Songfacts®:

• Jim Lauderdale is a prolific songwriter who penned popular tunes for the likes of George Strait, Elvis Costello, and Patty Loveless, and released more than 30 of his own albums. But for the first time in his career, he hit a creative wall during the COVID-19 pandemic.
  
  "Nothing made sense," he told American Songwriter's Off The Record podcast in 2021. "I wasn't sure if I'd ever play live again."
  
  Thankfully, a session with his co-producer Jay Weaver pulled him out of his funk, and he put together the 2021 album, Hope, a collection of inspirational songs to encourage listeners who were struggling with fear, loneliness, and grief during the pandemic. The latter emotion is explored on "Memory," a poignant ballad that reminds us to cherish the memories of our loved ones, because it's the memories that will help us move on without them.
  
  He sings:
  
  I'm glad to live another day
  Your memory helps pave the way
  Softens the pain of losing you
  As much as anything could do
• Lauderdale didn't realize he was eulogizing one of his closest friends when he recorded the track. It was one of the last songs he wrote with his longtime collaborator Robert Hunter, who was best known for his work with the Grateful Dead. The pair worked together over the course of two decades and wrote over a 100 songs, but their professional relationship dwindled as Hunter's health declined. Prior to the pandemic, Lauderdale had a few songs already written that would end up on Hope, and "Memory," based on a lyric given to him by Hunter, was one of them. He sent the finished track to Hunter just a few months before he died in 2019.
  
  "Losing Robert just before the pandemic was so hard, but he left the perfect lyric to sum up my feelings about him and to honor all the people we've lost since," he explained in a statement.
• Lauderdale has been around long enough to know what makes a successful songwriting partnership, and a big part of it is understanding that collaboration is a give-and-take process.
  
  "My favorite times to co-write with others is when it's a real collaboration," he told Off The Record. "I really love it when you're finishing each others' sentences and melodies. On those good days when it all falls in place, you do have this give and take. I look at it like, this is something I wouldn't or couldn't have done on my own, and just through this collaboration, it's boom - here's something that probably neither one of us would have written."
• Robert Hunter's widow, Maureen, painted the artwork for the album, including the surreal cover of a white stag in a forest of flowers.
• Influenced by country-rock and pop-leaning folk music of the '70s, Hope is a sonic departure for Lauderdale, whose songwriting roots are in traditional country, Americana, and bluegrass music. He started writing tunes for a classic country album, but some of them sounded too modern and necessitated a whole new project.