Ron Sexsmith - Reasons to Believe, Volume 1: 1995-1998

A few months ago, a follower of this blog named Pete the Greek contacted me with an idea. He's a huge fan of singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith, and he suggested I made some albums of all of Sexsmith's non-album tracks. Now, I'm a fan of Sexsmith's music, but not a huge fan. I don't even have all of his studio albums. But Pete the Greek sent me a collection of non-album tracks, and I thought they were very good. I actually liked them more than a lot of his studio albums. It helps that a lot of them are cover songs, and Sexsmith has excellent taste in covers. 

So I began working with Pete the Greek on this, and things kind of snowballed. I think we originally started with four albums of material, but ended up with eight! That's a lot for a singer-songwriter who isn't even that well known. But it's all good stuff, in my opinion. Actually, I consider this very similar to the series of Marshall Crenshaw covers albums I've been posting, with a similar number of albums. Both of them are musician's musicians with deep, deep record collections. But this is somewhat different in that it includes all of Sexsmith's non-album tracks. Most are covers, but there are a fair number of originals. The only thing I didn't include was songs from his 2003 compilation album "Rarities." That's mostly a collection of B-sides from the earlier part of his music career. 

I'm calling this series "Reasons to Believe." I was looking over the song titles on the different albums I made, and I noticed he did the Tim Hardin classic "Reason to Believe." That made me think of "Reasons to Believe," as in, hopefully these albums will give you additional reasons to believe that Sexsmith is a very talented musician and songwriter, if you weren't aware of that already.

Note that Sexsmith has also posted hundreds of cover versions and alternate versions of his originals to his YouTube channel over the years. I'm not including ANY of that here, because that's an entirely different can of worms. I have posted two albums of Kinks covers mostly drawing from that. Perhaps I'll make other albums from that in the future, we'll see.

Thanks again to Pete the Greek. Without his help every step of the way, this series of albums wouldn't have happened.

If you want to know the sourcing for all the songs, check the mp3 tags for details (which is the case for ALL the albums I post here, by the way). But, in brief, tracks 2 and 11 through 13 are the officially released ones, from B-sides and other artists' albums. The rest come from a demo (track 10), in-person radio sessions (tracks 1, 4, and 5) or concert bootlegs (the rest). When it comes to concert recordings, I've used the new MVSEP audio editing program to wipe out the crowd noise as much as possible, so hopefully they all sound like studio versions.

This album is 50 minutes long.

Here's a list of the original artists for each song:

01 You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go - Bob Dylan
02 You're Learning - Ron Sexsmith
03 New Pony - Bob Dylan
04 Ribbon of Darkness - Gordon Lightfoot
05 Caroline, No - Beach Boys
06 To Ramona - Bob Dylan
07 Windows of the World - Burt Bacharach & Hal David / Dionne Warwick
08 Everyday I Write the Book - Elvis Costello
09 Love Minus Zero-No Limit - Bob Dylan
10 Dirty Windows [Demo] - Ron Sexsmith
11 We'll Manage - Ron Sexsmith
12 It's All Over but the Smoke - Jules Shears
13 Overcast - Mitchell Froom
14 Listen to What the Man Said - Paul McCartney
15 Sundown - Gordon Lightfoot
16 You Still Believe in Me -Beach Boys

And here's the usual song list:

01 You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Ron Sexsmith)
02 You're Learning (Ron Sexsmith)
03 New Pony (Ron Sexsmith)
04 Ribbon of Darkness (Ron Sexsmith)
05 Caroline, No (Ron Sexsmith)
06 To Ramona (Ron Sexsmith)
07 Windows of the World (Ron Sexsmith & Elvis Costello)
08 Everyday I Write the Book (Ron Sexsmith)
09 Love Minus Zero-No Limit (Ron Sexsmith)
10 Dirty Windows [Demo] (Ron Sexsmith)
11 We'll Manage (Ron Sexsmith)
12 It's All Over but the Smoke (Jules Shears & Ron Sexsmith)
13 Overcast (Mitchell Froom & Ron Sexsmith)
14 Listen to What the Man Said (Ron Sexsmith)
15 Sundown (Ron Sexsmith)
16 You Still Believe in Me (Ron Sexsmith)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16227872/RONSXSMTH1995-1998_ResnstoBliveVlum1_atse.zip.html

The cover photo is from 1995 or 1996. But I don't know the details.