Aside from writing and producing for television and occasionally playing in a rock band called The Enablers, Barbara Hall has also authored several novels for young adults, including DIXIE STORMS, THE NOAH CONFESSIONS, and THE MUSIC TEACHER. In today's guest blog, she revisits a particularly life-altering moment from her past, muses on teenage soul searching, and describes how both of those things eventually inspired her to pen her latest novel, TEMPO CHANGE.Imagine a world without the Internet. Imagine a world without cell phones. Without iPods or CDs or cable TV or satellite radio or GPS systems. Imagine there are only land line telephones, which you have to share with your siblings and parents, and three channels on the TV and radio stations which sometimes work but sometimes don’t, depending on the weather. Imagine you are a teenager in that world, and you are growing up in a small town far from anything important, and the only connection you have to the outside world is through books you get from the library and magazines you use your allowance to buy. Imagine your only connection to music is through your radio (which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, depending on the weather). Imagine you have a guitar and you want to learn to play it but music lessons are too expensive, so the only way you can learn is by listening to the handful of records you can afford to own and the songs that unpredictably come through the radio.
Is this the start of some kind of end of the world scenario movie? No. It’s the world I grew up in, not all that long ago.
Aside from the lack of technology, my teenhood was not that different from yours. I bumped around in the universe, trying to figure out who I was, what I wanted to do, where I fit in, if I were pretty enough, if my clothes were right, if boys would like me, if I were cool, if I were smart, if I mattered, if I’d ever find my way. I did all that while trying to keep my parents happy, get along with my siblings and get good grades. And like any other teen in the whole wide universe, I wondered if I had a talent, a calling, a reason for being.
My reason for being peeked out of the fog of my striving for acceptance, so quietly and so subversively that I almost didn’t recognize it when it appeared. It happened this way: I was lying on my bed in my room in a small town in Southern Virginia, contemplating all the aspects of my condition, while tuning into an AM radio station on my bedside transistor radio. I heard the last few chords of a song called “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen and it caused me to sit straight up and pay attention. I heard this strange man singing to me, and I heard the harmony of his guitars and the rawness of his voice, and I vaguely heard the words, and I knew it had something to do with me. The song ended suddenly and the DJ mumbled something about who it was and then it all disappeared into the ether. I couldn’t text anyone or Google anything. I caught a glimpse and then the glimpse was gone. I spent the next several years of my life hunting that voice down and trying to figure out what it had to do with me.
This happened and that happened. But basically what happened was that I went to college and I rediscovered Bruce Springsteen, and then I went to see him in concert and then my whole life changed. Bruce, who has managed to span several generations with his music, had a whole lot to say to me and I hunted it down as if I were on the mission to solve a mystery. The mystery was what to do with my life. And Bruce told me, in his own way.
I became a professional writer because of Bruce Springsteen. Because after I hunted him down and solved the mystery, I found what I was looking for in his message. Bruce, like me, had grown up in a tiny town far away from anything that mattered and all of his music was about how he intended to escape that condition and join the real world. He figured out how to do it because he had two things: a guitar and a car. I figured out how to do it because I had those things, too, but because I heard a third thing in his music: he had a dream. I had a dream, too. But until I heard him, I had no idea what to do with it.
I am a full-grown woman now, with a teenager who has the internet and Facebook and a cell phone and an iPod and a GPS system and all of those things that connect us to the world. She also has library books and has spent a lot of her time rediscovering records --- the kind you buy in vinyl and spin on a record player. Only because it is exotic and interesting to her, not because it connects her to anything vital. At the same time, I still have a career as a professional writer, something I never would have had if I hadn’t caught those last few notes of a Bruce Springsteen song on a transistor radio.
The point of this is this: that Bruce Springsteen song truly and really changed my life. It catapulted me out of some sleepy dream where I had to accept the circumstances of my existence, and into another reality where I could be anything I wanted to be if I set my mind to it. Bruce taught me that. Not because he was some exalted celebrity --- there really was no such thing in those days --- but because he was just some lower middle-class guy from nowhere who, like me, managed to make his way out by following what he loved and believed in.
Here we are, years later, and I’m in the great position of talking about how I came to write a book like TEMPO CHANGE. It is my sixth young adult novel. I began writing young adult novels over ten years ago because I never ever forgot how important it felt to be a young adult. I remember being collapsed on my bed one night, during my turbulent teens, and my mother leaning over me saying, “One day you’re going to look back and laugh at this.” The concept of that offended me so much that I vowed never to let it be true. I knew that my pain in that moment was real and I would be damned if I would ever forget it or minimize it. I am proud to say that I never ever looked back and laughed and I never will. Young adult pain is not only real --- it’s possibly the most real pain a person can ever experience. My advice? Always resist the person who tells you otherwise.In addition to becoming a professional writer, thanks to Bruce, I also became a musician when I grew up. I learned to play the guitar --- mostly by listening to the radio but eventually by taking lessons when I could afford it --- and I formed a band called The Enablers. I still play in that band from time to time. There were many times when I had band rehearsals at my house and my daughter would stomp out of her room and say, “When is the band leaving? I have homework.” It might seem like the coolest thing ever to have a parent in a band but the truth is that a kid just wants to be a kid and anything a parent does is lame, even if it means plugging in rock and roll instruments.
My daughter never thought my band was cool, but she grew up around music and musical instruments, and eventually became a musician in her own right. Her involvement in music is so different than my own at her age. She has all these various networks through which to communicate her interest in music. She isn’t clinging to a transistor radio --- music is just a natural part of the fabric of her life. She never had to fight for it but she found it all the same.
So this is what led me to write TEMPO CHANGE. I wanted to write about the second, or maybe third, generation of music --- a parent like me, who had to fight for it, who marginalized herself in order to have it, in contrast to a girl who simply grew up with it as a fact of life. My daughter will never have to defy anyone to claim music. But wanting to stake out your place in a musical environment will never really change. The call may come over different channels but when the call comes, all you can do is answer it.
In the ever-changing world of communication, music shifts and mutates and forms and reforms, but there is something about it that never really changes. It’s a call in the wild. To follow it, one always has to take a chance. It has to pierce your ears, your consciousness and your dreams. There has to be something in you that sits up and says, yes, that’s it, that’s where I want to go.
This is the story of a girl who heard the call and followed it. What I added was a parent who, because he never fulfilled his own dreams, has an unevolved desire to squelch his daughter’s ambition. This happens, I’m afraid. My generation was led to believe we could have anything we wanted. This was ultimately no more true in my generation than it has ever been, but we fell for it momentarily. The truth is, when you have a child, you sacrifice your immediate desires in exchange for theirs. This doesn’t mean that your parents give up their dreams. They simply postpone them. By choice.
But if a parent hasn’t settled with that choice, the journey can be arduous and difficult. Once the parent has made peace, the journey looks much different. And the parent sees this:
Our paths aren’t so very different. Only the equipment has changed.
Imagine a girl lying on her bed, anywhere in the world, wondering where she fits into the universe. That, I suspect, will never change.
-- Barbara Hall
