Speaker 1: I have an eight year old and then this little
Speaker 1: baby who's one and a half, and the eight year
Speaker 1: old is kind of like curious about all the older kids. Stuff.
Speaker 1: Actually told her what the swear words were this morning,
Speaker 1: she asked, and I was like, I'm going to just
Speaker 1: tell you what they are and how to spell them.
Speaker 1: And if I tell you them, would you just not
Speaker 1: save them? Does not save them? For a while, my
Speaker 1: mom had really never told me anything. But then when
Speaker 1: I went and I was like, hey, what about this?
Speaker 1: She was like, I know, it's crazy. Why don't you
Speaker 1: tell me? She's like, I don't know. I just thought
Speaker 1: I'll you'd wait for you. Amazing. Hello, I'm Mini Driver.
Speaker 1: Welcome to The Many Questions Season two. I've always loved
Speaker 1: Chruz's question at It was originally a nineteenth century parlor
Speaker 1: game where players would ask each other thirty five questions
Speaker 1: aimed at revealing the other player's true nature. It's just
Speaker 1: the scientific method, really. In asking different people the same
Speaker 1: set of questions, you can make observations about which truths
Speaker 1: appeared to be universal. I love this discipline, and it
Speaker 1: made me wonder, what if these questions were just the
Speaker 1: jumping off point? What greater depths would be revealed if
Speaker 1: I ask these questions as conversation starters with thought leaders
Speaker 1: and trailblazers across all these different disciplines. So I adapted
Speaker 1: prus questionnaire and I wrote my own seven questions that
Speaker 1: I personally think a pertinent to a person's story. They
Speaker 1: are when and where were you happiest? What is the
Speaker 1: quality you like least about yourself? What relationship, real or fictionalized,
Speaker 1: defines love for you? What question would you most like answered,
Speaker 1: What person, place, or experience has shaped you the most?
Speaker 1: What would be your last meal? And can you tell
Speaker 1: me something in your life that's grown out of a
Speaker 1: personal disaster? And I've gathered a group of really remarkable people,
Speaker 1: ones that I am honored and humbled to have had
Speaker 1: the chance to engage with. You may not hear their
Speaker 1: answers to all seven of these questions. We've whittled it
Speaker 1: down to which questions felt closest to their experience, or
Speaker 1: the most surprising, or created the most fertile ground to connect.
Speaker 1: My guest today on many questions is musician and multiple
Speaker 1: Tony Award winner Anius Mitchell. Anius wrote the extraordinarily brilliant
Speaker 1: musical Hades Town, which won eight Tony's out of fourteen nominations,
Speaker 1: including Best Musical and Best Original Score. She is, by
Speaker 1: any standard of musical bloody genius, and her curiosity, her talent,
Speaker 1: and her spirit feel like they permeate all aspects of
Speaker 1: her life. Hadestown is a telling of the Greek myth
Speaker 1: of Orpheus and Euridiccy through jazz, folk rock, and pure Americana.
Speaker 1: And if you know the story of Orpheus and Euridacy,
Speaker 1: Orpheus to sends into the underworld to rescue his love Euridiccy,
Speaker 1: and when Hades, king of the Underworld, allows him to
Speaker 1: take her back to the world, his only instruction is
Speaker 1: that Obvious must not look back as they are ascending
Speaker 1: up into the world. And you were to see us
Speaker 1: walking behind him, and in this moment of what I
Speaker 1: have always thought of as sort of thick headed hubris,
Speaker 1: although as sees it differently, Ophous looks back and you
Speaker 1: were to see is lost to him forever. It's a
Speaker 1: sad miss but Hades Town is full of the kind
Speaker 1: of raw, soulful joy that makes even this sad love
Speaker 1: story shine with magic. When and where were you happiest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when and where I was the happiest. This one is
Speaker 1: so tricky. There's so many different moments and eras of
Speaker 1: my life, and I feel like immediately I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: I should talk about birth of my children. I should,
Speaker 1: you know, things I should say. But the one that
Speaker 1: just popped into my mind first is this moment. I
Speaker 1: was like, I was twenty seven years old, and I
Speaker 1: was coming out of like a kind of a stuck
Speaker 1: time in my life, like creatively socially, just feeling like
Speaker 1: everything was inching along and not and then never like
Speaker 1: coming to fruition, and it just felt kind of stuck.
Speaker 1: I guess it was my saddern return, right, kind of
Speaker 1: classic for that. So the first thing that happened was
Speaker 1: I read Eckert Totally's book for the first time. Have
Speaker 1: you read those books? Oh yeah, oh yeah? Did you
Speaker 1: read What the Power of Now? It was actually A
Speaker 1: New Earth was the first one I read, and I
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't have read it except someone I really trusted
Speaker 1: kind of said here, if they saw me in my
Speaker 1: sadder Return moment, They're like, here, you should read this book.
Speaker 1: I've reread it since, but it was the first time
Speaker 1: it really packs the wall of for people that haven't
Speaker 1: read it, all about being present in the moment and
Speaker 1: kind of detaching like your experience of life and being
Speaker 1: in the world from all of the names that we
Speaker 1: put on it. So I'm reading this book and I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'll read a few pages and then just put it
Speaker 1: down and feel so alive and jrful. And at this moment,
Speaker 1: I was offered a gig opening a tour in Europe
Speaker 1: for a band, a big, much bigger band that I
Speaker 1: didn't really know, but I came to really admire. And
Speaker 1: so it was me opening solo acoustic tar for this big,
Speaker 1: beautiful band and riding on their bus, you know, in Europe,
Speaker 1: and we were kind of like stay up all night
Speaker 1: we played the gig, We'd stay up all night listening
Speaker 1: to music. What was the thing before the iPhone, the iPod,
Speaker 1: right like pass around the iPod and everyone would get
Speaker 1: to choose music, and we just were so in love
Speaker 1: with music. And I remember this one morning that we
Speaker 1: woke up we had a day off, and we were
Speaker 1: in Paris and we were rolled out of the bus
Speaker 1: and there's a little cafe and started to drink beer,
Speaker 1: you know in the in the daylight, like these tall
Speaker 1: French beers, and then just like coming out of this
Speaker 1: cafe and the sun was shining, was kind of cold day,
Speaker 1: the sun is shining, and I looked across the street
Speaker 1: and there was the Louver, and so I went to
Speaker 1: the Louver and the art was hearing like a thousand
Speaker 1: times as hard because the Eckert totally and the beer, yeah,
Speaker 1: and the friendship, the camaie and just being out there
Speaker 1: doing what I wanted to be doing, and so that
Speaker 1: was like a moment for me that was a very
Speaker 1: happy time. I love that. You know what's funny is
Speaker 1: like the idea when we think about happiness, and it's
Speaker 1: certainly in having talked to loads of people about it,
Speaker 1: the idea of there being a sort of a purity
Speaker 1: in anything that it is on a Lloyd, that there
Speaker 1: isn't a confluence of things happening at any one moment
Speaker 1: that creates these moments like it's I feel like we're
Speaker 1: extraordinarily binary and going, well, if I'm doing this, I
Speaker 1: will be happy this one thing. Whereas it's really totally
Speaker 1: and it's beer and it's light and Paris and opportunity
Speaker 1: and probably a certain return it's all these things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes total sense. Again and again I come to
Speaker 1: the realization at like the big moments I'm often not
Speaker 1: as present for like the winning of the Tony or whatever.
Speaker 1: It was like in a fugue stick, you know, like
Speaker 1: I just I wasn't even there. And even my wedding,
Speaker 1: you know, which was like so beautiful, it felt like
Speaker 1: such a oh my friends and family, this culmination of
Speaker 1: so much in this commitment, and it was kind of
Speaker 1: like an incredible party that I wasn't entirely at, And
Speaker 1: so I just sort of had stuff looking for satisfaction
Speaker 1: and happiness from the moments when everyone's like, how does
Speaker 1: it feel? How does it feel? I think that is
Speaker 1: exactly it. And as with most sort of like ruminations
Speaker 1: that I think we probably then forget about and get
Speaker 1: them with making the coffee, changing the diaper, it's like
Speaker 1: take your eye off the ball, like my dad used
Speaker 1: to say, when something was really bad, was one was
Speaker 1: really hard, stop looking at it, even though it feels overwhelming.
Speaker 1: To take your eye off it and get back into
Speaker 1: the sort of menut shy of what is happening, and
Speaker 1: you will start to metabolize your life again and weirdly
Speaker 1: piggyback your better feeling onto that shitty thing. I think
Speaker 1: these in the same way that these huge moments they
Speaker 1: require almost too much for us to be able to quantify,
Speaker 1: whereas it's these tiny moments, these fragments that you patch
Speaker 1: together and suddenly that's where the explosion. Yes, that's huge,
Speaker 1: that's huge, And I feel like two things jumped into
Speaker 1: my mind. One is like if you're doing a crossword puzzle,
Speaker 1: you know, and you get stuck on a clue and
Speaker 1: you just want to like bang your head against the
Speaker 1: newspaper to find this clue, yeah, or cheat, right, But
Speaker 1: usually like if you take a break, like you just
Speaker 1: got to take a break and put your mind somewhere else,
Speaker 1: and then the soft focus, Like a lot of things
Speaker 1: come out of that soft focus. That's too creatively, I
Speaker 1: think you when I'm writing and when it's difficult, I walk.
Speaker 1: There was a whole thing neurologically that literally, when you
Speaker 1: are physically doing something else, your brain stops worrying at
Speaker 1: your right and left brain are sort of more balanced
Speaker 1: when you add in another activity. So it actually kind
Speaker 1: of makes sense. But I always find that the great
Speaker 1: unblocking comes when I do something else. Yeah. Yeah. At
Speaker 1: one point when I was working on Hades Sound, I
Speaker 1: was living in Park Slope in Brooklyn, and I was
Speaker 1: kind of borrowing my friends studio, which was in Lefford's
Speaker 1: Cardens around the other side of the park as a
Speaker 1: writing spot. So I would get on my bike and
Speaker 1: I would ride around Prospect Park to get to the studio,
Speaker 1: and I would have all these ideas, like I'd have
Speaker 1: ideas on the bike. Sometimes I roll around the park,
Speaker 1: the whole park, and then get to Leffords Guard and
Speaker 1: get to the studio, get to the desk, and then nothing,
Speaker 1: you know, nothing would happen at the desk, just as
Speaker 1: such an illustration of the app soft focus. And I
Speaker 1: even feel like in my life I've noticed side projects
Speaker 1: often are so magical and had son. You know, for
Speaker 1: a long time it was a side project. I felt
Speaker 1: like my songwriter career was the main thing, and then
Speaker 1: this is this weird other thing I'm going to kind
Speaker 1: of soft focus on. At a certain point it became
Speaker 1: the main thing. But there's a charmed quality to those
Speaker 1: things that were not obsessing over how did you write?
Speaker 1: Because you wrote another record while you were writing Hadi's
Speaker 1: time Bonnie exactly, Bonnie lad Horseman. But was that what
Speaker 1: you were talking about was that you had to take
Speaker 1: your eye off the ball and do something else or
Speaker 1: did you just owe a record and you had to
Speaker 1: write it. Yeah, that felt the same way. It was
Speaker 1: a side project. I was like, this is not my identity.
Speaker 1: There's not a lot of anxiety around that music at all,
Speaker 1: and it was easy as working with these two beautiful
Speaker 1: friend collaborators, Josh Kaufman and Eric D. Johnson, And it
Speaker 1: felt easy. And usually I don't trust that, like I
Speaker 1: think it's got to be hard or it's not going
Speaker 1: to be good, but that band felt like, oh wow,
Speaker 1: it's it feels so intuitive and natural. And so it
Speaker 1: was at that point that was the side project that
Speaker 1: was sort of giving me life interesting. I think my
Speaker 1: dad might have been a bit of an act cart Tolley,
Speaker 1: because I do think it's like, take your mind off
Speaker 1: the thing and put it elsewhere, and then the thing
Speaker 1: will work itself out and you'll get everything that you
Speaker 1: need to solve that problem by doing this other thing.
Speaker 1: As with most personal growth, it sounds counter into your type,
Speaker 1: which is probably why we don't do it enough, because
Speaker 1: it's like Wow, that sounds great. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: do that right, Yeah exactly. The director of Haiti Sound,
Speaker 1: Rachel Chapkin, is like kind of a Jedi, yeah, Jedi
Speaker 1: creative person and she gets a lot of good ideas
Speaker 1: when she's napping. And she'll take these little naps where
Speaker 1: she's very good at falling asleep in the middle of
Speaker 1: the day, you know, anywhere, just kind go in the
Speaker 1: back room and lay on the floor and can make
Speaker 1: herself fall asleep. And the way that she does it
Speaker 1: is she kind of she lays down and then she
Speaker 1: says she phrased the mind by thinking about like three
Speaker 1: or four things at once, like three or four things
Speaker 1: that she's interested in. She put her mind on him
Speaker 1: at once, and that kind of is like enough to
Speaker 1: knock her out. And I love she fries her own
Speaker 1: circuit board. Yeah exactly exactly, And somehow the frying of
Speaker 1: the circuit board then leads to like these great ideas
Speaker 1: that happened in the Knap state, in the knap space.
Speaker 1: Well that's also her book now, it's called Knapsack. What
Speaker 1: quality do you like least about yourself? I am definitely
Speaker 1: someone who overthinks and second guesses a lot, and I
Speaker 1: think just insecurity that I feel like I've lived with
Speaker 1: my whole life and I keep expecting it to go away,
Speaker 1: you know, as like I get older, I'm like, when
Speaker 1: am I gonna give less? Can I swear on the
Speaker 1: show or no swearing? Oh? Yeah, you can swear absolutely.
Speaker 1: I'll give you full permission, like not like, give no
Speaker 1: Fox anymore? If the fewer, you know, give fewer. I
Speaker 1: haven't arrived there yet. I just I care too much.
Speaker 1: Sometimes did I say something awkward? Is this song you
Speaker 1: know as good as it could be? Do I look bad?
Speaker 1: You know? Things like that it's exhausting. Do you find
Speaker 1: that the achievements so as you're standing there with the
Speaker 1: hardware of a tony, like multiple Tonys in your hands,
Speaker 1: did you ever sort of consciously allow that to mitigate
Speaker 1: that other voice? Like, do you ever think back to
Speaker 1: your achievements and help them soothe those moments of insecurity?
Speaker 1: I think no. The one thing I will say I
Speaker 1: feel a little bit more confident about now is that
Speaker 1: I've written enough songs that I know that at the
Speaker 1: moment when I'm like, I don't know how to write
Speaker 1: a song, there's no way I'm going to finish the songs.
Speaker 1: You know, I kind of can look back and be like, well,
Speaker 1: you did finish all those other songs, so probably it's
Speaker 1: going to happen. You know. That feels a little more
Speaker 1: sure for me. But in terms of like I'm meeting
Speaker 1: somebody at a party and I'm like, I want to Tony,
Speaker 1: it doesn't cross my mind. You know, taking like a
Speaker 1: power stance and in the women's room, we certainly allow
Speaker 1: ourselves to be haunted by the shitty things that happened
Speaker 1: to us. Oh yeah, why didn't we allow ourselves to
Speaker 1: be beautifully haunted by those things that we've achieved. I
Speaker 1: wonder why we don't do that more. They're they're they're
Speaker 1: available energy and actually fundamentally tangible, like you did these things.
Speaker 1: I do that sometimes with my son. I look at
Speaker 1: Henry when when things are not working out and go,
Speaker 1: I made a person. I made a person who is
Speaker 1: so funny and talented and kind and good, and give
Speaker 1: myself some sort of credit for that. Yeah. Kids do
Speaker 1: kind of change the equation a little bit because it's
Speaker 1: like your relationship with them has nothing to do with
Speaker 1: your creative accomplishments. You know, it's kind of like there's
Speaker 1: a foundation of family love that is going to be there.
Speaker 1: However awkward you are at a party, it's going to
Speaker 1: be there. Yeah, exactly how old is your son? He
Speaker 1: just turned thirteen? Amazing. Wow, it is completely bananas because
Speaker 1: it's the same. It's the same feeling as when they
Speaker 1: were one and a half or when they were six
Speaker 1: months old. I'm seven thousand miles away from my son
Speaker 1: right now, and it's brutal. Yeah, even though I know
Speaker 1: he's totally fine and happy and doing his thing. It's
Speaker 1: just I don't think that ever goes away that feeling
Speaker 1: of I need to be in close proximity. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: wonder what it's like for my parents now, you know,
Speaker 1: like an adult life, if you still have those vieelings
Speaker 1: or not. It's funny. I think they do. I just
Speaker 1: think that there's more space in between because that the
Speaker 1: letting go, which is what nobody ever tells you about
Speaker 1: about parenting. The very first thing literally physically that you
Speaker 1: do with your child is let go. Everything is more
Speaker 1: letting go, and I think as you get older. I
Speaker 1: was very close with my mother, but I watched how
Speaker 1: she would foster those spaces in between because she knew
Speaker 1: that we had to go and do our thing, but
Speaker 1: I know now that it was active and conscious and
Speaker 1: probably quite painful, right, I know it's brutal, actually, I
Speaker 1: mean it's beautiful. It's beautiful and brutal parenting because I
Speaker 1: would literally I would have Henry carry me around his
Speaker 1: book bag, like if possible, I just like get inside,
Speaker 1: back back, I'll stay here through double chemistry with you.
Speaker 1: I just wanted what relationship, real or fictionalized to find
Speaker 1: love for you. I'm a kind of a romantic, like
Speaker 1: I always have kind of been a romantic and love
Speaker 1: to the idea of you know, love at first sight
Speaker 1: and a kind of twin souls, you know, and yeah,
Speaker 1: that idea that you meet someone I'm thinking of worth
Speaker 1: us and your reality right now, because it's that's what
Speaker 1: it was. Yeah. I remember, like a bunch of times
Speaker 1: in the sort of amateurgical trenches of working on the show,
Speaker 1: people with the dramaturg or like someone else would be like,
Speaker 1: but why does you love her? You know, why does
Speaker 1: orpheus love you? Real Tocy and I would be like,
Speaker 1: because he's orpheous and she's your really, which is not
Speaker 1: enough for you know, a lot of people they need
Speaker 1: to see the kind of causality. But the idea of this,
Speaker 1: what's what is written in the stars. And oh another
Speaker 1: kind of fictional version of that that went deep for
Speaker 1: me is that Hemmingway book for Whom the Bell Tolls.
Speaker 1: You know, just these like young revolutionaries like fighting fascism
Speaker 1: and their love and it's like the earth moves and
Speaker 1: all that stuff. And I feel like I've had an
Speaker 1: experience of that with my life partner. I've been went
Speaker 1: the same guys since I was nineteen. We were like
Speaker 1: not fully formed in our identities, you know, we were
Speaker 1: like wet clay when we met, and it wasn't full on,
Speaker 1: you know, from the age of nineteen. There was kind
Speaker 1: of a courtship and there was some breakups and stuff,
Speaker 1: but there were a bunch of moments that felt like
Speaker 1: these star cross moments like oh my god, this is
Speaker 1: my person, you know, and almost like a scary terrifying
Speaker 1: because you see your mortality connected to it. It contains
Speaker 1: everything this idea of like the love at first sight.
Speaker 1: It's like youthful infatuation and beauty and then also you
Speaker 1: know you're gonna die with this person, like you you
Speaker 1: see the whole thing, and it contains all of it,
Speaker 1: and and so there's a way in which it's almost
Speaker 1: like it's tragic even if it's not ortheous in your Idacy,
Speaker 1: or or Romeo and Juliet. It's like, even if you're
Speaker 1: married for seventy five years and then you die in
Speaker 1: each other's arms, it's still like a tragedy at some level. Right, Wow,
Speaker 1: the span, I think that's pretty amazing, Like you hold
Speaker 1: the paradigm that is pretty massive at the idea at
Speaker 1: nineteen to be able to be with someone that kind
Speaker 1: of love and the love. Now are you in your
Speaker 1: like late thirties, like around I just turned forty. Look
Speaker 1: at that, like that twenty year span, Like that's incredible
Speaker 1: to be able to see the end and to not
Speaker 1: let it derail then now, to see it as tragic,
Speaker 1: to see it as beautiful, to see it as never ending.
Speaker 1: I mean, no wonder you love the Greeks. Really. I
Speaker 1: work up this morning thinking about Orpheus and euridacy because
Speaker 1: the last thing this person that I he was my
Speaker 1: best friend and I loved him very very very much.
Speaker 1: We were together for a long time and then it
Speaker 1: ended horribly. The most helpful thing he ever said to
Speaker 1: me was don't look back. And I've always linked it
Speaker 1: to orpheous and euridacy. I've always linked it to that
Speaker 1: moment of just don't look back, Just don't. I know
Speaker 1: what happens if you do. You know what happens if
Speaker 1: you do. Just don't do it. I think about those
Speaker 1: gifts that you get from people that have hurt you,
Speaker 1: and I wondered if he got it from orpheus. He
Speaker 1: loved the Greeks too so, and but I don't look
Speaker 1: back for you? Was it to not doubt yourself? Was it?
Speaker 1: The idea of like, don't look down almost is literally
Speaker 1: coming back to the Eckhart totally idea of it is
Speaker 1: a complete illusion to look back, to look back and
Speaker 1: feel that that is going to have really any relevance.
Speaker 1: And I know that's sort of a bold statement, but
Speaker 1: the now, this moment, trust this now, to trust that
Speaker 1: all of the ideas that you think, like, if I
Speaker 1: look back, I will get this if I look back
Speaker 1: and I pick over the bones at this thing, if
Speaker 1: I look back because I'm frightened, it will somehow make
Speaker 1: mine now better. And that that is a fallacy. It's
Speaker 1: such an extraordinary gift that he gave me because I
Speaker 1: think it often, particular, when I start being frightened about
Speaker 1: historical stuff that I'm worried is going to play out
Speaker 1: again in this now, I shriek it at myself Sometimes
Speaker 1: this morning I was shrieking it orvious, like just don't
Speaker 1: just don't look. I just keep walking, Just keep walking,
Speaker 1: and it's going to be fine. Like trust you can't
Speaker 1: hear anything, you can't see anything, you don't know anything.
Speaker 1: Trust this very moment and you will be all right.
Speaker 1: Oh man, Yeah, a cosmic thing that kind of happened
Speaker 1: with our orpheus and you're to see I think I'm
Speaker 1: allowed to tell it's quite public at this point, but
Speaker 1: our actors that play orphous and you're to see totally
Speaker 1: film love you know they really that's amazing. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I thought, oh, you know, when I saw that that
Speaker 1: was hapening, I was like, I hope they can keep
Speaker 1: it together because it's not going to be easy. You know,
Speaker 1: six months down the line, if there's a breakup and
Speaker 1: they're like trying to play these start cross lovers and
Speaker 1: but they're still together. They made it through the pandemic.
Speaker 1: They're like got a dog, Like it's beautiful and they're
Speaker 1: so beautiful together. It's crazy because it's a story that
Speaker 1: the people know how it ends, but there's still a
Speaker 1: gasp like when he turns around, it's like, how did
Speaker 1: this happen? That's exactly it. We want to change the
Speaker 1: ending of the story, maybe like seeing the repetition of
Speaker 1: that over and over again, it's like you, you can't
Speaker 1: change that story, but you can take the piece that
Speaker 1: you're shrieking about and you can bring it into your
Speaker 1: life and go, I know how that works out? Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 1: And there's also something about like you're saying that this
Speaker 1: sort of this X of yours gave you this piece
Speaker 1: of wisdom that you have carried on in your life,
Speaker 1: and that there's a way in which, like I'm like,
Speaker 1: you light someone's candle with your candle and then or
Speaker 1: their cigarette with your cigarette, and you keep a flame going.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of I think in the Orpheus story,
Speaker 1: at least the way it plays out with Hades Toun
Speaker 1: is like, well, okay, we still celebrate Orpheus because he
Speaker 1: kept the flame and now it's someone else's turn. Got
Speaker 1: that such a beautiful image, like the relay of love? Yes,
Speaker 1: and we judge the tragic part of it, the part
Speaker 1: of it not working out. But actually, as you just said,
Speaker 1: like in your own life, it's part of the whole.
Speaker 1: The tragedy is always there, present in the joy and
Speaker 1: the wonder. It doesn't diminish your takeaway or fears. Seeing
Speaker 1: you really to see in the forest or wherever it
Speaker 1: was that he saw her and falling madly in love,
Speaker 1: and the very short time that they had to love
Speaker 1: each other, or the short time that I had to
Speaker 1: love this man. It's not diminished by how it ended
Speaker 1: up in a way, but it's hard to hold that
Speaker 1: in your heart that all can be true. Poor humans,
Speaker 1: we're given certain tools that we just don't use. What
Speaker 1: would be your last meal? From my best meal, I
Speaker 1: would like it to be a sort of like this
Speaker 1: is your life meal. You know that I could return
Speaker 1: to some dishes that were You know how at different
Speaker 1: times of your life you just do one dish a lot,
Speaker 1: and then maybe you're sick of it and you don't
Speaker 1: do it again. But then if you were to have
Speaker 1: it again, it reminds you of this era. And so
Speaker 1: here's what I'm gonna do. This is okay, it's a
Speaker 1: few things yes, okay, okay, So from my childhood, I'm
Speaker 1: going to have So I grew up on this sheep farm,
Speaker 1: and my parents they spent a little time on this
Speaker 1: Greek island when they were young hippies. Then like they
Speaker 1: carried the kind of romance for this Greek island with them,
Speaker 1: I think in my childhood. And so my mom she
Speaker 1: would make like a marinadd lamb chopped. It was all
Speaker 1: about just like marinade them like crazy with the family marinade,
Speaker 1: and then broiled them like really fast on both sides.
Speaker 1: And also I think like she would make these Greek
Speaker 1: potatoes they had lemon and garlic, and so I associate
Speaker 1: that with this sort of special family meal that we
Speaker 1: would have, like if people came over for dinner, it
Speaker 1: was all like we're gonna have lamp. So I'm going
Speaker 1: to have that. And then so my husband, my life partner,
Speaker 1: he is a farmer of vegetables, and there's a couple
Speaker 1: of kind of vegetable dishes that I associate with him
Speaker 1: in different times of our life. And so I'll get
Speaker 1: his vegetables and I will make like a kale salad.
Speaker 1: You massage the kale with you know, the salt in
Speaker 1: the oil, and then maybe it's feta and lemon and
Speaker 1: like maybe some toasted seeds and they're all like finally ribboned,
Speaker 1: ribboned up, and all right, what else was I think? Oh? Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so Haiti's town. I've worked on Haiti sound for so long,
Speaker 1: and I spent a lot of time with Rachel Chapkin,
Speaker 1: the director, and our music director, Liam Robinson. And there's
Speaker 1: a whole era where we were working on the show
Speaker 1: out of town, and so we would be put up
Speaker 1: in these little flats and a lot of times, like
Speaker 1: late at night, we come back to the flat someone's
Speaker 1: flat and we would fry some Halloomi cheese, like we
Speaker 1: all got into halloom me at the same time. And
Speaker 1: now if I taste the Halloomi cheese, I picture this
Speaker 1: like really joyful time of like in the trenches with
Speaker 1: those guys eyes working on that show, which is really
Speaker 1: like a third of my creative life was like working
Speaker 1: on that show. So I have the Halloomi. I don't
Speaker 1: have a meaningful dessert really, so I might just have
Speaker 1: like a chocolate moose. You know. There's a thing that
Speaker 1: I always like, don't let myself have it. So I
Speaker 1: would have it. Wow, I really like that. There's a
Speaker 1: kind of Dickensie and let's go back and revisit the
Speaker 1: ghosts of meals past. Yeah, it's like Proust. It's like
Speaker 1: the Madaline and the Teeth. That's a way better analogy.
Speaker 1: I love that because it does it. It lights up
Speaker 1: those parts of our life. So it really just becomes
Speaker 1: the illustration of memory in such an immediate way. And
Speaker 1: food can do that like and and actually, I guess
Speaker 1: the sense of smell really does that in a way
Speaker 1: that you know, you smell like a product, like a
Speaker 1: perfume that your boyfriend wore when we're like fourteen or something,
Speaker 1: and it's just like a complete body slam of memory.
Speaker 1: And music is that way too. I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 1: But if I listened to Elliott Smith, it's so painful
Speaker 1: and it is so beautiful. I was in the studio
Speaker 1: with him while he was recording Exo and when he
Speaker 1: was layering these vocals, and it was it was so funny,
Speaker 1: like watching somebody build something which is still standing now
Speaker 1: he's gone. It's incredible. It's like experiencing the strongest moments
Speaker 1: of him. It's so interesting how there is music. It
Speaker 1: hits you on every single level and kind of takes
Speaker 1: your breath away. It's so physiological, like you really feel
Speaker 1: it in your body. And I look at a person
Speaker 1: I get like obsessed with one song, almost like I
Speaker 1: can't breathe, like I need it, you know, like you
Speaker 1: get in the cards like quick, get it on, like
Speaker 1: get it on the stereo like I need it, and
Speaker 1: just listen again and again and again to one song
Speaker 1: or one album from one artist at a time. And
Speaker 1: then if I hear that song, it takes me back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's feeling right, it's getting having permission to feel again.
Speaker 1: Poor sweet humans, we can't marshal all of the stuff
Speaker 1: that there is to synthesize and feel in this life.
Speaker 1: I think music is a way of doing that. As
Speaker 1: his food, as his love, I suppose. Yeah, music is
Speaker 1: very calming for me. I find like if I'm at
Speaker 1: home and like, you know, the boredom of children, A
Speaker 1: small children, Yeah, yes, small children. They're just like they
Speaker 1: want to read the same board book a million times.
Speaker 1: And if I have music on, I don't mind. You know,
Speaker 1: if you're cooking something, they go together. If you're cooking something,
Speaker 1: you smell that thing cooking out of the kitchen and
Speaker 1: you've got the music on, everything is okay, you can
Speaker 1: sort of be cool. Yeah, it's absolutely true. Certainly with
Speaker 1: the children thing. It gives you a place to sit
Speaker 1: on that is above the grinding repetition of small children,
Speaker 1: which is obviously how they're learning. They need to repeat
Speaker 1: all that stuff. But it doesn't like you in saying,
Speaker 1: but listening to phole records, I must say, I love
Speaker 1: doing that. My son's just started doing that and going,
Speaker 1: you know, because these children, they've just been indoctrinated with
Speaker 1: like a single or like a song to playing him albums.
Speaker 1: He came running in the other he just listened to
Speaker 1: Inner Visions and he was like, Mom, it's connected, the
Speaker 1: whole thing. It's connected. And doing something else. I said,
Speaker 1: what do you mean. He's like the songs it's connected,
Speaker 1: like if you listen to them one after the my
Speaker 1: sweet friend who's like born into the world of like
Speaker 1: infinite shuffle, like there's no connectivity. It was so brilliant
Speaker 1: his little face when he saw that music could be written,
Speaker 1: you know, all the way through in the an A
Speaker 1: side and a B side, Like there was a reason
Speaker 1: that those five songs there, the other five songs were there,
Speaker 1: and how they connected. Yes, I love that. Well, first
Speaker 1: of all, I love your accent, your son, whatever you're
Speaker 1: impression in him. You know, he gets very annoyed because
Speaker 1: he doesn't really talk like this anymore, but he did
Speaker 1: his whole life. I have video to prove that. He
Speaker 1: always sounded like a tiny bookie from the Catskills. Amazing, amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know what you're talking about. With the sequencing of
Speaker 1: an album. I completely lost my mind trying to sequence
Speaker 1: this record. But yeah, I took months. It took months,
Speaker 1: and it ultimately cut a couple of songs. That's the
Speaker 1: hardest thing. That is like killing something you love. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. Nowadays, like you can put
Speaker 1: them out and put them out as a couple of songs,
Speaker 1: so it's not a big deal, but it feels like
Speaker 1: maybe it's a thankless job. With its bonny light Horseman music.
Speaker 1: We're we're all like obsessed with the album and the
Speaker 1: A side and the B side and you know, how
Speaker 1: are they connected? Yeah, what's the narrative arc of things?
Speaker 1: Let alone, you know, here's the banjo on this one,
Speaker 1: and the syclophone and this one and this isn't key
Speaker 1: of C and this isn't you know, you can't have
Speaker 1: two sees following each other. Well, this one cap, but
Speaker 1: it's like, but it does go after that, Well it can't.
Speaker 1: Then you gotta put it in a different key because yeah,
Speaker 1: all of those battles so tricky. But also nowadays, like
Speaker 1: because of the algorithms, like people may not hear the
Speaker 1: music in the order that you put it on the record.
Speaker 1: Like basically whatever is popular will then rise to the top,
Speaker 1: and that might be the first song people here it is.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right, that's what the algorithm does. So this
Speaker 1: whole notion of it really was like one, two, three,
Speaker 1: four five, Like that's the order. I do like doing
Speaker 1: that with people's records and seeing what they I've really
Speaker 1: tried to do that with a new record. No, I'm
Speaker 1: the same, I'm the same. It's special when songs can
Speaker 1: speak to each other, and a lot of times they do.
Speaker 1: What person, place, or experience has most altered your life.
Speaker 1: The person that leaps to mind is my grandma. My
Speaker 1: parents had a house, and then my grandparents also when
Speaker 1: they were alive, had a house on the same land.
Speaker 1: And now this is in aside. But my brother's family
Speaker 1: has a house on this farm, and we have recently
Speaker 1: left New York City and we're living in Vermontain. We're
Speaker 1: going to renovate my grandparents house and move into it.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of a full circle moment for us.
Speaker 1: But this house, my grandparents house, Like I spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time down there. It's literally my happy place.
Speaker 1: Like when I was getting ready to give birth for
Speaker 1: the first time, I did like a hypno birthing class,
Speaker 1: you know, and they're like, what is your happy place?
Speaker 1: And I thought my grandma's house, And I'm picture myself
Speaker 1: like laying on the floor with like a son beam
Speaker 1: coming in like a carpeted floor, and the sun coming
Speaker 1: in the sliding glass door. My grandma was an incredibly
Speaker 1: creative woman that wasn't an artist per se. You know.
Speaker 1: She's a homemaker mostly and a sort of community member.
Speaker 1: And she was a quilter, she made quilts, and amazing cook,
Speaker 1: amazing entertainer. She wrote letters every morning. So in the pandemic,
Speaker 1: we fled from New York. I was pregnant with our
Speaker 1: second baby. We had the baby on this farm, and
Speaker 1: then we moved into my grandma's house and I found
Speaker 1: a box full of old like letters from my grandma
Speaker 1: and read them and amazing eye for detail, like it
Speaker 1: was always so and so was wearing this type of fabric,
Speaker 1: you know, and the or dervs were like this, and
Speaker 1: like this type of bird is hanging out in the
Speaker 1: tree like really and eye for detail. But there are
Speaker 1: two ways in which she really set me on a path.
Speaker 1: One was that she and my grandpa would travel a lot.
Speaker 1: My granddad was retired, but he was consulting. He was
Speaker 1: like a solar energy guy back in the day, you
Speaker 1: know before where it was cool, so he was he
Speaker 1: would be flying around. They go into like Europe, and
Speaker 1: they would go to China and Australia, and my grandma
Speaker 1: would go you know with him, and they would bring
Speaker 1: me back things from wherever they were, and there always
Speaker 1: was this value of like any chance you can travel,
Speaker 1: you get to do it. Like they sort of instilled
Speaker 1: like a wanderlust that I think as I actually was
Speaker 1: pretty formative for me in terms of like becoming a
Speaker 1: touring musician. And the other thing they did is that
Speaker 1: they brought me home, I think from China this tiny
Speaker 1: size violin when I was seven years old. I had
Speaker 1: seen a woman in my elementary school in a beautiful dress.
Speaker 1: She came with a gown and she played the violin,
Speaker 1: and I thought, this is I'm going to play the violin.
Speaker 1: And they brought home this I think one eighth size
Speaker 1: little red violin, and then they paid for my violin
Speaker 1: lessons as a child, and I would even go to
Speaker 1: their house in the morning to practice, like before I
Speaker 1: went to school. So eventually I gave up the violin
Speaker 1: and I picked up the guitar and I started to
Speaker 1: write songs. And you know, I don't think of the
Speaker 1: violin as any part really of my music reality now,
Speaker 1: but as a formative instrument, like just to be living
Speaker 1: with that kind of melodic music, it was pretty huge
Speaker 1: for me. So I think the gift of that violin
Speaker 1: and the lessons in the space to practice it, because actually,
Speaker 1: no parent wants a kid to be learning violin in
Speaker 1: their house, you know, you're terrible for years. And then
Speaker 1: the travel, I think, like, certainly I became someone really
Speaker 1: just I wanted to tour around and play music, and
Speaker 1: so I thank her for that. Oh my god, how
Speaker 1: lovely stringed instruments and wander lust that's pretty crazy good combination. Really,
Speaker 1: I cannot thank you enough for coming and answering all
Speaker 1: these questions so fun. What an amazing format. I'm like
Speaker 1: really impressed. It was totally fascinating to hear like Tony
Speaker 1: Blair and Alan coming, like just amazing variety of people
Speaker 1: and minds. And you know, I'm just at the beginning
Speaker 1: of doing a bunch of interviews for the record and
Speaker 1: putting out and it's like usually so boring, like this
Speaker 1: is no way to get access to something fresh. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm dying to hear your next record. Amazing. So I'm
Speaker 1: so excited for this to be out in the world.
Speaker 1: I bet you are too. I mean, you know, you've
Speaker 1: been doing a lot of giving birth well done. Thanks
Speaker 1: and knows. His new self titled album is out now,
Speaker 1: featuring the song's bright Star, Brooklyn Bridge, and many more.
Speaker 1: You could also see Haydestown on Broadway Now or on tour.
Speaker 1: Mini Questions is hosted and written by me Mini Driver,
Speaker 1: supervising producer Aaron Kaufman, Producer Morgan Levoy, Research assistant Marissa Brown.
Speaker 1: Original music Sorry Baby by Mini Driver, Additional music by
Speaker 1: Aaron Kaufman. Executive produced by Me Mini Driver Special thanks
Speaker 1: to Jim Nikolay, Will Pearson, Addison No Day, Lisa Castella
Speaker 1: and Nick Oppenheim at w kPr DE La Pescadore, Kate
Speaker 1: Driver and Jason Weinberg, and for constantly solicited tech support
Speaker 1: Henry Driver