"My soulmate is a special girl, a girl that's just like me/ She'll share tremendous oral sex and try everything she sees/ She won't be insane or hung up like most other girls/ I'll worship her until it hurts, 'cause she's on top of my world." Those lines open Lou Barlow's wonderfully warbled love ballad "Soulmate"-- on which, in less than two mintues, the gently tapping troubadour collapses into a hyper-strummed folk implosion. It's what I remembered most from Sebadoh's The Freed Man. I played the cassette version obsessively when it was released by Homestead; until recently, I hadn't heard it in close to a decade. It's weird what you forget.

When the expanded reissue of Sebadoh's debut outing arrived on the doorstep, I dug through the boxes in my closet containing seriously musty Shrimper, Union Pole, Search For Terrestrial Intelligence, Eldest Son, and Catsup Plate cassettes. Beside two coffee-stained copies of Sentridoh's Lou B's Wasted Pieces '87-'93, I uncovered a very worn The Freed Man Homestead original. The newbie has the same photo of Barlow and Eric Gaffney smiling and waving on the front. Listening to the oldie beside this expanded edition, though, is an entirely different experience.

For starters, Lou and Eric's original pre-Homestead cassette has more than doubled in length. That first version is an incredibly rare self-released edition of 25 or so copies -- 30 minutes with two 15-minute sides, as Gaffney told me via email. He explained, "I duped copies and sold those at Main Street Records, Northampton, MA for $1.00 in a box I made with Dr. Seuss art." I have the Homestead cassette (32 songs), but was too cheap to splurge on the Homestead vinyl (which Gaffney told me was "muddy, botched, redone a 2nd time"). It's kind of like detective work piecing together all these drafts. Gaffney noted that this new 52-song reissue is actually the fourth version: "The reissue contains songs and versions (one each, not multiple) from the orignal cassette release... from the LP version [i.e. the Homestead version], a few of my songs, re-recorded, off The Freed Weed CD, and unreleased tracks, along with the 2nd and 3rd 'singles' and part of the first split." Got it? Probably not. Whatever the math, the extras and different mixes/takes shift something once familiar into a gargantuan 79-minute lo-fi opera. It's fascinating from an archival standpoint, and I love that Gaffney painstakingly organized a brand new collage.

This Freed Man is overstuffed and weird, studded with some duds, and entirely fitting. Part of the joy of early Sebadoh-- this collection through Bubble and Scrape, aka the Gaffney years-- is the clash of egos and brilliant songwriters. It's totally evident on this new version: 25 songs by Lou, 25 by Eric, and two covers, including a garage-punk take on the Beatles "Yellow Submarine". Pretty telling, right? To take it even further, the cassette was re-mastered at Abbey Road Studios.

It's a lot of fun reading the separate notes provided by each player and figuring out the different histories. Gaffney's liners provide background about the record and trivia about his songs. Barlow's are briefer, but still historical: He mentions his favorite song of the bunch ("Jealous Evil"), and includes the totally dead-on statement that "this record was intended to be a mess, a stinking garden of delights." Hence the swamp-side photo on the cover (also mentioned by Barlow). Contextual shit aside, it's just great to hear Lou's downer folk countered by Eric's noise-punk-- that massive push and pull.

Fittingly, random feedback invades even the album's prettiest ballads. Chaotic cut-and-paste cassette noise tramples ambling pop songs. Fragments are held together by 4-track tape experiments, thorny acoustic bits, psychedelic hardcore, samples of television and family time. After Gaffney left, the band felt emasculated and boring, so for a fan of the old shit, this is a rare treat. I remember certain days as a kid fast-forwarding through some of the noisier pieces to get to "Soulmate", Barlow's gently tapping "True Hardcore" ("True hardcore is forever young"), and "Healthy Sick", or cringing at the dorky "Lou Rap." Other days you stuck to Gaffney's amazing fuzzcore, like the bottomed out, phased "Nest".

In the extras it's amazing to find skeletons: The patterns of "Elements" reborn as III's manic finale, "As the World Dies the Eyes of God Grow Bigger". Or to remember the things that were there all along like the forgotten brass on "Punch in the Nose", the crazed screaming and bleeding sounds turning into the harmonizing pop nugget, "K-Sensa-My" (Barlow, '86). So many new discoveries, too: "Oak Street Raga", "Dance," "Fire of July", "Jaundice", "The Lorax". The earliest material is Barlow circa 1984 ("Pig", not yet freed) and the newest, a live version of Gaffney's "Attention" (Hadley, MA, 1990).

Of course, the irony of releasing The Freed Man now is pretty huge. The title was partly a response to Barlow's recent freedom from Dinosaur and his control-freak nemesis, J Mascis (his thoughts, not mine). At this point he's not only back with Dinosaur J, they managed to record a new record. It sounds great, sure, but it's divorced from the time that made it essential. This shit, though, is so of its time and place. It's necessary for anyone who prefers the Mountain Goats on cassette or likes noise with their morning breakfast and summertime poetry. It breathes gorgeous dope-smoking breaths all over the place. (Crazy to remember this was going on alongside Dinosaur, You're Living All Over Me, Bug...all so amazing, but so amazingly different).

Okay, before listening, consider this set-up: A DJ and zine editor who delivers pizza for the Pizza Factory and collaborates with the late Charles Ondras (who went on to become Unsane's amazing drummer, RIP) joins his Sentridoh pal, Dinosaur's bassist, who comes armed with a cheap, parent-purchased 4-track. The two start smoking pot ("things sounded better slow..."), experimenting, feeling giddy with the results. This is a history I actually care about. It's gorgeous on so many levels.