Of Spirit and Friends
Tributes and inspiration from those who have been in my life these past 72 years.
As every album is a crucible, this one is no exception having started in 2019 and finally completed this past summer.
Sharing sacred words, profound, and insightful, from friends who gave council through texts, songs, art, and their caring, be they lovers or friends. There are tributes of those who died tragically or time just ran out, whose role in my life became more fully realized in the writing of these songs.
It started with back and forth emails with former partner Rosemary up in Toronto that prompted me to write Everything is on the Table. She was then in the throes of fighting ovarian cancer yet offered me eloquent words about her struggle as she contemplated the end of her life, me borrowing words verbatim with her blessings. Then there are my own dues, paid to the road and myself on display in Expecting Rain. Written in the mid 70’s with a few upgrades to the prose, it’s the only song on the album with a complete folk-rock accompaniment and all the conviction of my ’70’s innocence intact, also featuring Eric Graham’s eloquent fretless electric bass. I pay homage in Davis & Victoria to the renaissance Vermonters who died in a tragic house fire, to my close friend Lorna in Route 14, and through Reflections honoring the beloved painter George Lawrence who did so many of my album covers. Pappy Biondo came on board to put the grass into the 'free folk cosmic collision' that is Open Fields and the salute to backcountry skiing Breakin’ Trail; Pappy also added his 5-string soul into May It Always Be So, another song to honor a plethora of lost and found relationships. I asked central Vermont’s newest talent Jess O'Brien to sing harmony on a song I wrote when I was 16, We Love To Sing when my songwriting buddy Jared and I were street-singing through Canada and the west. I also penned Green Mountain Home as a teenager, as every refugee folksinger needed one of these ballads to allow us over the Vermont border in the early 70’s. I’ve been playing it for 50 years yet this is its first official recorded debut. Steady Inward Pull reveals the resignation of the times. Finally, the last crucible were the mandolin tracks Dan Haley sent me from Portland, Oregon to interpret the depth of my grandfathers sadness and triumphs in Morris' Blues, Dan being a veteran of many of my studio albums and gigs when he was a Vermonter.