“I collaborated with my buddy Tom Hambridge on this. He won a Grammy for Buddy Guy’s recent album [2010’s Living Proof]. To say that Tom is sort of mysterious would be an understatement. What a gifted, blues-based writer he is.

“We used Memphis as kind of our ground floor. The guitar is doing an arpeggiated, string-by-string pattern over the chord changes, and the piano is copying the arpeggiation but with a different inversion of the chord.

“Rick told me, ‘I didn’t know you played piano,’ and I said, ‘I don’t.’ [laughs] The engineer helped me as I put my hand on the first chord, and then we’d get through the second chord and so on. All in all, it oozes that bluesy thing.

“The day that I was set to get together with Tom, it was storming like you wouldn’t believe. ‘Are you sure you want to brave these waters?’ he said to me. But the dismal nature of that particular afternoon drove us into a very dark feeling. We envisioned this down-and-out guy, he’s sitting on a park bench, he’s lost his girl, nobody gives a damn about him, but he’s got the presence of mind to realize, ‘This is bad, but I’ve got to get over this.’”