It’s hard to even begin to conceive of how to measure our boundaries. An impermanent, permeable thing, lovely for its changeabil- ity, blameless for its fallibility. The heart is a beautiful vessel, prone to failure and breathtaking acts of grace. I reckoned with things that I couldn’t see, but I could feel and in so feeling begin to under- stand as real to me and those whom I love. I wrote about our responsibilities to our brothers and sisters-of blood and the road-and how easy it can be to abdicate those responsibilities at the slightest threat of bad weather. Through the spring and summer, while traveling and when I was off the road and at home in Durham, I wrote about love-the teaching kind and the destroying kind- and about movement, and being moved, really and truly moved. But in that snowy ho- tel room I found the refrain that became my compass: I was a dreamer, babe, when I set out on the road but did I say I could find my way home? And then-driven by monthly bills and pure fear- I left for another tour, carrying a load of guilt that I could just barely lift. How could I forget? Though maybe my lapse was reasonable: I had just quit my job, the most recent and last, in a series of dead-end gigs stretching back 20 years, with the vow that my children would understand their father as a man in love with his world and the inventor of his own days. Forgetting, momentarily, that for me, each exists only with the other. At that time I was feeling-more acutely than I had ever felt before-wrenched apartīy my responsibilities to my family and to my music. The writing of the songs that became Heart Like a Levee started in a hotel room in Washington, DC, in January of 2015 during a powerful storm that dark- ened the East Coast.
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