A friend, the writer Noah Gallagher Shannon, recently told me that while he was studying at Columbia University, one of his journalism professors, Sam Freedman, brought in a copy of Lucinda’s lyrics for “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” as the lesson for the day. The gist of Freedman’s lesson as Noah remembered it: “Look how much she’s doing with so little.”
Like many of Lucinda’s songs, that one is hardly more than a list of unexplained things: the scent of a simple breakfast, the crunchy sound of a rural drive, the names of the singers on the radio, the objects seen out a window, a screen door, a curtain, a suitcase, some voices and “stories nobody knows,” a little girl, dirt, tears. When we were discussing it, Noah posed a question that seemed to him almost too obvious to even ask, “It’s an abuse song, right?” Not that abuse or trauma is ever mentioned, just that everything around it is named. The song works because of what is left unsaid.
Lucinda tells a story about writing that one, that she tried out a version at the Bluebird Café, a thing you do when you’re still working on something in Nashville, on a night when Miller happened to be there. Her father approached her after the show and apologized for her childhood. She says before that night she didn’t even really know what she was writing about, that she was just trying to name a few things that a 5-year-old girl might notice. She didn’t know it was about her own trauma until her father recognized her in it.
“When I was growing up, I never saw any families really enjoying their children,” she writes in the memoir. “I remember thinking as a teenager, ‘Wow, nobody seems to like having kids. Nobody seems happy having kids. It’s a burden, not a joy.’ It seemed like everybody would rather be partying and fucking each other freely.”
“People think musicians are wild and crazy and drunk and fucking each other all the time. Musicians are nothing like writers, not even close, from what I’ve seen,” she writes.
