Music and lyrics from Cub Lea and Winter Heat

10-song 1.3MB sampler track
Don't waste your time on music you won't like! This small four-minute sampler mp3 (48kbps mono; fairly good fidelity for the size) contains snippets from ten different Winter Heat/Hot Spot/Cub Lea tracks covering nearly the full range of styles I've written. Links below connect to pages with downloads to the full-length song. Tracks included in this sampler are:
One is a Thousand | Take These Chains
Shake Me | Only Time Will Tell
Wrap Me | More to Life Than Sex
Old Time Tunes | The Ecstasy Point
Livin' on the Upside | Shivering Heart

In the early 1980s I embarked upon an abortive career as a musician. As a player, I make a great fan. But by the mid-1980s, I had exploited the availability of cheap desktop recording hardware to become, without a word of boast, one of the best pop/rock songwriters in the country. I really was that good.

This section now includes more than fifty full-length tracks ready to download. While these tracks are all offered here in low-bitrate monophonic audio, most of the original recordings were fairly low fidelity to begin with, and you should find these ultra-small encodings quite listenable...soundwise. As for the music, well, that's another matter.

...stuff worth hearing...

...stuff worth less...

The Winter Heat Project

This was my dream-never-come-true...a project from the late 1980s that I still think could have written a legend in Canadian music, and ended up never even making it past the demo stage. Mp3 quality ain't the best, but some of these songs are excellent. (11/04)

Hot Spot: Misfits and Slow Learners

I recorded my first "album" in 1987 under the name Hot Spot, a cassette-only release entitled Misfits and Slow Learners that mainly got heard only by friends and acquaintances. If you're curious about whether my inconsistency and my disregard for taste and tolerability is a recently-acquired trait, here's the evidence that it isn't. (12/04)

Songs Without Projects

Not all of my best words end up on the printed page, and not all of my best music ended up on tape or CD. Some of the songs I've written just don't fit with the Hot Spot or Winter Heat projects. If you didn't find anything in the Hot Spot or Winter Heat projects that tickled your fancy, there might just be something here that will. (05/05)

...You know those pesky mosquitoes that you just can't seem to kill? Imagine they all got together and made a record. Now imagine that they expected you to listen to it. Support Monsanto and ADM...this world needs better pest control. (This was just a "salvage attempt" marketing gimmick for Winter Heat.) (05/05)

Buttnuggets: The Worst of Cub Lea

Bad people can make good music. But bad people can also make bad music. And this is some of the worst you'll ever hear. From sappy love songs to sanctimonious "message music" to pretentious "pseudo-prog", you'll find it in these pages, ready to waste your time and give you that "smile of lemon satisfaction". (05/06)

Unrecorded Lyrics and Poetry

...because one too many well-intended fools thought it would be charitable to encourage me to believe I have had a life worth telling other people about. (Actually, some of this stuff isn't too bad at all, and there's a downloadable plaintext archive with about 100 more pieces.) This section has been a cublea.net fixture since... (04/94)

Yet another exercise in turd-polishing
While developing these pages in the spring of 2005, I remembered a package of old plastic lettering I'd stashed away years earlier. I traced my Strat copy on the hood of my car using an erasable whiteboard marker, and after about an hour of indecision over which lines in which songs to apply to the hood (and weighing in the balance the relative lack of E's, T's and S's), I settled on these lines from Let It Go, a song slated for use on the ill-fated Winter Heat debut album. Look...a two-dollar bag of plastic letters ain't gonna win me any customizing awards, but it's not like it's going to destroy the value of a 16-year-old Plymouth, either. In fact, I like the result so much that by the time I get finished, you'll need five minutes just to read my car!

"Creativity is always a substitute for living."
- Cub Lea -

"I should have shot that Canuck asshole when I had the chance."
- Noam Chomsky -