A Note to the Listener

W B Yeats’s sometime soul-mate, comrade, muse, lover (though briefly) and “troubling of my life” was Maud Gonne. Their relationship has inspired much interest in popular and literary circles. In a sense this collection of songs documents, celebrates, examines, and laments this relationship just as WBY did when he produced his poetic accounting of their time together: the eleven poem cycles A Man Young and Old (1928,1933) and its companion A Woman Young and Old (1933). These poetic cycles, being arranged chronologically, embody the idealism of youth too soon dashed into the realism of adulthood, eventually giving way to the fatalism of old age. In making these songs, my hope is that these lyrics will inform the understanding of the aging process for each listener. All good poetry is good partly because it finds the universal within the particular.

This album, five years in the making, embodies a magical format of eleven three-song cycles which reflect a general , a female, and