Music Makers 
Pitch Perfect
We asked five Texas musicians—Guy Clark, Patty Griffin, Sonny Throckmorton, Robert Earl Keen, and Jack Ingram—to tell us the secret to writing a great country song. Their answers were predictable (avoid Nashville), surprising (read Rumi), and downright quirky (two words: “graph paper”).
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Throckmorton: Co-writing with some people is like co-painting. You don’t hear about Van Gogh ever co-painting a picture.
IV. “NOTHING BAD WILL EVER HAPPEN TO ME BECAUSE I GOT PLAYED ON THE RADIO.”
Spong: Jack, you’re selling more records and playing in front of bigger crowds than the rest of the table. And you write your own songs, but your hits have been written by other people. What do you look for when you’re trying to find a song that’s going to sell?
Ingram: It still boils down to that thing I talked about at the beginning: a song that stops my world for a few minutes. So I’ll look through a thousand songs and then tell my producers, “Here’s five that work for me. You guys tell me which ones work for you, because y’all are the ones that are trying to get it on the radio.”
Spong: So a “hit,” in the context of purely commercial success, isn’t a dirty word?
Ingram: Absolutely not. Nothing bad will ever happen to me because I got played on the radio.
Throckmorton: A hit just means that people like what you do.
Ingram: For me, it came down to not wanting to play for 25 people. I’m from Texas and proud of it. But I don’t make music for just Texans. My music is for as many people as want to hear it. Plus, I like riding in a bus. [Everybody laughs.] It means that after the show I get to go home and wake up with my kids. It’s not the ego part of having a bus, it’s—
Griffin: The sanity.
Ingram: I like having a sane life.
Throckmorton: You know, all four of these guys make a living by going and playing to people. Crowds actually show up to hear ’em and love ’em. And here I’ve written a bunch of hits, and I can’t draw flies. My dream was always to do what they do.
Ingram: But you just have to walk out to your mailbox and grab that royalty check.
Spong: When you open your mailbox, you don’t hear the crowd roar?
Throckmorton: I do. And that’s nice.
Spong: Robert, didn’t George Strait just cut one of your songs? The few people I’ve ever talked to who wrote songs that he recorded, guys who’d grown up listening to him, called that a distinct kind of thrill.
Keen: That was very cool. I wrote “West Texas Town,” a fun little swing song, with Dean Dillon about three years ago, and it was fun because we hung out for a couple days, going to all these thrift shops looking for Old Spice bottles, and then sort of at the end of the day, Dean says [Keen affects a gruff voice], “Hey, Robert Earl, let’s write a song.” And I said, “Okay.” We sat down and wrote that one in about thirty minutes. Then three years later, he calls up [Keen uses the same gruff voice], “Hey, Robert Earl, George is going to cut that song, and I’m going to sing it with him. How cool is that?”
Griffin: What’d he want Old Spice bottles for?
Keen:I guess he collects them. I didn’t know much about Old Spice.
Spong: Sonny, when I read about you writing for Tree Publishing in the seventies, I pictured a Brill Building—type organization and you running down a hallway, waving sheet music over your head, screaming, “I just wrote ‘The Last Cheater’s Waltz.’ ”
Throckmorton: We were a looser group than that. We used to hunt bottles too. I collect Fire-King bottles, so we’d go driving around looking for ’em. One time Glenn Martin and I jumped in the car and just took off for Florida. We had to be back by Monday, because that was my time to demo—
Ingram: You recorded demos of new songs every Monday?
Throckmorton: Every Monday. I actually had all day to record if I had that many songs. So me and Martin went to Florida knowing we had to write something to demo by the start of the next week, and we wrote “If We’re Not Back in Love by Monday” [a number two country hit for Merle Haggard in 1977]. It was just a great time, and Nashville has never been the same. [Publisher and producer] Don Gant was running the company—
Clark: He was a cool guy.
Throckmorton: Yes, he was. And he knew songs. He could hear a song once and tell if it was going to be a hit. And he discovered so many great artists. Keith Whitley. And, uh, that “Margaritaville” guy. [Everybody laughs.] Lots of folks. It was so much fun. We were all getting drunk and writing hits.
Spong: With you, Guy, I think of the difference between a personal song like “The Randall Knife” and a number one hit like “Heartbroke.” Did you approach writing them differently?
Clark: Well, yeah. “The Randall Knife” is a cathartic thing that I never thought was even going to be a song. I wrote that when my father died, and that was just to get it out there. It never occurred to me to make it a song. “Heartbroke” was different. I used to write in bound notebooks, and you couldn’t shuffle pages around like you can with graph paper. I had these four verses that I thought were really good, and about two pages over I had this great chorus. And one day, just by chance, I happen to pull those two things and put them together, and that was “Heartbroke.” They just fit.
Ingram: Like chocolate with peanut butter.
Clark: Exactly. But I must speak to this with a song. [Clark plays a new song called “Somedays the Song Writes You.”] “You can search for the way / You can curse you can pray / But the words have a way of their own.” I wrote that with Gary Nicholson and Jon Randall Stewart, and it just popped right out of the three of us. My sensibilities tell me that’s a real cliché-ridden song, except that when it all came together, I thought, “Well, it’s not something I would ordinarily sing, but it sure is true.” You can’t argue with it.
Throckmorton: And it is true. They do write you.
Ingram: See, that’s what I was talking about. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in the rest of the world. Maybe it’s because Guy’s one of my all-time heroes, but sitting here—you get drawn in. You feel it curling up inside you. It’s like a drug. And that’s what songwriting is. It can take you completely away from everything that bothers you. Even a sad song. It’s comforting because you know the rest of the world has felt that way. “The Randall Knife” is the perfect example. It is the most personal story that Guy could tell. I had issues with my dad, and that connection is immediate. It made me feel like, “All right, this happens to everybody.”
Clark: You know, Vince Gill loves that song. He told me that it touched him so much, that he had the same feud with his father. Except his was over a 4-iron. He broke his dad’s 4-iron. But it’s the same thing. If you leave a place where the listener can connect to it, but not write the listener out of it by putting in so much detail that it excludes them—
Griffin: Are you thinking that when you write? “Don’t leave the listener out”?
Clark: Actually, maybe not when I’m writing it, but certainly when I’m editing it, going back over it and working it out. I do consciously think about that. But it still has to be intelligently written. You can’t write down to the listener. You have to give people credit for being smart enough to get how cool you are.
Spong: And if you write it that simply, with the right specificity, it’ll become universal.
Clark: See, I have this real haiku approach to the end result, the yin and the yang of it.
Spong: How long had your dad been dead when you wrote “The Randall Knife”?
Clark: About two weeks.
Griffin: Wow.
Spong: Because you’ve written songs about your childhood, memories you’ve carried around with you for years.
Clark: Well, yeah. “Texas, 1947.” And “Desperados Waiting for a Train” is about something that happened to me when I was six. Some things just come to the surface whenever they want. It doesn’t matter why, just so long as you get the song.
See a slide show of images from a day on the set.
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