I left Boston with love on my mind. The thickness and shape of it. How it moulds to our hands, spills into ever fold of our skin, stays with us long after it is gone. I knew I would write a love song when I reached the White Mountains.

Along the way, I stopped for lunch and wrote this short piece:

I like forgotten places. The nook between a brick chimney and the wall, the strip of floor that stays dusty behind an opened door, the edge of bookshelves, too skinny for a book. Time lives in these places.

I remember a tiny inset shelf that lived above my mother’s bed. Only large enough to hold her alarm clock. The kind that ticked and tocked and rang like a bell at seven a.m. every morning. I used to sneak tiny pink stones into the corners next to that little clock.

I pulled off the highway to a slanted pizza shop hung with successive American flags.  Ordered a slice. The television spit out pictures of wild fires burning in Texas, rivers busting through the Midwest. Somewhere in Kansas, I thought, there must be good weather.

The brown vinyl booths glowed and hummed beneath yellow lamps, and while the rain sputtered outside, I longed to stay still, quiet. But Highway 302 pulled me forward into the pines, the White Mountains, the festooned riverbanks. I did not resist.

In New Hampshire, I placed my blue Olivetti in Wendle’s Deli in the tiny town of Franconia. The owner was hospitable and sent me off with a steaming black coffee.

With two days left before my show in nearby Easton, I went seeking words. Sometimes they fall from the eaves of old buildings and I just have to make sure I’m there to catch them. But I was unlucky that day. It rained. I found pianos on the street (The Piano Project), I found a black Underwood typewriter in a three-story antique store and I bought it. I found a cold bookstore with a wall full of Robert Frost. But the words didn’t come.

Where I stayed, there was a second-story painter’s studio with a piano in it. I sneaked up the stairs with my guitar and settled cross-legged in the centre of the large, window-lit room. Mysterious utensils of another art cluttered the shelves: brushes, sketchpads, photographs, un-stretched canvas, easels leaning like long-legged men resting against the wall. I peered down at my simple work tools: a composition book, a pencil, my guitar. Humbled. The piano winked from the corner and I went to it.

Here’s a short clip of the song I wrote that afternoon: