FOREVER CHANGED, MAYBE
Me and Rod Hohl, London, Alexandra Palace, 17 October 2024. Photo by Mick Brown.
Sometimes we humans get to positively impact other humans. Recording artists and performers get that chance a lot. Our attempts don’t always land. Or score. Or hit it out of the park. (There’s a lot of sports around right now.) But when we do, it transforms us.
My first big experience with that was with my 1999 album “True Lovers of Adventure,” produced by Eric “Roscoe” Ambel. There’s a song on that album about domestic violence called “Why Don’t You Leave Him”. I was inspired after I read the statistic that 75% of all women who are murdered by a partner are killed after they leave him. I was shocked and appalled. I thought about all the women in abusive relationships who are asked “Why don’t you just leave?” They’re talked about in the third person the same way: “Why doesn’t she just leave him?” And so, with my brilliant co-writer Arnie Roman writing some deep, beautiful music, I wrote these words:
Why don’t you leave him?
Why don’t you leave him?
He said he’d kill me
And I believe him
True Lover’s of Adventure album cover. Photo by Paul Chan.
A woman who’d been in an abusive relationship for some time heard the song and wrote to me. She said that after she heard it, she called her brother and asked him to come over to her house with his van and move her out, immediately. She certainly must have thought about it many times before, but something in the song propelled her to take action that day. And she left him. Imagine how I felt getting that message. In that moment, I thought “my work here is done”. But as I like to joke with audiences where it seems that at least several people are having a good time, “If you’ve reached just one person, it really isn’t enough.” And so I kept on.
I rarely write with the conscious intention of helping anyone—except when I write with kids. I write from my own observations and experience whether it’s a statistic I’ve read or from my own loss and triumph or that of a loved one. This may be TMI—or maybe JEI (just enough 😊), but because of early events in my life, I grew up feeling like a no one, like a nothing. Our early feelings do tend to stay with us, for better or worse, and I still have to wage battle against that inner dialog at times. That must be part of what inspired me to write “Will Anybody Know That I Was Here?”.
Will Anybody Know That I Was Here? Performed 18 October 2024, London, Alexandra Palace. Photo by Keir Fernie.
Written years ago from a place of feeling under accomplished, unnoticed and unknown, I finally found the way to introduce this song, the thing that’s universal in it. It was on my recent tour of the UK opening for Joe Jackson: “Here’s the title track to The Songs of Beulah Rowley, the song ‘Will anybody know that I was here?’ The question to which we all hope the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.” The audiences applauded just for the introduction. That was a first.
Me and rockin’ Rod. At Ally Pally as the Brits call it. 18 October 2024. Photo by Keir Fernie
Sometimes life brings good surprises. I first opened for Joe in 2003, all over the US, UK and Europe. Up to that point, it felt like the most amazing that ever happened to me—getting to go on tour opening for an artist whose music I idolized. When the Beulah album found a way to its release in the UK and Europe on East Central One Records, with a release date of 18 October 2024, I saw that Joe was touring there at the same time. So I asked if I could open for him. The answer was a resounding “yes”. The dates would also happen to include my birthday, the biggest one yet! Imagine that.
Me & Joe, then and now (photo on the left with Mike Maska, photo on the right with Jackie Coleman, trumpet player extraordinaire on this tour, peeking out over my shoulder).
I write this “messay” at the end of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, on the eve of a tumultuous election in my country, knowing how lucky I am, thankful that sometimes we can create our own luck, and hoping this story is uplifting and inspiring to anyone reading it who might be needing some of that right now. I hunger for it almost every day. Soul food. Eat up.
and PS: Happy halloween!!!!
where to see Mary Lee next?
Little City Books, “A Complete Unknown” 12/12/24.
Katie Curley Holiday Spectactular & Record Release, Young Ethel’s, 12/14/24.
And…
Photo by Barry Sutton. Joe’s Pub ticket link.