In the Hills

Song story & origins

Introduction

In the Hills was written around 1997 and first released on Circuitous (2004). It later returned on the 2015 remaster (paired with Before the Great Divide), and I also issued a purely instrumental version on the 2011 soundtrack for an educational documentary about Tȟašúŋke Witkó (Crazy Horse), then remastered that instrumental again for The Road Behind (2015). The piece exists in both forms because it began as a lyric-driven song and later proved itself as an evocative landscape without words.

Where the song came from

We had just bought a four-acre lot in Mountain Plains 2 above Spearfish and were planning to build in the summer of 1997. I was finishing my first year teaching at Black Hills State, we had two little girls, and life felt stressful. After a small argument—exactly the kind young couples with young kids tend to have—I drove up to the lot to think, trying to understand what it meant to be a good husband and father. That hillside is where this song arrived. The title names that setting: I went “into the hills” looking for solace and wisdom from the place itself.

The images are literal: there was a dry streambed on the property—no water for years, but the polished stones remained, a reminder of the river’s care and a promise that it might run again. A storm cloud was hanging in the west; the rumbles were a little scary, and yet the cloud also looked like mercy coming—lowlands filling, levees shifting, what’s stuck moving again. That’s the relationship hope inside the verse: even if we’ve hit a dry spell, the season can turn.

Recording story (2002–2004 → 2011 → 2015)

I began recording the song in 2002 in our Spearfish basement studio—mostly guitar with a rough vocal—but then we moved. In Buffalo Gap, Texas, I never managed to set up a studio, so the track languished on my Roland digital recorder. A later move to Canyon, Texas finally gave me a room again—an underground storm-shelter space we’d sought out because our daughter Megan was understandably anxious about tornadoes. In that concrete room (which turned out to be a perfect little studio) I pulled up the old files, re-did the vocals, and added wooden flute, which opened the song and took me sonically home to Spearfish. Finishing it there was deeply therapeutic.

Years later, when I needed underscore for the Crazy Horse documentary, I’d already built a backing track for live performance; that bed became the instrumental version (2011). I kept using that instrumental in other projects, so when I remastered a batch of instrumentals into The Road Behind (2015), I included it alongside the 2015 remaster of the full song on the Circuitous / Before the Great Divide double release.

What the song is saying

The lyric balances weather and marriage, place and person. Orion, dry river, storm cloud, autumn coats—they’re all ways of hearing the land speak when you’re too far apart to hear each other. The refrain lines wrestle with a familiar ache: I love you / you love me—so why is this so hard? The closing movement turns from thinking back to action: apology, presence, coming home. The hills helped me remember what mattered; the last verse is me getting off the ridge and going back.

Music and arrangement

The guitar framework is steady and open. The wooden flute (tracked in the Canyon studio) creates the song’s lift—air and distance—and became the bridge to a wordless arrangement for film. The two versions—the lyric song and the instrumental—are the same landscape seen two ways: one with a story walking through it, one with light and wind only.

Why it stays with me

Because it’s the sound of a turning—out of pride and isolation, toward listening and return. The place that gave me the song is the place I went back to, and the song still takes me there when I need to remember how to come home.

Source: New Music Memoir (1).docx