Most of us have a "nowhere" we are trying either to prevent or to realize, escape to or wake up from.

This was the rabbit hole century and the list is long of all the trails and tails we have been fooled by. People of the future may find it hard to wake up from the dreams we dreamt for them.

Fortunately, in defiance of any public dream, and although we live and love together, we we each have our own agenda when we sleep. Or, as Edwin Drood, author of the landmark study This Way Up: Living in Zero Gravity, so cannily observed, "so, in space nobody hears you scream? Well, nobody hears you sneeze either, and the consequences can be more serious."

This has been a difficult birth. Provisional vocals and initial drum tracks were already laid down in December 1996. Concepts and titles came and went, various formats were considered before the present three-handed approach (solo - trio - band, with a separate producer for each), was decided. The choice of songs was then made on the basis of theme, drastically reducing an unmanageable list of candidates.

I had initially planned May 1997 as release date for the album. 1997: year of the navel, the year some of our leaders realized that blowing the limbs off civilians and children with anti-personnel mines is wrong, the year the Asian tigers got scared, baby boomers first began to worry seriously about their pensions and computer programmers about the approaching millenium.

But above all, it was a year of goodbyes, of smog and excuses. What better time could there be for starting a journey from Cyberia to Blutopia? The journey turned out to be a long one. So long that I had time to record, release on schedule and even sell the first edition of the double-CD Me & Miss Wray before we were finished. I think It was worth the wait.

The songs in this collection (some of which have since turned out curiously prophetic) are roughly grouped around utopian and dystopian themes. The things we profess form the outward spirit of the age, while the undercurrent of our personal yearnings whispers a counterpoint in the background, rendering simple issues complex, or cutting through the complicated to reveal an essential simplicity. Somewhere between we make our deal with destiny. The result is either a rock we can build on, a rock we can cling to, or the rock upon which the ship of our life breaks up.

News from Nowhere leaves a calling card for the late 90's, a sideways statement about where I thought we were in the big picture. As befits the close of the nostalgia century, I borrowed the title from a novel written at the close of the one before by the artist and social philosopher William Morris. We all have a "nowhere" we are trying to prevent or to realize, escape to or from. Some of mine are here. In the novel, our hero is forcefully faded out of the utopia spun for him from his author's dreams. He neither makes the big party that evening, nor does he get the girl. It's a classic "... and then I woke up" ending.