Album Notes

Playing and singing nearly all his life, Richard Broadbent only began writing songs in 2001. A woodworker over twenty years, he compares songwriting to fine woodworking saying, "Both processes expose the grain. In woodworking beauty can surface in the most gnarly piece of lumber. In a song, a story well told provokes the listener to find their own beauty and truth in life's situations."
Richards first recording is CHRISTIANA, a collection of songs 53 years in the making.
Produced by David Essig (who produced Cathy Fink, Fred Eaglesmith, Trapezoid, Walt Michael and others) at Essigs British Columbia studio, CHRISTIANA features outstanding Canadian players Oliver Schroer on violins, Essig on slide guitars and mandolin, Tobin Frank playing bass and accordion, and percussion by Vince Ditrich in addition to Broadbents guitars, harmonicas and vocals.
The title track, CHRISTIANA, is the story of freed blacks who joined together around the Lancaster county, Pennsylvania town of Christiana to protect each other from kidnappers who would sell them south back to slavery. On September 11, 1851 they confronted privateers and a Maryland slave owner was killed. Exposing the grain of this story, Broadbent asks listener, what may be the relevance to our contemporary 9/11?
Songs like THE VISIT and THE HEART, elegies to friends lost along life's road, let the listener use the songs images to discover their own losses in different light.
TALKIN' FIRED BLUES documents the inauspicious beginning of a folksingers fledgling career under circumstances many will find familiar! THIS MODERN LIFE chronicles a beleaguered everyman commuter, trying to make sense of daily existence.
Stories exposed, like the grain found beneath the surface of rough cut lumber, paint images for listening, consideration and enjoyment.