The Song Friends Christmas Special

Christmas Eve Gift

To paraphrase, misquote, misconstrue and contradict Tolstoy:

All unhappy families celebrate Christmas alike; each happy family celebrates Christmas in its own way.

My happy family traces our unique holiday tradition back to my grandmother’s childhood in Beaumont. As far as we know, it began at least a century ago in her family’s apartment above the small grocery that her father managed. My grandmother, Ida, and her sisters Imola, Opal, and Pearl and their brother Holly (the only sibling with a pretty girl’s name as he was often reminded when he played football for UT) would wake up as early as possible on the morning BEFORE Christmas and shout “CHRISTMAS EVE GIFT!” to each other and to their parents.

That’s it. That’s the whole game. If you say “Christmas Eve Gift” to someone on Christmas Eve before they say it to you then you theoretically win the right to open a present from them early. But really you win the right to say you won “Christmas Eve Gift” which is A VERY BIG DEAL.

Beaumont, Texas in the 1920’s according to Google.

My mom says that when she was a kid, her Uncle Holly would sneak in their house through the back door to “get Christmas Eve Gift” on her and her sister. But then he would give them both a silver dollar even though he had technically “won.”

And a generation later, I would tiptoe downstairs at 12:01 AM on December 24th to wake up my grandparents (who were as sound asleep as two people in their seventies on a hide-a-bed couch could be) and whisper shout “christmas eve gift!!!” into their ears to ensure that my little sister and I would get new Christmas pajamas in the morning.

I was a delightful child.

At the turn of this century, as my grandmother was headed into her nineties, she appointed herself the “league commissioner” of Christmas Eve Gift. She established a few new formal rules to reckon with the latest technologies that we adhere to now even fifteen years after her passing. She declared that whenever possible, an in-person “Christmas Eve Gift!” remains the only acceptable mode. Phone calls (in the actual morning, not at 12:01am) are permitted only across state lines. Answering machine (and now voice mail) messages do NOT count under any circumstances. Nor do text messages or emails (which we’ve since extended to include Tweets, DM’s, Snapchats etc.)

Got it?

Christmas Eve Gift League Commissioner Ida Brock Hamic (1911-2007)

And thus the tradition remains intact, though I’m glad my kids are now old enough that I no longer have to “let” them win. Those of you who think of me as that easy going Jay everyone knows and loves would be shocked at how hard and how devious I’m willing to go for CEG victory.

A few years ago I became a little curious as to whether this was as unique to the Brock-Hamic-Knowles clan as we believed or if this was yet another original unoriginal thing that everyone had a version of. So on Christmas Eve morning I texted several of my song friends, “Christmas Eve Gift!” And while they were no doubt thrilled to have their holiday family time interrupted to hear from me, none of them responded with a “dang you got me” or “texts don’t count.” Seems other people really do have Christmas traditions of their own (that I hope you all will share in the comments section, of course.)

The following year I had recently acquired a little Gibson acoustic from the ‘50s (just like my dad’s first “real” guitar) and I spent the week before Christmas learning it by learning to play “Silver Bells” for no reason other than the fact that I was charmed by the lyrics in the second verse… the bunch/crunch rhyme and the phrase “Santa’s big day.” And then on Christmas Eve, I sat down and made a recoding of it into my phone and called it “Christmas Eve Gift.”

Now, as a professional writer (and occasional professional performer) of songs, nothing seems less cool… or less professional (to me) than sending a text of me singing and playing a song I didn’t write to other professional writers performers of songs. But why not, it’s Christmas. I pressed send twenty or so times and a new version of the Christmas Eve Gift tradition was born.

Every year since, I’ve sat down the week before Christmas with my little guitar and learned a new Christmas song. And now the list has expanded to include most everyone I’ve texted in the last year for any purpose other than to inform that, “No I am not looking to sell my home. STOP.” And the people who get a kick out of it seem to get a kick out of it. My newer song friends who are confused by it tend to catch on by the next year. And the people who ignore it, ignore it. That’s fine. It’s Christmas. Why not?

One of these two Song Friends has liquor on his breath.

Because it turns out that all of my favorite things about Christmas are the things we do because “It’s Christmas. Why not?” The things that we might hesitate to do any other time of the year because it’s silly or imprudent or uncool. Because it’s Christmas I sit down and re-learn how to play a C#m6 chord. Why Not? Just like because it’s Christmas I’ll eat eleven cookies. Or I’ll pretend someone who cuts me off in traffic did so as a result of my generosity not their assholery. Because it’s Christmas, if I feel like spending a day just looking at but not really reading an entire book or watching only episodes of televisions shows I’ve seen before, I’ll do it. And because it’s Christmas I’ll tell people who already know I love them that I love them. Why not?

But recently I’ve realized that the reason I do all of these things “because it’s Christmas” is not really because it’s Christmas but because when I do them I’m actually a little closer to being the person I wish I was… the person I am always working year-round to become. Christmas just provides an excellent cover story. A chance to be that guy without being THAT guy. I get to eat more sweets. To be sweeter to people. To learn to sing a song I like. To give something I made to folks who might enjoy it. To sit around and do nothing with the people I love except be with the people I love. And to share a little bit more of myself with you in the hopes that you might share a little bit more of yourself with me.

And maybe just maybe some of that sticks. My wish is always that the person I get to be “because it’s Christmas” rubs off at least a little on the person I am once we’re rolling into the new year and the excuse of “why not?” has passed.

And I feel like that is a Christmas message League Commissioner Hamic would approve of… even if it does arrive via email.

Bonus Track. Initially, I learned this one for Christmas Eve Gift 2020 but it seemed a little too dark given the state of the world at the time… so I sent out Blue Christmas instead. But now that everything is wonderful everywhere…

Just Like My Daddy Said To Me...

Why I Picked This Job

I’m taking a 14 hour solo road trip tomorrow. I haven’t started packing yet but I am just about finished with my playlist… a playlist with a very specific and hopefully instructive theme: Country songs wherein the singer relays the wisdom they have received from someone who has achieved the status to be a wisdom giver… folks like mothers, grandfathers, cowboys, elderly alcoholics, gamblers… you know the bunch.

My hope is that by the time I arrive in upstate New York and meet up with my family I will have something smart and wise and, more than anything, helpful to say to my daughter when she graduates from college on Sunday. The pressure is on! So far, as I’ve skipped through the list, Country Music has provided a grab bag of notions that, devoid of context, can seem a little beside the point:

“Feel small when you’re at the beach.”

“Any time 2.7 seconds or above is a respectable achievement for an amateur bull rider.”

“You’re gonna miss this? Too late for that one! So. Maybe, you’ll also miss the next thing too someday when that’s over as well so...”

“I didn’t have to be… no wait, does that sound like I’m picking a very poor moment to tell her she’s adopted?”

“Turn the radio up? Drink beer? Purchase dirt? Eat fried chicken?”

Song Friend Patty Loveless singing the best song ever written about driving.

I’m sure there’s something somewhere in there. I’ll report my findings. But I welcome your suggestions. Please!

Though I suspect I’ll spend a lot of the drive not listening to anything except whatever my brain decides to cook up. Just driving and thinking. Thinking and driving. Probably at some point thinking back to the weird, difficult, fuzzy week I had almost exactly thirty years ago during the time between finals and my own graduation.

The day of my last exam, my mom called to tell me that my best friend from growing up had died in a rock climbing accident down in Tennessee. I flew home to Nashville for his funeral and then, still reeling, I returned to Connecticut for a few days to party and graduate and say goodbye to the people I believed (correctly) would be some of the best friends I would ever have. This was, obviously, before social media. It was also before cheap flights, before cheap long distance calls and really before email was much of a thing. So I knew (correctly) that goodbye really meant goodbye and that I wouldn’t see much of any of them for a long time. All of that began to sink in as I made the long, solo, north-to-south version of the south-to-north drive I’ll be taking tomorrow.

My first Song Friend to ever own a Stratocaster, Storm Sommer

But after four years in Connecticut I was returning home to Nashville to be a professional Country Music songwriter… not because I’d ever written a song anyone could describe as anything more than “competent” and not because I had a voice that could “sing the phonebook” and not because “I had a dream since a tender age/to hear my songs on the Opry stage” or anything reasonable like that.

I was just following some advice that my dad had given me… something he heard somewhere (most likely not a Country song) and decided to share with me. And now that I know what it’s like to be a father the age he was at the time, it was probably just him thinking out loud one day and it wasn’t some deeply considered paternal knowledge drop.

He said this: “Don’t pick a job based on the work, pick a job based on who you’re going to do the work with.”

I’d been thinking about law school but that immediately took lawyering off the list. And I had liked the idea of college professing, but I wasn’t convinced that many of the college professors I knew liked that idea.

But then I thought about one morning, two summers earlier. I had a job pulling weeds. And I didn’t hate it. Mostly because I got paid to be outside and listen to my little Walkman all day. That morning I was listening to Gerry House’s morning show. (For you youngsters in the biz, Autumn’s dad… he was the drive-time DJ it seemed like everyone in Nashville listened to at the time.) He had on some songwriters who had just started a new band called Billy Hill. And for an hour or more Gerry and John Scott Sherrill and Bob Dipiero and Dennis Robbins played songs they’d written but mostly the just made each other laugh.

Who in their right mind would want to be Song Friends with this bunch?

That. I realized. That was the answer to my dad’s question. Those guys are who I wanted to hang out with and be friends with and be like when I grew up. Ok. Maybe not those guys specifically (although I did sign my first publishing deal a year and a half later at the company where Bob and Scotty wrote, too.) But songwriters.

I guess one of the benefits (dangers?) of growing up in Nashville is that you know songwritering really is a job you can have and I knew or had met or been around other real live songwriters… Stewart Harris, Steve O’Brien, Layng Martine, Jr., Paul Craft, Kent Robbins. To me, they were just grownups who lived in Nashville. And I wanted people like them to be my friends from work. My Song Friends, so to speak.

And for the last three decades, they have been.

Y’all have been.

So is that the advice I should give my daughter? It definitely feels like the classic hokey/hackey setup as we go into the final chorus:

“So just like my daddy said to me…”

Gross. Sorry. No.

Honestly, unless I stumble across a thought or a line or golden nugget of truth I’ve never heard before somewhere between here and Brooklyn (where I’ll be staying with one of those college friends I left behind long ago) tomorrow, I’ll probably just tell her I love her and that I’m proud of her and keep my mouth shut, advice-wise. She’s already smarter and kinder and wiser than either my dad or I could hope to be. Life (and whatever life-lesson songs she stumbles across on her own) will teach her the rest of what she needs to know.

But I, on the other hand, I think I need to continue re-giving myself the same advice that my dad gave me back then that got me into this mess in the first place.

Because it’s really easy to get caught up in the missed cuts and the potential next singles and the tracks and the contracts and who’s hot when you’re not… or more than that just the daily grind of giving your all to songs that you know, statistically, will do nothing but gather dust. That is always a part of this job. But so is the reason I decided (correctly) that I wanted the job in the first place. Because I still get to spend every day with my friends… my weird, funny, cool, new, old, young, smart but dumb, dumb but smart, crazy, always Mexican-food-loving, tired, angry, broken, goofy, inspired song friends. And most every day we’re still just hanging out talking about our lives and talking shit and making each other laugh.

Oh. And writing songs. We also write songs.

Whose Bright Idea Was This?

The Bugs Are Always Out There

I hear they do for some people, but song ideas never come to me in dreams. Except once. I woke up shaken. Typed it into my phone and fell back asleep. When I got up that morning, I’d forgotten the idea but not the buzz it gave me. I bopped around all morning, but I waited until I got to the office to sit down and check it out….

Girl, you are just like a song
I want to drive around and listen to
with the widows rolled down.

Kindof a sweet, if jumbled, sentiment. Except also this was also seven years after Florida Georgia Line spent 24 weeks atop the Hot Country chart singing:

Baby you a song
You make me wanna roll my windows down
And Cruuuuuuuise.

So Brian Kelley, Tyler Hubbard, Joey Moi, Chase Rice and Jesse Rice win on a technicality, I guess, by being first and far superior. Jay Knowles would have to look elsewhere for his own song idea that day.

Apparently, great ideas can be difficult to come by.

But this is the sixth one of these newsletters I’ve sat down to write. It should all be a little easier by now.

Song Friend Ray Lotta thinks I’m funny like a clown.

Did I really think that? I didn’t really think that, did I? I’ve been a professional writer for… I’m searching for the phrase that makes it seem the most intimidatingly long… there it is… a Quarter of a Century. And while writing has become a lot of things over that time, “a little easier” is not one of them.

Sure, the kind (and interesting) things y’all have said in the official comments section as well in emails, texts, and calls from long lost song friends make me feel like I’m not shouting (pouting?) into the void. I appreciate all of it more than you know (unless you make stuff up for a living in which case you definitely do know.) And it makes it a little (a little) less terrifying to press send to the growing number of names, more and more of which I don’t even recognize (so also, thank y’all for spreading the word… you are my marketing department.)

But it sure as shit ain’t “a little easier by now."

Before I commenced this endeavor I spent, gosh, six months writing down ideas in my Notes app whenever they occurred to me and very quickly I had more than enough ideas to last me for at least two years. So I thought, “No sweat. Let’s go!”

I should have known. (Why didn’t I know? I knew.) Because sometimes, with the other Notes app list (ominously called THE LIST) I have for my day job, no matter how long that very long list is, every single song idea looks like the most ridiculous non-idea for a non-song that anyone has ever had ever in the history of Western music and I can’t imagine WHAT the bonehead amateur who wrote all these down was thinking.

And some days you don’t even want to look at the list at all. Because it just feels like reading a rundown of all of your future failures. (That’s not self-pity, that’s just the job.) So then you decide that maybe there really is no such thing as a good idea for a song. Or… maybe that means there’s also no such thing as a bad idea for a song, too? Or… maybe only the bad ideas are the good ones? Or… oy.

Welcome to the inside of my brain on any given Thursday.

Until one day in the midst of one of those spirals I had the liberating realization (or was it just a sanity-preserving decision) that all ideas are bad AND all ideas are good. So, unlike what we’ve been taught all these years, the idea, the initial hook or spark really doesn’t matter all that much. It’s the execution that counts.

It’s not the lightbulb, it’s the bugs that the lightbulb attracts… it’s all the tiny little thoughts and suggestions and notions and notes that swarm around the idea that matter.

Inventor/Top Liner Tom Edison has a hook you’re gonna freakin’ love.

Like, maybe we’re not a bunch of wannabe Edisons re-inventing the lightbulb over and over so much as excitable, grade-school entomologists trying to assemble an interesting and unique collection of moths and insects for show-and-tell this week.

And that unhelpful part of your brain (and/or your co-writer in a crappy mood) who just goes nope, nope, nope to everything? Beware! That ain’t nothing but a dang bug zapper.

So if you can resist your natural urge to zap, swat, spray or smush… or to run away squealing… who knows what you might find.

Is “I Can’t Make You Love Me” an unassailably good idea for a song? Wasn’t the earliest version a bluegrass kind of thing? Is that right Mike? Allen? That sounds like, at best, an unremarkable musical moment.

“He Stopped Loving Her Today” could have gone wrong in so many ways. It’s true greatness may, in fact, lie in the fact that it’s always inches away from going hilariously awry.

“Silver Wings” isn’t even an idea really. It’s just two resonant words stuck together. Then Merle Haggard started strumming and humming one afternoon.

“10,000 Hours”? Why would you set out to write a song based on the discredited theory in a success manual from a decade ago? Seems like an embarrassing waste of a day. But Two Billon streams and a frivolous copyright lawsuit can’t be wrong.

It’s such a liberating thought, isn't it? The ideas are just the light bulbs. It’s the insects that are the actual magic. So. Really. The search for the perfect lightbulb is over! You just grab one from the box, screw it in and flip the switch.

Then see what bugs you get. Nothing? Try a different bulb. Different lamp. Different spot in the room. Different day. But ask any entomologist, exterminator, gardener or picnicker. The bugs are always out there.

The bugs are always out there. You just gotta find what they are into today. Once you got that, they’re yours.

Song Friend Haley Joel Osment sees song titles.

You don’t believe me? All I had when I started writing this newsletter today was the sentence: “This is the sixth one of these newsletters I’ve sat down to write.” The bit about the lightbulb and the bugs? That came as I was writing. And, considering the fact that I’m about to press send to you all, I’m at least moderately pleased with the notion at the moment.

Wait. So “the lightbulb” was really just another bug the whole time????

Woah.

Eat your heart out, M. Knight Shyamalan.

And holy cow, just as I was proofreading I realized this is the SIXTH newsletter. Get it?

More bugs are always gathering.

Okay. I’ll stop typing now.

jay

Edson in the Middle

An Introduction to String Theory

Several years ago I taught songwriting at a summer music camp for grownups in Puget Sound, Washington. One of the benefits, other than spending a week in August in lovely Puget Sound as opposed to soupy Nashville, was that we teachers could also take classes during our free period.

I decided to take the one in Brazilian-style guitar… mostly because songs sung in Portuguese had become the only songs I could enjoy unreservedly since I’d started making my living thinking way too hard about the lyrics of songs written in English.

Edson Oliveira was the instructor’s name. (Which is a way cooler name than any of the 1343 names on this newsletter’s current subscriber list. I’ve checked.) He was a lovely fella and an excellent teacher and I learned lots of cool new chords and interesting grooves… none of which I have never used professionally and most of which are now long forgotten.

The one memorable thing I did learn from him is something he taught me more by happenstance. All week I had noticed how before he played a song, he would pause, sway almost imperceptibly and murmur to himself for a moment or two. Then, without a count-off (no one, two, three… or rather no Portuguese um, dois, três) the song simply began.

Song Friend Edson Oliveira

I kept trying to figure out what he was up to. I didn’t dare interrupt once the song was in motion. And it seemed like it might be some specific personal or cultural affect that would have been rude or even insensitive of me to inquire about.

But by day five in the Northwest woods, Edson and I had become teacher pals and my Southern manners had receded to the point where I just asked straight up, “What’s the deal with that mumbling thing you’re doing there, man?”

“I’m finding my tempo.” He smiled, like that was the complete answer.

“What?”

“I sing just a small bit from in the middle of the song til it feels just right and when I know that’s the tempo, I begin. If I start with the start, it could turn out to be too fast or too slow once the song gets going which is no good. I want it to feel settled in from the very first note.”

And so right there, I learned more about how to write songs from him than I had imparted to any of my eager students that entire week by playing the role of the battle-hardened pro from Nashville who could cure all their songwriting ills.

As all songwriters know all too well, the most common (and completely reasonable but nevertheless useless) question that people who don’t write songs ask of those of us who do is “What do you start with, the words or the music?”

And the answer I tend to give, because I think I’m clever, is, “Yes.”

But clearly the real answer is, “Actually. We start in the middle.”

Even if the first thing we come up with is the first few words and/or the first few notes, just like Edson before he sings “The Girl From Ipanema” what we are really always starting with is “all of it.”

Song Friends Thom Schuyler, Fred Knobloch and Paul Overstreet as babies

Thom Schuyler had taught me something similar several years earlier, the first time he and I wrote together. I suggested a few lines for our opening verse and he said, “That’s cool and all but I think those might mess up our second verse.” And I was like, “How does he know? We don’t have a second verse yet. Or a chorus. Or a first verse even.” But I didn’t say that. Because I knew at least enough to know that he knew things I didn’t know and to be cool with that so that I might learn something. And I did learn something.

You’re always writing the whole song all at once.

But maybe it’s something I discovered when I was six and trying to figure out how to draw people’s faces. Where do you start? The hair and work down? The neck up? I tended to pick the right eye and work outward from there. I’d realized that the eyes were the point of a face. The “hook” as it were. Get those right and the rest will come. Still, I had to be very aware of where on the page I put that first eye or I’d run out of paper before I made it to the hair or the left ear.

And I’ve always thought songs are more like drawings than stories anyway. But now I’m thinking maybe they are more like pieces of string. Sure there is a start and a finish. But the way we write them, and especially the way we experience them, that string is almost never pulled tight end to end. If a song is a string it’s usually more like a knotted up pile resting there in the palm of your hand. Songs rarely start at the start and end at the end. Songs just… exist for three minutes. They are there… then they go away. You go in and you live in them and then you leave them… or they leave you.

That’s what Edson knew.

The middle is where the song lives. The middle is where the audience always enters the song. It’s where, if the writers and performers do their jobs well, we stop merely listening and we find ourselves tangled up (sorry) in the song.

“In Medias Res” is what they called it in Latin. “In the middle of things.” It’s where Homer’s Odyssey begins… in the middle of Odysseus’ adventure, hanging out (a prisoner, technically) with Calypso. The real why of why it was written that way is far above my pay grade, for sure. But one thing I think it suggests is that the beginning of a story is only interesting once you believe the middle is worth investing in. Instead of “once upon a timing” and hoping you trust that the next 900 pages are worth it, you go BAM straight to the good stuff. And then the “what got you there” is actually more interesting and more worth knowing.

Song “Friends” Odysseus and Calypso (Sir William Flint Russell)

So is there a lesson here about how to write songs? Probably. But I think it’s more a lesson about how to approach any moment of creation. Whatever that creation is… a song, a conversation, a friendship.

I think of it every time I sit down with a new co-writer for the first time. When I make a new Song Friend, that is. I don’t know really who this person is or really why they are here. I definitely don’t know what song we will make that day. And since I don’t know that, I’d prefer to know even less than that. Where are you from? It might make for polite small talk but it’s unnecessary information. Are you famous or about to be? Booo. So gauche! Are you good at writing songs? Even that one is immaterial. The only real question is "are WE good at writing songs?” More specifically “are we good at writing whatever song we’re writing today?” So let’s get to straight to the good part. And if the good part turns out to be really good, then, maybe someday (or maybe even somewhere in the middle of making that very song) we’ll talk about the moments in our lives that led us to this moment that this song is being made and why we’re making it like this.

So that’s where the relationship begins. Where every relationship begins, really. You pause. You murmur to yourself. And when it feels right, you begin… even though you’re already somewhere in the middle of it.

jay

And here’s this week’s playlist!