Because she writes stuff about stuff I’m into like Hazel Dickens, a legend in folk/country music, who doesn’t have a My Space page.

You know those moments in life where you read a book or see a film or hear a voice that changes the way you look at things? Hearing Hazel Dickens for the first time did that for me. Her recordings, with Alice Gerrard and then solo, were so honest, so close to reality they brought me to tears. Here was a woman conveying hard truth and beauty in the same notes. If I’d never known anything more about her she would’ve still had that effect on me. But when I learned how she’d grown up in a coal mining family, worked day jobs for most of the time she was writing and singing about working people – well, she was someone to look up to in many ways.

Also, Amy Rigby’s daughter is just a little older than Teen Spirit and I appreciate Rigby’s thoughtful musings on what happens when your child goes to college. She’s living in France and her boyfriend just went away for a few days:

But in the night I started thinking “I should go with him. Even if the UK authorities turn me away at the port like they almost did three weeks ago.”

Because I possibly don’t know how to be alone anymore?

Because I’m happy not being alone anymore?

Because when our kids go off to live their own lives, we don’t know what to do with ourselves, even if we’ve spent 18 years scratching and clawing for something that is our own identity, outside of being a parent, but then we realize in fact it was ALL about being a parent, about having somebody to do it for?

And without that, somehow writing a song seems more like…an artistic choice, rather than an imperative, a means of survival. And that freedom scares me.

Shit.

Come back soon Eric, make me laugh, keep me busy and save me from thinking about this stuff!