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Country
Cousins
by
Kate Sweeney
My
musical doppelganger lives in San Francisco. My boyfriend,
Marshall, says his musical twin used to live in Greenville but
has moved to Charleston now, according to the man’s
website. He told me this without missing a beat when I told him
I’d discovered my Internet counterpart and that she was a
country singer in northern California. It seems my Marshall
discovered Musical Marshall online some time ago. Musical
Marshall plays rough-hewn acoustic guitar and sings in a pretty,
plaintive tenor. He has recorded two albums. Musical Marshall’s
website says that he is one of the South’s best-kept
secrets. The logic of stating such a thing about oneself is a
little confusing to me, but he has a nice singing voice.
Country Kate Sweeney sings well, too. In fact, while I
intended just a cursory jog through her website before moving on,
I ended up listening to three full songs. The more I listened to
her voice, the more I liked it. It’s described on her
MySpace page in various shades of desolation. It’s “bleak,”
writes one person. “You may never have heard a sound so
lonesome and bleak as Kate Sweeney,” says another, and
after giving her a listen, I was inclined to agree. I was also
inclined to feel weird, because I found myself thinking things
like, “This Kate Sweeney is someone to watch” I
considered buying her album. I was riveted. I was rattled. Ten
minutes online had transformed me into someone new: a fan of this
new brand of my name, this brand of me that isn’t me.
“Okay. She wins,” said a voice in my head. It’s
official: In the eyes of the world, Kate Sweeney is the lonely,
searing folk voice in the night, her appearance that of a
waiflike flowery hippie. Kate Sweeney is definitely not me.
I
had spent the past few days tidying up various rejection piles.
There were the neat, preprinted half-sheets from esteemed
literary magazines, and the pithy, three-sentence letters
regarding communications jobs I had applied for six months
before. I had also started surfing the Internet to find an
unclaimed web address featuring my name. That’s when I
discovered Country Kate. In my efforts to establish my identity
as a writer, I had wanted to start a real website, “real”
meaning professional, “professional,” meaning either,
A. Larger than Life in this way that emphasizes certain aspects
of one’s personality to hyperbole, or, B. slightly dry, as
in: name and resume only, please. Either way, “professional”
means no online essays about finding Internet doppelgangers or
speculating on future health concerns associated with a
peanut-butter toast habit that’s seven years’ strong,
because such chattiness is the hallmark of the amateur blog. A
professional face means a cessation of interacting with the world
in normal, quotidian, running-on-at-the-mouth ways. It means
choosing your Message. It means brushing your teeth, putting your
face up on a billboard and claiming your brand.
The
problem is, I have no earthly idea what my brand might be. The
words I peck out every day are abstractions that describe and
sing about all that is physical, but I long ago gave up the idea
of settling on one style or aesthetic for myself. I am not
country-goth or punk rock or classical. I am a person, subject to
acute crushes on all these genres, one after another,
half-a-dozen times a day. Now, for example: I look at Country
Kate’s website with her dark and desolate mountain songs
and it so charms me that it feels definitive. Today, her
visitors’ log sports more hits than ever. More and more,
she is known. More and more, she is the world’s Kate
Sweeney.
Country Kate Sweeney’s photograph is dimmed
out to the point of near-blackness, her head ducked, her long,
dark hair obscuring her face, like the ghost-child in the
Japanese horror film The Ring. Last night, over bad, overpriced
margaritas, my friend Ranger took off her Loretta Lynn fall and
gave it to me. I held it up to my face like the ghost in The
Ring, just like that other Kate Sweeney. Also like Country Kate
Sweeney, I have made up various country and pop-soul songs with
my boyfriend Marshall—about our rice-cooker, cleaning the
shower, and our cats. We have not sung them outside our house.
After I’ve browsed through Country Kate Sweeney’s
site yet again, I go ahead and navigate to Americana Marshall’s,
too. The address I entered before does not work. I try it again,
but again, I get only an error message. Over lunch, I tell
Marshall about this development over the phone, but he seems less
interested. He doesn’t remember what I’m talking
about. “What are you talking about?” he asks. “Who
is Americana Marshall?” Today, my boyfriend had to stop a
fight at work. Marshall actually had to physically separate his
red-faced, loudmouthed, South African cubicle-mate from the man’s
brother-in-law who wanted to tear the guy limb-from-limb for
stealing a large chunk of inheritance money. Things like this
happen to Marshall. He is the most even-tempered of our friends,
a good listener, and somehow he often ends up playing the role of
diplomat between warring parties, the fixer of broken appliances
and broken friendships—even in his workplace. Apparently,
even there he is indispensable.
Several days pass, and
Americana Marshall’s site remains shut down. Maybe he’s
decided to stay a well-kept secret. It feels odd that he could
just disappear from the world like that though, after putting so
much work into his career. Two albums. I bring it up again, as my
Marshall cooks Beef Rendang for dinner. He shrugs politely and
goes back to chopping the lemongrass. I stare at this man. He has
all the freedom in the world to stake his own brand—and yet
he is happy. He hasn’t been turning some secret shard of
disappointment on himself. He is perfectly satisfied with
creating and enjoying amazing meals, with being a good friend and
leading a life free of advertising. Thinking about this feels
dangerous—and tremendously freeing.
Out on the
porch, we eat the Rendang, and bursts of turmeric and lime juice
and chilies explode in my mouth. Marshall and I talk about our
friends’ problems, about the goodness of Sriracha sauce,
about whether we’ll ever save enough money to retire. The
talk is abstract and without consequence, the night air mild and
carrying the crisp scent of fall. It is lovely. I chase a bite of
coconut-curried beef with a sip of beer, and I am struck.
I
know what Americana Marshall needs to do to save his career.
And
maybe it’s what Country Kate needs too, to finally break
through. It might mean my own forfeiture of a brand for myself;
it might mean a lifetime of saying, “I’m Kate
Sweeney. I’m a writer. No, no relation to the Kate Sweeney
you’re thinking of,” but now that doesn’t seem
to matter. I want to help them.
Americana Marshall must
cross the miles that separate him from Country Kate, and they
must write a song together. Obviously, it would be brilliant, a
work of Its genius with that timelessness that has lends
the appearance of easy destiny to in the very best art. The song
would make itself known to the world and give rise to their dual
superstardom.
Picture it: The Grand Old Opry. Marshall
Black and Kate Sweeney, together. The house is packed. One of
them ponies up to the mic before those legendary footlights and
says, “Well, here’s the song that started it all, I
guess,” with that stylized country modesty. At this, the
crowd, its anticipation finally given an opening, erupts; they
know what’s coming. And the other says, as he tunes a
little more, “Yeah. Before this, we were pretty much the
best-kept secret in Country/Americana songwriting duos.”
But before anyone can react, they launch into it, this song that
electrifies the crowd and brings it to its stomping feet, not
just this Nashville audience but everyone the world over. The
tuneful strains of the song closes the circuit somehow and bolts
these two out of semi-obscurity forever, leaving Marshall and me,
small and human and happy, breathless and rapt, to watch the
dusty computer screen in our anonymous home, as these our own
real names become legendary.
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