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Switching over to A.M.
Searching for a truer sound
Can't recall the call letters
Steel guitar and settle down.
-- Son Volt, "Windfall"

When I was in Alberta last weekend visiting my parents, my mom asked me to see if I could get CFCW to come in on her kitchen radio. I was surprised it wasn't coming in since it had always had a very strong signal that you could pick up all over the province, but, try as I might, I couldn't get it to come in either. We never did figure it out.

As we sat and had coffee on the mornings of that weekend, it always felt like there was something missing. No steel guitar. No stories about heartache and loss, about living through what life throws at you. No farm reports. No birthday greetings to people in the rural communities around where I grew up. No CFCW.

Even now, it's hard for me to imagine them getting up to have their breakfast, sitting down to toast and coffee without CFCW on in the background. Mom said she occasionally tried another station, but she didn't like the music or the hosts. For her, and for me as I grew up, CFCW was the truer sound.

I spent countless mornings listening to the legendary Bev Munro play singers like Faron Young, Ray Price, Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, Lefty Frizzell, and other country greats. Even though I didn't really appreciate it at the time, that music worked its way deep into my musical sensibilities. Even though I enjoy a vast spectrum of music, I always keep coming back to country, back to the music of my mother's kitchen.

When I was going to graduate school in Lincoln, Nebraska, some friends and I often met at Duffy's Tavern for conversation over a few drinks. For about a year around late 1995-early 1996, one of us would inevitably get up and put enough money in the juke box to play all of Son Volt's Trace, the album on which "Windfall" appears. No one ever said anything, just put the quarters in the machine. We always stayed until the last note faded, no one ever grabbing a coat until then. Sitting in that bar, talking about writing and books and grad school politics, we were all a long way from where we'd grown up -- rural Nebraska, rural Tennessee, rural Alberta -- but I think Jay Farrar's mournful voice made us all feel a little closer to home.