I'll Only Live 'til I Die

I'd Lost My Family To My Years Of Failing As A Songwriter. All I Had Were Bills, Child Support, And Grief. And I Was About To Get Fired. It Looked Like I'd Trashed My Act. But There Was Something Liberating About It. By Not Having To Live Up To People's Expectations, I Was Somehow Free.

There Were Decades I Didn't Play Sober. I Thought, Who Would Want To? But At Some Point, I Decided That If It Was Important Enough To Me To Keep Doing It As Art, I Should Do It With All My Tools.

Johnny Cash Was The Champion Of The Voiceless, The Underdogs And The Downtrodden. He Was Also Something Of A Holy Terror, Like Abraham Lincoln With A Wild Side. He Represented The Best Of America.

As Soon As You Learn To Never Give Up, You Have To Learn The Power And Wisdom Of Unconditional Surrender, And That One Doesn't Cancel Out The Other; They Just Exist As Contradictions. The Wisdom Of It Comes As You Get Older.

Well I Work Up Sunday Morning, With No Way To Hold My Head That Didn't Hurt, And The Beer I Had For Breakfast Wasn't Bad, So I Had One More For Dessert. Then I Fumbled Through My Closet For My Clothes, And Found My Cleanest Dirty Shirt. An' I Shaved My Face And Combed My Hair, An' Stumbled Down The Stairs To Meet The Day.