Latest / Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond / Aoife O’Donovan

Transcript

Aoife O’Donovan · Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin Today, we have Efa a Donovan on the show,
0:22
Speaker 1: and to be honest, couldn't have been better timing. Only
0:25
Speaker 1: a handful of days ago Grammy nominations came out and
0:27
Speaker 1: our guest Today was nominated for two awards, Best Folk
0:32
Speaker 1: Album for her All My Friends record and Best American
0:35
Speaker 1: Root Song for the album's title track. Ifa is a
0:39
Speaker 1: wonderfully prolific singer and songwriter from the Americana tradition, who
0:42
Speaker 1: perhaps also surprisingly has an academic background, having studied improvisation
0:47
Speaker 1: at the New England Conservatory of Music. Over the years,
0:51
Speaker 1: she's performed with many different groups and with orchestras and symphonies,
0:55
Speaker 1: and since twenty ten she's put out a handful of
0:57
Speaker 1: beautiful solo works. Her latest Grammy nominated effort, All My Friends,
1:02
Speaker 1: is a gorgeous set of songs inspired by the life
1:04
Speaker 1: and work of suffragist Carrie Chapman Kat and celebrates the
1:08
Speaker 1: hunt year anniversary of women securing the right to vote
1:12
Speaker 1: in the US through the nineteenth Amendment. Innipha's conversation with
1:16
Speaker 1: Bruce Headlam on today's episode, you'll hear more about how
1:19
Speaker 1: the project crystallized for her and some of the challenges
1:22
Speaker 1: it posed. She'll also play some songs, so enjoy and
1:27
Speaker 1: EFA congratulations on the Grammy Knot. This is broken record
1:34
Speaker 1: liner notes to the digital age. I'm justin Ritchman. Here's
1:42
Speaker 1: Bruce Headlam and Efo Donovan.
1:45
Speaker 2: Let's start with your new album this year, All my Friends.
1:49
Speaker 2: Can you tell me about the the genesis of it,
1:52
Speaker 2: how it started, where it came from.
1:55
Speaker 3: Yes, I made this album over the last several years. Actually,
1:59
Speaker 3: it was the longest sort of extended period of time
2:02
Speaker 3: I've spent making one album. The music started with this
2:06
Speaker 3: little seed of an idea that I got from the
2:08
Speaker 3: Orlando filharm Orchestra. They commissioned me to write a piece,
2:11
Speaker 3: a twenty minute piece or you know thereabouts, of music
2:16
Speaker 3: honoring the Nineteenth Amendment, in memory of the Nineteenth Amendment,
2:19
Speaker 3: having something to do with the nineteenth Amendment. It could
2:21
Speaker 3: really be whatever I wanted it to be. It didn't
2:23
Speaker 3: have to have text, it didn't have to be anything
2:25
Speaker 3: other than that I had to write it. So with
2:29
Speaker 3: that framework in mind, I wrote the first five songs
2:32
Speaker 3: on All my Friends, the first five songs that became
2:35
Speaker 3: All my Friends, and then kind of sat on that
2:38
Speaker 3: performed it. With Orlando, performed it with the Knights in
2:40
Speaker 3: Central Park, performed it with a couple of orchestras, and
2:42
Speaker 3: never really thought it would turn into an album, but
2:46
Speaker 3: it did. I was commissioned then by Freshcrass Festival to
2:49
Speaker 3: write another collection of songs that I tied into the
2:52
Speaker 3: original five, and that is what the album is.
2:55
Speaker 2: Had you ever written orchestral music before?
2:58
Speaker 3: I hadn't, and I had, you know, performed with orchestras
3:03
Speaker 3: in the past. I have charts for my pre existing repertoire,
3:07
Speaker 3: but I had never written songs the intention for their
3:10
Speaker 3: you know, their original form to be orchestral, and so
3:14
Speaker 3: it was. It was a pretty daunting task. I was
3:17
Speaker 3: so lucky to work with an orchestrator and arranger, this
3:19
Speaker 3: woman named Tanner Reporter, who really helped me take my
3:22
Speaker 3: melodic and harmonic ideas and she is the one who
3:25
Speaker 3: put them on the page and wrote those kind of
3:27
Speaker 3: wacky woodwind parts that I could never you know, who
3:30
Speaker 3: knows what cleff those guys are in.
3:32
Speaker 2: H Yeah, I know they use those two in between claffs.
3:35
Speaker 2: So it's just like it's the tenor cleff. Like you're done.
3:37
Speaker 2: It's like Viola's to the same.
3:39
Speaker 3: Exactly child too, Cleff, I think is viola.
3:41
Speaker 2: But yeah, okay, one of those. Uh so it sounds
3:45
Speaker 2: like a theater piece in a way. Was it ever
3:48
Speaker 2: conceived of as like were people ever going to be
3:50
Speaker 2: on stage doing it in character?
3:52
Speaker 3: No, that was never my intent. It's funny. I feel
3:56
Speaker 3: like I was sort of this this theater kid in
3:57
Speaker 3: high school, but I was really always just a musician
4:00
Speaker 3: because I am actually a horrible actor, and I was always,
4:04
Speaker 3: you know, the last person in the callback. It was
4:06
Speaker 3: always between me and one other person. And the only
4:08
Speaker 3: reason I was there is because I could sing. But
4:10
Speaker 3: I never got those lead roles because in the end
4:13
Speaker 3: I would start laughing or break the fourth wall or
4:15
Speaker 3: just lose my pool. And it was never never for me.
4:18
Speaker 2: That's not what they needed in maime.
4:21
Speaker 3: The The funny thing about All My Friends is that
4:23
Speaker 3: it came out in March, which is the same month
4:26
Speaker 3: that a great Broadway show about suffrage also went up
4:29
Speaker 3: by Shanna tab called Seffs. And it's been cool to
4:32
Speaker 3: sort of have people come up to me and say,
4:33
Speaker 3: have you heard of this? This musical stuffs and it's
4:36
Speaker 3: you know, really dealing with a lot of the same topics,
4:37
Speaker 3: although a pretty a different, a different, you know, more
4:40
Speaker 3: nuanced to take obviously, I think she did. She went
4:42
Speaker 3: way deeper into the story and really created full storylines
4:46
Speaker 3: for all of these historical characters, minus more of a
4:48
Speaker 3: kind of I wouldn't say surface level, but it's a
4:51
Speaker 3: it's a miniaturized version of that.
4:54
Speaker 2: Okay, but it was. Your songs were inspired by one particular, Yes, Suffragett.
4:58
Speaker 2: Can you tell me suffragist? I'm sorry, no, it's okay, Wow,
5:02
Speaker 2: am I am? I out of date?
5:04
Speaker 3: I was corrected actually initially by somebody who sent me
5:07
Speaker 3: a very nice email at the very beginning of this.
5:10
Speaker 3: This is many years ago when I first started even
5:11
Speaker 3: talking about that I had been commissioned to do this,
5:13
Speaker 3: and I was using the term suffragette, and she said,
5:16
Speaker 3: you know, I think that you might want to look
5:18
Speaker 3: into this because I really believe that the term that
5:20
Speaker 3: is more sort of accurate is suffragist, because you know,
5:23
Speaker 3: putting ette is maybe a diminutive, it's not necessarily.
5:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, okay, So tell me about the woman who.
5:30
Speaker 3: Inspired Carrie Chapman. Kat is who inspired a bunch of
5:35
Speaker 3: songs on this record. And I was really able to
5:36
Speaker 3: use her just her experience, her womanhood, her the tenacity,
5:44
Speaker 3: and the way her speeches, her letters, her words, her
5:47
Speaker 3: voice to kind of really that that's really what gave
5:50
Speaker 3: me the kind of the legs that I needed to
5:52
Speaker 3: really get this piece moving. I was reading a book
5:55
Speaker 3: called The Woman's Hour by Elaine Weiss, a great writer
5:58
Speaker 3: who was also a consultant on the musical stuffs, and
6:02
Speaker 3: it opens really with the story of Carrie Chapman Kat
6:04
Speaker 3: being at the forefront of the final days of marching
6:08
Speaker 3: to get the thirty six state their ratification of Tennessee,
6:12
Speaker 3: and sort of her involvement, her take. And when I
6:15
Speaker 3: went and started kind of googling it and looking into it,
6:18
Speaker 3: I found so much text that she had written, so
6:21
Speaker 3: many speeches and all these letters and correspondences that she
6:23
Speaker 3: had had, and I was really just moved by them,
6:27
Speaker 3: and her voice just seemed to kind of jump off
6:29
Speaker 3: the page, and I wanted to sing these words.
6:32
Speaker 2: What was that like, trying to write to someone else's voice.
6:36
Speaker 2: I don't know if you've really done that before. Well,
6:38
Speaker 2: you've done songs in other people's voices, but in this way.
6:41
Speaker 3: Setting, Yeah, it was difficult, But I think what made
6:44
Speaker 3: it easier, honestly, is the fact that when I wrote
6:46
Speaker 3: this music initially, I wrote the music first. I didn't
6:50
Speaker 3: start with text. I didn't actually even at that point
6:53
Speaker 3: the arrangements the charts needed to get made. This is
6:56
Speaker 3: November December of twenty twenty. The piece was supposed to
6:59
Speaker 3: be premiered in May of twenty twenty one. I needed
7:01
Speaker 3: to get the arranger of the music so that the
7:03
Speaker 3: arranger could start arranging it, so that the orchestra could
7:06
Speaker 3: get it, to do the markings and start learning it.
7:09
Speaker 3: So at this point I was working on my previous album,
7:12
Speaker 3: Age of Apathy, and coming out of a real deep
7:16
Speaker 3: writer's block, you know, kind of dark I don't even
7:19
Speaker 3: want to write anything. I have nothing to say period
7:21
Speaker 3: in my life. And I somehow managed to like find
7:24
Speaker 3: the inspiration to write the music and kind of get
7:27
Speaker 3: the basic idea of what I wanted to do these
7:29
Speaker 3: five songs that were going to kind of connect with
7:30
Speaker 3: each other, but I wasn't sure exactly what the text
7:32
Speaker 3: was going to be. And it wasn't until a few
7:34
Speaker 3: months later that I kind of got the meat for
7:39
Speaker 3: the story and really put it together that way.
7:41
Speaker 2: So when you were writing those charts without this character,
7:45
Speaker 2: without these songs, were you were you writing a top one?
7:48
Speaker 2: Were you doing a melody?
7:49
Speaker 3: I was doing a melody, yup, And I did have
7:50
Speaker 3: some placeholder lyrics, and some of the songs did have
7:52
Speaker 3: some lyrics all my friends. The first song had the
7:54
Speaker 3: first verse. I was really just sort of envisioning that
7:58
Speaker 3: that sort of just that idea of all my friends,
8:02
Speaker 3: you know, you come and go and there are highs
8:04
Speaker 3: and lows in your life, and kind of it could
8:06
Speaker 3: really apply to anything. And I ended up making it
8:08
Speaker 3: much more socific as the song went on, and the
8:11
Speaker 3: song daughters also were you know, you're really am not
8:14
Speaker 3: singing from Carry Chapman Kat's perspective, that's kind of from
8:16
Speaker 3: my own perspective looking back, and that that song had
8:19
Speaker 3: maybe half of the lyrics in, but the other the
8:21
Speaker 3: other three were just total just melody, melody lines and
8:24
Speaker 3: harmony lines and melodic ideas and harmonic structure.
8:28
Speaker 2: You may be the first songwriter to put words I'm
8:33
Speaker 2: sorry put a melody to the words by Woodrow Wilson.
8:39
Speaker 2: I really noted lyric.
8:41
Speaker 3: Right, It's really funny. You know, he's a really complicated
8:44
Speaker 3: character in American history. And a lot of negative connotations.
8:49
Speaker 3: And he was not, you know, by no means a
8:52
Speaker 3: great a great guy, but he really was an ally
8:55
Speaker 3: of the suffragists. And it's it's interesting to sort of
8:58
Speaker 3: from historical lens, say, Okay, there are these people in
9:00
Speaker 3: our country's history who really sucked in many ways. But
9:03
Speaker 3: what did they do to advance this cause even while
9:06
Speaker 3: they may have been pushing back other causes for justice.
9:09
Speaker 3: It's it's something that I think we do have to
9:11
Speaker 3: grapple with as Americans, right.
9:12
Speaker 2: And the song is called war Measures.
9:14
Speaker 3: The song is called war measure, and it comes from
9:16
Speaker 3: a letter that he wrote to Carrie Chapman Kat responding
9:19
Speaker 3: to her, and he's saying, Okay, you know, the women
9:23
Speaker 3: are a war measure. We could not win the Great
9:26
Speaker 3: War without women staying home on the front lines, at
9:29
Speaker 3: home and and sort of picking up the slack. And
9:31
Speaker 3: that was his angle, one of his angles to say
9:34
Speaker 3: that you know, you guys deserve the vote because look
9:37
Speaker 3: at all the stuff you're doing here.
9:39
Speaker 2: He felt it was a debt. He kind of owed them,
9:42
Speaker 2: and that was that sort of was that a political
9:45
Speaker 2: argument he was making, like I've got to make this
9:48
Speaker 2: argument and this might work.
9:49
Speaker 3: I think it's hard to say exactly what the what
9:51
Speaker 3: the motive was. I feel like it's you can really
9:55
Speaker 3: apply it to today too. There are so many, you know,
9:57
Speaker 3: people have their hands in so many different pockets and politics,
10:00
Speaker 3: and and how do you please everybody without alienating this other,
10:04
Speaker 3: you know, without alienating your base, so to speak. Right, So,
10:09
Speaker 3: I'm not sure, but that song is kind of one
10:11
Speaker 3: of my favorite ones to sing because it's I kind
10:13
Speaker 3: of tried to make it kind of like a body
10:16
Speaker 3: sort of like raucous, kind of barroom type of song.
10:19
Speaker 3: It's still obviously very folky, but with the brass, and
10:23
Speaker 3: it's it's a fun one to do live, you know.
10:25
Speaker 2: Speaking of people with complicated legacies, a lot of the
10:31
Speaker 2: original suffragists, Susan B. Anthony and some of the slightly
10:35
Speaker 2: more famous ones at one point separated their cause from
10:40
Speaker 2: African American enfranchisemen. But Carrie Chapman Cat didn't. She's interesting
10:45
Speaker 2: in that way.
10:46
Speaker 3: She didn't. But she also was separate from a younger
10:49
Speaker 3: kind of cohort of suffragists. And there were many different
10:53
Speaker 3: factions of the whole movement, and I think it's just
10:56
Speaker 3: it's a lesson that gosh, it's so hard to get
10:59
Speaker 3: anything done. And I feel that somebody like Carry Chapman Kat,
11:04
Speaker 3: who you know, we don't know her, she's no longer here,
11:07
Speaker 3: but after the nineteenth meant she did become a big
11:11
Speaker 3: champion of the civil rights cause and was involved in
11:14
Speaker 3: that after she had, you know, helped to pass this legislation.
11:20
Speaker 3: I don't know, it's yeah, it's it's sort of hard
11:21
Speaker 3: to sort of look back and cast judgment for me
11:24
Speaker 3: as a as a human being. And that's that's been
11:26
Speaker 3: a difficult thing as I've kind of done this record,
11:28
Speaker 3: because there there have been people who have stood up
11:29
Speaker 3: and say, well, why you know she somebody who stood
11:31
Speaker 3: up at a show recently and kind of called me
11:35
Speaker 3: out for saying that, why did you choose to highlight
11:37
Speaker 3: Carrie Chapman Kat and why didn't you choose to do
11:40
Speaker 3: this in the voice of I to b Wells, And
11:42
Speaker 3: I was sort of like, well, I think that would
11:43
Speaker 3: have created a whole you know, you kind of can't
11:47
Speaker 3: necessarily right, I don't know.
11:50
Speaker 2: What I'm saying, right, but that would be that's an awkward.
11:53
Speaker 3: That would be another sort of awkward situation.
11:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's a different awkward.
11:57
Speaker 3: But initially I actually had wanted to do that. I
11:59
Speaker 3: had wanted to make this piece be from five different
12:02
Speaker 3: suffragists perspective, and that's something that maybe I'll do down
12:05
Speaker 3: the road. And I think that Shina did that pretty
12:07
Speaker 3: well in Stuffs, where she really did take all those characters,
12:10
Speaker 3: and again, that's a much that's sort of like a
12:12
Speaker 3: life's work type of piece. But this is my sort
12:16
Speaker 3: of first dip, dipping my toes in the water of
12:19
Speaker 3: even anything topical. And at the end of the day,
12:24
Speaker 3: I think my statement is that I'm just a singer.
12:27
Speaker 3: I'm just a folk singer, and this is sort of
12:29
Speaker 3: my way of telling this story through my own art form,
12:32
Speaker 3: which is ultimately folk songs. Me and a guitar singing
12:35
Speaker 3: these songs, trying to connect them with people, with the
12:38
Speaker 3: audience and with the musicians that I'm playing with.
12:40
Speaker 2: You mentioned that the last day to ratify the nineteenth
12:43
Speaker 2: Amendment was or the state that.
12:46
Speaker 3: The thirty six stage they made it the law yes.
12:49
Speaker 2: Was Tennessee, and she did not. And she was pushed
12:53
Speaker 2: to argue against giving black women the vote because that
12:56
Speaker 2: probably would have passed through the leasier but she didn't
12:58
Speaker 2: do that right now, she did say some things about
13:01
Speaker 2: an interracial marriage and some other things. She was a
13:04
Speaker 2: creature of the nineteenth century. Far from perfect.
13:07
Speaker 3: It's true, It's true, and just sometimes I think a
13:09
Speaker 3: lot about what these women were dealing with and what
13:13
Speaker 3: they were experiencing as they were growing up. And there's
13:16
Speaker 3: another song on the record sort of much more from
13:19
Speaker 3: my perspective called Someone to Follow. But I really started
13:22
Speaker 3: that song thinking about what were the mothers of the suffragists, Like,
13:26
Speaker 3: who were the women that raised these women who ended
13:30
Speaker 3: up really changing the world, and were they Was there
13:34
Speaker 3: feminism championed by their own mothers and grandmothers? I mean
13:37
Speaker 3: likely not in most cases, but I suppose we'll never
13:40
Speaker 3: quite know the answer to that.
13:42
Speaker 4: Well.
13:42
Speaker 2: In the case of Carrie Chapman Kat, she had sort
13:47
Speaker 2: of a traumatic life exactly growing up. She wasn't wealthy.
13:51
Speaker 2: Her first husband died very soon after they were married.
13:55
Speaker 3: Right when she went to San Francisco, and he died
13:57
Speaker 3: pretty soon after that.
13:59
Speaker 2: So you know, it wasn't she didn't have an easy life.
14:03
Speaker 3: No, and she really had to overcome a lot to
14:05
Speaker 3: sort of And there's a song actually called the Right
14:07
Speaker 3: Time that's kind of about my imagining of her early
14:10
Speaker 3: life and how she kind of got through that.
14:12
Speaker 2: I thought that was a very interesting song because so
14:14
Speaker 2: many of the other songs are they're not marching songs exactly,
14:20
Speaker 2: but they're kind of exclamatory and what are we going
14:22
Speaker 2: to do? And suddenly you have this song where it's
14:25
Speaker 2: more self conscious and it's questioning.
14:28
Speaker 3: Right, when is it going to be the right time?
14:30
Speaker 2: Is that something you got from her letters, from speeches
14:34
Speaker 2: or is that just something you tried to imagine. There
14:36
Speaker 2: must have been a point in which this complete powerhouse
14:42
Speaker 2: thought to herself, is this going to work?
14:46
Speaker 3: That really is from my imagination that song. But I
14:50
Speaker 3: think that any strong woman can relate to that idea
14:53
Speaker 3: of even whatever the facade is, whatever the front is,
14:55
Speaker 3: even if you're the most confident, successful person in the world,
14:58
Speaker 3: you obviously have moments of self doubt or of wondering,
15:03
Speaker 3: am I on the right path? Is this the right
15:05
Speaker 3: thing to do? Will anybody remember me after I go?
15:10
Speaker 3: Is it my time? Is it my time?
15:12
Speaker 2: Do you want to give us a song?
15:14
Speaker 3: Sure?
15:15
Speaker 2: All right?
15:15
Speaker 3: Don't you just play that song?
15:16
Speaker 2: Song? Play any song you like?
15:18
Speaker 3: Great? This is so fun.
15:48
Speaker 5: And it easy to cn.
15:55
Speaker 6: My particle Sharlock movies. Try to lose a lamb all
16:03
Speaker 6: the way, don't care anything, love it Bell. I'm a
16:15
Speaker 6: fuck woman. I keep matching. He'll turn.
16:28
Speaker 7: Farewell, Long Charge City.
16:34
Speaker 6: I geese something to talk of.
16:35
Speaker 8: Bell's gonna be the red time, Better's gonna be the
16:50
Speaker 8: retime berator.
17:02
Speaker 6: I feel my pal growl the personal thick skin.
17:15
Speaker 7: I'm gonna moan bottle baby, They'll give.
17:22
Speaker 5: Him something to think about. What's gonna be time be
17:37
Speaker 5: W's gonna be the red.
17:38
Speaker 9: Time, That's gonna be the rod, That's gonna be the RITI.
18:03
Speaker 10: A good said Francisco with the cool acles down. See
18:16
Speaker 10: the Golden Gate.
18:18
Speaker 6: Sings so bad?
18:23
Speaker 10: Will you miss me when I'm gone? Will you miss
18:30
Speaker 10: me when I'm gone? Will you miss me?
18:36
Speaker 5: Will you miss me? And gonna be time?
18:47
Speaker 6: Mill Rotside.
18:51
Speaker 9: Gonna be the right side, gonna.
18:59
Speaker 5: Be the rights are mill ROTSI gonna be the right
19:06
Speaker 5: side mill ROTSI.
19:20
Speaker 2: It's beautiful. I won't turn this into a masterclass, but
19:24
Speaker 2: I want you to walk me through the first few
19:25
Speaker 2: chords of that. Okay, for our guitar.
19:28
Speaker 3: Set, there some drop d M and I'm kind of
19:33
Speaker 3: playing like an f shape with the low D and
19:37
Speaker 3: the base and capo five and then walking up a
19:45
Speaker 3: lot of hammer on ye and then kind of there
19:47
Speaker 3: was on the record. There's kind of like a little
19:50
Speaker 3: harmonica part that's like.
20:03
Speaker 2: And capo and the fifth threat. For those playing along
20:06
Speaker 2: at home, yep, okay, let's find out where all that
20:09
Speaker 2: we're all that great figurant picking came from.
20:13
Speaker 1: We'll be right back with more from Efo Donovan after
20:16
Speaker 1: the break. We're back with more from Efo Donovan.
20:23
Speaker 2: Did you grow up in a musical family?
20:25
Speaker 3: I did. I grew up both my parents are musicians.
20:29
Speaker 3: My father was an incredible singer, guitar player, radio host.
20:33
Speaker 2: He was a professional music.
20:34
Speaker 3: He was a professional well he was a professional music guy.
20:37
Speaker 3: He had a radio program on WGBH and was a
20:41
Speaker 3: much beloved member of the Boston music community. He's from Ireland.
20:45
Speaker 3: He passed away about a year ago, very sadly, and
20:49
Speaker 3: we missed him so much. He was really the person
20:51
Speaker 3: who I would say both of my parents were kind
20:54
Speaker 3: of my biggest cheerleaders and champions growing up playing music,
20:58
Speaker 3: and unlike many people who grew up with musician parents,
21:02
Speaker 3: I really wanted to be them. I wanted to have
21:05
Speaker 3: their life. I loved their social life, their music community,
21:08
Speaker 3: their friends. They would always have you know, bands staying
21:10
Speaker 3: at our house. They would always have these epic music
21:13
Speaker 3: parties at their house where my mom would play the
21:15
Speaker 3: piano and people were just standing around the piano singing
21:16
Speaker 3: all night. And when I was in high school, my
21:19
Speaker 3: friends and I we would like it was like a
21:21
Speaker 3: cool thing. At least I guess I thought it was cool.
21:23
Speaker 3: Maybe it wasn't, but I'm so glad that that it
21:27
Speaker 3: turned out that way and that I didn't rebel against it,
21:29
Speaker 3: and you know, only want to, I don't know, do
21:31
Speaker 3: something totally different.
21:33
Speaker 2: Was it traditional Irish music they played my not really.
21:36
Speaker 3: My dad's radio show is mostly traditional Irish music, but
21:38
Speaker 3: it's it's really just kind of songs, kind of like
21:41
Speaker 3: the culture of a sing song. You know, anybody who
21:44
Speaker 3: spent time in Ireland and in kind of that community
21:47
Speaker 3: knows that phrase. There's a thing that people do called
21:49
Speaker 3: the sing song. And my whole dad's extended family we
21:52
Speaker 3: love a sing song where you just get around and
21:54
Speaker 3: everybody kind of has their cover that they sing their song,
21:56
Speaker 3: and my mom notes all the songs on the piano,
21:58
Speaker 3: or somebody passes around a guitar and you just kind
22:00
Speaker 3: of it's like a jam basically a jam, but a
22:02
Speaker 3: jam with all singing and no instrumentals and no solos.
22:05
Speaker 2: What was your first sing song performance?
22:09
Speaker 3: My well, my first.
22:12
Speaker 2: Maybe very happy. The answers like tainted Love or something
22:14
Speaker 2: by it.
22:15
Speaker 3: Well, no, you're going to laugh at this. So when
22:16
Speaker 3: I was much younger, one of my favorite songs to
22:19
Speaker 3: sing that I really sang first at karaoke at the
22:22
Speaker 3: Inchridoni Hotel, and I think it was like nineteen ninety four,
22:26
Speaker 3: maybe I was probably like eleven or twelve. I sang
22:29
Speaker 3: Leader of.
22:30
Speaker 2: The Pack, Wow A mad him at the Candy Star Fabulous.
22:36
Speaker 3: I got to bring I got to bring that back.
22:37
Speaker 3: I just realized I need to bring that one back
22:39
Speaker 3: from my karaoke repertoire.
22:41
Speaker 2: So that's the first song you did Leader the Pack, that.
22:43
Speaker 3: Is in the first batch. But as I got a
22:45
Speaker 3: little bit older, I really used to love to sing
22:48
Speaker 3: the Dimming of the Day. That was one of my
22:49
Speaker 3: party pieces that I would do with my parents.
22:51
Speaker 2: Richard Thompson's song Okay, any other Richard I've We've interviewed
22:57
Speaker 2: Richard Thompson we're going to do it again.
22:58
Speaker 3: So I love to sing nineteen fifty two Vincent back
23:01
Speaker 3: Lightning that. That really became more of a sing song
23:04
Speaker 3: song as I got a little bit older. I used
23:05
Speaker 3: to do that song all the time.
23:06
Speaker 2: Can you do the guitar part to that? Because I
23:08
Speaker 2: kind of.
23:08
Speaker 3: Have my own like version of it that I do, like,
23:12
Speaker 3: I don't do. Nobody can play like Richard Thompson, but
23:13
Speaker 3: I do just like that.
23:17
Speaker 2: It's beautiful. Yeah, he's amazing.
23:19
Speaker 3: He does his own. I mean, it's you can't. I
23:21
Speaker 3: feel like with Richard Thompson, you can't try to imitate
23:23
Speaker 3: his guitar playing. You just have to kind of, you know,
23:25
Speaker 3: do a hero too much going on. That song speaks
23:28
Speaker 3: for itself yet.
23:30
Speaker 2: And so when did the guitar start for you or
23:32
Speaker 2: was it guitar your first instrument?
23:33
Speaker 3: Guitar was absolutely not my first instrument. I played piano
23:36
Speaker 3: growing up and mostly but really mostly I just sang
23:38
Speaker 3: and I didn't start playing guitar. I mean, I took
23:41
Speaker 3: some guitar lessons in high school and could kind of
23:43
Speaker 3: play basic chords and my first band, Crooked, Still, I
23:49
Speaker 3: didn't play guitar at all in that band. I just sang,
23:51
Speaker 3: and it wasn't until that band really stopped touring. I mean,
23:54
Speaker 3: I was playing guitar, you know, for I would do
23:57
Speaker 3: the occasional solo show in New York at Rockwood, or
23:59
Speaker 3: I was writing songs on guitar, but I didn't really
24:02
Speaker 3: start playing guitar and kind of developing my guitar style
24:05
Speaker 3: until I would say, gosh, until I've played turned thirty.
24:08
Speaker 3: Probably until you know, the last ten eleven years.
24:11
Speaker 2: Was there a particular song or experience that made you think, yeah,
24:15
Speaker 2: I can do this.
24:16
Speaker 3: I waiting for that. I still am like, can I
24:18
Speaker 3: play the guitar?
24:21
Speaker 2: It was Leader of the Past.
24:22
Speaker 3: Well, no, honestly, I feel like it. Actually, probably when
24:25
Speaker 3: I started to get more serious about the guitar was
24:28
Speaker 3: when I decided I was going to make a solo album,
24:31
Speaker 3: and I knew I was going to have to, you know,
24:32
Speaker 3: lead a band and play all of these songs on
24:34
Speaker 3: the guitar. And my mind, you know, I would hear
24:38
Speaker 3: these things in my head that I would want to
24:39
Speaker 3: play on guitar, but I needed to figure out how
24:41
Speaker 3: to play them on guitar. So it was sort of
24:43
Speaker 3: I feel like the songs helped me find my way
24:47
Speaker 3: around them, you know.
24:48
Speaker 4: What I mean.
24:49
Speaker 3: I had the songs, but I needed to my hands
24:51
Speaker 3: needed to follow my brain.
24:52
Speaker 2: Really yeah, that's interesting. I think for so many people
24:56
Speaker 2: it's the other way around, which is they just start
24:58
Speaker 2: shapes on the guitar and then the songs come out
25:02
Speaker 2: of that.
25:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's not the way it is for me.
25:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, did you figure them out on the piano or
25:07
Speaker 2: I would just.
25:07
Speaker 3: Like figure them out of my head and then then
25:09
Speaker 3: I would have to find I would could hear them
25:10
Speaker 3: in my head and have to find them on an instrument.
25:12
Speaker 2: Really yeah, that's amazing. When did the song start?
25:16
Speaker 3: I started writing songs, I mean, gosh, when I was
25:18
Speaker 3: really young. I remember the first the first two songs
25:22
Speaker 3: that I feel like we're complete songs I wrote with
25:25
Speaker 3: my friend Sarah Heaton, who was an opera singer. She's
25:27
Speaker 3: in the met Chorus, and we had a band in
25:30
Speaker 3: that We were in seventh grade, and the band was
25:31
Speaker 3: called Fairy Missed FAE r I E. It's very inspired
25:36
Speaker 3: by the Indigo Girls and by the story that great
25:39
Speaker 3: band with Jennifer Kimball and Jonathan Brook Oh, And I
25:42
Speaker 3: think we basically just wanted to be either of those
25:44
Speaker 3: two female duos, and we made this little cassette demo
25:49
Speaker 3: of these two songs. One of them was an original
25:51
Speaker 3: called Lover's Secrets that I had the tape somewhere. It's
25:55
Speaker 3: really it's kind of a hilarious, but it's a good
25:58
Speaker 3: song for two twelve year olds. And then we set
26:00
Speaker 3: the E Cummings poem Maggie and Millian Molly and May
26:02
Speaker 3: to music and I played it on the piano.
26:05
Speaker 2: That sounds like a really good idea.
26:07
Speaker 3: It was cool.
26:07
Speaker 6: It was like Maggie and me and Molly and May
26:10
Speaker 6: went down to the pitch to play one day.
26:13
Speaker 3: It had all these cool sort of major to minor
26:15
Speaker 3: mode things going. It's cool.
26:17
Speaker 2: I think more people should probably do that. I just
26:21
Speaker 2: I think I heard, you know, Andrew Bird did a
26:23
Speaker 2: song by Oh my God, her name's just flown out
26:25
Speaker 2: of my head. She's only the most Emily Dickinson, thank you.
26:29
Speaker 2: And I thought, well, this is going to be terrible.
26:30
Speaker 2: I thought, actually this is really good. I bet yeah.
26:33
Speaker 2: It actually really worked. And you sort of think, oh,
26:35
Speaker 2: this is going to be too dramatic in high school, but.
26:38
Speaker 3: Now it was I think, is your I mean somebody
26:40
Speaker 3: like Andrew bird is definitely up for the challenge.
26:42
Speaker 2: Mm hmm. Maybe we should leave it to him. And
26:46
Speaker 2: then you went to New England Conservatory.
26:49
Speaker 3: I did.
26:49
Speaker 2: In fact, if you look up I just did this.
26:51
Speaker 2: I thought, well, just like when you look up New
26:53
Speaker 2: England Conservatory alumni, the first picture is Correta Scott King.
26:58
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, and you're the second on Google.
27:01
Speaker 3: Wow, maybe that's maybe that's just your Google. You ever
27:04
Speaker 3: wonder that because they knew you were searching for me?
27:08
Speaker 2: Do I have a Google?
27:09
Speaker 3: I don't know, don't you?
27:10
Speaker 5: Isn't that like?
27:10
Speaker 3: That's is that really true? Me and Coretta Scott King?
27:13
Speaker 3: What what company to keep?
27:14
Speaker 2: Maybe it was? Well and Rose Kennedy is up there,
27:17
Speaker 2: so they've they've covered the rest of the the Boston exactly.
27:21
Speaker 3: There's covering their basis.
27:24
Speaker 2: They've got the lace curtains.
27:25
Speaker 3: I love it that. Yeah. I Corretta Scott King, my
27:30
Speaker 3: mother in law, my late mother in law, was a
27:32
Speaker 3: new in the conservatory.
27:33
Speaker 6: I v.
27:33
Speaker 3: Jacobson. It was one of the things that my husband
27:35
Speaker 3: and I first like bonded on was that I went
27:37
Speaker 3: to ne C and his mom had gone there. She
27:39
Speaker 3: was a flute player. But it's it was a great,
27:42
Speaker 3: a great place for me. It really, I have to
27:44
Speaker 3: give it so much credit for opening my mind in
27:46
Speaker 3: ways that I never could have imagined.
27:49
Speaker 2: How did you because you went in as someone were
27:53
Speaker 2: you considering an opera career.
27:55
Speaker 3: I went into the Contemporary Improvisation department, which at that time,
28:00
Speaker 3: this is in two thousand when I started, I really
28:03
Speaker 3: it was basically part of the jazz department. It was separate,
28:06
Speaker 3: but it was there were so few kids in c
28:08
Speaker 3: I that it was. I think there were like three
28:10
Speaker 3: undergrads when I started, so we were really kind of
28:13
Speaker 3: lumped into the jazz department, even though I was not
28:15
Speaker 3: a jazz musician at all. I knew nothing about jazz.
28:18
Speaker 3: I still know nothing about jazz, but but it was
28:20
Speaker 3: it kind of kicked my ass in a way because
28:22
Speaker 3: I was around all these people who were so musically virtuosick.
28:27
Speaker 3: They had this deep theoretical, you know, language that they
28:32
Speaker 3: could speak. They had these great chops, this great rhythm,
28:36
Speaker 3: and I felt a little bit like, oh my gosh,
28:38
Speaker 3: what am I doing here? What do I have to offer?
28:41
Speaker 3: But it was it was really fun. I remember actually
28:43
Speaker 3: those first couple of weeks getting together with kids in
28:46
Speaker 3: the basement of the dorms and having these like just
28:48
Speaker 3: like late night jam sessions, just improvising, singing, making up
28:51
Speaker 3: a shit and just kind of going for it.
28:54
Speaker 2: Were you playing guitar at that point?
28:56
Speaker 5: Not really.
28:56
Speaker 3: I was really still mostly just singing. I don't even
28:59
Speaker 3: think I was playing. I don't even know I had
29:00
Speaker 3: a guitar with me. I was just singing and playing piano.
29:02
Speaker 2: Right, that's amazing. And is it four years you did?
29:06
Speaker 3: I actually did three years. So I switched halfway out.
29:09
Speaker 3: I switched from the bachelor's program my third year. I
29:12
Speaker 3: really wanted to tour and I knew I knew I
29:14
Speaker 3: didn't want to stay in for four years. So I
29:15
Speaker 3: switched to an artist diploma program.
29:17
Speaker 2: And then what did it give you? The theory? If
29:21
Speaker 2: are you now going to point out, you know, C
29:24
Speaker 2: minor thirteenth, Well, you.
29:25
Speaker 3: Know, it's funny, it did. It definitely did give me
29:28
Speaker 3: all that that theory that I use and I do
29:31
Speaker 3: use all the time. I think that people people always say, oh,
29:34
Speaker 3: you know, Bob Dylan couldn't read music, or you know
29:36
Speaker 3: that people love to sort of shout out these things like,
29:38
Speaker 3: you know, just because you can do this, it doesn't.
29:40
Speaker 3: It doesn't mean you're better. And that's absolutely true. Many
29:42
Speaker 3: of the greatest musicians that I know don't know you know,
29:45
Speaker 3: a third from a fifth. But I will say that
29:48
Speaker 3: as a side man and as a collaborator, it's so
29:52
Speaker 3: handy to have have that skill set in your back pocket,
29:56
Speaker 3: and it just makes things go a lot faster to
29:59
Speaker 3: be able to know what the chords are when you
30:01
Speaker 3: when you want somebody to play along with you. You can
30:03
Speaker 3: shout out the chords. You can shout out the key,
30:04
Speaker 3: you can shout out the shapes, you can say the numbers,
30:06
Speaker 3: or you can say the actual chord. You can trans
30:09
Speaker 3: postings quickly in your head, all of those things. I
30:11
Speaker 3: think that if you're you know, young people listening, if
30:14
Speaker 3: you're considering a career in music, like it doesn't hurt,
30:16
Speaker 3: definitely doesn't hurt.
30:17
Speaker 2: It's better than shouting out you know Bob Dylan, well,
30:20
Speaker 2: he couldn't play, you know what I mean.
30:22
Speaker 3: It's I think that people sort of love to and
30:25
Speaker 3: and it's it's great. There are many people, like I said,
30:27
Speaker 3: who I love to play with who don't speak that language,
30:30
Speaker 3: but I mean no disrespect.
30:31
Speaker 2: But they bring they bring something else. To the table.
30:34
Speaker 2: So then what we were first you said you wanted
30:37
Speaker 2: to tour. What were your first steps as a professional.
30:39
Speaker 3: So around that time that my band Crooked Still started.
30:42
Speaker 3: It was a string band where we did mostly mostly
30:47
Speaker 3: old bluegrass songs, old you know, source recording old time
30:51
Speaker 3: songs that we would find and rearrange for our untraditional instrumentation.
30:56
Speaker 3: We had a crazy cellist named Rashaan Eggleston who really
31:00
Speaker 3: was one of the first people to do that the
31:02
Speaker 3: chop on the cello. He was at Berkeley, Greg List,
31:05
Speaker 3: this great bancho player who was getting a peach Sheett
31:08
Speaker 3: at the time and teaches at Berkeley College of Music.
31:10
Speaker 3: And a bass player who was also at any scene
31:12
Speaker 3: in Corey Tomorrio. We were a quartet. We started playing
31:15
Speaker 3: gigs my freshman year of college and really started touring.
31:18
Speaker 3: And that's kind of what I wanted to do, was
31:20
Speaker 3: go on the road and be with Crooked Still and
31:23
Speaker 3: make records and tour.
31:25
Speaker 2: And then you also did you did radio, You did
31:28
Speaker 2: the Prairie Home Companion.
31:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was a couple of years later that that started.
31:33
Speaker 3: That was a huge, huge part of my life for
31:35
Speaker 3: in both configurations with Garrison Keeler first for many many years,
31:39
Speaker 3: and then when it changed over to Chris Seely, I
31:43
Speaker 3: was in the house band for that as well, and
31:44
Speaker 3: that was some of those experience, really some of the happiest,
31:48
Speaker 3: most fulfilling musical moments of my life. To put it
31:53
Speaker 3: in two words, it getting to do that every week.
31:58
Speaker 3: I mean, talk about a good course in having to
32:01
Speaker 3: have your chops be at a certain you know level.
32:05
Speaker 3: Chris is obviously I've worked with Chris for many years.
32:07
Speaker 3: We have a band together called Goat Rodeo Sessions. But
32:09
Speaker 3: he in that context where he's calling the shots and
32:12
Speaker 3: you're showing up on Friday and learning, you know, thirty songs.
32:15
Speaker 3: I mean literally often it would be just so much
32:18
Speaker 3: music because you would do sort of half song snippets
32:20
Speaker 3: of this. You would do song of the week. You
32:22
Speaker 3: would many times be in the band for whatever guest
32:25
Speaker 3: was on the show, So you'd have to learn, you know,
32:28
Speaker 3: all of Trey Anasasio's songs, all the parts for that,
32:31
Speaker 3: all the harmony of parts, et cetera.
32:33
Speaker 2: It's just one song just goes on a long time.
32:35
Speaker 2: What were the would you'd only have a day to
32:38
Speaker 2: rehearse it.
32:39
Speaker 3: You'd show up on Friday morning, and a lot of
32:40
Speaker 3: the times you would not even get. For the first
32:42
Speaker 3: couple of years that Chris was doing it, he was
32:44
Speaker 3: doing this thing called Song of the Week and he
32:47
Speaker 3: would be writing the song all week and he often
32:50
Speaker 3: wouldn't finish it until the middle of the night on Thursday.
32:53
Speaker 3: So you would wake up on Friday morning with an
32:58
Speaker 3: MP three in your inbox and have to basically learn
33:04
Speaker 3: the song by the rehearsal, which usually started at twelve wow.
33:08
Speaker 3: And then you would have the rehearsal from like twelve
33:10
Speaker 3: to ten, and then you'd go back the next day
33:12
Speaker 3: and started sometimes as early as like seven thirty in
33:14
Speaker 3: the morning, and then do the show. It was such
33:17
Speaker 3: a rush. It was really really fun.
33:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, it must have been. It must have just been
33:22
Speaker 2: a terrifying in that.
33:23
Speaker 3: But everybody's in it together, so it's this sort of
33:26
Speaker 3: real communal, communal terrifying thing of just saying, Okay, we
33:30
Speaker 3: got this and it's live radio. That's the thing. It's live,
33:32
Speaker 3: and that it happens and it's over.
33:33
Speaker 2: It sounds like you're like playing in the NFL or something.
33:36
Speaker 2: It's just like doing an award show every week.
33:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was so much fun.
33:42
Speaker 2: Tell me about something I wasn't going to ask you
33:43
Speaker 2: about the guests, but now that you mentioned it, can
33:46
Speaker 2: you remember any experiences that stand out with the guests?
33:49
Speaker 3: Oh, my gosh, I mean it, tons. I mean that
33:51
Speaker 3: first show, this is right when Chris took over. That
33:54
Speaker 3: was the one with Trey that was like just such
33:56
Speaker 3: a blast. There was one that we did with Craigorye
33:59
Speaker 3: on Isaacov that was really special we did. I got
34:03
Speaker 3: to sing with Renee Fleming with Garrison actually the first time.
34:05
Speaker 3: That was another time that I got to sing with
34:07
Speaker 3: the guest. Bonnie Vera got to sing with Bonnie on
34:09
Speaker 3: that show. The list goes on and on. It was
34:13
Speaker 3: every week it was somebody different who was incredible and
34:17
Speaker 3: getting to just sing harmonies with.
34:18
Speaker 2: I talked to someone who did this analysis of Renee
34:21
Speaker 2: Fleming and they just they ran her voice through and
34:24
Speaker 2: apparently she can hit just dead center of every note.
34:28
Speaker 3: She's she's a real magical singer.
34:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, and no slide when she's going up to it.
34:36
Speaker 2: Just he said it was surreal, like you never see
34:38
Speaker 2: someone who can sing like that.
34:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, and she's still she still got it.
34:41
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, So tell me then you had that project.
34:45
Speaker 2: You've had other projects. You did go Rodeo with Yo
34:48
Speaker 2: Yo Ma. I guess you should explain.
34:50
Speaker 3: That that really came through Chris and Edgar Meyer are
34:54
Speaker 3: both and Stewart. I mean, that's kind of my world
34:57
Speaker 3: there the bluegrassers when that started in two thousand and eleven,
35:03
Speaker 3: I think that's when when that started. They were writing
35:05
Speaker 3: music and they knew they wanted to have some vocals
35:08
Speaker 3: on the album, but Chris didn't want to do it
35:10
Speaker 3: by himself, or Edgar thought that it should be a duet.
35:13
Speaker 3: And I think he had heard Chris and I sing
35:15
Speaker 3: Farewell Angelina. I tell your ed a couple of years before,
35:18
Speaker 3: and he's like, what about you and if I do
35:20
Speaker 3: a couple songs. So we wrote those two songs that
35:23
Speaker 3: are on the first record together, and then for the
35:25
Speaker 3: next record, which was almost a decade later, I actually
35:28
Speaker 3: got together with them and wrote the music and the
35:30
Speaker 3: lyrics for those two songs that are on the newer one.
35:34
Speaker 2: And they don't you know people who you know? I
35:38
Speaker 2: grew up with certain classical popular music crossovers you Hoodie Menu,
35:45
Speaker 2: and famously did albums with Stephan Gripelli, the Great Jazz violinist,
35:50
Speaker 2: and you know, it never really it was a kind
35:52
Speaker 2: of a party trick that never really worked, but it
35:55
Speaker 2: was nice to be at the party. This is something
35:58
Speaker 2: completely different.
35:59
Speaker 3: Well, yo yo is I think he has managed to
36:02
Speaker 3: avoid falling into that trap of being somebody else's party trick.
36:06
Speaker 3: He's there's not really any musical figure quite like him,
36:12
Speaker 3: I think alive today, and I don't know if there
36:14
Speaker 3: really ever has been or will be. He's a one
36:16
Speaker 3: in a million guy musician, player, cellist, and his taste
36:23
Speaker 3: for creating something special is infectious. He really he pulls
36:28
Speaker 3: people together, He sits back, he does his thing, and
36:33
Speaker 3: he lets everything else kind of come around it and
36:37
Speaker 3: sort of envelop it in whatever it's doing, do you
36:40
Speaker 3: know what I mean? So in Goat Rodeo, he's not
36:43
Speaker 3: being asked to do the same stuff that Stuart and
36:47
Speaker 3: Ager and Chris are doing. He's being asked to be
36:50
Speaker 3: himself and play these gorgeous melodic lines and harmonize with
36:54
Speaker 3: the other string instruments and provide the rhythm that only
36:57
Speaker 3: he can do in his way. And then they managed
37:00
Speaker 3: to sort of create what almost sounds like a chamber
37:03
Speaker 3: orchestra with just these four instruments and it's really special.
37:06
Speaker 3: I think it doesn't sound like crossover at all. I
37:08
Speaker 3: think it just sounds like music.
37:10
Speaker 2: It it sounds like it's his own thing, That's what
37:12
Speaker 2: I mean. It doesn't it doesn't have that kind of
37:14
Speaker 2: you know, Pava Rotti sings the classics and I think.
37:17
Speaker 3: That Yoyo achieves that as well, and other sort of
37:20
Speaker 3: collaborations that he does across the board, the Silk Road Ensemble,
37:23
Speaker 3: you know, and it's when it first started, it was
37:25
Speaker 3: really a lot of that sort of world music and
37:26
Speaker 3: bringing people in and it never sounded cheesy or forced
37:30
Speaker 3: to me.
37:31
Speaker 2: No, He's just a great experiment.
37:33
Speaker 3: Exactly exactly, and it's really honest and authentic. And I
37:35
Speaker 3: think that that's when you can sniff that somebody's doing
37:38
Speaker 3: something to be a crossover thing. That then that's when
37:43
Speaker 3: you start to lose me.
37:44
Speaker 2: Yeah. So your first album was Fossil and if someone
37:51
Speaker 2: looked at the album, looked at the photo, looked at
37:54
Speaker 2: the titles, they would think, oh, someone's doing a traditional
37:58
Speaker 2: Irish album. They're doing but it's you, it's me, your.
38:02
Speaker 3: Song, it's exactly, it's all my songs.
38:05
Speaker 2: How did did that come naturally? Out of the songs
38:07
Speaker 2: you'd been doing before or is that something thought now
38:09
Speaker 2: I'm gonna I'm gonna make everybody think it's one thing.
38:12
Speaker 3: No, that really did come naturally out of the songs
38:14
Speaker 3: that I had been working on, you know, your first
38:16
Speaker 3: solo album. Obviously, I was twenty nine when I made it,
38:19
Speaker 3: so it was everything that I had, not everything, but
38:21
Speaker 3: the ten best songs that I had written up to
38:23
Speaker 3: that point, and I really had, you know, quite a
38:25
Speaker 3: few to choose from. But that was a I really
38:29
Speaker 3: wanted to do it. I wanted to make a solo album.
38:31
Speaker 3: I wanted to work with Tucker Martin. That was kind
38:32
Speaker 3: of a dream of mine in my twenties was to
38:34
Speaker 3: get to make a record.
38:35
Speaker 2: With Tucker and it's and tell us about why.
38:38
Speaker 3: Tucker Martin had made some records that really just knocked
38:42
Speaker 3: me out when I was in that in you know,
38:45
Speaker 3: the early two thousands. His records with Lower Years I
38:48
Speaker 3: loved so much. I still love so much. But it
38:51
Speaker 3: was in particular a record he made with Sarah Siskind,
38:55
Speaker 3: who I first met in I think two thousand and
38:57
Speaker 3: three or two thousand and four, a great singer songwriter.
39:01
Speaker 3: She was filling in in a band that I was
39:03
Speaker 3: in called The Wayfaring Strangers, and she this was before
39:06
Speaker 3: she had had, you know, the sort of viral success
39:08
Speaker 3: she ended up hapening having with Bonnie Vera covering her
39:10
Speaker 3: song and with you know, writing for the TV show
39:12
Speaker 3: in Nashville and doing all this stuff and being quite
39:15
Speaker 3: an alouded writer that she is now. But she made
39:17
Speaker 3: this record called Covered. She gave it to me, gave
39:20
Speaker 3: me a copy of the CD in two thousand and
39:21
Speaker 3: three or two thousand and four, whenever it was, And
39:24
Speaker 3: I remember getting home and putting it in my car
39:26
Speaker 3: and just I was like, what is this music? What
39:29
Speaker 3: is this production? Who made this record? Someday I want
39:33
Speaker 3: to make a record with whoever this guy is. And
39:35
Speaker 3: it really happened. It's just really cool.
39:39
Speaker 2: And then you were you were covered by Alison Kraus.
39:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that happened before I made my record. And
39:45
Speaker 3: I remember getting that that call she she covered my
39:48
Speaker 3: song Laid My Burden Down. She first covered it for
39:50
Speaker 3: a movie called Get Low with Bill Murray and Robert Duvall,
39:53
Speaker 3: and then they ended up recutting it for a Union
39:55
Speaker 3: station recorded.
39:58
Speaker 2: Affirming, Oh it was it was.
40:00
Speaker 3: I think that That was the moment where I was like,
40:02
Speaker 3: maybe maybe I can, you know, write songs and I
40:05
Speaker 3: can sing.
40:05
Speaker 2: Them because she's a little well, she's a little like
40:10
Speaker 2: yo yo ma in that whatever else she does, she's
40:13
Speaker 2: got incredible taste.
40:14
Speaker 3: She really does.
40:16
Speaker 2: She doesn't hit too many bad notes.
40:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, talk about singing in the center of a pitch.
40:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, incredible, incredible voice. Did it change the way
40:25
Speaker 2: you were writing at that point? Was it still just
40:27
Speaker 2: I got the song in my head?
40:29
Speaker 8: All?
40:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, it didn't really change my approach to the craft itself,
40:33
Speaker 3: but it definitely gave me probably a much needed boost
40:36
Speaker 3: of confidence to say, Okay, I can be I even
40:40
Speaker 3: still you know, am like, am I a songwriter? Am
40:42
Speaker 3: I a singer? Songwriter? What is it exactly that I do?
40:46
Speaker 3: But that was the first moment where somebody else said, Okay,
40:48
Speaker 3: we like this song and we want to sing it.
40:50
Speaker 3: And that's that's a huge compliment to any songwriter.
40:52
Speaker 2: H And then there's a check coming. That's another nice thing.
40:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're right, Yeah.
41:00
Speaker 2: That's a good thing too. But you said you ran
41:03
Speaker 2: at a writer's block. Was that before the age of
41:05
Speaker 2: apathy or.
41:06
Speaker 3: That was before the age of apathy? So after Fossils,
41:09
Speaker 3: I made a record called in the Magic Hour, did
41:11
Speaker 3: a bunch of stuff in the interim my band I'm
41:14
Speaker 3: with Her, et cetera. When when COVID hit is really
41:17
Speaker 3: I just come out of a two year tour with
41:19
Speaker 3: I'm with Her. My child was two a little bit
41:22
Speaker 3: more than two. She was two and a couple of months,
41:25
Speaker 3: and I really hadn't hadn't stopped in a long time,
41:27
Speaker 3: and I had made no time to sort of sit
41:29
Speaker 3: and be creative and think about what I wanted to
41:32
Speaker 3: say and what kind of songs were going to come out.
41:35
Speaker 3: So that whole first six months of COVID I was
41:37
Speaker 3: really just, like you know, I think many people were
41:41
Speaker 3: kind of stricken with what am I going to do?
41:43
Speaker 3: What am I going to do? And out of that,
41:45
Speaker 3: it was really when I moved to Florida that somehow
41:48
Speaker 3: something kind of got unlocked and I was able to
41:51
Speaker 3: sort of reaccess that side of myself. And it's I'm
41:55
Speaker 3: so grateful because it's once the door kind of got
41:58
Speaker 3: pushed open, it's just continued to be fruitful.
42:01
Speaker 2: Okay, but it was six months COVID. Yeah, I'm not
42:04
Speaker 2: sure that's right.
42:06
Speaker 3: I'm sure there's there's much more writers blocked down the
42:08
Speaker 3: road for me.
42:10
Speaker 2: So well, then you made Age of Apathy with one
42:14
Speaker 2: of our favorite people here, Joe Henry, one of the greats,
42:17
Speaker 2: one of the greats. How did that come about?
42:20
Speaker 3: I first met Joe in twenty fourteen in Cincinnati. I
42:25
Speaker 3: was doing a show with the Cincinnati Pops called American
42:28
Speaker 3: Originals where we were singing the songs of Stephen Foster
42:31
Speaker 3: and it was Rosanne Cash. That's also where I met
42:33
Speaker 3: Rosann Cash has become a friend. Joe, Henry, Don Flemons
42:37
Speaker 3: was there, The Great Band Over the Rhine was there.
42:42
Speaker 3: It was a really special weekend of music, and I
42:46
Speaker 3: really had it off with Joe. And you know, I
42:48
Speaker 3: didn't see him that often over the next decade or
42:52
Speaker 3: eight years, but I knew again he was somebody who
42:56
Speaker 3: I was like, I want to make a record with Joe.
42:57
Speaker 3: I love the way his records sound, his solo records.
42:59
Speaker 3: I love the way his the records he produces sound.
43:01
Speaker 3: And I just knew we had a kinship, we had
43:04
Speaker 3: a vibe, and I knew he was the right person
43:07
Speaker 3: for Age of Apathy. When I got to Florida and
43:09
Speaker 3: I started making the demost Rage of Apathy. I think
43:11
Speaker 3: I'd made like three demos and I just kind of
43:13
Speaker 3: cold called him and I was like, can can we talk?
43:16
Speaker 3: Are you interested in making this record? It's covid. We're
43:19
Speaker 3: not going to be able to do it in a
43:21
Speaker 3: traditional way where we're in the studio together, but I
43:23
Speaker 3: think this will work if I make these demos and
43:25
Speaker 3: send them to you and you send them back. And
43:28
Speaker 3: it worked so well, it was so much fun.
43:30
Speaker 2: Well, you're lucky it was Covid because he's in Maine.
43:33
Speaker 2: You don't want to go there, and we.
43:34
Speaker 3: Had just moved too. Is really he had just gotten
43:36
Speaker 3: to main and when we were starting these conversations.
43:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, he don't want to do that.
43:39
Speaker 3: No, I'm from Massachusetts. I know.
43:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course, you know, just as in the side.
43:44
Speaker 2: Roseanne Cash one of the first people we interviewed for
43:47
Speaker 2: the show and Joe both helped us. Malcolm and I
43:50
Speaker 2: did a book with Paul Simon and they both contributed chapters,
43:54
Speaker 2: but the producers cut Joe's and I was so disappointed. Ah,
43:58
Speaker 2: I know, he did this amazing riff on the song
44:00
Speaker 2: duncan I don't if you know that side I do, and.
44:01
Speaker 3: It's exact I feel like I've heard Joe play that
44:03
Speaker 3: song before.
44:04
Speaker 2: He's played it, but he did this. He did this
44:06
Speaker 2: big thing about how it's like the Boxer but different
44:10
Speaker 2: in the same way that to have and have not
44:13
Speaker 2: is different from Casablanca but kind of the same. Okay,
44:16
Speaker 2: it was so genius.
44:18
Speaker 3: I got to read that book.
44:19
Speaker 2: Well, it's an audiobook. And then Roseanne and her I
44:23
Speaker 2: don't know if you know her.
44:24
Speaker 3: Husband, yeah, John, of course.
44:26
Speaker 5: They did.
44:28
Speaker 2: Only living one New York and they just talked about
44:30
Speaker 2: the production because the production of that song is so increased.
44:33
Speaker 3: Is it on the audible or how do I get this?
44:36
Speaker 2: I don't know how you fd that's terribly.
44:37
Speaker 3: I'll find Yeah, that's so cool. That one of the
44:41
Speaker 3: and I still say that the best nights of my life,
44:44
Speaker 3: the best, the top three nights of my life. I
44:46
Speaker 3: was seeing Paul Simon and Madison Square Garden really in
44:49
Speaker 3: twenty eighteen. It really was. It was just one of
44:53
Speaker 3: those moments that gosh. I actually went with Sarah Drose
44:57
Speaker 3: the two of us went, we bought tickets. We were
44:59
Speaker 3: in the thirteenth row and we had we were sobbing
45:03
Speaker 3: the entire time.
45:03
Speaker 1: It was.
45:04
Speaker 3: It was so good.
45:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, so many good songs.
45:06
Speaker 3: So many good songs, and also what a great performer.
45:08
Speaker 3: My favoritavorite part of that show was how much better
45:11
Speaker 3: he sounded at the end of the concert than he
45:13
Speaker 3: sounded at the beginning. He was so warmed up by
45:15
Speaker 3: the end. Oh, interesting, I didn't want it to stop.
45:18
Speaker 3: He was just he really felt like his voice was
45:20
Speaker 3: just opening up and opening up and opening up. And
45:22
Speaker 3: then by the last couple of songs he had every shade.
45:27
Speaker 1: We'll be back with the rest of Bruce's conversation with
45:30
Speaker 1: Ifa A donovan after the break. We're back with the
45:37
Speaker 1: rest of Bruce's conversation with ifa O'Donovan.
45:41
Speaker 2: So, a couple songs I wanted to ask you particularly about.
45:43
Speaker 2: There's a lot of great songs on Age of Apathy,
45:45
Speaker 2: it's such a good album, but Elevators was one of
45:47
Speaker 2: the songs that, for some reason I was really taken with.
45:50
Speaker 2: Can you just talk a bit about that song?
45:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, that song is one of my favorite songs on
45:54
Speaker 3: Age of Apathy. Also, I remember starting to write that
45:57
Speaker 3: song and just kind of having this movie playing in
46:02
Speaker 3: my mind of me watching like a movie of myself
46:07
Speaker 3: in the rear view mirror, like of my youth, sort
46:09
Speaker 3: of my more wild days as a touring musician, and
46:13
Speaker 3: just the concept of have I been here before? Like
46:15
Speaker 3: waking up and looking out the window literally, and the
46:19
Speaker 3: first line is I was looking out the window wondering, like,
46:21
Speaker 3: you know, if I've been here before? That looks the same,
46:23
Speaker 3: that looks the same, that looks the same. And how
46:25
Speaker 3: when you are a musician and you live on the road,
46:27
Speaker 3: you tend to be able to pinpoint events based on
46:31
Speaker 3: the randommest things like who was I dating at the time,
46:34
Speaker 3: or who was my bandmate dating at the time, or
46:36
Speaker 3: all all these things that just end up being sort
46:38
Speaker 3: of silly and trite, but really are coloring the fabric
46:42
Speaker 3: of your life in this funny way. And that's kind
46:45
Speaker 3: of where that song came from.
46:46
Speaker 2: And you need that because every day you're just waking
46:49
Speaker 2: up at a holiday.
46:50
Speaker 3: And express every day is the same in this one way,
46:54
Speaker 3: and it's so monotonous to get to get in the
46:56
Speaker 3: van and to stop at the gas station and get
46:59
Speaker 3: the same snack that you always get at the gas
47:00
Speaker 3: station because you're sick of you know, for a while
47:03
Speaker 3: it's smart food, and then you switch to some other
47:06
Speaker 3: sort of healthy thing like oh, I'm going to eat
47:08
Speaker 3: beef jerky this tour or something. But it's in field.
47:11
Speaker 3: Musicians just had this. You have your routines that you
47:13
Speaker 3: go through when you're on tour all the time, and
47:16
Speaker 3: there's sort of no clear way to mark the time,
47:20
Speaker 3: like when was I in this venue? And then you
47:21
Speaker 3: see your name on the wall and you're like, what,
47:23
Speaker 3: I don't even remember writing that, you know, it's really
47:26
Speaker 3: it's very trippy.
47:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was your beef Jerky tour.
47:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like, oh yeah, oh that was a tour
47:32
Speaker 3: that like her boyfriend was there with us for like that,
47:35
Speaker 3: and that was so awkward, like, you know, just just
47:37
Speaker 3: weird memories like that.
47:38
Speaker 2: Sure. Oh, so I want to ask you. We're now
47:42
Speaker 2: up to your current album. I want to ask you
47:45
Speaker 2: about Daughters. Yeah, tell me about that song.
47:49
Speaker 3: That song was one of the first songs that I
47:52
Speaker 3: think I wrote in its entirety four age of Apathy,
47:55
Speaker 3: and I think I mentioned at the beginning of the
47:56
Speaker 3: interview that I did have some of the lyrics intact
48:00
Speaker 3: before I sent that one off to the arranger. I
48:03
Speaker 3: was imagining or I was just sitting there thinking about,
48:08
Speaker 3: you know who, who were these women who were the suffragists,
48:11
Speaker 3: and what did they think we were going to be
48:14
Speaker 3: saying about them? They did they know how important the
48:17
Speaker 3: work they were doing was. And when I get to
48:21
Speaker 3: the chorus, I'm singing, I say, all your enemies never
48:25
Speaker 3: leave your side, and it's just sort of that idea
48:27
Speaker 3: of you know, no matter even if you've even if
48:29
Speaker 3: the fight has been one, there's still going to be
48:32
Speaker 3: a shadow of your opponent next to you forever potentially.
48:36
Speaker 3: But how do we overcome that? And how do we
48:39
Speaker 3: how do we get past that? And my favorite part
48:41
Speaker 3: of that song and that recording is the San Francisco
48:43
Speaker 3: Girls chorus singing behind me on that chorus where I'm singing.
48:47
Speaker 6: Oh, your enemies never leave your.
48:49
Speaker 3: Side, they will always be their daughters. Dry your eyes,
48:52
Speaker 3: and they're singing behind me saying kind of echoing me,
48:55
Speaker 3: and it's this really sort of powerful physical thing. When
49:00
Speaker 3: I listened to it, when I got their parts back,
49:02
Speaker 3: I just that's exactly as I wanted to sound, and
49:03
Speaker 3: I wanted to be me. And this does tie into
49:06
Speaker 3: the song. We were just talking about elevators, talking to
49:08
Speaker 3: your younger self, talking to the past version of you
49:10
Speaker 3: were talking to your mother when she was a child,
49:14
Speaker 3: or your grandmother when she was a child's and then
49:16
Speaker 3: looking forward talking to the daughters of your daughters. It's
49:19
Speaker 3: really just sort of the line keeps going m.
49:22
Speaker 2: Hm because it had this theme about your enemies always
49:26
Speaker 2: being with you. There was one line that really struck
49:30
Speaker 2: me as strange, and that is the line about protected
49:33
Speaker 2: and serene, rich women still honing their malevolent skills.
49:41
Speaker 3: That part is about is about the people who were
49:44
Speaker 3: opposed to suffrage and often the people who and I
49:48
Speaker 3: feel like we still see this in today's political climate.
49:51
Speaker 3: It's often people with great privilege that are the most
49:56
Speaker 3: fearful of change because they're not the ones who are
49:59
Speaker 3: being negatively affected by the lack of progress.
50:04
Speaker 2: We're not going to turn this into debate, but the
50:07
Speaker 2: suffragette movement, and it's been criticized for this more recently,
50:11
Speaker 2: did rely on often very prosperous benefactors. Of course, I
50:17
Speaker 2: mean famously Alva Vanderbilt, who had changed her name by
50:22
Speaker 2: that point, but put a lot of her family money
50:25
Speaker 2: right and it it's it seemed like a strange note
50:30
Speaker 2: to hit because a lot of those women were regarded
50:33
Speaker 2: as privileged. They wouldn't have been able to do it without.
50:35
Speaker 3: It, right, No, you're you're you're you're not wrong. But
50:38
Speaker 3: I think that that that in that in that line,
50:41
Speaker 3: I was sort of talking about the people who who
50:43
Speaker 3: were nay, the antis, the people who were against it,
50:47
Speaker 3: who were you know, there were there were. It wasn't
50:49
Speaker 3: that all the rich people were pro No, no, I'm sorry, suffrage.
50:52
Speaker 3: So it was just one side of it growing bulging
50:56
Speaker 3: the treachery some.
50:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I may have been I didn't talk
51:00
Speaker 2: about this with my wife. I may have been channeling
51:02
Speaker 2: my wife a bit though, who sort of felt that
51:04
Speaker 2: in the last few years, being a certain kind of
51:09
Speaker 2: woman has not exactly insulated you from criticism. Yeah, and
51:16
Speaker 2: you got it with the why didn't you do well?
51:19
Speaker 3: Of course?
51:21
Speaker 2: And it almost seemed like everybody comes from some kind
51:25
Speaker 2: of privilege.
51:26
Speaker 3: Well not everybody does, not everybody, of course, but it
51:29
Speaker 3: is I mean, I think it's important to acknowledge and
51:31
Speaker 3: to be aware at least that's that's what I'm trying
51:35
Speaker 3: to do as a person in the world, to be
51:36
Speaker 3: aware of my own privilege and how of course I'm
51:39
Speaker 3: very privileged to be able to sing these songs and
51:41
Speaker 3: to write these songs. But that line I think I
51:43
Speaker 3: was trying to you know, later in the song, it
51:46
Speaker 3: kind of comes back like, you know, the women in
51:48
Speaker 3: the fields and countain houses. I'm really talking more about
51:50
Speaker 3: the common woman. As the song goes on, and the
51:53
Speaker 3: next and the next stands up after the chorus comes back,
51:55
Speaker 3: and you know, the women in the shops and in
51:57
Speaker 3: the farms, they're all around us. They got babies crying
52:00
Speaker 3: at their breasts. You know, the veins of these women
52:02
Speaker 3: are not filled with milk and water. These are mothers
52:04
Speaker 3: of bold American daughters. Just really trying to make it
52:07
Speaker 3: more of a sort of an everyman, every woman type thing,
52:11
Speaker 3: if you will. That that was kind of the maybe
52:13
Speaker 3: I it was a missedtep, but.
52:14
Speaker 2: I think, no, no, no, no, I don't You're not
52:16
Speaker 2: to You're not to sit there saying maybe I'm not
52:18
Speaker 2: a song right, And that is.
52:21
Speaker 3: Why, that is how I was trying to sort of
52:23
Speaker 3: tie it into. These women are sort of sitting in
52:25
Speaker 3: their gilded homes, not out there. You know, even if
52:30
Speaker 3: they were, you know, going to vote yes, which they
52:33
Speaker 3: couldn't vote obviously, but even if they were pro suffrage,
52:38
Speaker 3: it wasn't necessarily affecting them in the same way that
52:40
Speaker 3: it was affecting the women who you know in the Frontier.
52:44
Speaker 2: And by the way, that line that the mothers of
52:47
Speaker 2: bold American daughters is just such a great, great line.
52:50
Speaker 3: And I love singing that song. I love singing that
52:52
Speaker 3: song live.
52:53
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, it's got such a kind of The other
52:55
Speaker 2: one I wanted to ask you about was because I
52:57
Speaker 2: think it's one of the You've got a lot of beautiful,
52:59
Speaker 2: very long you write very long melodies, by the way.
53:03
Speaker 2: That's but that's a good thing, right.
53:05
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, it is what it is. Some
53:07
Speaker 3: people are like, yeah, I think I read a review
53:08
Speaker 3: once a record of mine, and they were like, her melodies,
53:11
Speaker 3: they're not exactly the kind that you can sing along with.
53:13
Speaker 3: She sort of meanders from one I do to the next.
53:16
Speaker 2: And it was it was it was I think the
53:18
Speaker 2: answer to that is don't recretic.
53:20
Speaker 3: No, and I think it was. It was still a positive,
53:22
Speaker 3: It ultimately was positive, but it it kind of cracked
53:24
Speaker 3: me up because I'm like, yes, that that is exactly
53:26
Speaker 3: what I'm doing.
53:27
Speaker 2: Isn't that what all melody? Yes do? Yeah, but I
53:30
Speaker 2: think one of your loveliest is uh, America, Calm on this,
53:35
Speaker 2: thank you so much on that record. Tell me about
53:37
Speaker 2: writing that one.
53:38
Speaker 3: That one I think I really just got in my
53:40
Speaker 3: head is kind of this march of like dude like that,
53:44
Speaker 3: that real ascending melody to kind of and all the
53:48
Speaker 3: octave jumps. It's very hard melody to sing.
53:50
Speaker 2: Live it is. There's big jumps.
53:52
Speaker 3: But it's funny that I had that melody before I
53:56
Speaker 3: had the phrase, because I feel like that it's it's
53:59
Speaker 3: some like F I think is what it is. And
54:01
Speaker 3: I play this one thing that like I tuned my
54:05
Speaker 3: low string up to an F on this one, it's like,
54:07
Speaker 3: what is it?
54:08
Speaker 6: Democracy up?
54:12
Speaker 3: It's really low and then really high at the same time,
54:15
Speaker 3: and it's very jumpy and the.
54:16
Speaker 2: Way I've never seen it, I guess it's like a
54:20
Speaker 2: drop D tuning, but it's an F tuning.
54:22
Speaker 3: Do I actually write a lot of songs in that tuning?
54:23
Speaker 2: Is that common?
54:25
Speaker 3: I don't know. I don't know anybody else who does it,
54:27
Speaker 3: but I've never heard of it. I can't say that
54:29
Speaker 3: I invented it, but I don't know anybody else who
54:31
Speaker 3: does it.
54:32
Speaker 2: Well, then I think you can say you invented it.
54:33
Speaker 2: I would patent it.
54:34
Speaker 3: I'm sure Jony's tried it.
54:37
Speaker 2: She's tried it all. Are you a fan by the
54:38
Speaker 2: way of Johnny.
54:39
Speaker 3: Come on, huge fan, biggest fan.
54:41
Speaker 2: Okay, I would say some of your songs I can
54:44
Speaker 2: hear that influence a little bit. Elevators actually is a song.
54:47
Speaker 2: I can hear a bit of that.
54:49
Speaker 3: I'm a very big Johnny Mitchell fan. I love I
54:51
Speaker 3: love all of her music and her melodies and her
54:56
Speaker 3: her writing is just I think unparalleled.
55:00
Speaker 2: It's funny because in the interviews I've read with you, you
55:02
Speaker 2: don't mention Jhonny Mitchell.
55:04
Speaker 3: I feel like I do when I talk about my influences.
55:06
Speaker 3: I feel like I would say Johnny Mitchell and Paul
55:08
Speaker 3: Simon are of the two people who I would say
55:10
Speaker 3: are my most old school, biggest influences.
55:14
Speaker 2: Okay, those are good influences to have.
55:16
Speaker 3: And I did a recording of term Meanama Radio And
55:19
Speaker 3: actually one of my favorite Live from Here performances was
55:21
Speaker 3: Coyote that I got to do at Town Hall with
55:25
Speaker 3: Chris and the Live from Here band.
55:26
Speaker 2: What's that Like to That's a really hard song.
55:29
Speaker 3: So it was so fun. That was really one of
55:31
Speaker 3: my top musical moments. Of my life.
55:34
Speaker 2: There's another YouTube clip then you should look at, which
55:38
Speaker 2: is because I'm Canadian, of course, my number one is
55:42
Speaker 2: Gordon Lightfoot Love Gordon Lightfoot. Gordon Lightfoot had this house
55:46
Speaker 2: in Toronto. He was famous for having these parties that
55:49
Speaker 2: nobody remembered later. But if you look it up, there's
55:52
Speaker 2: a party at his house and I think he's there,
55:55
Speaker 2: and Dylan's there, and then she starts playing an early
55:58
Speaker 2: version of Coyote.
56:00
Speaker 3: I feel like I've seen this clip on Instagram or something.
56:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, and at some point they're looking at each other
56:04
Speaker 2: and you realize, you guys are kind of out of
56:07
Speaker 2: your depth here, like they're trying to play along and
56:09
Speaker 2: they're like, we can't tell what she's doing.
56:12
Speaker 3: They should have gone to music school.
56:14
Speaker 2: I'm not sure what to help because I think her
56:16
Speaker 2: stuff is so idiot and that song is very idios
56:18
Speaker 2: And yeah.
56:19
Speaker 3: I wasn't playing guitar. I was just singing when I
56:21
Speaker 3: did it.
56:23
Speaker 2: I didn't even know what her tuning was, right, I.
56:25
Speaker 3: Think an open sea tuning, I'm pretty sure.
56:27
Speaker 2: Okay, but it's got a very Yeah, it's got its
56:30
Speaker 2: own thing, so cool. Yeah, you should look it up
56:34
Speaker 2: if you haven't seen it because because there is kind
56:36
Speaker 2: of a nice moment where they're like, oh man, we're screwed.
56:41
Speaker 2: We got nothing, we got nothing. Maybe we get the
56:43
Speaker 2: bass note.
56:44
Speaker 3: Maybe not too many notes.
56:46
Speaker 2: Too many notes, too complicated, you know, in this album,
56:52
Speaker 2: because the album is it's not, as I said, it
56:54
Speaker 2: feels like a theater piece. It feels very much of
56:56
Speaker 2: a piece. Then it takes this shift this album, and
57:01
Speaker 2: I'm sure it was a very deliberate shift, but the
57:04
Speaker 2: last two songs go in a completely different direction totally. Yeah,
57:08
Speaker 2: starting with over the line.
57:10
Speaker 3: Over the finish line, Yeah, oh, over the.
57:12
Speaker 2: Finish line, Pardon Me, which has just a very different mood,
57:16
Speaker 2: very different lyrics. Do you want to talk about that?
57:18
Speaker 3: Yeah? Those the way this album ends. I think this
57:24
Speaker 3: was unexpected, and maybe I wasn't quite sure, to be honest.
57:31
Speaker 3: From the beginning, I was sort of like, how am
57:33
Speaker 3: I going to release this music? What am I trying
57:36
Speaker 3: to say with this as an album? Because usually you
57:38
Speaker 3: put out an album and it's like neat, it's you know,
57:41
Speaker 3: ten or twelve songs, and you can play each song
57:43
Speaker 3: and there's little snippets and some of them are happy
57:45
Speaker 3: and some of them are sad. And some of them
57:47
Speaker 3: are slow and some of them are fast, and you have,
57:48
Speaker 3: you know, an album's worth of material. This record was
57:52
Speaker 3: just a totally different beast. So the last two songs,
57:56
Speaker 3: I felt that I had to sort of finish my thought.
57:59
Speaker 3: I had to kind of come from the past into
58:02
Speaker 3: the present, but then take a slight detour to a
58:05
Speaker 3: different part of the past. It's almost like the sort
58:07
Speaker 3: of time travel thing that I'm doing over the finish
58:11
Speaker 3: line is the second to last song on the album,
58:13
Speaker 3: and it's a song that I'm singing from really the
58:16
Speaker 3: only song where it's entirely from my perspective, you know,
58:19
Speaker 3: me Ifodnevan twenty first century Woman, Mother Citizen, you know,
58:27
Speaker 3: artists looking back at what I've just said, you know,
58:30
Speaker 3: I think that there's a lot of sort of referencing
58:32
Speaker 3: of the previous songs that you've just heard. When you
58:35
Speaker 3: get to that point in the album, I'm kind of
58:36
Speaker 3: talking back to Carrie Chapman Katt almost and talking about
58:40
Speaker 3: the current state of affairs and about how I feel
58:43
Speaker 3: that it's almost kind of ties into Age of Apathy
58:45
Speaker 3: in that way that we're sort of not connecting in
58:48
Speaker 3: the same way, and what can we do about it,
58:51
Speaker 3: and I don't think I really come up with an
58:53
Speaker 3: answer in the song. It's more just a you know,
58:55
Speaker 3: if I could, if I could change in mind, whose
58:57
Speaker 3: mind would I want to change? If I could make
58:59
Speaker 3: something that would get us over the finish line, and
59:02
Speaker 3: then it's almost like I throw out my shoulders and say,
59:04
Speaker 3: we're living in hard times. And it's an intense song
59:07
Speaker 3: to sing, and Aus Mitchell saying harmony on it so beautifully,
59:11
Speaker 3: and I feel like really helped me kind of get
59:13
Speaker 3: the the feeling across the urgency that I was sort
59:17
Speaker 3: of talking about before, just what what can we do
59:19
Speaker 3: and how do we do it? And at the end
59:20
Speaker 3: of that song, I quote Carrie Chapman Kat and I sing,
59:24
Speaker 3: you know what is this democracy for which the world
59:26
Speaker 3: is battling? The song that I just haught saying that
59:28
Speaker 3: long line in the previous song, And then you know,
59:31
Speaker 3: i'd ask Carrie, I feel I feel that we might
59:34
Speaker 3: have made our beds here, like have we? And it's
59:36
Speaker 3: it's really just a question.
59:37
Speaker 2: It's a very uh it's a down song.
59:40
Speaker 3: It's a down sound. There's nothing happy about it.
59:42
Speaker 2: And that what you were feeling even after you after
59:45
Speaker 2: you wrote the rest of.
59:46
Speaker 6: These songs, it really is.
59:47
Speaker 3: And it's funny because you know the question America Come,
59:51
Speaker 3: the song that comes right before this where it really
59:53
Speaker 3: ends with me and the girls and the brass and
59:55
Speaker 3: we're singing, you know, it's it's almost like a chant,
59:57
Speaker 3: like holding her torch hi like America America. And then
1:00:01
Speaker 3: I think it's kind of the whiplash that that we
1:00:04
Speaker 3: that I certainly have felt over the last you know,
1:00:06
Speaker 3: eight years of existing and this this time, this crazy time,
1:00:10
Speaker 3: and I sang about it in Age of Apathy, but
1:00:12
Speaker 3: the whiplash of kind of going back and forth between
1:00:15
Speaker 3: feeling really hopeful and just really dejected and wondering how
1:00:20
Speaker 3: we can do about it and what is our role?
1:00:21
Speaker 3: What is the role of the artist. And throughout this.
1:00:24
Speaker 2: It reminds me of American tune the Paul Simon.
1:00:29
Speaker 3: One of the great songs, right.
1:00:31
Speaker 2: But it's more downbeat.
1:00:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean American tune at least has that like
1:00:36
Speaker 3: really soaring bridge.
1:00:39
Speaker 2: You cut out the soaring.
1:00:40
Speaker 3: Bridge, no story bridge in this one.
1:00:42
Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting because the end you are addressing this
1:00:44
Speaker 2: to Carrie Chapman Kat the album is really springs from
1:00:50
Speaker 2: and I was particularly in the combination with America come.
1:00:55
Speaker 2: By the time I got to the end of that song,
1:00:57
Speaker 2: I was thinking, I was wondering, what do you think
1:01:00
Speaker 2: when you talk about we're living in a hard time?
1:01:02
Speaker 2: What do you think? What do you think? Her answer
1:01:04
Speaker 2: to you would.
1:01:05
Speaker 3: Be, well, I think that the crazy thing is. And
1:01:07
Speaker 3: I read a lot of historical fiction, you know, just
1:01:10
Speaker 3: looking gosh, hard times have are always hard. Times are
1:01:15
Speaker 3: always crazy when you think about I read recently, I
1:01:20
Speaker 3: read Libra by Don DeLillo, great book, you know, Lee, Harvey, Oswald, Kennedy,
1:01:24
Speaker 3: the whole that whole time period was so crazy, like
1:01:29
Speaker 3: that that was so crazy. I feel like it's crazy now,
1:01:31
Speaker 3: but it's crazy in a different way. And everybody always
1:01:33
Speaker 3: thinks that what they're going through was like the crazy
1:01:34
Speaker 3: is like shit's crazy. Times are so hard, times are
1:01:36
Speaker 3: so hard. Technology this, you know, But if it wasn't technology,
1:01:39
Speaker 3: it was TV, or it was the Cubans, or it
1:01:41
Speaker 3: was whatever, whatever the fear DuJour is. And I think
1:01:47
Speaker 3: that that's kind of what made me want to program
1:01:50
Speaker 3: the record this way in After that song, it goes
1:01:52
Speaker 3: into the lonesome Death of Hettie Carol, which is living
1:01:56
Speaker 3: in hard times, you know, one hundred percent living in
1:01:58
Speaker 3: hard times, that those times were horrible for Hettie Carroll
1:02:02
Speaker 3: and for anybody in her situation.
1:02:03
Speaker 2: And was that a song you'd we're talking about the
1:02:06
Speaker 2: Bob Dylan's song, of course? Is that a song you
1:02:09
Speaker 2: performed before?
1:02:09
Speaker 3: I performed it live a few times with orchestra, with
1:02:12
Speaker 3: full orchestra.
1:02:14
Speaker 2: Because it does end on a very.
1:02:15
Speaker 3: It ends in a very very bad note.
1:02:18
Speaker 2: No, but I don't mean the song itself, but it
1:02:20
Speaker 2: just ends the album on a strange it does.
1:02:23
Speaker 3: No, it does.
1:02:24
Speaker 2: And what's always interesting to me about that song is,
1:02:27
Speaker 2: you know he took the melody from another folks song.
1:02:29
Speaker 2: I think an Irish folk song probably.
1:02:32
Speaker 3: I can't remember what the name of it is, but you're.
1:02:35
Speaker 2: Mary Hamilton, right. But I think a lot of people
1:02:40
Speaker 2: in casually hearing that song thinks it's about think it's
1:02:43
Speaker 2: about something that happened long ago. It actually happened in
1:02:45
Speaker 2: the sixties, nineteen sixty three she was killed, right, But
1:02:48
Speaker 2: he makes it seem as though it's like something from
1:02:51
Speaker 2: old Baltimore exactly.
1:02:53
Speaker 3: But no, it's very recent, right, And I think that
1:02:56
Speaker 3: that I really thought long, hard about it. If I
1:02:59
Speaker 3: wanted to put that song on the record at all,
1:03:01
Speaker 3: if I wanted it to just read these neat eight songs,
1:03:03
Speaker 3: and I think of it almost as a coda to
1:03:05
Speaker 3: the album. It's almost like the album does you know,
1:03:08
Speaker 3: psychic the end after over the finish line, and then
1:03:11
Speaker 3: you kind of go into this sort of dreamscape of
1:03:14
Speaker 3: just one more thing, just one more thing. And that arrangement.
1:03:18
Speaker 3: I find it so compelling. My friend Gabriel Kahane did
1:03:21
Speaker 3: that orchestral arrangement and it's very stark. It starts with,
1:03:27
Speaker 3: you know, just me singing the opening stanza. After of course,
1:03:30
Speaker 3: the battle hum of the Republic and the orchestra comes
1:03:33
Speaker 3: in and it turns into this kind of wild there's
1:03:36
Speaker 3: like a Viennese waltz section that he puts in and
1:03:39
Speaker 3: then but it does end, you know with now you know,
1:03:43
Speaker 3: bury your face deep in the rag. Now is the
1:03:45
Speaker 3: time period of years.
1:03:47
Speaker 2: It reminds me a little. I'm just thinking of this
1:03:49
Speaker 2: now of the Falkner book that has the Bear Go
1:03:54
Speaker 2: Down Moses.
1:03:55
Speaker 3: One of the few Falkner books I haven't read.
1:03:58
Speaker 2: Well, you should because it ends well, you know, it
1:04:00
Speaker 2: has the Bear, which is that famous short story which
1:04:02
Speaker 2: is indecipherable okay, but it ends with a very contemporary
1:04:07
Speaker 2: scene in an American police station and a mother's there
1:04:10
Speaker 2: and her son's been arrested. It has that same kind
1:04:13
Speaker 2: of feeling. You should read it. It's on the Broken
1:04:15
Speaker 2: Record reading list.
1:04:17
Speaker 3: Great. I mean, I'm a huge Faulkner fan, but I
1:04:18
Speaker 3: really I guess, like you know, Absolute Masalem Gazila, Dying
1:04:22
Speaker 3: Sound and Fury.
1:04:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll try this one.
1:04:25
Speaker 3: Okay.
1:04:26
Speaker 2: The short stories, but they're they're connected, right, and it's.
1:04:29
Speaker 3: Well, I'm excited. I'll go to the books around the wheel.
1:04:31
Speaker 2: They're kind of brilliant. Do you want to play another song?
1:04:33
Speaker 3: Share?
1:04:34
Speaker 2: Take us out?
1:04:34
Speaker 3: What do you want? You want elevators or do you
1:04:36
Speaker 3: want a new song?
1:04:37
Speaker 11: Uh?
1:04:37
Speaker 2: You should play whatever song you think is gonna is
1:04:40
Speaker 2: going to really move product? What would that be?
1:04:42
Speaker 3: Oh cares about products? But now I kind of want
1:04:44
Speaker 3: to play Elevators because I haven't played it so long.
1:04:46
Speaker 3: And it's like fine, right, okay, okay, great?
1:04:54
Speaker 7: Looking up and do it feels like a shady patch
1:04:59
Speaker 7: of clean hand the big bookstore, run out of the
1:05:04
Speaker 7: corn and.
1:05:04
Speaker 6: Then passed the swinging back in the back of the cutlass.
1:05:09
Speaker 6: A man in America Merica.
1:05:15
Speaker 4: I've spun out my trying to rum wells in America,
1:05:21
Speaker 4: I swear so running for the back door, a fine
1:05:35
Speaker 4: like bread crawls down the country road, and.
1:05:38
Speaker 5: The only thing the matter was Latin.
1:05:42
Speaker 6: My Lord had an excellent station. I stopped for.
1:05:46
Speaker 4: A drink and I washed the memories down the dirty
1:05:49
Speaker 4: bedroom sake in Amica America, I'm.
1:05:55
Speaker 6: Sculling out my hair trying to remember.
1:05:57
Speaker 4: Wellmost in Ammica, running for the back door. Hello, its
1:06:12
Speaker 4: old songs, empty bottles, so long after me nights when
1:06:21
Speaker 4: I was young, the ice smelt it and gets a long.
1:06:27
Speaker 12: Hello spoken the last nothing less.
1:06:39
Speaker 4: I finally figured out that everything was lost, so I
1:06:43
Speaker 4: climbed in my legon and I started colts.
1:06:47
Speaker 5: But I don't be for every added up to the lake.
1:06:51
Speaker 5: Where is what's good here?
1:06:53
Speaker 6: And a wondowing gonna make of America America?
1:06:59
Speaker 4: I was brown up mayor trying to the wirls in America.
1:07:05
Speaker 6: I swear a s one for all the bed.
1:07:20
Speaker 11: Running, running, run fun and that old songs anti battle
1:07:33
Speaker 11: so long.
1:07:35
Speaker 9: That to mad nights, when now was he gone.
1:07:40
Speaker 12: I smelt it on my time, Hello spoken glass nothing, Hello,
1:08:06
Speaker 12: Thanks so.
1:08:06
Speaker 1: Much Sef for coming by to talk about her project
1:08:09
Speaker 1: My Friends and for performing some songs, and again, congratulations
1:08:13
Speaker 1: on the Grammy nominations. Best of luck to you. You
1:08:16
Speaker 1: can hear all of our favorite Efo Donovan songs on
1:08:19
Speaker 1: a playlist at broken record podcast dot com or in
1:08:22
Speaker 1: the episode description for this episode, and be sure to
1:08:25
Speaker 1: follow us on Instagram at the Broken Record Pod. You
1:08:29
Speaker 1: can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record
1:08:32
Speaker 1: is produced by Leah Rose with marketing help from Eric
1:08:35
Speaker 1: Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Tollinay. Broken
1:08:39
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1:08:43
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1:09:03
Speaker 2: Our theme music's by Kenny Beats.
1:09:04
Speaker 1: I'm justin Richmond.