"The Blues, and Zip-a-dee-doo-dah."

It really gets me sometimes when people don't know Townes Van Zandt's music or who he was. I can't be too hypocritical though; I didn't know about him until I met Sean, and by that time Townes had already passed (in '97). "Be Here To Love Me" came in the mail the other day and I watched yet another brilliant (and disturbed) folk singer go too early with too little exposure when he was alive.

Townes wrote "Waiting Around To Die" in the walk-in closet of the new apartment he and his first wife (not the woman in the video) shared. She said she couldn't hardly understand how a song like that came out of the man she'd just married: 25, healthy, with a happy childhood and no criminal record. After a session of endless hours by himself with his guitar, he told her he'd written a song—she had expected love ballad or something, but got this instead. "I tried to kill the pain, I bought some wine and hopped a train, seemed easier than waiting around to die." Needless to say he'd didn't live that domestic life long before hitting the road to sing about things he couldn't possibly know about. Damn songwriters just have to get "it" out, I guess. Damn cowboys always have to steal my heart. As Townes has said, "There's two kinds of music: the blues and zip-a-dee-doo-dah."