Smokey Mountain Night is probably my favorite song that I wrote. I thought it was this real breakthrough in where I wanted to take my writing, but then a bunch of shit happened to fuck that all up.
It came to me while I was on this little Southern tour of a bunch of places in Memphis, then swinging through Louisville, then into North Carolina for a bunch of shows. The idea come to me after Memphis driving from Louisville to Boone, NC.
A lot of it actually happened, including the first line, “some things are better written, than said face to face”when I stayed with someone I'd been corresponding with for years to find out they weren't anything like who I thought they were.
The weird thing about the internet especially pre-Facebook is that no one ever looks like their name.
So anyway, the idea came to me I think driving down these totally insane often scary mountain roads in North Carolina. So I had it in my mind for maybe two weeks and one night in came out really fast.
I'm a person. A person who basically prefers for the most part to be alone and to be left alone. Because you basically have to be alone in order to create. To do what I really do writing a song like Smokey Mountain Night for instance I have to connect to something. It's never been a thing where I wake up and say, "oh I'm going to write five songs today" or some shit like that. It doesn't work that way. I can turn it on and off to write an article, but like the truly inspired articles, the songs that last come from somewhere else, almost as if I am just the conduit, and they are writing themselves. When that happens I know it's really happening.