Speaker 1: Pushkin. Back in the spring, I was part of a
Speaker 1: traveling variety show called No Small Endeavor. It's put on
Speaker 1: by a friend of mine, a theologian from Nashville named
Speaker 1: Lee Camp. A bunch of us got in a big
Speaker 1: tour bus left Nashville for Louisville, then Indianapolis, then Grand Rapids.
Speaker 1: Lee and I told a story about the famous showdown
Speaker 1: between the suffragettes and the anti slavery movement in the
Speaker 1: mid nineteenth century, and then a bunch of musicians played
Speaker 1: music to help us tell a story. It was one
Speaker 1: of the most fun things I've ever done in my life. Anyway,
Speaker 1: when you're traveling on a tour bus, you spend a
Speaker 1: lot of time talking to everyone else on the tour
Speaker 1: bus and along the way. I got to know the
Speaker 1: musical headliner on the show, the singer songwriter Drew Holcombe,
Speaker 1: and I found him so thoughtful and fantastic and full
Speaker 1: of life that I invited him to come to New
Speaker 1: York and sit down with me at eight twenty fours
Speaker 1: in reopened Cherry Lane Theater. And to my delight and
Speaker 1: I hope your delight as well, he said yes. Drew
Speaker 1: is in his early forties, Beard lives in Nashville, but
Speaker 1: he's from Memphis. He's maybe a country artist, although he
Speaker 1: would dispute that description. His band is called the Neighbors
Speaker 1: and they've been together forever. And if you've never heard
Speaker 1: his music, you're going to hear more than a little
Speaker 1: bit on this episode. Because I gave him only one
Speaker 1: rule before we had our conversation. You have to bring
Speaker 1: your guitar and it can never leave your side.
Speaker 2: Here we go, all right, all right, welcome everybody to
Speaker 2: the Cherry Lane Theater.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be a great evening.
Speaker 3: I want you guys to welcome Malcolm Gladwell and Drew Holcomb.
Speaker 2: Good evening. I'll get it started with a song.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 5: I am fairthe well Now, I am strong, I am goodbye,
Speaker 5: long way from home. I am an orchard at the
Speaker 5: start of spring. I am a mocking bird. I love
Speaker 5: to you singing.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna fly. I'm gonna fly.
Speaker 5: I am an old road walking on my feet. I
Speaker 5: am laughing me weeping willow tree. I'm a dog barkain
Speaker 5: a honey bee steam. I ain't annoying you, bude. I've
Speaker 5: got my wings. I'm gonna fly. I'm going to fly.
Speaker 6: I'm gonna fly. I'm gonna fly. I'm gonna fly.
Speaker 4: I'm going to fly. I am moving, I.
Speaker 5: Am flashing bones, I am a gunshot with my microphone.
Speaker 4: I'm a boy at.
Speaker 5: The window as the summer sun sets, an old man
Speaker 5: in winter, nothing more, nothing less, And.
Speaker 7: I'm gonna fly. I'm gonna fly, I'm gonna fly.
Speaker 1: Tell me why you chose that to start with?
Speaker 2: Well, that's my favorite one I've ever written. I just
Speaker 2: figure when I get nervous, just play something you like.
Speaker 1: You know, when when did you write that song?
Speaker 2: I wrote that song probably January of twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2: I always tend to write a lot of songs right around,
Speaker 2: mainly after New Year's It's a good time to kind
Speaker 2: of get in your feelings and introspection about your life,
Speaker 2: about the world around you, and it tends to be
Speaker 2: a creative season for me.
Speaker 1: How do you decide you say that's the favorite your
Speaker 1: favorite song you've ever written?
Speaker 2: Probably?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Why what is it about that song? Though? Well?
Speaker 2: It was it was something about the song kind of
Speaker 2: came out of this. I just turned forty around that time,
Speaker 2: and I actually enjoyed all the way things that I
Speaker 2: felt after turning forty. Everybody told me I should be
Speaker 2: afraid of them, but I actually really enjoyed them. Also,
Speaker 2: was kind of born in old soul. My mom said,
Speaker 2: I was born an old man. I felt comfortable in
Speaker 2: that transition already, just because of sort of how I am.
Speaker 2: I started writing a song with the lyric started I'm
Speaker 2: a boy at the window as the summer sunsets. I
Speaker 2: have this keen memory for my childhood of being told
Speaker 2: to go to bed before the sun went down in
Speaker 2: the summertime, you know, and staring at the window and
Speaker 2: seeing my neighbor whose parents let him stay up, and
Speaker 2: being sort of full of jealousy but also sort of
Speaker 2: full of wonder. And then also, even though I'm not old,
Speaker 2: I feel certain I feel old in certain ways, and
Speaker 2: I sort of this song is kind of in the tension,
Speaker 2: is me just sort of embracing the tension of that,
Speaker 2: And that tension feels more and more what I see
Speaker 2: when I look in the mirror. And so when I'll
Speaker 2: play that song, I feel it's like a blanket for me,
Speaker 2: you know. And I also finally let myself admit that
Speaker 2: I like my own music. You're not supposed to do that,
Speaker 2: But I do like my own music.
Speaker 1: Why you're not supposed to do that.
Speaker 2: It's just a you know, cultural thing you shouldn't. You know,
Speaker 2: if you drive down the street and see an artist
Speaker 2: listening to their own music, you might think, man, what
Speaker 2: an arrogant guy. But which that happens to me with
Speaker 2: my kids sometimes because they want to hear my songs.
Speaker 2: I just look at people, you know, hey, yep to
Speaker 2: me listening to my own song.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how would you describe the genre that that song
Speaker 1: belongs to?
Speaker 2: You know, I growing up, I was the music that
Speaker 2: I listened to a lot sort of fit in either
Speaker 2: categories of folk or rock and roll, some country, soul,
Speaker 2: folk rock was sort of how I framed it before
Speaker 2: this sort of ubiquitous word of Americana kind of came around,
Speaker 2: and it felt like they created a sort of a
Speaker 2: an institutional home for artists like myself who are definitely
Speaker 2: not country in the sort of commercial sense, and we're
Speaker 2: not rock in the sort of new radio sense, and
Speaker 2: we were a bit homeless. There's a lot of us,
Speaker 2: and so it kind of created this. So that's what
Speaker 2: I say now is Americana. But one of the great
Speaker 2: things about being in a you know, quote unquote Americana
Speaker 2: artist is there's not really a lot of rules about
Speaker 2: what you make, how you make whether the song has
Speaker 2: five stanzas and no chorus or you know, horns or whatever.
Speaker 2: You can kind of do whatever you want. It just
Speaker 2: has to be sort of made by real people in
Speaker 2: a you know, in a real sense.
Speaker 1: You're you're from Tennessee and you live in Nashville, but
Speaker 1: you you take great pains to distance yourself from country music.
Speaker 2: Well it all started. I'm from Memphis, which is, you know,
Speaker 2: two hundred miles west and a bit south of Nashville,
Speaker 2: and we were raised Memphians are sort of it's it's
Speaker 2: baked into your childhood and you're up bringing to hate Nashville. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's part of how you're raised. For instance, I
Speaker 2: my parents, every fall we would drive to Knoxville, where
Speaker 2: they attended school, and we'd go to a Tennessee football game.
Speaker 2: And that's a three hundred and eighty seven mile drive.
Speaker 2: So in eighteen years, let's say we did it. I
Speaker 2: don't know, maybe sixteen times in my childhood that I
Speaker 2: that I can recall, and so thirty two times through
Speaker 2: Nashville we stopped zero times and I forty goes right
Speaker 2: through the middle of town, and my dad would just say,
Speaker 2: there's a state capital, keep bomb moving. So we grew
Speaker 2: up admiring. You know, there was some country that sort
Speaker 2: of leaked into my childhood. I think there's perceptions of
Speaker 2: folks outside of the South that like, everybody in the
Speaker 2: South just listen to country music. We listened to motown
Speaker 2: and Bob Dylan and Amy Grant, you know, like it
Speaker 2: was this interesting mix of like gospel music and you know,
Speaker 2: black soul music and then all the my dad loved
Speaker 2: all the sort of contemporary seventies songwriter stuff, and so
Speaker 2: there was not a lot of country music in it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: in my childhood.
Speaker 1: I want to talk a little bit more about Memphis and
Speaker 1: Nashville in your mind. What is the difference between Memphis
Speaker 1: and Nashville.
Speaker 2: Well, practically speaking, I mean, Memphis is a very it's
Speaker 2: a hometown city, meaning that most of the people that
Speaker 2: live there grew up there. I had family from there,
Speaker 2: grew up in the surrounding, you know, one hundred mile radius,
Speaker 2: whereas Nashville attracts people from all over the country, especially
Speaker 2: in the last fifteen to twenty years, and so it's
Speaker 2: a much sort of work. Those two realities create different,
Speaker 2: very different cultures. In Memphis, everybody knows each other and
Speaker 2: you know, where'd you go to school and who do
Speaker 2: you know. It's a bit of that small town, big
Speaker 2: city experience, whereas in Nashville, so many young people move
Speaker 2: there because of what the city can offer them, the
Speaker 2: opportunities that may springboard out of living there. And then
Speaker 2: it's a center for I mean the big employers in
Speaker 2: Nashville or the music business and healthcare, which are both
Speaker 2: sort of booming and transient jobs, Whereas Memphis it's you know,
Speaker 2: these big blue collar companies like FedEx and AutoZone, and
Speaker 2: so just creates very different cultures. And then you know, racially,
Speaker 2: Memphis is majority African American town. Nashal is very lily white,
Speaker 2: you know, so they're just they're they're very different. My
Speaker 2: favorite story to tell about about Nashville and I moved there,
Speaker 2: was Memphis is a great food town, especially cheap food,
Speaker 2: you know, Tamali's and barbecue and great unique pizza, and
Speaker 2: it's just a very you know, being a river town,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of transients over decades, so you get
Speaker 2: a lot of unique food, and Nashville had basically nothing
Speaker 2: that I that I wanted to eat, and I would
Speaker 2: just complain to my wife. I was like, that's nice here.
Speaker 2: I know you're from here and that's why I moved here,
Speaker 2: but there's nothing to eat here that I want to eat.
Speaker 2: And then fast forward almost twenty years and it's one
Speaker 2: of the greatest food towns you know, in the country.
Speaker 2: Everything's there now, so it's it's changing. It's it's a
Speaker 2: very sort of get evolving and fluid place.
Speaker 1: Maybe you can explain my favorite joke. It's my favorite
Speaker 1: joke because I I feel it has many, many layers,
Speaker 1: many of which I don't understand. It's a joke from
Speaker 1: the Civil Rights Movement era. Black man in Detroit wakes
Speaker 1: up in the middle of the night, it's one of
Speaker 1: those people who come off from the South, you know,
Speaker 1: and then turns to his wife and said, I had
Speaker 1: a terrible dream, and she said, what happened? He said,
Speaker 1: I dreamt that Jesus came to me and told me
Speaker 1: to go to Birmingham. And she says, did Jesus say
Speaker 1: go with you? He says, Jesus said, he go as
Speaker 1: far as Memphis.
Speaker 2: That's a great joke, isn't it that?
Speaker 1: It's my favorite joke of all time. It is, like
Speaker 1: I said, because it's a joke about Jesus who said
Speaker 1: he would be with us always, but not in Birmingham,
Speaker 1: not Burmiam. Yeah, it's a joke about Birmingham.
Speaker 2: Like, it's definitely a joke at the expression Birmingham, dark,
Speaker 2: dark joker.
Speaker 1: But like, why did Jesus stop at Memphis?
Speaker 2: Well, because, I mean, Jesus would love Memphis. There's there's
Speaker 2: great food, there's great hospitality, there's great music, Like Jesus
Speaker 2: would thrive there. Yeah, that was my experience. Jesus thrived
Speaker 2: in Memphis.
Speaker 1: You listened, Well, I want to go back to that
Speaker 1: mixture of things you would listening to as a kid, Motown,
Speaker 1: Amy Grant, What was the third one?
Speaker 2: Bob Dylan.
Speaker 1: That's a fantastic and unusual mix of things to be
Speaker 1: exposed to. This is is this your father or your
Speaker 1: mother's doing? Let's put both both.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So my dad grew up in the and you know,
Speaker 2: my parents met in the third grade, and so they
Speaker 2: they grew up seven or eight like blocks from each other.
Speaker 2: So there's this very sort of I one of twenty
Speaker 2: eight grandkids. It's like a very yeah, there's a lot
Speaker 2: going on there. That's just on my mom's side. That
Speaker 2: didn't include my dad's side.
Speaker 1: So wait, there's twenty eight grand kids on your bomb's.
Speaker 2: Side, that's right. Yeah, and I remember fourteen or fifteen,
Speaker 2: I can't remember, but yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 5: Very like.
Speaker 2: It'd be hard to overstate how sort of like central
Speaker 2: Christianity and religion was to my upbringing. Part of that
Speaker 2: was that when I was apparently when I was like
Speaker 2: I don't even know how old, three, four or five
Speaker 2: years old, someone from the church came to my parents'
Speaker 2: house and they were everybody in their church was doing
Speaker 2: like a record clean out of things in their house
Speaker 2: that weren't honoring to God, and so they would get
Speaker 2: rid of all these records that when I heard about
Speaker 2: this in high school, I wept. I was like, oh, Dad,
Speaker 2: you had all of these great records and original copies
Speaker 2: that they managed there out because it was the Devil's
Speaker 2: music that was really too bad. You know, a lot
Speaker 2: of led Zeppelin got thrown out and things like that.
Speaker 2: You know, I mean, come on, yeah, gotta get rid
Speaker 2: of it, which we could. We'll come back to this.
Speaker 2: But my first record I ever bought was Pearl Jams ten.
Speaker 2: I was eleven year I actually got it for Christmas
Speaker 2: from Santa Claus and my dad broke the record by
Speaker 2: five pm on Christmas Day because we had to go
Speaker 2: through the liner notes together and there's drug references and
Speaker 2: he's like, you're too young for this and break. So
Speaker 2: this was you know, an intense, an intense scene. But
Speaker 2: that some of the things that made it through the
Speaker 2: gauntlet was Bob Dylan's evangelical records of course, you know,
Speaker 2: slow Train Coming Saved and there's another one. And then
Speaker 2: because he still made it in there somehow his old
Speaker 2: records also got a pass. Ye got grandfather in Yeah,
Speaker 2: and he was Jewish, so there's like a thing there too,
Speaker 2: you know, you're allowed to have records made by Jewish artists.
Speaker 2: So and then Motown was like it was all you
Speaker 2: could listen to Motown except for like, what's the you know,
Speaker 2: the great the market record just blinking off side of
Speaker 2: Sexual Healing of course, well yeah, yeah, but the name
Speaker 2: of the record, what's going on?
Speaker 1: Oh, what's going on? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Oh, sexual Healing would have been was on that record,
Speaker 2: wasn't it.
Speaker 1: No, what's going on is earlier sex. I was saying,
Speaker 1: sexual really is so far beyond.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, you can only hear that the only
Speaker 2: the only way you could hear that in my childhood
Speaker 2: was at a wedding by the by the cover band
Speaker 2: you know, and and so, and it still felt awkward
Speaker 2: for everybody. But uh so, yeah there was so then
Speaker 2: any Christian music was okay. Bob Dylan was okay, and
Speaker 2: motown was okay because it was just a bunch of
Speaker 2: love songs and clean oldies stuff, you know, before the
Speaker 2: music business cut. You know, Amy messed up.
Speaker 1: Can you explain to a heathen New York City audience
Speaker 1: who Ammy Grant is and why she's important? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Ammy Grant was sort of I mean, the whole genre
Speaker 2: of contemporary Christian music was there was Southern gospel, which
Speaker 2: is a whole different thing. So it's basically take the
Speaker 2: songwriter model and people started applying it to their faith stories,
Speaker 2: which this all predates the whole Now, the big thing
Speaker 2: is all this big ensemble worship stuff, which was basically
Speaker 2: like every all these church bands trying to sound like
Speaker 2: coldplaying you two. So Amy Grant was like this young
Speaker 2: songwriter and she was. They created old radio sort of
Speaker 2: format around artists like her, and she became the most
Speaker 2: most famous and successful. And then she had a crossover
Speaker 2: pop hit called baby Baby that sort of sent her
Speaker 2: into regular superstardom. And yeah, she was just a very
Speaker 2: beloved woman and she's she's also as a human, she's like,
Speaker 2: she's honestly one of the greatest ones I've ever met. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I know her because my wife knew her. But I've
Speaker 2: moved to Nashville again sort of like country and Christian music.
Speaker 2: This town sucks, you know, And then I got to
Speaker 2: know these people. I was like, Wow, these people are
Speaker 2: all really great. This is tough.
Speaker 1: Wait what so wait what what denomination were your parents?
Speaker 2: Yeah? They they were They went like an independent Bible church.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it was non denominational. It's very they're very
Speaker 2: proud of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was asking you about other music that that
Speaker 1: made it in Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think basically my parents were pretty okay with all
Speaker 2: the classics. So we would go see you know, you
Speaker 2: could go see Paul Simon. They built the Pyramid in
Speaker 2: Memphis when I was a kid, which was a new
Speaker 2: arena where the Memphis Tigers played, and so I got
Speaker 2: a job there in high school as a part of
Speaker 2: the event staff, and so I got to see all
Speaker 2: these concerts for free by telling people to stop smoking,
Speaker 2: you know, and had my little yellow shirt on, and
Speaker 2: you know, anything from boys to men as easy top
Speaker 2: to whatever could sell fifteen thousand tickets. I was, you know,
Speaker 2: exposed to at a certain point that sort of the
Speaker 2: rules weren't really that well enforced. It was a sort
Speaker 2: of a young when we were young, was very much
Speaker 2: that way. But our alarm clock every day growing up
Speaker 2: was my mom played piano and she would play hymns
Speaker 2: like that was get up and go to school. It
Speaker 2: was like up from the gravey your roles, you know.
Speaker 2: She was like a whole her like whole play on
Speaker 2: get up and go to school. You know.
Speaker 1: But that's fantastic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great. Yeah, daily it's got a great sense
Speaker 2: of humor.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I have a theory which I very grandiosely call
Speaker 1: Gladwell's theory of asymmetrical parenting, which is that at any
Speaker 1: given moment, when we account for our parental influence on
Speaker 1: our lives, we only talk about one parent. It can
Speaker 1: change over time, but you try to sound on somebody
Speaker 1: you ask somebody, Yeah, so what are your parents? People
Speaker 1: will never talk about their parents. They will the minute
Speaker 1: you dig into it. They only talk about one for
Speaker 1: a while. So I would like you to give me
Speaker 1: an asymmetrical parental theory of the jew Holcomb childhood.
Speaker 2: I completely disagree with that theory.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that you only get only one mattered.
Speaker 1: I'm saying that at any given moment, only one matters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in a particular story.
Speaker 1: Right, So it may be from you know, in high
Speaker 1: school it's only your mom, and then in college it's
Speaker 1: only you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's my parents are going to listen to this probably.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, yeah, that's the whole point.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think we were actually talking earlier back backstage about
Speaker 2: how as as dads, you sometimes get this free pass
Speaker 2: that it's almost like, and I've seen this, I have
Speaker 2: three children that, especially with my daughter, she sort of
Speaker 2: defaults to dad, you're doing great, You're awesome, even if
Speaker 2: my wife, Ellie has done all of the hard work
Speaker 2: that day the parenting space. So with that said, I
Speaker 2: think that that's probably true in a lot of ways
Speaker 2: that my dad had sort of an outside influence.
Speaker 1: What did your dad do well?
Speaker 2: He was a dentist and then he hated it, so
Speaker 2: he quit and became a financial advisor. Seriously true story.
Speaker 1: This reminds me of one of my favorite stories about
Speaker 1: a friend of mine whose dad was an investment banker,
Speaker 1: and he once had a long heart to heart with
Speaker 1: his daughter and my friend about how he felt his
Speaker 1: career had been misspent and he made a series of
Speaker 1: terrible choices and he had squattered his life in a
Speaker 1: profession with no meaning. And she was very moved by
Speaker 1: this because she didn't realize her father had this other side.
Speaker 1: And she said, Dad, so what do you think you
Speaker 1: should have been? And he says, I think I should
Speaker 1: have been a tax attorney. That's kind of like what
Speaker 1: you're hearing here is kind of like, but your dad did.
Speaker 8: Yeah, well, he he said that he was just very
Speaker 8: he was very sort of bored by the monotony of
Speaker 8: dentistry and how he's he's he's very extrovert, and he
Speaker 8: was trying to have conversations with people and they couldn't
Speaker 8: because you know.
Speaker 1: Oh, he was one of those annoying dentists who's like
Speaker 1: asking you questions and you're six seventeen.
Speaker 2: Well, and I think Honestly, I think it was a
Speaker 2: It was a serious crossroads for him because he'd spent
Speaker 2: he put himself through dental school selling jewelry out of
Speaker 2: a tackle box. This is like he he worked his
Speaker 2: way really hard to get himself this you know job,
Speaker 2: and and this career. But then a decade in he
Speaker 2: realized how much he really did not enjoy it and
Speaker 2: found a way out of it. Took him. It was
Speaker 2: it wasn't like an immediate transition. He went to one
Speaker 2: day a week to doing the other thing, to two
Speaker 2: days a week doing the other thing, to half and half,
Speaker 2: and then eventually, when I was in high school, sold
Speaker 2: this practice and went the full time the other direction.
Speaker 2: He loved music and he had wanted to pursue music
Speaker 2: in high school. He wanted to be in a like
Speaker 2: a in a garage band. And his dad, who was
Speaker 2: even more strict, you know than my parents' generation, basically
Speaker 2: was the cutcher here. And don't you you know he
Speaker 2: has a story, he says, he tells the story about
Speaker 2: my grandfather. They're driving in the car and my grandfather
Speaker 2: smoked cigarettes and non stop and Bill Withers lean on
Speaker 2: me was on the radio and Dad was like fourteen
Speaker 2: years old in the passenger seat, and it's that part
Speaker 2: of the song where if you need a friend, call me,
Speaker 2: you just call me. And my grandfather was a jazz guy.
Speaker 2: He hated popular music. He said, finally takes a dragon
Speaker 2: cigarette after about this, the seventh or eighth that called me,
Speaker 2: and he goes, well, just call him, damn it. So
Speaker 2: he had this like weird relationship where his father squashed
Speaker 2: his creative dreams. And so I think when I sort
Speaker 2: of showed interest in this, he he just launched fully
Speaker 2: in with me. Oh really, yeah, you know the first
Speaker 2: thing I told him I wanted to pursue music. I
Speaker 2: had like an okay guitar and he's like, well, let's
Speaker 2: go to the guitar shop. Let's get you. Let's get
Speaker 2: you something nice. You know, if you're if you're really
Speaker 2: gonna work hard at it, I'm in your corner.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: That was his two rules, where if you're gonna work
Speaker 2: hard at it, And then he said, and promise me
Speaker 2: that if it's not working, you'll know when to walk
Speaker 2: away and move on with your life. And he could
Speaker 2: say that from experience because he walked away from something.
Speaker 2: You know, he didn't just stick with the career that
Speaker 2: he chose as a nineteen year old, really because he
Speaker 2: started dental school. Back then, you didn't have to get
Speaker 2: a college degree to go to dental school. You just
Speaker 2: had to get the preres, which he did in three
Speaker 2: semesters and then started dental school as a nineteen year old.
Speaker 1: So did you play another song?
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, all right, I'll uh since this is sort
Speaker 2: of symmetrical. Asymmetrical, I'm gonna go down the street to
Speaker 2: my grandparents' house. I grew up five doors down the
Speaker 2: street from my grandfather, who was this sort of lion
Speaker 2: of a man. He was a bit of a big
Speaker 2: fish personality. He would tell these stories. He didn't know
Speaker 2: how much of it was true and how much of
Speaker 2: it was fiction. Lived a very interesting life. Was a surgeon,
Speaker 2: was the chief of surgery in Tokyo immediately following World
Speaker 2: War II. Operated on Admiral Dagano two weeks before he
Speaker 2: was executed. Like, he just has these like wild stories
Speaker 2: in his life, and one of them was that he
Speaker 2: told the story about how he went to England with
Speaker 2: his friend who raised Labrador retrievers, who got invited to
Speaker 2: this dog trial at the Queens of State and so
Speaker 2: he went, and he was very old and couldn't walk
Speaker 2: around very well, and he came back with this wild
Speaker 2: story about how he got to ride around the Queens
Speaker 2: of State in the Queen's Land River with her driving it,
Speaker 2: and we were all like, sure you know, sure you did.
Speaker 2: And he passed away about six years later, and we
Speaker 2: got a letter from the Queen Secretary sending her regrets
Speaker 2: of his passing and sharing how much the Queen enjoyed
Speaker 2: the day she spent with him driving around her estate
Speaker 2: in her land Rover.
Speaker 1: So there you go.
Speaker 2: I wrote this song about him many years after he died.
Speaker 2: He just had a huge influence on me, and songs
Speaker 2: called dragons.
Speaker 4: I was climbing a mountain.
Speaker 5: A sleep in the moonlight goes to my Grandpaul came
Speaker 5: to me in a dream, as.
Speaker 2: A star was hung above us.
Speaker 4: He started singing this chorus.
Speaker 5: He laughed loud as head and said this to me,
Speaker 5: take a few chances, a few early romances. Go swimming
Speaker 5: in the ocean all New Year's Day. Don't listen to
Speaker 5: the critics, Stand up bed witness, go slay all the dragons.
Speaker 4: That stand in your wing.
Speaker 2: He stayed up and talked until.
Speaker 4: The sunrise of war and love and sorrow.
Speaker 5: He said, stop spending all your money on forgiveness of sins.
Speaker 5: Today's all you promised. Don't trouble with tomorrow. He faded
Speaker 5: into the forest, proudly singing this hymn.
Speaker 3: Take a few chances.
Speaker 5: A few early rommances. Go swimming in the ocean all
Speaker 5: New is Day. Don't listen to the critics, Stand up
Speaker 5: bell Winness, Go slay off the dragons.
Speaker 4: That standing r Roy.
Speaker 5: Woke up with a fever, surrounded by lightning. All my
Speaker 5: windows were open. I let the rain flooding. The past
Speaker 5: felt like the present, with the future uncertain. A sing
Speaker 5: like a spiral lost.
Speaker 2: In the wind.
Speaker 5: Take a few chances, do earthy romances.
Speaker 3: Go swimming in the.
Speaker 5: Ocean all New Year's Day.
Speaker 3: Don't listen to the critics.
Speaker 5: Stand up in bed Winness, Go slay all the.
Speaker 9: Dragons that stand in your way.
Speaker 10: Go slay the dragons that stand in your wamm.
Speaker 1: Hmm, thank you, incredibly beautiful tribute.
Speaker 2: Thank you. Yeah, it's a beautiful man.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back, and we're back. Let's talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about the role of faith in your life
Speaker 1: and work. Okay, yeah, So you grew up in a
Speaker 1: very religious family. You went to seminary in Scotland. Tell
Speaker 1: me about Yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Think I've always sort of grown up. I think a
Speaker 2: lot of people that grew up in a world that
Speaker 2: I grew up in sort of either chose to just
Speaker 2: join into that space as adults, or they sort of
Speaker 2: run the other direction and go through a deconstruction phase
Speaker 2: where they, you know, on a spectrum of sort of
Speaker 2: kindness to full vitriol, they depart from that space. And
Speaker 2: instead I tried to navigate sort of a third way,
Speaker 2: which is I didn't have a personal experience with faith
Speaker 2: that sort of mirrored what I was told it was
Speaker 2: going to be like that it would bring all this
Speaker 2: meaning and stuff to my life. And when I was seventeen,
Speaker 2: my brother passed away. He was born a spine of
Speaker 2: and had all sorts of health issues, but still suddenly
Speaker 2: out of nowhere. I was out of the country when
Speaker 2: it happened, on doing like a summer of Spanish immersion
Speaker 2: in Themican Republic, and it passed away and got home.
Speaker 2: All the sacraments and words and instruments and communities of
Speaker 2: faith were sort of bubbled up in me, and it
Speaker 2: wasn't making sense for me. So I had sort of
Speaker 2: a crisis of faith, and instead of turning away from it,
Speaker 2: I was still sort of trying to figure it out.
Speaker 2: But music was really the thing that kind of helped
Speaker 2: me make sense of my life. I'll never forget. There
Speaker 2: were two records in particular in that era. One was
Speaker 2: Van Morrison's Moondance. The other one was David Gray's White
Speaker 2: Ladder that I would just drive in my car and
Speaker 2: just listening to records and sob and those records weren't
Speaker 2: even necessarily about grief, but they were grief records for me.
Speaker 2: But I also didn't My experience with faith and the
Speaker 2: faith community was that while I was struggling to believe
Speaker 2: what they told me was the right thing to believe,
Speaker 2: I also was experiencing a lot of love and affection
Speaker 2: from them and had from a young age. And so
Speaker 2: a lot of people's hurt and deconstruction is fed off
Speaker 2: of abuse or mistreatment or you know, And that was
Speaker 2: not my experience, and so I couldn't have that same
Speaker 2: sort of departure because I was loved well. And so
Speaker 2: it's created this really interesting tension in me because I
Speaker 2: was also expanding the way my worldview is expanding in
Speaker 2: ways that didn't line up with a lot of what
Speaker 2: I grew up around. But also we're talking about it.
Speaker 2: You know, it's easy to lump people into these categories,
Speaker 2: and really the spectrum of people who helped raise me,
Speaker 2: they all have different different sort of spectrum of beliefs
Speaker 2: about different things, whether cultural, cosmic, theological, cultural, political, et cetera.
Speaker 2: So I don't want to sort of speak about that
Speaker 2: community as one monolith. But but at the same time,
Speaker 2: what I was finding and who I was becoming was
Speaker 2: getting farther from that. And part of the way I
Speaker 2: part of that was going to seminary. I went to Scotland.
Speaker 2: They had a program at St. Andrews University. I could
Speaker 2: go for two weeks a semester twice a year and
Speaker 2: then write my papers. And so, you know, I was
Speaker 2: just I was searching, but I was enjoying the search.
Speaker 2: You know. It was like it was less of a
Speaker 2: like frantic looking for the lost keys when you're trying
Speaker 2: to get out of the house, and more of a
Speaker 2: like I just want to keep looking at them, finding
Speaker 2: a lot of interesting things. I'm reading a lot of
Speaker 2: interesting people just allowed myself to engage in reading and
Speaker 2: in music and in ways that was sort of open
Speaker 2: to it instead of looking for a fight. And that's
Speaker 2: sort of the way I would say that I was
Speaker 2: raised is that the church in that era, the school
Speaker 2: that I went to, was a wall, and it was
Speaker 2: more of a wall and less of a bridge. It's
Speaker 2: more about protecting the flock instead of building a bridge
Speaker 2: to the world. And I would say my faith now
Speaker 2: is much more of like, I just want to be
Speaker 2: a bridge builder. But I haven't necessarily, I haven't rejected
Speaker 2: some of the sort of central teachings of Christian Orthodoxy,
Speaker 2: but I have certainly rejected sort of American evangelical culture
Speaker 2: and has cost me a lot of fans. But that's okay.
Speaker 1: Memphis to Scotland is a long way.
Speaker 2: Yeah. My senior high school English teacher took a trip
Speaker 2: every year to the UK. In the first place we
Speaker 2: went with Scotland, and that immediately within three days on
Speaker 2: that trip, I sai, I'm going to study abroad.
Speaker 1: Here.
Speaker 2: This place is Edinburgh's just this wonderland. And you know,
Speaker 2: I loved English literature, I loved English history, you know,
Speaker 2: and honestly, like the South was settled by Scots, so
Speaker 2: a lot of it, you know. So there was like
Speaker 2: when Braveheart came out, every Southerner in the world was like, yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, was there anything about the of Scotland that
Speaker 1: appealed to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there's a There was a There was a
Speaker 2: pub down the street from my flat, Sandy Bell was
Speaker 2: the name of it. And every night they had traditional
Speaker 2: Scottish music, you know, people playing instruments that I didn't
Speaker 2: even know what they were, but they put these traditional
Speaker 2: Scottish folk songs and they're always in with Loch Loman.
Speaker 5: You take the high Rule and I'll take the little Rule,
Speaker 5: and I'll be in Scottland before Aria for me and
Speaker 5: my true lover, and they're to meet again on the
Speaker 5: Bonnie Bonnie banks of Lochlomond.
Speaker 2: I was like, that's in the corner, crying about me
Speaker 2: and this mythical woman I'm gonna meet at the Bonnie
Speaker 2: Banks of Loch Loman.
Speaker 1: Scottish accent's pretty good.
Speaker 2: They got a lot of practice my kids. My kids
Speaker 2: are always asking for it. But there's something about the
Speaker 2: Scottish weather in the story that sort of that's where
Speaker 2: I started writing songs. I was still sort of in
Speaker 2: the throes of my grief, and I was trying to
Speaker 2: process that grief. And so as a student, I decided
Speaker 2: my senior thesis at in my program was going to
Speaker 2: be an oral history about my brother's life and death
Speaker 2: from everybody that knew him, and sort of the question was,
Speaker 2: why does a severely handicapped child have such like so,
Speaker 2: because when he passed away, there were like two thousand
Speaker 2: people at the funeral. Two Yeah, there were like one
Speaker 2: hundred nurses from the hospital that had met him over
Speaker 2: the last fifteen years came and the entire elementary school
Speaker 2: he went to had a day out of school and
Speaker 2: they all came.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It was this incredible celebration of a very short but
Speaker 2: very sort of thorough life. And so my sort of
Speaker 2: analytical side of my brain with the creative side of
Speaker 2: my brain was like, what if I just wrote an
Speaker 2: oral history of his life and interviewed this doctors, teacher,
Speaker 2: his neighbors, his cousins, and why did Jay matter so
Speaker 2: much to you? So I was working on that in
Speaker 2: Scotland and that's when I started writing songs because I
Speaker 2: didn't really know anybody. I always say that at that
Speaker 2: time I was alone. I wasn't necessarily lonely, but I
Speaker 2: was alone, and I had taken my guitar and I
Speaker 2: just started writing. And when I got back home from
Speaker 2: that semester, started playing these songs for some friends, and
Speaker 2: I think they were all expecting something completely different from
Speaker 2: my life. I got laughed out a couple times before
Speaker 2: the song's like, wait, you wrote songs. I know you
Speaker 2: play music, but like, aren't you going to be like
Speaker 2: history lawyer guy or something? And I'm playing these songs,
Speaker 2: They're like.
Speaker 1: Oh, these are What's the first song you wrote that
Speaker 1: you were proud of?
Speaker 2: A song called Nightingale that I don't remember, but I
Speaker 2: do remember it being about my then friend and much
Speaker 2: later became my wife, Ellie. But it was a it
Speaker 2: was a heartbreak song because she she had sort of
Speaker 2: ripped the heart from my chest in that era of
Speaker 2: my life.
Speaker 1: So is that why you don't remember it?
Speaker 2: It's just a yeah, I got to move on from
Speaker 2: that song.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can't have forgotten all of it.
Speaker 2: No, I mean that was something like, well, okay, this
Speaker 2: is embarrassing. I do remember the first line, Cinderella was
Speaker 2: a fairy tale.
Speaker 3: One, that's true.
Speaker 2: I don't remember where it went after that. But there
Speaker 2: was something about she sang like a nightingale something, something
Speaker 2: that rhymes with true.
Speaker 1: Wait, did you play this for her after she broke
Speaker 1: up with you?
Speaker 2: Well, you made an assumption there that we dated in
Speaker 2: the first place.
Speaker 1: Oh, at what point in the trajectory of you and
Speaker 1: Ellie did she hear that song?
Speaker 2: I mean pretty soon after I wrote it, But I
Speaker 2: didn't tell her it was about her, you know.
Speaker 1: She didn't figure it out.
Speaker 2: No, she did not. Oh, come on, well that's according
Speaker 2: to her. That's you've talked to her about that. But yeah,
Speaker 2: so that I mean, that was That was the first
Speaker 2: song I sang. And I was playing it like for
Speaker 2: my buddies in college in college, and they're like, that's
Speaker 2: pretty good, you know. But that that was before Scotland.
Speaker 2: That was the first song I wrote, and Scotland's we
Speaker 2: started writing songs that I I don't know, just something
Speaker 2: started to click, but really I didn't. It took me.
Speaker 2: I moved quickly into sort of what I would call
Speaker 2: my twenty to twenty three year old Steve Earld Bruce Springsteen,
Speaker 2: Ryan Adams imitation phase, where I was really trying to
Speaker 2: write the rugged third person minor chord songs and it
Speaker 2: wasn't me, but I needed to do that to find
Speaker 2: to find my path. But none of those songs are
Speaker 2: available on the internet.
Speaker 1: Which Spruce, Which Spruce Springsteen? There are many Bruce Springsteen's.
Speaker 1: Which is your favorite Bruce Springsteen?
Speaker 2: Well, my favorite Bruce Springsteen is Greetings from Raspberry Park
Speaker 2: Bruce Springsteen. But I like them all. But the one
Speaker 2: I was imitating was like the Nebraska Tom.
Speaker 1: Say, Nebraska. Yeah, I want to talk about Nebraska for
Speaker 1: a moment. I because I was obsessed with that record.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know it's funny because music like that doesn't
Speaker 1: just influence musicians, it influences writers.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the song that I always came back to was
Speaker 1: I know it's called but it's the one about the
Speaker 1: guy who's a police officer.
Speaker 2: How a patrolman?
Speaker 1: Hwre you patrolman?
Speaker 2: I played that song one hundred times.
Speaker 1: Man turns this back on his family. He just ain't
Speaker 1: no good, he just ain't no good. That was like
Speaker 1: as a kind of template for writing an emotionally powerful story.
Speaker 1: It's just stuck in my head, it was. It's so
Speaker 1: that song is so beautifully constructed. Well, can you do
Speaker 1: you can you can you remember any of it? I
Speaker 1: can play.
Speaker 2: I can play the chorus probably, yeah, pay the chorus.
Speaker 1: For those who don't know the song, this is it's
Speaker 1: I think it's one of his finest songs.
Speaker 2: I can do a part of it.
Speaker 4: My name is Joe Roberts.
Speaker 2: I work for the State.
Speaker 5: Sergeant out of Burdenville, Bear Snumber.
Speaker 1: I've always been an honest man.
Speaker 2: An honest man, honest as that.
Speaker 5: My brother named Frankie, and Frankie ain't no good?
Speaker 1: Is it bad that I sing along.
Speaker 2: As the audience I don't know, but then you know
Speaker 2: goes on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're laughing, drinking.
Speaker 5: Nothing feels better than blood on, blood, taking turns, dancing
Speaker 5: with Maria.
Speaker 4: The band plays now that you Flood.
Speaker 1: Catch him w straight again?
Speaker 3: Yep, any brother would do teach you how to walk
Speaker 3: that line.
Speaker 2: It's two different courses.
Speaker 1: Oh right, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.
Speaker 5: Because because my favorite is uh like any like any
Speaker 5: brother would.
Speaker 2: Uh man turns his back on his family. Well, he
Speaker 2: just ain't no good.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 2: And then there's this, uh that line to me that
Speaker 2: that song. I love it song for a lot of
Speaker 2: different reasons. If you know, I'll just the song has
Speaker 2: been out for forty years, so I spoiler alert basically,
Speaker 2: you know this this the narrator is a state trooper
Speaker 2: higher patrolman, and his brother's a mess and he ends
Speaker 2: up injuring possibly killing somebody in a bar fight, and
Speaker 2: he gets called into the scene. I was his own brother,
Speaker 2: and his brother he's chasing him out of the state
Speaker 2: in Michigan, and and he lets him go into Canada,
Speaker 2: you know, and lets him escape, and then he ends
Speaker 2: with that course and turns it back on his family.
Speaker 2: He just say no good and uh, my brother, who's
Speaker 2: now been eight years sober. There was a lot of
Speaker 2: years where that was like that was our dynamic.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: I was the good rule following successful big brother and
Speaker 2: he was the you know, he didn't mind me saying that.
Speaker 2: We were very close, but he turned his life around.
Speaker 2: But I thought that was gonna be my life. Was like,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna lose him to his vice. And so I
Speaker 2: play that song on nights when I hadn't heard from him,
Speaker 2: and I love that song.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of emotion in here.
Speaker 2: A lot of emotion in here in no in you.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I think that is a compliment.
Speaker 1: I did not just folks made I know this, but
Speaker 1: we June I met a couple of months back then.
Speaker 1: They're doing this thing which can't be described.
Speaker 2: And it's a form of a variety show.
Speaker 1: A variety show. We hung out together. It was on
Speaker 1: the bus with Drew, among other things, and you said something.
Speaker 1: There are a series of things. I didn't know anything
Speaker 1: about you, and you said something to me that just
Speaker 1: so surprised me, and I would you said that. You
Speaker 1: just talked about how you have it. You have you
Speaker 1: get angry. Yeah, And I didn't see that. I didn't
Speaker 1: see that in you, And I was so surprised to
Speaker 1: hear that.
Speaker 2: I was sort of talk growing up that anger is bad,
Speaker 2: you know that. What I've since learned is that anger
Speaker 2: is not bad. It's rage that's bad, which just like
Speaker 2: sort of the that's not going to get all counselate
Speaker 2: on you guys, But that's been a big part of
Speaker 2: my journey as a as a person and as a music.
Speaker 2: It's not the anger that's bad. Angers like the red light,
Speaker 2: you know, it's what you do with it. And so
Speaker 2: I've learned, instead of getting sort of physically upset, is
Speaker 2: to go, I'm so angry, what is it. It's usually
Speaker 2: some sort of injustice. Either it's me or the world,
Speaker 2: or my neighbor or my family, or is it's it's
Speaker 2: your yellow light that's flashing that you're lonely or sad
Speaker 2: or hurt. And so I've learned that it's like my superpower.
Speaker 2: Like when I'm angry, I know that I know that
Speaker 2: I've got to figure out what's going on instead of
Speaker 2: trying to tamp it down.
Speaker 1: You know, have you ever written what is your what
Speaker 1: is the angriest song? I have an idea that you've
Speaker 1: ever written.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's great. It's a song called Ring the Bells. Yes, okay,
Speaker 2: you want to hear it?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Wait, you got to give the context. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I wrote this song with my I wrote this song
Speaker 2: with my friends Avener and Amanda Ramirez. Avener as a
Speaker 2: Cuban American, Aman is an African American. We wrote the
Speaker 2: song together, I think three days after Charlottesville White Supremacy Rally,
Speaker 2: when some very famous sort of American Christians were both
Speaker 2: sides in the situation, and we got real pisted and
Speaker 2: wrote this song together.
Speaker 5: Ring the Bells this time, I mean it did the
Speaker 5: hatred very well. Give back the pieces of my Jesus
Speaker 5: to take your counterfeit to hell.
Speaker 3: Thank the drums.
Speaker 5: This means war, not the kind you waiting for. We
Speaker 5: say mercy won't be rationed here. It's what we're fighting for.
Speaker 3: Their fall is fair in love and war. Then what
Speaker 3: the hell is.
Speaker 1: Love even for?
Speaker 5: If we can't sing it loud enough, we'll keep on
Speaker 5: at anymore?
Speaker 4: Ring ring, ring.
Speaker 2: Ring, Just a little bit of it.
Speaker 1: That's that's what I That's the one I had in mind.
Speaker 2: I was, we were I was very angry when I
Speaker 2: wrote that song. Felt good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny, it's it's you're you. You play it
Speaker 1: like a man possessed.
Speaker 2: Well, I was watching Daniel Tiger one time with my daughter,
Speaker 2: and there was.
Speaker 1: I just loved to segue from yea possessed to someone
Speaker 1: who there's a lot of.
Speaker 2: Well, it's very it's very related to what we're talking about.
Speaker 2: So there's the scene where Dane gets up and the
Speaker 2: mom says, okay, Dan, we'na learn a song if you
Speaker 2: feel so mad that you want to roar, take a
Speaker 2: deep breath, then count to four. And I was like,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, Emmy Lou, she's four years old. I'm like,
Speaker 2: that's not always true. Sometimes what you need to.
Speaker 11: Do when you feel so mad that you want to roar,
Speaker 11: take a deep breath, Yes, get it out, don't stuff
Speaker 11: that stuff inside of you.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back with drews answers to the homework
Speaker 1: assignment I gave him. I asked him to come up
Speaker 1: with his five favorite country songs of all time so
Speaker 1: he could compare his list to mine. And we're back.
Speaker 1: Can we talk. Let's talk about musical influences for a moment.
Speaker 1: Let's start with Amy Lou Harris. I would love to
Speaker 1: when we were thinking about this evening about our list
Speaker 1: of iconic country songs, and one of my one of
Speaker 1: on my list is Boulder of Birmingham. Do you know that? No,
Speaker 1: that's the that is uh. It is the one of
Speaker 1: the few songwriting credits she has on her first I
Speaker 1: think she only has one songwriting credit on her first
Speaker 1: nine albums, and that's Bouldered Birmingham, which she writes about
Speaker 1: Graham Parsons. Oh yeah, and it is. Actually we're going
Speaker 1: to play a little bit of it. It is the
Speaker 1: most just play the first little like it's so heart
Speaker 1: wrenchingly beautiful. And the I mentioned only because we were
Speaker 1: talking about grief and about emotion. It is a song.
Speaker 1: It's a song about grief, and it's the articulation of
Speaker 1: her sense of loss and longing. Is just perfect. Anyway
Speaker 1: here it is. I think I will run.
Speaker 3: In the close.
Speaker 4: I would hold my.
Speaker 10: Any say, race.
Speaker 3: Away from bolted be give about actcy.
Speaker 2: Act see.
Speaker 1: I would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham
Speaker 1: if I thought I could see, I could see your face.
Speaker 1: That's her, the way she articulates her sense of loss.
Speaker 2: She sings with so much ache too.
Speaker 1: Yeah did you do your homework?
Speaker 2: I did my homework. Yeah, you're one assignment. I respect.
Speaker 2: I Yeah. I had some arguments with my wife when
Speaker 2: I picked this first one, because she's like, I don't
Speaker 2: think of that as a country song, and I was like, well,
Speaker 2: it was like a number three on the country charts.
Speaker 2: But I think my favorite country song, or what I
Speaker 2: think is the best country song is which tall Lineman
Speaker 2: by Glenn Campbell. I need you more than want you
Speaker 2: and I want you for all time. There's a song
Speaker 2: about a Jimmy Web wrote the song and he talks
Speaker 2: about how I think it was his uncle was a lineman.
Speaker 2: He always remembered seeing him up on the polls, working
Speaker 2: on electrical lines, and so the song came easy to
Speaker 2: him because he can imagine him, you know, being away
Speaker 2: from home for a long time, wishing for to be
Speaker 2: home with the one he loves. And its stood the
Speaker 2: test of time too. It's a very simple song about
Speaker 2: a workingman missing his love. But that's my number one.
Speaker 1: Your wife said that was not a country song.
Speaker 2: She said she doesn't think of it as a country song.
Speaker 1: What does she think of it? As?
Speaker 2: That was not clear to me. We agreed on my
Speaker 2: my second one, though, which is which is Crazy by
Speaker 2: Patsy Klein.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, okay.
Speaker 2: I mean it's such a standard, but it is so
Speaker 2: good and I love that Willie Nelson wrote it, and
Speaker 2: then a couple of years later he kind of quit
Speaker 2: the industry, moves to Austin, Texas, and writes the most
Speaker 2: non commercial country record ever, that's You Redheaded Stranger, as
Speaker 2: a forty three year old, his career blows up. I
Speaker 2: just love the story, and we've played a lot. We've
Speaker 2: gotten to play a lot of shows with Willie over
Speaker 2: the years. I've sang with him a dozen times.
Speaker 1: You know, Willie Nelson, I didn't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean we're not We don't like to call
Speaker 2: each other because he's you know, he's he's an older guy,
Speaker 2: and but I have. Yeah, we've shared the stage and sung.
Speaker 2: He does this really neat thing every night where he
Speaker 2: does at Medley of I Saw the Light will the
Speaker 2: Circle being broken, and one other blanket on and he
Speaker 2: invites you know, the opener to come out and sing
Speaker 2: it with him. So I've got to do that twelve
Speaker 2: or fifteen times. So he and Dolly tim are the
Speaker 2: two living legends left, you know, in that space. And
Speaker 2: then my third one would be Joelene as a Tennessee.
Speaker 2: And if I didn't mention a Dolly Parton song, I
Speaker 2: couldn't go home. What's your other one or two?
Speaker 1: Uh? George Jones The Grand Tour, that's a sad song.
Speaker 1: It's you know I have. I might be more attracted
Speaker 1: to you, like are attracted to pure emotion, it seems like,
Speaker 1: and I'm attracted in country music too over the top
Speaker 1: grandiosity and the Grand Tour. George Jones is like, he's
Speaker 1: like the he's in the best possible sense of the word,
Speaker 1: a caricature of a country singer. Yes, voice, We're going
Speaker 1: to make the play just the beginning of a play.
Speaker 1: Play the Grand Tour until the line chills me to
Speaker 1: the bone, step Ride, Come only.
Speaker 3: Elf, you'd live to tell the Grand.
Speaker 1: To pr along list so fantastic walks was Home, Sweet Home.
Speaker 1: I have nothing here to sell you to.
Speaker 4: Come saying that I will tell you.
Speaker 5: Something things I know will chill you to the ball.
Speaker 1: I mean the notion that you would write a song that,
Speaker 1: with a straight face, has the phrase chill you to
Speaker 1: the bone. And you know he's got nothing, he doesn't
Speaker 1: have anything. The chill get to the bone. Some woman
Speaker 1: dumped him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 2: An empty house that this will chill you to the bone.
Speaker 2: My empty house, my empty ass.
Speaker 1: He's so I just can't get over the bath. He's
Speaker 1: so genius.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you love the melodrama.
Speaker 1: I loved the melo.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: I once back in the day of mixtapes, I used
Speaker 1: to make these mixtapes constantly, and they were always named
Speaker 1: after for reasons I forget now, they were always named
Speaker 1: after popes. So on the front of the CD case,
Speaker 1: i'd have an image of one of the popes, like
Speaker 1: you know, Pope Pious the twelfth or Emmanuel the sixteenth,
Speaker 1: and then the Soul Also, I made like ten of
Speaker 1: them because there were a lot of popes. And I
Speaker 1: was once driving with some person who didn't know me
Speaker 1: very well, and I was playing one of these mixtapes,
Speaker 1: the Long Drive. One of these mixtapes after another, and
Speaker 1: after like the third one, this guy Mike turned to
Speaker 1: me and said, what is the matter with you? Every
Speaker 1: single song was some kind of melancholy, over the top weeper.
Speaker 1: I'm happy if the tempo is never picked up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, songwriting, you're always pulling from your library, you know,
Speaker 2: and you hopefully your library just keeps growing and growing.
Speaker 2: And the trick is when I when I was young,
Speaker 2: you're imitating and then you get better at finding you
Speaker 2: when you find your own voice, and then you're just
Speaker 2: sort of taking cues from your library or not copying anybody,
Speaker 2: but you're you're going, oh, that's interesting. That's kind of
Speaker 2: reminds me of this. Let's you know, make it our own.
Speaker 1: And the people that you've mentioned who are important influences
Speaker 1: for you, we just mentioned we talked before about oh
Speaker 1: about Paul Simon. I'm curious what's the thread that links
Speaker 1: and also Tom. I know that Tom Petty is someone
Speaker 1: that has had an influencer. What what's the thread that
Speaker 1: links these influences.
Speaker 2: I think all those songwriters, I don't know if there's
Speaker 2: if there's actually a perfect common thread between them, but
Speaker 2: something about all those songs or all those artists, they
Speaker 2: made records that really connected with me and helped me
Speaker 2: sort of see the world, if you will, and help
Speaker 2: me feel the world. And that's the beauty of music
Speaker 2: is there's a bit of magic to it, and I'm
Speaker 2: sure there's scientific and sociological ways to explain them. I'm
Speaker 2: not really interested necessarily in hearing them because I like
Speaker 2: the magic of it. I like the myth that I
Speaker 2: don't know why this record speaks to me so much.
Speaker 2: But when I hear you know, Tom Petty's Wildflowers, and
Speaker 2: I hear all I have to hear is you belong
Speaker 2: among the wildflywers, you belong in a boat out at
Speaker 2: sea at that in and of itself is just a
Speaker 2: beautiful sentiment, you know, executed with this, you know, the arrangement,
Speaker 2: the sonic sort of landscape of it. None of the
Speaker 2: artists that I love seemed to sort of play by
Speaker 2: a certain formula. Maybe they do sometimes on certain songs,
Speaker 2: or certain records. But Tom Petty's a great example. If
Speaker 2: you look at his sort of the arc of his
Speaker 2: career and listen to the records, they don't all sound
Speaker 2: the same. There's you know, the different producers have sort
Speaker 2: of different eras and fingerprints on his on his work
Speaker 2: Jeff Lynn stuff is different than the Jimmy Ovine stuff.
Speaker 2: And and I like that that they're always looking for
Speaker 2: something else to say, something else to sing, some new
Speaker 2: way to express human experience via music and instruments and
Speaker 2: electricity and all this stuff that makes this makes it work.
Speaker 1: I asked you to sing one cover. Yeah, tell me
Speaker 1: what you chose and why.
Speaker 2: I Well, I did. I chose this song because you
Speaker 2: and I connected over the song back when we met
Speaker 2: in April. And I just saw this artist play at
Speaker 2: the Rhymann, which is a my favorite venue in the
Speaker 2: world and a serious underplay for him. The last time
Speaker 2: I saw him in Nashville was the Bridgetone Arena. He
Speaker 2: then he retired, and now he's come out of retirement
Speaker 2: to do these intimate acoustic shows. I know that you
Speaker 2: have interacted with him a ton, and I've heard nothing
Speaker 2: but great things about him personally, and I think this
Speaker 2: is one of the great songs. I also think it
Speaker 2: has what I consider the best first line of a
Speaker 2: song that I can that I've ever heard. So this
Speaker 2: is this is Paul Simon's America.
Speaker 5: Mm hmmm, let us be loves, will marry our fortunes together.
Speaker 5: I've got some real estate here in my back. So
Speaker 5: I bought a pack of cigarettes missus Wagners pies, and
Speaker 5: wall walked off to look for.
Speaker 3: Erica.
Speaker 5: Kathy, I said, as we boarded a grayhound in Pittsburgh, Michigan.
Speaker 4: Seems like a dream to me.
Speaker 5: Now. It took me four days to hitch ick from
Speaker 5: sagging off. I've gone to look for Armerica.
Speaker 3: Laughing on of us playing games.
Speaker 5: With their faces, she says, the man in the gabardine
Speaker 5: suit is a spine, I said, be careful his bow tie.
Speaker 5: It's really a camera. Well, toss me a saga. I've
Speaker 5: got one here in my raincoat. No, we smoked the
Speaker 5: last one, and how we'll ago Well, I looked at
Speaker 5: the scenery she read her magazine as the moon rolls
Speaker 5: over and over.
Speaker 4: Open. Feel o, Kathy, I'm lost, I said, though.
Speaker 5: I knew she was sleeping.
Speaker 4: I'm empty and a king, and I don't know why,
Speaker 4: m hmm.
Speaker 5: Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. They've all
Speaker 5: gone to look Formerica, all gone to look form Maerica.
Speaker 5: We've all gone to look for America.
Speaker 1: Let us be loves.
Speaker 4: We'll marry our fortunes together.
Speaker 1: He ups with thank you, said his concert at the
Speaker 1: Ryman that you saw earlier this.
Speaker 2: Year, and it was actually, this was really sweet for
Speaker 2: me personally. But we played two nights at the Rymond
Speaker 2: on May second and third, and then he played three
Speaker 2: nights at the Rymond May like twelve, thirteenth, and fourteenth,
Speaker 2: and I got to sit and watch a show right
Speaker 2: after I had played there and to see one of
Speaker 2: my heroes in the same spot that I was in
Speaker 2: eight days earlier, and he had the same reverence for
Speaker 2: the room that I always have, and it was it
Speaker 2: was a bit of an emotional and joyous and overwhelming experience.
Speaker 2: And he did two sets. He did the seven Hymns
Speaker 2: record from front to back, and then he came out
Speaker 2: and did sort of all the songs that you would
Speaker 2: want expect to hear in the second set, and it
Speaker 2: was just a yeah, it was wonderful.
Speaker 1: So you were in the middle. You you you were
Speaker 1: in the middle of writing a song about Cormack MacArthur.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I was.
Speaker 1: Tell me how that came about. Yeah, you are so.
Speaker 2: Cormick McCarthy is one of my favorite authors. You know,
Speaker 2: Southern Gothic, dark, violent, into the world, apocalypse, human sort
Speaker 2: of morality play author right, very sparse and no country
Speaker 2: for old men, all the pretty horses, the road, so
Speaker 2: many great books that turn into great films, et cetera.
Speaker 2: So he actually grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, which is
Speaker 2: where I went to school, but he had he left
Speaker 2: there and lived all over but it sort of landed
Speaker 2: in the desert and Santa fel Passo somewhere in there.
Speaker 2: Unrelated to that, seemingly was. I love old cars, and
Speaker 2: so I get this email from a company that auctions
Speaker 2: old cars just because I love just to look at them.
Speaker 2: And I get this email in April, early April. It
Speaker 2: says Cormick McCarthy's Ferrari it's being auctioned off, and so
Speaker 2: kind of like blue affuse in me because I'm like,
Speaker 2: Cormie McCarthy didn't drive. It's like it's like, sure he
Speaker 2: actually did. He drove this black Ferrari in the last
Speaker 2: years of his life, and so I had this idea
Speaker 2: of like writing a song Cormie McCarthy's Black Ferrari, but
Speaker 2: I couldn't quite find my the end, you know, I
Speaker 2: didn't find the end, but I thought, no, I want to.
Speaker 2: I want to drive Cormie McCarthy's Black Ferrari through the
Speaker 2: desert and like and have a complete existential crisis as
Speaker 2: and I feel like everybody right now is sort of
Speaker 2: we sort of live inside of existential crisis. That's that's
Speaker 2: like going to be the era that we live in.
Speaker 2: We look back on it, we're like, that's the that's
Speaker 2: the air of the existential crisis. There's just so much
Speaker 2: happening at such a speed that it's hard to keep up,
Speaker 2: and it's hard to know how to where to put
Speaker 2: your anger and where to put your your joy and
Speaker 2: how to how to live. And I thought one of
Speaker 2: the ways it would help me is if I had
Speaker 2: Corey McCarthy's Black Ferrari for a day. So I wrote
Speaker 2: this song, and first person I sent it to was
Speaker 2: you because we had talked about that.
Speaker 1: Interview and I love old cars too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we also we could. Yeah, we connected our
Speaker 2: old cars and I was like, I yeah. So I've
Speaker 2: never played this song before except for during soundcheck, So
Speaker 2: this is this is a debut and I really liked
Speaker 2: this song. And if you don't like it, I don't
Speaker 2: really care that much because I like it a lot.
Speaker 2: So let's see. I remember how to.
Speaker 5: Walking on the sidewalk through my neighborhood. My neighbor's black
Speaker 5: cat is up to no good. There's something in the air,
Speaker 5: something in the streets, like a red tail wading up
Speaker 5: in the trees. There's levees and tolls and roadblocks and
Speaker 5: speed bumps. Has it been a day, a week, or
Speaker 5: just a month? Unwanted packages by the front door screen
Speaker 5: and EMPTYEP pages in my diary. Cormac McCarthy's got a
Speaker 5: black Ferrari that he drives across the desert on a
Speaker 5: Sunday morning, and I'm dreaming about the wind in my face,
Speaker 5: nothing but my worn out suitcase driving that Ferrari, like
Speaker 5: Cormac McCarthy in my mind. In my mind, UF fiasco
Speaker 5: falls like rain on our faces, a Mickey Mantle rookie
Speaker 5: card ruined in the basement, and nothing turns out.
Speaker 4: Like you thought it would. It's a little more bare
Speaker 4: food than Hollywood.
Speaker 5: It's confusing the losing the booze and excusing the stage
Speaker 5: fright and all the troubles shooting.
Speaker 3: Where do I.
Speaker 5: Fit in amongst all the matter in this party?
Speaker 4: He always feels like a lost soul's gathering.
Speaker 5: Cormac McCarthy's got a black Ferrari that he drives across
Speaker 5: the desert on a Sunday morning, And I'm dreaming about
Speaker 5: the wind and my face, nothing but my worn out
Speaker 5: suitcase driving that Ferrari, like Cormac McCarthy in my mind,
Speaker 5: In my mind, engine and fuel and pain and chrome,
Speaker 5: muscle and bl blood and skinning bone. Engine and fuel
Speaker 5: and pain and chrome, muscle and blood and skinning bones.
Speaker 5: Cormac McCarthy's gotten black Ferrari that he drives across the
Speaker 5: desert an him Sunday morning, and I'm dreaming about the
Speaker 5: wind in my face, nothing but warm out suitcase of
Speaker 5: driving that Ferrari, like Cormac McCarthy.
Speaker 12: In my mind, in my mind, in my mind, I'm
Speaker 12: driving Cornmac McCarthy's black Ferra.
Speaker 1: In my mind, I love that.
Speaker 2: I hope you.
Speaker 1: Why you said you couldn't figure out how to couldn't
Speaker 1: figure out your way in? What did you mean by that?
Speaker 2: Well, I had this this like obviously the phrase in
Speaker 2: the rhyme Corey McCarthy's Black Ferrari. It was like, this
Speaker 2: song gonna be like a funny song about how could
Speaker 2: this Maudelin writer have such a you know, cultural toy
Speaker 2: like this. This doesn't make sense to me.
Speaker 1: It should be a old Chevy pick up.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, that's like that's the imagination, right, It's not
Speaker 2: that he had this car, so it's like a magnum
Speaker 2: p I car, you know. And so then I was like, no,
Speaker 2: that's not the right frame because what I felt when
Speaker 2: I saw that that existed as a fan of his work,
Speaker 2: and it's also someone who would like to have a
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty nine Testerosa just for a day. Even was
Speaker 2: that No, even the saddest, most sort of gothic, you know,
Speaker 2: the chronicler of American violence needed an escape, and so
Speaker 2: he had this Black Ferrari and he would just go.
Speaker 2: I'd imagine him smiling, driving one hundred and twenty miles
Speaker 2: an hour across the desert in Santa Fe. And there's
Speaker 2: not a picture in the world that exists of Corn
Speaker 2: McCarthy's smiling no, and so I relate to that. I
Speaker 2: relate to feeling the weight of of you know, life
Speaker 2: and all of its like joys and tragedies, and that
Speaker 2: sometimes the simple pleasure might make it go away for
Speaker 2: a minute.
Speaker 1: Has that song as it stands? Now? Have you worked
Speaker 1: on that with the band? Or is at all you
Speaker 1: at this point?
Speaker 2: Well, they've heard it, but we haven't know. We wait
Speaker 2: till we all get in the room together before we
Speaker 2: sort of dive into it.
Speaker 1: But yeah, what will happen to it when when you
Speaker 1: all dive in?
Speaker 2: I don't know. I mean, we'll we'll go through several iterations.
Speaker 2: First thing we'll do is we'll make sure we're in
Speaker 2: the right key. We'll do some practical things, make sure
Speaker 2: we're the right key, figure out the tempo, and then
Speaker 2: we'll sort of jump into the approach, you know, like
Speaker 2: what are the drums gonna be doing? Are we are we?
Speaker 2: Is this acoustic sort of is that the main engine
Speaker 2: driver of the song? Or are we gonna do like
Speaker 2: a piano bass drums thing? And then you know, just
Speaker 2: kind of like try a bunch of different things and
Speaker 2: then inevitably one of them, all five of us will
Speaker 2: go that's it. That's the that's the approach.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a really beautiful song. Thank you, Thank you do.
Speaker 1: I think we're I think our time is.
Speaker 2: I have no idea ho much time we've been up
Speaker 2: for a while.
Speaker 1: Though we've been up here a while. Yeah, I feel
Speaker 1: are people lurking? How should we end this?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm being sumptuous. So if I ask you to play
Speaker 1: one more song.
Speaker 2: Sure, Sure, I'll play a song I wrote. There's a
Speaker 2: wonderful band in Nashville that has toured for many years
Speaker 2: called Old Crow Medicine Show Good. My kids go to
Speaker 2: school with some of Ketsch's kids, who's the lead singer
Speaker 2: and writer. And this is a great Nashville story. We're
Speaker 2: dropping our kids off at school and he's like, what
Speaker 2: are you up to this week? And I said, I'm
Speaker 2: just gonna be in my office doing some writing and
Speaker 2: you know, working, And he said we should write a
Speaker 2: song this week. We'd never written a song together before,
Speaker 2: and so I said, well how about tomorrow morning. So
Speaker 2: the next morning, we drop our kids off, we get coffee.
Speaker 2: About eight thirty, we're writing songs, and we wrote this
Speaker 2: song about ten thirty that morning. We both had just
Speaker 2: gotten back into doing normal shows again with a real
Speaker 2: with live audiences, and we had really missed that.
Speaker 1: So this is such a fantastic only in Nashville story.
Speaker 2: Yeah it is. And then it was a great It
Speaker 2: was a great song for me. It ended up being
Speaker 2: It's the song is called Dance with Everybody, ended up
Speaker 2: getting picked up by the NCAA for two years straight
Speaker 2: as the theme song for March Madness, which a song
Speaker 2: is not about basketball, and b I am like one
Speaker 2: of the world's worst basketball players in a big family
Speaker 2: of athletes, and so it brought me a lot of
Speaker 2: satisfaction that my song I was in. I got to
Speaker 2: participate in March Madness. None of my none of my athletics,
Speaker 2: six three cousins did.
Speaker 5: So you walked into this room, you hardly knew anyone.
Speaker 5: See full of strange, just crashing all the rooms with
Speaker 5: the band strikes. By the end of the night's strange
Speaker 5: as normal. I want to dance with everybody.
Speaker 9: Who came through that dog, whether you came here to
Speaker 9: party or you came here to cry, whether that'll meet somebody,
Speaker 9: cheat somebody to get little get high.
Speaker 4: So come on, all you people.
Speaker 3: Hit two feet on your floor.
Speaker 9: I want to dance with everybody and came through that door.
Speaker 3: WHOA, let it all go?
Speaker 5: WHOA, Shake up your soul, throw your hands in the air,
Speaker 5: throw your hat in the ring, grow your hips in
Speaker 5: your heart into everything, Get lost.
Speaker 9: In the crowd, Get down on the floor. I wanna
Speaker 9: dance with everybody came in that door. Well, come, all.
Speaker 2: Your saints and sinners.
Speaker 3: Poets, profits and fools.
Speaker 5: Are you cowboys, tricks and zipss trying so hard to
Speaker 5: be cool? All you dreamers and schemers thirsty for more?
Speaker 3: I wanna dance with everybody.
Speaker 2: Came through that door.
Speaker 4: WHOA, let it all go? Whoa.
Speaker 5: Oh, shake up your soul. Royal hands in the air,
Speaker 5: royal hat in the ring, royal hips in your heart
Speaker 5: into everything, Get lost in the crowd, Get down on
Speaker 5: the floor.
Speaker 3: I want to dance with.
Speaker 5: Everybody came through that door.
Speaker 13: Oh where, ohhey, ohhay.
Speaker 3: Well, let's put us oude our differences. We'll lace up
Speaker 3: our shoes. Let's narrow the distance between.
Speaker 4: Me and meet me in the middle.
Speaker 3: Let's quit keeping score.
Speaker 9: I want to dance with everybody came through that door.
Speaker 3: WHOA, let it all go.
Speaker 14: WHOA shake up your soul, Throw hands in the royal
Speaker 14: had read royal hips in your heart into everything.
Speaker 5: Turn the world on a stream, Turn the winds on
Speaker 5: a dive, Turn the wheel to the west, and the
Speaker 5: water the wine.
Speaker 3: Get lost in the crowd, get down on the swoon.
Speaker 9: I want to dance with everybody came through that I
Speaker 9: want to dance with everybody who came through that door.
Speaker 1: Oh, thank you so much, Drew, Thank you all. This
Speaker 1: episode of Broken Record is produced by Lea Rose and
Speaker 1: Nina Bird Lawrence, with bend A, da f Haffrey and
Speaker 1: Lucy Sullivan. Our engineers are Nina Bird Lawrence, Sarah Buguerer,
Speaker 1: and Ben Holliday. Marketing by Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan.
Speaker 1: Our executive producers are Jacob Smith and Justin Richmond. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to Wage twenty four, to Wallowise Linton, and to
Speaker 1: the whole crew over at the Cherry Lane Theater. My
Speaker 1: name is Malcolm Gabo.