Back to the River

April 10, 2008

I went through a pretty rough divorce a few years ago.  You can probably tell that from my music.  Writing has been a big part of the healing for me in processing all that heartache…it became a place to put the pain so I didn’t have to carry it around with me anymore.

A while ago, on a cold February day, I went through a very cathartic exercise in forgiveness.  It was completely spontaneous – I just woke up in the morning and knew exactly what I needed to do.  I’ve wanted to write a song about what happened that day for a long time, but I was afraid to even try because the experience was so intense that I knew it would be very difficult to do it justice in a song.

Well, the other day I finally wrote the song.  I wrote it with two of the songwriters I admire most: Tom Douglas and Jamie O’Hara.  Tom’s songs are works of art…”Grown Men Don’t Cry” by Tim McGraw and “Little Rock” by Collin Raye, to name a couple, and Jamie is a Grammy-winning songwriter who has had a string of solo-written hits including “Grandpa, Tell Me Bout the Good Old Days” by the Judds and “The Cold Hard Truth” by George Jones.  As you can imagine, being in the room to write with two such amazingly talented writers is an unbelievably creative experience.

We started off writing a completely different song, and for some reason the conversation took a turn and I felt compelled to tell them about this experience I had…I closed my eyes and re-lived it…and the words just tumbled out.  When I opened my eyes, Tom said, “That’s the song we need to write”.  An hour or so later, we had it finished, and there was my story almost verbatim, painted around the edges with poetry.  It’s called “Back to the River”, and it's gonna be on my new record in early 2009.  I hope you like it!

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