The Season's Greetings Trilogy:
Part One • Spring and Summer • Be Still Life
Part Two • Autumn • Fireside Favourites
Part Three • Winter • The Forget Me Knot

So, I really thought "The Forget Me Knot" would be our last album. I'm happy to say I was wrong about that.

In February of 2017, I was writing what I thought would be another track by my electronic shadow project, Phobadrena. When I was finished, I discovered that a new track by 400 Lonely Things had just crept in, like a snake's egg in a bird's nest. I was pleasantly surprised by this, and put the song in a playlist of orphaned 400 tracks and let it sit, wondering if it might hatch...

Sometime later, weeks or months perhaps, it happened again. I listened to these two new recordings back to back and realized that I had the opening and closing tracks for a new 400 Lonely Things album. The only thing left for me to do was fill in the spaces in between.

22 songs and more than four hours later, I've filled in those spaces - and during the process found that it was going to be the missing second chapter in a trilogy of albums that I didn't know I had been writing. Starting with the Spring / Summer ode "Be Still Life" and ending with the Winter offering "The Forget Me Knot", "Fireside Favourites" is a crackly sonnet to Autumn, the most personally bittersweet of all seasons, that bridges these two previous seasonal releases.

Most of the material for "Fireside Favourites" was recorded throughout 2017 on an old MacBook outdoors at Shady Acres Studio here in Lonely Mountain. However, as always seems to be the case, the past creeps in. Tracks like "Hold Please" have their basis in an old four-track cassette from the late 1980's. The bulk of (the very bulky) "Asleep at the Abyss" was first recorded live to 2-track cassette in 1996. "Nestuary" and a couple of other tracks are from the early 2000's. And while most of this record is made from samples, field recordings and some acoustic and electronic instrumentation also play a part.

It has been my great pleasure assembling "Fireside Favourites". It's also given me the motivation to finally polish up and release our many unfinished albums, hopefully in the coming year. But Autumn is nearly over, and I feel a hibernation coming on.

Craig Varian
Friday, Nov. 24, 2017.