It was August, 21, 2017, the day of the big solar eclipse. My horoscope that day said to keep pen and paper nearby for sudden flashes of inspiration. I did and this song came. I heard the latter part of the chorus first. “Tonight, I lay my body down alone, I know you’re coming home.” There was that first night, the night he died, that I laid down to sleep without him. And, Joe was going back to source, home. The rest of the song came very quickly. I pulled from our conversations from his last days to early on in our friendship to communing with him after death.
I wrote it on the piano in Bflat and knew it would be played on guitar. I recorded it on voice memo and sent to Rocky and Chris with instructions it was a finger-picking guitar similar to Jackson Browne’s These Days. Chris recorded the guitar at my house with Mike Landis. The piano was an afterthought at the end of the day. It’s a melody that is in the same realm as Dvorjak’s “Going Home” from the New World Symphony and one that I think Joe would have loved whistling.