When I sat down with Mike Reid, I thought we would talk about songwriting and music, with some football in the mix. After all, he played football at both Penn State and then for the Cincinnati Bengals. Post- football, he launched a songwriting career that includes such hits as Stranger In My House for Ronnie Milsap and I Can’t Make You Love Me for Bonnie Raitt. And we did discuss all that. But right off the bat, when you sit with Mike at his home studio, you get an idea of life’s big questions that he likes to ponder. So we also touched on art, poetry, philosophy, and what things truly matter. Here’s our conversation. You can see what a warm, sensitive, insightful, and talented individual he is.
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I saw in one of your interviews you said the road to happiness is being good at something?
Being competent at something. To me, I think happiness is overrated.
I’m not a Buddhist but the first of the Five Noble Truths is that life is s
You’ve had a storied career and yet you’re not resting on your laurels. Do you have an internal drive that you feel you always need to be creating?
I wouldn’t call it a drive. I don’t think I’ve ever been a driven person. I’ve never had goals in my life like, “I want to achieve this or I want to do this.” I just managed to follow those things that interested me. Carl Jung — I loved his description of life. Among many things, he said, “life is a moment between two vast mysteries.”
Isn’t that wonderful? And so I really at this stage of life, I love the mystery. The hidden narrative. The sense that there is something beyond what we’re experiencing here. I don’t necessarily mean an afterlife. I don’t even know what I mean by that. I’m given to melancholy. But the curiosity gets me up.
Is that just the nature of a deeply thoughtful, creative person?
I don’t know about that, but I have been that way most of my life. I remember being that way as a kid. My mother was a marvelous woman, but that bothered her. So it stayed with me pretty much. But I find enormous beauty in it. We’re not talking about clinical depression. I’ve had friends with depression who couldn’t get out of bed. I’m not talking about that.
It’s this beautiful — look, the thing that gives life its meaning is the knowledge that it’s going to end.
And so this experience we have for all its joys and sorrows, we get all this. Look at this. We get all this. But it’s going to end. Until it does, I’m curious. I find that’s what I do here in poems or songs, or the people that I read. [But] I understand going down to Music Row. And turning out songs until 5 o’clock and then going home. Saying, “because that’s my job.”
Did you ever do that?
No, I never did. I tried, I was with a company called ATV. I tried to do the cubicle thing. Here are the songs that are happening; go write five of these. Co-writing: I’d never done that. My god, what the hell is that even? I don’t even know this person, and we’re going to sit here and…what? Within a year they ran me off. I wrote 45-50 songs that I pray to God no one ever hears.
Then what?
I ran into a guy named Rob Galbraith. The fates were kind to me to cross paths with Rob because he was the anti-music row publisher. He didn’t even want me to co-write. He said, “I don’t care you’ve got to figure it out by yourself first. See who you are first by yourself. Then once that begins to emerge, you can think about getting with some other people you admire.”
I had enormous admiration for a guy named Troy Seals. We wrote a couple of things. I had heard Troy Seals songs and thought, wow I wonder how you write that? So there was nothing like getting into a room with him to find out there is no magic.
Everybody’s got the same blank page.
What he did have was an idea. He could have a sound vision of what he wanted the song to be and he would not stop until that song was in that place. And it might take a while, but he was relentless. And I thought, well there’s the magic. I find it’s wrestling with something until you get out of the damn way and let the thing start speaking to you. Rather than, “this is what I want it to be.” I always think about “Be Still and Know that I am God.”
I think a contemporary interpretation is, why don’t you just shut up for a while and listen?
Lessons?
They’re not even lessons. What are they? Lifelong acquisitions? Breakthroughs? I’ve been wrestling a week with a song and I’m putting it away because I’m ruining the song. Because the idea back there is, “Is anyone going to cut this?” And that’s death. That’s the end of anything wonderful that you might do. Quincy Jones says when money walks in the room, God Walks out. It’s something along those lines. I love that. And I love the general use too of the word God. The sense of m
The great playwright Arthur Miller referred to it as the hidden narrative, that all artists and creators were trying to get to a hidden narrative. What is it? One never knows. You know the closer you get to it is when something starts working in ways you don’t even realize or you don’t even know why it’s working, just that it’s working. He came up with that idea in reference to plays of his that didn’t work, that he felt he didn’t get close enough to the hidden narrative.
There is no perfect work of art but Death of a Salesman is pretty close to something extraordinary. You can think of all kinds of examples like that. To Kill a Mockingbird. I can think of several classical composers. Not always, but when they did, it was extraordinary. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
I understand meeting Rob Galbraith was special for you, but it was only three years after moving to Nashville that you had a number one hit. And yet you say you’re not driven? Don’t you have to be driven to enter that world?
I tell you what, Paige. I tell young songwriters this. The question to ask yourself about writing, before issues of talent and ability, because a lot of this is acquired.. wrestling with it over the years…
I think you really have to be brutal with yourself and ask, are you sufficiently compelled?
In other words, are you going to show up? Showing up. If you’re just compelled to show up, and then you show up with a love in your heart for it, one never knows what will happen. That’s the first thing I’ve found. We don’t want to get into a semantic discussion. You might get a better answer from my wife if I’m driven. To me, it’s more that I’m curious.
Was your childhood full of music?
I was 13 years old when I rode my bike across town to my
Mostly it was classical music. That’s what I loved. I also loved church hymns, that close harmony. And I love songs of surrender. Human beings saying “okay, I give. I need help.” Those kinds of songs really still inform a lot of what I write even know. The “give it up” thing. I have never been one to write an anthemic “I am me. Hear me roar.”
I started piano lessons when I was a little kid, and then when I got to high school as a sophomore I auditioned to be the pianist in the orchestra. And they instead put me on double bass, and I’d never played that. When I showed up, I was the only guy in the orchestra. I thought “that ain’t gonna work.” That’s the way you think when you’re 15. So then I got into sports in high school. Then the music thing kind of drifted away. But I was always into music. I always loved it.
When you were at Penn State, you didn’t start out majoring in music?
A guy I admired in high school was my high school football coach, Earl Strohm. And he was a very quiet taciturn man, and he taught history. So I thought that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to get out of college and I’m going to coach football and teach history. So I majored in history and I had a teacher that had a way of expressing herself that I found incredibly confusing. Maybe she was a good thing for me because I left the history department.
And I had a lot of buddies majoring in business. It’s a good thing to fall back on, right? So I switched my major to business and I understood absolutely nothing about anything that someone said to me about any of that. I was on a full scholarship for football and I was was going to flunk out. I had no interest in much of anything else. So I auditioned for piano and they said yes, we’ll take you.
Then I began to major in music. It was the only thing I had any feeling for.
After college, you played for the Cincinnati Bengals. What was it like playing pro football?
It’s so long ago, it’s an entirely different game. The money was nothing like it is today. I was the seventh kid drafted in the first round and signed for $22,000. So that’s how much less the money was. I think I saw this year the 7th-round pick signed for 22 or 23 million dollars. What you have now in professional football that is worth noting is the skill level of some of these kids today is like nothing I’ve ever seen.
And that gets down to they have extraordinary mental presence and body control. Control of what they can make their bodies do. You have large men able to move very fast now. That’s what makes the game as violent as it is. Force = mass x acceleration. So you have these big guys running into one another at a very rapid pace. I was defensive tackle and I played that game at 250 pounds — you can’t play that position at 250 now.
Did you think when you played football, okay after this, I’m going to pursue music?
No, I never thought of “after this.”
You didn’t? You were just living day to day. Until you get five years in…
Five years. I had cracked a vertebra
But I could only dream about being a writer.
Writing of some kind was unimaginable to me. After I got out of my 12, 13, 14, 15 years of age, my heroes began to be more literary. There were never any athletic ones. Like
When you finished your football career and then started doing music, didn’t I read that your first break was getting a Jerry Jeff Walker cut?
It didn’t? I thought maybe that gave you credibility to get a deal as a writer when you came to Nashville.
Oh God no. It was a very obscure weird song called Eastern Avenue that I’d written about a street that runs along the river of Cincinnati. No, the “break” was that I knew a guy in Cincinnati who had a song that he wanted to pitch to Kenny Rogers, and he asked me to sing on the demo. It came across ATV when they pitched it and they said, “I don’t like that song but who’s the guy singing?” So they tracked me down. I had just come off the road; I was living on the road playing little listening rooms.
And I was tired and thinking this is the rest of your life unless you figure out a way to get to a wider audience.
I knew that
How did you all meet?
I just walked to meet a buddy of mine at a restaurant for dinner; she was hostessing. In Cincinnati.
And the rest is history.
Yeah, a long history. As I’m pondering the various ramifications, she’s got our stuff all packed up and says “I’m going to Nashville.” Are you coming with me?
Changing gears, what was your introduction into musical theater?
At Penn State, I was down with a knee surgery — I was redshirted. So this group of people came to see me and said they’re putting on Guys N Dolls. They wanted me to come read for the part of Big Julie. So I went and read for that part. And then I did the show as Big Julie. It was one of the best experiences of college for me. Here I was, known on campus as the football guy. I’d made 2nd team all-American as a sophomore. And these kids in the play were great singers and actors. They were so good, and they worked their butts off. We
Was that when you started loving musical theater?
I had never been a musical theater fan. And that includes Rogers and Hammerstein shows. Now I look back on it, I really appreciate the craftsmanship of it. But they’re not songs I would choose to sit down and listen to. What did it for me was that someone
When did you start writing musicals? And how do you choose the material?
Somewhere in the middle of the songwriting experience for whatever reason, you start to feel the limitations of the commercial form. And there must have been something creeping around in me and it was right around that time when I ran into a friend from Cincinnati who’s a huge Sondheim fan who
Robert Frost said one of my favorite things: One must begin on insufficient knowledge.
And then Mac Pickle (founder of Tennessee Repertory Theater) around that time sent out to the songwriting community in Nashville on the Row: Anyone interested in writing a musical in Nashville? There’s a lunch. I figured great, I’ll go down there and eat lunch. I was the only one who showed up. Actually Rory Bourke might have shown up too. And I said I’m interested so Mac and I began to communicate.
Mac had it in his head to do something based on the Civil War. So we began. I always said we should have written a book about how we made that piece and the last sentence of the book: now that you’ve read this book and you see how we made this piece, — this is a guidebook about how NOT to write a musical. It was put on downtown. I think we started writing songs right out of the bat, right out of the chute. Why are you writing what you’re writing about? What’s this heartbeat, the central nervous system?
All narrative follows necessary elements: Intent and obstacle. Intent: here’s a character. What is the intent and what are the obstacles? Every time you create an obstacle to block intent, you create drama. Who knew this back then? I just thought you write great songs. The best song in the show was the longest. most agonizing four minutes of the night. It was unearned. You didn’t believe what came before it
Mike Nichols the great director, I’m paraphrasing here, but he said an audience comes into a space and give you two very important things: their time and their money.
And they’re go
Because when they collectively, if you do it skillfully enough, get why you’re telling them this, they can go “okay the play’s about over and we can go home and talk about this.” But if you don’t, then halfway through they’re going, “what time does the babysitter need to be home?”
After that project did you think, okay I’ve learned a lot. and you were ready to take on your next musical?
I was really hooked at that point, hooked in the form. There was a guy named Michael Ching, and he ran Opera Memphis. And somebody
Because
It was right around the time of the OJ Simpson thing was
And right around that time. there was a slot in what was called the Hal Prince workshop for this piece called The Battle of Little Jo. Sarah said “do you want to submit?” I said what’s that about anyway? They told me and I said, God that doesn’t sound like a musical to me.
The piece has been done beautifully in theaters. It was just done in Dallas a couple of months ago. It took so long getting it right. People who see it will come up and say “this is one of my absolute favorite experiences of all time.” It’s too dark for New York. It’s not commercial enough for New York.
Too dark for New York? That must be pretty dark.
No, you look at New York now.
Sweeney Todd dark?
Without Sondheim’s name attached, I don’t know that you could get Sweeney on now. Arthur Miller lamented when they gave him a lifetime achievement award, that probably Death of a Salesman would not be produced at
And the idea was, now that you were emerging to the next tier and were successful and had yours, you didn’t want to buy a ticket and go to a theater and be told, Oh guess what? There’s still homeless in the street. The world is not fixed just because you made it. The world is still in trouble and always will be. Those people don’t want to be told that. They want to be told in a theater piece “everything’s great.”
You see that even now. Look at Hamilton — who can afford it if you want to see it in New York? It’s entertainment for people with money, and that can never be a good thing when all you’re doing is entertaining people with money. I believe that, anyway. I don’t know what that is. That’s just distraction. Rarely does art come out of that strata. Rarely does the best that’s in us come out of that.
Because the best to me that’s in us comes out of wrestling with difficulty, with want, wresting with stuff that’s not working. That’s where I think the best of us comes from.
But that wasn’t the end because you’ve done more musical theater since then.
My favorite piece that we’ve ever written is called In This House. And it had a beautiful production at Two River Theater in New Jersey. Four Characters (it’s small).
There’s not going to be any getting the car out, so they make their way to this abandoned house They go in and build a fire. There’s a knock on the door, and it’s an old couple. They say “oh is this your house, should we leave?” and they say “no, we used to live here. We just take a New Year’s Eve walk every year.” So that sets the stage for the four of them spending the night. And what it is, it’s a look at how a young couple about to embark on a lifelong relationship, how the past might inform what they’re going to go through. The fun part at the end, you find out the old people are ghosts of the people who built the house.
Your most recent one is Cassanova?
No that was before the Penn State one. Cassanova’s the most commercial one. Here’s the thing about a musical. You either get to New York or you don’t. It’s like if you want to be in Country music, you’ve got to get on the radio. It’s a shame about these things. And the problem with musical theater in New York is it’s SO expensive to mount a show, like 15-20 million dollars now. And it’s such a crapshoot, you could lose that in a couple of weeks.
How does it work? You write a musical and go workshop
Sure you workshop it. Ideally, I would never write another one unless there
So where is Cassanova now?
It’s all over the place. It gets so close. It was close
Once they come into being and they’re produced, they exist forever. They don’t die. But it’s getting it there.
How did you come up with the topic of Cassanova?
Artie Massella was the guy who directed an opera by Dominic Argento who just died. I love a lot of his music. He wrote an opera and Artie directed it. Artie said “ Dominic this would make a great musical, would you be interested in selling the rights? “ and he sold the rights to the libretto
It was one of four chosen for a worldwide musical search in Wales. Susie and I went over and they did
What was the inspiration for the Penn State play that you wrote? Tell me about writing that.
This way they can get on the inside of character development: why this character is this way, why this song needs to be cut, how this character relates to another character, why this needs to be rewritten. Sarah Schlessinger, the woman I write with, and I agreed to do it. At
So we asked them, what do you love? What are your joys? And the question I really wanted to know is what are you afraid of?
That was how we talked to them, came up with an idea, began to work. And we’d work for three months and go back there and run some things by them, put some songs in their voices. Just build it through the arc of the year, and it was supposed to be just that. And we did a reading and that night those kids knocked it out of the park. They just killed it. And the director said the president of the school loves this piece and wants us to do it again. So we did rewrites and put it on this past summer.
And what is it about?
It’s called The Last Day. It’s specific to a group of theater students, one of whom gets booted out of the program because he won’t show up and won’t do the work. And he comes back to them, back into the room and discovers that something that they did (they didn’t mean it) contributed to his being thrown out of the program. And through the arc of the night, he has a weapon he pulls out and he threatens to make them watch him end his life.
Then you find he begins to hallucinate about an event in the past involving an older brother who was his hero who saved his life in falling through the ice. His life was saved but his older brother drowned. And he’s never been able to get past that. The piece becomes about how a small community might rally around someone in crisis. Which they do in the end.
The idea came out of the fact that the kids when I asked them what frightens them, the number one thing they said is violence on campus. There’s a siren that goes off when there is an alert; either someone’s been physically assaulted or something. And they said that siren goes off way too much. That was the dominant thing. When I was their age, you didn’t have to think about whether you were safe.
I’m sure stuff happened when I was there, but my helmet was fitting properly and that’s the only thing I was worried about. This is a dominant theme in these
Back to your music, I think I Can’t Make You Love Me is a beautiful example of how the music and lyrics come together to make something magical. The chords get into your spirit and the lyrics are so vulnerable.
It’s funny when the whole process of when a truly great singer like Bonnie Raitt takes it and makes it her own, takes it to the public. And then this weird
And I tell you I’ve never written anything I’ve decided “wow that’s really good.” The only determination I’ve ever made is “okay I won’t change anything.”
And how do you get to that point?
It’s visceral. You just keep mashing until you don’t. Right now I have a lyric that I really like, it’s a simple direct praise lyric. And every piece of music I do for it bores the pants off me. One day, it’ll be a Saturday, and I’ll have a cup of coffee, and Sue will be in the kitchen and I’ll be in the living room, and it’ll pop. Something will blindside me. Yeah, if we’ll just shut up and listen.
The whole world is begging us as a creative — listen, listen, it’s here. Be still and know that I’m here. It’s here, all around. It’s interesting how difficult young writers will find this. I will do the occasional workshop and I always challenge people to do this. To leave the space, we’re going to take a 4-minute walk and then come back. Then I ask them to write down what they saw. And it’s really hard because we’re just not trained, or programmed, or encouraged to observe. I don’t believe the ideas are in us. I think they’re in the world, and we can slow ourselves or calm ourselves enough to catch them when they come by.
Is that one of the pieces of advice you would give to young or aspiring writers?
I don’t ever do that. I don’t believe in the separation — advice means someone knows and someone doesn’t I don’t know anything.
Well
I can tell you about my experience. So what is that? That will just tell you about my life. My life isn’t yours. I’d do better if you tell me what’s bothering you, or what you’re curious about. Then I can say “oh yeah we’ve got a shared experience because this is what I did. This is what I found.” I was blind. Getting with guys like Troy Seals or Rory Bourke — I learned a lot just being in the room with guys like that and keeping my mouth shut and listening to how they processed.
And what I found from the writers I thought were truly great is that there is no magic.
Has your process changed through the years? For example, one method might be you have a title and you want to go ahead and get some meat on the bones. So you start working on it and you throw out some music and lyrics with it. Later, you go back to it and edit it. Or do you find after all these years, you’re doing a lot more self-editing as you go along, so the process is slower?
That’s truly a great question. I find a little bit of self-editing happens but I try not to let that happen too much. I tell you what I will
We only had those first two lines. I took the kids off to kids to school one day and came home, and this whole verse plopped out. I was in that listening not judging zone. And what’s interesting is when I got to the line “Don’t Patronize Me” I came out of the place and thought “oh no no you can’t say that… no one’s going to say patronize in a song.” It feels too weird to say that. And then you just live with it. But the minute Mike comes into the room, inspiration leaves. Here’s big Mike getting his big nose in everything.
How do you feel about some of your other hits?
Stranger in My House has a sweet place in my heart. Bob McDill was a great songwriter. And Ronnie [Milsap] had a song of mine out called Prisoner on the Highway, a truck-driving song. And McDill had written a country standard called Good Old Boys Like Me. It’s a great song. And Rob [Galbraith] ran into McDill, and he said I haven’t met Reid but tell him I like that Prisoner on the Highway song. And Rob said, yeah well I know personally Mike thinks Good Ole Boys Like Me is where the bar is, and that’s what everyone should be shooting for. He said McDill got a wistful look on his face and said, Yeah I wrote that before I knew what I was doing. I love that.
And the songs that I can stand of my own, are when I was just not sure what I was doing.
But I do a different version when I perform it now. I like the character in that song. And I wrote that before I had any idea what talent was doing. I can almost say that about most things. The great T.S. Eliot from the Four Q
You’ve seen so much change in the music industry over the years. You said if you want to be in
I think so, to be a country artist. Now, I can just hear people in Texas who’ll take issue with this. You can have a whole life and a career in Texas alone; you can play a year in Texas and not play the same place twice. And they love their songwriters down there. Robert Earl Keene, Charlie Robinson. So maybe I need to rethink that. But radio still in Country Music drives a certain kind of career. Maybe I should amend that to say radio drives a certain kind of career, and if you want that kind of career, then radio would be a necessity.
What are you reading these days?
I highly recommend any book by James Hollis. Most notably I would recommend Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life. I just started David Brooks’ book The Second Mountain. And Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward. I love the idea, it’s really hit me like a ton when I’ve run across it — when Brooks says often it takes something to shock us out of living out of our ego. The life that is directed by the ego. And I’m fearful that my life is driven by ego more than it should be. Another of Brooks’ books I love is Living the Examined Life.
Really? That doesn’t sound like you at all or any of the stuff we’ve talked about this whole time.
If I can call on myself in the service of something larger than me. And that’s what matters.
What do you do to relax?
I go to the gym and I work out. I love getting on a bike and looking at people and seeing people try.
And do you listen to all different types of music?
Yeah I will. I love 20th century classical music. I love the music of the time in which I live. You start generally with all the big pieces, romantic pieces, like Tchaikovsky and the melodic big orchestral thick. Then you go to Beethoven and back through Mozart and Bach. Then you work your way up and eventually I landed in the 20th century that I love so much. Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber. Usually certain music it takes me a certain kind of season to listen to but those I can listen to at any time.
Do you have a project you still want to wrangle?
I don’t know why I don’t do this. I have enough poems for several books. And I’d love to have done them just so that I could hand one to you and say “here.” I’m not interested in what publishers say about poetry. Not for publishing. Just so I could hand it to you and say “here Paige, here’s a poem.” And you can read it or set your drink on it, whatever. Ravel the great composer said — he tended to be a little cranky — but he said his responsibility was to bring as much beauty into the world as he could. And he certainly did that. And made it a better place. Maybe that is the bigger thing.
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If you missed my last interview post with Scott Young on learning and motivation, click here: Ultralearning: An Interview with Scott Young
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