A very, impossible to understate special thanks to all my friends who agreed to contribute their creativity to this album at the last minute, as well as everyone else who has listened to me talk about quadruple-octuple tracking guitars and melodicas over the past three months.

From when I set out to work on very stripped back, folky music in the summer of 2022 to now, the idea of the solstice & equinox album pair shifted many, many times. Early on, the idea was to just make one album - the track list consisting of the two title tracks as the opener and closer, with The Hound and a much longer song that never got finished in between. As time passed, tracks like Our Hangman's Sun, Javelin, and Crescent Cracking were added to the fold, and I toyed with the idea of making the album that was then tentatively titled Javelin a double album. By the end of the summer, I had enough material either written or planned out to fill a double album, and split the one into the two single albums that got released.

At this point, though, only about half the music on those two albums ended up on the final albums. I tried recording an early version of As Fall Turns to Winter (the album) that included Javelin and Crescent Cracking in November & December 2022, but ultimately felt I had to sit on the music a little longer before it was ready. Through 2023, I worked on a lot of other music, but I was always tinkering with these two albums in the background, exorcising bits and pieces and songs to the "for later" pile as I wrote bits and pieces and songs I thought were better fit for the project. At a certain point, there were two dozen songs totaling up to two hours of music floating around in consideration, but by October I had whittled down what I was going to use on As Fall Turns to Winter.

Or so I thought. Originally, Adirondack (then known as Limbo) took the spot of Deliver, and Brand the Barn Burner was going to be far shorter, with Getchell/Ash Swale and Crescent Cracking closing that album. As I realized Adirondack needed more time in the oven and Brand grew and grew, the tracks that ended up on As Winter Turns to Spring instead were pushed there, and some tracks planned for that album were then pushed into the "for later" pile. Once As Fall Turns to Winter was released and after some travel and illness, I started work on As Winter Turns to Spring almost immediately, with a locked in track list that somehow did not change through to release.

The tracks themselves did change considerably over the time of recording, however. Crescent Cracking received a lyrical overhaul, and Adirondack received entirely new lyrics courtesy of Ava. The Hound especially underwent a significant metamorphosis during writing and recording, as I went into it with only the first two stanzas and the very last stanza of music and a whole lot of lyrics (some of which got exorcised for a different project), with no idea on how to connect the two. One attempt at writing a section grew into another song for another project, and an attempt at writing a hidden track coda for the album grew into the foundation for an entirely different album.

At various different times over the past two years, I had very different ideas on what I wanted a "folk" album to sound like, ranging from Anthony Phillips/Genesis inspired pastoral arrangements to Sung Tongs era Animal Collective-esque freak folk to Natural Snow Buildings influenced acoustic drones. In the end, I ended up making a much more varied pair of albums than I expected, with acoustic guitar as a focus being the thing that tied the batch of songs together. My "for later" pile still consists of over an hour of acoustic focused material in various states that got cut from the two albums, which leads to the question I've sought to answer in writing all of this - will I return to recording folky stuff at some point?

Probably. Well, almost certainly. I can't imagine it will be soon, since there's at least half a dozen album ideas I'd like to pursue in the meantime that are each in various states of completion, but everything that did not get used will appear on something at some point. Whether it's as scattered songs transformed to fit the albums they end up it, another standalone folk focused project, in other bands, or all of the above, they will see the light of day at some point.