Album Notes

Music carries across the water. Especially Eileen Quinn's music. The poster girl for the flotsam flotilla has just released Not To Be Used For Navigation, her fourth CD of bluewater music.

Boaters have come to expect Quinn to give voice to the humor and insight they experience out on the water and, once again, she rises to the occasion like a spring tide. Not To Be Used For Navigation charts a course through waypoints shared by the nautically afflicted.

Quinn is a smart and funny songwriter with an uncanny knack for capturing the spirit of the cruising life in words and music. She makes us laugh and she makes us think. Her quirky perspective demonstrates the irreversible effects of nine years of full time bluewater cruising on a thirty six foot sailboat.

Not To Be Used For Navigation is an exuberant CD ballasted with moments of reflection. In "Working On My Boat" Quinn sings about the love/hate relationship we have with our boats. "A Sailor's Daughter" tries to reconcile the cruising dream with family responsibilities. "What Does It Take" pokes fun at the icons and achievements that the sailing magazines consider newsworthy. "The Perfect Sailor" is about the guy on your dock who knows it all. "Heartbeat" tackles the issue of whether or not you can ever really go home again from a cruiser's perspective. "Drunken Sailor" shows how cheap booze mixed with an unstructured life serve up a risky cocktail for some cruisers. "Dirt Dweller" is a tale of doomed love between a landlubber and a sailor. In "Company's Coming" we love to see them coming almost as much as we love to see them going. "He Don't Love Me (Like He Loves His Boat)" laments the unfair competition between glass reinforced plastic and flesh 'n blood. "Power" is a rock anthem for your boat's electrical system. "Ask Me" celebrates a chance meeting and the possibility of a romance at sea. "Friends" is about what we've really got to show for all these years afloat.

The twelve songs on the CD range in musical style from modern folk to Motown pop to Patsy Cline lament to swinging blues to rock anthem.