Notes

"Leaving L.A." is a song that expresses the mundane realities of urban life with a touch of the sublime.  The stark harshness of the daily grind is contrasted with a dreamlike vision of lost love, a haunting vision that transports us beyond the metropolitan surface noise of freeways and AM radios.  The background chorus and saxophone solos lend an eerie subtext to the contrapuntal texture.

"You'll Never Know" should be heard along the beach under swaying palm trees and gentle breezes where elegant women who all look like the girl from Ipanema are sipping umbrella drinks out of coconut shells serenaded by the music of the samba, flutes wafting serenely over our heads, washing the strand with overtones of a reggae reverie.

In "El Norteno" the ancient mystery of love unfolds as a migrant wanderer almost remembers with sadness times long ago and far away, in a land almost forgotten with tears that have long-since dried.  The text is alternately in English, Spanish, and Italian, and is freely adapted from a phrase in Ovid's Art of Love.

"Through Your Window" is a catalogue of residual memories left by certain romances as they fly fleetingly into the bittersweet melancholy of the past.  Mythological references to beautiful women long-since passed away ought to give the listener poetic pause for reflection.

A cowboy waltz with mysterious implications, "When I'm With You" creates a mood of tranquility rarely found in the honky-tonks and Texas Two-Step joints.

"Mother Jones" began as a 1960s style protest song.  In its present form, the song has dropped most of the outboard histrionics and has emerged as a protestant hymn about the conflict between feelings of hope and the inevitability of death.

A common struggle between the sexes is depicted in "Nothing to Say."  In this story of stress, the refrain exhorts us to have some fun while we may.  There is a moral in this that for now remains secret.

The tragic medieval love story of "Abelard and Heloise" is told in haunting tones of ghostly voices echoing from a time long ago forgotten full of gothic picturesque romance.  In its current manifestation, the piece is composed as a sequence of madrigal-like episodes interwoven with a backdrop of liturgical music from the Catholic Latin mass.