Nicholas Jamerson came through and gave me a bucket list moment—getting to record “Riverbank,” a song I’ve played hundreds of times. This session is Appalachian storytelling at its finest: the kind of writing that lives right in that space between laughing till you can’t breathe and staring down the hard stuff you don’t always say out loud. The song moves from being stuck in a rut—sleeping all day, up all night—to finding that one place you go when you need to think… and maybe take a drink. What I love about this one is how real it stays. There’s that classic riverbank memory—Crowder stealing a fifth and getting way too drunk, rolling around in the rocks and clay—and then it turns into heartbreak, trying to drown “deadlier sins,” and the strange feeling of time speeding up when you’re staring down 40. After the performance, we talk about the stolen bottle story (turns out it was a 1996 national championship edition Maker’s Mark), and how—24 years later—it actually got made right. Everybody’s got a “Riverbank.” It doesn’t have to be an actual river—just the place you go to reset.