David Kauffman and Eric Caboor

David Kauffman and Eric Caboor met in 1982 playing the coffee houses of Los Angeles. Every week, the pair met in a converted utility shed in the backyard of Caboor’s childhood home in Burbank to play each other the songs they wrote. They were never a duo in the conventional sense–rather, as the Madison, NJ-native Kauffman put it, “two loners who happened to join forces.” In 1984, the singer-songwriters released their home-recorded debut album, Songs From Suicide Bridge, on their own Donkey Soul Music.

After two frustrating years of trying and failing to catch a break in a music industry that was focused on new wave, pop, AOR–anything but the folk-rock the duo were offering–the pair conceded defeat. One of them suggested, half-joking, that they should put all their darkest and least viable works together on one record, if only to spite the industry that had rejected them. The more they thought about it, the better an idea it seemed, and when they started to plot out a tracklist from their vast catalog of songs, the end product was a full-length album they titled Songs From Suicide Bridge, the morbid nickname of the Colorado Street Bridge connecting Pasadena to Los Angeles. Though real life encroached, Caboor and Kaufmann continued to work together, releasing albums as The Drovers in 1989 and 1992. For the first time ever, their debut is now available with brand new liner notes by Sam Sweet. Hopefully, it will finally find its audience–a listener who can see hope in the darkness. “People would tell us those songs were depressing,” Caboor says in his interview with Sweet, “but it wasn’t depressing to us. In a lot of cases, playing those songs in that little room was one of the only things that made us feel better.”