I find music theory fascinating and an interesting problem to solve but I can also take it with a grain of salt when making up songs. Music has so much mystery and unexplainable connection to our DNA and our connection to all living things that trying to codify sound and tonality down to 12 subdivisions of an octave is a little reductive, if you ask me. I went to the Berklee School of Music in Boston in the 1980’s and the music classes I enjoyed the most were harmonic theory - the analysis of chords and chord progressions. In “harmony 4” class it sometimes felt like we were just making stuff up. Any chord could be analyzed in a number of ways and it seemed like any chord could follow any chord and we’d just find some way to explain it.

But as a music teacher, being able to explain the basic building blocks of accepted western music theory is important. Over the years I’ve made a handful of charts and diagrams for my classes to help explain simple chord theory. In songwriting class I tell students the place to start is with the 6 chords in the western major scale. You’ve probably heard of 1, 4, 5. Those are the major chords and the minors are 2, 3 and 6. 1 major, 2 minor, 3 minor, 4 major, 5 major, 6 minor. (If none of that makes sense it doesn’t matter.) A great song to demonstrate this is Bob Dylan’s, “Like A Rolling Stone.” He literally goes up: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and eventually comes down, and the chorus is 1, 4, 5 - standard rock and roll progression used in dozens of songs (twist and shout, hang on sloopy, la bamba). One of the first assignments I give in the fundamentals class is to write a song using all 6 chords in a key.

In another rare case of me actually doing one of my own assignments (see the essay on Saskatchewan to Chicago for more on that), in 2008 or so I came up with “Obsidian” doing the “use all the chords in a key” assignment. Some songs just kind of spit themselves out and, to the best of my recollection, that’s what happened with “Obsidian.” Diane is a Buddhist and there was a book of teachings on the table one morning when I was eating breakfast. I’m going to very poorly paraphrase but it said something about the way transform toward compassion is through the “soft clay of your heart.” I liked the line and the image. It occurred to me that the opposite of soft clay would be obsidian, remembering the cutting tool I found when I was a kid. I got my guitar and played the chords in the key of G up the scale: G, Am, Bm, C, D, Em

In my 20’s and early 30’s I had a temper that was frightening. Most of the time I was mild mannered and basically the same person I am now but every once in a while rage exploded, often around some perceived injustice. It definitely freaked Diane out a few times and it scared me, too. It felt like I was possessed. My dad had a similar out of the blue temper when I was a little kid. He played on a softball league and I remember him getting into fights several times, usually after a lot beer. Many years of therapy helped me to move beyond the rages and I’m so grateful for that. It never happens anymore. But I do remember. That’s what I must have been thinking of as I worked on Obsidian. “Let the change begin.” I wrote the chorus first as a sort of plea to self but also echoing the Buddhist concept of opening to compassion. The verse lyrics all came very fast and I honestly don’t know who I’m talking about. I don’t feel like the ‘everything you say will be misinterpreted’ line is about me because I don’t feel that way. Maybe I was thinking about the person who wrote the Buddhist book or religion in general. But the line sounded good to my ear and felt right. Basically the song, to me, is saying, “soften your heart and open up to change and don’t be so hard and certain that you’re right.” It’s a prayer or a chant. I hope that doesn’t mess up anyone’s take on the song. As I and others have said, though, your interpretation is as valid as mine. Some people thought it was about Obama because it came out when he first got elected and his campaign slogan was “change.” It didn’t occur to me until someone mentioned it. It is not about Obama.

I love making recordings as much as I love making music. In high school I had two boom boxes and I’d record some guitar on one of them, then play it back while playing or singing another part and recording onto the other, back and forth. After 5 or 6 passes it sounded like it was recorded next to a jet taking off with all the accumulated hiss, but I loved it. I loved the sonic transformation that adding one thing could do. In college I traded my Les Paul for a Tascam 4-track. (It was a late 70’s black Les Paul custom that - I just checked - would be worth about $5000 dollars now). I was obsessed with creating songs and sound collages on the the 4 track. I’d stack harmonies and play layered guitar parts, add percussion and sound effects. It was so much fun! It also had the most rad distortion if you overloaded the inputs. Once I figured that out I played guitar through it all full tilt until it died. In 1994 I bought an upgrade Tascam portastudio and Dolly Varden recorded our first album on it, “Mouthful of Lies.” DV drummer Matt Thobe and I were equally obsessed with recording and we had a blast making that album on the 4 track. The icing on the cake was having it played on WXRT and getting reviewed in CMJ, leading to a packed showcase at SXSW and RCA records almost signing us. For the follow up I borrowed a bunch of gear from my friend Bob Egan, who ran a guitar repair shop and who’d played pedal steel in a classic country band side project we called Pope Eel and the Pocket Fisherman. Bob went on to tour and record with Wilco and later moved to Toronto to play with Blue Rodeo. Bob was going on tour with Wilco so he loaned me his ADAT machines, a mixing board, a bunch of mics and cables - basically everything we needed to record at home. It took a while to figure out but I recorded a lot of the album “The Thrill of Gravity” on Bob’s gear in the coachhouse behind our house in Chicago. That was 1997 and 98 and the world was moving toward Pro Tools. Dolly Varden went to Nashville for the next two albums to record with Brad Jones. The first one, “The Dumbest Magnets” was on ADAT machines (1999) and the second was ProTools (2001). I learned a ton watching Brad work and came home and downloaded the free version of ProTools and bought a used Mbox 2-input interface. That’s how I got started digital recording and it was similar to the old 4-track cassette days but I was a better musician now and had a lot more experience with recording. My first ProTools project was the album “Duets” in 2003. Half the album is live songs from a concert at the Old Town School and the other half is new songs recorded at home into ProTools. I got the hang of it pretty quickly and loved it. I was using it like the 4-track but it had more options, more tracks and less noise. On “Duets” I played all the instruments (except for Joel Paterson on guitar on 2 songs). Dolly Varden took a hiatus after that so I started work on my first solo album, “Sweet Is The Anchor,” in the home studio. At that point I was in a tiny room under the stairs inside the house. I was packed in there with a piano, a little hammond organ, an iMac G3, an Mbox and a handful of mics. That album was so fun to make and it is still one of my favorites. I had genius drummer Frank Rosaly over to record drums in the living room. When it came out my touring band was Joel Paterson on pedal steel, guitar and occasional drums, Casey McDonough on bass, Jason Adasiewicz on vibraphone and occasional drums, and Diane singing harmonies. I did one show at the Old Town School, one of Robbie Fulks’ “Secret Country” shows, with that lineup. What a blast that was! “Love is a Blessing” was the one people like the most from that album, I’d say. That’s me trying to write an Al Green song by way of Ann Peebles.

“Obsidian” is the opening song on “I Will Miss the Trumpets and the Drums,” my second solo album from 2010. By then I was fully moved into the coachhouse, had a drum set in place, a better computer and a better interface and better mics. And I was getting better at playing drums and bass and getting better sounds. I was beginning to record other people, too. The first few projects were John Kuczaj’s “Atomic Shop,” Jack Higgins’ “Seeds” and “Hide,” and a few others. I loved working with people to flesh out their songs and I still do. Since 2006 I’ve recorded many dozens of albums by Chicago artists in my studio (I haven’t counted and I actually have no idea how many!), Kernel Sound Emporium. On “I Will Miss The Trumpets and the Drums,” I played and sang pretty much everything. I did have Jason Adasiewicz, bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Frank Rosaly on a few songs (later to become Funeral Bonsai Wedding), and Joel Paterson plays pedal steel on “Obsidian.” I was inspired by the sound of the Teenage Fanclub song, “Start Again.” I LOVED that recording! So when I went to record the singing I tracked at least 10 tracks of vocal layers on the choruses for a real choir sound. It’s been very fun playing it live over the years because I’ve had the pleasure of singing it with so many great singers in Chicago: Ingrid Graudins, Diane, Nora O’Connor, Steve Frisbie, Liam Davis, Jenny Bienemann, Alton Smith, Tommi Zender, Gerald Dowd and others I’m sure I’m forgetting. What a joy to join in harmony those voices! I don’t get tired of “Obsidian.” It always seems to have something new to offer each time I sing it.

I made the video using public domain footage of Isadora Duncan and her students dancing in the 1920’s, along with some trains. It’s crazy cool how the dancers seem to work with the music. I had a lot of fun making the song, the album and the video.

thanks for reading!

Original recording and video from 2009

Live at SPACE in 2022 with the Lucid Dreams

I moved with my dad, my sister and my step-mom from San Diego, CA, to Hailey, Idaho, in August of 1977. We arrived a little too late for me to register for 7th grade electives so my choices were limited. I needed credits. The counselor said, “You could take guitar...”

There was a little music shop in Hailey where we bought a cheap used Yamaha acoustic guitar. (Was there a little music shop in every small town in the USA in the 1970’s?) There were fewer than 2000 people living in Hailey, Idaho at that time. The store had guitars, brass instruments, music books, records, strings, harmonicas and more. Guitar class quite literally changed my life. My teacher, Linda Terry, a post-hippie free spirit in a very conservative town in a very conservative state, taught guitar and song learning as a near spiritual pursuit. There we were, 8 or 9 twelve and thirteen year old boys and girls, the children of farmers and small town workers, and me, seated in a semi-circle being implored to feel what John Denver was feeling when he wrote about sunshine on his shoulders or being “lost and alone on some forgotten highway.” I was into it. Deeply. I loved guitar and I loved the class. Miss Terry practically hugged me when it was my turn to show that I’d learned how to play alternating bass notes in the key of A. I aced it and I was thrilled.

When I told people I was learning guitar everyone, and I mean everyone, said, “Oh, like James Taylor.” It was the mid 70’s, of course, but I’d never heard of him. Growing up in San Diego I was a Beatles fan. My mom and dad had all their albums and a big Magnavox console stereo. I’d lay on the floor in front of it and soak up the music and stare at the record covers. I remember once listening to the entire White Album start to finish that way. It seemed so dark and adult and enticing. A portal to another world both terrifying and thrilling. The scary songs even made the pretty songs seem somehow slightly menacing and mysterious. That aesthetic has never left me.

I’d also carry my little blue round portable AM radio with me everywhere, listening to KCBQ top 40 radio. Early 1970’s top 40 free form was really something. Everything from Parliament to Elton John, Stevie Wonder to Carole King, and all the one hit wonders, solo Beatle songs and so much more. The last vestiges of Brill Building classic pop songwriting, the pre disco peak of R&B and soul, the influence of country and folk all in a big mix of melodies and grooves. I’d ride my bike with the radio hanging from the handle bars. One thing that imprinted was the idea of music and songs being bigger than the restraints of category and interacting in cool ways outside of genre. Top 40 could literally be anything that was a hit. The White Album also cast a wide net of styles - it had straight up rock and roll, pretty folk songs, tightly arranged pop songs, avant-garde sound art, scratchy blues rock and tin pan alley throwback songs, and more. To me this all made sense and still does. When I record people at Kernel there’s often a conversation about which songs “fit” on an album and which don’t. My answer is always just choose your favorites. They fit because you say they do and because you wrote them and your voice is singing them. Some may disagree.

My mom was a tragic character. Something terribly wrong went on in the house she grew up in, I’m sure of it. We’ll never know because everyone is gone but the signs were all there. Her brother was a creep who was barred from coming to our house. My mom’s mom (my granny) was an alcoholic who drank Olympia beer in extra tall cans and smoked Parliaments. Her husband, my grandpa, left them at some point and died of a heart attack when he was 40. Granny remarried a WW2 veteran who never said more than 3 words to me. Even so, my mom was an elegant and smart pretty blonde in high school in San Diego in the 1950’s. My dad was charismatic, super handsome, the star athlete of the football and baseball teams and great at drawing. My mom fell hard for him and they got married and moved to Los Angeles where my dad went to the Art Center School of Design. My sister was born in 1961 and I was born in 1965. By the time I was in 1st grade things were getting bad. My mother’s demons were ever-present. She chain smoked and drank a lot and did not have interest in anything, really. I remember a trip to the redwoods in northern California where she stayed sitting in the car smoking the whole time while my dad, my sister and I walked around the forests. I always felt very bad for her and wanted to somehow reach her, but she was far away. Once I stayed with her in the car as a sort of solidarity. Her drinking got very heavy by about 1972 when we moved into a bigger house in Del Mar, a fancier beach town north of San Diego. My dad was thriving as an illustrator and having a narcissistic early mid life crisis. A little while later he walked out on us to be with his 23 year old assistant. (Tale as old as time) He bought an overpriced British sports car, a Lotus. (that thing was a piece of trash, by the way, constantly breaking down and nearly killing him once when the front wheel came flying off on the freeway) It left my sister and I in a bad situation: alone together in that big house with no parenting, really. My mom rarely got out of bad and when she did it was usually to go get more booze. My 9 year old brain thought that if she could just stop drinking she’d be fine. My memories are scattered and sketchy and time makes no sense. It could have been years or weeks. My sister says it was about 2 years. The issue was forced when my mom attempted suicide and ended up in the hospital. We first went to live with a family friend and eventually ended up with my dad and my stepmom. We lived a year in San Diego and then my dad decided we were moving to Idaho because he’d always wanted to live near a trout stream. My mom remarried and did better off and on but the demons were always there until she died in 2003. She’d attempted suicide at least one other time that I know of.

This all leads to the main point of this essay. Why write songs about deeply personal and troubling things? It’s a good question. As I write this I’m thinking it has something to do with coming of age in the early and mid 70’s. A lot of the big songs were about serious and troubling things. I think this gets commonly attributed to the “confessional” singer-songwriters of the era: Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and, yes, James Taylor. And yes they did write songs of personal experience and sorrow, and yes it did become a hackneyed cliche in lesser hands. But...Bob Dylan was writing very personal songs of hardship in the mid 60’s. He wrote from anger and outrage more than sorrow, but it still signaled a shift from “universal” topics in songs to specific personal topics. John Lennon wrote wildly personal songs during and after the Beatles. More personal than Joni or JT ever did. It was a dark time as the Vietnam war dragged on, Nixon, racism. Stevie Wonder’s song “Living for the City” was on top 40 radio, so was “What’s Goin’ On,” along with other songs about racism, drugs, war, death and existential dread. Movies were dark and existential. TV shows were serious and heavy. I think my concept of songs was forged in that atmosphere: songs should be serious, not frivolous, and about real experience.

In Idaho once people heard I was learning guitar I would get songbooks as gifts for birthdays and Christmas. I got the Neil Young “Harvest” songbook, Simon and Garfunkel, Complete Beatles (fantastic! and it made me learn bar chords) Hits of 1977 (awesome), and a James Taylor anthology that included an odd assortment of songs from his first 3 or 4 albums, none of which I knew. The public library in Ketchum, Idaho, had “Sweet Baby James” and “One Man Dog,” on LP, so I checked them out and one by one learned the songs in the book. A lot of the songs weren’t from those albums, though, and I had no way of hearing them, so I’d make up the melody and rhythm based on the words and the chords. I fell in love with the sound and the vibe of those 2 albums from the library. I didn’t love all the songs but “Fire and Rain” is still a powerful song and the droning low strings on the 3rd verse are intense and unsettling, along with the tom tom fills at the end of each chorus. It’s an interesting song, too. The lyrics of the verses don’t make a lot of sense but the chorus, “I always thought I’d see you again,” is relatable and direct. The verses are a little surreal, especially the flying machines in pieces on the ground. This made an impression. I didn’t really know exactly what he was singing about but it lit up my imagination and made me feel something important. Sorrow was never expressed in my family but sorrow and trouble was all around us. That song, and others to follow by Joni Mitchell, Phoebe Snow, Rickie Lee Jones, Neil Young, Jackson Browne and Paul Simon were a portal to another world. Combined with Miss Terry’s near spiritual regard for songs I knew that music and songs would be my life’s pursuit, for better or worse.

I’ve written a lot of songs trying to understand my mom. Trying to make sense of what happened and who she was. These include, “Weather in the Desert,” “Trying to Live Up,” “Girl in a Well,” “Del Mar, 1976,” “She Knew,” and “Balcony.” “Balcony” is the first one where I tried to write about my scattered memories of my sister and I living in the house in Del Mar, along with images of my Granny and her husband mixed in. In the song I say, “it is a secret one I will never tell.” Here I am sort of spilling the beans but not completely. Some of the images are not real and some are combinations of events and scattered memories so a specific interpretation is not possible, really. As I said in the “Mayfly” essay, I don’t want to dispel anyone’s interpretation of a song by saying too much. Some of the images in the song are the lowest moments of my life, though, and there is a strange catharsis to sing about them, even when they are semi-disguised. Why write songs about personal and troubling things? Maybe that’s part of the answer.

The song is a circular chord progression that, I think, is in B major: E B A C#m F# then E G#m A C#m F# I think the A is a flat 7 chord. The song is only verses. No chorus, no refrain. Just the chords, a melody and the scattered storytelling. It was written in the late 1990’s and I think it may have originally had a chorus. It definitely had more verses that were cut out by the time Dolly Varden recorded it in Nashville with Brad Jones for the album, “The Dumbest Magnets.” Once again I didn’t know what to make of it as a song or a thing. Brad was enthusiastic about it and the recording came out great. I wanted to open the album with it but the band and I eventually decided against it. I think it would have been a great opener, actually, and it became a fan favorite. People enjoying something that to me is so dark and cryptic never quite made sense but I guess I really love songs by other people that are dark and cryptic. I think the fact that the storytelling and imagery are based on real things comes through even if the details are unclear.

Now there are sisters and there are miracles

There is proof that nothing lasts

There was a cold front, there was a balcony

There are pictures from the past

You were a string-bean, you were a beaten rug

A cigarette in the hand

and right through that screen door there was a concrete face

showing slides of the Grand Coulee Dam

Can’t you smell the ashtrays? Can’t you smell the cheap perfume?

The beers in giant cans

and every Sunday Before the air-raid bells

your mama’s nervous laugh

It is a secret, one I will never tell

It is stuck beneath my tongue

How we were drawn there up to that balcony

As dumb as we were young

Just like a fountain, just like a waterfall

You waited underneath

Don’t tell the neighbors for crying out loud

Till the ambulance is on our street

Now there are sisters and there are miracles

There is proof that nothing lasts

There was a cold front, there was a balcony

There are pictures from the past

But not one word now, eyes to the ground

The past has been replaced

No, not one word now, don’t make a sound

Never one to complain

Here is the original version from The Dumbest Magnets

Thanks for reading!

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan is about 300 miles north, as the crow flies, from the border of Montana. The first white people there were Methodists wanting to escape the Toronto liquor trade in the 1880’s. By the 1940’s there were over 100,000 Scottish immigrants in Saskatchewan. Something was drawing them there! But my great grandfather, apparently had had enough of the vast tundra and moved to San Diego, California, sometime in the early 1900’s. He and his wife had, I think, 7 daughters, and my grandpa.

Teaching runs in my family. My sister, my aunt and uncle and my grandpa were all teachers. It never occurred to me that it was something I’d end up doing, let alone find so fulfilling and inspiring. I fell into it as a matter of desperation to do something besides work at the record store run by the sociopath. (more on that in a later episode!) I’d heard of and known about the Old Town School of Folk Music and I’d seen a few shows there, at the 909 W Armitage location. I’d peeked at the printed catalog and wondered what might go on in a songwriting class, but it seemed distant and sideways. I was aiming to be a touring recording artist, not a teacher. But a few things aligned and forced the issue in 2004 and I ended meeting Jimmy Tomasello, head of the school’s guitar department at the time, and he offered me a guitar class to teach. I fell into it pretty naturally and loved it immediately. After a year or so, one of the people teaching the songwriting classes moved away and I told Jimmy I’d like to give it a go. Mark Dvorak said, “Steve, you know you can’t teach people how to write a song.” And I said, “yes, I know.” And I do know. The thing you can do, though, is encourage them and give them the space to figure it out. I set out, slowly but consistently, to create the kind of environment that I’d craved growing up. In Idaho I had no one, really, to show my songs to. I wrote and wrote, made tapes and obsessed over listening to them but never shared them. It’s a weird thing. It never occurred to me to NOT make up songs. It seemed like the logical thing to do once you learned a few chords. I would have loved to have a circle of people with open minds and interest in music to play songs for, and to hear what they thought. So that’s what the classes are. A prompt, a deadline and a group of open-minded people sharing the goal of making up a nice song. 21 years later I’m still teaching 3 group classes a week, 48 weeks a year. I’ve made up hundreds and hundreds of songwriting assignments, or prompts. A question I get often is “do you do your own assignments?” Usually I don’t but occasionally I do.

I often say the best thing I can offer as a songwriting teacher is an understanding of song form: what’s a verse, a refrain, a chorus, a bridge, etc. In attempting to explain form and it’s development and history in American music I spend some time on blues and 12 bar blues form. Listening to Andrew Hickey’s remarkable podcast, “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs,” it is staggering how many 12 bar blues form songs were foundational in every genre of American popular music from the 20’s through the 50’s. I play some songs in class that sound like what you’d expect a blues to sound like but I also play a song by Greg Brown called “Blue Car.” It’s an exquisite song and one of those that the more you dig into the better it gets. It’s a 12 bar blues form but it sounds like a folk / Americana song. I met him once at the Folk Alliance conference and told him I use the song in my classes. He said, “as an example of what NOT to do?” (Songwriters don’t seem to appreciate being told that their songs are being studied, at least in my experience. I got excited talking to Patty Griffin about how I love to use her songs in my classes one time and she slowly backed away with a sort of fear in her eyes. Maybe I came on a little strong...) Anyway, back to “Blue Car.” The assignment is to write a 12 bar blues song that doesn’t sound like a blues with Greg Brown’s wonderful song as the template. In this case I decided to give it a try myself.

I’m not sure how I decided to use the migration of the Dawsons as the storytelling part of the song, but I just literally started singing the facts: “well, my great grandfather left Saskatchewan for California.” It has a nice rhythm and cool sounding consonant and vowel connections. Once I started down that path it was pretty easy to see the trajectory. Great grandfather to grandfather. My dad to me. The details are all true in the song. My grandpa used to talk about teaching in a one room school house in New Mexico during the depression. He thought it was hilarious that he had to shoo chickens out of the schoolhouse in the morning. The story was, “that was the only job available.” It was right around the time my dad was born, so 1937. Then the song moves forward to my dad moving my sister, my stepmom and me up to Idaho in 1977, then finally to me moving to Chicago in 1987. I wrote the song as an exercise. I didn’t see why anyone would be interested in it, let alone like it. But as I played it for people I started hearing people say, “that makes me think about my own family and where we came from.” So, there you have it. I learned that songs cause people to consider their own lives in relation to what’s being sung about. Moreover, people often create their own interpretation of a song that is very different from the intention of the writer. I’ve learned to not say too much about what a song is “about” so as to not dispel the picture that someone has painted in their own imagination. The drunk guy from the beginning of this essay clearly wanted more info that, in this case, I did not have.

This song was released on the Dolly Varden album, “For A While,” in 2013. I’ve played it in nearly every show since then. On the album the very talented Zack Kline plays some gorgeous fiddle and I think it’s some of the most soulful drumming Matt Thobe has done on record. I don’t really remember the process of recording it but we did this one in my home studio, Kernel. In the comments I’ll put the original Dolly Varden version and a solo live version from the Steve and Johnnie show on WGN radio from 2 years ago.

thanks for reading!

Dolly Varden version

Solo live on WGN radio, The Steve and Johnnie show

How memory works is something that I don’t understand. I read relatively recently that we can’t actually trust our memory to be accurate, and I suppose I knew that, but it does call into question important events that are foundational. It does for me, at least. Memories play like short films, always the same scenes. The fact that I’m usually in them doesn’t make them any less movie-like and distant.

One little reoccurring movie is of me and my high school girlfriend sometime in 1983, turning upside down in my dad’s yellow Chevy Blazer, in slow motion, skidding from a bend in the highway a few miles north of Hailey, Idaho, into an open field on the right side of the road. We’d been in Hailey watching a movie. My friend Shawn cleaned the movie theater in the afternoons. The owner showed him how to run the projectors and he’d show movies while he cleaned up and he’d invite us to come hang out. I remember watching parts of “Urban Cowboy” four or five times that way. (here’s an example of how memory is unreliable: Urban Cowboy came out in 1980, which is a little early for this timeline) In my memory we were driving back from Hailey to my parent’s house about 5 miles north. It had been raining, but not heavy, and there was no one else on the road. This is another unreliable part of the memory. My brain has placed us on an empty stretch of highway for a better movie, but who knows. I looked over and down at my girlfriend and when I looked up the bend in the road was coming up very fast. I overcorrected and the car skidded off the road and landed upside down. From there I have only scattered bits. “Are you okay?” “Yes, I think so.” I ended up at the nearest farmhouse on the phone with my dad. I don’t remember the sheriff or the police or anything afterward. Somehow we got home and were both ok. Blazers in the late 70’s were top heavy and prone to rollovers.

My dad was an avid fly fisherman. He was obsessed and so was my uncle Robert. I started going on fishing trips in junior high and got into it pretty deeply. I learned how to tie flies and studied trout and rivers and learned how to cast and which bugs specific trout would be drawn to in what conditions. We always did catch and release. Though I always did feel pretty bad once I reeled in a fish and pulled the hook from it’s mouth. “I’m really sorry to put you through all that, buddy.” Sigh. In the background, though, there was time spent on a river and that made a huge impression. The insects, the birds, the moving water and the sound it made and the feel of the motion and getting into the minutia of each moment. Mayflies are a favorite food of river trout. They live most of their lives, a year or so, in the mud at the bottom of rivers, as nymphs. Then, all at once, they emerge and hatch out onto the surface of the river, fly around, mate, lay their eggs and die, all in a matter of hours. Fish go nuts. I’ve been on rivers in Idaho mid hatch, covered in mayflies, with fish jumping all around me. Surreal and thrilling.

When I go to make up a song I usually tap into one of these short “films” of memory and see where it takes me. One afternoon in 2012 I started writing about the car rollover from high school, basically just describing what happened. I usually don’t have a plan or a direction, just the memory bits, some chords and, hopefully, the sketchings of a melody. In college I became a huge fan of a poet named Richard Hugo from Montana. He has a collection called, “31 letters and 13 dreams”. The dream poems have titles like “In Your Wild Dream,” and go in unexpected directions. In a dream anything can happen. Maybe it’s a cheat or an overused trope but I decided to start the song with “In the dream the rain is ending...” By the end of the scene we were ok and I’d come upon the “we are lucky and I must not forget” line. The storytelling was in first person, in present tense.

After the first verse was written and I was relatively happy with it I needed a new place to go so I went back to the “In the dream” and “we are lucky” ideas and landed on an unrelated memory: singing in a small venue in the UK with Diane sometime in the early 2000’s. We used to do 10-day to 2 week tours over there, sometimes twice a year, from about 2000 to 2005. It was often to small audiences but they were tuned in to the details and they owned, listened and were enthusiastic about the records we were making. There was always a sense of this being fleeting and rare and we would often remind ourselves how fortunate we were to be invited (and paid!) to cross the ocean and sing songs to people from another country. There are moments singing with Diane where our two voices combine into a thing greater than the sum of it’s parts - where the overtones line up in some way and the sound radiates the air around us. We are not really in control of this. It happens sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t. It can last for a whole song or just a few moments. The image of floating like a mayfly came to me in the course of attempting to describe that sensation.

After the second verse was mostly settled I put the song down. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. This is a familiar feeling with songs that has only gotten more acute the older I get. There’s a feeling of, “what is this?” “Is this a song?” I usually end up answering myself with some sort of, “oh well, who cares, anyway?” and then proceed. But with this song I wanted a final verse that glued the first two parts together in some way and I was stumped. I’m not sure how long it took but at some point I got the idea of casting Diane and I far into the future, near life’s end.

The song was written while Dolly Varden was making the album, “For A While.” We recorded it live at my home studio, Kernel, with drums, bass, electric guitar, and me on acoustic guitar and singing. I can’t remember the overdubs other than Diane’s vocal. It think there’s piano on there and probably a second acoustic guitar. I was unsure about the live vocal and attempted a redo that the band (correctly) rejected. In live performances the song’s coda has expanded into a semi-improvised section where the dynamics and feel are adjustable depending on the moment and mood.

Original recording by Dolly Varden

Live from the Old Town School, Oct 2021 with Strings