I first wrote about David Childers’ newest album, Run Skeleton Run, on April 4, 2017. Since that time, I’ve listened to the album on a nearly daily basis, seen Childers perform live, and had the opportunity to chat with him. As a result, I’ve developed a deeper appreciation of the complexity and sophistication of the album and a great deal of respect for the man himself.
I called Childers after getting back from MerleFest. I was sunburnt and tired and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of great music that I’d heard that weekend. So I began our conversation with a softball question, asking Childers, a published poet, about his songwriting process. I explained that some of the songs on Run Skeleton Run sound like they were written as songs, while others sounded like they had been originally written as poems. Childers replied that he doesn’t have a consistent process. “[I]t's just kind of whatever shows up, like a pick up basketball game, you know, who is showing up today, oh, okay here's a poem. I don't really write poetry much because I'm not really good at it, I think I do a lot better with song lyrics.”
Keep in mind that David Childers has published two volumes of poetry, American Dusk in 1977 and The Monster in 1993, and won the American Academy of Poets Award for North Carolina in 1973. The appropriate word here is “self-deprecating.”
Childers explained that the song “Ghostland” (which after much reflection is my favorite song on the album) did start as a poem. “A fellow up in Ohio” sent him a rhyming poem and he “worked with it a long time” which resulted in the final song. “People do that,” he continued, “they'll send me things and I usually pick out ten or fifteen percent and then build around that.”
Speaking of poetry, I asked him about the dramatic spoken word introduction to the opening track, “Run Skeleton Run.” Childers explained “[w]ell that was the idea of our lead guitar player Dale Shoemaker, he called me up, Dale's a country boy, he's got a real strong accent like I do and he's like man, why don't you get Scott Avett to read a poem or something in front of that song in one of them weird voices he can do. And I had this poem I had written … probably two or three years before I wrote the song. And it was just sitting here on my word processor that I'd run across every once in a while and revive a little bit.”
I shared with Childers my observation that Avett’s dramatic poetry reading reminded me of the intro to Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around.” Childers responded that while he wasn’t explicitly thinking of Cash, “it’s just kind of a natural thing that happens with me cause … I always like Johnny Cash. Well, he's a rocker, I mean he knew how to rock it. So that's certainly an influence... I mean we do a lot of songs that are like that. A lot of it has to do with playing live and learning what makes people get up and move. We like people to dance. You know we don't ... I hear people talk about going to shows and they're not allowed to dance. Or [other] people get mad at 'em [for dancing] and I'm like ‘What the hell are you there for’?”
A few weeks after our conversation, my husband and I drove to Lexington, North Carolina to see Childers perform in a bar. Let me share a couple of observations. First, he is a captivating performer. He believes his songs and makes you believe them too. Second, nobody in the audience was dancing. I won’t go off on a whole rant about people rudely talking during live music performances, but let me just say that David Childers and his band deserved a much larger audience that night and that those who missed that performance or rudely talked through it were the big losers. I think my husband got a bruise on his arm from the number of times I hit him and said, “see, what’d I tell you? Isn’t he GREAT?” The moral of this abbreviated concert review is: if David Childers is playing anywhere near you … go see him. And if you feel like dancing, dance.
Back to the interview. I asked Childers about another of my favorite songs on the album, “Greasy Dollar.” Since he’d worked as an attorney before turning to music full-time, I wondered where he got the inspiration for a song that was so authentically rooted in a blue collar life.
“I wrote it at the beginning of 2016. I got this old guitar that my wife gave me for Christmas and … it seemed like it wasn't that great [of] a guitar. But something about it brought out things in me, tunes, ideas. And that was a song I've been wanting to write for years ever since I was a teenager when I went to work for the city of Mount Holly … picking up trash and cutting grass. I did a lot of ditch digging and actually laid a sewage line before I had to go to football practice for August. But I always wanted to write about the guys I worked with [that summer]. They were grown men and they were uneducated but they had a lot of soul and I admired that. Just how tough they were. They'd drink at night and then they'd get up and be at work. I was always seeing them … Hell, they'd take me home, you know, eat lunch or something with them. I wasn't but 14 years old. Very impressionable. But I didn’t know that [the experience] had an effect on me.” After he finally wrote down the song, Childers revealed, “I broke down and cried.” Why, I asked? “I mean, [the song] seemed like a gift. Like so many songs seem to be gifts from the angel.”
I initially hesitated to share that Childers told me that he cried after writing “Greasy Dollar,” because social convention in the United States discourages men from showing that kind of emotion. But Childers didn’t suggest that I shouldn’t reveal it or that he was embarrassed by his reaction. Nor do I think he should be. After reflecting on my conversation with him, I think that what I respect most about him as a person and as an artist is his unflinching honesty. He is honest with himself and he is honest with others, even if his views may be unpopular or his feelings uncomfortable. He isn’t looking to pick a fight, but he isn’t going to deny his truth. At the same time, he is remarkably empathetic. Some of his songs begin with lyrics or poems written by collaborators. Some are autobiographical (“Radio Moscow”), but many (“Greasy Dollar”) are not. The beauty of his writing and performance is that it is nearly impossible to tell the difference between the two.
The last song that I asked him about was “Goodbye to Growing Old.” He began with a poem written by a good friend from South Carolina, Theresa Halfacre, about aging. “Hell, getting old to me is not a big deal. You know I've been able to imagine that all my life. I've never had a problem imagining being old. Now that, you know, I am old … I'm almost 66, and my legs aren't what they used to be, [but] you know, I keep moving. This is just not a thing that I'm really much concerned with. I mean it's inevitable and I've had an amazingly great life. Every day I get is just like a gift.” Childers doesn’t understand why people “obsess” about getting older. “Just make the best out of what you got,” he advised. “It’s a life process. … Can’t do a damn thing about it so why should I worry?”
Our conversation then turned more broadly to the state of modern America. Childers blames advertising for promoting “ideas of what we’re supposed to be, how we’re supposed to live, what we’re supposed to be doing with our lives and what we have to have. … It’s just an insane way of life that’s pushed on people by advertising.” Childers argues that many Americans have internalized these unachievable norms of “how we’re supposed to be” and feel like failures because they haven’t achieved them. Childers sees this phenomenon as a major social problem because “people just need to accept themselves more.”
That social problem also has a political dimension, Childers explains. “That’s why we have a president like Trump. … People don’t read or think too much anymore. Everything they get comes from a television or some little device where they’re being fed products… [and then] here’s a guy that’s been coming into [our] homes at night for years and entertaining [us]” and promoting those “insane” ideas about the best way to act and live. “And all of a sudden [people] are willing to listen and believe anything he says. … I look at Trump as the triumph of television over democracy. People have just decided to surrender their constitutional rights and their morality to somebody they’re comfortable with. … There’s too many of us that … go for the easy choice.” Remember what I said before about unflinching honesty? This is unflinching honesty.
But Childers was clear that Trump isn’t the fundamental problem. He’s a symptom. So what do we do about all of this, I (unfairly) asked him?
His answer can be summed up in a bumper sticker I had on my car in high school: think globally, act locally. Childers explained that he finds himself turning to people “trying to make the world around them in their immediate world a better place. I try to be good to my neighbors. … I’m probably one of the few Democrats around here but I love the people around me. … I have a certain group of people I go down and hang out with and people I consider friends. I’ve got friends that listen to Rush Limbaugh everyday. You know we connect in certain ways and we have to keep that connection. I think losing that and becoming alienated from one another is maybe worse. … I’m trying to live a good life.”
He continued, “I don’t really see much hope, to tell you the truth, but at the same time it doesn’t stop me from being happy. I’ve got a little granddaughter and I look at her and that’s what keeps me really caring. … You just can't give up, that's all. I may sound like I've given up but I'm just facing reality. [We have big problems, but] it's in our communities that's where we can probably have the most impact and maybe even show people a better way.”
One of the ways that we can form communities, Childers explained, is through a shared love of music. “We look for these tribes to be a part of,” Childers said, “that's what people want … and being a fan of certain music is like joining a tribe, like Avett Nation, you know, people like The Avett Brothers, they come together, and it is more than the music, I mean the music is a part of it but they formed a tribe around it.” Damn straight we did.
It took me a month to write this piece after talking to Childers, partly because I’ve been busy, but mostly because I had to process our conversation before I could describe it. Here’s what I’ve come up with. David Childers is a complicated, thoughtful person. His unflinching honesty allows him to see uncomfortable truths about himself and the world around him. But he accepts those uncomfortable truths. He’s getting older. Television is making us dumber. People have some insane ideas about the best way to live. But he’s not going to let any of that stop him from being happy. He’s going to plant a garden, find common ground with neighbors who have different political beliefs, and try to live a good life. I don’t know that I could come up with a better approach to life. Maybe it’s time to form a Childers Nation—that’s a tribe I want to be a part of.