I started writing this song in 2014 with the intention of offering it to Suz for her lullaby record Watching the Nighttime Come. Suz was downstairs tracking vocals at the Brooklyn studio and I was upstairs with our baby daughter Calliope in the Ergo baby carrier. In an effort to keep Calliope from crying, I started playing the piano. The chorus for the song spilled right out.

"Big Sur" was the first song we recorded with Carl at his beautiful home studio, and that experience set the tone for the whole album.  It was like taking the first step into a sonic world together, and immediately, we knew the collaboration was going to be characterized by a real ease and comfort. We also realized that Carl could quickly create such warm sounds as a very intuitive engineer, and that we could lean heavily on ourselves as a duo and build up gradually from there. 

We've been blindfolding our audiences for experimental concerts we call Concert in the Blind. We perform the entire concert moving in and out of the crowd, whispering in their ears and playing with the fact that they can't see us. I wanted to write a song that spoke to this particular experience. I imagined harking back to those classic country duets where a man and woman are in conversation but recasting it with a metaphysical slant -- a rollicking song about good and evil, light and dark. In all our 12 years together, we've never written or performed a song that works like that and I loved the challenge of it.

Making "Unfruitful" was one of the most fulfilling recording experiences I've ever had. Working on this song with Sam Kassirer at Great North Sound Society felt like living out the fantasy I had about making records when I first fell in love with recorded music. It felt like we were building a world. And now, when I listen back, I hear this beautiful cacophony of styles that somehow feels like it has its own unique DWM stamp on it.

“Uncover the Gold” is a political anthem of hope, a message from a father to his children. I wrote it in response to the events of August 12, 2018, when white nationalist gathered in our hometown of Charlottesville. We, along with everyone else in our community, have been struggling to process the hate rally and the anti-Semitic chants we heard in our otherwise quiet, progressive college town. I've seen our community radicalize in positive ways and strengthen as a result of this terrible event and wanted to write a song that reflected on how an awful situation can reveal something beautiful. I wrote this song for our children as a reminder that light can come out of darkness and as a prayer for a world with less strife and ugliness.

"Lose Touch with the World" is one of those songs that went through a drastic transformation once we got into the studio. While I was demoing it, the song was more of a rocker, and the lyrics just flew by. Fortunately, our producer Josh Kaufman could hear past the abrasiveness of the demo. He felt that the song was actually quite melancholy and that there was a disjunction between the lyrics and the driving rhythm. He was also concerned that the lyrics were getting lost and the song was losing its emotional impact.

I first heard "El Querreque" during the summer of 2001. I was volunteering with the American Friends Service Committee in a small, rural village outside of Xilitla, San Luis Potosi, Mexico. I knew next to nothing about Mexican folk music but had found myself fortuitously spending a summer in a town with a thriving huapango scene. This rustic music captivated me -- I loved the lilting falsettos, the virtuosic violin flourishes, the percussive strumming, and the communal dancing. The music was woven into daily life in the villages in a way I had never witnessed or been a part of before, and it profoundly changed the way I thought about folk music and the role of a musician.

This song started with the riff, a walk down the neck of the jarana that I seen Ramon Gutierrez (Son de Madera) play as an adornment on another song. Once I got the figure in my hands, I found I could repeat it ad infinitum and never tire of it. That's usually a good sign that it's a riff worth exploring for a song.

This was always one of my favorite cuts from the "Guesthouse" sessions. We recorded it late one evening in the live room at The IsOkOn up in Woodstock, NY with the musicians gathered in a circle.