Life can be a minefield of thoughts and the rollercoaster of emotional states. I write songs, in part, to help me process and understand what I’m experiencing. It’s therapy fleshing these things out, getting them out of the realm of inner monologue so I can hold them in my hands, turn them over, look at them and marvel at their strangeness. “How odd that love would make me afraid. That I’d feel jealousy about this or that. That I’d be confused when I know the game is simple. That I’d be lonely when surrounded by so much love. That I’d be wracked with doubt when I was clearly on the right path with the right motives. How strange and unpredictable these emotions… and how beautiful.

I made this record because it was time. I’d been writing, performing, and recording music for over 20 years and had yet to make a statement that was purely my own. The previous three years I’d cultivated a weekly gig and played with everyone I could, in every style I could. From some of those sessions emerged a theme and an aesthetic for a grand gesture in the form of an album. It had emerged organically when I asked myself, “If you could do whatever you wanted, what would it be? And if you could sing about whatever you wanted, what would you sing about?” The answer was that I’d play a jet black Gibson ES 135 and front a band of the best musicians in town. I’d sing songs I’d written about love and other (strange) emotions. I’d follow my heart and my instinct with very little compromise, and I’d do it for the love, the challenge, and as an offering to myself and the universe. 

These songs span my entire creative life. Several of them were written for this project. Some have been recorded before with my neo-Bluegrass ensemble The Infamous Stringdusters. A few of them were just waiting for me to pick up an electric guitar before they came home. One of them was the second song I ever made up. These songs are about my life and my experience trying to make sense of it all. Emotions and thoughts are strange. They feel so close, so real, yet they are separate from ourselves and they materialize the fall away like clouds in a summer sky. They exist only in theory but they create and inform every bit of our experience. If, like me, you’ve attempted to make sense of them, then I know you’ll find something in Love and Other Strange Emotions that resonates and seems familiar.