This is from what will become "Exile In America," my little presentation at this years Midwest Pop Culture Confrence. Enjoy...and no crap about the spelling, I was absent from school that day.

Why are we so alone? Why is America full of such lonely hearts, broken dream, men alone, women forgotten; what makes us a country full of such determined, hard-working, yet very anti-social people?

There is a saying that a man should live in quiet desperation, and while I think this might actually be true, occasionally, man is not so quiet and starts to answer those questions.

There is not a better place than our very own rock ‘n roll to hear these voices of singularity, these men and women that want so desperately to be noticed, to be heard, to be recognized by others. It has been asked “What came first, the music or the Misery,” and my answer is very simple, neither, America came first.

Our best and worst are those lone voices; those voices that uplift, or disquiet a moment of peace, the voices of decent or approval, the misunderstood voices, and most of all the voices of love and hate. That thrilling pursuit of the great singular voice is actually just us trying to find our own voice. A heart broken teenager might find themselves soothed by an old Beatle classic, looking for that understanding that their friends can’t seem to hand over. How about the soon-to-be-divorced mother of three that has everything she could want except for a husband that understands her, maybe she’s going to take solace in the independent musings of Liz Phair, or the haunting beauty of Joni Mitchell.

We want our pop stars to be solo stars, and most of all we want them to be just like us, pulling themselves up by the boot straps, making good, and sticking it to those that kick ‘em along the way.

Elvis is still in all of us, as much as we don’t want to admit it. Everything that he did really hit. Bruce is still us. Dylan is everything we want to say, but can’t get it out. Smokey is there, and so is Marvin, Smokey ever the optimist, Marvin the lone wolf. Otis was there when you needed him, but never as much as when he left this world. Yeah, there Lennon and Townshend and Jagger and Richards, but we will always be their unbridled cousins that only wish they could understand. They will always understand the claustrophobia of life; we will always understand the loneliness of it. We still live in wide open spaces,