

Track 6: A Million Miles Away
This is another song that came from my "situation drama" approach of considering a circumstance and then imagining how it would play out. In this case, I wanted to write a song about long-distance relationships, so I threw my narrator into that situation, even though I hadn't been in that situation myself. This song actually introduced me to home recording many years ago. I'd recorded in studios a number of times, but I'd never had the chance to try out any of the portable fo


Track 7: Forever
Many of the songs I've been sharing with you come directly out of my life. This isn't one of them. In fact, in some ways, this song served as a model for the novels I would write later. I refer to my Hearts of Men stories as "situation dramas." Like situation comedies, they throw their characters into a set of circumstances and watch them react to those circumstances. I did not experience most of these circumstances. For example, I never had to raise an infant on my own as Ge


Track 14: I'll Never Be
I remember, sometime after my fortieth birthday, watching a football game and realizing that everyone on the playing field was younger than I was. That's it, I remember thinking, I'm never going to be a professional football player. In truth, I might very well have had that thought when I was nine, because it was abundantly clear by then that I did not have a promising future as an athlete, but there was something about this that resonated. As I was getting older, my options