I guess I stayed with the faith. I mean, organized religion is not something that I've maintained a direct connection to in my life, but the spirituality of it has had an indelible impact on my life and remains with me.

I'm really proud of it. To me, it's a movie about character behavior and the pecking order of the pack, as well as the central character's massive survival guilt.

In addition, I'm finishing a track for the movie 'Waking Up In Reno', but there are numerous other singers I look forward to recording with in the near future.

I wrote "Miner's Prayer" after [grandfather] died. I'd gone back to his funeral, and he died in 1979. And I came back to California, and I think a couple of weeks after that funeral wrote that song thinking about him, his life.

[My grandfather] was very, very fortunate that he was never trapped in a mining cave-in. But he lost his brother in a mining disaster on a shift that he wasn't working. And he was in a collapse where his brother-in-law was killed very near him in the same section.

I don't really drink, but I've been around a lot of drinking and, at 18, when you start playing in bars, you start to witness the good, the bad and the ugly of alcohol as a source of escape. I wrote about it because I witnessed its use as a means of medicating - a lot of people using it to medicate themselves from hurt.

They both sang. My grandmother had a very haunted mountain voice and would sing hymns. My grandpa would sing but in a very, very subdued way.