As a child I was captivated by stories, songs, and movies such as Puff The Magic Dragon, Rudolf The Red Nosed Reindeer and Winnie The Pooh. The mystery, meaning and wisdom of these stories has remained with me and grown over the years. The theme "Power Of Place" has much to do with where the search for answers to these mysteries has taken me.
     I recorded the nature sounds on this album in far northeastern Minnesota in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.  During the process of combining those sounds with my songs I learned something quite emotionally stirring, as previously unnoticed connections between myself and the natural world were exposed to my consciousness. 
     I had heard distinct melodies in nature before which I couldn’t figure out what they were or where they were coming from.  Finally I realized it was the sounds of all the birds, wind or water together, the “overall song”, that I was hearing.  This overall song was not like any of the songs individually, in melody or sound.  I also experienced that the birds were well aware of this overall song which they and all of nature’s entities were contributing to.  What I didn’t know was that the place from which my songs come is this same awareness of the overall song.  I call it “The Neverending Song”.  All I have to do is turn on my recorder and I’m recording the Neverending Song.  But I don’t need a recorder to hear, see, smell, taste, or touch it.
     When Tom Brown Jr. suggested I do a project called “Power of Place”, I hadn’t conceived of how effective nature sounds could be in translating that power. I had, however, always wanted to put those sounds on my songs.  I wrote the songs on Power of Place over the course of 30 years, three of them after Tom's 2008 suggestion, with the help of Tracker friends.  Truly, the Neverending Song brings us to, punctuates and helps define the Power of Place.
      I had spent many hours and days recording nature during various Boundary Waters trips. In making this recording I searched through countless audio files for the one that seemed perfect for each song.  When the right file struck me, I found time after time that at that point my job was simply to find a key point in the nature file that went with a certain key point in my song.  It was at this point that I would become overcome with emotions because when those 2 key points were laid over each other I found that me and nature both knew the rest of each others songs!  So often their voices, pauses, and volume increases, punctuated my song perfectly.  Or was it the other way around?  It makes me feel humble, honored, loved, supported and unlonely.
     As much as possible I let these tracks be their own punctuation and you are hearing a real time nature track. No tracks are looped or played more than once on the album.  At certain points however, I played more than one nature track simultaneously or had to splice them to create a certain effect or emphasize a point in the story.  Experienced tracking ears may notice that at these times nature is out of context with itself .  Call it an overlapping of worlds, or being in 2 places at once.