At some point around the middle of February (when I was trying to write 14 songs in the month), I decided I needed to write a song that was more clearly a story song than was true of the first few songs I'd written. And when I look back at my songs from the month, the ones that I like the best are the ones that tell stories. That’s not surprising – I think that’s a strength of my songwriting in general: my best songs tell stories (and not necessarily stories from my own life). But in thinking about what worked (and what didn’t) in my February songs I think I came up with a slightly different take on what it means to tell stories and how doing that makes a song successful. A few of the songs I like best from the month are clearly stories. Underground (Draglines and Dollar Signs) is the story in which the narrator “grew up in a coal town” and then found herself facing financial pressures to allow fracking for extraction of other kinds of fossil fuels on her land. Ludlow, 1914 is explicitly a story about what happened in a labor action about mining conditions during a specific historical event. Those are the songs that most obviously tell stories. And both of them involved some actual research. In the case of Underground I wanted to write a song that would address fracking and decided that it would be interesting to look at a place that had in an earlier era had been involved with extracting coal but is now instead extracting petroleum. So even just identifying where that might be geographically required looking at where those two activities have been done historically, and picking an area – I ended up choosing Pennsylvania. I then had to look at the ways fossil fuel extraction had been done in that place, and the specific types of effects in that area (as well as other geographic details – there’s a reason there are box elders, for instance, and sweet grass, in the song). The same thing was true with Ludlow, 1914. It started with a New Yorker article about the strike and resulting massacre, and I did other research about what was going on in that place and time. I had to figure out what the specific conditions were in the mines, what the strikers were asking for, what language they would have used to describe the situation, and other things. It might be less obvious that Susanna’s Song involved research, but it did. That’s the song that is meant to be a re-telling of O Susanna, but from a different perspective. So it started with research into the history of the song. And when I found out it was a minstrel song originally, it meant I had to find out more about slavery (the context in which minstrel songs emerged, and the situation in the region the song is set when the song was written), and how the slave markets worked and what slaves in that area and in that era would be doing. In all three cases there are enormous numbers of details and types of background information I learned that didn’t make it directly into the song. Susanna’s song, in particular, is much simpler than I first intended to make it – I was going to put the slavery part (including perhaps a market in which the person who was returning from Alabama to Louisiana would have been sold) more explicitly into the song. But when I started writing it, and, in particular, when I wrote the last verse, I decided that I could say it much more poetically and simply if I was less explicit about that detail. (Instead, the first two lines of that last verse are “Your hands were never meant to pick the cotton; My back was not intended for the fields.”) But part of what I realized is that knowing all that detail influenced the song even if it didn’t get directly written into the song. I understood the relationship between the two people in that song better because I know so much about the broader context. I could write the last verse of Ludlow (“I guess there are no winners, as the dead, and God, observe; but I still think that workers should be paid what they deserve”) in a way that – I hope – doesn’t sound trite, because I understand the history that led to that point. In the case of Underground I could say something in passing “(but the cattle brought in barely more than they cost”) that could explain the decision to allow someone to extract fossil fuels on your land, because it could carry the weight of the rest of the un-said information. One of my other favorite songs of the month, You Remind Me , is less obviously a story song, but it is – it tells the story of the narrator’s love and appreciation for someone. And because that one really is about my life I knew all of those details without having to do research (although I did have to remind myself to be specific). And I think that’s what makes that song work – the backstory, even if it’s not told, is there in the details. “You remind me that to listen to hope over doubt” comes from a specific context (as does something as mundane as “and there’s nothing as real as a walk or a meal to be grateful for when days are done”). The songs that I think don’t quite work, even if they have elements of good songwriting, are those – like Letting Go of Leaving or Sit With Me – where I either don’t feel like I have a full picture of the story (or didn’t let myself really tell the story that prompted the song). Those songs feel too generic. The funny thing is that, in some ways, they don’t look that much more generic than something like Susanna’s Song . . . but they really are, and the difference is in the backstory. I used to think it was funny and a little pretentious that actors would invent a backstory for their characters that had nothing specifically to do with the scene they were acting, but I’ve come to realize that it’s part of the same phenomenon. If you know the full context into which the character you’re embodying fits, then even if all you show of that character is a three-minute scene or three verses and a chorus, there will be a depth to that character and that situation that goes beyond what the surface shows. And that is what makes a good story and a good song.