I recently stumbled across the words for these seven songs and felt inspired to set them to my own music. Some of them are ancient songs with origins lost to history, others date to the late 1800s, and one of them was written in 2004. All of them convey a mood of longing and perseverance – two characteristics of traditional folk music I’ve always been drawn to.

The process couldn’t have been any more simple. As soon as I found a melody and arrangement that suited the words, I recorded each song through my iPhone and these are the results; these bare-bones recordings capture the initial moment of inspiration for each song.

True – these are what most folks would consider scratch tracks or first takes. And while I may, one day, decide to do more with them, what you’ll hear on this album is the initial moment of inspiration for each song. Despite the occasional throat-clearing or flubbed note, I was able to capture the precise moment when these songs “clicked” for me, which usually disappears from a song when it’s put through the mechanical process of recording and production. From that perspective, they’re perfectly imperfect and I couldn’t have recorded them any better if I’d tried.