There's a particular kind of clarity that arrives on the drive home from a show. Maybe two hours in. The adrenaline is gone and the road is doing most of the thinking for you, and your shoulders finally drop, and the night opens up around the windshield the way a dark room opens up after you've been staring at the wall for long enough.
This is when the songs come. Not always — most nights are just three hours of headlights and the same album playing twice. But once or twice a tour, a song that's been half-written for months finishes itself in the cabin of the car. The driving holds your body in one shape so steadily that your mind is free to wander somewhere else.
I don't trust songs that arrive at a desk. They feel too obedient. The ones that come on the drive home have the texture of being given rather than made. They show up the way a deer shows up — already entirely themselves, looking back at you over a shoulder you didn't expect to see them across.
The trick is to keep something to write on within reach without letting the act of reaching for it interrupt the thing that's coming. I have a notebook in the door and a recorder on the dash. Both have been wet, both have been forgotten, both have caught songs I can still play.
The last hour of the drive is for the song to settle. By the time you turn into the driveway it knows what shape it wants to be in tomorrow. You don't, but it does. That's enough.