This book has been written in real time, from inside the wreckage, from the other side of redemption and back again while it was on fire, it still is - a controlled burn, not me this time but something much higher and it's burning off the dross - finally and I'm standing in the middle of it.
I kept quiet for a long time. Not out of fear. Out of patience. The patience ran out.
We're going to finish it together. I'm glad you're here - even the silent ones, the keyboard critics, all of us. Life is happening. Pull up a chair, but wipe your feet. This is my house.
“Matt King writes and sings songs that are so achingly true to life that they make you want to cry, or ball up your fists, or burn something down.”
Rick Bragg, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, All Over but the Shoutin', Ava's Man
For that kid in a Gold Norris house trailer.
For every dog still tied to its chain.
For the last kid picked.
For my Heidi.
-Still here.
From the Prologue
My first words were a command. I was not quite two years old. I pointed at the record player and said, “Rekky lo on.” Turn on the record player. Before I could form a sentence, before I could say mama or daddy or please, I told someone to activate a machine that produces organized sound waves.
That night, or some night near it, they put me to bed in my father's guitar case with a bottle. Not as punishment. You might say that my first bed was a resonance chamber. The wood that made music during the day held me while I slept.
I am telling you this because it matters later. It matters a lot.
Life started out in a trailer on Route 2 Fruitland Road in Edneyville, North Carolina. My maternal grandmother killed my grandfather in what they called a hunting accident. My mother was adopted by family relatives. The orphan cycle was supposed to continue. Grandmother leaves. Mother leaves. Son leaves. Three generations of walking out.
I didn't leave.
That's the whole book, really. I didn't leave. Not the empty venue. Not the marriage that was breaking. Not the business that's cost me my hands and is down to myself and three others - succeeding in spite of it, still bleeding, still here.
Not the craft. Not the faith. Not the practice.
Still here. Every time. Against every instinct the bloodline handed me.
I went to Nashville with $300 and a young wife. My first live performance in that city was standing in front of Harlan Howard on his birthday. Harlan Howard. The man who said all you need for a country song is three chords and the truth. No record deal. No publishing contract. No connections. Just a kid from the mountains with a guitar, playing for the man who wrote the rule book.
He didn't offer me any tips or tricks. Nobody did that night. But I played. In front of the man who defined it. And I didn't stop playing for the next twenty-five years.
And I haven't stopped.
Not yet.
Writing in real time. Follow the book as it happens.
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