Seriously, I used to smoke. For all you youngsters out there, a whole lot of us did. It was the ’80s, we were dumb, and we smoked. A lot.
I smoked, on and off (trying to quit) until 1997. I was really glad when I finally quit. It ain’t good for you. When you are a smoker, it’s a part of the fabric of your life in a really fundamental way. It’s a reflexive habit, and the ritual of smoking becomes part of your mental landscape.
So in 1996, when I finally wrote a song I would actually dare to play in front of other people, smoking was a central part of the song. Songs come in a bunch of different ways- mumbling along to a riff on the guitar, working out a lyric idea in full, having a half of a something that later on another half of a something seems to complete in some weird way. And then sometimes a song just falls out of your head. Later, I learned that is the most rare form for a song to arrive.
It was September of 1996. I had spent the summer working in Alaska with a ski industry buddy of mine. Things just played out for us in really cool ways, and we ended up working for this great company called Alaska Wildland Adventures -they’re still up there and I think fondly of those folks every day. We made some life long friends and had cool adventures.
But the season ends early in Alaska, so in mid-September we headed out in my buddy’s 1986 GMC High Sierra truck with busted rear spring to return to Colorado. We didn’t know if we would get back to Alaska or see any of those wonderful folks again- we did. We were young, and transient, and we smoked. So you tend to count driving distance in cigarettes.
Somewhere between Glenallen and Tok (look it up, it’s how you get out of Alaska by road), the chorus of this song started rolling through my head, and I scribbled it down in my dashboard notebook, along with some other lines that seemed to work. It all came in a rush, and I was in a moving vehicle, so I didn’t do a lot of thinking- I just got as much as I could down on paper between the huge bumps that frost heaves make in the road up there.
Those lines sat in my notebook for about two days, until we camped somewhere in British Columbia. Don’t ask me where, we did a lot of rambling in those days. Sitting on a stump by our campfire I pulled out my guitar, the notebook and a pen, and worked up the melody and chord progression.
And that, as they say, was mostly that. I think later that fall I might have made a few edits to the lyric to make it sing a little better, but not much. It was the first song I wrote that I would actually play in front of other people.
The next summer, back in Alaska, I had a chance to play it for the folks I worked with up there and they really liked it. And while I learned later that songs falling out of your head is a rare and precious experience, it did give me the confidence to keep trying.
A few weeks back I broke that song out for some folks and their response was really positive, which got me thinking about that first song in a whole new way. I might take for a spin more often. In the meantime, here’s the whole thing if you’re interested. -JS
