I met Annie Gallup in the mid-1990s. I was living on Greenwich Street in the West Village and she contacted me to invite me to her show at Fast Folk in TriBeCa where she was opening for Ellis Paul. Annie was looking for a producer for her next album and had heard my work with other singer-songwriters like Cliff Eberhardt, John Smith, and Cormac McCarthy.

I went to the concert and onstage Annie was poised, certain of what she was singing, and how she was singing it. Her work was unlike any I had heard, which included semi-spoken pieces; her songs essentially short stories. We stood out back while Ellis performed, navigating the beginnings of getting to know one another professionally and personally, and we had lunch the next day as a follow-up. A short time later she let me know she would be working with David Seitz, who had a recording studio and a label called 1-800-Prime-CD. Years later she would say I didn’t pursue her hard enough, but her decision made sense to me.

We would run into each other from time to time at Folk Alliance conferences and after I moved to Santa Barbara I would see her with mutual friends Douglas Clegg and Kate Wallace, when she would play at their concert series Trinity Backstage, or just come to visit and recoup from the road. They were veterans of many years of attending the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, a vehicle that has brought many songwriters together and created lasting friendships and sadly, a place I have never been. I confess, the folk festival circuit was never quite my thing, though I was invited to the Telluride new folk competition in the 90s and had a mostly lonely and humbling experience. I did meet John Smith and Michael Lille and wound up producing several wonderful albums for John, who is a treasure.

In 2007 it came to light that what I thought was Hepatitis B, dating back to when I was nineteen years old, was in fact Hepatitis C and after a biopsy learned I was exhibiting advanced fibrosis of the liver. It was recommended I undertake treatment, which at that time included a highly invasive cocktail of Interferon and Ribavirin, which I reluctantly agreed to pursue. Coincidentally Doug and Kate had put together a gathering at Fernwood Campground on the river in Big Sur, that they called Surville. It included twenty-five or so songwriters, friends, spouses, partners, and dogs, all connected to the Kerrville Festival, where camping, hiking, shared meals, relaxing, campfire, and a nightly song circle would take place for the better part of a week in mid-May there in stunning Big Sur. I had begun the treatment, and unsure of how I would feel, decided to join my friends for rest and TLC. Annie Gallup was there, and slowly over the course of that week a door opened.

We communicated over the next nine months, Annie at her home in Ann Arbor and me in Santa Barbara. And we became closer. Annie flew to Doug and Kate’s in the spring in preparation to play several concerts in Northern California and I asked if she might like company for the trip. No strings or expectations, and she said yes. By the end of that long weekend a bond had formed. In tandem with thinking about a life together, we began talking about collaborating musically and came up with the name Hat Check Girl for our “band”, a name pulled from an Eric Taylor song that references young women in nightclubs that would check gentlemens’ hats. Along with our individual albums, videos, productions, and other writings, Hat Check Girl has recorded eight albums and our ninth, 29 & Gone, was released yesterday, March 28th. We have been together since that time and married in 2014.