Townes Van Zandt

Townes Van Zandt came into my life the first year KXT radio was on the air in Dallas. I was commuting an hour home each day, driving from the Apple Store through the last light of the evening, down a long winding road that cut through junkyards and trailer parks. Mine was the fourth trailer park down, across the street from a mansion with a giant fountain in the yard.

 

I had interviewed for the Apple Store job the day after having a baby. I was a new mom, broke and single, doing my best to make do. I had to leave the shelter because I was pregnant. The contrast between my world and the world I worked in could not have been more complete.

 

Townes Van Zandt had the opposite life; born into wealth, he walked away from it to follow music. His family had him committed and treated with electroshock therapy to cure his depression. Half of his ashes are buried in a ghost town called Dido, not far from where I was living in Fort Worth.

 

His music had a quality I understood immediately: the feeling of being an outsider, made beautiful. I would listen to “Rake”, a song about isolation and distance, on the drive home from work as the sun went down. It was the quietest, stillest part of my day, and it was his.