Album Notes

What to say? I guess I\'ll start at the very beginning....

I started playing guitar when I was ten years old. Back then, heavy metal was the thing and that new \"alternative\" music was just on the rise. My friends and I all tried to play as fast as we could, memorizing and mastering long, complicated guitar solos to try to show each other up (in the friendliest of competitions, mind you).

After a while, the speed-demon school of guitar started to seem kind of soul-less to me. When the things I was playing all started to hold my interest about as much as a math test, I knew something needed to change. So I un-learned years of training and spent long hours trying to come up with a style more... \"me.\" Oh, the singing was still a couple years to come.

I began to idolize idiosyncratic guitarists like Ani DiFranco, Dave Matthews, and the guys from Korn. They seemed to be more about expanding the limits of what a guitar (and a guitarist) could do and, somewhere in there, had discovered their own voices. I began to admire the completeness and self-reliance of the acoustic guitar. It seemed an existential instrument to me; if you make a mistake, there\'s no band to fall back on. You make a choice, live with your mistake, and go with it.

I stopped listening to a lot of guitar music, looking for other sources of instrumentation for inspiration, and discovered the likes of Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, and Björk and my in-car vocal training began. I was very lucky to be able to follow along (somewhat) with such mistresses at the helm. It was at around this time I discovered Jeff Buckley. I was in love. And my voice became an instrument all its own.

My style is simple: I try to be the whole band all by myself. I can play most instruments (my studio recordings are full of them) but my everyday arrangements are just me and my 7-string, trying to sound like 5 people. And that, I think is what I sound like. My style is forged out of the notes and rhythms I pick to convey the most important parts of songs I love.

About this record: it\'s a live record. This is the most \"me\" it gets. And many connoisseurs (like my family, who have been to almost every concert) regard this as my best concert ever.

The title of the record comes from a significant WWII air battle my friend told me about that just so happened to fall on the same date as my concert.

These songs are new songs, unreleased (yet) songs, and old songs re-worked to showcase my new aesthetic: sometimes you can say more with a whisper than you can with a scream.

Thanks for listening. I\'m very proud of this one.