I’ve long maintained that I listen to a pretty wide variety of music. Classic rock was probably the first thing I really tweaked to — one of my earliest memories is of falling asleep on my mother’s lap at a casual house party my parents and I were attending, with the smell of pot in the air and Pink Floyd on the stereo (how very 70s a thing to remember), and rock was the vast bulk of vinyl albums my parents had — but my grandfather often had various classical playing when we visited, and that grew on me as well. Over the years, plenty of other stuff was added into the mix, from punk to 80s hits (some of which are still solid) to various metal to jazz to musicals… and the list grows.
There used to be two exceptions to the statement I used when the topic of music preferences came up, saying that I listened to at least a bit of pretty much everything I had encountered other than rap and country.
It wasn’t a snobbish thing, or me trying to be exclusionary. It was simply fact. Or so I thought.
Then it occurred to me many years into defaulting to that comment that, hold on… actually, some of what I was breakdancing to in the 80s, and liked, was rap. And some of what Anthony Kiedis was doing as the singer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers (definitely on heavy rotation for me for a while) was basically rap. Then soon after that, Rage Against The Machine hit the scene, and things got even more blurred for me, because pretty much everything that Zack de la Rocha does over that aggressive, crunchy groove of the band in song after song was absolutely rapping. So while I wasn’t going out of my way to listen to full-on, pure rap like Run-DMC and Public Enemy and Ice-T and NWA — though some found its way to me anyway and still sits on playlists of mine today — I definitely did like some rap. And that appreciation has only grown over the years.
That only left country.
And outside my wheelhouse it stayed for decades.
I didn’t try to make it so, you understand. It was just the case that I hadn’t heard any one country song that I could genuinely say I particularly enjoyed.
Then it happened.
Two years back I was listening to a podcast I like, with Paul F. Tompkins and his wife Janie casually talking about whatever comes up. And it turned out that they’re fans of country music, and had watched the Country Music Awards that year, and they mentioned that a performer named Jelly Roll(?) had… won something? Performed? Something of the like. And both Paul and Janie started singing together:
“I only talk to God when I need a favor.
And I only pray when I ain’t got a prayer.”
… and I thought, hey, country or not, that’s kind of catchy. I’m a writer, and turns of phrase often catch my ear. That one did the trick.
I checked out the video for the song, and… whoa. Cut in with shots of Jelly Roll singing, it’s a silent story of a father going to a small town hospital to visit with his young daughter, who’s sleeping in her hospital bed while hooked up to tubes and machines and clearly in rough shape.
He prays at her bedside.
He prays in the hospital chapel.
And as he exits, he’s passed by doctors and nurses racing down the hall, where his daughter’s room is.
He runs after them and stops short at her door… as the medical staff run past him, farther down the hall.
And he sees his daughter still sleeping silently in her bed. And he sags against the door frame, relieved, as the song ends.
Heavy stuff, and hit close to home, with my being a dad and deeply understanding how helpless I would’ve felt if my kid had ever been that sick. The willingness to do anything. The prayers I would’ve said, lack of religious faith notwithstanding, to anyone or anything that could help.
I didn’t add the song into my playlists, but it was notable that it was the first clearly country song that I really considered one I liked, or at least appreciated on an artistic level.
Then cut to two weeks ago. I was at work, slinging boxes and flats of cans in the warehouse, as one does, and someone had connected their phone to a communal Bluetooth speaker and was playing some definite country songs. And I didn’t catch much as a few played in the background, but then I did hear, “I need you like God needs the Devil, honey.” Again, catchy phrase (and beyond that, a pretty deep religious concept) that I found repeating in my head for a while.
Following that song was another one with yet more lyrics that I liked:
“If I’m so awful
Then why’d you stick around this long?
And if it’s the whiskey
Then why you keep on pullin’ it off the shelf?
You hate that when you look at me,
you halfway see yourself.
And it got me thinkin’
If I’m the problem
Well, you might be the reason.”
If I’m the problem… you might be the reason?
I mean, come on, music genre entirely aside for a minute, that’s a great line.
And that was it. I was done. It was time for me to acknowledge that despite decades of not hearing country that particularly appealed to me, you know what? There were now a few country songs that had catchy turns of phrase woven in with genuinely good music that I liked.
I made a playlist titled, “Kinda Country WTF” (evidently still not fully embracing this whole new concept) and threw those three songs into it: Need a Favor by Jelly Roll, God Needs The Devil by Jonah Kagen, and I’m The Problem by Morgan Wallen.
That’s it for now. And I’m not saying I’m a total convert, going out and getting me a pair of cowboy boots and a ten gallon hat thwarted in size by only my belt buckle. Nothing of the sort. But I’m now more open to something I never thought I would be. And it feels pretty good.
Just when you think that you’re probably of the age where musical tastes have long since been established — and I imagine it’s got to be the same with a great many other things — something comes along by total chance and makes you realize that these kinds of tastes aren’t set in stone. Not unless you want them to be.
So keep watching and reading and listening to and generally trying new things, because old dogs absolutely can learn new tricks. And at any time you may, despite a lifetime believing otherwise, discover a whole new thing you genuinely like after all.