People tell me how much they like the title of this CD. “Songs from the Roof,” one friend remarked, is such a great metaphor for looking back over one’s life and seeing the remnants of joy, romance, angst—both real and imagined—and musings about what life is all about. And it’s more autobiographical than I would sometimes like to admit; in my teens, as a burgeoning musician, I used to escape the family by climbing up on the roof with my first guitar. In this perch, I spent long hours inventing songs and exploring the mysteries of the guitar. The CD begins with “Anyone Can Tell You.” Nothing too intellectual; just a sincere lyric about the luck of the draw, so to speak, of finding the person with whom you want to spend the rest of your life. I had great fun arranging the vocals to weave in an out of the melody. The inspiration was definitely from Lennon and McCartney’s final, Abbey Road period. “In Another Town” echoes the quiet desperation of wanting to start over in a new place, with a clean slate, where no body can see through to your heart. (A friend of mine once said of this song, “you don’t need to be an outlaw to understand this desire; this notion hits most of us at least once in a lifetime.”) Ron Sodos' pedal steel, which conjures up the sounds of Poco’s Rusty Young, really cries on this tune—especially during the solo. Most piano ballads are romantic. But my own ballad, “These Two Hands,” describes the arc or a person’s life—from childhood, to adulthood, and to middle age—using the metaphor of hands, which convey so much in our roles as friends, parents, and lovers. “City Lights” takes the listener to the rainy streets of Manhattan, and through the pages of an accidentally discovered diary.