More Notes From Elsewhere (CD)

I’ve lived with songs for so long now that I don’t remember what it was like without them. Each one of them hangs around my travels in its own orbit, whether I go through a season of playing them regularly or not. They all had their beginnings somewhere, maybe as a title in the back of a notebook, a melody emerging unbidden from the static, or a snippet of language in a book or on the radio. One or two of them even emerged the way I imagined they would before I really became a writer: all at once, under the fingers and on the tip of the tongue. And of course, for most of the people who’ve heard them, they exist in the recorded version, the way we captured them in a studio: Goody on electric guitar, or Todd on upright, or Kris singing harmony, painted together on a screen and in a hard drive, or perhaps even on magnetic tape. And however we caught them that day, that’s how they emerge into kitchens or cars on the Interstate. For me, though, they live on stage, completely mutable, usually elusive, occasionally thunderous, but always, always ephemeral, ever-changing. And so often they occur just as you hear them on this recording: a dialogue between guitar and voice, between their bones and the best of my improvisational capacities, between head and heart.

Thank you, Steven, for catching these at Yellow Couch Studio (am I remembering this right, that we got one the first day and sixteen more the second day and then mostly we just hung around?) and for mixing them over the ensuing months. Thank you, faithful listener, for giving these songs the space for existence that listening creates, for showing up at the gigs at all, night after night, for showing up in kitchens and in the cars on the Interstate. Thank you to the songwriting circles I’ve been lucky enough to gather around me. And I must thank, I suppose, the songs themselves, or wherever it is music comes from, transcendental and really dumb. Thank you silence. Thank you.