Your Draft Needs More Country Music

Rock music is about ideas. Country music is about stuff.

I grew up listening to rock. The Pitchfork-approved indie rock and late-sixties revival that dominated LIVE 105 in the Bay Area during the early aughts. Death Cab for Cutie. The Rolling Stones. Jet. Jimi Hendrix. Modest Mouse.

At twenty two, I moved to eastern Utah to work as a river guide. It’s oil country out there. Low rolling hills and Sinclair gas stations and one radio station. Country star Kip Moore hit the airwaves that summer. “Somethin’ ‘Bout a Truck” is a pop-country song about drinking a beer with a pretty girl in a red sundress somewhere in a farmer’s field. Nonspecific, as if the song is a recipe for a country hit and not the country hit itself. Add two parts truck and one part pretty girl and a teaspoon ice cold beer.

I have failed, again and again, to write about that summer. I was just out of college and, for the first time, truly far from home. I felt wild.

My coworkers and I used to scream that Moore song every time it came on the radio in the work truck. Top of our lungs, making up lyrics, pounding out percussion on the dashboard. I loved it even before I knew all the words. I hardly needed to know them. A list of mutable country objects: campfires, dogs, shots of whiskey.

In a country song, the pieces can feel interchangeable. That’s because country music is about stuff. Dogs. Boots. Pretty girls. Beer. F-150s. Dirt roads. That is, after all, what makes country music such an easy punchline. Decades of songs that seem to revisit the same familiar objects. But these cultural symbols are powerful precisely because of their simplicity, their ubiquity. They make meaning through association, inviting a reader’s own experiences into their understanding of a piece.

A lot of conventional music theory says it’s a mistake to place too much emphasis on lyrics. NPR Music critic Stephen Thompson wrote, “[Instrumental] works access emotions just as efficiently as words do, if not more so.” Often, lyrics are written for how they sound with the music with less thought given to their meaning on their own.

But, country music has a reputation for “storytelling,” which is another way of saying that it centers the lyrics. The meanings explicit and unabstract.

Consider this line, a favorite of mine, from the chorus of the 2017 Logan Mize single “Better Off Gone”: “She’ll know when our hometown country station turns to static / She ain’t ever been that far from home.”

Here, the crackling static of the fading radio station represents something ineffable. Freedom, apprehension, an expansive frontier rolling out before you. The image has an intuitive, emotional resonance. Particularly for someone who has had the experience of driving away from home.

But unlike a metaphor, the meaning here does not hinge on a direct comparison. Metaphor clarifies by pointing to similarities. If I were to suggest that someone has a “heart of stone,” the metaphor implies shared properties between two objects; both are hard. But that feeling of freedom and the sound of radio static are not similar and they are not interchangeable.

Instead, static and freedom have a metonymic relationship. As with a metaphor, the relationship is associative but the association works differently. The metonymic relationship is one of copresence. Both things exist together — physically near each other — in the material world.

A more familiar example of metonymy: “tongue” used to describe a language or dialect. The meaning here relies on a contextual understanding of the relationship between the tongue muscles and spoken word. In the same way, “record label” can mean the circular label at the center of a vinyl album or the music company that produces the record. For someone with the right cultural context, “Nashville“ can describe both a city in Tennessee and the country music industry at large.

To appreciate the emotional meaning of the radio static that occurs at the edges of a small town’s broadcast range in “Better Off Gone,” I need certain kinds of cultural knowledge. I need to know something about rural life and how radio stations work. And, I need some implicit understanding of the uniquely American relationship between freedom and the automobile. This is what I mean by copresence — what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls a “word by word” relationship — the literal proximity of freedom and radio static within a rural American cultural context.

Now, of course, this image is only powerful to the extent it aligns with the emotional associations I already know how to make, either from my lived experience or other art. And I have lived in places where the crackle of static marks the bounds of civilizations.

But I have struggled to write evocatively about that era of my life in Utah. The feeling of freedom is too big. My drafts lacked life. In the intervening years, I have come back again and again to those old radio country songs because they capture that same fresh liberation they did when I first heard them over a gas station milkshake on a dusty 110-degree day. They express what I never could.

Consider another example, from Brandon Lay’s 2017 single “Speakers, Bleachers and Preachers.” Amidst all the hometown imagery, Lay includes “82 degrees on the bank sign,” speaking to the listener who intuitively recognizes the digital bank sign’s omnipresence in rural life. It’s not a conventional small-town symbol like a high school football team or a single stoplight. Instead, it’s a symbol that has more faith in the listener. The writer believes that the right listener can make the necessary associative link.

When people talk about Taylor Swift’s poetics, this is usually what they’re referring to. Her inventive use of metonymy, the storytelling style she brought with her when she crossed over from country music to pop. She speaks in image and object. The stolen red scarf in “All Too Well,” the cardigan that haunts folklore, the “stupid old pickup truck” she never got to drive in “Picture To Burn.”

More than engaging the five senses, metonymy enlists our emotional histories. For me, Lay’s bank sign conjures the narrow main street of that eastern Utah town. Drive-thru coffee the morning after the rodeo. Crossing into Colorado just to buy real beer. My own life pours into the song’s gaps. Not just the idea of small-town wildness but the feeling of it.

”Show, don’t tell,” goes the old writing adage. Similarly, “no ideas but in things,” is a famous maxim of poet William Carlos Williams. Because, of course, our internal experiences are directly tied to the physical world around us, in ways that are often predictable and shared.

But this requires a degree of trust in one’s readers, that they will make the same associative leaps. And it requires comfort with the possibility that they will make different leaps altogether. Evocation is an act of faith in shared human experience.

Of course, writing must do more than music. It’s enough for a song to merely elicit a vibe. As a form, writing must push further, be more explicit. And yet country music reminds us to leave more off the page and trust readers to meet us halfway. The more space I can leave for the reader’s experience, the more invested they are in a story’s meaning.

So, rather than fearing the language of tropes, we can learn to speak it. When faced with the biggest and most profound emotions, I find it helps to turn my gaze to the physical world, trusting that my feelings arise inevitably from the scenes around me.

The “somethin’” can be ineffable but the truck never is.