About

I need to say up front that I am not a gun advocate as this album title might infer.  I am, however, an advocate for perspective shifting (as my project Consenses would later amplify).  Like many of my songs on this album, “Shotgun” can be perceived differently in different contexts.  Shotgun can be a long barreled fire arm (as seen in the liner notes image), a passenger side seating arrangement on a roadtrip (as pictured on the cover), a way to drink a beer (something I no longer do but can be seen pictured on the CD image, assuming you have one of the few physical pressings of this record… apparently you can find it on Amazon for $156 or in my basement covered by a heavy dust) and Shotgun can be a forced wedding (as is depicted on the back of the CD with my then boyfriend Dean Miller where I’m clutching a cowboy hat, I’m pretending is a baby bump, under my gown).  

The idea that context matters and that no single thing is just one thing was something I started talking to my parents a lot about in my teens.  My family was going through a divorce, and I was trying to understand out how the public was narrating our experience without us.  Did I have to take what the media said as truth?  Was my own experience valid?  Could I tease out my own reality from what I was hearing?  It was a relief when I realized there is no one story.  Everyone’s version can be helpful and none of them will be right, including my own.   Creating Shotgun was part of this revelation for me.  I could tell my story through song and claim my own experience knowing it was just one angle of the truth. I could let other people’s versions co-exist with my own.

I only partially produced this record.  It’s very rough and raw.  I included a 3×4 return mailing slip in each CD asking people for their perspectives on it and recommendations with the thought I might return to the studio with all the other versions people had sent back with their cute little notes and puppy dog stamps on them and re-produce the songs but…. I never got around to it.  Instead, I fell in love and had a baby and sold my van and quit the road.  Thank you to all of you who took the time to share your notes and perspectives with me.  I still have your folded 3×4 notes somewhere around here.  Maybe someday I’ll take them out and record the songs again.

I titled my second album Apt #6S to remind me where I come from; a delicious and outrageous illusion, and a geographic address as real and permanent as its bricks and mortar. Michael White (of Whitney Houston fame) produced this record for me in the mountains of Colorado. We mixed it in Whitney’s purple leather cushioned studio in New Jersey. It’s probably the best-sounding record I’ve made.