Country

This is a pretty different topic than what I normally write about, and having said that, I would not blame anyone for choosing not to read what I am about to write. But believe me when I say that what I have to say is more relevant to writing than you might think it is.

I'm a fan of country music. That's a thing that goes in and out of fashion depending on when and where you are, but I don't care. There are a lot of things that I thoroughly enjoy about country music, but it's not just any country music. The classic joke about country is "Do you know what you get when you play country music backwards? You get your house back, your truck back, your dog back, your wife back..." There is a subsection of country that this absolutely applies to, and that is not the kind of music I am talking about. Some of those songs are ok, I won't deny, but they're not why I love country.

There's the huge subsection, especially in more recent years, of drinking songs. All kinds of songs about going out and getting drunk, or why you're getting drunk, or why you aren't getting drunk, and all kinds of bullshit. If you haven't been able to guess by some of my stories, I'm not a drinker. I don't particularly understand the appeal of getting drunk, but that's another story entirely. Again, some of these songs are good, especially ones that make me laugh, but these aren't the songs I'm talking about. These don't define country for me.

No, the country music that I love, that I am a fan of, is the music that tells of life. The songs about love, and life, and work, and childhood. Songs that you can listen to and relate to, that you can visualize in your head, and that make you feel something. Funnily enough, a lot of these songs don't sound that country. They're not big hoedowns with lots of guitar twang and thick, southern accents. If you just heard them without knowing beforehand that they were country, you might not even realize it.

If you're willing to take a chance and take a peek at what I'm talking about, I suggest Lady Antebellum's "I Run to You", Darius Rucker's "This" and "Alright", and Tim McGraw's "Live Like You Were Dying".

These aren't the songs people think of when they think country, much in the same way that when I say medieval fantasy I don't mean Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings. I run on a different system, but there aren't words that distinguish what I'm talking about from what other people are talking about. I can't just pick a single word to describe them. If I could, I wouldn't be writing about it now.

If you've made it all the way here, I hope you realize just how different what I wanted to say came out from how you might have judged me right off the bat. Ideally, that's the kind of character I want to write in a story. But that can be pretty hard to do. Playing with a person's expectations isn't the easiest thing to do in the world, especially when you're making something entirely from scratch. Things have to come from somewhere, after all. But as a writer, this is something that I strive to do. To take your expectations and twist them on their head, but not make you feel lost in the process. It's not easy, and it's not something you can just do. It takes time. It takes explaining and building.

You can't just tell someone you like country that isn't really country, even if it is true.