I (Al) love this song that Jess wrote for our first album (Manhattan-Monee). I recorded this version while learning to play dulcimer in late 2008, with my horrible crappy recording setup. Randomly stumbled on it cleaning out some files, thought…

Musical tribute to the ideas of Jane Jacobs (author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities) and Christopher Alexander (author of The Timeless Way of Building).

I am concerned with the values of my generation.

Original working title was something like, "And after six years I finally understood why they sing in the streets here, and could go home." It's sort of about anonymity in the modern city. If that sounds pretentious, that's because it is.

Good old dulcimer bash-up. This is certainly the most aggressive song I've played on dulcimer. I'm sure all those people with solid-body electric dulcimers have done worse...

Words are from a sestina of the same title by Steve Davenport, who asked us to make music out of it! This was a terribly fun song to record. We did it, of course, while drinking. Thankfully no instruments were harmed.

I'm going to get all pretentious again and say this one is about the concerning strain of what I might call "religious modernist traditionalism" espoused by technological singularity fanatics (Ray Kurzweil) and authors like Neil Stephenson.

I lit a string on fire...

This song was recorded illegally. Please don't rat us out.

Started recording this with no idea what to do with the sound. Wound up with three different vocal takes to choose from, didn't like any of them, used all of them.