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The idea for Residual Hauntings kind of began in 2019 and 2020 with the idea of a 15th anniversary edition of Ghosthouse that might have spanned 2 or 3 discs. There were a lot of rare and unreleased tracks and unfinished demos from around that time, including an unfinished EP and an lost album that, for the most part, didn't make it past rough partial demo fragments and more fleshed-out ideas in my head. So there was plenty of material for a disc of bonus material, much of it never-before-heard, but also a lot of work to do finishing it. Then, one thing or another happened (including 2020), I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with the Ghosthouse portion of the album (Remastered? Remixed? Reworked?) and the idea of a 15th anniversary edition of Ghosthouse was kind of put on the backburner and then scrapped entirely. However, the idea of releasing this material and finishing the "lost album" kind of reamined in my head, and I eventually decided to make it a standalone album. So here we are in all of its DIY, lo-fi glory, whether you consider it a mostly new Fornever album, a compilation of rare demos and newly completed tracks, or what would have been the bonus outtakes/rarities disc to pair with Ghosthouse. Tracks 1-3: Unreleased 2003 EP. This probably would have been released before Ghosthouse as a third EP in the series that included the Rose and Summer EPs, but around that time, my music distributor shut down on short notice, throwing a lot of my stuff out of print and sort of squashing release plans. "Circles" and "Fall from Grace" are new mixdowns from the original multitrack recordings from that era, while "I Give Up" is a newly recorded finished version (the original 2003 demo appeared as a b-side on the single). Tracks 5-6: Classic demos. "Sugar Coated Deities" and "She's the Fall" are early Fornever songs originally from 1996 and 1997, respectively, that were included in various versions of the Colours demo cassette in the '90s. These are later demo versions that were released online for fans around 2004 while working on Ghosthouse and getting it ready for release. They're both mixed down from the original multitrack masters, but I did go back and polish up a small guitar part on "Sugar Coated Deities" and the guitar solo on "She's the Fall." Tracks 8-22: Scrapbook. These songs were originally intended to be a follow-up to Ghosthouse, tentatively titled Scrapbook. However, by the time Ghosthouse came out, I was already working on new material that would become the next two Fornever albums, If You Don't Like the World Change it and Smile. So these songs were, for the most part, never finished. Most existed in the form of just demo fragments, whether it be a fully-formed song idea or just a few guitar riffs and a line or two of lyrics. "Sorta Kinda Maybe" was an exception, with an earlier vocal version slated to be the b-side to the scrapped "Bright Blue Eyes" CD single. The version found here is the RETROspective series (See Here) version with new vocals from 2015 with partially rewritten lyrics. I honestly thought the original was lost since most backups only had the music recordings, but I later came across one backup CD with the original full vocal/lyric version, which I included as one of the b-sides to the "I Give Up" single. As for the other Scrapbook tracks, they were painstakingly finished over the last year or two, often trying to incorporate elements of the original demo recordings where possible. I suppose I bit off a bit more than I expected, as it really amounted to writing an album's worth of material from fragments and ideas. A lot of these songs, though, have been playing in my head for over 15 years despite being unfinished and unreleased, so it's cool to finally have them whole and out there, some in sort of the lo-fi form they probably would have taken if the album was finished and released 17 years ago as the immediate sequel to Ghosthouse. -Joshua Heinrich, 2023
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