Ah, those lucky musical geniuses, composing song after song, hearing each fully formed result in their heads from the moment they write the first lyric.

We were never like that. Almost every initial idea turns out to be the beginning of a journey, a series of trials and errors, with techno tracks morphing into ballads and guitar songs suddenly demanding to be heavily synthesized. If all goes well, and more often than not it does, we end up with a version that feels exactly right, showing all the ones that went before it as mere detours. But sometimes, well, sometimes we wonder.

For this record, we collected some of our favourite alternative versions. Some are early arrangements of songs we later released in radically different shapes, like 'October', which was a melancholy ballad on our album Pappelallee but started as the slightly bombastic rocker you find here. Others are studio reworkings of live versions we liked especially well. Singing about the fear of aging in 'Fade Out', for instance, feels much better when you do it to a mean synth sound and beat, as opposed to the softly chiming guitars of the album version. Then there is the radio remix of 'Go'. Sung by Selda Kaya, the seven-minute-plus original is included on our first album Everyone Loves You. Our record company suggested we do a shorter pop version of the song for a single release. We spent three days figuring it out only to see the record company go bankrupt a few days later. Alas, the single was never released.

Listening back to most of these tracks instantly gave us ideas. We're not much for nostalgia, so we couldn't resist tweaking a few things, from slightly changing a beat to recording new vocals - or in some cases deconstructing the whole thing and turning it into something else entirely. Instead of just browsing through the archives and throwing some stuff together, we soon found ourselves doing new versions of old versions.

While half of this collection is alternative takes, the other half consists of entirely new songs - new as in never released, not in any version. Some we wrote only recently. Others are older songs which for some reason or other didn't quite fit on their designated albums. Or so we felt at the time. The half-finished 'Trust' lay sleeping on some battered hard disk for years. Now we feel it is one of the best things we have ever done. 'God Knows What God Knows', with its angry preacherman fighting a choir of angels, dates back to before our first album. It seemed too dark to be included on Everyone Loves You, but it has haunted us ever since. The same is true for 'The Party', which fell off our last album, Aquarium. We were really excited by these rediscoveries.

Needless to say, we immediately went and did new versions of them.

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