Album Notes

Each one of the CDs I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of has its own fingerprint and this one followed suit. In the past I filled up a box, a notebook, a little tape recorder full of songs and song ideas and when it started overflowing I’d dump them out onto the table and pick out what I thought were the songs with the best chances to make it past the dream stage.

I decided to do a little Field Of Dreams work and start building the park before the players had been chosen for this team. I did have a list of titles, and I had some music that I liked, but very few of the songs were finished when we went into the studio. The songs came from every direction; an old PM song written with brother Jim Mayer and Roger Guth, but that never made it into a recording ‘til now, an arrangement of a hymn that we’ve done live that we have wanted to get down, a lyric idea that had been a persistent itch on my brain and that would not disappear ‘till it got some attention. I ended up with about 20 ideas that were distilled (by time and quality control) down to 13.

This CD has multiple personalities, there’s no doubt in my mind, but each of these songs, like some of the people, places, and things they were written about, brought something intriguing, devastating, beautiful, good, necessary, challenging and/or irritating to my life, and life at this point would not be the same without them. The other thing I need to say is that without the co-writers, musically and lyrically, I would have nothing. And…I’ll add that many of you were co-writers and didn’t know it in the way that chance interactions spark a story each and every day. So…now that we’ve written these songs together I hope you love them or hate them enough to stir something up in you.