One of my favorite Paul Simon songs goes “It was the year of the Beatles, the year of the Stones. A year after JFK.” 1964 also happens to be the year I was born. Needless to say, I’ve seen some stuff. Vietnam, watergate, inflation, recession, genocidal atrocities, endless wars, and more cultural shifts than I can count. Not to mention pet rocks. And all before the present century. The old curse, may you live to see interesting times, comes to mind as well as “you ain’t seen nothin yet”. America is the gift that seems to keep on giving when it comes to interesting times. The context of this album is the end of the Bush years and on through the Obama years. It was nearing completion about the time Trump was elected and I decided to delay it’s release. I didn’t want to saddle my poor creation with a release date in the midst of that particular circus. Flat Land is a metaphor for a world that’s become psychologically two dimensional. It seems to me we’ve gotten into the habit of rejecting reality as it is in favor of a flattened, simplified, caricature. A world view without any depth or context where all choices have become binary and all colors have been reduced to black and white. There’s a certain amount of comfort living in a world like that. It helps assuage the anxiety that’s existed in American culture literally my whole life. The album deals with the personal aspects of my life during this period as well as the public. It is my view of things from my small perch in the woods of central Texas where I make my home. Thankfully it’s very quiet where I live