Songfacts®:

• Dave Rawlings is a professional guitarist and harmony singer, who is best known as the long-time musical partner of bluegrass singer-songwriter Gillian Welch, who appears on eight of the nine tracks on A Friend Of A Friend and co-wrote five of them, including this tune.
• The Dave Rawlings Machine started "accidentally," Rawlings told Billboard magazine, as a vehicle to semi-anonymously road test some new material. He added: "You start out singing other people's songs 'cause you love them, and at some point you start to feel like you'd like to sing some of your own. I think that happens to most people. It's just happening to me much later."