Compass Studios, Nashville, February 2007. Nobody's fretting about making an album here, much less the challenge of following a triple-platinum, multi-award-winning independent roots music landmark of five years earlier.

As tourists take pictures of the studio's scarred back wall – the place where Waylon Jennings is said to have practised throwing his bowie knife between takes back in the '70s – this band is just here to take stock after a break; to sing, play, kick ideas around.

Then an album happens – kind of a spontaneous souvenir, in a sense, of the joy of making music together.
That's the Waifs for you.

sundirtwater is an album born of time and distance.
The geographic space between singer-songwriters Donna Simpson, Vikki Thorn and Josh Cunningham, and the long hiatus since their last studio triumph, Up All Night, created a kind of vacuum that these new songs could hardly wait to fill.