UPDATE: Ernest Jenning Record Co.’s Peter D’Angelo says the record wasn’t leaked by the press. See bottom of post.

There’s good reason to be excited for the debut album by Title Tracks, the latest project of former Q and Not U and Georgie James member John Davis. Officially, It Was Easy won’t drop until Feb. 9 on Ernest Jenning Record Co., but a digital rip of the record leaked over the weekend to BitTorrent Web sites. Davis, while disappointed, says he’s not surprised.

“I suppose you’d like for your album to not be available for free two months in advance of when it’s available for sale, but that seems to be the way things go now,” Davis wrote today in an e-mail. “I wish that it wasn’t the case, but I don’t think you can really expect it not to happen once you’ve started to distribute copies to the press.”

Record labels often respond to leaks by releasing an album digitally ahead of the planned street date. Davis wrote that he may suggest such a plan to his record label.

Album leaks aren’t new to Davis. He wrote that when Georgie James’ 2007 record, Places, leaked, it contained a song that didn’t end up on the final release: “We had a few occasions where people would come up to us asking to hear that song and we’d give them the business a little bit for having not paid for the record.”

If the Dischord single that Title Tracks released earlier this year is any indication, It Was Easy should contain plenty of infectious, sun-kissed, tightly structured power-pop. Camera Obscura singer Tracyanne Campbell guests on two of the album’s 11 tracks, which also include covers of the Byrds’ “She Don’t Care About Time” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Tougher Than The Rest.”

“I don’t expect any huge success off the bat,” Davis wrote. “I just want to get the record out and start playing shows around the world and be building something. Hopefully, we’ll have a good year and each year will improve on the last.”

Update: Ernest Jenning Record Co.’s Peter D’Angelo sent me this:

Honestly, the biggest surprise was that we HAVEN”T SENT OUT COPIES OF THE RECORD YET! I’m not really sure how this leaked besides someone that we actually work with in one capacity or another passing it along. That said, we are sending the review copies of the record out this week so it is unfortunately inevitable. For a record like John’s it has two sides: Sure we want to keep this under wraps and put the record out there on our own terms, but if there are people excited enough about this record and band that they haven’t even heard yet to be searching this out, it is a good sign for Title Tracks moving forward.

We react along these same lines every time this happens, and it does happen every time. We definitely try and get each site to take down the record links when we find them, and we do our best to hunt the links down early, but then there’s just another faceless kid somewhere else with his album leak blog who posts it up again. At the end of the day we hope people like it enough to go see the band when they come through town.

Welcome to 2010. Maybe we can keep our business from exploding.

Best,
Pete