"For example, after my mother had a stroke, she told me that she was seeing dead people at roadside crosses. It was an intense conversation that made me think. So I started playing with the line of "lonely ghosts and roadside crosses," and it become a song of mine called "Lonely Ghosts": "Like lonely ghosts at a roadside cross/We stay because we don't know where else to go." I built the song around that phrase, and it ended up being a love song about two people who can't leave each other because they don't know anything else. So that's an example of taking a story someone told me, and making it into a song."
From an interview with Orenda --
"For example, after my mother had a stroke, she told me that she was seeing dead people at roadside crosses. It was an intense conversation that made me think. So I started playing with the line of "lonely ghosts and roadside crosses," and it become a song of mine called "Lonely Ghosts": "Like lonely ghosts at a roadside cross/We stay because we don't know where else to go." I built the song around that phrase, and it ended up being a love song about two people who can't leave each other because they don't know anything else. So that's an example of taking a story someone told me, and making it into a song."
source: http://www.writersonprocess.com/2010/09/orenda-fink.html
source: http://www.writersonprocess.com/2010/09/orenda-fink.html