A musician's life story, learning to accept herself for what she is, instead of living in the shadow of her famous Dad. Very honest and heartfelt.
Quotes:
For my entire life I have been trying to give voice to the rhythms and words that underscore, propel, and inform me.
I have often attempted to explain my experiences to myself through songs: by writing them, singing them, listening to them, deconstructing them, and letting them fill me like food and water.
I have charted my life through not only the songs I’ve composed, but the songs I’ve discovered, the songs that have been given to me, the songs that are a part of my legacy and ancestry. Through them I’ve often found meaning, and relief, while at other times I’ve failed to recognize or understand a rhythm or a theme until it became urgent or ingrained and I finally came across a song that captured the experience.
I have always wanted to live as a beginner
what I understand more clearly now, is that it’s not just the singing you bring home with you. It’s the constant measuring of ideas and words if you are a songwriter, and the daily handling of your instrument if you are a musician, and the humming and scratching and pushing and testing of the voice, the reveling in the melodies if you are a singer. More than that, it is the effort to straddle two worlds, and the struggle to make the transition from the creative realms to those of daily life and back with grace.
Someone once told me to perform to the six percent of the audience who are poets.
The idea of performing, of going on endless tours and living the draining, peripatetic life my dad was leading, was not appealing.
But I did want the songs. I wanted to write them and I even wanted to sing them. I wanted to collaborate with other musicians, and construct arrangements and sonic textures and poetry, and get inside a rhythm and a beat, and go into the studio like a painter and create something from nothing. In the end, I wanted to do that so badly that I concluded that the benefits outweighed the attending risks,
But through all of it, I worked hard, I paid attention, I sang to the six percent even if only two percent showed up on a given night, I sang to become better, I sang for the band if no one else was listening, I just kept doing it until it felt like home. I worked out a lifetime of self-doubt and musical and emotional vulnerabilities under the spotlight.
desire can become commitment, and commitment can make the forces of the universe work to your advantage.
repertoire is destiny.
I would think of her—proud but not egotistical (a feat in itself), delicate and strong—and of how the world would never again be innocent enough to produce another Tammy Wynette.
During those long, frightening days of near-muteness, I vowed that if my voice ever returned, I would give up the internal monologue of self-criticism about it. I promised myself that I would enjoy it, for a change. And I did. I saw my voice in a whole new way once I really did get it back. It was so much stronger than I had believed, so much more lithe and nuanced.
I thought I knew just about everything there was to know about parenting after twenty-plus years of motherhood, but what I knew about was mothering girls.
Having realized that I had been operating on a false premise for over thirty years, I now felt a palpable sense of relief. Maybe some of the other burdens I had carried from the past into my adult life had also been based on equally false assumptions, and maybe I could review some of them now, find a fatal flaw in my logic, revise my prospects for the future, make my way through my personal mazes, and put away some of my regrets and obsessions. It was never too late to undo who you had become.
That was June. In her eyes, there were two kinds of people in the world: those she knew and loved, and those she didn’t know and loved. She looked for the best in everyone; it was a way of life for her.
She was like a spiritual detective: She saw into all your dark corners and deep recesses, saw your potential and your possible future, and the gifts you didn’t even know you possessed, and she “lifted them up” for you to see.
The best thing I could wish for him now is that all his beliefs are coming true.
There is not meaning in everything, but one can ascribe meaning to anything. Therein is the beauty.
If I had wings I’d cut them down And live without these dreams so I could learn to love the ground.
“God Is in the Roses”
“The World Unseen,” the opening line of which was a reference to Psalm 102,
With time the unbearable becomes shocking, becomes sad, and finally becomes poignant. Or maybe poignancy isn’t the conclusion to grief. Maybe there is something beyond poignant that I haven’t experienced yet.
film Walk the Line, which had recently been previewed for me, and which I found to be an egregious oversimplification of our family’s private pain, writ large and Hollywood-style;
I ended the album with a track that was seventy-one seconds of silence. To me, it was the only direct tribute track to my mother and my father, both of whom had died at the age of seventy-one.
In the months since my father’s passing I had come to understand that the loss of a parent expands you—or shrinks you, as the case may be—according to your own nature.
You begin to realize that everyone has a tragedy, and that if he doesn’t, he will. You recognize how much is hidden behind the small courtesies and civilities of everyday existence.
Loss is the great unifier, the terrible club to which we all eventually belong.
We all need art and music like we need blood and oxygen. The more exploitative, numbing, and assaulting popular culture becomes, the more we need the truth of a beautifully phrased song, dredged from a real person’s depth of experience, delivered in an honest voice; the more we need the simplicity of paint on canvas, or the arc of a lonely body in the air, or the photographer’s unflinching eye.
For me, art is a more trustworthy expression of God than religion.
Sometimes songs are indeed postcards from the future, and are not written out of prescience as much as time travel.
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