Album Notes

Recorded live in the studio across four days, "the whether of summer" finds Liz Mitchell melding the world of the contemporary singer/songwriter with the abstract, sometimes angular text of an ee cummings, questioning the relationships between faith, love, the weather and dogs with a voice and melodic sense straight from the heart of traditional folk music. Cut primarily as live trio sessions, Mitchell and her piano are accompanied by Boston legend Billy Novick on clarinet, bass chameleon Paul Kochanski on upright, award-winning cellist Kristen Miller, and special guests Jake Armerding on fiddle and Lorne Entress on drums. producer and engineer Tom Eaton tends the helm and offers the occasional accordion.

From the celtic influenced piano ballads "winter in april" and "my father's eyes" to the rollicking beat jazz of "knife and gun club," Mitchell finds an ever revealing way to look at the world around her; balancing a lifetime of real life and death experience as an emergency room doctor with an artist's deep respect for our universal mystery. When she sings about "the miracle of life and love" she reveals an understanding of our fleeting, fragile nature from both perspectives: "it's time, and it's the seasons... it's the beating of your heart...it's the miracle of life and love, and every day we start." A record some twenty years in the making, "not the whether of summer" has finally found its time, beat, and season.