Billy and I met in the spring of 2005 while I was recording Jewell Ridge Girl. One of the songs cut for Jewell Ridge Girl, “Back Then,” caught Billy’s attention and he suggested that we consider a songwriting collaboration. We found that writing together came easy for us. We also started playing out together. We were getting a good response from audiences and loved performing as a duo. We wanted a CD for shows, but we felt like our sound was still developing, so we decided to release a few songs in our repertoire, but to wait a while for a full release. This is how Sweet & Toxic came to be. What you have here are the very early days of Jeni & Billy when we had been playing and writing together for only a few months. Our love of both classic country duets and Appalachian ballads rings out in these songs — but our sound is still forming, raw and searching. Like actors who don’t watch their own films, we don’t often listen back to our own recor...