No Fence Holds Me

This song opens the album, and it does what an opener should - it tells you plainly where I am from and what I am not. I will tell you where I'm from. I will tell you what I'm not. And then you'll know the rest of me. It walks a whole life in three verses. The boy in Potosi with a machine no other boy for fifty miles had ever seen. The man at twenty-five when grace hit me like a freight train. And the present, a little website built in the corner of a room in eastern Kentucky, and no man gave me leave.

Every one of those life-stages runs into a fence. That is the thesis of the whole record. Every house that held it had a fence around the yard - a list of what to say, a list of where a man should stop. I could not stop where they stopped, so I never could move in. The chorus is the line the album is named for, and it defends itself before anyone can accuse it. Not because I loved to leave, but the truth had already left, and I just went where it went.

I want the bridge heard clearly, because the easy charge against a campless man is that he simply would not submit. The opposite is true. I bowed low to the text until the text walked me past the gate. Campless is not a rebel's word. It is an honest one. And the last verse turns the grief toward where the album is going - I am not the first one out. Somebody came before. That is the whole record in one line, planted in the first song.