Despite running this site, having my fingers in several music-related forums and generally being well-read when it comes to music, I have never really seen a whole lot of rare releases. Pre-releases, yes; but then these days it’s not hard to find leaked versions of upcoming albums, just keep an eye on your local friendly torrent site. But stuff that’s hard to find anywhere else? That requires actual work, lots of connections or both. The closest I get to that sort of material is generally stuff in fairly wide release anyways, like Liz Phair’s early “girlysound” tapes. Though I honestly couldn’t tell you where to find it if you asked.

Anyways, they say fortune favors the bold. Sometimes fortune favors me, as once upon a time I stumbled across a pack of MP3s someone had ripped from a CD-R from a friend of a friend back in Boston. The CD-R contained the b-sides from Helium’s Superball+ EP—and a bunch of demos, acoustic versions and unreleased songs. “Julia” never saw the light of day, it seems, but the demo is fairly polished. With Helium’s sound evolving a great deal around the time of The Dirt Of Luck and beyond, it’s entirely possible that “Julia” didn’t fit into Helium’s new world order. As a one-off, though, it’s a nice track to have. And for anyone enamoured with Mary Timony but not her later treks into neo-medieval dirges, “Julia” is a glimpse into an alternate universe where Mary Lou Lord ends up fronting Helium permanently while Timony goes back to busking in the subway and singing sweet little acoustic numbers in coffee shops.