When I was about fifteen, two people drifted briefly into the orbit of our church group. We called them “the two gypsies.” I don't remember exactly where they came from or where they went afterward. They were essentially homeless musicians, moving through the world and, for a little while, looking for someplace to belong.
Years later, I would call them Lucas and Rosie.
They weren't around very long, but Rosie did one small thing that altered the course of my life. I wanted to learn to play guitar, and she sat down and wrote out the four or five basic chords I needed to get started. Nothing sophisticated. Just the handful of shapes from which an astonishing number of songs can be built.
I doubt she thought much about it afterward.
I did.
Those chords became songs. And years later, when I was beginning to seriously write songs of my own, those two wandering musicians came back to me. I borrowed pieces of them—their circumstances, their restlessness, the impression they'd left on a teenager—and transformed them into the characters Lucas and Rosie in a song called “Mad Dog Holler.”
The original “Mad Dog Holler” was a very simple song: two or three verses and a chorus. The bones of the story were there, but that was about it. Like a lot of songs I wrote in those years, it went into the notebooks and stayed there.
Nearly forty years later, while building Texarkana, I came back to it.
This time I began fleshing out the world around those original verses—following the characters further, extending the story and allowing the song to become something larger without losing the little song at its center. The version of “Mad Dog Holler” on Texarkana is the song as I understand it now: an old song expanded decades later by the person who had lived all those intervening years.
And then another coincidence appeared.
Texarkana also contains the new song “Texas Chili Parlor,” which mentions Mad Dog Margaritas—a deliberate nod to Guy Clark's “Dublin Blues” and its famous reference to Austin's Chili Parlor Bar.
Suddenly Texarkana contained two Mad Dogs.
It looks intentional.
It wasn't.
I wrote the original “Mad Dog Holler” years before “Dublin Blues” existed and before I had ever set foot inside the Texas Chili Parlor. The older Mad Dog came from two wandering musicians who briefly appeared at a church when I was a kid. The newer one arrived decades later through Guy Clark, Austin, the Chili Parlor and another song.
Somewhere between them is Rosie, writing a few guitar chords on a piece of paper.
That's one of the peculiar things about Texarkana, and maybe about songs in general. Meaning doesn't always arrive when you write them. Sometimes a simple song with a few verses and a chorus waits around for nearly forty years until another song, another place, another memory—or an older version of yourself—wanders up beside it.
Then suddenly the old thing isn't quite the same thing anymore.
Or maybe it is.
Maybe we just hadn't lived long enough to hear the whole song yet.
J.T. Kattner August 2026