Since Snider planned to produce the album, as well as play all the instruments, he asked his HWA bandmate and longtime confidant Chad Staehly to fly in from Wisconsin for the week and assist with the production.

Snider’s road manager Brian Kincaid fetched Staehly from Nashville International Airport that morning and took him straight to Snider’s house on Old Hickory Lake just outside the city. As Kincaid recalls it, “We got back to the house, and they dove right in, started talking about how many songs he had and started getting a plan of attack for the week.”

Snider played the songs he planned to record for Staehly and got his first impression: Staehly loved them. As Snider ran through the songs, they talked about the keys and ironed out a few wrinkles. Late afternoon, they loaded up the instruments Snider might need during the sessions and headed to the Cash Cabin where engineer Chuck Turner awaited their arrival.

“Todd is a classic artist, a classic singer-songwriter,” says Turner, who knew the kind of record Snider wanted to make and already had a basic setup in place. “Working with people like that, they’re spontaneous, and I knew that I needed to have microphones (positioned) in such a way that I could capture anything that might happen. So with that in mind, I went with a classic setup with a mic on his vocal, a mic on his guitar, and two ambient mics to capture the sound in the room.”

Another thing Turner had ready for Snider was Johnny Cash’s century-old Martin guitar. As you would expect of such a vintage instrument, the guitar has a beautiful tone, and as the studio’s longtime chief engineer, Turner knew exactly how to capture its big, warm sound.

When Snider and the others arrived at Cash Cabin between 4 and 5 p.m., he took a short walk outside the studio, soaking up the vibe. The studio is called Cash Cabin because the tracking room and control room were added on to an old cabin on the Cash estate in Hendersonville, Tennessee. The cabin was Johnny’s private getaway, a place where he often would commune with fellow songwriters, like Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson.

After his walk, Snider got right to work. With Johnny’s guitar in hand, he got settled at the microphones and began to warm up. Turner tweaked the mic setup a bit, then went into the control room and began working on the sounds. Staehly sat nearby, notebook in hand, preparing to track the takes.

Soon they were ready to begin, and Snider kicked off the sessions with “Talking Reality Television Blues,” a hilarious and irreverent chronicling of the evolution of television from its birth (“Of course, radio reported we’d all ignore it / The paper said we had no time for it”) to the present (“Reality killed by a reality star.”)

The next morning, Snider and crew picked up where they left off the night before — with “Talking Reality Television Blues.” The first take he did was the keeper, but he took one more pass at it just to make sure.

From there, he moved on to “Working on a Song,” formerly known as “A Song About a Song,” which is exactly what it was. Back in 1988, Snider had an idea for a song called “Where Will I Go (Now That I’m Gone).” He worked on that song for decades and thought he almost had it more than once. A few years ago, he started writing a song about trying to finish “Where Will I Go (Now That I’m Gone),” and that was the song he tackled next that morning. He recorded four takes and the fourth was deemed the one. Musically, the recording features some tasty fingerpicking by Snider.

While the first two songs he worked on that day went quickly, he did sixteen takes of the third song he recorded, a beautiful bit of nostalgia called “Watering Flowers in the Rain,” the title of which had been suggested by Staehly. He recorded a spoken word intro for the song in which he explained it was, “about a guy who used to roadie for Elvis and always kind of fantasized about it being the other way around.” The song was inspired by a former associate of Snider’s whose nickname was “Elvis,” and was one of the songs he had recorded in 2017 with Hard Working Americans.

Snider switched to a newer Martin guitar with a brighter tone for the song, and after five takes, he tried a new arrangement, which everyone liked. Then on take nine, he switched from the Martin to a Guild 12-string guitar and got the master take on take fifteen.

Out on the porch of the original cabin during a smoke break, Snider discussed the song he wanted to work on next, “Just Like Overnight.” “The song sounds like a story but it’s a list,” he said. “It’s a list of stuff that is gone.”

“Just Like Overnight” was another of the songs Snider had recorded with HWA. The first part of the song’s chorus, which Snider had since revised, succinctly expresses one of life’s big contradictions: It seems like day after day goes by like nothing is ever going to change / But just like overnight it’s like it ain’t never going to be the same.

Snider recorded fifteen takes of the song, the first ten of which featured a riff similar to one on the HWA versions, but on take eleven, he decided to go in a different direction. He cut five more takes using that approach and the fourteenth take overall was deemed the keeper.

“It sounds like a massive leap from where it was, but it’s not,” he says. “I just took the riff out and played the big major chords. It evolved into it’s own melody after I let go of the riff.” Snider also played some plaintive harmonica lines on the song during the breaks.

After getting the banjo set up to his liking, Snider spent a few minutes warming up on it. Turner joked from the control room, “That sounds better than Bela Fleck.” Snider laughed and said, “Call Bela and tell him this ain’t that hard.”

After a short run-through, Snider was ready to try to get one, and he did. “‘The Blues on Banjo,’ that’s one take,” Staehly recalls. “And I just marked, ‘lightning in a bottle’ underneath the first take. I had him come in and listen to it, and we knew we had it.”