This is the only album I recorded in 2010 and I knocked it out in a couple of nights recording, then another night editing. It's chock full of many of 2010's songs, lots about various injustices in the world -- for example -- Mountaintop Removal addresses big-time strip mining in Appalachia, Josseline is about a girl who died trying to enter the country on our southern border, Nagasaki Mushroom tells you in its title, etc.

Others revolve around our good life in the Green Mountains and old time musings. The whole album is done in "string band" format with me on all parts. You'll be hearing various guitars, mandolin and bass the whole way through, and nothing else. It's good to get back to basics!

I had a heck of a lot of fun recording this album. It's a mini concept album, based on the supposed evolution of man on the planet Venus, rather than Earth. Man proceeds to trash the world with uncanny and disastrous inventions and use of the land, then rockets off to Earth to begin again. With the amount of acid (rain) in the atmosphere of Venus, heck, I could believe it, too.

Star instruments on this recording are a 1920s Regal tiple (10-string steel-strung super ukulele) and lap steel guitar, both of which impart that island breeze... turned into 1950s space-age doom.

This is best heard pretty loud.

This album sounds like Vermont feels. By the time I recorded this album we'd been living in the Green Mountains for a year and a half and all that time, space, and fresh air had finally saturated my blood. Banjo, subdued old parlor guitars, and thoughts of love and loss reign here, in a mix of (at the time) newer and older songs, which were taunting me to get them "on the record" so I could get them out of my head.

Overall, looking back, I feel like the album was more of a prayer for human kindness and understanding more than anything else. I suppose I felt that at the time, too!

A short album consisting entirely of ukuleles and gut strung parlor guitar... and of course, lyrics. I wrote all these songs in one winter night and then recorded them over the following couple of days. Each song is about the life of a tree or plant I'd come to know since moving to Vermont. I figure just about anything in the world has a story to tell -- but maybe those stories have to be translated into something humans can relate to before we can pay attention to them.

I'm really happy how this one turned out. Understated and warm and cold at the same time. That's just about how the evening felt when I was writing the songs so I wasn't too surprised by the tone they took on.

The first album I'd recorded since moving to Vermont, this one took on a bit of the remains of our first two winters... but I still managed to fit a cowboy song in the mix: Kansas James, which was a narrative lifted from a dream I'd had about John Wayne. Like some ghostly spirit vision he told me the story while I dozed. Truly bizarre.

Other songs, Home to Be and I Will Follow, have become regulars when I'm playing out. This album was the first that I had done since acquiring an old uke or two and you can definitely hear how its mellow pluckiness made mush of my brain, which is not at all a bad thing.

I think everyone should play uke. Best songwriting tool ever.

Every song on this album was written for a specific person or persons I know, and while I didn't intend it to be that way, that's how these songs from 2007 piled up. This was the first album I had a decent mixer, vocal and instrument mic hanging about, thanks to my Dad, whose habitat (New Mexico) managed to filter its way into my songs from a trip out to see him earlier that year.

I think living in Providence, Rhode Island and working a pretty stressful job too many days a week culminated in the minor chords and fatalistic plunges heard here and there throughout this album. But -- city life does have one excellent amenity -- cafes to serve the tired and inspired.

I'd been writing feverishly since recording Briar Rose and really, really wanted to put some tracks down to get the things out of my skull. This project turned out a lot longer than I thought it'd be and turned itself into some sort of folk-rock extravaganza. I went through my instrument collection at the time and tried to use "one of everything" on this set, with the expected result that dulcimers, bowed, fall into place next to electric baritone guitar and sleigh bells.

Living in Providence gave us great access to the sea and number of these were infected with sea air and lots of sun. The oceanside in autumn is amazing, especially if you're wanting to eat guacamole sandwiches in the open air.

Many of these tracks reflect ponderings on family and friends, as opposeod to the "outside" world.

Recorded at the Cape-area beach house of some family friends, this was a mellow, mellow bit of work. You can even hear some crickets and surf if you listen really, really close. These were songs I'd been gathering for some time beforehand and had been written about friends, ghost stories, family stories, out west landscapes, and the turn-of-the-year wheel.

Instruments are my poor old "first" dreadnought guitar, a '60s VOX 12 string acoustic guitar, a 4-string mandola, and an old Stella tenor banjo from the '20s.

While not strictly a holiday album, this one's storyline revolves around the solstice celebration of gnomes and their animal friends. Woodland friends. You got it.

So the idea goes like this: a bunch of furred friends and their gnome compatriots are hanging out and singing songs about one another.

The opening track is in faux-Norski and the closing is named after the Finnish far mythological northland. Yessir, winter can be long!

This album existed in two lands: one foot in Connecticut and one foot in Rhode Island... close to one another but far enough away that friendships lapsed or changed by the time we got back to them.

I'd been collecting stories and songs all year before getting a chance to put them down on record, and this is what popped out.

The excellent artwork for the album cover, like most of my albums, was done by my Bonnie dear.

My good friend Sam Fritzsche and I recorded this as a 2-piece rock outfit. It was a heck of a lotta fun playing with Sam on our outings as Pay the Wolf, with a very memorable basement "gig" that was our last work as a unit.

This was recorded on two mics at Sam's place in Stonington, CT. Yeap... the mic's going through the guitar amp. No need for a PA!