This is a compilation of acoustic songs recorded for various studio LPs over the last several years, often with some sort of ambient backing or samples (and, in a few cases, subtle electronic beats). The earliest recordings here come from my Tetralogy of 2021, recorded during the Covid pandemic, and three of the four recordings from last year (2023) represent rerecorded versions of early songs of mine: "People," from 2016, which I wrote when I was in a band, though we never performed it together; "Red Signals" from 2017, the latter previously only released as an electronica track, in versions both with and without guitar; and, finally, "Broken Wing," here in a rather different arrangement from the purely-acoustic/vocal version released on 2021's "The Sun Is Coming." The present version (released on last year's "1. Solitude" LP) was in fact recorded "live" in my room - i.e. guitar/vocals performed simultaneously - and the backing tracks were later added to the mix.

The third track from 2023 I've included, and from which this release takes its title, is an improvisation I did late last year on my Ibanez acoustic; I'd actually intended for it to be a sort of sequel (in concept/sound/feel) to "The Way Out Is In," which I'd recorded spontaneously one night in early 2022, later adding improvised vocals to it to create a second version which became the title track to my first release of that year. Of course, the two tracks ended up hardly resembling each other either in sound or in style, but what they do share in common is that both were 100% improvised and that both were played on the same acoustic guitar: the Ibanez.* They appear together here on the same release for the first time ever.

* Note that these days - and for the past several years since acquiring it in the summer of '22 - I tend to favor the Guild acoustic to the Ibanez, but at the time of recording "The Way Out Is In" I hadn't yet owned the former. The decision to record the track "Wood, Metal, Earth" via the Ibanez was, therefore, intentional, just as I also intentionally used the Ibanez to record the songs for my "022623" LP, an album of newly-arranged and (re)recorded songs from my band days back in '16... Also note that the song "People" was in fact one of the things I hadn't redone for that album that I had wanted to rerecord at some point, and so I decided late last year to give it a go (though on the Guild acoustic this time around). The present version was originally released on "Shadowlife" earlier this year (2024).