About seven or eight years ago I was going through a rough time in life, the details of which I won’t bore you with, and had watched an old black and white movie on television one night. There was a line in the movie (the title of which escapes me) spoken by a prison guard to a prisoner that stuck with me. The line went something like, “Boy, you made the chains. Now you gotta live in them.”

That next morning, like most times in my life when I’m going through a rough patch, I ended up sitting at the piano and playing songs while my mind wandered. It was kind of like a pity party combined with trying to use the music to get back on track, because music is my coping mechanism. All of a sudden I realized I was singing words to a song I couldn’t remember hearing before, and those two little lines, “I’m bound in chains from the sins I have committed. Each link’s been forged by my own two hands,” along with a simple chord pattern, were the place I started writing.

This is one of those songs that didn’t come to me over a few hours or even a few days. This was a song I kept going back to over several weeks; working and re-working the words and tinkering with the melody. The song really represents the journey I took getting back on track, and although it starts out at a low point, by the end you can see life is back on track.