Notes on The CROOKed MOUTH.ME: I am at my most joyful on stage, in a band, singin raw or sweet. When I started to work with Matt and Troy in the CROOKED MOUTH STRING BAND, I felt this huge bear lift up inside me. I had had 5 or 6 bands before CROOKED MOUTH, but it had been several years since anything had gone from the maybe stage. With Troy and Matt we would often play without talkin, moving from song to song that I mostly already knew how to sing—Troy and Matt choosing their instruments, playing off of each other with a look of bad garlic in the mouth or the yes face. We started to add new stuff, Matt songs, stuff i was writing. Jenny, my longtime cohort in MAESTRO SUBGUM & THE WHOLE, heard us and declared that we needed a drummer and agreed to sit in. She never left, bringing with her a passel of new songs. Troy wrote a pile of new stuff. Our friend Vicki decided she would join us, and as we already knew that things go better with Vicki, she was in. Somewhere along the way, we lost the string band part and recorded a pile of songs. Here’s the first bunch. Some of them I started singing thirty years ago, some Lena wrote when she was seven.Tears Of Women was recorded before, in a duo that I had with Mr. Greenberg. Deathrag was on the last MAESTRO album. -- Beau O’rEilly