I am my father’s son.
He was a showman, after all. A restless spirit. A fearless thrill-seeker. A hard-charger. An entrepreneur.
I am my mother’s son as well. A compassionate soul. A gentle spirit. An open mind.
I am the sum of my relationships, my convictions, my hopes for a better planet.
I am a reflection of the lives of my parents. Another chapter in our family’s history. An extension of the lives they imagined for themselves.
There’s something to this DNA business, yes? We take the genetic material in our makeup, and then we mash it up with the influences that find us along the way, and somewhere in that nature vs. nurture broth we drink deep and discover who it is we are meant to be. Each of us is like a living, breathing remix of all this other stuff: the genetic markers we carry, the role models we collect, the styles we grab at and make our own, the cultural norms we embrace or reject … they’re all a part of us. And they are all stored in one way or another, at one time or another, in the layers of memory. But my memory trips me up. It does. The wiring is slightly off. I’ll get a story in my head, and it’ll stay with me in a certain way for years and years, and then one day I’ll revisit that story with whoever might have been with me at the time, and he or she will tell it from a whole other angle.
Here’s what it comes down to, best I can tell:
There is the truth of what I have been told.
There is the truth of what I have lived.
There is the truth of what I remember.
This is the formula, people. Been this way forever. These full-on truths and half-truths and imagined truths are how we get to who we are, where we are, where we’re going. Trouble is, what I remember isn’t always how things went down, so I’m not always working off the right map. The mind plays tricks—or maybe it’s not even paying attention. Most of the time, this is no big thing. It is what it is, you know. It might be that you don’t even notice the space between what you think happened and what actually happened. You live so long with a distorted version of events that the distorted version is what you remember. But when you go to write a book, you expect to be able to set down the stuff of your life as it was, as it is … only as I get started on this I can see there are some pieces missing. Whole chunks. Like that story I told earlier, about how my parents’ marriage came apart on the back of that big reveal in my father’s hospital room after his accident. That’s the way I’d always heard the story, only now that I’m writing about it I’ve gone back and reread my father’s biography and a bunch of old newspaper accounts, and the story takes on a different color. In my head, I was always a newborn—as in, just a couple months old. In my head, my mother had no idea about the other family in my father’s life, but of course it was only like that under our roof. That was the story we were told, because we experienced the truth of it from my mother’s perspective.
A lot of my memories are like that. They go one way. Then I get to talking with someone who knows the deal and they go a different way. There might even be a third or fourth perspective in there, and that takes me off in a whole other direction. And so my thing is to look at where all those stories come together—to find the intersection of what we’ve been told, what we’ve lived, what we remember.
I want to get it all down, be a reliable narrator. I want to honor all the people in my life, the stories they keep in their heads. Their truth matters, same as mine. The lessons they’ve drawn from the experiences we’ve shared … they matter, too. And so I’m pumping everyone I know with questions. My siblings. My friends, from back in the day. The people who know me now. I’m having them over to shoot the shit, walk down these lanes of memory with me. I want to know what they know, so I can add it to what I think I know, and then set it all down.
Wasn’t until I let the filmmaker Justin Krook follow me around for a documentary on my life and career that I started thinking in this way. I was never big into talking about myself. In my songs, maybe, but not to a journalist or anything. For someone who’s as out there and in-your-face as I am with my shows and my lyrics, this might seem like a line, but I always considered myself a private person. That is, until Justin came through. He was hanging around with his crew for a long-ass time, and I started to feel so comfortable around them I almost forgot they were there. He pushed me to talk. About my music, absolutely, but also about what it was like to grow up the way I grew up. About my relationship with my father. My childhood. My family. My life …
One day, deep into it, I looked up and realized Justin had opened me up, in a way I wasn’t expecting. So I turned to him and said, “I’m letting you take a picture of me naked and showing the world.”
Justin ended up using that line in the movie I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, and it got a lot of play, and that’s really how it was. I was stripped-down. Raw. Naked. And after the movie had been out awhile and was making some noise—on the festival circuit, on Netflix—I started to hear back from people how important it was for them to hear me open up in this way. Not just my friends and family, although they were into it. Regular people, who maybe didn’t even know my work. Don’t know how they came to the movie, must’ve been plugging in search words like dysfunctional family or demanding father, but I guess there was something universal in my story. We’ve all got our own shit to deal with, you know. Demons, skeletons, unresolved issues … whatever. It’s how we deal with them that sets us up for what comes next. It’s what we do with what we learn.
And then there were my fans. People all over the world who knew my music but didn’t know me. They were into it, too. Can’t be sure, but I told myself there was a whole new energy to my shows. The energy that was coming back to me from the crowd … it was changing up on me. There were more colors to it. Told myself that now that people knew me in a different way, they were responding to my music in a different way. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t … but that was the story I started telling myself. And that’s when I got to thinking long and hard about seeing if there might be some kind of book in me. A story that was mine to tell, and mine alone. Nothing against Justin Krook, who did a kick-ass job. I’m super-proud of the piece he put out into the world. He got it down and he got it right, but that was his take on what drives me, and it left me thinking I should take that look myself, see what I can see on my own.
Who knows, maybe the picture that comes back will light a different kind of fire in me, help me to grow my game, connect with my audiences in a brand-new way. Might even get some people to look again at the stuff of their own lives, and spend some time thinking how the ways they were raised might help to guide them on whatever path they’re on.
And so …
Here is the truth of what I have been told.
Here is the truth of what I have lived.
Here is the truth of what I remember.