I saw the name “Demand Badger” on a side of a semi driving down the highway. I was immediately struck by the name; am I supposed to demand a badger, is demand a verb? As in, where is that damn badger? Or is it describing a pretty pushy badass mammal (which they really are, if you had not heard)… so is demand an adjective modifying badger? I liked it a lot. I also liked the random similarity to one of my heroes, Robert Wyatt’s last band, Matching Mole. Matching Mole is how Soft Machine sounds pronounced in French.

As far as being an octet, while completely fictional as a group of musicians, everyone I list in the credits is definitely a real person; almost all of them were in my first grade classes at Haven Elementary School in Evanston, Illinois. I just loved their names: Monique Maifair, Anne Asp, Dorsey Worthington, Jeffrey Truehart.

But after writing for bands and ensembles for longer than I can compute, it is much more fun to write parts for a person and imagine them playing and rehearsing it. The process becomes much more animate.

Everything with Demand Badger is recorded in layers but in real time; no sequencing. For many of the CDs I would record live drums, no backing or click track, and then begin to compose and layer the parts on top of the drums. Only recently have I been able to layer the drums on top of existing music—primarily because I was never happy with the volumes while playing drums. I also have occasional guest stars on guitar or vocal, like the lovely Molly Beaird from Austin, Texas doing the vocal on British Invasion on Flight Risk and Big Bang on my latest CD, Terror Management Theory.

Demand Badger Octet recordings:

Watching Bridges Burn (1999)
Minutes After the Hour (2001)
Flight Risk (2002)
Funhouse Falling Down (2003)
Moscow on Wheels (2008)
The Road Ends in Water (2010)
Terror Management Theory (2011)
Beware of Gifts (2012)

A sample from Terror Management Theory: