I had a friend, a songwriting mentor and a great songwriter, John Stewart, who told me just before he died, "We are all just radios, hoping to pick up each other's signals."
I found that to be true and profound. And I've spent my life trying to clear the static. The strongest signals that come to me are musical in the form of songs or stories told in rhythm and rhyme. Sometimes I can tune in to a revolution in the heart. Sometimes I hear a keen from my Celtic ancestors. And some songs have been postcards from my future.
In my family, there was a song for every loss, every celebration, every unspoken need, every longing. But there was also so much chaos that often I was the only one who recognized what was being communicated.
My grandmother, Carrie Cash, moved with my grandfather and their five children into a New Deal era colony created by FDR for poor families in the sunken lands of the Arkansas Delta in 1935. So they moved into this freshly painted cottage, and she gave birth to two more babies there with the assistance only of a doctor who came by in a horse and buggy and pulled two loose aspirin from his pocket to give to her. The same pocket in which he kept his fishing worms.
(Laughter)
That's true.
(Laughter)
I read once that every time an old woman dies, a library disappears. And before her library disappeared, I tuned into my grandmother's signals and gleaned her tenacity which I borrowed, and her long suffering in her life of constant work with seven children, six of whom made it to adulthood. In a house without electricity. In the sweltering cotton fields, and I wrote these words about her.
(Music)
(Singing) Five cans of paint
in the empty fields
And the dust reveals
And the children cry
the work never ends
There’s not a single friend
Who will hold her hand
in the sunken lands?
And the mud and tears melt the cotton balls
It’s a heavy toll
Oh, oh
His words are cruel
and they sting like fire
Like the devil’s choir
Oh, oh
Who will hold her hand
in the sunken lands?
(Music)
The river rises and she sails away
She could never stay
Oh, oh
Now her work is done in the sunken lands
There’s five empty cans
(Music)
(Music ends)
(Applause)
In 1992, I was writing a song about my divorce, which hadn't happened yet.
(Laughter)
But which I saw coming like a freight train.
(Laughter)
So I was stuck in this song like I was stuck in my life. And the same time across the country, my mother was going through a box of my school assignments and childhood drawings, and she sent it to me. So I started going through this box, and I came across this yellowed paper, this school assignment I had done in the seventh grade in Catholic school on metaphors and similes. Now I vividly remember the pleasure I took in that assignment because it was literally the only thing the nuns had ever given me to do that I enjoyed.
(Laughter)
So this line I had written popped out at me. "A lonely road is a bodyguard." What did it mean? I had even pasted a picture of this empty road next to the line. It was a metaphor. It wasn't "a lonely road is like a bodyguard," a simile. It was the much more poetic: “A lonely road is a bodyguard.” As painful as that was then, and as it still can be painful now, I knew what she was telling me. That ... Solitude can protect the seeds of creativity. And that loneliness contains a priceless gift if we can tolerate the initial discomfort and avoid the seduction of despair.
So my 12-year-old waved at me across the decades, saying that who I was was who I would become. And I waved back and I dropped her line right in the song I was writing.
(Singing) I’ll send the angels to watch over you tonight
And you send them right back to me
A lonely road is a bodyguard
If we really want it to be
(Music ends)
We're all just radios hoping to pick up each other's signals. And some of those signals have a backbeat and a melody, and they're universal. And music can unlock a frozen memory that melts into the seeds of our creativity. And the reverse is also true. A memory can unlock a song that's waiting to be written. It can reveal us to ourselves across time and generations, in community, in solitude. Some frequencies are sound, and some frequencies are light. And some take a half a lifetime to reach their destination.
(Music)
(Singing) Light is particle and wave
Our histories written large upon the page
The star in middle age
The love that fades to black
Once revealed, won’t be taken back
Light nothing can escape
The ignorance we once forgave
In the future, if we don't decide to change
The things we cannot save
But it slows to shine upon your face
We owe everything
Everything
Everything
To this rainbow of suffering
Light is particle and wave
Refractions of this place
Reflections of our grace
It reveals what we hold dear
And it’s slow so I can hold you near
(Music ends)
(Applause)
There's one thing I know for certain. That we clear the static by being vulnerable and by telling the truth. And here we are doing just that.
Thank you.
(Applause)
