Shipe Pit Bull Blues on Acoustic Guitar Forum

Googling myself again (for professional reasons, I swear), I ran across a link to the Acoustic Guitar Forum. Someone had posted a YouTube slide show featuring my song “Pit Bull Blues.” The ensuing discussion is quite passionate. Not what you’d expect on a music forum. (But this isn’t an ordinary forum. Other AGF threads discuss random stuff like T.V. Westerns, Charlie Sheen, and The Green Bay Packers.)

I have said before that I am the world’s most unlikely Canine Advocate. When I was younger, I must have had the ubiquitous fantasies about a music career full of idealism and importance to Western Civilization. You know…. power-to-the-people, save-the-world, and all that. But I lost my appetite for conflict and confrontation along the way. (My highest political aims now are to tell stories that evoke “empathy,” which is actually pretty damn political in its way. We’ve seen what a beating that word–”empathy”–has suffered in the media lately.)

Anyway, who’d have thunk that after 300 songs, my controversial impact on the culture would amount to this?

If I get called to the floor to speak articulately about this stuff, I hope I’ll know what to say. A lot of folks care deeply, on all sides.