Tag: short stories

MIXTAPE: Mile Twelve’s Favorite Short Story Songs

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Songs can be truly short short stories. There is so little time, so little space to convey a complete narrative. That challenge has always thrilled us when crafting our music. When we were asked to create a themed playlist for The Bluegrass Situation, I thought through our own songs that formed the new album Close Enough to Hear (out February 3) and wondered what common thread tied them together. Many of them really are conveying a story, something with a beginning, middle and end. We all went back to our favorite short story songs and marveled at the writers’ ability to forge a genuine drama, with a plot and characters, inciting events and climaxes, in just a few short minutes. It’s a high wire act, where every single word counts and nothing can be wasted. Here’s a list of our favorite short story songs. — Evan Murphy (acoustic guitar), Mile Twelve

Bruce Molsky (Molsky’s Mountain Drifters) – “Between the Wars”

This song makes me emotional every time I hear it. Bruce delivers this Billy Bragg song so powerfully and honestly, giving it a distinctly American flavor. – Nate Sabat (upright bass)

Bobbie Gentry – “Papa, Won’t You Let Me Go to Town With You”

I was recently turned on to Bobbie Gentry through the Cocaine and Rhinestones podcast by Tyler Mahan Coe (highly recommended) and stumbled on this song while checking out her catalog. She’s done such an incredible job painting a musical representation of that longing, wishing feeling of wanting to be included. And on a dorkier note, listen to how the phrasing of the hook is different on line one of the chorus than it is on line four. So, so good. — Nate

Cy Winstanley – “Little Richard Is Alive and Well in Nashville, TN”

Our good friends of the duo Tattletale Saints are excellent songwriters from New Zealand, now based in Nashville. This song about Little Richard has beautiful, clear imagery that pulls you right into the song. It’s a mellow performance, not trying too hard and resulting in a memorable story about a unique Nashville music legend. – BB Bowness (banjo)

Jean Ritchie – “West Virginia Mine Disaster”

This haunting a cappella song written by Jean Ritchie is sung from the wife’s point of view as she awaits news of her husband’s fate down in the mine. The song captures the anxiety and uncertainty she feels while she imagines a possible future without her husband. — BB

Jason Isbell – “Speed Trap Town”

A dozen cheap roses in a shopping cart, veins through the skin like a faded tattoo. Isbell’s tight, sparse images bloom into vignettes which form a complete story by the end of this song. A man has reached the limits of his patience with a stagnant life. His father lays dying in the ICU, he has no prospects, nothing to stay for. After long years, he finally decides to pack it up and break free. When I am in a period of writing I actually can’t listen to songs this good. They torment me with their lean, sinewy perfection. To use Isbell’s own language, there is no fat on these lyrics. Everybody knows you in a speed trap town. — Evan

Bruce Springsteen – “Highway Patrolman”

“My name’s Joe Roberts, I work for the state” might as well be “Call me Ishmael.” For me, this is the quintessential short story song. There are major motion pictures with plots less deep. It’s the struggle between two brothers, Joe and Frankie, one a state trooper and the other a struggling veteran who can’t seem to stay out of trouble. “I got a brother named Frankie, and Frankie ain’t no good,” sings Joe. Maybe it’s the fact that I have two older brothers, but when Joe watches Frankie’s taillights disappear across the border I cry, even after hundreds of listens. “I musta done a 110 through Michigan County that night.” How desperate was Joe to catch Frankie, to save him from himself? This song has taught me so much about musical storytelling. Springsteen is larger than life, for me and so many others. I wish I could open the back of his head and see how he does it. Thank God we have his music, it’s sacred. — Evan

Gillian Welch – “Caleb Meyer”

“Caleb Meyer, he lived alone in them hollerin’ pines” opens this exquisitely brutal ghost story. Gillian Welch has reshaped the very structure of modern folk songwriting. She and David Rawlings prove that when the song, the vocals and the playing are flawless you really don’t need anything more. “Caleb Meyer” is a haunting murder ballad. A woman fights for her life, finding a broken bottle to slash the throat of her would-be rapist. I am in that room with her when I listen to this, the hair standing up straight on the back of my neck. It’s a full-fledged Western, and she does it in three damn minutes. She is a force of nature. — Evan

John Prine – “Hello in There”

The lives of Prine’s characters are smaller and simpler than the legends of epic folk ballads. There’s no steam drill, no six shooters, no gallows at dawn. It’s just Loretta, Davie and Rudy, a back porch, a TV that plays the same old news. This is Prine’s genius, making the mundane transcendent in its beauty and its tragedy. It’s like watching modern human life itself dancing on top of his gorgeous finger-picked eighth notes. He was one of our great American prophets, observing, critiquing, reflecting, teaching. He is missed so dearly. — Evan

Josh Ritter – “The Temptation of Adam”

“‘If this was the Cold War, we could keep each other warm,’ I said on the first occasion that I met Marie.” Ritter is a favorite of novelist Stephen King. It’s not surprising, given the literary grandeur of his songwriting. The strange, post-apocalyptic tale of Marie and the missile silo transfixed me when I first heard it. It’s more mesmerizing with each repeat listen. How does someone create a world so fully realized, so convincing, with such simple tools at their disposal? What a gorgeously weird tale. — Evan

Cindy Walker, recorded by Bob Wills – “Dusty Skies”

When I was younger, I had four or five Bob Wills CDs that were pretty much on repeat for my whole childhood. This Cindy Walker song was on a couple of them, and every time I heard that fiddle intro, it would stop me in my tracks. I’d sit there completely absorbed in the stark, dusty imagery. This song is lyrically and musically as simple as it gets, but it packs a heavy emotional punch. When this song was recorded by Bob in 1941, the Dust Bowl was barely history, and I can feel the pain it caused in every beat. You don’t always need fancy chords and poetry to make a statement—sometimes you just need a semi-natural disaster. — Ella Jordan (fiddle)

Joni Mitchell – “The Last Time I Saw Richard”

How can you have a playlist without a Joni Mitchell song? The oppressively ordinary yet starkly evocative imagery in the second half (only Joni can put a dishwasher in a song) somehow reminds me a little of some of Lucia Berlin’s writing. This is one of those songs that if you had never heard anybody sing it and you just read the lyrics, it would still be a beautiful poem. One that takes you on a journey, and makes you feel things. One that makes you question your life choices. We all hope it’s only a phase, these dark café days…. – Ella

Randy Newman – “Dixie Flyer”

This is one of my favorite songs from Randy Newman. He sings about traveling around the United States as a child of a Jewish immigrant family in an attempt to find a home and live the American Dream. He deals with themes such as privilege and the issue of losing one’s culture while assimilating. This is the story of many families during the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th and continues to be a relatable topic today. – Korey Brodsky (mandolin)

Songwriter Unknown, Recorded by Hazel & Alice – “Two Soldiers”

The story of two Union soldiers during the Civil War who promise each other they will bring news back to their families if one of them does not make it through the battle. The imagery of war is vivid and the storytelling is masterful. Hazel & Alice bring this one to life in their incredible version. — Korey

Photo Credit: Dave Green Photography

Bad Listener: Episode Nine

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After firing shots at the moon, I understood that this story was at an end.

The police in this part of Missouri were waiting on me, surrounding the hill’s slope where there had been girls once, many fireflies long ago (the only miracle I’ve known), the water tower nearly touching the moon, so near the house of Martha and her mother. What ate me up was not so much that Sheriff O’Connor and his gang caught me, but that I would be sent away childless, without progeny, single, imageless. Brindle sat in the jalopy and put his paws against the glass and barked as I was cuffed and questioned.

The moon was the plate into which I once stared and saw the face of what might have been. Sound of water. Coulter’s Creek, just down the way, softly grumbled and received its life from other sources of its blood-water. Regret surged in my chest like a nest of poisonous snakes.

The sheriff asked what I was doing near Martha’s mother’s house. He had a leathery, taut face, sad eyes that regretted that he would have to take me into the squad car and to the jail; eventually, he would drive me to Joliet, Illinois. The charges against me, though you aren’t allowed to know most of them, added up to a good deal. Tax evasion, breaking a restraining order, unlicensed weapon, et cetera, et cetera. If only O’Connor knew. There was much, much more.

But it wasn’t the list of criminal accomplishments that burned. I had wasted my life. Have you ever actually admitted that? That’s what really killed me under the pre-dawn sky that burned all around with sirens and cars, lights like signal fires surrounding the hill and fields near Prospect Heights. There were no prospects and few heights, as most subdivisions are inadvertently contradictory. You know what I am trying to say.

The sheriff’s voice sounded insect-like, due to decades of heavy smoking and, in the end, he filled the rest of his forlorn days with regret that it had been him who’d caught up with me. He had pulled me over in my younger days and poured my beer out on the roads. We had been friendly and he had even seen me play baseball so long ago with the other kids who yelled and hollered in the green, green fields of Summer. Snow started to come down and it was almost as if O’Connor was disappointed in me, himself, life.

“I’m sorry, Sheriff.”

“I am too, Harry. Damned sorry about all of this,” his voice creaked. “You should’ve laid low and kept working and not come here to all of this.”

“I wanted to see Martha.”

“Why in the hell …?”

“… I guess I missed her. I know I did, in fact. But things are over before they end.”

“What do you mean?” he croaked nervously.

“A lot of the stars you see are dead, even though you don’t know it.”

“So what?”

“We’re made of that stuff. Stardust. They died so we could live.”

“Do you believe in God, then?”

“I suppose I do. I just dislike Him.”

“Chrissakes, Harry. He goes and kills the stars so we can live, and you dislike Him?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I don’t know how that all works.”

“You should know about this shit, Harry.”

“So he made the stars? The ones I fired at?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then the both of us are wasteful destroyers. Can you see me back here?”

“Yes.”

“There’s the difference, Sheriff.”

We drove on past the suburb, the fields and, as I glanced back, shackled in the car, I swore I saw a figure in the window of that house I was attempting to get to. I heard a cry that swallowed the universe. I was busted. In the cell that night, I cried out to what I disliked or hated, even, and nothing stirred and the world went spinning on its axis and it was cold inside and out. I was as wasteful as God, and we both knew it.

I won’t tell you about Joliet. It makes me sick. This place is the opposite of making sentences. What I mean is that I felt good this past year making sentences, writing, and I felt they — the sentences — made me a better person. Or at least writing made me able to keep going. Now it’s the sound of a different type of machine for washing dishes, and the faces here scowl and the voices howl out and the hatred is palpable. I walk the yard and wait. Faces in the turrets and towers. Wire. Razor wire and barbed wire and no mail and it’s so goddamned cold, and still I wonder what happened to Brindle and the rest of my life. Woof.

Catch up on the whole first season of Bad Listener by reading from Episode One.

Photo courtesy of Sundve via Foter.com / CC BY-SA

Bad Listener: Episode Eight

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Once, I lectured to my students about the histories of certain families or the history of the family within Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I was entirely unqualified to do this, but there was one persistent theory that drove my speech — and that was the utter collapse of the stable home life, the disintegration of mothers and fathers, the selfishness that can be inherent and persistent in our hearts, that chokes the heart like a great knot of weeds and ends up ruining us. I couldn’t help it. I kept talking in order to kill the entire period. Sally, one of those better students — curious, disinterested in grades and points — asked about my parents toward the end of our class. I told her to re-read Hamlet. Sally, eager to please her teachers, laughed in a nervous way. Our time was up. The students filed out like ducks or stooped, arthritic figures. Generally, the boys wore capacious jeans and logo-tees; some of the girls dressed to impress or interest the boys who, in general, noticed nothing. I stared out of the windows and saw a kite trapped in the crotch of a tree. This meant nothing.

I would have told Sally this, though: that this is my mother in this particular photograph, holding me in the sun. This is my mother, who looks like Joan Baez and the Virgin, who laughs in the soft light of the Polaroid, and I am laughing with her. Or rather, I laugh with them … a feminine-trinity of the folk singer, the mother of our Lord, and I laugh with my mother who is present in the photograph. I am still laughing, to think I once had the gall to talk Shakespeare and other fine things to the students at the community college. I was born laughing, scoffing even. I have read of a debate that took place between two scholars, two adversaries who farted their opening remarks and cross-examinations. This seems right to me: Watch the news, listen, be alert. The stench of the world lies in the mouths of most pundits. I can only laugh today.

Once, a teacher in high school told me that laughing would not get me through my days. He’s six feet under now, after living out his time with a verbally abusive, domineering wife, and I am quite alive and going to see Birdcloud — a band with which I’m totally unfamiliar — with my nephew this evening. He insists I’ll love them. I have the day off from Eddie’s and am getting ready to clean the apartment that has become such a mess over the last few months. This is the gun my father bequeathed to me, a Smith & Wesson 9mm. I loved my dad, the way he used to refer to Brindle as “Mr. Brindle” in an ironic voice as the pup would wag its bit of tail, the way he took care of me when I once was ill for months — the photograph of my mother was taken by him. I truly miss him now. We hoisted his coffin and it was heavy the way memories are heavy, not only the body but time, time, time rioting within the wooden casket. That’s why I haven’t been cleaning lately. There are too many reminders of my losses around here. But today, I feel, is different. It is a day to make amends, to hustle around, to clean and think about what must be done. "What must be done must be done," I say to Brindle. He agrees and then sleeps into the afternoon on the dusty leather couch.

At 7 pm, my nephew picks me up in his “Creed Truck.” This machine — an old Chevy with rust and dents — has become infamous for somehow channeling the music of Creed whenever I enter the cab. After a minute or so of “With Arms Wide Open,” after being able to hear the under-bite of Scott Stapp coming through the speakers, we begin to laugh. This stuff — this music — has always been ridiculous. But Scott and I are not so far apart. At the end of the day, we’re both crazy. Snow falls, dimming the streets. I am wearing a gray blazer, jeans, cowboy boots. Tony Lamas, ma'am. So is my nephew, for that matter. We are a duo of scoffing, howling maniacs. And I can’t say we’re not ensemble quite dapper dudes.

We enter the club where numerous bodies brush against other bodies.

“That’s them,” my nephew says, gesturing to the two girls at the bar, beautiful girls.

“Who?”

“That’s Birdcloud.”

“And …?”

After several drinks, he and I lean against a wall waiting for the duo to start. They sing gorgeously — one plays mandolin, the other guitar — and they face each other while they play, as if they were lovers, best friends, something like that. A song begins about being pulled over by the police: The refrain is something like, fuck you cop, what you gonna do? What must be done must be done. The crowd howls and laughs with each satirical song, and I begin to wonder about how Birdcloud must feel about this particular audience. They — the audience — are collectively smashed and have bovine, dumb faces weighed down and bloated with stupidity and drugs and alcohol. I find Birdcloud’s music good enough to be played in a symphony hall, not a hole-in-the-wall dump like this. We should all be laughing in a great space, like the space in which I saw Rachmaninoff for the first time. Who set up all these peculiar rules?

I am as sharp as a cracked white plate tonight — my nerves are even and I will do what needs to be done. I feel the country calling me out to its vast, cold spaces even as Birdcloud sings another song … something about Jack White retweeting their tweets. I know this sounds impossible, but after the show, after filing out of the club into the night, we get in my nephew’s ride, and immediately Creed plays some terrible song about jumping from an edge. If only they had.

The faces of the women in Birdcloud are etched into my mind’s eye. Kind faces, too good for the environment they got stuck in tonight. Some fights broke out. I shoved a man to the ground and told him I would end him, if he bumped into me again. He scurried into the bathroom, and his ridiculous mustache had cocaine on it. What a cheap type. I was once his double.

Alone in the apartment, the freshly clean apartment, I play "Damn Dumb" off the EP my nephew has leant to me. Brindle cowers in the corner or is fearful of something. I pick up the phone and call Martha. What must be done must be done. You’re damn dumb, so goddamn fucking dumb. No answer. Dial again. No answer. I leash Brindle and then put the holster back on. I get in my own jalopy and head toward the country. The wheat fields glisten with ice on the edges of the stalks. I know it must be warm where Martha is, at her mama’s. A lone hawk soars across the stars and I am smoking like a demon. I turn onto a gravel road, far from the city, kill the engine, and begin to think about these places. I must right what has been so wrong. I must do what needs to be done. I pull my father’s 9 from its holster, point at the great moon that hovers over the detritus of a cornfield, and fire. Little did I know that moon and sun and stars — my bit of the universe — would come crashing down as I would fire up the jalopy with the pup at my side, waiting on an answer, a reckoning that was long overdue. I am so dumb, so goddamn fucking dumb.

Click here to read Episode One. Photo courtesy of UnknownNet Photography / Foter.com / CC BY-SA

LISTEN: David Berkeley, ‘Last Round’

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For his new album, Cardboard Boat, singer/songwriter David Berkeley aimed to do something a little bit different, so he put his degree in literature from Harvard to work and added “author” to his job title by writing 10 short stories to accompany the tracks. Collected as The Free Brontosaurus, Berkeley's novella will be released on the same day as his album.

Through both collections, each piece has a main character, and that's the perspective from which the songs are sung. Berkeley first tested the combo album/book concept in 2010 with Some Kind of Cure and 140 Goats and a Guitar. But the new project fine tunes the idea, weaving them together in a more proper way.

“'Last Round' is the fourth song on my new album, Cardboard Boat," Berkeley says. "Like all the songs that pair with female characters on the album, Sara Watkins of Nickel Creek sings back up. The character 'Last Round' is based on is a pacifist-outsider-artist who catches her husband in bed with another lady. She kicks him out and gets a divorce and tries to be very Zen about it all, but never really gets over him. Despite her hippie nature, she finds herself getting angrier and angrier and lashing out at everyone around her. This song is her empowerment song, in a sense. It's a song of rage and revenge and liberation. Fitting, it's in the cleanup spot in the track lineup.”

Cardboard Boat floats on September 25 via Straw Man Records, simultaneously withThe Free Brontosaurus via Rare Bird Books.

Photo by Kerry Sherck