I named my prior blues CD "Blues Soufflé" because my kind of blues is on the soft/smooth side. A brûlée is also soft and smooth, so thus the title for this current CD. For the cover image my wife kindly baked me a crème brûlée with blue food-coloring added in the middle. Won't Break Me Down -- I had been thinking of various troubles in my life and how I wasn't going to let those troubles get me down. Suddenly, the refrain for this song (along with music and some lyrics) came to me. Naked Singularity -- I read that while many astrophysicists believe in the "censorship conjecture" (that one can never see inside a black hole because its light can never escape it), some astrophysicists believe that special black holes might exist in which some light can escape and they have dubbed such an hypothesized cosmic entity a "naked singularity". The moment I read that phrase, the idea for this song came to me. Blues Brûlée – I was listening to a podcast (on NPR's "Fresh Air") about how the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax had recorded many folk singers, including Vera Hall, a school teacher in the late 1930s, and how she would add a kind of falsetto to the end of each of her verses, and how unusual that was. Hearing her sing inspired me to try a similar technique in my song. Ebb and Flow -- What sounds like human voices (during the musical interlude) is actually synthesized. Credit Default Swap Blues -- I had just been placed on a forced furlough and that inspired me to write an economics-oriented blues song (about the role of AIG, the S.E.C., Goldman Sachs, Alan Greenspan, etc. in the world financial crisis that started around 2008/9). While Waitin' for Nothin' To Happen – At one point I said to my wife "While we're waiting for nothing to happen, we should ..." and she immediately said that this phrase would make a nice song title. I agreed and, within a day, I had this song written. Countin' Down Blues -- This song is about someone who is counting down the weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds until they can be with their lover. It is a major rearrangement of an earlier song I wrote, titled "Countin' Down" (which appeared on my CD Butterfly's Release). Calypso Blues 1 -- I was experimenting with steel drum sounds on my synthesizer and I wanted to see if I could write a blues instrumental piece that would have a calypso flavor to it. Atheist's Lament -- My songs are usually about love and relationships, but occasionally I have written songs about the environment or about searching for enlightenment. In this case, I decided that it might be interesting to write a philosophical song. It contains an atheist's arguments against belief in immortal souls and in God. To do so I first wrote a poem; then I came up with the music. The music then required that the poem be radically modified in order to fit the resulting lyrics to the constraints of the music's structure and meter.