From the liner notes:

Arriving in Berlin with the hopes of musical adventure turned out to feel a little like walking onto the set of an Andy Warhol Holocaust film. The circus-like atmosphere of a town swarming with the bohemian, artistic and intoxicated, coupled with the haunting, terrible weight of what is still recent history, I floated in what seemed a surreal haze, both curious and full of trepidation.

With very little knowledge of how to proceed, I endeavored to write ten songs, a collection of impressions of my surroundings as they came to me. Some would be specifically about the city and others would continue on old themes but adopt some of the sounds that played everywhere around me, and I was more than a little curious to see what would come out. I was delighted, too, to get to work on them with some of the fine musicians that I was introduced to.

I managed to write all but one of the ten songs during my initial seven-month stay. ‘Old Synagogue,’, was written afterward, on a visit to Toronto. The one song I wanted to reserve for the topic of my Judaism, so dramatically re-contextualized by the strange kind of pilgrimage that going to Berlin was for me, it proved too hard for me to put into words while I was actually there.


This recording is a testament to the magic that can happen between friends and colleagues when a love of song is shared. A live show at the Jägerklause in Friedrichshain, it's a warts-and-all recording, true to the happenings of any given night, in any given show. But it is also one that captures one particular shared evening in time and space that I am more than a little grateful for.