On a cloudy Monday in October, 1992, I sat down at a grand piano at Studio 101 in Solana Beach, California, put on the headphones, and listened for the first time to how a piano sounds when heard through four very sensitive microphones. I was there to record an album of show tunes and pop songs, but the engineer asked me to just ‘play anything’ so that he could set levels and check the equipment. That is when ‘opus one’ was recorded, and it was the genesis of this album. Up until that moment, I had never played ‘opus one’ before, and I haven’t played it since. Now that it’s being released, I’ll have to go back and learn it by ear so that I can play it again…. After the first album was done, a dear friend encouraged me to go back to the studio and just record whatever I’d play. Serenity is the result of those sessions: from the heart, single takes, unedited, original, honest, exposed, spontaneous. Since then, I’ve learned something about on-location outdoor landscape painting in oils, a technique the French call ‘plein air.’ The artist works quickly to capture a vision of an ever-changing moment; each brush-stroke is critical, exposed, beautiful. A plein-air painting sings with the spontaneity of the moment in which it was created – a moment when the subject, artist, and painting become one. This album is as close as I’ve come to finding that one-ness in music.