Playdough Boy

Song story & origins

Introduction

Play-Doh Boy appears on Nebraska Catfish (2012). I wrote it out of reflective work I do with educators—multi-day retreats where we journal, sift early school memories, and notice how those experiences still shape our classrooms. In that setting (around 2011) I followed my own prompts and a metaphor clicked: those middle-school years—10, 11, 12, 13, 14—had often felt like being shoved through a Play-Doh Fun Factory. You take malleable, living material and force it through a die so it comes out the “right” shape. That image gave me the song’s frame.

Not long before the album I’d also built a course and site called Teaching From Within, and I wrote a blog piece, “Unintended Lessons,” whose spirit sits inside this song. It begins with Thoreau—What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us—and then names what school had quietly taught me by sixth grade: that boring, pointless work can be treated as good for you simply because it’s hard; that prizes and punishments keep you moving; that the whole school can be structured so it’s hard not to comply; that there are occasional “fun” mini-courses between quarters that don’t really connect to learning; that whatever you care about you should keep to yourself because it may be used against you; that you should live for snow days and breaks and the spaces between the “real” stuff; and that even when something in class sparks real interest, you’d better hide it—don’t do your best, or they’ll expect it every time. By the time I hit middle school, the things I loved—drawing, writing, recording, climbing trees, watching ants, sitting in the Platte River feeling the sand wash out from under me—no longer felt like “learning.” That tension is the heart of Play-Doh Boy.

Where the song came from

The Fun Factory metaphor came straight from childhood—the plastic press and the plates with stars, spaghetti, snakes, flowers. As an adult looking back, I felt the violence of that image: taking a living, changing kid and forcing them through a shape someone else chose. That first verse’s line—he lost the top of his head, he lost the tips of his fingers—names what gets sacrificed: thought and touch, imagination and making. (In the back of my mind I could see SNL’s Mr. Bill, another pliable figure who keeps getting mangled.)

The middle verses are simple autobiography the school never asked about: the boy who loved to draw, who lay in summer grass, who watched ants run their small cities, who put songs into a cassette recorder, who sat in the Platte feeling the river work beneath him. In competitive school settings, you learn to hide those loves. The refrain’s numbers—10, 11, 12, 13, 14—pin it to the middle-school age when that hiding often begins.

The bridge returns to the factory—everybody likes stars—and the pressure to value one kind of star (gold sticker, grade, ranking). The last lines insist there are all kinds of stars, and the boy could have been anything if someone had asked the right questions.

What the song is saying

It’s a classroom mirror held up to an outside-in model of schooling: compliance first, identity second. The song argues for the reverse: honor the human first. Ask, What do you love? What do you notice? How do you like to spend your time? Sometimes learning opens simply because someone asks. The repeated ages and the factory chorus let the sadness in—push the plunger down—but the closing lines widen back to possibility.

Music and arrangement

I built an ethereal, echoing intro by pulling a later lyric (“He had a cassette recorder…”) up front and letting it float over acoustic instruments—piano, guitar, mandolin—with layered harmonies that verge on a drone. It isn’t standard pop stacking; I wanted something haunting, because the subject is dehumanizing even if the metaphor looks like a toy. Live, I often play it solo with guitar, straighter and simpler—the lyric can carry the weight on its own.

Why it stays with me

Because it keeps sharpening my work with teachers. If school taught us to hide our loves, then as adults we can unlearn that and build classrooms that invite them out. We can stop forcing kids through the one die labeled “star” and start recognizing that there are all kinds of stars—and all kinds of kids—worth honoring.

Source: New Music Memoir (1).docx

From the Being Human journal

Playdough Boy explores some of the more challenging elements of my own experiences in school—especially middle school. Schooling is often a time when uniqueness feels devalued and conformity, elevated. Becoming and growing though, are linked deeply with discovering and valuing what is fundamentally ME.

Source: Being Human: The Songs — Album & Journal (2020) · p. 3

Being Human · The Songs

Reflection & journaling

Theme: Valuing My Uniqueness

Choose a question or word or line(s) from the lyrics to guide your meditation or journaling as you listen.

1. What are my unique qualities?
2. Am I aware of them?
3. What experiences have helped me to become aware of the things that are special about me?
4. Are their people who have encouraged me to value myself?
5. How did they do that?
6. Do I frame Learning and Growth as me becoming myself more fully… or as me becoming someone else?
7. What are the implications?

Source: Being Human: The Songs — Album & Journal (2020) · p. 3