Dog Eared Days is an album built from places, memories and the small observations that accumulate around a life. Across thirteen instrumental pieces, Michigan guitarist and composer James Filkins uses acoustic guitar as his central voice, surrounding it at different moments with bass, strings, flute, harp, whistle, accordion and other acoustic colours.

Much of the album belongs, in one way or another, to Northern Michigan. The landscape appears explicitly in pieces such as Cat Head Bay and Leelanau Lullaby, but its presence reaches further than place names. Gardens, birds, trees, changing seasons, water and the particular character of the region become part of the musical vocabulary. Rose and Hummingbird grew from watching hummingbirds move among the flowers in his wife's garden. Witch Hazel takes its name from the unpredictable trees surrounding his home. Cardinal Serenade imagines the transition from a Michigan winter into spring.

Filkins has always had a particularly physical relationship with the acoustic guitar. Alternate tunings, baritone guitar, fingerstyle playing and the different resonances of individual instruments are part of the composition itself. He often develops music as a conversation between registers and melodic ideas, allowing fragments to sit for months, sometimes years, until another voice reveals where they belong. That patient way of working gives Dog Eared Days an unusual sense of natural time. Some pieces are spacious and restrained, while others become rhythmic, percussive and restless.

The conversations also extend beyond Filkins' own instruments. Michael Manring's fretless bass gives the title track a dark, fluid countervoice. Stephen Wake brings his guitar to A Place in the Sun. Katie Larson and Sav Madigan add strings to House Cleaning and, together with Christina Karakos, help expand the long history of Leelanau Lullaby. Elsewhere, flute, harp, whistle, accordion and nylon-string guitar enter the album without disturbing its intimacy. These collaborations feel less like ornamentation than different characters entering the same landscape.

The title Dog Eared Days carries perhaps the most personal memory of all. Filkins and his wife shared more than sixteen years with their rescue dog Mojo, whose life became intertwined with walks, cross-country skiing, paddleboarding, Christmas mornings and countless ordinary days at home. After Mojo died in 2025, photographs and memories of those years helped shape the idea of a life whose favourite pages had been revisited so often that their corners had become worn. Mojo appears on the album cover, sitting on a paddleboard, part of a landscape and a history she had shared with the family for years.

That idea of memory runs quietly through the whole record. House Cleaning remembers leaving a family home after nearly three decades. Leelanau Lullaby reaches back to a composition Filkins first recorded many years ago before returning to it with new musicians. Other pieces begin with something much smaller: a bird, a tree, a garden, a physical sensation, a particular place.

Musically, Dog Eared Days sits within the broad tradition of fingerstyle and contemporary acoustic guitar, while drawing naturally from folk, Celtic and chamber-like instrumental language. Filkins' influences include generations of guitarists who expanded the instrument through alternate tunings and individual approaches to touch and resonance, but his music remains closely tied to his own surroundings and way of listening.

The thirteen pieces ultimately feel like pages from the same book. Some preserve important events, others hold things that might ordinarily pass unnoticed. Together they form a portrait of an artist paying attention to the people, animals, places and sounds that have stayed with him.