This week… is launch week!

 

Today I have a little section of Wreck Your Heart for you, from a moment when Dahlia Devine is thinking about what country music is, and isn’t, and who’s allowed to make it…

 

Our little band got people off their butts, dancing—people who wouldn’t normally get off the couch to do anything at all came to see us play Wednesday nights, out past their bedtimes. We gave people what they wanted: a good dang time.

Was I supposed to pretend that Doll Devine wasn’t the reason people came out? Pretend that women didn’t come out to McPhee’s on a school night, leaving the laundry undone, so they could imagine themselves shimmying in one of my tight-fitting dresses? And you can guess why the men showed up.

Everyone came out to feel and then went back home to get lucky or to get out their old records and, well—sorry if I wasn’t supposed to admit that my voice reached into people’s hearts. Reached in and gave a little tweak. That’s what it felt like to listen to a good country song, you know? Like, when I first heard Patsy Cline, I didn’t know how to feel—elated and drunk, turned on, sad. Most people feel a little sad listening to Patsy. Her regrets became yours. And still, all these years later, when I heard one of her songs, I always remembered the saying that country music is three chords and the truth. The truth, like a gong inside your soul.

A good country song, a true one, no matter how many chords it uses, no matter how rustic or slickly produced, sang to the inside of you and burst you wide open, lashed you raw and brand-new, and left you thinking of all the hurt you’d survived.

Now, some seemed to think country was about location, but not everyone can be from the same place. Not everyone can be born and raised.

Country wasn’t a dot on any map, not a way you were brought up, not a way you styled your hair, not a pair of boots you slipped into. Anyone can buy the trappings and put it on like a—

I was reminded of the guy on the bus, asking about my costume. And now Marisa suggesting the word country didn’t belong in my mouth. Telling me I had to talk some certain way, couldn’t name myself, couldn’t make myself anything I wanted.

Some might put it on and get it wrong, and maybe I’m one of them, to think I am country even though I’d lived in the city my entire life. And not the right city. Chicago is no Nashville, you’re thinking. No Austin.

But country wasn’t a place. It wasn’t one kind of music, either, or one kind of singer. Country was that gong—loud, hollow, ringing on and on unanswered.

If you know what I mean, you never have to ask. Am I allowed? Am I invited? If your soul reverbs with loneliness when you hear a fiddle singing sweet, even in a crowded room and with someone on your arm, no matter how you’re living, then, cowboy, you’re country enough.

 

Hope you are making plans to come to one of my launch events? Check out the events page!