Why I Wrote This Song

I wrote "The Calling" as a love letter to the whole of the Colorado Rockies, not one peak or one postcard view but the entire sprawling range as a single living thing that calls to a person. Most mountain songs pick a spot and stand there. I wanted this one to travel, from the valleys of the Yampa up to Pikes Peak, through Leadville and Gunnison and Crested Butte, past the Maroon Bells and the Great Sand Dunes and out to Durango, because the Rockies are not a place you visit so much as a country you keep moving through, and no single vista does them justice. The song is built like a drive, and that was deliberate. You do not take in these mountains all at once. You earn them mile by mile.

The story behind the song is the ache underneath the scenery, and it lives in one repeated line. The Rockies are calling and my heart aches for change. This is not only a song about beautiful country. It is a song about a person who hears in that country an invitation to become someone freer than the life they are currently living. Every place name is real and every one of them is doing double duty, because the mountains are not just where he wants to go. They are what he wants to feel like. That is why the final chorus quietly changes the words, so that instead of aching for change he is watching his spirit soar and his troubles drift on by. The landscape did not just get admired. It did the thing it was called on to do. It changed him.

The turn I care most about is the last line of the whole song, where the Rockies stop being a destination and become the only home I know. That is the heart of it. Songs Across America is built on the belief that the American landscape is not scenery we pass through but something we belong to, something that can hold a person up and give them a sense of where they are from. By the end of this one, the mountains are not calling him toward something anymore. They are calling him back. I hope people who love that range hear their own version of it here, all the names they would have added, and I hope anyone who has ever felt a place calling them recognizes the ache. What I want them to take from it is that the calling is worth answering, and that some landscapes are large enough to be a home.

Genre:

Sweeping Americana and mountain-folk anthem functioning as a musical travelogue, moving through the range like a long scenic drive. Warm acoustic foundation with wide, singable choruses built for open spaces, its arrangement expanding toward soaring, spirit-lifting crescendos that mirror the high country it names.

Theme:

The grandeur and vastness of the Colorado Rockies, wanderlust and the longing for change, nature as spiritual calling and transformation, belonging and homecoming, and reverence for the American landscape as something we are part of.

Primary Subject:

The Colorado Rocky Mountains in full, traveled from the Yampa Valley and Pikes Peak through Leadville, the Maroon Bells, Rocky Mountain National Park, and the Sangre de Cristos out to the San Juans and Durango.

Mood:

Awe-struck, yearning, and uplifting. Expansive and reverent throughout, aching with longing beneath its wonder, and resolving into soaring, homecoming peace.

Core Message:

The Colorado Rockies are not a single view but a vast living presence that calls to something restless in us. The ache we feel before wild country is really a longing to become freer, and answering that call can turn a landscape from a place we visit into the home we most belong to.