The audience hears the melody, listens to the lyrics and makes up it’s own story. They cannot feel the wind as it blows through the tamaracks or smell the smoke drifting across the lake. The author, if he does his job correctly, lets them conjure up their own tale, whatever that may be, while he, upon hearing the very same song, sees places.

He hears the scratching of pencil on cheap motel stationary and recalls the little A-frame cabin on the outskirts of the Garden of the Gods or tastes the wine drank on the porch of the vineyard in Northern California. The audience hears the grand piano, but cannot recall the upright spinet, perfectly out of tune, that played the very same melody in the great room with the fireplace where not long ago, the same song was crafted by the same skilled hands. The author feels, even sees these things, but the audience hears a different story, and that is the story they have written themselves.

The story I had attempted to tell was that of traveling throughout the diverse landscape of the United States, stopping in widely different places to write down what I was going through at the moment, which was usually, at the time, very similar, in that she was still on my mind. The last stop in the song was at a lodge on the shores of a lake in Kalamath Falls, OR that we had rented to kill a few days off between gigs. I woke up early one morning, finished the last verse and later that day, we decided to lay down a demo of it.

Bukka Allen was on tour with us, so naturally, he played piano. Joe dragged his upright bass out from under the bus, and we set up around the fire. I showed the guys the freshly written song, and we arranged it on the fly. After a few takes, we had it demoed on my little portable recorder. It’s almost the exact same arrangement as it is on the record, and the same band, with the addition of Chris Masterson on guitar. We somehow managed to recapture the spontaneity and magic of that first demo at the lodge.