Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, Welcome to all you lovers out there.
Speaker 3: This is Justin Richmond and I'm Leah Rose.
Speaker 4: We're the host of Broken Record, where we interview your
Speaker 4: favorite musicians and bring to life the stories behind their music,
Speaker 4: behind some.
Speaker 2: Of your favorite recordings.
Speaker 4: If you're listening to this in the Broken Record feed,
Speaker 4: welcome back. But if you're hearing us as a listener
Speaker 4: of another Pushkin show, that's because today we're doing something special.
Speaker 3: That's right. This is our Valentine's Day special, and today
Speaker 3: to celebrate the music we love. Justin and I are
Speaker 3: going to do what we love, which is argue about music.
Speaker 4: Ros's gonna be talking to some of our friends here
Speaker 4: at Pushkin, people who have equally strong opinions about the
Speaker 4: songs they love.
Speaker 2: I'll be talking about Gladwell, who.
Speaker 4: Has a very Gladwelling intake about why he believes country
Speaker 4: is the best genre for love song and I can
Speaker 4: guarantee it's not for the reason you may think.
Speaker 5: It's depressive music. That's what it is.
Speaker 3: Well also hear from Ben nattif Hoffrey, the sometimes host
Speaker 3: of the Last Archive, about a love song he wrote
Speaker 3: that's so good it helped him score his Forever, Valentine.
Speaker 6: I think that folk music does love songs the best.
Speaker 3: But first, justin I'm going to ask you what I
Speaker 3: think is a central question of today's episode. I think
Speaker 3: I know what you're gonna say. But out of every
Speaker 3: genre and subgenre that exists today, which one do you
Speaker 3: think does love songs the best?
Speaker 2: R and B?
Speaker 6: I knew it.
Speaker 4: Look, when you think about it, it's really the shorthand
Speaker 4: in music in an audio for love, Like if you
Speaker 4: were scoring a love scene in a movie for like
Speaker 4: Netflix or like the most amount of people are possible.
Speaker 2: To watch, like, you would probably throw in an R and.
Speaker 4: B song, you know, maybe uh yeah, you know Al Green,
Speaker 4: Let's stay Together.
Speaker 6: I'm so.
Speaker 7: Come on.
Speaker 2: That's that's really Those are the sounds of love right there.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: It's very much like what song are you choosing for
Speaker 3: the first dance at your wedding?
Speaker 4: The first right, the first, the first slow dance. It's
Speaker 4: your junior high welcome dance, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 4: Or you're a senior prompt like, it's gonna be R
Speaker 4: and B. It's kind of the cliche genre that we
Speaker 4: go to, and I don't I think I should give
Speaker 4: a deeper reason in here, because I think R and
Speaker 4: B kind of gets short shrift in the music world,
Speaker 4: like you know, rock and roll and hip hop. I've
Speaker 4: taken up all the air in the room for sixty
Speaker 4: years now, yeah, you know, since since the since the
Speaker 4: British invasion.
Speaker 3: A couple of years were spent on em but yeah.
Speaker 4: A couple of years, yeah, right, scrill X was big
Speaker 4: there for yeah, yeah, Yeah, It's not a sexy topic
Speaker 4: for some reason. I think because it's so ubiquitous, because
Speaker 4: in some ways it's so ever present, and we just
Speaker 4: find it very easy to ignore. But when you think
Speaker 4: about the fact that R and B comes out of
Speaker 4: really like it comes out.
Speaker 2: Of gospel, you know, like.
Speaker 4: Gospel is about love and devotion to a higher being,
Speaker 4: to God. And at some point, all these gospel musicians
Speaker 4: that go out they want to write popular songs or
Speaker 4: sing popular music instead of just singing in the church,
Speaker 4: and they take everything they've learned in gospel music about
Speaker 4: how to sort of create a stir and a fervor
Speaker 4: around God, and they just sort of sent a romantic love.
Speaker 4: So they just take God out and put in a man,
Speaker 4: a woman, a lover, you know, a classic example is
Speaker 4: Sam Cook, who's originally with the gospel group the Soulsters,
Speaker 4: and he releases a song He's so Wonderful, which is,
Speaker 4: you know, it's a gospel.
Speaker 8: Track, wonderful, God, so.
Speaker 4: Wonderful than when Sam Cook wants to cross over, like
Speaker 4: about a year later and wants to just make an
Speaker 4: R and B cut, he reworks that same song and
Speaker 4: instead of wonderful, becomes.
Speaker 2: Lovable, lovable, My.
Speaker 8: She's lovable.
Speaker 4: So then how could you not say that R and
Speaker 4: B isn't like the preeminent genre for love songs.
Speaker 2: It's like it's it has to do with the.
Speaker 4: The ethereal and the theological, down to the romantic and
Speaker 4: the platonic, like it's everything.
Speaker 3: And then it just gets dirtier and dirtier as the
Speaker 3: years go on. And then we landed the song.
Speaker 4: Song Yeah, shout out to I Love Cisco and that's
Speaker 4: a great album.
Speaker 2: I love the song.
Speaker 3: R and B does do love very very well. But
Speaker 3: there's other genres too. I mean, look at Dolly Parton
Speaker 3: on Joelene. She's bagging and she's pleading and she's out
Speaker 3: of her mind. Please don't take my man.
Speaker 2: But then who takes?
Speaker 4: And we love Dolly, But then who takes a Dolly
Speaker 4: song like I'll Always Love You and takes it to
Speaker 4: the next level Whitney Whitney.
Speaker 3: Speaking of Whitney, someone who could sing anyone's song and
Speaker 3: make it sound phenomenal. This makes me think of the
Speaker 3: interview you did with Babyface for a Broken Record back
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty three. And he wrote some of Whitney's
Speaker 3: biggest hits.
Speaker 4: I mean, he wrote some of my favorite Whitney songs.
Speaker 4: Forget about his this is some of my favorites, and
Speaker 4: you know a million other unforgettable songs that you know. Yeah,
Speaker 4: they also happened to be hits. Boys and Men's End
Speaker 4: of the Road Mariah carries We Belong Together Breathe Again
Speaker 4: by Tony Braxton.
Speaker 3: Yes, that was such a great interview.
Speaker 4: Yeah, man, I mean I'm sitting there with baby Face
Speaker 4: and I'm watching him play guitar in front of me.
Speaker 4: It was just crazy, you know. And he's he's left handed,
Speaker 4: he plays upside down like Hendrix. I mean, he's not
Speaker 4: as good as a guitar players Hendrix, but I mean
Speaker 4: it was just incredible would be that person up close
Speaker 4: with them and seeing how he wrote these songs, and
Speaker 4: he played for me a song he's never recorded with anyone,
Speaker 4: and it's the very first song he ever wrote about
Speaker 4: an early love of his first his first love actually
Speaker 4: in high school.
Speaker 3: Let's hear some of that.
Speaker 1: Here I go falling in love again.
Speaker 9: That was my first song, and I wrote it for
Speaker 9: a girl because I was like in love and stuff, and.
Speaker 1: So the guitar really was just an instrument.
Speaker 9: For me to get these songs out of me. I
Speaker 9: always like to say, even when I played and learn
Speaker 9: things on the piano, i play, I'm not really a
Speaker 9: piano player.
Speaker 1: I learned things.
Speaker 9: To support my songwriting, and that's what I did.
Speaker 1: Then I turned that into my first song.
Speaker 9: So I was just learning chords to support out my
Speaker 9: little songs.
Speaker 6: Wow.
Speaker 4: And for you, songwriting was about writing songs for the
Speaker 4: girls you were in.
Speaker 9: Love with crush and it was it was purely kind
Speaker 9: of an escape, so to say, Wow, it wasn't anything
Speaker 9: but that. I didn't think they were gonna go anywhere,
Speaker 9: but that was the that was the drive, and.
Speaker 4: You would have been like eleven twelve, ten, eleven twelve, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: I can't play a deal song sweet November.
Speaker 8: But mad that time that will read bad.
Speaker 4: That we Wow, man, that's that's a great song.
Speaker 9: I wrote that right out of high school. Out of
Speaker 9: high school, yeah, it was. It was because I was
Speaker 9: a man child. So it was second year or something,
Speaker 9: seventy eight or so, seventy eight seventy nine, right in
Speaker 9: that time.
Speaker 1: So it was a girl. It was like this one girl.
Speaker 1: She was like the most.
Speaker 9: While we were in highigh school, we were really good
Speaker 9: friends and there's no way I would have ever thought
Speaker 9: I would have been with her. But when I got
Speaker 9: out of high school, we we started talking and then
Speaker 9: we actually started dating.
Speaker 1: I remember Daryl was like, how how was this even happening?
Speaker 1: How do you have her?
Speaker 9: And then I remember we went to go see Brookshields
Speaker 9: Endless Love when I saw Endless Love together and then
Speaker 9: something happened, I think before we were going going away
Speaker 9: in Manchild, all of a sudden she stopped calling me
Speaker 9: and I couldn't I couldn't reach her, and I don't
Speaker 9: know what happened, but it was just like we're just
Speaker 9: like broken up. And then there was no cell phones,
Speaker 9: there was no good you couldn't reach our on the phone,
Speaker 9: and no social media. It was just done. And I
Speaker 9: was really messed up about it. And and that's when
Speaker 9: I wrote this, you know, because you know that was
Speaker 9: the time period. It was in the fall, and of
Speaker 9: a sudden, I was thinking maybe maybe when I come back,
Speaker 9: maybe maybe it's November, we'll get back together and find it.
Speaker 1: So that was actually a loss song that was written
Speaker 1: way back then.
Speaker 4: And would you have written the words or would.
Speaker 1: You write the words for piano and wrote it's.
Speaker 4: Like the piano.
Speaker 9: Yeah, wow, So.
Speaker 4: Because it's kind of beautiful even just divorced from the music,
Speaker 4: if you just look at the words like high level.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it was when all the first arrived. You with
Speaker 9: my lady, we're dating.
Speaker 4: It was the second reign of Ittom. We shared a feeling.
Speaker 9: Yeah, come on, that's it's like we start dating and
Speaker 9: then all of a sudden we like I remember it
Speaker 9: was raining and like it looks like something's gonna happen here.
Speaker 4: So that almost really personal. Yeah, exhale was more from
Speaker 4: watching the movie.
Speaker 1: Watching the movie.
Speaker 4: You don't necessarily have to write from personal experience. You can,
Speaker 4: you can, but you can watch others and.
Speaker 9: No, yeah, it's really about watching others and how they
Speaker 9: how they feel and how they imagining having to go
Speaker 9: through that. I'm always asked, how are you able to
Speaker 9: write for women? Yeah, and said, if you just kind
Speaker 9: of think of it and think of whatever they go
Speaker 9: through and think out how you'd feel, you know, it's
Speaker 9: not that hard to figure out. Damn, that's fucked up. Yeah,
Speaker 9: I feel you know, I think all right about that,
Speaker 9: you know. And as a kid that was always falling
Speaker 9: in love and thinking I.
Speaker 4: Was in love, feeling like you.
Speaker 1: Know, that's what it was.
Speaker 9: My very first song was about a girl named round
Speaker 9: the new bould always say her name, and that was
Speaker 9: in here I Go falling in love again. And the
Speaker 9: second song that I wrote that I clearly remember was
Speaker 9: about the same girl, which was two years later, from
Speaker 9: sixth grade to eighth grade, because she broke my heart,
Speaker 9: was called the Better Taste of Life. Oh those are
Speaker 9: feelings that I that I had, and everything was exaggerated.
Speaker 9: I had written a song called so Shy, So there
Speaker 9: were pieces, there were be pieces of things of songs
Speaker 9: that I would write. I wrote a song called Anita,
Speaker 9: wrote a song called Shelley. One of the best songs
Speaker 9: I ever wrote was a song called Last Song Forever,
Speaker 9: which was I wrote that when I was in my
Speaker 9: senior year. Can never recorded, I think so. I think
Speaker 9: I let a group record as they turned into a gospel.
Speaker 4: Do you remember any of it?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Could you play a little of it? I don't
Speaker 1: know what my voice is like right now.
Speaker 10: When I think Spanish, I remember a special feeling sweet se.
Speaker 1: Then I think.
Speaker 10: Spanish show moments. Those were special times. You told me
Speaker 10: you can.
Speaker 2: You know when.
Speaker 10: Blown away?
Speaker 8: I hope you know why now Mark, I will always
Speaker 8: I love you for you know man of thinking Libeta song,
Speaker 8: I God love you then, my dude right now and.
Speaker 1: That's okay.
Speaker 4: You can hear all of my conversation with baby Face
Speaker 4: and the broken record episode that was going to link
Speaker 4: to in the show notes. There's so much more to it,
Speaker 4: including how some of his biggest influences were singer songwriters
Speaker 4: like James Taylor and the Beatles. Coming up after the break,
Speaker 4: Pushing and producer Ben out of Paffrey tells Lea about
Speaker 4: writing his own love song.
Speaker 6: I think that folk music does love songs the best.
Speaker 3: That star Pushkin, producer and sometimes host of the Last Archive,
Speaker 3: Ben Natif Haffrey Folker Country.
Speaker 6: Either one would be my leading contender for the genre
Speaker 6: that is best at love songs. And I think it's
Speaker 6: because on some level, like I think like a breakup
Speaker 6: song or a lost love song is superior to a
Speaker 6: straight up love song. Me too, because I think, like you,
Speaker 6: if you're in love, you don't really need a song
Speaker 6: like you feel this kind of symphonic happiness, Like there's
Speaker 6: something specific that you're experiencing with another person, Like if
Speaker 6: you are experiencing lost love or unrequited love, there's something
Speaker 6: about a particular breakup story or yeah, romance song that
Speaker 6: like creates a community with you when you maybe feel
Speaker 6: otherwise alone or bereft. But I think that there's like
Speaker 6: wistful folk music, wistful country music kind of toes the
Speaker 6: line between these two things.
Speaker 3: To be honest, I also think that sad songs might
Speaker 3: make the best love songs. But the real reason I
Speaker 3: wanted to talk to Ben is because I learned at
Speaker 3: our holiday party that he also has a second life
Speaker 3: as a musician and as a songwriter with the band Ruken.
Speaker 6: Yes, and this is part of my long con to
Speaker 6: get interviewed on Broken Record for my music.
Speaker 2: Well you're class.
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: So this is our Valentine's Day special. And I was
Speaker 3: tipped off by our producer Izzy about a love song
Speaker 3: that you wrote a couple of years ago, and it
Speaker 3: actually ended up having sort of like a big impact
Speaker 3: on your life. So I wanted to ask you about
Speaker 3: this song if I didn't know you by now, so
Speaker 3: set the stage for us. How did this song come
Speaker 3: to be?
Speaker 7: Well?
Speaker 6: I wrote this song about like a year after I
Speaker 6: first moved to Brooklyn. So I was like just out
Speaker 6: of college and I had moved to Brooklyn and I
Speaker 6: was living with a bunch of friends in what was,
Speaker 6: you know, actually quite a nice apartment. I had not
Speaker 6: made my corner of the apartment particularly nice. I was
Speaker 6: not having the best time that year, and I had,
Speaker 6: I think, as an expression of vague despair, just like
Speaker 6: not really done anything to set it up. I don't
Speaker 6: remember why this is, but I remember I had like
Speaker 6: a tarp in the corner of the room. I had
Speaker 6: a tarp in the corner of the room like a mattress,
Speaker 6: and then a saw on the wall. Oh my god,
Speaker 6: I thought it would be like fun to put on
Speaker 6: my wall, but it looked terrifying, And that was like
Speaker 6: pretty much it. And I remember distinctly walking into the
Speaker 6: apartment one time with a good friend of mine from
Speaker 6: high school, and I had like in my pocket and
Speaker 6: I like took the change out of my pocket and
Speaker 6: I threw it in the corner and she was like,
Speaker 6: why did you just throw your change in the corner?
Speaker 6: I was like that that is the corner of the
Speaker 6: apartment where I keep my change. And it was like
Speaker 6: it was indeed like next to the tarp, like a
Speaker 6: pile of change. So there were no shades on the window.
Speaker 6: This is like a crucial thing. I just was like
Speaker 6: not super taking care of myself, Like everything was totally fine,
Speaker 6: but my life was not in order. And then I
Speaker 6: started dating a friend of mine from college. Her name
Speaker 6: was Julia, and she was living in Nashville at the time,
Speaker 6: and we sort of like picked back up talking to
Speaker 6: each other at a distance, and then when she came
Speaker 6: to New York, we would hang out. And I noticed that, like,
Speaker 6: as Julie and I had been talking more and started
Speaker 6: seeing each other in Nashville and also in New York,
Speaker 6: that slowly I had begun to set up my room.
Speaker 6: I got shades through the window. I put like they
Speaker 6: didn't actually fit, but I got like handkerchiefs that extended
Speaker 6: them to the bottom. I got rid of the tarp.
Speaker 6: I did, in fact leave the saw on the wall
Speaker 6: because that was by then a crucial part of the
Speaker 6: decor and my identity and remains. So I don't remember
Speaker 6: what I did with the change corner. There's a good
Speaker 6: chance to change corner sort of remained.
Speaker 3: The growing up process is a slow one.
Speaker 6: The growing up process is a slow one, but it began.
Speaker 6: It began with fixing up that first room. There was
Speaker 6: a moment I remember where she came and visited. It
Speaker 6: was early spring, and we had this really wonderful weekend
Speaker 6: together exploring the city, and she'd grown up in New
Speaker 6: York and I was kind of new there, and she
Speaker 6: was shown me around and we went to like a
Speaker 6: Lebanese church, and I'm Lebanese and it was kind of
Speaker 6: like a so they just wandered in because they were
Speaker 6: having like a food festival kind of thing.
Speaker 4: Like.
Speaker 6: There were a lot of wonderful, serendipitous things. Yeah, And
Speaker 6: I remember it was after that visit, I think on
Speaker 6: the day that she had left, but I was hanging
Speaker 6: out in my room and I was playing guitar and
Speaker 6: I started writing this song. Like a lot of hack
Speaker 6: guitar players, I use a lot of open tunings, and
Speaker 6: around that time I had been playing the Rain Song
Speaker 6: by led Zeppelin, which is a version of open C tuning,
Speaker 6: and so I just would like keep my guitar in that,
Speaker 6: and I remember figuring out the sort of main guitar
Speaker 6: line and then messing around with the words over it.
Speaker 6: If I didn't know.
Speaker 10: You ran.
Speaker 11: Whatever the plans upon the window falling away, back up
Speaker 11: my clean clothes with complain you know.
Speaker 6: When I'm not a professional songwriter. This was a song
Speaker 6: that like definitely did not come easily to me, but
Speaker 6: it felt sort of like inspired by that moment and
Speaker 6: that feeling. It was kind of like a reflection of
Speaker 6: the fact that I was noticing that my life was changing,
Speaker 6: and an expression of gratitude to her for bringing me
Speaker 6: to the place where I wanted to do that.
Speaker 3: At what point did you realize I'm writing a love
Speaker 3: song for Julia.
Speaker 6: I think that that is just what it was. I
Speaker 6: think it's just because that was sort of where it
Speaker 6: came from, So I don't think it was a realization ever.
Speaker 6: It was just kind of that was the feeling it
Speaker 6: started from.
Speaker 8: I didn't know you.
Speaker 6: I didn't know, so yeah, I was in a long
Speaker 6: distance relationship, both then with Julia because she was living
Speaker 6: in Nashville, but then also with the lead singer of
Speaker 6: my band, Adam, who he was in like the UK
Speaker 6: getting a masters in medieval literature or something, And we
Speaker 6: were always working on an album in the background, usually
Speaker 6: as like an escape patch from like one or another
Speaker 6: job that we didn't want to do, So we were
Speaker 6: always like kind of trading versions of things. We spent
Speaker 6: a lot of time basically on every song, just like
Speaker 6: trying to get it right, recording and rerecording that kind
Speaker 6: of thing. And I would always share those things with Julia,
Speaker 6: and she like a joke evolved where she sort of
Speaker 6: teasingly would be like, is this song about me a
Speaker 6: thing that I would always like flatly deny. Did she
Speaker 6: come to shows? And she would like We would always
Speaker 6: have these long introductions to our songs about Often we
Speaker 6: wrote historical songs like Mark Twain's brother died in a
Speaker 6: steamship accident, and like there would be a long preamble
Speaker 6: to the the song about you know, Samuel Clemens's brother
Speaker 6: who dies in this horrible way, but there would notably
Speaker 6: be no no preamble or introduction to this song. And
Speaker 6: so this was the thing I was often mocked about.
Speaker 6: And it kind of reached ahead when we were like
Speaker 6: crowdfunding an album that we were doing, which is a
Speaker 6: fancy way of saying like asking our friends for money,
Speaker 6: and there was a thing that we offered that was
Speaker 6: like a handwritten lyrics sheet with the story behind the song.
Speaker 6: And so Julia bought that it requested a lyric sheet
Speaker 6: with the story behind the song for this song, which
Speaker 6: as a way of like cornering me into having to
Speaker 6: admit the provenance of the song. And I did not
Speaker 6: fulfill that lyric sheet for like quite a while, and
Speaker 6: it wasn't until again sort of as like a joke
Speaker 6: in return, But it wasn't until we got engaged that
Speaker 6: I then did actually deliver the lyrics sheet with the
Speaker 6: story as a kind of like, you know, obviously this
Speaker 6: is a song about you.
Speaker 7: In the way I feel about you, seen.
Speaker 8: How you have fats it out.
Speaker 3: If I don't know you, do you have a favorite
Speaker 3: part of the song.
Speaker 6: I always love everything. Adam writes, he like wrote the
Speaker 6: last verse that I think kind of like takes it
Speaker 6: to a totally different place. It gets like a lot
Speaker 6: darker right at the end, in a way that I
Speaker 6: wouldn't have done, but think it gives a lot of hafts.
Speaker 8: Put back in, Alix.
Speaker 11: And want to have.
Speaker 10: With you.
Speaker 11: Still you haven't closed.
Speaker 12: All the dogs to the night still feels good, and
Speaker 12: lean mind into your side.
Speaker 8: Come to me the first snow.
Speaker 12: Then when that sound, Yeah, that was so Na you said,
Speaker 12: all right, canv me back?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Ben, thanks for having me.
Speaker 6: This was fun, Happy Valentine's Day.
Speaker 3: Such a beautiful song. Again, that's if I didn't know
Speaker 3: you by now by Ruken. I'm not sure if Ben's
Speaker 3: going to convince Justin that folk is the best genre
Speaker 3: for love songs. But in a minute, Malcolm Gladwell wais
Speaker 3: in and he gets us thinking about this question in
Speaker 3: an entirely different way.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't think country music does good love songs.
Speaker 5: I think it does good breakup songs, heartbreak songs. It
Speaker 5: does the reverse.
Speaker 4: Malcolm Gladwell is a best selling author, the host of
Speaker 4: Revisionist History, and Pushkin's resident country music aficionado. When I
Speaker 4: heard we were doing a Valentine's Day music episode, I
Speaker 4: knew we were going to have to get his take.
Speaker 5: So country music, it's true, which is consistent with its
Speaker 5: role in American popular culture. It is the downer to
Speaker 5: rock music's upper right. Rock music and I did a
Speaker 5: whole Revision's History episode on this. It was, you know,
Speaker 5: the striking thing about rock music is the inability of
Speaker 5: rock musicians to write effective sad songs. The sad songs
Speaker 5: are terrible. They're just not sad, right, They're not believably sad.
Speaker 5: They're rock and roll songs that are kind of you know,
Speaker 5: try to pretend to.
Speaker 2: Like.
Speaker 5: I gave the example of Wild Horses, which is supposed
Speaker 5: to be a sad song. It's not sad. What's sad
Speaker 5: about it?
Speaker 2: And also it's like total.
Speaker 5: It's also banal and like wild wild Horses, Like what
Speaker 5: is going on? I mean, it's just like it doesn't work. Country, though,
Speaker 5: is totally comfortable in that kind of emotional morass. That's
Speaker 5: the whole It's depressive music, that's the whole point. It's
Speaker 5: the South. It's like white guys who lost the Civil
Speaker 5: War never got over it. That's what it is.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 5: I was talking to some guy yesterday about the Church
Speaker 5: of Christ, which is an almost overwhelmingly Southern denomination of
Speaker 5: Christian denomination, and Nashville is the heart of Church of Christ.
Speaker 5: The music in the Church of Christ churches is insane.
Speaker 5: The Church of Christ is famously has no orchestral music.
Speaker 5: They God, No, it's all a cappella, which is way
Speaker 5: more demanding. The Church of Christ. It is not a
Speaker 5: happy denomination. It's not Pentecostals jumping up and down and
Speaker 5: welcoming the risen Lord. No, it's like it's like white
Speaker 5: Southerators bemoaning the laws of their status and like be
Speaker 5: bowing their head in the face of avengeful God, and
Speaker 5: no piano to no piano to lift their spirits. No organ,
Speaker 5: no piano, no nothing. Use your own voice, dammit. Which
Speaker 5: is why, by the way, so many country singers come
Speaker 5: for the Church of Christ. Amy Grant is Church of Christ.
Speaker 5: Merle Haggard is Church of Christ. I could go on
Speaker 5: and on. Listen if you look it up. Is insane.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm looking at this church. I'm like, this isn't
Speaker 2: Roy Orbison.
Speaker 5: They're all Church of Christ.
Speaker 4: They're all Church of Christ, Loretta Lynn Woody Guthrie.
Speaker 5: So, like, is it any surprise the country music which
Speaker 5: comes from Nashville, the epicenter of the Church of Christ
Speaker 5: is like the least happy music known to man. No,
Speaker 5: it's like it's like depressive.
Speaker 4: So stands the reason then that, like in the in
Speaker 4: the continuum of you know, when it comes to love
Speaker 4: songs and the continuum of of sort of emotions that
Speaker 4: go along with love, country music would fall more on
Speaker 4: the side of sad over a breakup, sad over a
Speaker 4: unrequited love, sad because I'm in a marriage I don't
Speaker 4: want to be in but I'm still in love with
Speaker 4: my high school sweetheart, or whatever, you know, whatever those
Speaker 4: songs are that these sad kind of love's not going
Speaker 4: right or breaking up.
Speaker 5: One of my favorite country songs about heartbreak is I
Speaker 5: think it's George Straight does fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind?
Speaker 5: Which is a classic. I mean, you can't if we're
Speaker 5: going to talk about country music and sad songs, we're
Speaker 5: starting with George Strait now, okay, So I'm gonna read
Speaker 5: to you some lyrics to does Fortworth Ever Cross Your Mind?
Speaker 5: This is the opening Stanza Cold fort Worth Beer is
Speaker 5: how it begins. Just ain't no good for jealous. I've
Speaker 5: tried it night after night you're in someone else's arms
Speaker 5: in Dallas. Does fort Worth ever cross mind?
Speaker 1: Darling?
Speaker 5: While you're busy burning bridges, burn one for me if
Speaker 5: you get time.
Speaker 13: If you get time, there's no orange. Don't fake so
Speaker 13: weasy word rausm.
Speaker 5: What's hilarious about this is this song is all about
Speaker 5: parsing the cultural distinction between fort Worth and Dallas, which
Speaker 5: looms large in the in the minds of people from
Speaker 5: Texas and the rest of us are like what this
Speaker 5: song makes no sense to anyone who's not from Texas.
Speaker 5: I want to give you a You left me here
Speaker 5: to be with him in Dallas, and I know it
Speaker 5: hurts you at the time. Well, I wonder now if
Speaker 5: it makes a difference. That's for worth across your minds.
Speaker 5: It's twenty miles away. It's a whole song. It's a
Speaker 5: whole song about a stretch of interstate. It's just so fantastic.
Speaker 5: This is what's so hilarious about it.
Speaker 2: It is like so petty, it's.
Speaker 5: So petty and so but like, this is why rock
Speaker 5: and roll can't do a breakup song, Because a breakup
Speaker 5: song requires a certain level of emotional and narrative specificity,
Speaker 5: and rock and roll is too obsessed with being universal.
Speaker 4: Yeah, not enough in the details.
Speaker 2: No details.
Speaker 5: Did Prince ever write a song about? Did Saint Paul
Speaker 5: ever cross your mind?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 5: No, no, because that's not the business he's in. He's
Speaker 5: not in the business of mode of evoking this kind
Speaker 5: of strong emotion. He was aware of the distinction between
Speaker 5: Minneapolis and Saint Paul, but chose chose to overlook it
Speaker 5: in his songwriting. That's why he's a rock musician or
Speaker 5: a R and B musician. I'm not a country musician.
Speaker 4: So so he's saying that you left me to be
Speaker 4: with him, and he's saying Dallas with the level of this,
Speaker 4: I mean, that's.
Speaker 5: A you want to have to understand a song. Here
Speaker 5: the reason why it's not Does Dallas ever crossed your mind?
Speaker 5: That's a wholly different song.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that fort Worth is the is the ugly stepsister.
Speaker 5: Fort Worth is one step down the wrung. So she
Speaker 5: left him to upgrade and move up. Yeah, that's why
Speaker 5: it hurts. She left him for for a dude in
Speaker 5: fort Worth. He's fine, he's moved on. He's not a
Speaker 5: girl in Dallas. No, no, no, no, no, no. He's at
Speaker 5: fort Worth and what does she do? Got up one morning,
Speaker 5: drove down the interstate and upgraded her situation, Lee, leaving
Speaker 5: him in a pile of tears in fort Worth.
Speaker 4: But you see, this is why, and you know I
Speaker 4: want to talking to Leah. This is why I think
Speaker 4: R and B is the greatest genre for loves on.
Speaker 4: I don't ever want to be the guy in Fort
Speaker 4: Worth finding about the woman who left me to upgrade
Speaker 4: to go to Dallas.
Speaker 2: Like that's why.
Speaker 4: Like like Whitney Houston, like you know, in her song she
Speaker 4: catches like the guide cheating and she says it's not right,
Speaker 4: but it's okay.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna make it anyway, like I.
Speaker 4: Want, I wanna you left me fine, I'm not gonna wallow.
Speaker 4: I'm just gonna move on with my life, bigger, better things,
Speaker 4: like that's what I want to live.
Speaker 5: No, No, it's you're just what you're just identifying is
Speaker 5: that she's made stronger stuff. That's what that's about. And
Speaker 5: some of this is like, is bethos somebody pronouncing that right?
Speaker 5: Bethosathos pathos, pathos are pathos. I think bethos is the
Speaker 5: word I want.
Speaker 2: Bethos b A T H.
Speaker 5: Bethos definition. Yeah, anti climax created by an unintentional lapse
Speaker 5: in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous. Like,
Speaker 5: that's what does foot worth across your mind?
Speaker 7: Is?
Speaker 5: Is Bethos right?
Speaker 1: That's what that is?
Speaker 5: Right, that's the that's the appeal, that's the appeal of
Speaker 5: the of the song.
Speaker 2: Is it is?
Speaker 1: So?
Speaker 4: I mean, is there a hope for the country music family?
Speaker 4: Like you know, I guess there are country music songs
Speaker 4: explicitly about love. They is not as good. They're just
Speaker 4: not They're not the A tier country music songs, right.
Speaker 4: I mean there's like Forever and Ever aighty man Randy
Speaker 4: Travis people played at their wedding and there.
Speaker 5: But that's a song. But think about that song the
Speaker 5: way he sings it. He sings it like it's a
Speaker 5: sad song. I'm going to love you forever and ever.
Speaker 2: It's very wistful.
Speaker 5: Forever and Ever. It sounds like he's committing to a
Speaker 5: prison sense. Ah man, Like.
Speaker 4: What does it say about you, Malcolm that when you're
Speaker 4: asked to think what genre might be the greatest for
Speaker 4: love songs?
Speaker 2: The breakup song.
Speaker 5: I Want some I had a friend named Mike and
Speaker 5: he didn't know me very well, and we decided to
Speaker 5: go to a ballgame together. This is in the eighties,
Speaker 5: and we drove from Washington See to Baltimore to see
Speaker 5: the Orioles and I played some mixtapes in a car
Speaker 5: and end he turned to me and he said, I
Speaker 5: had no idea how depressed you are, because every single
Speaker 5: song on the mixtape was a song about some kind
Speaker 5: of broken heart, suffering, sadness, death. I don't know that's
Speaker 5: what I wanted a song.
Speaker 4: But there is no part of being around you that
Speaker 4: feelsmird in sadness, depressed.
Speaker 1: No, but I don't.
Speaker 5: I don't want to. I don't like upbeat song So
Speaker 5: why it's my problem with rock and roll is just
Speaker 5: like just calm down already, like just this, Can we
Speaker 5: wallow in our emotions for a moment here and not
Speaker 5: just beating your head against the wall in necstasy. It
Speaker 5: just it strikes me as unseemly.
Speaker 4: Leah, I mean several points well taken from Malcolm.
Speaker 2: You know, I love country music dearly.
Speaker 4: I think songwriting is impeccable, and they certainly do a
Speaker 4: love song in a setnd song incredibly well. But you know,
Speaker 4: I just I guess I just I just like a
Speaker 4: more happy song. I like a mom Just no, No,
Speaker 4: I don't know if I can live like in that
Speaker 4: kind of misery.
Speaker 3: I think it's so funny. I mean, you know that
Speaker 3: I love a sad song over a happy song, and
Speaker 3: I'll take a depressed, unrequited love song over a happy
Speaker 3: over the moon love song any day.
Speaker 4: Well, Leah, you know, I feel like we're back to
Speaker 4: where we started, which is you know, I mean, You're
Speaker 4: probably right. Look, the whole idea of genre is and
Speaker 4: it's a it's a man made creation, and there's probably
Speaker 4: no way to categorize what sort of genre and what
Speaker 4: culture does the love song the best.
Speaker 3: It's just so subjective.
Speaker 4: It's so totally subjective, and you know it's for me
Speaker 4: based on my personal experiences still R and B. I mean,
Speaker 4: I think I'm even further to entrenched in my position
Speaker 4: now at this point. But you know, I love that
Speaker 4: Malcolm and Ben both have their strong feelings, and I
Speaker 4: love that your ever sort of noncommittalness around any of that.
Speaker 3: Yes, I know, I'm just going to keep it open.
Speaker 3: I'm keeping it open for new experiences, and I'm going
Speaker 3: to sit here and I'm going to celebrate Valentine's Day
Speaker 3: by listening to songs that make me cry.
Speaker 2: Well you know, no, no, no, celebrate Valentine's Day. I
Speaker 2: made a great playlist love songs. Listen to that.
Speaker 4: We'll put that in the show notes, and listen to that,
Speaker 4: not the sad songs.
Speaker 1: Please.
Speaker 2: Wait.
Speaker 3: I just saved a playlist, and this is real. I
Speaker 3: just saved a playlist from Spotify called Classics for Crying,
Speaker 3: So I'm getting that cute up.
Speaker 4: This episode was produced by Isabelle Carter and edited by
Speaker 4: Sarah Nix.
Speaker 2: Our mix engineer is Sarah Bruguier.
Speaker 3: Special thanks to ben Atahoffrey, Malcolm Gladwell, Costanza, Guyardo, Owen Miller,
Speaker 3: and Eric Sandler.
Speaker 4: I'm your host, Justin Richmond, and I'm Leah Rose.
Speaker 3: Happy Valentine's Day.
Speaker 8: Eh Yeah