What was not to like? It was such a pretty song, such crisp little blue-grassy turns in the key of G, and it had been such a bad fight. The latest, I'm sorry to say, in a string of bad fights, and it hurt bad also because I was trying to follow Jesus, and so I was also ashamed that I was yelling at a person I loved. All a long time ago, such a long long time ago, and people have moved on, and the children in the middle of the angry parents, those children who perhaps suffered the most are now adults themselves, and if they don't want to talk about it, who's to blame them?
When the image came though of the little brown bird stuck in the tree, I went, "Oh yeah," and then when the joke came out at the end about how we'd get married and "...all our kids get little brown wings..." I thought, "OK, now I can take this to April and Rich and Bill." Sometime in 1998, I think; maybe that night at the Dublin Pub I played through it for them. This song also neatly models something I learned writing poetry back in the late Cretaceous Age: that making art can help manage pain. Jesus, and love do win out in this song, though it is a mixed business and a near thing, much like the rest of my life.