This ain’t no cowboy song: writing through grief with music

This is a bit left-field for this blog. Usually, I’m writing about books and fiction. But creativity doesn’t always stay neatly in its lane. Sometimes it spills out in unexpected ways.

A few months ago, I wrote a song. Not just a throwaway lyric or a fragment of melody, but a fully formed country ballad. It’s called “This Ain’t No Cowboy Song”.

A line that wouldn’t leave me

It started with a phrase that got stuck in my head: “This ain’t no cowboy song.” For years, I couldn’t shake it. Eventually, I stopped resisting and wrote the song around it. What came out wasn’t fiction or invention. It was something deeply personal.

I’m British, but the story is true — just transposed to an American backdrop. My dad was a truck driver. We had a complicated relationship, and when he died, there were things left unsaid.

Working through the unsaid

Writing the song was a way of facing that silence. It became a form of grief work, like writing a novel chapter by chapter, only compressed into verses and choruses. Where books allow me to explore characters and themes in depth, this song cuts straight to the heart.

It’s not about cowboys or wide-open ranges. It’s about diesel, highways, and the solitude of a man who kept to himself. It’s also about regret — the things I never managed to say.

From page to music

I’ve always been a fan of country — Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams, Plains, Zach Bryan. That tradition of storytelling through song felt like the right medium for this particular story. It gave me a frame, a rhythm, a set of images that could carry something otherwise too raw to put into prose.

For complete transparency: I wrote the lyrics, but I used AI tools to create the arrangement and instrumentation. Think of it as collaborating with a machine to give shape and sound to something that started purely as words. The heart of it remains mine.

Creativity, whatever the form

Most of what I write will remain in books — novels, essays, and blog posts like this one. But this time the words wanted to be lyrics. Creativity is messy like that. It doesn’t respect categories.

The song is out now on Spotify, Apple Music, and all major platforms under the name Wheels Down.

It isn’t a cowboy song. But it is my story.