Joe By The Book - Buck Meek

Joe By The Book - Buck Meek

There's no design for life, just a pattern it settles into. Joys, turbulences, exaggerations, considerations, hesitations, chores, confessions, routines, detours, silences, repairs.

"Drew, my god, who'd you fool to borrow this race car?"

There are songs, there are people, who direct the scene. There are songs and people which settle in. This isn’t a song about what I’m gonna do, what I want, what I hope for, dream about, fear, want to build or destroy. It slices life thin enough to wear like a blanket. Comfort and trust. Drew's friend and Drew. Their history and context. Amusement, not surprise. Play, not business. Their necessary ease with one another. They are each a part of the good life the other suffers their indignities for.

feels like:

outside gravel drive / canonball nostalgia / we win as many as we lose / blue work shirts / take care now / payday is next friday / power lines drooping / wonder what's for dinner / these must be the good old times / i saved you a seat.

The way Buck Meek pulls and stretches the melody temporarily uninvents the clock for me. Sun is up. Won't be long. There’s nothing to hang the moment on, just the flow of a day. Nobody knows anything. They’ve all got a feeling. It doesn't matter which words belong to who.

There’s fire in it. The specific mundanity of engine parts. The pull of giving aid. The possibility of assistance. The clear memory of kindness. The necessity and beauty of grounding relationships in exchange. People getting through a day, and doing it together when they can, because nobody likes to walk into darkness alone.

"Would you lend me a hand?
Push it up to Shamrock's
And have Joe take a look?
They call him 'Joe by the Book' and I trust him
He fixed my grandma's Cadillac"

Joe's got a nickname, we know him. He's good people like us; bonafide. That’s the comfort of community logic - the kind of thing these two guys would talk about to feel good for a minute. You can feel the trust and the time behind it all. The ease. The familiarity. The unremarkable, shining love. Functional love. The shared balanced momentum of intention.

Friendship is the reason they could share in the memory of a good thing. It's the reason that car will get fixed, and then fixed again. It’s often the reason. That’s why this song is here.


Here's a video of this song being performed that I really like.


This is a playlist I’ll be adding to over time. Each song comes with a journal entry of some kind—what that looks like might shift and morph as I go. I’m going to have fun with these. It’s a celebration of songs that make me feel all kinds of ways.