Exclusive: Chad VanGaalen Prepping Enormous B-Sides Collection, Digital Archives For Charity

“[Soft Airplane] was narrowed down from quite a few songs,” Chad said. “I scrapped a few versions of the record with different songs in it. There’s still about 100 songs that we were picking from. We’re trying to find a place for all that stuff. It’s been in the works for a while but I think I’m just going to put it out as a download as a fundraiser for World Wildlife, because there’s no place for it. I don’t want to make more CDs.”

At this rate, the Chad VanGaalen archives will hit the Internet before Neil Young’s. The prolific musician has a couple of other discs in the works — Black Mold, his electronic music project, is due in January 2009, and he’s working on a Broken Ankles release with drummer pal Eric Hamelin.

Despite his fascination with sleep, the musician-cum-animator has burned enough midnight oil to start on a feature film, as well.

“I’m working on a full-length animation right now which allows me to score and combine the visual arts with that,” Chad said. “That’s sort of loosely based on [an unfinished] Philip K. Dick story, ‘The Owl and the Daylight.'”

Chad added he doesn’t “want to move away from pop music,” but that he’s looking into doing more scoring — so Hollywood types, call the guy up. He was a natural on Letterman.