Album Notes

About this cd: A roots up folk recording: intimate, raw, stark, and honest. 14 songs that traverse the dark corners of love, loss, and life on earth. There are no pulled punches here. It's about the stiff grip of fear, memories that refuse to die, the dawn of another painfully glum day... It's about scrubbing your scars until they bleed and then, standing in the heart of your own darkness... finally understanding the price of true redemption. Recorded in the early summer of 2001, Blueprints embodies the lo-fi ideals of capturing the true essence of music and offers a good range of old and new tunes. Featuring "you behind the wheel", "scars", and "one last way". About this artist: Frequent raids against the NPR fortified stronghold that Mark's parents had constructed left his childhood rife with confusion, distress, and late eighties pop ballads and tv jingles. At an early age he enlisted in the ranks of the oppressors, seeking comfort through the likes of Annie Lennox, Onyx, Jon Bon Jovi, and Bel Biv Devoe. And yet, hope was not lost. Due almost entirely to the kindness of a handful of rebels (such as viola de gamba playing Ralph, Julie the coloratura, Mike and his Ledbelly records) Mark's days of blind wanderings were numbered. Arriving home from school one day Mark searched the house of his youth and emerged with his mother's old nylon-string classical guitar. Sitting there, upstairs with a 12 dollar copy of "You Can Teach Yourself to Play Guitar" across his lap, Mark strummed the E minor chord for hours on end... until, slowly at first, and then resolutely (like the determined details of an almost forgotten story) that old guitar began to whisper its wild and transparent secrets. Every song since, it seems, has been a retelling of those first faint whispers against the small bones of the inner ear.