Country Dignity

Where are the real people in country songs? Where have they gone? There's dignity in country people. Yes, they have trucks and muddy jeans out there, although most Music Row songwriters apparently never leave their condos long enough to see for themselves. If they did, they'd meet someone rather surprising.

Country folks have hearts and souls. They rescue the lives of colts and calves birthed in breach. They fix the roof and dig the well. They save and sacrifice to marry off daughters or pay their college tuition. They send sons to war or give them a parcel of the family land to farm. They stop and talk with strangers while they mend fences. They raise a neighbor's barn and lend tools to each other. They tell very funny stories. They grow strawberries and give hayrides at Halloween. They aren't always drunk at the bar down the road or drunk at the lake. Where are the real people in country songs?

I believe a songwriter should be a poet. He should speak the timeless truth and find the wisdom in simple actions. A song lyric doesn't need to lead the listener down the path like a dumb cow on a tether. It can be an invisible sword that wounds the heart without drawing blood.

By contrast, here is the kind of cheap limerick-verse we get from Nashville these days:

There were two karaoke girls drunk on a dare
Singing "I Got You Babe" by Sonny and Cher
Yeah, life was good everywhere

My reaction to these lines is that life is pretty pathetic in some places. This is, in fact, what urban people do when they have no life. What about the stuff that really makes life good everywhere? Why does the working stiff need to aspire to this obnoxious spectacle on a Friday night? Can't he, for once, go to a town meeting and debate healthcare reform? Or do you think he's too stupid to do that? Go on, urban cynic, poke fun. Let's see you dismantle a tractor engine and have it running by sun-up. Let's see you run a family business on fumes and a prayer.

The rule of thumb in Nashville is: make her crude, make him dirty, put them in a truck (with a six pack sometimes), and it's a country song. Keep listening to country radio and you'll hear plenty more where that came from:

She wants her nails painted black
She wants the toy in the crackerjack
She wants to ride the bull at the rodeo
She wants to wear my shirt to bed
She wants to make every stray a pet
N' Drive around in my truck with no place to go

Real or bogus? "Wanted desperately: one goth redneck woman. She must have no idea what fun is, and prefer being thrown from a 2000 pound bull at the end of the date. I will shower her with little plastic Crackerjack toys (hopefully one will be a ring!) and affection. In return for winning my heart, she can waste my hard earned pay on $3 per gallon gas driving around aimlessly in my truck (which I never need), and keep every animal she finds along the way. Waiting anxiously for the woman of my dreams!"

It's time to call this what it really is: bogus parody- and cynical parody at that. Let's bury it. Let's pronounce it dead. It's anti-poetry, anti-heart, anti-reality, and anti-country.



copyright 2009 craig bickhardt

All The Spells

The instinct is a mystery. We can't justify it, can't explain it, or defend it. We just feel it. A song pulls us into itself before we have time to over-analyze what we’re doing. It’s the mysticism of songs that compels us to search for new ones. We discover something that reflects the beauty of the world as it appears through our idealism and we call it a song. The whole universe would sing it, every star in the night, if only it were perfect.

We second guess the instinct. We tinker with the spontaneous “unseen logic” (as Emerson refers to it); those will-o-the-wisps of connection too serendipitous to be planned and too recent to be mapped. In the process of seeking critical approval, seeking the elusive cut, we lose something. The logic has become visible and the mystery goes out. It's so subtle it would be invisible under a microscope.

Why do you love your favorite songs? Search in vain for the definitive reason; you can't name it, can't point to it, can’t analyze it, you just feel it.

If pushed for a critique some would say the Beatles song "Yesterday" needed more attitude and imagery in the lyric. I can imagine being a young McCartney trying to sell that tune in Nashville today. Good luck, Pauly. The song defies this kind of criticism because we feel the tug of the soul when we hear it. Do you trust that mysterious instinct, that soul-tug, or do you trust the ever-logical criticism?

Like the illusion that the earth stands still as the heavens move around it, “right” is sometimes just a way of seeing something that could easily be proved wrong eventually. If a song sends a shiver down your spine, you don’t need to ask for someone else’s opinion of the shiver or the shape of your spine. Better to ask why there’s no shiver produced by the other songs. And that’s probably a simple question to answer: because there’s no mystery in them. They are laid out like assembly directions. Welcome to contemporary hit radio...

I turned a friend of mine onto one of my favorite songwriters this week, Bruce Cockburn (last name rhymes with "slow turn"). I discovered Bruce back in high school when a copy of his first LP fell into my hands out of a discarded radio library. Such luck rarely repeats. He has a lot of wonderful songs, but there's one in particular I love called “Pacing the Cage”. It has a verse in it that could be the creed of every serious songwriter:

I never knew what you all wanted
So I gave you everything
All that I could pillage
All the spells that I could sing

We are in the advantageous position of offering something, everything that we are in song. We can weave spells. The spell is part of the mystery; the incantations of the spirit. I’m skeptical of things that appear "right" when they ought to appear mysterious. I’d rather a song lift me off the earth than grasp at my ankles.

copyright 2009 by craig bickhardt

The Radio's Echo

If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money.
- Andrei Tarkovsky

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
- E. B. White

I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.
- Stephen Wright

There are at least two ways of approaching a creative endeavor. The first is to look around you to see what everyone else is doing and try to take a little bit from here or there in order to conform to the general tone of things. The second is to shut all of that off and go within to find your own voice and muse, and only emerge from the cave when the job is finished.

If you've been confused by too much critical advice, it's probably because you've approached your work using the first method. Almost everyone in the industry can spot this type of song. It has all of the flair and style of the Emperor's New Clothes. It sounds like the radio alright, but it sounds more like the radio's echo.

As hard as it is to understand, you will not be successful until you digest all of the elements of commercial music until they are in your very fibre and blood, in your cells, and then ignore every bit of conventional wisdom you hear and write from who you are. Your contribution will be unlike everyone else's and yet it will find a symbiotic place in the ecosystem of commercial music. It will fill a niche no one knew existed until you came along. This is exactly how it is.

Whenever I encounter a writer trying too hard to "be commercial" I tell him/her that the worst kind of song is the song that's clearly written for the money. A song can earn tons of it and still be a very original piece of work. But if you write for the money you are playing it too safe to succeed. What do "Wooly Bully" and "City Of New Orleans" have in common? Both are hit songs, both are nothing you could have ever imagined writing yourself, and neither one was written for the money.

Focus on your craft and learn everything you can about songs and songwriting. Become a better musician, and a better singer if possible. Study the writers who have forged their own path, but don't imitate them. Learn from them how to be you. Songwriting is like a personal instinct-- mannerisms, quirky expressions and gestures. No two people express themselves in quite the same way. If you are having a dialog, do you imitate the other person's accent? Do you say the same words, make the same gestures, lean the same way? Do you answer predictably? Do you repeat everything you heard yesterday or do you think for yourself? Songwriting is no different. We learn the language, we learn the musical scale, we learn what chords work best, we learn what's legal and what isn't. But nearly everything else is a reflection of the individual.

If you've got the page numbers done, don't think the rest is just a matter of filling up the blank spaces on the paper with readable sentences. Give us some reason to turn the page. You'll find that reason in your head, heart and soul, not in someone else's.



copyright 2009 by craig bickhardt