“Two strong threads run through this album of songs by Houston-based composer Robert Nelson: ingenuity and community. The ingenuity is focused, as you’d expect, on the composer himself, whose imagination has led him to devise unusual ensembles to accompany his songs, such as a piano quintet with an oboe replacing the first violin, but even more so in how he merges art song, jazz, theatricality, and quite often narrated text. The community he is embedded in—which includes the Moores School of Music, where Nelson is professor emeritus, and the Houston Symphony, which supplies a number of the excellent musicians on this disc—also embraces a close collaboration with mezzo Sonja Bruzauskas…If you crave hearing a body of ingenious and moving art songs that also express a communion of composer, performer, and poet, this lovely CD is warmly recommended.”