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.