Titles and ideas for songs arrive from many sources. In this case I had a date with my significant other lined up and she called to say she had a change of plans for the evening. That's all it took. I thought wait a minute that could be a title for a song, maybe a blues. Thanks for the title babe!

My co-writer Ed Haaker and I discussed the idea during our weekly online writing session and came up with the story of a relationship going south and how little you can do to change the outcome in most cases. We've all been there. We decided instead of a gypsy giving the protagonist much needed advice it would be a shaman in the mountains of Peru, where Ed had been on a recent visit, and the Cusco train was a nice visual from a real place which added some reality to a quickly deteriorating situation.

Having spent a few weekly sessions creating the lyrics we decided to hand them over to my best buddy and longtime co-writer and guitarist Bryan Kessler over on Oahu. He vibed with the lyric and amazingly it took him no time to come up with the music. Within a few days he sent us a demo track with temporary drums, bass, keyboards, vocal and guitar: a starting point for the process to follow.

As is the usual case working remotely one musician at a time I painstakingly recorded my vocal then sent the tracks to my musically masterful bro and longtime AT collaborator since 1987, Michael Ruff (Bonnie Raitt, Rickie Lee Jones) for his keyboard contributions, which honestly always blow my mind and takes the song to the next level. After receiving his splendid parts I sent the tracks to Jimmy Johnson (James Taylor, Elton John) for his always in the pocket and on the money bass part - JJ has now played on my last three albums and 9 singles and is always helpful with ideas for taking things another step in the right direction.

Bryan felt like his guitar demo parts weren't cutting it, so we decided to have another guitarist lay down the parts. But who??? We've had this conversation before and always seem to choose from our guitarist dream list Dean Parks - who joined us for the 1st time on 'Van',and Michael Landau (Michael MacDonald, Joni Mitchell, Michael Jackson). Since we already had a guitar track from Mr Parks we discussed Michael Landau. Besides Michael playing on so many of our favorite artists albums, Bryan sent me a YouTube video of Mr Landau playing with Jimmy Johnson something like 30 years ago and that sufficiently lit us up to reach out to Mike. He asked for us to send him the track and he'd get back to us. Within days he reached out and said he wanted to be part of the recording band especially because his one-time bandmates Jimmy Johnson and Keith Carlock were part of the team, plus he said he loved the tune. A week or so later he sent us back his guitar parts and they were numerous and fit in all the right places. We were ecstatic. We then enlisted Mike Ruff's daughter Olivia Ruff - a truly gifted singer whom I'd known since the day she was born, to sing back up vocals, and as usual she nailed it. Lastly we sent the tracks to Keith Carlock (Steely Dan, Toto, Sting) for his deep pocket drum parts. As always he delivered above and beyond tracks and after that we knew we had it and the song needed nothing more. Another tune in the 400 plus original songs comprising the AT canon.

I mixed the track as close as I could get it to what I wanted to hear then sent it to my old friend and bonafide mixer Paul Northfield (Rush, Wilson Pickett, Roberta Flack) in Montreal for his expertise and final polish.