This is the first time I recorded this song that I later produced as a full-on multi-track effort. It is mostly true that the very best songs hold up really well as demos, not just when they are fully polished for release.

After several years of not recording demos, riffs, or melody fragments, I asked Mary for a microcassette recorder for Christmas, and received the one I wanted on December 25, 1986. It couldn’t have been more timely as I was about to enter a very prolific creative period, not just in music, but in the quest for personal identity and in the development of the Dramatica theory of narrative structure.

I recorded all of that in about fifty hours of tape spanning almost a decade. Then I ran out of things to say. For a while…