Ivy were only around for about six years, but they made some seriously great guitar pop in that span. Though co-founder Adam Schlesinger would go on to bigger things with Fountains of Wayne, I still think his best work was made alongside Andy Chase and Dominique Durand. Thankfully, one last collab is in the works.
The trio's 2000 album Long Distance is about to get a reissue, and it'll feature three bonus tracks, including the previously unreleased "All I Ever Wanted," which is out today. "All I Ever Wanted" was made in 1997, when Ivy were working on Apartment Life (which was reissued last year), and while I wish it had come out at the beginning of summer, it unsurprisingly rules.
In a press release, Chase explained how he and Durand uncovered the song:
Dominique and I searched through the Ivy archives for any unreleased Apartment Life-era songs we might be able to use as bonus tracks. We put on one of the 2-inch 24-track reel-to-reel tapes we unearthed that had the title "Stupid Cat" scrawled across the outside of the box. This song started playing. It was so familiar to Dominique and I that we Shazam'd it, to see what it was called and which album of ours it was on. But when Shazam came up high and dry, we started remembering more and more of this song's foggy, unresolved history.
Back in 1997 the great Lloyd Cole had co-produced a few songs for what would be Apartment Life. We released one called "I've Got a Feeling" and, for reasons lost on us today, we shelved the other one – this one – never even doing a rough mix of it. So the master tape sat in our storage locker for the next 24 years, fully forgotten from our memories. After its reemergence, we had it transferred to digital and I finally was able to do a proper mix of it in my studio in 2024. And yes, Lloyd is even playing some guitars on this song!
While digging around in their archives, Chase and Durand say they found more than 21 unfinished songs they'd been working on with Schlesinger. Now, they're in the process of finishing those songs for the first new Ivy album in over a decade. Yay!
Listen to "All I Ever Wanted" below.