"Only the Stars Remain" consists of three songs created around my trip to the Philadelphia area in mid-May 2023. I was headed there to play three concerts, and I did a lot of rehearsal recording in the weeks before the trip. Two of those songs are on the album. I also wrote one song on the way home, and that is on here as well.


1) Beyond and

"Only the Stars Remain" consists of three songs created around my trip to the Philadelphia area in mid-May 2023. I was headed there to play three concerts, and I did a lot of rehearsal recording in the weeks before the trip. Two of those songs are on the album. I also wrote one song on the way home, and that is on here as well.


1) Beyond and Within: I initially rehearsed this piece as part of my set for the Echoes Living Room concert I’d be playing when in the Philadelphia area.  The rehearsal recordings (from which this version was taken) turned out better than I expected- and the version I played for the Echoes Living Room concert turned out so well that I decided to also play it for the Gathering concert the following evening.

The original version of this song was on my year 2000 album “To the Shores of Heaven” (During the Echoes Living Room concert, host John Diliberto asked when that album was released, and I said it was released in 2000- his reply was “that album does not feel 23 years old”- and that’s probably because the year 2000 doesn’t feel like it was 23 years ago!)

In reality, the year 2000 WAS 23 years ago (as of this writing), and it has been 30 years since the release of my first CD project, “Tenderness and Fatality” in 1993.  Between songs at the Echoes concert, I pointed out that the Echoes radio program was not only one of the VERY first programs to play my music in 1993, but also one of the VERY FEW programs to play my music at all; some ambient radio shows that were around back then had a problem playing “guitar music”, which resulted in unopened cds being sent back to me in the mail.  So I was (back then, and still am now) grateful that Echoes took a chance in playing the music of an unknown 26 year old musician.


2) Only the Stars Remain: This is a long one (both the song and the story behind it).

The main parts of this song were created on the night of January 29th, 2023.  I had driven back to Missouri for my father’s funeral, and the morning of his visitation, I drove out to the family farm where my siblings and I were raised.  It was the first time I’d been there since the 1860's era family house had been torn down, and the change to the physical and emotional landscape was noticeable; where there was once a house, there was now tillable land.  Later that evening- VERY late in the evening- I drove out to the farm again, with a guitar and laptop, and waited inside the warmth of my car for whatever would happen.  And something immediately happened, which was not surprising; there was, naturally, a lot on my mind that night- my dad, my mom, my family.

I was in the same physical space that I wrote about on my song “The Stars Above my Childhood Home” (from the “Skies and Stars” album in 2019), but that home wasn’t there any more- and neither was the orchard that I spent teenage summer nights walking through while listening to “Music from the Hearts of Space” on my headphone radio.  So many things, and now people, were no longer there.  But the stars were still there. 

The version on this recording features two acoustic guitars and two loop pedals- with everything run through effects that take the acoustic guitar sounds and transform them into something else.  Initially, I had a goal of debuting this song for my Star’s End set at WXPN, but the reality of playing a live on the air set at 2 AM on a Sunday morning didn’t lend itself to the emotional stillness this song required from me (there’s still too much “inner jitteriness” from having hauled gear into the radio station, set the gear up, check levels, etc…).  However, such a setting works great for improvisations, and, as with my sets for Star’s End over the past 24 years, I improvised an hour long piece that I was pleased with- a piece that featured some of the themes found in “Only the Stars Remain”.


3) Of Nostalgia and Goodbyes: this song came into existence somewhere along the Pennsylvania turnpike after I left the Philadelphia area on early Sunday morning, May 14th.  I quickly (and poorly) hummed some musical notes into the recording app on my cell phone, and then pulled over at the next service plaza, pulled out a guitar, and worked out the arrangement.  And then I was on my way home again.

I had mentioned, after the poor job humming the song into my phone, that the song was “full of nostalgia and goodbyes” and it’s not surprising that such things were on my mind; the night before, I said my goodbyes to friends in the Philly area that I’d known for around half my life.  But that simple phrase guided me in making the quick arrangement of the song at the service plaza, and in working on the final arrangement when I arrived home.  It also guided me in coming up with a title for the finished song.