S. Michael Tolley's liner notes from "World On Its Knees":
4 October 2003: The Abraxas sampler EP is done at last and Mackie and I are driving through town listening to “Tommy Odle” and smiling like beefeaters in a protein contest. He reminds me of a similar drive in 1996, cruising through town like the coolest two dudes you ever saw, when I had admitted to him the truly un-Tolley-esque desire to be part of a rock band, not as a front guy but maybe as a lyricist or something. Mackie was a guitarist of fine reknown to me and though I don’t remember if he was in a band at the time or not, it wasn’t a secret that he seemed often just as content playing awesome guitar by himself as he was surrounded by others. Still, it wasn’t a hint or anything like that - I was equally just as happy walking around by myself, headphones screwed to my head, singing Morrissey as loudly as possible - like “Special Timmy” strolling the lawn, picking dandelions and waving bye-bye to passing cars. Still, six years later, I was standing in a friends basement with the aforementioned Garrett, playing a trumpet I hadn’t touched in ten years and writing some lyrics on the side.

There were six of us at that time, including a keyboardist, a bass player, and a regular drummer, not to mention the occasional cellist or flutist. “Bring It Down” was written about that time, as was “Criticism,” the tune of which is about four or five months older than the lyrics - a happy remnant from a collaboration with an ex-frontman. The lyrics are a response to my first encounter with “literary” criticism after my first novel was published and my church voiced some serious disapproval. “Bring It Down” is Mackie’s response to 11 September 2001, a sympathetic expression of the seriously immediate issues underlying such an event. I love the lyrics for their insight and the Jamaican influence Mackie brought back with him after a half-year tenure on the Isle of Goodness. In my opinion, however, they fall just short of the personal beauty of “Whirlwind,” which is an expression of awe, love, and context in the hours following the birth of his heroic daughter, Maia. God bless you.

Ryan moved into my apartment building in the Fall of 2002, having just endured a personal tragedy not unlike the 9/11 inspiration mentioned above, though better expressed poetically in analogy with the sinking of Atlantis. Nix that - not long after joining Abraxas, he did even better than that by writing “Snake In the Grass” and bringing it all full circle to the Garden of Eden. Beautiful. And typical of Mr. Ijames. I’ve held his friendship for a decade now and he has never failed to surprise with drippings of insight that sometimes seem to hint at the possibility that he knows something we don’t and he’s not quite ready to share yet. Then he’ll do a spot-on Harry Caray imitation and he’s just like us again - another dude riding around town in a car, talking about music. That winter was rough for Ryan, but it had the Tchaikovsky-effect on him in that a veritable butt-load of inspiration came out of his slump. “Lost Winter” is a part of that, and includes the first tootings of a euphonium by the horn section in about nine years.

I wrote the lyrics for “Tommy Odle” in strange remembrance of an eighteen year old who killed his entire family (two brothers, a sister, mom and dad) one afternoon as they came home, stabbing most and strangling the others. I was in sixth grade at the time, and though I barely knew anything about the family, a kid finds himself affected by the simple fact that something of such a nature actually happens outside of cities and cop shows. The funeral procession ran right through the middle of town; everyone saw it, and for quite some time a community of 17,000 was not a little more mindful of mortality in a frighteningly acute sense. Tommy received the death penalty, on which was declared an indefinite moratorium by an otherwise sketchy governor. Appropriate, I think - life’s a regular trial without the complication of imprisonment...imagine the struggle without even your family to care.