It’s snowing where I am today. Where I am looks like a scene out of the Netflix show Virgin River. The room is reclaimed wood. Bon Iver is playing overhead. A ponytailed college student working part-time just sat a pot of cardamom cinnamon tea on my table next to my laptop. My friend Bailey walks up. Bailey, who is the assistant volleyball coach here, has two little boys and another due in a few months. She drove her SUV in on an icy dirt road just to get a “vanilla latte to get me through ‘til the evening” and “a lemon blueberry doughnut for the boys.” She doesn’t have any makeup on. She doesn’t need it.
Right after Bailey leaves, my favorite high school English teacher, Betsy, walks in. She taught me how to be a provocative wordsmith senior year. She had my back when the guys got annoyed with me trying to meet the literary journal deadline during track season. But we don’t talk about that. We talk about her new grandbaby and which nearby town her son is now contracted to teach in. Words like ‘legacy’ and ‘divine feminine’ come to mind as I watch her unzip her winter coat and speak at the speed at which I started sprinting toward Nashville upon graduation.
One table away is Heather. She has a golden singing voice and golden hair. I can’t count the hours I played piano as she led hymns at the Methodist Church. A career foreshadowing I couldn’t see at the time.
Then I get a text from my friend Courtney. Courtney was No. 44 in basketball. That’s because when she moved here from Texas, I already had taken No. 40 and 44 was the next best thing. Courtney’s married to a farmer and she can tell you the price of wheat and how much it’s going to cost when it hails. These are the scores she keeps now. Today, Courtney took my kids bowling so I could write an article for a magazine that you won’t find on the local grocery store shelves here in Kansas.
As the moment passes and my waitress asks, “Do you need more honey?” I am reminded of the time in an interview when I was asked how I knew if a song was worth being written. And how without ever having thought about that before, I said certainly, “If it’s something the girls in my hometown would care about.” My answer got me thinking:
If every artist needs an audience, then every writer needs one too.
And when you don’t have a fanbase, you must learn to draw from something else. I can see how an artist gets to look out in their crowd every night and notice the common denominators of who buys a ticket to come listen to their songs. That becomes the litmus test for that artist to try out their ideas. But how does a writer, who is all alone on Music Row, with no fans and no stage, audition their ideas in their mind? I look around this coffee shop in Kansas and I think about how, for me, it’s the girls in my hometown. The Heathers & Betsys & Courtneys & Baileys. What would it sound like during their carpool commute? What would they think about the reference to weed or profanity? Would it make them feel seen? Would they be glad someone else was saying what they don’t feel like they can say at their jobs? Would they click ‘play’ with their kids in the car?
As I started to think about it more, I realized in hindsight that when we wrote three on a tree for Miranda Lambert’s “Automatic,” I saw Brenna—a girl from my hometown—and the stick shift she taught me to drive on in her Honda. And it was that same Accord I went to in my mind when we were flying by rearview crosses, railroad ties in “We Were Us” (which would eventually be recorded by Keith Urban and Miranda Lambert). But the more I thought about it, I took it one step further and started to think that maybe THE girl in my hometown I had been writing for all along wasn’t any of the above.
As my tea officially turns cold, I am now recalling the girl I’ve been writing for the most. It’s the one still nervously learning to drive a stick shift. She’s getting certified to be a lifeguard so she can work two jobs to pay for a prom dress. It’s for the one who has a Hotmail address with Nashville in it. And has a boyfriend who thinks he’s going to the NFL. And a curfew no later than midnight. I am thinking about her and her Chicks posters and burnt CDs when I look up to realize that Betsy has gone home and Heather has too and my tea is officially gone. I’m the only one here to read my own words. And much like the songs that got me here today, I haven’t been writing any of this for any of them—but maybe it was mostly for another girl in my hometown: ME.
There will always be a me in the creation of art in any form. So long as the me doesn’t get ahead of the art, all’s well. I wrote southern short fiction for years and switched to writing lyrics. Really tough but I love poetry so I figured why not. At 86 I can’t have that much longer to wonder if what I have to say is singable. Been critcized many times and mercilessly at that but I am not bitter, nor am I a quitter. A large number of my lyrics are about women because I like em and being a man I know what men are like in their basest moments. Need someone with experience to edit my stuff and critique me. Don’t mind paying for the service. [email protected]
I love the last thing Nicolle said in her interview, using “concepting” as a verb. Some writers think a clever title is sufficient. But, to me, the concept or the theme of the proposed song idea is often even more important and more motivating. First of all, in order for a song to be emotionally resonant to the listener, it has to have been emotionally true to the creators of the song. I think my best songs have always come in part from me feeling the urge to write something about a certain topic or on a certain theme, involving a certain type of person, a situation that I can relate to personally. Concepting… looking at the idea from every angle, what language and imagery might work, what specific plot points might come into play, who the characters are and how they feel about the situation they’re in. It’s much like play writing or screenwriting. Not just a bunch of clever language, but a cinematic and emotionally charged picture.
Yes, it’s always about ‘me’ even when it isn’t.
There will always be a me in the creation of art in any form. So long as the me doesn’t get ahead of the art, all’s well. I wrote southern short fiction for years and switched to writing lyrics. Really tough but I love poetry so I figured why not. At 86 I can’t have that much longer to wonder if what I have to say is singable. Been critcized many times and mercilessly at that but I am not bitter, nor am I a quitter. A large number of my lyrics are about women because I like em and being a man I know what men are like in their basest moments. Need someone with experience to edit my stuff and critique me. Don’t mind paying for the service. [email protected]
I love the last thing Nicolle said in her interview, using “concepting” as a verb. Some writers think a clever title is sufficient. But, to me, the concept or the theme of the proposed song idea is often even more important and more motivating. First of all, in order for a song to be emotionally resonant to the listener, it has to have been emotionally true to the creators of the song. I think my best songs have always come in part from me feeling the urge to write something about a certain topic or on a certain theme, involving a certain type of person, a situation that I can relate to personally. Concepting… looking at the idea from every angle, what language and imagery might work, what specific plot points might come into play, who the characters are and how they feel about the situation they’re in. It’s much like play writing or screenwriting. Not just a bunch of clever language, but a cinematic and emotionally charged picture.