This song started from a dream.  I don't usually remember my dreams, and there aren't usually songs in them (although I dreamt that I sang All I Need and awoke and put it to paper), and this is not an exception in that case.  Rather, when I awoke I told my wife that I'd had an odd dream in which everyone was looking for a key to something--I was not certain what--but that the dog woke me before I found it.  She said it sounded like an idea for a song.

  I sort of agreed, noncommittally, and shelved it; but then, on a Monday morning the new old car had to go into the shop to attempt to get it through the state emissions test, and I was stuck in a nearby restaurant (one car means stay within walking distance).  I started turning the idea over in my head, and ran two doors down to a deliconvenience store to buy some paper.  I wrote about half the song--it came in chunks all together, that is, I came up with the words and music for what I thought of as the chorus, and then for the three choruses (although ultimately they were more the end lines of the three verses), and then gradually created words and music for the first verse.  I sketched rough staff lines on the notebook paper so I could write melodies and vocal harmonies, and sketched chord names over part of it.

  In writing the music for the verse, I made an intentional decision to shift up a whole step in the second half, much as Janet and I did in I Can't Resist Your Love years ago, and then had to think through how to bring it back by turning the IV chord of the new key into the V7 of the old one.  I had a complicated poetic structure and an interesting musical construction, but was going to have to work to finish the song.  I also made the decision as it came out of the first eight lines to go for something irregular in the chord pattern, so it wouldn't be predictable, and so went from the tonic D to the Eb and up to the out-of-scale F before reaching the G and A to return to the key.

  Already the driving rhythm of "One-and-two, and-four" was established as the way the chords should be played through most of it, with respite only in specific spots, because I wanted this to be a rock song and the melody itself wasn't going to do that.

  Then I wrote the bridge, again writing the words and music together and sketching vocal parts on sketched staff lines in the notebook.  It was rather easy to know where to start, because I'd already written the last words of the second verse, about talking to the door, and I needed the bridge to make sense of that by identifying Jesus as the door.  As an aside, decades ago when I was in high school I played Love's the Only Command for Dennis Mullins, then of the band Rock Garden and later pursuing a solo career, and he was interested in having their band do it but wanted to change the words "I am the door" to "Open up the door" because, he said, that's what Jesus actually said; I pointed out that Jesus said both ("Open the door" is in Revelation 3:20, "I am the door" is in John 10:7), but they never actually did the song.  In any case, the same words were needed here, and it made sense to use the way, truth, and life, but to reverse these so I wouldn't have to rhyme to "wife" (always a tough one).  Again as I wrote it I looked for an unusual chord shift, and this time I went the opposite direction, dropping down a whole step on the second line and cutting back to the V chord out of the subtonic to return to the key.  I couldn't finish the bridge at this point, having only the first lines (two of four or four of seven, depending on how you count them) and the notion that I needed to say something about counting the cost if I didn't want it to become too trite.

  With that much in hand, I posted it privately to the band members (at that point, kyle, Jonathan, Mike, and Sara), and got some encouragement but no suggestions.  I batted it around a bit, coming up with the first part of the second verse the next day, and transcribed all my notes into a Scorio version.  A few days later I finished the bridge, deciding to truncate the last line and let the end of the bridge hang, partly because I couldn't make a longer line work well either musically or poetically, and ultimately I liked it this way.

  Once again, the words I had required me to write something else, and so from the bridge ending "Your life is lost" the opening words of the last verse, "Lose your life" opened.  I thought "and you will find it", but the rhymes weren't coming, and it was better in several ways to say "and He will find you," followed by "putting all your past behind you," but I still wasn't there.

  The next day, a week and a day after I started, I finished the last verse, but was still stuck for the end of the middle verse; I had all the music but not all of the words.  It was a week later, I was back in the restaurant while they again worked on the car, and I hammered out the end of that verse to my satisfaction.

  I also started work on another, writing the words to a.k.a. Book Song, which is another story.