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In February, I remodeled a spare bedroom in our house in Idaho. I opened up the double-wide closet and built a long desk with a chest of drawers underneath the left side. I shoved the clothes in the drawers then wall-papered the inset work area with old blueprints from our former house in Durham, NC. My wife was happy: “Good thing you got rid of that ol’ closet and its clothes or else you wouldn’t have a decent place to hang those blueprints of a different house from a different part of the country.”
     I then shifted creative gears and worked on a batch of new songs as well as a handful of ancient lingerers. The new songs came quickly, one completed in fifteen minutes. The old songs took a little more total time from start to finish, about ten years.
     I usually don’t use the word ‘fun’ or ‘easy’ to describe my writing process yet for that brief few weeks, it was both fun and easy. For the new songs, it may have been challenging every so often however even those times were fun. For the old songs, it was nine years and eleven months of stultification then for a few blessed blissful days in February, it got easy. The tone of the album is winterly, neither fun nor easy, but I’m grateful at least the process swayed between each.
     In March, I sent the dozen tunes to my Chasing 76 cohort, Brandon Collins, then I drove around the northern Nevada desert during that month’s New Moon. I won a six-pack of drink tokens playing BINGO in Elko and immediately made five new friends. I found my top speed strolling the Bonneville Salt Flats in Wendover. I slept somewhere along Route 50. A few of the locals claimed Route 50 is the loneliest road in America but there are lonelier roads in America with no more locals to tell you how lonely it is.
     When I came back to Idaho, Brandon and I started working on the songs. We concentrated on nine of the twelve. We recorded April through July then mixed in October. A week before Thanksgiving, we drove around listening to them, in and out of downtown beet town, on and off the lonesome crowded western highways.
     This set of songs feels more an extension of the work akin to the JKutchma & The Five Fifths material rather than Chasing 76. The project is called One Fifth. The name of the album is Tell Me the Words.