In the winter of 2019-2020, just before the pandemic stopped everything, I went back into the studio with Evan and revived the project we had started 8 years before as The Diamond Age.
When we had made the first album, it was intended as a gift for my beloved grandparents, and particularly for my grandpa Sydney, whose passion for music is matched only, I think, by his regret at never having studied to become a musician himself. I've spent my life making music, surrounded by musicians and people who love music deeply, and can say that no one I know listens and receives the transmission more acutely than Sydney.
So we made an album of songs that he loves, that my grandmother Doris loves, and specifically songs that are dear to them from the years of their courtship and early marriage - during and after WWII, the dancehall big band tunes and love ballads that defined that time.
As I sang them and shaped them with Ev, I became aware of the magic in them, the vision of romance they conjured in me, and of the presence of my ancestors around me as I formed the gift of the recordings, gathering to impart to me that although I had not been given anything resembling a clear template for romantic partnership by my parents, that knowledge was present more deeply in the river of my body, and that they, my ancestors, wanted me to get my shit together and clear the path to give and receive a love that would last, that would urge me toward generation, and that would employ my heart in nourishing the story of the world.
And there it was. The songs worked their wild spell on me, were greatly enjoyed by my grandparents, and acted as a potent thread tethering Doris to the present when her memory began to wobble not too long thereafter.
And then, years later, we went to London to visit in the summer of 2019, and Sydney began to make song requests.
Have you ever heard of this one? Or this one?
I shocked him by quickly finding the songs in the strange deep pockets of the internet, some of the recordings a hundred years old. And I saw what happened to him as he listened to them, a man in his nineties, raising them into living memory, remembering the details of his childhood home, of his parents dancing in the kitchen, of his father singing him to sleep.
So we recorded again.

I love them. I hope you love them.

Deep Purple is a gorgeous dancehall number that became a hit when Paul Whiteman's epic big band played it, beginning in 1933.
Margie is a love song first recorded in 1920, one remembered as a song often sung by Sydney's father Bertie to his mother Marjorie. Our recording is a direct, humble bow to the arrangement and recording of the Don Shirley Trio, which is one of the sexiest things we've ever heard.
And Wonderful One was the song that was held most dear to Bertie and Marjorie's marriage - "their" song.