This song has a lot of layers- both lyrically and musically. I was playing the music on the guitar and thought, “This should be a song.” No plan, just some music. Sometimes I write place-holder lyrics when I want to remember the rhythm of the melody, so I began in that vein. Something about that first line captivated me, and when I got to the second line, I knew I wasn’t writing placeholder lyrics. I wasn’t writing so much as channelling from a very deep source. Something knew what to write, if I didn’t. Sometimes, I find that if you can get into a rhythm creatively, you create things that you never could if you had planned it ahead of time.
I had written a song years back called “Borderman,” which was autobiographical- that is to say that it was based on me. When I write from my life, it eventually goes somewhere my life has never gone. That’s just how imagination works. So maybe the borderlands are the place we find ourselves, which is between two more important places. Perhaps in that period of my life, I found myself between the sowing and the reaping. Or maybe it's between two great powers, where a certain lawlessness exists. I was definitely in between purposes during that period. My rational mind can’t explain it, but my creative mind gets it.
Then there is that middle bit. There’s a kind of musical breakdown where the time signature does some funky stuff. In another lifetime, I was in a prog-rock band, Satori. We used to jump between time signatures all the time. Of course, those songs involved me screaming loudly. I don’t do that as much these days. I didn’t even do a good job of that when I was younger. I was constantly losing my voice before the show was even over.
For the longest time, this recording was just acoustic guitars, bass, and a click track. It wasn’t until last fall that I started adding the band. Glen was the first I added, and his drums gave the song a level of urgency. Then Woody came along, and the song went in a new direction. He really made an effort to give different parts different sounds. Thanks to his work, the bridge transports the listener to an alternative dimension.
Danny Flanigan and Gloria Marshall sang the backups on this. I was having a hell of a time getting Tonya on the recording, and I had been chatting it up with Gloria at a party, and she said she loved to do backing vocals, so I dragged her in. She and Danny put the cherry on top. Andrew Lee added more sounds to the bridge. It might be the shortest part of the song, but I promise that the more you hear it, the more you’ll hear in it. With any luck, you’ll beat the boss at the end.
In a perfect world, the strings would’ve been recorded by an orchestra, but I didn’t have the budget for that.