Here’s a studio recording of Homecoming, which I hope you will enjoy and will serve as a kickoff to a new phase in which I’ll be releasing new songs more frequently than once every eight years.

For the past several years, this song has only existed as a live recording, but I always had it in the back of my mind to release it as a more polished single. Well, let me tell you that there is nothing that gets you interested in re-working old songs than an attempt to write brand-new ones! While I am getting closer to releasing something all-new, the more I worked on new material the more I felt pulled back to this one and the urge to really complete it.

It took me a while to get this recording posted, for a lot of reasons totally under my control and avoidable. One was the song artwork, which I always struggle with because you’re trying to create something to represent a song, which I find difficult. I hunted around for photos I had that might do the job, and didn’t really have anything that represented “Homecoming”, at least not in the melancholy mood of the song. I started to go down the road of using AI to set the mood of a photo I had, and I chose an interesting one of myself and my friend Banks. So for you, dedicated fan, I offer the initial artwork for the song, which maybe I’ll add as a fold-out poster when I’m super famous and the box set needs something extra.

I really am intrigued by what AI can do, particularly since this photo started out as one taken on a sunny day! Though I’m not sure the homecoming feel is in the art here, I really did like the way this dark, rainy scene really seemed like it had a story to tell.

Alas, a wise person (who I will not name because she doesn’t want to leave a big footprint on the Internet) advised me to stay away from AI generated (or, in this case, enhanced) artwork, because of the risk that people may see the AI art and assume the song itself is AI-generated (a real problem these days!). That seemed like a reasonable concern, but it left me with precious few options. Ultimately I decided to go with one photo for the entire “album”, just making some small variation between songs (once I’ve posted more songs, you’ll see what I mean about that!). So while Homecoming doesn’t have anything at all to do with trains, that does hopefully capture more the sprit of the album and it will all sort of make sense in the long run.