This album represents recordings which were done between 2002 and 2010. Some elements of the music were conceived as early as 1968. One was actually written in 1978, while traveling over the Tappan Zee Bridge in the back of a van. I was on the way to open a show for my friends Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at a club in Woodstock, New York.

Most of this music, though, was written in Brooklyn and Québec, my geographical muses, close to the time they were recorded.

I am not sure what inspires me so much almost exclusively in those two locations, but it must be the proximity to the sea. Having grown up in the mountains, I have always been drawn to the sea. If the Midwest is America's Heartland, New York harbor is its greatest valve, and still carries all the inspiring power and energy that Walt Whitman wrote about so eloquently. And the Saint-Laurent, the great estuary that drains the Great Lakes and opens up to its majestic gulf, holds a power over me that can best be described by the music I have written in its valley.

The synchronicity of my son Pete Tridish giving me one of a new generation of recording devices in 2000, and the "Stolen Election" followed by the tragedy of September 11th, opened up the most productive time of my life as an artist. It was political protest that was always my greatest motivator. As a political songwriter, no period called for action as much as the last decade. With the constant collaboration and support of my beloved Mama Dish, the musical drive was so strong, the issues so imperative, that music spilled out of me and into recording devices, even beyond the political songs. This collection is from that musical overflow.

There is a certain unevenness about this album. Since it was recorded in two different countries, at different locations, with different recording devices and different instruments it is unlike the studio recordings of today. Even with my modern digital recorders, it is more like the field recordings of early folk music collections. I am perfectly happy about that because my identity as an artist has always been as a folk musician.

Papa Dish