The tapes began taking shape in the winter of my last year on Central Park West, in New York (1998). The only song that had been written prior to that was 'In Honor Of You (George)', which began as a letter to George Gershwin. I was in the frame of mind at the time that I would give up writing songs.All writers go through periods of this sort. I am not distinguished in this respect. I was brought out of this slump (temporarily at least) by hearing the Gershwin's 'Embraceable You'. The letter I wrote was more directed at George than at Ira Gershwin, because it was in the folds of the musical language that I was brought back to thinking that perhaps I had something to say, because I was passionate about it after all.

It may have been that letter, or ultimately the process of writing and arranging the song with Teese Gohl, that got me out of my writer's block snaggle. I'm not exactly sure, as it was complicated by all the vitality and emotional requirements of being a patient during that period (I had been diagnosed with breast cancer in the fall of '97 and was going through chemotherapy at the point I am referring to). When you are challenged with a serious disease, you have to struggle to get to the surface. If you let go, you can drift. I had to latch on to something in myself that was strong.
It would be my music.

I set up shop in my living room (a very good name for it) and began composing into an 8-track tape machine. I learned very simple methods of engineering and had two teachers: Bobby Eichorn and Frank Garfi.

Russ Titelman, a friend of mine for years, came over and listened and gave me confidence and pointed me in various useful directions. Russ was going to produce the CD but I moved away from NY to Martha's Vineyard and so our working relationship fell a little bit adrift. He doesn't realize how meaningful his appreciation of what I was doing was - and is.

When I got to the Vineyard, I moved all my equipment into my daughter Sally's old bedroom. This is what the 'bedroom' title refers to. It's a little room with a slanted ceiling and funky blue and white curtains. It's just down the hall from my bedroom and it provided me with a perfect work space for more than a year. The relatively small amount of recording equipment takes up the entire room except for little patches of carpet that abound with shakers, painted and shaped like pears, eggs and red peppers. There are also balrons and tambourines everywhere and guitars piled up on top of each other. Throughout the recording of the album the place was littered with scraps of lyrics, my lyric books, phone messages, dried up pilot pens, past-the-pale tea mugs, and an accumulation of crispy moths from last summer. No one cleans in there. Even I am not allowed to, by my own better judgment.

Sometimes I enlisted the help of Jimmy Parr and Stuart Kimball, two neighbors. Stuart and I helped Jim to put together a studio in the basement of his house on the Vineyard. Stuart played guitars on two songs 'Our Affair' and 'Whatever Became Of Her' in that studio and then I brought the tracks back to the bedroom and added whatever was lying around on the floor.

The fun part of those long nights was that there was no danger of anyone hearing me. I could fail over and over. I could try anything and ask whoever came by the next day to guess whether it was a hair brush, brushing against a strand of pearls, or the sound of a bee buzzing against the corner of an old copy of Joseph Conrad's 'The Secret Sharer'. The world of what was available and what could emanate from my throat or my hands was what I relied upon, and had true fun with.

This is an album I don't think I could have made if I had had record company executives suggesting directions or asking me to imitate Natalie Imbruglia, Christina Aguilera or the Backstreet Boys. All I was doing is what I had started out doing thirty years ago. Making sounds that I liked. Not thinking in an orthodox way about songs. Leaving the concept of choruses behind in many instances. Thinking in a new way about structure. Playing like a child with fingerpaints. I have never quite had that much fun. It was like playing with dolls. I was the big doll. I made many a call in the middle of the night to Jimmy Parr or Bobby Eichorn to ask them why track 7 wasn't recording, or why my reverb was acting up. I must say, that everyone was helpful - like good doctors always are.

I worked (or played) hours into the dawn and wrote and recorded nearly 20 songs. Somewhere down the line the rhythm section was aided and abetted or replaced by Steve Gadd, T-Bone Wolk and Tony Garnier. Teese Gohl arranged orchestra for three of the songs. Much of the original material, however, recorded to my 8 track, is in tact on the finished product - just as I wrote and played it during the initial process.

Liam O'Maonlai and the Rankin Sisters came to the Vineyard one weekend and sang in my barn. They are on seven of the eleven tracks. Liam presented me with one of the all time great gifts of my life, when he wrote an end to the song 'Scar' and sang it in Gaelic. Mindy Jostyn played fiddle a week later (also in the barn) and Michael Lockwood, Stuart Kimball and Peter Calo did some exceptional guitar playing.

In New York during the mix and when Frank Filipetti came on board, more colors were added (though not too many). Sean Pelton played drums on 'In Honor Of You (George)', and my son, Ben, and John FortŽ came down to Right Track one night and sang funky big dumb guy parts, curiously enough, on the track 'Big Dumb Guy'. It couldn't have been more appropriate.

The whole collection was originally going to be called: 'When Manhattan Was A Maiden', because nearly all of the songs had a Manhattan reference. The title song ('When Manhattan Was A Maiden') was eventually left off the CD, however, as were a couple of other tracks that didn't seem to ultimately fit with the body of work. Once the Manhattan reference was diluted, it lost it's 'concept' and became a collection of songs whose only thematic glue was that I was singing them, and in greater part they were recorded in the bedroom. There are overtones of New York City, as in 'If Only We Could Cross The River', 'Whatever Became Of Her', 'So Many Stars', and 'In Honor Of You (George)', but the overall landscape became more generalized and less geographically centered.

Every song has its little history and anecdotal material. I always prefer to leave the evaluation and interpretation up to the listener, however, since it is an effort whose outcome has no absolutes. The most interesting hard truths are about the recording process itself, which I have alluded to already.

As anyone who knows me will probably agree, I am an intense person emotionally. I can only assume the songs reflect an emotional state of being that is heightened during the writing and singing of notes with words. An example of the way I write songs is the following:
I have a drum machine. I only know how to do the most simple programs. But I know how to create a drum loop. One of the ways I like to do it, is to put all the available notes that I like in it. Several bass drums, different snares, lots of tom toms on many beats, high hats, a few cymbal crashes, and random percussion. Then I close my eyes and put my fingers on the delete button. Whenever I hear a beat on a sound that at that moment seems superfluous, I press the button, feeling all the power of a conductor or an editor of a film. I do it with my eyes closed so that there is no visual distraction: the cat passing by, the headlights of a car coming into the drive etc. I recommend this process to anyone who is willing to do the absurdly obvious. I continue pressing the delete button at intervals and on certain drum beats, until I have a program that few would have thought of. I have a collection of these stored in my drum machine. This is the kind of fun you can have when you're alone. It might be called the creative process using 'deletion', the way I imagine Michaelangelo carved out his massive statues of slaves from huge rocks. The difference being that chance plays a big part in my game. And... I am no Michaelangelo!

Another bit of technique based on the principles of randomness and flow is the way I wrote the song 'Cross The River'. I got my drum loop first, the way I just described. I recorded six minutes of it on track 6 on my A-Dat machine. I then wrote a first verse about a group of post teens in New Jersey, wishing they could get to the 'Big City'. I accompanied myself singing these words with a bass ostinado on my keyboard. After the first verse, I went to bed and thought about a chorus melody. The next day I added the chorus vocal melody and words, a cappella, to the verse I had already put down. Then I changed the sound on my keyboard and added a rainstick sample going into the chorus, and then an organ sample to try to get across the yearning, almost spiritual, sound of a group of young kids saying (singing) "If only we could cross the river, we could get a jump start on life...". I then got bogged down or bored and went off to make a few phone calls.

By the next day I had forgotten the number of the keyboard program sound I had used on the bass ostinado part and so spent most of my writing period recreating. Always remember to write everything down! Once I had relocated the bass sound, I then discovered I had lost the organ sample number! If you listen closely to the song, you will hear this sonic confusion. If I really hadn't liked it, I could have re-done it with uniform sounds, but as it turned out it was actually more adventurous and more like the characters in the song, to be diverse and eclectic, even hectic.

Every new sound inspires a chord, or a note that I want to sing. In some cases, it inspires a new range of emotion. When I got to the end of the verse of 'Cross the River', after the rap section ("When I was twenty and crazy, as a joke...") I hit these four mournful single notes on the keyboard. The sound of those lone notes hitting the airwaves the way they did precipitated the last verse of the song. The verse is the main character's letter to her friend, Laura. The main speaker in the song is the one teenager who actually did make it to the city and married a big tycoon on Wall Street. She writes to her friend, Laura, a note of longing, wishing she could cross the river, this time back to New Jersey, because she discovers, too late, that she is still in love with 'Danny', who she had dismissed in her whole upwardly mobile plan to 'make it'. Got it? On the way to the last chorus of the song, I transplanted those four keyboard notes and then slowly brought the drum machine back in, though this time it came in backwards. In other words, I was singing over the second half of the beat, so that the accent fell in a different place in the phrase. It was unexpected. I added keyboard parts I never would have if the drum part had come in where it was supposed to! So, this is a way of writing as you go. Linear writing. Not planning too much beforehand and having no compunctions about trying anything.

This was the way I wrote most of the keyboard oriented songs. Songs like 'Actress', 'I'm Really The Kind', and 'We, Your Dearest Friends'. The ones that I wrote on guitar, I took a more traditional approach to: sitting down with a guitar and an almost complete lyric. 'Scar' is an example of that, though even after I had a complete lyric (which had taken six months) it took another six months to make it emotionally 'true'. For a few months, the melody became too complicated to get the feeling of the lyrics across. Finally I wrote the words on a large sheet of poster paper so that they loomed before me. I watched them, and thought: I want the melody to be as available as these words staring me big in the face are. I had to forget months of notes I had already chosen and was quite married to. I erased them from my mind and just saw these huge letters and then felt the melody anew. Many of my songs go through this metamorphosis. Often it is the words that change once I have a melody I know is working.

After my bout with breast cancer I had a tough time with depression. Any experience, as songwriters know, is something to turn into music. As long as you can remember to breathe first. I was having trouble with remembering anything and so I wrote about that in the song 'I Forget'. This was the most painful experience of all the songs on the album. Although the most satisfying - in the way that having a big, sobby, long cry usually makes you feel refreshed (sometimes grapefruit juice does this without your face having to get all puffy). It was also a song that took many months (nine) to complete. I'm still learning how to play it, although I managed to learn it long enough to record it. Listening to it brings back that stretch of time when I felt too depressed to tell anyone how I felt. The fear of bringing people down is not generally a fear of mine when it doesn't look open-ended; but the one thing anyone knows who has been through a hefty bout of melancholia, is that you think it will never end and, therefore, you can't afford to use up your dance card with your friends. You get good at avoidance and denial and the 'fake smile'. Putting this emotion into a song was something I had only done previously in a colloquial sort of way "I've got the blues" type thing. In 'I Forget', I tortured myself into a closer examination.

These are some of the things that make this collection of songs important to me. I believe I am honest in what I say in the songs and that they do not cater to some idea, always mutable, of what is 'hip' right now.

As I write, I am up here on the Vineyard, ready to go out and promote my work with a song or two, or three. It's April 10th and the temperature plunged today, here on the Vineyard, from 68 degrees this morning to 34 degrees this afternoon. That's what we call weather. I like those fluctuations. To watch the snow swirling around the forsythia and wonder what's next.

Even if it was never released to the public. I would have to say that the God-given strength and inspiration helped me through one of the hardest times of my life. Without sounding too terribly as if I'm encouraging the sniffling of those reading this, it showed me that I had 'the stuff' to travel alone and lightly. Indeed that's more romantic than it was, as there were plenty of supportive players. However, in the remote and sometimes darkly fantasy-laden nights, I was happy to turn to my music. It does soothe and it does lead. Not everyone wanted to go through this with me. While the emotions were raw, there was turmoil. There were those that fell by the wayside, who are no longer friends. I could have become bitter, the way we all have the opportunity to become bitter, but it seemed all too predictable. I would rather be like the man who got attacked by the shark who thirty years later is the primary advocate of sharks and who can be seen in National Geographic specials stroking their undersides. And so many new friends, the great mandala.

There are friendly faces and Spring in the air. There will undoubtedly be some sharks, in fact there are several swimming around on my lawn right now. I must turn off the computer, put on my boots and go outside and pat them....