Background
In 1976, I wondered about the emotions that would go through a father who knew his son was dying of a terminal disease. I thought of a story line where the mother had already died, the father knew the son was dying (but the son didn't know), and the son thought his father was just sad because the mother had passed away. Some people after hearing this song have asked me very privately whether this had actually happened to me. No it hasn't, and I never had a living son named Jon Mark. When it came time to start recording this song, I had a problem with the vocals. I don't have the type of voice to be able to sing lead on this type of song (some people may say I don't have the type of voice to be able to sing lead on ANY type of song). But I had played Trumpet on a recording a couple years earlier for a guy named Joe Lupina who had a great voice for this song. Alan called him and he remembered that I had played on his recording, so he agreed to sing the father's vocal line. During the actual recording session, he had a little bit of trouble singing the song, but the emotion was there and we got his parts all done well. Afterwards, he apologized for faltering, but confided in us that the lyrics reminded him of the child he and his wife had lost. The emotion you hear in his voice on the recording is real.
Instrumentation
I had always envisioned a full orchestra for the section of this song after the first verse. As a graduate student at Old Dominion University, I played Trumpet at the basketball games with several of my fraternity brothers and other acquaintances. I started taking notes of what instruments I needed for this song, and who I knew that played those instruments. I got a lead through another fraternity brother on string players, and by the time this song was ready to wrap up I had found a group of friends for the brass/woodwinds section (I paid them in pizza and beer) and a group of hired mercenaries for the string section (I paid them by check). The strings, brass/woodwinds, and French Horn rips really make that passage of the song.
Behind the Scenes
When Alan first started his recording studio, he did a lot of research and read all sorts of articles. One small thing that he would talk about every so often was backward recording, similar to what the Beatles and other groups had used for special effects. He talked about recording a symbol crash backwards - if he ever found a place in a song for that, he thought it would be a tremendous effect. The end of this song was the perfect place, Alan recorded it in one take, and it is the last note on both the album and this "greatest hits CD."