Uncategorized

Mama said she caught her getting me out of my crib when I was just a tiny baby. I don’t know what her plans were, but I’ll bet they were fun and involved listening to Willie Nelson or Miles Davis while driving fast and laughing. She told me that by the time I was born, she was hip to what the situation was and she was primed and ready. She pretty much always has been.

She is the bravest person I know.

She taught me how to ride a bicycle, how to make cinnamon rolls, how to fish, how to drive, how to smoke a cigarette, how to sing, and how to dream big dreams.

She makes me laugh harder than anyone else on the planet by hardly doing anything at all.

She used to take a .22 and go into our grandparents’ backyard, shoot a squirrel, skin and clean it, fry it in the skillet, and eat it.

She is handy with tools and can make things. Impressive things.

I don’t know anyone more soulful, anyone who does everything they do with more depth and feeling than she does. The things she can’t do that way, she typically doesn’t bother with. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

She is smart and she is kindhearted. She is funny.

She is an exceptional artist, a singular singer, and a wonderful writer.

She would stand between me and anything that threatened to harm me in any way. I would do the same for her.

I have never spoken to anyone who regretted that they had a sister. I am filled up with gratitude for mine. We are both very fortunate to have so much love in our lives, but we know that we are the walking versions of perfect love for each other. Always have been, always will be. I hope and pray that we both grow to be very old, always together in mind and heart and speaking our unspoken language, and that in another 50 years we can sit and sip something in a pretty garden somewhere and say, “Look what we did, Sissy. We did alright.”

Happiest of birthdays to the shining light that is my sister, Shelby Lynn Moorer.

Happy Monday Y’all,

AM

Some days I don’t know if I live in the spaces between the lines I write or if I write in between the lines of my life. Don’t read that sentence too many times, but do you ever wonder what drives what?

The other night at my sister’s house, I sat at the table with her and two other writers after dinner and somehow we wound the conversation around to how we’re always waiting on the next line. We laughed when we admitted how we can each be in some dramatic situation with a lover, friend, family member, etc. — but no matter what goes down we always have our antennae up to catch a well-turned phrase or profound thought that might lead us to a beautiful sentence or paragraph, a song, a story, a book, a screenplay. I think what I said was, “You’d crawl over your dying Mama to get to the next good line.” No one disagreed.

You might laugh at that. And it is a funny image and thought. But it’s not as much of a stretch as it may seem. We’re always collecting. Be careful what you say around a writer — you might hear it come back at you later.

Artists often have dramatic lives, which begs the question — do we have dramatic lives because we need something to create about or do we just have dramatic lives and then can’t help but become artists so that we have a way to deal with it, to process it, to make something out of it all so that it has some sort of meaning?

I’m sure it’s some of both on most days, one or the other on other days.

You can’t time creative convergence — sometimes I have the space in my day and can’t get it going, sometimes it’s going and I don’t have the opportunity to sit with it and get it down. Crazy notebooks filled with pages of scribbles I make in the heat of the inspired moment, approximately two-hundred, seventy-seven notes in my phone of titles, sentences, ideas… I’ll never get to them all. What a way to live, in a state of waiting, fingers tapping. Waiting for the wave to rise, hoping you’ll know when it’s coming, and being able to hop on and ride it out when it does.

It’s cloudy today. I’m contemplative. You probably noticed.

Thank you for reading my thoughts.

Happy Monday, Y’all.

AM

I’ve been thinking about this word since yesterday — not in terms of what’s beating in my chest, but instead in terms of what’s running through me, what propels me. My will, my life force, my energy, my gumption, my courage, my vitality.

Some days it feels stronger than on other days.

I have not succeeded much more often than I have succeeded. In fact, when I look at my life, it’s rife with supposed failure if we’re weighing wins and losses in a practical sense. I’ve failed at two marriages, never made a record that sold more than 75,000 copies (and most of them haven’t sold half that), never had a top 40 single (or even close), have played to more half-empty rooms than sold out ones, have never been gainfully employed in a way that could be written down as work experience on a resume, I haven’t invested well, I have made a lot of what amounted to questionable business decisions, I struggle to keep up with my friendships, I’m frustrating in a relationship, and I’m a fair to middling mother. Though I am an incredibly fortunate woman, things have not been exactly, let’s say, easy.

Sometimes I feel like Alabama Worley (Patricia Arquette) in True Romance when Virgil (James Gandolfini) beats the life nearly out of her, then he gets up to shoot her and she holds out a corkscrew she’s managed to find on the motel room floor to defend herself with. He smiles at her and says, “You got a lotta heart, kid, you know that?”

I keep getting back up and trying to do better. I keep trying not to die. That’s what most of us do.

We have heart.

I think I started thinking about this because I picked up a book called “The Rise,” by Sarah Lewis. I’m 14 pages in and I can’t wait to read every word. It’s about failure. Specifically, about what we find in failure. Thank you to The Unspoken Podcast (love it) for the tip, by the way.

I want to send these words out to everyone I know who is in danger of losing heart due to the past few weeks of ridiculousness we’ve had to endure. Please don’t. It’s so easy to get discouraged, but think about where you get the juice to get up in the morning and make eggs instead of having cold cereal. Think about how you push yourself to do three more reps during your workout instead of giving yourself a pass and stopping. Think about giving birth if you have to (those of you that have) and how hard that was and how you’d do it all again for that sweet baby. Think about the things you’ve worked your tail off for and how good you felt after you did. Think about where we’d be if those who came before us hadn’t persevered, if they hadn’t kept going and working at whatever seemingly insurmountable task they had before them and saying, “No — I’m not settling for that.”

Think about how you’re a badass at life.

I have failed at so much so many times. But if I’d sold a million copies of my first album I probably wouldn’t have made what I think my best one is. If my first marriage had lasted I wouldn’t be emotionally awake or had the humbling experience of having to check my own stuff. I’m not one of those, “I’m thankful for that bad thing that happened because it made me who I am today…” people. Of course, everything that happens makes us who we are and it doesn’t have to be bad to be character building all of the time. Spare me. I’m for good things shaping us through increasing gratitude! I digress… My point is, we do find ourselves when we have to pick it all up and try again. And we find that we have more heart than we thought we had.

That is a lovely, awesome thing.

Sending so much love today, particularly to my fellow failures, who keep getting back up and trying.

Happy Monday, Y’all.

AM

I want to stare back at you. I want to imitate your face with my face and show you how ridiculous and awful you look — eyes bulging, mouth often open because your jaw has gone slack with incredulity. But I don’t, not usually, not unless I’m in a particularly perturbed mood and feel like a confrontation, which I know you won’t accept. It’s not only because I want to keep him focused on me and how I don’t think he’s at all strange, of course I want to do that, but it’s also because I know it’s not polite. Didn’t your mother tell you that?

It’s not nice to stare. Don’t stare! Quit staring! Remember?

I can understand when children do it. They don’t know any better and have to be constantly told most things until they learn them. But adults? Give me a break. Children stare with curiosity. Adults stare with disdain and discomfort, letting everyone know that they can’t believe their precious experience is being disturbed by something they’d rather not see.

From an evolutionary perspective, staring is supposedly meant to indicate dominance. Someone wants to assert power, so they lock their eyes on the threat. The object of the laser beam then interprets that they are somehow inferior and cowers from the starer. Whether my son feels inferior because of your rudeness or not, I don’t know. He doesn’t really seem to. But then his face might not register the correct emotion to go along with what he’s feeling. I’m told that he can be sad while uproariously laughing. That you would potentially hurt him, that you would try to make him feel inferior, boils my blood. Is it okay with you to know you may be doing that with your insensitivity and inability to mind your own business? That’s part of it, though. You’re not thinking are you? It is my hope that your attention just bolsters the sense of cool that he already has. I hope he says to himself, “Look at that pitiful jackass. They’re so square and normal they don’t know how to take in the awesome being that I am.”

I pray. I doubt. I sometimes think I see his face fall just a little bit when he feels someone boring holes into him with their unintelligent eyes. He gets a little quieter, his movements become a little bit less large. Some would argue that that’s a good thing, but I would suggest someone changing themselves because of someone else’s disapproval or bewilderment only serves to make us all go more toward the middle. Gag. Yuck. Gross. No, thank you.

And by the way, do you think you’re so very void of unusual traits? Maybe your constant throat clearing and nose wiping strikes me as odd, annoying, and even repulsive. Maybe your verbal tics and slew footedness make me want to cross the street to avoid you. But I tend to remember what my Mama told me. I wouldn’t want to make you feel uncomfortable because you’re different.

Happy Monday, Y’all.

AM

I knew there had been a shift when I picked him up Saturday morning to take him outside. He felt lighter, less here.

He wasn’t sick for long. He was a tough little dude — by the time he was ten years old he’d torn the ACLs in both of his back legs because he liked to jump off of things that were too high to jump off of, but he never made so much as a peep. Both injuries slowed him down for a while, but Petey could still fly when he wanted to. He was pretty hardy for eight or so pounds. When I noticed the cough he’d developed when he’d try to sing along with something he liked (y’all know he was singing until the very end) and that I also heard when I picked him up to hold him, I took him to the vet. I feared cancer or something, but the x-ray and EKG revealed nothing but a general inflammation and fluid sort of everywhere. Just old dog stuff, they said. He’d been slowing down for the past few years so I wasn’t surprised. His eyes were going and he’d lost most of his teeth. But I was determined not to put him through a bunch of drug therapy or surgeries. He’d lived a long time and though I wanted him to be here for as long as he could, I knew that as long as he could was something only he could decide. I wasn’t about to put a geriatric dog through pain that he didn’t need to endure or prolong his time here because I couldn’t stand to see him go. I trusted him. My only desire was to keep him comfortable, to love him as much or more as I always had, and to let him have his dignity. We started him on a diuretic and he seemed to be doing fine — the cough didn’t go away but he seemed happy. He spent the week before the last of his life sitting on a pillow in his beloved sunshine in Tennessee. Petey was a king and he knew it.

When we returned to NYC a week ago I told him he could be still for a while. A less than twenty-four hour trip back to Nashville on Wednesday found him with his sitter as I didn’t want to make him travel again so soon. He was the ultimate road dog and rode in a bag underneath the seat in front of me on I don’t know how many planes, and has traveled in more tour buses, vans, and cars than I can count. He was a trooper and hardly ever complained. But I knew I was time to let him rest. When I got him back on Thursday, he was his usual sweet self and did all his usual sweet things.

Saturday morning came with some heavy and rapid breathing. I knew the the corner had been turned so I wrapped him in a blanket and spent most of the day on the couch with him. I consulted with all of my fellow dog lovers, mostly my sister, and they coached me through my worry. He was still drinking and eating, so I thought he’d be around a while longer even though he seemed to be heading out. At 1am on Sunday morning I woke just in time to hear him take his last breath. Petey always slept with me and that night was certainly no different. When he exhaled for the last time something in the room changed. He was no longer in that tiny body and that I knew. I thought my heart would burst from sadness as I looked at him and stroked his little head, but I was also taken by the fact that I could feel him all over the room.

When a spirit leaves a body, where does it go? I know that it supposedly means those of us who believe in any sort of afterlife possess outside egos and that’s what makes us think this plane isn’t the last one — we can’t possibly be snuffed out and cease to exist, right? But I don’t agree with that theory, and not because my puppy just died and I don’t want him to be completely gone. Energy can’t be created or destroyed. It can only be transformed or transferred. (Thank you Law of Conservation of Energy).

We are energy. Petey was energy and I saw that when I felt him leave his body. I felt it the morning before when I picked him up and noticed it had changed. He was getting ready to go. But does energy concentrate in one place, like a ball of glowing ghost material? Or does it scatter like the sparks that fly off of the tip of a sparkler, throwing itself into every corner of the universe? Can it do whatever it wants whenever it wants if it isn’t harnessed into a container?

I don’t know. But just as I know souls come from somewhere when they inhabit a physical form, I know they go somewhere when they’re out of one.  Godspeed my faithful companion Petey, and send your light to us whenever you’re not too busy getting cosmic belly rubs in what I hope is the most beautiful sunbeam you’ve ever seen.

Happy Monday, Y’all.

AM

My voice has provided me with an exceedingly cool life.

My voice is not all there is to it, but in a lot of ways, the things I get to do begin and end with what does or doesn’t come out of my mouth or from the tips of my fingers.

Today is Constitution Day. So in celebration of the great voices who gave us such a terrific document, I’ll be making some noise with my own when I will join a cast of other loud mouths at Cooper Union’s Great Hall for a special edition of Voices of a People’s History of The United States. I’ve been so lucky to have been included in many of these events since my first one, which also happened to be in the room we’ll be in tonight, in 2008.

Thank you to my dear friend Anthony Arnove and to Howard Zinn, without whom we would not be gathering to do such a thing. I’m humbled by their work to bring the voices of those who spoke and speak the truth to our attention, and I’m reminded today to use my own for good.

Happy Monday, Y’all.

AM

I think about intentions a lot. In my work, in my daily actions, when considering the overview of things — I want to be able to call them good, wholesome, unselfish, sometimes maybe even lofty. If I am honest with myself I can stand back and point out when and where they haven’t been or aren’t, and instead exist to serve my ego in some way. I hate that.

My intention yesterday was to have this posted by midnight. Despite that intention, I didn’t get it done. Though the ticking clock nagged at me all day, I didn’t live up to the deal I made with myself that I’d do this every Monday during 2018 and instead am offering it now, this Tuesday morning, I guess better late than never, but still late. I hate that.

But as in most or probably all things, what happens in my life drives a question. Why is it so important that I live up to a deadline imposed on me by me? What is this structure doing for me, my body of work, my life? Why do I do this at all? Is it simply to serve my ego or is there something else going on?

I’ve put plenty of work into the world. Sometimes I think I don’t need to do any more. I’ve written lots of songs, made a handful of records, even have a fair amount of written work floating around and, much to my delight and surprise, have an actual book coming out next year. I ask myself why a lot. Did the world ever need any of my input and does it now? Truth is, I’ve chosen to earn a living by taking what’s in my brain and heart and trying to convince the world it’s worth paying attention to and paying for. But the truth also is that I probably could’ve chosen an easier route to having money to pay for groceries and the roof that keeps my head dry. Regardless, it’s the route I’m on. And having some guardrails around it keeps me from ending up in the ditch of doing things later or not at all. Confines and deadlines keep things moving. Is it all ego driven? Probably. Is it possible to make any kind of art without ego? Probably not.

I guess I’m just trying to figure out how not to die when it gets down to it. And putting these paragraphs here is one way in which I’m trying to leave something behind, one way in which I’m trying to say, “I’m here. And after I’m gone I hope someone will remember that I was.”

I could give you a list of why I didn’t make it to these paragraphs yesterday. I could tell you about the thousand little joys and heartbreaks that forced themselves into my day and made me stop to catch my breath, my lists of tasks and my amount of overwhelm, but they don’t matter I don’t guess and I know new ones will line themselves up again today. I see them out of the corner of my eye and hear them breathing behind my back right now.

I will tell you that one of the reasons I am late with this missive is that I was lucky enough to watch John Prine receive The Troubadour Award at BMI last night. So I was out late and found myself too emotional afterwards to put any words down that would’ve made any sense. I had thought I would, but no. Yes, I love Prine’s aching songs as much as anyone does, and enjoyed hearing the performers who were chosen to sing a few of them. “The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness,” “Big Ole Goofy World,” “Angel from Montgomery,” and “I Want to Dance with You,” were all delightful and made me feel almost light. That was not the case, however, when Robert Earl Keen delivered, with grace and gravity, “Hello in there.” That song is so damned lonely it makes me not just cry but actually tremble every time I hear it. I get scared when I become that moved, and astonished when I feel so seen. But that’s what the best songs do, don’t they? They make us feel understood. Even though I am not Loretta just yet, I, like most of us, feel like I will be one day and sooner than I want to admit. As I always say, art is a mirror. I don’t always realize that I’m afraid I will be Loretta until I hear the proper words wrapped around the devastation of invisibility.

So I reckon my intention is to try not to be invisible. I don’t want to disappear before my own eyes, become irrelevant to those I’m supposed to be relevant to and even myself, and stare out the back door screen today or any of my tomorrows. I know I most likely, at some stage, will. I get how it usually goes. But for now I’m fighting it like the devil. For now I’m trying, like the rest of you, not to die. For now I’m saying, “I’m here.”

It may not be the best intention, but for today it’s the one I’ve got.

Happy Tuesday,

AM

Some people are born into their thing. I’ve calculated that my sister and I did our ten thousand hours of singing in the car with our Mama before we were even close to grown. 

That doesn’t make us geniuses, but it gives us a certain confidence about doing the thing that we were born into which is, without a doubt, making music. 

These past weeks I’ve immersed myself in making a record with Hayes Carll. He asked me to co-produce with Brad Jones and it’s the first time I’ve formally held the position. While I lack, sorely, any technical musical prowess, I know my way around a studio, a song, and a performance as much as it pains me to admit it (I’m female – I tend to downplay and underestimate my talents – but as a side note please let’s work on getting more women in the producing and engineering door). Lest I digress, my point in telling you all of this is to say that I saw a lot of dedication in human form come in and out of that studio while we were recording the record. There’s a reason why people travel from all over the world to make records in Nashville – the musicians who reside and work there are, across the board, simply the best that can be found. When I stand back and consider the talent I’ve been lucky enough to be surrounded by the past twenty-two years, and that I’ve been allowed to be a part of the music making business family as a whole, I am astonished. What a fortunate person am I to have been given a front row seat to witness mastery, sometimes on a daily basis. Some of these folks were born into their thing and came by it more easily than most could, but some of them were not and instead had their souls set on fire by something that made them want to pick up an instrument and master it. I love almost nothing more than a natural talent, but I have the utmost respect for a hard worker.

I said to someone recently that while it’s true that I do and have done a lot of different things in my professional life, I was aware of what it takes to be great and didn’t want to dilettante around at this or that, never giving myself a chance to become great at anything because I wasn’t disciplined or dedicated enough to stay the course. It took me a while to get to that way of thinking. It takes a lot of backbone and other things, such as reminders like the one I just described above, to think like that every day. Life’s too short to take halfhearted stabs. At some point, one must nail something to the wall. 

Happy Monday. 

AM

PS – Thank you Connie Chornuk for the great photograph.

I’m relatively new to podcasts. I had an awareness of the seemingly never ending sea of them, but like most television shows, I find it hard to start listening to or watching a series because I’m a bit of a completist — I don’t like to commit unless I’m 100% sure I can follow through. I’m becoming less so in this stage of my life — I now find it hard to justify sticking with something I started it if I don’t like it. Life’s too short to read a book you hate. But since I discovered the On Being podcast after reading Krista Tippett’s “Becoming Wise,” I try not to miss an episode. I guess it should go without saying that I am behind, and just this morning listened to the August 9 show with Joe Carter. It was heavy stuff for a Monday morning, but if you’re gonna get heavy, it might as well be on a Monday, yes?

Trouble songs. I don’t even know now why I wrote that down as I listened — I don’t remember if that was something he said or if I just heard the word and connected it to the spirituals he sang and then started my own train of thought about it, but those are the words that have been going around in my head all day.

I’ve been in the studio with Hayes helping him make a new record. It’s going to be a great one. He’s written his own new batch of trouble songs and they’ll soon be delivered to y’all. As the group of us huddled in that dimly lit space today, trying to make magic as we always do, my mind kept returning to the thought of trouble, and how our traditions of making noise to ease our pain are so deep. Songs are a secret doorway to peace, always have been. A wail, a cry, a release, an admission of weakness, a plea for help — trouble songs are communion, a way to join others and an invitation for others to join us in our sorrow and then, hopefully, probably, ultimately, exaltation when we have expressed our hurt. All art making is the transmission of feeling that cannot be kept inside.

My most recent evenings have been spent stitching the words of my own trouble song into the quilt that you see pictured. The pieces were cut out and sewn together by my paternal great-grandmother. They were discovered by my maternal grandmother in a junk-filled building we called the little house that sat on the edge of the yard of the house where my sister and I grew up. Our grandmother, many years after rescuing them from the rat pills and squirrel carcasses, sewed them onto a top that she lovingly and painstakingly picked out, matching the colors just so. The lyrics to “Blood,” are going on it now. I don’t know if my forebears held trouble in their hands as they did the work on this piece that will hold such a sweet piece of my family’s history, but I know they had their share to express.

The most amazing thing about art is it gives our trouble a place to go.

Happy Monday, Y’all.

AM

I didn’t really know what I was going to write about this morning when I woke up. Some Mondays, I have something sort of ready — something starts to bubble up on Saturday or Sunday. But not this week. I knew my heart felt heavy, but I didn’t know where that weight would necesarily go.

I subscribe to the Words of Women newsletter. I recommend it. It too comes on Mondays, and today’s letter helped me figure out part of what has been hanging over me — the notion of time, exchanges of energy, what we do and do not allow to be done with our energy and attention, and the price tags that go on those things, figurative or real.

We just lost Aretha Franklin. When I was thinking about currency today, I began to imagine what a random promoter in a random city might’ve thought of when considering making a performance offer for The Queen of Soul. How does one put a monetary value on that? I have no idea what sort of guarantees Ms. Franklin received, but I know they could not have been close to high to enough. You can’t put dollar signs on the kind of talent she had or the kind of giving of it that she did.

Nor can you pin an appropriate number on the value of any interaction, when there is wholehearted give and take. I’ve paid as little as a few dollars or maybe no dollars at all to witness performances that stopped time for me, performances that I’ll remember and continue to be touched by forever. I’ve had honest conversations that changed my life. I’ve read books that altered my way of thinking forever. I’ve had lessons poured into me by those who are, or were at the time, smarter and more experienced than I am and I became better because of them. I’ve spent precious minutes with my son that expanded me in every direction.

Our energy, our attention, and ultimately our time are our most precious resources, not only because they require the most of us in order to give them fully, but because they are the things of which we have the least. We never know when we will have no more of ourselves to give in an earthly way. We never know when others’ time will be up, either. As mine dwindles, I realize this more and more — there are no more days to be offered up to anything that isn’t worthy. And the things that are, deserve nothing less than my all. I consider this in reverse as well — I don’t want to take up anyone else’s time unless I have a way to earn it.

The great news about getting older is that the vision is honed, the edit is edited, the focus narrows, and the magpie tendencies fall away. A svelte life becomes a requirement, because who can say how much every tick of the clock is worth? As an old friend once told me, life is minutes, and every one of them is priceless.

Happy Monday, Y’all.

AM

PS – This photo is a screen shot from a video I did with Coleman Saunders for “Tear Me Apart,” from my last record.