Shuffling through an iTunes library containing 105 days of music means that I will occasionally land upon a long-forgotten item so obscure that, were I still storing music on plastic media, would remained consigned to the backs of my closest for years, if not forever.

Such a moment occurred the other day when my player landed on a half-finished track by a band I was in seven years ago. We were called Racecar Radar and we were an Iowa City supergroup, inasmuch as a band comprising members of three local, unsigned, about-to-break-up bands can be.

We had some good songs, though, and we went on to do great things in other contexts, so Racecar Radar remains a brief pit-stop, preserved in the amber of the hazy alcoholic summer of 2002. We did stick together long enough cajole our way into John Svec’s studio for a few days in August to bash out a few demos, only one of which we finished.

One of the unfinished tracks is also one of my favorites. Its working title was “Lighthouses” and Dino wrote it. I won’t post it here because it really is noticeably unfinished and would require a major overhaul, which will never happen. Dino’s scratch vocal is buried in the mix, the lyrics half there; the guitars are out of tune with each other; the whole thing is rough and unmastered.

I forgot this song even existed until my computer thrust it at me the other day, and I was immediately plunged into the usual morass of nostalgia and what-could-have-been, but I also noted that—if you’ll permit me brag for a moment—I am killing the drum performance on this recording.

Sure, I pretty much bit the whole part from Joe Easley’s groove on “The City” by the Dismemberment Plan, but if you’re going to go plundering geniuses, I can think of worse places to start. And I suspect John Svec deserves most of the credit, for getting such great sound from my dear old drum kit in such quick and dirty circumstances. But my chops were tight from a summer of performing again after a long post-Speed of Sauce hiatus, and I was in my element with these new friends and bandmates.

Maybe Racecar Radar’s songs are poignant because that band was such a flash in the pan, and we never took it that seriously. As Dino (at least, I think it was Dino, but it could be Nick) wrote on our MySpace page, we “never spent more than 15 minutes trying to write a song, drank 2356749823 beers, dated each other, made out with each other, broke up with each other, and then got back together during a game of spin the bottle.” We played a handful of shows before returning to our primary bands. That beautiful drum kit got stolen from my car. Our primary bands eventually broke up, too. We all left Iowa City. And so on.

What I’ve posted here is not “Lighthouses,” but “Two Days Before She Set Herself On Fire,” the only song from those sessions we mixed and mastered. It’s a Nick Burd original, from back before he was a hot-shit New York novelist, and it still twists me up in knots.

Racecar Radar, “Two Days Before She Set Herself On Fire”