A few years ago, I watched my way through part of a Zach Galifianakis series called Baskets. It is a beautifully acted and produced character piece centered around a failed clown named Baskets (Galifianakis). His life is one failure after another. He had just flunked out of clown college in France. His family is a collective failure. Even his somewhat successful brother is a failure as a human being. In the last scene of the final episode I watched, he finally just hopped on a moving boxcar and left everything behind. It was the first time I felt any sense of relief for that character, and it was the trigger point for this song. That moment moved me rather profoundly and it was the image I had in my head when I wrote the opening lines of the song. It’s hard to explain without sounding like self-pity, but very often, as a songwriter, I feel less like a creator and more like a pawn, or a puppet. I rarely feel in control of much, if any, of the creative process. It’s almost like something I have unwittingly agreed to endure for the sake of a song. There is a rather odd and humbling sensation that everything I have written was dictated in gibberish, and I am, at best, just a good listener or translator, tasked with taking notes. This, compounded by ubiquitous self-doubt nurtures a pervasive sense of despair, fearing no one will truly listen anyway; that it is all for naught and mere self-indulgence. So, this business of deciphering and processing such chatter is rather lonely work. I do the lion’s share of my writing late at night, or very early in the morning before the world starts moving and drowns out the voices I am so dependent upon. Songwriting, for me, is very much like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Except first, I have to create each piece before I can even begin to figure out how they go together, if they even do. There is no photo on the box top, and no guide other than the song itself. An often unwilling mute, only tentatively revealing what it wants to be. Although, it can be very loud and opinionated if I am getting it wrong. It’s exhausting.