It's certainly an underappreciated art.

It's like bluegrass. Deciding to be a poet is a hardcore decision. It's saying, "I'm going to do something that's really hard, that I'll never master, and that will never make me a fucking dime." Bluegrass and poetry have a lot in common.

You think you'll make another bluegrass album?

Probably. I'm just not the type of person to make one when everyone else is making one. I guess I don't look quite as crazy as when I made [1999's] "The Mountain" [with the Del McCoury Band].

How do you decide which format any story you have will be written in?

It's really taxing sometimes, but you can do it. I probably learned from Tony Fitzpatrick and Terry Allen more than anyone else that it's really important to do stuff outside of your core craft. I think it keeps you fresh in your core craft.

Terry is a songwriter who makes these really wacko records that are always on small labels. He wrote "New Delhi Freight Train" [for Little Feat] years ago and his day job is as a sculptor. He works on a fairly large scale with metal and he also does these wired-for-sound kinetic sculptures. He's the reason that Joe Ely, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore are who they are because he was their teacher.

I had just finished "Doghouse Roses" and I was working on the play and I actually had started on the novel and we were doing land-mine dates on the West Coast and I hadn't seen Terry in a long time. He was there and I told him about everything I was doing and he said. "Cool. Man, don't you do any visual art?"

And I don't. I don't have any aptitude for it at all, which is odd because I'm the only one in my family who doesn't. My father paints beautifully and my brother did when he was younger. The most I have is bonsai, which is a visual art that God helps with.

I love Terry's attitude, though. I really kept my head down in songwriting and songwriting only until this sort of second lease on life that I got. Originally, writing prose was an exercise because I'm scared of not writing because I didn't write for four years. It turns out that all I have to do is not spend my whole day running around trying to find dope and I write just fine.

Writers fear blank paper more than anything else. I've been really blessed that I've had something to say and that people have been pretty supportive of me when I step outside of music.

How'd you get into the bonsai?

Probably through haiku. Part of it was this dream that I had before I fell in love again and moved another girl into my house who started putting stuff everywhere and decorating everything. I had this dream of this really uncluttered Japanese environment in my house. That's all gone to hell. Girls, they decorate.

My girlfriend says bonsai is the only time I shut up, but she's never been fishing with me. I do shut up when I'm fishing, too. You get up in the morning and that's generally when I'm messing with the trees. And sometimes the thing to do is nothing.

I've got maybe too many trees. I just lost two because I was in Europe and my son managed to kill two and Sara has a black thumb, too, so every once in a while when I'm on the road I'll lose one. I probably have nine trees now. I've had 16 or 17.

It makes you look at trees differently. When I see a full-size tree now, I look at it differently. I'm looking at why the trunk does what it does and speculating on what makes it do that. Bonsai is an illusion. You're seeing this miniaturized version and sometimes it's not what it seems. Sometimes it'll look great, like a deciduous tree will look great in the summer and springtime but when the leaves fall you can see that the limbs have been amputated and it's an illusion. It's kind of a cool thing.

Why did rehab work in '94?

I was ready. I was sick of it. I knew about the program and I just didn't know how to stop. My grandmother and grandfather on my mother's side were both in the program. You can't say A.A. or N.A., traditionally. I can say 12-step program and it's important that I say that because what happened to me was so public.

I still do exactly what I did almost eight years ago. I go to meetings. I call my sponsor. When I'm home, I go five or six times a week. I try to go every day. An hour a day, the program is my spiritual system. It's the only one I have still. It's absolutely the centerpiece of my life.

That's interesting. From your work with haiku and bonsai, it sounds like you have an Eastern sensibility trickling in.

I'd be a really bad Buddhist. I really hate to kill things now but I don't mind that other people kill them so I can eat them. I think it would be really hard on me to get that introspective. My spirituality boils down to that there is a God, and it ain't me. That's what's important for me to remember.

Our attempts to be God are where we fuck up. When we start trying to control shit or control the illusion that we control things, it's bad. The vast majority of times I still want to control everything and I wear myself out and then I have these moments where I'm able to literally let it go and those are the best times.

It happens automatically for me in a ballpark. It sounds weird but ballparks are the most tranquil structures human beings have ever built. For me, more than any church, more than anything else.

I'm a huge Yankees fan. I was 6 years old in 1961 and that's what you got on TV in Texas was the Yankees. But I'll go to any ballpark, it doesn't matter. We have a triple-A team in Nashville and I go a lot. I can walk in and it happens almost immediately. As soon as I get to the top of the steps and see the green, I start feeling better. The shape of the fields, the colors, everything about 'em, I love 'em.

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