"It was my first Friday night in LA," Laurie says in her press kit for the album. "I was stuck on the Santa Monica Freeway, thinking about buffalo. A vast single herd covering the earth from one horizon to the other, the way they used to, placid, lost in their own grassy thoughts, then suddenly careering off at top speed, all of them at exactly the same time.

"So there I was, cheek to bumper with all the other cloven-tired, sunroof-humped, Klaxon-horned metal ungulates, stalled on the concrete plains, watching the hot breath steam from their tailpipes, when the sky blew up.

"I didn't know if it was terrorists or nuclear war or the Big One that was supposed to drop us all in the Pacific, but it was clearly the end. Huge concussive explosions and fat orange cinders trailing fire out of the sky. Ashes on the windshield. Cars veering off onto the shoulder and me pretty sure I could feel the freeway shake under my Little Brown Datsun. I kept driving, though, because, really, this was what I'd been waiting for all my life: Armageddon.

"Anyway, I finally rolled my window down and looked up and realized it was nothing but the fireworks show at Disneyland. They launch the rockets, apparently, a few feet from the highway and the damned things go off right there over the cars. Some freak atmospheric condition was pushing the debris back down before it completely burned up.

"So that's where 'Just Another End of the World' came from. That thought: If this is really the end, I won't have to do laundry tomorrow. My rent check will never bounce. Of course it was just one more false alarm, not even a sign from God, only a sign from Unca Walt, in his block of ice under the freeway, and it had no more cosmic message to convey than 'Hey, look at me.'

"Though I will say this. Once I was over my initial disappointment, it was a hell of a show. The human mind can't leave something like that alone. It's always going to read signs and portents wherever it can. And I remember sitting straight back in my seat, both hands on the wheel, and saying, 'Thank you. I'm glad to be here.' "