A Quote by Don Helms
I don't think I ever saw Hank with anybody, say, 'Let's go write a song.' One Sunday morning we left Nashville to go to Birmingham to do a matinee and a night, and he said, 'Hand me that tablet up there.' And he wrote down, 'Hey, good lookin', what you got cookin'' and before we got to Birmingham it was finished.
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All I've got on my iPod is every single Queen song and every single Judas Priest song. Queen were an incredible heavy metal band. I saw them on their first ever tour, at Birmingham Town Hall. They just blew me away.
I was at a bar, and this guy bumped into me, and he did not apologize, and he said, "Move!" I thought that was rude, so I said, "Go to hell!" Then I started to run. He caught up to me. He had a mustache, a goatee, a pair of earrings, sunglasses, a ponytail and he was wearing a hat. He said, "Hey, you got a lot of nerve!" I said, "Hey, you got a lot of... cranium accessories!"
Birmingham people are the salt of the earth, and I've carried that with me all around the world. People respond to a certain down-to-earthness that I have, and that's purely as a result of coming from Birmingham.
For Birmingham, I scored four on my debut. It's not bad. First one was a tap-in; it set me up nice for the day, and I think I got a hat-trick in 13 minutes. So obviously I was cruising, then got one in the second half and came off!
When you've got African parents, you go to uni, do finance, and go into accounting. But I'm not good with systems. I dropped out in my final year of college to become a Christian poet. Then went back to do my A-levels and went to uni in Birmingham to do political science and theology. I lasted 12 weeks.
My agent is a Birmingham fan and I don't think Birmingham and Aston Villa get on too well.
It was that famous joke: What's the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? 'Hey, I wrote a song.'
I came to Nashville in the early '90s, and I thought, 'OK, enough is enough. I write songs; I just don't have the backbone to show it to anybody. I want to go to Nashville and learn how to properly write a song.'
There was a shop in Birmingham called Autographs, where I'm from in Birmingham. My uncles and dad used to shop there. They played professionally, too. When I started, I went to Autograph, and they had brands like Rick Owens. There are loads of brands, like my go-to brands that I will go to if I want to buy jeans, like DSquared or Balmain.
I didn't really had a good answer, as so often -- is me. But then somebody sent me the other day, Isaiah 49:16, and you need to go home and look it up. Before you look it up, I'll tell you what it says though. It says, hey, if it was good enough for God, scribbling on the palm of his hand, it's good enough for me, for us. He says, in that passage, 'I wrote your name on the palm of my hand to remember you,' and I'm like, 'Okay, I'm in good company.'
I don't wake up in the morning and say, 'Jeez, I feel great today. I think I'll write a song.' I mean, anything is more interesting to me than writing a song. It's like, 'I think I'd like to write a song... No, I guess I better go feed the cat first.' You know what I mean? It's like pulling teeth. I don't enjoy it a bit.
My ultimate goal? To move my momma out of Birmingham. To move my whole family out of Birmingham, my friends, my family, me. It don't even need to be out of Birmingham, just to a better community, a gated community or something.
I don't even think any stimulants really help writing. You talk to most guys and they say, "Hey. I wrote this." And they're out of their head or they had a few beers or a bottle of whiskey. You wake up the next morning, it's usually pretty crap. But you know Dylan Thomas wrote some great poetry. Brendan Behan. You never know but ultimately I'd say you have to get up early in the morning and you're usually sober when you write your good stuff; it's hard work. So alcohol, keep it for chilling out, fun, and having a good time. Not for work.
So when I wrote 'Down' - when I sang the melody, I sung the word 'Down' for no reason. I don't know why. That's how I came up with the medley. I was like, 'I don't know why I said down, but we got to write a song around it.'
Actually think anybody ever approaches writing any song, I think the song approaches them, truth be told. Usually what happens is that a song arrives and afterwards you say that "I wrote the song," and it's not actually true; they find you, they write themselves.
I wrote before I could write. I got my hands on a journal, maybe a hand-me-down; I had three older siblings. My first entries are in the handwriting of the sister closets in age (5 years my senior). She must have gotten tired of my dictations because she gave up and then my blocky scrawl shows up. I wrote plays as a kid mostly.
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