Written and recorded in summer 1981, in the earliest days of the Fashion Jungle, this is yet another interpretation of the old saw, “Wherever you go, there you are.” I started writing the lyrics in an art history class and finished the song over a gin gimlet, sitting at the round red table in my sister’s living room, on a sunny summer evening, with Bob Newhart on the TV, volume muted. “Shortwave” stayed in the repertoire for more than 20 years, from the FJ through the Howling Turbines. But in keeping with this 40th anniversary year of the FJ’s founding, this performance features the original foursome: In addition to yours truly on guitar and vocal, the players are Mike Piscopo on bass, Ken Reynolds on drums and Jim Sullivan on the Farfisa rock organ. “Shortwave Radio” copyright © 1981 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. (Photo by Jeff Stanton: The Fashion Jungle at Kayo’s, September or October 1981)

Written in 2011, this sad tale was the first song I wrote for mandolin, which I’d taken up the year before, and my second composition of the 21st century after a years-long songwriting drought. Perhaps most significantly, it’s my first contribution to country music’s illustrious catalog of songs that are about parts of a room (“Walking the Floor Over You,” “Hello Walls,” etc.). Performed here in October 2011 by Day for Night: Doug Hubley and Gretchen Schaefer. “The Ceiling” copyright © 2012 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved.

Ah, Paris in the spring — what better garden to grow romance? But the real-life romance that inspired this song took place, instead, in Vienna and Stockholm during a long-ago July, which may say something about the prevailing mood. In short, “Je t’aime” is an interpretation, somewhat unfair, of an affair I had with a Swedish girl in 1976. I wrote the song in 1982, the early days of the Steve Chapman–era Fashion Jungle; revived it for the Boarders; and retained it for Howling Turbines, heard here rehearsing it on Aug. 8, 1999. Bass, Gretchen Schaefer; drums, Ken Reynolds. ”Je t’aime” copyright © 1983 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved.

In one of the less usual concepts for a country song, “You Wore It Well” traces the course of a relationship through things applied to the skin. Written in 2013 in New Hampshire and Colorado, it also stands out in my catalog because it’s taciturn. And no minor chords! Recorded by Doug Hubley and Gretchen Schaefer — aka Day for Night, of Portland, Maine — in a September 2016 rehearsal. “You Wore It Well” copyright © 2014 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved.

We knew a woman whose charismatic lover was rumored to be a coke dealer, woman beater, demon in the flesh, etc. This is their story as I imagined it. Sometime during the 1987–88 winter I wrote the lyric over gimlets in the lobby of the Eastland Hotel on a snowy afternoon while waiting for my girlfriend, Gretchen Schaefer, to get out of class. One of my favorite songs I’ve written and, I think, one of the Fashion Jungle’s best. Too bad few people ever heard it. I recorded the first part of this track in The Basement in August 2020, and the coda is extracted from a videotape that Gretchen made of the FJ in Steve and Jeri Chapman’s basement early in 1988. Steve, bass; DH, guitar; Ken Reynolds, drums.