that is the old-timey sound of Ten-
nessee. The music reached across
rivers, mountains and the Mason
Dixon line and bound my soul
through a sense of the American
songbook, the most frightening
sense of realism, and an unspoken
joy to work, sweat, love, lose and
feel a wide range of emotions. I
don’t have to try to “eat a streak
with a big ol’ tablespoon” to know
how it feels to be so enraptured by
a woman that I simply lose the ca-
pacity for rational thought. My re-
lationship with country music and
its place in the sonic history of our
nation is what I’ve always enjoyed.
Scratch Roses and Broken Hearts,
NJ STAGE - ISSUE 58
The Losin’ Kind and my most re-
cent album This American Life are
inspired by Hank Sr, Johnny Cash,
Elvis Presley, Stephen Foster, Wil-
lie Nelson, and Roy Acuff.
It took me and my father 14
hours to drive between Mon-
mouth County, New Jersey and
Nashville, Tennessee. On April 7th,
I listened to the notes, rests, fid-
dles, pedal steel bends encoded
in a mystical and mysterious sys-
tem of zeros and ones as we trav-
eled to their source.
We left early Sunday to reach the
west end of Virginia by 6:30pm.
We spent the night in Abingdon,
Virginia and had dinner at Papa
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