1. Dog Days - From the time I was 12 to when I left for college, I lived in a small town in the middle of Pennsylvania, nowhere near a big city, an old town with cobblestone streets and alleys, old money from the logging boom in the 1800s and farmers. Just a typical small town, where people got married right out of high school to their prom date, had kids, grew old, never left. I set it as someone at the end of their life looking back on the best of what they had there-- "Got my shoes off with the mud between my toes/don't forget to dress me in my Sunday clothes/I could count the afternoons left on my hand/let it all begin again." 2. The Killer In Me - I wrote this song in late December 2007 in about a half hour while stuck in the snow in my Shandaken cabin. I'd written down the phrase "The killer in me loves the killer I see in you" a while ago in one of my notebooks and my songwriter friend Erik Balkey had emailed me asking if I was working on anything and I pulled out these lyrics and we wrote the song fairly quickly by email, recording parts, sending them back and forth. I think of it as a love song--that we're all looking for that mirror in our lovers, but sometimes what we see are the dark shadows of our own natures, and that's what we're attracted to. It was the last song I'd written for the album and the minute we wrote that song, I knew I wanted to make it the title track to the album. 3. Better - I was driving through Alabama on a tour a while ago, listening to no