“Clearwater Sun” is one of the most personal songs on the album, even if it doesn't announce itself that way at first listen. At its core, this is a song about leaving. And, eventually, discovering what it means to come home.

I left Lewiston at seventeen with the kind of confidence that only comes from not yet knowing what you don't know. I had aspirations, ambitions, and every intention of making my mark on the world. Small-town life wasn't going to be enough for me. There were bigger things out there, and I was determined to find them.

And for a while, I did.

But success has a peculiar way of changing shape once you finally get your hands on it. The things that once seemed so important gradually lose their luster. Money, titles, accomplishments, all those things you spend years chasing, can turn out to be surprisingly poor substitutes for the things you left behind.

What I hadn't anticipated were the tradeoffs. The distance. The restlessness. The realization that achievement doesn't always carry the meaning you thought it would.

It took me twenty years to go back.

When I returned to Lewiston in 2008, something happened that I hadn't expected. The town was familiar, of course, but I was looking at it through an entirely different set of eyes. The things I'd once been so eager to escape had somehow become the very things I missed. And the song came almost all at once.

I wrote “Clearwater Sun” in about twenty minutes. But in truth, it had been twenty years in the making. The recording followed a similarly unexpected path.

In my head, this was originally a straight country song. And for years, that's how I imagined it would sound. But when I picked up a 12-string acoustic-electric guitar and ran it through a phaser, something interesting happened.

The sound opened up. It became wider, richer, and more atmospheric. The guitar was no longer simply providing rhythm. It was creating a texture, almost like a memory that you can hear but can't quite hold onto.

And then the saxophone showed up.

That wasn't planned. It wasn't even part of the original concept. But once I heard it against the arrangement, I couldn't imagine the song without it. It brought a warmth and expressiveness that the guitars alone couldn't quite capture.

What emerged was something that still had its roots in country music but refused to stay there. A little country, a little pop, a little rock, and a saxophone that apparently hadn't received the memo about what kind of song it was supposed to be playing. And somehow, it all worked. Perhaps that's appropriate, because the song itself isn't really about returning to the past. It's about understanding it.

“Clearwater Sun” isn't an expression of regret. I don't regret leaving Lewiston, and I wouldn't trade the experiences that followed. But I eventually came to understand that the things I'd been looking for weren't necessarily the things I needed.

Sometimes you have to leave to understand what you left behind. And sometimes you have to come back to understand yourself.