Country music is a lifestyle
I live for country music.
It’s an odd thing to live for, and kind of dramatic, I admit. I don’t strum a guitar or sing raspy rich tunes like Tanya Tucker and I don’t die for the mud and trucks and stereotypical lifestyle qualities that people associate with country music. But I love it as more than just a genre.
If I’m being frank—and hang with me here, this sounds like a bit of a stretch—I think country music is one of the most existentially fulfilling bridges from dream-state art to the charm of the reality of life. Country music plays on every heartstring from happy to sad and comfortable on a Sunday morning to wild and reckless.
I started The Line about five years ago, mostly just for fun. It was a way for me to practice creativity and expound in my interests through multiple facets: writing, country music, website design, graphic design and visual implementation. But the blog always seemed too ambiguous. I wasn’t a country news blog. I wasn’t a free writing blog. But The Line had a little bit of both, neither of which had enough content or strength to stand alone, nor did I want either one to stand alone. I love country music and I love to write, and always tried to somehow piece the two together.
I’ve always had a deeply rooted revelation about country music and its existential relatability to real life, but not until recently did I truly feel captivated by the literal experience. I realized that everything I wrote about, abstract or literal, honest or exaggerated, “country” or not, echoed the precise charm that any good country song somehow relates to the ears of listeners. Even though I’m not a songwriter, anything written in country music was essentially one in the same with every thing I would free-write about. I would write prose about something particular and suddenly relate it to a country song. Or I would hear a country song and relate it to an experience I wrote about, not because they were one in the same, but because country music covers all the bases.
More recently, with higher hopes of developing my blog further, I tried intertwining country music and my free writing a little more commonly and clearly. I created the tag line “Country music is a lifestyle” in hopes to bring not just the music aspect of country music but the effect it has on daily living. And how simply living in your day-to-day illuminates the charm of country music, too. To capitalize on the “lifestyle” side of my blog, I played my hand at a short, quippy fashion post—an ode to denim. I wrote this post in June and it was quick and concise: just a simple excerpt one would find on Levi’s website for instance. I described how a pair of jeans can be dressed down or dressed up, how a pair of jeans feels like home for your hips, how a pair of jeans, worn at the seems, can feel a little bit like life.
In early October, Steve Moakler released a song called “Blue Jeans” on his new EP. The album cover is a patch of dark denim with embroidered effects incorporating his name and EP title, with stars around the text—like something your mom would sew on your favorite pair of jeans in high school in the 90s. Immediately, just from the album cover, the listener feels comforted by nostalgia. The song sets the tone of California dreaming and living through life’s journey, getting worn-in like your favorite pair of blue jeans. The fade and the wear are good; it’s the kind of breaking in where you get comfortable with life. Moakler sings, “Getting better with time/it’s a beautiful thing/breaking in this life like a pair of blue jeans,” and it is one of the truest explanations. I live for country music.
I’m a big Steve Moakler fan, so when I saw he released a “pocket” of songs I made it a priority to listen on my drive home. When “Blue Jeans” spilled through the speakers for the first time, my ongoing revelation suddenly came full circle. I smiled, because the connection just makes me happy. This is exactly – and quite literally – the kind of song that meshes the beautiful simplicities that make life so magical, and it resides in something as uncomplicated as a worn-in pair of blue jeans. The metaphor here is almost too much to bear it’s so simple. Country music is a lifestyle, and this is why I love it. You can learn a lot about yourself and about life if you live by country music like it’s your lifestyle.
