Any album represents a journey for the artist. 

This particular album began in May of 2004, in Morocco to attend the Fes Festival of Sacred Music.  Every night after the concert I found the private garden where the Sufis played their music, and afterwards stumbled home through the dark alleyways and lay in bed unable to sleep, reading Rumi and Hafiz, Mohammed Choukri, Driss Chraibi and others.  Holed up for two weeks in a riad in the medina during the daytime to avoid the scorching heat, I embarked on the journey, and began writing the first of many songs I would compose for this album. 

In 2005 I travelled to Lisbon and, in stark contrast, spent two weeks mostly in rain, haunting the fado clubs at night in the Alfama, tracing the footsteps of my literary idol, Fernando Pessoa.  In my tiny room on the highest of the seven hills in Lisbon, the distant Tagus a muddy ribbon to the sea out my window, I continued writing, as the stories of my own heteronyms began to emerge. 

And for many weeks in 2006, I lived in a small, whitewashed village in southern Andalusia, spending virtually every day hard at work writing, and where the shape of the album began to finally take seed in my mind, in the ruins of Lorca and the flamenco soul.

So when it later came time to produce the album, I naturally sought to infuse the project with some sense of the western Mediterranean, the Al-Andalus region from whence these pieces originated.  Years later, many songs written, recorded, and many rejected, here I finally arrive with the hardy fellow travellers that remained.