I wrote an original soundtrack to my short story collection, 'Bear County, Michigan.'
On music and stories
In our backyard, here on the rural outskirts of Detroit, we have a little white house – a playhouse, but a little more advanced. We call it The Little House.
It was built by my father-in-law’s father back in the ‘50s or ‘60s. He was one of those guys who could build anything, kind of like my father-in-law.
I was never one of those guys. The only thing I could ever build were songs, stories and, recently, a book – Bear County, Michigan. It’s been out for almost two months and the response has been wonderful.
But I’m not going to talk about Bear County, Michigan the book. I’m going to talk about Bear County, Michigan the album.
But first I’m going to talk about The Little House.
We got it soon after we moved into our house in Whitmore Lake. It had a big yard for our girls, then a toddler and baby. Within the first year or two, my father-in-law arrived with The Little House on a trailer.
Between my shifts of covering murders and mayhem at the newspaper, I was writing and publishing the cycle of stories set in a fictional northern Michigan county that would become the book Bear County, Michigan, roughly 2011-2018 (with a lot more editing and rewriting leading up to the book’s publication). But at night, after we got the babies to sleep, I would escape to The Little House with an acoustic guitar to blow off some artistic steam. I’ve always dreaded writing lyrics, so I thought it would be neat to shape some of the guitar parts I had into songs based on the book of short stories that was coming together. And so I began writing the songs that became Bear County, Michigan: The Album.
Here’s a taste of the album. The song is Compensation, based on the story of the same name (they all share the same name) about Jimmy Blizzard, a fella who gets hooked on Oxys after losing his finger at work.
But let me back up. Before I was a journalist, before I published any of those short stories, before I went to college or graduate school, before I was a father and a husband, I was a Suburban Delinquent. I got my first guitar when I was fourteen and started playing in punk bands a few years later. This was in the mid-1990s, amid a second punk explosion. My first band was called Pee Wee Manson. Our songs were in the vein of the Circle Jerks – we even covered one – and had names like “There’s a Lizard on My Amp” and “Legendary Heroes,” an ode to the Harlem Globetrotters. We played a few backyard parties and abandoned warehouses in the city before breaking up. We were even featured in the iconic zine Maximumrocknroll, which labeled us garage punk. After we broke up, the bass player (Howie C!) and I started a new band which had a few different names before we settled on Suburban Delinquents. We started playing the parties and punk houses before opening for bigger bands. I was still only a junior or senior in high school by the time we worked our way up to venues like The Shelter, Magic Stick and St. Andrew’s. We did a few short tours, opened for some bigger touring punk bands and played at Pine Knob when a new festival called the Warped Tour came through town.
I loved punk music, and still do. But as I got older, my tastes broadened. There was also an alt-country explosion going on. I loved bands like Uncle Tupelo and their off-shoots Son Volt and Wilco. I always liked folk and blues music like Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan. I’d written most of the songs I brought to the Delinquents on an acoustic guitar. The more I listened to folk music, the more I realized that punk is just folk electrified and sped up, the lyrics screamed instead of sung. But it’s still got the the same working-class challenge to authority. When I was in college, as I started reading and writing more fiction, I also started writing more folky acoustic songs, mostly for fun.
Even as I played music, I harbored dreams of being a writer. The two disciplines have been connected for me from the beginning. All songs are little stories. And short stories are carried along by the musicality of language. Both require a certain letting go. Sometimes you jam a riff and see what happens. I’ve always approached writing the same way. Start with an image or a feeling or situation, take it in a certain direction and see what happens. Shut down the part of your brain that requires logic or sense. Follow instinct and feeling, images and voices. Explore the territory even as you’re creating it. Music is similar. A journey into the non-self.
It’s rather annoying living with me, because I play the guitar frequently. I do it when I need to escape the realm of the living, when I need to lose myself in musical patterns. When the girls were babies, I’d sit in the bathroom and play them little songs while they took their baths. I’d make up songs we sang once and then forgot. We’d have dance parties and sing-along sessions. In this way, I always have dozens of guitar parts I played around the house for fun. And those were the seeds for the Bear County songs, guitar parts I played around the house for fun when I was finishing the stories that became the book, perhaps for the children while they ran around the house. Or for the dogs snoozing in the corner of the room.
But if everything was so freeform, no art would ever get polished, produced and released to the world. So at nights, I went out to The Little House and started formalizing the structures of the songs and writing the lyrics. They didn’t come in any particular order. They just sort of happened. Some of the lyrics match the stories in more direct ways than others. Some of the lyrics reference earlier drafts of the stories that were since revised. But most of all, it was for fun. To enhance the fictional world I was trying to build. To help me understand that world better, to help me see it better. And I can only hope an audience will experience both in a similar way.
And now those two worlds are completely entwined. I can’t imagine the stories without the songs. They bring each other to life.
I also spoke about the process with Marty Slagter, who writes the wonderful music blog Radio Amor here on Substack. Check that out, too!
