The second track on our new record, The Kicking Mule, is called "Birch Meadows, 1991," and there is a reference to "The Dance" in the lyrics. Birch Meadows is the name of the trailer park where I grew up in upstate New York. Lyrically, it deals with the brutal divorce I watched my parents go through when I was a kid. Garth Brooks' debut album had come out a year or two earlier, and that cassette got a lot of play around the house that year.

My mom took me to Arkansas to stay with my aunt that summer, and when we got back home my dad had left all these notes taped up all over the trailer, saying things like "welcome home," "I missed you," "I'm sorry" … my mom went around and tore them all down, one by one. Later that night when my dad came home from work, my mother told him she wanted a divorce. I heard my father crying in their room, begging her to change her mind, though at the time I didn't understand. They told me together at dinner later that night. It was a shock, but I remember that the hardest part was seeing how much it hurt my father. He was sobbing uncontrollably at the dinner table, tears and snot running down his face. I remember being angry at my mother then, silently blaming her for destroying our family. Many months later, when I was visiting my father in jail, I had a different perspective. My mother had tolerated as much as she could for as long as she could, and it was more than she should have.

I don't remember when it was exactly, but one day around that time I sat and listened to that Garth Brooks tape by myself. I didn't really care for much of it, except for "The Dance." I'd probably heard that song a hundred times, but I'd never really listened to it. This time was different. This time those words shot right through me, and all of a sudden I understood my father's pain, his anger, his regret. I was still too young to have experienced heartbreak myself, but this song made me feel what my father must have been feeling, and eventually it allowed me to forgive him for the things he did. I don't listen to this song very often, but when I do, it wakes me up. There is something pure and perfect about the way it captures those core elements of love and loss, and how the razor-sharp accuracy of those feeling can be energizing in their own punishing way.