Tune Info: These are both songs I wrote. "Rio Grande" was written when I was living in Mexico (note that's OLD Mexico, the Spanish-speaking foreign country, not the state I currently live in). I went down to teach school and live outside the USA for a while, and hopefully learn another language and have a little adventure. I did learn a lot, and in some ways, it was a very good experience, but I honestly was very naive about how different things would be and the kinds of problems that could happen. My wife got dengue fever, our 6-month-old son got salmonella, our pickup truck was stolen and the insurance company refused to pay anything close to what it was worth. The work was tedious and boring, and all the unpleasantness put a huge strain on my marriage (we eventually divorced). One night, after feeling like I was at the end of my rope, I was sitting on our patio under a moonlit night sky and dreaming about being back home, and this song more or less just popped into my head. I didn't write it as much as it just happened. It took less than 20 minutes to complete it.

"Jake McCoy" tells a story I heard in a creative writing class. A young woman in the class wrote it up as a short story and read it to the class. The sheriff was her great grandfather, and it really did take place in the Bear River mountains of Northern Utah, in a canyon called Steam Mill Hollow (it's up Logan Canyon if anyone is interested). I took poetic license with a couple of facts (there was no shooting and no one died), but otherwise, it recounts what she said.

I had a lot of problems recording the tunes this time around due to recording equipment failure and a still-nagging right shoulder injury that makes it hard to position the guitar comfortably. I hope folks will forgive the imperfections and enjoy the tunes for what they are.