Ten Year Bender is sort of an interesting title in light of this record’s journey. The song of the same name is a meditation on the previous decade of my life, a time in which I was running from my demons and trying to drown them in drink and smoke them out of me with drugs and soothe them away with women and, well, you probably get the picture. This record was recorded after I had stopped drinking but before I found my way into any kind of recovery framework. I was white-knuckling it, as they say, and while I was hoping life was about to get a whole lot better, in fact I was standing on the edge of the abyss. Which may be a necessary place to visit if you want to get rid of all that old pain and the horrible programming most of us endure and absorb throughout our lives. The abyss will take that stuff right out of you, if you let it. Getting back to the light is another story, and it took ten more years for Lupo and I to get to a place where we could release this record. Not that it was all bad in those ten years. There was living through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, but there was also becoming a father and…well, that’s another story for another day. What I’m trying to say, I think, is that the space we were in when we recorded this thing (Lupo – slowly recovering from a life-threatening illness; me – slowly recovering from a deep alcohol addiction and several years working in large corporations, and just about to fall completely off the grid) was so intense, it just took us a decade to be able to go back and “listen without prejudice” to these songs we’d recorded together one cold winter in the borderlands of life. And wouldn’t you know when we finally did listen – we liked this little record! We hope you do, too. – D.K. Brainard