Although many of my songs are based in something that happened, they’re also fiction. But the idea of fiction is to use it to make the song more true. Dave Carter used to preface many of his songs, including the most imaginative ones, by saying “this is a true story.” In songwriting workshops or critiquing groups sometimes people respond to feedback about word choice or images by saying “but that isn’t how it happened” or “this song came from a dream, and in the dream, this is the way the dream went, so this is how it needs to be in the song.” It’s your song – you can do with it what you want – but to me the whole purpose of songwriting is to tell the story most effectively, even if it involves changing the story or imagining details that might not have been there in real life. And the trick is to make those details right – that’s the reason they’re there in the first place, to fill in the scene and bring people in to the experience of the song. So when I’m writing and revising I need to pay attention to things like meter (which trumps everything) but also to getting the details “right,” even if they’re made up. I think I’ve mentioned the song 2nd and Magnolia before on this blog, and the more I think of that song the more examples come to mind from it. It had its genesis in a restaurant, actually called Ralph’s Burgers, that I walked by every day in Gainesville Florida when I was living there for a few months. There was evidence of a homeless person there – a shopping cart with some things in it, a few possessions in the bushes – although I never saw the person. One day Ralph’s was put up for sale, and the grounds were prettied up . . . and all evidence of the other occupant of the grounds disappeared. So I wrote the song to tell the story I imagined of that person. And although I started the song with Ralph’s Burgers, I changed some of the details. The actual location was something like 2nd Avenue and 2nd Street SE (Gainesville is not all that creative with its place names), but I decided that I wanted a place name that was both more poetic and more communicative of the fact that this story took place in the south, so I changed the name of one of the streets. And although there was a drive-through beer place across the street, it wasn’t called Billy’s -- it was actually called something that wouldn’t easily communicate what kind of place it was – so I changed its name, too. There were two details in particular that I made up entirely but that I tried to get “right.” First, I named my person Anna Mae. It seemed like the right kind of name for someone of the age and in the region I was placing the song, but I’d literally never known anyone with that name. A little while after my first CD came out I was at a store in Gainesville and saw “Anna Mae’s Barbeque Sauce” and was thrilled – it gave me evidence that I’d chosen a plausible name. I also wanted to set the scene when the property was being prettied-up for sale (and had a set of syllables in a particular meter, because by that point the song was mostly written to work with). After playing around with a lot of different ways to convey it, I chose “they planted mums and asters by the walkway.” I’m not a plant person, really, but I figured that it made sense that if they were planting something to try to gin up a sale, it would be annuals, and those turned out to be the ones in that category that fit the meter best. Later, at a farmers market, I saw a sign advertising “mums and asters” (I’m not even sure I knew what asters were before that) and was thrilled to discover not only that they were the sort of plant you could use for that purpose, but that they would be sold at the same time as mums by the same plant purveyor. There’s some – in fact, more than I’d realized until this very moment – similarity with the song The Best Art on my forthcoming CD. That’s also written about a person on the street, but one I actually met and conversed with. He’s an artist and in our conversation I asked him about what he used to make his art. His answer is what inspired the song, because he talked about how you don’t need fancy supplies, like ink from China if the art is good; he used Magic Marker, chalk, and pencil. In conveying that sentiment I wanted to include examples of what the fancy materials you didn’t need were, and used his specific Chinese inks image. But I needed more, and so I went online to art supplies stores (I have no visual art inclinations or experience) to try to determine what would count as high falutin’ art supplies. I came up with this stanza: Some artists look for value in the fanciest supplies Buy the finest inks from China, sable brushes, custom dyes But if you have a good idea and the courage to proceed Magic Marker, chalk, and pencil are sufficient . . . So . . . right now I’m reading a book that is largely about an artist. And just last night I reached a passage describing her supplies, particularly indicating the ones she valued, and first on the list was sable brushes. I let out an excited yelp on reading the evidence that a detail I’d worked so hard to make up was indeed true.