I had intended for my first entry to delve into some of the details about the recording of the new album, Luck In This Life, in Berlin last summer. However, we posted the new site just days after war broke out in Iraq. Since then, like many folks around me, I've been wracked with an uneasy ambivalence about the reasons, rationalizations, results and ramifications of that war. I was struggling with ways to expresss that ambivalence when I came across this passage from Ernest Hemingway's A FAREWELL TO ARMS. I think this sums it up rather neatly for me:

"I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain.  we had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards in Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were so many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.  Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates."

--Ernest Hemingway