*All income from sales for this record will be donated to A New Way Of Life Reentry Project, who provide housing, case management, pro bono legal services, advocacy and leadership development for women rebuilding their lives after prison. (anewwayoflife.org) *
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In the September of 2011, I was planning a tour of the USA and reached out to my good friend, heart-throb of the Half Moon Bay indie-folk underground, Adam Lipman, to see if he wanted to join me for a leg of the tour. He agreed to come out on the road for a few days and at some point sent me an e-mail that read exactly as follows:

"let's do a song a day on tour.
if we do we can have enough for an album.
and we can try to write all country songs.
and we'll call the album "Drinkin' and Jawin'"

Having no experience writing or playing country music, I naturally agreed and set out to do some research, buying an armful of “Famous Country Music Makers” CDs from Deptford flea-market and seeking some guidance from my dad as to what country songs are about (“You know; dogs and trains and being sorry…”). With this I felt equipped to begin.

Our tour together was litany of misery, sickness, bad wine and inept musicianship, played out to an audience of none, but we kept ourselves amused, and kept approximately to our vow to come up with attempts at country songs along the way. Thus, in a frat house in Corvallis, in a crusty activist centre in Olympia, and in a desolate feminist bookstore in Portland, the creative juices began to flow and, as Hank Williams puked in his grave, the songs for the album began to take shape.

On returning from the tour, I found myself unemployed, living in my dad’s house in Wymeswold, where I huddled next to the wood burning stove and continued to work on ideas for songs which I demoed and sent over to Adam, while he did the same in California. By May 2013, we had enough songs to make up a record and Adam came over to England to record them. Darren Hayman agreed to helm the recording, and I managed to convince some extremely talented musicians to come and play the songs with us. We finished the recording in 3 days before Adam flew back to California, Darren and I spent an afternoon mixing them, and the album was finished!

Now, seven years later, for reasons too complicated and straight up dumb to explain, we are sharing this record with you.

Thanks to Darren Hayman for recording these songs in his home, and to all the musicians named below, who offered their time and talents in return for nought more than a few cans of Polish lager. Your playing made these songs sound way better than we ever imagined they could turn out when we first conceived of this.

Finally, my thanks to Adam for putting up with my pestering down all the last years and for finally agreeing to put this out in to the world for people to hear.

-Hugh J. Noble
July 2020