It starts with a handwritten song.
Hunted by Dreams is one of the older songs in the surviving archive. A handwritten lyric sheet dated December 1987 still exists among the papers.
That page matters because the later recordings are not the beginning of the story. By the time computers, software instruments and digital recording entered the picture, the song had already been hanging around for years.
First came the song. The technology came later.
Get it down before it disappears.
At some point the song was captured as a rough acoustic performance — one of the recordings later gathered into the archive now called Before It Was Lost.
The point of those recordings was preservation rather than polish: old songs, fragments and explanations put onto tape so that they would not simply vanish. The surviving digital copy was part of a batch digitised in 2004.
Hunted by Dreams — acoustic preservation version
Twenty years after the lyric sheet, I tried again.
The song starts being built.
A surviving sequence of working files — i20 try, try 2, try 3, try 4, try 5 and try 7 — documents a new approach to the song. There is no surviving try 6; it may never have been saved.
The files grow from about 2:44 to more than five minutes as the arrangement develops. One surviving M4A retains a creation timestamp from the beginning of May 2007, and the working files identify Paul Cruse and 2007 in their metadata.
I played the electric guitar, bass and electronic drums myself, added an electronic keyboard sample and experimented with Auto-Tune effects which, with hindsight, were perhaps not the technology's finest hour.
It was a sketch in the literal sense: trying things until the song appeared.
Hunted By Dreams (Sketch).
The surviving 5:06 MP3 identifies itself as Hunted By Dreams (Sketch) 128k, by Paul Cruse, dated 2007. Its album field says Necessary Humanoid. Whether that was intended as an album, project name or simply an organising label is not yet established.
The final i20 try 7 working file and the 128k MP3 are effectively the same completed sketch, preserving both the source-quality working version and the web-era compressed export.
Hunted By Dreams (Sketch) — electric/electronic version
The working title finally makes sense.
When the old files were revisited in 2026, a half-memory remained of something called “itry”. The working AIFF and M4A files supplied the answer: they were not another lost song. They were the development trail for Hunted by Dreams.
The archive now holds the December 1987 paper, the acoustic preservation recording, the 2007 working sequence and the surviving electric/electronic sketch.
There is no need to pretend every stage is finished, or even good. The interesting thing is that the stages survived.
Twenty years of one song, still arguing with itself.