I suspect that one of the reasons I don’t get tired of playing “Sunny Georgia” is that I always really liked the lyrical construction and the music feels like an old friend. It’s a freedom I’ve never felt and sort of envy. Chris once told me that Hank Williams Sr was the same way, borrowing music freely from other songs and adapting his own lyrics. I’m always afraid to sound too much like other, more famous songs. It’s one of Chris’s genius attributes that he does not realize he’s borrowing from other songs, which is what frees him up to write familiar sounding melodies and chord progressions. The walking bass line in the song is ripped straight from “ Stray Cat Strut“. I told Chris once that it was one of the few songs I never got tired of. I wrote lyrics for four of the 11 songs on that record, but “Sunny Georgia” was always my favorite to play. It must not have been solid enough to make it on to that first record, but it was the lead-off tune on the next record, “ Too Many Treasures“. I think Chris and Doug Trail-Johnson worked up the melody/chords together, and I remember them playing it for the band at Chris’s house at a practice night. I wrote the lyrics to “Sunny Georgia” in the autumn of 1998 and gave them to Chris. One such time was that original recording session at the First Baptist church building in Lowertown Saint Paul, and I’m forever grateful she made it there. Heidi O and I played music together at Heidi VS’s wedding in the late summer of 1998, and it was so magical that we tried to play together several more times before life logistics intervened. Heidi and I met through our mutual friend Heidi Van Schooten. I will mention Heidi Olson and her beautiful violin playing on that first record, which we called the white album because it originally had no art or title, just a white cardboard sleeve. A good origin story I’ll tell another time. There’s a good origin story for how Chris Larson and I met, and how I got Peter Rasmussen involved, and how one thing led to another until we found ourselves setting up mics in the church baptistry on a cold Saturday in the winter of 1998/99. I don’t think I’m overstating things to claim that the band would not have made any records at all, and maybe never started a record label, if I hadn’t wandered into the church one evening in the fall of 1996, then again in the summer of 1997. We were the host band at the House of Mercy church in Saint Paul. The House of Mercy Band recorded several albums from 1999 to 2010. Instead I wrote a lot of songs, and then moved back to Saint Paul and re-joined the House of Mercy Band, and we made some records. I never ended up taking any classes at Emory. She’s in Sydney, Australia, and thanks to the magic of the internet her voice was in my ears as I mixed this one. I am especially grateful to my friend Andrea who contributed background vocals to this track. So it was fun to make that connection 23 years later. I realized, recording this last winter, that I had never told my sister about “Abilene” or played it for her. I set it to music a week later, after I finished my trip to Atlanta (because yes, we had to drive back across Texas just a few days later). I wrote down the lyrics to this song at our next stop, when we traded seats. Hours and hours of straight lines and, if I’m lucky, stars. The buzz of the overhead lights at the empty gas station, and the moths trying to stay warm. There’s something about the hours between midnight and dawn, the small hours, that gets me pensive. Puts the pedal down and locks in and goes. I don’t know if you’ve ever driven east to west across Texas, but that is one really wide state of the union. I think we drove overnight so we could arrive on New Year’s Eve. My younger cousin was the first of our generation to get married, and we were going to celebrate her, and my grandfather’s birthday. I stopped in Arkansas on the way, left my car parked outside my sister’s double-wide trailer, got in her car and we drove together to Tucson, Arizona for a family reunion. I was going to enroll at Emory’s Candler School of Theology and work on a master’s degree. Just after Christmas in 1997, I loaded up all my worldly possessions into my 1989 Honda Civic (which got 40+ miles to the gallon even back then!) and drove south from Saint Paul toward Atlanta.
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