Poems and Promises is an album that never was. First a little background. I first began trying my hand as a song writer before high school when I was performing with my older brothers as an acoustic trio. By 1979, when I began my freshman year, I had committed to pursuing the craft seriously. By the end of high school I had begun to organize my songs into groups of what I considered my best work and recording them. My own personal mixtapes as it were. During college I continued this process and in 1986 I recorded a song cycle called Songs of Solitude. By this time I was thinking in terms of LPs of 45 minutes or less so I arranged things for that format. Songs of Solitude was a collection of demo recordings that I hoped one day might become a full production album. Poems and Promises was my second attempt at the same. A proper album never happened in either case but most of the songs from Solitude did make it onto my 2021 release, Love Cycles and Full Circles, in re-recorded form. I don’t have any plans to do the same with songs from Poems and Promises. The project spans a period of song writing occurring roughly between 1989-1991. In those days it wasn’t unusual for me to write as many as ten songs for each one that made the cut. Then, as now, I also wrote songs that just didn’t fit the project I had in mind for thematic or aesthetic reasons. In the end I boiled it down to 12 tracks. Once recorded, I gave cassette copies of Poems to friends, as well as friends of friends who requested them. Eventually I also distributed copies on CD-R but I never officially released the project before now. Poems and Promises went into the vault and by the time I gained access to the resources to produce a professional recording I had already moved on, both personally and artistically. As a result, Amystery, became my first professional project recorded in 1994. I never returned to Poems and Promises so now I’m releasing it as a kind of time capsule. It represents an important stage in my development as a writer and producer that I now wish to share with a wider audience. I hope you enjoy this little journey into my musical history.