From Byzantium to Texas

I wrote the song "Byzantium" while sitting on the curb near my cabin in Yellowstone National Park in 1995. In those days, I was reading Plato, Lao Tzu, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Merton, and Shakespeare as well as novel after novel. My job did not require much mental strain or cause too much stress, so I was never too tired to read books, write fiction, or compose songs. What I read tended to influence what I produced, as evidenced by the lyrics to this song.

"Byzantium" was recorded almost by accident. While in the recording studio with the band Nijak in the Czech Republic in the early 2000s, Radek, the producer, asked if we had any songs that we had not been practicing or working on. I told him that I had one, so I played "Byzantium" for him. A few minutes later, Honza had an acoustic guitar in his hand, and we recorded the song pretty much spontaneously. Pavel, who was not in the studio, dropped a bass line in after the fact, and the result is the song linked below.

Back home in Texas many years later, it is as if another person sang on the record. Maybe it's because  thousands of miles and multiple lives now span between the time of recording and the present. I even found myself in old Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium, along the way.