Songfacts®:

• Weinland is an Oregon group led by Adam Shearer, who told Songfacts about this song. "A few weeks before we went in to record Breaks In The Sun, I got a call from my dad, who lives in Montana where I grew up," said Shearer. "He was calling to tell me that he had found my box of old letters, I was a serious letter writer from grade school through college, in my old bedroom. He told me he had been reading them and said something very frightening like, 'they're cute.' Various things I could barely remember flashed through my head... things that may be in those letters... years worth of relationships all documented through correspondence. 'This won't do' I thought. Actually, this was such a big deal to me that a day or two later I got in my car and made the ten hour drive to my home town and retrieved my box of letters. I brought them back to Portland where they would be safe. A few days after I got back I dug through the box and read a few of the letters, then sat down and wrote the bones of 'The Letters II.' A day or two later I strummed a little guitar riff and sang the words I had written into a microphone at the studio. The band then listened to the song for the first time and started laying down their parts over the top, thus creating the album version of the song."
• Shearer talks about writing the songs for this album: "Basically the best songs just come. I'll be doing something else entirely and a lyric or melody will come through my head, and I'll know I have to find a guitar and sit down immediately, before it passes. That is how most all of my favorite Weinland songs have come to be... just by luck really. Usually if I labor over a song I lose my excitement and then it never seems to come together. Also, in the past I have always been the sort to write lyrics and chords at the same time, but more recently I've been forced away from that - the last two records we recorded were both very spontaneous in how we tracked them, which meant my bandmates couldn't sit around and wait for me to finish lyrics before recording, so a fair amount of the songs found themselves entirely tracked except for lyrics. Then I would put the lyrics together in the studio - so far its worked out, though there have been a couple of times I've thought of better words later and kicked myself for not thinking of them when we were recording. But that's okay, I just change them in the live performance." (Weinland's website is weinlandmusic.com)