"I wrote that song the day after the quake and we got stuck in Lyttelton. I gave a lift to a young woman over the hill. It was good for me to able to mark that day because my family is down there. It was good, not to dwell on it, but to get it out of my system."
There's also the country-laced The Wheel Inside.
"I wrote that when we were touring in Australia. It's just about the heat and the madness. It's hard to keep it together when you're on the road in Australia. It's a hell of a big place. I love it, but it's a hard grind."
And for good measure, there's The Warratahs' take on the Johnny Cash classic, Ring of Fire.
"We'd toured years ago with The Highwaymen and June Carter Cash was on the tour with us.
"She told us that she originally wrote that song as a ballad," says Saunders.
"It has a lot of meaning to me. It was my mother's favourite song. A lot of people don't like this version. They know the Cash version with the trumpets and everything, and they don't want some folk song, so it pisses some people off. But that's just bad luck," he says, laughing.
They're all tunes that have the same country-blues spirit that made The Warratahs household names but Saunders says two points of difference make this record stand out from their others.
First, most of the songs were recorded in Auckland, not Wellington. And second, it's the band's first studio album recorded live. "The songs were really only scraps of paper. We sort of did them on the spot. Nothing's really more than three takes."
Saunders says recording so quickly produced a certain amount of panic but also excitement. "Sometimes the more stuff you put on, the more the song goes away. It's like trying to do a painting. If you keep putting stuff on, it eventually disappears. But with this record, the band only does one thing - you turn it on and that's what it sounds like."
Runaway Days is out now.
• The Warratahs are touring New Zealand, starting at King St Live in Masterton on July 7 and finishing at the Tuning Fork in Auckland on Friday, August 7.
