REDWOOD RECORDINGS
Reid Genauer Releases This Is What I Saw — Five Scenes, 100 Songs, Eight Hours of Music

November 2025 — La Honda, CA / CT — Most projects don’t begin with a piece of fan art and end with a songwriter walking out of a cabin in the California redwoods with 100 newly recorded songs, but Reid Genauer has rarely taken the usual route. Best known as the singer and writer behind Strangefolk and Assembly of Dust, Genauer has spent three decades where folk storytelling meets improvisational instinct, collaborating along the way with musicians who quietly define the American acoustic vocabulary — Béla Fleck, John Scofield, Tony Rice, Jerry Douglas, and Richie Havens, whose final studio performance was a duet with him. This new project is the opposite of ensemble work: one person, a few well-worn instruments, and an attempt to rediscover his songbook before arrangement, expectation, and time left their fingerprints. Now 53, Genauer even folded in four unreleased songs he wrote at sixteen.

A Cabin, Five Days, One Hundred Songs
The setup was minimal — a Martin, a Strat, a banjotar, and a microphone in a small studio on Sloth Mountain in La Honda, CA — but what followed over the next five days was not. Genauer recorded his entire catalog stripped down and unvarnished, often re-felt rather than reimagined. “I wasn’t trying to perfect anything,” he says. “I wanted to live the songs as one body of work and see what remained once everything else was removed.” The result, This Is What I Saw, is a 100-song album captured in single takes. The release begins January 12, 2026, rolling out in five “scenes” of 20 songs every six weeks — eight hours of imperfect, unguarded, deliberately honest music.

The Spark: A Fine-Art Illustration as Cartography
The project began not with a concept but a gift. Fine artist Pete Nogas created a 36″ × 24″ pen-and-ink print threading references to 100 of Genauer’s songs into a single illustrated landscape — part map, part puzzle, and for Genauer, a mirror. “This project felt like a boomerang,” he says. “You go off exploring — making things with people you admire, getting lost in bands, arrangements, touring. Then one day you’re back in a room with just the song and a guitar, and it’s all still there.” That visual world extends into a reissued 200-page This Is What I Saw lyric book — part lyric anthology, part photographic journal, part scrapbook.

Three Nights, No Repeats
Genauer will mark the launch with a national tour next year. As the opening chapter, he’ll perform a three-night solo residency at Fairfield Theatre Company’s StageOne on Nov 21, 22, and 23, offering a different setlist each night. A live extension of the project, the residency treats the catalog as fluid — songs rediscovered in the act of playing them. “Songs are like small boats,” Genauer says. “Some drift, some travel afar, some get lost, but they always find a way home.”

Listen / Explore – www.reidgenauer.com/blog/this-is-what-i-saw
Contact: John Leccese · press@reidgenauer.com · (908) 251 7401

Preview selections from This Is What I Saw via Samply.

Reid Genauer is a singer, songwriter, and storyteller whose work bridges the worlds of folk, rock, and Americana with a signature blend of honest and imagination. Best known as the frontman of Strangefolk and Assembly of Dust, Genauer’s songs carry the warmth of lived experience and the spark of myth, delivered with a voice that is equal parts gravel, grace, and invitation. His music—rooted in narrative, and melodic craft—reflects a lifelong devotion to story, spirit and song.