Liner Notes:

So how did I get involved in all of this in the first place?

We have to go back to winter 2002, after my first full year living in Germany.  Life in Stuttgart wasn’t all I had expected it to be.  I wasn’t wading every night in beer and mysterious german women; most people didn’t care much that I was a misplaced  New Yorker.  More importantly I had yet to fall in with a like-minded group of friends and it was starting to drag me down.  People who didn’t think that Mission of Burma was the title of a Chuck Norris movie, that sort of thing.

While scoring a copy of Barbara Manning’s One Perfect Green Blanket at 2^nd Hand Records one day,  I found out from the record store clerk that her current band the Go-Luckys were from the area and that they would all be playing live in the basement in just a few weeks.  Huh?  Just when I was giving up all hope that there was a viable music scene to be found in this relatively unheard of city, a musician whom I highly respected actually had her own foundation here.

I remember walking up to the record store that day and seeing Barbara through the window - of course browsing the New Zealand section - and just hoping I would get a chance to chat with her and find out how she ended up being in a band with some random German-Italian twins.  As if in a script she walks up and starts talking to me, taking me for someone she knew.  After realizing I wasn’t that person but just a lonely American music freak far from home, she got giddy and couldn’t wait to introduce me to the twins.  The rest, they say, is history.

Now nearly 4 years later, after a stint as their roadie and numerous other happenings I can’t begin to list here, the members of the likewise mischief-seeking and music-obsessed band known as Barbara Manning and the Go-Luckys are some of my best friends:  Fabrizio, the guitar player that wants to take you for a ride, who knows what he wants and also how to charm;  Flavio, a f’in great drummer and much needed dreamer in this rigid world;  and of course Barbara, who is an inspiration not just for her impeccable taste in music but for her go-lucky way about life in general. That’s how the energy persists inside her to keep writing great songs – the rock teenager in her soul will never die.

The joke here is that because of Barbara I ended up meeting most of the people whom I now call my good friends here in Stuttgart, and that she often has an almost supernatural effect of making good things happen to people.  I can’t guarantee something other-worldly happening when you listen to this record; but if you’re alone, and the sounds and emotions Barbara conveys so strongly and intimately somehow gets you out of yourself for a moment, then that’s magic in itself, isn’t it?

Patrick Mathewson - September 2005
 

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