Sounds Better As A Song: “Bound”

I like to tell stories. Every once in a while, I tell the stories with music and stuff. This is one in an occasional series called “Sounds Better As a Song,” in which I share the story that inspired a song I made up.

I was sitting in a coffee shop called The Coffee Ethic, looking out the window at Park Central Square in Springfield, Missouri. It was April 2017, a beautiful Ozarks spring morning, and I was visiting my hometown mostly because I had some excess airline miles and a weekend with nothing better to do. Also, I just wanted to go home for a minute.

My relationship with my hometown has always been complicated.

It’s not like I have generations of history there. I was born in Springfield because my parents’ parents chose to move to Springfield midway through the 20th century.1

My grandparents stayed in Springfield, and my parents stayed, my sister stayed, and most of my extended family stayed. I never thought about leaving, because why would I?

Then, sometime in my mid-20s, I thought about leaving. I thought about it a lot.

I was a newspaper journalist. There was only one newspaper in Springfield. If I wanted to advance in my career, I would need to do so at another newspaper in another city.

I arrived at this realization at exactly the same time I concluded that I had seen more than enough of Glenstone Avenue and Sunshine Street.

So, shortly after Thanksgiving dinner in 1993, I left. I did a career-driven half-lap around the United States that took me to Cincinnati, to Orlando, to Dallas, then back to Florida, then to South Carolina, then to my current temporary home in Australia, which will at some point send me back to South Carolina.

The last 30 years have been quite a ride, to say the least. I wouldn’t trade my journey, but it has definitely come at a price of stability and familiarity. Every passing day, I see more value in those things.

Whenever I need to re-center, whenever I need to remember what makes me Me, I find myself back somewhere between Interstate 44 and Battlefield Road. Usually, because it’s the part of town where I grew up, I find myself back near Park Central Square.

Here’s part of what I wrote while sitting in that coffee shop in 2017:

I find myself marveling at how deeply the grooves are cut into a young mind. This place is just coordinates on a map, just a grid of streets and a pile of dirt, just like any other nondescript city without a suburb. Springfield, Missouri, is Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is Rockford, Illinois, is Greenville, South Carolina, is Kalamazoo, Michigan. Yes, this place was home to me for my first 25 years, and of course that makes it different. But I can’t explain why I keep getting drawn back, like I’m looking for something I left behind. 

I occasionally fathom coming back here, but damned if I know why. There’s nothing special or different about this dirt than any other dirt. People I love live in this city, but there’s no reason why I couldn’t learn to love people in any other city. (And I have.) The weather here is no better or worse than anywhere else. It’s not particularly easy to get anywhere from here, although it’s also not particularly hard. It’s just as perfectly average now as it was when I left in 1993. 

And yet. 

And yet I continue to feel like this place is my cradle. This latitude and longitude, this climate, these accents, this grid of streets is basically me.

I never finished that essay. I came back to it a few months later and turned it into a song. I play the song in public sometimes. It sounds something like this:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIt’s just a random patch of dirt
Coordinates on a map
A grid of streets that I know
Like the lines on my hand
I could drive them with my eyes closed
You know I probably have
Hit the yellow lights just right
Like keeping time in my head

The sidewalks know my secrets
I know they’ll never tell
They know I’m not the same
Since the last time I fell
I wonder if they trust me
Enough to let me leave
Or if they know I’ll be back
By Christmas Eve

I guess I just don’t know
How a town can hold you down
How the signs that stand at either end
Can make you feel bound
People try to tell me
About all the things that’s changed
And all I see around me
Is all the things that ain’t

I’ve packed everything I have
Except everything I know
And all those folks who tell me
It ain’t my time to go
Well, brother, if you can scare me
I’ll buy you a beer
You see, I long to ask myself
“How the hell did I get here
How did I get here?”

I guess I just don’t know
Why a town would hold you down
Why those city limit signs
Can make you feel bound
People try to tell me
About all the things that’s changed
And all I see around me
Is all the things that ain’t
All I see around me
Is all the things that ain’t

It’s just a random patch of dirt
It’s the place that I call Home

Even as I feel gratitude for my journey, I I occasionally wonder if leaving home was the right thing to do. Sometimes we write not to answer the questions; sometimes we write to just to ask the questions, to acknowledge their existence and their validity. Acknowledging the validity of the questions sometimes is actually the answer.

Author’s note: A really big thanks to Staves Brewery in the Sydney suburb of Glebe. Staves Brewery has an open mic night every Thursday which attracts some of the most talented musicians in Sydney. They’re kind enough to let me play there occasionally too. They provide professionally produced video to all the artists who play there, which is a super-cool thing to do. If you’re in Sydney and you like beer and/or music, I can provide my highest recommendation.