Songfacts®:

• "Heading For Home" is both the title track and opening song from Peggy Seeger's 2003 album of the same name. It is a gentle meditation on aging, death, and the realization that the finish line is somewhere up ahead.
• Seeger told Uncut magazine the song's origins go back to a gig she played in Maine in the late '90s. Hardly anyone showed up (it was very cold) but she struck up a conversation with the wife of the venue operator. When Seeger asked her what she does, she replied that she's a painter, and she paints the state of Maine. She later sent Seeger some of her work: little cabins, rugged coastlines, oceanscapes. Looking at them, Seeger thought, "This is home." Out of that epiphany came "Heading for Home."
  
  "It was based on the moment of realizing that maybe, way, way back in my past, my ancestors would have lived in Maine," Seeger said. "I'm very at home here in Iffley, though it's the first time I've been part of a community."
• "Heading For Home," along with the rest of the album, was produced by her two sons, Calum MacColl and Neill MacColl. Seeger's characteristic banjo work provides the primary instrumental foundation for her vocals.
• Heading For Home was recorded in an 18th-century cottage rented specifically for the project, with the intent of creating an album that blended traditional and new folk compositions in an authentic setting.
• The album was Seeger's 20th solo recording in a discography that stretches back to the Eisenhower years. It was the first volume in what she later called her Home Trilogy, the folk world's answer to The Godfather movies, only with fewer mobsters and more banjos.
• "Heading for Home" found new life in 2023 when Rufus Wainwright covered it with John Legend for his album Folkocracy. Seeger gave it her blessing, remarking, "He does a lovely version of it. I'm very pleased because sometimes they murder my songs!"
• The song sits comfortably among the folk canon's contemplative pieces on aging, like Pete Seeger's "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)" or Judy Collins' take on "Who Knows Where The Time Goes," but with a personal twist that makes it unmistakably Peggy Seeger's.