I still remember the feeling I had that night. I always love to hear the introduction. It charges the audience up and lets them know they’re about to hear what they’ve waited for. They climbed up the steps, and Tom went to the drum set, and Marty took his seat at the pedal steel, and Robert and Bill and Rich picked up their guitars and stepped to their mikes. After they took the stage, everything up there seemed bathed in a weird blue glow, or maybe something that was more like a weak black light. Robert was still wearing his cap, and he started singing, and the band swung in with him, and the voice of that pedal steel began to make itself heard, and the songs sounded almost the same, except that they’d taken on a different feel, as if they’d gained a new friend. The words were the same, and I knew that because I remembered them, and Robert’s voice was the same, but somehow the band had altered its sound in a way that was almost not noticeable, except for the beautiful voice of the strings Marty was playing, the silver-tongued notes that floated and lingered on their way up into the dark air above the crowd.
And then they started playing some of the new ones, things I hadn’t heard before. I knew they’d been in the studio, and had finished a new record, and what I was hearing was some of it. I looked out at the people and they were like they’d always been, standing there swaying, faces turned up, caught in the moment when the car rides or the airplane rides and the ticket lines are behind them and forgotten and the man they’ve come to hear on the stage gives it to them live and up close, and there’s nothing else like it, so they swayed, and they swayed, and swayed again.
Talking with Robert about the process of writing is remarkably similar to talking to somebody who writes fiction or poetry or even non-fiction for a living in that he’s very aware of the need for revision. And he knows it takes time and practice to learn even that. Everybody gets a lucky piece now and then that doesn’t need a lot of fine tuning, a rare gift from somewhere or nowhere, but most of it has to be worked on some more. Even Hank did plenty of that with Fred Rose in Nashville.
“There’s nothing wrong with editing yourself,” Robert says. “Once you’ve written a song and you go back…At first I thought everything coming out of my head was good and then if you step back and think, ‘Do I understand that reference?'” He laughs for a moment. “Or maybe you just think you sound cool. The largest lesson I’ve learned is that editing is a good thing and you can make a piece of work better.”
He’s right as rain, of course, and I ask him about ideas for songs, because people who want to write or students are always asking fiction writers where they get their ideas. It’s always a hard question to answer because ideas come from everywhere and sometimes unbidden at the moments you least expect them, but I’m interested to hear how it applies to a songwriter who’s written over three hundred songs, somebody who’s a big fan of Norman Blake and Townes Van Zandt, somebody who started writing songs when he was 18 and first picked up a guitar.
“I always start with some point of truth,” he says. “It might be as simple as how a car looks with a flat tire. But from there I start filling in the pictures the way I want to. On rare occasions I try to go with what really happened and what really took place in my life.”
I ask him if he can name a song as an example. I know how stuff from real life creeps its way in there. It has to because what you’ve seen or heard of in your life and what you can imagine is all you have to write about.
“Sure. ‘Gringo Honeymoon’ was written to try and follow what really happened as closely as possible. Sometimes it’s a total failure. Sometimes the fiction is so much better than the truth. What I try to do with the writing is fill in all the pictures I can.”
And anybody who wants to write songs or whatever would do well to listen to that.
Lafayette County, Mississippi, Spring 2001: I’ve got a song running over and over through the CD player in my black and muddy truck while I go down the road late in the evenings these days. I can hear Bill and Rich singing backup on “Wild Wind”, which was one of the new songs I heard them play in Nashville, and their harmonizing is the epitome of cool. I sat up real late that night with them, and Allison Moorer got on the bus about 3 that morning after Robert had gone to sleep. She played a couple of songs for us on a mighty fine Collings guitar that Robert had given Rich, and I’m thinking about that night while the song’s playing. I can hear Bryan on his fiddle, Tom on his drums, and Marty on his pedal steel. Rich and Bill are playing their guitars along with Robert. The melody and the words have captivated me after only a few times of hearing it and it’s gotten to be one of those things that won’t leave your head, and you hear the harmonica chiming in when you’re not even listening to music but instead doing something else, like driving a tractor, or holding a fishing pole. A song just gets inside you and it lives in there and it won’t leave. The really great ones never do.
As the days pass one by one and I keep listening to the songs and getting more familiar with them, I’m really listening to the words:
Ain’t no secret
Old Doc Skinner
Wrote prescriptions
Made lots of friends
He could dance like
Nobody’s business
Folks around here
Are sure missing him
Simple common words, the words in the everyday language of everyday people, that say so much in such a short time. I listen to the words and I try to imagine how and when he wrote them, maybe on the kitchen table at a deer camp in West Texas, or lying on his bed with a pen and a tablet and his guitar while the bus went down the road somewhere between Austin and Atlanta, and everybody was asleep except for him and Larry, the friendly man who drives for him. Or maybe in a hotel room in Chicago or Nashville or Birmingham or Los Angeles or Boise when he couldn’t sleep and something had been running through his head, some words, a vague tune to go with the fragments that were all he had. And of how, sometime later, maybe after weeks or months, when some or all of the words were written on a sheet of paper, they all sat down together and he played them how it went for the first time, and then they started in on it, adding their parts, beginning to learn them, revising them, playing it over and over until they had it finished, and one night they put it up on the stage and some audience in some distant city heard it for the first time. It’s got to be a damn good feeling. I know it is. It’s a piece of work to publish, one part that with all the others you do makes an album or a book. And then it goes out into the world and other people hear it and see it and begin to share in it, to tell friends about it, to pass on the word, and the word grows like a strong young tree.
I’m still listening to all the great new songs on Gravitational Forces. It’s coming out August 7th. That doesn’t mean that I’ll stop listening to the other records they’ve done. All those old friends are stashed safely within reach, ready for the gloam of an evening, and a lowride through the countryside, and a wide awake dream of time with Texans who know how to kick a little ass. Eloquently.
Larry Brown is a music fan who lives in the country with his family near Oxford, Mississippi, where they raise cattle. His latest book is Billy Ray’s Farm, on Algonquin Press.
