Track Me Down

When I was writing and whenever I play Track Me Down, I get this Western movie vibe in my mind. When you listen, you can kind of hear galloping horses, that sense of something chasing you down. But the law in this story isn’t a sheriff. It’s the past. The choices that find their way back around. The reckoning, for good or bad, that shows up when you least expect it.

I wrote this song not long after I’d left the city for a small town. I had walked away from a fast life that looked exciting from the outside, but it was pulling me away from who I really was. At the time, I thought I was writing about an artist who seriously gave the finger to the entertainment industry on her way out the door. Maybe fame had caused her to hurt people and she didn’t want to become that person, so she got out. Maybe she blew something up or turned somebody in. But looking back, I was writing my own story before I’d lived the some of the hardest parts of it. Those that know me know.

Track Me Down first came out in 2008 on the Lofidelphi album and it’s carried me through a lot of miles since then. When G and I started The L/G Project, it was actually his idea to remake it for this album. And I am glad that we did. There’s more road in my voice, more dust, more truth.

At its heart, Track Me Down is about standing your ground when the stakes are high. Sometimes you lose work. Sometimes you lose status. But, hey, you can also lose the version of yourself that needs to be liked and just goes along with a crowd that wants you to be someone else. Which means that sometimes we make unpopular decisions.

And here’s the tricky part: later on, when we look back we might pat ourselves on the back or cringe at what we’ve done or said. Integrity doesn’t make us infallible. We have to face both our successes and our mistakes.

If we’re lucky, we have a few ride or die friends who still calls us “friend,” through all of it. The good, the bad, and the ugly. And if we’re really lucky, we learn how to be that kind of person ourselves. Further explorations of these themes arise in Borrowing and Shoulder Season on the album.