Songfacts®:

• The Steel Wheels are a four-piece group based in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. This track from their Lay Down, Lay Low album was chosen as NPR's Song of the Day for May 10, 2012.
• The band's lead vocalist and primary songwriter Trent Wagler explained to us the story behind the song. "Well, we live in the Shenandoah Valley," he said. "It was a rainy day when I wrote the song. The idea that inspired the song was some good friends of mine who were building a cabin in this valley where there was a river. During the process of building this cabin they had been warned that when the rains really come, in this particular valley that water can flood you out so quickly and it can surprise you."
  
  "And my friend," he continued, "who today would admit how ignorant he was and how he kind of blew them off, he had parked his car fairly close to the river. Where the cabin was, to get to the cabin site he had to boat across. So he boated across, they were working on the cabin, and later that evening the storm came and it washed away his car and totally flooded him out. It was a dramatic experience."
  
  "But it made me think," Wagler concluded, "Wow, what power. In a world where we control so much with climate controlled rooms and houses and cars and everything, there are some things that every once in a while we're just kind of tricked into remembering we don't control. That sense of the power of that water really struck me as a force for something."