Chapter Fourteen

Homeownership, the world changed; van trouble and playing anyway

Songs in this episode 

• (What's So Funny `Bout) Peace Love & Understanding live Sept 21, 2001
• Don't Ever Change April 24, 2026

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Chapter fourteen I must have settled in. I was about to buy a house in Nashville. I hadn't intended to buy a place so soon or to be a landlord, but just like with our first rental, my landlords needed to sell, and it hadn't even been a year since Hazel and I moved in. I saw our possible future of moving vans and working out the layout of Kroger after Kroger until we'd lived in every part of Nashville. In New York City, tenants usually had some protection, but the Nashville rental market was a free for all. Who knew how much rent would cost for the next place we found? Between that, utilities, and frequent pricey repairs to the Aerostar, I was barely scraping by, not to mention catching up on years of lax dental care. I'd never been great at money, so why start when I actually had some? Can't you find a cheaper house? My father asked when I sought his help with the down payment. The owners, sellers, had offered to finance. Even though I had the first steady monthly paycheck of my entire working life, I still didn't qualify for a mortgage through the bank. Everyone said the cheapest places were over in East Nashville, past the new stadium where the Titans played football. But the schools in East Nashville were even worse than the ones on the west side of town. It would still be another year or two before voters amended the state constitution to allow a lottery to raise much needed funding for schools in Tennessee. My dad made a good point, but I was so used to battling with them I didn't bother to consider looking around. So then I owned a house. But I didn't know anything about owning a house. This one had been beautifully renovated and maintained by Mark and Donna, the previous owners, and rent from the attached unit would help with my monthly mortgage payments and loan payment to my dad. My tenant was so sweet, quiet, and employed that it never occurred to me to raise her rent even a little bit. I never asked to see her small, tidy apartment until I needed to get in to make a repair. When the air conditioner malfunctioned, the repair guy waved a gummed up, fuzzy filter at me. Y'all need to change these once in a while, he said. Um what do you call that just so I know what to ask for? Decades of New York City apartment living left me ill prepared for all the issues that go along with owning a house with a yard. It was a big day when I found my way to Home Depot for the first time and bought a lawnmower. Being my own landlord was a lot to balance with frequent touring. Flights, drives, and gigs were a lot to balance along with parenting, but at least we had a secure base at last. Nobody could kick us out unless I fell behind on the payments, so I needed to work harder, push more. A tour on the west coast tested me and Paul to the breaking point. Somehow we were okay back in the cozy confines of Nashville, but touring as a couple, when I tried to be road manager, band leader, and artist all at once, was a brutal test of our generally easy-going relationship. I felt like Paul was on my side, but it felt hard for me to be on his when I had to keep putting myself first. We arrived in LA and the rental car I hired at LAX immediately broke down on the way to the sound check that was meant to serve as rehearsal with guitarist Tony Gilkison and bass player Kip Boardman. We ran through the songs at the Silver Lake Venue Spaceland, then sat and waited for budget to deliver a working car while I felt all my dreams of a perfect LA show evaporate. No time to return to the hotel to shower, change clothes, or put on makeup. I bitched, fretted, and complained to Paul before and after the sparsely attended show, until he turned on me, unleashing venom and fury I never suspected lay bottled up inside his gentle exterior. Back at the hotel we sobbed and held each other. Were we breaking up? We still had a week of shows to play. The second gig went better and we headed towards Reno, checking into a super eight outside Bakersfield. I'd sprung for plane tickets for the other guys, convinced I needed to treat musicians as well as possible, maybe a result of being married to a side man for years. I'd heard every complaint and failing, but forgot the artists Will worked with usually had management, tour managers, real label support behind them. Maybe I was afraid the guys wouldn't think I was worth working with if I didn't pamper them a little. What was that I said about loyalty, the either being earned or bought? I didn't figure out till years later that part of a musician's reward was playing good songs with an artist they respected. I flailed around sleepless in the motel bed, worrying about Hazel back at her father's depressing apartment complex in Nashville, and what the rest of the West Coast gigs would be like. We needed to start driving in a little while. Bakersfield Torino was a seven or eight hour drive. Oh why hadn't we flown too? But then I would have needed to find amps and drums up north. There was no easy way. Through the thin motel wall, I heard the same two bass notes over and over again. Music was tormenting me. I couldn't stand it any longer. Paul, the person in the next room has been playing the same Whalen Jennings song for over an hour. I'm losing my mind. That, said Paul, laying on his back and smiling up at the ceiling, is the sound of a man snoring. We laughed and laughed, and my angst faded. The rest of the trip was a success. Gigs full, magic on stage, as Tony, Kip, Paul, and I clicked in the van and as a band. Paul and I made up. I was losing money out on the road, what with airfares, renting vans, and paying a band. But I was making progress too, connecting with audiences through new songs that were almost eclipsing the old ones I thought were my classics. Nashville was having a positive effect. Not quite twenty years since I wrote my first song, I felt like I was beginning to develop as a songwriter. How lucky was I, though, to have been a part of that freewheeling seventies, eighties, and nineties New York City scene that gave me the confidence to push my ideas out there without any technical ability. I owed New York a lot. Then I ached to get back there like you'd rush to a loved one in a crisis. It was September eleventh, two thousand one. I'd flown from LaGuardia Airport to Nashville the night of September tenth, in love with New York City and happy to still feel a part of it. I'd played a good short run of shows backed by local musician pals, finishing up with a rocking show at Maxwell's in Hoboken. The one thing I couldn't help noticing and remarking upon at the end of the trip was how kind everyone had been. Maybe it was the happiness I felt connecting with old friends and fans through music, not for where it would get me, just to be where still felt like home. On that familiar stage, so hot and unventilated I'd had to take off my shirt and play in a camisole. I'd found a moment of clarity. This, just this chords, volume and melody, words, rhythm and harmony, smiles, sweat, tears. Let me hold on to this. And it was the way the city turned optimistic when summer was over and anything felt possible, even the Mets in the playoffs. I'd bought a pair of knee high boots at one of the shoe stores on Broadway, the sales clerk working me, sharp and funny in that only in the city way. Picked up a few cosmetics at Ricky's next door, entertained by drag queens parading in the false eyelash aisle. It had been one of those days New York gives you sometimes like a gift. You look good, you feel good, and even cat calls appear almost like a blessing. Looking fine, mamma. Back in Nashville buying coffee at Bongo Java the next morning, a barista said one of the twin towers had been hit by a plane. I said, That's not funny. Don't joke like that. I'm not joking, he said. Hazel was at school. When I got back to our house on Grantland, I knelt in front of the TV to watch the second tower fall. Two of my brothers lived in the city. I tried to call them and the lines were jammed. Another plane crashed in Pennsylvania, seventy miles from my dad and mom and brother Patrick in Pittsburgh. Another in DC, just up the road from my oldest brother in Fredericksburg. I felt like my whole family was in harm's way. The school called to tell me they were sending the kids home and to come pick up my daughter. When I used to temp around Manhattan, I was amazed by the varied lives people led outside of the office. Determined bohemian that I was, I had mistakenly presumed that someone who held a real job was defined by their working life. When I stayed at a company more than a week, I'd get to know people, diverse characters with outside interests, boats, gardens, children, pasts, hopes, creativity. I'd done a stint on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center when I was pregnant in 1988. All those elevator rides, buying lunch in the mall underneath the towers, crossing the immense plaza to get to the subway. For the next few months I'd read the Times, portraits of grief, capsule bios of many of those who died in the attacks, and felt like I knew them all. A week later, I wondered if it was okay to leave home for a run of dates, opening for Richard Schindel in the Northeast. Supporting better known, more established artists was how I spent a lot of my time on the road. This tour had been all set to be business as usual, but everything had changed. I left Hazel with her dad and set out from Nashville in the Aero Star. I was only halfway to Knoxville when I had to pull over and rest. It was going to be a long drive, and the psychic toll of putting myself out in the world in the middle of such grief and uncertainty was heavy. But it felt like playing music might help someone now, maybe even me. Somewhere in Virginia, I popped a mixtape in the Vans Cassette player. Elvis Costello singing What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding? The Nick Lowe's song I'd thought I was intimately familiar with never sounded so urgent, so deep and meaningful. That was life just after 9-11. What we perceived as truth before rang even truer. The mountains of Virginia go on forever traveling north on I-81. Or so it seemed with my effort to get back to where I'd come from. Heading down south has always felt to me like rolling downhill. As I climbed a steep section of highway approaching Lexington, I felt the Aerostar's engine straining. I thought I smelled smoke. Hello, car trouble, my old friend. I tried not to worry about it. Suddenly I heard honking. A couple passed me on the left and gestured frantically. I flipped them off, a New Yorker's preferred defensive driving technique. The next driver matched my speed and motioned to roll down my window. I remembered the World Trade Center and how we were all going to get through this together. You're smoking, bad. You better get off the road, the man shouted. I pulled off at the next exit, and the lady behind the counter at the gas station directed me to a nearby garage, her accent a softer twang than the Tennessee one I was becoming used to. The mechanic looked like Father Time. He popped the hood of the Aerostar. Where are you headed? he asked. He clocked the guitar case and box of merchandise in the back of the van. I'd planned to stop for the night somewhere in New Jersey and drive into Manhattan early the next morning, like you'd go visit a dear friend in the ICU. I wasn't trying to meet up with anyone in New York, not even my brothers, their trauma too recent and raw to intrude on. I just felt the pull of the city, my city. Once I saw it, felt the energy and assured myself life would continue there. I could carry on up I ninety five for the first gig. You can't drive this van, the mechanic said. He saw the look of disbelief on my face and said, Take that blue Chevelle over there, just worked on it, drives great. Bring it back when you're done and we'll see what we can do about this aerostar. I started calculating costs in my head. When I asked how much to rent the car, he told me to just give him one of my CDs. Your favorite deal? Asking a musician to choose their favorite album is like asking a mother to pick her favorite child. I probably just gave him the one that was hardest to sell, the sugar tree. Why oh why had I let someone at the label choose that font and the artwork was just way too dark. Still, I was stunned by his kindness. Next morning, I lined up in traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel. Police were checking inside every truck. I had no business coming into Manhattan, but it was too late to turn back. I felt guilty for being there and guilty for not being there when the unthinkable happened. I'd turned my back on New York, choosing a softer, easier place. I'd rolled on downhill to Nashville, but still wanted to keep my claim on New York. Coming up out of the tunnel into midtown, I'd never heard the city so quiet. No honking, just a hush. The air was dank and foggy. It was a whole other New York from the one I'd flown out of a week ago. I headed downtown towards what felt like a giant void, a smoky gap between buildings. I crossed canal to the Manhattan Bridge and took the usually hateful BQE like I was running my fingers over the face of an old lover, remembering this pothole and that curve and this feeling. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Up in New England, Richard and I played to audiences hushed and reverent, who then suddenly let go with laughter and cheers. Everyone was punched drunk on grief, and we helped them careen down to the mat. In Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, I sang the Nick Lowe's song, feeling it so much that the people in the old memorial hall felt it too.

SPEAKER_00 15:21

What's so funny about peace, love and understand? As I walk on the trouble times, must be trusting. What's so funny about peace love and understand? What's so funny about peace love and understanding? What's so funny about peace love and understanding?

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Richard sang the old Stephen Foster song Hard Times, and the audience sang along, gradually joining voices until the hall was filled with a hushed block of sound. I imagined a crowd in this hall at the turn of the last century, facing whatever trials bound them together. Looking back, it seems we were living the end of an innocence we hadn't realized still existed. The Y2K everyone fretted about had finally arrived. But the joining together made everyone a little stronger. In the local coffee shop the next morning, strangers came up and thanked me for playing. I sat on the rocks by the Deerfield River and thought, what a beautiful place in this awful but still somehow perfect world. I was thankful I'd come out on tour, even if I wasn't sure how I'd get home when it was over. Driving back down through Connecticut in the alien Chevelle, I heard the Kennedys singing Life is Large on WPKN. How wonderful to write a positive song, I thought, one that celebrated life. My songs were mostly laments, or at least a little pissed off. Feeling good never motivated me to create the way feeling bad or uncertain did. I wished I could share the feeling of love I'd felt in Shelburne Falls. I had to pull over at the next rest area because a song was coming to me, the words and melody like dictation I needed to take down. The next show was held at a school auditorium in a commuter town in New Jersey. I finished the second verse of Don't Ever Change in the classroom used as a dressing room while I waited for my sound check. The town lost dozens of people at the World Trade Center. I thought of kids saying goodbye to their parents as they left for work, not knowing they'd never see each other again. I thought of my daughter back in Nashville and how much I wanted to get back there. The mechanic gave me the bad news over the phone that the Aero Star was not capable of making it the five hundred miles back to Nashville. He offered me a little money for it. One of them Washington and Lee students can use it for a runaround, he said. Paul offered to drive from Nashville and pick me up when the gigs ended. He was waiting in the parking lot of the auto shop in the shadow of the mountains when I pulled up, his curly hair tied back in a ponytail. Sometimes I felt pissed off about the things that attracted me to him, that he was a drummer, that food was the only thing he took seriously, but he wrapped his arms around me, his woolly oatmeal sweater scratching my cheek, and I felt safe. He'd driven eight hours north and I'd driven eight hours south. I emptied the blue chevel of my guitar and nearly empty merch box, and put them under the tarp in the back of Paul's truck. I checked the Aerostar for cassettes and grabbed my tattered road atlas. When we'd made it home to Nashville, I wrote the last verse of the song and tried to hold on to the faces of people in little halls across the northeast. I remembered Shindel's sonorous voice, the acrid smell of New York City, an aching wish that my daughter be safe, the love I felt for Paul. After a few weeks the song was all I had left. Like many things from that era of my life, I was so fixated on getting somewhere that it was hard to appreciate the beauty of what I had. But every time I play the song, the feeling comes back. Just to see what was going on. Sat watchin' two guys fishing in the river running through. Like there was nothing wrong. Nothing wrong. They had their lines in the water ten feet apart. Beer guts, t-shirts, me with my heavy heart. Don't have religion, but I'm trying to play.

SPEAKER_02 21:24

I love you, you're perfect, don't ever change, don't ever change, everything. I love you, you're perfect, don't ever change.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

I picked my daughter up at school last week. She had her headphones on, she barely They said hello, and all I wanted was to hug her, smother her with kisses. But I was cool, like hide there. How did it go? She had chipnail polish writing on her hand. She was nodding her head to her favorite band. Steering into space like she was all alone. But I didn't take it personal.

SPEAKER_02 22:28

It meant that I was home and I said, Hey, I love you, you're perfect. Don't ever change, don't ever change, hey, I love you, you're perfect.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

Don't ever change, I don't ever change. I'm holding on to anything that's good in this world.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

There's a lot that's good in this world.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

I saw my baby sitting there at the breakfast table. His hair a mess, and he forgot to shave. And I wish that he would get up, make it all better, stop. Drinking so much, learn how to behave. Then the radio was playing a chuckle berry song. He was looking at me, asking what was wrong. I made a list of the things I could say, but he gave me a wink, and it all went away.

SPEAKER_02 23:50

I told him, Hey, I love you, you're perfect, don't ever change, ever change, hey, I love you, you're perfect, don't ever change, ever change.