Songfacts®:

• Joe Henry didn't intend to write a song about Karen Dalton, but the '60s folk singer came to mind while he was driving through Nebraska late at night during a cross-country trip. "I just heard the beginning of a song start to unspool in my mind as I was driving. I try to be a faithful custodian and then just listen to it speak," Henry explained in a 2023 Songfacts interview.
• Although Dalton's career was short-lived (she released just two albums: 1969's It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best and 1971's In My Own Time), she was a major influence on her Greenwich Village contemporaries, including Bob Dylan, who called her his favorite singer, noting that she had "a voice like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed."
  
  Despite her talent as a singer-songwriter, she refused to perform her own material and hated the recording process, especially when producers tried to take control. After her second album was deemed a commercial failure, she faded from the music scene and spiraled further into drug and alcohol addiction. She died of an AIDS-related illness in 1993 at age 55.
  
  But that's not the story you'll hear in Henry's tune. It's not "The Ballad of Karen Dalton," he says, but rather it captures her unfettered spirit.
  
  He told Songfacts: "She came to mind right on the heels of it, and I understood that it somehow involves her and an idea of living your life very far out on the fringe, very, very high up on a tightwire. It was just something I understood. It wasn't anything that I planned."
• This is featured on All The Eye Can See, Henry's 16th studio album and his first release in three years. In the meantime, he also produced Rhiannon Giddens' 2019 album, There Is No Other.
• Folk singer-songwriter Madison Cunningham provided backing vocals and played electric guitar on the track.