In the Sweet By & By by Ben Seretan

“Basically this album is about being in love, old American music, and Jesus. I wrote it while living in upstate New York this summer and while rehearsing in an old horse barn. I think the exemplary line from the record is 'When I’m with you, heaven smiles down - crocuses are bursting through the soil.' Seeing the world as an enchanted/religious/blessed place, feeling good, summer baptisms, laying with a naked person in a too-small twin bed, the smell of grass, entertaining the notion of a creator with no notion of the devil, edenic, a feeling of living in multiple time periods at once (the feeling of talking on a cell phone in a field unchanged for centuries, using a language that is new but somehow remembered), the guitar as if it grew out of the earth like a root vegetable, my voice like it fell sun ripened from a tree.”

Written while in residence at the Wassaic Project, August 2012. Recorded live with no overdubs in the course of a single afternoon.

This is the final record in the "NEW ________" series, see NEW SPACE and NEW MUSIC.

Engineering, production, mastering all by Tom Tierney of Spaceman Sound in Brooklyn, New York.

All written by Ben Seretan, except for "In the Pines," a traditional. All performed by Ben Seretan

Album art painting detail by Jessica Sugerman.

Thanks to Alex Baron for use of his boombox.

Thanks to Reid Bingham for the backup boombox.

Thanks to Asa Horvitz, as ever, for use of his guitar.

Thanks to Benedict and Alex Lewis.

Thanks to A.C., the pretty one

Thanks to J.K.

And Thank You for listening