"I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama and began playing piano when I was six. My parents found an old piano which had been salvaged from the wreckage of the Tutweiler Hotel after it burned down. It had been used in the cocktail lounge and there were still drink stains on it. I loved playing that piano, but loved even more hearing my grandfather play it. I would crawl under it and stick my head up by the sound board. No one else seemed to get how amazing the thing sounded when he played it. I've been playing music ever since. I studied music in college and went on to get a master's degree in composition, but I've found that most of that formal training has just gotten in the way of making music. All that information clogs things up. I'm sure it's crept into my writing somehow for the good, but I spend most of my time running away from it.

I moved to Los Angeles to write music for film, but the whole time I was secretly writing songs. I was churning out bad music for bad tv shows, then running home at night to write and record songs. It just didn't work like that, and I finally had to leave the steady job. That's when I started making records, first with eastmountainsouth, and then on my own. I'm still learning to write good songs, and I'm still learning to sing them. And I still remember the sound my grandfather made when he played that old piano.

The title and theme of the album is inspired by a line from the Mark Strand poem titled *The View*: 'He's always been drawn to the weather of leavetaking.' The word leavetaking resonates with me on many levels. It's a theme you hear in so many traditional songs... some of them traveling songs, or gospel songs, or love songs... they've got that old longing in them that I'm really drawn to."

pba