a switch-hitting third baseman for the Royals. I was going to

hit 50 homeruns each year and my contract was going to be a

credit card from the Royals, and they were just going to pay for

everything forever. I didn’t want to have money, just have what I needed.

June 26th I’ll open for Mike McClure at Woody’s in Lenexa.

That’s another dream. It’s a better one now. Well, almost.

Baseball is awesome.

Goodbye – L.G. Maddy

He walks up to the casket, and can’t believe she’s dead
the locks of grey he brushed are piled atop her head.
The hands that told a story, and wrapped a Christmas gift
are wrinkled, curled, and bony, a ring still on the left.
The ears that always listened, seem cold and hard and frail…
but he sits right down beside her, to tell another tale.

and he says…

“I remember that you told me you’d love me with your heart,
in good times and in bad, until death did us part.
You’ve never broke that promise, we married at twenty-two..
now sixty years behind us since we both said ‘I do’.
This day has been a hard one, and I must tell you know
that since the time you passed on I’ve broken my wedding vow.
‘Until death do us part’…I know that I agreed,
but I’m a mortal man, and I have many needs.
And I have my suspicions, you might have broke yours too…
at night I dream of visions…of Heaven, me, and you.
There’s no need for alarm, I’ve loved with every breath.
The Love begun in this Life, won’t even end in Death.”

I’ll beg Traffas not to comment on the obvious grammatical errors. They are intentional, and good to end a sentence with.

Dangle that modifier.

Farming is intimidating. Dad wasn’t a great student in school, and to my knowledge was truly never mechanically inclined. But the way he looks at a problem can be refreshing.

His internal cause-and-effect’er is far better than mine. My sense of danger is catastrophically misplaced – I jump when the torch pops back at me…dad has eternal faith in cheap brass check valves. The gas/fuel mix was off on the torch, so it would light, and then “POP!!” out immediately. Paint on the toolbar was already burning when the happened, so Dad used it to re-light the torch instead of pulling out the sparker.

Again…and again…and again….it sounded like automatic weapons fire. Re-lighting 4-5 times per second until he finally got the metal as cherry as he needed it.

I sought cover. Dad delighted in the fact that he could be entertained and productive at the same time.

Been playing music lately. The response to the EP, which went up on iTunes 2 weeks ago, has been great. Some radio play in Wichita and KC, a forthcoming “half-hour with Maddy” on the hometown radio station…maybe some spins in Manhattan and Hays soon as well.

Got a cliche’ shirt last weekend when I played at Woody’s in Lenexa. Black with white letters…

Reddirt
it’s not just music
it’s a lifestyle.

Not a fan of cliche’s, but I love that shirt. I love it.

I remember standing in the living room of the little 2-bedroom house I grew up in, watching as people celebrated the fall of the Berlin wall. I didn’t know the significance.

I remember dropping off Dad’s ’92 GMC took get a new muffler put on the morning of September 11, 2001. As I walked in to talk with the mechanic, he asked me if I’d heard about a plane hitting a building in New York. Terrorism, to someone from Northwest, KS…it’s even less of a threat than communism. I know now how significant that moment was.

And I remember the first time I heard Mike McClure’s voice. Driving towards Oberlin, KS on Highway 36. Moving west. The Great Divide – Let’s Get Out of Here Tonight. Been singing it ever since.

I talked recently with someone about songwriting. For a long time, I wrote poems. Poems that weren’t very good, and I did it to pass the time. I wrote them on seed salesmen’s booklets and the inside of tractor windows back when we used to till this land for days and weeks. You can only listen to the same songs so many times. Smashmouth’s “Allstar” and Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance” drove me to thinking.

I thought all over paper. Trite rhymes, predictable patterns, hokey hokey pokey corny crap.

Not long after I heard some Great Divide I started to understand that it was ok for songwriting to be whatever you felt, not whatever you wanted someone else to feel. “But I Do”…”Wildflower”….”Billy Covington”….

I wrote my first good lyrics that summer. I’ll try to find them and post them here soon, but I think it was called “Goodbye”. It was told from a first-person perspective, an old man at his wife’s funeral. He’s at the casket, apologizing that in just the short time since she’s passed he’s broken his wedding vows…remember the vows say “til death do us Part”..

His apology is that he’s never stopped loving her, and suspects she’s broken her vow too, so they can talk that one over when they meet again.

It was beautiful, simple, sad.

Elegant like white-wash, not like pearls. Someone was dead. And I learned – it’s ok to write songs about people dying, because they do.

It somewhat gladdens me to know that competing countries that will benefit from our subsequent downfall will have to wait until after Obama’s term to crown him a living god.

However, I am disappointed that my senators can’t be knighted.

No battles won…no battles lost.
What I don’t know scares me
What I do turns me off.

“See Lonely” and “Fat Julie” are now up on YouTube. Check em out – they were recorded with a Flip video camera, and came out fair. I could have done with a shave prior to recording, but didn’t feel it was worth the time

After some encouraging phone calls recently, I’m giving thought to trying my hand in Nashville, let me know what you think. Go Royals.

Maddy

I feel lyrics coming on again, needing to get to some Dale Jessup (great cowboy name) has written, and also have an insatiable desire to simply hold a guitar. I can’t go on…there is an Ibanez within reach…I leave you with the beginnings of what I hope will be my next finished lyrical project.

It Is What It Is by Lucas Maddy

She cut me like a hotel razor, burned me like a bummed cigarette, hung my heart on a wire hanger, walked away with no regret. I still live…it is what it is. Don’t forget, just forgive…I still live.

lyrics copyright Lucas Maddy, 2010.

No, mostly people stay the same as they were…they just eat less doing it, as the small town becomes an island of their claim, and they go about knowing everything they can about that island. These are the spies of their tiny domain, who do their best to recollect every fact. And either they do it with amazing accuracy, or else their audience is so afraid to challenge for fear of being challenged themselves, that seldom is any thought a wrong one. The conversation just rolls on. I guess this is what the world was like before texting.

First off, Rhett Miller. Honestly, I had rarely listened before when it was playing as Traffas and I rode to a show in a purring Cummins. Use of purring, now three times in so short of a span? Called for, I say. Undoubtedly.

It was Singular Girl that spun round my head for a nickel’s play yesterday as I drove back from Wichita. Beyond simple melodic pleasing, it has a certain tinge of dork to it that must be appreciated. “You’re like plate techtonics” is not what draws me…Rhett avoids an obvious “sonic” rhyme and burrows around the nerd alert, refusing to oblige the beg for resolution.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saTT9xpYSFc

This is not new, nor resurfacing in response to an artist being convicted, murdered, or entering “Dancing With the Stars”. Rather, it’s just time to pay attention.

For those of you who traipse here for the music to be disappointed by a blog, here is an update – Tim Sprigg, Katelyn Autry and I are in Norton, practicing on a regular basis, and booking some shows acoustic and full band, to be joined by the rhythm section of Trent Boehner and Tommie Lebanon. New writing is an occupational hazard, a shiny bright lyric begging to be recorded when in fact Bad Little Man, Power of a Song, Last of Your Kind, and Every Man’s a Cowboy, just to name a few, continue to sit patiently in line. In an effort to stir up some reaction, I’d like to hear from you what songs you may like to have recorded and put up. In fact, the first three people that subscribe to this blog (I think you can subscribe to the blog, if not, just steal your neighbor’s copy off his front step. He’ll get another one…he’s rich) will be sent all future copies of fresh cuts for preview and response.

I like response, especially from non-writers. Why? Well, if you own a restaurant, shouldn’t you ask the customers what to do better rather than the chef and the waitstaff? Amen.

I’m heading back into the rain. Time to post a letter and dive back into Lonesome Dove. The book this time.

Can’t wait to be seeing you at some upcoming shows. Check the gig calendar for one in your hemisphere of influence.

Maddy