West of Independence Soundtrack Part 1

Music will always be a part of West of Independence. A long playlist accompanied me as I wrote the book, and readers won't find a page of it that was written in silence. At every moment of the process, music was sounding in my ears, making me smile, causing my heart to race, or filling my eyes with tears.

I have long believed that books should be sold with a recommended playlist attached, and have often wondered why someone hasn't figured out a way to make it happen. Well, since writing West of Independence, I have come to understand why. Each chapter of such a personal story deserves to live with the music that helped to write it, and whittling the playlist down to something reasonable requires the elimination of songs that are not easily let go. I set out to do it, and the task has proven to be my Gordian Knot.

Nevertheless, I have done my best to build a "soundtrack" that I feel comfortable releasing to the world. But rather than list them all at once and be done with it, I am going to pay them each the respect that they deserve and post them a few at a time, along with carefully selected excerpts from the book and links to the best playable versions I could find on the web.

I hope that these songs adds to the experience of reading West of Independence, because it certainly added to the experience of writing it.

1. Willy Porter "Unconditional"

"maybe he was a Muslim, a Christian, or a Jew...I hope that he was laughing when off that bike he flew...maybe he struggled to believe, just like me and you...as the ambulance is too late arriving...now he stares into the sky above, into the face of unconditional love..."

The words of this song inspire me while putting me to shame. I have learned the hard way that selfishness, no matter the driving force behind it, cannot exist in the same heart with unconditional love.

From West of Independence page 25:

"It was hard for me to accept that my older brother was gay, and so I didn’t. While I loved him for so many reasons, I also hated Harrison for causing so much confusion in my life. I was incapable of seeing his lifestyle as anything other than a bad choice, his failure to find love and comfort with girls driving him to decide that he must be gay. It disrupted my parent’s lives, and since I had blindly followed my parents into the black and white fog of unyielding religious beliefs, it disrupted my life as well. I felt committed to my parents and all that they had taught us growing up in the Mormon religion. Harrison had decided to be gay, and therefore was subject to harsh judgments, condemnation, and a life full of misery. He would never be truly happy, and would risk the dangers of a promiscuous and unnatural life, namely AIDS and a horrible death.

And Harrison's earthly life wasn't the only life at risk. My big brother was endangering his eternal soul, and along with it the eternal nature of our family. Without him we could not be an Eternal Family, a blessing promised to the obedient and faithful.

I didn’t want to believe this, and secretly hoped that God would have some small measure of mercy for my brother, if not for his sake, then for mine."

2. David Bowie "Heroes"

Anyone who knew Jared will remember that he loved David Bowie. We spent weeks worth of time in our attic bedroom listening to his Bowie records, and together we went to see Bowie's Glass Spider rock show in the late Eighties. I remember walking all around the stadium with Jared, looking for some part of the fence through which we could enter ahead of the crowd, since our tickets were general admission on the field, and I feared being so far back into the crowd that Jared wouldn't be able to soak up the full David Bowie experience. We found our gap, made a mad dash for the front, and ended up center stage. It was hot and humid that night, and people were passing out all around us as "Ziggy Stardust" wowed us with his voice, his music, and his theatrics. I will never forget the smile on Jared's happy face as he stood oblivious to the chaos around him, captivated by his musical hero. 

To do the same again with Jared, "just for one day" would be worth anything you might ask of me.

From West of Independence page 30:

"Weeks passed, and though it was tight quarters, no one complained. Jared slept while we were at work, and woke up to eat dinner and spend some time with us before walking to work. I was employed cleaning carpets at the time, and Jared would abandon sleep a couple of days a week to work with me and make some extra cash. We drove around Seattle together in a big van with a colorful carpet cleaning super hero painted on the sides.

The job sucked. Cleaning dirt, food, sewage, and various bodily fluids from stranger’s carpets was gross, but the time spent working with Jared became something to look forward to each week. We made a habit of raiding the customer’s kitchens for food, turning their stereos up too loud, and riding the carpet buffer across their living rooms. We dreamed aloud of being free and happy, living as we pleased someday, un-tethered by the worries of the average jerk. I hoped to become a published writer, and Jared a successful artist, but we gave little thought to the effort and heartache required to achieve such elusive aspirations.

To dwell on the hows was too depressing anyway. I had little hope or talent with which to materialize my own dream, while Jared was sure to succeed due to the raw creative genius that seemed to course through his veins and flow out his fingertips as he drew or painted."

3. Journey "Don't Stop Believin'"

Has anyone ever taken a road trip without listening to Journey? I am pretty certain there is a federal law that states "when crossing more than two state borders in a car, no fewer than six Journey songs must be played at full volume, without regard for embarrassment during vocals and air guitaring."

Tell me, what good is a road trip without nostalgia, and with that nostalgia, a little self inspection and regret?

From West of Independence page 41:

“Uh-huh,” Connor said, acknowledging my request. He dropped the Ipod back into the dock, and the car was filled with the sounds of keyboards, guitars, and the Eighties. The unmistakable music of our youth threatened to blow the speakers as we cruised down the highway in our tiny black rental car, trying to match the singer's long high notes and jamming out the well-known but never tiresome riffs on our air guitars. I knew it was silly and cliché, but it didn’t feel that way. We kept it up for miles, working our way through a long list of favorites.

When the playlist ended, Connor reclined his seat and settled in for a nap. The ability to sleep anywhere, at any time, was a skill that both my younger brothers had always possessed. On all of our many road trips as kids, outside on our trampoline, and while camping with our friends in high school, I had watched them drop to whatever disagreeable surface was available, falling asleep without too much trouble while I laid awake, uncomfortable and jealous of their deep breathing and unconscious state.

Connor had once slept in the bottom of our canoe for an entire day on a river, not even stirring when we ran some rapids. I was so worried he might be dead that I poked him hard with my paddle. It was like waking a sleeping bear by sticking a lit cherry bomb up his ass. Connor was so pissed off at me for waking him up that he thrashed around and nearly dumped us into the water.

I smiled at the memory, and at the realization that once more I had found myself awake with my little brothers at rest around me. Setting the cruise control at eighty-five, I sat up tall in the driver’s seat and gripped the wheel, my hands at ten and two in order to ensure that I would not relax too much and risk falling asleep. The white center lines whipped past, disappearing into the darkness as the miles stacked up behind us."

It Amazes Me

I saw an online article about John Denver's upcoming birthday (it would have been his 70th) and a dam burst somewhere inside of me, setting free a torrent of memories. This piece will be written without respect for continuity, because that's the way memories flow.

It amazes me.

My first memories of music are of John Denver’s “Back Home Again.” I was only four years old, but I remember. Mom would slide the album out of its sleeve, drop it on to the turntable, and slip the massive headphones over my ears as the music began. The rhythmic strumming of the title track would transport me to the cab of a big rig out on the open road, where I would ride alongside its driver, eager as he was to get back home to his wife, the light in her eyes, and supper on the stove. A montage of love and family would dance through my head as John sang of what it meant to return to the one you loved in the place you called home.

“Back Home Again” took me home, but “On The Road” drove me back out onto that lonesome highway, with my own father at the wheel of an old Mercury V8. It was just the two of us against the world, following the open road, searching for imagined love in the shape of a girl at a truck café. In a family of nine there were few moments that I spent alone in the car with my father, so I had to rely on John to provide me the setting for what I believed would be the greatest road trip I’d never take.

“Grandma’s Feather Bed” was always a fun break from sentiment, with its silly suggestion that it took the feathers of forty ‘leven geese to make it, and that it would hold eight kids, four hound dogs, and a piggy stolen from the shed. The images of laughing cousins, dozing beside the fireplace, and waking up in a giant heavenly bed still linger with me today.

My name is Matthew, and so is one of my favorite John Denver songs. It never fails to evoke memories that I have never lived, paint my mind’s canvas with landscapes that must be experienced, and promise reward in a lifestyle full of challenges that few can fathom. To be like Matthew would be to live a life worthy of a standing-room-only funeral. My father quoted the song when speaking to an audience about me when I was about to leave home for the first time at the age of nineteen. About to serve a two year mission in Paraguay, I was unsure of myself, frightened by all the uncertainty that lay ahead. To hear my dad say that I was made of joy was a rare moment in my life; hearing him suggest that I was something he could be proud of is something I have not forgotten. Indeed, the thought of it carried me through some rough moments over the following two years as I served others, and I was able to find joy in some of my darkest hours in a foreign land.

But the memories don’t end with the songs from “Back Home Again.”

The album “Poems, Prayers, and Promises” can be credited in great part for my propensity to think deeply at a constant clip, more often than not to a fault. As a young boy I hadn’t yet experienced most of what John was singing about, and so my mind was forced to stretch itself in order to grasp how sweet it is to love someone, to the point that their tears belong to you. My maternal grandmother was a member of the Blackfoot tribe, and so dancing about the house to the wild, angry cries of “Wooden Indian” meant something more to me than I could possibly understand at the time, but listening to it I knew that some great injustice had been done to her people. The mournful tones of “Junk” suggested that my father was not so misguided in his passion for antiques, and while we never owned a parachute or a sleeping bag for two, the belief that memories lived within the pieces he collected was not lost to me.

For many years and over many circumstances I considered my three brothers to be prodigal sons of the family, but the words of “Gospel Changes” have since suggested to me that as a firm believer in a higher power I should have been a better example of unconditional love. I hate to think it, but I know that had I been, my little brother might not have taken his life.

We all have heroes, and one of mine was a man named Pete. He taught me how to fire a muzzleloader, the art of a great campfire story, and what it meant to be a good man in spite of shortcomings. We lived in Connecticut, but his heart had never left his family’s farm down in West Virginia. I remember his eyes filling with tears and light whenever he spoke of that little plot of heavenly land. In the cassette player of his Jeep was a tape with “Take Me Home, Country Roads” recorded over and over again on both sides. I don’t recall any other song ever playing through those speakers, and to hear it now dredges up miles of memories that make me smile. I had the chance to drive through West Virginia last year, and in Pete’s memory I played the obligatory song on a loop as I passed through towns where time runs backwards in a good way.

The playlist of songs and the memories and moments they evoke continues…

My father was never a seamstress; he preferred hammer and nails over needle and thread. But I still have the shirt that he gifted to me one Christmas when I was a young boy with dreams of being like John Denver. The shirt looked just like John’s from the cover of “Spirit.” Dad probably pricked his fingers to the point of severe blood loss while embroidering the sunshine onto the shoulder of that little blue button-down shirt. It wasn’t quite finished, but I didn’t care, in my eyes it was perfect. I wore it for our family photos the following summer, and again when I was John Denver for Halloween. It took Dad more than a decade to finish sewing on that sunshine, but when he finally did, he wrapped it and gave it to me for Christmas all over again. Sunshine on my shoulder does indeed make me happy, and then again sometimes it makes me cry.

You know, I’ve always wondered just what a Berkley Woman is, and whether or not there would be hunger in my stare should I see one…

My maternal grandmother may have been a Native American, but that didn’t stop her from marrying a cowboy. My grandfather was the first in my short list of heroes. He slept with a six-shooter under his pillow until he died, wore a cowboy hat with authority, and understood what it meant to be a man. When I take his shotgun up into the mountains behind our home I can’t help but think of him, and in those moments I want nothing more than to be a cowboy, to ride the range, see the high country, and lay down my sundown in some starry field. All of these thoughts play out in my mind accompanied by John’s music, and his lyrics make me believe that my dream is not so impossible after all. Hell, I already live in a rodeo town on the side of a mountain, so the stretch to becoming a cowboy is not that far.

Yes, I live in the mountains nowadays, having left most of yesterday behind me. Every breath at altitude brings the high that John knew and sang about so well. My hope is that my children will look back and remember with fondness the paradise that we moved to when they were young, the place where eagles lived in rocky cathedrals, where they were free to shoot at empty pop bottles with their pistols, and where the days are all filled with an easy country charm. One of the greatest advantages to living in the west is that you can almost always see where you are going, even if you don’t always know where you are headed. Here in the mountains I have enjoyed the blessing of listening to God’s casual reply to my many questions, and I can’t see myself living or dying anywhere else. John’s music means that much more to me now, because I can drive through our valley and see his lyrics living all around me.

I moved to this paradise with my very own Darcy Farrow, whose voice truly is as sweet as sugar candy (most of the time). We have been married almost 21 years, pushing through a share of troubles and strife that are ours alone to know. Not long after our courtship began, Elizabeth discovered that I loved and still listened to John Denver. She later confessed that this fact further solidified her belief that I was the one for her. It does not embarrass me to say that she is my personification of Annie’s Song, and that the barely audible, comfortable sigh of contentment heard after the first line is reminiscent of the way I feel when I think of spending forever with her. I fear that should she leave this life before I do, I will be buried with her on that terrible day, because life without her is something in which I have no interest. I don’t have to experience it to know that it’s a hard life living when you’re lonely.

I started listening to John when I was just two feet high, and today I listen to him standing six feet tall. When I was five, my parents took me to see him perform. Mom still says it was the longest I have ever sat totally still, and that she marveled at how fixated I was on John as he sang songs that I had only heard amid the crackle of my father’s turntable. John’s music truly does make pictures, and for me it will always tells stories. Not one of his songs fail to transport me back through time, to moments when life looked more like a long and comfortable drive down a familiar country road than a four-lane highway congested by the heartbreak, responsibilities, and trappings of adult life.

As a child I would listen to John’s rendition of “It Amazes Me” over and over again. As the song climbed higher, louder, and faster, I would drop to all fours and buck across the living room like a wild bronco, much to the delight of my family. I have never ridden a real bronco, but that hasn't kept me free from the occasional bucking. The music to which I live my life has at times built itself into crescendos of wild wondering and untamed circumstance, and I find that I’ve gotten lost on my way, shouting “where can I hide?”

In moments such as those, I sometimes think that maybe that little boy in the sunshine-shouldered shirt turned out to be a little like John Denver after all.

In “Around and Around,” John confessed to hoping that once he was gone, others would think of him in moments when they were happy and smiling, and that the thought of him would comfort them in moments when they were crying.

I do, and it does.

Thanks John.

Bon Vivant

"Man, this woman is going to be your wife forever!" Alex almost shouts, pointing at Elizabeth.

I grin, and look over at my forever-wife. Elizabeth is fanning her denimed butt over the flames of a gas fireplace. She shakes her head in dismissal of our conversation about love, life without passion, and NORAD. The mock dismissal is forgiven when she smiles wide at us.

Us: Alex Dezen, lead singer of The Damnwells, and me, author of "West of Independence," standing together on the back patio of a stranger's house.

"I'm singing in my sleep, driving across Texas with you..."

Surreal doesn't cut it, while epic is just stupid and exhausted.

Comfortable; that's what this is.

Ryan steps through the sliding glass door, a red cup of warmth in one hand, two pieces of pizza in the other. Nazi-hunting-war-corresponding-tour-managing-sidekicking buddy to Alex, Ryan is more than a character. This self professed "bon vivant" carries knowledge and experience on constant offer, and he underlines all of it with a humor-colored highlighter.

"What are we talking-whoa, drop it like it's hot!" Ryan interrupts his own question when he notices Elizabeth waving her tush over the fire.

"You look so good..."

My head feels light, but it isn't the altitude.

To say that this is a moment long in coming would be a lie. I had never bothered to imagine the chance to personally thank Alex for keeping me company on my drive across Texas in 2009, my little brother's ashes resting in the back seat.

Ryan is arguing with Elizabeth; he thinks she has long legs.

Alex has just played a private show for us. Every song had spread a new layer of goosebumps over the tiny crowd. Emotion arced across the room, interrupted only by the banter, praise, and laughter shared in between songs.

And then he sang "Texas."

A sleepy poem about love and distance, put to music made for counting highway mile markers, "Texas" is a song that sneaks up on me and puts a comfortable pressure on my chest. By its end I am miles from home, the one that I love most in the world sleeping in the passenger seat as we drive through the night across the flat, wide, thought-provoking expanse of the southwest.

"I could stay another day with you, stall the winter's pain 'til June..."

The song is as much a part of "West of Independence" as the paper (or pixels) upon which it is printed. It not only journeyed with me across Texas, but across page after page of the writing process as well. As Alex began to play it, I held my phone up to record the moment. A few lyrics in, and I couldn't hold the phone steady; my arm shook and my eyes clouded. As a lump filled my throat, I turned off the phone, choosing to live the moment rather than record it.

And to drive across Texas one more time.

Thanks Alex.

Missed Moment

“Two bobs left, two bobs right, then one left, one right, one left, and then it starts all over again, but from right to left,” Jared explained.

I watched, dizzied as my little brother bobbed his head from side to side in perfect rhythm.

“And you're always telling me that it's my turn to move, when I wonder what could make the needle jump the groove,” Amiee sang to the beat.

Jared’s head danced while I waited for the right moment to join in, like a little girl watching for her cue to leap between whirling double-dutch jump ropes.

My head bobbed left twice, right twice, and then back to the right for a single bob, just as Jared had instructed. I was feeling pretty good about my chances, and went left.

For two bobs…

Jared laughed as I tried to correct and catch up to his easy going movements. It was too late; my head frenzied back and forth in a seizure-like loop as Aimee sang on.

“Acting steady always ready to defend your fears, what's the matter with the truth, did I offend your ears?”

“Kid, it’s not that hard,” Jared said.

“Maybe for you it isn’t, but my head has a mind of its own,” I replied in jesting defense

.

“Just follow me,” my brother said, ignoring my protest. His head began to bob.

Aimee ignored us both. “Now I could talk to you till I'm blue in the face, But we still would arrive at the very same place, with you running around and me out of the race…”

I followed Jared’s example, and he nodded with encouragement as my head bobbed for one complete, correct, and rhythmic cycle.

“You got it!”

I grinned, and the multitasking center in my brain flickered under the sudden load. My head threatened calamity with a feint to the left, but just then a synapse fired, sending my head to the right, back in sync with Jared’s.

We spent the rest of the afternoon driving around Seattle to carpet-cleaning appointments, rewinding the tape and playing the song over and over again, our heads bobbing in unison to the rhythm of Aimee’s counsel.

“You're like a sleepwalking man, it's a danger to wake you, even when it is apparent where your actions will take you,” Aimee sang.

"That's just what you are..."

--

Happy Birthday, Jared. I hope you know that I am no longer a sleepwalking man; that's just not who I am...anymore.

Aimee Mann's "That's Just What You Are"