This song took a long road to get to where it is now.

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It started decades ago, in the late ’80s or early ’90s (ah, nostalgia!), with a drum track I’d built on the Alesis HR-16, a really cool drum machine that I wish I still had. I played some open chords on acoustic, as well as some Knopfler-ish licks.

I liked what I had; Dire Straits influences aside, I think this was the first song I’d written that felt like I was moving beyond merely copying my heroes and developing my own voice.

I asked at-the-time girlfriend and her best friend, both of whom were artsy, to write some lyrics, and I did my best to shoehorn them onto the track. And thus the earliest version of the tune, then called “Intoxication of Immersion,” was born.

I walked around with the tune in my mind for years, so when I returned to recording a few years back, it was near the top of my list for re-recording. Unfortunately, the only copy of the song I had was low quality, and I couldn’t reconstruct all the lyrics. And since my friends were poetic in ways that I never really was, I couldn’t fill in the blanks without it sounding clumsily stitched together.

So I decided to create a new melody and lyrics.

As I’ve written, I’ve been working my way through The Transgender Studies Reader, reflecting on trans people’s experiences, and especially on their resilience. It was no surprise, then, that my first attempts at new lyrics moved in that direction, taking shape around an ally character who promises, “I’ll still be there.”

At some point, though, I became uncomfortable with that approach, for two reasons. First — again, as I’ve written — trans issues were invisible to me until relatively recently. So while I am sure that I’ve encountered trans people my whole life, I’ve only been aware of them in the past couple of years. It seemed weird presenting a character with such a high level of commitment when I was so new to the issue.

More important, I began to see that the song was centering the ally rather than trans people.

Now, neither of those things is necessarily deal-breakers: I value writing from perspectives that are not my own (hell, the protagonist in my story Emily’s Grave is a teenage girl), and allies can use support and validation, too.

But in this particular case, it felt wrong.

As happened with “In the Right,” a simple shift — from “I’ll” to “You’ll” — made all the difference, and the rest of the song came together rather quickly.

The music itself is fairly true to the original — the drums are as close as I could reconstruct; the bass line is fundamentally the same, though I shifted to a fretless sound; I played many of the same guitar licks. Above all, I was right in my assessment that I was developing my own voice. It was nice to revisit.

All that said… it depresses me how relevant the song remains, and how it will likely only become more so, at least for the foreseeable future.