You can’t buy Baby Ray’s new CD anywhere, and the band won’t be making a penny off the disc. That’s because the local popsters aren’t selling the new disc, called Demonstration and released on their own label (and burned on their own home computers). They’re giving it away. Instead of doing the common thing and making all the tracks available as mp3’s, they’re handing over a CD to anyone who asks for one. They’ll have copies available at their shows (the next one is September 21 at the Lizard Lounge); or you can contact the band via their Web site (www.babyray.com) and they’ll send you one.

" Let’s face it — a lot of records don’t make a lot of money anyway, " explains drummer Nathan Logus when we meet up at the Middle East. " It’s harder for people to part with the precious 12 bucks these days, and I don’t want them to have to think about whether they want to buy our album instead of somebody else’s. What’s important is that people get to hear it. So the album isn’t completely free, because there’s one stipulation: they have to promise us that they’re going to go home and play it. " Adds singer/guitarist Erich Groat, " And if they don’t like it, they have to come to another one of our shows and give it back. That’s where we’ll make the money. "

The free CD also gives the band an easy way to reconnect with their audience after falling off the radar in the past year. Prior to that, Baby Ray had been on a tear, releasing two CDs (the album Monkeypuzzle and the EP Do I Love America, both on Thirsty Ear), writing hundreds of songs, and generally endearing themselves to fans of pop with a twist. And they truly were prolific: when I remarked, in a review of their first album, that its catchiest songs included the word " fuck, " they responded by sending me a 45-minute tape of Baby Ray songs with that word in the lyric. They even learned an entire set of oddball cover tunes (ranging from Genesis’s " Squonk " to Chaka Khan’s " Tell Me Something Good " to Steely Dan’s " Reelin’ in the Years " ) for a gig at the Lizard Lounge last year, for which they billed themselves as the Ray Babies. Last summer the band went off to record with Logus’s brother Paul — a hotshot engineer/producer on Puff Daddy’s payroll — and there was talk of their signing to Universal or another major. And then, nothing for a long while.

" We heard all sorts of encouraging signals from a number of places, and then nothing panned out, " Groat says. " There was so much going on, and so much not going on at the same time. I really needed to stop playing for a while. " As for the major-label rumors, " Everything’s a rumor until it actually happens — nothing happened, so everything’s a rumor, " is how Logus puts it. Most of Baby Ray’s members popped up in other places during the layoff: Logus in Francine; Logus and guitarist Ken Lafler in the Weisstronauts; all three members in the Willard Grant Conspiracy. When Baby Ray finally reconvened, bassist Paul Simonoff opted to stay on hiatus, so his place is now being taken by Willard Grant member Pete Sutton, who also played in Trona and in Logus’s old band the Barnies.

A lot of Baby Ray’s most upbeat, between-the-eyes pop songs went into the unreleased album, whose contents are still sitting on Paul Logus’s hard drive (he swears it will all come out someday). Meanwhile, the Demonstration CD shows a more esoteric side of the band and, in some ways, a more rewarding one. It’s not strictly a Baby Ray recording, since the songs were tracked separately as home demos by Groat and Lafler. Each writer then overdubbed his own percussion, so the band’s rhythm section doesn’t appear. But it reminds you why bands make lo-fi records: to show off the melodies that might get lost behind bigger arrangements. In that respect, " Boom Chicks " is the best thing here, and one of the best in the band’s catalogue. Performed by Groat with just a couple of acoustics and a drum machine, it conveys a sense of loss and yearning that doesn’t always come through in Baby Ray’s more exuberant, full-band incarnation.

As the set list for that all-covers gig revealed, Baby Ray’s members are pretty serious music heads. And they’re the first to admit to being fans of some of the bands they’ve been compared with in the past, notably Guided by Voices, XTC, and Radiohead. " I actually write the most songs when I spend the most time listening to music, " Groat explains. " Radiohead have proven to be a huge inspiration, but I wouldn’t say I’ve done anything that sounds like them. And the fact is, I had no idea they were so popular. When I heard Kid A, I decided I wanted to contact them, because I was wondering if they’d read a certain book I was reading. So I went to see if I could reach them on-line, and that’s when I found out that they were #1 when that record came out. So that’s how far out of the loop I am. "

Neither does he feel that the cards are particularly stacked against a band like Baby Ray’s signing to a major. " The heyday of the well-constructed pop song was over before we were even born. That’s why we struck out in that direction, and there were other bands in Boston that felt the same way. So we don’t feel like the ground dropped out from under us, because it was never there in the first place. "

THE PAST FEW YEARS have been among the busiest and most frustrating of Bill Janovitz’s career. He’s written several batches of new songs and played out in four different formats: solo; with the country/rock band the Bathing Beauties; with his new rock band Crown Victoria; and in occasional hiatus-breaking gigs with his regular group, Buffalo Tom. It’s been a frustrating period for Janovitz because, like many of his contemporaries who find themselves out of the mainstream demographic at a relatively early age, he has fallen off the industry’s radar. As a result he hasn’t released any new material in the three years since Buffalo Tom’s Smitten (Polydor).

" I don’t know of any record labels that are signing 35-year-old white guys doing indie-rock music, " he explains, noting that one of his favorite current bands, Wilco, were recently dropped by Warner Bros. " You just have to come to terms with that, and it’s been a long process for me. For instance, I feel a little responsible for the guys in Crown Victoria: they love to play, but if they expected to sign some big deal on Buffalo Tom’s coattails, that’s not going to happen. I don’t have the energy to be my own label or to spend months on the road, so I’m probably going to have to get some kind of job. "

Of course, the hard times also remind a musician what really matters. " There was one thing I missed with Buffalo Tom: the feeling of just getting out and playing a bar. Part of me always wanted to get out and play every Friday night, the way guys like Mark Sandman did. So we bemoan the business side of things, but it can make you discover what was special in the first place. "

Janovitz’s new solo album, Up Here (spinART), finds him taking matters into his own hands. Unlike his first, countrified solo effort, Lonesome Billy (Beggars Banquet), or for that matter a lot of the unreleased Crown Victoria material, it’s not a major step away from what Buffalo Tom were doing, just a subtler, stripped-down version of same, mostly performed with just acoustic guitar for backing. And as with the latest Baby Ray disc, the material gains something from the setting. Without the trademark screams and crashing power chords, the songs fit into a comfortable, classic-rock mode. Not that Janovitz has ever made a secret of his love for Neil Young and Exile-era Rolling Stones.

What comes through most is a warmth that he’s previously kept up his sleeve. Many of the songs concern separation from a loved one, something he attributes both to missing his wife on the road and to the current scattered state of Buffalo Tom. And he’s learned the trick of being vulnerable without sounding like Dan Fogelberg: a roughed-up, countryish edge in his singing makes it work. " Like You Do " ranks as one of his first outright love songs; " Like Shadows " includes a resonant chorus ( " I’ve learned enough from hollow youth to hold on to the good things that I got " ) that puts a lot of Buffalo Tom’s more despairing songs in perspective. When you consider the general absence of happy songs in that band’s catalogue, this amounts to something of a breakthrough.

" My wife is always asking why I always have to be so bleak and oblique, " he notes. " It may just be my neurosis from growing up in New York. I think of a song like Bob Dylan’s ‘I Threw It All Away,’ which just devastated me — the idea that a guy can have so much in life and fuck it all up. I think I live with that shadow all the time, the potential we all have for self-destruction. ‘Like You Do’ was actually written for somebody’s wedding, and that’s what gave me license to be more direct and just write a love song. "

Janovitz also attributes some of the flavor to his recent songwriting collaborations with Fuzzy’s Chris Toppin. " If I break out of my usual pattern, it gives me license to write something different. With Chris I can write a line that I’d otherwise never do myself, maybe something more on the lovy-dovy side. That’s not to say she’s wimpy, just that she’s come around to that way of writing more than I have. "

In fact, Fuzzy and Buffalo Tom can’t seem to get enough of each other. While Janovitz plays in the Bathing Beauties with Toppin, Buffalo Tom bassist Chris Colbourn leads a band with Fuzzy frontwoman Hilken Mancini that also includes Fuzzy bassist Winston Braman. It seems only a matter of time, I suggest, before the two bands merge into one. " I feel like that’s already happened, " Janovitz notes. " We’re like Fleetwood Mac, only without the marriages. "