The Mollusk Sessions

The Mollusk Sessions
The Mollusk Sessions
Semi-official compilation by Ween
Released	October 16–19, 2007
Recorded	Fall 1995
Length	40:42
Label	Self-released

The Mollusk Sessions is a semi-official bootleg which was reportedly streamed on Ween's MySpace from October 16–19, 2007.^{[citation needed]} It contains tracks recorded during the first sessions for The Mollusk, recorded on 16-track tape before their beach house flooded.

Dean wrote at length about the sessions on the original MySpace post:

I've been told that "file sharing" is all the rage among kids nowadays so I figured I would take this opportunity to share something with all y'all. I meant to do this during the summer, but we were pretty busy getting the new record together and touring. It has been ten years since we released "The Mollusk", our 6th studio album, so to celebrate this we've decided to give you the raw sessions from the record. I don't mean to come off like a self righteous storyteller but indulge me for a minute here.
We had always talked about recording an album down at the beach during the off-season, when no one else was around. Holgate, (which is the southern tip of Long Beach Island, New Jersey) was the spot where we decided on recording. This was because my father had built a house there in the '70's and I had a lot of roots in Holgate. My sister and I have a trailer down there presently. Anyway, in the fall of '95 Aaron and I rented a beachfront property where we were gonna write and record our new record. Greg Frey (who would later become our manager) helped us rent a Ryder truck and set up our 16 track tape deck and mixing console. The place was gorgeous and it turned out to be a very productive environment, for awhile at least.
In November we halted our sessions in Holgate and went to Nashville to record "12 Golden Country Greats", a project we had scheduled prior to the Mollusk sessions. We had already written the tunes for that record and the albums were treated as separate projects. After we got back from Nashville our enthusiasm for our weekly beach trips had diminished somewhat from laziness and fatigue. We took a few weeks off and finally we went back down to the beach house in December, only to find that the pipes had frozen and burst and water had been continually running across the floor for at least a month. Everything was dripping with beads of water, like an aquarium.
We had no choice but to move out and finish the album back at home. We wrote and recorded a few more songs in a rented farmhouse in Holicong, PA and Claude's home studio in Hopewell, New Jersey. Andrew Weiss then took the tapes and mixed them, we also did some overdubs and re-recorded a few tunes from the beach. The bulk of the record was made at the shore though, and that was where the album took shape. We worked from Sunday til Thursday every week and would go home for the weekends. These sessions were bounced from a cassette that I kept for the ride home. Every Thursday I would add whatever we had recorded that week onto this tape. I transferred this old tape to my computer and encoded it here for you. It doesn't have the songs we made at home, like The Blarney Stone, Jonny on th' Spot, etc. This is just the music recorded in that flooded beach house. We would rent it two more times to write the songs for White Pepper and then Quebec. The record was eventually released in June of 1997.^[1]

Track Listing[edit | edit source]

1	Mutilated Lips
2	Cold Blows the Wind
3	The Mollusk
4	Waving My Dick in the Wind
5	Kim Smoltz
6	Ocean Man
7	Koko
8	Did You See Me?
9	Flutes of Chi
10	She Wanted to Leave
11	Vinnie the Eel