I recorded “The Counting of Nothing” over the last few months - mostly alone in my home studio. Unlike other albums, I did most of the arranging, singing and playing myself (with tremendous input from Mike Ensign). The songs seem a bit more autobiographical to me than my other albums. Like, for example, “Four Thousand Days of Quiet” - which is about my meandering music career. Or “A Little Older (Everybody’s Safe)” which is about spending the first half of 2018 in South America, where I wrote the song. There is also a four-song narrative in the middle of the record that was originally meant to take up the entire album. It is the story of a boy who leaves his home to find the music he hears in his head - music the natural world hears and moves to, but which people around the boy cannot hear. The sequence begins with “The Boy Who Could Hear Music” (leaving home), continues with “Cinema Day” (sleeping under a tree that protects the boy), moves to “Calling Off The Search” (a moment of despair for the boy), and wraps up with “There’s A Hole In The Ocean Floor” (finding other people on a similar search). The story doesn’t resolve on this album, but I wanted to include at least a fragment of it here and am looking forward to developing a way to tell the whole story through live performance. I’m grateful for the warm feedback I have already received for this album and am excited (and nervous) to send it out into the big world.