"They can write it on my stone, my life's been a country song." - Chris Cagle, My Life's Been A Country Song
When I thought about what I wanted to write about when I applied to write for Odyssey, I wanted to write about something real, something about my life and something that people could relate to.
So what is more relatable to write about then country music?
For anybody that knows me, I'm a huge country music fan. Although I grew up in the big city of Cleveland, Ohio, I somehow became a country music fan. I grew up on old school classic rock thanks to my dad. Around the time I turned 12, I got gotten Toby Keith's "Greatest Hits 2" and never looked back. While I still love me some classic rock and blues, as well as music of all kinds, country is at the heart and soul of what I listen to.
There's just something to country music that is just so realistic. Most people just write it off as it just being songs about beer, booze and tailgates. It is that, but it's also so much more than that. It's about life in general. I can't count the number of times when I listened to a song and heard lyrics from a country song and went, "That's my life in a song."
Country music has that effect on you. As I tell every person that laughs at my love for country, there is a country song for every situation. You just have had a bad breakup? You just made a terrible decision? You miss somebody who just passed away recently? There's a song for all of that and more.
With Cagle's song, he name checks numerous country artists who have had some of the best songs in history that had a powerful impact (Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried," Alan Jackson's "Where Were You When The World Stopped Spinning," Alabama, and George Jones to name just a few). He goes on in the song to describe how country music has defined him as a person "It's all about fallin' down and gettin' back up/Your good times and hard luck/True love and amazing grace/Workin' all week for a backache".
Cagle's song represents what country music means to me. Whether it be a moment in time that country music has connected me to a lyric or accurately describes how I feel on any given day, it has this amazing ability to capture you in the perfect way.
My goal is to be able to connect the music I love to my life, to be able to take a couple lines of a country song and be able to write about a time when those lyrics meant so much to me. I'm not trying to get people to be a country music fan, but I hope that people will be able to look at country music from a city boy's perspective.
