Big Country

I have recently taken up running and this has led to a new season of music listening in my life. Thanks to my trusty new ipod I get to listen to music for 30-45 minutes every morning I run. This is the kind of music listening that absorbs you, not the kind that is in the background while kids are running around and begging for snacks. I may think I like a song, but I am completely in LOVE with that song when the first note reaches my ears and it gives me the energy to make that last curve on Battlefield Drive. I could just hug David Mead or Ryan Adams in those moments and thank them for cheering me on. (It is amazing how adrenalin can translate a depressing love song into “You can do it, Jill!”)
A few days ago I heard Big Country’s “In A Big Country” on the radio and knew I had to download it for my running mix. I have loved this song for years and this technologically challenged girl is just realizing I don’t have to wait for two years to hear it again, I can actually go get it on itunes. As I was listening to the song and trying to understand the lyrics I suddenly remembered hearing something about the lead singer of this band and his connection to Nashville. I spent an hour or so on the internet trying to piece together the snippets of information that were coming back to me.
Big Country was a band out of Scotland that hit their peak in the US in the early 80’s with the song “In A Big Country”. Though they had continued success in the UK and made many more critically acclaimed records, they never attained that kind of success in the United States again. Their lead singer, Stuart, moved to Nashville in the mid 90’s and opened the hair salon Trim with his wife, Melanie. I met Melanie when Word sent me to Trim before my first photo shoot. I also remembered seeing Stuart and Melanie on a VH1 Where Are They Now that showed him talking about music and their new business endeavor.
Stuart had struggled with alcoholism over the years and disappeared in 2001, not making contact with any of his band mates or family. He and Melanie had become estranged and with divorce on the horizon some friends claimed the weight of perceived failure in several areas of his life drove him to depression. He was found dead in a Best Western in Honolulu, Hawaii on December 16, 2001. He had hanged himself. He left behind two children from his first marriage, a son and a daughter. His band mates were quoted as saying they didn’t know the extent of his problems and one of the reasons Big Country had stayed together over the years was they stayed out of each other’s personal lives.
This story has been weighing heavy on my heart lately. When I ran this morning and the song came up in the mix I felt a wave of sadness. I am not usually a melodramatic person, but I was haunted by the fact that I knew something Stuart didn’t know as he sang those words. I knew how he would die. He would be alone and intoxicated in a Best Western in Hawaii and he would hang himself. When he recorded this song he was young and full of optimism for his life and career as many of us are. Somewhere along the way he lost all hope and honestly believed the world would be better off without him in it, that his children were better off without him around.
The other reason I feel such sadness is I realize that without the grace of God it could have been me, it could be any of us. I have had many career stops and starts, relationship struggles, bouts of anxiety. It is only through Christ and not by my own strength that, in the words of Sara Groves, the tragedy has been rewritten. I am also thankful for my friends and community who do know what is going on in my life and give me courage to keep walking as they walk alongside me. We don’t have the luxury of staying out of each other’s personal lives to avoid conflict.
In one powerful line Stuart sings, “I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered, but you can’t stay here with every single hope you had shattered”. I can never listen to the song in the same way again.