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 four-track machines that had come onto the market. Then my friend Dave invited me to try out his, and we did this song together. The tracks fell into place nicely, but then we realized that we needed a drum track – and nei
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 Gerry does in When You Went Away, and I never had my best friend develop a fatal disease as Rich does in Flash and Dazzle. What I did with those books was place myself into those situations emotionally and then parse out h
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 for what I could do with my life were getting fewer. This song came out of that thinking, though it came many years later. Curiously, it didn't come as a result of a dark night of the soul or some morbid meditation on my
