Album Notes

L.A. Heberlein is better known as a novelist and poet ("Every Man Must Build a Home," "Sixteen Reasons Why I Killed Richard M. Nixon), but he's also been writing songs for longer than most singer-songwriters you see around have been alive. His songs have an edge, and when you first hear them you might even think the worldview is bleak. But if you listen again, they're full of radiant hope — it's just hope grounded way, way deeper than you usually encounter.

L.A. grew up in Colorado on land where you could still see wagon tracks. For several years he taught English literature. For several other years he worked in the software business. He lives now in a 1916 Craftsman-style house in the Phinney Ridge neighborhood of Seattle with his wife, the painter Gillian Theobald.

You can read L.A.'s poems and journals at www.heberlein.net. You can hear his songs on "New American Song."