Signs

Song story & origins

Introduction

Signs was written in 2010 and first released on Letting the Sunlight Back In. It’s a story song and a road song—me, my father, and my younger daughter on a long drive from South Dakota down through Colorado to New Mexico. It carries the tenderness of three lives at different ages riding together, the ache of old wounds reopened, and the small mercies you can feel without having to say them out loud.

The road behind the road

The trip sits in a bigger story. Years earlier (2005) I’d been fired from directing a religious youth camp in New Mexico after doctrinal/scriptural differences with leadership hardened into personnel decisions. It was painful to watch people we loved divide into those who opposed us, those who quietly cried but did nothing, and a few who remained friends. We moved north, but our youngest still had deep ties to friends at that camp. We told her she could keep going through her senior year if she wanted, and in 2010—likely her last year—my father offered to ride with me for the long delivery and the longer list of emotions the place brought up. We drove past the signs that sell each state to you (New Mexico’s “Land of Enchantment,” Colorado “Colorful”), and let the roadside do most of the talking.

I’ve written a lot about aging. Even in 2010, I was noticing it in all directions—my dad napping in the passenger seat, me saying aloud, “so am I,” and my daughter seventeen in the back, headphones on, somewhere between childhood and flight. We measured the miles in bathrooms and cups of coffee. Underneath the small talk my dad and I both knew what the drive meant, but we didn’t hash it. Instead, he reached across and rubbed my neck, like the time I was twenty-one and briefly broken after my fiancée and I split. Back then I remember touch more than words; on this trip the touch said everything. We dropped her off—sleeping bag and guitar—and watched the parents hugging children as the sun broke out. On the way home the peaks were finally visible. We are what we are, not what we were going to be. That’s the pivot the song insists on.

How the song was built

This one began as an instrumental. I laid down two tracks of classical guitar I loved, then wrote and recorded the story vocal over them. That gave the lyric its talked-through cadence—like telling a friend a story while the landscape rolls by. It also created a performer's puzzle: I hadn’t co-composed voice and hands, so I had to learn how to play and sing it live. Over the years I worked out an approach that feels right, and I’ve performed it often (several phone-captured takes are floating around). For the 2010 studio version I added a soft, dobro-like bed with electric guitar + pedal to get the steel-guitar shimmer the story seemed to want. A 2015 live release captures the song’s bones, and in 2020 I recorded a Tiny Desk Contest version in my office—one-take on the phone—with a little improvised whistle break in the middle.

What the song is saying

The signs are literal—highway markers and booster slogans—and also spiritual: how we read our lives, how we decide what matters, how we accept what we are (rather than mourning forever what we thought we’d be). It’s also a song about presence—that a hand on your neck, or a daughter heading into a camp full of laughter, can be the only sign you need.

Why it stays with me

Because it turns a dreaded errand into a memory of mercy—gray miles easing into color, old hurt eased by touch, a father and son trading sleep and steering, and a last look in the rearview before driving back through the Rockies with the peaks clear again. That’s the journey the song tries to hold: from rain to color, from what we were going to be to what we are.

Source: New Music Memoir (1).docx