In the fall of 2015, Mark Oppenheimer asked me if I wanted to set some fan emails to his podcast Unorthodox to music. That went well. Then I heard an Unorthodox "News of the Jews" item about the actual Holocaust Survivor Beauty Pageant and I imagined the song the host might sing to the winner. By then, Mark had christened (sorry) me as the Jewbadour, so I thought I should write a song about that. Other songs that ended up on the podcast included one inspired by a certain legendary stud of the Borscht Belt ("Baby's Daddy"), one for a Passover Haggadah of song organized by Unorthodox mega-personality Liel Leibovitz, and a couple theme songs I tried to write for this three-person gang of subtly subversive Jewish aural-intellectuals (Stephanie Butnick bringing the much needed burst of womanly power to the crew).

This collection represents the songs as I first recorded them, the process of which changed my approach to songwriting. Almost all of these songs started with me being out and about, sometimes on assignment to write and sometimes just struck by inspiration. Then I'd whip out my phone and sing a line in my head into it. The more I walked around the faster the songs came together. I'd write down the words and figure out the guitar chords. Then I'd record several takes of the song into my phone, figuring it out as I went. Eventually I'd land on a finished form, and usually, a couple takes later, I had a demo recording to send to Mark. I recorded some more complex versions of these songs later with fuller instrumentation, but what you are hearing here are the raw versions that I generally ended up liking better in the end.

I hope you can enjoy these song in this context. Don't expect perfection in the recordings. You're hearing a process, and a response to stimulation from the podcast directly or indirectly. This whole thing helped me get deeper into my roots, as a troubled half-Jew, and as an ever-evolving singer-songwriter. And for this, I am so grateful.