There’s one thing that The Fugitive has in common with other songs I wrote around the same time is that the title of the song doesn’t actually appear in the song. As a music listener, I hate when people do that. I mean, if I mentioned the songs Funk #49, Rainy Day Woman #13, Basket Case, or Baba O’Reilly, would you be able to hum them? You probably know all of them well, even if you don’t know their names. That’s bad enough, but as the writer of a song, the last thing I want is for anyone to have any difficulty whatsoever in actually finding the song if they wanted to. Still, somehow once I started thinking of the song as The Fugitive, it was hard to think of it as anything else. Later, when I recorded the song with my bandmates, I added “(The Man Don’t Forgive)” to the title to distinguish it from the earlier recording I did myself (and which, as a result, featured much better banjitar, bass and percussion), and at least that phrase does appear in the song.

I wrote this song around the time I was fronting a rather short-lived country band, and I was looking to add a country-rock song to the set that I could slide in between covers. It was important that the song have a distinctive guitar riff that announced the song, that the riff had enough energy that the song wouldn’t lag when I was playing it solo and, most importantly, it was easy enough to play that I wouldn’t need to concentrate too hard on it with everything else going on.

The Fugitive name-checks a few country songs from two of my musical heroes. The name “Willie Lee” was the alias of a Johnny Cash protagonist in Cocaine Blues. And the line “You don’t know me, but you don’t like me” is a line from The Streets of Bakersfield by Dwight Yoakam.