To John, a song’s “receiver” is very important as a kind of silent co-writer. He doesn’t consider a song complete until the listener makes it part of their own imagination, their own life. That process can take one of his creations far from where his mind-set was when he first created it. When he wrote the song “I Saw A Stranger in Your Hair” (not on this album) he was imagining someone missing their lover and seeing that person in certain attributes of strangers in the street: “I saw a stranger with your hair/I saw another with your eyes/I heard an angel with your voice/By the way how is my heart/By the way how is my heart?"

A woman in Salt Lake City came up to John and said she liked that song because it reminded her of her son. “That’s one of the first times I started to realize all these songs can be more than I thought they were and made me more able to sing the songs over and over again ’cause it’s kind of a collective thing.”

“Holed Up in Mason City, Iowa” on Bright Side of Down is a favorite of John’s wife. “This was the first song she felt was set here in the upper Midwest. I’m originally from New Jersey, and she thought that it had a more Midwestern sense of place.” The song is about being holed up during a snowstorm in the town where Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper took off in a private plane that crashed and killed them on Feb. 3, 1959. John was only months old when that first tragedy of the rock and roll era happened, but it was the day after this writer’s 15th birthday, and it brought home to me how temporal our relationships can be, whether they be with idols or people close to us. To me as a receiver the image of John shivering at the Big Bopper Diner and the line “In a booth I saw Buddy Holly’s ghost writing to the girl he loved the most” brings up very painful personal memories.

One of the guys John worked with on his album Out of The Valley had been a friend of Buddy Holly’s. “He had a guitar that belonged to Buddy Holly, and I got to play it on a few songs when I made the record. I think it’s one of those things that I’ve come to realize that I think of these people as legends, but to the people that knew them, there’s a very different relationship. John writes some songs through a process he calls intentional neglect. “If I come back a month (after writing the song) and the melody comes back, and the music and the feel come back, then I realize, ‘OK, this might be a real song capable of reaching others.’”

But when the receiver gets involved, “intentional neglect” is forgotten, and the song takes on new meaning. A man from North Carolina who was dying of liver cancer told John that his music really connected with him. “That’s my hope that people can find some use from the song as more than just entertainment.”

Folk musician John Gorka hopes that people can find use from his songs as more than just entertainment. (photo: Ann Marsden)