The CD this comes off of is New Earth Mud or something like that, and I imagine when Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes was a sophomore in college, and liked to skip his World History class to go to the park and play his acoustic guitar, he wrote most of these songs for Kate Hudson, who was in his Southern Literature class, and they googly eyed each other when they noticed they both were really into Flannery O'Connor. Usually Chris Robinson was more into playing guitar during the day and hanging with his buds in Theta Chi at night. Robinson could get in a zone on the foozball table, especially because he was usually sipping on Sierra Nevadas while everyone else was pounding Natural Lights. And don't get it twisted... he'd drink a Natty Light too, it's just he figured if he was gonna get a drinking buzz on, he wanted it to be clean. But Kate Hudson didn't really run those same circles, at least not then. The next year, when she was a sophomore and he was a junior, that's when she started showing up at parties, and they hit it off and would do X and hang out talking until the sun came up, sitting cross-legged on the 2x4 frame bed nailed up halfway in the corner of his room. She thought it was neat he had painted the walls so dark and put those glow-in-the-dark stars and moons all over the wall, but just in that one corner, so they'd light up under a black light. She was the first girl he'd ever met that knew anything more about the Beat writers than Jack Kerouac, and they would talk about Gary Snyder and joke about playing yabyum, which was their nerdy well-read way of chewing around the sexual tension, but on the edges of it, both of them afraid to scare the other away. You know how things are.
So Chris Robinson would blow off World History class, once in a while at first, but eventually every Tuesday or Thursday afternoon when it was sunny enough, to go sit out in the park on the other side of the athletic complex, just off official campus grounds, and write songs on his guitar about Kate Hudson. Some of his Theta Chi stoner buddies would show up sometimes, playing hacky sack, talking about going to Merlefest next year, but all Chris Robinson would want to do was write songs about Kate Hudson.
Eventually, they got married, had kids, shit screwed up, got divorced. He was briefly addicted to heroin but does a lot of yoga now. She's fucking an MMA fighter from Belize. Their two children are raised by an assortment of caretakers and nannies, most lovingly by a 44-year-old black woman from Liberia. But they're not her kids. You can tell it affects the kids. They don't even know this song exists.
STEAL "Barefoot By The Cherry Tree"
NEXT: A pharmaceutical anthem!
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