This project has been a long time coming... I started working on this album in 2008, which was a big year for us. We had our first baby, we were renovating an old farm house, and I got my first real job as a public school teacher. I had a lot of inspiration for music, but very little time to record. Months would go by, then I might have an evening here or there to lay down some tracks, then I'd put it aside for a while. It went on like that for years. In the early sessions, the album I was crafting had lots and lots of layers. Songs like Heaven is a Campfire and Beauty in Captivity were ambitious songs to finish -- recording, bouncing, mixing, bouncing, remixing, rerecording... I found that the hardest part about recording from home is that it's free, so there's always a temptation to keep fixing, trying to make it perfect. When you have to pay someone for studio time, there's more pressure to finish. Home recording a recipe for indecisiveness. Besides, when I hear other people's music, I like the occasional string squeak or chair creak that makes the music feel alive, like you are sitting in the room with the musician. When it's too polished, it loses something...

I put the project down for a while, then I called my friend Cora Treoir Duncan to help me finish. She's got such an incredible ear and a wealth of stories from her life in music. She encouraged me to trim words from lyrics, cut away a lot of the extra instruments, and strip the songs down to their emotional root. Many of the solo tracks on this album were recorded with her acting as producer.

After the Cora sessions, I now had dozens of recordings -- so many versions of the same songs -- far more than what is included in this collection -- and I was still writing new ones! How was I ever going to finish this?

Two things eventually happened. First, CD's officially became a thing of the past, which really helped me change my thinking about this project. Without the confines of a CD's length, I could include as many versions of the songs as I wanted -- I could think of the album more like an anthology of 15 years of songwriting and home recording. This was liberating!

The other change was that over the past year or so, my songwriting has started to go into some different directions. I am continuing to write songs, but the new ones don't feel like they belong on this album. (The songs Fall Apart, Sunset on Hope, and In the Glen are three of the most recently written songs, and I think they mark a transition between musical styles for me. Maybe you can hear that, too?) Finishing this album and putting it out to the world is opening space for me to begin working on the next one.

Looking at this collection as a whole, I'm really proud of these songs. There's an embedded story about my journey into parenthood, getting older, reconciling who I wanted to be with who I am, sobriety, anxiety, serenity... It's a musical diary of the last 15 years. Looking back, looking ahead, the album title still rings true: "it all comes back to now."

Thanks all!