“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
I look at this question today from a different lens than I did as a child. First of all, do you ever really grow up? I know I am still growing. For me, growth means change, and change is constant.
My mom recalls teachers asking parents this question: “What does your child want to be when they grow up?” at a parent teacher conference, probably sometime around my kindergarten years. She remembers the proud parents whose children wanted to grow up to be doctors, lawyers, astronauts, teachers, even the President of the United States. And she remembers when it came her time to answer, all she could say was the truth: “My daughter wants to be a country music singer.”
I don’t know when in life I fell in love with country music, but I have memories: walking down the hallway of that house on Northpointe Parkway with a CD player and headphones too big for my ears, belting Alan Jackson’s “Tall, Tall Trees;” years later, car windows rolled down, Rascal Flatts’ lyrics left to be swallowed up by the rush of wind passing by. I remember Shania Twain and Garth Brooks singing me to sleep. Faith Hill and Tim McGraw painting pictures of what I dreamed my life would look like someday. And in college, Taylor Swift, her stories paralleling the heartbreaks I endured—her lyrics giving voice to what I felt I needed to say. In exactly the right way.
The beauty of music to me lies in the lyrics. I’ve always been a sucker for words. And there’s a gift that songwriters have, to take a simple phrase and hold within it a whole universe of meaning.
Like Shane McAnally, Josh Osborne and Miranda Lambert’s “Vice”:
“ All dressed up in a pretty black label / Sweet salvation on a dining room table / Waiting on me / Where the numb meets the lonely / It’s gone before it ever melts the ice”
Where the numb meets the lonely….
And then, how a song can turn a phrase on its head and give it a whole new meaning. Like in Carly Pearce, Josh Osborne and Natalie Nicole Hemby’s “Easy Going”:
“You made it easy to love ya / Easy to get lost in your lies / The way you kept it undercover / Made me fall harder every time / Now that it’s all out, out in the open / You made it so easy going”
(Did anyone catch the “get lost in your lies” play too?)
These are the things I latch onto, the things that I feel drawn to, where I sense something beyond just music and words. There’s a connection there, a relatability, an understood reminder that “you are not alone.”
Most recently I came across one of Lauren Alaina’s newest songs, which she co-wrote with Hillary Lindsey, called “It Was Me.” There’s something about hearing a song for the first time, when that song seems like it was written for you, that shoots like electricity, that demands your attention, that invites you in and allows you to heal. If I could offer an apology, it’s in this song.
I’ve driven from my hometown in Mississippi to Nashville countless times, mostly during my college years. There was so much growth that happened on those drives. So much change. Six hours of country music playing on my stereo. Six hours mulching through the lyrics, drawing parallels to my life, trying to figure out my role in the heartbreaks I’d endured, trying to figure out the patterns that kept appearing in my life, trying to rationalize and justify the decisions I was making. The boy I kept running back to. The career I wasn’t sure I wanted. The past that kept following me, mixing into my present, confusing me with all the timelines and the distances and the supposed-to-be’s and the have-been’s. I just kept driving up I-55 and east on I-40, then back again, my wheels collecting dust and fumes, my CDs scratching and turning and repeating over and over and over again.
In between the drives were the nights on Broadway, the fancy dresses and winter coats at the CMA awards. The bright neon lights of downtown, the last calls, the rooftops where I made promises and stole kisses, where I pretended to be someone I wasn’t, where I hid from what I was becoming. I acted as though I didn’t care, stumbling on stages and singing karaoke to songs I’d once listened to as that child longing for the bright lights of the Opry. I made friends with strangers, collecting happiness like it was something I could store and use later on when the music was long gone. A distant melody or some far off echo.
Now it’s my turn. No, I wasn’t blessed with a voice that stands out, or even one that stays on tune. And no, I don’t have the dexterity and built up callouses required to seamlessly strum a guitar. But what I do have is the experience. The struggles and lessons, the memories, the nostalgia, the journals that kept track of all those drives back and forth from Mississippi to Tennessee. What I have is the desire to turn my heartache into art, with the hopes that one day the way I speak will touch someone else who needs to be heard and hasn’t yet found their voice.