Matthew M Cornett

Tag: rock

  • More Than A Feeling

    One of my favorite episodes of the X Files is “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose.” It’s about a man who can supposedly tell how someone is going to die and Mulder and Scully work with him to try to catch a serial killer who is fascinated with his own future. There’s a moment when Mr. Bruckman and Mulder are standing in the apartment of a murdered woman who collected dolls and Bruckman delivers the following lines:

    “Why does anyone do the things that they do? Why do I sell insurance? I wish I knew. Why did this woman collect dolls? What was it about her life? Was it one specific moment where she suddenly said ‘I know…dolls.’ Or was it a whole series of things starting when her parents met that somehow combined in such a way that in the end, she had no choice but to be a doll collector?” 

    That episode always made me wonder, why are we the way we are? Nature? Nurture? A combination of both or the luck or curse of being born in a particular place and time? All of those things fall together and turn us into who we become. I have always been fascinated with the concept and it’s made me do a lot of self reflection. For me, I have always wondered why it is that music has always intrigued me in the way that it does. Many people enjoy listening to music, but for me it’s almost an obsession.  I have always tried to figure out why and I talked about it my book If We Never Meet Again when I said about my childhood:

    “For some reason, I also remember rain. We had this huge front room window and I clearly remember looking out and watching the rain fall on our driveway. I was captivated with the way each drop fell and pooled up around itself. I remember just standing there barely able to see over the ledge, watching, observing, and lost in the fascination of that moment desperately trying to understand what I was witnessing while listening to my mother’s music. It’s that perfect feeling that great music still creates for me even after all these years.”

    When I wrote those lines a year and a half ago, I had an epiphany. Music, like all great art, has the power to move us. For me, it recreates that feeling of being “lost in the fascination of that moment.” Music is emotional resonance, and I can’t imagine living without it. In chapter nine of my book, I met a man who had been doing just that and I was blessed to be part of a special moment in his life that forever changed me.

    Once I had to drive a patient to his new residence. He was forced to move to another assisted living and his only relative lived 20 hours away. I always felt bad for him because he used to just sit in a dark oppressive room always half asleep because of the medication he was on for his brain tumor. My marketer arranged for a company to move his things and I volunteered to drive him. It was a bright, beautiful, South Carolina Spring morning. He sleepily climbed into my truck and we began our morning journey. I asked if he wanted to listen to some music and he basically said “Whatever.” From my book: 

    I scrolled down to my “Classic Rock” playlist, hit shuffle, and then it happened. Boston’s “More than a Feeling” started playing. The slow fade in of the 12 string string playing the opening arpeggio, repeating the pattern, the bass, and then the drums leading into the first verse of the song which I typically took for granted. Mr. Davis sat up, rolled the window down, leaned back again and began to enjoy himself for what I imagine was the first time in a long time. For a man who literally sat in the dark and barely said anything, by the time he sang out “It’s more than a feeling, (More than a Feeling), When I hear that old song they used to play” he was alive in a moment of ecstasy, punctuated with drum fills on his legs. When he finally broke out the air guitar for the solo, he was truly reborn. For the next 45 minutes, through various songs, he sang lyrics that had obviously been etched on his heart the same way they had been on mine. It was a great drive.

    I have been a fan of Boston since I was a four year old kid in my oldest brother’s room listening to their debut album on 8 track cassette back in 1976. I remember holding my brother’s white wooden Wilson brand tennis racquet like it was a guitar and rocking out to sounds none of us had really heard before. If you get a chance, get on Youtube and watch Rick Beato’s “What Makes This Song Great? More Than A Feeling.” He does a far better job than I ever could talking about the genius of Tom Scholz. He even plays an isolated track of Brad Delp’s vocals that will truly blow you away. As Paul Phillips wrote in the comments “No pro tools, no plug-ins, no copy and paste, no samples, no loops, one of the finest compositions ever” and I couldn’t agree more.  

    When I had time to reflect on those moments, I wrote “All we did was drive down the road with the windows down listening to some of the greatest music ever made. It was something so commonplace for me that had been stolen from Mr. Davis by disease and neglect. All it took was a 45 minute drive to reignite that dormant passion. One song in and he was reborn…But ever since then, whenever I roll down the windows and let the music flow over me, I always think of that moment and try to appreciate it like we always should.”

    Do yourself a favor later on today. Go for a drive, roll down the windows, play whatever works for you, and enjoy the moment. Whatever is weighing on you, let it be for just a while. It will still be there later, but for that moment, enjoy. Like Mr. Davis taught me…without those moments, all we have is the dark room of all of our struggles. Sometimes we just need to go outside, roll down the windows, and rock on. 

  • “Love Untold”

    This week I am skipping ahead a chapter because I messed up. To prepare for my weekly blog, I start out on Monday thinking about the upcoming topic. I spend the week thinking about it off and on and come up with an approach to take. The problem is, I was thinking a chapter ahead to “Love Untold” and have been working it out all week. It’s fine and I’ll backtrack next week starting tomorrow. 


    I have always been a fan of the underdog in life and I spent this week wondering why off and on. Whenever I want to understand something, I think about it, read about it, talk about it, and eventually make sense of it for myself. In the Psychology Today article “Why do we love Underdog Stories? Psychology Weighs In” by Matt Johnson, the author said something interesting that really made me think. Halfway through he argues “The underdog story is one of the most classic storylines with a universal appeal, reliably driving feelings of empathy. They tap into the qualities we like best about ourselves and find most admirable in others.” I have to admit two things here: I am naturally a very empathetic person. I don’t know why but I have always been able to connect with people who are going through something and I promise, it’s genuine. I’m sure people can fake that but I genuinely do feel for people and their experiences so that makes sense to me. But the other issue is even more personal: I guess I have always viewed myself as an underdog too. 

    It’s not because I had a tough life or anything. Sure, we weren’t rich, but we certainly weren’t poor either. I had nothing like that as compared to my father. He grew up genuinely poor. I remember hearing stories about him growing up so poor he and his buddy would hunt for pop bottles to sell so they could buy a school carton of milk to split for lunch. He didn’t want the other kids to know he was poor so he wouldn’t eat the free lunch they gave to the poor kids and thought of that breaks my heart. Nobody expected that poor kid to do anything with his life. He was from the wrong side of town and a true underdog, but that boy grew up, joined the Navy, married the love of his life, made something amazing of himself, and has a family that loves and adores him to this day. How can you not respect that?

    When I was in 5th grade,  The Outsiders movie came out and it changed me as a kid. It cemented what would eventually become my identity. I became obsessed with it. I read the book over and over, watched the movie everytime I could on cable, and even did a book report wearing rolled up jeans, high topped Converse, and a cut off purple sweatshirt just like Ponyboy. I connected with those boys and now that I’m older, I know why. It’s because that’s how I imagined my own father’s experience. In my mind, my old man was born “grease,” and that’s what I was too. No wonder, I loved Elvis and The Outsiders. Heck, by the time I was a Junior in High School, I was greasing my own hair (actually moussing and hair spraying it…go ahead and laugh) and pulling it down in the front. I honestly looked like some scrawny Elvis/Rebel Without a Cause/Cry Baby rip off in the late 80’s but it was my identity and it stuck.

    So I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the kid no one believes in, the kid who had no shot at success, yet somehow overcame those odds. Rocky Balboa, Daniel LaRusso, and Marty McFly…those guys were my heroes. And that love for the underdog even made its way into my musical tastes with one specific band- the greatest band that could have and should have been-The Replacements. They were a bunch of slackers from Minneapolis who formed a band in 1979. The problem for them was that everytime they got close to really breaking out into the “big time” they usually committed some act of self sabotage. Their early stuff was happily loud, obnoxious, and quite drunken. Their music matured by the mid to late 80’s much to the discontent of their early post punk fans. From 1981 to 1990 they made 7 albums and finally broke up in 1991. 

    I wasn’t introduced to them until the Fall of 1990 when I was sitting in ENG 101 class there at the University of KY. My TA’s name was Ben Webb and he was a really cool guy who made a comment about being excited for the new Replacements album (1990’s All Shook Down) which coincidentally was to be their last as a band. I checked it out and fell in love with it. Now some purists would say that doesn’t make me a true Replacements fan because by that time, it was basically a Paul Westerburg solo record and I understand that argument. But for me, I started with that album, then moved back to 1989’s Don’t Tell a Soul, and finally to 1987’s Pleased to Meet Me. I loved those three albums and their “Bash and Pop” sound which bassist Tommy Stinson would later call his own band in the early 90’s. Paul was the genius behind that sound and he went on to have an amazing solo career as well. I personally believe that he is one of the finest underdog lyricists of my generation. His ability to write about everyday experiences in such poignant and playful, thoughtful and irreverent ways still blows my mind to this day. He writes about loners and losers, people who never had a chance or blew the ones they had. And he does it all with conviction and self deprecation. 

    A perfect example of this is the song “Love Untold” off of his 1996 album, Eventually. It tells the sweet story of a bashful couple who were supposed to meet but never did. He sings:

    They were gonna meet, on a rocky mountain street

    Two bashful hearts beat in advance

    Their hands were gonna sweat, it was all set

    She ain’t showed up yet, still a good chance

    It’s a love untold

    It’s a love untold

    As he sings the first verse, it’s hopeful and you can imagine these two getting ready with the sweet excitement of that first meeting. But as it develops you find out that it never happens. Ever. For some reason, they never meet or fall in love. By the middle of the song you get a sense that it was doomed from the start with “Games will be played, Excuses will be made, The stupid things they said, In their prayers, All about a love untold.” For whatever reason, it just doesn’t work out. By the end of the song the narrator seems crushed: 

    They were gonna meet on a crummy little street

    It never came to be, I’m told

    Does anyone recall the saddest love of all

    The one that lets you fall, nothing to hold

    It’s the love untold

    It’s the love untold

    Once upon a love untold

    To me, this song illustrates his genius. He takes these nobody characters that nobody cares about and turns their story into a tragedy, using it as almost a warning to us all. I love it and when it came time to pick a song for Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Chapter 7 of my book If We never Meet Again, this song was perfect. If you haven’t read the book, it’s a chapter about a time I lied straight through my teeth to get a saintly woman back into the ER to see her husband one last time. It was right at the beginning of COVID, and she panicked, called 911, and he coded on the way to the hospital. They stabilized him, and put him on life support. I went with her to the hospital but they weren’t about to let her back in there to see him. I took matters into my own hands, and somehow after waiting there for hours well into the night, I talked the doctor into letting me take her back to him. We walked back there and I helped her stand there beside her husband so she could kiss him goodbye. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed.

    Let’s face it. Outside of their circle, they were nobodies. No one would ever hear about their love story. No one would ever care. Theirs was merely another story that was destined to be a “love untold.” But just like when they told that sweet woman she couldn’t see her husband, I wasn’t about to let that happen. The chapter ends with:

    “I was glad I didn’t take no for an answer from the hospital, and I am still glad and completely unashamed to this day that I lied to get her into that room to see the love of her life one last time. I have told some big lies before that I truly regret but not that one. I will gladly pay whatever price I owe for it and do it again without hesitation still to this day.”

    It’s one of the best things this underdog has ever done. And I think Westerburg would love that irony.

  • “A Whiter Shade of Pale”

    “A Whiter Shade of Pale”

    I was truly blessed to grow up in the 1980’s. Although I was born in 1972 and events of the late 70’s impacted me, it was my coming of age in the early, mid, and late 80’s that shaped me into who I was to become. Many aspects of that time period influenced me, but it was probably the movies and the music that shaped me most. They created a love for both that still endures in me to this day.

    The movie soundtrack played a very essential role in helping me to expand my horizons as a kid. While I had MTV and “Casey Kasem’s Top 40,” both of those were designed around what was popular on the charts at the time. The movie soundtrack contained those popular hits also, but the extra tracks took you somewhere else entirely. For example, in the fall of 1986, as a 14 year old kid, I went to Northpark Cinemas in Lexington, Kentucky, one afternoon to see a double feature of Ferrris Bueller’s Day Off and Pretty in Pink. What a time to be alive! Ferris had some great music in it but it was Pretty in Pink that introduced me to OMD and The Psychedelic Furs. You never saw them on MTV or heard them on the Top 40. For a kid living in Lexington, KY, this opened up a whole new world of possibilities. But not only them…it also had INXS, New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen, and The Smiths. I had already liked what we now call the “New Romantic” bands like Duran Duran, The Human League, and A Flock of Seagulls because bands like those were in regular rotation on MTV, but the Pretty in Pink soundtrack and many others like it introduced me to so much more. I remember going to Musicland in Lexington Mall and Camelot Records in Fayette Mall searching for the back catalogs of these bands we had no idea even existed. These albums came to define my experience and still live on fondly in my memories and on my Spotify playlists.

    When I turned 16, I got a job working at the Lexington Mall Cinemas and had the time of my young life. I remember waiting on the film credits to end so I could quickly clean up the theater before the next showing. As those credits rolled, there was always music playing. In 1989 we had When Harry Met Sally and by the time that film left I knew every one of the classics that Harry Connick Jr. performed. I remember picking up empty popcorn buckets and singing “It Had to Be You” as loudly as I wanted. I eventually picked up the soundtrack cd and am still a Harry Connick Jr. fan to this day. Not to mention, it led me to Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald, all of whom are still in regular rotation for me as well. Don’t discount the power of a great soundtrack.

    That same year, there was a film called New York Stories. It consisted of three stories that revolved around New York City at the time. The segment directed by Martin Scorsese was the one that stands out to me because of one song: “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” by Procol Harem. The segment was about an artist played by Nick Nolte. As I remember, the opening had him painting and listening to the song. I have no idea why, but that song entranced me. It was beautiful. I really don’t remember much about the movie, but that song found its way onto “My Favorite Songs” playlist that I have been making for the last 20 years. 

    The band released the song in 1967. Rock music was changing at that time into much more of an art form. The Beatles and The Beach Boys had been going back and forth creating masterpiece after masterpiece, each of them pushing things forward.The Beatles started it with Rubber Soul in 1965. That album pushed Brian Wilson to create Pet Sounds in 1966, which in turn pushed the Beatles to create Revolver. By October of 1966, Wilson released “Good Vibrations” and in 1967 The Beatles released Sgt. Peppers. And none of that even begins to acknowledge what Dylan, the Stones, Cream, Buffalo Springfield, and Simon and Garfunkel were also doing at that time. Rock music was being pushed into a whole new realm and Procol Harum were part of it as well.

    They considered themselves a “blues band with classical influences.” In fact, the melody of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was created when organist Gary Brooker was trying to play J. S. Bach’s “Orchestral Suite No 3.” He started on the right note then couldn’t remember the rest. Brooker once said “it does a bar or two of Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’ before it veers off. That spark was all it took. I wasn’t consciously combining rock with classical, it’s just that Bach’s music was in me.” The lyrics are vague, seemingly about a drunken party, a “seasick” protagonist, and a girl with a “ghostly” face that “turned a whiter shade of pale.” Whatever the song is about, for me it has always been the feel of it with that beautiful organ melody. 

    When I was writing the second chapter to my book If We Never Meet Again, there was never a question as to which song on my playlist would anchor it. The chapter is about the first death I ever experienced in the world of hospice. In that chapter, I refer to it as my initiation:

    “My first death was quite the experience. Now you have to remember, the only place I had ever seen a dead body was at a funeral home all dressed up and on display. I certainly had never touched a dead body. As a teacher I had seen my share of crazy moments. I broke up fights, managed students during emergency drills, and dealt with my share of crazy parents. But this was different. Seriously, you don’t have to make up what happened to me” (11).

    He was my first death and nothing had prepared me for it. In the chapter, I describe the horror of the moment. The wife was screaming, the coroner was cussing me out and it was a truly dizzying moment:

    “I walked in the house, turned the corner, and there was Albert laid out on the floor, eyes wide open in a look of complete disbelief, naked, with arms and legs opened wide. He still had a tube coming out of his mouth where they had intubated him with blood splattered across the floor. I had never seen anything like that moment. It was a scene out of a horror movie to me, or a bloody picture from a crime scene. He looked terrible and it was certainly not the way I would want to go out” (13-14).

    Still to this day, I cannot think of him without seeing that look on his face. It was horrible. I later stated that the experience was my “trial by fire into the world of hospice; none of the online training I had completed remotely prepared me for such insanity.” Later, I continued “The memory of Bert splayed out there on the floor with that terrified look in his eyes…I don’t think I’ll ever shake it. It’s still just as vivid to me as the morning it happened.”

    I guess that for me the “Whiter Shade of Pale” line initially applied to the look on his poor face, but honestly, it could have been and probably was on mine the whole time. 

  • “If We Never Meet Again”

    At this point, I want to spend the next 8-10 blog entries talking about each individual chapter and provide some insight for the reader into what I was trying to do. To accomplish this, I will need to start with the songs. When I released the book back in January, I made an announcement on Facebook and even provided a link to my Spotify playlist that accompanies it. One of my former students hilariously commented, “Of course, there’s a playlist.” Music is a huge part of who I am and has been for as long as I can remember.

    I was blessed to grow up in a music loving household. I am the youngest of four children and had the benefit of each family member’s musical influence. My dad loved everything Elvis and classic country and  my mom loved the Carpenters and John Denver.  My oldest brother was all about Classic Rock like The Who and Bruce Springsteen, my middle brother liked the Southern Rock of Lynyrd Skynyrd and 38 Special and “Modern Rock” like Foreigner and Night Ranger, and my sister had Michael Jackson, Prince, and Madonna all on vinyl. I soaked up every single one of those influences and hundreds of more. The first album I ever bought was Queen’s Flash Gordon soundtrack in 1980. Epic. 

    But just as big of an influence on me was the early days of MTV. I watched it all the time from 1981 when it first appeared until the late 80’s. MTV introduced me to so much music that became the soundtrack for my life. And it was all over the spectrum which is why my tastes are the same. Classic Rock, New Wave, New Romantic, Early 80’s Modern Pop, Metal, Hair Metal, Rap, Mid and Late 80’s Modern Pop, Thrash Metal…man, the 80’s were all over the place and I loved every second of it. My tastes were all over the place and still are.

    I started writing my memoir in the summer of 2023 and I don’t know when it hit me to use “My Favorite Songs” playlist as a way to structure the individual narratives of my book, but it really worked. It was probably because of the long drives I often had to take for the job and the thoughts about the patients going through my head as I listened to whatever playlist I had cued up, but slowly I started to piece it all together. The songs were all there in my playlist and something weird happened. As I was putting everything together, each individual narrative started to claim its own song from the list and they worked perfectly, even providing clues, context, and insight into the various individuals.  

    So what about the theme song? In 1988, I saw the video for “If We Never Meet Again” by Tommy Conwell and the Young Rumblers and I immediately connected with it. I have always loved Roots Rock and their bluesy yet modern sound spoke to me so I went and bought the cassette tape (yes, we used to do that…hear one song and then go buy the album). That song made it to My Favorite Songs playlist eventually and I still listen to it today. When it came time for me to name the book, it was my first choice and just clicked.

    Most would say that the song is about a break up and trying to move past that but context matters. I love the fact that a song can have meaning beyond its own limitations, and with a different context it can mean something no one intended. You don’t believe me? Take Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” It’s a song about female empowerment right? Where she’s “about to give you all my money, and all I ask for in return honey…” is a little respect. Wow! A woman in 1967 saying I have the monetary and sexual power here and if you want it, you’d better show some respect. That’s amazing. But guess what? The song was written by Otis Redding and when he sang those similar words in 1965 it wasn’t exactly about female empowerment. Now, does that take away from Aretha’s amazing rendition and its meaning? Absolutely not because of context. Even Otis realized that before the tragic end of his own life when he finally accepted that “it belonged to her.”

    One thing that I really like about this song is that even with its subject matter, it’s not a sad song. In fact, it’s actually quite upbeat which for me makes it less sad and more contemplative, and even celebratory, which made it perfect for my book. For me, “If we never meet again,” isn’t about a break up. It’s about finding a way to move forward after something powerful ends:

    If we never meet again, 

    If goodbyes remain unspoken, 

    I won’t glorify our past, 

    But our bond remains unbroken, 

    If we never meet again

    When you work in hospice, you inevitably have many powerful moments and connections. It doesn’t matter if it lasts 2 weeks or 6 months. Having to say goodbye after connecting with someone so intimately can weigh on you and you go through it over and over again. For me, it’s that unbroken bond that I get to carry with me that helps me make sense of it all. When you sit beside someone in their final moments, try to comfort them as best you can, and then walk away, you can’t help feeling a bond with that person. It’s powerful, and the song captures it perfectly which is the reason why I made it the theme.