Jimbo Mathus meets a wise stranger in a parking lot

I was in the parking lot of the grocery store. There was a music store there called Backstage Music. And the owner would let me have guitar strings, some, you know, and he helped me with instruments and stuff ’cause I was working as a musician. Um, right next to, to Backstage Music was a grocery store called Sack ’n Save. It was like a cut-rate grocery store. You know, five boxes of macaroni and cheese were a dollar. You know, so this is where I would get my food to, to live on, on the budget that I was on. So I was in the parking lot, it was in the summertime, in Mississippi. The name of the town is Starkville, Mississippi. It’s in Oktibbeha County, which is an Indian name. And the summers in Mississippi are incredibly hot. And I’m leaving the Backstage Music store. My little car is parked in the Sack ’n Save parking lot, and a guy follows me out of the music store, who I had seen in the music store. And he walks up to me, 18-year-old me, and I just remember the heat in the parking lot was just oppressive. He said “My name is Kenny Nowell.” That’s his name. Kenny Nowell. And he said, “I overheard you in there and I’ve seen you around town, you know.” There was no music scene in the town. The word had gotten around. I was a musician, and he thought he would speak to me. And he said, “uh, you know, what’s your band? What are you doing with your band?” And I said, “Well, you know man, I’m cool, you know, I’m playing songs by, you know, REM, and the, you know, DEVO, or whatever, you know.” I thought I was... The Germs or whatever. I thought I was so cool. He said, “you know,” he said, “if you’re gonna play those kind of covers, you know, nobody’s gonna pay you to listen to those around here, anyway.” He said, “if you’re gonna do that, you might as well write your own songs.” And there was just this pause, and at first I didn’t understand what that meant. And I kinda got offended a little bit, at that moment, in the heat, in the parking lot. And we kinda stood there for a minute and I said, you know, “okay, yeah, yeah, you’re probably right man,” you know. And we parted ways. But that just stuck with me, you know. Over the days and weeks following, it started to sink in. And I was like, okay, how do I do that? It wasn’t really by copying anybody else. I couldn’t do it by copying other styles. I was just kinda waiting on something to hit me. And eventually it did. As I pondered this, it all kinda made the first little gears in my mind, you know, started turning as a songwriter. Over the next year, I kinda started to figure it out. And that’s what, you know, basically instilled in me the writing talent, the habit that I have. You know, the lifelong pursuit of it. Now it’s very easy for me. But had I not met him, in that, you know, parking lot of that cut-rate grocery store, and if he hadn’t taken the time to kinda follow me out and wave me down, and say “hey, man.” And he was just a year or two older than me. You know, but he knew, you know. He understood more than I did then. And at that point, I became a songwriter.