On The Record

"Day You Said Goodbye"

Sep 02, 2021

This might be the song that taught me the most about revision and how important it is to not always go with the first thought, best thought philosophy. I’m a feeler, and my inspiration usually pours out all at once so it’s always tempting to let it be however it came to be in the first place, but as someone who likes to think too, I know that’s not always the best route to good.

“Day You Said Goodbye” started out as a traditional sounding thing — almost like a torch song. The structure lends itself to that — verse, verse, bridge, verse — very classic. And when I first wrote the idea, it had a soaring melody and slow tempo — it sort of reminded me of “Apartment #9.” But we wanted The Hardest Part to explore territory that was more country soul and country rock than what we’d recorded on Alabama Song, so even though Butch liked the song as I presented it, he pushed me to change the music, so we set about doing that together. Where we took it was very Rolling Stones and Tom Petty inspired, but the melody still allowed me to sing the way I sing. With Kenny Greenberg’s guitar playing, we found a recipe that we knew would set the tone we wanted for the album. One of my favorite things about this track besides the fact that it’s a lot of fun and rocks, is that 7th chord in the bridge that comes right before in the middle of the night — there’s something so romantic and jangly and open about it. It’s the kind of chord in the kind of place in a song that makes you want to raise all the windows. The lyric was finished by Butch and me, and it’s one that always suited my singing well. I love a lyric with space in it as opposed to one that has a bunch of words jammed into it (maybe I just don’t have the right kind of mouth for those) so I can stretch, and stretch I did, especially on the outro, which was purpose built and not an studio accident. In fact, most of The Hardest Part wasn’t accidental at all — we made demos of every song in sequence in Kenny’s basement studio sometime during the cold weather months of 1999. We didn’t hit Woodland Studios to record it in earnest until the beginning of the following summer.

The band on “Day You Said Goodbye,” was the band we used for the entire record. All Nashville cats, except for one: I’d become friends with the great Jay Bennett some time before Alabama Song came out, and because of the direction of The Hardest Part, we asked him to come down from Chicago and play. Jay was a brilliant and soulful multi-instrumentalist, a quintessential cigarette-hanging-out-of-his-mouth-onstage dreadlocked wizard, and was part of Wilco at the time. I’m so glad I got to make music with him (he played on Miss Fortune too). I sure loved him and I sure miss him. And Jim Hoke appears here — Hoke can play anything. I’ve never stumped him. If I asked him to play a conch shell on something he’d probably say, “Yeah, I’ve got one in the trunk, let me go get it.” He’s the guy to call for the finishing touches on a record — he is truly a genius musician.

This album felt so good to make — it was intentional and forward moving storytelling. It didn’t bother me at all that the air conditioning wasn’t working at Woodland — a tornado had blown though east Nashville a few months earlier and just about wrecked the place (that tornado was the catalyst for east Nashville’s revival, by the way) — in fact it almost felt right to sweat. They brought temporary units in to cool the room but we couldn’t run them while we tracked because of the noise but we forged ahead. That’s why you hear me say, “Let me get the sweat off my fingers,” at the beginning of “Think it Over.”

Personnel:

Acoustic Guitar, Piano: Jay Bennett

Electric Guitars: Kenny Greenberg

Pedal Steel: Russ Pahl

Bass: Michael Rhodes

Drums: Chad Cromwell

Harmonica: Jim Hoke

Percussion: Eric Darken

Harmony: me

Recorded by Don Smith at Woodland Studios, Nashville, TN

Mixed by Justin Niebank at Masterfonics, Nashville, TN