"Gone for the Day" is my favorite song on the album. It totally wrote itself. I have no idea whose story this is, but it surely isn't mine. In that regard, it may be dylanesque. Or at least cryptic.

This was another one where I came up with the cool title first. I was at work somewhere in 2001 and heard someone tell someone else that the boss they were looking for was "gone for the day."

That's a little different than being "not in today." A sick person is "not in today." A guy on a business trip is "not in." "Gone for the day" seems to say: "He escaped." He WAS here, but he left and he is NOT coming back.

The person "gone for the day" in this song, seems to be missing out on all kinds of things, some clearly unpleasant (court, paparazzi) and others that are possibly unpleasant (small talk, borrowers, trash talk, chicken & ribs.) Somehow, it's the singer's dogged responsibility to clean up after this absentee and the faithful service he's giving to a corrupt person is starting to grate. "...I'm a patient man, but , come on!..."

It's very much a song for a times. Lots of absenteeism in the place of leadership these days. Successful communicating these days seems to be not communicating at all: cos you're gone for the day.

The drumming on this one, is, again, masterful. It simmers, builds, kicks into full gear. A lot of drummers since have tried hard to recreate what Eric Olsen did here just off the cuff, but nobody's done it yet.

And I myself am horribly proud of the riff and the structure of "Gone for the Day." This was the song that got me thinking of myself as a Riff Guy™. I was just a songwriter before that.