In Their Words: “‘Long Way to California’ was written at a time when I was indeed far from California, and also felt a bit stuck; in fact at the time, I was literally stuck at home with a stranger I didn’t particularly like, a friend of one of my roommates who was staying there while my roommate was on tour. It was written as more of an imagined escape than anything else; little did I know that it would foreshadow moving back to California with someone I love a few years later. Ultimately it’s a song about California and the West as a place of openness and the possibility of a better life, the promise it might have held to my grandparents when they moved there from Ohio in the ‘40s. For me it took living on the East Coast for several years to really understand and see California that way.” — Whitney Lockert