A Songwriter Considers the Last of Things

04/13/2023- The solo songwriter, the state of my State, and rage for the good.

Since the Pandemic, in the days before I leave for every tour, I wonder if this will be the last time? No tour yet has felt like the last tour, but I know that one day the hands won’t uncurl and loosen up, the legs and back will weaken, notes I’ve always sung will be out of reach, or the heart (as a metaphor, and maybe, in reality) will give out.

At 63, I’m one of the older solo performers working the small theaters and smaller rooms as a performing songwriter. Jazz cats are super-human so they don’t count.

A solo singer/instrumentalist is like a baseball catcher, in on every play. Everybody else can breathe, but the catcher is always on. A catcher decides to take it easy for a couple of plays, he gets a tipped ball in the throat, or pulls a hamstring, or worse, ends up back in the minors, or the lower minors, or rookie ball.

That’s what it’s like to be a solo performer. There isn’t much room for error and you can’t afford to run your motor with a cylinder missing.

And maybe you should go easy on the metaphors, but you get my point.

Rehearsal area in the shack, with unfinished windows.

Is it harder than warehouse work? More painful than hanging sheetrock or roofing? Of course not.

But it’s not like playing a show with a band, like I was doing for a while as the Super Session Band, with my friends, Craig Pratt, Gordon Inman, and Pate Russell.

You can even sometimes limp along on three cylinders if you have the extra horsepower of a band of people willing to fill in the spots where you are absent.

It can energize you on a night when you need to feel like you had better keep up. Peer pressure is a hell of a motivator.

And no matter the level of musicianship, no matter the complexity of the music, it is never as difficult as holding an audience, and physically presenting a moving, emotive show, all by one’s self.

A photo by my friend Becky Pope from what turned out to be the last Super Session at the wonderful Barking Legs Theater in Chattanooga.

I was rehearsing less than 72 hours after slicing my ring finger on my fretting hand. I hate to lose a single day when there are shows around the corner.

It’s just harder to play solo.

It’s also harder work to get. In the US, in particular, nobody seems to want to hire solo performers for anything bigger than an intimate house concert or the smallest folk club.

There’s an image of the solo performer as a head-down, introspective, Emoesque strummer.

And I can understand the fear of having to sit through two sets of mid-tempo songs about despair (or worse, self-affirmations), played with a limited set of guitar skills. That’s a fate worse than death. But that’s also more a cliche than the truth.

It’s been a while since the days of the acoustic storytellers: John Prine, Harry Chapin, Leo Kottke, Steve Goodman, Bonnie Koloc, Nanci Griffith, and the whole Texas gang: Townes, Guy, and Eric Taylor. The promoters don’t know, or haven’t been shown, what can happen between one solo performer and an audience.

Even my friend, Bruce, who owns Barking Legs with his wife Ann, is burdened with an unflattering image of the performing songwriter. He hired me because I have guitar chops.

I know what I can do, but I fully understand why most clubs and festivals aren’t willing to take a chance on a soloist.

We are more work. Which is funny since we have to do more work.

Most places want a band. A band comes with extra loudness and extra snap to sell beer and keep girls and boys in the joint. At a festival a band makes more noise, has more moving parts, can sometimes do harmony singing that lifts the listener right out of their ordinary day. It’s easier on the club owner and simpler for the audience.

My late friend Keith used to say about Bluegrass Festival crowds, “when the audience hears all that stuff going on, they know something is happening.”

Keith hired our duo Bell and Shore over and over again and helped us pay the bills for years.

Keith told me that he just didn’t see a fit for solo acts.

Late night after shows I’d argue with him about this, but he only ever hired me once after the duo broke up. And, yeah, nobody showed up.

Tours begin on hotel beds.

Over here in Europe, where I’ll start a tour that could always be the last tour, they are more open to solo acts, songwriting, and the kind of contemplation that takes place in the best of solo shows.

If you come to one of these shows I will (to paraphrase Miles Davis, again) play the fuck out of my guitar, but even more so, I’m going to tell you stories. Serious, sometimes joyful, sometimes painful, oft times bittersweet, stories about how we live and who we live with.

My songs have always come from equal parts rage and love.

This is the first time I’ve left for a tour with a heart filled with more rage than love.

Two weeks before I got on a plane to Amsterdam, my state blew up.

Tennessee has been governed, through gerrymandering and crookedness, by a group of older, Christian, white men, and a few woman collaborators like my State Rep.

I don’t have enough time to write about even a few of the things that the Republican super majority in Tennessee have done to harm their fellow citizens, but a quick online search can get you started. It’s like a buffet restaurant where they just sell all you can eat homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, and extra racism with a truly amazing hatred of women.

You’d think somebody would have noticed by now, but nobody has been looking at Tennessee. Not really looking. The media mostly act like we are still populated by bootleggers, country stars, and the occasional Heisman Quarterback, with a few gentleman scholars thrown in for good measure.

If you aren’t a swing state in any election, nobody looks at you.

Georgia used to be Tennessee.

Just watch. Tennessee just took the first step toward being the next Georgia.

It’s hard to look every time there’s a shooting in the Unites States, but if you pay attention, you know that there was another school shooting, this time in Nashville, Tennessee, and that started people yelling about guns again. Why do we ever STOP yelling about guns? But it wasn’t that shooting that really caused the people of Tennessee to attract the attention of the nation.

It was Racism. With some misogyny and middle school level spite thrown in for good measure.

Two young black men, and a retired female school teacher, members of the state assembly, did what we all should have been doing all along and ruined the white supremacists day by interrupting them and supporting the school children (yes, children) who had come to the State House every day to ask, demand, hope for a conversation about how it might be possible for these same children to graduate from school without being shot and killed.

But the white supremacists were having none of it. You can watch the video on any good news organization’s website. Led by their Grand Wizard, Leader Cameron Sexton, the white supremacist Republican super majority just kept talking, until finally they realized that the kids were determined to be heard and two “uppity” young black men and a “mere” woman were going to help those kids.

If you haven’t already heard about this, in exchange for this impudent behavior on the part of mere citizens, the white supremacists, including my former friend, voted to throw the two duly elected black guys out. But they kept the white lady in.

Which meant that they combined racism and condescending sexism into a package that caused everybody all over the United States to finally look at my state and say, “what the fuck?”

That this came on the heels of ANOTHER school shooting is no surprise. But, of course it did.

*note - As I prepared to leave for the airport, there was yet another shooting, this time in a bank in Louisville, Kentucky. And no, it was not.a.robbery.

As I get older and these tours get harder, I think more about what it would mean to not travel, except on vacations with my crush (we do vacations really well), and how easily I could quickly adjust to that.

To those who love my music, thank you. But I’m very good at looking at my career arc realistically and disappearing would be simple. Men much more well-known than me have stepped away and been forgotten in no time at all.

And I’ve never done this for fame. The tours get harder, the preparation longer, the recovery from hard travel more difficult.

There will be a last tour.

It’s something all older musicians think about. Except the jazz cats.

But I love to write. And I love to sing the songs I write.

My state blew up.

So maybe I’ve been writing the songs I write for just this moment.

For this moment when we actually start to push back the forces of white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, racism, classism and the other unnecessary “isms.”

I’ve always written songs about the things that happen, not the things we wish would happen.

The kids are making things happen that must happen.

And I owe those kids something from my work.

I owe those kids the truth.

There will always be a last moment: the last day it was illegal to marry your same sex partner, the last day it was legal to be a woman of reproductive age in most states in America, the last day a trans child could feel safe in Florida, Iowa, or Tennessee, The last day it was legal to refuse service to a black citizen, the last time I’ll walk on stage and sing about the United States that I know, a flawed place in turmoil, but once again full of the promise of a good life, for everyone.

As things seem worse, the voices that make things better are getting louder.

And if this turns out to be the last tour, I’m determined to make it 16 shows that lay out, with unblinking clarity, the hardness that has crept into our United States, and even more importantly, the beautiful action, marching feet, and raised fists of chanting young people, trying with all their good hearts to save us. We failed them, but I don’t think they will fail us.

It’s not really much, to be a songwriter.

I am full of rage and all I have is one goddamn guitar.

Kids are dying. The least I can do is sing the things out loud.

Love somebody,

N

Note to my readers- Both reps, Justin J. Pearson and Justin Jones have since been reinstated to the house by their respective city commissions. The third protesting Rep, Gloria Johnson, continues to call the thing what it is. The kids keep showing up at the State House. The United States is changing, my friends. This I know.