----- THE STORY ------ In the Summer of 1996, I was living in southern North Carolina, near the South Carolina border. I had been down there a couple years, started a band called Grayson Hugh and The Mooncussers, and, like always, was writing and recording songs. I got a phone call that August from my publisher EMI in New York. It was Evan Lamberg, then the Senior Vice President. He said “Hi Grayson! There’s a guy here in New Jersey that would love to write some songs with you. I know you don’t usually write with anyone else, but we would be happy to fly you up here and pay your expenses while working with this guy for a couple weeks. He is really a huge fan of your music. His name is Marc Swersky.” At that moment, I just happened to be receptive to the idea of doing something different, and having a change of scenery, so I said yes. So up I went, from one end of the intercostal waterway to the northern part of it in Long Branch, New Jersey. That’s part of the old Jersey Shore, where the presidents used to vacation. There I met Marc Swersky, a songwriter, bass and guitar player and producer. I stayed for a little over a week at his apartment while we wrote. Marc would get his guitar out, and start playing until something caught my ear, and then we’d fine tune the rough blueprint of a song: chords and a melody that I would “syllable sing”, which we’d record on my Sony Walkman. Then I’d take a notebook and pen, some coffee and my cigarettes (yeah I was smoking back then) out on his a balcony that overlooked the beach where surfers were still catching the waves in early September Atlantic Ocean. It wasn’t yet Fall, and not quite Summer, it was that inbetween time I love so much. That whole quality of changing seasons, changing air and light, sort of became a theme for my lyrics. I was also inbetween changes in my life. I was planning to move back north in a few months, before December hit. It was a bittersweet parting of the ways for my girlfriend and I. We had been together over five years, having met at a show in Atlanta, GA, during one of my tours in 1989. Slowly it had become apparent that we wanted different things out of life. I was still searching. I still felt love for her, but I knew I had to leave. That whole feeling of being half in the relationship and half out of it, with all the conflicted emotions, inspired many songs, including some of the ones I wrote with Marc. So romantically, geographically, existentially (and I would say spiritually, too) I was truly somewhere inbetween. I had filed the songs away after recording them. It was only just recently when my wife Polly asked me where those songs from New Jersey were, that I realized I couldn’t find them anywhere. At one point I had them and had played them for her, but that was shortly after we got married when I could still transfer cassette masters to digital music library. Then Mac got rid of Audacity and our computer crashed. Some photos and songs were lost, among them, the songs I had written and recorded with Marc. So I called him up and asked him if he had them. He said he did, somewhere, on a d.a.t. tape. He found someone with a d.a.t. machine and sent them to me. So here they are. They were lost, and now they’re found. It’s good to hear these lyrics and chords and rhythms, all chugging along the intercostal air and water waves, singing about that strange, weird time when I was all “somewhere inbetween”. ------- THE MUSICIANS ----------- Grayson Hugh: Lead and harmony vocal, Hammond B3 organ, clavinet, congas. Andrew Carillo: Electric guitars. Marc Muller: Acoustic guitars. Marc Swersky: Electric bass, acoustic guitar. Richie Monica: Drums. Sheryl Beattie: Additional backup vocals on “The Great Divide”. ------- THE STUDIOS --------- Recorded by Joe DeMaio at Shorefire Studios, and Lorenzo's Soundgarden, both in Long Branch, New Jersey, September 1996. Mixed by Marc Swersky, Lorenzo Conte and Grayson Hugh. Mastered by Marc Swersky and Joe DeMaio at Shorefire Studios, Long Branch, New Jersey, October 1996.