My father was a teacher. A professor, to be exact, at Stanford University. It had always been assumed by all concerned that I, too, would be a teacher. Then in the spring of my senior year, all my words which had always come so easily stopped coming entirely. I mutely fled the cloister of academia and entered the physical and tangible world of carpentry. I apprenticed with a Norwegian boat builder turned house builder in the Sierra foothills of California and by 1973 I had started a building company called Windham Hill builders.
Guitar playing had always been with me since I learned to play a tennis racket to the Beatles. I've always loved it. Friends had urged me to make a record for years and I finally did so in 1975. What might have been just a minor blip in my life turned into Windham Hill Records and by 1979 my business card read, "Windham Hill Builders * Records * Music (BMI)." And always there was the guitar and the music and I always loved it. Through all of what was to become Windham Hill Records and all the excitement of hearing George Winston for the first time or encountering Michael Hedges, Shadowfax or Liz Story, I found time to play the guitar late at night. And my own music never became a business; it was always a place of escape and discovery. I don't release as many records as some other people; I just do them when the music appears to me. When I look over the songs on this recording, I don't see a career; I see the nights and days in which the songs were written and the changes that were going on in my life and the lives around me. I see the people I was with and feel the love of music making which is still such a wonderful mystery to me. -- Will Ackerman
