Ben Lee, Burn to Shine, Bottom of the Hill (1997)

A bunch of college radio friends and I went to see Ben Lee at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco in 1997, when he was touring for Something to Remember Me By, just him and his acoustic guitar, and I still remember his performance of this song in particular—which wasn’t on the album—as being just incredible. Bottom of the Hill was not a very big venue, and after the show, while I was waiting for my friends to be ready to leave, I spotted him across the room walking around near the stage; I’m by no means someone who normally goes up to people like this, but I felt compelled to walk over, shake his hand, and tell him how great the show was and how amazing that song in particular was.

I only ever heard it that one time. I was looking for it to come out an album, and was stoked to see it on the track list for Breathing Tornadoes a year later...which version was so different from what I’d heard at the live show that it’s not simply a studio version of the song, it’s literally a completely different song (and a pretty limp and unimpressive one at that). It doesn’t even have the same time signature.

This YouTube version, which somebody recorded in Cambridge, MA, on the same tour and apparently put on a cassette, at least gives an idea of what the original song was like, but it doesn’t at all capture how raw and powerful it was at that particular San Francisco show, watching it at age 19, maybe 10 feet from the stage in a tiny club, just him and the guitar. That one performance is, for me, the great lost song of all time.