This is a tribute to all of those resilient, persevering musicians who have endured the worst and dream of a brighter day.  A word to the wise and advice to the hopeless: When you're young and your entire life is in front of you, you can afford to write bad scripts with bad dialogue, bad plots with bad characters that no one will give a damn about. Rejection letters will fill your inbox and you'll pin them to your chest and wear them like badges of honor.  Failure is not an option? It's pretty much guaranteed my dear boy. When you're young… When you're young and your entire life is in front of you, you can afford to get cute with your poetry. Spell your name like e.e.cummings, drink like Dylan Thomas and Charles Bukowski. No one will read it anyway, so who cares. When you're young… When you're young and your entire life is in front of you, you can afford to be compared to someone else, be called the next so and so or a young so and so. You're not your own person, you can only strive to be and comparisons with this person or that person are only natural.  When you're young… When you're young and you're entire life is in front of you, you can afford to play and sing in those redneck bars, dives, and hellholes. You sleep on someone's couch; you drink someone's beer, but whatever you do, do your homework and learn how to play Freebird. When you're young… When you've matured and reached a certain age, attained a certain level of awareness and knowledge, attained a modicum of success, you can look back on it all and just like ol' Frank Sinatra's remark that it was a very good year. Maybe you wrote that great American novel, maybe you didn't but there's some 53 year old guy living in his mother's basement in Malvern, Arkansas who thinks you're cool. Then there's that old lady down the street with the bad teeth and the arthritic knees… she's a fan. And now when you play those bars along the honky tonk highway, you do it because you want to… not because you have to. And when the crowd cries out for Freebird, you take note; you take a swig from a beer bottle someone has bought you and you give 'em what they want…you sing Freebird.