A small fire for you to sit beside: Secret River, Hidden Place.

I started building it around 2003, when I was 23, recently uprooted and relocated to the city for the first time. I was lonely.
With the exception of Kick My Phone Off A Cliff and Be The City, these songs were written in Toronto: alone, in my bedroom above a psychic's studio on Bathurst St, near Kensington Market.

I'm 40 now, and recently found myself sitting on my bed with the box of old cassettes I'd put away when my kids were born. Listening back to those demos and unfinished songs I'd begun way back, I felt that now was a good time to come alongside my younger self and collaborate with her; to record her songs and finish this lovely album that she'd started.

So here we are.

I kept the production very gentle and sparse- no frills, no tricks- knowing that that's how I would've done it back then.
Aside from the people heard in the field recordings, the sole guest you hear is Julia Fenn- my favourite voice in the world, and a good friend- who sings harmonies on Kick My Phone Off A Cliff, Til Morning Rose, and Willow Wood.

There are fragments of old tape-deck demos woven into the album, too, and some answering machine bits I'd recorded (no doubt having NO clue how amused I'd be by them almost 20 years later... but I obscured them enough that no one now will know what was being said or who was doing the saying!)

And finally, I put a call out to friends on social media who are in Toronto, to see if anyone was willing to go out and get some audio footage at specific locations- in and around Kensington Market, at Bathurst and Bloor, and- literally- in front of and in the alley behind the old house on Bathurst. I'm deeply thankful to Lostworldsounds, Jason Blackthorn, and Handreaux for coming through and getting that footage for this album; my intention with it is to deepen the energetic continuity between the past and the present, in service to these tunes.

This is a deeply personal album, but I hope it warms you, too, in these uprooted and untethered days.

Thanks for your time.