“I remember Dad whispering, just before the last verse began, ‘Here’s the kicker, listen.'”

When I saw Bruce Springsteen at Penn State University earlier this year he opened the concert with “No Surrender“;

Well we busted out of class
Had to get away from those fools
We learned more from a three-minute record
Baby, than we ever learned in school

I thought about these lyrics as I read and resonated with Jolene McIlwain‘s piece at LitHub: “Why a Small-Town Record Store in Rural Pennsylvania Was My First Library.” Here is a taste:

Through songs, I built my lexicon as well as my early story craft. Back then, I hadn’t yet heard of so-called “high” and “low” art, of pop culture and the cultured elite; back then, no one knew Dylan would win the Nobel or they would teach his lyrics at the Ivys. I just knew that with one Carly Simon song, I not only learned the meanings of “vain,” “yacht,” “gavotte,” “eclipse,” “naïve,” “lear jet,” I found, on our spinning globe, the Saratoga and Nova Scotia she mentioned in “You’re So Vain.” And I was obsessed.

I can’t remember many paragraphs from books I’ve loved, ones I’ve read and taught time and time again. I may not have been able to memorize lines from the Canterbury Tales or The Declaration of Independence or Poe’s “Annabelle Lee,” but I still remember the entirety of “Devil Went Down to Georgia” and “Hotel California.” Songs like The Eagles’s “Hotel California” taught me the effectiveness of place, concrete detail, metaphor. Was the hotel actually Hell? What is that “warm smell of colitas” and what are those “mission bells”? My siblings, my friends, and I deconstructed the lyrics together, making attempts at meaning. Sometimes I’d go for days wondering … It was my first taste of literary analysis, of understanding the elements of story. This curiosity led to my first desire to write my own stories.

I studied pathos in songs—didn’t have the word for it until I was in college, but I could feel it. I wanted to learn how to bring on that aching like Elvis singing “Old Shep,” Michael Jackson singing “Ben,” (from the movie of the same name—good gravy, a young musician with a rat as his pet, and yes, spoiler alert, in the movie the rat dies), and Henry Gross singing “Shannon” written about Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s dead dog (Yes, I had a thing for songs written about dying animals, still do!).

The legends I learned about through songs were also endlessly compelling—some from real life (Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”) and some entirely fictional (Bobby Gentry’s “The Ode to Billie Joe”). Also, many “legend” songs had twist endings and I’d studied them long before I knew of O’Henry. Vickie Lawrence sang the ever-confusing “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” with an ending that Tarantino’s characters discuss in the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs.

Powerful endings were another element I learned from songs like “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” which reveals in the end that the man stopped loving his former lover “today” only because he is dead! It was one of my dad’s favorites and I remember Dad whispering, just before the last verse began, “Here’s the kicker, listen.”

Read the entire piece here.