Audio: I Want Everything (back and forth)

Luna (1992)

When I started this website in 1994 I didn’t really know anything about what I was getting into. All I knew about Galaxie 500, Luna and Damon & Naomi was what I read on the back of the record sleeves, or in the occasional interview that turned up in the print media… and subsequently online.

When someone emailed me and told me that two different versions of I Want Everything had turned up on different pressings of Lunapark, I accepted it as fact and published it on the website - although in the back of mind there was almost certainly some “yeah, right” thinking go on so I never bothered trying to track it down (also this was back when downloading a track from the Internet took days!).

So with this “fact” happily filed away my life of Luna completism happily ticked along unaware that it was actually a fact (without the inverted commas… and in italics!) and that my collection could never be complete… until…

In 2006 Luna released the compilation album, imaginitively titled “Best of Luna” and when my (US Only edition!) arrived I popped it on and approximately 2’30” into I Want Everything I thought my CD player had gone on the blink - that solo was sounding very messed up!

Here’s Dean’s notes from Best of Luna

There’s a great documentary about the Apollo trips to the moon called For All Mankind (with a soundtrack by Brian Eno). They’re up there in space and the astronauts are making little Super 8 movies and talking about their feelings and one of them looks back at Earth and says that he can feel an incredible unseen love emanating from the planet. I made a note of that. Check out Stanley’s cool conga pattern. We mastered this song two different ways. Some copies of Lunapark were pressed with a backward guitar solo here, some have it forward.

So here for comparison you can listen side-by-side to both versions of I Want Everything and enjoy them.

Luna - I Want Everything - guitar solo backwards

Luna - I Want Everything - guitar solo forwards

So… which was better?

Now go buy some Luna - you can get most (probably all now) of their albums on Amazon and iTunes, and their later stuff is on their Bandcamp site.