[TYPEWRITER CLACKING]
Downloaded from YTS.MX
♪♪♪
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
[CELLO PLAYING]
[TYPEWRITER CLACKING]
TOM: Not too long ago, I received a letter.
It was a letter from a desperate young songwriter
asking for advice.
I could tell that the rejection,
the waiting for nothing to happen
was killing his heart, mind, soul and spirit.
So, I did what any good writer does. I wrote him back.
"Dear friend, you asked me why the hell am I here.
"Well, truly heaven only knows.
"We all got here the same way, I suppose.
"We followed the song.
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
The first sentence in the Bible talks about creativity.
Create. A verb which means to bring something into existence.
People have often asked me about the creative process.
How do you write a song?
A friend of mine sent me his definition.
It's so good I think I'll just share it with you.
How do you write a song?
It happens in the shower.
You're soaping up your armpits and suddenly you realize
that you're humming a tune that hasn't been written yet.
And when that happens, something cracks inside your skull
that causes your brain to flood with one of those chemicals
that causes a man to wanna drive off the edge of a cliff
if he thinks that he can brush the cheek of God
for half a second.
And the next thing you do, I mean the very next thing,
is not rinse off or dry off.
You have to get your soapy ass to a piano,
a guitar, a xylophone.
Hell, even a set of water glasses
tuned to a scale will do,
because here's the thing.
That little ditty that you're humming in your head
has a set of tiny leather wings
and it starts to flap the minute that you know it's there.
It's scared of you. It doesn't wanna be caught.
So you have to hold it down by those tiny little wings
while it thrashes.
And then you look up and you realize
that you've missed an appointment,
or worse yet, you've been ignoring your woman.
And there she stands with her bags packed
and she says that she's been saying goodbye
for eight years, but you were too damned busy
with that flapping thing in your fist to notice,
and so she leaves. It's on paper now.
It's shredded and thrown up into the air like confetti,
and that's all you have to show for the struggle.
So you get in the shower the next morning
and gone are her soaps and shampoos
and lady razors and that poofy thing
that she uses to exfoliate,
soaping up your lonely life,
weeping for the broken space there.
And suddenly you realize you're humming a tune.
There's something in that whole damned drama
that makes a man need to be heard.
The struggle can't be all for nothing.
♪ I hope it always hurts and makes you cry
♪ Draw the beauty from your pain
♪ Life is just too beautiful to put it in a frame
♪ Maybe that's the reason why
♪ Van Gogh went insane
♪ You pour your heart out on a page
♪ You bear your soul upon a stage
♪ You got the power to make us feel
♪ You got the power to help us heal
♪ And I hope it always hurts and makes you cry
♪ Draw the beauty from your pain
♪ Life is just too beautiful to put it in a frame
♪ Maybe that's the reason why
♪ Van Gogh and Marilyn and Elvis
♪ Went
♪ Insane
See, you wanna write a song,
create something that wasn't there before,
but it's dark and formless and brooding and hovering
and then, let there be light.
And you have an idea and it's good,
but you're swimming in the waters of confusion.
And then you spot land and you have a verse
and there's light and there's dark
and there's morning and there's evening
and there's a beat and there's a rhythm.
And you feel the whole thing start to come together
and the birds sing a song
over the expanse of the Earth.
But the chaos remains
and you're trying to make some order
of the jingle jangly chords
and the jumble of ideas and words.
What is it about after all?
It's really just a love song.
It's a man and a woman, bone of my bone,
flesh of my flesh,
naked and unashamed.
And magically and mysteriously,
you have three-and-a-half minutes
of mind altering, spine tingling,
goose-bumping, iTunes downloading,
Pandora and Spotify underpaying music.
And on the seventh day, we can rest.
Every song is a love song in some form or fashion.
Good love, bad love, happy love, sad love,
rollercoaster, hands in the air love
or throw yourself off
the Tallahatchie Bridge love.
I learned what love is
and isn't at home, and I bet you did, too.
[ENGINE STOPS]
They say you write about what you know,
so write about your home.
I'm gonna tell you about my parents,
Marjorie and Tom Douglas.
My father was a steel salesman
with U.S. Steel Corporation,
and part of his territory was Shreveport, Louisiana.
A friend introduced him to a beautiful brunette bank teller.
Can I get a cup of coffee, please?
She wore the fragrance of roses
and floated across a dance floor on a Glenn Miller tune.
Stephen Sondheim, the great Broadway composer,
says God is in the details.
So load up your lyrics with sight, sound,
smells, taste, touches and motion,
and your audience will engage the songs all the more.
My parents married after a brief courtship in 1945.
And they say songs and stories are kinda like onions.
You have to peel them down till they make you cry.
You see, it was my mother's second marriage.
Her first husband, a young Navy pilot,
was killed in the opening days of World War II,
and the war department sent a telegram to her at work
and she fainted.
They say that we should all cry about once a week,
so don't shy away from your emotions
because the tears brought on this one.
♪ I pulled in at the shopping center
♪ And saw a little boy wrapped around
♪ The legs of his mother
♪ Like ice cream melting they embraced
♪ Years of bad decisions running down her face
♪ All morning I've been thinking
♪ My life's so hard
♪ And they wore
♪ Everything they own living in a car
♪ I wanted to tell him it would be okay
♪ But I got just got back in my Suburban
♪ And I drove away
♪ I don't know why they say
♪ Grown men don't cry
♪ I don't know why they say grown men don't cry
♪ I am sitting here with my kids and my wife
♪ And everything that I hold dear in my life
♪ We say grace and thank the Lord
♪ Got so much to be thankful for
♪ Then it is up the stairs and off to bed
♪ And my little boy says I haven't had my story yet
♪ And everything weighing on my mind
♪ Disappears just like that
♪ When he lifts his head off the pillow and says
♪ I love you Dad
Well, the story continues.
It's 10 years later, 1963.
I'm 10 years old.
My family and I go roller skating
early one Saturday morning
and my father falls and breaks his arm.
My mother takes him to the doctor's office
to get a cast and 50 opioids.
And he gamed the system and he needed more
and more and more, and he was an addict
right then and right there.
And he had to go to a sanatorium,
which is really like a rehab.
My mother covered for him with his bosses
while he was gone, and took him around
on his sales calls when he got back.
And it took a while and he recovered.
Until he didn't.
I come from a long line of storytellers.
Masterful yarn spinners.
Every holiday, every Sunday, every vacation,
somebody would always say,
"You know, that reminds me of the time..."
And I'm telling you my story not because it's the best one,
it's just the one that I know the best.
I wish that I'd recorded my grandmother playing the piano,
my mother's laugh, my father strumming the ukulele,
my father-in-law reading the Book of John.
What I wouldn't give to have those memories.
Tempus fugit,my friend.
[ENGINE STARTS]
February 9th, 1964.
It was a Sunday night. It was cold,
it was my mother's vegetable soup and cornbread on TV trays.
My mom and sister sat on the couch,
my dad sat in the big easy chair.
I sat on the hearth with my back to a roaring fire
and Ed Sullivan said to 73 million Americans
and the four Douglas's,
"Ladies and gentleman, welcome The Beatles."
My father loved The Beatles.
All the other fathers thought The Beatles were
the devil's right hand,
but not Thomas Labert Douglas Junior.
He loved their songs, their harmonies,
their Nehru jackets, their haircuts.
That's the first time I really remember the power of a song.
I was 11, my father was 53.
What did I know?
What I did know was that a boy loves what his father loves.
And that's the day I became a songwriter.
And then we went to Metro Music
and bought a red, six-string Hagstrom guitar.
Took it home and I was practicing.
The next day he burst in my bedroom and he said,
"Man, we gotta take that guitar back.
"You gotta be a bass player like Paul McCartney.
"It's gonna be so much easier for you to be in a band
"as a bass player than a guitar player."
Big Tom, always my biggest fan and the easiest to impress.
Then he dropped me off at Morris Brandon Elementary
and I boarded a yellow school bus with some friends
and classmates and some teachers,
and we went to Atlanta Stadium to hear, you guessed it,
John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
And I can still hear the girls screaming in my ears.
Dropping me off to go see The Beatles
would be a little bit like taking your
11-year-old to Bonnaroo saying,
"Have a good time, sweetie.
I'll come back and pick you up."
It was pretty radical, but then again,
Big Tom was pretty radical.
He had the radio on in the morning when he shaved,
the radio on in the afternoon when he swam laps at the Y.
They had a big Victrola in their bedroom.
He kept that black vinyl spinning.
Little did he know that I would end up in this crazy business,
living in a heartbreak town.
Hey, I just want you to know
what you're getting yourself into.
The writer has to learn to live
in a space of unresolvable conflict.
First you have to face the dark overlord of apathy.
And she sits in the corner of your writing space
and she smokes cool cigarettes and sips espresso
and she growls, "No, no, no,"
with every strike of your Blackwing Palomino pencil.
And then you have to face the face in the mirror,
the one that looks at you and says,
"You're a fraud. This didn't work out well yesterday,
"it won't work out well today
"and it won't work out well tomorrow."
That voice is a rat that sits on the edge of your piano
with a long tail and gnarly teeth
and it utters profanities at you.
You have to walk over, pick it up by the tail,
put it in a mason jar, screw down a brass lid,
walk it out to the driveway,
-load up a 12 gauge -[GUN COCKING]
-and blow it into smithereens. -[GUN FIRES]
And that's just to get the song started.
In the spring of 2009,
the rat started talking to me.
"The next big thing is coming to your studio
"in a couple of weeks, big boy. What you got for us?"
I didn't answer. I walked over,
carefully picked him up by the tail,
avoid biting as he screamed profanities at me,
put him in the mason jar,
screwed down the brass lid, kaboom.
If a cat has nine lives, a rat has 99 times 99 lives.
You never kill the rat, you just have to
deal with him over and over and over again.
We have to stay focused.
We have to block out the distractions.
Don't worry about getting it right,
we just have to get it written.
And we can rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.
In the spring of 2009, the rat got in my head.
I failed to follow my own process.
I started thinking about trying to write a hit
instead of finding a point of inspiration.
That's the kiss of death.
[ENGINE STARTS]
The next big thing was coming on Monday morning
and I couldn't rhyme blue with shoe.
The weekend before, I was gonna run
the Nashville Marathon, 26.2 miserable miles.
I started the race with my two best friends.
They abandoned me at the halfway point.
It's the desolate wasteland, the metroplex.
It's boring and it's heartless,
running through a nondescript office park.
I saw a guy in a yellow chicken suit
and orange flip flops. He sailed by.
And a mature group of women in matching purple tutus,
they raced by.
Then I saw him, or at least the back of him.
His t-shirt read, "I run this town."
I was thinking of metaphors and similes and analogies.
I was delirious. I run this town like a mafia boss.
I run this town from point A to point B.
I run this town like a mayor.
I followed him for miles.
I developed a hatred for him.
I really hated myself and I really hated running.
My life was a mockery.
I thought of the rat sitting comfortably
back on the edge of my piano, laughing at me in my misery.
All I know is I run and run
and never seem to get there.
Monday morning 10 a.m., the fresh faced trio
come into my studio.
They pull up three chairs.
They say, "What do you got for us?"
They didn't see the rat.
You see, I'm an alleged professional.
I've had weeks to prepare. My publisher has set this up.
I walk over shakily to my keyboard
that I've had since third grade.
I put my hands on the ivories and I say,
"I run from hate, and I run from prejudice
"and pessimist, and I run too late."
I turn around and I imagine that
they're packing up their backpacks,
slowly edging out of the studio.
Instead, they jump up in unison and they say,
"That's genius! You're brilliant!"
And I say, "Oh shucks,
"I've been saving that for you folks
"for a couple of months now."
That's the first time I met and wrote with Lady Antebellum.
[PLAYS PIANO]
♪ I run
♪ From hate
♪ And I run from prejudice
♪ And I run from pessimists
♪ But I run too late
♪ And I run
♪ My life
♪ Or is it running me
♪ I run from my past
♪ And I run too fast
♪ Or too slow it seems
♪ When lies become the truth
♪ That's when I run to you
♪ This world keeps spinning faster
♪ Into a new disaster
♪ So I run to you
♪ Baby
♪ When it all starts coming undone
♪ You're the only one that I run to
♪ I run to you
I really had an idyllic life until about 1975.
I graduated from college, my sister getting married,
my father retiring from U.S. Steel
with a gold watch and a 45-year pen.
It should've been the best of times.
It was, in fact, the worst of times.
'75 to '82's kind of a watercolor blur.
Let me describe it for you.
It was days and days of my father staying in bed,
hefty black garbage bags filled with every pill imaginable.
It was doctor's offices, psychologists,
psychiatrists, hospitals, shock treatments,
Mount Paran Church of God healing meetings.
It was lifelong friends of my father whispering
as they passed him in the hallway,
banished from the locker room.
They gave up, he gave up, I wanted to give up.
But I can't give up on something that I love,
and you can't either.
I was driving myself crazy
chasing my songwriting dream in Nashville.
And my mother called me and I could tell that
my father's slow motion suicide was driving her insane,
so I brought my father to live with me in Nashville.
And when he left home, he would never go back
to Atlanta again, and my mother and father
would never live together under the same roof.
My songwriting wasn't gaining any traction
and I couldn't care for my father,
so I reinvented myself as a real estate broker
and my father and I moved west to Dallas
to drive my sister and brother -in-law crazy for a while.
You can't give up on something that you love.
The only way that I could pierce
that fog of anti-depressants and psychiatric voodoo
all those years was songs.
Songs of Nat King Cole and Sinatra
and Waylon and Willie and Hank.
And freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose,
and feeling good was good enough for me
and my Bobby McGee.
My father loved Kris Kristofferson.
As poorly as I had done in the music business,
I actually fared worse in the real estate business.
But interest rates went to twenty percent
there was the Savings and Loan crisis.
It was about 1992 and sometimes in the afternoon,
I'd go pick my father up
and take him around with me on my sales calls.
We'd drive out to some shopping center,
I'd find a shady place and we'd park
and he'd sleep and I'd start at one end
of the shopping center and go to the other.
"I'm Tom Douglas from Cornerstone Real Estate.
"I lease the shopping center down the road."
I'd hand them my business card.
At the same time I'm having an audible conversation
with prospective tenants,
I'm having an argument with Almighty God
in which I say, "God, it seems unfair that
"at 39 I'm jaded, cynical,
"and incredibly disappointed with my life."
Almighty God says, "My son,
"you've been worshiping the creation
"instead of me, the Creator.
"How's that working out for ya?"
So there I stood at the crossroads,
asking myself, "Who am I?
"Where am I from and to whom do I belong?"
Almighty God whispered, "You're a writer.
"You're from this family.
"You belong to me.
"Your past is not your poison,
"your past is your greatest gift.
"Go write about the brokenness,
"go write about the healing
"as you stumble down redemption road toward home."
About a year later, I pulled in the parking lot
and walked the dimly lit, lime green corridors
of my father's nursing home in Dallas.
Unable to speak, he'd become a shell of a man
with saggy sweatpants, soup stained pajama top,
terrible slippers.
Usually, when I went to see him,
he would just lie on his bed with hands
laced across his chest like that of a coffin pose.
My anger, fury, simmering and disjointed prayers
in a metal chair with a smiling picture
of my mother between us.
But this day...
this day, I thought I had the wrong room.
I turned the corner, the lights were on,
music softly played on his cassette player
and it was a song that I had written.
He said, "Buddy, I love this one."
The calm and gentle demeanor of a man whose countenance
I had not seen in some 20-odd years
sat on the edge of a neatly made bed
with his hair combed, freshly shaven,
starched white shirt and washed sweatpants.
"Tommy, would you like a piece of Freedent gum?"
the smiling man asked.
After 19 years of living with a ghost,
my father and I shared a piece of chewing gum
and a little music.
And I suppose that's why I love songs
and I believe in miracles.
Here's what he was listening to that day.
♪ Well I know I've disappeared a time or two
♪ And along the way I lost me and you
♪ I needed a new town for my new start
♪ Selling VCR's in Arkansas at a Walmart
♪ And I haven't had a drink in nineteen days
♪ My eyes are clear and bright without that haze
♪ I like the preacher from The Church of Christ
♪ Sorry that I cried when I talked to you last night
♪ I think I'm on a roll here in Little Rock
♪ I'm solid as a stone, baby, wait and see
♪ I've got just one small problem here in Little Rock
♪ Without you baby, I'm not me
♪ Lying here upon this motel bed
♪ Thoughts of you explode inside my head
♪ Like a castle built upon the sand
♪ I let love crumble in my hand
♪ I think I'm on a roll here in Little Rock ♪
TOM: And we followed the song
from the mournful bagpipes in the Scottish Highlands
and we add a little shake to Shakespeare
and we Bebopped with Bach and rolled over with Beethoven
and migrated to the hills of Appalachia
and breathed death and life and misery and redemption.
And the low rumbling chants of the African slave ships
all the way to the Alabama cotton fields where we met
Robert Johnson and the devil at a Clarksdale crossroads.
And we bounced across the Atlantic ocean
to a transistor radio in Keith Richards' bedroom.
And we followed the song and the glow
of the rocket's red glare and we raised the flag
in the dawns early light to marching bands
under Friday night lights.
With brother facing brother, in the uncivil war,
the Yankees singing Nearer My God To Thee
and the Confederates bellowing Dixie,
to the greatest generation singing Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,
running down a lost highway to a bespeckled boy
in Montgomery, Alabama who was so lonesome that he could cry.
And we followed the song to the TEAC tape decks
blasting the Ballad of the Green Berets
all along the watchtower down the Ho Chi Minh trail.
Walking the line down the long and winding
yellow brick road with me andBobby McGee,
and we still hadn't found what we're looking for.
Talking to a pretty girl in the chair
with friends in low places,
with Indian outlaws wearing no shoes,
no shirt, no problem, praying, "Jesus, take the wheel,"
with teardrops on my guitar, gently weeping.
One of the fascinating perks of this profession
are the interesting people that we get to meet.
A few years ago, Alecia Moore,
you might know her better as Pink,
reached out to my friend Allen Shamblin and me
because she loved our song, The House That Built Me.
Alecia walked into my studio and sat right down
on the hard concrete floor.
What do you do when somebody sits on the floor?
Well, you sit down right next to them.
It's kind of a brilliant psychological move.
We talked. She told us her story, we told her ours.
We exposed our father wounds. It was a magic day.
We wrote two songs.
One of them is called Love Me Anyway,
which is on P!nk's album, a duet with Chris Stapleton.
The other one is a song called Recovering.
The famous, the infamous. The rich, the poor.
We're all bleeding, we're all broken,
we're all healing and...
♪ I am a recovering
♪ Anxiety addict
♪ A broken perfectionist
♪ Somewhat erratic
♪ I am a recovering
♪ Constant regretter
♪ Hold it against her
♪ At least till forever
♪ And little by little Day by day
♪ One step at a time
♪ Shake off the devil
♪ Take back my piece of mind
♪ Tell them I love them
♪ Take back my piece of mind
♪ I am recovering
How did a guy selling real estate
and advertising in Atlanta, finally running away from home
at the ripe old age of 27, to a four-year odyssey
in music city but always on the outside looking in,
leaving never to return, settling down in Dallas, Texas
with a beautiful wife and three children,
sitting down at a grand piano on a bright blue
Saturday morning with a black and white composition book,
a good cup of coffee,
finally decide to tell the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
How did he become just another 25-year,
overnight sensation writing you a letter of hope,
telling you everything you never wanted to know?
I gave up and the grace of God rescued me.
Mine is really a story of failure.
I didn't work and work and finally figure it out.
I surrendered. I surrendered my past
so I could get on with my future.
In the summer of 2002, the famed Bluebird Cafe
sent Allen Shamblin and his family,
me and my family, out to Sundance, Utah
to do a writer's round.
One morning, Allen came in the restaurant
and calmly said, "I've been thinking
"of my childhood home. What if we wrote a song
"not about the houses that we build,
"but the house that built me?"
As soon as Allen said that, the Earth tilted on its axis.
The forks were suspended in midair,
the water froze in the pitcher.
That's the power of a good idea.
Allen was thinking of his home in Huffman, Texas.
I took a trip back to 3018 Argonne Drive,
and maybe, just maybe, you're thinking
of your childhood home right now.
An idea is a powerful thing. It's a metaphor.
It's our details and our memories,
but it transports you back to another place
and another time.
You wanna slap somebody that starts a sentence with,
"Socrates said," but Socrates said,
"Man's greatest creative act is the ability to see
"one thing as another."
He's talking about metaphor.
He's talking about the house that built me.
I begged Allen not to utter those five words
to another living soul until we got back to Nashville.
And true to his word, we got back,
Allen had written four verses, I had written three.
We put our first draft together. It was epic.
It was 10 minutes long. We demoed it,
we turned it in to the publisher
and their response was, "Cool."
Which in Nashville is code speak for,
"We will never, ever, listen to that song again."
Crushed but undaunted, Allen and I would get together
over the next S-E-V-E-N years and work on other songs.
In 2009, we dusted off the lyrics
to The House That Built Me.
We printed them off, which by this time were
as voluminous as the novel East Of Eden.
We spread it out on my coffee table,
we scratched out, we deleted, we etched out.
Finally got down to the absolute essence,
only to realize we were missing something.
We didn't have the setup line for the hook.
We didn't have, "If I can just come in
"I swear I'll leave.
"Won't take nothing but a memory,"
from The House That Built Me.
This time, we demoed it again.
We turned it in to the publisher.
The sirens screamed, the lights flashed,
and people freaked out.
[PLAYS PIANO]
♪ I know they say You can't go home again
♪ I just had to come back one last time
♪ Ma'am, I know you don't know me from Adam
♪ But these hand prints on the front steps
♪ Well, they're mine
♪ Up those stairs in that little back bedroom
♪ Is where I did my homework and I learned to play guitar
♪ And I bet you didn't know in the shade of that live oak
♪ My best dog is buried in the yard
♪ I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
♪ This brokenness inside me might start healing
♪ Out here it's like I'm someone else
♪ I thought that maybe I could find myself
♪ If I could just come in I swear I'll leave
♪ Won't take nothing but a memory
♪ From the house that built me
♪ Mama cut out pictures of houses for years
♪ From Better Homes and Garden magazine
♪ Plans were drawn and concrete poured
♪ And nail by nail and board by board
♪ Daddy gave life to mama's dream
♪ I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
♪ The brokenness inside me might start healing
♪ Out here it's like I'm someone else
♪ I thought that maybe I could find myself
♪ If I could just come in I swear I'll leave
♪ Won't take nothing but a memory
♪ From the house that built me
♪ You leave home You move on
♪ And you do the best you can
♪ And I got lost in this 'ole world
♪ And forgot just who I am
♪ I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
♪ This brokenness inside me might start healing
♪ Out here it's like I'm someone else
♪ I thought that maybe I could find myself
♪ If I could just come in I swear I'll leave
♪ Won't take nothing but a memory
♪ From the house that built me ♪
There's The House That Built Me and then there are the homes
that we build.
When I moved my family to Nashville
the second time in 1997, a good friend,
a great songwriter, took me aside for a drink
and said, "You know pal,
"there's nothing that a good divorce wouldn't do
"to help your songwriting."
I said, "That's fascinating,
but I better check with my wife on that one."
My heart and my home are in Katie,
the love of my life, and my children,
Katherine, Claire, and Tommy, my son-in-law, Austin,
my granddaughter, Creasy.
I hope you get married.
I pray you're blessed with children.
I hope your life is messy and complicated
and beautiful and breathtakingly magical.
Remember, it's all a love song.
My wife and children walk in and out of the words
and the music of all my songs.
Little Rock was about my dad, but I couldn't stop there.
1994, the son becomes the father
and my son, Tommy, was born.
My life was evolving and so were my songs.
When the doctor said, "Congratulations, you have a..."
He didn't say, "You have a boy,"
he said, "You have a son."
My life and songs would never be the same.
Without Tommy, no Grown Men Don't Cry.
Without Tommy, no Drunk Girl,
which is really just a fatherly admonition
to a young man how to treat a young lady
in a compromised situation.
♪ Take a drunk girl home
In 2005, Tim McGraw asked me if I wanted to collaborate
with him on the end title song of a movie
that he was making, Flicka.
I flew out to California and as the sun burned down
on the Hollywood hills, I entered the movie set.
I was absolutely panic stricken, 'cause they needed
this amazing song in two weeks.
So I flew home to Nashville the next day
and my family was scheduled to go on our annual trip to Florida
right after that, I told my wife Katie,
"I gotta stay here. I gotta work on this song.
"It's gotta be amazing."
Of course she prevailed and I got in the station wagon
the next morning and drove eight hours to Florida.
It's ironic now, looking back, that I was trying to write
a father-daughter song completely detached
from my own children who were 10 feet away.
About midweek, I was sitting on the porch and I was brooding,
and Katie came out with two glasses of wine.
You'd think she would chastise me and lower the boom
for my pity party.
Instead, she gave me a kiss on the cheek
because you don't give up on someone that you love.
And then she asked, "What's the story about?"
"It's a father-daughter coming of age story."
She said, "You have daughters.
"Tell me about that."
So I went through a typical day with my daughters and she said,
"You have an evening ritual." I said, "I go upstairs,
"I read The Chronicles of Narnia,
"I kiss the girls goodnight. I turn off the light.
"I say, 'I love you,' they say, 'Love you more.'"
My wife is scribbling furiously in a yellow legal pad
and then she hands it to me and she says, "Here it is."
I looked at it. In fact, there it was.
Fathers and daughters, it's beautiful
and it's complicated.
All my hopes and dreams and aspirations bled into this song.
♪ You beautiful baby from the outside in
♪ Chase your dreams but always know the road
♪ That'll lead you home again
♪ Go on, take on this whole world
♪ But to me you know you'll always be
♪ My Little Girl
♪ Someday, some boy will come and ask me for your hand
♪ But I won't say yes to him unless I know
♪ He's the half that makes you whole
♪ He has a poet's soul
♪ And the heart of a man's man
♪ I know he'll say that he's in love
♪ But between you and me
♪ He won't be good enough
♪ You're beautiful baby from the outside in
♪ Chase your dreams but always know the road
♪ That'll lead you home again
♪ Go on, take on this whole world
♪ But to me you know you'll always be
♪ My little girl
I love quotes.
"You can go fast if you wanna go alone.
"But if you wanna go far, you gotta go together."
That's an African proverb.
Thirty years after watching The Beatles
on the Ed Sullivan show with my father,
after the rollercoaster ride of addiction and depression,
after the birth and death and resurrection of a dream,
I came back to Dallas celebrating my song
going number one in Nashville, and presented my father
with a silver mint julep cup.
It said, "June 1st, Number One, 1994,
"Tom Douglas, Little Rock."
It was a symbol of our achievement,
as much as my father's as it was mine.
He'd given me the blessing of his love
and the gift of a song.
And he showed it to every nurse and doctor and orderly
that came in his nursing home room until the day he died.
♪ About the age that he was
♪ Second time he got sick
♪ And retired with a gold watch
♪ Tick tock tick
♪ He had faith in the doubts
♪ Working out his salvation me, I'm trying to live up
♪ To my father's reputation
♪ I'm the son of a salesman
♪ I got two-thirds of his name
♪ First one is Abel
♪ Second one Cain
♪ He got lost between high waves
♪ In the Book of Revelation
♪ Me, I'm trying to live down
♪ My father's reputation
♪ And love is complicated
♪ Between a father and a son
♪ Wanna use a son of a bitch
♪ And the other as a son of a gun
♪ Every song I write and every fight I fight
♪ I resist the cruel temptation
♪ To redeem
♪ My father's reputation
♪ Got his picture on my desk
♪ Holding hands with my mother
♪ Their whole life before them
♪ God they loved each other
♪ He whispers let it go, boy
♪ I'm a new creation
♪ Tell your son
♪ It's your father's reputation
♪ I carry it home
♪ I carry the name
♪ And I hear his voice
♪ Through the drops of the rain
♪ Won't you come home
♪ Bill Bailey
♪ He left me some songs
♪ And an old ukulele
♪ And every song I write and every fight I fight
♪ I have a greater appreciation
♪ For my father's
♪ Reputation
We all go through the dark night of the soul.
Sorry, it goes with the job. Hank said it best,
"Nobody gets out alive."
Ours, yours is a noble calling. Mark Twain said
the two most important days in your life
is the day you're born and the day you figure out why.
Well, we know why.
We know why because we have to write.
We have to write because a frightened mom and daddy
on the ninth floor of a children's hospital
are gonna need something inspiring to listen to
while they wait for the prognosis of their sick baby.
And the singer on a stage in Afghanistan
is gonna need to bring a little home to homesick soldiers.
And sometimes you just wanna
roll the windows down and turn the radio up real loud.
We're overcompensated and underpaid.
We don't do it for the money.
We would pay them to let us do it.
We have brilliant advocates who will help us reconcile
our art and their technology. Don't sweat it.
If the art is compelling, we will get paid.
We have a gift and with that gift comes
an immense responsibility.
We're responsible not to become the victims
of the catastrophe of failure where we think that
we're doomed and everything conspires against us,
or victims of the catastrophe of success,
thank you, Tennessee Williams,
where once removed from the struggle of creation.
We're nothing but swords cutting daisies.
And the result of both these catastrophes
is that we end up worshipping the creation
and not the Creator.
Idols ultimately require everything from you.
In closing, my dear friend, in the end and in the beginning,
God creates and we recreate. God redeems and so do we.
We write down the songs that he gives us.
He allows us to participate in this heavenly endeavor
and through our anthems, heaven whispers and leads
the prodigal child back home.
And when we save one boy and save one girl,
we in fact, save the whole world.
So tonight all's well, but put your pen to paper
because sooner or later, I will get lost
and need you to help me find my way back home.
Don't give up on something that you love,
because I'll follow your song.
That's why you're here. Love, Tom.
TOM: That's why you're here. That's why.
Love, Tom.
[COUNTRY MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ Through the dirt and the gravel
♪ Through the years and the miles
♪ Every road that you traveled
♪ Through the tears and the smiles
♪ Through the clear and the muddy
♪ Through the thick and thin
♪ The quiet nights
♪ The howling wind
♪ Through the good and the ugly
♪ The blue and the black
♪ To the ends of the Earth
♪ To the moon and back
♪ And through all of the words
♪ The mean and the kind
♪ Through the strings that unravel
♪ And the ties that bind
♪ From the crazy and the different
♪ To the more of the same
♪ From the coast is clear
♪ To a hurricane
♪ Yeah, I'll be right beside you
♪ On a roll or off the tracks
♪ To the ends of the Earth
♪ To the moon and back
[TYPEWRITER CLACKING]