I’m not sure what I’m allowed to say here. I don’t want to be too specific because too many things are unsettled. But here’s an outline of how all this got started:
Chris went to Houston for a day business trip a while ago. While he was there, he happened to meet Cliff Young of Caedmon’s Call. A couple weeks later, Cliff casually mentioned how much he liked Chris to his friend and bandmate, Andrew Osenga. Osenga checked out Chris’ website. He liked what he saw, so he sent Chris an e-mail telling him so, at which point, Chris came into the living room with his “I know something good that you don’t know” smile and said, “Andrew Osenga just e-mailed me!” Chris wrote him back, telling him we were big fans and that I’d even written a review of Letters to the Editor, Vol. 1 recently. They chatted and talked on the phone and decided that we should all meet at the AP Christmas show, for which we’d already purchased tickets.
So we did.
And it was great.
After the show, we waited while all the artists chatted with their fans. When the lines finally died down, Andy O turned around, saw us sitting there and said, “There you guys are!” before taking a seat beside us. And then we just hung out and talked for 30 or 40 minutes. I forgot to ask every single one of the questions I wanted to ask. (Most of them were about his writing process.) Because as soon as he started talking, I forgot that he’s one of my favorite musicians. He was a regular guy. Instantly likable. Instantly accessible. And he asked questions about us before we could even think to ask any about him.
So we talked about Hemingway and Steinbeck, How to Kill a Mockingbird and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We discussed how morbid Flannery O’Connor can be and how Presbyterians seem to love her (even though she was a Catholic). I recommended that he try her again, but this time in chunks, instead of reading her collection of short stories all the way through. (I didn’t mention it then, but I’d also recommend reading her essays/letters. They cast a new light on her as a writer and as a theologian of sorts. I don’t agree with her approach, but it’s interesting.) He admitted that he’s never made it all the way through Faulkner, and I told him that you gotta read it through with the Cliff’s Notes the first time (which I can condone without shame as a former English teacher) and to remember that Faulkner is torture when you’re actually reading him but surprisingly rewarding when you get to the end. (I’m assuming we were talking The Sound and the Fury. I like Light in August much more, although every time I start it, I can’t stand the writing style at first. But then I get into the rhythm of it and fall in love with the characters.) “I’m just saying. I need a period now and then, man!” Andy concluded. And he’s right. Faulkner failed English. (I wouldn’t let my Basic Writing students anywhere near him.) And he pretended to be be a wounded war veteran for years, when he never even shipped out. But that’s one of my favorite things (the crazy liar part, not the no punctuation part) about him.
We talked about the freelance business, how sometimes deals fall through, churches don’t pay, and money you were counting on just isn’t there. Turns out the independent music business offers the same trials. So we covered making the mortgage, buying the groceries, keeping the kids from breaking the laptop, and even his personal trick for helping his daughter, Ella, keep from crying when he drops her off at Parents’ Day Out. We talked about first birthday parties and how babysitters can save a marriage. When Chris told him he loved the show and that was really saying something because he had high expectations, I said:
“Yeah, Chris is a little bit of a Snob.”
“Me too, man,” Andy replied.
“To be fair, I’ve got a little Snob in me too,” I admitted.
“Oh, I know. My bad rhymes and everything,” he smiled.
(He was giving me a hard time about the side note in this post.)
“I love your songs, and nearly all the time, the rhyming is awesome. Plus, rhyming well is so hard to do. I can’t do it. I don’t even try. None of my poems rhyme!” I scrambled.
He and Chris just laughed.
(Seriously, though. I was telling the truth about rhyming being hard to do and him doing it well. Actually the one or two “bad” rhymes I was talking about would be better labeled “easy” rhymes. And even those beat mine.)
When I brought up how he’d said he didn’t like Dallas on his blog, he hesitated for a minute until I confessed that Dallas is too big and wealthy for me too. Chris told him I want to live in Stars Hollow, and that’s how we learned that Andy likes Lorelai, Rory, Richard, Emily, and Luke, but can’t stand the townies. But he liked the show for the writing (which is exactly why I love it and exactly why Chris hates it). Then he just casually mentioned that he knows one of the writers who started on the show (Gilmore Girls) in the second season! What?!? The guy now writes for Grey’s Anatomy. I seriously need a network like this.
Anyway, he eventually asked if we wanted to go out for a drink or something. (He doesn’t do coffee.) But we had to get back and relieve the babysitters. Before we left, he took us back to the tour bus, where we briefly met Cason (as in, “Cason’s always talking about the sky that covers Kansas/wish I could be under it today,” from “The Best I Can”) and chatted for a few minutes with Andrew Peterson. Andy P was so gracious. And when I told him how much Caelyn loves his kids’ album, Slugs & Bugs & Lullabies, and that I actually enjoy it too, he told me how he thinks kids want (and deserve) real music, just like they’d rather play with your cell phone than the light-up one you bought for them at Wal-Mart. “They should have real music, good music that’s about the things that concern them,” he said. I couldn’t agree more. As a bonus, before we left, he placed his hands on Chris’ shoulders and said, “You haven’t looked me in the eye yet. So I’m looking you in yours now and saying, ‘Thanks for coming to the show and helping us musicians out. We need it and I appreciate it.’” It was awesome.
Chris claimed he just didn’t want to stare and look star-struck. I’m not so sure.
Andy O asked us to pray that they’d make it to Nashville safely and on time for his youngest girl’s first birthday party and then they were back on the bus, headed for Taco Cabana and then Nashville, only to return to Austin the day after. I admit that while they were singing on stage, I was thinking how incredible the community between the artists is, how much I would love being a part of something like that. I thought about how they work on songs together, tossing words in and out, playing with rhythms, creating something beautiful and meaningful out of nothing, and I longed to do that with poetry again. But standing in that moonlit parking lot with wafts of diesel swirling around us, I remembered that, yes, it’s wonderful, but it’s not as romantic as it seems.
Sure, they love what they do. But they miss their families too. They’re real men and women with tangible (and intangible) needs. They pray for God’s provision every day, and they feel it when he lets them stretch. It made me appreciate what they do even more. It made me hear the story they were singing more loudly and see it in how they live, doing the best they can, raising their families, following Jesus the way he’s enabled them to, failing and sinning before hundreds (and just each other too), and in that, illustrating the most freeing message of Christ: forgiveness, what it means “to be known and loved, loved and known” (to quote The Normals). It made me realize that changing your own corner of the world happens in lots of ways because God’s called us and gifted us in many different ways, but always, at the root of it all, whether you’re putting clothes in the donation bin on the corner, feeding children in Africa, cleaning bed pans in the local hospital, preaching from the pulpit, teaching your children Truth, or sleeping on a tour bus, it’s about Jesus being more than us, but always in us.
Andrew Osenga Holds the Light
You can help turn on the light. Check out some of Andy’s music on his Virb page or visit his website and listen to all of The Morning by selecting the album player on the front page. If you like what you hear, buy some albums here.
10 Comments
December 5, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Katy, this post was amazing. And it confirms something that I’m thinking lately, and I don’t even know if I have the guts to write it, because writing it makes it real…like maybe I have to do it if I write it.
But what if, what if, what if, there was the possibility for a sort of creative community among those friends who read one another’s blogs and wrote and thought and commented on various sundries? What if there was something world changing that could be born from that? And what if that creativity could be done in service of the Kingdom, but not necessarily “for” or “to” the Kingdom? And what if it all started as friends getting together to talk about the “what if” part?
Just some thoughts I’ve been chewing on for the last few days.
December 5, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Another thought: is Cormac McCarthy at all like Faulkner? I mean, have you READ his Border Trilogy? The stories are so poetic, but the punctuation is wack! I just bought “The Road” but have yet to read it. And I should have already read “No Country for Old Men.” And now it’s a dang movie. And we all know I’m a movie sucker.
December 5, 2007 at 2:28 pm
It sounds like this was a really profound experience for you! Thanks for sharing it.
December 6, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Hey guys, Caelyn & I are in Altus, where I’ve yet to get the laptop hooked up to the Internet & what I’m gettin’ on the iPhone is way slow. Plus my texting skills ain’t so mad, so here’s my short reply:
Steve! Thanks! Keep thinking! Keep having guts! I want to hear more soon.
Lex, thanks for reading.
Longer comments coming (here and elsewhere) soon!
December 7, 2007 at 10:29 am
i was thinking of mentioning the idea of a writer’s collective (since we all write.read.blog together through some stuff). but then i thought it sounded too Dead Poets Society or whatever. but then i re-thought it, and i thought: no, it would really be cool. so steve, i like your idea. i am trying to think of a name…
December 7, 2007 at 10:30 am
How about the Chill’d Guild? HAHAHAHAHAHA
but seriously, i am gonna think of names. if not for any other reason, because they’ll be funny to post on my blog
December 7, 2007 at 10:56 am
[...] I went on over to Katy’s blog this morning, and there was Steve’s comment. [...]
December 11, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Okay. Sorry it took me so long.
Steve, thanks again! I’m glad you enjoyed the post. I know what you mean about it taking guts to write what’s in your head sometimes. Putting something in writing makes it so concrete, not to mention, people start holding you to it. I had more questions for you about what exactly you’ve been thinking, but I guess we covered it over at Allie’s blog. I take it you two had the same “vision”? Before you brought it up, I had an inkling of the same concept, but not enough to have have known what to say about it. Have you had any more thoughts that haven’t been mentioned yet? I’m excited/a little nervous to see how this will all pan out.
I haven’t read McCarthy’s Border Triology. But maybe I should. (I need people to recommend new/now novels. So you guys get after it!) Faulkner’s punctuation isn’t always crazy, but it is in The Sound and the Fury. It’s intentional and functional, though. In case you haven’t read it . . . . He uses 4 different points of view to tell the story of one family. The first-person narrator in the first section is a mentally-impaired man, whose ability to communicate reflects his mental state, hence punctuation is used improperly and limitedly. In this section, Faulkner also jumps between past and present w/o any warning, drops characters into the tale with no introductions, and has the narrator say whatever is on his mind (usually something sensory) with no filter whatsoever. In another section, the narrator is suicidal. In the scenes before his suicide, Faulkner writes with no punctuation at all to put the reader into the pace and chaos of the narrator’s mind. Needless to say, it’s confusing. But the punctuation is restored by the final section and the story finally makes sense, so the reader feels like he/she has been through the redemptive (and I’m using that word kind of loosely) process that the family has endured.
Chris went to see No Country for Old Men while we were in OK. (Yes, I was jealous.) He really liked it. He says it’s “bone-chilling.” And I think that really means something, because I’ve never heard him use that adjective before.
Lex, I guess it was a profound experience. It didn’t necessarily seem like it at the time. It was just cool, but once I started writing about it, I realized there was more to it than I thought. I haven’t written about anything faith-related in a long time. I just felt like I’d spent too much time writing about it in someone else’s voice for my old job. I thought I needed to give that voice time to work itself out of my writing/head. At the end of this post, I suddenly decided it’d been long enough. I hope I was right.
Allie! Chill’d Guild! Ha! I’m glad you’re on the same page as Steve! Thanks for running with the idea. “Obsolete Vernacular” is great! And I still like Walt’s “Back from Oklahoma.”
December 13, 2007 at 4:51 pm
[...] Poets Society (This one’s not really in the Family Drawer. I got tricked into watching by Allie’s reference not long ago. But don’t worry. I fast-forwarded through the [...]
March 9, 2008 at 4:04 pm
[...] I’ve mentioned Andrew Peterson and Randall Goodgame’s kids’ album before, and said that for a children’s album, it’s actually enjoyable. It’s obviously for kids, but it won’t make you want to destroy every music-playing device in your house. The first half is made up of fun tracks about bears not wearing underwear, post office ladies in the snow, babies who won’t burp, and imaginary tigers. The second half serves up lullabies that feature both daddies singing to their children, assuring them that they’ll be right down the hall while they sleep and not to worry, God will be keeping them through the night. Obviously, “Beautiful Girl” fits into the latter half. [...]