Beth Nielsen Chapman - Nothing I Can Do About it Now

 

So, in 1985, my husband and my son and I picked up and moved to Nashville, Tennessee, so I could pursue my career as a songwriter. The first couple of years were pretty frustrating and intense and exciting. I was just running around trying to meet producers, and get my songs heard, and getting a lot of rejection letters and things like that. I remember talking to some of the writers and they were basically telling me that, "Don't worry, as soon as you get a song on the chart going up the chart, they'll call you." And I thought, wow, that would be a lovely thing if that would happen. 

 

Five years after moving to Nashville, I wrote a song with Don Schlitz. It got recorded by Tanya Tucker, a song called Strong Enough to Bend. It went all the way to number one and it was nominated for Song of the Year, and I was like, “Oh, my God. Thank God.” I remember being really excited about that, but it's true. Then my phone rang and I got this call, and it was one of the legends that I'd ever been exposed to a man named Fred Foster. Fred Foster had signed Dolly Parton and Kris Kristofferson, and he produced Pretty Woman. He was just a legend and an icon. He calls me up and he goes, "Hey, this is Fred, and I'm making an album with Willie Nelson."

 

Now, Willie has been going through some stuff in his life. He's got a deadline, and he hadn't been writing a lot of songs. He's got a new wife and a new baby and a lot of things going on. He just said to me the other day, "Find out who wrote that Strong Enough to Bend song, get them to write me one." I'm just listening to this on the phone going, "This is not happening." Because I knew every Willie Nelson song. We had all his records. I mean, you could hold them up to the light and see through them, that's how much I knew all of his songs. I was absolutely thrilled, and I said, "When do you need it by?" He said, "Three months." And I went, "Consider it done." 

 

Hang up the phone, and I immediately go into supersonic songwriter mode. I was completely focused and just freaking out. I remember my husband was so great during this time. He would pick up our son from school, and they'd come home and I could hear him in there. And then, they slide over, open the door and peek in right around dinner time and say, "How's it going, mom?” I look at them like, "Oh, what?" And he'd go, "See that face? That's your mom's songwriter face, bud. [audience laughter] Let's go get us another pizza." [audience laughter] So, somehow, I don't know, I finally had to get out of the house. So, I went to the Y and I jogged around the indoor track. 

 

At the Y, because I was jogging around, I got this idea. I was like, "Okay, Willie Nelson, come on, what do you do?” You go, [imitates percussion beats] and there's no, yeah, On the Road Again, it's the train beat. So, I thought, okay, I got it, the train beat. That's it. I got the music part. And then, I'm driving, I'm just, "Okay, I'm going." I think, it's got to have a great title. It's got to be, what would Willie say right now? And then, this phrase popped into my head, There's nothing I can do about it now. And I thought, perfect. And then, I got really paranoid, because I thought, gosh, that's such a good title, surely somebody's going to write it out from under me before I get it done.

 

Anyway, I worked and worked. The other problem with this title, was that I had to rhyme it at the end of every verse. Hardly anything rhymes with now. I used them all up in no time. I had allow, and I had brow and I had, I don't know, another somehow. I was just sitting there going, "God, there's got to be another hour on that's not Bow Wow," when all of a sudden I started thinking about that lullaby that said, "Rockabye baby on the treetop, when the bough," B-O-U-G-H. And I'm thinking, okay, okay, don't panic, there's a way to get that at the end of this line, so I can rhyme it at the--" Took two more hours.

 

This is one of those things where I'll never forget how hard I worked to get this one little bit. It was just like excruciating. [chuckles] I finally got it and I said, "And I've been dreaming like a child since the cradle broke the bough, and there's nothing I can do about it now." And I went, "Oh, my God, I got it!" And I'm like, "Yes!" [audience laughter] And my husband comes in there and he goes, "Are you okay?" And I'm like, [excited] "Yes, this is going to be so good." I just felt like I'd crossed over the mountain of songwriting. I'd gotten to the top and I knew that I had that song, and I finished the rest of it in 20 minutes.

 

And then, I went about, okay, now it has to be a demo. I got my little four track cassette machine out and I played all the parts, even though I don't really play bass. I did keyboard bass, and I played guitar and I did a little kind of piano thing. I even had to really work hard to get a good snare drum sound, because I don't really have drums. So, I had my dulcimer turned around and I was hitting the back of it with my bedroom slipper, which had a really cool sound. [audience laughter] I literally finished it with just enough time to crawl out of my cocoon of songwriting madness, and go in my slippers, and my dirty hair to the airport and hand Fred this cassette. I just remember just going, "Here." 

 

I knew that I'd written a great song. I'd written the best song I'd ever written. I had absolutely no expectation that Willie was going to cut it, because in the interim, every songwriter in Nashville had started writing songs for Willie. The word got out, and I knew there was a huge amount of competition. When I was driving home from the airport, I'm like, "I'm going to stop at the store, I'm going to get some chickens and a nice bottle of wine. I'm going to wash my hair, take a bath." I made this beautiful dinner for my family. I said, "Hello, it's me, remember me? I'm back in the world." And the phone rings.

 

Now, I'd had a couple of glasses of wine, because I was celebrating, so I was a little tipsy and I said, "Oh, I'm sure that's Willie Nelson calling me [audience chuckle] to tell me they're cutting my song. So, I'll be right back." I went and picked up the phone and I went, "Hello?" And it was [excited, chuckles] Willie Nelson calling me to tell me they were going to cut my song. [audience cheers] 

 

I couldn't believe it. I was like, "Okay." I don't even know what I said to him, it was really very poor. And he goes, "Well, let me put Fred on to go over the details with you." And in eight hours, I was on an airplane, and I was flying to Austin and I was driven out to the Cut-N-Put studio. Some of y'all around here know what that is. 

 

This was totally the greatest moment of my life. Willie himself opened the door. I stood up and I was five inches from Willie Nelson's face. And he goes, "Hey." I was like, "Hi." And he goes, "You want to play some golf?" And I'm like, "Sure. [audience laughter] Yeah." I've never played golf. So, I'm standing there, and I'm swinging that club, and the ball is just staying there the whole time. [audience laughter] He was so kind. He came over to me and he said something that I consider to be deeply philosophical. He came over to me and he said, "You know what, Beth? You don't actually want to hit the ball. You want to throw the ball with the end of the club." [audience laughter] I have applied that to many things in my life. [audience laughter]

 

Anyway, he said, "Come on, let's go in the studio and make a record." So, we walk in there, and there is [chuckles] just the band, you know, B Spears, Bobby, Willie's sister on piano. We're talking about legends here. Paul English on drums. I'm sitting there, four feet from Willie Nelson's guitar, Trigger. I can touch his guitar. I'm like, "Oh, my God, it's really happening." They play my demo, which sounded like a hit. [audience laughter] I'm sorry, it just did. [chuckles] And they were like, "This is a great song." And I'm going, "I know." [audience laughter] I must have been such a doofus, but I was so excited and I had that train beat, There's Nothing I Can Do About It Now, right? I'm like, “Okay, wait till this band gets a hold of this song.” 

 

So, Willie goes, "Count it off, Paul." Paul counts it off, one, two, three, four. And he plays it really differently. It wasn't bad, it was just completely different. It was like, instead of, [imitates percussion beats] it was like, [pa-pum, pa-pum, pa-pum, pa-pum] which is a shuffle in my world. I thought, whoa, oh, that can't be right. Nope, it doesn't go with my strum at all. And I'm thinking, any minute Willie's going to stop and they're going to start over, because it's wrong. And they didn't stop. He kept singing, and the band was playing their hearts out. They got to the end of it, and Willie said, "That was fantastic. Let's go to lunch." And I just went, “No. Oh, no.” And he looked at me and said, "Is everything okay?" 

 

And I went, "Yeah, yeah. That was great. That was fantastic. That was great. But you know, there's this one little thing. You might want to just listen to that demo one more time, because I wrote it all around, you know, On the Road Again, that whole train thing--that's your signature." I'm realizing, you are in the studio telling Willie Nelson how to make a record. This can't end well. He was looking at me with these deep-- He's got really amazing eyes. He's looking right through me, bemused. And he goes, "Let's ask Paul. Hey, Paul, did you hear that last one as a shuffle?" Paul's putting his coat on, he's going, "Yup, I think I did." Willie said, "That's what I thought. Let's go to lunch." [audience laughter]

 

So, I just had to smile and be professional and I was just sure that was not going to be a hit. I said, I should just be grateful, I've made it this far, I got to meet Willie Nelson. And for the next couple of months, we worked on the track. I played the guitar, tried to make my guitar playing work with the shuffle. I was just like, “Hmm, okay.” And then, it came out on the album and I thought, oh, boy. I didn't even tell anybody that I wrote this song, because I knew it was not going to-- And then, they put it out as the first single. And I thought, oh, this is going to be so terrible, it's going to be a flop and it's going to reflect on me.

 

Anyway, I couldn't believe it, it came out as a single. And the interesting thing that happened is that the higher it went up on the chart, the better it sounded. [audience laughter] Like when it got in the top 10, it was an amazing record. And I was like, "Yeah, I wrote that. That's right. I did." When it went to number one, I was going around saying, "Yeah, I wrote that," just like that. [audience laughter] Oh, yeah. But I was fascinated by how so many things within me changed, and adapted around that, and how my perception changed, and how I was so sure that wasn't a hit, and then it was and I was like, “Wow, what's with me?”

 

So, I've learned a lesson from that, which is that going forward in my life, anytime I felt 100% positive that I was absolutely sure that I knew something, I always just reserve a little wiggle room just on the periphery, a little space for the part that I might not know, you know, that part. And that's made my life a lot better. So, I have Willie to thank for that. I'll never, ever forget, my favorite memory of this song was the first time I heard it on the radio. I was driving my car-- And of course, I reached over and cranked the volume all the way up, which is why I didn't see the stop sign. [audience chuckle] I got pulled over, of course. 

 

The cop was very insistent that I turn the radio down, and I kept telling him, "There's no way that's-- I've got one more song. One more, like, two minutes on this song. It's like, that's my song and that's me singing with Willie. I'll sing it with you. I'll show you. That's me, and that's my guitar playing." He's just going, "Uh-huh. You know what? I've heard a lot of them, and that's the best one I ever heard." [audience chuckle] And he wrote me a ticket anyway for $8.46. And I thought, fine. And it turned out fine, because I got to pay for it with my royalties. Thank you.