I remember rehearsing for this, the first of what now seems to be a string of occasional reunion concerts. They have been and most likely still will be for some kind of cause or fundraiser, as this one at Piano's was (see the track with Tom talking about it). We never really broke up back in 2000...performing and making more records just didn't make sense in the scheme of how our lives were headed. Families, work, commitment to other practices and gigs, etc. Because the end was never quite drawn up, the restarts, similarly, sort of just happened and, perhaps, will happen again. Maybe beginnings and endings just aren't our thing.

In any case, this was a good gig; we rehearsed a lot towards it and some of our favorite people in the world were there. I'm not sure how it was recorded (you can ask Ian or Tom), but the sound and the playing are pretty on for the most part. And friends and fans can get nice snapshots of songs we wrote but never recorded...songs like "Yell in a Cavern" and "Basket of Winter," which feel a bit like (fittingly) surrealistic poems, and "Puppet Strings" (a nice T Sull and A Merge collaboration - one of my favorite coming togethers we've ever had), "Firefly" (still one of the more unique ballads we've drawn up...love the rhythm synergy between Dan and Ian here), and Danny's beautiful "St. Andrew." It was a wonderful gathering of mostly old friends and fans in a tiny intimate room in the Lower East Side not too far from the million and one gigs we played at Street Level and Spiral and The Underworld. On the live stuff during the in between, you can feel the love. For sure.

I won't be adding commentary or lyrics for the individual tracks for this or any of the live collections...it just doesn't make sense. I'm not sure anyone was listening to the lyrics at the shows anyway. More about the overall painting than the individual brushstrokes with us. But if anyone wants lyrics to these songs and they don't appear anywhere else on this Bandcamp catalog...you know, just ask. Here, Surreal is charged with nostalgia for sure but also an electricity that comes from rediscovering its own music as more mature older men with concerns that have drawn us away from a thing that we used to love deeply. Our new understanding of time and life and mortality and the thread that connects those things made this hour and change into something intensely sweet and liberating if only for that small window.

Enjoy the document(s).