She’s In Love With the Boy

It was the summer of 1994. I was sporting a half up half down curly perm hairdo held in place by a fluffy mauve scrunchy. Sitting in the passenger seat of my cousin Mandy’s maroon Mustang LX, I excavated a few quarters from a striped tube sock that housed the money we’d scavenged for our first parentless road trip. In need of gas, cigs and chocolate milk, we pulled into a Texaco station where I handed two pounds of change to a clerk while ignoring her raised brow. We were headed to Nashville, TN. I was seventeen and I felt as free as the donated bologna, ham, pickles, mayo, mustard and American cheese that sat chilling in the cooler in the backseat. 

Though the adventure was worthy of a novella, there’s one piece that I’d like to put under a microscope for the purpose of this post. The term “full circle moment” gets thrown around a lot in Nashville. When you decide to follow a dream, you do so without a map. There are only varying sets of point A and point B that can be examined and connected upon the realization that various parts of the dream have come true. A while back, I had a jarring full circle moment in my living room while watching my three year old daughter dance and lip sync to the 90’s Trisha Yearwood classic, “She’s in Love with the Boy”. Point A? Seventeen year old, road tripping Angaleena, sitting in the Bluebird Cafe, listening in awe to Jon Ims sing a song that he wrote called, “She’s in Love with the Boy”. 

The song was a breakout hit for Yearwood in 1991. I can’t count the number of times that I belted it into my my hairbrush, well, by that time I was singing into my turquoise hair pick, pretending to be Trisha nonetheless. “She’s in Love with the Boy” is a song about a girl, Katie, who is head over heels in love with hometown good ole’ boy, Tommy. A hillbilly version of star-crossed love, the romance does not have the stamp of approval from Katie’s father, wherein lies the conflict. Of course, it all works out in the end as the listener is lead to believe that Katie and Tommy will inevitably live happily ever after. As a pubescent coal miner’s daughter in a town with one red light, I believed that it was only a matter of time before I would find my Tommy.

“Stand up Lynn…” he insisted. Lynn, Ims’s real life college girlfriend aka inspiration for Katie, bashfully stood up as a round of applause erupted. Up to the very second that I stepped my foot over the threshold of the Bluebird Cafe, I thought that the person who sang the song also wrote the song. I’d only heard of the Bluebird because of the movie, The Thing Called Love starring the late River Phoenix who portrayed an up and coming singer-songwriter. A couple of my favorite country artists, KT Oslin and Pam Tillis, made cameo appearances. 

Having learned a few chords on my dad’s old guitar around the same time that The Thing Called Love was released, I became obsessed. However, I hadn’t quite put two and two together as to how the business of songwriting worked. As Ims played through the song, a hush came over my body. My limbs went numb and I could feel my heart beating like a hammer on my chest. I thought to myself, “Who is this yahoo and where in the hell is Trisha Yearwood? Did this dude really write this song? How can this be? People can write songs for other people to sing?” Then, a sudden calm eased its way up my spine and something that us hill people call a knowing created a vacuum in my brain. That was the exact moment when I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I would grow up to be a songwriter. 

Up until the moment that the gavel fell on my second divorce, I believed in the kind of love that Katie and Tommy have. I believed in making out in the last row of the drive-in and make due Dairy Queen proposals. Part of me filed for divorce as a Hail Mary effort to erect a grand gesture movie moment where my husband would show up in a limousine with a dozen red roses and a clean bill of health from a team of therapists and psychiatrists. The other part of me, the voice of reason, filed because I knew I had, to no avail, given him every chance on God’s green earth to show his chivalrous side. Still, there was a spark of hope that he’d climb over the table in the courtroom and publicly denounce our parting of ways. He didn’t and as the ink on the papers dried, my faith in wholesome love and partnership flatlined and perished. 

As I sat on my couch watching her perform, a tornado of memories touched down around my little girl’s feet, twisting and scattering debris as she twirled. I saw a teenage dreamer, hopeful and rising into the unknown without fear or hesitation. I saw an accomplished, head strong woman singing Housewife’s Prayer to Loretta Lynn from the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, and I saw a 40 something, twice divorced, single mom, singer-songwriter, laying on a bone cold bathroom floor, wailing like an injured animal. I saw my Kentucky born and raised mom and dad, my aunts and uncles, my mamaws and papaws who all married young and have gone to ground beside one another as I suspect Katie and Tommy would’ve done. I saw true love and abuse and homesickness and joy and pain and true grit. I saw the mud and muck of my mistakes and misgivings. I saw an innocent child, my baby, giggling, shining, lighting up the room and buying into what Katie and Tommy were selling and it pissed me the hell off. 

Mother bearing against the spread of happy ending, horse shit, fairytale propaganda over the airwaves of my living room, I suggested that we listen to a different song. She declined and  requested to repeat the song at least six consecutive times until she had memorized the lyrics. Now, the song is on its fifth week in the number one spot on my toddler’s chart. She particularly loves the full circle moment in the song where Katie’s mom says, “My daddy said you wasn’t worth a lick. When it came to brains you got the short end of the stick. Well he was wrong and honey you are too, cause Katie looks at Tommy like I still look at you” I can literally feel her little heart welling up to the beat of her sassy hip shake up as if to say, “See!! I told you love would win.”… 

But the thing is, my baby doesn’t know that her chance to experience the etherial idea of her mom and dad enjoying a moment of clarity regarding the disapproval of her rebellious beaux, has been robbed from her. My baby daughter will never know the peace produced by a post nightmare crawl into bed between two committed and connected biological parents. Her dreams will be dreamed through the veil of divorce and discord. Maybe I wasn’t angry at the thought of her precious ears being polluted by a silly, unattainable love story. Maybe I became jealous when reminded of the fact that some, including her, do still have the chance to find and keep Katie and Tommy brand love.  

I really thought I could have it all. I thought I could geographically abandon Beauty, Kentucky yet carry the traditions and ideologies deep in me like seeds that I would plant in big city soil. Sadly, I don’t have a green thumb. I have slender fingers good for playing guitar and a knowing that takes the wheel when I get close to cashing in my chips and settling for a simpler life. Townes Van Zandt said, “You have to blow off your family. You have to blow off comfort. You have to blow off money… You have to blow off your ego. You have to blow off everything except your guitar.” As a deep thinking artist who’s no stranger to the dark side of dreaming, I unequivocally relate. As a woman who unexpectedly got pregnant with my first born by a handsome midwestern singer who reminded me of Townes Van Zandt and River Phoenix, I constantly buck against the balance between mothering and music making. 

In a way, I do have it all. I have unconditional, magical, authentic love in my relationships with my children. I’ve made a name for myself in the music industry, written hit songs, met a lot of my heroes, including Trisha Yearwood. I have friends who would step in front of a train for me. I have long weekends in Kentucky with my Katie and Tommy esque parents who throw rocks in the creek with my kids and teach them how to sew and ride four-wheelers. I have full circle moments where I realize that parts of my dream have come true. In fact, I had another one while writing this post. I remembered that the name of the leading lady in the The Thing Called Love is Miranda Presley. Twenty nine years after the release of a movie that altered the course of my life, Angaleena PRESLEY is a Pistol Annie with MIRANDA Lambert and Ashley Monroe. 

All that said, my desire to ever again be “in love with the boy” remains lifeless on a Davidson County courthouse floor. I’m more damaged by this marriage and divorce than I’ve ever been by anything else in my life. Normally, I’d work it all out in songwriting rooms on Music Row. That’s what I did after my first divorce. But, that relationship was a whirlwind, art fueled romance that burned itself at both ends until the raging fire became a spark in a baby boy’s eyes. There’s no bad blood between us. We understood that we weren’t meant to be together but instead were meant to, together, raise a part Kansan, part Kentuckian guitar playing, music loving Nashvillian. We peacefully continue to do so. We’re supportive, respectful and kind to one another. He’s proud of the fact that I picked up my guitar and churned the pain of our separation into bread and butter for our boy’s table. He’s humble in that way and he appreciates a good song when he hears one. Even when he’s the ramblin’ main character. 

There’s a difference between fire and poison. Fire keeps you warm. It’s dangerous but when met with caution, it’s comforting and life giving. Poison just makes you sick. Poison seeps into the cracks of things, undetected. It festers. It kills things softly. My second marriage was toxic and I’ve yet to find an effective cleanse. At times I feel like my internal organs have been replaced by a bunch of rusted, misshapen cogs and gears that don’t know how to grind my body into action. It’s like there’s a residue on everything, a sludge that my boots can’t navigate through. 

I’m here because I need to detox from the chemicals that are making me hate Tommy and Katie’s guts. I’m here because I’m scared. I’m here because I’m lonely. I’m here because the urgency to turn this trauma into art is overriding my lackluster admin skills. I can’t book the co-writes fast enough. I’m here because my lullabies were Appalachian murder ballads sung by strong hill women who didn’t take no shit from no man yet somehow managed to hold on to a man with the stickiness of those high lonesome melodies that continue to glue my wayward soul to my small town heart. I’m here to talk about music and misery and motherhood and making due. I don’t know why. I just know that this is what I’m supposed to do next. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about dream chasing, it’s that sometimes, during the scariest parts, you have to let go of the bar and throw your hands up in the air trusting that your higher power’s grand design will not only keep you on the rails but also deliver you to your purpose.

In the words of Jon Ims, “What’s meant to be will always find a way.” That’s something I’ll never stop believing. It’s what forces me to drag myself through the darkest of days. I’d scream it from the roof of the old RCA building, the same way Miranda Presley screamed, “I’m here Music City and I ain’t never leavin”. For now, I’m going to keep my nose to the grindstone, and my hands hard at work, writing and sharing the words that will hopefully turn all this bull hockey into something as useful and inspiring as my daughter’s current favorite song.