CHAPTER FIFTEEN
TOWNES
The interview was supposed to be routine, a sit-down with a music journalist named Carla Reyes who'd been asking for time with me since "The Light She Left On" hit number one, delayed for months by my schedule and then delayed further by everything that happened after.
Deb set it up as a way of getting ahead of the gossip about the pulled Vega song, framing it as a chance for me to control the narrative before somebody else controlled it for me.
We sat in the label's downtown office, a room with good light and a couch too soft to sit up straight in, and Carla started with the easy questions, how I got into writing, who my early influences were, the kind of warm-up material that let both of us settle into the rhythm of the conversation before she got to what she actually wanted.
I'd met Carla once before, briefly, at an industry mixer a few years back, and I remembered her as sharper than most of the writers who covered the Nashville beat, less interested in easy mythology, more interested in the actual mechanics of how a song got built.
That reputation was part of why Deb had chosen her, I suspected, betting that a smarter journalist would produce a more credible piece than a softer one who'd simply run whatever quote made the best headline.
"Let's talk about 'The Light She Left On,'" she said eventually, leaning forward with the particular focus of a journalist who knew she'd reached the real interview.
"It's been called the most emotionally honest song of the year.
People want to know where something like that comes from. What was the real story behind it?"
I felt the old pull, the one that used to make these moments easy, the temptation to lean into the mythology, to give her the kind of quotable line that would end up as a headline, something about heartbreak and honesty and bleeding onto the page.
I'd have done exactly that six months earlier, and I'd have believed I was being generous with my own vulnerability, when really I'd have been spending somebody else's.
"It's not my story to tell in the way people want it told," I said instead.
"I think there's an assumption that a song this specific has to be a confession, has to map exactly onto something that happened to me personally, word for word.
I'd rather not turn my marriage into content for anybody, including myself. "
Carla tilted her head, clearly not expecting that answer. "But you've said before that your best work comes from real life."
"It does," I said. "That's true. But real life includes other people. My wife's life ran alongside every song I've ever written that people call honest, and I don't think it's fair to her for me to keep letting the industry frame those songs as purely mine when they weren't."
"That's an interesting distinction," Carla said, writing something down. "Some artists would say that's exactly what makes a song powerful, though. The audience wants to feel like they're getting the real thing."
"They are getting something real," I said. "I just don't think 'real' has to mean I get to hand over somebody else's private life without asking them first. I made mistakes about that. I'm trying not to keep making them."
I watched her decide whether to push further, the journalist's instinct weighing against something else, maybe curiosity about what exactly I meant, maybe a professional read on how a story about restraint might be received compared to a story about raw confession.
She let it go, moved on to questions about the pulled song instead, and I gave her as much honesty as I could without handing her Larkin's story on a plate.
"I made a deal I shouldn't have made," I said, when she asked directly about the Vega song. "I sold something before I'd earned the right to sell it. Pulling it cost me a lot, professionally and financially, and I don't regret it."
"Can you say more about what it was about?"
"No," I said, plainly, without apology in my voice. "That part isn't mine to explain. I know that's not a satisfying answer for a piece like this. It's the honest one."
She closed her notebook a few minutes later, and as she was packing up her recorder she looked at me with something that might have been respect, or might have been simple surprise at getting a less polished, less usable answer than she'd expected.
"Most guys in your position would have given me the whole heartbreak story," she said. "Made it into a bigger piece."
"I know," I said. "I used to think that was the same thing as being honest. Turns out honesty and confession aren't always the same word."
The piece ran two weeks later under a headline that surprised me, something about a songwriter learning the limits of his own material, and Deb called to say the response had been better than she expected, that people respected the restraint even if it made for a less sensational read.
I didn't feel triumphant about it. I felt like I'd done, finally, the bare minimum of what should have been obvious from the start, which was that some things weren't mine to package for anybody's consumption, including my own reputation's benefit.
Carla Reyes called me a week after the piece ran, asking if I'd be willing to do a follow-up, something longer, a real profile instead of an interview tied to a single song cycle.
I told her I'd think about it, and I did think about it, seriously, turning over what it might mean to put myself in front of a longer, more searching conversation with a journalist skilled enough to notice things I hadn't intended to reveal.
I called Deb to talk it through, and she was cautiously in favor, seeing an opportunity to keep building the more thoughtful narrative the first piece had started.
"It could be good for you," she said. "Especially now, with the industry buzz starting to settle back in your favor a little.
People like a redemption angle, Townes, as long as it's genuine. "
"I don't want to build a redemption angle," I said. "I don't want this to become a second version of the same problem, where I'm mining my own growth for a story instead of mining Larkin's pain for one."
Deb was quiet for a moment on the line. "That's a fair line to draw," she said finally. "I don't always agree with where you're drawing lines these days, but I respect that you're drawing them on purpose now instead of not thinking about it at all."
I told Carla I'd do the follow-up, eventually, once there was something real and settled to talk about instead of a story still very much in progress, and she agreed to wait, professional and patient in a way I appreciated more than I expected to.
My mother called after the piece ran, having seen it shared by a cousin who still followed the Nashville music press closely, and she was quiet for a moment on the phone before she said anything about it.
"I read what you said," she told me. "About not turning your marriage into content. I don't think I've ever heard you talk about your own work that way before."
"I'm trying to think about it differently now," I said.
"Good," she said. "I always worried, watching you grow up, that you loved turning things into stories more than you loved the things themselves.
You'd take some ordinary Tuesday and turn it into a story before it was even finished happening.
I used to think it was just how your mind worked, harmless enough.
I didn't used to think about what it might cost the people standing next to you while you did it. "
Her words sat with me for the rest of the day, turning over the same uncomfortable territory Rhett had already opened up for me weeks earlier.
It seemed like everyone who actually knew me well had already sensed the problem long before Larkin ever had to spell it out loud.
I wondered, uneasily, how many other people in my life had noticed the same pattern and simply decided it wasn't their place to say anything, the way people so often do with a habit that looks, from the outside, like nothing worse than an artistic temperament.