Traveling Companions: Hair, hair bands, and driving with the windows down

old car radio

[This summer’s Traveling Companions is a relaxed blog series telling stories about and highlighting songs/albums/artists that have accompanied me along the way. This is the fourth in the series; other posts are here, here and here.]

This was not part of the plan when I started this series. I mean, Jackson freakin’ Browne is still waiting his turn. Or I could go Van Morrison next, or Sara Bareilles. But last Friday a totally un-August-in-Virginia day befell us – upper 70s and not a lick of humidity. I cannot stress enough how unlikely this was.

I had an errand to run down the road in our county and my hair was still wet from the morning’s swim. The day was so gorgeous, just driving through it wasn’t enough, so I opened the windows and let the wind do its worst, tangles be damned.  I found the local classic rock station, the same one whose station promo, back when I was in college, was “lock it in and rip the knob off.”

It’s been a while since my hair was long enough to whip in the wind. As soon as I picked up speed on the curvy road I felt like the students moving into their dorms this week – young, free, invincible, like the road was opening up before me into possibility and promise.  Not just the road.  The Road.  It’s the way I’ve always felt when the air kisses my skin just so and the wind whips my hair and the radio’s up loud enough to hear over that noise.

I wondered as the feeling washed over me if this is the way I’d always feel, in a car with the windows open and good tunes on the radio.  When I’m 85 will those sensations still combine to fool me into a carefree younger-than-I-am moment?  When I used to look over at my white-haired, arthritic, sun-spotted grandmother, driving the truck to town with the windows down when we’d visit in the summers, is this how she felt?  When I saw a comfortable, soft, old woman was she feeling The Road and existing as a young girl in her own mind?

This is really the kind of thing my mind does.

Anyway, Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” came on in the car last Friday. I can still remember the black and white grainy MTV video and the intense longing the song, the band, and the sight of Jon Bon Jovi’s hair brought out of me at a certain point in life. For a while, I had a picture of Jon, cut from a magazine and taped to the visor in my car, so I’d see it any time the sun was in my eyes.  My friend Katie and I would flip it down even on rainy days, because sometimes you just need to see something beautiful.  Eventually I became embarrassed about my visor and my interest in Bon Jovi and started listening to other things, but last week in the car I let my Bon Jovi freak flag fly unapologetically, singing along at full volume.

Like my own personal “this is your life” tour of college days, the next tune up was “Hard to Handle” by The Black Crowes. Every time I hear it I’m transported to a certain stretch of Interstate 64, heading east from Richmond, the place where we were when my friend Molly called it the “Sahanahanaha” song, which, you have to admit, is exactly how it sounds when they sing it.  (Go on, listen and you’ll hear it.)

I almost waited until I could get it together to write about Jackson Browne.  I mean, I don’t even own any Black Crowes or Bon Jovi anymore.

But this summer I’ve been writing about Traveling Companions and the best of them are the ones who, despite the odds, are still accompanying you, even when you no longer have their albums…even when you see each other more on Facebook than in real life.  The best traveling companions are the ones who awake in you someone you thought you’d let go of but who, you realize, you miss sometimes.  Maybe they can even still see your younger self when your grey hair is flying about in the wind.

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photo credit: © 2014, Feddacheenee, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Traveling Companions: Susan Werner and “Barbed Wire Boys”

[This summer’s Traveling Companions is a relaxed blog series telling stories about and highlighting songs/albums/artists that have accompanied me along the way.  This is the third in the series; other posts are here and here.]

I used to drive a stretch of I75 in Kentucky, from Berea to Lexington.  Listening to the radio on one of these drives, I heard a new voice singing, “Here I come, banging my broken drum…there will be no more standing in my own way.”  I knew something about getting in my own way, blocking my own steps forward.  The song and the singer’s strong, clear voice resonated.  By the end of the track I was singing along, like it was my own manifesto.  The radio station must have done a “twofer” because the next tune was the same gorgeous mystery voice, telling the humorous and heartfelt tale of waiting around on the next train to show up (“Time Between Trains”).  With descriptions of boredom captured in the image of counting the ceiling tiles of the train station, the song is a metaphor for time in between loves, waiting on the next person to show up and feeling ready long before s/he comes around the bend.

Susan Werner outdoor concert PA

If you have the opportunity to hear Werner play live, take it! She’s a superb performer and she plays great spots, like this (free!) outdoor summer concert in King of Prussia, PA. At the concert we attended this summer, she sang “La Vie en Rose” in flawless French.

I have been an evangelist for Susan Werner ever since.  I haven’t yet introduced her to anyone who couldn’t appreciate her talent or didn’t like her and I’ve nurtured several fans almost as ardent as I am.  (So beware, reader, of your iTunes behavior after reading this.)  That first song I heard, ”Standing in My Own Way,” was written by Dana Cooper, but other than a few covers and her cover-concept album (Classics, which showcases her perceptive arranging talents), she falls squarely in the singer-songwriter camp.  By that I mean she mostly writes her own music, though the style ranges from singer-songwriter/folk to Americana to pop to jazz standards to gospel to torch songs.  She plays and composes on both guitar and piano, thought at one time she’d be an opera singer, and earned a master’s in voice from Temple University.  The woman’s got range.

The same album – sometimes the same song – can go from hilariously irreverent to beautifully poignant.  Her most recent album, Hayseed, includes “City Kids,” the revenge fantasy for farm kids who grew up jealous of the kids who lived in town, alongside her affectionate and cheeky tribute to her home state in “Iowa,” and the lovely and reflective words of advice to other young Iowans dreaming of pulling up stakes for the big city in “Something to be Said,” the chorus of which ends with “There’s something to be said for blooming where you are planted,” with “planted” landing in her lowest register, like a seed being pushed deep into the earth.  An older album, New Non-Fiction, boasts another fine use of extended metaphor in the darkly funny and sweetly hopeful “Misery & Happiness,” in which lounge lizard womanizing Misery, “sings at the Hilton…sways his hips and smooths his hair back, winks at you and gets you thinking/ He’s handsome from a certain angle.”  Misery “woos you when his show is over, buys you drinks and keeps you laughing while he’s looking down your shirt.”  Over in the corner, good guy Happiness is keeping a watchful eye while he “doodles on a cocktail napkin and waits for you to figure out that you should really lose this loser,” saying, “call me when you want to come back home.”

Piano, guitar…it’s all excellent.

To pick a favorite Susan Werner song would be an enterprise in frustration and never-ending “but then there’s…” so I won’t name just one.  I will say “Barbed Wire Boys” (New Non-Fiction) is pretty near the perfect song.   If I were teaching either a writing or songwriting workshop, we would start by listening to and looking at this song. It’s a tribute to and portrait of the men in the rural Iowa she “knew when [she] was coming up,” and though I’ve never been to Iowa and only fleetingly lived in rural communities as an outsider on an extended stay, one listen and I know who she means.  “Barbed Wire Boys” is a complete short story in three minutes and twenty seconds.

Like any great writer, Werner’s language is precise and revealing, as she describes the men who “were sober as coffee in a Styrofoam cup” who “sat at the head of the table and prayed before meals/ Prayed an Our Father and that was enough/ Pray more than that and you couldn’t stay tough/ Tough as the busted thumbnails on the weathered hands/ They worked the gold plate off their wedding bands.”  It’s a full moment, presiding at the head of the table, nodding to the depth of faith and family – but just a nod, no tears, no extraneous words.  It’s a portrait of working class life, summed up in the detail of the “gold plate” worn off the wedding ring by hard, continuous, feed-his-family work.

Looking back on a childhood surrounded by barbed wire boys, the adult Werner wonders about the dreams these men may have had for life and considers their unexpressed deepest hopes “beat[ing] like bird’s wings in the cage of their chest.”  It’s a love song at heart, for a place and a people and a way of life she took for granted as a child and sees differently now.  It’s an ode of deep appreciation and hero worship for the overlooked men who “[held] up the sky” and made way for dreamers and artists like Werner:

And now one by one they’re departing this earth

And it’s clear to me now ‘xactly what they’re worth

Oh they were just like Atlas holding up the sky

You never heard him speak, you never saw him cry

But where do the tears go, that you never shed

Where do the words go, that you never said

Well there’s a blink of the eye, there’s a catch in the voice

That is the unsung song

Of the barbed wire boys

If you haven’t heard it yet, you can listen here to a live version that’s a bit more slowly and reflectively paced than the recorded version on the album.  At first I preferred the tighter, faster recorded version but each has its merits and the song itself is so utterly perfect it shines through each arrangement.

I hope you enjoy it and the unfolding journey of getting to know Susan Werner’s music.  She’s worth the trip.

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[A note on the text, or, How I Wrote Something and Then Completely Disregarded It:  Yes, my previous post was about how I was going to forge ahead into the one space world and try to curb my many-decades worth of two-spaced typing after sentences.  I’m still trying to change that but, after a nice break from writing and work, traveling to see family and Susan Werner, I completely forgot about that goal until this very moment as I had it all uploaded and ready to publish.  So, I won’t go back and painstakingly take out the extra spaces.  I’m a work in progress.]

Traveling Companions: Amy, Emily, and Chapin

[About this summer’s Traveling Companions blog series:  To give myself the excuse to listen to more music this summer and to evangelize a little about some of my favorites, I decided to do a relaxed series telling stories about and highlighting songs/albums/artists that have accompanied me along the way.  Here’s the first post in the series.  I promise this whole series won’t be about the Indigo Girls, but they have been traveling with me for a long time now and I just saw them in concert last week, so here they are again.]

When I was 23, I sang along to all the songs on Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Shooting Straight in the Dark album.  One of the songs, “Middle Ground,” has the lyric, “She’s 33 this time around” and whenever I got to that line I sang, “23” instead, feeling in synch from 10 years behind MCC.  Around this same time I made a mixed tape (translation for younger folks: playlist) of favorite songs, including that one, and called it my “Trying to Tell You Something about My Life” tape, titled after a line in the Indigo Girls’s anthem “Closer to Fine.”  I gave copies to close friends and I played it until it wore out.

mcc_c_2006_mike.evans

Those were the years between college and seminary, the first time I lived in Appalachia.  There was no internet.  We thought nothing of driving 2-3 hours to visit friends for dinner and then driving back home again the same night.  There was ample time for listening to music and dreaming.  I stayed three years before heading to Atlanta for seminary.

On the way to Atlanta, I lived in Nashville for about 6 months.  I was ready to go but nervous about the change in work and the pace of life there.  The night I arrived, my friend took me to dinner at a sushi place near Music Row.  As we sat at our table chatting, I heard a voice I recognized at the table behind me.  It was the low, sultry, very-slightly-southern voice of Mary Chapin Carpenter and something about hearing and seeing her there on my first night in Nashville served as a blessing on the new chapter I was beginning.  I would be all right.  I wasn’t accustomed to asking for or looking for signs but somehow seeing and hearing her right then seemed to be a good one.

About four years earlier, still in college, I went to my second Indigo Girls concert.  It was a summer night at Wolf Trap, where we spread a blanket on the lawn and looked up at the stars while they sang.   They were touring for their first widely distributed album, Indigo Girls, the one with “Closer to Fine” and “Kid Fears” (which featured Michael Stipe in a haunting harmonizing vocal).  When they were getting ready to sing “Kid Fears” they paused to introduce a special guest about to come out and sing that third vocal with them.  The kind of people who yell out commentary from the audience were yelling, “Michael Stipe” – which I was pretty sure wouldn’t happen since he didn’t live near Washington D.C. and since he had his own tours to carry out.  I was aware that MCC lived in the D.C. area at that time and I had this small sliver of hope it might be her, though I’m not sure I had any proof before that night that they even knew each other.

I was right.  It was a special treat to hear that version of the popular song, and to know these three women I admired and listened to actually knew one another.  At the end of the concert during the encore, Amy and Emily brought Chapin back out and they capped the evening with an a cappella version of “The Water is Wide.”  It was chilling.  For me, it was church.  I have remembered it – the sounds, the feeling, the moment of it – for 26 years.  (And, no, I never once before this moment thought of looking on YouTube to see if there was a recording of them singing this together!)

Over the ensuing decades, I’ve heard them all play many times and brushed past them in real life.  When I lived in Atlanta I found myself pumping gas next to Emily Saliers one day.  Heading down the stairs from Eddie’s Attic one night, I heard an unmistakable voice talking to friends heading up the stairs and looked over to see I was passing Amy Ray.  A few years back I attended a wonderful preaching/writing workshop co-led by Emily and her father (and my seminary professor) Don Saliers.  The past few Advent seasons at the Wesley Foundation, we’ve become fond of singing Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Come Darkness, Come Light.”  She now lives in Virginia, not too far from me, so I wasn’t surprised when we were in the same Starbucks getting coffee last year.

Last week my husband and I went to a benefit concert for the Charlottesville Free Clinic.  From the moment I heard the Indigo Girls and MCC would be the performers, I hoped they might sing together again like I have remembered all these years.  Amy and Emily sang the first set, then Chapin sang.  At the very end, she called Amy and Emily back out and the three of them sang “Closer to Fine.”  Then, just as I’d hoped, they sang “The Water is Wide,” first with accompaniment and then, on the last verse, only their three lovely, miles-traveled-together voices floating into the sticky hot night.  I looked up at the stars again but I also closed my eyes to drink it in.  It was worth waiting 26 years to hear again.

I own every album Chapin and the Indigo Girls have put out, I’ve gone to countless concerts, and we have crossed paths over many years, though I realize I’m the only one of the four of us who realizes this.  That’s fine.  Each of those crossings has been a blessing and a sign, a reminder of the places and times they’ve been my traveling companions.  I’m 47 this time around, which means Chapin’s 57.  I’m still singing along.

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photo credit:  © 2006 Mike Evans, CC BY 2.0

Traveling Companions: New Music

Back before the Internet, when downloads and iTunes didn’t exist, I drove to another state for the new Indigo Girls album.  It was 1990 and I spent my day off driving from Jonesville, Virginia, to Kingsport, Tennessee, to the mall.  Remember mall record stores?

I had recently upgraded from my first car, a 1968 Dodge Dart named Arthur (yes, it was incredibly old even then), to a nondescript K-car.  I got air conditioning and FM radio in the upgrade but no tape player.  So, on road trips I’d bring along my radio/cassette player and one of those power cords that plugs into the cigarette lighter.  It didn’t play through the car’s speakers, I just blasted it as loudly as I could from that sad little “box,” sitting, speakers up, on the passenger seat.  It takes about an hour to make that drive, which means I got to hear the whole album at least once on the drive back.

I want to say new albums meant more when obtaining one was an event like this, but I don’t think it’s true, even though I remember small, specific details of that day, like how steamy the car was when I got back in at the mall parking lot, wrestling with the thin, tight-wrapped plastic to open the hard, textured-plastic case around the tape.  Like putting my sunglasses on and hearing “Hammer and a Nail” for the first time, making my way back to the highway.  Like I was recognizing something I’d heard before yet couldn’t wait to hear revealed.

I want to say this but then, today, on retreat in a remote locale with a one-bar signal, I managed to download the new Indigo Girls album, One Lost Day, onto my phone in decent time.  And when I heard “Elizabeth,” the sound of summer and longing all mixed up with their voices – like another summer whose stormy soundtrack was Rites of Passage (“Ghost,” “Romeo & Juliet”), like the epitome of late-summer ripeness and longing I can actually taste every time I hear “Mystery” (Swamp Ophelia) – memory of that drive flooded back.

It took a lot less time to procure this album, but I’m in the same place, transported.

Driving to my retreat yesterday, I listened to another musical traveling companion, Susan Werner.  These days I can plug my phone straight into the car’s sound system to listen, but the essence of companionship is the same.  Driving alone through the green gorgeous western Virginia mountains, Susan sang to me about “the greenest corner of God’s green earth,” and though she meant Iowa, it resonated.

Lately I spend most of my time in the car navigating appointments, with NPR on in the background.  Yesterday’s drive reminded me how much I need music and what great musical traveling companions I’ve spent time with over the years.  To give myself the excuse to listen to more music this summer and to evangelize a little about some of my favorites, I decided to do a relaxed series here called Traveling Companions, telling stories about and highlighting songs/albums/artists that have accompanied me.  I hope you’ll come along for the ride.