Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

Well, we certainly proved ourselves to be exactly that at our little wingding last Thursday. Thanks to everyone who came out and listened to us tell our lies, read aloud from our books of lies, and sing about things that never really happened at all.

But that's not why I'm writing this.

It's Thelma, y'all. And I'm hear to tell you a thing or two about lies. And the lying liars who tell them.

See, we're all equipped with a B.S. meter. Ask any little baby you come across, or just watch them when they're still too little to worry where mom is. If she hands them off to someone they don't feel right about, they'll start wailing.

You were just like that when you were smaller. Some of us manage to stay that way, which is very lucky. Others get acculturated and domesticated, and probably told a few too many times that it's rude to not believe people's lies, or smacked around for questioning things they dang well know are lies. And it starts to get complicated and confusing. Eventually you sort of give up, and your gut instincts get ill. And gut + ill = guilt. Heh. I'm gonna copyright that formula.

I don't know if there's any way to fix this about myself, so I've just started thinking backwards. I figure any time I feel guilty for not buying someone's load of crap, it's my gut instincts in disguise, wearing a chicken suit and squawking to get my attention.

Donald Passman wrote this book that's pretty much the bible of the music industry for artists. It's called All You Need To Know About the Music Business.

It could also be called "All You Need To Know About Navigating Human Nature," but I guess that overreaches. Still, Passman makes a great point about how to know whether you can trust people when you're having to make decisions that could spell life or death for your career in the big-time. He tells you to trust your gut. Now, how are you supposed to do that when your gut is dressed in a chicken suit and impossible to take seriously?

There's something about creative people, or maybe the act of taking the leap of faith, that involves this boiling-oil situation of learning to be loyal to your instincts. Even if you tank from it in your career, know this: You'll still have to master it in your daily life no matter what. If you're pursuing a creative goal, you likely aren't buffered by the safety nets most people take for granted -- a regular paycheck, someone else paying for your health insurance, maternity leave. As if that didn't suck enough, you also have little to no budget for dishonesty or bad faith in your life, from yourself or from anyone else. You are going to pay the price for it, directly and dearly, and it has less to do with being "creative" than it does with being the person who's assuming all the risk. Welcome to You, Inc.

I've started thinking about the idea of emotional incorporation -- some way to protect your emotional investment so that, if it all comes crashing down tomorrow, you won't crash with it. I'm beginning to conclude that having healthy instincts, and the courage to respond to them appropriately, is something well worth cultivating. It's a good argument for maintaining your childlike state as a creative person. And not that you care, but it earns you respect.

My Voice: The Lost Years

As published on the Skyrocket blog

People who've been following my career for a while, or even as Trish and Darin back in the day, might already know that singing (to say nothing of songwriting) has never come easily for me. Somebody somewhere out there has sat through a performance when I was so hoarse I could hardly get through the show, or even showed up only to find that I couldn't sing at all and had to cancel (this only happened once, in 1999 at the Mucky Duck in Houston, and I was still there to sign CDs and have a CD-release "party.") Those days are pretty much over, except for November and April bouts with allergy-driven pharyngitis, and if you were in Houston last weekend you heard it for yourself.

I have my time with Skyrocket! to thank, though, for a lot of my rehab. From the time I was a tiny kid I've had kind of a rasp to my voice, and by the eighth grade things got pretty dire. I'd go to a slumber party and be mute the next day. Singing was limited to about one hour's worth, and after that forget it. Finally I was diagnosed with vocal nodules, which are basically hard callouses that form on your vocal chords and cut off some of the air that needs to pass through them to make a clear sound. Surgery followed in 10th grade, and months of speech therapy to correct some of the habits I'd developed in the attempt to make my voice audible -- to push sound out through those two tense, worn-out little reeds of muscle.

I didn't know then that it would take a lifetime, really, for my voice to heal. Nobody knows what causes the musculature to tense up in your throat, tongue, jaw, neck and head, but that's what happens when you're using an impaired voice. "Raising my pitch" to eliminate "tongue tension" became a daily practice in therapy, and it seemed so stupid and annoying to hear the fake, babyish pitch I had to use instead of my 'real' one, which was low and throaty and pressed down on my pipes in a way I could feel. The new voice was surprisingly free of effort, heady and relaxed, but I thought I sounded like a dork. I never got the hang of it.

My range was limited to maybe an octave by that time. I limped through high school, in choir and theater, faking it as a second soprano and praying I wouldn't poop out when I got cast as Babe in "The Pajama Game." I can't even count how many speech tournaments I bombed when my voice would buckle under the pressure in final rounds. Sometimes we'd win anyway, but I never felt good about it. It seemed like whenever the stakes were high, my voice would always give me away.

Fast forward to the Trish Murphy years, when major-label showcases, South by Southwest, and the relentless grind of sleep deprivation and industry scrutiny caught up with me from time to time. By then I'd regained some of my footing and earned some confidence, but the high-stakes climate of career decisions and competition would still take its toll. I'd have nightmares where I would need to scream but no sound would come out. Or someone in the dream would make me fly into a hoarse, impotent rage.

By the time I joined Skyrocket, in 2004, I was ready for things to get easier. I'd just put out a new record that I'd financed and then promoted independently, including radio and European tours, and the stress of it was getting to me. I had also begun to realize, the hard way, that not speaking up for yourself to command what you need, want and deserve in life (or in a career) isn't a good thing. Eventually as I started to reverse that habit, the weirdest thing happened. The stakes somehow didn't seem so high any more. I started to relax. And my voice came back.

A few weeks ago my mom was in the audience and saw Skyrocket rip out a full-tilt version of "Crazy on You," complete with the little acoustic-guitar intro. She couldn't believe I actually sang it. I don't have one of those golden throats, but what I do have is hard-won, and I hope the sound that comes out is honest. The material doesn't matter to me. My own songs are written as a confession, and the singing is an afterthought although the melody is usually scrupulous. Singing other people's songs is strangely liberating. The stakes are lower. And I probably need the relief.

The picture, by the way, is of me and my eighth grade best pals Kay and Ellie, who knew me when. We're still figuring out our voices, and how to use them.

Nosh and Dish at the Garden Cafe with Thelma and Louise (and Brad Pitt and the gasoline truck guy?)

Party On at the Garden Café in Dallas, TX
This Thursday, April 17, from 6-8 PM, the Garden Café is hosting “A Strictly-For-Fun Gathering of Smart-Mouthed Fiction Writers and One Lucky Guitar, Trading Stories, and Songs. Writers in the Round: On Fiction, Truth, and Three Chords.”
Translated: a wine and cheese reception with Austin singer/songwriter Trish Murphy, Dallas-based authors Will Clarke, Harry Hunsicker, and Melanie Wells.
from D Magazine.com - Posted on April 14th, 2008 2:03pm by Nancy Nichols Filed under Events, Restaurant News

(Will and Harry are waaaaaaaaaay more fun than this photo suggests...) - mw

The Creative Disease

This is a painting by a woman who, as a 53-year-old scientist, experienced onset of a rare brain disease that decimated her scientific memory and abilities while triggering a torrent of creative activity.

She later adapted Ravel's Bolero into a series of visual works, and oddly enough it turns out the composer had suffered from the same disease.

I've known for some time, from my own pathetic experience, that linear and creative thinking compete for air time in my head, and that linear thinking usually wins. The creative part is way harder to boot up and keep online, but it's every bit as legitimate and lucid once it takes hold. What's going on in our brains? Does anybody out there know?

Me, Melissa, and MLK

I should take a moment to thank the academy... (and shoot whoever fixed my hair for this photograph).

I love my birthday. I think birthdays should be national holidays. I never work on my birthday. Ever. So I have taken the day off (sort of - I've already balanced four checkbooks and done a bunch of blechy desk work), but as usual, I've forgotten to schedule a play date with anyone. So I will take myself shopping ALONE. What a loser. You'd think by now, I'd learn.

Okay, back to the Melanie/Melissa thing. My mom - aka The Dot - wanted a little blonde-haired blue-eyed girl. The Dot has dark hair, olive skin, brown eyes. She looked like Cher when I was growing up. I'm not kidding. With hot pants and everything. My dad is blonde and blue-eyed. So they hedged their bets and went with Melissa if my hair was blonde and Melanie if my hair was black like my mother's. (Melanie means dark and mysterious. Clearly NOT a fit.) My grandmother took one look at me and said, "She looks like a little Mexican baby." It is my understanding that she did not mean this as a compliment. Classy, huh? This was the '60s, you realize. She wasn't terribly evolved, even though she made incredible fried chicken.

Anyway, I did look like a little Mexican baby, but as you can see, that did not last. Here's a picture of me sitting with Daddy-O at my fourth birthday party. I look smashing in my white dress and knee socks, don't you think? Shortly after this photo was taken, we found out Martin Luther King had been assassinated earlier that evening. I didn't get to eat my cake that year. It was a very sad day.

Daddy-O is 65 and still has no gray. The Dot, however, was gray by the time she was 25. As a result of Daddy-O's good genes, and despite the fact that my name is not Melissa, I remain the only woman in the entire state of Texas who does not color her hair.

Jesus was smiling on me on April 4, 1964. If only he'd let MLK off the hook four years later. I wonder where we'd be today?

Happy Birthday Louise

That's right, it's Melanie's birthday on Friday. I look forward to it every year because I'm so grateful she was born. I feel like calling her mom up to thank her. Did you know that her mom named her Melanie because she was born with dark hair? She'd picked out "Melissa" for a blonde-haired baby. Heh.

We always give each other lots of birthday presents -- mostly inexpensive, useful things like kitchen gear, lip gloss, and the dress, pair of shoes, bikini, jacket or whatever that the other one wouldn't splurge on for herself. We make a big deal out of wrapping everything, even stupid stuff that doesn't really wrap. And we re-use all the same boxes over and over again. They keep passing back and forth like a cold.

But I read somewhere recently that one of the best things a friend can say to you is, "I will if you will." And I can say that probably nothing would have happened in my life (well, nothing GOOD anyway) in the last seven years if Melanie hadn't said that to me at least ninety six times. That's only once a month. So I bet it's more times than that.

Happy birthday, true-blue friend. Thanks for challenging me to believe in myself against all appreciable odds, to kick my own butt when appropriate, and for never kicking mine even if I deserved it. I can see at least twice as far in the fog with you around, and true north is a little easier to hang onto.

We Cowgirls Rope some Writers