Introduction

Hello there.

Many years ago my mother, who lives deep in the English countryside, chanced to meet an eccentric sixty year old woman.

She called herself a songwriter.

In their conversation, my mother mentioned her son, who lived in America, was a songwriter as well.

The woman asked my mother if she might be kind enough to forward to me a cassette tape containing a few of her songs.

It was through the arrival of this tape that I first became acquainted with Di Farrelly.

By listening, I learned Di Farrelly had been pursuing a career as a songwriter for more than forty years. Sadly, she explained on the tape, these pursuits had never come to fruition.

Over the years, every few months, Di Farrelly sent along other tapes. As I listened, I was drawn to the haunting spoken messages she included for me on these tapes.

I would often try to picture Di, alone in the back bedroom of her small country cottage, composing on a small keyboard, and carefully adding the touching spoken letters written to someone who lived far away, and whom she had never met.

Several years ago the tapes stopped coming in the mail.

One Christmas, while visiting my mother in England, I asked after Di Farrelly and was told she had passed away.

Upon returning to America, I re-listened to the tapes Di had sent me over the years, and decided to compile them into an album.

The result is a heartbreaking narrative on the frustrations of not only being a songwriter, but on a much broader level: on the questions of art and obscurity to which all of us, artists or not, can relate.

I have attempted to let her true story speak for itself, and I believe, in her story, Di Farrelly speaks to and for us all.

Thank you, very much, for listening.

For Gordon.