SERIES STATEMENT: You know the story - a woman spends her young life consumed with the idea of escaping her hometown in order to find happiness. If she searches hard enough, she’ll find the right person, place, or thing that will replace emptiness with joy…blah, blah, yada, yada. Out she goes on her quest, desperately crashing around the planet and, here’s the kicker, every experience leads to crushing disappointment. Every. Single. One. She hobbles back to her hometown and slowly comes to the realization that everything she needed had been right under her nose all along and she laughs until her belly aches at the stupid irony of having to leave home in order to understand what home truly is. So, she fills an empty journal with new goals and old stories, orders a talisman (supposedly) blessed by Himalayan monks, and burns some sage. This woman gets her dang ducks in a row, then takes a deep breath and tries again in the place where she was born but it’s different this time and she is glad. That she is me, I am her. The Long Way Home is a love note to that story. (Additional influences: Supertramps’s Take the Long Way Home (car jam sessions to this tune are one of my first and fondest memories with Mom) and my all time favorite book, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.)