Danny Speer has just issued a new album called Where Were You When the Fun Began? and he confesses to being very pleased with it. He and Mark Sammo have worked on it steadily for the past three years in Sammo’s home studio in Ithaca. The songwriter and the drummer had not worked together in 30 years. They will have a CD release show at the Trumansburg Conservatory of Fine Arts on Sunday, June 23 at 5 p.m.

“David Arnay put out the Peabody Band Archives album in 2009,” said Speer, “and when Mark heard it he gave me a call and said we should do something together.”

In the 1990s and into the early 21st century Speer wrote songs for and played with Circle D and then Speer•Specker•Henrie. Speer characterizes these as country bands and certainly Bob Carlucci’s pedal steel and Dee Specker’s fiddle and soaring voice make a case for that categorization. But Speer’s lyrics run a little more oblique and his arrangements a little more complex than the average country set.

Circle D and Speer•Specker• Henrie were smaller ensembles and Speer wrote relatively simpler songs so that they could be performed live without additional band members. The songs on Where Were You When the Fun Began? mark a return to the multi-part arrangements that identify his work with the Peabody Band, which generally included eight or nine people on stage.

In addition to the expansiveness that recalls the 1970s, Speer has also built in a certain amount of mysticism by making each of the 12 songs on the album correspond to an “alternative zodiac” that he created with Harvey Gitlin.

Almost all of his compositions (here and over the years) are love songs.

“Honestly,” wrote Speer, “Where Were You When The Fun Began? is a fanciful journey through my own timeline. Tutors advise ‘write what you know,’ to which I add ‘and embellish gracefully.’ Since age 11 romance had drawn me like a moth to the proverbial flame, (offering plenty of illusion in illumination), but I feel that particular illusion-chasing was an experience shared by my generation and perhaps those that followed.

“We’re all in love with love,” he said. “We’ve been set up by the happy endings that literature, then movies and television promised.”

Whatever you do, don’t listen to this album on a set of tiny earbuds. Let it fill a room and then swim around in this emotional lake of heartbreak, bliss, humor, and history, a lake where you can see clear down to the bottom.

In local music stores and from dspeer39@aol.com.

*     *     *