It’s May, 2010. I’ve just graduated college from Vermont and I’m home for the summer noodling away on my acoustic guitar. I’m tucked away in my childhood bedroom, sitting in my creaky swivel office chair. I’d been playing these guitar chords over and over again all day. At the time, I was really into finger picking on the guitar, and found these four chords I always kept coming back to. I always played it, and had started humming this sweet melody line in my head that I really liked the sentiment of. I also loved the slide guitar at the time, and had another sweet southern twangy melody in mind that felt like the it could be added as the main melodic hook of the song. I remember being so excited, because a real song was unfolding! (It’s rare when a really good song comes along!) I remember being giddy and doing everything I could to try and capture the magic. So I threw a long lasso around this big blue whale of a song, jumped in and went for it.
I called the song “Jonah and the whale” because in that special place in time, I was also being swallowed up by an energy that was pulling me into a new chapter of life. I was barely twenty-two and leaving home for the first time. Something up to that point I’d never really done in my life. It was so strange knowing that I wouldn’t be living near my twin brother and all of my family in North Carolina anymore. This song captured that moment of my life, venturing out into that big ocean of life on my own raft. I love looking back on this song, it makes me really proud of younger myself. This tune was a really sweet gift from somewhere, I don’t know where, but when it arrives you just thank the muses for getting you this far. It was the first song I ever wrote that made me feel proud, and finally feel able call myself a songwriter.