Songfacts®:

• This song tells the story of a couple who go missing after they take a walk in the woods. They're never found, so their story becomes legend. At the end of the song, we find out that the singer took his own walk in the woods and didn't come back either.
  
  The song isn't based on any real events - it came to Peter Case in a flash when he was working on a crossword puzzle at a Los Angeles coffee shop called Ben Frank's.
  
  "All of a sudden, some of the phrases started to come to me from the things I was writing on the newspaper," he told Songfacts. "I go, 'Oh my god, I'm getting a song here!'
  
  I paid the bill and when I got in my car it kept coming to me. I had to drive down Sunset Boulevard, up Laurel Canyon Boulevard to where I was living on the hill up in this cottage. By the time I get up to it, I'd written almost all the lyrics on the newspaper. I came into the house, picked up the guitar, and just played all that music and sang the song. Like once. That was it. Bam! The whole song just showed up like that. It blew my mind. It was completely formed."
• This song, and the rest of the Peter Case album, was produced by T-Bone Burnett and recorded at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. It was one of the first albums produced by Burnett, who went on to helm many highly acclaimed albums, including Brandi Carlile's The Story, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' Raising Sand, and the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack.
• "Walk In The Woods" is a track from Peter Case's eponymous debut solo album. He was previously in the bands The Plimsouls and The Nerves. Case never landed a hit but remained very well respected among musicians and built a loyal fanbase. He released solo albums at regular intervals over the next few decades, and in 2022 was the subject of the documentary Peter Case: A Million Miles Away.
• Case had an impressive roster of musicians on the album, including Roger McGuinn, Victoria Williams (his wife at the time) and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. But on this track, it was just him on acoustic guitar and harmonica.