When I give an interview, 9 times out of 10 I am asked the same litany of inane questions. The one I dread the most (even more than the completely irrelevant "How old are you?") is this one: "Who are your biggest influences?" There are a lot of reasons I don't like this question: It's overly broad, it takes for granted that my "biggest influences" are "whos" rather than whats or whens and it assumes, quite dubiously, that whatever my influences are, I am consciously aware of them. These are all perfectly legitimate reasons for loathing this question, but they don't tell the whole story.
The truth is I can't stand being asked about my influences because, by general critical consensus, my influences are pretty lame. Take, for instance, my biggest influence, country music. I love it. And I'm not talking about the country that even hipsters like you CL readers can stomach. I'm talking about the uber twangy stuff that most people in my socio-cultural demographic dismiss as maudlin, cliché, trite and unforgivably corny; the songs about how the corn fed boys from my map dot can out work, out fight and out drink the soft handed sissies from your urban center; the songs with titles like "Where I Come From" and "Where the Green Grass Grows."
Don't get me wrong. Some of this music is hopelessly bad, but some of it kicks and spits on the door of greatness. I'm devoting this blog to separating the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats and any other biblically tinged agricultural metaphor for good from any other biblically tinged agricultural metaphor for bad that you can think of. Here it is: The good, the bad and the country according to me.
This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2008.