You have, in your own way, disappeared a few times.
“Several times. Problem was, everywhere I went, I met me there, you know?”
Live and on Full, Graham chooses to follow “Swept Away” with “Something Wonderful”, each line repeated like a Buddhist chant, the guitars big, chiming and churning like Joshua Tree-era U2, of all things. “Something very wonderful is going to happen,” he sings in that great broken voice of his, as if singing will make it so. And maybe it will.
Two songs later he is alone with his guitar, a supplicant singing “O Dearest One”: “I swear now, to you, I did my best/But I guess/That my best is still/Not very good.” Later, on “Rosewood”, he adds, “You’re beautiful/And I am no damn good.”
“Holes”, the song from which the album draws its title, is as blunt: “Well I’m so full of holes/I whistle when the wind blows,” he begins. The chorus comes sadly: “Full, so full,” adding, carefully, “but I saved a little room for you.” It is a loping, beautiful piece; one of his best, one of his most honest, one of his most difficult.
Rough nights. On “Bonaparte”, he groans, “Calling Mr. Fix-it, tell me what to do/I seem to have set myself on fire.” “WCD”, addressed to a friend whose name he prefers not to reveal, is more direct: “There is no forever/No such thing as never.”
“The Garden” ends here: “Never will I hide myself again.” It is a prayer, not a promise. The imagined Eden of our youth is long gone.
Enough of that. That’s what comes after. This Full record is also about what happens now, in the middle years. It is about the tension between making art and making a living, between being a parent and a partner and being successful at one’s craft. It is about persisting.
About juggling.
“The biggest struggle with me,” Jon Dee says, clearing his throat, “is trying to find some sort of balance. For instance, I have to be completely alone to write. That’s just how it is. And it’s not, ‘Oh, I’ll be quiet, honey, I won’t rattle the dishes.’ If I know you’re there, you’re too there. And so most of my writing happens after everyone has gone to bed and is asleep, and I get up really early in the morning and I write then.”
You came to songwriting relatively late.
“I’d been writing songs all along, but not really writing songs. That was not my job. My job was to be the hotshot guitar player; that’s what I did. And I worked in some really interesting situations because of it. But there just got to be a point where what I wanted to do was write. God help us all, because it’s a hard job.”
Was it something you’d been putting away and off in some ways?
“Yeah. Yeah, because it’s…I mean, you can look at my songs and tell I’m not really making anything up. I wish I could be a storyteller that could build these incredible collections of characters. That’s not what I do. I’m a transcriptionist.
“I carry a pocket notebook, take notes all day long, but it’s a juggling act, and it has to be fluid. Your creativity and your work as an artist has to be like a liquid, which flows into the space which you will allow it. And so you allow it as much space as you can. But we’re grown men with families. There’s going to be a limited amount of space. Fortunately I provide a lot of the income for the house, so that’s respected, and there comes a point where I can say, ‘Daddy has to work…’”
Sometimes it is the songs themselves which demand.
“On that last record, that song ‘East 11th Street’ — ‘Children turn your cell phones on.’ That line popped into my head and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cute,’” Graham says, still betrayed by the wonder of things. “Two days later, ‘Yeah, that’s all right.’ A week later, ‘Jesus, leave me alone!’ Four weeks later, ‘All right, I’ll write you down just to prove to you that this is not a song.’ Wrote it all down, wrote the whole song [his cell phone rings], and then went to the record company with all of my demos. They were like, ‘Oh, we love everything, all except this “Children turn your cell phones on,” we’re not sure what you’re getting at with this.’
“And so I said, ‘Well, sorry, it’s friends with all the other songs so it’s not going to go away. And I agree with you, I actually agree with you, but it’s apparently gotta be recorded.’ So when I went to work with Charlie [Sexton] on pre-production, Charlie goes, ‘Man, this is some of the best stuff you’ve ever written, with the possible exception of this “Children” song because it just seems sort of inane.’
“I said, ‘I know, Charlie, trust me, I know, but we have to record it.’ So out of 100 stations that they polled with it, how many picked that? 90. 90. And I’ve had the most amazing e-mails from people. I wasn’t even really sure what that song was about. It wrote itself and plopped in the front seat of my car and it wouldn’t go away. And anything that hangs around for three weeks demanding to be written, apparently it’s got its own idea, you know?”
Well, if you believe in the divine, you have to listen.
“Yeah. Ray Wylie Hubbard says, when the phone rings, pick it up.”
ND co-editor Grant Alden would like for the phone to have rung more often during the writing of this piece.
