Two Songs in One Day

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a banjo starting up like it has somewhere to be)

[Verse 1]
Nineteen seventy-three. One afternoon. One woman at one table.
She writes a song about a red-haired woman she is frightened of,
and then she writes a song about leaving a man she still loves,
and puts down the pen, and goes and makes the supper.

[Chorus]
Two songs in one day. Two songs in ONE day.
Either one of them would be the best thing most writers ever did,
and they came out of the same afternoon, in the same handwriting,
and she did not know, and how could she, and she went and made the supper.

[Verse 2]
One of them becomes the most covered song in the history of country music.
The other one becomes the biggest-selling single by a woman, ever,
in a version she did not sing, that she heard for the first time on a car radio
and had to pull over, because a stranger had taken her goodbye and made it enormous.

[Chorus]
Two songs in one day. And people asked her about it for fifty years,
and she never once made it sound like magic. She said she was a songwriter.
She said songwriters write songs. She said some days you get two.
She said it like a woman describing a good day at work, because that is what it was.

[Bridge]
And I think that is the thing about her that people keep missing.
Not the wigs, not the nails, not the jokes she made before you could —
the work. Three thousand songs. Maybe more, nobody has counted them all.
A working writer from a one-room cabin who never once stopped filing.

[Outro]
(the banjo winds down, unhurried)
Two songs in one day.
Then she made the supper.