On The Record

"Feeling That Feeling Again/Cold, Cold Earth"

This series, “On the Record,” will be a weekly Substack exclusive in which I’ll go through my recorded catalog song by song starting with my first album, Alabama Song, which was released on MCA Records in 1998. Photos will be attached if available and tolerable.

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I remember sinking into what felt like a dreamworld when we recorded this song. One of my favorite things to sing is a stone cold country melody paired with a tearjerking lyric. Those ignorant to the depth of what those two things do when combined make jokes about it, but those of us who know, know, and we’re all the better for it.

And those of you who know The Hardest Part know that if you let “Feeling That Feeling Again” play out, you’d find “Cold, Cold Earth” as the hidden track.

“Cold, Cold Earth” was something that I wrote quickly on the back page of a notebook one day. I set it aside, thinking it far too personal to ever record, but my first husband found it. He and Kenny convinced me to record it, mostly because I guess they thought it was brave, and I agreed to put it at the end of this album that had been so inspired, however loosely, by my parents’ relationship. It does interest me as a writer. I think if I tried to write that song now it would be an entirely different thing. And that version needed to be told too, I guess.

I completely lost it the first time I tried to sing it all the way through. I think I made it through the first two verses and then fell apart. But I tried again, and got it on the second take. At that point in my life I hadn’t talked about them very much, so singing it felt like revealing my deepest wounded-ness. That’s me playing the acoustic guitar, my father’s 1964 Gibson B25. The brilliant and soulful Chris Carmichael played the cello. And there it was.

There it is.

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Personnel on “Feeling that Feeling Again”:

Acoustic Guitar: Rick Plant

Electric Guitar: Kenny Greenberg

Steel Guitar: Russ Pahl

Fiddle: Chris Carmichael

Bass: Michael Rhodes

Drums: Chad Cromwell

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And that’s all I’ve got today. I don’t think I can go into the reasons why I wrote the song, or why I ultimately recorded it then. I guess sometimes you just do a thing without really thinking because it comes from somewhere you aren’t really in control of — it isn’t cerebral, rather almost a reflex. I’ll talk about it again when I get to Blood, where it reappeared in a non-fiction context.

Thanks for reading these. I hope y’all have had a good week.

I’ll start on Miss Fortune next week. That’ll be a doozy.

Onward,

AM