He emerged in the aught years with Ghostfinger, earning a Best Frontman award from the Nashville Scene and a devoted following in the back rooms of pre-corporate Music City. Then came RI¢HIE — nine-piece band, striped suits, touring as a sideman around the world. Then came hard times. Then came Silver & Gold.

Songs are being written, recorded, shelved, resurrected, and written again at Clown Farm — his home studio set at the end of a dead-end street in an unusual corner of Nashville, at the nexus of an industrial park, a set of youth baseball fields, and acres of wilderness that stretch past a mysteriously relocated cemetery and Civil War era earthworks to the Cumberland River.