Alan Chamberlain aka Axon explains his music and his journey to recovery. We explore country music, songwriting, the power of music in recovery, and the 12 Step process. Axon plays a few songs in the process.

Alan is a singer/songwriter in the “herban” cowboy tradition. His songwriting examines the Western mythos in defiance of the popular image created by an atavistic mass media. He says “I’ve learned from studying songwriters like Guy Clark, John Prine, Nancy Griffith and James McMurtry that if you’re going to write a multigenerational novel in three choruses and a bridge, you’re going to have to make a lot of shit up, and then leave a lot of shit out.”

I traveled around a lot in my early years. I set out to become the next Bob Dylan, and discovered that that job was already taken. But I traveled around the southwest, I traveled around the southeast – I come from mid-Missouri, and found that I could generally find employment as a singing cowboy in medium-sized college towns, as a new kid in town. And so I would get three to six months before I stopped being the new kid in town, before I’d then move on to another town, and that was kinda how I developed my persona and my style and all that.

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