July 24, 2016 — As a child, I was an artist, an artist of it all. I played music. With an untrained hand, and untrained ear, I made sounds from the piano, always wanting those sounds to be more intense, more introspective, more haunting. I liked the sound. To me, it had more meaning. Songs like that brought me into that place inside that no one goes. As a child, I’d find songs like that, tape them from the radio, and I’d play them over and over. As a child, I drew house plans. All were square; most had a courtyard; all had a playroom. As a child, I played guitar, all the time, that quiet, serious girl with hair to her waist who the teacher sat in the front of the class with a guitar while everyone played their recorders. As a child, I wrote stories. Those stories always featured a girl who got a puppy.

As an adult, I listen to music. With all that formed me, over time, I was taught, by friends, by what is popular, that happy music is the best music. People told me intense, introspective, haunting music is sad music. They told me that people who write that, who like that, are sad, even lonely people. Still, as an adult, every once in a while I’ll hear an intense, introspective, haunting song and … play it over and over, just like when I was a child. As an adult, I still draw house plans. I don’t have the money to build them, but there are little sketches of these things all over my desk, taped to the wall, taped to the cabinets behind me, my art, waiting for the day when something breaks, something makes it possible, although I wonder if I ever actually build my house I say I’m going to build, on the day it is finished would I only want to tear it down and build another? And there’s music. On the eve of being an adult, I put music away, the guitar long gone by the time I graduated college, listening only to the radio, certainly not the place of intense, introspective, haunting music. As an adult, I wrote things for work, an enormous amount of them, but never, ever that book I said I was going to write, never ever another story about a girl who gets a puppy. Perhaps when the adult finally got her very own puppy, there was no need. Perhaps all that was my work took away the will to sit at a table with a pen and paper or in front of computer screen for anything else involving words. But, I was still … an artist inside, still that strangely intense, introspective, quiet person, only in a vastly different body.

I don’t care now. Now, I listen to my sad music. I play my sad music, or I intend to after I get done learning my training music — Led Zeppelin. House plans have become … well, I’ll keep that one inside. I have my third puppy of my life. She flips over on top of me every morning when the sun comes up, no fail. I have every other pet I want too, all friends with each other. And then there is my writing. There are no books, no stories of puppies, just this, this thing, this place I never planned to have. I’m never sure people read me, or if they do whether they think I’m completely indulgent, or even putting a secret message out, or for that matter, any message. I wondered if I should even write this subject this week, admit these thoughts. More, I wonder if this is normal; do artists who write words influenced by what’s inside them, influenced by their own emotions, fear putting those words out there, fear what people will think, dare I say, fear losing their own listeners, their own readers?

Friday morning as I drove in the early morning Los Angeles traffic, I was wondering about my own writing, what would I write today after this intense week, that fear consuming me, all while my body was on the verge of collapse from tiredness. I like country music in the car, perhaps because my car is a truck, perhaps because it’s what I listen to when I drive across country. When I’m driving, the familiarity of rock music puts me to sleep, and I was very sleepy. I was at a light on Fairfax Avenue, just sitting; that light is crazy long. Miranda Lambert was being interviewed. She’s one of my favorites because I relate to her. I started my life in a small East Texas town where my family lived only two towns away from the small East Texas town where she was raised. Her accent is exactly perfect, just like everyone I knew and loved sounds (or sounded). My accent was once just like hers, exactly like hers, but along the way of life, out of necessity, I trained it out of me; people from these big-deal cities don’t like that accent; they don’t take it seriously; they think they’re smarter. Sometimes though, I want it back; people from East Texas don’t trust people who don’t sound like them, so I play a Miranda song, and my accent is instantly back. Then it is easier to get the water connected to my East Texas house, my East Texas land, to get a trailer delivered, things like that. So for me, Miranda is one of my people; her voice being so near and dear to me, I know it the second I hear it.

She was talking about her new single; they called it Vice. Even the title was a bit ominous. Apparently, the DJ had heard the song. He said it was the kind of song he will go to when things are not so good, a song to help him heal, a song to play over and over again. She said she wrote the song a year ago when she was in a hard place. She said no more, no specific facts about the unstated but real speculation that she cheated on ex-husband Blake Shelton causing their divorce, no explanation as to the words of the song, no explanations at all as to its meaning, save to say she was happy that it might help people. She was putting her inside thoughts outside, at least in some coded way, hardest of all, leaving it for people to interpret how they saw fit, no explanations of the truth from her, her truth that formed her song. With that, she sounded vulnerable, nervous even, because nothing is harder than that. So… not only was the song was going to be dark, my kind of song, the song was going to be my answer.

The light changed to green, and as I drove forward, the radio went silent, I believed one of those rare glitches of unintended silence. I gave it a second, not hearing the record scratches over the sound of my engine, really hoping the song hadn’t played before the interview, then I heard Miranda’s familiar voice:

Sting of the needle dropping on a vinyl

Neon singer with a jukebox title

full of heartbreak

33, 45, 78

When it hurts this good

you gotta play it twice.

Sure I could tell you what I think of those lyrics and the lyrics that follow, why they hit me personally. I could tell you what I think they mean to Miranda. I could point you to lyrics in her prior album Platinum, itself containing two songs that got me through the winter of my life that was 2015, thanks Miranda, each foretelling her relationship struggles, but those things don’t matter. I’ve read many articles discussing this song, Rolling Stone, US Weekly, music rags, even texted my just-out-of-high-school rabid country music fan nephew as to what he thinks (yes, texted, that’s how it works in that world). There were technical opinions about whether the normally conservative country audience could handle lyrics that blatantly discuss sex and female desire from a female point of view. There were speculations as to the couple’s divorce and the causes. She referred to the writing process– making her guitar her friend, pen and paper her friend, stating music is medicine, essentially of the importance of the influence of introspection. There were discussions that fans might not be receptive to her, that they might leave her out of judgment, out of her letting too much of her inside feelings out. Even my nephew wasn’t sure on that point: time will tell, he said. But amidst all this speculation, that DJ and I am not alone — this song hurts so good, I’ve played it way more than twice – and apparently so has everyone else because it’s number one on iTunes after only a week, an indicator that it will top the country chart. Her fans are not leaving her.

But most importantly to me, this song showed me that artists, even ones who are not very popular or good, like me, can’t help but write what’s inside … because what’s inside us is our life, that’s what’s real, and that’s where real art comes from. So (and assume I’m saying this in my first accent), thanks, Miranda. Again.