I experienced one of my most prolific songwriting stretches. I was in my mid-30’s, enjoying a confluence of skill, passion, and discipline. (Such is common for people at that age. The New-Agers, mystics, and other knowers-of-things call it “Saturn-Returning.”) …The only unusual thing about these songs is that there are 31 of them in the same package.

Bringing Pollyanna and Cassandra together has not been easy. This is not a match made in Heaven. Limited time, limited resources, limited equipment, and unlimited naiveté. But true love is stubborn.

“Pollyanna,” the derogatory nickname for a person who is optimistic so far beyond realism, that such optimism ceases to be a virtue. “Cassandra,” the Trojan prophetess of doom. I take to be some sort of archetype for a personality that is peculiarly intelligent, sensitive, but self-fulfillingly tragic.

Most fields of endeavor are populated by “mediocre men.” They don’t “run things” so much as “maintain things” with gate-keeping, rites of initiation, rigid themes of expectation, micro-hazings and harassments that reserve places in the hierarchy for other mediocre men.