It’s harder to write a serious protest song than a satirical one. And once I got David Nagler’s demo of my lyric - and he had worked me to provide a more conclusive ending, which was totally the right move - I think we both thought we might put real strings on it, but in the end that seemed way too much, like pleading for sympathy. I had suggested something a little like Gerry Rafferty’s beautiful song "The Right Moment" but with drums. Apparently David took that in but missed “with drums” entirely, and the end result was this piano/synth ballad. And between this arrangement and the lyric, there didn’t seem the need to add much to it at all.

However, I also had the urge to record a totally different version of the song. And on the same day we gathered to record “Penelope”, with Patrick Berkery on drums and Justin Mazer on guitar (and of course David and Eddie Carlson on bass), we also recorded a band version of “Thoughts and Prayers” which I think of as the “Budokan” version because the arrangement sounds a little like the Dylan of that era with the horns and so forth. We kinda arranged it more or less on the fly, but David knew what I wanted going in, based on my obsession with that much sampled riff from “Private Number” by Judy Clay and William Bell. I was very happy with it but only because it stands in counterpoint to this actual album version of the song: the echt-version. (I’d say über version, but it doesn’t sound right these days.) I could have put both versions of the album like “Forever Young” on Planet Waves but…. I wasn’t short of material!

If you’d like to hear that Budokan version, please repair to Bandcamp, where it’s paired with “Bad Mother Blues” (in two versions, one with the same band, recorded that same day.) I suppose that version, is the John Wesley Harding version, whereas this album version - which you can hear the day after tomorrow - is the Wesley Stace version. I can’t quite remember my thinking there but it works out well.

This song is the best I can do on the subject of guns, and I’ve been writing gun songs ever since I started: "Scared of Guns", "One Shot", "I’m Staying Here (& I’m Not Buying a Gun)". On this album version, the last chord never resolves: when it comes to guns, apparently nothing changes.

Photo (Marfa at Sunrise) and Design by Morgan Narkiewicz