Dear Mary,
Have you ever written songs about family members that reveal things they might rather keep quiet about? How do you deal with that?
- Annette
Tacoma Park, WA
Dear Annette,
I try not to censor myself when I write. In a perfect world, the song leads, and I follow. I never really know where a song is going, and like it that way because discovery and epiphany become a natural part of the process. It can be exciting to unearth buried treasures, but as you probably know, it can also mean uncovering and disclosing something unsettling. A song can be a passageway to a deeper knowing, but the hallways are often haunted. After decades of wandering spooky passageways, I’ve come to expect that this is how songwriting usually works - it is supposed to scare me.
I have to navigate fear to get to discovery, then navigate even more fear when I bring a new song out into the world. I never know how a song will land on people, or what they will hear when they listen.
Tennessee Williams, in The Beautiful and the Damned, wrote (in the voice of Zelda Fitzgerald), “Between the first wail of an infant and the last gasp of the dying—it’s all an arranged pattern of—submission to what’s been prescribed for us unless we escape into madness, or the act of creation.”
Like Zelda Fitzgerald, artists are often black sheep, but the real work is to remove the wool from our own eyes. Songwriters are given a chance to break free of prescription and conformity in their songs. For many, myself included, our creations are a pushback against that which could damage or destroy us. I have a book coming out in July called Saved by a Song. It is both a memoir and a discussion of my songwriting process. I chose the name for a reason.
When inspiration guides my hand and asks me to write something into a song, I write it. I allow myself in my art to disregard many of the rules imposed on me by outside forces who try to tell me what is acceptable for me to say and do. Tennessee Williams (who is speaking to me right now because I am in Key West—his longtime home), also wrote, “All good art is an indiscretion.” I say, yes, yes, yes. Artists reaching for truth is the foundation of all art, and often a desperate play for salvation.
The songs I love most tell secrets and say something honest in a new way. They pin down a core of significance—while the songs that hold back are less compelling because they let an essence slip away. Great songs are fevered visions that render a soul vulnerable, emotionally naked. To withhold out of fear of offending is to capitulate to forces both internal and external that would silence us.
For the artist, silence is not safety. Fear-based self-protection can become, over time, an existential threat to the creative process. A fully insulated heart might be inoffensive, but it is creatively dead; nothing enters, nothing exits. If I know in advance what I will not allow a song to say, I am imposing limits on inspiration and vision. It is to say, “I agree not to look. I agree not to see. I agree not to reveal.” In essence, it is to agree not to learn anything from the song. If you’re fighting a song that’s trying to get written, it’s going to enter the world bruised at best. Fighting to simultaneously reveal and conceal is a losing battle. One side or the other will win out; there really is no meaningful middle ground.
Inspiration is difficult to source, but it is born from willingness to lean into not knowing. Not knowing and agreeing not to look or to see are two very different stances. Not knowing is a place ripe with possibility, receptive to discovery. To work this way requires audacity and boldness whether I am writing about my family or not. Agreeing not to look is a capitulation.
Let me give you an example.
From day one as a songwriter, I did not want to use gender in first person love songs. This left me one choice, I had to refer to my love or former love as “you”, never “she”. I did this even when the narrator was not me, knowing there would be listeners thinking it was me. I came out as gay in my early teens and was never closeted in my adult life, but I censored my songs because I was trying to avoid being pigeonholed as a “lesbian folksinger.” This made perfect sense to me, even though it has always been obvious to anyone with eyes that I am a lesbian folksinger.
So why did I do this?
Fear.
What mattered most from the very beginning is that my songs reach a larger audience than just those interested in what was then called “womyn’s music.” I wanted to follow in the footsteps of my songwriting heroes, songwriters like John Prine, Guy Clark, Hank Williams, Lucinda William, Willie Nelson, Billy Joe Shaver, Nanci Griffith, Woody Guthrie, to name a few. These were songwriters whose work shaped what I did. I did not want to risk offending anyone with a lyric that was outside of what I believed would be acceptable to fans of these masters. I did not want to be put in a box, labeled as a stereotype. So I made a rule and stuck to it for six studio records: Do not record a love song or breakup song lyric that sounded like a woman singing about or to a woman. Keep it universal, keep it safe. I wrote lines like this:
The clock inside the church bell tower
Rings your name every hour
I see your face I touch your hair
Then the ringing fades and nobody's there
It wasn’t bad writing, in fact, it worked well for quite some time. I defended it by saying it allowed all genders to put themselves into the skin of the narrator, but I eventually ran out of running room. I hit a wall writing my seventh record, Trouble & Love. The songs were written after a particularly painful breakup, and the intensity of emotion behind the songs would not allow my self-imposed rule to stand. Twisting myself into a pretzel to avoid gender had become too much. My new songs demanded I blow up the jail I’d put myself in. I did not have the strength to walk the labyrinth any longer. For the first time, I wrote things like:
Tryin’ to catch my breath, she moved so fast
Rumble strips, red lights, broken glass
Twisted steel, sirens, and blood
Love and trouble, trouble and love
The world didn’t end. Fans didn’t run out of concert halls with an appalled looked on their faces.
And, most importantly, I was finally free to write in a much more natural way. Now, I understand this example both is and is not a family story. Gender is personal, yes, but every story I tell is a family story in some way because my willingness to speak from all of my truth was certainly shaped by the family I came from.
Also, I am an adoptee, a product of the family I know and the one I have never met. No one in my family but me could possibly be aware of what it was like for me to be adopted.To be honest, it took many years of therapy, a pilgrimage to the orphanage, and deep research that included reading dozens of books on the psychology of adoption for me to begin to make sense of it myself. I have written many songs that explore my attachment troubles and addictions, through the lens of my beginnings; there is enough story there for me to make a career out of it—and yeah, I pretty much have.
So, I write about the impact of family, the one I know, and the one I do not know. I do so even when I do not mean to. It would be impossible not to. Untangling the ramifications of these complex interconnections is my soul’s journey, and I’m still on it. Where I came from shaped me into who I am. I pick up my guitar to write, and BOOM, there it all is, again.
Annette, it sounds to me like you are worried about offending family members with your songs. But you can’t ever know what will offend people in a song, you just can never predict it. The danger in censoring yourself is not just shorting yourself of an epiphany or being a lesser writer and writing a lesser song; the danger runs bigger than the individual songwriter. Because revelation and disclosure in art are often the source of connection and resonance in the world, the risk in censoring yourself is that the world will be less populated with honest music. Songs that will bring people together, in ways that matter. It’s like the old saying, “You can count the seeds in an apple, but you cannot count the apples in a seed.” Focusing on who might be offended, avoiding subject matter that might disturb someone, can limit a song’s ability to do its work in the world, work that transcends the individual songwriter.
Songs create connection, understanding and resonance through revelation and disclosure, but also through empathy. I would never single out a family member, friend, loved one, or anyone and write a song to intentionally bring pain or shame them. Revenge songs are not my style, they put the songwriter in the wrong relationship with the song. The job of a song is to create empathy for its message, and the mystery of how it does this cannot occur when a song is not free to become what it wants to be. Going in with an agenda never really works. The best songs tell us who they are, not vice versa.
Back to your question. I write about my family, but the work is to find deeper truths about the complexity of family by searching my soul, not theirs. It is to tell my truths, not theirs. There is an art in knowing whose story to tell, and there are ethical boundaries around whose story a writer has the right to tell. I tend to focus on telling my own story, which is no simple feat. Making sense of my own life has been anything but easy. Writing about my family, and the lifelong effects of coming from this complex family, is a powerful way of engaging with the larger subject, one that is found in all great art—our shared humanity and what it means to live in this word.
As long as what I write what is true for me, and I am not intentionally cruel or mean or vengeful, I will allow my songs to go wherever they need to go. Even if I know there will be people who might not like it.
- Mary