It’s been eight years since I last performed as a solo folksinger, but on March 31, 2017, I dusted off some of my old tunes and even played a new one for an intimate show at Conroy’s Pub in Lawrence, KS.

It was a surprisingly gratifying experience for me, and I hope to have another opportunity to do it again soon. More than that, though, it got my creative juices flowing and I’ve begun working on a new album of folk songs that I hope to release digitally in Fall 2017. This time, I’ll be working with lyrics from old-time folk songs in the public domain and setting them to my own arrangements. At some point, I may be interested to write new songs from scratch, but for now I’m really enjoying the process of working with great words already written.

The aforementioned “new” song from the recent Conroy’s performance is my arrangement of the old folk standard “Rye Whiskey.” Lyrically, it’s a combination of a few well-known versions, and musically, the new arrangement gives an already timeless song a bit of a contemporary feel, in my opinion. Here’s what it sounded like at Conroy’s: