Soap Box

My wife and myself are currently on our yearly vacation in the beautiful Rocky Mountains of Colorado, something we’ve done almost annually for the last 21 years.

It’s a quiet relaxing place to spend some downtime, recharge our batteries and get set for another busy touring year.

Starting a vacation, for me, is like driving eighty miles an hour and suddenly slamming down the brake pedal, one day I’m extremely busy and have been for ten months, and the next day I’m facing several weeks of doing whatever I want to, and the first few days it’s hard to realize that I’m not leaving town tonight, that I don’t have a meeting at the office, phone interviews to do or a recording session at the studio.

As I sit here, occasionally looking at the wonderful isolated view out our front windows, I am surrounded by musical instruments and keep feeling like I should grab one of them and practice scales or work on new material, instead of relaxing in an easy chair and reading my new James Lee Burke book I’m enjoying so much or just watching the clouds drift over the mountain tops.

I go through this every year, this feeling that I should be doing something constructive, and not the very thing vacations are designed for, kicking it in neutral and coasting, but, I sometimes wonder if I even have a fully neutral gear as I have such a hard time disengaging from the transmission and it seems that I can’t quite totally knock it out gear, at least for the first two weeks or so of my downtime.

We would usually be spending some of our time gallivanting around the Rocky Mountains out back on snowmobiles but any significant amount of the white stuff has been extremely hard to come by on the back range this year, so distractions have been too limited, relegating me to inside time where the urge to be productive seems the strongest.

My contention is this, when you love what you do as much as I do, working is not a grinding experience, especially when so much of it is done by a mental process and committed to memory, or taking hold of the guitar which is just five feet away from me and molding a melody around some lyric idea in the back of your mind, and nothing gets me going like creating something.

Just to be brutally honest I never get completely away from my work life, it has become such a part of me in the last sixty years and is so embedded in my mental process that even if I am gliding across a snowmobile trail, pedal to the medal and eyeing the giant aspen trees and the snowcapped peaks, I’ll find my mind casting around for a word that rhymes some lyric line I’ve been trying to finish.

Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t complaining, I love our time in Colorado and it is restful and peaceful and we’ve made friends we enjoy spending time with, the restaurants are excellent and the views are second to none.

And regardless of whether I was in The Rockies or Timbuktu, I’d still be occupied part of the time with new songs, new ideas, what our show set is going to consist of next tour, and all the nuts and bolts of my long and happy musical career.

And the great part is that creativity is timeless and that at the age of 81 there will always be a new way to combine 12 notes of music in infinite combinations to create a new melody or craft words together in a unique way to create a new set of lyrics, and it’s all portable enough to be carried around in your head until you get the chance to turn on a device and record it or jot it down on a piece of paper, and when it finally comes together it’s a beautiful thing and a source of joy, even if it has cut into your vacation a little bit.

Some people think you can’t combine work and play, I sincerely disagree.

What do you think?

Pray for our troops, our police and the peace of Jerusalem.

God Bless America

— Charlie Daniels

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