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The first song on the table was a classic rock tune Stonehill was calling, appropriately, "Irresistible Future." "It clicked with Phil right away," Stonehill remembers. "He started helping me flesh out the structure. He got this glint in his eye and said, 'You know, man, let's just go down to the studio and blow this thing down, just for fun, and see what we get.' So I said, 'Well yeah, okay. I mean, we barely even know how this thing is going to go.' 'It's all right,' he said. 'It's you and me and we'll decide how it goes.'"

'We had good fun that day,' says Stonehill

"We had good fun that day," Stonehill adds. "I hugged him goodbye and he said, 'Man this was so cool.'" Stonehill flew back to Los Angeles the next day, while Keaggy added layers of guitars, bass and backing vocals to the track. A couple days later Stonehill got an e-mail from Keaggy with a rough mix MP3 attached and a note that read, "Dear Randy, let me know what you think."

"I was sitting there with Sandi [Stonehill's wife] at the computer, listening to what he sent across. I was just smiling saying, 'Oh man, this is so good!'

"A day or two later he e-mailed again and said 'Hey Randy, do you want to make a record?' I thought. Yeah, I'd crawl on broken glass to make a record with you, my buddy. So then he put this thing in motion. I would come to town to work with some country writers and we'd build another day in. Inevitably we'd start in the morning or early afternoon. We'd put song ideas on the table. We'd pick something that rang a bell with both of us and Bernadette [Keaggy's wife] would usually make us lunch.

"We'd be kind of chipping away at the idea and then Phil would get that glint in his eye and would say (in Stonehill's best Liverpudlian accent), 'Come on lad, down the stairs then. Down to the studio.'"

Keaggy brought in a few other key players, including Glass Harp's drummer John Sferra, who played on a remake of "Sunday's Child."

"I think it's really quite good," Keaggy says. "It's a lively, shorter version of the original. Considering it was twenty years later, and that we can still sing like we sing, it was good." Stonehill enjoyed the trip back in time as well. "I remember standing at the vocal mic with you after dinner," Stonehill says to Keaggy, "and it was all just fun! It was such a nice moment to sing that, to revisit that song."

The two also re-visited a classic song by their late friend, Mark Heard. Keaggy had tracked a version of "Love Is Not the Only Thing" for a pop acoustic album called Acoustic Café (recently released by Green Hill Records.) The label felt it wasn't a fit for that record, a project that featured Keaggy's takes on classic songs from artists like The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, Roy Orbison and others, so Keaggy re-purposed it for Mystery Highway. "To me it's the cherry on top," Keaggy says. "It's great that this album could have a Mark Heard song. And if Mark would have been here with us, he would have come here and sung it himself."

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