Hi folks! As a companion to the release of Avenue of the Saints I would like to share these extended notes about each song on the album:

Friday morning, March 9th after spending the night in my van in a truck stop on I-35 just south of St. Paul, Minnesota I set out toward a gig in Davenport, Iowa. Along the way I noticed a succession of small blue signs noting that I was driving on the Avenue of the Saints. Even after veering east toward Cedar Falls the signs kept appearing. Not finding any explanation in the way of some historical marker as to what gave this road its name I started making notes of my observations. By the time I arrived in Davenport I had filled six pages in my notebook, and began working on a song. That night my audience informed me that the "Avenue of the Saints" was simply a name that the highway department had given this proposed new interstate to run between St. Paul and St. Louis. This gave me incentive to finish what I had begun. I think this song well expresses my sense of connection with Mid-West, and my belief that no matter what we people do to "develop" the land it will ultimately persevere and restore itself.

I get a similar feeling with James Leva's amazing song Love Beyond except more in the realm of matters of the heart. There is a palpable force of love that surrounds us at all times, and as James writes - There is a love that exists beyond the love we think we know… This song connects me with my faith in that, and the natural course of things. A broken heart will heal itself given the willingness to carry on and love again. So the earth will also mend with the willingness of people to engage their hands in the soil. I've long 
been an admirer of James' work, his fiddle playing and song writing, as well as his collaborations with Carol Elizabeth Jones. Check out www.jamesleva.com, and www.jonesandleva.com for more info.

One Way Ticket was written in a motel room in Mammoth Mountain, California while playing at the ski area there. The setting is a greyhound bus trip I took in the early 80's and an imagined conversation with a cowboy personified in a neon sign outside a casino in Elko County, Nevada. The result was an understanding of the dues needed to be paid for my passage to wherever it is I'm going. It's reconciliation with my past - with my father, with leaving California where I grew up, and my family there. I love the lap steel guitar that Rose Sinclair put down on this track. It seems to evoke the essence of the lonely Nevada desert and the cowboy itself.

What Would Woody Do: In August of '99 I was camped on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia on my way to Nashville when NPR played a retrospective of Woody Guthrie's work. All that week I had been seeing WWJD bumper stickers plastered on everything imaginable. There I considered looking at the contemporary performing songwriter's life from what might be Woody's point of view. What Would Woody Do became sort of a secular response to WWJD. I mean to express in the latter part of the song Woody's philosophy of how anybody can write a song, and how a simple, truthful song can elicit great change in society and the lives of people. 

The words to Susquehanna came slowly over a period of a couple of years from a desire to honor the muse of this beautiful river. I enjoy the blurring of images between the river and a woman: young at the headwaters then maturing as she flows to the sea. The Susquehanna originates near Cooperstown, New York then makes its way south through Pennsylvania and Maryland into the Chesapeake Bay. Many old and beautiful railroad bridges cross over her including the Rockville Bridge, which is the longest stone masonry bridge in the world. It is visible upstream from I-84 through Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Just upstream, perched upon an old railroad pier in the middle of the river is a not-so-miniature Statue of Liberty. I find "Miss Liberty" as she's known, to be a beautiful, and evocative personification of the Susquehanna itself. 

Casper & Dots was born near Alpine, Utah south of Salt Lake City in February 1999 when Lui Collins and I were on tour. Our hosts had a couple of Dalmatian dogs that would not quit barking thus making an indelible impression on us. The tune was composed in their living room, and when thinking on what to name our new tune it seemed only natural to immortalize the dogs.

This Town was written in two motel rooms, one in Bridgeport and the other in Ogallala, Nebraska during a weekend of driving through the Sandhills of western Nebraska. In Bridgeport I hung out in the "Wildman Bar", which that night had only four sedate patrons in it. My conversations with them about 
the railroad, the town, and life in general put me in the frame of mind to begin writing This Town. Ogallala was built up on Route 30, otherwise known as the "Lincoln Highway". The Lincoln Highway was the first paved road that ran coast to coast where the first motels in the country were built to lodge travelers. I stayed that second night in one of the older motels, which gave me material to finish the song. 

Ain't No Cane evolved over a three-year period. It began after hearing Harvey Reid sing the old chain gang song Ain't No Cane on the Brazos on his album Steel Driving Man. I learned Harvey's version, but never played it much. Meanwhile, I had a fiddle tune I wrote I was calling "Bound For Glory". In a case of "folk process" I had the idea of singing Ain't No Cane on the Brazos lyrics against my fiddle tune. To give the song structure I added some of my own words and dropped some of Harvey's, and Ain't No Cane was born. 

Hoosac Tunnel was written when living in Ashfield, Massachusetts in 1996. I had played a college gig in North Adams in the Berkshire Mountains, where the college newspaper that day had an article about the history of the Hoosac Tunnel. I took the article home and pinned it on my wall. Almost a year later as I was taking the article down an idea for this song came to me. What caught my attention was the accident in October of 1867. An explosion caused by the volatile naptha gas sent a dozen men to their death 600 feet down the ventilation shaft. I took the liberty of creating a story from the point of view of one of the miners. After writing this I took a trip to the eastern portal of the tunnel to see it for myself. I managed to walk twenty feet inside the opening. With the dark closing in and water dripping and echoing all around, I could sense the hard lives spent digging it. I knew the song was real enough to sing. 

The music to Safe Home came to me on St. Patrick's Day 2002 in Santa Clara, California while warming up for a house concert. I knew there was a song in there somewhere but the words didn't come until a couple of months later on tour in England. "Safe Home" is something that folks all over the UK say to each other as a goodbye. The phrase stuck in my head until one morning in the sanctuary of Steafan Hannigan and Saskia Tompkins' home in Northampton, UK, the words came to me all in a piece. I wrote them down as if by dictation. As I read them back I realized they were in fact, lyrics. With hardly an edit I put them to the music and there was the song. 

Island is the eldest song of this batch, written in a little cabin I rented in northern Vermont in the summer of '94. The lyrics are abstract, but their emotion is very liberating to sing. At the time, I was anticipating my life changing from working at my Bakery in Newport, Vermont to returning to Northampton, Massachusetts. and taking up music full time. This is also the song that I sang at Carnegie Hall for the Putumayo Songwriters festival in November of that year. Island was recorded as a demo for The Trade in '98. I recorded another version of it in Nashville that Bil VornDick produced. I decided that I liked my demo version much better and I saved it for this album. 

Talkin' Ditch Weed came about from the desire to write a talking blues. Talkin' Ditch Weed is not a "pro-pot" song, but rather a statement of fact about the history and politics of hemp in this country. I largely consulted a book called The Emperor Wears No Clothes. I took copious notes then edited the mess into a round story, beginning with my own experience with "ditch weed" one fall in the Mid-West.