You Never Even Called Me by My Name

I wanted to tell the story of how the blog got its name.  It was one of those moments where everything just seemed to fall in place.  I had been talking to the Mrs about some of the thoughts I was having about the interrelation of music and mediation and at some point she piped up with the thought that I should write a book about these ideas.  Writing about them was definitely intriguing, but a book seemed a bit daunting.  The idea of blogging though was very intriguing.  I felt comfortable that there were enough related ideas floating around in my head that I could generate enough content to get myself locked into the blogging groove, so I floated that idea.  Mrs thought that was a good idea and suggested calling it "Peace Music and Everything Else".  Catchy, I thought, but not quite there.

At that moment, I happened to be playing a jazz album I had recently downloaded.  The album is by a bass player named Janek Gwizdala and I found the album to be excellent background music for when I wanted to work or otherwise concentrate.  It's the kind of music that makes you feel very "centered" when listening to it.  I caught a glimpse of the album cover in my iTunes library.  The name of the album is, The Space In Between.  No need to hit me over the head again, "The Space Between" seemed like a great shorthand descriptor for the connection between these two things.  In fact that album is now the de facto soundtrack for me while I'm blogging.

It also occurred to me that it would be good to throw in some explanation relating to the post titles.  No big secret, they're all taken from song lyrics or names.  I thought I'd close each post with a little reference to that day's song.  Today's post title is the title of a song originally written by Steve Goodman and most famously recorded by David Allen Coe.  It starts out as a fairly standard country song about a man done wrong by a woman.  After a few verses, Coe goes into a verbal break talking about how when Goodman first wrote the song, he told Coe it was the perfect country and western song.  Coe talks about writing Goodman a letter telling him that he had not written the perfect country and western song because he hadn't said anything about mama ... or trains ... or trucks ... or prison ... or gettin' drunk.  Coe then continues the story by talking about how Goodman then wrote another verse to the song and sent it to Coe.  After Coe got this final verse, he realized that Goodman had indeed written the perfect country and western song, so Coe felt obliged to put it on the album.  The last verse goes a little something like this:

Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison
and I went to pick her up in the rain
but before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
she got runned over by a damned old train.

Yes indeed, the perfect country and western song!