BOB MCDILL: Art & Commerce: Threading a Masterful Career

Is there a song of yours that should’ve been a hit but just didn’t make it?

There are several… There’s a song that Sammy Kershaw did called “Honky-Tonk America,” and to do that, I fused the honky-tonk tradition with a Bruce Springsteen approach. I thought it was very innovative. It was sort of a blue-collar anthem. So it came out and about a day before that, all the radio stations decided they would no longer play anything with the phrase “honky-tonk” in it. So it went kaput. It wasn’t a great piece of art, but it wasn’t a bad piece of art.

One thing that strikes me about your songs is the degree of honesty in a lot of them. Should lyric writing be honest-or is that more complicated than it seems?

Well, think about those really great songs you remember. I mean the great Paul Simon songs and some of the others. They really are honest, or at least there’s the illusion of honesty and reality. Of course, if you write it for the radio you can massage those stereotypes and say the same old thing in a little cuter way.

Were you encouraged to be as honest as you could?

Yes, because the great thing was, I had people like Don Williams who really wanted to do good art and didn’t care about that latest radio record. He was a hit act for 20 years, and you see there’s a lesson there. I was so fortunate to have Don Williams all those years. And Dan Seals, too. Both those guys were really interested in recording great songs, rather than just staying on the radio.

Another theme you touch on in your songs is growing older, which is not a typical subject for a hit record.  Did that fascinate you?

I did fascinate me, and now that I’m 62 it no longer fascinates me [laughs].

Anything you’d care to say about why you chose to retire?

I was just tired of it. One can get tired of anything. I always liked that dentist who woke up one morning and realized that if he had to fill one more molar, he was gonna shoot himself.

It wasn’t a question of not having any more to say as a writer?

That’s part of it. And I remember thinking when I was writing that in country music I wasn’t allowed to say everything that I wanted to say, even though I got to say more than just about anybody else. And now, I’m writing anything I want to say, fiction and nonfiction. I’m mostly writing outdoor stories for Shooting Sportsman. I’ve had about 15 stories in there.

Any advice you’d give to an aspiring Nashville songwriter?

There’s one thing I would tell young writers; I think you can walk a fine line between selling out your art and being just a pure artist of the often-starving variety. Some people are so sensitive about that thing. It seems like people either want to get rich or be a well-respected artist. I think you can write some art and write some commercial stuff, too. There’s no law that says you can’t.