Category: life

What the jukebox taught me about writing

Editor28 Comments

Bobby Braddock’s been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. You don’t know the name, but I guarantee you know his songs:

“He Stopped Loving Her Today,” by George Jones. “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” by Tammy Wynette. “People Are Crazy,” by Billy Currington.

Here in Nashville, Bobby Braddock is a songwriting god.

Reading about him, I was reminded of something that’s easy to forget:

Songwriting, like any kind of writing, requires some talent, but mostly it takes a lot of work.

Songwriting is Bobby Braddock’s job. He can’t afford to sit around until something inspires him to write. He just has to write.

Listen to this. It’s from an interview Bobby Braddock did a few years ago with a website called larrywayneclark.com:

“Well, the people that think that lightning’s going to strike and that you can’t discipline yourself to do inspired work, I think that’s not true at all. You can make yourself write stuff, and you keep doing it and keep doing it and eventually the good stuff will come….”

That’s a great attitude when it comes to writing anything.

Here’s another example:

Couple years ago, I went to hear Bob McDill at the Hall of Fame. He’s another Nashville songwriter, one of the best: “Amanda,” by Waylon Jennings. “Good Ol’ Boys Like Me,” by Don Williams. “Gone Country,” by Alan Jackson.

Before he retired, he aimed to write a song a week. He had an office, and he went there, and he worked.

He said the song “Amanda” came in about 30 minutes, but “that’s the last gift I got. Afterward, it was blood, sweat and tears.”

He wrote a song with Dan Seals called “Everything That Glitters.” Here’s how it starts:

Saw your picture on a poster, in a cafe out in Phoenix;
Guess you’re still the sweetheart of the rodeo.
As for me and little Casey,  we still make the circuit
In a one-horse trailer and a mobile home.
And she still asks about you all the time;
And I guess we never even cross your mind.

There’s a lot of story in those six lines. McDill said he and Seals worked on that song for “months and months and months” until they figured it out, got everything just right.

Blood, sweat and tears.

Writing, any kind of writing, is work. It’s great if you’re inspired, but usually you’re not, and the only thing you can do is write through it, and if you’re lucky, the good stuff will come.

Cool hand, Luke

Editor30 Comments

I finally let Thing 2 (the 5-year-old) watch Star Wars. We watched the original trilogy over a period of about a week.

We watched the movies together. I explained the parts he didn’t understand and, when things got scary, I told him to cover his eyes or reminded him that it was only pretend, and I fibbed my way through what I thought might be the really disturbing parts (I said they were only burning Darth Vader’s costume on the pyre at the end of “Return of the Jedi”).

I thought he’d have questions about Luke Skywalker being Vader’s son and Princess Leia’s brother, but he took both revelations in stride. His only question came a couple days after we watched “The Empire Strikes Back,” on our way home from preschool.

“Dad,” he said, “where’s Luke’s hand?”

“Well, Darth Vader cut it off with his lightsaber,” I said, thinking maybe I’d made a mistake and that he wasn’t old enough to watch the movies, even though most of his friends had.

“But he gets it back, right?”

“Well, they give him a new hand, remember? On the spaceship, at the end of the movie? They give him a mechanical hand.”

“But where’s his real hand?”

“It, uh, fell.”

He was quiet then, but he asked me about Luke’s hand again the next day and the next, and I then realized he wasn’t thinking about Luke Skywalker as much as he was Mark Hamill, who played him. He wanted to know what happened to the actor’s hand in the scene where it looked like it got cut off.

“That was just pretend. He just pulled his sleeve down over his hand so you couldn’t see it, but it was still there, like this,” I said, pulling my sleeve down over my hand.

He understood and demonstrated to Sweetie when she got home from work.

I thought everything was OK until a few days after we’d watched “Return of the Jedi.”

“Dad, what happened to the snow monster’s arm?

“What do you mean?”

“When Luke cut it off. He didn’t have any sleeves. Where’d his arm go?”

PHOTO: Luke’s mechanical hand, from The Empire Strikes Back. Part of last summer’s Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination movie prop exhibit at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville, Ala.

The vanity of a 5-year-old boy

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It’s been a tough week. We got 4 inches of snow Sunday night and Monday morning, which is a lot here in the South, so they called off school, and by Wednesday, Things 1 and 2 were getting a little stir crazy. They’d gone sledding, and we’d all gone out to eat and gone to Target, but still.

So, Wednesday night, Thing 2 decides to spin around and around in the living room as fast as possible. Sweetie and I turned our backs for a moment and heard a “thunk” and then a wail.

(Before I get into the gory details, let me say Thing 2, who just turned 5, is fine, really.)

So, we heard this “thunk,” and then a wail, and Thing 1, (the 10-year-old) said her brother had made himself dizzy and fallen over and bonked his head on the entertainment center.

I go over, and I’m checking him over, and I’m feeling for a bump on his head, and his hair’s wet. I look, and there’s blood.

I mouth the word “blood” to Sweetie, so she won’t freak out when she sees it, and I carry Thing 2 upstairs to the bathroom to get a better look.

He’s got a small cut, maybe half an inch. It isn’t gushing, but it’s bleeding a little, so I hold a wet towel against it while Sweetie checks the first-aid books. It doesn’t sound like we need to rush him to the ER, but I wanted a second opinion, so I asked Sweetie to take a look.

Thing 2 screams, “Noooooo! I don’t want anybody to see it!”

So, I doctor the wound as best I can, and I say, “Well, at least you’ve got a good story to tell ’em at school tomorrow.”

“NO!” he said. “Don’t tell anybody!”

“You embarrassed that you spun around so fast that you fell over and bonked your head?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“I don’t blame you,” I said.

Last night, I gave him his bath and rinsed his hair without shampoo and combed it. He thought I was combing his hair just to comb it, but, of course, I was parting it around the boo-boo so I could get a better look.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” I said, even though it was something. “You want to see it?”

He ran over to the mirror and checked it out — and then used his fingers to comb over it.

“Can you see it?” he said.

“Nah,” I said.

“I don’t want anybody to see it,” he said.

“OK,” I said, and I instantly pictured him when he’s older, much older, and begins to worry about losing his hair.