I can identify with your approach to writing songs from stories I've heard, or incidents I've experienced. Everyone has hundreds of great stories in their lives, yet few think of them as worth telling.

That's a great description of how you write, Nathan. I knew that your wife was very much a part of the the writing. I've never written with anyone else. It's a very different process. Most of my songs tend to be from an individual point of view (mine or someone else's) so it would be difficult to have a group approach to that. But then, we all tend to write songs from our own perspective.

A few years ago I did a book of photographs, stories and reminiscences of my family's history. It was a real pleasure and more a compilation of songs I'd already written. I have the family collection of photographs so it was great fun to match the lines in songs to old photographs. As an example, I wrote a song drawn primarily for a long letter I asked my mother to write about her childhood on my grandfather's dairy farm. One of the lines is
"Throw all the kids in the old hay wagon, and point the horse to town" and I have a wonderful photograph of all 8 kids on the hay wagon with my grandma and grandpa Holliday standing in front, and the horse hitched up and ready to go to town. I put the book together to give to my mother, and she really treasured it. I gave it to her qa couple of years before she died, and it brought back so many memories, some of which ended up in The Gate of Beautiful.

Jerry