Discography dead weight
I went down a rabbit hole in the train this morning…
Roughly 43% of recorded songs across their 15 albums are rarely or never played live. I deduped re-recorded acoustic and live versions.
Of about 134 unique studio originals across the 15-album catalog, 48 songs (36%) have zero documented live plays on setlist.fm, and another 10 (7%) have been played fewer than 10 times ever.
Stretch the definition to “under 50 plays” (roughly less than once per five shows over a 30-year career) and its about 60% of the catalog.
Sixteen songs do all the heavy lifting, about 12% of the catalog accounts for the vast majority of live performances.
The “never played” pile is heavily concentrated in the post-2015 albums.
• Kill the Flaw (2015): 5 of 11 never played
• All I See Is War (2018): 5 of 11 never played
• Blood & Stone (2020): 6 of 12 never played
• Truth Killer (2023): 9 of 12 never played
• One (2026): only 2 singles tested live so far
Once they hit Cold Day Memory (2010), they stopped meaningfully expanding their live repertoire. New albums get one or two singles into rotation (Dirty, Truth Killer, Everything, Fence, Blood From a Stone, Dying to Live, Till Death, Decay) and the rest of the tracklist essentially never makes a setlist.
Why bother writing new stuff? Why not try something dramatically different, limited run in cities with the deepest fan penetration?