When I was very young, my father would go out alone at dusk into the marshes of Pennsylvania with his reel-to-reel tape recorder to gather and preserve the sounds he loved so well: the wild melancholy cries of water fowl, the joyful vast praise choruses of insects, the amorous belching of frogs. He would play his miracles at breakfast for a captive audience of six children.

I've been pointing microphones toward music for most of my life, hoping for a miracle of my own. Since Karin and I began writing songs and playing in a band, we've made records in garages, basements, basement garages, barns with blinking horses, mansions in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Sunday School rooms, my third-story bedroom, the kitchen, the attic.

Seldom has it occurred to us to go into a real studio with someone who actually knew what they were doing. Perhaps it was too obvious, or (at various times during an underground career) too costly. Maybe we found the concept lacking something subversive that is hard to put into words.

We wanted something a little wilder. Something unpredictable. A document of an event. So when we heard about an old bus from Texas full of vintage recording gear that was parked in Dave's back yard in Nashville, a bus with peeling paint, an old art nouveau machine which had been not only one of the first mobile recording units ever assembled, but had also once been completely submerged in a (1981) flood in Austin, something clicked and we knew somehow that we would make our next record right there beneath a few trees, while down the road, classrooms full of fourth graders worked on their "Tennessee Notebooks".

Well sure enough, we got started in the attic of our leaning house and then boxed up our tapes and headed south.

Dave pointed the microphones toward the instruments and we prayed to Jesus you would hear what we were hearing in our heads. As always, our prayers were answered in ways that made us wonder if they were answered at all. Maybe that's the beauty of recording: even after all these years, we have no idea what to expect. Capturing songs is something we've never been able to control or quantify: sooner or later, we surrender all, and something emerges with a life all its own.

I think maybe this recording, this collection of songs is about internal worlds, about the dialogue that runs inside all of us, conversations we have with ourselves. We hope anyone who hears these songs will find some fresh language and maybe a soundtrack of sorts for the stories we're all writing everyday with our lives, whether or not we ever pick up a pen.

These days are pages, these years chapters. A plot emerges which is sometimes lost, often revised. Characters come and go, the people I have known, the limited cast of humans that one life can bear. Some I betray, some I love. Some I admire, some I pity. Some I teach, some teach me. Some I lust after, some are naked and I hope to clothe them.

So fade to black and white now, roll the movie of my life inside of my head...