Dean dropped out of the public eye, keeping to his estate in Texas. Former FW drummer Lisa Braeden lived with him for a while, and People magazine kept a vigilant watch on her left hand but to no avail. Cas sat in on a number of classical records, 'favours for old friends' as he referred to it. "Maybe I can shake them up a bit," he told Rolling Stone with that characteristic not-quite-smile of his. "Give them some new ideas." Gabe began running his mouth about the Ruby era to anyone who would listen. Paul Stenning released the inevitable unauthorised biography of the band, Making It Up As We Go, the Free Will Story.
Sam made a series of solo albums, Cage, Soulless, and Brotherly Love, difficult and gorgeous and clinical albums that the critics raved over but never sold quite as well. He shrugged off questions about sales. "I never wanted all that super fame, people screaming my name, all that shit. That was Dean's dream, him and our dad. I just wanted to play, you know?" He toured once, playing smaller venues and doing surprise drop ins on small clubs. Bootleg recordings of these shows are the only places you can hear many of the songs he worked on during this time, songs that never made the cut for the albums. In Cincinnati, at Bogart's, he did an acoustic version of "Past Lives." There's a number of shaky camera videos of it, you can find them on youtube easily enough. "For my brother," he says, and then drops his head over his guitar and barely raises it again.
Dean showed up at the release party for Brotherly Love, lean and tanned and healthy looking, smiling his same grin for the cameras. We know now, of course, that he's the uncredited second guitar on the last three tracks on Love, but that was very much under the radar at the time. The brothers didn't seem eager to announce their artistic reconciliation to the media, and it was a tenuous thing, in any case. Dean kept making noise about 'the next Free Will album,' but when asked about it, Sam only smiled noncommittally and talked about his other commitments.
In the fall of that year, Virgin Records released a compilation album, all their greatest hits from Hard Road onward. Cas, Sam, even Gabe showed up to the release party, and they did a group interview for People, a slightly chilly but perfectly polite cooke cutter reminiscence about their days on the road that tiptoed around the subjects of addiction, Ruby, or any further Free Will projects. In the photo attached to the article, Dean is on one end of a black couch and Sam on the other. Cas sits on the floor between them. Gabe is slouched against the back. They don't look like a band.
In the wake of the album, all the old stories about Zhel and the Lost Album and John's death were recycled again. Zhel had been sold twice, and was now under the umbrella of Crossroads Entertainment, the media conglomerate owned by Liam Crowley. Singer had negotiated briefly with Crowley about the Lost Album, but nothing had come of it. Nothing would have come of the resurgence in interest this time, either, if it weren't for a throwaway comment Sam made to a blogger fan after a show. "It's a damn shame," he said. "Those songs were some of Dean's best writing."
It was a bit of a shock to the fan base. "Dean's voice, Sammy's words" had been the motto for Free Will since the beginning. Dean had written the Lost Album? The message boards went crazy, people bemoaning the cruelty of Big Entertainment, that we would never get to hear Dean's 'best writing.'
As it turned out, the fans weren't the only ones who thought it was unjust.
