I Made This For You is an Americana/country song inspired by “Childhood Burning,” an episode of Love Letters to Forgotten Things.

This one felt like it needed roots.

The episode comes from something that happened after my parents died, when I found a box containing more than a hundred childhood drawings, cards, and construction-paper creations I had made for them over the years.

They had kept them all.

Crayon pictures. Misspelled words. Crooked little portraits. The kind of things children make without embarrassment because they haven’t yet learned to be self-conscious about love.

Finding them decades later was overwhelming. These weren’t valuable objects in any conventional sense, but they were evidence. Proof that a little boy had spent years trying, in whatever l ...