I rearranged it slightly from the acoustic version I used to do in Collapsis. Let's just say it bridges this album to The Lessons Of Autumn in a great way. John and I tried many different approaches to recording the song. We first tried a live recording of just me and a guitar. When that wasn't too exciting, we tried a live piano/vocal take that was fair, but not fitting. We decided to make a production out of it. The new recording reminds me a little bit of "November" and "Birthday Song" from Lessons.

"Throwaway, A Race Horse" will be the oldest song on the album. I wrote it back in 1997 when I was living at the Newman Center in Chapel Hill. After I graduated from college, I elected to take a summer job as a caretaker at a Catholic Church where I was a member for several years. One night, when no one was around, I slipped into the chapel and wrote a song on the piano. Holly, who is now my wife, and I had been dating for about six months. I was sad because she was taking a job at Disney World in Florida. At the time, I was reading the Cyclops chapter in James Joyce's Ulysses...the chapter where Leopold Bloom pisses off some tavern members by leading them to believe that he won a lot of money at the race track that day. He led them to believe that he had placed his faith in a horse named "Throwaway." At any rate, this song is the intersection of this part of the Joyce novel and what was happening in my life at the time. I often played this song at Collapsis shows before "Wonderland."