Tell Me You’re Not Leaving
Photo by Joe Worthem
It’s been a few years since Volume Five cut the poignant “Tell Me You’re Not Leaving” for Milestones, the band’s seventh record for label Mountain Fever. Far from a traditional bluegrass barn burner—something this band can get around—the slower, reflective song reached #2 on Bluegrass Today charts. Lead singer Glen Harrell still hears strong fan reactions to the song. “When we play it live, it goes over well,” said Harrell. “Folks tell us that it’s one they listen to repeatedly. People relate to it, I think.”
There’s plenty of emotion conveyed in the song—regret, helplessness, and deep sorrow over a love that is slipping away. “Tell Me You’re Not Leaving” was co-written by bluegrass songwriters Craig Market and Tim Stafford. Stafford (Blue Highway) is a respected artist and prolific songwriter. He’s had more than 250 of his songs recorded, is a co-writer of the 2008 IBMA “Song of the Year” (“Through the Window of a Train,” with Steve Gulley), and is a repeat winner of the IBMA “Songwriter of the Year” award (2014, 2017). An artist in his own right, Market has been writing songs for 30 years that, numbering in the hundreds, have been recorded by artists like Dan Tyminski, Ronnie Bowman, Alecia Nugent, Lonesome River Band, and others.
A Typical Co-write
“Tell Me You’re Not Leaving” resulted from a writing session in August 2016. “We meet in Nashville, talk a while about stuff going on, and finish a song within a couple hours,” described Stafford of a typical co-write for the two. “Melody usually follows lyrics, and both of us have come up with lyrics and melody. As I recall, Craig had the idea that turned into this song. Craig is one of the most talented guys I know and a great singer. It’s a joy to write with him.”
The admiration goes both ways, assured Market, “Musicians can be tiresome due to a tendency to be one-dimensional…the price for singularity of focus. This isn’t a guy with that affliction. He’s curious, funny, gifted—a genuinely interesting person—and he’s never lost touch with his inner east Tennessee hillbilly. That’s fertile soil for someone like me to till.”
Getting to the Hook
While it’s often routine to start from a title, this song fell out differently. “I had the first line, Lately, you don’t talk at all,” Market recalled, “Finding rhymes gelled into a coherent thought, and then, as writing generally does, it found something in life to connect to and developed from there. I remember thinking about how silence is this innocuous thing … but before you know it, it becomes irretrievable.”
From such thoughts came more lines followed by the humble, effective hook/title, Tell me you’re not leaving. It’s a line pulled from a common enough emotion, yet it resonates so deeply with fans. “That’s the craft,” said Market. “You want to reach the most universal group of people at the most visceral level without having to think about it.”
Of using the title at the end of the verses and chorus, Stafford noted, “The idea came less intentionally, more intuitively. The length of the lines varies enough to make the emotional payoff strong at the end of the chorus. The title is the emotional core … in the verses, it ends the thought. This leads to the chorus, where the narrator is speaking in disbelief, casting it in a sort of last-ditch, desperate way that brings the song home.”
“Tell Me…” contains a section before the last chorus that writers know as “the bridge.” It’s a piece that brings in something new—an emotion, explanation or revelation—often with a differing melody. “I think of a bridge as a departure from the verse and chorus. In this case, it’s kind of a stepping away,” Market explained. “The singer’s embroiled in this emotion that something is slipping away from him and there’s nothing he can do about it. He’s taking a lot of his own blame, it’s too late to really retrieve it, and it’s frustrating. But then in the bridge, he takes a step back and wonders, ‘maybe I’m looking at this all wrong … maybe I’m wringing my hands over something that’s already over.’”
A Fitting Melody
As with many of Market’s compositions, the song is a pleasing example of prosody, where the melody fits the lyric well. “Craig is one of the best melody writers, and a lot of times, I’ll defer to him,” said Stafford, who is no slouch at melodies himself. “In this case, the melody evolved while we were there. The goal is to make the melody match the lyric, and I think it does here.”
Of his knack for melody, Market said it isn’t intentional, “Sometimes, people read too much in … they wonder, ‘were you trying to say this or that from the start?’ First of all, you were probably trying to find something that rhymes and fits the meter and that kind of thing—all while keeping the idea together. In doing so, you get the ‘magic sauce’ sometimes. You end up like, ‘wow, look what happened there.’”
Finding a Home
When Market and Stafford joined forces to work on this song, they weren’t aiming for a particular genre—just a great song. When they finished, however, “Tell Me You’re Not Leaving” quickly found a home in Bluegrass band Volume Five. “I felt the song fit Glen’s voice,” said Stafford, who sent it to Glen.
The band quickly decided to record the song. “I liked the storyline—I mean, you can’t beat the emotion in the bridge—but the melody sold me on it as much as anything,” said Harrell. “I’m a huge Tim Stafford/Craig Market fan, and the instant I heard it, it reminded me of a James Taylor-type tune, the melody was so different.”
A memorable melody and simple but weighty lyrics are just two of the reasons “Tell Me You’re Not Leaving” is still stirring listeners—a phenomenon these writers work hard to achieve. “You never know why something you write speaks to somebody,” sums Market. “Once it escapes, it will affect people, and you don’t know how it will. You have one chance to move people.”
