The American Dream: The Lyrics of Dan Sullivan

I started writing songs at the age of 14. More than a half century later, these are the results. Some of these songs came to me out of the clear blue sky, and I wrote them down. Others I had to dig out of the ground with pickax and shovel. They’re not the songs you’ll ever hear on commercial radio or on popular streaming sites on the Internet. They’ve got nothing to do with the music that dominates popular culture today. They’re from places and times past, the kind of songs you might find on sheet music stacked in boxes hidden away in the back rooms of museums, or on shelves in curio shops, or perhaps in a box of old 78 rpm records hidden away in a bedroom closet. They’re songs full of stories and situations that I picked up on the trail walked by earlier songwriters - John Prine, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Joe Shaver, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and others - giants whose footprints I used as my guideposts. I’ll leave it to readers to decide what, if anything, these songs are worth. But I found purpose in writing them down. And that’s been good enough for me.