On my first visit to Nashville in 1983 I began keeping a journal, a practice that I carry on to this day. This isn't a blog. The journal is the old fashioned sort; paper bound into a cloth and boards cover. I make entries with a pencil. Remember pencils? A few times a year I re-read and harvest a couple of passages that stand out.

While much of the journal is concerned with matters of little interest to anyone but myself, a small portion of it might be found interesting to those pursuing, or interested in pursuing the vocation of songwriting. Generally speaking, I have avoided using names except in cases where the names are a matter of record, or where withholding the name would serve no purpose. I suppose once or twice I've used the names for other reasons, although I don't think of myself as vindictive (yet, anyway).

Passages about my family, friends, and colleagues are retained according to their ability to shed light on the difficulties and the mind-set of this particular career. Allusions to specific circumstances are also included as illustrative of the professional (or absurdly amateur) situations in which we often find ourselves.

Contradictions will be noted throughout. My experience has taught me that many of us pass through recurring phases in our careers; times when black becomes white, when yesterday's certainties become today's doubts. I have not tampered with what I believe to be the commonly shared fluctuating perceptions.

I do not necessarily write to be read. I write seeking my own clarity. I am responsible for my own words and all opinions expressed are mine or else I stole them from friends. The most recent entries will be found immediately following.

This is obviously a work-in-progress and additions will be made on a semi-regular basis as I discover in my little book things to delight and amaze you.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008
I've never doubted that a great song could escape the black hole of Nashville. It's just that the odds have gone down steadily since 1990, and I think that's what I grew tired of-- the endless disappointment after hoping for so much.

Monday, June 09, 2008
Sometimes I can't bare to hear a great song. I hate listening to bad ones, obviously, but the great ones can hurt more.

Sunday, June 08, 2008
Many people claim to be "in it for the music" but it doesn't take long to find out that "the music" means fame, success, popularity, and ultimately money.

To be able to strip life down to three chords and the truth, and to have that truth resonate so deeply, is fascinating. Herein lies the mystery. It all sounds so simple, but it's incredibly hard, even technically, to pull it off with authenticity. When we encounter the real thing it's like encountering great literature or great poetry. It speaks so loudly and definitively, and it's uncompromising.

Great writers cannot be made, they are born, and the more I try to teach writing, the more I learn why teaching fails.

Friday, June 06, 2008
I'm well aware of my shortcomings when compared to other lyricists I admire, or people who sing and play better. But it seems as if some of the more authentic artists are the phonyest of all. They contrive extreme purist attitudes, as if even casual contact with commercialism will taint their cache.

You'd think that having a Johnny Cash cut would mean more than it does, but some people don't even want to be told Johnny didn't write his songs.

...my own doubts are just as deep. We never overcome these things, they're like soul shadows, and the brighter the spotlight the darker the shadows.

Thursday, May 29, 2008
I have always told writers that the kind of songs many aspire to write are not only trendy but that this type of writing is the CAUSE of Nashville's problems. They write goofy double entenders and corny clichéd one-trick contrivances thinking this is what works. But the audience that Nashville is marketing to is as flighty as the Britney Spears audience. It's a quick-buck-no-loyalty crowd. It was only a matter of time before Nashville figured that out. I don't really believe there will be a sudden sea-change, but change is inevitable when nothing sells.

Sunday, May 25, 2008
The show last night (w/CB, Don Henry and Julie Gold) was one of the best shows I've ever been a part of. We sold out, which was unexpected, and the place was full of long lost friends and acquaintances. We played for two hours and still got a standing ovation encore. I'm headed to NYC now to wrap this short tour up.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008
This is the result of two years of momentum. I always hear the echo of G's voice saying, "But if I ever stop pedalling, the bike falls over." There's no way off this ride...

There's a core audience in this MySpace morass. I haven't met many of these people face to face but every week some of them tell me they just bought tickets for a future show I'm doing, and there's some reward for all the endless promotion work.

Friday, May 16, 2008
... we took our favorite drive along the Brandywine River in Chester County-- incredibly beautiful tonight, with wildflowers in full bloom, the water clear and flowing like nothing I've ever seen-- the light at dusk was unearthly. The river snakes along like a narrow, semi-wild aqueduct through a wide flood plain of fertile land, with big stone jetties at intervals for the fisherman.

With 27 shows on my calendar I can testify that if you're open minded about possibilities, willing to go out on the limb and sing where ever they want you to sing, if you're loving the audience and the opportunities, and if you give people more than they expect in terms of emotional rewards and commitment to your art, it's amazing what comes to you.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008
I rarely play for audiences who know who I am. Most of the time it's a room full of curious people. They might read my bio in a promo flyer and come out to try something new. The only advantage I have is the names of artists who have recorded my songs, and in the House Concert world people don't really see this is a big plus. The first assumption people make when they see a guy with gray hair onstage and they've never heard of him is : he can't be any good because he's had a lifetime to get famous and he isn't. It's a negative perception that I have to overcome every night. Of course it's easy to overcome after I sing a few songs, but it isn't always easy to get the gig in the first place. People are just more incredulous about older artists they've never heard of. If you're young and unknown, no problem, maybe you'll be somebody some day. By my someday has passed, they think.

Monday, April 28, 2008
Clearly there are two types on people on the planet-- people who think songs are magic and people who eat beef jerky.

I played a song F. and I wrote when I was 18 on Saturday night. It's a completely mad song. Afterwards at least a dozen people commented on how much they liked it.

This is why some writers are not train-able in the NSAI sense. They really are "mad" in fundamental ways, creatively I mean. I deal with writers all day long who are so sane and logical that they can't be introduced to magic at all. The concept eludes them. Their lyrics read like math word problems. Essentially a song must do what J. said-- "open a window" -- and that's such a great metaphor for what happens... completely sensual and magic, the opened window on the unimagined scene.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008
We're generally spinning in all directions at once up here until the wheels fly off every day. I have over twenty shows booked on my calendar and more in the works. We've demonstrated that we're serious about this and now we've got a few allies.

Friday, February 22, 2008
Our Idlewheel tour was successful, exhausting due to all the travel, but very rewarding. We sold out two of the five shows, and the other three were well attended. The NYC show was the most fun because all the Poco fans were there cheering for us.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008
I'm waiting for Jack's plane to arrive from Nashville. Two nights of rehearsals with the band and then we have five Idlewheel shows.

Friday, January 25, 2008
I told B. that her addiction to validation was "valaddiction"...

Thursday, January 24, 2008
I've received a lot of feedback on NMW so far-- even an offer to go on the Jerry House radio show on WSIX in Nashville. This is all just hoopla and I don't care about it, I just want to keep the blog alive and give writers some truth and encouragement.

There's something so beautifully strange about being on the road-- you drift and drift and suddenly you connect in a place that seems as remote as the moon, yet it's a cocoon. So extraordinary.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008
The brain retains it's plasticity throughout life, provided one condition : willingness to tackle change/challenges. Overcoming our hardwiring isn't impossible, but we have to approach it with a will. A brain unwilling to learn doesn't function in the same capacity as a brain willing to learn. Learning is change, adaptation to new stimulus. We can't adapt unless we are willing participants in life. I recall the feeling very well when I was in Nashville struggling to accept the move. I was unable to learn how to adapt until I just decided it was a good time for a change. Suddenly everything was about learning to live a new way, breaking out of a comfortable rut and facing challenges with some enthusiasm. I don't think I changed nearly as much between the age of 10 and 30 as I changed between the ages of 50-53.

We're working on the logistics for the Idlewheel tour in February now. It has been complicated because we're using a band and we only have two evenings to rehearse. I'll also be going to Nashville again in March to work some more on the new CD with John, and to see my grand daughter. This is all so new I don't even know if grand daughter is one word or two...

Wednesday, November 07, 2007
The summation line became essential for me, and that's what I took to Nashville with me. I try to have one in every verse, chorus and bridge. My older lyrics have more subtle summations, now I usually try for more impact, but it's difficult. That's where I get hung up in re-writing. Frost tried for that kind of mega-impact in every poem.

F. and I wanted each other's songwriting gifts very badly. In one sense, songwriting died for me when he died because I no longer have that shared incentive to push me through the tough spots. I've only written a few songs I care about since 2003, and one was written with him posthumously [a lyric he left behind called "Carrying A Dream"]. I'd love to find the time for more songwriting again, but I spend so much energy fixing other people's songs and preparing for shows... I'd love to block out a week and take a writing retreat somewhere. Another thing I can't afford...

Monday, October 22, 2007
...the most important event of the tour happened 5 miles from home. 15 seconds earlier, and L. and I would be dead. A car (driven most likely by a drunk driver) was traveling 50mph on the wrong side of Rt 202. He met an oncoming vehicle head-on. We sat 100 yards from the accident for over an hour. I walked up fairly close to the mangled wreckage and saw the most horrible things I've ever seen in my life. The road giveth and the road taketh away.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007
The middle man... I remember him. It's been a while since I wasn't singing directly for the only person who matters in the audience-- the END man. The middle man needs to get out of the office more often. His power extends to the far reaches of the room and he controls literally everyone in a six foot radius. How I wish he didn't dominate all those who wish to be dominated. He doesn't see the power that great music has over the audience.

But there's still the resistance to all things unique in Nashville. The town has always resented some of it's best citizens. The people in charge do not want to be reminded of their mediocrity. They want the real talent to go away so the manufactured talent can sleep at night. I think back to those I knew-- it took Vince Gill almost 10 years to get attention down there. Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith all had to leave to get attention. Mary Chapin Carpenter wouldn't get signed in Nashville today, and neither would Cheryl Wheeler or Kathy Mattea.

Who'd win American Idol in 1968, Bob Dylan? No, Bobby Sherman. Art can't be democratic. The herd doesn't get to vote Samuel Barber off because he writes sad melodies. This is what affects thinking in the business. Rather than pedalling the artist, they pedal the efficiency of their production line.

Thursday, September 13, 2007
I feel a sense of obligation at those times, the need to keep going because I've gone this far, and that leads me back onto the stage where I remember how much I love to sing and connect with people. It's possible for me to remain much calmer by doing nothing. But then I get bored, and lethargic. So I stay in this perpetual state of creative tension and aggravated determination which makes normal life seem a bit distant.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007
The weekend in WV was exhausting in a good way. I taught 3 seminars per day, went to a Barbeque, song circles, did a concert with Susan Werner, Jason Blume, Ron Sowell, and Devon Sproule. I left on Sunday with no voice, but really inspired. Then on Monday we shot the videos at Chaplin's-- Larry and Tom Crosswaithe's new venture-- a streaming Internet video site that will be called Blue Comet Cafe and will feature new artists in concert w/interview footage. Larry is excited about my performance, although I haven't seen any of it.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007
We moved into our new house on July 12. The house has been taking every spare minute, there's lots to do. It does feel a bit like home and there are some things I really like about the place. It's relatively quiet and secluded enough to feel some sense of privacy on the deck overlooking our wooded yard with the little stream at the bottom. If not for some stressful gigs and the WV teaching camp coming up I'd just be unwinding for a few weeks. The last two years have taken a heavy toll on me. I hope things get easier for while, but knowing how life goes...

Tuesday, June 19, 2007
I'm enjoying performing more than ever. It's such a release from the chaos and calamity of life. I look forward to every show, just to be able to sing and forget about all of this stuff, what a joy.

Thursday, June 07, 2007
It gives me a perspective that most indie artists don’t have because they’ve never been close to the big label machinery. I’ve seen how screwed up it can be, and I’ve seen how much money gets thrown around in the process of breaking a major act nationally. The brutality of the major label record business isn’t for the faint hearted. The highs are higher, the lows are lower. But I also know that it takes a lot of success to stay in this business for four decades. How does an artist that only sells 5000 CDs ever come up with a mortgage payment and health insurance premiums and put a child through college? Living that way is fine when you’re 20, tougher when you’re 30, nearly impossible when you’re 50. True, with the indie scene we’re getting to hear a lot of good music that wouldn’t have been made two decades ago, but most of these artists will not have long careers without substantial royalties. Unfortunately the future of royalties is seriously in question. We’ve all taken quite a blow in that department lately. But the attitude now seems to be, “I’ll make music for a while, then I’ll get serious about a career in some other field”. That wasn’t the case for me. Music was all I ever intended to do. I hoped to get to the top somehow and songwriting was my vehicle. Being an indie artist by choice is different than being one out of necessity or because you don’t have long term goals. I choose this now because it gives me artistic freedom and because I’ve already had my hits and my platinum cuts. Someday I might choose to sign with a major label again.

A great lyric has an ideal way of expressing itself, and that can sometimes make it a pretty good poem. And there are also poems that can be set to music and become good lyrics. But T. S Eliot poems can’t all be sung, and Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen lyrics can’t all be quoted as good examples of poetry. The overlap is partial. There are poetic devices that are important to me. I use metaphor a lot. I also use alliteration, assonance and symbolism, which are the implements of poetry. I like storytelling, especially the kind used in the old traditional ballads that came over from the British Isles. There’s a lot of poetry in that stuff. But ultimately my lyrics just have to sing right.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007
I have a few career related disorders that I should probably be compensated for-- prolonged opening act syndrome comes to mind. Side effects include shortness of sound checks and dizziness from attempting to squeeze 30 years of music into 25 minutes. I had to do a radio show Sunday night to promote my concert with Susan Werner next weekend. I don't mind this so much, but after a few dozen University of Penn. kids stared at me like I'd wandered into the wrong universe I wondered if maybe I should be wearing a t-shirt that says, "Gray by choice and proud of it." Personal injury indeed.

But this is a long term battle, and the daily stuff is just dust on the goggles. I miss the regular commiseration of pros like Jack and John and Thom. The goal is the same no matter where I live-- artistic freedom and an audience.

Roots are important. Even in a seemingly rootless culture I think our generation is guiding. We are alienated from ourselves, while posters of Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan hang in every concert arena and coffee house in America. Young people really embrace the counter culture of the late 1960s in a huge way, but we've forgotten it.

Friday, June 01, 2007
Godfrey Daniels was a huge success. The show was sold out the afternoon before it. It was great to sing with the guys again. Those in attendance were treated to an SKB reunion show that even surprised us. We actually harmonized better than ever. Many old friends trekked up to Bethlehem to see it. The upshot is that we'll try to put together a three date mini-tour up here next spring if we're all still kicking. In some ways it's twice as lonely now that they've gone back to Nashville. I struggle over the lack of professionalism surrounding me...

We close on our house in four weeks. Another move and more wasted time, but I hope this will be nearly the end of a two year ordeal from which I'll never fully recover.

Thursday, May 17, 2007
I live in Glen Mills and my new house will be a stone's throw from the ruins of the Ivy (paper) Mill. I love the local history here. The Battle Of Brandywine was a key chapter in the revolutionary war. It was fought over some of the same terrain that Andy Wyeth immortalized, and ironically, it was fought on 9/11 (1777). The fords of the river played a key role in the battle, and the closest of these is Chads Ford which is near where the old Wire & Wood farmhouse sits, so my history intersects the river's history.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007
I just played a festival here called the Americana Roots Ramble. I did 3 shows on Saturday night to three packed audiences. Sunday I played The Arts Scene-- a big warehouse converted into a gallery, a restaurant and a theater-- they projected old films silently on the wall behind the stage so I had Victor Mature spearing dinosaurs ['One Million B.C.'] behind me as I sang "Watching Life With The Sound Turned Down". This kind of serendipity could never happen in Nashville. I'll be doing a show at Godfrey Daniels in Bethlehem with Schuyler, Knobloch and Tony Arata in May. I'll also be doing a ten day tour in the fall that will include opening for America and then doing a series of house concerts down through VA, including a concert in Blacksburg, that will eventually take me to Nashville. I plan to spend time down there working on the new CD with John.

Saturday, March 31, 2007
… will the young people gravitate to us the way we sat at the feet of Seeger? I don't think so. Will our generation care about what our generation's singers are saying? Yes, I think it's possible that a whole movement could be galvanized around aging issues similar to the 1960s. People may even want to relive that kind of experience-- a health care legislation rally where 65 year old folkies are singing protest songs about the price of medicine; "500 pills, 500 pills..."

I'm in the middle of a constant tornado up here. Very little of it is creativity, mostly teaching, evaluating, advising semi-pro friends by the dozen, promoting gigs, performing, and traveling, brainstorming with L., and practicing my songs to keep my voice in shape. Creative time is almost non-existent. I have this one song struggling to come together, and I think I'll finish it.

Thursday, March 29, 2007
… the ride has been white-knuckle lately. I've been offered two Indy record deals, but I feel like I've been shopping at the Big & Tall Shop and the Short & Stout Shop....nothing fits. I may just keep going down the road and see what else comes along. It's an extraordinary feeling to be wanted by these folks again at a mature age. But it follows that we give up as much as we gain, and we have to be willing to play the entire hand to the finish.

The only loyal audience that pays for music is the 40-65 generation-- the boomers and post boomers. Of course these are people who like real music, not the BS that's being marketed, so the stars line up for singer-songwriters roughly 40 - 65 years old who write intelligent songs and have career longevity. Amazing but true. We are the new Heavy Metal.

You can throw all the heat you want about how good the playing is, or how literary the songs are and it means nothing because those are dead marketing tools. Everything is pitched as "great music" even when it sucks.

Monday, March 26, 2007
T. and I had a successful show at Chaplin's, probably our best. The audience was so responsive it was startling. The rapport was wonderful...lots of easy laughs and a real affinity between the crowd and the songs.

Sometimes I feel like Hunter Thompson bluffing his way through his last two decades before eating the bullet. To have an idea, a feeling, a songwriting motive is like waking up with a re-grown limb. It may rot and fall off, but to have it sustained for 3 days is incredible.

Saturday, March 17, 2007
I'm about to take a big breath and dive deep. This is an ordeal for me, travel and pressure all weekend. I'll be playing for about 1000 people and driving 700 miles, small time by most standards, but it's a test of willpower. A part of me would rather stay home, grill salmon on the deck, and read a book, but I don't know if those days will ever return.

Thursday, March 15, 2007
The roller coaster continues...more gigs, more travel. This weekend will involve 12 hours of driving. I'll make L. crazy by Sunday night.

I was sitting there listening to R. explain some production concept and I realized that I was, at that moment, insane. It never occurred to me that people actually realized they were insane, but that's how it is. You just suddenly know you're insane, and then you go back to the conversation as if nothing happened.

Saturday, March 10, 2007
I haven't felt brave since I came up here. I feel crazy, foolish, excited like a gambler, reckless, elated, depressed, but not brave.

Thursday, March 08, 2007
Nearly everybody seemed to get from F. exactly what they wanted without recognizing the rest of what he had to offer. If you laid brick he was the perfect brick layer's companion, period. If you were a wildlife conservationist he was the ultimate conversation on hawks and bears, period. I know people who think they knew him well, but when I talk to them I realize they barely knew him at all. He had a remarkable ability, like a chameleon, to adapt to the conversation as long as it was interesting. He was just as happy discussing the firing temperature of brick compounds as he was talking about songs.

I had a one hour phone interview today, a good one, but I realized once again how tiring it is to be "on" so much of the time. I get to the end of my day and I just want to escape. I really can't believe I'm doing this sometimes...live late night radio, phone interviews, on the road... but the Genie is out of the bottle. It is fun if you can go with it and keep the rest of life at bay. My trouble seems to be that the rest of life is always growling at my door and I don't have any chicken bones handy.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Welcome to multi-tasking senility. I updated a crucial gig description in my CoffeeCup software per the house concert host's request, then forgot to upload the page-- now he's furious at me. It's a daily thing-- me vs. the roomful of monkeys with Coronas who will eventually type the works of Shakespeare. All that sets us apart is a SS #.

Wednesday, February 28, 2007
These commercial geniuses are incredibly adept at what they do. There's no artistic give and take-- just the HIT, and you must know what the commercial move is at all times. There's an unseen treasure map and they know if you're following it or not. My whole consciousness shifts in the presence of a great commercial writer. I leave a part of me behind in the interest of finding the hit treasure. But it's a big game, that's all.

Whenever I'm around anything that smacks of mega-success in life I know that every rung on that ladder was a personal sacrifice the likes of which I've engineered my whole life to avoid.

I've sat in rooms with writers who obviously had no clue what a commercial hit was. Trying to write hits with them was like dragging a wagon full of iron ore uphill. I've also sat in rooms with writers who make the writing feel like a downhill ride with a sail attached. Those are the times when you finish each other's lines. There's the feeling that the ideal song is already written in the ether, and you are trying to get as close to that as you can. And you both envision a very similar song, it's "the hit".

A great commercial song is a clean, clear stream flowing unimpeded. The best commercial writers collaborate effectively because they're both digging the same obstructions out of the way at the same time. When the co-writing chemistry isn't right, you get the sense that one writer is putting big rocks back into the stream and saying, "Doesn't this look pretty here?" No, it's in the way, get it out... Until an artistic writer learns to avoid language that dams up the stream with distractions, it's very difficult to write a hit. The beauty is the stream, it's the flow of the idea. Maybe there are some rocks but they lie flat against the bottom or they guide the stream's path along the banks. If the slope is right and the banks are solid you just stand back and let it flow. If the idea has no "hydraulics", if it requires all kinds of contrivances to keep the stream flowing, you'll never write a hit. It may not be easy to write a hit but it always flows effortlessly from top to bottom as if it were easy.

We all keep good excuses handy for going home from the writing session early. My favorite line was always, "Well, we have a start on something, let's both go home and sleep on it." That was a tune that never got finished.

Thursday, February 22, 2007
L. bears the brunt of the rejection from promoters and agents when he tries to book me. It gets personal sometimes-- today a local house concert sponsor sent him a really offensive email about unsolicited pitches asking that he remove them from his email list-- these people have no idea who they're rejecting, and they treat everyone as a local amateur. But it's potential money so we pursue it.

The realities of any "royalty deal" are such that you can usually do as well financially on your own by selling 1000 CDs as you can with a major label by selling 20,000 CDs (at a $2 per unit "royalty"). But the difference in terms of market impact between selling 1000 CDs and 20,000 CDs is significant. Acts are treated as successful at the 20,000 unit level-- more press, more airplay, etc. You can sell 5000 units on your own and gross $50,000 and still remain unknown in the press-- no market impact. These are very complex issues to sort out.

There's no substitute for intelligence in these matters. Calculated risks are part of life. When you ignore the calculations you're being reckless and the odds are against success.

I didn't choose to keep myself above the fray in Nashville, it was easy. I never liked the contrived Music Row stuff. And there was so much less of it when I moved down there than there is today.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Some writers don't even stop to consider the remote believability of their lyrics. Today a writer sent me a lyric that had a "poor old man" who was "still driving that 38 Oldsmobile". I pointed out to the him that his 'poor old man' was driving a car worth $150,000 in running condition.

Friday, February 09, 2007
It seems to me I've met incredible people who have taught me so much of what I know. But maybe that's just something that would only make sense inside my mind. These people are/were artistic geniuses in the pure sense of the term. I feel like I went to Olympus for a few years and hung out with gods. Ok, so it was just songwriting...

Monday, February 05, 2007
[Re: F. C. Collins] He's a fragmentary ghost, more and more I can't get a grasp on him. So much has changed. He'd love what's going on, but the stream of life flows quickly and he's standing in a spot way back on the shore. There are times when I deeply wish he was here to enjoy it all. The best days of my life were spent with him, writing songs and talking. That will never come again.

We had a way of not only supporting our strengths, but supporting each other's flaws. Life is about being un-tethered to the past, including the habit of relying on [F.] to tell me it's ok not to move forward. Good friends do that for us, make us feel at ease when we shouldn't be so at ease.

Saturday, February 03, 2007
I was looking at my lyrics tonight and realized that my 90 minute set has three songs about death in it. Good show! Drink up, folks, life is short!

The people who succeed in this business are the ones who can see the rut before they fall into it. Hence, no fear.

January 30, 2007
Some writers pursuing Nashville lose all sense of taste and judgment. I picture them eating with their fingers and belching as loud as possible.

January 23, 2007
Every great song idea has commercial potential if it's written with heart and soul.

January 20, 2007
Too much humility is like too much arrogance, an excess that ruins the balance.

I'm not belittling my work or the challenges I face, but there's a humanity in the small details of ordinary life that's utterly lacking when I spend my time trying to figure out how to coerce 20 more people into buying tickets for my show.

January 18, 2007
My life oozes unpredictability, and mostly that's good, but people who keep consistent schedules can't relate to what I do.

January 13, 2007
We're conditioned to think of time as linear. I called my new CD "No Road Back" because time is not linear, there is no way back even conceptually. Now is a succession of instants and we are flickering our way to eternity.

January 12, 2007
I think back on the writing days fondly-- it seems so alien here, now. There's a center to writing and that is gone for me right now. I haven't begun to tap into the resources I've stockpiled in my catalog. There are still 3-4 CDs worth of great songs to release. I don't know if I'll live long enough to archive it all, but that's the work at hand.

January 11, 2007
I'm pragmatic about everything except that tiny crack where the light gets in (to quote Leonard Cohen). It's the point where reality meets the unknown and there's a revelation of something. When I write I'm usually looking at, or for, the light.

January 10, 2007
I told B. I'd write, but I'm really not sure if I can. I don't feel it, I've got all this momentum going and it's very hard to remain quiet and concentrate. The job I'm doing now is a whirlwind, not a still pool. But, just being involved and living a life focused on art is fulfilling enough. I'll surely burn out on this eventually. But my new CD [No Road Back] should arrive tomorrow, I've got several new gigs coming together, L. and I have plans for the year, and I'm still not working at Walmart. What a con artist I've become!

Wednesday, January 03, 2007
I've been invited to open for Livingston Taylor at the Colonial Theater later this month. An auspicious beginning for the new year.

Saturday, December 23, 2006
It's amazing how often people say to me, "It's so good to hear words that make sense". I don't know why this obvious connection to the audience seems to have gone the way of great lyric poetry and realist painting. If it makes sense it can't be art...

Last night was the best show I've ever experienced. The energy was perfect-- the exchange, the emotion, the humor, the sound...all perfect. There were about 75 people there, which comfortably fills Chaplin's. N. and M. came and so did F., in spirit I think. We got a standing ovation and an encore. Bad weather up here seems to make people rebellious-- the worse it gets, the more determined they are to leave the house and have fun. It was a nice way to end my performing for this year.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006
It seems counter-productive to tell a writer a song isn't commercial when it may have other merits. I'm not always kind to the song but I try to be respectful of the writer.

Monday, December 18, 2006
There's a type of person who never thinks about a legacy. On the other hand, I've known tradesmen in many walks of life who think there's a legacy in every action. This morning I had one song each from five of my six favorite writers at SongU. It struck me how differently these writers approach the craft of songwriting. It's assumed there will only be formula in the most basic sense (a chorus and a verse), it's assumed the idea will have unique personal perspective, it's assumed there will be purpose and heartfelt motivation. Some of these folks are geniuses at one aspect and weak at another aspect of songwriting, but it's the motivation that they share in common. They aren't imitators and they don't chase the money.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006
I wish the performing was all there is to life up here. I'm struggling in this condo, housing is disappointing and priced out of our range. I wish I could take these gigs back to my house in Tennessee.

Monday, December 11, 2006
I sold 26 CDs tonight, if that's any indication of how the show was received, I guess it was well-received. Tommy [Geddes, my percussionist] had a blast. The Sellersville Theater was amazing-- a 350 seat converted theater from 1894, tastefully decorated and pretty much sold out. Suzy [Bogguss] got me up for two songs at the end of her set. One song I'd sung harmony on for her record 18 years ago, "You remember this song-- you made up the harmony part!" yes, but that was 500,000 miles ago! Then we closed with "Take It To The Limit". The crowd loved it of course, she really knows her fans.

Sunday, December 10, 2006
Every time I leave the house with my guitar up here something good happens. It's extraordinary compared to Nashville where dead ends await you at every turn. People are so optimistic, there isn't the futility of facing the big machine that defeats all but the most marketable, beautiful, malleable, vanilla, image-conscious artists. There is NO hierarchy, just people making music.

The range of styles at The Milkboy Cafe last night was remarkable, but the same audience sat, listened and cheered for all 6 acts. This club is huge for a listening venue. It probably seats 200 and takes up as much space as a mid-sized restaurant. It was a very relaxed night for me-- the routine of being in front of people is working as I hoped it would. Eventually it all comes together-- the ability to go inward and sing, then come out and make people laugh between songs, then go back in again.

Monday, December 04, 2006
I've been working with John Mock to get the limited edition CD "No Road Back" finished. He's doing the artwork and mastering. The CD cover, very basic-- in keeping with my theme of using personal things that symbolize the journey, will be a picture of my 1953 Gibson J-185, which is one year older than me. I'm pleased to have accomplished both of these little projects ["Idlewheel" and "No Road Back"] in spite of everything else that's going on. Sometimes I actually think I might reach most of my goals.

Friday, December 01, 2006
My feeling about many hippies is that they (in complete denial) became reactionaries in the opposite direction. When their experiment in Socialism failed they became cynical and shamelessly capitalistic. They abandoned honesty, integrity, principals, self-respect, compassion and Utopianism in order to make more and more money so they'd never have to be Socialists again. Being a Socialist is easy when you're poor but very disturbing when you're rich. I'm not for re-distribution of wealth, but I hate that wealth = political power now. In that sense it's evil because it enables LAWS against the poor. We are no longer, in my opinion, a true Representative Democracy, but a Corporatocrasy with Aristocratic Representation. This would be ok if there was a conscience in the Aristocratic Representatives…

I was never a hippy idealistically speaking. I didn't care about the "soul" of the movement because it had none. It was just a depraved effort to avoid responsibility. The people who marched for peace were mostly students-- today's millionaires who never swallowed Leary's drop out ideology. If a true hippy marched it was because there were good drugs at the rally. I met one of the Chicago Seven in LA. He was a cynical, disillusioned person, but I couldn't help thinking he hadn't really changed too much since the 60s.

Thursday, November 30, 2006
The big news of the day was that WUMB in Boston and XM15 are playing the record [Easy Fires] we're getting some decent exposure. For a CD that's 5 years old, this is unheard of.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006
I have nine shows in December, plus seminars, song evaluations, and the holidays. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

Thursday, November 23, 2006
I'm proud of the awards, but it isn't how I represent myself. I don't even perform most of the award winning songs. The biography gets me gigs and gives promoters something to talk about. Audiences don't care. They just want to hear good music. I am, to some extent, living down the tunesmith moniker. It's a transition from writer to performer, out of the cocoon. I have second thoughts about this every day. My big fear is not failure, rather, what success may lead to-- being on the road, exhausting schedules at an age when it will be a strain on my health, and other compromises.

I need a staff. I'm evaluating songs, doing seminars, promoting gigs, rehearsing, doing interviews, putting together artwork for a CD, house hunting, emailing my blustery opinions... I'm a cottage industry without thatch.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006
M. used to tell the story of how he got this wonderful gig on a train. He thought, "Wow, how cool-- a concert on a moving train, lots of atmosphere, scenery rushing by, romantic candles on the tables, everyone relaxing with a glass of wine..." They got him on the train and said, "Dinner's at 5:00. We want you singing while strolling the isles between cars till at least 7:30"

Friday, November 17, 2006
ALL great music is personal. That's why it connects. It's the vulnerability, the raw nerves, the naked emotions, the transparent confession that lures people-- other humans longing to recognize themselves in a work of art.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006
I believe there is a core of spirit in all of us that knows when justice has been done. We may lie about it, deny it, vaguely recognize it, but it's there. To the extent that we hold anything above compassion we will fail to see wisdom.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006
I have to realize that people make stupid choices regarding my own worth, my artistic value. Anyone who "comes around" to my way of thinking at a later date should be welcomed. This is common sense, but sometimes ego gets in the way.

It seems as if depression comes on suddenly with some people-- they're pretty well adjusted, then they wake up one day and consider suicide, so they seek help and write a book. The rest of us just accept the darkness with the light and plod onward. I never expected anything to be different as far as I can remember. My first big disillusionment was my last. It ended young. Now I'm in siege mentality most of the time. It doesn't mean I can't laugh or enjoy things, and there are big triumphs if you take chances... but this quest for happiness is absurd. And people who want to get through life without feeling pain? That's not what life is about. You must be willing to feel pain, seek situations where you might encounter it, or life is meaningless.

Monday, November 06, 2006
Accomplishing meaningful artistic things is never easy. I had a long period in Nashville where nothing would get finished-- that ended when Idlewheel came out. I'm moving fast because I'm unsettled in this transitional state. I'm starting on the No Road Back retrospective tomorrow. Next year, I'll begin a brand new CD.

Saturday, November 04, 2006
I know it's a mainstream CD [Idlewheel] but I'm still proud of where we took the music. I won't go there again if I write, but as a chronicle of an era when Nashville was constricting to such an extent that it excluded these songs, I think it says a lot about the evils of corporate politics and the cookie-cutter Clear Channel mentality.

Thursday, November 02, 2006
In spite of all I say about it, I have an abiding love for Nashville. There are hundreds of hacks and idiots down there, but also dozens of brilliant, wonderful people. There's no concentration of talent of that caliber anywhere else. The simple, brilliant commercial song is the Rosetta Stone. So difficult to find, yet it unlocks the world.

The big hits are never exactly what they set out looking for. It's like Nashville is busy growing coffee beans when suddenly a talented writer strikes oil.

Monday, October 30, 2006
The Tin Angel show, my first big one up here, was nearly sold out and the audience was one of the most enthusiastic crowds I've ever played for. Ais and I had a blast w/Tommy. During 'Still The Voice' I learned over to her and said, "You'll remember this", and she smiled at me. The crowd caught this, and so did Bill Miller who was watching my set from the back of the room. Bill was incredibly gracious, talking about my set and Aislinn during his show. He also talked about the days when he used to sit in the back of the Bluebird and listen to Thom, Don, Fred and me. Finally, after his excellent part of the show during which he told wonderful stories, he invited me up to close the evening. We did "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" together.

Thursday, October 26, 2006
None of us is powerless. Most of us are crippled by doubt or paralyzed by lack of enthusiasm. I have a small handful of friends who make things happen. They don't change the world, they just change the part of it that they come into contact with. It's wonderful and inspiring.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006
No rhyme? That's like cooking without spice. Someone down there needs to knock some heads together and then recruit a few untainted minds, maybe some kids raised by wolves...

I find that if I stop competing and just do music for the love of it, things happen. And it's so much less painful. I no longer see myself rising, or climbing anywhere, especially over dead bodies. There is no "there" to get to. It's about waking up alive for one more day, and hopefully having a nice experience with music before I sleep again, or die. Since throwing myself into the local scene here there is something exciting almost every day, either a promising possibility, or a new gig, or finding out that an agency or a promoter is interested in what I'm doing here. These things mean so much more than they used to.

There are so many good people out there who will be loyal to you if you just show them you're in it for love. They respect age and vitality. They are starved for passion, and they hunger to be around it. If we just put ourselves in the path, they trample their way to us with enthusiasm. Just leave the house, sing, talk, meet, write. It's everywhere.

What depresses me about writing for Nashville is how nearly fruitless the whole thing is. If I invested as much energy into the local scene here as I invested into Nashville I'd be the Mayor of Philly.

Sunday, October 22, 2006
I won't be silenced by Nashville so I'm overcoming what won't be denied. Almost every gig is a combination of amateurism and wonderful surprises that short circuit my expectations. Time after time I'm sitting there waiting to perform thinking, "It was so much more professional in Nashville", but by the end of the night I'm blown away by the enthusiasm, and moved by the extremes that people go to just to enjoy the music (like driving 100 miles for the show).

Thursday, October 19, 2006
Robert Frost was looking for colloquial speech when he wrote North Of Boston. He labored over it for ten years. Finally when he was living in England he really began to hear New England's colloquial speech in his head-- he had to get away from it to recognize it. Great writers hear what people say. Bad writers try to invent what people say.

Words always have rhythm, tone, vibration. A sentence can resonate and still be plain spoken. Poetry can be excessively poetic, too. Poetry is an arrangement of words, a way of communicating a thought. But things get said many ways. That's essentially character.

I think Music Row songwriting has fallen into a trough of banal commercialism. We wanted it to be more, and we pushed the literary envelope. Most of the folks who care have left the building.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Distraction from writing is probably a defense mechanism.

I still do better than the vast majority of writers who depend on royalties, but it's a small blue collar income at this point. I believe there's some potential in the performing thing, but it will take a while to get to headliner status. Ah, the road beckons again... a mini-van this time.

I know I will lie on my deathbed and say it was worth it. Screw all this greed and luxury. In the Internet age, obscurity is never more than an electronic miracle away from semi-obscurity! Either way, if we end up with something we're proud of; music or children, life is certainly worth living if we do it artistically.

Monday, October 16, 2006
It's always difficult to see the light at the end of a winding tunnel.

I go into any situation with a reserve of strength and I hold up pretty well until a few bad days feel heavier than usual. Then I begin to understand what I'm up against-- and I can't make a situation end by saying, "ok, ENOUGH!" I have to keep going until things change. When we're young and we don't like something we just walk away from it. Later on that becomes impossible-- we have commitments, responsibilities, people depend on us.

Friday, October 13, 2006
The Native Americans say "Honor The Spirit" of things, trees, stones, etc. The white man has no mythology anymore. He has no time for childish things like honoring the spirit of water. So he builds levees that are too small and dies in a tsunami. Observing is only half. Science observes. It's more like living in awe. If we were in awe instead of so cock-sure of everything we'd make less mistakes.

Thursday, October 12, 2006
Spend ten minutes thinking about every detail of what a tree actually is-- we look at a tree and sum it up in our minds in a sentence, an instant, a flash that relegates it to almost nothing because we have no time for more. Yet volumes, hundreds of volumes, have been written about what trees are, what they do. Our summations are conveniences but they get us into trouble all the time. I see clearly that I cause much of my own unhappiness because I visualize/conceptualize the world a certain way and put myself into a relationship with that concept.

Americans are so gullible and easily surprised by broken levees and terrorists flying planes into buildings. There was one island occupied only by natives when the tsunami hit last year. When the water retreated far out to sea they instinctively knew the result would be catastrophic. They all climbed to the highest ground and no one was killed when the wave came in. All of the westerners went out to look at the retreating water-- why? The concept that a wave is only 12 feet high and that land is secure.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Something dawns on us [as writers]when we chase the sequence of thought. Sort of like Emerson's hidden logic-- a bloom follows a bud that follows a seed, yet the bloom, bud and seed are different concepts. Hidden Logic is like that, unrelated concepts that follow one another due to some connection we don't always perceive.

Monday, October 09, 2006
Had an interview with a young woman from *** Magazine who asked me whether I found all the young Philly performers intimidating. I stared her down for thirty seconds before answering, "No more than the young journalists." There goes that article…

Friday, October 06, 2006
Miles Davis, W.B Yeats, Van Gogh-- its always the demolition of concepts that makes art so powerful

F. was the most completely Zen person I've known. I'd be walking with him, talking about songwriting maybe, and suddenly he'd look up at the sky, see a hawk, and in mid-sentence, with no pause, no punctuation or change in vocal tone, he'd start talking about the wing markings or the behavior of hawks. Some would call it a degree of insanity, or ADD, but he was instinctively reacting to the moment, always open to life as it rushed past him. That's quintessential Zen.

If I wake up frustrated and say, "I'm a songwriter who isn't inspired today", I am first conceptualizing myself as a songwriter and then conceptualizing myself as uninspired. In reality I'm neither, because I'm not a concept. I'm just not pulled to do that today. By eliminating the concept "I'm a songwriter" I won't be tormented by "I'm not inspired" when I don't write. Of course this is easier said than done...

Tuesday, October 03, 2006
I feel very little call to writing now. This is nothing I want to preserve. I'm almost wishing I was a touring artist again, rootless, roaming everywhere

...if a writer is writing for the radio by imitating what he hears now, he's nine months behind. Everyone on Music Row is hearing stuff on the streets that will be on the radio next summer.

Saturday, September 30, 2006
The only way you can say you completely trust God is if you know you can live in a cardboard box and still retain your faith. If we only trust God to keep us under bricks and shingles maybe we don't understand what's possible, and so our faith is shallow. I personally believe the faith of 90% of Christians is the brick and shingle faith. Then again, maybe true faith is rewarded with bricks and shingles, I don't know. I always wonder what the final thoughts of the missionaries are, just before they're executed. Are they thinking, "Surely Jesus will stop this bullet"? I doubt it. That's the difficult problem with faith. It has to include, "I have faith that Jesus will let me die of a gunshot to the head now." But then I see the homeless and I think a bullet in the head isn't really very much suffering.

If a person seeks the dissolution of self and the service of humanity, peace of mind is probably a more regular experience in life. The problem is not with the recipe. It's with us. We compromise with ourselves and we struggle, and in return we are only given some of the peace and contentment that's possible in life.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006
It feels exactly like when I first got to Nashville-- the fixation with accomplishing something, the daily frustrations, the little victories and the big ones like last Saturday. There has been a lot of encouragement, many things are in progress thanks to L., who senses the momentum. I hope the pace will be sustainable...

Tuesday, September 26, 2007
We're always waiting for amazing things to happen and they rarely do. A year ago it was the Highwaymen cut, out of nowhere, incredible affirmation. The days between miracles are the hardest.

Sunday, September 24, 2006
…afterwards we went to Wilmington to David Bromberg's party. Market Street was ripped up entirely. We skirted the rubble, and as I was walking up to the door I suddenly stopped and said to E., "I feel like I'm about to have one of the strangest nights of my life."

Bromberg's place is literally a museum. He collects violins and he has one from every American maker-- they hang in rows on his walls. The collection dates back to 1880. It's the only one like it in the world, and there are hundreds of instruments. The whole place is decorated with folk art-- outlandish, bright, wonderful art. Then there's an LP library, rare old stuff, thousands of records, plus a wrist watch collection. In the midst of this sits Bromberg, long gray beard and twinkling eye, with a dozen really superb bluegrass pickers, Paul Seibel and some very talented young singers, and a small audience of fans, relations, & friends. They're picking and harmonizing up a storm, quite good. Two hours go by and there's no loss of steam. I sit listening with E. and L., feeling pretty small but enjoying it. No one has invited me to sing.

Suddenly one of the bluegrass pickers starts a tune, and three others jump in-- they know this one. He starts singing, "A cold night wind sweeps across the prairie floor..." and my hands go numb. The others harmonize the chorus, "Brother to the wind, my long lost friend..." They finish a rough but lovely version of the song and E. stands up (my champion) and says, "Where did you learn that??" The guys look surprised..."Uh, Tony Rice taught it to us." "My husband wrote that! He's over there," she says, pointing as I duck and cover in the corner. "Get up here!" Bromberg says with a grin, and the bluegrass pickers are saying , "Oh no! We mangled it!" The crowd is laughing... What are the astronomical odds of this happening with such an unknown song!?

Thursday, September 21, 2006
All collaborations are elements in combination, with the result that we create new compounds. Some of it disintegrates quickly, some of it endures. I had no idea I'd still be singing some of these songs twenty-five years later. They just survive the changes and grow stronger.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006
The InVerse show went very well. I only sang six songs but poetry audiences are very attentive. I got to spend some time talking with poet Ron Silliman, who writes with visceral imagery and reads like a freight train coming at you. He enjoyed the music, so I traded a CD for a signed volume of poetry.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Affluence is a license to let your worst qualities hang out. I'm not a socialist, I believe people should keep what they earn, but I mean ALL people, not just the rich. The poor are robbed, either by sickness or misfortune, they pay a much greater toll than the wealthy. The economy is an endless "bubble" cycle-- real estate, Wall Street-- under the control of rich white power, always just out of reach for most of us.

I've always loved the concept of provisions in a backpack. When I was young I used to try to make a list of essentials that I'd be able to live on for months and yet be able to carry on my back. I think there's great joy in the shuffling off of shackles through the realization that we need nothing but our next breath and maybe a few matches. Writing is the ideal profession for anyone who can live like that.

Monday, September 18, 2006
The stresses pull in different directions. We're only human, and that isn't enough. This is what troubles my faith. God never tried to make it in the twenty-first century. I wonder who would pay Jesus's healthcare? Some days I'd rather be sleeping in my car and singing for the homeless…

I knew there was a reckless aspect to this move up here. But I was tired of the numbness of Nashville. I bet double or nothing because I don't think life is a wait-and-see proposition. I think you gamble or you lose, sometimes both, but never a no-gamble

Sunday, September 17, 2006
Even sadness should be expressed beautifully and there should be more than simply a statement of pain, or a stifled scream of alarm. I think it's very hard to offer courage and hope in the current climate, but why write otherwise? Why extend your suffering to others...

Thursday, September 14, 2006
The unspoken conclusion I reached back in Nashville was that I am no longer a writer who can depend on royalties for a living. That isn't to say the old model is dead, but it has been restricted tremendously by the narrow focus of the song marketing. If you can write the blockbuster song for the blockbuster act, you can still make a half-million in royalties. On the Internet, as B. told me, we're fighting over a quarter of a penny in song royalties. This has taken us back to the dark ages. Stephen Foster made $.02 per sheet. Songwriters will make $.0025 per download in this model. I think live music and self-owned content is the future for those who can cut it.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006
There are so many mysteries with poetry because it can't depend on melody, it must sing itself somehow… unlike lyrics which are constantly disturbed or enhanced by melody.

Sunday, September 10, 2006
My days are a chaos of emails about gigs, seminars, SongU, private coaching, song charts, rehearsals, house sale listings, and song evaluations. It's much more distracting than Nashville. It has usurped the creativity completely. It's out of control. I came here too open minded.

Saturday, September 09, 2006
I only wish there was something like accrued relevance. I used to imagine myself basking in my accomplishments when I was old. They're removed "basking" from my menu…

I've always been highly driven-- restless without a clear destination. How do people go through life avoiding things like completion, satisfaction, challenge, growth? How can some people end the day no smarter, sharper, tougher, closer to goals than when they woke up? I'm in awe of unmotivated people. They must suffer some nasty kind of torment.

What communication we make [as writers] is always a response, direct and clear, to stimulus. Things sensate the mind until language isn't an abstraction anymore. It's palpable.

Thursday, September 07, 2006
American pop culture is so disturbing I can't even work up a good rant about it anymore, it's like kicking a drunk or teasing a deaf-mute.

There are days when I sit down to work and think, "I can't keep pushing this bolder uphill..." I have a lot of support and I'm very lucky, but I push it all day long. I turn around and the gigs have run out... gotta hustle and the writing must wait.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006
L. has loaned me a volume of correspondence between the poets Charles Olsen and Robert Creeley. I've been devouring it, although it's almost in code. Read a sad Internet piece written by Creeley in which he spoke of Olsen's death: "at his death I felt a distance occur, not between us, but between myself and that projected world of our enterprise. It could no longer be the intimacy of a day's possibilities. No one was any longer so present." [This entry was written on the third anniversary of F. C. Collins' death, and the passage reminded me of him].

There used to be some chronology in my life. Now I think it's more in the present. Maybe it's age or maybe it's this unsettling move. I keep reminding myself to be open minded. I never used to do that. We spend our lives carrying around a concept of ourselves that makes us feel secure, safe, somebody, when in reality we are just a moment, only now. In the liberation lies an ability to be anybody or anything.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006
We're all dreamers drawn to the impossible.

I think the interaction between a performer and audience (of one or a thousand) is the Holy Grail of the art.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006
I've always found that a good performance experience is like an aphrodisiac to creativity. I wrote my best songs and recorded them while I was battling with the Bluebird gig every other Friday.

Monday, August 14, 2006
...what songwriters sometimes think when they perform. But it isn't about us, it's about the audience. They come to us to be renewed. When we write we should keep this in mind.

I think there's a voice inside the song. It speaks from the narrative and the dialog, and a writer has to find it in order to play the role the song requires.

I've been studying Woody Guthrie and I'm amazed at what he accomplished by transforming the rural traditional voice into the sophisticated radical voice. His simplicity belies his brilliant mind. Listening to songs like Lindbergh or Jesus Christ, or even the unfiltered version of This Land Is Your Land, it's as if he was Will Rogers, Mark Twain, and the Lomax family all in one.

Guthrie had some great topical songs. He was afraid of nothing. Because Dylan was so heavily influenced by him, I can hear the evolution of American music take a huge leap forward in Woody. He virtually invented the "talking blues" which is every singer-songwriter's comic standard today. "Deportees" is as relevant today as it was in the 1940s. So is "Jesus Christ". It's really incredible how many timeless songs he wrote. Even the somewhat dated songs like Grand Coulee Dam, Lindbergh, and Pastures Of Plenty are so authentic they seem like musical documentaries.

Sunday, August 13, 2006
Very late and I've just returned from the DaVinci's show-- the place was wall to wall friends. The party continued back at our buddy J.'s house where everyone came by to play songs and laugh some more. If I had one day left to live I'd probably just as soon do this again as do anything else. These friendly gatherings remind me of life on the road. The bus is a cannonball of hurtling camaraderie shot across the anonymous landscape. It's a beautiful thing to share the darkness and sit in the dim cabin lights feeling very vulnerable and mortal with your pals.

Friday, August 11, 2006
The shape of life here is very amorphous. I don't feel like I'm home at all-- it's a displaced, unsettled feeling when I think about how deep my roots in Tennessee had actually grown. The pace is too fast, the real estate too expensive, the dangers and risks have increased. It remains to be seen if the rewards will make it all worth the trouble.

Monday, August 07, 2006
…the Internet interpretation of copyright law is really a mess. Everyone seems to be interpreting it as they see fit (in their favor). To complicate the issue, an mp3 is a new format-- it isn't a digital hardcopy and it isn't a tape or a recording, it's a file. There are no literal laws governing "music files".

Wednesday, August 02, 2006
I'm moving forward somewhat blindly, booking gigs, playing music, trying to "get some traction" as L. says. I don't have time to dwell on the past, but it overtakes me sometimes. Friends and family have been kind. Still, I feel a pull I can't explain, maybe it's just the restlessness of living in an apartment.

Tuesday, July 25, 2006
L. has already got me booked at Tin Angel. I'll do a show there with Bill Miller in October. I have couple of other humble gigs…

There are moments when I'm gripped by the desire to slam on the brakes and tell everyone I'm just going back "home" to Franklin, as if. To know the past is really gone, so gone it's like somebody else's dream, is disorienting. I don't look back very often. When I do, it's surreal. There are almost no tranquil moments, no creativity, it's all energy going outwards.

Tuesday, July 18, 2006 Glen Mills, PA.
[Here will be found the first entries on my new life in Pennsylvania in which I have shifted my emphasis to performing live, teaching and releasing CDs rather than writing for the Nashville market. I've set out on a path in the "new music business", the world of Internet self-promotion and MySpace, hoping to discover new ways of living creatively; ways that aren't restricted by the chaos that's sinking the traditional music business. Once again I thank Ms. Charlotte Ryerson for our correspondence, which assisted me with these entries.]

I have an inkling of how busy my life could potentially get up here…it's a bit like finding a smorgasbord after being rescued from a desert island. My first "official" show will be August 12. Preparing for it, I often stop and think about past performances, and the more absurd shows come to mind. I remember doing my laundry in my shorts, shirtless in California when our drummer, P., came running in to grab me, "We're on stage in five minutes they screwed up the schedule!" I played for 500 people in shorts and a dirty t-shirt. Then there was the gig after the tornado on a sopping wet stage while the winds blew mic stands over. And of course the long drive to the Florida pan handle to play a show only to find out the gig was double booked and the local band got the gig. The more you perform the more stories you have to tell the grandchildren.

Wednesday, June 28, 2006 4:16 AM, Nashville, TN.
[Year Of Transition, Part Two : With this entry I closed a long chapter in my life and began a new one.]
[Read "Year Of Transition, Part One" in correct sequence]

A spoken word echoes around the house to accentuate the emptiness. A song turns the place into a cavern. The most unfamiliar feeling right now is the lack of physical comfort in my own home. There's no soft place to fall. I hope I can't remember this night in a year or two, but something tells me I will. I've been unable to sleep-- the house makes unfamiliar sounds; groans and creaks with relief, nearly five tons of furniture and boxes off its back.

A. came by yesterday and I made her the last of the pasta using the last available pan, the last plate and silverware. I wanted her to remember how we spent this time. Watching the young movers fly down the gravel driveway with every load made me feel tired and old. A. and I laughed at them together. Then she took her cat and left, teary-eyed. I wish I could dig into the memories that crowd my brain, but every time I open the door just a crack I'm flooded with them and have to get busy doing something. There's still some cleaning, some errands to run, the money from the closing to deal with. I'll get out of here eventually in the morning, but tonight I feel like a squatter, a derelict in someone else's space.

I've packed up the laughter and swept out the tears, just like the lyric says. I've scrubbed off the fingerprints and every other sign of our occupation. Its a clean slate for another family.

The starlight on the woods is grand tonight-- silver blue, ancient light. The crickets are singing. It's a peaceful corner of the world. But all things must end. It is time to let the past begin to grow dim, although in a place in my mind it has never glowed brighter.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006
I'm waiting on my movers. A. has come home to say goodbye to her bedroom...very touching. The weather has cooperated-- a balmy 80 degrees and dry. No such luck where I'm going.

It's what the move represents that makes it difficult. It reaches down into the insecurities we all have about life, disturbs the sand at the very bottom on the pond. S. called this morning feeling the same way-- it has been up to me to reassure others that life is still full of possibilities, and leaving Nashville isn't leaving Planet Music...

Saturday, June 24, 2006
A. moved out today. God speed, sweet child. I stood in her room tonight remembering singing her to sleep, reading "Goodnight Moon", writing "Dance With Father Time". The house is dead to me now. Four days and counting.

Jack opened a box of Idlewheel CDs to give one to a friend-- no CD inside the jewel case! So he opened another, and another...25 jewel cases beautifully packaged and shrink wrapped. No CDs inside. The entire shipment had to go back. Turns out it was only 60 missing CDs but the only way to find them was to open all 1000 cases and re-shrink wrap them. Nashville Disk And Tape had to do this, of course, not us. And now they also have to ship the CDs to me in PA at their expense.

Thursday, June 22, 2006
A. is supposed to be moving out tomorrow. The significance of that hasn't sunk in at all. It just seems like one more surreal event in the sequence rather than an important life passage. I'll be pondering these weeks for decades to come. I have never felt so adrift, exhausted, and numb in my life.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Things have become crazy here. The Jeep broke down again-- as expected-- and A. has contributed her little crisis. Plus a ton of last minute details to take care of. It continues again tomorrow with a 9:00 am appraisal, rental car return, getting half of the Idlewheel CDs to Jack, picking up a Power of Attorney document and having it notarized for the closing...

We are all totally exhausted at this point. E. was in tears on the phone-- just had to let off steam. She is moving again on the 25th, I move on the 27th, A. moves somewhere sometime before the 28th. I'll sleep the last night in my house on the floor. Fitting... The stress has been so bad I couldn't remember the name of my bank today-- had to put down the phone and go to the file cabinet to pull out a bank statement.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Sometimes I really think death will be no big deal-- you don't have to pack for it, drive to it, pay for it, or wait for it to get fixed. Sounds like the best deal in life.

Part of the reason I'm willing to undertake this move is because I'm aware that life isn't always about maintaining comfort. It's also about exploring discomfort, testing limits of endurance. I've tested mine for 6 months and I'm stronger for it. What we find out when we challenge ourselves is that life only rewards those who gamble.

Monday, June 12, 2006
I live in the hope [of finding] a way out of the cage. I've been out, but the cage is something that finds us and encloses around us. I wrote about it in Crazy Nightingale. We beat our wings against it, but we also see heights sometimes.

Thursday, June 08, 2006
There are no groups or movements like the old days. Instead we get song camps. Life moves too quickly and everyone is too concerned about money...maybe someday the technology will be simple enough to get a writing group going online-- a virtual meeting. But, like revolutions, eventually the wrong people show up.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Real progress is a rare thing. Jack and I are still waiting for our CD to come back from the manufacturers.

…with each day I get closer to the end of it. That's all I long for now, if it must end, let it, and soon. There are moments when it overtakes me… I feel my stomach contract and my head get light and I have to sit down until it passes. It's just like standing on a ledge, and when I look down... well, I'll try not to look down until the moment I must leap.

Monday, June 05, 2006
T. answered with a very long note, the sweetest email he's ever sent me. "I have already learned to miss you. however, I still have about 10 of your remarkable melodies that keep me company and inspire me every so often. Please leave this place with my love and affection for you and your sweet family. We all grope forward with little more than the blessings of those we are fortunate to meet along the way. We will do more great work - I know it."

I'm packing several hours a day, evaluating songs, dealing with the emotion. The burn will last as long as I'm skimming the atmosphere. I'm staying sane with correspondence, and when the move is over I will crash for a while. I'll need to heal my fingers and my brain.

Tuesday, May 30, 2006
I was reading Ezra Pound's Letters this evening. He was arguing very persuasively about the lack of quality in American poetry back in the 1930s. This has been a long, slow decline. He berates H. L. Mencken for "writing too much for your audience", and chides William Carlos Williams about his lack of clear poetic truth. Pound was, early on, a great poet, always a great critic and an amazing editor. He was recklessly honest, and the correspondence reveals a man who trusted that his colleagues understood he was trying to improve the art of poetry. It's such a rare trait, the willingness to take a stance, stick to it, defend it, and yet be helpful even to those you disagree with. Information has supplanted writing. There is an insatiable need for information and almost no time for the art of the written word. A sentence that conveys no useful information is a zero on a scale of ten. Reading Pound, the amazing vocabulary, the sparks leaping off the page...what a decline.

Sunday, May 28, 2006
I say it all day long, "Why do I want to listen again?" It's my #1 criticism of songs. It comes down to moments of delight always. I think of [Dennis] Linde's lines from "Under The Kudzu" about laying on the hood of the Camero with a Cola watching the sun go down. It isn't the line, it's what the line captures. I want to live forever in that Camero moment-- I absolutely love it.

Thursday, May 25, 2006
One writer, a total stranger, called me after the Ty Herndon hit and said, "As soon as I heard that song I knew you and I could write a hit together." I didn't bother to point out to him that I'd already written nine hits without him, so exactly what was his role in the song going to be?

Wednesday, May 24, 2006
When Da Vinci was my age he was leaving Milan penniless, still hadn't made any impact on art in Italy, and had yet to create his masterpiece.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006
I need to keep plowing forward so I don't get bogged down in this move. I've been packing and trying to envision the house empty... But every time I talk to someone and they say, "Wow...really? You sold the house?" I break out in a cold sweat.

Monday, May 22, 2006
I drove to the market for some Sam Adams after class. The stars were beautiful and the night was so peaceful. I genuinely love Tennessee, and for the first time it hit me that it was more than my house, more than the songwriting community, more than my daughter I'm leaving behind. I'm leaving this corner of the world behind, all of it; the way the rain comes down in buckets and the way the spiders grow four inches long, the way the skinks turn orange in the sun and the way the squirrels are sometimes suspiciously brown underbelly (do they mate with chipmunks?). I'll miss the smell of the Harpeth River and the harsh light of August, the rotting Osage fruit on the lawn in October. I love Pennsylvania, but it's like going back to find a first love...Tennessee is the mature love of my life.

A. and I spent some of the afternoon together. She was out on the big rocks crying after she found out about the closing date. We walked around the property together. "I'm gonna miss this house so much", she sobbed. I couldn't answer. I'd like to be two people and have one of me stay in Tennessee. It really breaks my heart to be leaving.

F. had a little pseudo-Zen expression he used. When you asked him what he was up to he'd say, "Just pickin' 'em up and puttin' em down"... it's the doing... "and when you do not think, you grow" There are monks in the Himalayas whose sole purpose in life is to create a brightly colored sand "painting" every day-- very elaborate mandalas-- that get swept up unceremoniously each evening.

Friday, May 19, 2006
I think I've been cursed with too much memory, and too acute recall. They say many writers have this brain anomaly, I don't know. It gets in the way sometimes. Like Thomas Wolfe, who was so distracted by vivid memories he couldn't even tell a story. He was obsessed with recording every memory in detail, thousands of pages of this stuff-- then his editor had to take it all and shape it into a book, find the story. Acute memory over-stimulates emotion, not good all the time. I used to love pictures but lately it's songs. Scents have always been almost a different category. I get stunned by them. There are physical sensations when I encounter certain smells- pumpkins, pipe tobacco, rotting apples, salt air, fresh cut grass if it's damp.

…five hours to inspect, a complete invasion of my home. When I got back there were little orange stickers all over the place with notes like "Loose" and "Not wkng" written on them. Radon test bags hanging from my chandelier... I momentarily considered burning the house down so no one gets it and my memories are preserved.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006
I understand C.'s miasma-- it hurts my brain to recall some of the quests I was on back in the day. I'd like to hug her and say, "Never write another corny, phony, double entendre lyric as long as you live".

If you're talented, you need to act like you don't care about making it. You just write your butt off and stay visible, ignore what everybody says and trust your heart. Write contrary to trends and stand very tall. That's how every writer I know made it.

Saturday, April 29, 2006
My last ASCAP statement had 2 songs on it, and I got a check for $650. I've had 150 cuts, 4 number one songs, and they claim 2 songs got played on the radio a few times. This means, according to ASCAP, I have two #1 songs that got played nowhere in America on any radio station last summer, plus 148 cuts that never got played on any radio station in America.

Friday, April 28, 2006
Our sorrow puts some depth in the experience-- that's how we know what joy is. I vividly recall looking at my children's faces as they slept-- maybe they were about four-- and being deeply sad knowing they would grow up. It has never been anything but a mixture of joy and sadness for me. I don't even know if the two can be separated anymore.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006
I always forget how much work goes into these things even when the recordings are finished. I've listened to the masters of the Idlewheel CD every day since last Friday and we've decided to re-master two songs. The graphics are going to change too. We sequenced for song strength and Jack thinks the more serious songs upfront suggest a more serious package.

Sunday, April 23, 2006
I've had experiences where I'm completely removed from time and space. It's like a form of meditation when it goes that deep. Part of the appeal is the experience itself.

Saturday, April 22, 2006
Writing changes us. We listen to old songs we've written and we realize we were wrong, and we don't want to be that way again. We have tangible milestones in our development, like an inner progress graph.

Friday, April 21, 2006
There were a lot of wild characters around Nashville when I got here. The core were educated radicals, old hippies, and real-deal country songwriters. Everybody rubbed elbows, and you had to be a bit off-center to fit in. They've killed the radical life-- the swamp got drained and fresh water fountains were installed, plastic underwater lighting, the carp live content. It's dull and getting duller... I'll take my memories.

Thursday, April 20, 2006
I've worked with professional songwriters who said, "If it feels like work, something's wrong". I wouldn't argue that some songs come easily and they are still artistic. But anyone who thinks writing West Side Story wasn't incredibly hard work is clueless.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Jack and I were interviewed by Barry for the liner notes this afternoon. He had some interesting things to say about the CD. He listened to the un-mastered songs while driving through western Ohio and said the music felt perfect in that environment. I told him that he could triangulate Minnesota (where Jack was raised), Philly and Nashville and probably be dead center in western Ohio. The mastering is almost finished. Closing in on the song sequence and the last details of the graphic design. We'll probably put it bed by the end of next week.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006
I think assonance is a wonderful device, especially as far as internal harmonics goes, but also for the occasional lapse due to the significant line. I believe it weighs in direct proportion to the original thought. If the line is great, then near rhyme is a gift of language. But, you can't teach this fine distinction at all, it's like teaching how to be an inventor-- impossible. You know it instinctively or not at all.

Monday, April 17, 2006
I feel like I'm standing on a bridge now looking back at 23 years. I don't know when I'll turn and walk the other way, I don't even know if it'll be possible, at least mentally, when the time comes. Massive withdrawal and sadness. The new CD is helping me cope with it all.

Thursday, April 13, 2006
Jack and I made progress today. I came up with a 'band' name that we are in agreement on. We'll call it Idlewheel.

Tuesday, April 11, 2006
I packed up all of my awards and platinum CDs yesterday. Three boxes, I guess I should be proud. Of course the thought occurred to me that I won't ever see these again. By the end of the day I was haunted by the bare walls and shelves in my studio. One of the last things I packed was a little bumper sticker I've looked at every day for 23 years. It says, "I was born to be a legend on 16th Avenue". No matter how many times I read it, I couldn't make it true.

Tomorrow Jack is coming over to listen to the 14 songs I've culled out of about 45 for our as yet untitled CD. I have no idea how he'll feel at the end of the day. I've left him options to bail on the whole project after he listens, but I'm hoping he feels like we have a nice offering-- not the best quality recordings that money can buy, but artful, commercial, and lively.

Saturday, April 08, 2006
Most days it was very hard work. But there were those golden days, physically buoyant times with J., F., T., B., or W., when it was just as good as working alone. People just glowed sometimes, they had an aura, and I felt like the luckiest man on earth to be able to make music with them and get paid to do it. Unless there are some perfectly happy and contented co-writing experiences you should never do it.

Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Songwriting is an awareness, a mode of living in which you are tuned specifically to that frequency-- song frequency. You pull in experience, feelings, influences, other art, and it comes out as songs.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006
I ultimately don't know what any of them will do with the information I teach, probably nothing, but... There's no way to leave the class without feeling the relevance of it. As far as Nashville goes, I've played their game a long time and there's very little I can't speak confidently about. A writer can come here and do everything they tell him or her to do and still not succeed. So why not try this our own way?

Monday, April 03, 2006
We're in tornado alley again tonight....I have three buckets in the den...water coming through the plastic tarp and dripping from the ceiling....I'm exposed to the wild rain here, loving it. It doesn't matter anymore, the house isn't mine. I'm listening to my entire catalog...it'll take days. I'm planning a two CD retrospective; maybe "No Road Back, Vol 1 & 2" [The Limited Edition CD "No Road Back: Retrospect & Rarities", released January 2007].

Saturday, April 01, 2006
Having spent a couple of decades concerned with publishing deals and hit songs so I could feed my family, it's a somewhat aimless and unrewarding feeling now thinking about leaving Nashville. This morning the repair crew will take the den wall out. I'll be living with a plastic tarp between me and the woods. Time to break out the camping gear and harmonica.

Singing is liberating. I miss the physical and spiritual contact with an audience as opposed to the hypothetical contact I get from writing. My hope is that I'll be able to do more performing up north.

Friday, March 31, 2006
We've burned through $160,000 in the last six years-- medical bills and E. working for babysitter wages at the school. Very little left of my success except what's in the house. The truth is I hate money. I hate worrying about it, I hate having it and not having it, it makes no difference. ...my family loves me, but I'm not a typical provider. It's a white-knuckle ride. All I've ever done is to try to maintain my artistic integrity, treat people right, and be faithful to friends and kin. I don't know why there's a need for this kind of stress in life. It doesn't seem to do any good, there's no "character building", just hardening of the arteries.

If a writer has a "voice", it's more a question of how long the voice can be ignored. A voice implies a perspective that's confident in it's uniqueness. We're all unique, but most people lack the confidence, so they imitate.

Thursday, March 30, 2006
I've had one of those days when an experience affects everything I think. I was supposed to help J. with a blues project he's working on and I just couldn't get my head around what he needed me to do at all. We spent two hours trying to get a guitar take and finally I just told him it wasn't going to happen. He was kind about it…

The pop/superstar market has been co-opted by producers/artists who are compulsive audiophiles. They spend a fortune making records that sound amazing on huge audiophile playback systems. Songs mean little compared to cool sounding big grooves and sonic bombast. Meanwhile, 50% of the music audience is listening on computer speakers and ipods. The industry has overlooked the fundamental reason why sales are off. What matters on computer speakers isn't audiophile quality, it's content. The Internet is all about content. Downloading is replacing traditional retail.

Tuesday, March 28, 2006
...the SongU writers sometimes get in my face about the relevance of what I'm teaching. "Can this happen now?" they ask. They mistake the corporate policy of a handful of labels for public taste. People love great songs, always have. It's just the idiots in the "bored" room who arbitrarily think it's time for a change.

Sunday, March 26, 2006
The reason so many burn out... is the over-amped exhaustion, the misery of the road. It's a glamorous life in many ways, romantic, fascinating, exciting. I crammed at least five years into two. I saw things, places, I'll never see again. It was very fulfilling. But the further you go down the road the less you keep a grip on sane living. You just let that go because it's a constant battle to keep anything normal. You sleep, if at all, in shifts-- maybe from 4:00-8:00 am, then from 2:00-5:00 pm. You're almost never clean-- hotel rooms are a luxury, maybe one night out of two or three. You eat fast food or deli trays in the dressing room. You drink too much-- everyone does unless they quit altogether. There's too much down time-the boredom of travel, the waiting for shows to begin. You basically live for that 90 minutes onstage. Everything else is ancillary. There are late night parties after the shows, radio interviews at 8:00 am, and 400 miles of road in between the two…

Saturday, March 25, 2006
I was really bugged last night by the way the song evaluations are going. E. said, "I think they should know what you aspire to - not what the radio sometimes plays - that's what you bring to teaching" So I guess the aspirations are the unifying thing, and a great hit song is no different than a great artistic song. No point in talking about the darkness between the stars.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006
By rights I should be working on my tenth CD, not my second. There was always something else that needed to be done, always another song quota to meet. And now, just as I'm getting serious about making a CD, the house repairs are going to make it difficult again.

Sunday, March 19, 2006
I spent too many years listening to publishers criticize my work. But when I listen to Nancy Griffith's "Other Voices, Other Rooms", or Gram's "Grievous Angel" I hear the wild song garden again.

Friday, March 17, 2006
…the song finally got recorded but the guy completely changed it, left out the bridge entirely. The lyric is about the 1920s moonshine brewers on the Cumberland Plateau, who were good at feeding their families and even better at evading capture when the revenue men came up into the hills. I thought the bridge was pretty cool, but maybe I'm too attached to my lyrics... I've been rubbed to death by this town in the past few years.

Thursday, March 16, 2006
Lately I've really been wanting to sing more than write. Where W. has had an audience but a failure of the imagination, I've had the imagination and a failure to find an audience. I finally just unplugged this afternoon. Got out my Taylor and spent three hours with it. I sang a couple dozen songs I love. A. came home in the middle of it and sat at the computer updating her Myspace website throwing on casual harmonies. It was like washing off two weeks of filth.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006
When there was enough money to go around, the Nashville publishers tolerated artistic temperaments. Not today. But you MUST allow for experimentation and foster an environment of free-wheeling creativity or you get no great songs. That's what's wrong in Nashville now, there's no environment.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006
My entire career is about defying expectations. The Highwaymen cut is the culmination of it all-- the miracle of miracles. All I ever did was try to write what I loved (and I failed most of the time). I still believe we have to take our art to people who love art. The numbers may be smaller, but the song lovers are out there-- I hear from them all the time. They won't make me rich, but they do make me feel wealthy sometimes.

Thursday, March 09, 2006
The thing that's been lost here is inclusion-- we had the luxury to care about and encourage one another back in the early days, because there was enough success to go around. Anytime you have too many people competing for the same dollar it all breaks down. Now the town is full of writers who never knew it any other way, there's nothing for them to compare this to. Everyone's defensive.

Wednesday, March 08, 2006
My problem is I have too much passion for the art and that's bad for dealing with people who have no passion for it. There's no indignation about the state of the music scene coming back the other way, so my indignation sounds like unleveled thinking.

Sunday, March 05, 2006
You really can't do this for the money and for the purpose. You can only do it for the purpose so well that you might make some money as a byproduct. I wish I could convey how it felt to write hit songs. There was no difference...none at all...to the approach of writing the purposeful song.

Friday, February 17, 2006
The guys back home have surprised me by booking a local gig for us next Friday night. It's a rowdy bar but it'll be fun. Trouble is, I have to work up a bunch of uptempo easy-strummers for the band, no quiet ballads. I went back through some old catalog today looking for songs...it was like opening a time capsule.

Monday, February 13, 2006
Real art requires recognition, and it rarely gets recognized. The discovery of art means absolutely nothing to the suits-- they want to discover money.

The energy level is very high in Nashville, people are buzzing around, bouncing off the wall all the time. You have to sync up with it when you go to town. All the brain chemicals go to work to pump you up so you can cope. At first it's a pleasant feeling-- the euphoria-- then it's brain fatigue. I used to be around it five days a week. Some mornings I would stand in a hot shower for 20 minutes just breathing deep, dreading the day.

Thursday, February 09, 2006
Radio music has to be something you love to do, like everything else in life. Many seem to think it's all about dumbing down and strumming harder, being diligent about your aspirated g's. No real love, no real purpose behind it.

In my mind it's the people behind the songs that makes them so bad-- the cynicism, the money grubbing, the lack of respect for any literary quality let alone southern literary quality. A writer is what he writes, and writing can't help but be who we are.

Wednesday, February 08, 2006
There were mornings in the Pancake Pantry when Waylon Jennings or George Jones would be sitting ten feet away and I'd be thinking, "I'm dreaming all of this". What replaces something so spectacular? They were artists who gave you incentive to be the best writer you could conceive of being.

Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Real art is magnetic.

Monday, February 06, 2006
E. loves those personality profile tests. I took one a long time ago and it said I was cut out to be a counselor and a leader. I don't even like it when my cat follows me.

Inspiration is the launching pad, and the propellant. Without it a song never gets off the ground.

Sunday, February 05, 2006
I couldn't have done anything else in life except write, play and sing songs. I can't have a boss, I can't sit all day at a desk, can't concentrate on anything boring, always devise my own system for doing things... my only choice has always been to get back up and keep going down this path. Stubborn determination, but also a lot of "no other options".

Saturday, February 04, 2006
I was thinking about the days of my early romance with Nashville. Long, sweet afternoons with nothing to do but finish a song. No pressure because there were cuts on the way, hits in the pipeline. It was a magnificent time. Young writers ask me the most innocent questions, "How in the world did you do this?"...as if I managed to do it with things the way they are now.

I've had bottles thrown at me onstage, a knife pulled on me once during a load out, drunks shouting in my ear while I'm playing, I've been ripped off by club owners, had a guitar stolen after a show once, I've slept sitting up in vans, driven all over the country-- So what class do you sign up for to learn all this stuff? The better question is what does it avail an artist to know this stuff? Because it's life, and art is essentially a product of life, not a gift of imagination.

Thursday, February 02, 2006
I feel a vocal when it's right. I can sing for days and not feel it. You have to own that feeling -- the vocal has to ride on the feeling. Without it, there's no performance. Nashville is fixated on pitch, enunciation, sterility. Those are secondary for me, they matter, but not as much as the quality of a performance. I like records where there are minor pitch flaws, where words get mumbled but you feel the performance.

I was explaining to B. how I felt there was a difference between chains of associative thought and sequential thinking. Chains of associative thought can be as radical as experience and personal memory make them, whereas sequential thinking doesn't make those leaps of poetry. B. had thought all this through himself before, it was nothing new. He tried to explain his understanding of intuition in creativity and [Ralph Waldo] Emerson came up. From "Intellect":

It's the unseen logic that works almost subconsciously. You can either demonstrate the logic or not, depending on how you want to affect people. Logic in this sense is not 1 + 1. It's intuitive creative logic-- it follows your chain of associative thought, but there is logic in it. Many writers don't know where to start unless clear logic is involved. If you say "blue--?" they will say "eyes" or "sky" ... not "divide" or "Avenue" ["Blue Divide" by Richard Shindell, "Blue Avenue" by F. C. Collins].

Sunday, January 29, 2006
We must consider exactly what language is, rather than taking it for granted. We didn't all sit down over Sabertooth steaks and agree on what to call things. It began as a desperate need to convey information, danger, survival by making sounds that indicated what required immediate attention. Think about the word "jump!" -- you lift off the ground and thump back to earth in the word. It seems to me that possibly one day in the ancient mists there was a man or woman who needed to make this sound to save someone's life and a word was born.

Thursday, January 26, 2006
Nashville likes the furniture nailed to the floor. All of the commercial writers are striving to eliminate ambiguity and make brick and mortar lyrics. I want the kind of ambiguity that the morning mist gives the landscape.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006
If it's worth writing at all, it's worth writing well.

Writers dwell in a world of living memories. We have the curse of sensual recall. Sights, sounds and smells produce feelings that accompany memories and we are at the mercy of them. We don't want it to be otherwise. We love the bittersweet associations of the past and present because it creates the emotional state necessary to write.

Monday, January 23, 2006
I worked around writers who wrote a song every day when I was on staff. I used to think it was amazing until I realized I rarely remembered anything they played me.

There's a kind of evocative power in mysterious language when it's used skillfully. Words are vibrations that have literal meaning and also a sonic effect. The sonic part is sometimes ancient-- dating back to dead languages-- and some words were contrived based on what an object represented spiritually or how an experience felt viscerally. When you think of vague similarities in meaning and sound in words like "cloud" and "shroud", or how beautiful words like "divine" and "harmonic" sound, or how mysterious the word "mysterious" sounds, it seems as if language must be used with the literal meaning as well as the sonic vibration in order to have full effect. Sometimes the sonic power actually overwhelms the literal. When that happens you get poetry that must be experienced rather than thought about like: "Trailing fingers through the phosphor or asleep in flowers of foam" [Shane MacGowan]. It does mean something literally, but it means more as an accumulating vibration of language in motion. When you speak the words, or sing them, it is almost like an incantation.

Genuine country music was, and is, a beautiful genre. What we have now isn't country music at all. It isn't even in an evolutionary line with old country music. All of the roots have been ripped up in an attempt to appeal to a broader audience. Real country music is in the hands of people like Gillian Welch and Del McCoury.

Sunday, January 22, 2006
…Nashville's rotten influence. The focus is on the money, not the art. What we've got is this momentum where lousy hit songs breed even more lousy writers. The audience is a victim of both. M. [my former songplugger] just quit the business this week. She's been in the trenches for 30 years. She says quality means nothing, it's all politics. She said she could put any one of five names on all of her songs and they'd get cut next week.

Saturday, January 21, 2006
I've done eight takes of [unreleased song title] and each one is different. I approach singing like an exterminator approaches an old house, warily, knowing there will be a whole lot of bugs. My voice is expressive but it has a mind of it's own. I used to hate recording in studios for that reason. There was always pressure from the clock. My favorite artists all have terrible pitch. I feel safe around them.

Here's the reason I can't go back to doing the staff writing job. Before we even started a song I knew exactly how it would turn out, how it would sound, how long it would be, how many chords we'd use, what words could not be used (98% of the dictionary), how it would be arranged and produced. It was like having the same nightmare every night for years on end.

Friday, January 20, 2006
I understand the attack of despair. It's a curse of the creative mind, I think. We spend too much time alone probing our thoughts. But there are no greater rewards than the inner discoveries

Thursday, January 19, 2006
Any great song can be a hit if a huge artist records it. That's more likely to happen if the song is unique than if it sounds like something a publisher ordered from the Big Catalog Of Clichés. Right now we all have a long shot at making money at this. I have chosen to become poorer and more artistic for as long as possible.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006
In retrospect, the holiday lull was like a miracle, but now I find it nearly impossible to summon the time or energy to write due to distractions…The pressure to make money and to get this house in order for the likely sale of it has been like dead weight around my neck. Add to it the stress of trying to keep a long distance marriage together and I'm at odds most of the day. Evenings are depressing and lonely, not very inspiring. But, I do want to get back to some writing.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006
I'm moving forward with plans to put the house on the market, doing some fix up, but I still have no idea if I'll have the desire to sell this place. I still love it here, even feeling lonesome at times doesn't make the house a horrible place to be. If I had a hit tomorrow, I'd pay this place off and spend part of my year here. With the kids more or less grown and E. near family in PA., there's very little for me to be concerned about up there. Of course we miss each other in the day to day ways...

Thursday, December 29, 2005
It was an indescribable feeling watching the truck pull away yesterday morning. For hours afterwards I'd hear some engine hauling up the road and go to the window expecting to see them coming back up the driveway. They called from Roanoke last night and E. was tired and very sad. I haven't let myself think about it for more than a few minutes at a time. I'm just trying to keep my head in my work.

Monday, December 19, 2005
It's slowly sinking in-- all of the countless little things that will change, all the new situations we'll face. There will be no more sit-down family meals for a long time, probably never in this house again. J. has come downstairs to kiss me goodnight on the forehead every single night for 17 years, but soon I'll be missing that, along with waking up to the smell of brewed coffee and the sound of a shower running and E.'s laughter, and the cats chasing each other-- the old black "witch's familiar" is going north, the young tabby inspector from Scotland Yard stays. J.'s books and videos are being packed up and I realized I won't hear John Wayne talking from the upstairs bedroom anymore, or see a pile of dog-eared Steinbeck novels on the stairs. I'll listen for a school bus that won't arrive, and my daily phone call from E. when she finishes work won't come. If I made a list of what I'll miss and what I'll gain there'd be one word in each column : everything - silence.

A Year Of Transition, Part One
In December of 2005 it became necessary to sell my house in Nashville and move back to Pennsylvania. The reasons for this are complex and involve my son's special needs. The transition was long overdue, yet I resisted, being content with my life in Tennessee and in particular my idyllic house in the country where I had the peace and quiet and space to write and record. The plan was for my wife and son to move to Pennsylvania while I remained behind with my daughter to fix up the house so we could sell it. During this period I was fortunate to be able to correspond with my collaborator and friend Charlotte Ryerson in Texas. The interesting dialogs and her provocative questions got me thinking about my years in Nashville. This was the germination of the entries that date from December 19, 2005 (about a week before my wife and son left Tennessee) until June 28, 2006 (when I left Tennessee). I'm grateful to Ms. Ryerson for her help with this phase of the journal. This was an intensely introspective period for obvious reasons so entries are daily at some points. I've decided to retain more personal glimpses of my life because it seems inseparable from my career transition at this point. This part of the journal is in some ways a summation of my experiences in Nashville.READ UP FROM DECEMBER 19, 2005 ENTRY (Immediately Above} ^

April 4, 2005
Was telling B. today that I think songwriting is always about becoming- the song in progress, the writer in development, the art in refinement. There is no bullshit about the job- you either do it well or your music won't be heard outside the living room. You can't sleep your way to the top or get there because you know the right people. Those ways to the top only exist for the hollow celebrities that wait like molds to be filled with liquid hype. A good song, on the other hand, is all about becoming the truth. Sometimes it's the truth as we see it, and sometimes it's the truth as nearly everyone sees it. But if it fails to become truthful you won't be singing it years from now.

Dear old Jack Keller died the other day. I thought about all the fun we had writing Caught A Touch Of Your Love and shooting pool with K. and J. I'll miss him.

March 19, 2005
C. has too much ambition. Ambition is good up to a certain point. Then it gets to be all about the ambition and not about crafting better songs. As long as the desire for self-improvement is stronger than the desire for money, there's no danger. But that line can be tenuous for some people. I've watched so many sell their souls for a little unnecessary comfort.

March 2, 2005
There's nothing worse than the fear you've written a weak song and having that fear confirmed as you read the previous day's lyric. How did such mediocrity creep into my skull? I thought I'd plugged up those holes years ago... It amazes me what gets in there, the stuff that crawls in while I'm watching TV or listening to another songwriter talk. A writer is a gardener of sorts. Part of the job involves protecting your harvest from the marauding elements and the parasites you can control: worry and insecurity, laziness and ambivalence, over-reaching and under-achieving. But you'll never rid your garden of all the critters that can slip in under the fence. That stuff you have to trap, shoot, and bury.

February 10, 2005
Some days the bear eats you. The insecurity rises to the level of panic and you wish you'd listened to your uncle when he said there was decent money in Dry Cleaning. How simple life would be now if only I'd been able to envision myself pressing suits at 50 with classical music playing in the background.

January 21, 2005
J. and I hung in there on the idea for four writing days over the course of a month. It was worth it. That's always been the essence of great songwriting: how long can you LOVE an idea? If it bores you after a few hours or a couple of days, how good can it be?

December 20, 2004
Life has become too pedestrian lately. I miss being in the center of the action. This must be how an athlete feels when he senses his playing days are fading fast.

November 29, 2004
At some point a writer may grow weary of his own re-invention. What then? I've often wished I could steal a new name, be nobody, and try a completely fresh approach.

October 2, 2004
M. set me up with a successful pop writer named E.W. The appointment was reminiscent of the days early in my career when I was intimidated by the names here in town. I came prepared with lyrics and melodies...but such is the difficulty of working with busy people; you get a few hours of their half-distracted time and you're left to wonder how the "date" went.

August 20, 2004
My writing wanders aimlessly, uninspired. I have always defined myself through my work. When my songs lack definition, I become a blur myself. I hunt for clarity rather than sing from the heart. The missing piece of the puzzle lately has been the validation of a cut or even a hold-- something I grew to dread! I play music all the time, singing the old songs and hoping they have the power to reconnect me somehow.

April 3, 2004
The Tin Pan South show felt a little rusty but the set was well received. The pendulum swings back to writing mode now. I'm longing to feel that characteristic euphoria that accompanies a creative breakthrough. I love chasing the image down the mind corridors only to meet it face to face around some unexpected corner.

March 5, 2004
L. once told me that he felt our primary job was to "stay sane". I'm beginning to agree. But being the "most sane" songwriter is like being the "best dressed" clown in the circus-- there's only so much you can hope for. God help the little creative guy when things get tough in the music business. As soon as it's crunch time everybody ducks under the wing of the most corrupt person they can find because those folks are the true survivors in this vicious industry.

Walking away from bad songs is like walking away from bad relationships-- always hard to do, but best in the long run.

February 10, 2004
People want the writing process de-mystified. First thing I tell them is there's a good deal of mysticism involved in the writing of a great song. You can never precisely pin down why a song is great. It resonates, it says things it doesn't appear to say, it brings powerful emotions to the surface in semi-magical ways. These are all very mystical things. Words are symbols that sometimes have arcane meanings that we interpret at subconscious levels. Melodic intervals can effect our moods. Harmony in chord structure can affect our brain-waves. All of these ingredients get mixed together like sorcery.

Knowing what to have faith in is an instinct that we sharpen through the years. I probably don't get more than a handful of ideas each year that I'm willing to put my faith in. Then I work for weeks on these ideas until they sound as if I wrote them in five minutes, which is the ultimate goal after all.

September 7, 2003-January 15, 2004
The entry dated September 7, 2003-January 15, 2004 directly concerns the untimely death of close friend and collaborator F. C. Collins on September 6, 2003. F. C. and I were as close as brothers. He was an extraordinary human being, and an important influence on my life and work. I include these passages because our 30 year partnership revolved around songwriting, collaboration, and the creative career. The entry was not broken up into dates, but rather, it was one long passage consistently added to when the need arose. F. C. and I also shared extensive correspondence, which may or may not be edited and published on this website at some time in the future.

It seems unimaginable that I'll never hear his acerbic, humorous take on the world again, see the glint in his blue eyes as he hits on just the right metaphor to describe the absurdity of human behavior, or the way a hawk glides through the sky. Hawks were his symbol. I think, to him, and maybe without knowing it, their solitary hunt represented the isolated mind's search for meaning in the world around it. His was the voice of a wise soul, who recognized that all he really needed to learn in life could be studied in his own back yard. Few of us are gifted with such a mind. Most certainly I'm not. He remembered everything of even passing interest and could collate and retrieve all of this rich information as efficiently as a seasoned curator. It always made for brilliant conversation. He was a born writer, not a 'made' writer like so many of us.

N. said he wished to be remembered as "someone who had a curious mind". When I'm able to get my feelings into words, surely that will be the spine of the song.

The verbal joust was his meat and potatoes. He was a master of syllogisms, a connoisseur of metaphor, and an embiber of human nature. All of this and funny as s**t, too. Those hang-on-for-dear-life talks with him were the five-ticket ride. He could fire up an interesting conversation at 2:00 in the morning, entertain me with his fabulous (and sometimes radical) theories, crack me up with his good natured contentiousness and with his facile reduction of everything to a summary witticism. He had a gift for language and his life was a living myth-in-the-making.

We shared a common feeling about creativity's mercurial nature: you don't poke too hard at it, you just hope for a glob of inspiration now and then. There are too many writers who don't observe well, but he was always an eye-opener in the collaborative sense. We often talked about how we each must write viscerally, as if nobody gives a d**m what we have to say. He knew that, and that's what kept his, and keeps our, work honest. Putting ourselves into the music is the only purpose for writing.

The writing of "Brother To The Wind" is such a fond memory; sitting under the stars on W.'s back porch with a bottle of good red wine, a little writing a little philosophizing, till way past midnight on a chilly spring evening. It's a song I cherish because it perfectly captures the way we were feeling that night. That's the essence of great writing-- capturing the powerful, elusive feeling while it's overtaking you.

He found his tunes serendipitously. He once said to me, "I can't write it until I hear it". He never sat down with intent to compose. Nose-to-nose collaborating is something to be tolerated only if the objectives are clear and the results satisfy all parties involved, which is seldom the case. He collaborated brilliantly, but it wasn't like him to construct little word puzzles around the notes. He was lightning in a bell jar. He laid it out in big dense chunks, like ore in slag. We wrote together without designated roles; he shaped, I shaped.

He will be missed by the music industry even if the industry doesn't realize it. His ilk are what keeps the rest of us believing we can become something more than what we are. He turned his back on Nashville to pursue his writing outside the narrow confines of a cliched genre that is circumscribed by visionless record companies and inept producers with their one-formula-fits-all recording approach. He made a joyful noise, but now the silence without him is awesome.

I'm nowhere near being able to understand the ramifications of what has happened, other than knowing I've lost a fellow traveler on the less traveled road. We breathed the same dream-atmosphere. He was an artist who created his own universe. Yet, he loved this world so deeply. And that, when all is said and done, is what I'll miss about him the most.

August 25, 2003
I've worked 27 days straight, right through our Florida vacation with guitar in hand. The project for M. & J. is finally finished. So is the new songU course. Instead of relief, I feel this vague uneasiness about what to do next. The band (Wire and Wood)wants to do a reunion CD. We've been digging up old lyrics and rough recordings of the stuff we wrote nearly 30 years ago. What surprises all of us is how fresh and inspired those songs still sound.

July 4, 2003
Most of the songwriters here have brains and talent to spare. Anyone who thinks those are the keys to success hasn't been here long enough. It really boils down to persistence, and good luck. As F. likes to say, you can't always be in the right place at the right time, but you can get in the right place and wait.

June 22, 2003
This business is getting tougher on those of us who don't want to participate in the dumbing down of the entertainment industry. For my part, if I'm not inspired to do my best then I'd rather not be in the music business. B. used to say that a writer has to create his own environment; his own place to feel comfortable so he can do his particular thing. I have to insulate myself creatively to some extent. I can't just follow the herd.

June 6, 2003
The older I get the harder it becomes to keep the faith through the lean times.

May 16, 2003
Spoke to J.W. today. I was moaning about a couple of cuts I've lost, cuts that I thought were "in the bag" so to speak. J. said "Craig, last year I had 80 cuts [as a publisher] on major Nashville labels." I said I was impressed. He added, "Yeah, but 50 of them were never released." If that level of waste is typical, no wonder these record labels are going broke.

March 1, 2003
I've finished ten songs since the holidays, which is a faster working pace than I've kept in a long time. By now I should understand the cyclical nature of my dry spells, but in the midst of one of them it always feels as if the drought is deeper, more severe than the last time. This is only a mental miasma, similar to the illusion that the "good old days" were better than they actually were.

I visited with K. on Friday. He graciously took most of the afternoon to sit and talk with me, in spite of the fact that he's busy because R.'s record is bringing him some production work again. "I remember this feeling from back when I first started out," he said. "I get out of bed everyday excited to work, but at the same time I know that if I don't pursue it, don't make it happen, the opportunities will just pass me by." We can never rest on our laurels.

February 17, 2003
A great song...never falls into our hands unearned. It's always a result of the preparation and practice- the days, months and years of striving to do better. Once you've known that kind of "high" from writing something you truly love, how can you be content with the mundane stuff? I'd like to relive all of the best writing experiences.

January 24, 2003
I'm less willing to spread my energy thin these days. This economy of effort is definitely a trait of maturity, but I see it as being more harmful to quantity rather than quality of output. In fact the quality seems to be more consistent to me. I'm actually willing to take more time on songs now than when I was younger because I have a certain amount of faith in my convictions.

T. sent me an email this morning in which he referred to the energy of "rebellious youth", and how it accounts for a certain amount of ill-deserved success. That's always been true.

October 25, 2002
"Anyone who is still taking home a paycheck from the music business is d**n lucky", D. said last night in his short farewell speech. I'm sure the statement resonated inside everyone present. All of us battle-scarred veterans know it won't be the same. The vibrant little songwriting community on Music Row is probably gone forever, replaced by a tepid corporate version that still keeps as its facade the tiny stone houses and outward appearance of small town America...

When it comes to songwriting, doing good or competent work is unacceptable. Simply finishing your job isn't enough. A songwriter must rise above his job so that no one can detect him doing it. He must achieve a kind of "job transcendence" in order to create songs people will love.

August 10, 2002
No matter how much success we have behind us, a little fresh failure can always create a crisis of confidence.

June 1, 2002
T. and I have finished our new musical. We both feel a sense of renewal from this. These longer works are much more rewarding than three and a half minute songs. There is a three dimensional aspect to long form, a depth as well as a length and breadth. It's the depth that absorbs. I felt completely swallowed up by this project and the experience was very satisfying.

April 23, 2002
The tê of songwriting could be defined as the ability to feel one's self a songwriter even when the songs aren't being sung by anyone. There are so many reasons not to write, but only one good reason to write, and that is essentially the tê. I should write, and probably do write because it is the character of my inner nature.

Feb. 10, 2002
I once asked R. what was the worst part about being your own publisher. "It gets awfully lonely--I don't have anybody calling me up telling me what a good writer I am anymore", he said. At the time I still had a publisher and I suspected he was just trying to spare me the worst part of his experience. But no, that is definitely the bad part. The rest is easy.

Feb. 1, 2002
Investing so much of ourselves; heart, mind and soul, into something so pre-destined to be battered, crushed and rendered obsolete seems more of a fool's errand than a life's journey. But on the other hand, F. told me recently that he suddenly realized that having songwriting in his life is what makes the rest of it tolerable.

Dec. 15, 2001
What I need in order to begin a good song is some genuine irritant, some experience or feeling that gets lodged inside of me until I can't be rid of it any other way. Time and again I begin a song with misguided motivation, prompted subject lines, ideas that haven't really been digested from the natural bed of my own environment. We need great patience to write great songs. We must trust to the currents and wait for the event that places in us the seed of a genuine pearl.

July 4, 2001
The Kentucky author and painter Harlan Hubbard once wrote that it was probably the poor painting that the artist didn't consider destroying at least once during the process of creating it. I believe this is true of a great song, also. The feverish kind of creative act always needs revision. Sometimes the required objectivity leads to feelings that the entire work, even the writer himself, is too seriously flawed to salvage anything worthwhile from the effort. But after these feelings pass, one can usually focus an unemotional eye on the areas that most need revision. This leads to that final stage when the unity of the work, the source of its original power, pulls it back together even stronger than before. The trick is to not abandon it prematurely.

December 30, 2000
I am six months into a new self-publishing venture, writing for no one but myself and quite content to do so. There are financial concerns looming on the horizon, but for now I feel a great peace about having no one but myself to please, no one to answer to or explain my erratic productivity to. I write freely, unencumbered by quotas and the misguided expectations of publishers who believe that things like inspiration can be regulated by legal clauses. I have rarely met a publisher who truly understands the creative process; its wiles and vicissitudes.

Between these two entries the journal was lost during a Florida vacation. It was found and returned to me after nearly two years by a very kind person who happened to keep a journal herself and couldn't bear the thought of losing her own personal writing. She searched for me using every means at her disposal. I'm eternally grateful for her efforts.

December 25, 1998
The single greatest aspect of life is it's ability to surprise us even when we feel that no further surprise is possible. The creative outpouring of the past three months is unequaled in my entire career. Among the twenty-five new songs are a smattering of new cuts...the real success was my ability at this late date to carry through on a commitment to collaboration. J. was my co-conspirator in this project. We found an easy level of communication between us and a confidence in our combined abilities. Since we were also sharing the high of our recent success it was like a season played on a winning team.

December 14, 1997
Success goes away quickly. We have a friend who refers to it as a "rented tux". What follows is unavoidable; the swift and indelicate return to things as they really are. I hate this scramble for money. I hate what it does to my love for music.

November 14, 1997
My release from the publishing deal was not a complete surprise, but it was an emotional and spiritual drain. The worst is behind me: the confronting realization that I am not worth the investment in their eyes. I have also faced the rejection of a half-dozen publishers who would have lined up to sign me a few years ago. I handled all the ignorant and insensitive questions with as much dignity as I could- one b**d asked me if I was still "hungry", or if I was slowing down a bit. It's the same old miscalculation: quantity equates to success, quality is secondary.

January 5, 1997
I have a tremendous desire to find a different way of living. My dependence on career gratification has caused too much disappointment. I need to be free of it. I have nothing special in mind, simply an ease of tensions between me and the business. These days I never seem to rise high enough into the creative atmosphere to get to the pure stuff. Thomas Merton wondered whether he could just write what was in his heart and hope that someone would want to read it. I wonder the same thing about songs.

December 31, 1995
I can't understand the way most people live their lives, the level at which they focus their energy, the things that captivate their attention, what seems important to them. The interior landscape is all a writer knows. Talent is a blessing and a curse. It mocks all efforts to exploit it while it goads the writer into new attempts.

Nashville is so isolated from the world of country music in many ways. We are so out of touch with the fans who make it popular.

October 17, 1995
When "In Between Dances" reached #1 it felt strange to be so visible again at all the dinners and parties. Nashville has grown so much that people don't seem to be able to place the name with the face with the song the way they could when the town was smaller. Fortunately, the pay for anonymity is much better than it used to be.

I've struggled with, and finally regained my writing momentum. It never ceases to amaze me how the inspiration can completely dry up when there are too many distractions. It feels as if you'll never write again, then there's the hunger for it, then the monumental effort to reach way down in there and flip the switch, a few false starts, then finally a song.

August 10, 1995
I'm too much of an observer of life, but the only time I feel handicapped is when I want to rise to the celebration of an especially meaningful event and I find myself watching it all like some autobiographical documentary. This is the price for the inward focus.

February 19, 1995
The last eighteen months of determination have taught me a lot about working even when I don't think I have an idea. But I believe that all of the good songs would have been written regardless. D. once told me that his period of writing two or three songs a day was just a learning process, all about learning how to finish what he'd started. It's an endless cycle: we start so we can finish, we finish so we can start. In the meantime, a few good songs come out.

November 7, 1994
I write to keep from worrying about not writing. It's a nervous affliction.

February 4, 1994
I feel as if I'm constantly redefining myself through my work. I've got to be satisfied with what I write but I've got to deal aggressively with the Nashville market. It's very difficult sometimes.

August 21, 1993
I never really seem to master what some of these gifted writers instinctively know. It's all innate. Try as I might to absorb the process, it eludes me. I stumble through songs, trip over lyrics, walk nose first into melodies like big doors.

March 20, 1993
I am seriously considering doing another record as an artist. I need to feel that my writing is more useful. Lately, I waiver between this idea and wanting to quit the business all day every day.

November 11, 1992
I have found renewed confidence and enjoyment in working alone again. I think more clearly and focus more single-mindedly when I'm not distracted by the presence of another writer, no matter how talented they are. I guess I'm as much of a stylist as I am a composer. I find it inhibiting to subject my ideas to anyone's scrutiny but my own.

I don't really mind being on the edge a bit, financially speaking. Sooner or later it brings out the best in me. I want to stay in touch with the kind of life that most people in this world live.

July 24, 1992
I've been emotionally drained by the prolonged pressure of falling deeper and deeper into debt. We're now nineteen months behind on our taxes with no hope of settling things in the near future. I can't write anything meaningful. I'm too distracted. I have nothing to say and no faith in what I used to believe. For a writer, there is probably no hell worse than this.

February 1, 1992
Lately, performing has become something of a challenge because of the continuous growth of my style of mixing difficult guitar pieces with dense lyrics and ranging melodies. The preparation has become much more time consuming, requiring hours of practice in the days leading up to a show. It compromises the very thing I want to leave time for- the writing.

March 27, 1991
Every time you slightly alter your goals in this business they wipe the slate clean. My experience as a writer counts for zero if I want to produce a record, despite what I know about the recording studio, and what constitutes a good song, and how essential that knowledge is to making a great record. They'd rather give the job to a "specialist": somebody who knows how to budget a recording session.

November 20, 1990
My inability to get something to click as an artist has thrown me back on the cushion of writing for others who can. This is a near impossible scheme these days because Nashville's new breed of artist is certainly the singer-songwriter. Everyone seems to be complaining about how difficult it is to get cuts because the available slots are diminishing.

The music business in general is about as sensitive as a rapist. I hate it, but I still love music more.

November 5, 1990
Maybe a writer suspects in his heart that he might have the potential to be writer of the year someday, but it takes so much more than that. The desire must be perfectly and intensely sustained for a very long period of time in order to build up the kind of momentum that propels him to that level of success. It won't happen for me because I'm bored if I'm not experimenting. Experimentation leads to peaks and valleys, successes and failures.

July 26, 1990
For the first time in eleven years I am under contract to no one. The motivation and the inspiration are overpowering. It seems ironic that I'm happy to own my copyrights for a month or two while a thousand songwriters are dying for the chance to give their songs away just so they can say they're in the music business. At some indeterminate point a writer turns that corner in his career where it becomes almost blasphemous to say that he expects to own his copyrights. The publishers will stare at him with insulted, injured expressions and he feels like a traitor, like someone who has broken a sacred bond.

At some point, without knowing the exact moment, a writer will do his best work. He will reach his absolute pinnacle. What a sad thing it is that the moment may be clouded over by dismal circumstances and not be seen or appreciated until years later.

May 16, 1990
There has been a powerful shift in my attitude again. My confidence has risen. Don Williams has recorded "Donald and June". There is a bright spot in my imagination where the record becomes a hit single. There is also another part of me that recognizes that no reward could be finer than to have a consummate artist dedicate four minutes of his CD and his live show to your best song.

February 19, 1990
The ---- have bumped two songs from their new CD and I have been recruited once more to help fill in the gaps. I was reluctant to subject myself to any further stress having had more than enough last fall. I told D. there was no way I could help. D. always knows how to reel me in. "Do it for me", he said. We wrote two more songs but both were rejected today.

January 9, 1990
Upon arriving back home I was met with the unfinished business of The ----. They've passed on the last ten songs that B. and I have written for them and I'm fresh out of incentive. T., who was a semi-reluctant participant in songs seven through ten, had left ominous messages on my answering machine. "Hi, it's T....I'm with B....we're about to kill each other."

November 12, 1989
A long distance affair with Nashville just doesn't work. It's a small town basically, with values that stress personal relationships as much as talent or anything else. People want to do business with their friends. Without that ingredient the doors of opportunity just won't open.

August 30, 1989
I am stressed to the limit by the pressure to come up with a hit for -------'s next CD. The song needs to be written, demoed and recorded within ten days. It has been extremely difficult to put the personal family trauma out of mind and concentrate on what is ultimately a golden opportunity. It has become so critical to succeed when opportunity beckons that I tighten up physically like a clenched fist.

February 5, 1989
F. and I got together every day and drove the long way across the valley in the bright, clear Pennsylvania mornings, taking time to observe the hawks. Eventually we'd arrive at his place where, after a few cups of strong coffee, we usually hooked into an idea we liked. The rhythm of our collaboration became second sense and I felt relaxed like those hawks hovering in the still blue. Our project was to lyrically complete a batch of melodies I had brought up north with me. By the time the trip was over, three weeks that felt like one, we had finished seven songs. It was like catching the perfect wave and riding a few hundred miles.

January 11, 1989
I've been wrestling with character development in songs... but something came into focus last night at the Bluebird. I suddenly felt I had the power to define a character with the tone of a lyric, much the same as in a screenplay only with highly condensed language. I carried the night's performance home in my head and some characters began to take shape. The song that finally emerged is called "Donald and June". I feel it will take me a long while to perfect and exhaust this vein. It has given me some new territory to explore.

January 2, 1989
I'm in awe of D.'s gift for words. Writing never came, or at least never appeared to come more natural to anyone. He can find the profound aspect of any simple idea within seconds of hearing it spoken. T. has a unique way of couching an idea in common experience but he still surprises me with his choice of language and always provides a twist of humor. Nothing of even casual interest ever escapes F.'s mind. Had I never met him I would not believe the human brain capable of such stunning and complete recall of detail. These are the essential characteristics of good writers.

November 20, 1988
D. called to let me know that Brent [Maher] was cutting the tracks for "Cadillac Red" today. What an odyssey that song has been! Three years and three complete re-writes since the day Naomi [Judd ] handed me a scrap of paper containing a few lines she'd scribbled down on it during the "Heartland" recording sessions. I don't even know how the final version of the song goes. She apparently went at it one more time with the guitar players in her band and I've not heard the final demo. J. jumped in midway through to give it a boogie-woogie groove. I stuck with it until I lost patience. At least six people have had more than a passing influence on the song by now. We are officially writing by committee these days.

November 9, 1988
I've been searching for an idea with some substance but my mind is too cluttered with politics. I make a distinction between politics and the interactions of the human spirit. Even my socio-political content songs, such as "On God's Green Earth", are about humanity, not issues. We need a grander metaphor in order to see human rights as a lack of poetry in people's lives.

I lost my temper today at my publisher's office. They sent out a bunch of my songs with typos in the lyrics. I spend hours anguishing over the perfect word to use in a verse and they can't understand my outrage at uncorrected lyric sheets.

May 11, 1988
Thom and I have recently returned from Athens, Georgia where we were invited by Kenny Rogers to spend a few days at his ranch writing for his next album. Thom and I both dug through our idea notebooks looking for enough to keep us busy for three days of intense collaboration... on the third day we wrote "Where in the World", undoubtedly the best of the four songs. We were stumped for a third verse but decided to play the song for Kenny, who liked what we'd started. Since we were under the pressure of a deadline, we immediately booked a demo session back in Nashville to cut all four songs. We finally wrote the missing verse to "Where in the World" right there in the studio at midnight, wired on black coffee. I think it's the strongest verse in the song.

April 21, 1988
It's a miracle that this song ["Givers and Takers"] waited for me all these years. Any number of artists have had a shot at recording it. So much has happened along the way but the song and my feelings for it remain as fresh as the day it was written. That's the wonderfully bittersweet thing about songwriting; great songs never age but the writer, like Dorian Gray's picture, does.

March 22, 1988
What's important is that the song gets out there. It doesn't matter who cuts it first or best. All that matters is that it gets sung. It isn't alive unless it's on somebody's lips.

October 10, 1987
Pure commercial intent makes for disposable music. Memorability is fine, but it isn't enough. And what is great art if not universally appealing, hence commercial? Selling something built with integrity usually results in a successful product. I feel that the two concepts- artistic merit and commerciality- must be united in order for a song to be really great.

September 26, 1987
Songs occur from living and I know that when I've lived 45 years I'll be a better songwriter.

July 28, 1987
I have a family to tend to. That is my main motivation to succeed and it is a powerful one. Twenty years from now my children won't be thinking of me and my struggle, but I know what they'll be feeling. They'll be celebrating the chance to dream for themselves as I once did.

June 30, 1987
The twins have already made me a more savvy business person. I've become selfish on their behalf. For the first time in my career I'm wondering if I should really be content with my publisher's status quo offer. I've decided to seek a co-publishing deal. Here in Nashville that's something that is reserved for only a small number of successful writers. I don't care about the draw money, my future is in my publishing ownership.

The SKB project has taken the majority of my time. D. and I wrote two songs in two days this week. This is how I must work right now. I can't afford to stumble around Nashville experimenting with collaborators anymore.

March 7, 1987
I'm frantically trying to hold down two jobs at once; one as writer, one as artist. There are so many projects that cry for attention: Mattea's new record, Brent's project with Michael Johnson, The "No Easy Horses" album. It now seems as if this has all happened so quickly. There aren't many good songs in my catalog that aren't already spoken for, but I have so little time to make new ones. I recall somebody once telling me that when you have a big hit people go back and cut songs you wrote when you were sixteen years old. God, I hope not.

December 12, 1986
[About the early "In The Round" Bluebird shows with Thom Schuyler, Fred Knobloch and Don Schlitz] It's as if the rest of the town doesn't exist sometimes. I write to inspire this small group of talented friends, we write to inspire each other and we're all better artists for it.

In many ways I regret some of the work I did in Nashville during the first couple of years. It was all a learning experience, but somehow I'd like to keep the results back in the lab under lock and key.

October 14, 1986
Miraculously I have managed to get another cut on the Judds new project [Heartland ]. The song is called "Shoutin' Shoes" [re-titled "Turn it Loose' prior to the album's release ]. I got called in to play guitar on the session along with Don Potter. At first Don and I weren't locking into the guitar parts, mostly because I was trying to play like him: clean and precise. I was being a session musician instead of being the writer of the song. Finally Brent [Maher] put my demo on the studio playback system and said, "That's what I want!". I went out and did my usual flailing without a guitar pick, kind of a slap and stab with the back of my fingernails, the way we'd written it. The band responded to the new energy and we got it in one take.

September 30, 1986
I have been working evenings and weekends all month and it only leaves more to be done. There are always loose ends; unfinished songs, unfinished demos, pitches to make, new promises to collaborate, sessions to do. I was talking to D. about it one day when his phone rang. It was Michael Bonagura [of Baillie and the Boys ] wanting to schedule a writing day. I overheard D. say, "I've worked ten days straight. I'll be exhausted, sick, fresh out of ideas, but I'll be yours." He hung up, turned to me, and said, "I can't ever say no to a record."

September 18, 1986
The three of us literally flogged a song idea to death today. It had a promising beginning but went very badly after that. Days like this drain me physically. Very tense and frustrating. Fortunately Thom and I finished a song the other day called "This Old House" that has redeemed my week. F. and I have also spent some great evenings on W's back porch. He is house sitting while she's in L.A. We drink red wine, study the stars, and do some pickle barrel philosophizing until eventually we write two or three great lines of a song. We both enjoy working slowly at night. It's a good time for the pace we naturally keep.

August 30, 1986
Sometimes a writer can work himself up into a state of creative impotence over the most ridiculous things.

July 25, 1986
This week I played the new song I've written with [F. C. Collins] called "You're the Power" for Allen [Reynolds]. Allen liked it, but his reaction was less enthusiastic than I felt the song deserved. I immediately went home and attempted a new demo of it in my new studio. I allowed the demo to grow simply and retain it's focus on the song; using nothing that wasn't essential to put it across. When it was finished I played it for Allen again, this time it evoked the kind of response I was looking for. He and Kathy Mattea will cut it next week.

June 24, 1985
The past month has been an intense struggle. I've been dealing with the insecurity that lack of success eventually brings upon a writer who seeks that kind of acceptance. There are no cuts, no holds, no interest in my music. I ask C. for assistance with my artist career and he tells me he doesn't think I've figured it all out yet. I don't give a s--t about the songs I'm working on now and I'm intimidated by the silence inside of me.

April 6, 1985
Thom Schuyler and I have finished two new songs including one called "You Take Me Home" that I like very much. I think we make a good collaborating team. Writing with him is like sailing with a strong wind; the song is always moving but we must steer it where we want it to go. We never get bogged down the way I do with writers who lack imagination.

December 14, 1984
I find myself absorbing too many influences in my writing. Co-writing makes me lazy sometimes. Lately, when I work alone, I can hear this inner voice echoing something that L. says about using "less narrative and more character". Then I fool around with a melody and begin trying to employ K.'s precise, almost mathematical approach. Then I imagine that I hear J.'s dry denouncement of a poetic phrase I'm trying to fit in somewhere. I have to learn to apply what I'm getting from others without letting them dominate my own voice.

December 5, 1984
The prospects of complete creative control and total freedom of expression are always exciting no matter what the negative consequences may be. The negatives include self-indulgence to a point of obscurity, and the eternal tweaking of insignificant little details.

October 11, 1984
I'm beginning to understand the task of attaining the absolute clarity needed in order to write a hit song. I've seen the intensity with which writers like L. chase the ideal of a crystal clear lyric. This job is much more difficult than I imagined it would be. Coming from my relatively lazy practice of 'stream of consciousness' writing, I lack the discipline.

September 26, 1984
T. and I have been working on a good song. There is a lot of silence between us when we write. It would appear to any casual observer that we are writing separate songs, or more likely, that we are strangers in a bus station. Over the course of a long quiet afternoon the lines come out very unceremoniously. We quietly agree on which ones are the keepers and then the silence returns.

August 23, 1984
I have been forced into several uncomfortable co-writing circumstances that have made me re-assess my own goals. I can't write well what I do not feel. I'm not especially good with gimmicks and clever phrases. I'd rather step back and allow the time for a great idea to surface. Some writers are in too much of a hurry. Songs get conceived and finished in a day's time. There are always weak spots that would improve if given a little extra effort and time.

July 25, 1984
The great writers in Nashville, the very best of them, share a vision that songwriting is something of a minor art form. It disturbs me that the current criteria for the average hit song involves a predictable formula and some clever cliché hook line. W. critically refers to the cliche-hook as "an old war horse". It is as if we have nothing to say unless it revolves around some over-used catch phrase.

June 20, 1984
I love to hear a writer sing his own song with just a guitar or a piano for accompaniment. There is something very seductive and appealing about a naked song.

February 24, 1984
K. certainly has an incredible amount of writing experience. Unfortunately, not enough of it was the humbling sort.

I'm at a point where I hate wasted energy so much that I can't relax for want of a great song idea.

January 18, 1984
There is a contagious disease here called competence. We can strum and rhyme all day long, but there's not much creative ecstasy. I'd rather be an impressionist or even a surrealist, if that's possible in a song. I'd like to re-create the feeling of climbing a mountain that is enveloped in a thick cloud and then suddenly breaking out onto a sun-lit peak that holds a breath-taking view.

December 6, 1983
C. keeps referring to "the magic, the magic...". Writing is hard work, not all magic.

I feel my own powers of discretion growing every time I write.

November 23, 1983
It amazes me how I've adapted to this constant songwriting. I never believed that I could sustain creative energy for long periods of time but one can definitely be trained to do it.

November 9, 1983
Since being in Nashville I feel the need for every song I write to be immediately accessible to the listener. Mostly, I fail.

October 18, 1983
The freshness of this experience may never again be duplicated in my life. I want to savor it. I have to keep reminding myself I'm here to stay. I can't help being caught up in the energy that surrounds the music in this town.

October 2, 1983: Pennsylvania
I 've said many good-byes in the past two days but until now I have not looked back at all. Now I have doubts and an ache inside that feels like a hollowing out.

September 2, 1983: Pennsylvania
Today I told C. that I am moving to Nashville. My future looks tentative unless I can root myself firmly in Nashville and make this work.

My First Writing Trip To Nashville
The following is from the first of my journal entries. It was made during my two week visit to Nashville and is dated July 2-July 16, 1983. This was my second trip to Music City; my first being a short visit in December of 1982. The impressions found in this entry were recorded fresh at the time and in many cases they have proved to be in error. I believe that the majority of it is representative of the Nashville music scene even today. I include some tangential writing here because it reveals something of my state of mind. This was an important life decision for me. It may be a decision that someone now reading this is contemplating.

Two of the most peaceful things on earth are a dairy farm at sunset and a deserted westbound highway. I've seen both today and it has eased my mind a little. The sky was white-hot over the Potomac. York County stretched its knee-high-in-July cornfields and unbroken grain fields south and east to the low mountains. Even the Steelton yards looked peaceful in the blazing, oily heat. The humidity cast a watery blue haze over everything. When the sun finally set it looked like a big Steelton bearing cooling from red to bronze to gray. Then the twilight mist crept down from Skyline Drive and spread across the Virginia wilderness. I sit here in this barren motel room, a way station on my trip to Music City, fitting a few lines to music. They came to me during the rain. Just south of Roanoke it poured with a vengeance, almost turning me back homeward. It wouldn't take much.

My welcome to Nashville was typical of infamous southern hospitality. I am a guest at C. and J.'s house, just in time for a fourth of July party. Everyone I meet has nothing but positive things to say and good wishes for this visit. It has eased some of the tension I feel.

Today was a day of organization and scheduling. One thing has become immediately obvious. The Nashville writer is very busy. It seems like too much is expected of him; too many songs, too many collaborators. The pressure to produce new work must be tremendous. The type of free-wheeling approach I practice back home seems unknown here. The competition, though on the surface appearing subdued and good natured, must be intense. Q. says he tries for three songs per week. I wrote three songs all last winter. I get the impression that people come here precisely for this: the discipline, the participation, the relentless flow of activity that prevents stagnancy. It's overwhelming. They're all pushing for the same big break.

Had lunch with L. today. He tells me Nashville needs writers because the artists have no time to write. Lots of records are being made all the time and good songs are always in short supply. I can't believe that at all, but maybe I've overestimated what is going on here. The writers continue to amaze me. Everyone is nobody special. They all get around, work nine to five, pitch their own songs. Most seem to have had good cuts, most are still broke. A lot of them are looking for work on staff. Many of the smaller publishing companies are folding, sending flocks of writers onto the streets looking for better, more secure publishers. Fifteen lose their deals, ten find new ones, the ones that don't find deals seem just as talented as the ones that do and I wonder... C. says there are only a handful of writers who never have to worry about getting cuts.

I wrote a song with D. today. I feel like a little kid who was just handed a signed baseball from one of his heroes- just to see my name next to his underneath the song title is a thrill.

I have not found a single exception to the warmth and the welcome I've received so far. I don't think I'm being conned; I haven't fallen under the spell of my own wishful thinking have I? It seems genuine- as if everybody here has plenty of elbow room and there's more than enough success to go around. Everything about Nashville indicates that it is a boom town.

I'm beginning to wish that I didn't need to go back to PA. It makes the whole thing so damned difficult. In a week I'll be up there wondering if it all really happened. I saw L.'s picture in the CMA Hall of Fame today. Didn't I write a song with him yesterday? I'm still surprised at how accessible everyone is.

Tried to write with R. today but he said he was in a slump. I guess that happens sometimes when you are writing every day. I wonder what keeps him going after all the success he's had. I realize that I don't confront these issues back home. I don't write often enough to notice when I'm in a slump. But just like a hitter in the big leagues who goes out there every day and takes his cuts, R. thrives on it.

I am beginning to doubt that I can do this without the support I have back home. I feel like a drifter; out of place and uncertain. Maybe I don't have what it takes.

Wrote with A. today. I can't believe how these guys think. They are always in touch with what the artists are looking for at any given moment. They bring that factor into the equation at every turn of phrase, every chord change, every note of the melody.

K. says this is a historic time in Nashville, like the days of the Brill Building in New York. It's almost sad to think that it will change. The week I arrived in Nashville I met several other writers who were here for their first visit. How can this town sustain all of us? Inevitably the walls will go up. Nashville will outgrow it's current ways.

Today I had second thoughts about moving here. For a town that boasts of it's environment being so conducive to writing, it seems suspicious to me that so many of the writers leave town when they want to do some serious writing. There seems to be a large group of writers who just aimlessly collaborate with everyone. I don't want to start this off on the wrong foot by making songs that would be better left unmade.

© 2001-2007 by Craig Bickhardt, all rights reserved.

Resources For Songwriters

The Muse's Muse Newsletter

Lyric Evaluation Service

Hard Knocks 101: Tips For Songwriters

SongU

Transcript Of A Seminar: Pitching Songs

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