Written late in the process, the title phrase came to me while walking to a favorite swimming hole in Vermont. In the course of a ten-minute walk, the phrase kept repeating and I could hear chords forming underneath the melody, and eventually the whole chorus structure came into focus. Sitting by the water, it wouldn’t leave my mind, even beginning to expand into verse territory. I quietly sang into my phone, noting possible chord sequences and approaches to song structure. When I got home, I grabbed a guitar and soon thereafter, the whole song came into existence. It’s nice when that happens. And all too rare for me. Most songs gestate over a period of months or even years. But it felt strong enough that I thought a second recording session with Ben Wittman in Toronto was warranted. This in turn prodded me to come up with a few others, since one song isn’t enough to justify the effort of travel, etc. Sometimes, obligation is the mother of invention.

The song itself fell into a fairly common trope of a narrator stuck in a dead end life, fantasizing that somewhere out in the world is a whole other existence that he can barely imagine, a party that he will never be invited to. Great guitar solos from a former student, Matt Swanton!

For a long time, this guitar figure went by the name “Canadian Whisper,” as it was conceived while staying in a yurt, on a peninsula sandwiched between Lake Superior and Lake Huron in Canada. I was very quietly playing the guitar, mindful of neighbors nearby, and made another phone recording, whispering the tuning and positioning of the hands before playing. And thus it stood, a half-forgotten fragment. That winter, I found myself holed up in a cottage in Vermont, hoping to record some vocals and guitar parts for the album. After the main work was done, I was scanning my phone to see if there was anything else I should put down – and lo and behold. Quickly ran through a few takes, then wondered what else to do. In an odd bit of kismet, the cottage came with a collection of drums and percussion instruments. I figured I’d put down some parts using the instruments at hand, just as a sketch. There was also a pitched metal drum in the collection, and I plunked out a few tones that revealed that the limited pitches on offer just happened to be in the key of the song. That felt like a blessing, and I took a little more care putting down parts. 

The lyrics were some of the last to arrive for the album. Inspired by a walk in the woods on a late fall day, after most of the leaves had fallen, the sky gray with impending winter. My birthday was just around the corner, so thoughts of aging and mortality overlay with the images of the seasonal arc. There’s a contrast at the conclusion of the recording between words and sounds as several bird calls from the early March cottage session can be heard during the last guitar chord – a hint that spring follows winter just as surely as winter follows fall.

One of three songs that were born from a guitar tuning. As with much of my music, this uses an altered, non-standard guitar tuning. And as with much of my output, I am often too lazy to re-tune the guitar once I find a tuning I like. This then tends to generate multiple songs from the same firmament. The bossa nova-like (lite?) feel is an unexpected turn for me, though Ben Wittman’s fabulous percussion tapestry gives it much more legitimacy than I think it deserves. And then there’s Mike Rivard’s most excellent fretless bass – so good, I gave him the solo! 

This lyric went through dozens of iterations, always with the same chorus phrase. In the end, I reverted to a few phrases that had emerged at the time the music was constructed. After a full year of disappointing expeditions in all sorts of directions, it turned out that the first impulse was the best. Often, the solution is getting out of one’s own way. Which happens to be the message of the lyric…

A bit of a New Wave pastiche, this one is an homage to my teenage musical awakening, when I finally put away the Beatle records and began to turn my attention to what was happening around me. Which was – Pete Townshend’s Empty Glass, Blondie’s Parallel Lines, The Knack’s “My Sharona,” The Vapors’ “Turning Japanese,” etc. Power pop with purpose. This one came to me driving around the Big Island of Hawaii. After several miles, I came to a stop light, giving me just enough time to pull out the phone and hit record. The light turned green and I sang the melody – both chorus and verse – while pounding on the steering wheel. And then, I forgot all about it. Several years later, while preparing to venture to Toronto to record the first batch of tunes with Ben Wittman, I began to worry that three songs wasn’t enough and I should see if there might be one more lurking in the shadows. Scanning through the 2-minute voice memos (always a sign that it be a song idea rather than a grocery list), I found this.

The lyrics are kinda dumb (ok, maybe more than “kinda”), but have something to do with my exhaustion with a steady increase in my students’ mental instabilities and sensitivities. As much as I care for these young adults growing up in a world I’m glad I’m too old to face head on, I also felt like maybe they took things a little too seriously. I found myself censoring every statement for fear that I would cause offense, inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings. I remember walking out of the building thinking, “My God, I’m turning into a right-wing radio host.” I know “radio” dates me; it should be “podcast,” but as I say, I’m too old to face the current world head on. At any rate, nobody died in the making of this track.

This song features a recurrent 3-bar pattern that plays throughout, with a slight visit to a minor substitution towards the latter part of the song, the figure born from the same tuning as “Before My Eyes.” I thought it might be interesting to see if I could slowly shift the tonal center of the verses and choruses over time, increasing the dynamic intensity with each shift. I fairly quickly honed in on a narrative based on a sad falling out with a friend, in parallel with another falling out, more of a drifting apart, with a family member. By the more intense musical section, the frustration/betrayal/pain in the lyric becomes pretty real. That long note was cathartic – wasn’t sure I had it in me. Wasn’t sure I wanted to have it in me. But it felt good to get it out.

I have a long and tortured history with the piano. But after several decades away from it, I began to tentatively stroke the faux-ivories. It felt good to feel some muscle memory return, and the relatively playable Bach and Mozart felt slightly less torturous. One day after running through my standard one-hour set of somewhat mangles pieces, my hands stumbled upon the opening phrases – fifths and fourths moving chromatically. It wasn’t much, but it was… something. It felt like the opening to something bigger, but I could never seem to figure out where to go with it. Definitely didn’t seem vocal.

Then one day, I was staying in San Diego at an AirBnb with a grand piano. Couldn’t resist testing it out by running through my permanently unfinished piano fragment. But this time, my fingers found a new tonal center, with a new melody. Something that could be sung. And I found a way to return to the original tonality. Hmmm. The next day, as I was walking through the fog that had rolled in from the sea, words began to form. I sat down at a little café and wrote the lyric quickly, inspired by the mist. And the piano.

The sound collage you hear in the background comes from a year’s worth of phone messages. I thought a rumination on the past might be supported with all the one-sided conversations I experienced; little stories directed at me. Some were from friends, some were from doctor’s offices and salespeople. Some were from family. All fairly mundane, yet somehow served as little reminders of the lives around me that have shaped my own. As someone once wrote, “some have gone, and some remain.”

A friend from Gainesville, Florida gave me a bass (without a case) while on a visit. Early the next morning, I sat on the porch and played it without plugging it in. This weird little riff came to me and stuck in my head for days to come. “Hmm, maybe it’s an actual song.” I had a second session scheduled with Ben Wittman and figured he could make my dumb little riff actually groove. And, this he did, playing along to click track and my dumb little riff played on my generic (no named manufacturer) bass.

The lyric came from a conversation with a Libertarian. While I subscribe to the notion of personal liberty, I always find it problematic to work so hard to ignore the plights of others. Not to mention the possibility that collective actions can sometimes accomplish more than singular ones. A selfishness vs. the greater good, etc. So, with not a lot of thought, I dashed off a lyric and put down a vocal. Then a few days later, driving around listening to D’Angleo’s Voodoo, I was marveling at his (admittedly Prince-derived) way of loosely putting together little harmony vocal sections, and I thought I’d give it a crack on my dumb little riff/song. The results transformed the song from lower case into capital “G” Goofy. The track was really feeling good, so I asked my UMass Lowell colleague John Shirley to put down a nasty harmonica solo. I think I specifically requested, “nasty.” And boy, did he deliver! 

Just as I was finishing off the mix, I heard of D’Angelo’s passing. So, for me, when I hear the song now, there’s a tinge of sadness mixed in with the goofy. Or, I should say, Goofy.

Another piano-based song. Like a lot of incomplete song ideas, it’s necessary to come up with a temporary title – if for file labeling, if nothing else. I could tell pretty early on that the vocal range was both a little low and a little high for me, depending upon which octave I used. So I soon came up with the idea of making it a male/female duet. The vibe felt like a movie theme, so the temp title was “Cinematic Duet.” Can’t explain where the lyric came from, though I have a memory of waking one morning with some of the lines floating around my head.

When it came time to find a duet partner, I reached out to Julia James, a former student who had been part of one of my UMass Lowell Album Ensembles. She had agreed to open some solo shows for me, and we ended up singing a few tunes together. It felt great and I knew she would find the right feel for the song. By that time, she was living a bit down the road on Cape Cod, so in early October, I packed up the gear and set up shop in a little (unheated) cottage in Wellfleet. Julia came by and delivered several great performances while standing in front of the fire. As predicted, she nailed it.

The other song to come from my “new” altered tuning was in fact the first to be written. Said tuning is essentially an open e minor, auditioned as I sat on campsite bench near Cape Canaveral in Florida. I figured some slow, sad, introspective music would result, but instead this upbeat, major thing popped out. My first new song after a few dormant years and cause for both celebration and consternation (“Oh no, I thought maybe this music thing was just a passing fad…”). The title phrase came quickly, and then… Around this time, I was asked to perform at a dedication ceremony renaming the UMass Lowell music building in honor of our former Chancellor, Jacqueline Moloney. I was thrilled to be asked, and informed them I would perform a new song entitled, “Just Like Water.” Several months later, with days to go before the event, I still had not completed the lyrics. The morning of the show, I finally settled on something good enough to perform, though everything was so new that I could not for the life of me get through the song without messing up the words. For the show, I printed a cheat sheet so long and so big, that there were several pages of bold print at my feet. Fortunately, I got through it with only a minor faux pas, though it would be months before I had a neural pathway I could count on to deliver the lyric intact.

We issued the song in the spring of 2025, but once the album began to coalesce, I determined that the mix could be improved (i.e. bigger drums), thus the Floating on the Dreamline version is noted as a (2026 mix).

This is one of my favorites on the album, though I doubt most folks would necessarily agree. Perhaps my fondness for it comes from the organic nature of its birth. I was in my little music workspace, trying to connect a keyboard controller to my computer to test a set of piano samples. In the process of getting it to work, I started playing the chord sequence of the verse. In the darkened space, something clicked and the whole musical part emerged quickly. Something was happening, so I reached over and hit the record button. Listening back, I felt satisfied, figuring I might come back it another time and develop it into something. I began to gather my things to head home, when I realized I was still “in the zone,” or perhaps, “floating on the dreamline.” So, I took off my coat and grabbed a pen. A half hour later, the lyric was complete. A few weeks later, I found myself in my Vermont cottage rental, with a microphone before me, a fire going in the woodstove, and the moon peering through the window. The whole process felt so natural and unforced that it seems both the composition and the performance captured something… pure.

And then Mike Rivard added a gorgeous upright bass part, seemingly effortlessly slipping into the vibe and my idiosyncratic timing and phrasing. The environmental sound collage is meant to evoke the setting of the lyric, but in part was constructed to disguise the noisy recording of the piano – a careless oversight in patching cables for what was just supposed to be an equipment test. Hey kids – always match your impedances when setting up to record…

The most recent song, born from the desire to have more things for Ben Wittman to play on. One of the many things I love about working with Ben is that he makes my oddball time signatures feel completely natural and fluid, and I had a feeling he would do the same with this one. Coming in so late in the game, neither Greg Porter nor Mike Rivard were available to play bass, so I asked a former student, Stavros Birmbas to add some gnarly low end. You can see him in both my UMass Lowell Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel ensemble videos. He is one of the most joyful humans I have ever encountered and it was a pleasure to have him join the project. And with the album all but completed, I turned to another former student to bring the clearly requisite fire for the guitar solo. Chris Gardino, a member of the awesome hardcore band Pathogenic, was already a jaw dropping talent when I had him as a student in a freshman survey class. And he continued to grow as a musician over the years. He very kindly and quickly came up with a mind blowing solo that not only is a display of virtuosity in full bloom, but also a deeply musical expansion of the song’s melodic raw material. By now, you may have noticed that I have gotten as much from working with talented students as I hope they have gotten from working with a cranky old man.

The lyric theme comes from several encounters with folks living on the edge of oblivion. Lowell, Massachusetts can be a hard place to get by, and narcotics as comfort and escape are a common solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem. There but for the grace of God…

Another song that emerged quickly. So quickly, that I forgot I had recorded it. One morning, I put down a couple of guitars along with the Peruvian instrument, the charango. Called it “Drop D in 6,” and went about my day. A month later, I was in Greg Porter’s basement having him add bass to the most recent session with Ben Wittman. Scrolling through the song titles, I rediscovered this. Greg liked what he was hearing in his headphones and jumped in. The middle section was left pretty open, and he spontaneously came up with the melody you hear, resulting in our first co-write after making music together for over 40 years.

After the darkness of the two songs that precede this, it seemed like it might be a good thing to close the album with a little, somewhat fragile optimism. In the face of so much daily distress, I often need to remind myself that there is in fact light to be found in the world, light to be found within. Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but it seems that we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by sharing whatever light we can muster. And after all, what is a prayer but a little wishful thinking…