This album is a musical self-portrait, a kind of snapshot of me in MMXXIV. Or 2024 if you prefer. The music on it has been with me for half a century. Some tunes are part of my active repertoire, while others have lived a kind of shadow life: half-learned tunes that never fully took shape. Until now. Working on these fiddle tunes has been like travelling back in time to those life-changing encounters with the older players who freely and generously shared their music with me. If only they had known how much they would mean to the young man who came knocking on their doors! Not only did they feed my enthusiasm for a beloved pastime – they even influenced my choice of career. I can’t thank them enough! Much of music on this album is performed on the instrument that has been with me for longest, all the way back to the age of nine or ten: the Jew’s harp. The “classic” Jew’s harp repertoire passed down by style icons like Mikkel A. Kaavenes (1872 – 1939), Aani Rysstad (1894 – 1965) and Andres K. Rysstad (1893–1984) is so rich and open to improvisation that I could easily have restricted myself to these tunes alone for the rest of my life and never grown tired of them. At the same time, though, I see the value of contributing new material. So you’ll find a handful of traditional tunes that I’ve transferred from fiddle, langeleik (fretted dulcimer) and song – a process that demands insight into both the limitations and possibilities of the Jew’s harp. At the same time, the fiddle tunes, which involve a far larger compass than the Jew’s harp can offer, are often cooked down to a kind of essence of important motifs and phrases. I hope my reworkings do the fiddle tunes justice.