Liner Notes:
Nato writes: Soap
and Ammonia came into the world between February and May of 1996 in Burlington,
Vermont. Half the tracks were recorded in my tiny home studio, and the rest were captured
at a gig at local non-profit Cafe No No. (A wonderful place but an ill-fated venture that lasted less than a year.)
The
goal was just to get the tunes down; arrangements and fidelity would have
to wait for the next album. I
think the concern addressed was, "So, what does this guy sound like?"
Now you know, heh heh heh...
 I
felt there was value added by contrasting the live with the
recorded version. In hindsight, I had enough other tunes I could have
substituted for the studio version, so it wasn't really necessary.
Maybe it was really an expression of my fondness for the song. I love it,
but I'd
rather it had never needed expression.
 "Spies" started out the result of a
particularly disturbing dream in which a female spy set fire to a male dwarf spy on the ledge of a gloomy tenement. The original version --composed immediately upon my
waking-- felt like a clunky Kinks-wannabe. I set it aside for a month, and when I returned to it I redid the music from scratch, changing the key, the meter, everything but the lyrics.
 The
compilation album Burlington Does Burlington (to which Andrew Smith refers in the intro) was a wonderful snapshot of the Queen City scene. Mighty
ex-Burlington band The Cuts originated "Stuck", which I slowed and to which I added some funky '70s-style keyboards. I'm sure there's someone reading this
who remembers dancing in Hunt's in, say, 1984 to an INXSish New Wave band
with a Linn drum machine for a rhythm section. They were and will always
be my rock heroes.
I follow the arranged version with an "unplugged" version. In her review in Seven Days,
Pamela Polston wrote that she liked the guitar-and-voice version better.
 Judy, the human, rocks. "Judy", the song, tries to capture her spirit. Judy has been a friend for a few hundred years. You don't stay somebody's friend that long and not write a song for her.
 For
a while I had problems writing slower songs. I was so sure that a leisurely tempo would encourage people to ignore me, and besides... I was a rocker. So it is that "Murder" started out at a frantic pace, but as I came to know the song better I realized that it needed to take its time. I pictured L.A. southern gothic, and Neil Young was very much the spiritual medium.
 The chorus for "Without Your Sunshine" came
in a flash while I was washing dishes. The musical inspiration was Cat
Stevens, the personal inspiration the same engine that powered "Run
Away", "Monkey", and a few others as-yet unrecorded. Sunshine was the last thing Vermont needed that summer, as we were enduring a months-long drought.
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