Jimi Fischer recommended me to a friend of his who was a songwriter. John had written a song, a love song, in need of a lyric, so I agreed to take a shot at it.

I have no idea why or where this lyric came from, but this is what came out. I sent it to John, knowing full well that it was not the romantic turn he was looking for. And it wasn’t.

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So I got together with another friend — Dave Monterey — and wrote a second lyric for John’s melody, “Leave It to Me.” Apparently, he didn’t like that one either as he never responded.

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So now, we had two sets of lyrics, completely different in tone and style, but written to the same song, so they had the same rhyming and rhythmic structure. In other words, the songs are cousins. But it was impossible for me to use either, because I had John’s music stuck in my head, tied to both sets of the lyrics. Arggh.

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Time passed, and Dave Monterey, Chuck Peden and I were co-writing songs for an album together. So Dave and I thought, “Chuck never heard the original song. Let’s give him Leave It to Me which we did, and together changed and added some lyrics. Chuck wrote the music for Leave It to Me, uncomplicated by John’s original music.

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That creation worked as a brain palate cleanser for me, erasing John’s song from my head and clearing the way for me to write my own version of How Could This Be.

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And I did. The Leeg played and performed it. But I was never satisfied.

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So when I was gearing up to make this album, I decided to take another crack at it and I zeroed it out, started fresh writing an entirely new song, which is what you hear here.

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As usual, many thanks to Peter Harris for his simply magical guitar part.