Leave them wanting more

I like to discover things – to stumble across something special or unique, to become privy to something that I might not have seen had I not turned my head a certain way. Something peeking out from behind a hedgerow, just waiting for someone to take their gaze from their own navel and glance around. It’s a guilty pleasure of mine to think that I’ve uncovered a lost secret, that I get to experience, to enjoy something that most other people won’t pay attention to.

It was 1991 when, as a senior in college, I was introduced to just such a gem in the music of Rich Mullins. I remember wondering at the time why I had never heard of him before then. He was one of the greatest singer/songwriters I’d ever heard and his music had a depth to it that I just couldn’t get enough of. I devoured every album I could get my hands on and, as the years passed, waited eagerly for the next one to come out.

Each CD demonstrated his musical skill, but it was the lyrics he wrote that really defined him. Honest words sung with heartfelt candor.

He died in 1997 in a car accident, at the age of 42 I believe. He was just starting another album. He’d taken his guitar and a tape recorder out to his barn where he kept an old piano and he played all of the songs that he was planning to cut later with his band. After he died his record company tried to clean up the sound on the tape and they released it. I listen to it every now and again and I wonder what it would have been like had he been given the time to finish it. And I wonder about all of the music that I will never hear.

See, he left me wanting more. Because he was talented – he knew his craft and dedicated himself to it.

As a writer, will I have that sort of dedication, that type of honesty and passion? Will I have something to say when I pick up pen and paper? When someone reads a book I’ve written, will it leave them wanting more?

I’ll let that question hang there. I’ve got a CD to listen to.