Songfacts®:

• "I wanted to write something about how the West has evolved, with all of our false environments we create for ourselves, whether it be pavement or structures that just shoot towards the sky 50 stories high." This is the lament of singer/songwriter Andy Hersey, who bears grudging witness to his beloved southwest openness as it's being transformed into a formidable concrete jungle. "It's about the evolving West. That song started out with a little bit of family history, in the autobiographical dictionary where my great-great-grandfather, Timothy Hersey, founded Abilene, Kansas, at the top of the Chisholm Trail. He went from Abilene, Kansas, down into Texas. And Horace Greeley, the man who coined the phrase, 'Go west, young man, go west,' claimed that my great-great-grandfather's place - restaurant - it'd be a bed and breakfast now, it would have been a stage stop or a way station then - was the last place to get a decent meal before you hit San Francisco."
• Hersey's angst is driven neatly home with the title line, "Welcome to the West." There is an unmistakable bitterness in his voice when singing that line. And if he could have, he says, he would have used more colorful language in the chorus. "I wasn't at a place artistically when I wrote and recorded that song, where I could replace 'forget' with another word," he says, laughing. That place would have been an independent label, allowing more freedom, which he has now found - and he loves it. "Not having to compromise anything artistically is just tremendous. It comes from being independent, and knowing that the crowd is smart, that the people we're playing for, they're intelligent people, and they're not going to go for anything that's not heartfelt when written." (Read more in the Andy Hersey interview.)
• Andy Hersey's ancestors, Timothy Hersey and family, are in history books as "the second white family to take up residence in the immediate vicinity of Abilene." The Hersey family's claim was staked out in 1856 on the west bank of Mud Creek, two miles or so north of where it empties into the Smoky Hill River. Hersey mapped out a town and his wife, Eliza, had the honor of naming it: Abilene. Their daughter, Sylvia, was the first non-native born in Abilene, Kansas. While in Abilene, Hersey secured a contract with the Butterfield Overland Despatch stage line to feed the passengers and employees who came over the trail. His advertisement to the west-bound traveler was "The last square meal east of Denver."
  
  During his eventful life, Timothy Hersey had the distinction of being both a captive of the Pawnee Indians, and an appointed Indian trader during the Civil War.
  
  Hersey was also instrumental in renaming the town of Beloit, Kansas, previously known as Willow Springs. The woman who cooked for his mill hands told the story that in 1870, Hersey visited the cook shack one day and announced that Willow Springs would no longer be called Willow Springs, but Beloit, "and with a crayon he proceeded to write the name on the stove pipe."