Fritz Hutchison trekked over on a January snow day and sat with me for two hours to bullshit about music and life, and I gotta tell ya' -- it was one of my favorite conversations in recent memory.

I couldn't put a finger on it until several days after we recorded, but there were a number of reasons why I was -- more so than others -- looking forward to this interview. My son -- perpetually eyeing in some fashion or other my calendar of upcoming guests -- made me giggle a time or two about Fritz's upcoming date. And after an oral-surgeon appointment for both of our kids, my ex-wife helped me connect that dots that I know his dad.

Neither of those mattered, though.

It just turned out to be that Fritz is a charismatic dude with a great sense of humor, a wild world of knowledge in his head, and he's a pretty dar ...