I'm celebrating an anniversary this year: twenty-one years on the road. It's a big milestone and one that coincides with the release of my sixteenth CD, The Time I Spend With You. Most of the time I'm a gig geek. I'll do anything to schedule gigs every night of the week. If I could, I'd drive hundreds of miles extra just to make another gig. As a result I rarely have time to see much of where I'm traveling. My friends at home find this totally mystifying. If I had a dollar for every time one of them asked with total incredulity, "You were in so-and-so and you didn't see such-and-such?," I'd be filthy rich by now. Pathetic! I know that's what they're thinking.

But I'm getting better at making time to see and experience more of the cool places I'm traveling through. Last year, for example, when I was on tour in the Midwestern United States, I took a slight detour in Alliance, Nebraska to see Carhenge- which is an exact replica of Stonehenge- only instead of monolithic stones, it is made entirely from abandoned automobiles. It's a site worth seeing, I tell you! I saw the real Stonehenge, too, but that was a few months before I checked out Carhenge.

Here's how it happened:

After my fourth tour of the UK in twelve months (and my ump-teenth tour to the UK overall), I longed to stay in one place to get to know an area of the country rather than doing one-night stands in B&Bs and hotels. So I rented a little holiday cottage in the village of Shrewton, about two miles from Stonehenge. It's centrally located enough so I could drive back to the cottage after many of the gigs on my tour.

I left New York City on an uncomfortably sultry late June night, arriving in Manchester, England the next morning to bright sun and delightfully perfect summer temperatures. I got my rental car and headed south on the motorway for Shrewton, a journey of about four hours. I was most pleased that my guitar had arrived when I did as there have been times when it has not, but that's another story.

Shrewton is a little village with three pubs and one shop. I quickly discovered that is all I need to be happy. Shortly after arriving in the village I was asked if I was that American guitar player (how did word spread so quickly?) and if I knew Les Paul (doesn't everyone?). I was also asked to join the local church's bell-ringing choir. I don't mean hand bells - the ones where you have to wear white gloves; we're talking bells, as in belfries and long ropes. I think their invitation had less to do with an intuitive sense that I have any latent bell-ringing talent, and more to do with the fact that anybody, literally any body will do.

Shrewton sits in beautiful Wiltshire, a couple hours west of London, and an hour or so east of Bath and Bristol. It's a little far-removed from the major motorways, but what it lacks in convenience (motorways-wise) it more than makes up in character and charm. Being summer, though, and on a major route to the southwestern seaside towns where I had a few gigs, the traffic sometimes had a fifth circle of hell component. Think Cape Cod, Massachusetts on a Friday afternoon in July. Yea, that.

When I'd drive back home after the gigs, though, the roads were clear and the village was so quiet I felt like I was the only one awake. I probably was as it was well into the a.m. hours. The pubs and the shop were closed.

When I had a night off and stayed in the village it felt like time stood still. Maybe it was the long light of summer, or the beauty of the fields and plains that surrounded us on all sides, but there was a tangible serenity, except on Tuesday evenings. On Tuesday evenings the British army, whose main training camp is ten miles away, exercises their heavy artillery. I can tell you that with house-rattling, bone-shaking certainty.

Any night of the week, but especially Tuesdays, is a good night to go to the pub. It's where you go to get a good meal, to have a drink, to play darts or scrabble, to meet friends. It's where you go to meet the community of Shrewton. It's also where you go on Tuesday evenings to distract yourself from the shell bursts. One evening, not Tuesday, I enjoyed a late meal in the pub garden while the bell ringers practiced. At one point they played the same phrase over and over again. It was a glitch in a medieval moment that kept repeating itself, repeating itself, repeating...

Shrewton, like many English towns and villages, is lined and crisscrossed with public footpaths. The footpaths wind around the village or out to some inspiring landmark or even to the next village (and pub). Shrewton's footpaths were fun to explore; signage is erratic in spots so explore is the operative word! I particularly loved the one that lead up to Salisbury Plain. Out my front door, across the busy little street (mind the cars, look right!), into the churchyard, through the graveyard, behind the larger houses, over the fence near the horse paddock (stop to pat the horses, there's a love!), beyond the farmhouse, up the muddy track through the trees, leveling out where the hedges are seven-feet tall on either side of the path and finally, out into the open on the plain itself where the track continues, as far as the eye can see across the fields and meadows of Wiltshire.

High up on the plain, if you really tried, you could hear the gentle sounds the village makes as dusk turns to dark. On one particular evening I could hear a dog barking over near the churchyard (was it the vicar's dog?) and I could hear someone walking on the road near the farmhouse. Behind me, further up on the plain, some exotic night bird was singing in the trees as if its life depended on it. I could hear it all as clearly as my own heartbeat.

It was up on Salisbury Plain while on a short ramble that I conceived of the idea for the title song to my new CD, The Time I Spend With You. And it was this song that inspired the whole recording; it was the first piece of a thirteen-song collection, though I did not know it at the time.

The chorus/hook goes like this:

The time I spend with you
Is over much too soon

I know where that sentiment came from: among other things, I was nearing the end of my stay in Shrewton (and England) and I was not looking forward to leaving, so I'm sure that informed the lyric, the "I'm-already-missing you" thing. Musically, I had a melody and groove in my head so when I got back to the cottage I picked around on my Flammang acoustic guitar until I was able to replicate the pulsing, groove-laden blues. I found it around a B-minor chord at the seventh fret. With my thumb hooked over the low E-string, my right hand vamped a shuffle on the down beats, while I chimed in triad tones on the off beats with up-strokes of the pick.

I knew I had something to work with and knew that over the next months I would edit the lyrics, chords, and melody into a tighter song. But no matter where I was when this happened - as it turns out it was Guelph, Ontario, Rolla, Missouri and Asheville, North Carolina, to name but a few places - the roots of the tune would always be associated with that little village on Salisbury Plain in England.

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