Flesh + Armor

• Track Listing

Since moving to Lopez Island in Puget Sound last year, Liam Bailey has learned to simplify. "I want to sing about the mystery of our brief and beautiful time on earth together. It's not that I want to understand it or define it for anybody else, but I need my listeners to know that I am in awe of our earthly circumstances and that they should be too. There's a party going on and we're all invited." Sometimes Bailey's dissection of the mystery can come across as religious examination, or at least flirting with those concepts, but really it's just more evidence of the way that bluegrass, blues and other American music has seeped under his skin. While Bailey has always been comfortable playing a range of styles, he's now loose enough in his interpretive abilities to experiment with instruments he's not proficient in. He has abandoned the electric guitar for the mandolin, and has been playing the three-string tres in a Cuban band on Lopez. After attending high school in Holland and the USA, Bailey attended college in Boston. " I was shamed out of my heavy metal passion and my tastes changed very quickly," Bailey recounts. "I got right into jazz and then bluegrass after that." His biggest influence has been guitarist Bill Frisell. "He wasn't ashamed of his roots in rock and roll. He incorporated them into his jazz playing and melded them with bluegrass and Americana. He has a unique approach and so do I." Like Frisell, Bailey didn't want to be limited to one genre of music. "I became passionate about everything I heard," Bailey admits. "If I listened to Django then I wanted to play swing, if I listened to Dave Douglas I wanted to play jazz and if I listened to Jeff Buckley then I wanted to play rock. It's still that way." In addition to guitar, he took on the fiddle as well as the mandolin. He also began to sing. His first label-released album, "Flesh and Armor" was released in early 2006 on Mad River Records in Connecticut. "The record is literally that," Bailey says, "A record of that week. I always wanted to make a live recording and I feel that the magic of music is in the moment that you create with a live performance." Bailey formed a band from musicians he'd played with in various guises previously and went into the studio after two days of rehearsal. "I'm so into performing now," he says. "Music is a real-time art form and my relationship with my audience is where the magic happens. I want everyone to feel this on my recordings."