Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Joe Henry and Mike Read brought two distinct but complimentary
Speaker 2: legacies to their new collaborative album, Life and Times. Joe
Speaker 2: was a celebrated producer and songwriter known for his atmospheric,
Speaker 2: deeply literary approach to Americana. Over the decades, He's produced
Speaker 2: albums for artists like Solomon Burke, Bonnie Rait, and Elvis Costello,
Speaker 2: while cracked in his own work that blurs the line
Speaker 2: between folk, jazz, and rock. Mike Read, a former NFL
Speaker 2: defensive lineman turned Grammy winning country songwriter, has written hits
Speaker 2: like I Can't Make You Love Me and has long
Speaker 2: explored the tender spaces between strength and vulnerability. Their album
Speaker 2: Life and Times captures conversations between two seasoned storytellers, their
Speaker 2: voices and perspectives interweaving across songs that examined memory, mortality,
Speaker 2: and the passage of time with unflinching honesty. On today's episode,
Speaker 2: Bruce Helm talks to Joe Henry and Mike Read about
Speaker 2: how they developed a deep friendship over their shared love
Speaker 2: of poetry at a songwriter's retreat. They also discussed the
Speaker 2: artists and songs that first drew them to songwriting, and
Speaker 2: they reflect on their individual creative processes and how they
Speaker 2: found new ways to inspire each other's work. This is
Speaker 2: broken record, real musicians, real conversations. Here's Bruce Hedlam with
Speaker 2: Mike Reid and Joe Henry.
Speaker 3: I Show from the Grave. It's the show lumberd On.
Speaker 4: It's curtain and ladders climbing up with a dawn that
Speaker 4: breaks like a heart, and house like a yawn of
Speaker 4: the stretching and wild rolling sea, ever so fully.
Speaker 5: Cafe's with a ghost who sits down beside me with
Speaker 5: tea and with toast in a rattle and sleeper. Carn
Speaker 5: Trason the coast through the darkness between.
Speaker 6: You and me.
Speaker 7: Flag a Man down way.
Speaker 3: Comes back this way.
Speaker 7: I'll cut run it over, and there's hell to pay
Speaker 7: for all we've been giving.
Speaker 8: And did not give away. Flag down a man going back.
Speaker 3: Maybe time yet we.
Speaker 8: Can try.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 9: The barreling in couples and buffalo phones wave to the
Speaker 9: cheering to those who would call with a look out below.
Speaker 8: I'm good luck to you all. Just as they drive
Speaker 8: the nails.
Speaker 10: And hold back the years into keeping the lid close
Speaker 10: for the roll on its side. Well as she goes
Speaker 10: it's a drop in the bucket heard of her life,
Speaker 10: fanst we know he see is how real love begins.
Speaker 8: Flag a man down when he comes back this way,
Speaker 8: our plup on and.
Speaker 7: Over and their hell de pay all we've been giving
Speaker 7: and not give away.
Speaker 11: Flag down a man going bad, Maybe timing, and we
Speaker 11: can try.
Speaker 12: Well we have in our favor the time at our
Speaker 12: backs were chasing our tails, and I could train on
Speaker 12: the tracks, steaming and blowing.
Speaker 3: It's a most awful life.
Speaker 13: Of the too many words we have.
Speaker 3: I could rest here.
Speaker 8: On the rails for the night. I can go with
Speaker 8: me in.
Speaker 7: The face of such flight of the engine that cut
Speaker 7: all and on, not just.
Speaker 8: Carry us. Saw the way home.
Speaker 7: Fag a man down when he comes, stand in his way,
Speaker 7: I would fall and old. And there's held the pain
Speaker 7: for all we even giving and did not give away.
Speaker 7: Flight down a man go in by.
Speaker 14: Maybe time yet we can try, Maybe time yet holding,
Speaker 14: Maybe time yet over there, Maybe time.
Speaker 15: Yet, time yet we can try.
Speaker 1: It's beautiful.
Speaker 16: Thanks you.
Speaker 17: So we're welcoming to great songwriters, even legendary songwriters. Mike Reid,
Speaker 17: who a dozen number one country hits.
Speaker 18: You know I've been told Bruce it varies from twenty
Speaker 18: down to a dozen, and you never know what publication
Speaker 18: they're referring to, so I guess maybe that has a
Speaker 18: lot to do with it. I have feelings about Number
Speaker 18: one records too, that you know, they're not only a
Speaker 18: handful of them are really authentic hits. And when I
Speaker 18: say hit, I even sort of regard that slightly differently.
Speaker 18: To me, it's whatever song impacts people's lives, whatever they
Speaker 18: take into their lives, and sometimes commercial hit songs are
Speaker 18: a little more than distraction. That's fine, you know, if
Speaker 18: you can write something that speaks to someone's life, good
Speaker 18: for you.
Speaker 1: Just tell me you cash the checks?
Speaker 3: Ah I did.
Speaker 18: That's a very very fair thing for you to say,
Speaker 18: by the way, Yes, I had when it came to that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you know all the number ones.
Speaker 18: That one well, well, you know, the terrible thing for
Speaker 18: me to say is that that's sort of principal thinking
Speaker 18: is an affordable commodity.
Speaker 3: So you had to be careful not take yourself too seriously.
Speaker 17: I think maybe what you should say from now on,
Speaker 17: it's not the number ones, it's the zeros.
Speaker 16: Tell you if you want a shorter answer, just ask
Speaker 16: me how many number ones I've had.
Speaker 18: Yeah, but I would ask you how many impactful songs
Speaker 18: you've written, Absolutely, songs that have that are deeply woven
Speaker 18: within the fabric of people's lives.
Speaker 1: I mean, isn't han Jo isn't that sort of Well
Speaker 1: that is the hope.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is the hope.
Speaker 18: And I think even if you're you know, Bruce, if
Speaker 18: you're a commercial quote whatever that means songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee. Yeah,
Speaker 18: there's an element, I suppose where it's the business, there's
Speaker 18: an element you have to be careful about the cynicism
Speaker 18: of money. But I'd have no reason to think those
Speaker 18: kids writing songs now don't want to do the same
Speaker 18: thing that Joe Henry has done, which is impact people's
Speaker 18: lives with the words and his music.
Speaker 17: Well, you jumped in and introduced Joe for me.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Good.
Speaker 17: When I mentioned Joe to people, I always say a
Speaker 17: great producer of many many know Elvis Costello, Bonnie Ray,
Speaker 17: Alan Toussant, But as a songwriter I think was Roseanne
Speaker 17: Cash said you're the one who keeps raising the bar
Speaker 17: for the rest of us.
Speaker 16: So well, that's high praise coming from her.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and you've done it again.
Speaker 17: You guys got together to produce this album Life and Times.
Speaker 17: We just heard the first song, Sleeper Car. Can you
Speaker 17: tell me how this came together as.
Speaker 16: Far as how we came together to begin working at all.
Speaker 16: We found ourselves both part of the so called faculty
Speaker 16: at a songwriting camp in Nashville in August of twenty
Speaker 16: twenty two that my dear friend Rodney Crowell runs.
Speaker 17: I have to stop you there because that sounds like
Speaker 17: an insane amount of fun.
Speaker 16: Well, let me just say it's intense work because people
Speaker 16: come from far and wide and they pay no small
Speaker 16: sum of money to be there in hopes of learning
Speaker 16: something that I don't know that can be taught. So
Speaker 16: I have some high anxiety. In fact, you.
Speaker 17: Don't say a songwriting can be taught.
Speaker 16: I like what Rodney says. I don't know if it
Speaker 16: can be taught. I believe it can be encouraged. And
Speaker 16: I think people who have anything going on, and it
Speaker 16: doesn't have to be something that I respond to, Is
Speaker 16: it something that they are responding to. I think what
Speaker 16: we can teach is refinement and strategies around just personally speaking,
Speaker 16: just getting into motion, because I think that's the biggest
Speaker 16: obstacle for people is just beginning, and they're all kinds
Speaker 16: of things that I've learned to do for myself over years,
Speaker 16: just to trick myself into some kind of motion, because
Speaker 16: when that happens, invariably I encounter something that I can
Speaker 16: work with.
Speaker 1: What are those tricks?
Speaker 16: This is going to sound over the obvious, but if
Speaker 16: I'm sitting in a hotel room, for instance, or in
Speaker 16: a moving vehicle, as I was when I wrote a
Speaker 16: lyric just the other day, I just start somewhere describing
Speaker 16: something that I see, and somehow just a descriptive gesture
Speaker 16: will lead to you know, what's the response to that
Speaker 16: thing that I see? And who is that character responding?
Speaker 16: And next thing, you know, you're in the kind of
Speaker 16: in the middle of some kind of a story. It
Speaker 16: might not be a line your narrative, but something starts
Speaker 16: to emerge if you pay attention to it. And I
Speaker 16: just encourage people in that case to stay in the
Speaker 16: seance of it as long as possible before you're ever
Speaker 16: thinking about whether it has any use to you or not.
Speaker 16: You know, John Cage said, don't confuse the creative mind
Speaker 16: with the analytical mind. They both have a purpose, but
Speaker 16: they're not the same animal. I like to try to stay,
Speaker 16: you know, in that part of the river that's sweeping
Speaker 16: you away for as long as possible before I get
Speaker 16: up and climb out onto the bank and start looking
Speaker 16: down at it and evaluating it, because once that's happened,
Speaker 16: you're not being swept away, You're not being seduced any longer.
Speaker 16: How long can the seance be sustained? So you're just
Speaker 16: spooling off raw fabric, and then it's quite easy in
Speaker 16: some regards to come back later to that raw fabric
Speaker 16: and then you know, fashion a pair of slacks out
Speaker 16: of them that you can walk around in. But that
Speaker 16: first generation of raw fabric is the thing that stymies
Speaker 16: most people. You know, how do you just get that
Speaker 16: wheel turning to begin with? And then you can decide,
Speaker 16: based on what kind of spools around you, where you
Speaker 16: might go with it.
Speaker 17: You know, I would say, as someone who's been an
Speaker 17: editor his whole life, I think those animals are actually
Speaker 17: enemies in the wild. And I've seen this particularly in
Speaker 17: other editors, really brilliant editors I've worked with at The
Speaker 17: New York Times and elsewhere. They have to stop writing
Speaker 17: because the analytical part of it just overams for sure.
Speaker 16: I mean, if I find that voice, if I'm in
Speaker 16: the midst of writing anything in that first burst, if
Speaker 16: I find myself for a moment even wondering, you know,
Speaker 16: is this any good? Do I like it? Will my
Speaker 16: wife like it?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 16: Anybody who cares about what I do like it. I'm
Speaker 16: done for the day, or at least for that period
Speaker 16: of time, because I know I've taken myself completely out
Speaker 16: of the stream, and it's easy to get there. It's
Speaker 16: easy to stay in that analytical, judgmental part of it.
Speaker 16: You know, how long can we stay free of judgment?
Speaker 16: I mean that's translatable to so many aspects of our lives,
Speaker 16: as much I so frequently.
Speaker 3: Is I agree with Joe.
Speaker 18: I don't think it can be taught like in that
Speaker 18: when Joe and I were at the Rodney's camp. You know,
Speaker 18: it's sort of like instructing or teaching people about the
Speaker 18: fact about the experience of their own lives. Stanislavsky said,
Speaker 18: acting is behaving truthfully in imaginary circumstances. And it may
Speaker 18: be you don't have to have lived what you're writing,
Speaker 18: but you have to. I think you have to understand
Speaker 18: the emotional atmosphere of the thing, you know, and very
Speaker 18: often I find in those camps, Joe, do you that
Speaker 18: the people come and they think, you know, they're going
Speaker 18: to find some you know, some technical secret. Yeah, more
Speaker 18: complicated than just Hey, I'm sorry to tell you this,
Speaker 18: but writing and teaches writing. If you can't spend all day,
Speaker 18: I get that. But you can spend a chunk of
Speaker 18: every day addressing it. I don't care, you know, if
Speaker 18: it's fifteen twenty minutes. The more you get in the
Speaker 18: habit of sitting down. Mary Oliver writes a beautiful ideas
Speaker 18: about showing up for that part of you that desires
Speaker 18: to be given voice to I always tell young writers,
Speaker 18: you know, talent commitment. They're fine, that's fine, but they're
Speaker 18: not quite enough. You have to be compelled to show up.
Speaker 18: If you do that over the long haul, I think
Speaker 18: things begin to happen you might not have thought would.
Speaker 1: And you were very disciplined in your writing, weren't you.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 18: I get up every morning and often Joe and I
Speaker 18: will text. He's in Maine, I'm in Nashville. We text
Speaker 18: over the first wonderful cup of coffee, which is the
Speaker 18: great sublime moment for both of us.
Speaker 3: I think, and.
Speaker 18: Then I will yeah, I will see what's on my mind.
Speaker 18: But now lately I stay with him the piano because
Speaker 18: as an old person, my hands have a tendency to
Speaker 18: want to go to comfortable, familiar places. So when Joe,
Speaker 18: for example, when Joe sends me a lyric of words,
Speaker 18: I will often print them and walk take a walk
Speaker 18: around the yard with them, or into a wooded area
Speaker 18: there around the house, and into nature. Get them out
Speaker 18: into nature, get them and I will speak them out
Speaker 18: loud into nature, into the air to get the sound
Speaker 18: of them in the world. And then that helps me
Speaker 18: get a little closer to understanding what is the atmosphere
Speaker 18: these words are conveying, and then can I find what
Speaker 18: the musical sound might be.
Speaker 17: You know, when I talk to you, Joe, and this
Speaker 17: was years ago, you would talk about using open tunings,
Speaker 17: different tunings, anything to get your hands out of.
Speaker 16: That yeah zone, anything to disorient me a little bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Mike, you've played piano for a very long time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, since I was a kid.
Speaker 17: How do you you can't well, you can't retune a piano,
Speaker 17: but you really don't want to do that. Is there
Speaker 17: something you do with the piano to try and defamiliarize
Speaker 17: your your fingers with what you're doing.
Speaker 18: Can I show Joe this little thing, Bruce, This is
Speaker 18: what I do. And if someone's listening, they may because
Speaker 18: we tend to sit down in an instrument. We you know,
Speaker 18: we're gonna maybe look for some kind of progression, some groove, might.
Speaker 3: All those things you know how to do.
Speaker 18: So what I do is to get away from that
Speaker 18: is I imagine a room of four people, right, and
Speaker 18: no one is going to say anything until they absolutely
Speaker 18: have something undeniable to say. So we'll start with a note.
Speaker 18: And this note for me might be silence, might represent silence.
Speaker 18: And this may go on in my little over that
Speaker 18: first cup of coffee for minutes, you know, four or
Speaker 18: five minutes until my left hand because that note is
Speaker 18: going to tell me to go somewhere. The two decidedly
Speaker 18: different things. One resolves attention. This creates a little bit.
Speaker 18: So I start extremely small like that, very small, with
Speaker 18: very small elements. Maybe at that point then a melody.
Speaker 18: I have Joe's words in front of me. I may
Speaker 18: begin to hear the sound of what they might sound like,
Speaker 18: the voice driving them. And sometimes we'll write a verse
Speaker 18: not write a verse. I will discover a verse with
Speaker 18: just playing that one note or two notes. So that's
Speaker 18: what I do to get away from those. And then
Speaker 18: if you go to too, you know, you'll eventually find
Speaker 18: your way back to something. But then I will go
Speaker 18: and say, okay, this is I don't I'm not a
Speaker 18: mystic of any kind, you know, but I think Arthur Miller,
Speaker 18: the great playwright, referred to it as the hidden narrative.
Speaker 18: You know, there is something that wants to be, that
Speaker 18: wants to come through, and I do my best, and
Speaker 18: I usually fail. I do my best to stay out
Speaker 18: of the way of that and listen for it and
Speaker 18: try to hear it before I insist me into the proceedings.
Speaker 17: And you said there were four people in the room
Speaker 17: you started. We started with one, then you had the two,
Speaker 17: the two, and then the next.
Speaker 3: There's three.
Speaker 17: Okay, you're not adding harmony, then.
Speaker 3: Well you may. It may be there's four notes.
Speaker 18: There four people who have decided I must speak.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 18: Now at some point they're gonna they're gonna arrive at
Speaker 18: some hopefully some reasonably agreeable conclusion. And so that you
Speaker 18: might get that may arrive at that. I mean it's
Speaker 18: a little thing that I do, and it could be
Speaker 18: very possibly. I spend too much time alone in my
Speaker 18: little workroom, and I end up doing unnecessary things. I
Speaker 18: like small, small, small, small small. When I'm when I'm
Speaker 18: lost and confused, I think less less less less might
Speaker 18: be not more.
Speaker 16: You know, I've learned some of those tricks from you
Speaker 16: know that that John Cage used to to do with
Speaker 16: word play. Uh and and people like William Burrow's kind
Speaker 16: of picked up on it from Cage. I think, well,
Speaker 16: I'll just, you know, pick up you know, the nearest
Speaker 16: book to me. There's always something close by, and just
Speaker 16: open it at random and decide that at the top
Speaker 16: of the left hand page. You know, I have to
Speaker 16: incorporate a verb and a noun that I find one
Speaker 16: or the other, and just by insisting that I utilize it,
Speaker 16: it's going to suggest something, you know, And you can
Speaker 16: try as hard as you want. It's impossible to put
Speaker 16: two words together that mean nothing, because the mind is
Speaker 16: trained to find some kind of sense, some kind of
Speaker 16: gesture toward narrative in there. When you start looking for relationship,
Speaker 16: you invariably find relationship. There's no such thing as no relationship,
Speaker 16: you know, even if it's complete what we would call chaos,
Speaker 16: that is a relationship to something interesting.
Speaker 17: You describe it that way, because I would say, and
Speaker 17: this is going to sound like an insult, and I
Speaker 17: don't mean it to be an insult. Your lyrics make
Speaker 17: the listener work a little harder. I think you're going, yeah,
Speaker 17: I know, like that's a bad thing. I want to
Speaker 17: hit d it.
Speaker 16: I think it's perfectly fine that that people are invited
Speaker 16: to be active as listeners. Almost every single night I
Speaker 16: play a show, I make a point of saying to
Speaker 16: an audience at the end of the night, listening is
Speaker 16: not a passive activity, and I appreciate anybody who brings
Speaker 16: their attention and time to bear. So yes, I expect
Speaker 16: that people, if they're paying attention to what I'm doing,
Speaker 16: they might have to work harder than they do when
Speaker 16: they engage other things. I don't know, but I I've
Speaker 16: had this conversation with Brad Meldal, the great pianist, who said,
Speaker 16: you know, you can't read Shakespeare without really bringing your
Speaker 16: full intellect there. You can't read Blake, you can't listen
Speaker 16: to Beethoven, you can't listen to Coltrane without bringing your
Speaker 16: real attention there, and that's part of what activates the process.
Speaker 16: That's part of what makes music a vibrant connection between people.
Speaker 16: If I'm only broadcasting out, that just sounds like pure
Speaker 16: ego to me. The electrical current only is complete when
Speaker 16: it becomes a circular loop. If I'm not feeling something
Speaker 16: back from a listener, even if it feels abstract, even
Speaker 16: if I'm home alone, something activates me into believing that
Speaker 16: there's a vibrational element to what I've just written that
Speaker 16: does not just belong to me. I don't believe that
Speaker 16: I can alone have that experience. If it's buzzy to me,
Speaker 16: it's because I believe that there are other people who
Speaker 16: will catch that. If I push it.
Speaker 1: Forward, it's like lightning. It meets in the middle.
Speaker 16: Yeah, and I do think it's a mystical I sometimes
Speaker 16: am shy to talk about it in mystical terms, except
Speaker 16: that I just think that it is.
Speaker 2: We'll be back with more from Mike Read and Joe
Speaker 2: Henry after the break.
Speaker 17: So, as listeners, when you got together, what did you
Speaker 17: hear in each other's work that you thought would that
Speaker 17: this would be a fruitful partnership.
Speaker 16: I can answer that question Honestly, I have no idea
Speaker 16: when we met on that first day of this camp.
Speaker 16: We just, by happenstance found ourselves walking across the grass
Speaker 16: at Vanderbilt where this camp was hosted, and in line
Speaker 16: together it's the dining hall. Thus we sat at a
Speaker 16: table together, and we found ourselves really quickly. I didn't
Speaker 16: have one notion that Mike knew who I was in
Speaker 16: any sense, but we found ourselves really quickly talking about
Speaker 16: the poets that we love in common, and that connection
Speaker 16: was energizing to me to the point where in the
Speaker 16: subsequent days, every time there was a coffee break, I
Speaker 16: was looking for Mike. I was looking for this conversation
Speaker 16: to continue. Yet when we parted company, when everybody left
Speaker 16: the camp, we didn't communicate for a couple months. But
Speaker 16: one day, I've been visiting my dad in North Carolina,
Speaker 16: and I was stripping the bed before we left, and
Speaker 16: I heard a couple of sort of unspool in my mind,
Speaker 16: and for whatever reason, I stopped what I was doing
Speaker 16: and I texted Mike and reminded him who I was,
Speaker 16: and asked him what he'd like to try to write
Speaker 16: some together. I don't really know other than the fact
Speaker 16: that I understood that he comes from a different musical
Speaker 16: tradition than I do, and I wanted to get out
Speaker 16: of the same habits that he's talking about his hands
Speaker 16: having at a piano. You know, I know because I
Speaker 16: come out of a folk in country blues tradition. Melodically,
Speaker 16: even though I studied the Great American Songbook, you know,
Speaker 16: I'm a Duke Ellington freak. I've put myself into that
Speaker 16: music as deeply as I can. I don't have a
Speaker 16: lot of facility articulating music in that way, though I'm
Speaker 16: my imagination is fired by it. And I'm sure that
Speaker 16: I recognized in what Mike does and what his background
Speaker 16: truly is that has little to do with so called
Speaker 16: country music, that he understood a lot of nuance and
Speaker 16: a lot of the elements that create that kind of
Speaker 16: architecture that the Great American Songbook standards share. And I wanted.
Speaker 16: I wanted to get free in that way. I wanted
Speaker 16: to be able to move into that kind of nuanced
Speaker 16: melodic invitation. I wanted to know what it would do
Speaker 16: to me.
Speaker 1: Do you remember what the couple it was?
Speaker 16: Sure, it's the It's it opened, It's the beginning of
Speaker 16: the song Room, which is song three on the record.
Speaker 16: It's the first thing we wrote. I waked to a
Speaker 16: room with a story to tell. Its silence was iron,
Speaker 16: the strike of a bell. That's what I had. I
Speaker 16: knew that that wasn't just a flat wall. I heard
Speaker 16: that couple as a door that might be opened. That's
Speaker 16: a pretty specific phrase to just announce itself in your mind.
Speaker 17: I mean, the reason I ask is that I know
Speaker 17: my I reread some interviews you've given, and you talk
Speaker 17: a lot about rhyme and how.
Speaker 1: You react to it. How did you react to that one?
Speaker 18: To underscore Joe's story about us meeting at that songwriting camp,
Speaker 18: I did know his work, and when I was very
Speaker 18: I was very anxious about setting across the table from
Speaker 18: him because he did what I suspected in within myself
Speaker 18: but couldn't get to. And I was such an admirer
Speaker 18: of his that I thought I will have nothing to
Speaker 18: offer this guy. But then that dissipated the minute we
Speaker 18: began to talk about poets that we both loved. And
Speaker 18: your idea that Joe's words make people work, I don't
Speaker 18: really feel that way, Bruce. Joe's words immediately and starting
Speaker 18: with room, and from then on my sense here's the
Speaker 18: word that I used. They were summoning me towards something.
Speaker 18: They were summoning me into a place that I suspected.
Speaker 18: I knew it was alive, but maybe I couldn't get
Speaker 18: there on my own. And when I started working with
Speaker 18: these words and finding, you know, melodic snippets here and there,
Speaker 18: it's the very first thing I said to him. He asked,
Speaker 18: you want to write? And I said, well, I don't
Speaker 18: know what I'm doing. I'm very slow. But if you
Speaker 18: want to push off the dock into the fog, I'm
Speaker 18: your guy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 18: The minute I think, what did Elliott say? One only
Speaker 18: in the four quartets, one only gets the better of
Speaker 18: words for the thing one no longer has to say,
Speaker 18: or the way in which one is disposed to say it.
Speaker 18: I'm not putting down commercial music or pop songs that speak,
Speaker 18: you know, romantically to people's lives. That's wonderful. I think
Speaker 18: we're here one time love something. You know, I happen
Speaker 18: to love the things that summon me into a place
Speaker 18: that is, by the way, not.
Speaker 3: Outside of me.
Speaker 18: They're summoning me within their asking. One never knows when
Speaker 18: you're getting close to that hidden narrative, it happens and
Speaker 18: it's exciting. But when it doesn't happen, I have found
Speaker 18: there's not a lot you can do to fix it,
Speaker 18: other than maybe a good night's sleep, get away from it.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 18: I love, I absolutely adore the people in his songs
Speaker 18: because every living thing, you know, every living thing has
Speaker 18: a pressure exerted on it by simply existing. And who
Speaker 18: we are physically, what we look like, what we say,
Speaker 18: do we have tattoos? Do we have no tattoos? Is
Speaker 18: a response to that pressure. And Joe's people in his
Speaker 18: songs are often confused but looking for light, always looking
Speaker 18: for light. And so that's me, I think, confused and
Speaker 18: looking for light. I hadn't thought of that to this moment.
Speaker 18: That perfectly describes me even now, at this point in life.
Speaker 17: Well, and it describes a lot of the songs as
Speaker 17: well on this album.
Speaker 18: Well I think, so, I think, so, I hope. Look,
Speaker 18: I'm not convinced the music that I found for these
Speaker 18: songs is up to those words, and I won't be.
Speaker 18: I can make a peace with it, and I can
Speaker 18: accept what's there, and I hope that the song, the
Speaker 18: music does not get in the world way.
Speaker 3: They tend to be.
Speaker 18: Very protective of Joe's worth, and yeah, would I like
Speaker 18: to go out there, Sure, but then there's the composer
Speaker 18: obscuring the words, and I don't want to do that.
Speaker 18: I don't know if you've ever listened to Copeland Zenmilie
Speaker 18: Dickinson song cycle or Samuel Barber songs, particularly Sure in
Speaker 18: the Shining Night at Great James a g and Barber
Speaker 18: of being a great composer. But it's so in support
Speaker 18: of those beautiful, beautiful words.
Speaker 3: And you know, I'm old.
Speaker 18: Now and I'm confronting my limitations, and so anything that
Speaker 18: gives me a chance to maybe exceed them, or at
Speaker 18: least bang my head against them, I'm going to do that.
Speaker 17: It's interesting you mentioned how the music interacts with the words,
Speaker 17: because when I sort of re listen to the album
Speaker 17: as a whole, they are they're piano ballads, and I
Speaker 17: almost started to think of this album could have like
Speaker 17: an old nineteenth century Oh wonderful, you know, piano ballads
Speaker 17: cover and particularly some of the phrases you used to
Speaker 17: introduce the songs almost sound like a kind of Stephen Foster.
Speaker 1: Oh that's a.
Speaker 17: Thing to say, well, Bruce, but then the lyrics are
Speaker 17: not in June what.
Speaker 18: A nice That was never the intent. You know, that
Speaker 18: was not the intent. But I love you because look
Speaker 18: to Joe's point earlier, we must no matter if it's
Speaker 18: a little, you know, simple little three chord country song,
Speaker 18: if it's a great blues song, if it's a Joe
Speaker 18: Henry lyric, a Wallace Stevens Elizabeth Bishop poem, that kind
Speaker 18: of work is asking us to open up the bags
Speaker 18: of our lives on it. What does it fire within me?
Speaker 18: Joe's never sent me a lyric, Bruce that it didn't
Speaker 18: fire something in me. Now could I explain that to
Speaker 18: you at this moment? Probably not, Or I could and
Speaker 18: take up a lot of hot air, a lot of gas.
Speaker 18: We don't need that. But Joe never sent me words
Speaker 18: that didn't fire something in me. A relationship to with
Speaker 18: the character. Because I don't see Joe. You should speak
Speaker 18: to this. I don't see Joe. Necessarily, to Joe's point,
Speaker 18: you cannot put two words together without meeting something. So
Speaker 18: it comes out of Joe Henry. He is he is
Speaker 18: the vehicle through which it passes. So it's going to
Speaker 18: be But I don't necessarily, Joe, think your songs are
Speaker 18: all you. I mean, I'm thinking my episode.
Speaker 16: No, No, I could count on less than that single
Speaker 16: hand the times that I think I've written something that
Speaker 16: you know where I am in some way the character.
Speaker 18: Actually, and yet let me let me interrupt you, Joe,
Speaker 18: because I I have an obsession right now with the
Speaker 18: Joe Henry song and it's only going to get worse.
Speaker 18: I know this is a song on this album. No Oh,
Speaker 18: it's the short Man's Room album. Yeah, and that's the
Speaker 18: song Shortman's Room because I am so passionately in love
Speaker 18: with the character in that song. And what do I love, Joe,
Speaker 18: What do I love about that is that it came
Speaker 18: through Joe. So you know, it's not why you're not
Speaker 18: totally not on the fringes of that.
Speaker 7: Oh.
Speaker 16: I don't say that I'm not involved, you know, I'm
Speaker 16: just saying I might just be the ring bearer, but
Speaker 16: I'm not necessarily the bridegroom of the story. And look,
Speaker 16: I won't pretend that I think that, Oh, I'm just
Speaker 16: visited upon and I don't have any relationship. But I'm
Speaker 16: not conscious of that. And if I was conscious of
Speaker 16: writing about my own life. I think I would. I
Speaker 16: think I would pull back. Not because I'm afraid of
Speaker 16: revealing too much or you know, my privacy or whatever.
Speaker 16: I just feel like my personal experience is too finite
Speaker 16: a space, you know, from winch to you know, launch
Speaker 16: any real discovery.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 16: I've thought of that a lot that you know, in
Speaker 16: the seventies, when I was a young person obsessed with
Speaker 16: songs and trying to figure out how they came into being,
Speaker 16: and it was there was the singer songwriter of movement
Speaker 16: that seemed to suggest, the more honest you were to
Speaker 16: your real life, that's how you know, that's how good
Speaker 16: this song was, you know. And in that regard, I
Speaker 16: think honesty is completely overrated or what are you being
Speaker 16: honest to? My own personal life is such as finite
Speaker 16: space to explore, But I take the same lens and
Speaker 16: point it out. I'm still witnessing through the lens of
Speaker 16: my own life experience. I'm not the goal, isn't you know,
Speaker 16: not like Cage who was looking for ways to create
Speaker 16: music that hadn't no trace of his ego in it,
Speaker 16: just to see what that would sound like. I'm not
Speaker 16: pretending that that's my goal. I just don't want to
Speaker 16: be limited by my own imagination. I don't want to
Speaker 16: be limited by the own you know, just the small
Speaker 16: experience is that as certainly when I was a young writer,
Speaker 16: you know that i'd had I didn't think I'd lived
Speaker 16: enough life to write about. But my desire to reach
Speaker 16: out and create character, like Felinius to say, I just
Speaker 16: create a character and find out what he or she
Speaker 16: has to tell me. That's how I felt about songs,
Speaker 16: like I want to begin a song in whatever way
Speaker 16: I can, and then see what it does to me,
Speaker 16: See what is asking me to do in service of it,
Speaker 16: not in service of me? How can I be in
Speaker 16: service to it? And how can it tell a story
Speaker 16: that's bigger than I am?
Speaker 17: Are there any parts of you that you think launch
Speaker 17: some of these songs?
Speaker 16: Sure? I mean I was just telling this on stage
Speaker 16: the other night. There's a song called stray Bird, and
Speaker 16: you know, I frequently I don't know where the beginning
Speaker 16: of a song comes from. It just seems to be there,
Speaker 16: like somebody sees the ladybug on them. There it is
Speaker 16: you want to deal with it or not. In this case,
Speaker 16: the song Straybird, my wife Melanie and I were visiting
Speaker 16: my sister in law in the Hamptons on Long Island
Speaker 16: a couple of summers ago, and watching our young nieces
Speaker 16: in the pool at dusk, and I just happened to
Speaker 16: look up and notice that the side of her house
Speaker 16: was on fire. The chef had left the heating grill
Speaker 16: too close to the cedar shingled house. And I look up.
Speaker 16: The house is on fire, not a big fire, but
Speaker 16: was asking for attention. I grabbed somebody else's jacket, it
Speaker 16: didn't need to be mine, and put the fire out.
Speaker 16: Now I have this wonderful young niece, and I knew
Speaker 16: that she was writing poetry in school. I think she
Speaker 16: was probably about nine in that moment, so I challenged her.
Speaker 16: I said, hey, Stella, let's both write a poem about
Speaker 16: what happened tonight and read it to each other at
Speaker 16: breakfast in the morning. Now, Stella, just Stella didn't do
Speaker 16: the assignment, but I did, and it got me started.
Speaker 16: It wasn't the whole lyric, because then it went somewhere
Speaker 16: else where. I wanted to make reference to her in
Speaker 16: some kind of way, not her. I just wanted to
Speaker 16: use her name by way of connecting it to her
Speaker 16: but it does start. You know, the house caught fire
Speaker 16: just after dark on a cold night in July. That
Speaker 16: is precisely what happened, and that's what put that song
Speaker 16: in motion. My reaction to that moment and realizing that
Speaker 16: that wasn't the biggest drama happening in the story. That's
Speaker 16: just a place that came out of a real life experience.
Speaker 16: Not writing about myself. I'm writing something about my reaction
Speaker 16: to an actual moment.
Speaker 17: Okay, But then the song goes on and I quote,
Speaker 17: there's like a sixty minutes interview. Suddenly, yeah, I'm all
Speaker 17: here for the man I was just yesterday is scarcely
Speaker 17: here to stand his every sway now stripped away the
Speaker 17: bird it leaves my hand.
Speaker 16: No, I know where this is going, and I can't.
Speaker 16: I can't right now say that you're wrong because I
Speaker 16: hear what you hear. But you know, was that a
Speaker 16: conscious thought in my mind? Absolutely not. And had I
Speaker 16: have been aware of how potentially revealing that phrase is,
Speaker 16: hats off to you for coming up with it so quickly,
Speaker 16: I would have steered around that fucking thing with everything
Speaker 16: I had, probably, But when I saw it later, I
Speaker 16: was like, oh.
Speaker 17: Well, this is sixty minutes. It's like I'm showing you
Speaker 17: internal company documents.
Speaker 16: Yeah, and you're like, well, I'm not sure. I'm sure
Speaker 16: that's not my signature.
Speaker 17: You know that came through another part of the company.
Speaker 17: It's just such a beautiful I mean, sway does a
Speaker 17: lot of work there.
Speaker 16: Yeah.
Speaker 17: Sway also means power influence. Yeah, and it also means
Speaker 17: your balance.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 17: And a bird flying away, which would seem almost weightless,
Speaker 17: how it would affect that.
Speaker 19: Yeah.
Speaker 16: And I love words that both are specific enough to
Speaker 16: be committed, but that have more than one way to
Speaker 16: be heard. So you're not nailing anything down to the floor.
Speaker 16: You're not limiting anybody's response to it. As you know,
Speaker 16: there's only one way in and out of this house.
Speaker 16: I try to leave as many doors in the window
Speaker 16: as open as possible so that people can enter them,
Speaker 16: however they might. I might not know what's the most
Speaker 16: significant part of any song. I know where I think
Speaker 16: the drama is. I think when I've written something, but
Speaker 16: I frequently find out that people have really other responses
Speaker 16: than I do to it as a finished piece. And
Speaker 16: I would never suggest that my interpretation once it's done
Speaker 16: has any more relevance than somebody else's.
Speaker 17: Okay, well we're going to go from the Hampton's to
Speaker 17: Pennsylvania where you grew up. Tell me when music first
Speaker 17: entered your life.
Speaker 3: Oh, wonderful, wonderful question.
Speaker 18: My grandmother, my father's other We grew up next to her,
Speaker 18: right next to the house, and her mother, my great grandmother,
Speaker 18: lived on the farm, on a farm, oh maybe seven
Speaker 18: six miles away, and uh, there was an old on
Speaker 18: that my grandmother's son porch.
Speaker 3: There was an old upright. You know.
Speaker 18: A lot of the keys didn't work, but I remember, Bruce,
Speaker 18: my first memory of life is probably about three, when
Speaker 18: I was three, sitting on that bench banging on the keys.
Speaker 18: And then my great grandmother, when she got very old
Speaker 18: and need to be cared for, they moved her down
Speaker 18: from the farm and I would play for her in
Speaker 18: that sun porch. And what I would play for her
Speaker 18: was really I think. You hear a lot of things,
Speaker 18: you know. The Cage's point, you know, about four minutes
Speaker 18: and thirty three seconds is his idea is that there
Speaker 18: is no such thing as silence. You know, you hear
Speaker 18: a lot of things, but intentional listening, you know. So
Speaker 18: to play for my great grandmother who would sit there
Speaker 18: in the summer heat, wrapped in blankets, you know, and
Speaker 18: due to circulation hymns and I think the first music
Speaker 18: in my life that I became aware of intentionally listening to,
Speaker 18: or the hymns in church. I loved, not necessarily praise hymns.
Speaker 18: I loved those songs of surrender where people say, you know,
Speaker 18: I'm lost, I'm broken.
Speaker 3: Where do I go from here?
Speaker 18: And I think in many ways that sort of those
Speaker 18: that music informs even to this day.
Speaker 1: And what was the what was the church?
Speaker 3: Well it wasn't It was just a yeah.
Speaker 18: I would love to be able to sit here and
Speaker 18: tell you it was Baptist and we were rolling in
Speaker 18: the aisles, But no, it was an old Methodist, just
Speaker 18: the Methodist denomination. And whatever the hymns were. I always
Speaker 18: I always tell young writers. They say, well, you know,
Speaker 18: in this climate, why write, you know? And I well,
Speaker 18: you got to get it into the world, get it
Speaker 18: into the world. John Newton got off a slave ship.
Speaker 18: I thought he was a captain of it. I don't
Speaker 18: think he was, but he was on a slave ship
Speaker 18: and he had epiphany about what was going on, and
Speaker 18: he went home and he prepared a sermon for the
Speaker 18: following Sunday, and during that sermon that were preparing that sermon,
Speaker 18: he wrote the words amazing grace, how sweet the sound
Speaker 18: that saved a wretch like me? And I always tell
Speaker 18: young writers, you cannot tell me. John Newton thought, well,
Speaker 18: in two hundred and fifty years, the whole world to.
Speaker 3: Know those words. No, you got to get it into
Speaker 3: the world. You know, get it. But I heard that.
Speaker 18: I just I love those that kind of music. And
Speaker 18: then when I was thirteen years old, my father was
Speaker 18: worked in the I think it was a miner when
Speaker 18: he was younger, and then worked in the job to
Speaker 18: have in those days when I was a kid was
Speaker 18: in the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Speaker 3: He worked in the railroad.
Speaker 18: Mom sold shoes when my brothers and I were able
Speaker 18: to take care of ourselves, and he rode my bike
Speaker 18: across town. I was about thirteen to a deer buddy
Speaker 18: Dave Berry, and he played me Van Klibern and Fritz
Speaker 18: Reiner's recording of the Beethoven Emperor. And I had no
Speaker 18: idea in thirteen years of living on this earth that
Speaker 18: such a sound existed. So those two things, I think
Speaker 18: were things that kind of the hymns were a gradual thing.
Speaker 18: The Beethoven, the Emperor and the birth of my children,
Speaker 18: I think, are the only things that I can say
Speaker 18: changed me in a moment really that made me. I
Speaker 18: missed the experience Joe had, you know, being touched by
Speaker 18: the people he was. I was very slow, you know,
Speaker 18: for example, I would be lying to you. I was
Speaker 18: very slow to Dylan. I was very slow to the Beatles.
Speaker 18: You know, they were up and almost broken up by
Speaker 18: the time I discovered Let It Be or Abbey Road.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 18: Did you ever see the movie two thousand and one,
Speaker 18: The Stanley Kubrick, You know the scene of the apes
Speaker 18: around the monolith, right, and they're not sure. They're compelled
Speaker 18: into it and they're frightened of it. That's what music
Speaker 18: was for me. I was drawn into it. I had
Speaker 18: no real natural ability in it. My abilities were in
Speaker 18: the physical world, were in the athletic world. But I
Speaker 18: was so compelled. And I must say, you know, the
Speaker 18: physical comes and goes, as you well know, I'm towards
Speaker 18: that dissipating time, but the thing being compelled into music
Speaker 18: has only gotten stronger and continues.
Speaker 17: You said you were compelled towards it, but afraid of it?
Speaker 1: What were you afraid of?
Speaker 18: I was overwhelmed. I didn't know what that was. I
Speaker 18: didn't know. And then it went from the Emperor. I
Speaker 18: remember back in those days, he Atlantic and Pacific tea company,
Speaker 18: the MP Supermarkets. First classical record I ever bought was
Speaker 18: a rock Mountain of Second Symphony for twenty nine cents
Speaker 18: in a bin there and I brought that home. Then
Speaker 18: there was a Richard Rodgers Victory at Sea, which is
Speaker 18: sort of a hybrid theater poppish classical.
Speaker 3: So it was just a gradual, just a gradual discovery
Speaker 3: of that.
Speaker 18: Music all the while when the pop you know, there
Speaker 18: was a record by the Walker Brothers that I love,
Speaker 18: early Elvis. I can't say that I was that I
Speaker 18: am or was an Elvis fan, but those early Elvis records,
Speaker 18: I remember Joe do you you're you're not old enough
Speaker 18: to remember?
Speaker 6: Was it?
Speaker 18: Bobby Darren split Splashed you guys, of course? And then
Speaker 18: Danny and the Juniors record called at the Hop and
Speaker 18: along with the you know, Beethoven and Bach then and
Speaker 18: I was later on twentieth century, but I love pop music.
Speaker 3: I just loved it.
Speaker 17: But then how did you did you start lessons? How
Speaker 17: did you?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 18: I started when I was They brought that My uncles
Speaker 18: and dad hauled that that upright up the hill to
Speaker 18: our house and put it in our in our house,
Speaker 18: got the got a tuner to come out and get
Speaker 18: things working.
Speaker 17: And it's very daunte and listening to Van Clyburn and
Speaker 17: well again that second and not knowing how.
Speaker 18: You know that was the apes around the monolith? You
Speaker 18: know that was I was an ape around the monolith
Speaker 18: saying what is this? I could put my hands on
Speaker 18: the keyboard, but I mean equating it with what I
Speaker 18: was hearing.
Speaker 17: Now we haven't mentioned that. You, I'm pretty sure, are
Speaker 17: the first Broken Record guests to have played in the NFL.
Speaker 1: So you were.
Speaker 18: I always say, listen, I can't believe I get to
Speaker 18: work with Joe Henry. I can't. I was just literally
Speaker 18: even now Joe thinks I'm girming him. I don't mean
Speaker 18: to I really And I always say Joe and I
Speaker 18: when when I say things that Joe, I always what
Speaker 18: do I say to you?
Speaker 16: Joe trying to take this as a compliment.
Speaker 18: Yes, because I don't mean it. I mean it. Bruce
Speaker 18: Moore as a statement.
Speaker 17: Of Yeah, how about this. Try not to take this
Speaker 17: a compliment. You played for the Cincinnati Bengals.
Speaker 18: You know, Yeah, I said I won't say what I
Speaker 18: was going to say. What I was going to say
Speaker 18: was going to sound mean. But even though I'm working
Speaker 18: with Joe Henry in this opportunity, I am the absolute,
Speaker 18: I know, unquestionably the greatest pianist ever produced by the NFL.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you know I may hear from.
Speaker 17: That now, right, Yeah, someone's going to come out now.
Speaker 18: Yeah, there's a defensive ends. He's the kid who's so
Speaker 18: dominant for the Cleveland Browns. I can't remember his name
Speaker 18: off the top of my but I read he's in
Speaker 18: love with poetry. He writes poetry. I've not read any
Speaker 18: of it. I don't know, but I know he loves
Speaker 18: it and he writes poetry.
Speaker 17: So, and you played for two years at Penn State,
Speaker 17: I think two. Well, you guys were undefeated those years.
Speaker 3: My junior red shirt, junior and senior year.
Speaker 18: I was red shirted, tore up a knee in a
Speaker 18: wrestling National wrestling tournament, so I was held out for
Speaker 18: a year. And then yeah, we were undefeated in s
Speaker 18: at sixty nine.
Speaker 17: Did the I guess I should ask you. You played
Speaker 17: for Joe Paterno back when he was starting.
Speaker 18: My sophomore year. This is I'm going to date my
Speaker 18: salf here. My sophomore year was Joe's first year as
Speaker 18: head coach.
Speaker 17: Wow, what was he like in the first year as
Speaker 17: a head coach?
Speaker 3: Very?
Speaker 18: Very very He had that Italian, fiery, Italian temperament. And
Speaker 18: I lived in fear of him. Not because I couldn't
Speaker 18: fill my hands with his little throat and that'd be
Speaker 18: the end of that. It's because I feared disappointing him.
Speaker 18: We since and I have buddies. I talked to an
Speaker 18: old buddy, Steve Smear today. We had a sense, when
Speaker 18: you're a kid, you don't know these things. But we
Speaker 18: had a sense we were in the presence of a
Speaker 18: unique human being, and we had no problem having faith
Speaker 18: in what he was telling us to do. And that
Speaker 18: was the beginning. It became something else. Apparently, of course,
Speaker 18: when it grows so monolithic, it's a very easy to
Speaker 18: lose one's self and all that, And that's a long
Speaker 18: conversation about you know what. But in the beginning, Joe
Speaker 18: was young. He had been there as an assistant for
Speaker 18: fifteen years. I think you could tell when he took
Speaker 18: over that he was ready for that job. He added
Speaker 18: his own ideas about how to make this thing work well.
Speaker 2: Last break and we'll be back with Mike Reid and
Speaker 2: Joe Henry.
Speaker 17: You've said that the football made you depressed even in college.
Speaker 3: I look back on my life now.
Speaker 18: I'm at the age where you do an assessment of
Speaker 18: what your life has been, you know, and I think
Speaker 18: the last time I loved playing that game I was
Speaker 18: in high school.
Speaker 16: I think you've told me the same have I told
Speaker 16: you were by the time that it was a profession
Speaker 16: for you that you didn't you knew you did it well,
Speaker 16: but there wasn't a passion for it.
Speaker 3: It could have been the profession.
Speaker 18: Well, Joe's son, Levon is a can I say, Joe
Speaker 18: or maybe you should talk about Lee. He's a unique,
Speaker 18: a unique carbon life form, this boy. And I don't
Speaker 18: even want to use the word talent, Bruce. He's he's
Speaker 18: such a well look at me, I'm struggling. But Lee
Speaker 18: has said that he worries about pursuit life in music
Speaker 18: for fear that the economic parts of it will disturb
Speaker 18: what he is going to try to do or find
Speaker 18: am I saying that right, Joe?
Speaker 16: Well, pretty much.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 16: Levon has said he's concerned that doing it as a
Speaker 16: business might might damage his love for music, and I'm
Speaker 16: sure that his witness of my career, which has been
Speaker 16: both incredibly rewarding and also you know, difficult. I've spent
Speaker 16: a lot of my working life out in the margins,
Speaker 16: and I think lee Von has witnessed both my devotion
Speaker 16: to what I do and also observed that it has
Speaker 16: been extraordinarily hard for me at times. And the difficulty
Speaker 16: has not necessarily been about I can't write a song.
Speaker 16: My difficulty has been, you know, the people who I
Speaker 16: connect myself with in hopes of carrying these songs out
Speaker 16: to whatever life they may have beyond me. And I'm
Speaker 16: not surprised at all that he has looked at the
Speaker 16: business of it and wanted to protect as sacred his
Speaker 16: relationship to music, because it's easy to get demoralized. He
Speaker 16: certainly has seen me demoralized. And I'm not trying to
Speaker 16: pretend as if you know, my life has been so
Speaker 16: extraordinarily hard, but my life in music has not been
Speaker 16: made easy either by the way the business is constructed
Speaker 16: or the kind of songs I choose to pursue. Though,
Speaker 16: you know, Mike and I quote this to each other
Speaker 16: all the time. You know, Rob Bryaner recently made this
Speaker 16: wonderful film documentary about Albert Brooks, and at one point
Speaker 16: Albert Brooks manager. He's telling the story to Rob that,
Speaker 16: you know, his manager had said to him at some point, Albert,
Speaker 16: you always take the hard road. And Albert said, you
Speaker 16: know the problem is you think I see two roads,
Speaker 16: and that's how I feel about my working life. It's
Speaker 16: not like I've chosen, you know, the harder path. I'm
Speaker 16: walking the only path that I see, and in fact,
Speaker 16: it's a path that I can't see. You know, what
Speaker 16: does the dial say? You know, the path that can
Speaker 16: be named is not the path. If you recognize it
Speaker 16: as a path, you're probably on somebody else's. It's not
Speaker 16: like I've chosen to be difficult, or I've chosen to
Speaker 16: be an acquired taste or all the polite ways people
Speaker 16: talk about music that is not exactly what we would
Speaker 16: call popular. And I'm not disparaging myself. I'm just making
Speaker 16: a I've not really learned how to full, you know,
Speaker 16: monetize what it is that I do. You know, it's
Speaker 16: it's not a natural fit for everybody. And I understand
Speaker 16: that I grew up listening to people who were not
Speaker 16: natural fits for everybody. I was really accustomed to going
Speaker 16: to high school and being in love with music and
Speaker 16: expecting that nobody that I knew would have any idea
Speaker 16: about it. So I've just always understood that the people
Speaker 16: that I held most sacred were somehow some kind of
Speaker 16: secret because because I had it and nobody else did
Speaker 16: not that I didn't think that I was good at it.
Speaker 16: But I think about the old, you know quote from
Speaker 16: Mark Dwaine, you know, to be good is to be lonesome,
Speaker 16: And I I that made sense to me when I
Speaker 16: heard it, because when I was doing the work that
Speaker 16: I thought was the best work I could do, it
Speaker 16: was frequently the things that were the least resonant for
Speaker 16: other people.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 16: When when I was on a label that was owned
Speaker 16: by Disney, when I made the record called Scar, I
Speaker 16: got called into the president's office, who would never be
Speaker 16: paying any attention to somebody like me in that moment,
Speaker 16: I got called into Bob Cavall, who's office. It was
Speaker 16: like I've seen it from a movie. He closed the
Speaker 16: door with a remote control. You know, I walked into
Speaker 16: this big mccoggany door just slams behind me as if,
Speaker 16: you know, as if by will. And he's just heard
Speaker 16: this song that I've recorded with on thatte Coleman. And
Speaker 16: he said, you're not really going to put this on
Speaker 16: a record. I said, put it on a record. It's
Speaker 16: my opus. It opens the record. He said, you know,
Speaker 16: you know, we got into a little bit of you know,
Speaker 16: of a scrap about it, and he thought I was
Speaker 16: being difficult. He thought it was the most puzzling thing imaginable.
Speaker 17: Was that the Richard Pryor song?
Speaker 16: Yes, yeah, he also made that difficult. He said, you know,
Speaker 16: you can't use Richard Pryor's name in a song title
Speaker 16: without his permission. And I said, sure I can. He's
Speaker 16: a public figure. And by the way, on the same
Speaker 16: record there's a song called Edgar Bergan. You're not saying,
Speaker 16: you know, get Candy Bergen's permission or it's over. But
Speaker 16: they were so afraid of Richard as a volatile figure,
Speaker 16: even though at that moment Richard was strapped into a
Speaker 16: wheelchair up and thensino unable to speak, but the idea
Speaker 16: that I was going to somehow transgress and open them
Speaker 16: up to an altercation with the Richard Pryor family.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 16: They said I couldn't do it. They said, you have
Speaker 16: three choices. You can leave the song off the record,
Speaker 16: which I wasn't willing to do. You can change the title.
Speaker 16: I said, I can't. That tells you how to hear it.
Speaker 16: I never mentioned Richard in the song. I'm singing in
Speaker 16: first person, or you can get his permission. The Path
Speaker 16: of least Resistance was the last one, and through some
Speaker 16: wild serendipity that my life is full of, which you
Speaker 16: don't have time for right now, I found Richard and
Speaker 16: it led to me writing a screenplay, being asked by
Speaker 16: him and his wife to write a screenplay based on
Speaker 16: his life, and then when that fell apart as an enterprise,
Speaker 16: my brother and I wrote a book about him. It
Speaker 16: put all kinds of things in motion. Great bo insists,
Speaker 16: thank you, insisted that I that my only choice was
Speaker 16: to find Richard. They didn't know what they were doing
Speaker 16: for me in that regard, As my friend Allen Tussaint
Speaker 16: used to say to me, here you are off the
Speaker 16: beaten path again.
Speaker 1: I wasn't.
Speaker 16: I wasn't. I wasn't trying to live over there. That's
Speaker 16: just where I could afford the housing.
Speaker 17: I do want to talk a little bit because I'm
Speaker 17: interested very much in how you wrote melodies. We haven't mentioned,
Speaker 17: you know. Probably the song you're best known for is
Speaker 17: I Can't Make You Love Me, which is first recorded
Speaker 17: by Bonnie Raid and since has been recorded by everybody.
Speaker 17: The number of covers it's been called. Dawn was called
Speaker 17: it the best song ever written, So it's up there.
Speaker 18: It's ever written. What Joe, come on, you got a
Speaker 18: comment to make on that?
Speaker 3: What's that?
Speaker 18: The equivalent declaring something the best song ever written is
Speaker 18: is like what?
Speaker 8: Uh?
Speaker 16: Well, I wish I could. I wish I could entity.
Speaker 16: I'm just somebody who stands in that line. I think
Speaker 16: it's a I think it's a towering achievement. And the
Speaker 16: reason I think so is purely because you can listen
Speaker 16: to how flexible it is. You know, listen to Bonnie's version,
Speaker 16: Listen to Bonnie Vere's version, Listen to Prince. I was
Speaker 16: just saying to Mike and the cab we were talking
Speaker 16: about it. Listening to Prince do that song, It's like
Speaker 16: watching you know, a grown man ain't candy just devouring
Speaker 16: it and the flexibility of that, and in all those
Speaker 16: there's nothing about any of those versions. There's not one
Speaker 16: of those that doesn't doesn't pierce me. You know.
Speaker 1: It's Nancy Wilson.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's my favorites, you.
Speaker 16: Know, but it's what the you know, the great film
Speaker 16: directors might typically say, you know, to an actor, I
Speaker 16: don't need you to be overly emotive. Just deliver the words.
Speaker 16: Let it's a great script, Let it do the work.
Speaker 16: You just have to be here and let it move through.
Speaker 16: I think this is one of those songs, not that
Speaker 16: it doesn't invite people who can really dig into a
Speaker 16: song and take it somewhere, but you have to do
Speaker 16: very little, I think, for that song to put you
Speaker 16: in its crosshairs.
Speaker 3: Whatever.
Speaker 17: The famous line is, we all long for somebody who
Speaker 17: longs for us.
Speaker 16: Yeah, I mean it gets sounded something that's that fundamental.
Speaker 16: And when its time waite say, you know, I love
Speaker 16: beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.
Speaker 8: You know, it.
Speaker 16: References something that is heart wrenching, and it does so,
Speaker 16: carried along by the sublime melody. You know, I can't
Speaker 16: imagine any great singer who wouldn't want to take it on.
Speaker 17: It's interesting when I was re listening to it and
Speaker 17: listening again to this album in the light of it
Speaker 17: is it's interesting how the melody is kind of stretched
Speaker 17: across the harmony. The melody is actually and it's a
Speaker 17: slow song, but it's quite syncopated. Yeah, in a way,
Speaker 17: that's sort of an expect that kind of song.
Speaker 3: Well, look, I'm thinking of it.
Speaker 18: I saw a piece on William Goldman and he said
Speaker 18: he asked Sondheim in a conversation, Steve, when you write,
Speaker 18: do you know what you're doing? And Sondeim said it
Speaker 18: didn't even hesitate. He said, absolutely not. No, if I
Speaker 18: knew what I was doing, I would have never written
Speaker 18: a bad song. And I have done that, you know.
Speaker 18: So look, if I knew when that music came out,
Speaker 18: that came out after that was a different song. For
Speaker 18: like months and months, my friend Alan Shamberlin and I
Speaker 18: worked on it, But when that particular phrase came out,
Speaker 18: you know, I didn't even think of those we had.
Speaker 18: I had two lines, I can't make you love me.
Speaker 18: You can't make your heart feel something. If you don't
Speaker 18: you can't make your heart feel something. That it won't,
Speaker 18: and I wrote it as Mike would write, as an
Speaker 18: up tempo bluegrass song, and then we couldn't get any
Speaker 18: more lines, and so I would put it away and
Speaker 18: we would go at something else. So that's all to say, Bruce,
Speaker 18: that if I knew what I was doing, I would
Speaker 18: have written ten more of those. You know, I managed
Speaker 18: to be musically out of the way and be allow
Speaker 18: something to happen and then say, okay, let's continue to
Speaker 18: pull that thread.
Speaker 16: It must be said, though, that sometimes knowing what to
Speaker 16: do is knowing how to surrender to a song's emerging authority.
Speaker 16: You know, I have a dear friend, the poet who
Speaker 16: lives in the Bay Area, Jane Hirschfield, and everybody who
Speaker 16: knows me has heard me repeat this because it was
Speaker 16: so important to me. When she wrote it to me
Speaker 16: in an email one day, she said, Joseph, don't ever
Speaker 16: forget that the poem has an intelligence the poet it
Speaker 16: does not possess. But you have to know a fair
Speaker 16: amount understand the fundamental truth of that. You know, the
Speaker 16: song knows something that I don't know. And that's not
Speaker 16: me claiming to be some kind of you know, mystic
Speaker 16: character that just gets visited upon like nobody else does.
Speaker 16: I'm just saying I'm recognized over and over again that
Speaker 16: when something is in motion, I'm attending to it. I'm
Speaker 16: involved and I'm committed. But I know that I'm not
Speaker 16: I'm not the driver.
Speaker 17: You guys are determined not to let need to mystify
Speaker 17: a songwriting, aren't you? Because my whole jobs journalists, I
Speaker 17: feel so badly for you.
Speaker 16: Yeah, because mysteries, you know, the great mysteries are not
Speaker 16: are not to be dispelled, to be abided. Well, but hey,
Speaker 16: take your best shot.
Speaker 17: I'm going to dispel a small mystery then, because I
Speaker 17: notice you use a technique on a couple songs here
Speaker 17: that i've seen you well, particularly walk on Faith, your
Speaker 17: song which was a that was a hit.
Speaker 18: For you, right, yeah, yeah, it was research wow, Bruce,
Speaker 18: Yeah it was. I had a marvelous life going on
Speaker 18: as a little songwriter, people cutting songs. I had two
Speaker 18: little kids, and Willie Nelson recorded a song.
Speaker 3: Called there you Are. It's called there You Were.
Speaker 18: And Bob Montgomery, the late wonderful, the late great bab
Speaker 18: Montgomery was that it was Columbia then before it became
Speaker 18: Sony said, boy, I love Willie's record.
Speaker 3: I love that song, but I really like your demo.
Speaker 3: Why don't you make a record?
Speaker 18: And I went, well, okay, well that's no way to
Speaker 18: make a record, you know. So I did tripped over
Speaker 18: myself and the next thing I know, I'm flying, leaving
Speaker 18: my family, flying down the highway and a bus with
Speaker 18: a bay full of T shirts with my picture on it,
Speaker 18: and wondering, Okay, what is this. Let's accept the adventure.
Speaker 3: But I was not.
Speaker 18: I was too young and too stupid and too close
Speaker 18: to really understand accepting the adventure.
Speaker 16: Have you got any of those T shirts? And medium
Speaker 16: I do, Yeah, I do.
Speaker 17: They're still in the cannon. He's going to fire into
Speaker 17: the crowd tonight. Well, let me talk about the song,
Speaker 17: because you do something in that song which is and
Speaker 17: I think it relates to your love of.
Speaker 1: Rhyme.
Speaker 17: But I love that there's a little delay before that
Speaker 17: and the last line is I'm sorry, trust and.
Speaker 3: Love, Trust and love.
Speaker 18: Yeah, right, So that's not really First of all, I
Speaker 18: got into speaking of some tim wonderful because he was
Speaker 18: He was fierce about perfect rhymes, and I know you
Speaker 18: invoke Rodney. That's one of the things he tells the
Speaker 18: people at camp right.
Speaker 16: Yeah, he's very much a stickler for you know, the clean,
Speaker 16: hard rhyme. Yeah, And of course I'm not in the
Speaker 16: least no. No, I think sometimes like the half rhyme
Speaker 16: is is just a complete delight. There's something very human
Speaker 16: about about the near miss that I'm just you know,
Speaker 16: I'm just you know, sort of in love with that.
Speaker 16: I'm probably you know here, I am being more revealing
Speaker 16: than than about myself, than than maybe my songs have
Speaker 16: ever been. But I just, you know, it just seems
Speaker 16: so human to me. I don't feel that I'm a
Speaker 16: lazy writer. I've been accused of that by a particular
Speaker 16: peer of mine, and I mean in a loving way,
Speaker 16: because I I don't write to a strict meter, like
Speaker 16: like like a Burt Backerac song, where every every word,
Speaker 16: you know, matches of a value of a note. I
Speaker 16: come out of a much more of a blues tradition
Speaker 16: where you know, if the right word is, you know,
Speaker 16: if the right phrase is it has a few too
Speaker 16: many syllables. If there's not a really smart way to
Speaker 16: make that work any other way, you're sing something as
Speaker 16: a pickup note, that's perfectly fair game.
Speaker 18: And I would hate to think, Joe, that you would
Speaker 18: encumber your words by saying though this has to be
Speaker 18: a perfect rhyme. It could be because the of the
Speaker 18: place you go down into where your lyrics takes one.
Speaker 18: I can give you a couple that I find enormously
Speaker 18: satisfying sometimes, Sweeney Todd, nothing's going to harm you.
Speaker 3: Not while I'm around.
Speaker 18: Demons are prowling everywhere. Nowadays I'll send them howling I
Speaker 18: don't care. I got ways now that's I find that
Speaker 18: enormously satisfying. But the meaning of what's being said there
Speaker 18: is pretty much on the surface of things. It's nothing
Speaker 18: to really nothing to figure out, nothing for the rhyme
Speaker 18: to obscure. There's another uh lorenz Heart. My romance doesn't
Speaker 18: need a castle rising in Spain or a dance to
Speaker 18: a constantly surprising refrain. I find that very satisfying. But
Speaker 18: those meetings of those two things are very on the surface.
Speaker 18: There's you're not you don't have to go down with
Speaker 18: a you know, light and try to do investigate. So
Speaker 18: in that sense, Shoe, I mean, I think perfect rhyme
Speaker 18: is something to shoot for. You know, some time was
Speaker 18: a stickler because he came from that in the old
Speaker 18: theater days, that was the tradition. And by the way
Speaker 18: and walk on Faith, you know, Bruce, it's a kind
Speaker 18: of sloppy rhyme really up with love, you know.
Speaker 17: It's not it's not the rhyme so much as as
Speaker 17: the pause before the last Oh, it's that that that
Speaker 17: it's what you do with it, and you did it
Speaker 17: a couple of times on this one, and I think
Speaker 17: it makes the last rhyme so much more satisfying.
Speaker 18: If there's that's that's a beautiful observation on your party.
Speaker 16: When a suspended moment of pause is the is the
Speaker 16: hook sometimes that is really really the case, whereas the
Speaker 16: absence is something that is is the thing that you
Speaker 16: can't take your ear off of, you know, waiting for
Speaker 16: that moment of suspension and then there's finally, you know,
Speaker 16: a relief of that, of that tension, and that is
Speaker 16: that's the payoff. It's not in a word, it's not
Speaker 16: in the concept. It's in an articulation of suspension and release.
Speaker 17: I've taken up far too much of your time. I
Speaker 17: was going to ask about just about every song on
Speaker 17: this album, and you know, City of Light, that beautiful
Speaker 17: line and I'd love to know when this occurs you now,
Speaker 17: is the prize all along?
Speaker 14: You know?
Speaker 16: I'm sure that was a moment where you know the
Speaker 16: beautiful thing about writing intentionally in rhy and it's interesting,
Speaker 16: you know, I read a lot of poetry, but I
Speaker 16: don't read rhyming poetry, and yet I write in rhyme
Speaker 16: all the time. I find that that reaching for rhyme
Speaker 16: frequently brings me to thought that I that I didn't
Speaker 16: have otherwise. I can kind of remember being surprised when
Speaker 16: that line landed. Now was the prized all along? Because
Speaker 16: I believed it when it happened. I believed it when
Speaker 16: I saw it land there on the page, but it
Speaker 16: was not. It was not anything I thought, like, it's
Speaker 16: a thought I've had. How can I say it pretty?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 16: The rhyme invited me there, and then I just believed it.
Speaker 17: I also want to ask about the last song, So
Speaker 17: We May, which you know I mentioned to you the
Speaker 17: album almost reminded me of sort of a nineteenth century
Speaker 17: collection of ballads. This reminded me of a It's like
Speaker 17: a national anthem. The song almost So we May Well.
Speaker 17: It's about a possibility being laid out and do we
Speaker 17: pick it up?
Speaker 16: Yeah, I think it's I think it is about personal
Speaker 16: responsibility too. That's something I think about after the fact.
Speaker 16: Nothing I thought about when I was writing those words.
Speaker 16: And that's a situation where I think Michael, you know,
Speaker 16: landed a melody for it that sounded. Once I heard it,
Speaker 16: I couldn't. I knew it couldn't go any other way.
Speaker 16: You know, it just sounded absolutely inevitable to me. It's
Speaker 16: a song that I think, I dare say Mike and
Speaker 16: I are both particularly proud of. It happened like it
Speaker 16: was supposed to when I heard it. It's what it
Speaker 16: felt like.
Speaker 17: You guys have time for one more song?
Speaker 1: Sure?
Speaker 16: Why don't we play Life and Time? Since it's the
Speaker 16: title song and I'm in the right I'm in the
Speaker 16: right tuning for it. We play that and see now,
Speaker 16: don't we?
Speaker 19: Yes?
Speaker 3: We do.
Speaker 16: Oh that's good news for me. Okay, you ready there, buddy?
Speaker 20: Yeah.
Speaker 19: I went north when trouble came, I thought it had
Speaker 19: stayed behind.
Speaker 3: I worked my way through.
Speaker 14: Michigan, finally crossed the line, made.
Speaker 16: My peace with solitude. This year's pushed on by.
Speaker 6: Hew.
Speaker 3: Would you face this grace itself upon my life?
Speaker 13: And time on my life and time. Well, I know
Speaker 13: well what people say when I go to town.
Speaker 4: Go, I keep my business street, hold my tongue and
Speaker 4: my head down.
Speaker 7: Moving like the ghost that I've become within my line.
Speaker 8: Where I've spent.
Speaker 3: My days with you, throughout my life in time, throughout
Speaker 3: this life and.
Speaker 6: Time, I'll watch a storm approaching now from this open to.
Speaker 7: And welcome in my sweep away all that came before
Speaker 7: the end.
Speaker 8: Of them, be getting out, finish up, the sun.
Speaker 13: Drawn.
Speaker 8: And you don't known to you whose my life and time.
Speaker 13: Drawn?
Speaker 19: And you don't know to g whose pe my life
Speaker 19: in time? I went north wind trouble key, Have.
Speaker 3: I knew that I.
Speaker 8: Carried you like fools gold across the border line, leading.
Speaker 7: My peace well, living out years that passed me by.
Speaker 3: Now I wear them like it broke in crown.
Speaker 8: Upon my life and.
Speaker 3: Time were of them, like it broke in crown.
Speaker 13: If all my life and time, all my life and time.
Speaker 1: I think that's how we end it.
Speaker 17: Thank you so much, what on honor Bruce, Thank you.
Speaker 1: Just Craig.
Speaker 2: In the episode description, you'll find a link to Mike
Speaker 2: Read and Joe Henry's album Life and Times as well
Speaker 2: as a collection of songs spanning both their careers. Be
Speaker 2: sure to check out YouTube dot com slash Broken Record
Speaker 2: Podcast to see all of our video interviews, and be
Speaker 2: sure to follow us on Instagram at the Broken Record Boy.
Speaker 2: You can follow us on Twitter at Broken Records. Broken
Speaker 2: Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing
Speaker 2: help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is
Speaker 2: Ben Holiday. Broken Record is production.
Speaker 3: Of the Pushcream Industries.
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Speaker 2: Are theme Music's by any Beats. I'm justin Richmond.