Before the Story, the Song

THE FICTION INSIDE THE TAPE

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I grew up in the 80s. Which means at some point, probably in somebody’s basement or a bedroom with the door shut, I put on a cassette and heard something that cracked me open a little.

Not because the songs were pretty. Because they were honest in a way nothing else around me was being honest. Skid Row. Metallica. Priest. Maiden. These weren’t party songs, even when they sounded like party songs. They were songs about kids with no exits. About soldiers who were never coming home. About the permanent cost of one wrong second.

What I heard in those songs, when I was the right age to let them all the way in, was simple, other kids were struggling too.

That was enough. That was everything.

This series is my attempt to pay that forward. Each story takes its title from a song that meant something to me then, and tries to find the fiction living inside it. The moment the song was always circling but never quite landing on. You don’t need to know the songs to get the stories. But if you do know them, I hope you feel what I felt in that basement. Someone else understood.

Two stories so far:

18 and Life. Two best friends. One gun. Thirty seconds that can’t be taken back. Small-town Ohio, 1989.

Disposable Heroes. A soldier with a number on his wrist and a memory of sunlight that was never real. A factory that makes men the way Detroit made cars.

Same thread running through them. Bodies that get used up. People the machine treated as replaceable. The songs knew it. We knew it. We just didn’t have the words yet.

I’m working on finding them now.

These stories don't run on a schedule. They show up when a song won't leave me alone. Could be next week. Could be three months from now. When it's ready, you'll hear it.

18 and Life

Disposable Heroes