Songs of My Divorce #2

Keith Urban – Stupid Boy

You don’t always get to be, as David Copperfield intuited, the hero of your own life, and that can be especially true when going through a breakup. Sometimes, you’re the Joker, not Batman. In that spirit, I’m going to tell this part of the story now, because I’m sort of the bad guy here, and I would like it if you’re still on my side by the time we get to the end of this part of my musical story.

My wife and I often kid about my complete obliviousness to things that are obvious to her. (My catchphrase is that I am “a keen observer of the human condition”.) My observational skills are hit and miss: I pay attention to things in direct correlation to how much I give a crap about them. (So, yes, gentle reader, I am a man.) This isn’t a new development – and it seems to be getting worse as I age – I had just never had anyone in my life who could be bothered to point it out to me. I wonder now though whether my ex was, in her own less direct way, trying to tell me something similar. As our relationship was circling the drain, two things became clear to me. First, I wanted to save our marriage a whole lot more than she did. Second, and naturally relating to the first, she had come to believe that I was holding her back from becoming all that she wanted to be in life. I won’t get into all the history that led us to that point – that’s mostly her story to tell – but at its heart was that what I thought was encouragement to be the best version of herself was being received as browbeating, that my coaching was seen as more Woody Hayes or Bobby Knight rants than (insert your favourite coach here – I could find lots of examples of violent, racist and asshole sports figures, but no universal opinion on who the nicest ones were – let’s go with Andy Reid, since he at least looks like a Zeddy bear and had the restraint during the “Big Game” (this post is not NFL-approved) not to drop Travis Kelce onto his overhyped ass).

Not unexpectedly, I finally understood what was going on thanks to a song. I don’t for a fact know that her attachment to this song had any connection to me – I wasn’t the only stupid boy in her life by this point – but the way you experience music is always deeply personal, and in the context of everything that was going on at the time, it felt like “Stupid Boy” was a mirror. And I did not like what I was seeing.

From the first time I heard him speak, Keith Urban has felt like a bit of a gag to me. How did a guy from Australia become, of all things, a country music star? Well, like myself, he started out listening to country music because that’s what his parents listened to. Talent and hard work took him from there. It’s a niche stardom: after punching just his first name into Google, he was the sixth suggestion, after Moon (would be a solid #2 option), Emerson (I guessed he was the Emerson, Lake and Palmer guy, but this is too high), Haring (3rd seems about right), Richards (there’s our top guy) and Morrison (the power of being on television all the time, I guess). (Keith David was 7th. Not relevant – is any of this though? – I just like that he came up.) And I can’t honestly recall now if I had even heard of him before the fall of 2007. He was only on my radar because I was trying to save my marriage through the magical power of country music.

I listened to a fair bit of Urban over the next few years, and “Stupid Boy” is probably my favourite of his songs, followed by “You’ll Think of Me”. There are two versions, and I always preferred the six minutes plus take over the under four minutes radio release. It gives Urban a chance to really show off his guitar playing chops, which definitely felt anomalous in country music at the time: that his major influences when he started out were Mark Knopfler and Lindsey Buckingham may explain the rockier approach.

The song, co-written and originally sung by a woman, Sarah Buxton, is a pretty harsh indictment of its target. It’s the story of a girl who has a beautiful spirit and the potential to do great things, but finds herself trapped by a boy who is threatened by everything that makes her special. The guy is definitely a dick, and lines like “She never even knew she had a choice / And that’s what happens when the only voice she hears is telling her she can’t” and “I guess to build yourself up so high / You had to take her and break her down” don’t give him a lot of wiggle room to make a contrary case. No knock on its originator, but the switch in perspective gives the song more power – where Buxton is telling a story of liberation, of her escape from the stupid boy, in the male voice it becomes a tale of pain and failure, which, if we’re being honest, is a damned sight more country. He is coming to grips with every mistake he ever made, and that pathos elevates the song.

There is some naturalistic strumming to start, with nothing but guitar for almost a minute, turning mournful on the chorus. There are no drums until the second verse, when the entry of a firm, steady thump heightens the intensity of the song. The guitar run at 2:38 is chilling and an absolute rock star moment. It builds to the finale – “It took a while for her to figure out she could run / But when she did, she was long gone, long gone” – and her freedom at 3:45 is celebratory, and a natural end point to the song.

But Urban keeps going, and the last two and a half minutes become an existential howl against the fates that had broken him. As much as I love the first part of the song – and it’s really a damned near perfect pop single (genre be damned) – it’s the ending that kept gutting me again and again as I played it. Because when you are in the middle of a disaster, you can’t see the end. In the days of “Stupid Boy”, I worried about what would happen to my daughters, about being alone, about all my narcissistic tendencies that had brought me to that point (another ex had often said “George will do what George wants to do”, and this was so not a good thing), about being a fundamentally unhappy person incapable of experiencing joy because I had spent so much of my life avoiding pain. I was so desperate to preserve something that wasn’t working for anyone (except, perhaps, our children, though I knew from my own experience of being around two adults who no longer loved each other that that shit wore down everybody real fast), that I didn’t see it as a trap. She, at least, was able to see that, and acted. I reacted.

Now, I don’t think I’m THAT bad. But in my utter lack of awareness about what I had been doing, and maybe to no small degree out of her need to not be the bad guy for being the one who broke up our family, she repainted me as a villain who had prevented her from becoming all that she was meant to be. She needed me to be the stupid boy, because the alternative was accepting her own part in things going wrong. I won’t fault her for that – at the time, I was doing a fair bit of finger pointing myself.

In the end, none of this mattered. We were a poor match, and I could have been as solicitous and nurturing towards her as she thought she deserved and it wouldn’t have prevented either of us from being deeply and irresistibly dissatisfied with our lives together. By the end, even a stupid boy like me could figure that out. And, fortunately, I was a whole lot less stupid about such things the next time love found me – though maybe not any less oblivious. Right, honey?

Songs of My Divorce #1

George Strait – Give It Away

With love to my wife Karen, who knows how this story ends.

Our aim in life should be to get better at things as we do them repeatedly, and I can say with absolute certainty that I did a much better job of choosing – or being chosen by – my second wife than my first. Marriages end for a lot of reasons, and I believe the core of my first marriage’s failure was that neither partner (1) fully appreciated what they were getting in the other and (2) fundamentally misunderstood who they were and what they wanted from life. She was 24 when we married and can probably be excused some for that: I was almost 30 and have no one to blame but my idiot self.

That doesn’t mean that, once you appreciate the magnitude of your mistake, you don’t stop trying to find a path forward together. If there is something worth saving, you each bend a little, adapt and, hopefully, grow stronger. And that can lead you into some unexpected places. When my first marriage was in its death throes, I did what many desperate men do in such times: I started listening to country music. This wasn’t due to its ample supply of busted marriage tunes, but for a far less subtle motive: my future ex had rediscovered her love of country, and I foolishly thought joining in might bring us closer. Of course, our issues were considerably bigger than that (though the gap between country and the post-punk and emo I was mostly listening to at the time is a pretty good microcosm for what was going on), and my project was doomed to fail.

I did, however, find myself enjoying a lot of what I checked out. I developed attachments to varying degrees with songs from a lot of artists – Dixie Chicks, Rascal Flatts, Keith Urban, Mr. Renee Zellweger – and I continued listening to country radio for several years until the proliferation of bro tunes chased me away. I still like Brad Paisley, and am looking forward to his upcoming album. (The uplift I felt listening to the first four tracks, released as an EP, show that he’s still got it, and then some.) But the one song that made the biggest impression on me during those sad days, and that I wish I had been able to listen to with my country-loving dad, was George Strait’s “Give It Away”.

My father had a pretty keen appreciation for the comforts of country music during marital turmoil. At one difficult point during his marriage to my mother, he wrote a song about the experience. I have the lyrics somewhere, in printed block capitals on lined school notebook paper, but I can recall the opening lines as if I wrote them myself:

Here I am, alone again, in a motel room once more / Just wishing that you would walk through that door

At another point – maybe the next two lines, maybe not – he sang:

I pray every night to the good lord above / To bring back to me the one I really love

Now, let’s stop here. My dad was not a praying man, or at least if he was, he didn’t make a big deal about it. But he was well versed in the cliches of country music, and a love-besotted man praying in a dingy motel room is about as country as it gets, assuming, of course, that he has a glass of whiskey in his hand (probable in my dad’s case), a dog by his side, a pickup truck parked outside and is waiting on a call from his mother while a lonesome train whistle blows off in the distance.

I also wrote songs when I was younger, but they were all awful (an early effort was called “Teddy Bear Love”, which is pretty damning on its own) and I had given up the practice long before my marriage rolled into the gutter. So I had to make do with the songs of others. Which is where “Give It Away” came in.

The premise is simple. A couple is splitting up, and the woman wants no reminders of the love gone sour, while the man soon finds that he can’t let go of those things. I was definitely the man in that story, trying to hold on to the dying relationship at (almost) any cost. Part of the appeal is the simplicity of the song. Co-written by the brilliant Jamey Johnson (seriously – listen to “In Color” and doubt me not) and two songwriting legends, the production is stripped down to a subtle backbeat, snappy guitars and mournful fiddle sounds. Strait’s voice has a gentle clarity – no trickery, just a straightforward purposefulness, a true troubadour (a role he would fully embrace on his next record of that name). It is emotive without being emotional, with not a drop of self-pity or false sentimentality. I don’t know Strait’s whole massive (30 studio albums) catalogue, but those who do consistently rate it among his best songs, and I won’t be arguing the counterpoint.

I don’t know if my dad ever heard this song – the single came out eight months before he died, but we weren’t really talking to each other then, and we certainly wouldn’t have discussed country music if we had been. I have sometimes thought my divorce might have given us a reason to draw closer – we would have finally had something in common. That’s foolish thinking, I know. But when I listen to “Give It Away” – even now, divorced almost 14 years, remarried to my soulmate for 12 and a half of those – I can’t help but feel a certain melancholy, but also pride that I overcame that attachment to my past (contrary to the ample evidence in this blog). In time, I became the woman in the song. When love ends, we should all aspire to that.

One-Hit Wonderment #2

Teddy Geiger – For You I Will (Confidence)

I’m a dedicated Spotify user, but it isn’t without its issues. Certainly, a lot of artists are screwed by the payment model, but artists being abused by the industry side of “music industry” is hardly a new phenomenon. More bothersome to me personally (yes, because that’s what counts) are the murky dealings that lead to songs entering and exiting the massive database of available tracks. Sometimes they might have a prolific artist’s entire catalogue (Van Morrison comes to mind) but for an album or two. Or a song you love might just show up one day on a playlist when it wasn’t there before (“Flagpole Sitta” by Harvey Danger, which I had been actively seeking on a regular basis). Or, in the case of Teddy Geiger’s “For You I Will (Confidence)”, a song I had on two of my own playlist creations, you might not even notice it’s gone until you go looking for it.

I have no recall of how the song came into my life, only that it caught my attention and never really lost it. On my old iPod is a version downloaded from LimeWire that differs from the single, and which I prefer. I love this song so much that I put it forward in 2011 to my fiancé as one of the possibilities for our first dance together as husband and wife. We ended up going with Ben Folds’ “The Luckiest” (I could do a whole series on what Folds’ music has meant to my life), Steve Earle’s “Valentine’s Day” found a place somewhere in the festivities, and “Linus and Lucy” marked our exit. I’ve never been to a wedding with cooler ceremony music than my own.

Geiger was something of a teen idol but there was a secret under this: Geiger had long known she was really female in a male body. She came out as trans in 2017, and carries on her life now as Teresa while still being Teddy in her career, releasing music as recently as October 2021. It’s also a bit of a cheat to call Geiger a one-hit wonder, since she has moved heavily into writing and production, working with such acts as One Direction, Maroon 5 and, most notably, Shawn Mendes, with the hits “Stitches”, “Mercy” (my two favourite Mendes tunes), and many others.

There’s no easy way to explain why the song still gets me in the feels. It’s about taking a risk for a chance at love, about diving in and having faith that everything will work out. I love the sort of echoey and bubbly feel with the slightly tinny guitars during the intro. I love how the verses suddenly explode with pent up emotion then drop low again before a colossal drum run into the chorus. I love the break after the second verse where Geiger states things she would do to get the girl’s attention. I love the way she sings “But I’ve got to try” in the last chorus. I love that a pop song uses the word “muster”. (That can’t be too common, right?) I love the romantic belief that everything will work out fine if you just commit

The music video is a classic of teen movie cliches. Shots of Geiger looking with longing at her dream girl – Kristin Cavallari of “Laguna Beach” fame – intertwined with Kristin’s obviously douchey and unworthy boyfriend (who reminds me of Derek, Justin Long’s competition for the love of Julie Gonzalo in “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story”) are intercut with Geiger in her home recording studio. It moves then to a pool party where Geiger takes that leap of faith she’s been singing about and gets to kiss the girl (bewildered Derek stands by with his red Solo cup, the universal label of young male douchery), who wakes up on a couch in that home studio, smiling at Geiger as she puts the finishing touches on the song she just wrote about them coming together as a couple.

Yes, it sounds cheesy, but I’ve never thought that meant something had to be bad: cheese as a food is as good as it gets! Sometimes we think things are cheesy because they’re too familiar, too direct, too emotional. But maybe that just makes them universal, too: most of us have known that feeling of wanting to be with someone who doesn’t see us that way. I listened to this song a lot in late 2007 and early 2008 as my world was falling apart and I felt completely unloved, and again later in 2008 when life was rapidly becoming better than I had ever thought possible. Maybe that’s why it still hits me hard even now: it feels like my own story was being told, that I was the one cannonballing into the water.