u/cheesedunker97

If you are unaware of The Western States Motel, it was an indie rock/pop band from the LA area, and nearly a solo project created by the musician Carl Jordan. It never received much mainstream attention, but their song "Powerlines" gained some notoriety in some circles and even appeared in a few movies, and their song "The New E Blues" was featured in one of the last episodes of the TV show The OC.

Anyways, I discovered the existence of this song a while ago while I was working on updating the band's discography on Genius. The song is called "The Cliff", and from what I can tell it was only released in 2010 through either the band's iTunes and MySpace page. I had never heard of it before, and it has never been added to the bands discography on websites like YouTube or Spotify, so it's safe to say it was released independently from any label or distro. The first piece of evidence I found was a review of the single by the music blog FensePost. The blog described the song as follows:

>"This song is that love lost, then found, then kicked to the curb, then left in a sobbing limbo of begging and frustration when you are alone type of song. It's simply undeniable how much tracks like these affect us. It's also undeniable that these guys have taken the baton of this blissful idea, and ran further than their predecessors could have ever imagined."

They also have a link to download the song, but it's broken.

So I was thinking, "Okay, but maybe that was just a working title, and the song got renamed on their following album, Freeway Freeway Riverbed." (Though the description we have doesn't sound like any particular song off of that album). However, I ended up unearthing some pretty solid evidence that this was just a single, never released on an album.

First clue is in an interview recorded by the blog Radio Free Silver Lake. In the interview, they are discussing the setlist for an upcoming live show meant to celebrate the release of their first EP, Painted Birds Flying In The Orange Mirror Sun. In the interview, Carl Jordan says this:

>"What we were working on tonight was a pretty even balance... We're doing the whole EP, though. The EP is five songs... We've also been playing a new song called The Cliff but that's not on the EP..."

This interview also establishes that this song was likely close to completion by the time of the interview ( Sept. 24th 2008). The FensePost review was made in January of 2010, for reference, over a year before their following album.

The second clue, and the strongest piece of any evidence I have, comes from the Internet Archive captures of the band's first official website. Sometime between Dec. 2008 and Feb. 8th 2009, the website was updated to display promotional art for song. The website displayed this until sometime after Feb. 2011 when the website was sold off. Unfortunately, it seems the image was the only part saved on the website, there's not any other text and the song wasn't saved if it had been on the site in the first place. I'd upload the image directly, but I suppose that isn't allowed so I just linked to the first instance of the image on the archive. It also appears on the archives for the second official website.

Alright, so we can conclude that this song definitely existed, and that it was almost certainly not a working title for another song that released later. Now, we just have to find it. Well, I've looked a lot of places and all of them seem to be dead ends.

-The band's MySpace page might have been one of the only locations it officially released., but it is unsurprisingly defunct now. Interestingly, the archive records for Oct. 16th 2009 name the song as "coming soon". The song first appears in 2011, with the page displaying it was added on Jan. 22 of that year, at the same time as some other songs both previously and yet-to-be released at the time. It lists the song as being 2:19 minutes long. The player wouldn't load the song for me, but maybe someone more tech savvy than myself can find a way to obtain it somehow.

-Another article on Radio Free Silver Lake (same link as before, but scroll down to the second article) mentions that they obtained permission to post an "early demo" of the cliff to the MySpace page of Rock Against HD in 2007. Unfortunately, the only snapshot of the page has no mention of the song whatsoever. The article also claims the track is for their "upcoming album", which probably meant their impending EP Painted Birds, but as previously established it was not included on it.

-The band's facebook page advertised that the song was "out now" on iTunes on Jan. 20th, 2010, and later mentioned specifically that it received air time on Morning Becomes Electric on radio station KCRW, and that it would be played later that night on the Locals Only show on KROQ on Feb. 20th, 2010. I tried looking through the iTunes page, couldn't find the song and there weren't any backups of the page either.

-The archives of the band's second official website list the song as a 2010 single. Following the link to purchase it leads to a dead iTunes link.

-The website Mrtzcmp3 is one of the few search results I found offering a download for the song, but the page is defunct and there's no backups it seems.

-A search result for TabLyricFM included the song in the preview description for the band's lyrics and tabs. This could give some insight into what the song at least sounded like, but the website is dead and I couldn't find any useful archives of it.

-Their Twitter/X account doesn't seem to have anything, but I can't access anything past the home page because I don't have an account.

The band itself has been almost completely inactive since 2017. The only new information I could find about the state of the band or Carl Jordan was on a post on r/Grandaddy by someone claiming to have emailed them, but they could have easily been lying.

At this point, I feel like I have dried up any potential leads I could find on the internet. Outside of some hidden file host miraculously having the song, or it appearing in an old archive of a radio show it was played on, it seems like my only hope to hear this song would be that someone just happens to have it saved somewhere and decides to upload it, that someone can work some website magic and pull it off a broken site, or that someone manages to get in contact with people connected to the band in the hopes they might still have the file as well, and are willing to release it. It's a real shame, I really enjoyed the band, and the idea of hearing one last new song from them got me excited. I think it's really sad how even a band that has received a modicum of success can still be lost to breaking websites like this. If you have read this far, thank you for taking the time to do so, it means a lot to me.

TO RECAP:
We know "The Cliff" by The Western States Motel was a single released sometime before or around January 20th, 2010 on iTunes and the band's MySpace page. Early demos of the song have appeared on the Rock Against HD MySpace page and have been played at live shows and over the radio. Every service hosting the file is seemingly now defunct or has lost it, including iTunes/Apple music. The artwork used for the song has been found, and we know the length is 2:19.

Thank you to anyone who helps search for this song.