Among the 10 new tracks on ‘Day and Age,’ the tuns that cuts the deepest for Keuning doesn’t include the contributions of any rockstar mentors; the album’s final track, 'Goodnight, Travel Well’ was written after the death of Keuning’s mother, Sandy, who died in March from cancer at age 56.
“That song’s hard for me to talk about and even to listen to in a way,” he says. “It’s probably one of my favorite tracks on the album just for the music alone, regardless of the lyrics…the music itself is the saddest piece of music that we’ve ever written. But at the end it turns kind of optimistic, and we’ve never written anything like that.”
The song was born in sobering conversations between Keuning and Flowers; the lead singer’s own mother has battled with a brain tumor this year with chemotherapy and radiation. The opening lyrics to the tune: 'The unknown distance to the grave beyond stares back at my grieving frame/To cast my shadow by the holy sun my spirit moans with a sacred pain.’
“Originally I wasn’t sure that the whole world was going to know what that song was about,” says Keuning, who prefers to keep his songs shrouded in a bit more mystery. “Brandon writes all the lyrics, and I know that we like to have the lyrics be - we don’t really like to explain the lyrics to any song. Because I think it should be open to people’s interpretation. I think about my mom every day at one time or another. It’s just not really fair, and that’s all I really want to say about it.”
- Dave Keuning on the creation of 'Goodnight, Travel Well’, The Des Moines Register (January 2009)
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