You can have the world at your fingertips now, with a laptop, some time, and some capacity for frustration. We have been here for two decades; David Gray made White Ladder in his bedroom, London, 1998. Dane Ferguson wrote and performed All of Your Might in his apartment in Los Angeles county, in the shadow of the ghost of Lana Clarkson and a few miles from the Civic Center.

There is a purity of expression that comes from playing everything yourself. When all of the other performances are fresh in mind, the chemistry between details can grow exponentially. It's the face of modern expression, half-real and half-assembled from digital dust, when the performance is modular to the tune of a 10-odd-second phrase loop, and the chemistry happens there. The rest is a creaky falsetto like an old rocking chair, some acoustic guitar, and a few pages from the memoire about love and letting go.