There are a lot of things one could say about a record they just released, and we certainly said some of them in the liner notes of this one, so we won’t repeat all that here. But we will say that after all’s said and done, making this record has felt a lot like life… by which we mean it felt like the making of it somehow managed to include all the ups and downs, all the quietude and clangorousness, that make up the bigger picture. But then, that’s just our experience speaking, so you can take that with a grain of salt. And now it seems awfully unfriendly of us to be tight lipped about this record on our own news page, so we take it all back, we will put some of the liner notes up here. Here we go: It’s hard to look back on three years and sum up what they felt like. But if it were possible to do, a collection of songs might be the way to do it. This particular collection came together slowly, as most things in this band do; some were around when we recorded our last record, others were coming together still as the tape was rolling in the studio. Each one, for us, is a trip back to the times and places and people these tunes grew out of: Petersburg Interlude will always conjure that harbor in Alaska, where we stayed in among the fishing boats, looking out through the fog and rain towards the mountain across the water. Gyrosmoke is so Darol, all swirling poly-rhythms and twisty melodies. He sent us the sheet music years ago, and it took us all of those years to figure out how to play it. The Way It Is came much later; Tashina’s serendipitous encounter with a live recording of Bruce Hornsby and his piano led to us listening to the song while we sat around the kitchen discussing the future of the band and ourselves. Something about the phrase “the way it is” struck a chord with us… don’t you believe them. Oddfellows Road is another tune that incubated for years, unnamed and unyielding to our efforts to arrange and play it. It gets it’s name from the street Simon grew up on, a short shot from the old port, running through the pines and madrones of Bainbridge Island. And Ran Aground… we all wanted this on the record, but hadn’t been able to spend much time with it beforehand. It was the last thing we recorded, and it is the last track on the record… Finishing with an unfinished thought.
Well, dear listener, thanks for lending us the attention of your eyes, as well as your ears… which, I suppose, makes you a reader as well as a listener. But you were that anyways, and many other things besides.