bolt again (probably because we were) but the stranger reached out and grabbed our arms before we could go anywhere. He didn’t look angry, which surprised me - just kind of annoyed. Not that I blamed him. We’d just stolen his property and forced him to chase us through San Francisco in ninety-degree weather.
“Look, I’m not going to call the police or anything, so just calm down,” he said. “I’m happy to let you go running on home. But I need that CD back.”
There didn’t seem much point in pretending we didn’t have the thing, so I reached into my backpack and pulled it out. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have taken this,” I said. “That was shitty of me. It’s just… we really wanted to listen to these songs. Is there any way we could buy the CD off you?”
The man sighed. “You’re chasing that whole viral story, aren’t you?” he asked. Up close, he looked older than I’d first suspected - maybe in his mid-forties. There was a weariness to him that looked immense, like time itself was pressing down on him. He had bags under his eyes and worry lines creasing his cheeks.
“We are,” I admitted. “What do you know about it?”
“More than anyone else,” he said. “God, maybe I should just tell you. This whole thing’s out of my control by now. What’s the point of keeping secrets anymore?”
I glanced at Tom. “Well, the two of us are amateur investigators,” I said. “We’ve got a blog with a decent-sized following. If you want to share your story, maybe we could interview you. We could get the truth out there.”
The man was silent for a long, long time. Then he nodded. We left the crowd and wandered over to an empty patch of beach, and it was kind of surreal, to sit casually on the sand with the guy we’d been fleeing from just minutes ago. Tom got the camera rolling, and we launched into the interview.
SHAUN: So, what’s your name?
STRANGER: I’d rather not say.
SHAUN: Fair enough. How’d you get your hands on the Vacant Daybreak demo tapes?
STRANGER: I knew them. I was actually a member of the band, once. It was a long time ago.
TOM: Get out!
SHAUN: You’ve gotta know the story behind the song, then. “Confessions of a Heartbreak King.” Is it actually about a real murder?
[The stranger was silent for a very long time. He kept looking away from us to stare out across the ocean.]
STRANGER: In twenty years, my best friend will murder the girl I’ve always loved. They’ll be together, he’ll think she’s cheating with me, and he’ll kill her for it. That’s what he’s singing about in “Heartbreak King.”
TOM: Huh?
SHAUN: Yeah, I’m kinda confused. You mean he threatened to do this?
STRANGER: He did it. He will do it. I don’t know the right way to phrase it.
TOM: I’m not really following you, man.
STRANGER: That’s fine. I don’t really understand it either.
SHAUN: Okay, so, you were in the band at one point, so that’s how you own a copy of the demo tapes. How did it end up making its way to Hella Robella, and later to MTSunrise?
[Another long pause. The stranger closed his eyes and let out a shaky breath.]
STRANGER: I thought… maybe if I warned them. Maybe I could change things. I don’t know. It was always a long shot.
TOM (to Shaun): Still having trouble following this.
STRANGER: Can I have the CD back? I don’t know if it’ll make a difference at this point, but… I’d rather hold on to it. It’s personal, you know?
SHAUN: Yeah. Yeah, of course.
[I handed the CD back to him. He stared down at the cover, running his fingers along the edge. Then he checked his watch, got to his feet, and brushed the sand off his pants.]
STRANGER: Thank you. For listening.
[He walked away from us. Tom kept the stranger in the frame as he pushed through the line of tourists and headed up the street. Then he swiveled the camera back to me.]
TOM: Dude. You just gave it back to him? Do you know how many of our fans would commit actual murder to hear what was on that CD?
SHAUN: I don’t know, man. He seemed really upset. I’m not going to steal something from a depressed stranger just for some internet points.
TOM: What the hell was he talking about anyway? Someone’s gonna murder someone else in twenty years? I don’t think we got any answers out of him at all.
[In the video, you can see a look of realization dawn on my face.]
SHAUN: No… no fucking way…
TOM: What?
SHAUN: He talked about the future like it was a definite thing. Like he’d seen it happen for himself.
TOM: You’ve gotta be kidding me. I don’t know what’s going on here, but that guy didn’t pull a Marty McFly and bring a song back from the future.
SHAUN: I’m not saying… look, just shut up and follow him. I don’t think we’re done asking questions here.
TOM: If you insist…
[By the time the camera turned around again, the stranger was barely visible, walking along a distant sidewalk. Tom followed me, camera shaky, as I ran after the man. In the video, you can hear me shouting for the stranger to stop, but he didn’t. A trolley pulled up next to him, and he climbed on board, disappearing in the sea of passengers. Then the trolley itself disappeared. Like a blink, it was gone between one frame and the next.]
TOM: What the fuck…?!
[He ran into the middle of the now empty street, where the trolley had been just a second ago. There was no one else on the road to see what we’d seen. It was sundown, and everything looked ghostly in the golden orange light.]
TOM: Where did he go?
So… yeah. I guess you could say this was a weird one. Tom and I still aren’t quite sure what happened yesterday. We also realize that you have no reason to believe this ever happened at all, and even if it did, you’re probably pissed that we had the lost demo tapes of Vacant Daybreak in our very hands and let them go.
To that, I guess I would say I’m sorry. But some songs just aren’t meant for us to hear, and some answers aren’t meant for us to know. The drama at the center of the Vacant Daybreak mystery seems sad, painful, and deeply personal, if our stranger’s “story” is anything to go by. So let’s keep it a mystery. Let’s bring our own stories to this lost track, and find our own meaning in it.
After all, isn’t that what the best art asks us to do?
– The Weird Brothers
/gallowshill12
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