this collection takes its title from the one song i wrote for it, "unsettled." the song cracked me up - always a good thing. first, the lyrics: i love it when the singer complains about his woman leaving him, and shows you in the process exactly why she'd do that. and then there's the whole arrangement - reggae bass, twangy acoustic guitar and, later, a mandolin. it was supposed to be a blues when I started it, but that didn't work out. so country reggae, wtf.

a friend, mike weber, in graduate school at ucsd, taught me a basic finger picking pattern, after which i learned all i know about that technique from listening to the recordings of mississippi john hurt. "louis collins" was the first finger-picked song i ever learned.

"scotch & soda" was my mother's favorite of the songs i used to sing back in the days of the kingston trio. the trio claims authorship of the song, but that's only because neither they nor anyone else could ever discover who actually wrote it.