Amy Mason Doan grew up in Danville, California and now lives in Portland, Oregon. She has an M.A. in Journalism from Stanford University and a B.A. in English from U.C. Berkeley.
Amy has written for The Oregonian, San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, Forbes, and other publications.
Amy Mason Doan's website
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It started with Wilco's song "California Stars."
San Francisco, 1998. I was twenty-five, and the plaintive tune had become my "earworm"—an ugly word for beautiful music. I played it on my red iPod Shuffle in the dingy studio apartment I shared with another girl and her boyfriend, and when I jogged along the foggy Marina. I listened to it when standing on packed buses to and from my dispiriting job as an advertising analyst, and when I couldn't sleep, which was often. I was lonely after a breakup, and the lyrics, about longing to rest one's "heavy head" on a bed of stars, became my lullaby.
A month after I first heard the song, I learned the story behind it from a radio show, and that became as much of an obsession as the song itself. The lyrics were part of a treasure trove of unrecorded Woody Guthrie lines that his daughter, Nora, had brought to Billy Bragg and Wilco so they could set them to music—which became the album Mermaid Avenue.
The gutsy intimacy of this project fascinated me. How brave it was to take a dead genius's words and meld them with your own music. How did Nora Guthrie feel about Bragg and Wilco's interpretations? What secrets of her father's might the lyrics hold? These questions became the seeds of ...
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