Mark Eitzel’s solo albums include 60 Watt Silver Lining, West (a songwriting collaboration with Peter Buck), The Invisible Man and 2012's Don't Be A Stranger. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Eitzel was front man for the San Francisco-based band American Music Club.
For our first invitational, we gave a group of musicians the following assignment: Create a song based—directly or in the most oblique way imaginable—on public domain material. Some of the participants chose to work from public-domain recorded music purchased for this project, while others contributed unique covers of older traditional tunes.