"No Return" kicks off the suite of four near-solo songs that bring GO WEST to its downward spiralling conclusion, possibly the very best part of the album. An experiment in doing a song with only keyboards and vocals (there's a little bass in the middle of the song), it took me a long time to decide it was a good track, probably because, like "Standing In Chicago," it had more in common with hip-hop (and, probably, Krautrock -- I had Kraftwerk in mind when I did the track) than with classic pop music. It wasn't until Steve Refling -- not one to go crazy over a track in general -- spent hours on the mixdown that I realized that it was one of the strongest tracks on the album, running on cold, depressive energy and pure emotion.

The period of time when GO WEST was being recorded, with the exception of the actual recording process itself, was not a happy one for me. It wasn't just the death and drama that took place during that time, but it was a building sense of isolation that had started with getting sick in '05 and the long drawn out process of trying to get it resolved and get my life back. It also had a lot to do with my lifestyle having gotten less and less social because of the pressures of music and the day job, and some key relationships lapsing because people had gotten older and moved on in their lives. "No Return" was triggered in a classic way, by stumbling across a Facebook page for an old lover, which let loose some very intense feelings of longing and loss.

The first draft of the lyrics was written the day before Thanksgiving, and the very next day was the day my house was broken into and my computer was ripped off. By the time it was thankfully returned, this song had been recorded and mixed, and I'd had to rewrite the lyrics from memory. Looking at the original draft, there were some lines I wish I had been able to use, particularly in the bridge, which is my first experiment with writing in prose.

The overdubbed vocals at the end of the song are me overdubbed 21 times...another experiment in recontextualizing the Beach Boys sound that worked (although it lost something in the mixdown). I did the whole thing in about an hour, just banging out one track after another. I'll tell you one crazy thing - the percussion thing that underpins the song isn't a sequencer. I actually played that whole thing on a keyboard. It's live.

"No Return" wound up being the second video made for GO WEST, nearly a year after the album came out. This wasn't the result of any grand plan; after I pulled the plug on GO WEST to make HELLO CLEVELAND, I over time returned to my original plan of making more videos for the songs on GO WEST over time, hoping the album - which proved to be too much for many to digest - would grow in appreciation over time. It seems to be happening, slowly, but we'll just have to see. I never saw this song as any kind of a single; though the emotion is sincere, it's one of those songs that I didn't rate very highly but other people seemed to really respond to, and that's fine. It just fitted the concept I had for the video I wanted to do better than any other song.