twain is a modern folk-opera of indefinite length consisting of songs and images from the life of mt. davidson, a self-caricature of the musician and writer Matthew Davidson.

There is nothing remarkable about my life that is necessary to know in order to appreciate the songs. Some of the songs deal with the experience of male-ness, but it isn’t necessary to identify as male or female to understand them. A lot of the music comes out of depressive or ecstatic states, but it is not necessary to have experienced those feelings in order to appreciate the music. The offering is supposed to be a very naked voice which the listener can commune with. If it were up to me, I would share this music with people who don’t know a single fact about my self, my name, my story. I make music in order to take a break from those things, and I hope the music I make offers others a chance to take a break from their own selves, names, stories…

The songs are a balancing exercise between soul-fantasy and self-scrutiny. They try to sit in the liminal state between the spirit’s ambition for itself and the often harsh truth of the present. The hope is to erode the barrier between those two places. Sometimes the facts of life make dreams difficult to protect. twain is my effort to reconcile those two states… to forget that they could ever exist in opposition.