Tom’s TGOH20 Blog Posts

Dear all,

This is a long post, but worthwhile reading. For those not on Facebook (as I was not until just last month), Tom did a series of posts about the background of each song on TGOH20, and he just finished it today with Faith & Grace. He is a wonderful storyteller in his own right. I have copied the entire series below. I hope these enhance your enjoyment of the album even more. Best, Vivian

Tom’s Blog Posts describing each track on TGOH20:

Today on release day, as part of our listening and insiders insights series – we’re sharing the story of how The Ghosts of Highway 20 album concept came to be. It’s a longer than usual post, but it was a long journey to get here – and we wanted to share this here with you because seriously… you are the best community of people out there. Your support and love is very much noticed and appreciated. We are truly blessed to have you.
#‎Hwy20InsideJobBlog‬

I will never forget it. We had just finished a long tour with the last show in Macon, Georgia where Lucinda had lived when she was 5 or 6 years old. She had never performed there and never been back since her childhood, so she was very excited to be there. After a very memorable show, we headed west to go back home to L.A. We dropped off everyone else in the band and crew at the Atlanta airport and we continued west on Interstate 20. Somewhere past Birmingham, I noticed a highway sign that had the mileage to the next three major exits: Jackson, Vicksburg and Monroe. We had already been in Macon and Atlanta, where she had history, and now seeing these three cities on freeway sign all right in a row on the road ahead, it suddenly occurred to me how much of her life had taken place along this very road, then known as Highway 20. From the time the time she was 5 – to that very moment – I realized what a major thread of her life, her story, and of course her songs Highway 20 was. Her brother was born in Jackson, her sister in Vicksburg, and her mother buried in Monroe; it was the full cycle of life. I watched as Lucinda was stared out of the bus window and she was very quiet. Over the hum of the bus wheels, I could only imagine what she was thinking. When we stopped a short time later to have dinner and let the bus driver sleep, I said to her “I didn’t realize how much of your life centered around Highway 20”, and she said “Yeah, there are a lot of ghosts out here”. It was something I had heard her say about some of the other places from her past (New Orleans & Austin most often). I casually mentioned how that would be a great song title, but her mind was elsewhere…and I don’t think she heard me.
Unexpectedly, the title of this record has created a lot of questions. Who and what are the Ghosts Of Hwy 20? What does that refer to?
Lu has been introducing the title song live by saying “It refers to the retrospection of looking back across a past that won’t let go of you – and a past that you can’t let go of and all the things that are bound up in that past.” It also refers those people – all of the characters on the disappearing stage – all of those spirits that haunt our memories. The prostitute in House Of Earth, the drug addicted girl in I Know All About It, the working man in Factory -they are all, without judgement, the ghosts of people we once knew but never quite forget. Like characters in a Tennesee Williams play or a Flannery O’ Connor story, they never quite leave, maybe showing up in dreams or incidences that suddenly bring long forgotten faces back into the present.
The layers of this record run very deep – intersecting and tangled. It is about far more than the impact of the places we are from – or one highway connecting those places. There is a deep current of loss and mortality also running thru these songs.
Shortly after the release of Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone, Lucinda and I both lost lost our fathers within a month of each other – at the very same time we also lost our dear friend Ian McLagan, who had just played on DWTSMTB. These losses were foreshadowed on some of the songs from DWTSMTB, especially Temporary Nature. While not completely unexpected, these losses, so close together, were especially sobering. With that kind of loss, all of our life perspectives and the things we take for granted are shaken up and so many things – like Time – are reevaluated.
As she sang in Car Wheels about the house in Macon and a “child in the backseat, ’bout 4, 5 years”, she now sings in the opening line of the title song on Ghosts Of Highway 20, “I know this road like the back of my hand”, after nearly 60 years she is riding down that same stretch of highway – that same old road is still playing a role in her life.
But this record is also a tribute not just to all of those that we have lost – but also about surviving those losses and finding the strength to move on with all of those close to us who also are surviving those losses. My mother, who was with my father for nearly 60 years, inspires with her strength and love – and her faith and grace. The album’s closing song, Faith & Grace, is meant as a siren call to surviving the darkest times with those we love and drawing on strength from each other.

That song, in the end, is the song that turns this record into a different place. There is a darkness on this record, but there is also a light there at the end of a long night.

That’s ultimately this record is about, facing down that darkness and moving on through it. For Lucinda, these songs had to be written. They are songs of pure and naked catharsis. There were many tears shed during the making of this record, but they were tears of a healing that has just begun.
– Lucinda mgmt. (Tom)
‪#‎Hwy20InsideJobBlog‬‬

Track 1 – DUST
Dust was one of the most unlikely and unplanned song on the record. We had a lot of songs already recorded for what was to become the Ghosts Of Highway 20 but we wanted to get a couple more recorded. We got Bill Frisell to come back for two days back in April and Lucinda was working hard finishing up some songs so they were ready when he got to town. She had a couple songs ready but wanted to have a few more. Ironically, she was just starting to work on the song the Ghosts Of Highway 20, but it wasn’t going to be finished in time – which I was disappointed about at the time. Somewhere in the week before I had shown Lu her father’s poem Dust and just sort of casually told her that I thought it would make a great song. I had come across it several months before and it stuck with me that it had song potential. Well…it really resonated with her instantly and it just came to her and she had it done in a day – maybe two at the most. When we got into in the studio it just exploded into the very special song it became. It was amazing to witness. Two days before it hadn’t existed.
Musically, it has some amazing guitar interplay between Bill and Greg – they are telepathic together. They way they play off of each other on this song is just incredible. That was one of the reasons we decided to open the record with this song. We wanted to establish that the guitars on this record were going to be a musical center of the record – and we also wanted make a statement that this record was going to be musically different that Spirt Meets The Bone. We actually put Magnolia (which features Bill & Greg) at the end of Bone as a bit of a musical sneak preview of the next record. That is one of the ways that two records connect.

Track 2 – HOUSE OF EARTH
A great story is behind this song. A few years ago Lucinda met Woody Guthrie’s daughter, Nora at a festival in Germany. After the show Lucinda and Nora hung out and really hit it off. A couple of years later Nora sent the lyrics to this song – a copy of the original typewritten version that Woody had done in 1947. She sent along a note saying, “I can’t think of anyone better to try and put music to these words – and no better person to sing them. But I understand if it’s too dark”. Certainly not too dark for Lucinda, who was so honored that Nora asked. She did indeed put the melody and music to Woody’s words. A year or so later Lucinda was invited to a big Woody Guthrie tribute show at the Kennedy Center in DC. Nora introduced Lu by saying “this may be the first time in the history of the Kennedy Center that someone has had the courage to sing a song about a prostitute”. She was most likely right.
A few months later when we got in the studio with Bill Frisell, Greg Leisz and Lu’s band, we decide to try and cut a full band version. There were many nights in the studio that had some real magic going on -and this was one of them. The mood and the dark tone of the original lyrics were completely captured right from the opening strum of Lucinda’s acoustic, followed quickly by Bill and Greg’s electrics. It’s a pretty breathtaking moment at 2:10 when the guitars come crashing down as Lucinda sings the refrain. The way both guitars just circle around Lucinda’s vocal and then explode is just pure mastery. I think Woody would be happy.

Track 3 – I KNOW ALL ABOUT IT
This was recorded the very first night of the recording sessions that would become Down Where The Spirt Meets The Bone and Ghosts Of Highway 20. Lucinda had a whole bunch of songs ready for the sessions and we had split them up into a couple of groups. (For lack of better description we called them the “rock” and “non-rock” songs).
We knew we had Bill Frisell only for the first week of recording in October 2013 and we had one group of songs that we felt really connected lyrically (most of what is now the Ghosts Of Hwy 20 record) and musically that would be great with Mr. Frisell. Somehow, this song just fell into the groove right away. Lucinda got very excited and it came together very quickly.
That first night kind of set the tone for all of the recording we were about to do. We finished versions of both I Know All About it and It’s Gonna Rain (from Spirit Meet The Bone), and we were off to the races – we all went home from the studio that night incredibly excited. We ended up getting 11 songs done in the six days with Bill. This song is about an old friend of Lucinda’s from her younger days and she’s never told me exactly who it was. When I look at some of the characters that run thru these songs – the troubled girl in this song, the prostitute in House Of Earth, the factory worker in Factory to name a couple…they are type of people that become the ghosts in our lives.

Track 4 – PLACE IN MY HEART
Every time I listen to this I am struck by how it at once feels so current, almost modern, with all the space created by just Bill’s and Greg’s guitars and Lucinda’s voice. But at the same time it feels like a song that emerged from somewhere in the past – almost as if Billie Holiday sang it – as Van Morrison used to say: “It came in through the ether”. Lucinda sings this with such a delicacy – much the same way that Miles Davis would play the gentle ballad like “When I Fall In Love”; she has gained such extreme control of her vibrato and uses it to such subtle effect here, much the way Miles would use one note at the end of a phrase to such emotional effect.
The thing that I just recently thought about is how Lucinda has several songs that seem to be about one thing, but subconsciously they also become about something else. She has often told the story about the song Car Wheels On A Gravel Road and when her father first heard it he knew it was about him, and when he mentioned that Lucinda realized that it really was but she wasn’t conscious of it when she wrote it. It was just recently that I realized that this could be one of those songs. On the surface it’s a classic sweet Lucinda love song but underneath it could could be a love letter to The South of her youth, which of course is a big theme on this record. On an album that is so much about a sense of place and time, the title of the song alone, with the word place, seems to be an unconscious reference to The South. Just a beautiful song and one of Lucinda’s favorites.
Postscript – of course after I had already written the above words, somebody asked Lucinda about this song and she said “Yeah, that’s another song about my brother”. I had never heard her say that before…

Track 5 – DEATH CAME
I don’t know where this song came from. What I’m saying is that there are times when Lucinda comes up with something and I almost wonder if she is channeling something. Lucinda first cut this on a handheld recorder in the kitchen of our house. She would record songs and bring them for me to burn on a CD so she could listen to them. When she brought this up and I listened to it for the first time, it was almost spooky – where this came from, I don’t know.
If Place In The Heart felt like it came from the 1940’s, then this one felt like it came from straight from Appalachia around the 20’s – like a lost song from Harry Smith’s legendary boxset, The Anthology Of American Folk Music. Dare I say it was ghostly and I actually wondered if she would be able to capture the quality of that little home demo once we got in the studio – or if it would work with a band.
As mentioned previously, we cut live in the studio and there were moments when songs ended and everyone would just be dead silent – a silence of awe. This song was one of those. I keep saying it but I don’t know where she pulls a song like this from. I’m not sure that I want to know. But there’s no one else on this planet that could write a song like this. No one.

Track 6 – DOORS OF HEAVEN
Sometimes it’s the songs that you think are going to be the easiest that end up taking the most time. And that was the case with this song. We’ve only had a couple of times where a song took more than a day to get it down and this was one of them. Lucinda’s home demo was done more in a pure delta blues style and she had kind of dismissed it because she didn’t want it to be Get Right With God Part 2. That was what proved to be a big part of the challenge – she was determined to make it something different and after a lot of effort…I think we nailed it. I love how it starts with just Lucinda solo on the electric and then Greg’s slide comes in and then Bill. Lu is very self deprecating about her guitar playing but she has a very unique fingerpicking style and a really great right (rhythm) hand and she really shows it off here. Greg and Bill really get going towards the end – Greg references some other song that I can’t quite name at the 4:10 mark and then at the 4:53 mark he plays something that almost feels Eastern. The whole outro section is just remarkable. Again, on the surface it seems like a groovy little blues jam but when you listen close to what Bill and Greg are doing they take it to somewhere. Then, at the end, they fall away and there’s Lu still playing that rhythm that she started the song with and then you realize she was there the whole time. That’s why we made the decision to leave all the playing in there. There would be some people that would feel the need to edit out that ending – or do a fade (except Lu doesn’t allow fades). When you’ve got musicians of this caliber playing live in the studio and creating pure magic it would be sacrilege to edit it out. We wanted everyone to hear what we were hearing.

Track 7 – LOUISIANA STORY
I was on the phone with one pf the people involved with the recording of this song and he said “I have listened to this song a hundred times but some reason today as I was listening I started crying, it’s just devastating”.
This is a song that contains some of Lucinda’s very best writing, incredibly cinematic. Actually I feel that this isn’t really a song at all – it’s an incantation.
It starts and ends with a simple but telling verse :
Down in the deep south
When I was growing up
Looking back on sweetness
Looking back on the rough
Each verse moves thru memories of a southern childhood, starting out almost whimsical:
Swatting at a fly
Hearing the neighbors talk
It’s so hot you could fry
An egg on the sidewalk
But then things take a very dark turn. In some ways this Louisiana Story is a bookend to Lucinda’s song Bus To Baton Rouge, and it is Lucinda at her most personal – it is a story that has been within her for a very long time, and when she finally got it finished I think it was a moment of catharsis and resolution. She tried a shorter more traditional version that was musically at the other end of the spectrum. And it just didn’t match the emotional impact of this version. When we recorded this in the studio, it was incredibly, done in one take. There was such a quiet dark vibe in the studio, Lucinda started singing we thought Lucinda almost went into a trance. When it ended there was nothing but silence and the sound of Lucinda’s tears coming from the vocal booth.
There was also personal resolution reconciliation and catharsis.

Track 8 – THE GHOSTS OF HIGHWAY 20
This one almost didn’t make it in time. Even though the idea for it had been being discussed for a couple of years – ever since the memorable tour bus ride home from Macon going west down I-20 where we saw all the consecutive exits to Vicksburg, Jackson, and Monroe – all significant signposts in Lucinda’s life.
Some time later when the floodgates opened and Lucinda started writing all the songs that would become DWTSMB and Ghosts Of Hwy 20, so many songs came rushing out and this one just got lost in the flood so to speak. From time to time I would remind her of this one as I just always had a gut feeling that it could be a very special song – but it was to push her on it because so many other songs kept coming. Fast forward to April of 2015 and we managed to get the very busy Mr. Frisell back in the studio for two more days and my real goal was to get this song recorded even if we got nothing else. Right. It was one of those best laid plans kind of things and Lu was working on this but it just wasn’t coming. Instead she wrote Dust and finished If My Love Could Kill and another song that didn’t make the record. At this point, time was running out for recording any more songs for Ghosts before we had to put it to bed.
In this time frame, summer of 2015, she did write If There’s A Heaven and we knew we had to get that one recorded so we knew were going to have one more recording session, which we scheduled and I told Lu that we simply had to get this song done before that recording session. She said “I will, I will, you know me, I will get it done”. And she added “If you have any ideas and want to help me with it, please feel free”. We went to dinner that night and just talked about the perspective of the song and ideas. She said, “Write down some of your ideas and let me see them”. The next day I gave her a bunch of things that I had jotted down and a couple of lines clicked and she went to work on it. Then it just came out the very next day and she came to me and said “I think I’ve got it and I think it’s going to be really special”. She never says that.
I have to add right here that it is an amazing thing to see, when she gets locked in and it just comes out of her like it had been there the whole time, and then, boom, there it is. I don’t know how anyone can do that so spontaneously and have the entire song be born as a nearly whole completed piece. She will always tell me. “Just because I’m not sitting with a pen and paper doesn’t mean I’m not working on a song”. After seeing it happen several times it’s hard to argue with her. They aren’t all born like that but more than a few are.
Okay, got a little off track. She knew this one was so special that she wanted me to hear it right then and there in the kitchen – usually she wants to put it down on the portable recorder and have me upload it to a CD, but not this time. This time it’s gotta be right now.
It was unbelievable how that song just came exploding out of her. It was something I’ll never forget. After three years, she had it and it was everything and more that I hoped it could be. It covers everything: life, loss, mortality. It is part Flannery O’Connor and part Woody Guthrie. It echoes out across the land of the blues and in the end it gets back to “my saving grace is in the Ghosts Of Highway 20”. The layers of the lyrics run very deep.
Just a day or two later we were in the studio recording it. Unfortunately, with his tight schedule, we couldn’t get Mr. Frisell back for the two days, and he so badly wanted to come back but it just didn’t work. Luckily, our good friend Val McCallum was in town and available. Val was the perfect fit because he and Greg Leisz have played a lot together in Jackson Browne’s touring band-and they both happened to be in town. A real stroke of luck.
With all the excitement about this song it came together very quickly in the studio and Lu was so dialed in on the vocal. The song is just filled with great highlights from the way she holds out the word tears at the 1:30 mark, to the defiance in the line “who I am now is who I was then” at 2:40. The resignation of the line “every exit leaves a little death” at 4:29 and then as the guitars are building up at 5:47 she yells over the top of them “ yeah” and again at 6:39. When we heard her do them that night in the studio it was exhilarating. Those “yeahs” were pure moments of sheer release – the release of all those ghosts.

Track 9 – BITTER MEMORY
Bitter Memory is a little song has been kicking around for a couple years. Lu played it live quite a bit in 2013 and then a much different version was recorded by the house band (featuring Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys) for the second season soundtrack to the Nashville TV series. I still don’t know the whole story but apparently this song became a bit of a flashpoint as to which direction the music would go in the early seasons of the show and apparently it got contentious. But that is for someone else’s book.
She was working on this around the same time as Louisiana Story and I thought it was the simpler flipside of that song, but she said “no, it’s just what it is, a song about a very bad relationship”. This was the other “simple” song that took significantly longer to get it just right. We tried it with different tempos and with bass and drums but this one with just Lu, Bill, and Greg is where we ended up. While her vocal is absolutely growling, the thing that always stands out to me is how hard she is hitting the chords on the rhythm guitar. Hers is the first guitar you hear and all the way thru right to very end she is just thrashing that guitar. Talk about real live bleeding fingers. This is also a good example of a song that is twisted around little bit to become something more than what is appears to be – for example we again left in the extended guitar playing at the end because Bill and Greg were on fire. If I’m not mistaken, at around 2:40, you can hear him quote from the old Sun rockabilly song Red Hot by Billy Lee Riley – which is of course completely appropriate on this Sun-ish track – in the rest of the guitar section you can hear them throwing in some very off the cuff riffs. I think there is also one point where you can hear, just for a few seconds, something almost eastern in there – they were just having some real fun on this one. That is what I mean when I say that throughout this record there are moments like that where there is a little more going on beneath the surface than what is at first heard.

Track 10 – FACTORY
There were some nights in the studio when we would get one song finished and Lu would want to keep going but she wouldn’t want to start something new that she didn’t think we could finish that night. As a result – we would record a song that she liked or a song that we had played live a few times. We had played this Bruce Springsteen song several times in the previous year so everyone knew it well and we cut this in probably less than an hour. Bill Frisell’s guitar is so haunting and just perfectly conveys the mood of the song. He just pulled that opening riff out of thin air and all of us in the control room just looked at each other with amazement.
A few months after recording this my father (Lucinda’s father in-law) passed away after a long struggle with dementia. He loved music, which meant my interest in music started very young – we always had some great records around the house. He worked for 31 years at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota. The line “men walk through these gates with death in their eyes” is only too true. I grew up seeing it firsthand. This song became a tribute to him, but I didn’t know if it should be on the record based on what it meant to me. Thankfully, I was quickly outvoted by everyone else involved with the record – most importantly Lucinda. They all felt that this song absolutely had to be on the record and I’m glad they did. In memory of Cal Overby 1933-2014.

Track 11 – CAN’T CLOSE THE DOOR ON LOVE
Lucinda had started working on this as a song for another artist who wanted something edgier than they had previously done. Lu calls it writing on demand, and it’s something really hadn’t done before so it was a bit of a first try. The project ended up not happening (to this day) and Lu recorded a simple little home demo and the song was just put on the back burner after that. In fact it was almost completely forgotten about and wasn’t high the list of potential songs to be recorded.
One night in the studio, out of the blue, Lu just wanted to take a pass at this song and it just completely blossomed into the version you hear now. At one point, we briefly debated whether this one belonged on the record – but we decided that it provided a somewhat different counterpoint to anything else on the record and we missed it when we took it out of the sequence. And of course – the guitars of Bill & Greg just play off each other and drive the song to a much different place than it started and it became the biggest surprise of the record.

Track 12 – IF MY LOVE COULD KILL
I mentioned earlier my amazement of how some of Lucinda’s songs are just born as a whole finished song. This was not one of those songs. Lucinda worked on this one off an on for the better part of two years wanting to get it just right. Her father, the poet Miller Williams passed away on Jan.1, 2015 and she hadn’t finished it.
After he passed, this song about his battle with Alzheimer’s took on another dimension and became very important to Lucinda. It had to be something that would be true to his spirit and memory. Dylan Thomas once wrote “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” – and her vocal on this, one of her most nakedly emotional ever, is in that sense her raging against the dying of the light. It goes without saying that there were a lot of tears after this one.
I have been mentioning, probably to the point of redundancy, the guitar playing on this record but I also can’t fail to mention the brilliant playing of Lucinda’s rhythm section David Sutton and Butch Norton. There are a lot of different “grooves” and “feels” on this record and this song is a perfect example. If I recall correctly, Butch was playing the percussive part on this with hand drums. It was the perfect subtle feel for this track.

Track 13 – IF THERE’S A HEAVEN
This song and the Ghosts Of Highway 20 were the last two songs written for the album and just barely made it under the wire before the album had to be put to bed. Actually, Lu’s one last goal was to finish Ghosts once and for all and then out of nowhere this one just appeared as she was finishing that one. I shudder to think of what this record would be without those two songs. I think this song more than any other, was Lu’s way of coming to some kind terms with Miller’s passing.
Miller used to love to tell the story about the time he met Hank Williams in Lake Charles less than a month before Lucinda was born, so it’s very fitting that this song would arrive – as if it was a gift from Hank himself. The way the song just came out of the blue almost mystically answers the very question that Lucinda is asking in the song.
Miller loved Hank and Lucinda has always seen comforting irony in the fact that Miller passed on January 1, the same day that Hank passed. There is such a bittersweetness to this song but it is not without hope, albeit one lined with resignation. A simple hope of a daughter and her father.
In memory of Miller Williams, 1930-2015.

Track 14 – FAITH AND GRACE
This was easily the most exhilarating and rollercoaster night of recording. It was the last night of the first week of recording we had with Bill Frisell (Oct 2013). We had already had a magical week, recording 10 songs in 5 days but we wanted to get at least one more before Bill had to leave. Unfortunately neither Greg Leisz or Lu’s drummer Butch Norton we’re available that Saturday night, but we decided to march on. We had long wanted to experiment with some Jamaican grooves on a song and I had a friend in LA who has serious connections in that world and the next thing I knew we had legendary Peter Tosh/Bob Marley drummer Carlton “Santa” Davis as well as legendary Jamaican hand drummer Ras Michael. (As a sidebar, Santa Davis was in the room when Peter Tosh was assassinated and was wounded himself. That is some serious musical history.)
By now Lucinda is completely worried about what exactly to record with them. She just kept saying “I don’t know what to do – I don’t really know anything about this”. I pointed out to her that there is very much a spiritual thread that runs between delta blues, something she obviously understands and knows a great deal about, and real roots mountain reggae. Ras Michael had also explored those connections on his records. We also had a record at the house that we both love by Mississippi Fred McDowell and his wife recorded in a church in Mississippi (highly recommended). There is an old traditional song on it called Just A Little More Faith & Grace, and with a little prodding I convinced Lu that it would be a perfect song to try in this context.
By the time we got to the studio she finally relented, but the stress level in the was sky high. Everyone is kind of waiting and wondering what is happening – looking back we were about five minutes from the train completely going off the tracks. So Lucinda sits down on the spot and rewrites the lyrics to what she wanted them to say. Okay, okay, we’re making progress…train not off the tracks yet.
Lucinda goes in the vocal booth and everyone else is finally ready to go. Lucinda starts singing by herself trying to find a rhythm to the new words and everyone just kind of falls in and follows her. Lu has now calmed down and is starting to see how this just might work. After just a couple more half starts to figure out the right key etc. we’re really ready to go. Santa sets the groove and Lucinda starts up again singing the opening lines “All i need is a little more faith and grace…” and what proceeds to happen next is one of the most extraordinary things that everyone involved had ever been a part of. Santa and David Sutton just completely lock in on the groove and Bill is starting to add different layers and Lucinda is just completely getting into it. Then, she starts to really go off, completely letting go and going into something that could be called a gospel trance – I guess you could say she was full on testifyin’ and the more she just continued to improvise like a jazz sax player and everyone just follows right with her. This goes on for nearly 20 minutes and builds to big mountain of rhythm and sound and words, just incredibly transcendent, that’s the only way to say it. When it finally ended no one said a word -not a sound – everyone knew we had just experienced something incredibly special. After a minute or so of stunned silence, someone said “well why doesn’t everyone come in the control room and give it a listen”. That was great because no one was thinking “Okay, let’s get take two”.
After one playback everyone just flipped out and I will never forget it – there was such a buzz in that studio – an awful lot of real love between all involved. Santa Davis said it was one of the most incredible thing had ever played on. Ras Michael, who also heads up the Rastafarian church in LA, came up to Lucinda with a big smile on his face and in a guttural growl, said one word as he patted his heart. “Gawwwd” and as Lu has later told the story, “sounded like it came from 400 years ago”. There was so much excitement that something very unique had just been created. It was something completely spiritual – something that was beyond anything you could call a song – someone mentioned Coltrane’s Love Supreme as a comparison.
And that was it – one incredible take. From near train wreck to pure magic in 20 minutes. There was no sense in recording anything else that night as it would never be topped. We ordered food and celebrated and listened to it over and over. As I’m writing this now I still can’t really believe what happened that night.
Just like that, the first week – our long planned week with Mr. Frisell was done, and what a week it was. 11 songs recorded in 6 days. Although I used the word magic above – nothing else really describes it. It really was magical.
Two days later we would go in with a whole different cast of characters and start working on what would become Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone.

Faith & Grace Postscript:
At 20 minutes long we debated long and hard what to do with this “piece”. Should it be on the album; should it be presented on it’s own? For the longest time I was determined to put the full length version on the album but to do so meant we would have had to add a third record to the vinyl package and we just didn’t want to do that again. We already had 88 minutes of music and we didn’t want to edit that down to a long single CD – so we made the decision that the best way to present it was two separate 40+ minute CDs, but we didn’t think of it as a double CD and we chose not to market it as that. But, another triple vinyl just didn’t seem realistic so we had no real choice but to edit Faith & Grace down a little. We ended up taking out about a 6 minute section to cut it down enough so we could just fit the entire album on two vinyls. Other than taking out that section, what you hear is what happened. There were no overdubs later etc. We didn’t want to touch a thing. We will release the full version, most likely digitally, because it really needs to be heard in it’s entirety. We will also be putting out a blue vinyl 12” remix single for Record Store Day in April. That is going to blow some minds