Last spring and summer, when I was invited to begin playing live solo shows for the first time in public since the start of the pandemic, I felt the drive to share my voice more than I had in many years. I've focused primarily on instrumental music since the founding of Flower Room in 2017, but at the start of 2022, I was inspired to write new songs with vocals, mainly because the messages I wanted to convey could most directly be carried out lyrically. The September 2022 release of my "Searching" demo was the first step of unveiling this new work, and Live From the Park documents an outdoor rural Northern Maine performance of some of these vocal-led songs, stripped down to just electric guitar, voice, and looping pedal.

"₵heap Money" was originally written and performed as an Herbcraft song (see its earliest incarnation on the Robes cassette), which has remained otherwise unreleased despite being a onetime live staple of solo, duo, and trio Herbcraft sets from 2013-2015. "Benedicta" and "Searching" were both written and demoed in Rockland, Maine in March 2022; these tracks foreground spiritual seeking and devotional disillusionment within interpersonal relationships, and may be officially recorded for a forthcoming solo album. "Copper Basin" was written for Ash & Herb's "lost album" Dome Cookbook, though never performed or recorded by the duo. Its style and lyrical focus fit perfectly with the other songs in the set, and the space its composition leaves for high-flying guitar leads make it an ideal set and album closer.

Live From the Park was recorded as part of the Arootsakoostik festival in New Sweden, Maine, on July 9th, 2022. The band shell at Thomas Park is a reverberation miracle, and with the help of Frank Hopkins on live sound I performed these songs in mini-sets throughout the day, filling the space while bands switched over in the background. Minimal effort was undertaken to sublimate the audience and environmental noises inherent in a festival of this kind, in favor of inviting you all to take a seat in the grass as these songs are shared with the air of my birthplace for the first time.

-ML