Musicians Featured:

• David Lord - electric guitar, clasical guitar, acoustic guitar, bass vi, glockenspiel

• Chad Taylor - drums, percussion

• Christine Tavolacci - flute, alto flute, bass flute

• David Tranchina - double bass

• Nathan Hubbard - vibraphone, marimba, percussion

Cover Artwork:

• Cover photography by William T. Carson

• Back cover photography by Devin O’Brien

• Layout by David J. Woodruff

Liner Notes from Anthony Dean-Harris:

What is a standard to a forest? What makes that different to what's a standard, in that jazz classic compositional sense, to a desert? To a city? To a suburb? To a plain? A wetland? A grove? The only thing standard in a forest, like any other environment, is the search for balance. Nature seeks an equilibrium and, given enough time, it finds it. It's the only way to ensure survival and growth.

For three albums, David Lord has been exploring this idea, seeking out some sense of the ethereal, with drummer Chad Taylor and producer Chris Schlarb, his only constant companions. All the while, on Lord's solo ventures under his own name (and even in his prior work under the nom de plume Francis Moss), he's finding new ways to examine the interconnectivity of trees, of fungi, of ecosystems brought together in harmony and just what that would be for people to make that kind of harmony for ourselves. This third volume is merely the latest iteration of that idea, the results of the latest planted seeds. The ensemble is a bit larger, and so are the ideas, but that's also how growth tends to work in the forest if things are going right.

When Taylor opens up on the kit midway through "Trees Yield Tomte" and all of Lord's and Nathan Hubbard's arpeggios start darting around corners, it's a fun break that doesn't feel at all like it's coming from the Christmas goblin of the song's namesake. Christine Tavolacci's flute on "In Woods I Know" add that sense of mystery like a concerning wind two the trees on a hike that could make an adventurous turn. How much of David Tranchina's bass acts the propulsive force of "Infant Elm" as much as Chad Taylor's drumming?

One song after the other, just like the two albums before this one, seem to come from the earth itself and made to fill one's ears while taking expeditions into nature's unknown. What makes these albums special is that David Lord knows the atmosphere he's making with this music and in each iteration of his chosen musicians to pull off these ideas, he's chosen just the right people at just the right time to go with the flow. He's made balance as nature does, as forests do. Like wind through leaves, like rusting branches, like birds swooping overhead, these are standards to a forest, and hopefully they are to us mere humans as well.