The album"if" was written over a period of about five years, starting in 2004. I was working on my MFA for much of that time in Naropa University's newly born contemporary performance program. My thesis piece was a community theater project which we named"Everything that Breathes". It was based on an old Serbian folk tale about a seemingly invincible villain,"Bash Tchelik" and accompanied by a volunteer kids' chorus."In this Moment" and"Watch Over Me" are two songs from that play."Marvin" was inspired by a story my father told me from his days working in Child Welfare Services in Buffalo, Ny. It was performed as part of"The Race", a solo piece I created to address race, racism and white awareness, conceived from a dream I had between semesters while at Naropa but later finished and performed at Montgomery Community College in 2010."Meredith" is named after Meredith Monk, who we sang with at Naropa, while"Sunday" and"if" were born from our study with Ethie Friend and Jonathan Hart from the Roy