The title sums up the theme of the album: Love and Ashes. I leave it to the listener to decide exactly what that phrase suggests, but the lyrics to the songs explore these two ideas from various perspectives, while the music walks further down the road that my music has been traveling for a long while: the synthesis of folk, jazz and popular musical styles filtered through a chamber music-inspired arranging lens. 

 Love and Ashes was both interrupted and then partially shaped by the COVID pandemic. The songwriting began in the spring of 2019. Recording was originally scheduled to begin in the spring of 2020 – and then COVID arrived. The songs went into a drawer, and for a time were off my radar and out of mind. 

I opened that drawer a year later in the spring of 2021 with an altered perspective. A few songs were eliminated, a few others rewritten and four new songs added, including two that are direct products of the age of COVID: Dinnertime at Jimmy’s and Just a Summer Rain. By September 2021, health conditions seemed safe enough to return to the studio, and it was a pleasure to be back with my brilliant Grammy-award winning co-producer of 34 years, Scott Lehrer, and my regular ensemble of musicians, the splendid group of long-standing colleagues that I informally and affectionately refer to as my ‘Large Band’. 

Love and Ashes was conceived as a recording project, specifically as a CD, its retro design, its approach to sequencing. There is no Side A, no Side B – just a set of 11 songs, ideally made to be listened to without interruption from beginning to end, conceived with a non-linear narrative in mind that’s open to various interpretations; reflections on the subject of love and ashes from a seasoned songwriter, expressed via a now old-school medium – the CD – with the convergence of those two elements hopefully creating a kind of poetic symmetry.

LR

4/17/23