Can't Make This Up.

The power of songs and the emotions of hearing them at just the right time. (part 2)

My wife and I were driving to a conference for church planter couples. The purpose was for people to get together, share experiences, be encouraged, soul-care, all the good stuff that you sometimes forget that you need. On the road trip we listened to a lot of songs, but during one particular song, I decided to turn it off just after the first chorus.

This post is related to (but does not depend on) last week’s post “Fort Worth Blues”. If you prefer a fuller context, you can go back and read it here.

The event was in Memphis, but we had to drop our kids at my mom’s house in north Louisiana, so instead of going straight up I-55 from Jackson, MS, we had the option of going up through Arkansas and over. We took the road less travelled. In doing so we saw a number of signs giving us the option of driving towards Little Rock. That was not our destination but as road signs and landmarks do on long drives, it got us thinking about songs. There is a country song called “Little Rock” by Reba McEntire about a woman taking off her wedding ring “little rock” to see if there is “more to life than what I got.” Not a great marriage bonding song, but a fun tune so we listened for a bit.

We then remembered the 90s country song by Colin Raye by the same name. Its about a man trying to get his life back together in the midst of a failing marriage. That’s country music for you (see part 1)¹. The song is his message to his wife about the momentum that he is gaining in his new found sobriety, selling VCRs at a Walmart in his new town.

I think I'm on a roll here in Little Rock
I'm solid as a stone, baby, wait and see
I've got just one small problem here in Little Rock
Without you, baby, I'm not me.

Getting kid-free time behind the windshield with your spouse can feel like an old familiar song, a reminder of days of different responsibilities and different horizons. A season to which you would not choose to return, but about which you reminisce fondly (and condescend to those who are still in it).

After the first verse and chorus of this “Little Rock”, I decided to turn off the song. You may have noticed by now, if you’ve read some of my posts, I can get deep into my emotions pretty quickly. Maybe I was feeling anxious about the weekend ahead or bogged down by whatever is that nostalgia-adjacent emotion that seems to tighten my seatbelt across my chest for the first 45-90 minutes of any trip leaving the town where I grew up.

“Let’s listen to something else,” I said, getting just out in front of what could have become tears or a suppressed blah that I really couldn’t explain. Without my kids in the back seat to receive unmerited shushing or misplaced scoldings, my hometown blues didn’t have a release valve. I wasn’t sad, I don’t think.

“What do you think it is?" my wife asked with a sweet mixture of curiosity and compassion.

Sometimes listening to a sad song makes me think of the song writer, even if he or she is writing about a made up scenario, it still comes from their heart somewhere.

“I don’t know, I think just knowing that whether or not this person actually stayed in a motel in Little Rock trying to restore a broken marriage, at some point someone experienced something like this and these emotions, and then put pen to paper… if it wasn’t Colin Raye, it was somebody, and I don’t know… that is just not the kind of sad song that I am into right this minute.”

I was not overly upset. I have been told (and admit) that if there is a chart for empathy, I am off of it. If this part of me is agitated, I am like the opposite version of the Incredible Hulk. I don’t even have to see it, if someone starts to tell me about tearing their ACL, my blood runs cold and electricity shoots from my knee-cap to my neck, I can almost smell that hospital smell, and feel the ace bandage and the ice, and imagine the trips to the physical therapist.

I think that means that sometimes, although I am listening to Colin Raye, I end up thinking about the song writer, and not just the lyrics but whatever emotions they had while writing those lyrics, and whatever circumstances they had endured in those emotions themselves. See what I mean?

So this is how it went that day.

I turned off a song that we had turned on because of a sign that we had seen, because of a route that we had decided to take, because our kids were staying with my mom, so that we could attend a conference, that was meant to help us and for us to help others.

We eventually arrived in Memphis. We checked in and went together to some kind of discussion or seminar about a topic that I am sure was helpful. For the evening session, Marianna and I would split up. She was going to look for a friend who had been sick and with whom she had not spoken for a few months. I headed for a program put on by my friend Richie. He sang a few songs with different people and then introduced his friend who would perform what amounted to a one-man-show about his life as a song writer.

It had not been that long since my breakdown on the highway with Malcolm Gladwell, Bobby Braddock, and Vince Gil. That may be why I was especially dialed-in to emotions and song writers. After several songs and stories from this man, he said something about his aging father, and feeling like a failure despite a successful real-estate career, and about wanting to write songs “whether they were recorded or not”. It was about how he wanted “to write something that was true for once in his life.” And then he said something about a hotel room (maybe outside of Dallas?) - and somehow I knew that it was happening again. He placed his hands on the piano and started to play the first few bars of the song that I had turned off just hours before. As much as it feels like I am making this up…

I was looking directly at the person whom I had unknowingly imagined earlier that day. It’s not just that I remembered the song and now was hearing it live. It’s not just that I had turned it off. It’s that I had said, “There is a person in real life, who felt these real emotions enough to write them in a song that gave access or outlet to whatever pain he was feeling and that is too much for me to think about right now”
It was THAT specific, and now, having NO IDEA that I had been thinking about Tom Douglas, I was listening to him explain that while the song was not directly biographical, it was the truest expression of how he felt.

Well, I cried again (see part 1), right there in the fellowship hall of the Independent Presbyterian Church in Memphis. I tried to find my friend Richie to explain what happened. I even tried (after the show) to explain to Tom what had happened - trying to tell him that something similar had happened to me not long before with Malcolm Gladwell and Bobby Braddock and Vince Gil… and that I was Richie’s friend…and that I had turned off his song earlier that day because whoever wrote it was feeling something… blah, blah, blah. I can’t imagine how off kilter that I must have seemed to him. Regardless, I felt like I had to say it out loud to someone. My wife found me a few minutes later, I explained to her what happed. She got it. I was so glad that she could corroborate to me that I had felt and said all of those things during the drive up. I wish she had been in the room with me when it all happened.

I still think about this all the time. These cosmic alignments in which God arranges the most conspicuous sets of circumstances to get our attention if we are willing to pay attention. After these years since, I wish I had a better way to sum all of this up and for it to connect to an even deeper meaning or fuller story and maybe one day it will, but for now… its another Substack entry about a story that I will keep thinking about, maybe forever.

Love, Tom is a fuller documentary film version of the show that I saw that night in Memphis. (Trailer link Here)

Tom Douglas also writes a Substack Tom’s Substack

**Maybe sometime in the near future I will include some other anecdotes about times when combinations of things happen that are just too eerie to ignore - I seem to catalog these events in one file in my memory, though most of them do not have such meaningful circumstances surrounding them - at least no meaning that I know of yet**

1. My last post was about an experience I had listening to The King of Tears an episode on Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History Podcast. “Country music has the ability to embrace rather than to tolerate emotional volatility”