I'm pretty sure I wrote it on the same vacation as Tell Me It's Okay. It was a good week. :-) Back in 1999-2001, the Flying Other Brothers had an annual one-week band camp with Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casady, Pete Sears, and GE Smith. Jorma, Jack, and Pete were 3/5ths of Hot Tuna and GE had recently left Saturday Night Live. Hot Tuna's recording of Hesitation Blues was one of the songs that made me want to play guitar, and those three weeks were life changing. Before our third band camp, I wrote Constellation Rag as an homage to Jorma and Jack. I borrowed licks and cliché lyrics from a dozen ragtime blues songs and assembled them into Constellation Rag. The music was tricky, but the lyrics took only an hour. My personal touch was to make Constellation a ragtime love song, rather than a blues. At that time, I could not finger pick, so I learned it with a flatpick, which took longer than I would have liked. One of my greatest thrills occurred a couple years later when the FOB Four quartet (Pete, Barry, Ann, Roger) played the song at Jorma's Fur Peace Ranch concert hall, with Jack on bass. A few years later, Jack joined us in the formation of Moonalice.

In the early days of Moonalice, we didn't play many songs written for the FOBs. That changed at a Jewels in the Square gig, when we played Tell Me It's Okay just for the fun of it. Playing the song was a blast, and the audience loved it. After that, we tested other songs: Happy Endings, Nick of Time, Silver Lining, and Constellation Rag. All of them were reborn in Moonalice.

Roger McNamee