Greetings:

Thanks once again to everyone, including Chris, who has posted comments about my new CD, Now the Wheel Has Turned. Additional comments are welcome from anyone.

The title song, Now the Wheel Has Turned, begins with these words:

Ah, who is David, and who is Goliath,
Now the wheel has turned?
And who fights with stones, and who is the giant,
Now the wheel has turned?
Now the wheel has turned, good Lord!
Now the wheel has turned.
Who fights with stones, and who is the giant,
Now the wheel has turned?

I recently sang that song at Kathy Westra's Songs for a Sunday Morning session at the NOMAD festival in New Haven. As soon as I finished, Mike Agranoff asked me, "Is that song about what I thing it's about?"

To which I responded in psychotherapist fashion with the question "Well, Michael, what do you think it's about?"

"You know," he siad, "the Israeilis and the Palestinians."

"It could be," I answered. "But then again," I added, "maybe it's just a plain old Gospel song."

Mike was, of course, right. The song Now the Wheel Has Turned was inspired by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it could just as well be about the Catholics and the Protestants in Ireland, or about the Greeks and the Turks, or the Pawnee and the Sioux. If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that the wheel is always turning.

On the other hand, Now the Wheel Has Turned works very well as a plain old Gospel song. If you want to listen for yourself you don't even have to buy my CD. I posted the song to my SoundClick music page:

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=106201

You can play it or dowload it for free. I also made three other songs from the CD available on that page: Okie Moon, A Shantyman's Life, and Mole in the Ground.. Of the 13 remaining songs on the page, John Hardy and The House Carpenter are studio recordings, while the others are unengineered "field recordings" I made of myself with a cassette recorder from the 1970s through the 1990s. Please enjoy all of them. And if after listening, you like what you hear, you are certainly welcome to buy the CD through the CD Baby website:

http://cdbaby.com/cd/stevesuffet

Or you can pick one up in person when I appear at the Peoples' Voice Cafe in New York City next Saturday night, December 10, 2005. See earlier messages for details.

--- Steve