This is just so perfect. Right from that enigmatic first line right on through to the strawberry wine.

I don’t care if you ever “finish” FAWM. As long as you make things like this. If you had said “elderberry wine” I could have told you a bit about it, but it doesn’t scan as well. Strawberry wine is probably just fine too.

Beautiful, Mike. I'm in awe every year of these gentle gut punches of yours.

You have authenticity in spades.

Moar.

You have such a natural ability to wrap the profound in a cheery little package that gets us tapping our feet and nodding our heads, and then realizing that you've reached down inside us and grabbed onto a primal fear that most of us have about time slipping through our fingers, and so much living left undone (like those trailing little sparks across the sea when we make our final journey - a genius line). And then, there's the unpredictable and just-right-quirkiness quality of the music that others have already touched on. Really well done, Mike!

Good to hear your new songs. This is so lovely, so delicate. Always such a pleasure to listen to you

Beautiful in it's simplicity. Always impressed by how you can get so much emotion and musicality out of so few elements, seemingly effortlessly. Vocal is stunning as usual and the words match the chord progressions perfectly.

Lovely voice and melodies! The percussion sounds really nice paired with the added instruments!

Great instrumentation here, and I love all the concrete wording you have here. You're giving me goals. Tremendous job.

Hey! Great to hear your voice again. What I love about fawm is we DO make the time. I'm glad you made the time to create this! But, yes... time really slips away. Lovely song full of fun sounds (harpsichord?!) and observations.

I really like the different melodies you've got going on here, especially the extra ones at the end. The lyrics are very relateable especially the line: "there's an endless thread of joy to be spun but it's never the time". Really great work!

lucky you, maudlin is my favorite. 🥰 this is really kind of a gut punch of a song, but cleverly packaged in a trojan horse of cheerful enough music and a whimsical arrangement. i think the second verse is my favorite—feeling mad at the sun while preparing to be mad at the rain when it comes too… why do we do this shit 😭

ugh, upholding capitalism really steals so much of our lives from us, huh? :/ thank you for doing your part to carve out time against it and reclaim a bit of your time for yourself. it’s so great to hear your voice again 💙

I love the sound of this. Instrumentation is so easy on the ears. The harpsichord with light percussion really gives this a nice vibe. Of course, your vocal melody is great. The strawberry wine part is funny to me. I'm not sure where you're from, but in the American south, young folks drink strawberry wine, cause it's cheap, doesn't taste awful, and you can get a good buzz off it.

this is a sentiment i'm always thinking about. we lose so much of our lives to fear. to indecision. to capitalism. you captured that ennui well, both lyrically and musically.

I was thinking how straight forward this was harmonically but there's a nice turn of chord in the verse to help sort of resolve itself into that lovely pop rock chorus. Very nice sentiment!

I love the harpsichord (dulcimer?) entrance! It makes it so much sweeter! I really enjoy the lyrical depth; this leaves me certainly contemplative. The bridge is my favorite part, those are some interesting chordal meanderings! A very sweet orchestration overall, very much enjoyed this!

Wonderful message and production, and I'm going to transcribe these chord changes to try to learn some of your magic.

Gorgeous call to action in this one. I love 'mister bony face', you've got a knack for making the grim feel warm. The harpsichord is excellent prosody to this, the dry tone reinforces the skeletal lyric. Beautiful lyrics all over it and wonderful musicianship as always

Ooh...this is a delight. Just your voice and guitar carry the day, but the chamber pop accoutrements are nice, too. What to say beyond, I love it. Gorgeous. And what a refrain, sad and lovely

Um, wow. This smacked me right in the face, speaking to something deeply important but maybe we could talk about it later? There's medicine in your maudlin. Now let's get to how much l love your production choices. That harpsichord sound is a delight.

Love the chord choices and the melody here...lyrically this is really relatable. I especially liked the "fill our houses with umbrellas saving for a rainy day"...it's the truth. Lovely tune!

Chamber pop almost read that wrong. Clocks are another fav to use in songs. A lovely lyric and really like the turn around. Reminds me of Macca song in structure

Really nice voice and song! I really like the lyrics and melody. And that changeup in the bridge was a really nice touch