LISTEN: Bird Streets Share Early Version of “Sleeper Agent”

Deluxe edition of 2022’s acclaimed LP Lagoon out on June 30th

June 19, 2023June 19, 2023 Ron Hart 0 Comments 2023, Bird Streets, Death Cab for Cutie, John Brodeur, Lagoon, Nada Surf, Pat Sansone, Sparkle Plenty

John Brodeur of Bird Streets (Image: Sherwin Lainez)

Released in November 2022 by newly minted Los Angeles label Sparkle Plenty, Lagoon is renowned songwriter John Brodeur’s most personal statement yet under the Bird Streets aegis.

And on June 30th, a digital deluxe edition of the album with an additional eight bonus tracks will hit streaming services. Among the extras include the Pat Sansone-produced new track “California High” as well as an early version of the key album cut “Sleeper Agent,” which Rock & Roll Globe is happy to share with readers this morning on the site.

“I was nine or ten songs into recording Lagoon when the pandemic hit,” Brodeur explains of the track’s origins. “‘Sleeper Agent’ was the song that shook me out of the longest writing slump of my career.

“It came to me during one of the daily ‘sanity walks’ I started taking that summer. (Man, those walks were a lifesaver.) Masked-up and roaming the streets of Brooklyn, I started hearing in my head a lyric from another song, with a new melody underneath. I hadn’t had a solid idea in months and then this thing just showed up. The verses spilled out from there–seven or eight of them. Once I distilled it down to the important bits I knew this was a song that could set the tone for the rest of the album.

Bird Streets Lagoon: Deluxe Edition, Sparkle Plenty 2023

“This early version of ‘Sleeper Agent’ represents how I first imagined the song: more in the vein of Death Cab or Nada Surf,” he states in regards to this particular rendition of the song. “This was recorded in the first part of 2021. The infallible Patrick Berkery lends some fantastic drumming to the song’s second half; I think this was the first thing he recorded at home during lockdown. Around that same time I started working with Michael Lockwood, and the version we made felt like more of a personal statement, so it went on the album. But this recording is an excellent time capsule of what the song could have been and almost was.”

As heady a meditation on divorce and separation as Marvin Gaye’s Here My Dear and Chris Isaak’s Forever Blue, Lagoon has been made even more poignant with the addition of these extra tracks.

Now is the time to surrender to its sorrow.

Listen below.