I have written music off and on throughout my life. Most of the things I did early in my life weren’t work keeping around. There are bits and pieces of this music stored away in drawers at my father’s house but it’s really not worth digging up. Sometime around 1998 or 1999, I started work on the song that would become The Belly of the Whale. At the time, I lived in Livingston, Tennessee. We only lived there three years and my youngest child was born while we were there. She might have been born before I started working on this song. At the time, I felt that I was being moved to minister to people that I really didn’t like. By writing this song, I attempted creatively address this feeling.
The first and last verse of the song came relatively easy. They were written while we were still in Livingston. I changed jobs and we moved back to the Jackson, Tennessee area. Two years later, I changed jobs again. The whole time, I kept the skeleton of this song around waiting for the inspiration to complete the song. It was about 5 years after I first started working on it that I completed work on this song. It has been a very popular song among my friends but was not one of the first for me to record. Some friends were disappointed that this was not included on my Bible Stories CD. While I had recorded several of my songs at that point, The Belly of the Whale was not one of them.
By the time I was preparing Six Minutes After Seven for release, I had recorded my Jonah song. It always had the feel of a pirate song and I included a concertina voice on the recording to emphasize that feeling. When I released Six Minutes After Seven the first question many of my friends had was did it include the Jonah song. It made me happy to be able to tell them yes. I was also happy to be able to share this song that started my most satisfying period of song writing.