The first version of "Where The Devil Don't Tread" was written for a songwriting group that I had belonged to. Consequently I was later kicked out of said group�twice� for lateness (what musician isn't perpetually late?). The theme that week was "two faces" and I instantly thought of someone I used to know. A divorce will do that to you I guess...

Essentially I had a vision of myself: alone, starring at nothing and surrounded by ruins. The song paints a picture of shattered glass everywhere, pictures thrown about and empty bottles- which is sort of how I felt my life looked at the time. Me just in the middle of all this wreckage I guess. I had a pretty dark period where I wanted to disappear from the world and have no one even think about me. I was determined to live in this wreckage, surrounded by fragments of someone I used to be. If anyone reading this is going through a divorce I swear to you it gets better, but at the time it was all pretty bleak and the song reflects that.

The title came from that old saying "I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy". I had a thought of the Devil himself feeling so bad for me that even he wouldn't have gotten involved with my life at that point. So in the end it's just me by myself, my only friend the Devil.

After tinkering with the words for a few days and playing around with different blues licks I had the final version. I demoed it along with a bunch of other tunes for the new EP and sent them to my producer, who right off the bat latched on to this one. I think we both knew that we could really do some interesting things with it and we were excited about the possibilities. Going for that "drrrty south" vibe we added plenty of slide guitar, banjo, and leads on it and played the main part on an old beat-up National resonator knock-off.

At the end of the day it became one of my favorites, as well as a crowd pleaser at recent shows. "With pain, comes great art", right?