Latest / Basic Folk / Joe Henry & Mark Erelli Wanted to Hang Out, So We Let Them, ep. 338

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Joe Henry & Mark Erelli Wanted to Hang Out, So We Let Them, ep. 338 · Basic Folk

• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hello, and welcome to basic folk where we have honest conversations with folk musicians on the bluegrass situation.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's Cindy House.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hello.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hi.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I host this podcast and it is on nice to have you here.
• 0:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, before we get into our guests.
• 0:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: today, Joe Henry and Mark Ureli.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about ways to stay in touch with this little folk podcast.
• 0:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can sign up for our newsletter at the link in the show notes or at basic folk.com.
• 0:40
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• 0:50
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• 0:53
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• 1:00
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• 1:07
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• 1:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Doesn't take a lot to make a difference and all that.
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can make a contribution
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Happy March!
• 1:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hope everything's going alright.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is like the worst part of the year, I think, especially if you're living in the winter times, because you've just had it.
• 1:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've had it.
• 1:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am ready to not be in the winter anymore, but we're muddling through just get yourself the right gear and keep on keeping on.
• 1:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Make sure you go outside.
• 1:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a very helpful and maybe
• 1:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, let's get into the show today.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Joe Henry has released 15 studio albums, a printist for legendary producer T-Bone Burnett, the four-US T-Bone Burnett, and in turn, Joe has produced many other musicians' albums on his own, including three Grammy award-winning albums for Solomon Burke, Caroline at Chocolate Drops, and Rhea Blinjack Elliott.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's co-written a few songs as well, including a couple with his sister-in-law, who happens to be the one and only legendary pop icon Madonna.
• 2:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: His latest is Life and Time, a collaboration with songwriter Mike Reed, who has written many wonderful songs like, I Can't Make You Love Me, one of Bonnie Reed's most successful and beloved songs.
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: In recent years, Joe has struck up a friendship with our bestie, Mark Urelli, Mark spent on basic folk 10,000 times, and in honor of his new record Spring Green, we invited him to do whatever he wanted on this appearance for the pod.
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mark chose to be in conversation with his friend Joe Henry on location, and Joe's beautiful studio located north of Portland on the coast of Maine.
• 2:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 2020, Mark was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, or RP, which is causing him to slowly go blind.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Joe is diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer in 2018, and was told he only had months to live.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 2026, his cancer is in remission and his health has improved.
• 3:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: In our conversation, we tackle topics such as asking for help and finding hope while living with chronic illnesses.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: We also get into other parallels the two musicians have experienced, including how music has shaped their male friendships and being free of vanity.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mark and Joe have never worked together, but their respect and admiration for the other is clear in our time together.
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here's hoping a collaboration is in the works for the near future.
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: We'll take a listen to a song from Mark's new album Spring Green.
• 3:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then in the middle of the conversation, we'll play a couple of Joe Henry clips.
• 3:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: But let's start listening to this song from Marca Relli.
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is Weary Traumler, and then we'll get to our conversation with Joe Henry and Marca Relli on Basic Vote.
• 4:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: What's most?
• 4:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: night fire blazing in our heart of stone to chase the chill from your tired bones we are each traveling elsewhere bound lay down and take your rest well a morning comes you'll be
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: All of the sun plays, it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: Elsewhere, man, lay down and take your rest When the morning comes, you'll be all who run Off to some place and sit
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Joe Henry and Mark O'Reilly, welcome to Basic Folk with our special great guest, Francy, is in the background.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Francy is going to babble during this interview, but we're just all going to deal with it.
• 6:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, take the pressure off.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so thank you guys for doing this.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is so exciting.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: So first of all,
• 6:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're in Maine.
• 6:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Can you each talk about your connection to Maine and how it's impacted your life and creativity?
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: I go first.
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: You should.
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: You've got a longer history.
• 6:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 6:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I went to college here.
• 6:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: And basically, when I was trying to figure out where to go after growing up in suburban Boston.
• 6:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: I felt like all the real songwriters were out in the real world, which as far as I could tell, started in Texas and went west.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I was too scared to go from redding Massachusetts right to Texas.
• 6:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I came to Maine instead, which felt like the Texas of New England.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: And actually the analogy holds in many ways.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I went to Bates College here and then
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: and then we actually came back a little bit when my wife was in graduate school and lived in Portland.
• 7:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, it kind of all started writing songs basically here in Maine.
• 7:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it kind of started here.
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_06]: Awesome.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_07]: I've only been here for a few years or actually five as of December.
• 7:16
  [SPEAKER_07]: I didn't have any connection to Maine other than I was intrigued by New England and was desirous for the weather.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, we were 31 years in Los Angeles and the thing that brings the most people of LA is the thing that made it ultimately untenable for a count like myself who just, you know, hides from the sun.
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_07]: But when we had a really rich life, our deep community is still in Los Angeles, both of my children, our native is of Los Angeles.
• 7:47
  [SPEAKER_07]: But some, I don't know, probably 20, 25 years ago, my wife Melanie first started saying, who had never been to Maine.
• 7:56
  [SPEAKER_07]: I don't know why I just want to go to Maine.
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_07]: I just feel like I'm supposed to go to Maine.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's your figure out why.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_07]: No other than that, she's kind of witchy that way, and here we are.
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_07]: So, you know, we knew we wanted to leave Los Angeles.
• 8:09
  [SPEAKER_07]: It just was getting too hot and too crowded and too expensive for us to just hang on there.
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_07]: There was a long period of time where most of my work happened in L.A.
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_07]: But most of my production work for sure.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_07]: And then that was no longer the case.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_07]: I was working in Nashville.
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_07]: I was working in New York.
• 8:27
  [SPEAKER_07]: I was working in London as much as I was working in L.A. And I just said to Mel at some point, you know, we don't just have to be here.
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, I can, I'm perfectly happy to come back here for work when it invites me to.
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_07]: I'm a person, doesn't mind being on a plane.
• 8:42
  [SPEAKER_07]: I like to write in motion.
• 8:44
  [SPEAKER_07]: But it was during COVID we finally got it together to move, so we couldn't really explore a whole lot of options like we might have.
• 8:52
  [SPEAKER_07]: It felt dicey to do it.
• 8:54
  [SPEAKER_07]: But our son Leaven had a house made in Brooklyn at one point that lives grew up on a farm in Tapsum.
• 9:01
  [SPEAKER_07]: And he and his partner at the time started coming to top some on holidays when they didn't have the time or resources to come back to California.
• 9:10
  [SPEAKER_07]: And so when we started thinking about coming back east, looking and Connecticut and upstate New York, it was Leva and it said, don't sleep on Maine.
• 9:18
  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, you guys, go to Maine, we'll go with you, check it out.
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_07]: We came here with Levi and his partner at that time at the perfect October weekend, and I live for that.
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_07]: That's how they get you.
• 9:32
  [SPEAKER_07]: I said, I don't need to see anything else.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_07]: I can do this.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_07]: I imagined myself in a civil-era townhouse in the old West End, but that's not where we are.
• 9:44
  [SPEAKER_07]: We're coming to you from
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_07]: the wilds of Harpswell, which is what the universe had in mind for us.
• 9:50
  [SPEAKER_07]: And we built a house between them.
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we have to get the name of your home builder, because this is how, no, no, you don't.
• 9:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: All right.
• 9:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: How about your connection to each other?
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, what does that look like?
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, well, started as if like fan, I was just a fan.
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm just going to say, it's been, yeah.
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I'm with from fandom to spiritual, I think, for me, I actually, it was a DJ from the local community that had a show on the Bates College radio station that turned me on to one of Joe's, you know, earlier records, and so that was when you were first on my radar.
• 10:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe fell out of touch for a little bit of while with his music, and then I reconnected over his production of the Solomon Burke record.
• 10:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Don't give up on me.
• 10:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it started in the 90s and now we're like 2000s.
• 10:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we've been friends for more than since the last century.
• 10:48
  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, that's the last century.
• 10:51
  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, my memory is that we were likely ushered into each other's proximity by Rose Cousins probably.
• 11:02
  [SPEAKER_07]: She might be the first person that mentioned your name to me.
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_07]: Interesting, yeah.
• 11:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I was in Canada, I remember it at a festival, which is where I met her.
• 11:11
  [SPEAKER_07]: So I think it was that same week and I feel it was Calgary, Winnipeg, or one of them.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_07]: One of those beautiful, and gatherings.
• 11:19
  [SPEAKER_07]: Where I just feel like I fell into the embrace of a number of people who are close to Rose.
• 11:25
  [SPEAKER_07]: And she's become one of my closest friends in life.
• 11:29
  [SPEAKER_07]: And so kind of anybody that is connected to her,
• 11:37
  [SPEAKER_07]: open attitude about.
• 11:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Open door policy.
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do.
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_07]: Until they don't transgress, they're in.
• 11:43
  [SPEAKER_07]: Right.
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 11:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I hear that you're both early risers and often early textures to each other.
• 11:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is it about the morning that appeals to you?
• 11:54
  [SPEAKER_07]: Well, for me, it really started happening to me before I was planning for it to happen.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_07]: I was kind of in the midst of a new and fairly dire moment in my life, health-wise, and found myself waking up at 4, 4, 30, 5 in the morning.
• 12:13
  [SPEAKER_07]: and realizing that if I got myself up and if I could slip out of our bedroom without waking up Melanie and I could sit out in the front room and start writing anything.
• 12:24
  [SPEAKER_07]: Paul and song, whatever, fragment, it might be that my entry point on the day was really, really different.
• 12:32
  [SPEAKER_07]: My attitude about...
• 12:33
  [SPEAKER_07]: where I was in my life and what was possible was really different.
• 12:38
  [SPEAKER_07]: And then I heard Toni Morrison say, well, you know, any serious writer is up before the sun.
• 12:44
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I thought, that's enough for me.
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_07]: I like to think of myself as a serious writer.
• 12:49
  [SPEAKER_07]: And now I just find it a really kind of extraordinarily productive time, you know, where I used to believe that all the good shit happens late in the late night hours.
• 13:01
  [SPEAKER_07]: It dived tailed into my recognition that when my kids were really young, and I was getting up really early out in necessity, and got them out of the door off to school, that it was in fact a really, really good time for me to be at work.
• 13:14
  [SPEAKER_07]: And now when I get up, you know, 4, 4, 30, something like that routinely, there's a number of hours that I get alone in the day before I'm using up what feels like a real, it's not really even on the books yet.
• 13:30
  [SPEAKER_07]: This is a whole bonus period of time and I just have a real different perspective and I just feel like I'm really free as a writer at that time of that time of the day.
• 13:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's so fun here.
• 13:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, I guess I've always been a morning person.
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's to get up.
• 13:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: My grandfather Live with us when I was growing up and I used to get up at like five and and to go up to his little in law Partman and I used to watch the Adam West Batman reruns and wait for him to get up and we'd have cereal together
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then when I started to become a musician, I was really nervous about this morning person thing because most of you work happens at night and I'd never been great at night.
• 14:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so I had to really try to adjust, but it was very countered in my nature.
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then I think it was during the pandemic.
• 14:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'd like to say I was getting up early to write really, what was happening was I would get up around the same time, around 430.
• 14:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I would just stress hard for like two or three hours till everyone else got up.
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then I would tell myself, like, that's your stress for the day.
• 14:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: like now you have to be like homeschooling dad and you have to learn how to bake bread.
• 14:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, you gotta do all this train the dog.
• 14:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: But you know, it was kind of like dark night of the soul but in the morning and then, you know, anytime you're talking about the dark night of the soul that involves social media and eventually I would maybe post on social media early and then of course you'd see the little thing
• 15:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, Joe, Harry, just liked my tweet at five in the morning and it took a few months but eventually I just like texted on one day maybe around six a.m.
• 15:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was like, you up and you came right back, yeah, and then it started.
• 15:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wow, yeah.
• 15:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I used to host a morning show and I'm not a morning person and it is funny when you like see this is back in the era where people would use G chat and I would see like, oh, who's online?
• 15:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: G chat.
• 15:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 15:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 15:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those people became your like best friends.
• 15:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Ireland, Marcus just returned from the first tour he's done in Ireland and Joe, you have a strong connection to the country.
• 15:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then this might also also be like a long meandering answer, but please,
• 15:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: What are both of your histories with Ireland experience playing music and what if you found surprising about your time there?
• 16:00
  [SPEAKER_07]: Well, my history, I mean, I didn't ever make it to Ireland until 2011 or 2012.
• 16:08
  [SPEAKER_07]: I could find out, but it's easy by Googling when Shane was he and you died because I happened to have been in Dublin the night before he passed.
• 16:17
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I was in the company of his closest friend,
• 16:22
  [SPEAKER_07]: And so up until that point, my connection to Ireland was just like feeling spiritually absolutely from the time I was in my teens and what I've discerned it.
• 16:36
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, like my bell really was wrong by a lot of Irish music and a lot of Irish literature.
• 16:41
  [SPEAKER_07]: So it was just this, this existed as this wild specter and I didn't even understand.
• 16:47
  [SPEAKER_07]: How have I been touring in Europe all these years and have never gotten to Dublin?
• 16:52
  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, I guess that's what happens when you have a British booking agent.
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_07]: It's to take our own seriously.
• 16:58
  [SPEAKER_07]: But I had produced a record for a woman who has become my really, really dear friend, Lisa Hanagan.
• 17:04
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I thought when I got hired by Lisa, okay, I'm finally going to get to Ireland, but no, she wanted to record in Wales because she needed to get out of town because she said, everybody will be, everybody will stop by and we need to go somewhere remote so we went to North Wales.
• 17:19
  [SPEAKER_07]: to record, but it was on her coat tails that finally brought me to Dublin for the first time, and I just got pulled into the embrace of her bandmates.
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_07]: I come out of a lot of production projects with deep friendships.
• 17:34
  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, it's never a guarantee.
• 17:36
  [SPEAKER_07]: But
• 17:36
  [SPEAKER_07]: more often than not in my life.
• 17:38
  [SPEAKER_07]: I've emerged from from what was just a brief four or five day recording project with friends that I know that I have for the rest of my life and and at least that's certainly one of them and I just got a you know my wife and I have an old dear friend from our New York days who's from Ireland who
• 17:56
  [SPEAKER_07]: somehow finagled me a writing residency at a small arts college on the West Coast of Ireland in the fall of 2018.
• 18:05
  [SPEAKER_07]: So I was in a pretty re-Anne Giddens just serendipitously while I was there.
• 18:11
  [SPEAKER_07]: So a lot of just kind of magical things have happened to me.
• 18:15
  [SPEAKER_07]: Not all of them positive.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, some of them have been quite spooky, but it's not like
• 18:20
  [SPEAKER_07]: Ireland isn't known for that, too.
• 18:22
  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, it's a longer story than I would tell you, but I did find myself one night and sort of terrified about my health journey in John Bryant's bathtub.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I took tremendous comfort and the fact that I was in John Bryant's bathtub.
• 18:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, man, I wish I had anything to compare with that.
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the first time I got to Ireland was 2019.
• 18:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Summer 2019, I was playing in Josh Ritter's band.
• 18:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Josh had been met with some acclaim in Ireland early on.
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it was kind of mythical amongst us.
• 19:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: singer songwriters in the Boston area like oh yeah Josh is a big star in Ireland and I was like really you know but then we went over there and we did two shows at the end of this this English run at the National concert hall in Dublin and the response after the first song both nights was
• 19:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: one yes Josh is very well loved here in Ireland and to how do I get to be a little bit how do I get a little bit of this you know and it took me another I guess you know another eight years and I went over there with my buddy and friend of the podcast into child as a duo and we had ten shows over there and just had a lovely lovely time.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: So another thing that you were talking about with you in Dinti going over to Ireland was that you were very open about how much Dinti was helping you mark with driving and you know booking things and just taking care of a lot of things due to your RP.
• 20:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it okay to say RP?
• 20:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sure, yeah, right.
• 20:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Nightis Pigmentosa, RP for sure, yeah.
• 20:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's what RP means.
• 20:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what has been both of your relationships with asking for help and how has that changed or evolved?
• 20:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: What a question.
• 20:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right?
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: I could probably speak to this for you.
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Please give you some time.
• 20:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 20:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, my disability is an invisible disability.
• 20:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: You wouldn't know it if.
• 20:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't have my cane out or something like that.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can't tell that I can't really see in certain conditions.
• 20:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so if I'm going to navigate a situation, you know, either like literally navigate around a country or, you know, metaphorically, I either have to just be all on my own and try to fumble through or I have to be
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: kind of brave enough to admit that I, there's some things that I can't do or that I need help with.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's, that was very hard for me at first, like I kind of take a lot of pride and kind of dealing with my own shit, you know, like if it's something goes wrong, it's not going to be because I didn't take care of something that was within my control, you know.
• 21:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now there's just a lot less within my control.
• 21:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: So for me, it's all been all about like leveraging or kind of relying a little bit more on the good friends that I surround myself with.
• 21:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, both for not just for driving and navigation stuff, but also, you know, kind of like spiritual emotional kind of support, too.
• 22:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, I would, I would count Joe among that group, like people that I can reach out to if I'm feeling something that I don't know if I can carry on my own.
• 22:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: in that moment.
• 22:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I don't have to explain, you know, I don't have, there's not a lot of extra context that needs to happen, and they get it.
• 22:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Joe is one of those, those people that does that.
• 22:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there is a bit of bravery that is required in asking for help.
• 22:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, and I, though I hesitate to use that work, because I don't, I don't feel brave when I, when I'm finally get up the, screw up the courage to ask somebody, but it's been my experience that
• 22:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, once you do, a new world opens up to you and it's oftentimes a lot less frightening and challenging than you had envisioned it being.
• 22:59
  [SPEAKER_07]: Well, I realized that, you know, my answer to the question is that I have not learned well enough how to ask for the help I need.
• 23:06
  [SPEAKER_07]: I also am fairly invisible with my illness.
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, I have stage
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, I was originally told I had three to seven months to live, but I'm aware that I'm a bit of an outlier.
• 23:24
  [SPEAKER_07]: I've survived really differently than most anybody that I'm aware of as far as people I've met, people I've talked to, even my own doctors, the three that I've had have all used the word outlier at some point or another.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_07]: People meet me, they don't know that I'm walking around with something that I'm told is going to end my life ultimately.
• 23:48
  [SPEAKER_07]: I'm not so sure, but I do know that it's hard for me to ask for help.
• 23:54
  [SPEAKER_07]: Because I'm sure that there's a psychological cascade of asking for help.
• 24:02
  [SPEAKER_07]: Telling myself that I need help, which is telling myself some story that I'm losing some kind of ground that I possessed before.
• 24:10
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I don't know at this moment that I don't need any extra help that I would normally need other than the fact that I am now 65.
• 24:19
  [SPEAKER_07]: I don't have limitations in my movement and what my work life asks of me.
• 24:29
  [SPEAKER_07]: That's not always going to be true, and I'm keenly aware of that, and learning to ask for help with really small things by its nature has to come before being able to ask people for help for the really big things down the road.
• 24:45
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I'm keenly aware of it.
• 24:49
  [SPEAKER_07]: I don't know how well I'm doing with it.
• 24:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mark also mentioned on the Ireland tour, marked it a lot of great social media posts, by the way, great fodder.
• 24:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: That was my contribution.
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: I couldn't drive, so.
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 25:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you mentioned the sense of friendship and brotherhood.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: You felt with Dinty, the other musician that was on tour with you, Dinty Child.
• 25:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: So how have each of you experienced male friendship thanks to music and how has that changed your relationship to being a modern man?
• 25:19
  [SPEAKER_07]: Well you know I'm a very well my writing life has been until the last few years been incredibly solitary.
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_07]: My production life is very collaborative and I've been really fortunate in a lot of my production life to have had really deep friendships with
• 25:39
  [SPEAKER_07]: the largely, but by no means exclusively male musicians with whom I work, I work with a lot of women as well, but I notice things about a very particular group of male musicians that I've grew to be close with in my years in Los Angeles, very sensitive, caring, affectionate people.
• 26:08
  [SPEAKER_07]: available to me.
• 26:09
  [SPEAKER_07]: I just kind of stopped working with anybody that I didn't fit that description.
• 26:14
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, I steered wide of, you know, anytime somebody would say about, so and so, you know, it's kind of an asshole, but he's an unbelievable guitar player.
• 26:22
  [SPEAKER_07]: I said, I'm not interested.
• 26:23
  [SPEAKER_07]: There's a million mind blowing guitar players walking around.
• 26:28
  [SPEAKER_07]: They're just a horror.
• 26:29
  [SPEAKER_07]: I don't want to work with anybody anymore who I don't want to have a meal with, who I wouldn't be happy to be sitting next to a plane or a train or a long car ride somewhere.
• 26:38
  [SPEAKER_07]: I wouldn't, I don't want to work with anybody.
• 26:40
  [SPEAKER_07]: I don't want my family to be around.
• 26:42
  [SPEAKER_07]: And as soon as I understood that, a lot of difficulty in my working life to smile.
• 26:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: I love that.
• 26:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: I guess there's a lot of parallels there for me as well, though.
• 26:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think a lot of my deepest professional relationships both at the start and even to this day have been with female artists, you know, people like Christel Morris and Laurie McKenna, you know, Chris gave me my first-side man job and I'm still side-man with Laurie, you know.
• 27:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I've spent a lot of time traveling with
• 27:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: female artists even just as like a duo.
• 27:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that felt very comfortable.
• 27:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think because of that sensitivity, that that dimension of sensitivity that Joe was was talking about.
• 27:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then just over time, I don't know if you attract it to yourself or you're better able to just recognize in others, but you start to see the sense of guys.
• 27:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you start collecting those relationships like, okay, that guy I can I can handle, you know, and he can handle me, and I dare say, I won't name names, but I think there's some guys in my life now that are very.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: very deep friends among my closest friends, that maybe weren't so sensitive as they seem to mean now.
• 28:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I don't know if it's a fact of them getting a little bit older and, you know, a little further down their own path or whether it's interacting with me.
• 28:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, you know, I don't want to take credit for that, but I've definitely noticed.
• 28:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: people evolving.
• 28:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then as they as they get more sensitive, I'm like, okay, now now now is the time you can know because it's like just said there's just so many great musicians and great artists that are just truly wonderful people that you don't really have to put up with any of the BS from the ones that you know don't want to treat people.
• 28:41
  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, in my studio life, at this point, I think it's true that I think a lot less about instrumentation than I think about just characters I want to populate the room.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_07]: I'm going to say any time an artist comes to me, I sometimes produce a band that exists as a band, but more often than not,
• 29:01
  [SPEAKER_07]: part of what I'm expected to do is cast a room, and I think a lot about what individual personalities mean, supportably, through the course of off, short, fairly intense project on this every record I make happens within three to five days, pretty rare that I work on anything that goes longer than that.
• 29:25
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I also recognized that it was a big reveal for me at the point when I became a parent, because I hadn't, you know, I've had say to a number of people that I was producing within my early life.
• 29:37
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, somebody, again, I, like you, I don't need to name a name, but, you know, somebody who just expected the fact that I was their producer, meant that I was carving out all kinds of time to hang post-session, and there was just this expectation
• 29:54
  [SPEAKER_07]: Management called me out on it, and I said, you know, my family's not my hobby, you know, I'm the first person in the studio when the day starts on the last person who walks out, your clients not entitled to more than that, you know, for me, and if they have a problem with it, they should talk to me.
• 30:14
  [SPEAKER_07]: But I'm giving them all that I have.
• 30:17
  [SPEAKER_07]: That does not mean everything that I am.
• 30:20
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I just started to notice people who respected the fact,
• 30:23
  [SPEAKER_07]: that my family was a big part of decisions I made about the way that I operated when I recorded.
• 30:30
  [SPEAKER_07]: I don't start sessions with three or four in the afternoon, you know, I get up at four.
• 30:36
  [SPEAKER_07]: My, you know, my best hours are behind me if we're starting at, you know, five in the evening.
• 30:42
  [SPEAKER_07]: Like, I've worked with some people who that's, that's what they prefer and it's, that's been a rang, that's been a tough rangle for me.
• 30:49
  [SPEAKER_07]: finding people who who respected the life that I was leading that allowed music to happen.
• 30:54
  [SPEAKER_07]: Not just, you know, the music work itself.
• 30:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Guys, this is some good dirt.
• 31:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mm-hmm.
• 31:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're collecting.
• 31:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, fair warning, this question is half a page and it includes a Thomas Merton quote.
• 31:07
  [SPEAKER_07]: Oh, I love Thomas Merton.
• 31:08
  [SPEAKER_07]: I'm ready for you.
• 31:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Mark's new record spring green.
• 31:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mark, you shared.
• 31:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to release myself from the impulse to showcase all the different, different musical things.
• 31:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm capable of doing and focused, instead, on simply being.
• 31:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Awesome, record sounds so good.
• 31:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Joe, you were on the podcast on being, and you were discussing this Thomas Merton quote.
• 31:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you write for God, you will reach many men and bring them joy.
• 31:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you write for men, you may make some money, and you may give someone a little joy, and you may make a noise in the world for a little while.
• 31:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written, and after ten minutes, you will be so disgusted that you will wish that you were dead.
• 31:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's from seeds of contemplation from Thomas Merton.
• 31:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you explained of that quote that the intention of writing for all mankind or writing for God is to free yourself of your own vanity and the idea of having everything have to reflect back on yourself.
• 32:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here's the question.
• 32:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Who have you guys written for and made music for?
• 32:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: How has that evolved?
• 32:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what does it feel like to finally, it sounds like Mark, you're right there with Joe on this one, finally free yourself of your own vanity.
• 32:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, wow, that's a big one.
• 32:25
  [SPEAKER_07]: There's a lot of question in there.
• 32:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's an amazing quote.
• 32:30
  [SPEAKER_07]: It's so good.
• 32:30
  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, it is.
• 32:31
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I read it when I was quite young.
• 32:33
  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, I read it in my teens.
• 32:35
  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, to finally get to the point when you are writing
• 32:38
  [SPEAKER_07]: free of ego, and I mean the original, not the way that people normally mean ego when they say it in a conversation.
• 32:46
  [SPEAKER_07]: But what it actually means, that everything is revolving, how does everything exist in relation to me?
• 32:53
  [SPEAKER_07]: I'm considering everything.
• 32:55
  [SPEAKER_07]: based on how it is in relationship to me.
• 32:59
  [SPEAKER_07]: I've just never thought like that as a writer.
• 33:02
  [SPEAKER_07]: I never set out.
• 33:04
  [SPEAKER_07]: I just set out to deliberately not write songs rooted in autobiography.
• 33:11
  [SPEAKER_07]: I was rushed back by people that I thought were doing that.
• 33:17
  [SPEAKER_07]: I thought I haven't lived enough of a life to make that the basis for everything that I'm doing.
• 33:24
  [SPEAKER_07]: I'm so much less interested in self-expression and so much more interested in discovery.
• 33:31
  [SPEAKER_07]: And once I had that phrase for myself and understood that,
• 33:35
  [SPEAKER_07]: I felt really liberated, you know, to do consciously what I had been doing sort of unconsciously for a long time.
• 33:43
  [SPEAKER_07]: I knew that I wasn't writing about myself, even though after the fact I could see myself in things that I had written, but I knew that's not what I was consciously reaching for at the time I was.
• 33:55
  [SPEAKER_07]: you know, in process.
• 33:58
  [SPEAKER_07]: So, you know, who am I writing for?
• 34:00
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, I'm writing for kind of an imagined, you know, community of which my job is to try to be a connector where I can.
• 34:11
  [SPEAKER_07]: Just like, you know, somebody's job is to fix my shoes and my job is to be some kind of custodian
• 34:24
  [SPEAKER_07]: hard-wired to be whether we're aware of it or not.
• 34:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: In contrast to kind of what Joe was saying there about the artist that you were gravitating towards, you know, like, I think I actually gravitated towards some of those, I don't know if you'd call them, I hate this word confessional writers, but, you know, people have thrown that tag around to, you know, Johnny Mitchell and Jackson Brown, you know,
• 34:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I definitely felt deeply emotionally connected to some of what I, a lot of what I heard in his songs.
• 35:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And of course, I didn't know him.
• 35:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Still don't.
• 35:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I was like, how do you, how do you do that?
• 35:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: How do you write about yourself and then have other people understand and connect with it?
• 35:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, uh,
• 35:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think for me, it's been a process of trying to write for the man that I want to be and in the voice of the man that I want to be.
• 35:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I would hazard a guess that maybe
• 35:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Those familiar with my work might think, oh, he's an optimistic, you know, hopeful guy.
• 35:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I am in my strongest moment, but, you know, I'm also not because I'm human and I have a range of emotions.
• 35:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I tend not to write from anger or sarcasm or bitterness, just because they don't feel like sustainable.
• 36:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: emotions.
• 36:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, they feel like they burn out pretty quickly.
• 36:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it also feels pretty easy to hit those targets.
• 36:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, I can, you know, I can, I know when I've, you know, nailed bitterness or sarcasm, you know, right in the bullseye.
• 36:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: But hopefulness or out of like a deep sense of love and compassion and empathy, like those just feel infinite.
• 36:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so it's been my goal to try and get closer to what it feels like to embody those, even though I know that I'll never get there.
• 36:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so I guess if I'm running for anyone, which I don't often have the sense
• 36:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: stepping back up a bit.
• 36:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: It feels like I guess like I'm writing for that something for that guy that I want to be to sing.
• 36:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then, of course, you know, you have to go all over the world to Ireland or wherever.
• 37:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you got to sing that that guy's words, believably.
• 37:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's, you know, you're not acting.
• 37:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's a bit of theater in it, but you're also deeply invested in that guy's emotions and his words.
• 37:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: And
• 37:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he starts to be that person a little bit more, more every time.
• 37:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so I don't, I guess it feels, I feel like the process of songwriting in that way makes me slightly better over time.
• 37:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's the hope.
• 37:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: But really going back to that, that Martin quote, you know, that writing for God like that mystery for me at the core of everything.
• 37:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's the thing that you have to find a way to kind of abide with and be able to, be able to kind of cozy up to and not be, you know, terrified of the, of the void of not knowing what's in that mystery, because even if you chip away at the edges, you can't ever get to the center of it, that that's me as what God is.
• 38:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, also my attempts to investigate that have really,
• 38:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: And brought me closer to that guy that I want to be as opposed to like the Catholic full of shame that I was raised up in.
• 38:23
  [SPEAKER_07]: Well, I always write in first person or almost always.
• 38:26
  [SPEAKER_07]: I just think that's the most intimate place from which to speak, is the most seductive place from which to speak.
• 38:34
  [SPEAKER_07]: But it's confusing to people because the singer-songwriter so-called confessional era that you're referencing, I was coming of age during that period of time.
• 38:45
  [SPEAKER_07]: And Jackson Brown, who has been a friend for 30 some years now,
• 38:51
  [SPEAKER_07]: I didn't gravitate toward him when I was a teenager, when a lot of my friends, especially my close friends, who were women in high school, heard a lot in his story and the way that he spoke and song, that connected deeply with him, that did not for me.
• 39:09
  [SPEAKER_07]: The light kind of went on for me with him later, even though I was aware that what's working about what he's doing, I don't know how to do that.
• 39:19
  [SPEAKER_07]: I don't, you know, even though I'm speaking I, and it's confounding to people sometimes that if you say I knew, and then you tell them later that you don't mean, I don't mean me myself.
• 39:32
  [SPEAKER_07]: It's, I'm, I'm in a character, but I noticed that when I, you know, even when I see myself and things that I'm writing, the eye that speaks in the songs has a lot, um, uh,
• 39:46
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, much more courageous than I am as an actual person.
• 39:50
  [SPEAKER_07]: There's spirituality as much lives and more extremes, you know, than I see myself, both in relation and devastation, you know, as far as a relationship to, you know, any sense of a creator.
• 40:02
  [SPEAKER_07]: I notice a lot of things about that consistent voice that I know, I know where it converges with who I recognize myself to be, and I know where it really divides and fuels away from the person that I think that I am.
• 40:18
  [SPEAKER_07]: I like that person.
• 40:20
  [SPEAKER_07]: I like that person's vulnerability, that character's vulnerability, and they're willingness to give it up.
• 40:32
  [SPEAKER_07]: Who I am?
• 40:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that answered, you know, we had to give you an answer, to convince her with the length of the question.
• 40:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
• 40:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of course.
• 40:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting to think you only sing in the perspective of I, you know, maybe wondered, does Randy Newman sing in the perspective of I?
• 40:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cause he has, yeah, he does.
• 40:53
  [SPEAKER_07]: And he happened to me when I was 13.
• 40:56
  [SPEAKER_07]: And nobody with the exception,
• 41:00
  [SPEAKER_07]: of a possible exception, a Bob Dylan had a beer impact on the sonwriter that I became then he did.
• 41:07
  [SPEAKER_07]: And for that exact reason, I heard him at 13, I bought good old boys.
• 41:11
  [SPEAKER_07]: It was a brand new record when I bought it, and I don't know how I understood completely
• 41:17
  [SPEAKER_07]: And simply that he was not, you know, as Rimbou said, you know, I is another.
• 41:23
  [SPEAKER_07]: I knew that he, the eye that he was representing was not Randy Newman, the songwriter.
• 41:29
  [SPEAKER_07]: I knew that he wasn't from Alabama.
• 41:31
  [SPEAKER_07]: I knew that he wasn't married to a woman named Marie.
• 41:33
  [SPEAKER_07]: I just assumed that he was a storyteller like a lot of the,
• 41:37
  [SPEAKER_07]: songs, kind of narrative, country songs I heard as a boy in the South, you know, connected to, you know, a lot of that tradition, but he was also deeply invested in the American songbook and theater and film music.
• 41:56
  [SPEAKER_07]: I was, I loved film, even as a young boy, so he was an enormous, remains an enormous character
• 42:08
  [UNKNOWN]: You
• 42:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to ask you a question about grief and acceptance.
• 42:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: So both of you we talked about are living with chronic conditions, Mark with RP, Joe with Stage 4 prostate cancer.
• 42:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It seems like you've both been on this journey of grief to acceptance and maybe even hope pulled that right from your album by, oh my god.
• 42:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: What does that look like for each of you?
• 42:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I'll just say right off the bat that the person
• 42:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Aside from my family and my wife, the person that helped me make sense of a lot of that is doing this podcast with me today when it's not me.
• 43:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: When I asked, when I asked Joe, if he would write, you know, if you would write the the liner notes as a for later darkness down, which was my previous studio record where I kind of was dealing with.
• 43:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: my diagnosis kind of head on.
• 43:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: The thing that you wrote, I almost couldn't believe that that was about me and my work, I felt like I think did he get the wrong file or something that I felt like can this really be the mission that I was engaged in and can this really be
• 43:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: what I have accomplished with this music.
• 43:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I realized right then, one of the things that you wrote was like one of the greatest gifts.
• 43:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And one of the things we most want and one of the greatest gifts we can give another person is the gift of them feeling seen.
• 43:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And at a time when you were literally,
• 44:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: told you or losing that sense of sight, you know, the stuff that goes to your head among many things is if I can't see, not only will I not be able to see others, but will I be able to see myself and, you know, Joe's essay showed me that, you know, that yes, you can see yourself
• 44:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: can see you in the work as well.
• 44:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, it was just...
• 44:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: It took the edge off of degree for me, you know, and there were a lot of other things that I was engaged in at the time to try and pull out of that nose dive.
• 44:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, just the kindness that it that was invested in the heart that was invested in that essay.
• 44:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think I've thank you many times for that, but I'll do it again.
• 44:58
  [SPEAKER_07]: You are so welcome, and I'm touched that you were sure that.
• 45:02
  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, for me, grief has been really a moving target.
• 45:06
  [SPEAKER_07]: I don't feel like I've got to go to handle on it, you know, some days better than others.
• 45:11
  [SPEAKER_07]: But I'm a person who did not grow up in grief.
• 45:13
  [SPEAKER_07]: My wife is a person who grew up in grief.
• 45:16
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, she lost her mom when she was 18 months old.
• 45:18
  [SPEAKER_07]: grew up in a house of kind of rampant addiction and and all manner of emotional and physical violence.
• 45:28
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I did not.
• 45:31
  [SPEAKER_07]: I grew up, I was raised by the most loving supportive parents, even when they didn't understand how I was going to do what I said I was
• 45:40
  [SPEAKER_07]: set on doing.
• 45:41
  [SPEAKER_07]: They didn't know how to do anything but support me and encourage it.
• 45:47
  [SPEAKER_07]: That's just, that was just the luck of that draw.
• 45:50
  [SPEAKER_07]: that I grew up like that, not to say I didn't have some trauma in my upbringing.
• 45:56
  [SPEAKER_07]: We moved a lot when I was young, that was deeply traumatic for me.
• 45:59
  [SPEAKER_07]: We moved from the south to the Midwest, right?
• 46:02
  [SPEAKER_07]: When I was starting fourth grade, for example, and I was really a target to be bullied.
• 46:08
  [SPEAKER_07]: I was very small.
• 46:10
  [SPEAKER_07]: I was really sensitive.
• 46:12
  [SPEAKER_07]: I had a southern accent.
• 46:14
  [SPEAKER_07]: I had a stutter.
• 46:16
  [SPEAKER_07]: Things that just made me a real target.
• 46:19
  [SPEAKER_07]: So I kind of retreated into music that was kind of just where I, you know, where I went.
• 46:25
  [SPEAKER_07]: That's just the, you know, the well that I ran to.
• 46:29
  [SPEAKER_07]: But the fact that I grew up as loved and supported as I knew myself to be.
• 46:37
  [SPEAKER_07]: I think I was really blindsided by the grief that followed my cancer diagnosis, and partly because I didn't know that that's what it was.
• 46:47
  [SPEAKER_07]: I didn't know that this was like an anticipatory, I mean, not just an anticipation of greater grief later, but the grief of just, okay, now I got to wear this around.
• 47:07
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, first thought in the morning, last thought at night what you assume everybody thinks about you when they talk about you if they talk about you at all.
• 47:17
  [SPEAKER_07]: I didn't know what to do with any of that, you know, I'm still trying to figure that out in some days, much more evolved in that direction than other days.
• 47:28
  [SPEAKER_07]: And our access to hope is intrinsically connected to our ability to love ourselves through whatever our grief might be, you know, forgive ourselves, what does my angel say, forgive ourselves for what we did
• 47:45
  [SPEAKER_07]: that I find that the more I'm able to sort of make real deliberate peace with my grief, not as a way to try to usher it out of the room.
• 47:57
  [SPEAKER_07]: It lives here and knows how.
• 47:59
  [SPEAKER_07]: But when I'm the most able to just
• 48:04
  [SPEAKER_07]: feel like, you know, my goal is to live into the experience of this life, whatever it is, automatically feel more hopeful by making that connection.
• 48:16
  [SPEAKER_07]: I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't, if I hadn't felt it as a fact of my existence.
• 48:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, the god that's so beautiful and it brings to mind this this other dimension of grief that I've experienced that I think what some of what you were saying there was like, it grief is a teacher in a way and you know, when I got my diagnosis, I I both myself and my wife started grieving intensely.
• 48:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: for all the things that we thought we're gonna happen and that may not be able to happen anymore and like we were grieving the way that our lives were supposed to work out and then you know the grief teaches you that like actually none of that was ever given any way
• 49:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: and nobody knows how their life is going to work out, especially if you're making stringent plans.
• 49:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, the universe comes to laugh at that and so the grief in addition to kind of being this overwhelming sadness was also on the flip side of that, was also like, oh, it's kind of showing you the way,
• 49:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: life as it actually is which is like it is there's that mystery again like you don't know how it's going to turn out and your task is how do you live with that?
• 49:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: How do you abide that mystery and how do you you know?
• 49:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: in the long term and in the day to stay, how do you get out of bed?
• 49:51
  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, that's where the morning.
• 49:53
  [SPEAKER_07]: Absolutely.
• 49:53
  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, like you say, our lives have always been unwritten.
• 49:58
  [SPEAKER_07]: I just feel like mine is sort of newly unwritten.
• 50:00
  [SPEAKER_07]: I'm confronted daily with the fact that I don't know and I really don't know.
• 50:08
  [SPEAKER_07]: And after remind myself that, you know, who else doesn't know, my doctor doesn't know.
• 50:13
  [SPEAKER_07]: And sometimes my doctor wants to point, is tempted to point to a fixed place on the horizon that he predicts, you know, this is the point where you're going to sail off this flat earth.
• 50:28
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I had to tell him, you know, if you're going to remain my doctor, you can't do that anymore.
• 50:35
  [SPEAKER_07]: my spirit matters to my healing and you deciding, you know, talking to me as if you know how my story ends.
• 50:43
  [SPEAKER_07]: I remember when he said that to me last time he tried to have that conversation with me.
• 50:47
  [SPEAKER_07]: I said, look, you know, I'm getting on an airplane tomorrow.
• 50:50
  [SPEAKER_07]: I've seen the buddy Holly's story.
• 50:52
  [SPEAKER_07]: There's all kinds of ways this can go.
• 50:54
  [SPEAKER_07]: You're not telling me not to buckle up on my drive home because you know how my story goes.
• 50:59
  [SPEAKER_07]: You don't know.
• 50:59
  [SPEAKER_07]: And he said, you're absolutely right.
• 51:01
  [SPEAKER_07]: We don't know.
• 51:04
  [SPEAKER_07]: we think we know a lot and we do, but there's so much more that we just absolutely do not know.
• 51:10
  [SPEAKER_07]: So it's a constant effort for me to remind myself that I'm not living into anybody else's idea about how my life plays out.
• 51:21
  [SPEAKER_07]: And thus far, there's not one advantage to me adopting anybody else's idea about how my life plays out.
• 51:30
  [SPEAKER_06]: Wow.
• 51:30
  [SPEAKER_07]: There's all kind of shit that happens.
• 51:32
  [SPEAKER_07]: Yes.
• 51:32
  [SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
• 51:33
  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, I know people, I mean, I can think of a few people off the top of my head who attended me when I first got diagnosed and felt bad for me and I knew what we're talking about me quietly in the next room who are no longer here.
• 51:48
  [SPEAKER_07]: They did not imagine that I, in any way, shape or form, was going to outlive them.
• 51:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
• 51:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's amazing.
• 52:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: That goes the sun, descending.
• 52:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's light in the street, defending.
• 52:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: What all of our days are ending, of all the eye can see.
• 52:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: travel begins at waking the weight of the world near breaking it's wave on the hearts under taking of all the eye can see
• 53:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: Has barely seen us We're just the river to it sea The falling mountains are around us Still you keep your peace with me
• 53:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: Here comes the night, unfurling It's torn holy fly, still burning At borders that bleed until blurry All the eye can see
• 53:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mark and I talked on the phone yesterday.
• 54:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: We were talking about you.
• 54:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was recounting a conversation that he had with you Joe about quote-unquote failed records.
• 54:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And how Mark had always used a certain yard stick as a measure of success.
• 54:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Does it register?
• 54:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm putting words in your mouth here, Mark.
• 54:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: So correct me if I'm wrong.
• 54:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, does it register with critics, with audiences?
• 54:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Does it make a million dollars?
• 54:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Did I get a lot of awards?
• 54:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Joe, your version of a quote unquote failed record was when you couldn't quite capture the sound on tape that was actually in your mind.
• 54:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So in thinking about that, what was the process of forming your artistry like was it a gradual evolution?
• 54:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Were there any aha moments that sparked this large leap ahead of how you were able to define your sound?
• 54:50
  [SPEAKER_07]: Interesting question.
• 54:52
  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean,
• 54:55
  [SPEAKER_07]: affirmation when I found out that a lot of the records that I'm most responded to and continued to respond to, you know, there are mistakes, so called mistakes everywhere, bleed in all the mics.
• 55:08
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, it's a balance of a smear of sound.
• 55:10
  [SPEAKER_07]: It's not about everything being isolated and then so an engineer at the at a control board using
• 55:18
  [SPEAKER_07]: you know delays and reverbs to recreate this sense of, you know, atmospheric cross-talk that's perfectly available to anybody who's standing in the middle of the room when it's happening, when music's being played in real time by people together.
• 55:32
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I just started understanding that those records that I kept going back to, that had so much blood in their veins,
• 55:39
  [SPEAKER_07]: They were almost all made with people alive in a room, kind of hanging on in moments of discovery together, and that the records that were built piece by piece, and everything is controlled and separate, and reassembled later, felt lifeless to me.
• 55:59
  [SPEAKER_07]: I wasn't excited, you know, as a teenager in real time,
• 56:04
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, I had friends who listened to, you know, Fleetwood Mack and Steely Dan and things like that.
• 56:09
  [SPEAKER_07]: Didn't interest me, it did not do anything for me at all.
• 56:15
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, and I could, I would go home and put on a led belly record and I say,
• 56:19
  [SPEAKER_07]: They're not even close, you know, they're not even close to what this is doing to me.
• 56:26
  [SPEAKER_07]: It is P.F.
• 56:26
  [SPEAKER_07]: Frank Sinatra, Robert Johnson, you know, Django Reinhart, I go on forever.
• 56:33
  [SPEAKER_07]: These records where you just can't miss that there is a moment where the song stands up and identifies itself and there's not a single person in the room that's uniquely and totally responsible for it.
• 56:46
  [SPEAKER_07]: It's like a sails.
• 56:47
  [SPEAKER_07]: If everybody's weren't around a table, joined in hand with a shared intention, this could not happen.
• 56:55
  [SPEAKER_07]: And so once I understood that those records were made the way I imagined they could only be made, which is, you know, if you want to sound like people are having a moment together, you better get them together.
• 57:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's funny, like, failure such a, it's such a strong, strong word.
• 57:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I mean, I always loved the records that I was making and yet I knew what they were bringing in.
• 57:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I knew that like I'd make a record and then I would not have
• 57:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: enough money from the sales of that record to make another record, let alone, you know, just life stuff.
• 57:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And to me that along with all the other, you know, kind of successful like I had friends that had real success that I was very close to and still I am.
• 57:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm very happy for it, but I was like, okay, so it's possible that it happens to people and then
• 57:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: it happened to them.
• 57:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: They were standing right here.
• 57:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, like, why isn't it happening to me, you know, and that became a question that lived alongside the art for a long time.
• 58:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't that I ever altered the art.
• 58:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: for, to try and attract that lightning bolt, you know, like to strike a few inches to the left.
• 58:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: I just, in fact, I have said suddenly for years like, I don't want to change what I do in order to be successful.
• 58:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: I just want people to recognize what I do and enjoy some degree of success that allows me to keep doing it, you know.
• 58:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: But you do this long enough and you start to
• 58:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: how unhelpful outside barometers and yard sticks are and how little control you have over so much and why I see that last bit of agency over what is, what feels like a win.
• 59:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so over time, I've gotten a little bit better at kind of putting all that stuff in perspective,
• 59:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think it was Chuck Profit who I interviewed for this very podcast actually I read his biography of his and there's a quote in there that I'm loosely paraphrasing that he said as as far as the lies we tell ourselves,
• 59:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: quote, this next record is going to change my life is not that, you know, it's not that bad to lie to tell yourself.
• 59:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I still kind of, I still kind of tell myself that every time I make a record, but now I'm old enough and experience enough to kind of realize that it is true, every record does change you.
• 59:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't necessarily pay for the next one, but you are a different person.
• 59:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I do feel like a different person when I every record, you know, I get under my belt.
• 1:00:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, uh,
• 1:00:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, whatever comes from that is what's supposed to come from it.
• 1:00:05
  [SPEAKER_07]: That's really interesting that you framed it that way because I felt like there was a real moment of liberation for me when I kind of made a decision to stop thinking about every record I made as if it was a lottery ticket.
• 1:00:19
  [SPEAKER_07]: you know, maybe this is the one, and this is the one who's finally going to, you know, vindicate me.
• 1:00:24
  [SPEAKER_07]: And at a certain point, I just decided, you know, I want my records to do well.
• 1:00:30
  [SPEAKER_07]: I want to be heard.
• 1:00:31
  [SPEAKER_07]: I want to play nice theaters,
• 1:00:34
  [SPEAKER_07]: you know, or people arrive with a certain kind of expectation because they brought themselves to this kind of a place and it's framed in a certain way, it's presented in a certain way.
• 1:00:45
  [SPEAKER_07]: I can afford to have the musicians play with me that I think are essential for me to do what I mean to do.
• 1:00:51
  [SPEAKER_07]: But once I kind of liberated myself from this idea that this next record, you know,
• 1:00:59
  [SPEAKER_07]: That what it meant out in the world to anybody else would leak into the actual making of the record.
• 1:01:08
  [SPEAKER_07]: I realize without that was a disastrous border not to be defending.
• 1:01:13
  [SPEAKER_07]: That I make records because I, I,
• 1:01:18
  [SPEAKER_07]: I'm hot-wired to do it.
• 1:01:22
  [SPEAKER_07]: I produce records to make a living and because I love making records, I like the art form of making a record, whether it's my voice and my song or somebody else's.
• 1:01:33
  [SPEAKER_07]: But I make my own records because I want to, and I need to.
• 1:01:37
  [SPEAKER_07]: And it sort of advertises my persona somehow.
• 1:01:42
  [SPEAKER_07]: as a producer, though I don't know how, I don't sell enough of them to justify the fact that I've continued to work as a producer.
• 1:01:51
  [SPEAKER_07]: I've had to say to most people I'm going to work with.
• 1:01:53
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, before we go into this, I don't sell any records, right?
• 1:01:57
  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, that's just not how it works for me.
• 1:02:00
  [SPEAKER_07]: And you need to understand that
• 1:02:03
  [SPEAKER_07]: that doesn't drive me.
• 1:02:05
  [SPEAKER_07]: I want the record is done.
• 1:02:06
  [SPEAKER_07]: I have a lot of hope for it and I want it to do well as it can do.
• 1:02:11
  [SPEAKER_07]: But I don't can't remember ever once literally, ever once making a decision in the studio for myself or anybody else based on whether I thought it would make people like me better.
• 1:02:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, something that T-bone Burnett said about you is that he learned to look for the most powerful takes not the most pristine.
• 1:02:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what would make a take powerful to you.
• 1:02:35
  [SPEAKER_07]: That I was desperate to to hear it again.
• 1:02:39
  [SPEAKER_07]: It wasn't just something that we listened to and started talking about and got as involved and talking about it, as we would be in actively playing it again or listening back.
• 1:02:52
  [SPEAKER_07]: As a producer, I almost never play on anything that I'm working on because I think my job is to be
• 1:03:00
  [SPEAKER_07]: completely hands-free, so that when a song happens in real time in the room, I stand there as a proxy for whatever audience this music might ever have, it's like somebody has to stay in here as a as a as a litmus to whether or not this experience was moving when it happened.
• 1:03:23
  [SPEAKER_07]: And when I listen to it and I just like, you know, God, we got it, we, you know, let's hear that again.
• 1:03:31
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I know that something is, something about it has changed the, you know, the course of my blood and my body.
• 1:03:40
  [SPEAKER_07]: There's just a vibratus of really good inspiration such as that.
• 1:03:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's, I think we're talking about the same thing here, but I'm maybe going to use slightly
• 1:03:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I just had this experience making spring green the the first day we're in the studio, you know, you usually taking a little bit longer to set up your getting your sounds, you know, and oftentimes that first day is not super productive in terms of like the number of songs you get because you just had to spend all that time setting up the first day of the three days that we did making spring green we got five.
• 1:04:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: songs that first day.
• 1:04:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the way that that happened was I knew that we had it when I didn't want to hear it again.
• 1:04:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're talking about the same thing by using, I think, just the inverse language.
• 1:04:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: I just knew, I was like, well, that was it.
• 1:04:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: I know that was it for me, and if anyone else screwed up, we'll deal with them later.
• 1:04:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I know that that was the one, and I don't need to hear it again.
• 1:04:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And actually the second day, when we came back, my buddy Zach Hickman, who generously let me in as a co-producer on this one, we kind of had a sidebar when we got to his house.
• 1:05:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: He said,
• 1:05:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let's just listen to a few of these things, just once, just to make sure that we got it.
• 1:05:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we did, you know, go back and listen before the band came in and I was like, I told you, it's there.
• 1:05:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: We, this is it.
• 1:05:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: We got it.
• 1:05:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, we don't have to, it's not that we never listen to anything, but it's just like, I know that that's the take when I don't feel that compelled to hear it again.
• 1:05:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: When I do wonder,
• 1:05:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: If we got it, then I think, well, let's just do another one.
• 1:05:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: If I have to wonder.
• 1:05:33
  [SPEAKER_07]: I think it's easier to feel certain, easier for me when it's not my record and not my voice.
• 1:05:44
  [SPEAKER_07]: I can, I can need to be reassured that what I felt happened actually happened and that everybody else was, you know, at least in proximity to what they meant to say, because I have so much respect for the people that I must typically play with or anybody who I would be.
• 1:06:02
  [SPEAKER_07]: recording with.
• 1:06:04
  [SPEAKER_07]: But when I'm producing somebody else, and I'm just, I'm just totally standing there as a listener.
• 1:06:10
  [SPEAKER_07]: There's always a moment when I just like, that just sounded like a record.
• 1:06:13
  [SPEAKER_07]: And it might, it might, it might, you know, be a mess in some ways.
• 1:06:18
  [SPEAKER_07]: It might need to be repaired in a number of ways.
• 1:06:21
  [SPEAKER_07]: But that's doesn't, you know, I can hear it right through that.
• 1:06:24
  [SPEAKER_07]: I just sounded
• 1:06:31
  [SPEAKER_07]: What needed to happen happened?
• 1:06:33
  [SPEAKER_07]: I've spent a lot of my production life trying to convince artists not to fix shit.
• 1:06:40
  [SPEAKER_07]: Just because it wasn't, you know, just because that's not what you meant to do.
• 1:06:45
  [SPEAKER_07]: It doesn't mean that it wasn't effective and powerful.
• 1:06:47
  [SPEAKER_07]: And before we just, I mean, if we listen to it and it's the distraction, of course we'll address it.
• 1:06:52
  [SPEAKER_07]: We can address anything.
• 1:06:53
  [SPEAKER_07]: I'm not opposed.
• 1:06:54
  [SPEAKER_07]: I'm not a purist by any stretch.
• 1:06:56
  [SPEAKER_07]: I will, you know,
• 1:06:58
  [SPEAKER_07]: Chop, channel, edit, fly, shit around.
• 1:07:02
  [SPEAKER_07]: Anything that's, I mean, it's all theater, you know?
• 1:07:06
  [SPEAKER_07]: This idea that anybody's doing yet for purity.
• 1:07:10
  [SPEAKER_07]: I think it's bullshit.
• 1:07:10
  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, as soon as it's coming out of a pair of speakers, it's already something that's been sampled.
• 1:07:16
  [SPEAKER_07]: I don't know Max, was sampling leadbelly.
• 1:07:19
  [SPEAKER_07]: Listen to an electronic representation of a frequency that puts leadbelly in mind.
• 1:07:24
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, that's not him, you know, you know, this idea, that this thing, just, this song just stood up like a living thing and told us who it was and where it lived.
• 1:07:35
  [SPEAKER_07]: And we might have thought two takes ago that it was a really, really different character.
• 1:07:39
  [SPEAKER_07]: but it has enough character now that it's telling us what it needs and what it, you know, how we serve it.
• 1:07:46
  [SPEAKER_07]: And when people, you know, artists do something that didn't intend to do, like, I remember having a really hard moment.
• 1:07:55
  [SPEAKER_07]: I was wanting to Franco's first producer that she had.
• 1:07:58
  [SPEAKER_07]: that wasn't herself.
• 1:08:00
  [SPEAKER_07]: And there was a moment when we kind of got into it about her picking what I thought was a significantly inferior take to the one that had come before it that I thought, I knew it was just that was the take.
• 1:08:16
  [SPEAKER_07]: But her voice had broken in a very particular moment and she was determined that it was a live record on the floor, and that we weren't, it was either a take or it wasn't a take.
• 1:08:27
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I said, look, before you throw that out, listen to what's happening.
• 1:08:33
  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, this is my memory of the event.
• 1:08:34
  [SPEAKER_07]: She may remember this really differently, and she's a deep artist and a deep thinker.
• 1:08:41
  [SPEAKER_07]: But I could remember this conversation of saying, you know,
• 1:08:45
  [SPEAKER_07]: that break in your voice there, that felt like a mistake to you, just jarred me out of complacency as a listener.
• 1:08:53
  [SPEAKER_07]: And a lot of things that happened, that the musician who executed the moment, thinks of as a mistake, just reminds people like, you know, my analogy of, you go to the circus and you see somebody on a high wire.
• 1:09:08
  [SPEAKER_07]: If they just walk straight across, you go, what's that?
• 1:09:11
  [SPEAKER_07]: No big deal.
• 1:09:11
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know?
• 1:09:13
  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
• 1:09:13
  [SPEAKER_07]: But as soon as they wobble, you're reminded that there's a human being up there with their ass hanging out, risking something.
• 1:09:23
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I think those moments on any recording where we're reminded that real people are risking something.
• 1:09:32
  [SPEAKER_07]: That's always so credibly seductive to me.
• 1:09:55
  [SPEAKER_05]: I went north when trouble came Thought it stayed behind Working my way through Michigan Finally crossed the line I made my peace with solitude It's years pushed on and by
• 1:10:25
  [SPEAKER_05]: But held your face, it's greased itself.
• 1:10:31
  [SPEAKER_05]: Born my life and time, upon my life and time.
• 1:10:41
  [SPEAKER_05]: I know well what people say.
• 1:10:50
  [SPEAKER_05]: When I go to town,
• 1:10:55
  [SPEAKER_05]: Though I keep my business straight hold my tongue in my head down Moving like the ghosts that I've become within my mind Where I've spent my days with you Throughout my life and time
• 1:11:24
  [SPEAKER_05]: throughout this life and time.
• 1:11:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do you guys have one more question in you?
• 1:11:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then we'll do a little bit of lightning round.
• 1:11:34
  [SPEAKER_07]: The question is, do you?
• 1:11:35
  [SPEAKER_07]: Yes.
• 1:11:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
• 1:11:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: OK.
• 1:11:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this was another marker really special.
• 1:11:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: He gave me the second one.
• 1:11:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: We were talking about you, Angel.
• 1:11:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So your latest record, Life and Time is a duo record with songwriter, Mike Reed.
• 1:11:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this was your, it's my understanding, because this is what I read on the internet, that this was your first recording and writing sessions together.
• 1:12:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is this sound true?
• 1:12:03
  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, just sound true.
• 1:12:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, Mark and I were talking about how trust must have played a huge role in this project, so not only did you trust the lyrics to Mike's sense of melody and song structure, but also Mike's voice is delivering your lyrics.
• 1:12:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, when you met other than like an appreciation for Mike's many hits, where did that sense of trust first originate from and what was the spark that made you
• 1:12:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: do some with it.
• 1:12:31
  [SPEAKER_07]: I'm laughing because the first thing that struck me is that he hit that he knew who I was.
• 1:12:36
  [SPEAKER_07]: That went a long way to meet, you know.
• 1:12:39
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, we met and we just found ourselves in line together at the dining hall at Vanderbilt where the songwriting camp was hosted and which but we got food together, we ended up sitting down together and I of course knew who he was.
• 1:12:52
  [SPEAKER_07]: I didn't think he had it.
• 1:12:53
  [SPEAKER_07]: Never occurred to me that he would have a notion who I was.
• 1:12:56
  [SPEAKER_07]: But it started by him asking me about the poets that mattered to me, and within a few minutes we were quoting a stanza across the table to each other from a poet that we realized we both love and common.
• 1:13:13
  [SPEAKER_07]: who was a pot from Ohio and in James Wright, and all the noise in this loud and loud dining hall of all these arriving so-called campers, it just disappeared and we were in this deep conversation within moments and then the subsequent days, anytime there was a coffee break, I was just I was looking for Mike.
• 1:13:37
  [SPEAKER_07]: I was like, I want to see if Mike wants to see the coffee, I need to keep
• 1:13:41
  [SPEAKER_07]: There was just something completely, it was just a brotherhood that was completely, you know, there's that cliche, somebody that I felt like I've known them for decades.
• 1:13:53
  [SPEAKER_07]: I felt that way about Mike, a Melanie will say, I remember that night you called me from the hotel in Nashville and telling me that you met this guy.
• 1:14:02
  [SPEAKER_07]: You were, it was a big enough deal to you in that moment that I couldn't remember the telling of it.
• 1:14:10
  [SPEAKER_07]: She said, I envisioned in that moment that you guys were going to work together in some way.
• 1:14:14
  [SPEAKER_07]: I didn't imagine how deep it would go.
• 1:14:17
  [SPEAKER_07]: I might have written with a lot of people.
• 1:14:19
  [SPEAKER_07]: over years, but always really random, circumstantial one-off kind of things.
• 1:14:26
  [SPEAKER_07]: And my sister-in-law, I mean, I probably written four songs with her.
• 1:14:27
  [SPEAKER_07]: Otherwise, it was just like a one-off here and there, Michelle and Digio Jello or an Ed Coleman, you know, Rosanne Cash, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh uh, uh uh, uh uh, uh uh, uh uh, uh uh, uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh
• 1:14:37
  [SPEAKER_07]: a lot of people, but not, but having, being in a relationship in a sustained, continuing way over what's now been, you know, three years, three and a half years, something like that, I never had anything remotely like that happened to me.
• 1:14:52
  [SPEAKER_07]: So I'm writing it always been so deeply solitary and I just was used to thinking that what I did was be confounding to people.
• 1:15:03
  [SPEAKER_07]: And the idea of writing with somebody, like I got to try to explain to somebody why that's where I would next go, you know, with the next line or next verse, I don't want to be thinking about it.
• 1:15:15
  [SPEAKER_07]: I can't, I don't want to be
• 1:15:16
  [SPEAKER_07]: explaining to anybody.
• 1:15:18
  [SPEAKER_07]: As soon as I'm justifying why the next verse all of a sudden starts, there from where we just were, we're not in the song anymore.
• 1:15:27
  [SPEAKER_07]: I'm not in the creative stream anymore.
• 1:15:29
  [SPEAKER_07]: I'm in the analytical mind.
• 1:15:32
  [SPEAKER_07]: John Cage made a big thing, really impressed me, made a big impression on me as a young person.
• 1:15:38
  [SPEAKER_07]: There's a big distinction between the creative mind and the analytical mind.
• 1:15:42
  [SPEAKER_07]: They both have a function but they're not the same thing at all.
• 1:15:47
  [SPEAKER_07]: that first writing zone of just spooling off raw fabric.
• 1:15:52
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, it's really easy for me for whatever reason to come back after the fact and take that raw fabric and tailor it into a pair of slacks that I can wear around.
• 1:16:04
  [SPEAKER_07]: But I don't want to stay in that unknowing, I want to stay in that swept away place
• 1:16:10
  [SPEAKER_07]: Um, there's a long as possible from ever thinking about what anything might mean or how it serves me or do I like it or anybody else like it because then you're not in the stream anymore.
• 1:16:21
  [SPEAKER_07]: You're you're up on the bank, you know, looking down at the water talking about it, but you're not you're not in it anymore.
• 1:16:29
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I just want to stay in there as long as I possibly can.
• 1:16:33
  [SPEAKER_07]: And that's largely true, what was the Great Tom White's quote, the way we do anything, the way we do everything.
• 1:16:40
  [SPEAKER_07]: I live my life in a, I trust my instincts, my internal knower, every big decision I've ever made in my life was based, you know, the biggest ones.
• 1:16:52
  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
• 1:16:52
  [SPEAKER_07]: who I married and what I do for a living were not based on any reality that I could point to.
• 1:16:59
  [SPEAKER_07]: They were both instinctive, immediate knowing in my person, in my body.
• 1:17:07
  [SPEAKER_07]: This is where my life was going to go.
• 1:17:09
  [SPEAKER_07]: Not that it would be easy, but that's where it was going to go.
• 1:17:12
  [SPEAKER_07]: what I was going to go.
• 1:17:15
  [SPEAKER_07]: So I just, I learned to trust my instinct that way and, and Mike allowed me somehow to, to believe fully from the beginning that, that, that, that, that,
• 1:17:32
  [SPEAKER_07]: I could trust him and I could hand something over and not need to try to drive or it was going to go.
• 1:17:38
  [SPEAKER_07]: Even stuff that I wrote that I would really really care deeply for, which with other people, I might be really reluctant to hand that one over.
• 1:17:48
  [SPEAKER_07]: Because I could already hear where I want that one to go and if they don't hear the same thing in it, I'm gonna have a real hard time letting go of it with Mike.
• 1:17:57
  [SPEAKER_07]: I've never really felt that at all, and I've written some of the my favorite things I've ever written that I then handed off to Mike.
• 1:18:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's so beautiful.
• 1:18:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean that.
• 1:18:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: just makes you want to talk about past lives and how you probably were like Brett like twin brothers, like many, many times over.
• 1:18:15
  [SPEAKER_07]: He's more than a decade older than I am.
• 1:18:18
  [SPEAKER_07]: He's 78.
• 1:18:19
  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, even Melanie and she'll hear us, you know, on the phone and she said, you know,
• 1:18:24
  [SPEAKER_07]: And I have a lot of really close friends.
• 1:18:27
  [SPEAKER_07]: I've been really blessed to have a lot of great friendships of my life.
• 1:18:30
  [SPEAKER_07]: And Melanie would say, you know, you've never in your life had another friendship like that.
• 1:18:34
  [SPEAKER_07]: What's amazing?
• 1:18:34
  [SPEAKER_07]: No, it is.
• 1:18:36
  [SPEAKER_07]: And you know, what was I 63 or something like that when I met I'm 62?
• 1:18:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: You guys ready for the lightning round?
• 1:18:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
• 1:18:41
  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
• 1:18:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: OK, we'll do both answer these questions I ask you.
• 1:18:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: OK. Mark's done the lightning round, like thousands of times.
• 1:18:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Doesn't have any better.
• 1:18:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: All right.
• 1:18:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: What was the last movie you watched?
• 1:18:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, the last movie I watched.
• 1:18:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was called Lights Out.
• 1:18:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was really bad.
• 1:19:00
  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, why would this be difficult?
• 1:19:05
  [SPEAKER_07]: The last movie I watched was the new Frankenstein.
• 1:19:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: What are you reading right now before you go to bed?
• 1:19:16
  [SPEAKER_07]: And Patchett's collection of essays called, this is the story of a happy marriage.
• 1:19:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: I just finished a book by Richard Powers, who wrote, it's Richard Powers.
• 1:19:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, he wrote the over story, which is one of my favorite books.
• 1:19:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I've been delving in his back catalog.
• 1:19:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I think the most recent one I've read was Be Wilder Mint, this is fantastic.
• 1:19:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a really important one.
• 1:19:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: What pie are you ordering at the diner?
• 1:19:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, blackberry cobbler.
• 1:19:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, wow, okay.
• 1:19:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, apple pie, I don't know what I think.
• 1:19:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Classic.
• 1:19:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is two questions in one.
• 1:20:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is your coffee order at the coffee shop?
• 1:20:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And how do you take your coffee at home?
• 1:20:04
  [SPEAKER_07]: You'd be right that those would be different things.
• 1:20:08
  [SPEAKER_07]: I don't trust anybody else's espresso other than my own.
• 1:20:11
  [SPEAKER_07]: So my order is an oat milk quartado.
• 1:20:17
  [SPEAKER_07]: But when I'm at home, I'm pretty strictly adopio kind of person.
• 1:20:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Mine is actually the same everywhere.
• 1:20:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's just a cup of drip coffee.
• 1:20:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's definitely, if I'm out in about, it's definitely ordered in person and not over the app.
• 1:20:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: I want to talk to the person and I want to just, I want them to hand me the thing.
• 1:20:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't want to wait 20 minutes while the people that ordered on the app get their coffee before I be.
• 1:20:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: I just want to talk to the breeze to get a cup of coffee.
• 1:20:52
  [SPEAKER_07]: Glad this has come up, though, because I can make a drip coffee in the morning and will.
• 1:20:57
  [SPEAKER_07]: I have many coffee systems in this house.
• 1:21:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the last one.
• 1:21:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hopefully, one day we'll get a tour of all your coffee systems because that's only really fun, actually.
• 1:21:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this is the last one.
• 1:21:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Who would you like besides francy?
• 1:21:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Who would you like to go to dinner with?
• 1:21:11
  [SPEAKER_07]: Hmm.
• 1:21:12
  [SPEAKER_07]: Who don't like to go to dinner with?
• 1:21:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: I know this is going to sound maybe canned but my oldest our oldest son is in college now and he's just making such leaps and bounds, you know learning about himself learning about the world.
• 1:21:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: I just feel like he's like a new kid every day.
• 1:21:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, more of an adult every day.
• 1:21:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, and it's been a few weeks now.
• 1:21:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I think I would like to see him and be like, what's new?
• 1:21:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 1:21:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 1:21:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're probably gonna have dinner tonight.
• 1:21:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: So you should do someone else.
• 1:21:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yeah.
• 1:21:54
  [SPEAKER_07]: Boy, you did come, you did come a spring to mind.
• 1:21:57
  [SPEAKER_07]: Um, well.
• 1:22:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Who'd you rather have dinner with, Joe?
• 1:22:06
  [SPEAKER_07]: Oh, well, Randy Newman, if I'm completely honest, I would think Randy did.
• 1:22:13
  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, I mean, what I love to, I mean, Joan Bias tells a fantastic story about Thomas Martin getting really drunk and wanting to follow her on the road when she went to meet him at Gostemony in Lexington, Kentucky, and she's like, he was really like, she and her girlfriend went to see him.
• 1:22:34
  [SPEAKER_07]: took him out into Lexington, I think, in that afternoon.
• 1:22:38
  [SPEAKER_07]: And like, first of all, he was like, like, two cheeseburgers, and have a beer.
• 1:22:44
  [SPEAKER_07]: And he was really, he got really, and went to a quarry to swim.
• 1:22:48
  [SPEAKER_07]: And he was drinking out of a flask, and he was like, just decided that he was going to like, wanted to leave the monastery the next day and travel with Joan and her friend.
• 1:23:00
  [SPEAKER_07]: And she said, we just slipped out the next morning because we just couldn't, I just, I couldn't handle the, I couldn't handle the pressure of like, like, I would have led Thomas Martin off his path.
• 1:23:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, anyway, I guess I also want to eat dinner with Joe Biden, apparently.
• 1:23:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 1:23:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you do.
• 1:23:18
  [SPEAKER_07]: But yeah, if I'm honest, you know, I would have, I'd have a lot more sort of significant questions for Randy, that if I would have Thomas.
• 1:23:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Didn't, wasn't there like a story about how Randy Newman has to sit with his back facing the restaurant because his kid is like too embarrassed?
• 1:23:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Did you tell me that story?
• 1:23:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: No.
• 1:23:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Pretty sure you did.
• 1:23:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: You could take credit for it.
• 1:23:42
  [SPEAKER_07]: It's good as embarrassed because people come up to him all the time.
• 1:23:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: People come up to him all the time and yeah.
• 1:23:47
  [SPEAKER_07]: Well, I met him all the on one occasion and I'm glad I got away with what being introduced to him without having to like walk up to him.
• 1:23:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Joe Henry Marker really, this has been so fun and I'm so grateful.
• 1:24:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much.
• 1:24:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, a pleasure.
• 1:24:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you Mark.
• 1:24:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we've been talking about a visit for a long time.
• 1:24:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: So this is like, you know, many, many birds, one stone kind of situations.
• 1:24:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: So thanks for doing this.
• 1:24:14
  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, thanks.
• 1:24:16
  [SPEAKER_07]: If I go over there and approach rules, it's still running.
• 1:24:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:24:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, shit, we have to do it again.
• 1:24:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: This episode of Basic Folk was produced by Anthony Cabrera, Dietrich Strauss, composed as our music.
• 1:24:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Andrea Weber is our street team leader.
• 1:24:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Basic Folk is a production of the Bluegrass situation, or BGS.
• 1:24:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can find all of our episodes there.
• 1:24:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can check us out on the Series XM by searching for Basic Folk.
• 1:24:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can go and find us on folkalley.com or folkalley's mobile app.
• 1:24:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can also listen to us at basic folk.com.
• 1:24:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or you can listen wherever you get your shows.
• 1:25:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you enjoyed this podcast, we suggest sharing it with a friend.
• 1:25:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like if you have a friend who moved around a lot and then lived in Los Angeles for a really long time and is considering leaving Los Angeles to come to the coast of Maine, send it to that friend because I feel like they would get a lot out of this.
• 1:25:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, thanks for listening all the way to the end.
• 1:25:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dr. Enex time.
• 1:25:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bye!