In researching libraries and publishers’ basements for materials for this project, I found some of the greatest American love songs ever written, a richness of music that made it difficult to choose. It was exhilarating to find unknown songs by Kurt Weill, and record them for the first time. For this recording, which covers a particularly inspired period of popular American love songs, immortalized by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett and many others, I chose George Gershwin, Kurt Weill, Harold Arlen and Arthur Schwartz who were friends, living in Hollywood during a specially creative period in their lives. As Thomas Z Shepard indicates in his notes, “these songs, created from the 1920s through the 1950s, represent the quintessential sophistication and elegance of an idealized world” – Carole Farley