I originally published this as a Note on Facebook in 2014 or so, but since Facebook has shut down that feature, I have begun the migration of some of my Notes to Medium, editing them a bit in the process.
This was originally going to be a very short post. It turned into something else entirely.
For maybe ten years, I wrote songs. Songwriting was a significant part of my life, and barely a moment of the day didn’t go by without my mind trying to somehow put something I saw or did or heard into a song. I didn’t write necessarily for public consumption, but I hung out for a while with real musicians and played my songs in their company, and occasionally performed at open mics. I was apparently OK enough to open a few shows — one for Mary Gauthier at Creole Gallery (with the gracious, wonderful late Brett Hartenbach accompanying me on guitar), another (also at the Creole) for Uncle Earl, and one for the great Jack Williams at the Ten Pound Fiddle Coffeehouse (mostly as a thank you for my almost ten years as the Fiddle’s Booking Manager). I attended the first five John D. Lamb’s Retreat for Songwriters in northern Michigan.
Songwriting, I have found, is a strange process. I bought my first guitar, an Ovation, not long after high school, and expected that songwriting would be a piece of cake, that by the sheer nature of having a guitar the songs would flow. That wasn’t the case. I wrote maybe two songs over the course of the next eleven years, one of which I liked enough to perform in front of a drunk (or soon to be drunk) audience at university. But I eventually came to hate the sound of the guitar so much that I sold it in 1984 or 1985. A few years later, my then-wife, Penny, bought a used twelve-string guitar from her caricature-art teacher, Dennis Preston, and gave it to me as an anniversary gift. But because the action (the distance between the strings and the fingerboard) wasn’t all that good, I mostly let the guitar sit idle.
Then came a series of events over the next few years that led to my discovering how to write songs.
1. One cold winter night in Lansing, Michigan I attended a coffeehouse event with Penny, at the now-defunct Hearthstone Community Bakery on East Michigan Avenue in Lansing, Michigan. A couple of local young women performed, one of whom I later came to know, Jen Bernard. (We didn’t discuss it at the time, but there’s a good chance that Penny had met Jen’s mother prior to that night, hence our attendance.) At the end of the evening, Jen introduced a song by saying that she wasn’t sure she had the chords for the song down, then began to play Michael Smith’s “Spoon River,” which I’d known via Steve Goodman, and is one of my favourite songs ever.
I sat quietly in my chair, screaming “OOH! OOH! I KNOW THE CHORDS FOR THAT! I KNOW THE CHORDS FOR THAT!” in my head. Also, I was quite thrilled that someone so young knew the song, as neither Michael Smith nor Goodman (author of “City of New Orleans,” made famous by Arlo Guthrie) were household names. When I got home, I dusted off the guitar and played the song myself, and began playing daily again, guitar action be damned.
2. I saw Loudon Wainwright III perform for the first time at Blissfest in northern Michigan. I have been a Loudon fan since that morning in 1972 when I heard “Dead Skunk” coming out of the radio of Dave Fischer’s Ford Galaxy 500 on the way to school. I had collected all of Loudon’s LPs by the time I’d graduated from university in 1981, but with career, marriage, and children came a drop-off in my record buying. After seeing him perform, however, I immediately bought his then-current CD, History, an intensely personal record that seemed to mirror what was going on in my life at the time, and soon the rest of his back catalogue. I learned the songs and played them regularly around the house (often in the basement at Penny’s behest, where my untrained voice could be muted a bit). While I didn’t begin writing at this time, I improved my guitar playing. Also, Loudon’s expositional style of writing planted its seed.
3a. My dad died.
3b. I had to put our dog, Nick, down.
3c. I was failing in my marriage.
3d. I quit my job.
4. Three years later, I attended a Carla Sciaky concert at the Fiddle (prior to my run as its Booking Manager), and at one point during the show, she spoke of a songwriting class she taught with high schoolers and what she said she tells her students at the beginning of the class: “You just don’t sit down and say, ‘I’m going to write a song.’ ”
I sat quietly in my chair said, “I’m going to write a song!” in my head.
It seems to be pretty typical for a lot of songwriters (or poets, or novelists, or painters) that pain and grief instigate (or inspire) creativity. That I had written and published letters to newspaper editors, or poems and other ramblings in my blank-paged books probably served as proverbial kindling for the process; the loss and grief, I guess, stoked the flames.
The first song that came out of me after that night was called “Coming of Age.” It was an appropriate title, I suppose, for my soon-to-be new phase in life. It dealt with loss and disconnectedness and dysfunctional family — remembered and current — I was experiencing at the time. A couple more songs tumbled out of me, and not long after, I asked a local guitar player, Wade Ramey, to sit in with me at the next Open Mic Night at the Fiddle. I think I performed three songs, two of mine and one by Loudon — “Motel Blues” — a clever little song about musicians on the road.
And so, I began writing about anything and everything that happened to me, essentially subscribing to the Loudon Wainwright III mode of songwriting. I also tended to follow Paul Simon’s general rule that the first line of a song should be a statement of fact. Some of my songs were bad, some were really bad, and a few were OK.
As I mentioned at the start of this, I hadn’t planned on this being a very long note. But at the time I started it, I had been reading Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917–1963 and towards the end, Dallek writes:
“The death in August 1963 of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, a baby born five weeks before term, only deepened the public’s ties to the president and Jackie.”
I looked up from the book, and I thought about my mom, and how 1963 would have been only five years removed from her experiences with stillbirth, and I wondered if indeed she felt more “tied” to the Kennedys because of that. And then I recalled the time that I began to write a song for her, a tribute to her for Mothers Day, which I’d planned would consist of four verses, one for each of her sons. As I sat in the bathtub that day in 1995 trying to write it, I recalled that stillbirth and the fact that that there would have been a fifth brother.
And much like this note, the song I started became something else entirely…
“For Johnny (Wherever He Might Be)”
I never knew you
You didn’t come home like the rest of us
You never grew to
Walk, talk and become the best of us
As brothers we might have been closer
As brothers we might have been pals
Even best friends as we’d gotten older
But that’s where the guessing game fails
I never knew you
You didn’t come home like the rest of us
https://soundcloud.com/patrick-t-power/for-johnny-wherever-he-might-be
