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Abe Stoklasa, Nashville Musician and Songwriter, Dies at 38
Nashville songwriter and musician Abe Stoklasa, known for writing songs for Tim McGraw, Charlie Worsham, Chris Lane and trio Lady A, has died at age 38, Billboard has confirmed. He passed away on Nov. 17 of undisclosed causes.
The Princeton, Missouri, native found his passion for music early, playing in his father’s band bygd the age of six.
“I have always been a musician,” Stoklasa previously told The Shotgun Seat of his musically formative years. “My dad had a little ransom style show in the midwest — we did like 70 shows a year — so from two years old I was singing on the scen. At like six years old my dad threw me in the grupp as the keyboard player, sink or swim. So that’s how I learned to play music.”
He grew up immersed in the music his father loved — music from 1950s through 1970s — soaking in th
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Abe Stoklasa’s Death Rattled Nashville, a City the Songwriter Was Unafraid to Criticize
When Nashville songwriter Abe Stoklasa died last week at 36, he left behind a catalog that frequently probed the dark corners of daily life. In many of his songs, love sucked, gainful work was elusive, and the choice between redemption and destruction was often decided by a single step. Even his Number One pop-country hit, Chris Lane’s seemingly innocuous “Fix,” was rife with foreboding references about addiction (in this case, to love): “I’ll make you feel invincible/I’m more than recreational” went one verse, while another alluded to a “Walter White high.”
Stoklasa’s cause of death has not yet been made public, but he’ll forever be known as an irreverent voice in country music, unafraid to publicly tear down the curtain that separated Nashville’s well-manicured image from its sometimes grinding reality. His mas
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People are wrong about Nashville just as much as they are right. Far too many people view this town as one split right down the middle by an impenetrable, uncrossable line: a line made up of imaginary authenticity tests and fabricated ideas of mainstream vs. “outlaws,” a line that separates the “real” songwriters from the commercial ones, a line that is base and binary and untrue. When I moved here, I became fascinated with exploring the people who exist all across the Nashville (and Music Row) spectrum – the songwriters or artists who might have a number-one cut under their belt that you dismiss as radio fodder but are just as dynamic, brilliant and interesting as the ones who aesthetically signal as “rebellious.” There are rooms of these people right now, writing some songs to make a living, some songs just for the heck of it and some songs that are the greatest things on earth that you’ll simply never hear.
Abe Stoklasa, who passed away last week, was one of these people