As I make the videos form a live performance, a basic chore is trimming off all the footage where I’m talking to people, tha audience, other performers, producers or sound techs, anyone on stage or back stage. I’ve started collecting these bits of dialogue into their own videos for the story they tell.

I went through a period a few years back, reflecting on my life, and for all the regrets, how I still felt I would choose it again, or even more, that I had no choice. I am what I am. Though I’m trying to explain what is is that has driven me to live as I have, though I can’t explain, because there is no reason, but there is something that drives me, haunts me…

This is a very deep and personal song to me, and it came on so strong when I was in Florida. I’d just finished it recently, and it had hung in the background. When suddenly it became so real, so much about what I was going through, that I sang it constantly. All the vague feelings that often go into a song became crystal clear, so much of what I wanted to say

I wrote this one while driving north up Interstate 95 at the end of the winter season. As a sailor, I’ve always done a lot of island music, its part of what I am. As I was driving, I started playing a simple “tump, tump-tump (ha-chacha)” beat on the steering wheel as I cruised alongin the van. Next thing I knew, the whole song came rolling out of me, and I wrote it down on a napkin (how traditional can you get?) as I drove, and sang it all the way up to Virginia

A Celtic traditional, another love story song, and I can relate to it, surely. I grew up with this music, my brother formed a Celtic band, though I went more modern, but maintained my traditional roots as well. Though I was always a singer, into the beautiful Celtic balladry, whether haunting melodies or driving, sad or with that wry touch of humor that is so part of it all. Great stuff, and I hear these melodies in the roots of so much modern music.

A beautiful love song that really shows what folk music is, a simple song that has stayed known and loved for hundreds of years, for no reason you can name for certain, except it touches something in people that does not change.

A traditional song that has always been a favorite, a simple song that I relate to both as a romantic who has long searched for someone to share a life with, and a traditional sailor with an old rowboat that I built, designed to carry two. This version is the latest, combining two versions into one.

Original, Live at Lou’s Ponderosa 5-1-09
Vocal and Guitar, I added a flute part later in the studio
Written in 2007-2008, I was just starting to play it regularly when this video was made