Oldefarr

My friend Tom was such a serious guy, but he came up with a lot of stuff that was fun for other people. My favorite was the time he let me "help" him with this grammy thing that copies sounds. I helped him by singing "My Old Kentucky Home" into one of his first versions. It made me sound terrible, but that didn't stop me and I kept wanting to sing into machines. In the war I tried to introduce Steven Foster to these French guys, and they tried to introduce me to rhubarb. When talkies came out, I tried to sing in those, but they threw me out of the theater.

I didn't actually take up the guitar until long after I saw Elvis. I completely missed Elvis's appeal, but I liked the guitar. You would think I would be better at it by now. The Beatles, of course, were a whole different story, and that's when I got into songwriting, which was obviously easier than either singing or guitar playing. Little did I realize what Paul explained decades later about him and John: "We had a knack for it." Knack, knack. Who's there? It's me still trying to write a song.

For a while I was in a band called the Spuds, named after the potato field you had to drive across to get to our company's lakeside retreat where Bob, who wound up not being in the band, first belted out, "Potato field, potato field, we met our fate in the potato field," along with about a dozen instant verses. I like nonsense, but I like my own nonsense best. Dean, Jeff, Alison and I later went on to Dean's basement, where we worked on songs by Buddy Holly, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and me. One of mine was a simple and fun Buddy Holly knock-off called "Doris," about this woman at work who "wears her pants so tightly, always wears a happy smi-i-i ile. We'd all like to get into them, if only for a whi-i-i-ile."

One of our favorites was "Crazy Mine," which could have been called "The Ballad of Laura LaRue," which was the true story of meeting this fabulous woman with that actual name Laura LaRue (anyone know her? where she is?) in a bar. At least the story was true up until the part about her staying with me. I still do that song. Another favorite, actually requested at a Spuds performance, was "Dreamer," a waltz where this girl is calling her guy a dreamer, "but you don't know a dream when you see her. Don't know your left from your right from your wrong. You've been asleep too long." Alison sang that one in the Spuds. I handed a CD of it to Carrie Underwood the night she was given the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame Rising Star Award in 2005. She never called. I later learned she had finished recording her first CD the day before. Bad timing -- and a sweet but flawed and awkward song.

The Spuds played a gig or two at a restaurant/bar called Treebeard's, where one of the pictures in this press kit was taken, and at Dean's going away party, which was the end of the Spuds.

I had a daughter. There's a home video of me and her playing guitars and singing songs like "Guess I'll Go Eat Worms." She was about three and her plastic guitar only had two strings, but it was a blast until we finally woke up Mom, who was sleeping in the bed right next to us. My daughter went off to college, and I began reintroducing myself to the guitar and songwriting. I played open mics at the Sunset Bar and Grill and at the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. I took singing lessons and did my song "Squeezin' 28/8 into 24/7" at the recital, where I learned to enunciate from the guy who came up afterward and asked, "What's 28-A?" I joined the Nashville Songwriters Association International.

New songs started coming out, some no doubt inspired by my long-running divorce proceedings. The meanest starts off saying, "This granite counter, hard and cold, reminds me. The coffee here, cross and old, reminds me." But in the end it says, "I made you hard and cold." Then there's the bleak, in a fun sort of way, "Which Way to Run," where "I got self-destruction. I got bad compunction. I got myself transported here to lose-lose junction." On a brighter note, "Love Rocks" tries to do for love what Homer Simpson did for India when he arrived there expecting to see the Indianapolis 500, Wrigley Field and Dodger Dogs. And the Indian woman scolds him for confusing India with Indiana, Indiana with Illinois, and the Cubs with the Dodgers. Another upbeat tune is "A Band-Aid Where," where "I've got a Band-Aid where my wedding band used to stay," but then I meet someone and have to quick ditch the Band-Aid.

I went to New York last summer to visit my daughter, who was interning at a Times Square office, and fulfilled a dream I didn't know I had: I opened up my guitar case, sat down on the sidewalk across the street from her office, played some tunes that disappeared into the traffic noise, and collected about a buck thirty-five and a fantastic story from this ex-con aspiring songwriter who happened along. I went to the open mic at Ashford and Simpson's Sugar Bar, but Andre totally judged me by my sou