Fault Lines
recorded at Brotheryn Studios, Ojai, CA in January 2004
Released May 2004

Syd - guitars, vocals
Tuck Stocking- guitars, vocals
Jesse Siebenberg - drums, keys, bass, guitars

One of the great things about having a record, no matter how hit-or-miss it is, at least you have something to hand out ad naseum. Week Days, Weak Knees---I probably gave out twice as many copies of that record as I sold. One of the people that got a copy was Nick Hartley, who along with another childhood buddy named Nick got ahold of the album when I was visiting Ventura, CA and started helping me get gigs in SoCal and get agents on board with what I was doing. One of the agencies we sort of carpet-bombed with records was Wally's World of Entertainment out of Hendersonville, TN and surprisingly, George, one of the agents there sent his sister to come see Jason and I play in Santa Barbara at a bar called (*gulp*) Sharkeez. High class. But she seemed to like the show and soon enough George and Wally's World had helped us score a string of college gigs for the fall of 2002.

Around that time Jason and I amicably parted ways and I was suddenly in the position of having all these long drives and no one to do them with. To top it off, I was 19 or 20 at the time and the only company who would rent cars to me was called Rent-A-Wreck. I wish I was making that up. Finding another musical partner was as much a logistical dilemma for me as anything. So I got in touch with my old time buddy Tuck Stocking and he agreed to come on board to play guitar for the shows we had. And we did that for what seemed like forever. By the fall of 2003 I had to cut my coursework down to half-time at Emerson because we were just playing all over the map. Tuck's boundless energy and incredible proficiency as a guitarist (and bassist and pianist and drummer and...) was infectious and we had begun to write some songs together. I promise you almost everything interesting guitar-wise on "Fault Lines" was Tuck's doing. The "All I Know" riff---Tuck. Every guitar solo is Tuck. That forced me to be a better player, a better listener, all of that stems from those times with Tuck.

Nick had a friend named Todd Hannigan who was starting a studio with another musician named Jesse Siebenberg out in Ojai, CA and they were looking for projects to produce. Both Todd and Jesse are incredible musicians, and are best known for their impressive resumés---Todd has scored countless surf films, and was the guy to originally record Jack Johnson's demos. Jesse is a multi-instrumentalist who plays percussion in Supertramp. During my winter break at Emerson, Tuck and I flew out to Ojai to record what would become "Fault Lines." We were such a well-oiled touring machine at that point that we just sat down across from each other and in one night played the basic acoustic tracks for all the songs. Then Jesse, monster talent that he is, would *overdub* drums, bass and keyboards. For anyone who's ever done any studio work at all, you know how impressive that is, especially since he made it sound like we were all playing together in the same room.

If there's one thing that marked those sessions, it was speed. Intense work schedules and an incredible rush to get things finished. Part of that was working on $0 budget and part of it was just a real desire to get another foundation to build off of for touring and the next steps. Because of that there are some great moments on the record, and there are a lot of things I remember wishing we had more time to do.

At some time or another I've played almost every song on this album live---Rest of My Life, Back Home, All I Know and The Bottom still have their place in the live show. This Is What I Get I don't think I've ever played live, and it's one of my favorites on the album--maybe for that reason.

If you believe that the album is the seed and the live show is the garden, Fault Lines is perfect proof of that. So much happened around the release of this album--2 years worth of touring. Playing and re-playing these songs, re-arranging and then re-re-arranging them to keep ourselves interested and the songs fresh. literally hundreds and hundreds of shows. This album made me a professional musician, and as much as I've moved on from it in some ways, I'm so grateful for that opportunity.