American Songwriter » Holly Gleason

Inside The Billy Reid Shindig w/ Hayes Carll, Civil Wars, Jessica Lea Mayfield

Holly Gleason — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 23:25:12 +0000

(Jessica Lea Mayfield plays the Shindig) It’s so easy to hate on South By Southwest… Too big, too corporate, too much, too too too… And it’s true, kind of. But not really… The energy in the streets of Austin is palpable. Music everywhere. Aging hipsters not nearly as hip as they used to be tragically dressed and not necessarily checking the mirror to realize the sartorial joke’s on them as they cling to some sense of “still cool.” That desperation extends to the young and hungry, the blurry mass of bands yearning to make their mark… Even the midlevelers, who have their people clamoring to bask in the we’re-so-cool-here-we-ARE of being somewhere where someone knows their name. Yeah, whatever. It’s pretty obvious. But in the obvious, there’s a lot of what you miss: the brightness of the people here to enjoy the moment… the shining charm of people making music… the pop and country and screamo sounds wafting through the not too hot (yet) air. You can hear it down Congress… escaping the exhibition hall at the Convention Center… creating an almost nervous cacophony all over Austin’s storied 6th Street. There are the VVIP events, where you have to know somebody to get in, those spaces fairly clogged like arteries with the hipnocracy clamoring to bask in their sangfroidliciousness, the undead of cool affecting a disaffecting sense of ennui. Which is fine if you don’t miss missing the thrill of it all. But that’s not how I – a professed cynic -- choose to roll. You can’t game me, because I’ve seen it all… a buncha times. But knowing all that, I still choose to embrace the arc of live performance, the heart of a song that reaches a little further into the emotional core of being human, a band that’s not afraid to explode or a singer to tear the flesh off their most vulnerable places. Down on Red River Road, American Songwriter has joined forces with progressive Americana/prep designer Billy Reid have set up shop in an industrial/faded luxe outpost called Swan Dive. It’s about vast potential of what songwriting can mean – and cold beer. And whether you’ve come to experience the magic, or just hang out on the fringe of what’s happening… the music is being played, and it’s alive with possibility. Heck, The Civil Wars, an unlikely duo who plays an organic, atmospheric set of songs that butterfly net the range of desire, decay of same and devastation, are everything American Songwriter stands for. Smart songwriting, true performances. The little DIY pair managed to debut at #1 on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums chart, proving the potency of this away-from-the-mainstream, emphasis on taltent and execution approach. So it is with the magazine devoted to where the songs come from. So it is at South By Southwest if you get beyond the obvious. Look around, especially at Swan Dive and the artists assembled, and see the collected yearning to be good. Jessica Lee Mayfield is here, and Caitlin Rose – both neo-queens of the alt-roots, near-rock realities, who write songs that peel back the cuticle and let it bleed. Jason Isbell working the reigning superstar for the oeuvre tip. Apache Relay drums thumping like hearts aflame with the overwhelming force of lust first encountered. Mike Grimes, purveyor of Nashville’s killer indie/used record store and underground venue The Basement is standing in the back, watching artists he’s been booking and selling local product on for over a decade. He’s smiling, recognizing that it may not be the elephant dollars of the great big music business, “but we’re making enough to get by… and we’re doing music that hits me.” Grimey knows of what he speaks. A journeyman musician, a color outside the lines businessman, he’s harnessed his passions and let it fuel an almost holy war against the machine. And he’s not a jihadist, but more a live and let liver… give him room to breathe and he won’t tread on you. Over the years, baby acts like the Black Keys and the Civil Wars set up shop at his room when no one knew who they were – and they come back now that they’re topping the sales charts and playing meaningful dates. The Civil Wars – for what it’s worth – will be closing this show for American Songwriter. “I just wanted to have a record store that was a continual party,” Grimey says in his quiet downplay way. “Somewhere people could come and the music was happening.” Happening enough that when Metallica headlined Bonnaroo, they set up shop to do an unannounced micro-club gig at The Basement. Happening enough that the sonically pulverizing Hall of Famers opted to turn the game tapes into Live from The Basement, an unadorned article of faith that demonstrated just why James Hetfield & Co. are the heaviest band in the land. Hayes Carll, all lanky slouch in fleece-lined demin, haunts the back of the room, taking in the music. It’s his fourth stop in a day that included the breakfast cast KGSR fields, a long interview with The Philadelphia Enquirer’s Dan DeLuca, a lunchtime show at an advertising agency – and now being one of American Songwriter’s big acts. He smiles that cockeyed smile, tilts at little about the ambitiousness of it all, but shrugs it off at the same time. He’s a craftsman, someone dedicated to the notion of quality of songwriting and forging a path that’s his own. It’s why he’s more kin to Ray Wylie Hubbard – a sometime songwriter – than a huckster pitching horse shoe hooks at the glistening fame machine. Another songwriter – who shall remain nameless – casts a sideways look. He's part of the continuum of an off-roading kind of frat boy country, that’s good for hooking in bumper crops of ball cap-backwards boys who lean towards husky, and the pretty young things who show up to hurl their hormones at these bards of their way of life. “It’s about teenage girls,” sneers the songwriter who shall remain nameless. “It’s about piles and piles of teenage girls – and the guys who chase’em. Hook when when they’re young, let a beer company use you to brand loyal them… and there you go. It’s the ‘Jersey Shore’ of Texas.” If I were drinking I’d’ve spit my beer out. Thankfully, I’m just dry and leaning in to hear in the dun of small talk bouncing off concrete floors and brick floors. If you’re into how important you are, a place like this could be a drag. If you’re looking for the life force of music made to matter – and musicians who’re striving to have a little quality conrol, albeit in an unfiltered form, this is a good place to be. (The Civil Wars play the Shindig. Photo by Zach McNair)

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Jim Carroll, 1949-2009

Holly Gleason — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:12:08 +0000

You knew when you heard it coming out of the radio, this was something different. Propulsive like a jackhammer, yet wildly melodic. The singer was fraught, frantic, biting off words, spitting them out like bullets. And yet for the subject matter--a list of dead people--there was an innocence. Punk was still a demi-monde proposition, more valued in America for the shock and vitriol than the music. Patti Smith a high, holy woman poet with a low slung guitar and Lenny Kaye riding shot gun, but she was… arty… and this, this punched out “People Who Died” was on pop radio next to the Doobie Brothers and Steve Miller, the Marshall Tucker Band and the not so blues jammy incarnation of the Allman Brothers. It was unnerving, yet you had to lean close, to know more. You were mesmerized by the urgency, the cataloguing of how they went -- from leukemia to straight ODs, even the detachment that marks the numbing shock of so much loss at such a young age. It was unblinking in its harshness, yet the love and loss shone through. Upon further excavation, the facts of Jim Carroll came to light. A basketball star. A bottom-shelf junkie who turned tricks to support his habit. A Catholic boy turned prep school charity case. A Lower Manhattan street poet whose work was published in the Paris Review and captured the interest of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Yet another flicker around the fringe of Andy Warhol’s Factory, a sometime provider of dialogue for the pop artist’s many films. A compatriot of Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye, the visionaries who coaxed the poet before a band--and then what the cold fission begins. The Basketball Diaries was almost a real time Catcher in the Rye for me, though more raw, more lurid, more beyond the grasp of my Midwestern mind. Yet so raggedly torn from forms I knew, it felt real, must be right, damn… Coming of age on the edge of a knife or a razor slicing through flesh and veins. He knew about people who died, about compromises without choice, about sullying oneself for a vicious habit that made ones muscles flinch back with a force almost stronger than he could cognitively muster. It was terrifying. It made me feel more alive. Like his music. Like his voice. Brittle. Boring into you. The words were everything, and they were the jagged sound of glass shattering. Combustive, Explosive. Undeniable. You couldn’t turn away, yet for all the churlishness, the kid who turned tricks looking at Manhattan’s Cloisters museum managed to hold your gaze with something that was somehow--against all odds--pleasing. Call it adrenalin. Call it horror. Call it the same other side that Lou Reed--a fellow poet, New York City downtown texture, Andy Warhol veteran via the Velvet Underground – harvested to such shocking musical reward. The jolt of it held you rapt, left you breathless… like the drugs wanting more. And like so many blazing creative fires, he burned even when there was no spotlight on him. After Catholic Boy, there were two more albums--which weren’t even a flicker in the ‘80s--and a few more volumes of poetry: The Book of Nods, Fear of Dreaming and Void of Course: Poems 1994-1997. Not to mention Leonardo DiCaprio’s turn as the autobiographist in a film version of The Basketball Diaries, which put a harrowing face on the squalid promise and depravity of Carroll’s notorious book. From the journals of a young man finding his way came the most compelling role the young heart throb had encountered since This Boy’s Life. Oh, and Jim Carroll was pretty. Really pretty. Stunning to look at. Sky-high cheek bones. Blazing red-copper hair so common to the Irish. Intense eyes that burned like hot steel rods. The whitest, palest skin that seemed to make him a true child of midnight, that blue-tinged almost skim milk color that makes vampires seem healthy. He was rock and roll perfection. And to most, he’s not even a footnote. Though being a New York-driven artist, he did warrant an obit in today’s New York Times. But that’s not what matters here. What stands out is the way anyone who heard the vicious lashing, thrashing had it burned into their skin, the psyche: the liberation of not just kicking out the jams, but the way exactitude in an almost musical insurrection made the songs hit that much harder. It was never just chaos, just shock. There was always that control. The cold within the fire. So few can handle that kind of rage,that kind of acid spewed against the bottomless pit of talent’s madness and dereliction. There’s no saying that Carroll, who was 60 and had a heart attack at his home, who was spoken for in death by his brilliant ex-wife and attorney Rosemary Carroll, handled it appreciably better. But what he did was make it something the rest of us, the ones brave enough to listen, could begin to understand. Too few can make it viscerally digestible. For everyone’s bad-ass, rebel, biker, outlaw want to, almost no one can cash the checks or truly live outside the law. The best we can hope for is someone who can hip us to how it tastes, the way it feels--even the bad parts, especially the bad parts. In today’s broker pseudo-bad, down-low ghetto whatever, it’s mostly pose for poseurs. Jim Carroll was the real: torn flesh, hard lessons, withdrawal spasms, brokered sex, unbelievable talent. To be able to see through his prism was a grace… and now we can only see through that which is fixed in time, knowing that because it once existed, the world of beyond combustible, but somehow held together in the pre-punk, downtown New York and post-punk valley of one was is real, indeed. The rest of us can only hope to maybe have that flicker a moment or two of our own. For Carroll, it was a way of life… and inspiration to the kids in the ‘70s and ‘80s who knew it took more than a little meth and a leather jacket to be dangerous, indeed. We saw the bar, couldn’t clear it and but understood what death-defy really meant. Not bad for a Catholic boy on borrowed time and too much talent.

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The Essential Guy Clark Songs

Holly Gleason — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:41:05 +0000

Guy Clark’s songs are exacting bits of detail that turn into revelatory looks into the dignity, humanity, tragedy, vulnerability and sometimes joy of being alive. Guy Clark’s songs are exacting bits of detail that turn into revelatory looks into the dignity, humanity, tragedy, vulnerability and sometimes joy of being alive. His simple language yields profound realities. There is a warmth to the melodies -- even the foreboding ones—that draws the listener in. Whether celebrating escape from chaos (“L.A. Freeway,” “Magdalene”), the depth of abiding comradeship (“Ramblin’ Jack & Mahan,” “Desperados Waiting for a Train”), the empty side of love (“Instant Coffee Blues,” “Let Him Roll”) and the transfixing qualities of the certain kinds of girls (“Rita Ballou,” “I Don’t Love You Much, Do I?”), Clark's songwriting reveals his distinct American brand of storytelling. In his ability to find universal connection in the common -- “Homegrown Tomatoes,” “Stuff That Works” -- and personal truths that ignite meaning for so many individually -- “The Randall Knife,” “Black Diamond Strings” -- Clark is a man who exhumes the reasons and the resonance of the unseen, unnoted and seemingly humble people, moments and things that are within all of our grasps. And he has maintained a consistency that’s spanned from his early records for RCA Nashville, where he emerged as a potent songwriter with a voice that was equal parts strength, musk and wisdom, to his more organic acoustic records of the late-'80s forward. A craftsman who knows the chambers of the human heart, his quality has not just maintained, but in many ways increased over the years. Here are my Top Ten Guy Clark songs: Classic Clark 1. “L.A. Freeway” 2. “The Randall Knife” 3. “She Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” 4. “Instant Coffee Blues” 5. “Let Him Roll” 6. “Rita Ballou” 7. “Desperados Waiting for a Train” 8. “Like a Coat from the Cold” 9. “Homegrown Tomatoes” 10. “Anyhow, I Love You” Contemporary Clark 1. “Black Diamond Strings” 2. “Old Friends” 3. “Stuff That Works” 4. “I Don’t Love You Much, Do I?” 5. “Magdalene” 6. “Ramblin’ Jack & Mahan” 7. “Boats To Build” 8. “Maybe I Can Paint Over That” 9. “Sis Draper” 10. “Dublin Blues” Holly Gleason’s feature on Guy Clark can be found in the September/October issue of American Songwriter magazine.

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HOLLY GLEASON’S BLOG: What The Dreamers, Stars and Singers of Songs Do When No One’s Around.

Holly Gleason — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:06:16 +0000

It is 10 after 5 in the morning, and Erv Woolsey, the storied artist manager, lets out a laugh. Not ribald or fatal or ironic, but warm; the sort of low rumble that is pure joy and appreciation of the moment. Less than 10 feet away, his client George Strait sits beaming at the corner of baby grand piano's keyboard, an acoustic guitar across his lap.

What You Don't See What The Dreamers, Stars and Singers of Songs Do When No One's Around. It is 10 after 5 in the morning, and Erv Woolsey, the storied artist manager, lets out a laugh. Not ribald or fatal or ironic, but warm; the sort of low rumble that is pure joy and appreciation of the moment. Less than 10 feet away, his client George Strait sits beaming at the corner of baby grand piano's keyboard, an acoustic guitar across his lap. Rascal Flatts' Jay DeMarcus is on the piano bench, fingers rolling over the black and white keys. Ronnie Dunn is to the dark-haired musician's right, taking it all in. Dunn, certainly an icon of two waves of major league country, basks in the songs being tossed back and forth, raising his voice as only he can. Though the hour is late, the spirits are blazing-not drunk, not high, but engaged in singing old country songs and hits that the assembled guests are calling out for. This is music by the people who make their living making music, but made for the joy of the moment, the celebration of song and nothing else. It is a feeling so sweet, so alive, that nobody wants to go home. And so they go on... Singing and laughing and loving everything about how music makes them feel. Even Oscar-winning local girl Reese Witherspoon is swept up in the sparkle and fairy dust vortex of music makers beyond the floorlights' high beams. She, too, calls out titles, sings along, feels the way the rhythm moves you. This is what draws people to a life of song... one that except for the very few is a life of scraps, promises and cobbling together the opportunities that keep one alive. For them, it isn't a life of getting by, it's the only way there is. Once you know there's no choice, there's only melody and words... and that sense of being electric in the connection to what you play. The songs tumble out, fill the room. The world's best jukebox brought to life by some of the most famous people in modern country music. A million songs held in common, rarely played, animated by their collective vision. "Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down." "You Don't Know Me." "The Fireman" "Jackson" "Wild Horses." Every song they've ever known or loved, tumbling out like a deck of cards, falling from an exhausted gambler's shuffle. Not perfect, but perfect for the way the lyrics and harmonies glow in a wooden barn in the soon to be slate grey threat of another day. Never mind the multiple award winners, the Entertainers of the Year and multi-platinum sales. Forget about the headlining tours, the waves of meet & greets, business obligations. This isn't just about titans or bold-faced name, it's about fierce integrity and loving music at its roots. Lee Ann Womack, who was inescapable with "I Hope You Dance" and topped every critics poll in the universe with her scorching take on Buddy Miller's "Does My Ring Burn Your Finger," leans over the piano in her stiletto heels, ashy blond hair swept up and just beams. She calls out songs she wants to hear... but she also backs up and sits on the stone fireplace's ledge so others can warm themselves by the ad hoc performance going on. Foe a woman whose brand new record is Call Me Crazy, in a moment like this, she's anything but. No, this is the source of her power - and the place where the reasons merge with passion in a communion of like-minded souls connecting at their source. And it wasn't just the über-famous. No, this candle-flame drew moths of all stripes. Friends and family members... Bob Marley's Wailers, especially dead-ringer singer Elan Atias finding his way through Music City for the first time and offering his sweet voice in harmony wherever it fell... New York City's iconoclastic catalyst of film, benefaction and music Nancy Jarecki looking every bit the glamazon blonde bombshell who is Sally Kellerman... and Nashville's consummate music man Tony Brown, who'd won two CMA Awards of his own that very night producing Strait's tell-it-how-it-is Troubadour... It was also newcomers like Jake Owen, who took his own turn at the piano to find his way through ‘Tiny Dancer" and 30-something hardscrabble traditionalist Randy Houser, whose "Anything Goes, When Everything's Gone" is challenging country radio in a way not seen since Kris Kristofferson gave Johnny Cash and Sammy Smith the double-barreled reality plays "Sunday Morning Coming Down" and "Help Me Make It Through The Night." But it's not about who anyone is, or what they do. Admission-such that is-comes from on some level certainly of knowing the right people, but it's more about genuflecting at the altar of why this matters... This, not being some network awards show that sells soap and pits artists against each other, but the reason they all fell in love with the jukebox, the transistor radio, the cover band down the street in the first place... Music in its purest form goes straight to one's gut. Even beyond the heart or the brain, it's an unacknowledged part of certain people's DNA double helix, wrapped around all the other chromosomes that make them who they are. It is not about money... fame... status... adulation... No, for these genetically encoded specimens, it's how they breathe. Music in, songs out. Somehow, some people are just more alive when they're immersed in the music. The trouble comes, usually, when the business-or the insecurity, ego or bad living-creeps in. The wrong reasons start becoming the manifest; the justifications looking like the truth. In the topsy turvy vertigo that sets in, sometimes the feral spirits who came for the ability to create or consume the plutonium cones of creativity lose their way-and the struggle to keep the spark alive begins amidst the deadlines, the growth curves, the market shares, the research mandates and the demographic analysis. It becomes a matter of margins and quantifiable limits rather than soul. It stops being about why people connect with the music and surrenders to a cover-one's-rump aesthetic drive, mandated by the profit center and people who don't remember, possibly never knew what it's like it to believe in a band or a piece of music so much that it can sustain them when everything else is falling apart. People sometimes laugh at me: the way I can go on... and on... and on... about a song. But those things truly move me. They change how I feel, whether it's AC/DC throwing me into overdrive, Patty Loveless drowning me in sorrow I didn't know how to tap, Bonnie Raitt opening floodgates of raw desire or Springsteen pulling me out from the shore to a place where I can truly breathe... and they are the things I can count on; they are the things that do it every single time I reach for them. For the people assembled in Ronnie Dunn's barn, here on what's billed as "Country's Biggest Night," they are as far from the pomp and the romp as a soul can be. With the branches scratching a slate colored sky, this is the root of the real why they are here. Not just in a barn at 5:30, but all these years later. It isn't for awards... sales... screaming fans... It is, simply, the music. Looking at the faces, the smiles, the nodding to themselves and each other in acknowledgement of what goes unspoken, it's obvious-at least to the people who know how it feels. Erv Woolsey, once an assassin promotion man, knows songs as well as anyone, loves them just as fiercely, with just as much sense of connection as anyone in this somewhat congested space percolating with the electricity of like minds converging. Scanning the room, not to make sure his client's OK, but just to take in the joy, he laughs again. He nods at his son a few feet away, a young man raised in a cradle of Dean Dillon, Jim Lauderdale, Bruce Robison and other crème de la crème writers, and receives the knowing look of a fellow discerner. At a time when it's easy to blame the mainstream, these are the moments that prove how wrong that notion can be. Business is as business always will be: about the numbers. But for the people who live for the music... here far away, only for themselves, it is the piano fills rising and falling, the acoustic guitar chords chopping up time like rocks of emotional cocaine. In this space, it's obvious what matters. Unseen, though it is, it is absolutely something for the fans to know... and believe in. This is the kind of thing that can't be faked or conjured. It is in embracing the notion that it happens that faith in at least a certain kind of singer can be restored. It is the sort of thing that must be taken on faith, trusted beyond knowing-and yet, right here, right now, it is all laid out like a fortune teller's deck and future that lies in store.

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HOLLY GLEASON’S BLOG: “Why Don’t You Quit Leaving Me Alone”

Holly Gleason — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:03:57 +0000

You never hear them coming... the ones that level you, take away your breath, buckle your knees. Those songs that hit the sweetest spot: you find yourself completely disoriented from how squarely they bag the emotional bull's-eye, you're not just speechless-you're hoping nobody noticed. You never hear them coming... the ones that level you, take away your breath, buckle your knees. Those songs that hit the sweetest spot: you find yourself completely disoriented from how squarely they bag the emotional bull's-eye, you're not just speechless-you're hoping nobody noticed. It was in Pinehurst, N.C., a sleepy town that smells of evergreen and red dust, where it happened. Driving the little streets for no reason, listening to an advance cassette of Rosanne Cash's glorious patchwork quilt of John Hiatt and John Stewart, John Kilzer and Eliza Gilkyson, then-husband Rodney Crowell and her own genius originals and marveling at what happens at the intersection of taste of bravado. Surging, whirling, aching, laid bare, laid raw... It was the best of what Emmylou Harris does-find great songs, turn your soul inside out and stretch it over musicians who are taste, fromp and the pocket on steroids. Having won the Grammy for "I Don't Know Why You Don't Want Me" from the hush'n'freneticism Rhythm & Romance (1985), she was flying high, could do no wrong... and man, she was blazing. In a grey-green-black knot of long-haired firs, I'd pulled over to consider... to listen that voice that Bobby Bare once described as "wet" as it spread like a claret stain across an old linen table cloth. Slow moving, succulent, something you hate to waste, but are transfixed watching the path of consumption and ruin. It couldn't get any better... And that's when the perfect pairs of quarter notes started dropping... bing... bing... bing... An elegy, perhaps, but more haunting. A dignity, but in the throes of some great storm. A light flickering, yet not quite extinguished. A shanty whistle swirled and curled around, an almost bed for whatever was going to happen... and in the starkness and the lonely, there was only blue light from the dashboard, and the soft dirt the mustang was sitting in, as the dripping pine sap oozed onto the car. "Maybe you remember... this old resort hotel...," came the whispered cry to... whom? "It's pink and white all over... historical as Hell..." The song didn't stop, even as the mind reels. What is going on? "F. Scott and Zelda stayed here... and you and me as well... "At least that's how the story goes, the porters like to tell..." What in the hell? Where... How... Beyond a few random facts, there was a world to cave into. And those facts, scalpelled off, like some rare truffle... A world was laid out, an emotional abyss plummeted into... Whatever it was, my heart beat thunder and my blood ran like the Grand River in winter. I had to know, because I knew... I'd already been there. The song was "Why Don't You Quit Leaving Me Alone." It was written by Benmont Tench, the elegantly dissolute keyboard player in Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, a man who wore mystery and melancholy as exquisitely as those suit coats draped over his lean shoulders. Quiet in the way only a train rolling through in the lost hours can be... Silence torn by something so far away, you can't get there physically, yet you also can't help but be overwhelmed by the far-off rumble. This was big... even as it was barely exhaled, a pain so grave, it required returning to the scene of the crime, to be locked away from all with the ghosts of what was-and what wasn't. Indeed, what would never be again. See that's the thing about a perfect 3:59: in less than four minutes, you can be consumed by the depths of devastation. There is the loss, abandonment, recriminations-not to mention the ache of emotional amputation. But it's not just the beautifully cascading melody, dripping and falling down-nor the way Cash gasps before beginning certain tumbling confessions of telling details. No, it's the evocative nature of the images and realizations strung together like popcorn or cranberries for a Christmas tree, or tiny white lights in some old school Italian restaurant. Against that Chinese water torture progression of notes, hand descending and rising from keyboard in metronomic precision-almost dispassionately locked into its inertia, over and over again. "Nothing on the TV., no message on the phone," comes the velvet lament. "Nothing but an awful lot of nothing going on..." goes the impossibly parallel construction. That balance of ennui and trapped is excruciating. And just when it can't get any worse... "Every radio station plays the same forsaken song..." Trapped in a vortex of bad music, recurring images and the place where it all went down. "You'd think I'd have the sense to leave this place alone..." Benmont Tench, besides being the atmospherics on some of Stevie Nicks' best records, the cloud for Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, even the Stones, is the invisible grouting for heroic American band-and iconic true Southerners beyond that-Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. It don't get any truer or more authentic. And to that end, Tench has crafted a song about being imploded by regret, loss, recognizing just how bad it is... and he's man enough to go to the scene of the crime, drain that slashed vein and face the spectre of what isn't. It's not harsh, as had as it is. The melody is a gentle lullaby, music made by a man who can take no more-even if the waves of angst just keep hitting the shore. He's not hiding, not is he wallowing, he's just trying to man up and face it. And the hotel in question... the Don Cesar in St Petersburg, Fla.... is indeed a grand dame old school hotel. Built by Henry Flagler when the industrialist had committed to turning Florida into a winter playground for his rich Yankee friends. The Don rises in its mostly pink, certainly antiquated charm slung the gulf coast highway-a remembrance of another more elegant time. It is breathtaking-even sitting along a road now dotted with t-shirt shacks and fast food franchises. Inside those doors is another realm and reality, something to take you back... and "Why Don't You Quit Leaving Me Alone" celebrates that. Merges the literal and the state of the heart... takes it deep inside, lets it play out like only a storm somewhere over the ocean can as you're watching it against the night sky from a place high enough to have perspective. "A cold hard rain keeps coming down... "It wasn't like this last time around... "There's no calm center to this storm..." It is harsh, whatever this moment of looking the mistake in the eye, must be. With a slight break in her voice, Cash moans, "Oh, baby..." and it is more than desire. With that vowel hanging in the hair, she gathers up her dignity on that final chorus, and manages to offer that final request, "Why don't you quit leaving me alone..." There trying to be lost in Pinehurst, N.C., I am speechless. When all is lost and you're not even sure you have the strength to inhale, that is just how it feels. That sense of unrelenting loss... and the sense that the tide will never rise again... and you will stand there waiting... waiting for a relief that will not come. "Some dreams die with dignity, they fade out clean and quietly," the alternate chorus explains. This is not one of those times. This is one of the jagged gouging pains for the ages, one where even the numb is gonna kill you. But there is a correlating truth: you're not lucky enough to die. You're gonna have to live with it. In that moment, me, the girl who always felt "My Funny Valentine," a minor key celebration of the gorgeousness of the off-kilter and the potency of love's enduring nature, was the song to end all songs-found herself blown away. This may be the one song above all others, the one that would be saved if all other music was to be eradicated. It was sobering, and it was absolute, something so sad, so painful, so quietly impassioned that there was no denying it. Indeed, it was a song that I would come back to watching the twinkling carpet on either side of Mulholland Drive, flying over Chagrin River Road outside Cleveland, Ohio, cresting the Mississippi River on lost nights in Memphis and crawling along the edge of Martha's Vineyard under pinpricks of stars falling on the sea grass. Any time, any place, anywhere... when I want to know what sad is, I go back. Bad speakers are even better than a high tech sound system. Windows rolled down preferable to attic rooms without ventilation. But always, it's there... a song that is nothing more than a haunted woman's voice laid over a demo that couldn't be trumped in the studio. Maybe like the song itself, it was that bit of feeling dripped across the keyboards like so much hot wax that slowly melted and flowed away, only to cool somewhere unintended. Regardless of the how, it worked. Twenty-five years later, nothing moves me quite as much or as consistently. And if that's not what songs are supposed to do, then maybe I've missed the point all along.

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