Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Madeleine Peyroux is a jazz inspired singer songwriter who got
Speaker 2: her start singing in street bands in Paris as a teenager.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety six, Atlantic Records released Madeline's debut album,
Speaker 2: where she covered tunes from the thirties and forties by
Speaker 2: artists like Bessie Smith and Billie Holliday, and the later
Speaker 2: she recorded songs by Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. This year,
Speaker 2: Madeleine Peyroux released Let's Walk, her first album of all
Speaker 2: original songs, co written with her longtime touring guitar player
Speaker 2: John Harrington. On today's episode, Madeleine and John play through
Speaker 2: some songs for the new album, and Bruce Headlin talks
Speaker 2: with them about their mutual creative process. Madeleine also remembers
Speaker 2: her early days busking with a Bohemian ex pat named
Speaker 2: Dan William Fitzgerald who became her musical mentor, and she
Speaker 2: explains how doctor Cornell West became her guiding light during
Speaker 2: a recent bout of personal despair. This is broken record
Speaker 2: liner notes for the Digital Age.
Speaker 3: I'm justin Richmond. Here's Bruce Hedlm's conversation with Madeline Peru
Speaker 3: and John Harrington. You've got this new album, Let's Walk,
Speaker 3: which is very exciting. It's been what six seven years
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, since your last album. Now your last
Speaker 3: album at the time, you said the question sort of
Speaker 3: driving that album was where do you stand? What was
Speaker 3: the question going into this album? What was animating you
Speaker 3: going into the studio this time?
Speaker 4: These songs are central to my experience in the middle
Speaker 4: of COVID, facing issues, realities, or feeling the need to
Speaker 4: be able to really get personal. And you know, I've
Speaker 4: always tried to say and I thought I sounded flippant
Speaker 4: in the past when I said everything is a little
Speaker 4: bit political, and some people would say, no, not everything.
Speaker 4: We need to be able to get away from it,
Speaker 4: and I'm like, yeah, of course we do. You know,
Speaker 4: I was not ever civically engaged in my life to
Speaker 4: a degree, So I suppose I was telling myself that
Speaker 4: the act of you know, playing live music, the act
Speaker 4: of sharing space, sharing vibrations in music is at least
Speaker 4: when I was a street musician it felt political in
Speaker 4: a way. But this time in twenty twenty that I
Speaker 4: spent a lot of time forced to be alone with myself,
Speaker 4: and I would have gone mad if it hadn't been
Speaker 4: for John Harrington responding to my email saying, Okay, that's
Speaker 4: an interesting idea. How about this? And we started collaborating.
Speaker 4: I think it was twenty twenty or maybe twenty twenty
Speaker 4: one when we first started the throwing things back and forth.
Speaker 3: How did you know each other before? Then?
Speaker 4: Well, we we've been playing music together. I pay him
Speaker 4: to hang out with me.
Speaker 5: I've been working for Maddie for at least fifteen years,
Speaker 5: we think maybe more like seventeen years.
Speaker 3: Okay, well that's why I thought. I was a little
Speaker 3: surprised just in her band on the road when I
Speaker 3: reached Oh okay, yeah, all right, so the relationship was
Speaker 3: a little different then, is what you are?
Speaker 5: Well, this is new for us, Yeah, to be songwriters,
Speaker 5: especially writing all ten tunes on the record. That that
Speaker 5: was new for Okay, for me with Maddie, Yeah, no,
Speaker 5: I've for a while. So I was new for Mattie too.
Speaker 5: She's she's had some you know, records where there have
Speaker 5: been other authors, but never like an exclusive writing pair
Speaker 5: for all of the tunes.
Speaker 4: I don't think that's true.
Speaker 3: Well, absolute and your producer, when he heard the song
Speaker 3: said no covers.
Speaker 4: Yes he did. We had a lunch one meeting with
Speaker 4: Elliott Shy and the three of us sat there and
Speaker 4: I had put together a list that that I thought,
Speaker 4: this will make sense, and we can revamp some older
Speaker 4: stuff and let's then we'll get this record done sooner.
Speaker 4: And Elliott he said, you know, I like the songs
Speaker 4: that you two wrote together, and so just do that.
Speaker 4: Only songs by you.
Speaker 5: He said. He said, no covers, and none of those
Speaker 5: other songs, just the ones that you wrote with John.
Speaker 5: And if there aren't enough, write some more, you.
Speaker 4: Know, Is that right?
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's what he said.
Speaker 4: I looked at John and I just went, what.
Speaker 5: What are we going to do?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Are we going to do that? Well, you've you've
Speaker 3: been writing for a long time, but you kind of
Speaker 3: made your bones as an interpreter of Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen,
Speaker 3: one of my favorites, Joe Henry. So what was it
Speaker 3: like to say, Okay, I'm ripping off that band aid?
Speaker 3: There's no.
Speaker 4: I mean, I was excited to try it, but I
Speaker 4: remember thinking, oh God, you know, what have we gotten
Speaker 4: ourselves into?
Speaker 5: It felt it felt daunting and overwhelming. I think at first,
Speaker 5: looking back at it now, I mean it was. It
Speaker 5: was a brilliant idea, I.
Speaker 4: Think, and it made this record.
Speaker 5: The record coheres in spite of the sort of range
Speaker 5: of you know, sort of heavy to light, you know,
Speaker 5: sort of content, you know, and and different moods. It's
Speaker 5: somehow coheres, which which I was concerned about, but glad
Speaker 5: to find that that it does.
Speaker 4: I don't think it coheres in the traditional way at all.
Speaker 4: I don't think it really. I think it's really weird record.
Speaker 4: I remember when we were recording it, sitting in the
Speaker 4: booth going what are we doing? This stuff is crazy?
Speaker 4: But but it is. It just wanted to let it be,
Speaker 4: I feel for me, these songs just came to us
Speaker 4: in varying degrees. We worked at chiseling away at them,
Speaker 4: but it's all a gift, and the mandate for me
Speaker 4: was to make sure that it's something that I really
Speaker 4: care about. Even the Mosquito song, Yeah, it's something I
Speaker 4: really care about.
Speaker 5: I was going to say that there are ways that
Speaker 5: it coheres from me, and that's that's the one I
Speaker 5: think that's the most critical. That these are the most
Speaker 5: personal collection of songs I think that you've ever put
Speaker 5: on a single record together. You know, and that's that's
Speaker 5: a big part of it. But I think sonically, thanks
Speaker 5: to Elliott, it coheres and thanks to the musicians being
Speaker 5: all basically the same same team, guys who'd been on
Speaker 5: the road with you and everybody who was in the
Speaker 5: studio together. That's true background vocal section that was the
Speaker 5: same on the what four or five songs that have backgrounds. Yeah,
Speaker 5: And so sonically I think it holds up that way too.
Speaker 5: And I think mostly because you weren't going to put
Speaker 5: a lyric on, you know, a word on this record
Speaker 5: that you hadn't vetted very thoroughly, and and that didn't
Speaker 5: ring true to you personally, And that's that coheres to
Speaker 5: me in spite of the range of styles, which which
Speaker 5: I understand is that's.
Speaker 4: What I'm talking about, you know, just like I don't
Speaker 4: think that that a lot of producers would have let
Speaker 4: us get away with doing it like that. I think
Speaker 4: Elliott might be one of the few people that's truly
Speaker 4: still very adventurous, beautiful thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love that about him. Do you think another
Speaker 3: producer might have said, Okay, but let's put on a
Speaker 3: let's put on a letter co on, let's put on
Speaker 3: let's put on something.
Speaker 4: I think that they would have wanted to rearrange the
Speaker 4: songs to be more tame in their stylistic breadth and
Speaker 4: and say, well, let's let's try to rain this into
Speaker 4: sort of a little bit dumb down to be you know,
Speaker 4: in a.
Speaker 5: Way, maybe the songs musically are more similar than they are,
Speaker 5: you know, far arranging. But you know, the other thing
Speaker 5: is another producer, if he were functioning as a real
Speaker 5: producer and wanting the cloud and the control, I mean,
Speaker 5: we should remind ourselves that you and I and Elliott
Speaker 5: were all sharing the producer role. And and for that reason,
Speaker 5: I think Elliott was hanging back a little more than
Speaker 5: a sort of producer producer who was the only producer
Speaker 5: on the record would do. And so it was a
Speaker 5: collaborative effort that way as well. And I think you know,
Speaker 5: he liked that and wanted it that way. And he's
Speaker 5: the kind of reticent guy until it's important to speak up,
Speaker 5: and then he speaks. And that's that's that's one of the.
Speaker 4: Only things he said at that lunch was no covers, like.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, it's he's he's got you know, strength, but
Speaker 5: but he waits a long time and He only speaks
Speaker 5: up when it when he knows it's important.
Speaker 4: In fact, he's sitting right here and he hasn't said
Speaker 4: a word.
Speaker 6: It's not.
Speaker 3: Well, we're waiting for that. He'll he'll finish the episode.
Speaker 3: So how did you split up the producing duties? How
Speaker 3: did that work?
Speaker 4: Well, John did most of the work.
Speaker 5: Well thing is a funny term, and there's so many
Speaker 5: there's so much overlap nowadays in the way most people
Speaker 5: put a record together. There's overlap between the songwriting, the arranging,
Speaker 5: the producing, the engineering, the recording.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: So, John, you had made demos before we met with
Speaker 4: Elliott Shiner, and we had made demos too, and then
Speaker 4: I had added my vocals to them. But I think
Speaker 4: you pretty much were the one that made those demos.
Speaker 4: You played everything we recorded. Anything that I recorded, I
Speaker 4: came over to your place, and some.
Speaker 5: We didn't have time to really demo, but we but.
Speaker 4: Even Yeah, and then there was the one like the
Speaker 4: title track, which you made the whole song and made
Speaker 4: a demo so we could hear all these vocal parts,
Speaker 4: all the harmonies, the type of bass treatment, the type
Speaker 4: of treatment, and the energy. And some of these songs
Speaker 4: were I mean could have just been scripted. Obviously, we
Speaker 4: didn't do that to the guy who.
Speaker 5: They were pretty well thought before we got to this.
Speaker 5: That's what we wanted to be that way.
Speaker 3: The title track, A couple of tracks have it. They've
Speaker 3: got like a New Orleans feel to that.
Speaker 5: That one certainly does.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you've got that kind of New Orleans organ
Speaker 3: And a couple other songs. Was that deliberate? Was that?
Speaker 3: Did that come from something?
Speaker 4: Or I think Let's walk became a sort of the
Speaker 4: drummer was playing that kind of beat. I don't know
Speaker 4: if there was conceive of it that way really, but
Speaker 4: I think I changed it a little bit.
Speaker 5: We tried it like that in rehearsal, and we sort
Speaker 5: of liked that it felt a little more spirited and
Speaker 5: not so sort of safe.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's a march, and what is more appropriate
Speaker 4: to feeling like you're dancing while you're walking, you know,
Speaker 4: feeling music and walking that's American? What's more American? Then? Yeah?
Speaker 4: And I think the New Orleans, the New Orleans.
Speaker 5: It's a natural part of all of these musicians, you know,
Speaker 5: sort of repertoire, you know, in terms of styles, you know,
Speaker 5: because it's music. We always we've all loved so much
Speaker 5: for so.
Speaker 4: Long, you know, and it's at the heart of what
Speaker 4: do you think, because like to me, I have decided
Speaker 4: that American music is one of the main important things
Speaker 4: that we have to offer the world, and we don't
Speaker 4: even know what we have. We don't necessarily recognize it
Speaker 4: very well. We don't understand stylistically how much crossover there is,
Speaker 4: how much like how blurry that is, and yet how
Speaker 4: also steeped really in different like cultures that are identities.
Speaker 4: It is. At the same time, you don't think to
Speaker 4: say I'm more country and I'm more bluegrass and I'm
Speaker 4: more People still do that, which is so odd because
Speaker 4: there is no those things were never separate.
Speaker 5: And musically well, you know, anytime money gets involved, you know,
Speaker 5: the categorizations help sell it.
Speaker 4: So that's why they're yeah, but I'm trying to I'm
Speaker 4: trying to step even further back. You know.
Speaker 3: Now most people, of course think you're French right, you
Speaker 3: are American right, But you did live in France and
Speaker 3: that was your kind of musical education. Do you think
Speaker 3: you have got that kind of outsider's view of American culture?
Speaker 3: Does that help?
Speaker 4: It helps immensely There's several things about it. There's being
Speaker 4: American in another country and realizing and listening to people
Speaker 4: talk about del Vandos and you know, Kulan Zogong and
Speaker 4: like who's cool and Zagong and who are Zabita's Who's
Speaker 4: what is that? I've never heard of that band before?
Speaker 4: Oh the Beatles? Oh okay okay. So like just like
Speaker 4: realizing what people talk about, how people talk about America
Speaker 4: that were my age at the time, when I was twelve,
Speaker 4: thirteen or older, you know. And then secondly, what happened
Speaker 4: when I became a teenagers I met American ex patriots
Speaker 4: who I would have never met. That's something that Dan
Speaker 4: Fitzgerald said. He was from Kingston, New York, so upstate
Speaker 4: New York, but he used to hang out in the
Speaker 4: Bowery and I used to take the train over to
Speaker 4: Canal Street over and Broadway. I would have been in
Speaker 4: New York City at the same time as him, but
Speaker 4: I was a young, like maybe adolescent or teenage white
Speaker 4: girl from South Brooklyn and he would have been a
Speaker 4: middle aged black man from Kingston. We would have never
Speaker 4: spoken to each other, even though we might have had
Speaker 4: all of these cultural affinities. That were hard to find.
Speaker 4: But because we saw each other in Paris, we became,
Speaker 4: you know, like family eventually, and of course it changed
Speaker 4: my life to be there because of that. So it
Speaker 4: was interesting. It's one thing to try. It's very hard
Speaker 4: to try to understand another culture. I mean, you know,
Speaker 4: I lived in France for a long time. My mother
Speaker 4: has lived there ever since nineteen eighty seven. She's still
Speaker 4: learning and we're still talking about attitudes and different types
Speaker 4: of like sayings that you might have to describe something.
Speaker 4: And like just today she said, there's a French saying.
Speaker 4: Women talk about French men, they say, you know, they're
Speaker 4: only interested until they have killed the beast. That's the
Speaker 4: literal translation of they catch you a woman is the
Speaker 4: wildness has to be beaten out of you. You have
Speaker 4: to be tamed, I think, is what it's kind of saying.
Speaker 4: And then then they're interested and they'll move on to
Speaker 4: other things.
Speaker 3: But I'll try I'll try that on my wife.
Speaker 4: I don't suggest it, you see American.
Speaker 3: I'm not an American. She is an American, and don't
Speaker 3: I don't think I would survive that conversation. I think
Speaker 3: there would be some killing. But it wouldn't be her.
Speaker 3: So but we should back up because we haven't talked
Speaker 3: about Dan. There's a song about him on this record.
Speaker 3: Can you just back up and explain how you met
Speaker 3: him in Paris and who he is.
Speaker 4: Daniel William Fitzgerald was born in nineteen thirty three in Kingston,
Speaker 4: New York. Dan went to ministry school, he went to
Speaker 4: law school. He became disillusioned by both of those things.
Speaker 4: Joined the army in the fifties and that's what brought
Speaker 4: him over to Europe. And then he just started going
Speaker 4: back and forth and creating his life. And apparently in
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy eight he was hanging out with some friends,
Speaker 4: some American friends he had met ex patriots in Paris
Speaker 4: find each other right, and he said, I want to
Speaker 4: go to JazzFest this year in New Orleans, and let's
Speaker 4: start a band in order to go down there. Somehow
Speaker 4: he knew all these old Bessie Smith and My Rainey songs,
Speaker 4: he knew them by heart. And there's a Ma Rainey
Speaker 4: song called The Loss and Wandering Blues. And he started
Speaker 4: a band called the Lost Wandering Blues and Jazz Band.
Speaker 4: He made a washtub, he turned it into a washtub base.
Speaker 4: He painted it and he started this band. They went
Speaker 4: around from that time on. They went to Europe, and
Speaker 4: if there was an American who was going to wander
Speaker 4: around Paris and they bumped into him, they would bump
Speaker 4: into him on the street and they'd recognize him, and
Speaker 4: then he'd make friends and we'd stay at somebody's house
Speaker 4: that night. We'd go play near a restaurant. The restaurant
Speaker 4: would come out and say, come inside and have a meal.
Speaker 4: You can hang out with us. And it was a
Speaker 4: lifestyle that he created. I come along to Paris and
Speaker 4: about twenty years later, eighty nine ninety, I was about fifteen,
Speaker 4: joined a different street band that was in the same scene.
Speaker 3: At this point, you played ukulele or guitar or what
Speaker 3: did you I had.
Speaker 4: A guitar, but I couldn't play any of the songs
Speaker 4: that we were singing. You know. People said, oh, what
Speaker 4: songs do you want to sing? I said, well, first
Speaker 4: I was passing the hat for somebody, and then I
Speaker 4: heard these guys singing and I said, you know, I
Speaker 4: could probably do better than them. So I volunteered myself
Speaker 4: as singing and they were like, oh, she wants to
Speaker 4: sing a song. Okay, sure, what do you know? And
Speaker 4: so it was Georgia in Summertime and that's it. And
Speaker 4: then I thought, well, I know all these other songs, but.
Speaker 3: I your mother taught you songs? Is that?
Speaker 4: Yeah? We used to play ukuleles together, and she sang
Speaker 4: all the time. She sang every morning, she sang all
Speaker 4: over the house. And it was really the only time
Speaker 4: that my father was not being kind of tyrant was
Speaker 4: when we would sit down, the two of us and
Speaker 4: sing together. He would just stop and be quiet and
Speaker 4: listen and say, oh, I guess I can't. I can't
Speaker 4: do anything better than that. But the rest of the
Speaker 4: time he was telling us what to do.
Speaker 3: But he was gone by the time you were in Paris.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we moved to Paris. Right after they divorced. He
Speaker 4: moved out. He was living somewhere in the city for
Speaker 4: the rest of his life, somewhere in New York. Eventually
Speaker 4: he moved out to Corona, Queens in the end, Yeah, what.
Speaker 3: Made you want to start busting?
Speaker 4: The first thing that I remember was that I was
Speaker 4: because I was in France and I couldn't speak the language,
Speaker 4: and I wanted to make friends. I would go around
Speaker 4: I would wander around the neighborhood with my guitar and
Speaker 4: just sit around and play while other people were talking
Speaker 4: to each other kids. And one day somebody threw some
Speaker 4: money in the case and I remember going, wait, what
Speaker 4: just happened here? So that was the revelation for me.
Speaker 4: It was like, oh, hey, you think I could actually
Speaker 4: make money doing this? This would be amazing. And then
Speaker 4: I did wander into Paris, I saw street I somehow
Speaker 4: we saw street musicians at one point, and I remember thinking,
Speaker 4: I've got to go back here to find these people,
Speaker 4: and I did. I did a like a trek through
Speaker 4: the city trying to find them, and that's when I
Speaker 4: saw Danny's band. And I didn't speak to him that day,
Speaker 4: but it was absolutely memorable because they all had hats on,
Speaker 4: they had microphones and amps, and it was so weird.
Speaker 4: It was a weird type of hybrid of American music,
Speaker 4: like it bring kind of full circle to what we
Speaker 4: were talking about, because he had this sort of Black
Speaker 4: American musical culture that I had never heard. I had
Speaker 4: heard some early blues from my parents' records, but it
Speaker 4: was mostly like stuff that had gone into universities, like
Speaker 4: Robert Johnson, Like there was a certain group of black
Speaker 4: artists that were part of the folk movement, but then
Speaker 4: there were all these other blues jazz artists that I
Speaker 4: don't know, Like that wasn't my experience. I didn't hear
Speaker 4: some of that stuff. I knew fat Swaller, I'd heard
Speaker 4: a lot of Fat Swaller, a lot of some Louis Armstrong.
Speaker 4: So but Danny was playing early early stuff, early jazz
Speaker 4: almost like rag time stuff, or if you listen to
Speaker 4: Bessie Smith records, it's right in the middle. It's after ragtime,
Speaker 4: because I think ragtime, I think of ragtime is like
Speaker 4: Scott Joplin, So that's eighteen nineties basically. And then if
Speaker 4: you think of swing, I think of the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 4: it's post depression. But then like there's this period in
Speaker 4: the through the twenties where even the rhythm is like
Speaker 4: not absolutely sort of the approach to how the shuffle
Speaker 4: feels is sort of like still in between those two spaces.
Speaker 4: It's not completely laid back yet, but you kind of
Speaker 4: feel it's starting to lay back. But Billie Holliday's first recording,
Speaker 4: when she was sixteen, was in the thirties and you
Speaker 4: can hear that the bands, the dance bands are now
Speaker 4: starting to do that thing where I suppose the Great
Speaker 4: Migration is influencing that too, right, because you have country
Speaker 4: blues becoming urbanized. And if you listen to Bessie Smith,
Speaker 4: like Ma Rainy is really country, you don't have a
Speaker 4: lot of harmonic changes. Really is sort of the in
Speaker 4: a folky world. It's a folk thing. But with Bessie
Speaker 4: you've got piano players and guitar players and they're playing
Speaker 4: all these passing chords and there's like diminished chords, and
Speaker 4: we're like little changes in tempo and these verses that
Speaker 4: never repeat or these sections that never repeat that are
Speaker 4: quite complicated. And I believe that that's more of like
Speaker 4: because of the urban influence where they go to the
Speaker 4: cities and you're hearing a lot of a lot more
Speaker 4: different kinds of music.
Speaker 3: What grabbed you about that music.
Speaker 4: Well, it's harmonically accessible to me, Like it's a pop,
Speaker 4: you know, dance type of music with some more complexity
Speaker 4: to it, but not to the point where it's ethereal
Speaker 4: and atonal. Yet it hasn't really gone over crossed over.
Speaker 4: So for me to learn music, to learn chords because
Speaker 4: I was so fascinated by hearing like, you know, some
Speaker 4: cool song like across the Universe from the Beatles. Like
Speaker 4: I remember thinking like, how are you supposed to play
Speaker 4: that on a ukulele? This is really hard. That was
Speaker 4: my biggest problem, was like, well, where's the harmony coming from?
Speaker 4: I just don't get it.
Speaker 3: Well, you know the key there is you only play
Speaker 3: the George Harrison songs because he used to write onles.
Speaker 4: Oh really yeah, definitely, Here Comes the Sun. It's like
Speaker 4: one of the first ones that I was like, yes.
Speaker 3: Yeah or something. I think he yeah, he used to.
Speaker 4: He used to use a oh that's beautiful and then
Speaker 4: he would just play sound like that.
Speaker 3: He would just play with the kpo right when he
Speaker 3: played it in the guitar, so it would be in
Speaker 3: the same Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean I'm not that I wasn't that good a
Speaker 4: ukulele player either.
Speaker 3: Let's get a ukulele out here right now?
Speaker 4: Not no, no, And I.
Speaker 3: Heard you like when you start a guitar. You liked
Speaker 3: Freddy Green.
Speaker 4: Well right, because he was in the small group with
Speaker 4: Billie Holliday and those incredible recordings that they made with
Speaker 4: Teddy Wilson Lester Young, Freddy Green, Philly Joe Jones maybe
Speaker 4: on drums and some of those those recordings. So I
Speaker 4: think they made like one hundred records, you know, during
Speaker 4: those two years, maybe two or three years, thirty nine forty.
Speaker 4: It was all wartime too. I wonder if it wasn't
Speaker 4: like FDR grants that made that happen. Those records are
Speaker 4: absolutely like, they're just so good.
Speaker 2: We have to take a quick break and then we'll
Speaker 2: be back with more from Madeline Peru and John Harrington.
Speaker 2: We're back with more from Madeline Peru and John Harrington.
Speaker 2: So tell me then, how how did you and Dan
Speaker 2: then connect?
Speaker 4: You heard him, Well, he taught me a lot of
Speaker 4: this music. I heard him, and then I couldn't find
Speaker 4: him again because apparently he had a car and he
Speaker 4: would leave town. I thought that was the most amazing
Speaker 4: thing ever, that the big Mercedes that would like just
Speaker 4: barely fit in the walking street where we were all
Speaker 4: hanging out in those days. So whenever he came to town,
Speaker 4: you knew it because he was parked in front of
Speaker 4: the cafe. But I didn't see him for a couple
Speaker 4: of months. I joined another band, I sang with them.
Speaker 4: We actually got a job singing in a club, and
Speaker 4: apparently I was very badly behaved, and I drank because
Speaker 4: I only had two songs to sing per set, so
Speaker 4: I just sat and drank alcohol the rest of the time,
Speaker 4: and by the end of the night they said I
Speaker 4: wasn't behaving, so I can only imagine was just basically
Speaker 4: everything looked bad at the point at that age, I
Speaker 4: think it was still only fifteen or something, and I
Speaker 4: had dropped, and I basically the high school told me,
Speaker 4: you know, if you ever don't show up anymore, that's it.
Speaker 4: You're out. So I took the gig, and I didn't
Speaker 4: show up, and I just assumed I was out, and
Speaker 4: then I was out, and then I ran out of
Speaker 4: money from that gig. And then there was a rainy day.
Speaker 4: Of course, if you're a street musician, you watch in
Speaker 4: the weather all the time, and it was a rainy
Speaker 4: day and there was no one anywhere, and I had like,
Speaker 4: you know, seven francs or something, which was enough for
Speaker 4: me to buy half a beer. Whatever it was I had.
Speaker 4: I literally decided, at ten in the morning, I'm going
Speaker 4: to buy a drink with this. So I sat at
Speaker 4: this bar with this beer and looked out the window
Speaker 4: and I said, what have I done to myself? And
Speaker 4: at that moment I saw Danny across the street, standing
Speaker 4: under a covered walking passageway, just standing there. I'm just like,
Speaker 4: what in the world. So I was just ran over
Speaker 4: to him. I said, Danny, you said I could sing
Speaker 4: in your band. He said, okay, go ahead, you have
Speaker 4: to audition first. I said, sure, no problem, He said
Speaker 4: go ahead. And then I said, I what here now?
Speaker 4: And of course I couldn't play any of these songs
Speaker 4: on guitar, so I snapped my fingers and I sang jeepers,
Speaker 4: creepers right in his face, and he stared me down
Speaker 4: the entire time, and it was so embarrassing, and I
Speaker 4: just just nervous, you know. I thought, Oh, this is it,
Speaker 4: you know. And then he was so nice. He just
Speaker 4: turned to be He went from like making me dread
Speaker 4: every minute to just being completely warm and said, okay,
Speaker 4: you're in the band, but you have to audition for
Speaker 4: the other guy as well. He's our musical director and
Speaker 4: he's in Holland and we're going to go there tomorrow.
Speaker 4: So come back tomorrow and we'll go to Holland. We're
Speaker 4: going to go to Holland together, and then I didn't
Speaker 4: have anywhere to stay that night, so I was really,
Speaker 4: he was your mother, not My mother had told me
Speaker 4: if I didn't go to school that I couldn't stay
Speaker 4: at home anymore. But I'd dropped out of school several
Speaker 4: times by this point, right, so we had gotten to
Speaker 4: a point where she was just like, well, you're not
Speaker 4: allowed to do that anymore. You can't be like this anymore.
Speaker 4: And she was right. But I got Danny to let
Speaker 4: me join the band, and I still didn't have any
Speaker 4: anywhere to stay that night, and I didn't tell him,
Speaker 4: and I didn't know him. I didn't know if he
Speaker 4: would have helped me out. But I had this other friend.
Speaker 4: I went to the guy and he said, yeah, okay,
Speaker 4: you can sleep on my fortnight if you're joining Janny's band.
Speaker 4: It's cool. It's gonna be great because he knew Danny.
Speaker 4: But then the next day, Danny just sat around drinking
Speaker 4: coffees all day long, and I sat outside the cafe
Speaker 4: with my guitar, just wondering, like, I hope we're leved.
Speaker 4: We didn't leave.
Speaker 7: I had to go back to my friend and he
Speaker 7: opened the door and said, what the fuck are you
Speaker 7: doing back here?
Speaker 4: Oh, Danny, you know, okay, you can spend another night here.
Speaker 4: And it's happened three or four times. Guy cussed at me.
Speaker 6: What the fuck went?
Speaker 4: Is Danny gonna leave? Then we did leave. I got
Speaker 4: and I joined the band and I started learning this music.
Speaker 4: The musical direct or, quote unquote was a wonderful guitar
Speaker 4: player named Chris Monin, who was actually also a teenager himself.
Speaker 4: He was studying guitar at the Conservatory, the Jazz Conservatory
Speaker 4: in southern Holland.
Speaker 3: So how long did you play with with Danny's band?
Speaker 4: I played with Danny's I tried to leave his band
Speaker 4: a couple of times, and then I ended up coming back.
Speaker 4: But I mean, I think I was about seventeen, Yeah,
Speaker 4: seventeen when when we got to the end of this,
Speaker 4: there was a documentary. This film student was making a
Speaker 4: documentary about us, and he said, come on, you guys
Speaker 4: need to play in Harlem. And I remember thinking, why
Speaker 4: on earth would we go and play this play in Harlem?
Speaker 4: And Danny took it as a challenge, I think, and
Speaker 4: so we did and people threw bottles at us. They
Speaker 4: said you better not you know, set up your amps
Speaker 4: in front of my house. What do you crazy? Which
Speaker 4: you know, that was crazy, It was bad idea. But
Speaker 4: we ended up finding a place that we could set
Speaker 4: up and it was out in the court building there
Speaker 4: on one twenty fifth. Anyway, when the documentary was over,
Speaker 4: the people that had funded this documentary were suddenly had
Speaker 4: no money to pay us anything at all, and so
Speaker 4: everybody had to fall back on their own. Drathers and
Speaker 4: I had nothing to fall back on. So I left
Speaker 4: the band at that moment because I had absolutely nothing,
Speaker 4: and I hitchhiked from wherever we were in Denmark back
Speaker 4: to Paris. So I played in the subway after that
Speaker 4: and tried to do like with my guitar, tried to
Speaker 4: use some of the stuff I learned being in the band,
Speaker 4: and didn't do too well, but I learned some a
Speaker 4: little bit of discipline. And then Danny would see me.
Speaker 4: I would turn around. This is how Danny went. He
Speaker 4: was so such an amazing because I'd be playing in
Speaker 4: this subway and everything, and I'd feel somebody staring at me,
Speaker 4: and I would look and way at the back of
Speaker 4: the car. He'd be over over in the corner and
Speaker 4: he had been following me, just listening to me, trying
Speaker 4: to see what I was doing, and I just remember,
Speaker 4: what are you doing? But it was so sweet. He
Speaker 4: actually just we were family, and that's just the way
Speaker 4: it was always going to be, you know, with his
Speaker 4: potato salads, that he'd make these incredibly huge tubs of
Speaker 4: food for parties, and he would throw parties on his boat.
Speaker 4: And he had kept let me live on his boat
Speaker 4: for a while when I was in the band too.
Speaker 4: He had a boat outside of the seine.
Speaker 3: Were you writing at this point or are you just?
Speaker 3: Were you just performing?
Speaker 4: I wanted to write songs and Danny told me I
Speaker 4: shouldn't do that. You know, I certainly didn't know what
Speaker 4: I was doing. Basically, my approach to songwriting was like
Speaker 4: everything else at that time. It was like close your
Speaker 4: eyes and wish, make a wish and see what happens.
Speaker 4: And I really don't think I could ever figure out
Speaker 4: writing until this record. I feel like I had a
Speaker 4: breakthrough because for the first time I decided before sitting
Speaker 4: down to finish a project or to write it and
Speaker 4: say this is what I'm going to stand by, this
Speaker 4: is what I believe is the song I want I
Speaker 4: decided I need to find out what's already there that's
Speaker 4: not being said, and just try and say it. And
Speaker 4: if I'm not saying it, if it's not clear, then
Speaker 4: the job's not finished.
Speaker 3: You've written lots of songs in the past. How is
Speaker 3: that different?
Speaker 4: I suppose in the past, I've always felt like I
Speaker 4: was looking to discover what the song was, that it
Speaker 4: was already that it was somebody else's song. Now it's mine,
Speaker 4: even though it was obviously it was still me doing it.
Speaker 4: But I think that COVID, all of the things that
Speaker 4: matter in the world became so pronounced. And I'm gonna
Speaker 4: borrow Carnel West's furbiage on this. It's the catastrophe that
Speaker 4: we had to face. Just how to how to deal
Speaker 4: with catastrophe. Now, I didn't suffer any catastrophe during COVID,
Speaker 4: but I just as most of my life I've witnessed it.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't much do a song. Now, what do you want?
Speaker 4: Let's play a song.
Speaker 5: You're gonna play Fine True Love. Yeah, this is the
Speaker 5: opening track on the record. Okay, you got it?
Speaker 3: Just me.
Speaker 6: Oh, let's go down to the.
Speaker 4: Vayume Fine True Love.
Speaker 8: Listen to the blue booze, the Gospel.
Speaker 9: Of Jeesus, feel the summer sunshine in the sun.
Speaker 8: Breazees, hear the little baby bees whimper and cry, make
Speaker 8: a little promise, Learn how to die all.
Speaker 6: Let's go on to the levee.
Speaker 10: Find true love. Listen to the brass bands, do.
Speaker 8: The second line, pick a little guitar, spill a little
Speaker 8: wine here the little.
Speaker 9: Babies whimper and cry, Make a little promise, learn how
Speaker 9: to die.
Speaker 4: All have proms to be open.
Speaker 8: To feel the joy and pain.
Speaker 6: The only way to make a life is to face.
Speaker 4: Try again.
Speaker 10: So let's go on to the hilltop to find true love.
Speaker 10: Listen to the seasons from above the tree line.
Speaker 9: Pick a little fresh con spell little moon shine.
Speaker 10: Hear the little babe bae whimper and cry, Make a
Speaker 10: little promise.
Speaker 4: Learn how to die.
Speaker 7: Oh yes, let's go on to the shoreline and find
Speaker 7: too low.
Speaker 9: Listen to the ocean thunder in the sky. Feel a
Speaker 9: little empty and run a little.
Speaker 4: Dry, give a little baby bees.
Speaker 10: Whimp and cry, make a little promise, Learn how to die.
Speaker 8: All a promise.
Speaker 6: To be all open, to feed the jaw pain, be all.
Speaker 4: Only way to me good life.
Speaker 8: It's too face. Try again.
Speaker 4: Let's go down to the bayou, find true love.
Speaker 10: Listen to the blues, the Gospel of Cheesees.
Speaker 8: Feel the summer sunshine and the sudden.
Speaker 9: Breathe, see the little babies whimper and cry.
Speaker 10: Make a little promise, Make a little promise, make a
Speaker 10: little promise. Learn how to die.
Speaker 3: Beautiful. A little feedback there right at the end. So
Speaker 3: tell me about writing that song. Do you remember how
Speaker 3: it started?
Speaker 4: Uh? Yeah, John, and I remember very clearly because we
Speaker 4: worked hard. I think the title and those three words
Speaker 4: find true love were the hardest part of the whole song,
Speaker 4: which now seems like the most obvious choice. But at
Speaker 4: the time I was using the phrase eat, pray love
Speaker 4: from the book, Right.
Speaker 3: Did you think that was going to be the song
Speaker 3: or were you like, I'll just fix that later.
Speaker 5: It was the whole song. I mean, you wrote the
Speaker 5: whole song using with that, with that as the title.
Speaker 5: But we threw lyrics back and forth quite a lot
Speaker 5: on that, and at some point we chucked it, you know,
Speaker 5: because it wasn't working with.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it wasn't necessarily the right thing.
Speaker 5: I know, but it was the springboard for you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the idea of eat pray Love is very powerful
Speaker 4: because there are three distinct sounds, three distinct one syllable
Speaker 4: words that are actions and nouns and worlds unto themselves.
Speaker 4: It's great writing, and I read the book and everything,
Speaker 4: but I wanted the meaning of the song to have
Speaker 4: its own life, and so I think on some level
Speaker 4: we knew that it probably wasn't going to survive scrutiny.
Speaker 4: It was sort of can you do better than that?
Speaker 4: And then I was like, well, I'm not as good
Speaker 4: as you know, Elizabeth Gilbert on this, so.
Speaker 5: I don't know what to say no, But sometimes you
Speaker 5: need that to just to continue working on it. Just
Speaker 5: having any words, you know, the blank sheet of paper
Speaker 5: is the terrifying thing. When you have anything down, then
Speaker 5: it's editable, you know. And so it wasn't a big
Speaker 5: jump to go from Eat Prey Love.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was my It was the banks.
Speaker 1: It helps.
Speaker 3: One of the obvious word choices to jump out in
Speaker 3: that song is learn how to die. Just about anybody
Speaker 3: else would say learn how to fly, learn how to
Speaker 3: do all these other things because it's a very joyful song.
Speaker 3: What brought that on?
Speaker 4: Well for me? That's a direct quote from Cornell West
Speaker 4: and I'd been listening to Cornell West quite a bit.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 4: I don't know who Cornell West might be quoting when
Speaker 4: he says, in order to learn how to love, you
Speaker 4: have to learn how to die, but he says it
Speaker 4: quite a bit in a lot of different contexts, some
Speaker 4: of his lectures that he's done and some of his
Speaker 4: speaking engagements that he's done. But whatever I could find
Speaker 4: mostly on YouTube during that time when for a good
Speaker 4: couple of years after George Floyd, but even yeah, even
Speaker 4: before that, you know, I was just following him because
Speaker 4: he had a voice. It was a voice of reason
Speaker 4: on television, you know, if you needed somebody, if you
Speaker 4: wanted to hear somebody on television on the news speak
Speaker 4: to you. It was slim Pickens for me, like I
Speaker 4: felt a direct mirroring of my childhood with my alcoholic
Speaker 4: father and the violent, tyrant tyranny in that world, and
Speaker 4: the escape or rather the survival of that environment as
Speaker 4: a child at playing music with my mother was like
Speaker 4: a mirror image for me in twenty twenty of seeing
Speaker 4: police brutality and the search for solace consolation, a path
Speaker 4: forward using the tools that I still to day are
Speaker 4: the only tools that really I've acquired, which is listening
Speaker 4: to intuitively to poetry and music and being trying to
Speaker 4: be part of that tradition.
Speaker 2: After this last break, we'll be back with the rest
Speaker 2: of Madeline Peru and John Harrington. We're back with the
Speaker 2: rest of Bruce Hellum's conversation with Madeline Peru and John Harrington.
Speaker 3: You said in the past about how particularly love songs
Speaker 3: are political. Is it because for you it takes you
Speaker 3: into a kind of a different place in your life,
Speaker 3: or it's like being relieved of a feeling of tyranny,
Speaker 3: a feeling of oppression that's political as well. It's not innotonus, Yeah,
Speaker 3: not in a cynical, terrible way, in a very profound way. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And also just the desire to be heard if you
Speaker 4: need help, or to feel like you could be heard,
Speaker 4: you know, if you're going to need help because something
Speaker 4: is going to come down the pike at you and
Speaker 4: you're going to need to survive that. And it's just
Speaker 4: a technique that I think a lot of kids of
Speaker 4: alcoholic parents have are aware of that they was part
Speaker 4: of their way of growing up. But I think when
Speaker 4: I hear somebody like Cornel West turn around and say
Speaker 4: we need to talk about justice is what love looks
Speaker 4: like in public, and tenderness is love in private. And
Speaker 4: it's like, yeah, that's These are not, you know, radical ideas,
Speaker 4: they're loving ideas. They might be radical in a sort
Speaker 4: of Christian way, but I don't think you have to
Speaker 4: be Christian because I'm not going to go for it
Speaker 4: that way. I needed to say the words the Gospel
Speaker 4: of Jesus in the song, and that was an interesting
Speaker 4: moment because I wanted to talk about the message without
Speaker 4: the religion, and I'm not sure if that's even possible
Speaker 4: for some people to grasp what.
Speaker 3: I'm interested with. The feeling you get from Cornell West,
Speaker 3: which is someone saying true, sometimes messy things out loud,
Speaker 3: is that this is a stretch. Is that the same
Speaker 3: feeling you got listening to those great old records you
Speaker 3: love so much, like Ma Rainey and Billie Holliday. Is
Speaker 3: it the same kind of truth telling in a way.
Speaker 4: Well, it's interesting that you say that. A very interesting
Speaker 4: question because it's definitely still taboo right now to open
Speaker 4: the discussion on violence within a relationship, within a romantic relationship,
Speaker 4: and it can ruin the feminist message that, for example,
Speaker 4: Billie Holliday or Bessie Smith or mal Rainie would have
Speaker 4: when they sing about being having a man that mistreats
Speaker 4: them and how much they still love him. But you
Speaker 4: know that's the point. I mean, love is messy. We
Speaker 4: are human. Nobody ever says I'm always right and they're
Speaker 4: always wrong unless you're not really looking at finding the
Speaker 4: truth because you've got to listen to more than one
Speaker 4: perspective to find the truth, even if you don't want
Speaker 4: to agree with it, you have to be aware that
Speaker 4: it's there.
Speaker 3: Your breakthrough album was Careless Love. The reason it's called
Speaker 3: careless Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: That was the WC. Handy song when Bessie smith recording
Speaker 4: was the one that influenced me. And then I met
Speaker 4: Odetta and she was singing it in her own way
Speaker 4: with her different lyrics and discussing the meaning of that song,
Speaker 4: and we perform it all the time, and it's definitely
Speaker 4: been one hundred years now.
Speaker 3: I think, tell me about how I wish on this record?
Speaker 4: So how I wish? I think that's a song that
Speaker 4: I chiseled at like it felt like like maybe what
Speaker 4: sculptors do when they see a shape inside of another
Speaker 4: shape and they remove what's in the way of that,
Speaker 4: And I feel like that was my job, especially with
Speaker 4: the lyrics.
Speaker 3: Okay, let me ask you first, then what was in
Speaker 3: the way.
Speaker 4: I had to accept that I wanted to be able
Speaker 4: to say something to somebody that didn't know me or
Speaker 4: anything about me or anybody else. I wanted it to
Speaker 4: be a blank slate starting point, but a direct conversation
Speaker 4: was a lot of my songs tend to be like that.
Speaker 4: I'm talking to somebody.
Speaker 3: Do you always have somebody in mind when you're No?
Speaker 3: I don't think so, did you?
Speaker 4: In this one, I'm probably talking to myself. Okay, well
Speaker 4: that's making it making somebody else suffer, you know, the
Speaker 4: conversation the monologue?
Speaker 3: Is that one of the ones you wanted to play
Speaker 3: very much?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Okay, please one two three, one two?
Speaker 10: How I wish I could bring.
Speaker 8: And slavening and to bear.
Speaker 4: The fat of each chaininess at to which.
Speaker 8: I've been a pot.
Speaker 6: All my Blackmerican hot.
Speaker 8: Wol I'd give and a learn.
Speaker 9: Should some pea and concern.
Speaker 10: Fils empty dread.
Speaker 1: On the world.
Speaker 8: We tread between fear and disgrace all my red American face.
Speaker 1: Would my life.
Speaker 8: Be in vain.
Speaker 4: Pifffin strove.
Speaker 8: Some small pain.
Speaker 1: I gave up the road to this screen.
Speaker 4: And spa.
Speaker 8: Then would my it bigga?
Speaker 6: Oh my white American.
Speaker 11: Skied no more, no more, endlessly.
Speaker 1: Journeying.
Speaker 8: Yet to he freedom.
Speaker 4: Must we all be taught a.
Speaker 8: No name shuns cross before the truth is whole?
Speaker 1: Oh, my lost.
Speaker 8: American.
Speaker 1: So no more, no more, no more.
Speaker 3: You may have to upgrade your opinion of your songwriting.
Speaker 3: And I think that's a great song.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 3: I loved everything you were doing on the low strings
Speaker 3: and the accompaniment. It's very uh, it was very Freddy Green,
Speaker 3: I thought, using that D string.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Actually John arranged it with a with a different tuning
Speaker 4: for the for the record, you did a love got
Speaker 4: the low D in there, and it was beautiful arranging.
Speaker 4: And uh And I'm glad. I'm glad that that it
Speaker 4: turned out to be a beautiful arrangement because I remember
Speaker 4: John telling me, what are you doing. I was like,
Speaker 4: there's something wrong, there's something missing, don't change it. It
Speaker 4: was good.
Speaker 5: Now, this was one that needed very little and we
Speaker 5: were you were working out for quite what while you're working.
Speaker 3: Quite a while.
Speaker 4: He was trying to teach me how to play the song,
Speaker 4: and he said, well, you wrote it. I said, no,
Speaker 4: I didn't do that.
Speaker 5: You would send You would send stuff like, because you
Speaker 5: were working for quite a long time on the lyric.
Speaker 5: You would send newer versions, you know, with different lyrics,
Speaker 5: so I could hear them and I would notice that,
Speaker 5: well she changed the melody there, or she changed that
Speaker 5: chord progression. They're like, no, what are you doing. I
Speaker 5: loved what you did early, so I mean so I
Speaker 5: had to sort of keep cracking the whip so you
Speaker 5: would just not lose what was great about in the beginning.
Speaker 5: The first version of this basically had all the music
Speaker 5: and you know, melody and chords and mostly the form too.
Speaker 5: And there's no single version of a song in any
Speaker 5: former incarnation that that was just yours alone or just
Speaker 5: mine alone that was better than the collaboration turned out
Speaker 5: to be. So yeah, in all cases, the collaboration I
Speaker 5: think helped, and I find that's almost always true.
Speaker 3: We should end there. I've got a million other questions,
Speaker 3: but I've taken a lot of your time and it's
Speaker 3: been fabulous. You real treat.
Speaker 2: Thanks again to Madeline Peru and John Harrington for talking
Speaker 2: about the making of their new album Let's Walk. You
Speaker 2: can hear it along with other songs from Madeline on
Speaker 2: a playlist at broken record podcast dot com. Subscribe to
Speaker 2: our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken record Podcast,
Speaker 2: where you can find all of our new episodes. You
Speaker 2: can follow us on Twitter.
Speaker 3: At broken Record.
Speaker 2: Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with
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Speaker 2: are theme music's by Canny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.