I
had returned to the Midwest for the funeral of my grandmother, to pay my
respects. I was taken by a sense of homecoming in the town of Packwood, Iowa,
home to four generations of my family.
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, but there was no there there. In the summers, when I was on Willard’s farm in Richland, Iowa, I used to pretend that was my home.
I was a Northerner in New Orleans, an American in Montreal, a Midwesterner in California and a non-Lutheran in Minnesota. But in Packwood I was just “Billie’s son.”
Back home in San Francisco, I wrote the first song, “Five Pines,” in about 15 minutes. I started working in the studio I built on Ellsworth Street, then in Minneapolis, and I finally finished recording the album in Montreal. There I worked with an old bandmate, violinist Joel Zifkin. He laid down his tracks at Silent Sound Studio, owned by another old pal, Juno winner Morris Apelbaum.
Most of the guitar tracks are played on the same Mossman acoustic guitar I played with Joel 25 years ago.
Some wonderful musicians joined me to make this happen. In addition to Joel, who is the violinist for The McGarrigle Sisters; Linda Winston, a gospel signer from Minneapolis; Jarod Rush, keyboard player for the Minneapolis band Mango Jam; Michael Wilkes, a San Francisco drummer; and my daughter Lenne, who makes her recording debut on this record all contributed wonderful performances.
