Drunken Mystic

About a year and a half ago, I got more serious about my songwriting.  I’d been seen by others, and even saw myself, as a fairly gifted and talented songwriter.  So as my desire to be the “artist” or performer has somewhat subsided, I decided to try and concentrate more on seeing if I could just write songs and possibly sell them.

While I realized this was difficult, I can say even now that I had only an inkling of an idea of how difficult it could be.  Not impossible, surely, but one of the more difficult things I could try to accomplish in this life.

And the humbling part has been the realization that while my songwriting has been top notch for local bands and the local scene, I seriously needed to work more on the craft of songwriting, especially as I began to explore a new genre and style for me: contemporary and modern country.

Now, those of you who have known me for a long time, you know that the last thing I would have ever found myself writing or enjoying was country.  But country music has changed over the last ten to fifteen years, and I’ve enjoyed it more and more as it has changed.  It is no longer the country of Randy Travis, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Hank Jr., and George Jones.  A more modern rock and pop sound has dominated modern country in recent years, just with a more country flavor.

While I’ve heard other people grimace at such a change to their traditional country … I’ve begun to really enjoy the music.

So I joined a little organization called TAXI and have been submitting songs to them, getting rejected, and working on aspects of my songwriting.  Every year in November TAXI has what they call the Road Rally in LA.  i didn’t go last year, but I really felt like I needed to go this year, even to the point of leaving my month old daughter and missing a dear friend’s wedding.

I could take a guest, so my good friend Josh went with me.  I also have some family in the LA area, so I got to visit with them while drinking from the music business firehose.

Registration for the Road Rally started on Thursday night, so we found a cheap flight out to Burbank.  We left my house at 4:30 am and got there at around 11am Cali time.  My uncle Dave came to pick us up and then we did a little drive through tour of Hollywood and downtown LA, which was incredible.  We ate lunch at Phillippe’s, a very popular place in downtown LA that serves French dip sandwiches.  They had ten lines going at lunch, each about twenty people deep.  We each had lamb French dip sandwiches.  Very good.

Then Uncle Dave dropped us off at the hotel and we checked in and got in line for registration.  After registration, I talked with my cousin Rick (one of Uncle Dave’s sons) and he took us to a local Mexican restaurant which was also good.  I hadn’t talked to Rick in a while and it was good to catch up with him.

We got back to the hotel exhausted.  Josh went to sleep and I checked out the open mic in the main ballroom for about an hour before coming back up to crash myself.

The Road Rally is basically a conference with all these seminars with things about the music business.  Everything from songwriting to marketing to publishing and recording.  I mainly focused on the songwriting part of it.

Friday morning started with a great intro by Jeffrey Steele, a highly successful songwriter in Nashville.  He has written songs like “What Hurts the Most”, “These Days”, “International Harvester”, and “Brand New Girlfriend.”  All great songs, and he had a lot of great advice and a great story and even had an amazing performance at the end of his session.  He was definitely a highlight.

Some overall thoughts on the weekend.  If you’ve never been around a host of people who make music and wanna be creative, it is a very cool vibe.  The energy was amazing.  Just being around a lot of people who are passionate about the things you’re passionate about was very encouraging.  There was a lot of meeting new people and networking, and even late night jam sessions … that I didn’t participate as much in, but Josh did!

You also have to be very patient to do what I’m trying to do, and be very good not only at writing but REwriting.  One presenter, very successful in the songwriting business, had his first song on an album after rewriting it SEVEN times.  What if he had given up?  Even then, it took years to see the money from that song.

Jeffery Steele talked about when he was hired to write a song for a boy band in the 90’s.  The band was Westlife, and the song he wrote for them was “What Hurts the Most”, which is, in my opinion, an amazing song.  But Westlife passed.  Seven years later, a country/rock band, Rascal Flatts, recorded it and had a huge hit.  SEVEN YEARS later.

Most songwriters don’t “make it” as songwriters because they’re just not patient enough.  They give up.  One songwriter on a panel talked about moving to Nashville in 1980 and not getting his first song on an album until 1995.  That’s fifteen years.

So while I’m hopefully closer than fifteen years away since I’ve been writing songs for a long time already, what if it takes years to be that good, that connected, and get that one opportunity?  Years of rejection is daunting for any artist, but will the ultimate goal be worth it?  To me, yes.  Others will make excuses.

I am a good songwriter.  Maybe a great one.  But I am not yet a consistently astounding songwriter.  That takes more learning and growing as a musician and writer and just writing lots of songs and continually getting better.

Did I learn a lot last weekend?  I did learn some, but most of it was either learning things I already know to a deeper level or just new bits and pieces here and there.  The biggest impact for me was realizing, especially after hearing professional songwriters talk and share, that I am on the right track to being that good.  And if I’m patient, I’ll get there.

Getting to see my family was also very cool.  I had never just gone to visit Uncle Dave and Aunt Sonnie, and getting to see my cousins Rick and Tracy was great.  Tracy is also a musician and songwriter and she’s been getting into trying to write professionally as well.

On Sunday night, while Josh crashed again, I went with my Uncle Dave and Aunt Sonnie to this great pasta place in Santa Monica.  I got the garlic chicken thing, but there was this atomic pasta on the menu that looked interesting.  Aunt Sonnie got it, and when I tried it, I was completely amazed at how good it was.  I should have gone for it!

So in conclusion, I have things to work on with my songwriting, skills to practice, more things to expose myself to.  In the meantime, I need to find a job that can help me support my family, as any aspiring musician or songwriter has done.

For those of you who have been so supportive and encouraging, thank you so much.

Peace.

In a weird week, both Becca and I lost our grandmothers, our mother’s mother.  Arlene Force, Becca’s grandmother, died on a Thursday.  My grandmother, Josephine DeWitt, died on a Sunday.

I’ll let Becca talk about her own grandmother, who for all she endured in the name of what was right, quietly, will receive great reward in heaven.

But I’d like to take some time to talk about Jo DeWitt for a moment.

She lived in West Virginia most of her adult life, although she was born in Maryland.  She was the oldest of nine kids, and Jo’s mother died in childbirth along with the ninth.  Jo was left as a youngster to care for all her siblings.  Then at a young age she agreed to marry Harry DeWitt, my grandfather and raised five children, of which I am the firstborn son of her youngest child.

As a kid, we lived far away in a distant, flat, hot land called Alabama.  Every Christmas we would make the long drive up to a different, mysterious land of mountains and snow called West Virginia.  In those days we had a thing called “the radio” and we listened to such songs as “Country Roads”, singing them at the top of our lungs as the old Dodge Aspen traversed windy mountain roads to get to where my grandparents, all four of them, lived at the time.  It was the 70’s.  For those of you who weren’t there … it was awesome.

Jo DeWitt’s house was where we usually stayed, and for the first decade or so of my life, that was where I had Christmas morning, presents waiting for me under the tree.  Christmas evening would be a grand party where the whole DeWitt clan would congregate in Jo’s house, eat fudge and sugar cookies, get rug burns from the shag carpeting in the basement, and receive presents.  It was as idyllic as you can imagine.  Norman Rockwell himself would have yelled “halt!” just to try and capture the moment on a canvass.

When I was younger, we called Jo DeWitt “Mom.”  When I asked about this strange behavior as a child, I was told that Jo didn’t feel she was old enough (or looked old enough, for that matter) to be anything resembling a grandmother.  I think she had great-grandkids before someone could wrestle her wiry frame to the ground and force her to take the “Grandmother” moniker.  It was probably my cousin Jo Marie.

Which leads me to one of the most important aspects of Grandmother.  Jo DeWitt was always quite the lady.  She never looked frumpy or wrinkled.  She held court from her recliner throne in full regalia of fashion and exquisiteness.  And she liked her house to be as impeccable as she looked.  She was always beautiful.

One summer my parents went to Ireland without me and left me and my brother and sister with Grandmother for two weeks or so.  It was supposed to be only one week with Grandmother, but my Grandpa got sick and so the other set of grandparents couldn’t take us for the other week.  My Aunt Twila did help out, but we were mostly there with Grandmother.

Our misbehaviour was off the charts, if you could ask Grandmother about it.  As the years went on, how bad we were took on mythical proportions, legendary status, up there in Grandmother’s mind with Pearl Harbor and the assassination of JFK.  I don’t doubt it.  It was the only time I heard her cuss.  But as I get older, I start to blame it more on the sugar rush from all those little pink candies she had stashed all around the house … and that she probably needed a cigarette.

Well, the years passed and families got bigger and grandparents got older, and we didn’t have the Christmas dinner together anymore.  It is the natural way of things, but last week, sixteen of the eighteen grandchildren got together there in that old house with new carpeting and pigged out and told funny stories.  It was the kind of healthy noise and laughter that house hadn’t had in a while.

More recently, somehow Grandmother and I got to talking about death and heaven.  I told her, “Heaven is a noisy place, you know.” 

To which Grandmother answered, “Oh, I hope not.”  She kinda liked the peace and quiet.

My sister, Gina, and I tried to assure her she would like the noise, but we weren’t able to convince her.

As she grew closer to death, and as we all knew it was soon, names were placed on items in the house that we might want.  Bicentennial plaques and naked baby paintings were claimed.

But my Grandmother had 60+ decendents (grandkids, great-grandkids, and great-great grandkids), of whom she was fond of saying, “Not a bad one in the bunch.”  And I cannot disagree, honestly, when I looked out at most of them there at her funeral.

If I could put my name on something, it would be that.  Next to an eternity with Christ, what better reward than to get to the end of your days, see those that have emanated from your body and say, “Not a bad one in the bunch.”  I can’t think of one.

Good thing about that is … there’s room on the bottom of that one for everyone.

She will be missed.  She has been missed, but praise God she’s in a much better place.

Peace.

So I was talking with Micah about school on Wednesday, and got out of him that he played the “Rose Creek Village” game with his friends at school.

I asked him how you played the game.  He explained that you get in the car, drive a long time, get to Rose Creek Village, have lots of fun, get back in the car and drive home.  Then you do that all over again. 

I asked him, “Did your friends play with you?”  He said they did.  I asked which ones.  “Jake and Charlie played with me.”

Peace.

Micah has been enjoying Where the Wild Things Are lately.  We read it almost every night.  He can say most of it with me by now.

If you remember, Max is sent to bed without his supper.  Then, as king of the Wild Things, he sends the Wild Things to bed without their supper.

Last night, at the end of the story, Micah says, “Daddy, you know what Max should have done?”

“No, what, buddy?”

“He should have given them big hugs … and kisses!”

He’s three.  I don’t know what world my son lives in, but I like that world.

Peace.

Just wanted to put down a note that I had the best birthday ever … well, as far as I remember, and as a year older, who knows …

But really, having a lot of people together, loving one another, fellowshipping, and the time at Eddie’s Attic, it was great.

Also awesome was the amount of emails and facebook well-wishers … I was overwhelmed.  I know Becca instigated some of the email stuff, but I just wanted everyone to know that it really blessed me to get a happy birthday and a couple sentences of encouragement.

I actually think it helped to further heal me of this head crud.

Love you all,

Peace.