Songfacts®:

• "Lover of the Bayou" was originally written by Roger McGuinn and Jacques Levy. McGuinn is better known as the lead singer and guitarist for The Byrds; Jacques Levy was a songwriter and theater director, who collaborated with McGuinn in 1969 with an interest in making a Broadway musical. While the musical never saw production, several of the songs survive today as Byrds' songs. This is a cover by the band Mudcrutch, better known as Tom Petty's old band which he reformed in the late 2000s.
• If the lyrics sound like they're full of Freudian symbolism ("I learned the key to the master look; I learned to float in the water clock."), that might be because song co-writer Jacques Levy was also a clinical psychologist! Levy also directed the off-Broadway erotic (and all-nude) revue Oh! Calcutta!.
• The original Byrds' version of this song may be found on disk two of the album The Essential Byrds, released in 2003. It was originally on their untitled album, along with "Chestnut Mare", "All the Things" and "Just a Season", also from the would-be musical.
  
  If a stage musical sounds unlikely, McGuinn had even bigger plans beyond that to produce a science-fiction film which would have been named Ecology 70 and would have starred ex-Byrd Gram Parsons and ex-Mamas And The Papas Michelle Phillips, as a couple of "hippies in space." This was a more common idea in the late '60s and early '70s than you might think - witness the 1974 John Carpenter film Dark Star.