Please Don't Tell Me How The Story Ends

On Why Loving Kris Kristofferson Was Easier Than Anything I'll Ever Do Again

We all have our secret guiding angels who we look to to shine the way forwards, and for almost as long as I can remember, Kris Kristofferson has been at the top of my tree (twinkling away with some others). Now he’s heading up to play in the great gig in the sky, and I have no doubt Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and a ton of other people he loved and lost along the way are reaching out to welcome him. What a wonderful life he’s had and what a glorious golden treasure trove he has left behind for us. There’s nothing to be sad about. As Kris has already told us in song, life goes on and this old world will keep on turning.

His philosophies always felt so clear through the words he conjured, and he was never afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve and to be everything all at once; earthy, kind, tough, decent, realistic, dreamy, hungry, lonesome, loving, restless, satisfied, sexy, funny, dark, free, moving on. He celebrated speaking your mind and loving who you choose and living how you want. And wonder and shadows and burning bright and running wild and rivers and risks and raindrops and ghosts and friends and strangers and time and drunks and highways and children and solitude and believing in yourself, even if you bombed in Birmingham or had nothing left to do but kick a can down a street in your dirty clothes.

Janis Joplin’s ‘Me & Bobby McGee’ was my first introduction to Kris as a little girl. Oh god, that song filled me up with a kind of beautiful melancholy and a vision of a freedom filled future, and I would beg my dad to play it on piano so I could ‘practise singing’ (what a kind and patient dad I have). ‘Help Me Make It Through The Night’ was a staple on my dad’s piano bar repertoire and always one of my favourites. When I eventually realised both songs were written by the same guy, my interest was piqued. Eventually I stumbled upon an album. I was gone. The silver tongued devil had whispered into my ear and I’d follow him anywhere, forever.

‘I never feel separated from them, and I never will, from the songs I wrote. To me, they’re the only reason I’m on the planet—to write those songs and sing ’em.’ Kris Kristofferson

When I turned up at Butcher Shoppe studio in Nashville to record my album ‘Lovers Dreamers Fighters’, I could hardly believe it when I found Kris had recorded there and signed the wall. It’s probably the closest I’ve come to the feeling of touching the hem. I felt the spirit of Kris and Cash and all those beautiful old Nashville cats I love in the room with me and it gave me a strength and lightness I really needed.

Signatures on the studio door at Butcher Shoppe Studio, Nashville

Kris has a rare skill of telling stories in his songs that is so vivid you can see them unfold like little movies. He lets us hone right in on the deepest, most secret parts of the characters in his songs.

He also brought that to the screen; his cinematic presence seemed to both hold and reveal a depth that stirred up something in the viewer, even when he doesn’t say much up there. Although we tend to think of Kris as primarily a musical artist, he lent his palpable presence to over 100 film & TV projects, and was a sensitive, compelling actor. A few weeks ago I watched ‘A Star Is Born’ with Kris and Babs on an international flight - gosh they looked fantastic in it - and teared up when he said ‘Come on out and see how it feels in the lights’ and ugly cried when he died, despite the predictability of it all and the fact that I’d seen it before - and that I knew he’d said ‘Filming with Barbra Streisand is an experience which may have cured me of the movies’. Lucky for us, it didn’t. And there’s always more to the story - he later said they had a lot of mutual respect and affection and he’d love to work with her again.

My book ‘Lovers Dreamers Fighters’ kicked off with a little Kris inspired story:

I sometimes think about watching Kris Kristofferson, one of my very favourite songwriters, being interviewed on a TV talk show late at night some years ago. Kris was a Rhodes scholar and professional pilot who threw it all away to become a janitor in the Nashville studio where his idols were recording, so he could do his damnedest to slip them a song. His mother virtually disowned him for it. He had a dream that didn’t make much sense to anybody else. He was a servant of song. I had spent so many hours lost in the company of his gravelly voice, admiring his lyrical pearls of wisdom and erotic erudition, that seeing him in the flesh, talking to another human being on a small screen, felt too personal – invasive, almost, like seeing a king in his underwear. The interviewer, whose name I cannot recall, asked Kris how it felt to get older. My eyes rolled, I was young and thought it was a stupid question. Ask him about the songs, my heart clamoured! But Kris, ever the charmer, graciously explained that one of the funniest things about growing older was that he’d begun bursting into tears at the drop of a hat. They laughed, and conversation moved on, twisting and turning until sometime later, the interviewer asked Kris a question about his family that hit a nerve. As he answered, an eloquent tear rolled down his craggy face and the sob in his throat made it hard for him to talk. He laughed his way through it. ‘See?’ he said.

I only have to think of that moment to be catapulted into all the sadness and glory that is being human: all that has passed, the people and places we’ve lost and found, and all that’s yet to be. It’s hard to fathom how much ephemeral detritus we carry within us, especially in a world where a songwriter has a mere fifty songs to expound upon the mysteries of it all.

Humans are not unlike pearls. We form in the same way, the product of a call and response that naturally occurs inside a living thing. A defence mechanism slowly grows many thin layers to protect tender flesh from the agitations of grit, parasites and other alien elements that have worked their way inside. Pearls are survivors. Nacre, the iridescent crystalline substance that eventually makes a pearl, layer upon layer, is stronger than concrete. It’s a righting of a wrong. A healing of a wound. Lessons learned. Torn pink flesh becoming tanned leather hide. Less than one in ten thousand oysters will yield a pearl, and not a single one will be identical. Federico Fellini declared: ‘All art is autobiography; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.’ We are all the sum of our parts, our pasts. We are all marinated in the briny joys, salty sorrows and mystical complexities of our lives, and should we manage to blossom and deepen from that, we turn into true pearls. There is a further weird fact about pearls: if you don’t wear them, they lose their lustre, grow dull. We need our own stories and experiences to shine – wear them with pride.

Goodbye Kris, thank you for sharing the sweetness of your naked emotion, for the good times, for helping us through the night, for celebrating walking contradictions, for showing us that freedom is just another word for nothin' left to lose, for opening every door in my mind.

Save a spot for me in the dream band.