Doors Of Heaven

Album: The Ghosts of Highway 20 (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • Lucinda Williams wrote this bluesy tune just after the death of her father in 2015. "I broke down and cried when we tried to record it," she recalled to American Songwriter magazine. "It just came to me in that traditional form, like an old hymn.

    It's not saying there is a heaven; it's wondering if there is a heaven. Even people who go, 'I'm an atheist,' must question if there's something else out there.' Struggling with my dad being gone, I wondered about that myself. The sense of him being gone is still so raw. It's something that a lot of people have dealt with, losing a loved one, that eternal question."
  • This took longer than usual to record. Tom Overby, Williams' husband and producer, recalled: "We've only had a couple of times where a song took more than a day to get it down and this was one of them.

    Lucinda's home demo was done more in a pure delta blues style and she had kind of dismissed it because she didn't want it to be Get Right With God Part 2. That was what proved to be a big part of the challenge - she was determined to make it something different and after a lot of effort...I think we nailed it."

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