How "Love Song For a Mountain" came into being

I spend a lot of time in Montana, often enough at the lovely Montana Artists refuge, a jazz composer's perfect refuge. So I had been hanging out with a painter there, and we were rather enthralled with each others' creative process and output. He took me all over the countryside and we would hike or search the ground for crystals or stare at landscapes for a couple of hours or so. We drove past this big bare-topped mountain somewhere south of Butte. Glorious and sparse and dreamy, it was. he asked if I could write a song about that mountain for him. Yes! No, it wasn't a torrid love affair. Anyway not the usual sort. We traded a song for a painting. "Love Song for a Mountain", that's the tune.