Stuck Here in the Middle

I’m pretty great at starting things. And, I’m actually not bad at ending things, either. A good ending to a song or a story is, for me, often my favorite part. I like art that sticks the landing.

But even if I know where we start and where we end up, I struggle with the middle.

How do we get from HERE all the way over to THERE? How do I make the journey as cool as the destination? Truth is, I’ve got a lot of incomplete songs that are incomplete because they’re missing a satisfying middle.

In fiction, usually, the middle is where the action is. All that ‘rising action’ and building conflict business they taught me in school. In songwriting, I call my “middle” problem, The Second Verse Conundrum. Sounds cool, right? Like The Eiger Sanction or The Osterman Weekend. Like there might be spies and perhaps some refined, European-styled violence.

Despite the fancy name, it just means I’ve either got to figure out where it goes, or how it develops its idea. Or—because remember there aren’t any rules anyone’s making me follow—I have to be ok with it doing neither of those things.

So, for example, in the song in question, I’m pretty happy with the first verse.

AND, in an unexpected turn of events, I found that I’d actually already written a second verse. Here it is:

And here’s a recording of the song I made back when I wrote it. With a little instrumental verse break in the middle, the whole things clocks in around 3 minutes.

I clearly decided that the second verse was just going to further develop the idea the first verse presented. This is a totally valid approach, I think. Not every song is a story that needs to move from point A to point B (not every story is a story that needs to move from point A to point B.) The danger with this approach is it’s almost always really difficult to match the intensity or cleverness that attracted me to the initial verse. And the second verse is not the place for a song to sag.

Let’s see how I went after it here.

First, it repeats the basic conceit of the first verse, but instead of “seeing” my dad, this time I hear him:

I heard that song on the radio this morning
that one you loved and I sang all the lines.
I heard you coming in on the high parts
And felt us pull a little on the rhyme

It nicely matches up with the cadence of the first verse. Content-wise, this is song, so a verse about songs feels cooly meta. My dad was always a lot more open to country music than me, so he’d often play me songs or artists I wouldn’t have otherwise heard. And I’d often end up helping him figure out how to play those songs on the guitar. This (and “Slingblade,” of course) is how I ended up a Dwight Yoakam fan.

So far, so good.

I heard you coming in on the high parts
And felt us pull a little on the rhyme

But this part? Totally made up. A pure fiction.

My dad wasn’t much of a singer and was always real self-conscious about it. We did not, as a matter-of-course, sing together. As I got older and more comfortable with singing and playing guitar at the same time, he mostly just let me play and sing.

But I’m not writing an autobiography. And this song is about the narrator’s Dad. And those people—the narrator and his Dad—they can be anything I want them to be.

While the song was born from a true thing that happened, and that I deeply felt, now I need to make decisions based on what’s good for the song—not necessarily what’s true. If you think this makes me “inauthentic,” I’d argue that you don’t know what “authenticity” means. But, I adore you so, let’s not argue. I’ll tackle my feelings of contempt for the growing drum-beat of “authenticity” some time real soon. But for now, I’m going to make up some stuff to make this song better.

This line:

And felt us pull a little on the rhyme

I don't have any idea what that means. I just made it up, and really like the way it sounds. I think it means the narrator and his Dad harmonize and warble a bit out of sync with each other on a rhyme. It’s a thing that makes the narrator’s memory of his Dad more human for me—the reality wasn’t perfect so this memory holds the same imperfection.

But it couldn’t be, it wasn’t you it was just me
And your voice only lives on in my head

As in verse one, our narrator realizes that what he mused in the previous couple lines can’t be true. I like the “lives on in my head” part too, because there is still a part of me that can hear my father’s voice in my own. It’s not the same, but I hear how it’s similar.

Notice that along the way here I stopped talking about “me'“ or “I” and started talking about “The Narrator?” That shift is intentional and pretty important. It lets me make some better decisions at this point—some less emotional decisions, maybe?

Maybe.

You gave me this voice, these songs, for a worried and troubled mind
You showed me how to play and play “Mamma Tried”

Again I borrow content and cadence from the first verse. And whereas verse one invokes the great Jonny Cash, with the “Walk the Line” reference, here I pick up a Merle Haggard reference instead. Jonny and Merle both loom large for me as songwriters, singers and generally salty country legends who did things their way. I know both of them through my old man, so even though I’m putting a little distance between me and the “I” of the song, that doesn’t mean I’m not in there too.

You taught me three chords and the truth will take the measure every time
So Daddy, why’d you leave this old world behind?

Do I go too far here with the “Three chords and the truth” reference? Nah. I mentioned at the outset that this was definitely a country song and that rather than fight that, I might as well lean into it. The admonition that county music is simple and true may be a bit of a cliche but it fits the song, it fits the theme and, in all honestly I feel like it’s a true lesson I learned from my father’s love of that music (or at least, some of it.)

So, this thing seems like a pretty well-formed tune. I’d normally consider a bridge or some kind of change somewhere to mix things up a little. But that’s not a deal breaker for me. It’s vaguely song-shaped as it is. If that’s the case, why am I only now getting to grips with it? Why did I write this, record a version of it mapping how it all fits together, and then walk away from it until I literally forgot about it?

I have a good idea of why. But that’s another story.