Album Notes

I have been playing & singing many of the songs on this album for most of my adult life. I garnered an appreciation of historical songs & the West as a child growing up in Nebraska. Time spent in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, & Colorado cemented the importance of the people of the West & the frontier - cowboys, mountain men, pioneers, scoundrels, gun men, scouts, warriors, & many others. I spent a great deal of time researching songs of the West at many times in my life for many reasons. I've spent so many nights around different campfires with many old friends & many guitars - sharing quiet moments, funny stories, & songs from all over the world. I feel that these songs own me as much as I own them. Some of them have been the soundtrack to my life - weaving in & out over the years at joyous moments & sad ones too.

I began this album really to answer all the requests for a cowboy album that I've had over the past 20 years, but it became much more than that as I spent time getting to know it in the studio. You see, I just couldn't let it be. I had to make it reflect all the richness of life that I feel in the West. So I included a few Americana songs that could have just as well been known & sung by any cowboy on the open range in the 1870's. God knows that our knowledge of history is not anywhere accurate to the real thoughts & occurrences that most of these folks had.

So this album is a mixture of real & mythic cowboy & Americana songs. The cowboy is many things to our culture & collective consciousness - adventurer, dreamer, loner, rugged sage. The West is still such a mythic spiritual frontier full of limitless opportunity - just as it was a physical frontier to our forebears. I offer up this celebration of the Old West to your inner frontiersman. May you dream big dreams full of spirit & fire.

-Tom Munch, May 2009