“I wrote ‘Sam Stone’ and ‘Hello in There’ on the route,” he told the Tribune in 2010. “When you’re a mailman on the same route for a couple weeks there is nothing to do. You just try to drop the right mail at the right house and make sure you’re on the right street. … I likened the mail route to being in a library without any books. You just had time to be quiet and think, and that’s where I would come up with a lot of songs. If the song was any good I could remember it later and write it down.”