"Songs Album II is LA musician Aaron MF Olson's Country Thyme Records debut, his second 'songs for singing' album in just over a decade of releasing music. His songs mix satiric, confessional and experimental lyric modes and his music's cut from a fine cloth of head-informed, classically sweet and soft pop/rock modes. Most of all, Songs Album II is music for listening. To listen to and to play music; that's been his highest aim, for most of his life. He's released four albums of 'Baywatch Krautrock' with LA Takedown, and played and recorded in many other projects, including but not limited to his experimental Music Tracing Ensemble, exotica collective Other Delights, Bedouine, Coffin Prick, Papa M, Tommy Peltier, Vetiver, and 'L.A.'s Most grateful Dead cover band,' Richard Pictures. If all this implies a wide palette of input/output, Songs Album II has it in reserve, framed scrupulously in a sequence of nice, light folk/rock ditties, their spacey-yet-precise arrangements colorfully blowing up the songs' personal values: by definition, perfect listening! It's Aaron, on most acoustic and electric guitars and basses, keyboards, harmonica, synth and vocals, Robin MacMillian on drums, Tara Milch, flute; Michael Sachs, clarinets; Luke Csehak, bassoon and trumpet; additional guitars and vocals from Blue Broderick, Bart Davenport, and Wayne Faler; keyboards and vocals from Andrew Dorsett and vocals by Matt Popieluch, making Songs Album II a collection of widescreen, hi-def songs and sounds. Aaron's voice is light-toned, gentle and tunefully raspy, falling somewhere between Jack Nitzsche, Van Dyke Parks, Robert Wyatt, and personal inspirations John Simon, Stephen Pastel, Jim O'Rourke and Kermit's nephew, Robin. Without trying to, Aaron came around to Songs Album II after another bout of demon COVID. He's a singer/songwriter who's been known to dream musical passages, with a couple on this record in delightful proof -- welcoming the hand of the mystic upon him. The 'no particular theme' implied by the title is only part so. It's no concept album, unless the concept is 'album, of songs,' but there ARE themes to be found here, feels and emotions crystalized around this lifetime of listening. With moments of sound laced into song, functioning both as toe-tapping sweet melodies and near-Joycean full-function index of personal reference, Aaron MF Olson's Songs Album II is music meant for listening to in the spirit of listening, and higher calling. And singing along!"