Our program is primarily podcasts and emails. Several people only read emails, while most people only listen to the show.

The best of the lot does both. Thank you.

The podcast will be coming back soon. Scheduling has been difficult. I’ve had to carve out time to cobble together emails. It’s tough to do a podcast in fits and starts like that.

Either way, we’re going to adjust and next week looks like we’ll have more of all of it.

And…feel free to pass on emails and podcasts to people who you think would enjoy them. Or just keep it all to yourself.

I’ve said it in the past about the podcast and the emails:

My concern is producing serious content amidst our unserious culture.

Of course, I’d like folks to read and listen and we certainly appreciate all the support.

If you want “serious content amidst an unserious culture,” we’re here for you.

Anyhow…

… if you’ve been following along, these last couple of weeks of emails have mostly been about “obscure songwriters,” as one reader put it to me.

Let me push back a little on that, however. I might agree that my “people” are a bit obscure in the culture at large, but in my little “niche” of the music world, these people are heroes.

I don't know much about songwriting. I've read plenty of lyrics and—painfully—sung along to a lot of tunes. I can't play a musical instrument worth a lick and have never tried even writing a song.

I talk about music a lot, however. I write about it perhaps even more.

We wrote about the last Elvis Presley hit single from 1972, "Burning Love," written by a young songwriter out of Nashville called Dennis Linde. And we've focused much of our attention over the last couple weeks on Linde's influence within the music industry, particularly 1990s country.

Now, Elvis was big in my childhood. We had an "oldies" station on the FM dial where they played a lot of the early rock 'n' roll. I liked "Hound Dog" and "Jailhouse Rock" astronomically more than the soft rock filling my earholes on the "adult contemporary" stations I was also subject to in the car. Sonic abuse, one could argue.

Perhaps The King's story resonates with me as a man of a certain age. Not entirely sure. I guess Elvis is a cultural touchstone in America, like it or not.

As for the certain age, I was born a few months before the Trail Blazers won the World Championship, which was, in turn, a few months prior to the final scoreboard that tallied:

As for country music, the genre hit its sweet spot about the same time I started listening to a lot of radio on my own. By the early 1990s, I had ditched the Top 40 stations—which were phenomenal in the mid-80s, supplying me with a solid roster of hits—for country music, somewhat freshly arrived on the FM dial.

By the time I was driving, the country music songs of Dennis Linde saturated the airwaves.

I had no idea about Dennis Linde as a person until a few years ago. Of course I knew the songs, but had never paid too much attention to who actually wrote the songs. Barry Manilow once told us that “I am music and I write the songs.” But Manilow didn’t even write that, Bruce Johnston did.

I figured some mope or another at a Nashville songwriting factory wrote all the country songs. Formulaic. Unoriginal. But catchy.

I realized at some point, that while the generalities were true, there were also some great and prolific songwriters out there doing the work. Stuff slightly out of the ordinary, but “normal” enough to stay—even flourish—in the mainstream.

Linde was a prime example of this and thanks to the bounty of the Internet, I started to put some of the pieces together.

I found that most of his characters "lived" in a town that he created out of whole cloth. Several Nashville artists cut songs featuring Linde characters. The folks in Norwell, (state unknown) used Margie's Bar as their watering hole, while the town's water tower might have been its most famous landmark, painted in "John Deere Green."

A lot of characters make repeat appearances throughout Linde’s canon. “Earl” was likely the most controversial.

In some ways, Linde himself was controversial, but not in any malicious sort of way. Nobody outside of friends and family knew much about him.

He stopped doing interviews sometime in the 1970s or 1980s and there are only a handful of known photographs after that.

One Nashville music executive called Linde a "mystery man." Dennis reportedly wrote music at his house, very much content with his wife, Pam, and supported by the love of his three children. The same executive said, "If you ever saw Dennis Linde, it was amazing, because you didn't get that opportunity very often."

In his early days in Nashville, one article published in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune said that the "slender, dark-haired musician ... looks a bit like 'Star Trek's' Dr. [sic] Spock without pointed ears." Not sure if that was a compliment, insult, or what.

As for his subject matter, Linde had a map of Norwell in his library where he reportedly did most of his writing.

World-building. The idea rubbed off on other artists, too.

In 2022, country music singer-songwriter Ashley McBryde released her third major label album Lindeville, a concept album—and website—where she created her own “world.” The world was the town of Lindeville, including Dennis Linde Park where the kids played baseball.

McBryde’s album was nominated for Best Country Album at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards.

McBryde said she and her collaborators "had characters and then invented ... a town, so we thought it would be the best way to tip our hats and honor Dennis Linde's genius."

I think the idea is cool. Having listened through it once, however, the execution could have been much better.

In 2009, Linde's daughter Lisa (a one-time Hollywood actress) sponsored a concert in Nashville called "A Night of Burnin' Love." Norwell came back to life. Rascal Flatts, Montgomery Gentry, Joe Nichols, Eddy Raven, and Mark Chestnutt all performed Dennis Linde originals.

The concert was a memorial of sorts for Linde, for he had passed away in 2006, but really a benefit concert. Linde died of complications surrounding Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF), a deadly lung disease that has no known cause, no FDA-approved treatment...and no cure.

Linde’s family and friends raised money in support of the battle against IPF.

And the disease hits close to home for me. While I am a huge fan of the Linde catalog, that’s beside the point, really.

My mother has been living with IPF herself for a decade or so.

IPF knocked off Linde at the young age of 63. My mother is battling through it at the age of (slightly older than that).

One of the reasons I took on writing these emails about Dennis Linde is to ultimately create awareness for IPF. Like I said last week, I only intended to write one piece about the guy and move on. It’s been two weeks.

His life and story are much more impactful—to me anyway—knowing that some of his greatest work was done while battling a disease that gives absolutely no quarter.

Essentially, pulmonary fibrosis is a progressive scarring of the lung tissue. “Idiopathic” means they have no idea what the cause is, so it makes it even more difficult to come up with a way to stop it.

The other reason for writing about Linde is that I found that his story touches so much of late-20^th Century popular music and these tales need to be expanded into fuller stories. So, I'm working on that, too.

The plan is to have a book out by the end of the year and if you’re not a fan of country music, don’t worry, that’s only one part of the entire project.

Donate to the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation for $250 or more in the name of my mother, Sally David, or in the name of Dennis Linde, or both of them and email me a copy of the receipt for the donation and I will provide you a FREE signed copy of this upcoming book, as yet untitled.

It also gives me some incentive to finish the manuscript up quickly.

Don't worry, I'll remind everyone about it once again when it is ready to be published.

Donate (there should be a button on the front page):

As always,

Brian