New Song: Farther on in the West
A drizzly Wyoming morning, wagon ruts cut into stone, and the song that finally went deeper than the surface.
Added a new song from the Yellowstone collection: Farther on in the West.
This one came from a place. Guernsey, Wyoming — the Oregon Trail wagon ruts. We drove out on a grey, overcast morning not expecting much, and the ground stopped us cold.
The ruts are real. Deep cuts carved into bare stone by thousands of wagon wheels passing through the same narrow corridor year after year. They’ve been there since the 1840s. They’ll be there long after. Standing beside them, you feel the weight of it — not just history, but the specific human cost of it. All those people who started the trail. The ones who finished it. The ones who didn’t.
This is also the song I’d call a turning point. Most of my earlier songs stayed on the surface — travel scenes, landscapes, snapshots. This one dug down. The Oregon Trail became a metaphor for the kind of journey that marks you permanently, the way those wheels marked the stone. Hard ground leaves evidence. So does a hard life, if you keep moving through it.
Two versions on the page — the cinematic arrangement and the original, which is the track Cathy and I played on the road across 4,500 miles. That one has its own story just from where it’s been.