The story of Darren Hanlon's first album in five years, Where Did You Come From?, spans two continents and a whole lot of miles traveled, resulting in his most resplendent musical effort yet - the songs reaching new levels of maturity without ever losing his trademark lyrical charm and twinkling eye. Making it involved an unplanned and sometimes perilous lope through the American South, through various cities, towns and recording studios. He recorded in one-off sessions in Nashville, Memphis, Muscle Shoals, New Orleans and Clarksdale, Mississippi, collaborating with an array of musicians and other characters he met along the way. ''When I hopped off the Amtrak, I just walked around and met buskers, tap-dancers, preachers, drunks and drug dealers, all of whom had something worth learning about,'' Hanlon says. ''I started having compulsive notions that whoever I met should somehow contribute to the album. Let fate play into it. One guy tried to break into a car I was sitting in and even he ended up playing bass on a song.'' To hear the analogue richness and singular vision resulting in the collection of songs that make Where Did You Come From? belies the accidental nature of it's process. It's a cohesive, hopeful and vibrant testament to the joys of travel, the tyranny of distance and the vagaries of love and fate.
