This is a song that I was reluctant to release on a record for several year. To me, it was just too sad and I didn't think it would fit on any album that I had been working on. When I came across my most recent session, I found that I had completed it in 2016.

As I was digging through some of my old recording session notes, I found that I had been working on recording Sad Sad Sad as early as 2002 when Jamie Philp played acoustic guitars and steel guitar on it. I also found that I had recorded some vocal tracks on this song in 2008.

I was trying to remember how it was that my final version was in 2016 while I was obviously working on recording it at least 14 years earlier. I think what happened was that my original 8-track analog tape recorder had quit working and I transferred all the tracks to digital – on Pro Tools – where I continued to add vocal tracks. When I finally revisited this song, I had to take what I had and run with it. My analog tape recorder was gone, and the updated Pro Tools session was no longer available to me when my hard drive crashed. Still, my mix engineer, Nik Kozub, was able to retrieve the tracks that I had most recently recorded, and he mixed the song with the tracks that we had.

Sad Sad Sad does sound like it's a recording from another time, but I'm fine with that. I think it has its own kind of magic.