Music can reach right down into the depths of your soul, sneak up on your heart, grab it and give you a rejuvenating hug! As a musician it's so easy to lose sight of this - this essential quality and purpose of music that drew you to music to begin with. It shows up again every time I write a new tune - that's why I write - but after it's written you necessarily shift into a different working mode. You have to work out all the technical Stuff, technique to pull things off on your instrument (on hammer dulcimer we call it "sticking"), expressive phrasing, dynamics and lots of nuance things; and then comes the mammoth task of memorizing. The inspiration lasts a few minutes; the work lasts for years!!! That reality about music making, so necessary to perform, too easily removes you from that initial blessing that made music such a basic part of your life. And I haven't even mentioned the mind-numbing hurdle of "marketing"! I told my wife after finishing "Parallax" that I'd rather do another album than promote this one... It's such a different set of skills - hats off to those who can do it well! Sometimes you can go for months, even years, without being revisited by that musical heart hug. But sooner or later it comes round again - every now & then you get a reminder. A heartfelt letter describing how your CD got this person through a tough night. Hearing on audience member release the kind of sigh that only comes from experiencing awe - a sound that tells me I didn't just perform a tune, I communicated to another human being what was in my heart when that tune was first written. A young man coming up after a performance, and saying quietly to me with tears in his eyes,"you touched my soul, man." (And he wasn't high.) My music career has always been semi-professional. Lucrative at times, especially with Michael Miller and our duo "Miller - Rowe Consort"; but always had to have a day job. Because marketing music is always a compromise between art and audience proclivities, over the years I built up a fair amount of material that is totally expressive art, and so wasn't suitable for what Michael and I were doing in Miller-Rowe. (Well, some was, like "Rebekah's Song" on "Appalachian Sky", our first album.) These tunes, and a few new ones that jumped out at me while recording this album, are what Parallax is all about. Some of them date back to the 90s. Whitewater Run was written in the late 90s. I actually couldn't play it then, it's so technically demanding. It spent a great deal of time on the back burner, with occasional visits in off seasons, and since retiring from my day job I've been able to finish it up and learn it, so here it is! Spring Breeze was the title cut of a solo album I did in '94, and it fits the bill for the spirit of this album, so it's in here, too! The first tune, Open Windows, was a late 90's composition. It's rhythms and motifs are my tribute to guitarist Pat Metheny, a HUGE personal favorite and influence. Again, like Whitewater Run, it took a long time to give it the time it needed to be brought into the light of day. The title cut, "Parallax", came to be in an unusual way. I was getting ready to do some recording on this album one morning, and all of a sudden I get this little ditty in my head. I worked it out, went ahead and recorded IT instead of what I was planning to record; and when I got done I analyzed it and discovered that the primary time signature was 7/8 (I'd never written anything in 7/8 before) !! Totally fun! In case any of you are into music tech - I recorded and produced Parallax completely on an iPad Air 2. Why the iPad, you ask? I was planning on recording bass, percussion, and color instruments to enhance the hammer dulcimer tracks. The iPad, with it's touch screen and proper software, can actually serve as a completely new all digital musical instrument! You can also hook up a midi guitar and play synthesizer apps on it. The app store abounds with apps utilizing this capacity, and a lot of folks are implementing them in music production and performance. Synthesizing is an obvious application, and many have been doing that already. But my interest was primarily recording audio, having the kind of audio editing capabilities I was used to on a desktop, and THEN using the touchscreen as an instrument as the icing on the cake. After a lot of research online, I concluded that the Air 2, new at the time, could do the job hardware-wise, and Aria (then Aria Pro a year into the project) would work as the recording/editing/mixing software. It worked! Some bugs along the way, but the good app developers stay on it and fix things. You still have to have good mics, of course, but wow, for about $2,000 dollars invested in an iPad and the right apps you can do what 20 - 30 years ago would have required $10,000 - $20,000 worth of equipment - and never leave the digital domain once your audio is recorded! The final result, Parallax - an album that sounds like what I hear in my head when I write tunes! As an artist, that's a dream come true! I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it!