What began as a simple idea of recording some of my old guitar songs turned into something else on day one. I was riding in the back of Chris O’Leary’s weary road van traveling across the country lost in thought. My mom had passed away two years earlier and I was feeling rudderless. Losing her took a toll on my mental health. In the months before she passed we spent a lot of time together. We usually spoke on the phone every few days and got together at least once a week, but in her final months I was at her side as much as possible. During one conversation a few weeks before her passing she asked me when I was going to record an album. Why had I not gotten around to recording any of my music? This scene was replaying in my mind as we were speeding down the highway and almost on a whim I called my friend Conrad Fisher to ask for his health.

Day one was a demo-recording session with Conrad at his glorious space in western Pennsylvania called Ragamuffin Hall. After I played My Moon for him he asked the question that took this project down a different path: “why don’t you bring a band in for that one?” Conrad’s band is a father-son team from Harrisburg, PA: Mark and Jordan Davis. I had played one gig with them the summer before. They’re great players and really nice guys. It was an easy yes.

Taking the vision of this album from just me and a guitar to adding other people opened the floodgates of ideas and gave me a wider palette of colors. Every song on this album happened organically. I knew I wanted some spacey guitar on This, but I didn’t know how Scott Tournet would take my simple notes and make it a soundscape. I wasn’t planning to add harmonica to Mississippi Moonlight until Conrad picked up a harp while we were talking about the troubles of the world and made some sounds that needed to be in that song. I knew Chris O’Leary was a brilliant harmonica player, but I had never heard him play directly into a mic and get those perfect Americana tones. I had never heard of Bryan McDowell before I went to an Old Time Music Festival in Baltimore with a buddy while I was trying to finish the album but I knew right away that I needed his touch on the mandolin. I never imagined that The Sun is Always Shining could have such a spacey lift until I woke up one morning thinking about Dave Hadley and wishing he hadn’t moved out of Maryland. I wasn’t planning on any guitar for Coming Home To You aside from a simple chunk, but then Jonathan Sloane plugged into my amp and I immediately knew that song needed more from him. I had some ideas for backing vocal parts but all Nikki Lerner needed from me were a few suggestions and she took her parts beyond what I imagined. I had never imagined The Island would have percussion, but when I was mixing it I had a notion of Peter Gabriel and Ben Tufts was the perfect call. Then you add in a few of my favorite bass players (and humans) like Jeff Reed, Chris Brown, and Randy Ball and you can’t go wrong. The icing on the cake for me is hearing my brother Harris Amster’s voice peeking into Mississippi Moonlight in a way that connects this album to my brothers Burt the Dirt.

The scariest part of this whole process was the idea that I was going to be the lead singer. That has always been out of my comfort zone. Luckily for me I have an ace in my pocket named Pete Strobl. Pete’s voice students include Eddie van Halen, Wolfgang van Halen, Neil Fallon, and all of my favorite local singers. He’s a guru, a cheerleader, and a smack on the forehead when you need it. So I took my sorry self over to his place for a couple of months and recorded my vocal parts one million times. He’s also very patient.

I really wanted to do all of the mixing myself. Even though I’ve working in Logic Pro for years, I knew that mixing an album required some skills I hadn’t yet polished. That polish came from my dear friend Robbie Cooper. Robbie mixed the latest Burt the Dirt album and I think it’s brilliant. He was very generous with his time, and very patient with some of my amateur mistakes, and he helped me tighten up the ideas I had been playing around with for a couple of months.

That’s the story of the album. I’ll leave the stories behind the songs to your imagination, with one exception. On a monumental evening in December of 1997 I cut my hair, put on a tie, and picked up Deb to take her out on our first date. That night we talked about absolutely everything. We talked about my first marriage to my high-school sweetheart. We talked about my obsession with music and my future dreams/plans. We talked about her years living in Peru and Mexico and her nascent career as a secondary education teacher. We talked about our families, our values, our dreams. We were comfortable with each other immediately. The following afternoon I sat down and wrote My Moon. This song shot out of me like a cannon. A year later I changed a few lyrics and used it to propose to Deb in front of all of our friends and we’ve been newlyweds since 2000.

My soul has been on low tide. Won’t you be my moon.

I hope you enjoy my moon & other love songs.