(Watch the video for "By and By" at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovtY4M-Mvkw ) In my youth, I became preoccupied with the desire to hop aboard the “Rock and Roll Rollercoaster”, and ride it to some distant, dark, and veiled land of undefined fulfillment and contentment. A notion, that, it seems, is “common as a sparrow”. I took all the obligatory preliminary steps in pursuit of that desire and dream: learned to play the guitar (serviceably — taking care not to kill passion with technical proficiency, though in reality, there was little danger of that); took up drinking, smoking (both filtered and “non”), and the pursuit of physical pleasure; maintained a long, tenuous relationship with higher education that ultimately ended in divorce; and embarked on a lifestyle defined by a series of low-skilled jobs — everything from ditch-digger to waiter to retail to security guard, and all things in between — punctuated by periods of unemployed idleness, which afforded the opportunity to read widely, listen intensely to the music of the day, carouse the nightlife of Macon and Atlanta, and document the imprint of these experiences through a growing list of original songs. By 1989, I was certain that God, fate, or both — the two were a little jumbled in my mind, at that time — would smile upon my endeavor. I had assembled a band, which was centered around my artistic relationship with a female bassist of unsurpassed intuition, and stalwart Scottish temperament. Her name: Trena McRae. We had been working together for 4 or 5 years. Not only was she a beauty, but she truly liked and admired the music I was writing (most of it…), and had an intuitive feel for it, utilizing her superb talent as a vocalist in interpreting the bass lines she invented. So smitten was I with her looks, her intelligence, her knowledge, her talent (she could command a room with her performances of Childe Ballads), and a sort of feminine, working class toughness that was novel and intoxicating to me, that I later made her my wife (or did she make me her husband?) and she has remained so for 25 years. We partnered with a drummer that I had seen playing in a jam band around town, who I enlisted in making a song for a local video show. It was recorded under the auspices of the legendary Paul Hornsby, at his Muscadine Studios. A hundred dollars did the trick, if I recall; the song was “In My Town (Blood Southern Streets)”, and I may put the video up on YouTube one of these days, if I can ever get it formatted correctly... (please continue reading at our website: http://www.thedovesamerica.com/blog )