The Curse of the Country Song
Originally created for Struthless in April 2023. A story about creativity, failure, and why the goals you abandon can teach you more than the ones you hit.
Everybody knows country music, and a lot of people hate it. I am one of those people.
But this is not actually about country music. It is about why we chase some goals, then quietly abandon others, even when we still care.
The Dream I Gave Up On
I wanted to write a country song for twenty years, ever since Johnny Cash delivered the line, "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die." That lyric lit my brain on fire. I call that feeling an astral yeehaw, the moment art makes you leave the planet.
Meet Adam (My Half a Plan)
I found a half a plan in a one-bedroom cabin in the middle of nowhere. Adam had the voice, the chaos, and the willingness to say yes. So we hit the road.
Hiccups
I have another name. A mistake, a slip, a wrong turn that becomes interesting, I call a hiccup. I know hiccups are the path when I draw, but the moment I picked up a mandolin, I forgot the lesson.
The less open you are to failure, the less open you are to success.
My favourite example is a Dolly Parton recording where she giggles mid-heartbreak. It was not planned, and it is perfect. The hiccup becomes the astral yeehaw.
Pressure Off
When we took the pressure off, the song started finding us. So off that I was not even filming anymore, I was outside cooking sausages, and in the background you could hear the track being written in under an hour.
Why We Abandon Goals
There are a million reasons we abandon goals. Sometimes life gets in the way. Sometimes it is self-sabotage. I do not have a universal answer.
But I realised something related. The goals we abandon can do more for us than hitting them ever could. Failure teaches us in a way success does not.
In weirder words, the goals we hit are the astral yeehaws, and the ones we give up on are the hiccups. And the hiccups are not the opposite of yeehaws. They are the key that unlocks them.
This article was adapted from the video "The Curse of the Country Song (documentary)". More about me at aaronnev.com