Latest / Basic Folk / Charlie Parr's Tiny Things, ep. 354

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Charlie Parr's Tiny Things, ep. 354 · Basic Folk

0:12
[SPEAKER_01]: A basic bulk friends, this is your co-host Lizzie now, making to you from Dublin, Ireland, where I just move.
0:20
[SPEAKER_01]: It's fall here, which makes my mind wander back to my home state of origin, New Jersey, where leaves are undoubtedly changing color, and cider donuts are being consumed.
0:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope you are enjoying autumn wherever you are.
0:36
[SPEAKER_01]: This summer, I said goodbye to Nashville, Tennessee, where I had been living for the past three years.
0:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I worked on a bunch of projects on the road.
0:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I re-homed my beloved foster dog Dino, and I prepared myself logistically to move to a new country.
0:52
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think it was possible to prepare myself emotionally, but the paperwork is done, and my stuff is moved.
0:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank goodness.
1:00
[SPEAKER_01]: I am mentioning all of this from my desk in Dublin, because it's really hitting me how quickly a transition period can become a major chapter of your life.
1:10
[SPEAKER_01]: How quickly a temporary living situation can become home, and how all of a sudden things that felt permanent
1:19
[SPEAKER_01]: This leads me to my interview with Minnesota Folk Singer Charlie Parr, whose new album rooming house comes out on Smithsonian Folkways this October.
1:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Rooming House is an emotionally impactful musical story in seven acts.
1:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Like a lot of Charlie Pars music, this record feels like a play where the stakes feel so real that you can't help but walk away more empathetic for having experienced it.
1:42
[SPEAKER_01]: The setting is a rooming house and the characters are the folks from young to old who have been thrown together by circumstance.
1:49
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the type of brilliantly observed story album that we are lucky enough to get when imaginative artists from working class backgrounds have
2:00
[SPEAKER_01]: In addition to being a prolific songwriter, Charlie Parr is a fabulous guitar player and a student of the blues.
2:06
[SPEAKER_01]: So our conversation covers some of his musical backstory in addition to a discussion of the album.
2:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think you're really gonna like his insight on discipline, but I won't spoil it for you.
2:18
[SPEAKER_01]: On a personal note, back in 2020, I made this exhaustive cross-to-unrelist of the songs from the decade prior from the 2010s that had been the most important to me, my favorite songs, The Big One's.
2:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And Charlie Parschipwine came in at number one.
2:35
[SPEAKER_01]: His songs have accompanied me through a lot of life changes.
2:39
[SPEAKER_01]: So today is a big day for me and a big day for basic folk.
2:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Before I let you listen to my conversation with this contemporary heavyweight of folk music, let me read you a passage from Charlie's written accompaniment to rooming house.
2:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Tiny things are important.
2:56
[SPEAKER_01]: You could say that the tiniest things are the most important things of all.
3:00
[SPEAKER_01]: What are you made of?
3:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Tiny things.
3:02
[SPEAKER_01]: This record is a tiny thing too.
3:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And meaningless in its way.
3:06
[SPEAKER_01]: But I did it anyway because I felt like I needed to do something because I felt helpless.
3:11
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought, well, I'll just do this then.
3:14
[SPEAKER_01]: It must happen all the time.
3:15
[SPEAKER_01]: This must happen more often than we'd like to think.
3:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Listen, in an emergency, I'm sure I'd know what to do.
3:21
[SPEAKER_01]: In the moment, some kind of overdrive will kick in.
3:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Some hidden well of powerful strength.
3:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Mother's lifting car is kind of strong.
3:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Mother's doing mother things kind of strong.
3:31
[SPEAKER_01]: In a crisis, I mean, not every day.
3:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not strong every day, like mothers are strong every day.
3:37
[SPEAKER_01]: But mothers have even more strength
3:41
[SPEAKER_01]: What is the emergency, though?
3:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not trapped under a car.
3:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe I'm sick.
3:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe it's not obvious to anyone else, but it's still a crisis.
3:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I've heard people say in all seriousness that if they were in jail at least they'd be warm.
3:56
[SPEAKER_01]: I know people who can't afford to see a doctor.
3:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I've heard people say she doesn't look sick, or I've never heard of that.
4:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Point to a part of your body to show where it hurts,
4:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Ask someone to look where you're pointing.
4:12
[SPEAKER_01]: These folks here in this record have no idea what's wrong or how to help.
4:17
[SPEAKER_01]: They are sick with the longing to make everything better and they can't.
4:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Tiny things are important.
4:23
[SPEAKER_01]: This house could be anywhere.
4:25
[SPEAKER_01]: These things could happen to anyone.
4:28
[SPEAKER_01]: There's only one thing.
4:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that naive?
4:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't care.
4:32
[SPEAKER_01]: There's only one thing.
4:36
[SPEAKER_01]: This is Charlie Parr for Basic Folk.
4:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Ron caught some fish and band, clean and flayed them when Sir came downstairs with a pan, instead of round the stove to see
5:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Fish sizzling the grease, join in the smell, the carousine, whole giant upstairs, the peat and told us, I don't to eat it all.
5:17
[UNKNOWN]: Let all the coal slough in that diner, out by the mong.
5:21
[UNKNOWN]: It's not far from the union yard,
5:38
[SPEAKER_02]: By the way, it's um...
5:55
[SPEAKER_02]: I couldn't take long for the fish to cook, so I grabbed a fork and had a look.
6:00
[SPEAKER_02]: She said it was right out of the book.
6:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, God ready for the bites.
6:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Charlie Park, thank you so much for joining me on Basic Folk.
6:20
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to dig into the fantastic new album, rooming house, but I want to start earlier than that.
6:27
[SPEAKER_01]: What was your first job?
6:28
[SPEAKER_03]: My first job?
6:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
6:31
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I worked out, I did field work when I was about nine to whenever my family, my family lived in Austin, Minnesota.
6:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And most of my family worked at the normal plant, meat packing house.
6:49
[SPEAKER_03]: But my uncle had a fairly large potato farm, and so in the summer time, everybody would go there and, you know, work on the farm.
7:01
[SPEAKER_03]: And I got, I think I was nine.
7:04
[SPEAKER_03]: I got kind of conscripted at one point to just do general farm labor for summers for no, little pay, long hours short pay.
7:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Did it radicalize you?
7:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, it made me crappy because you started the season out picking rocks and then it was a harvesting time that the old potato harvester was, it looked like it was homemade.
7:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Five gallon buckets screwed to it and little horribly uncomfortable wooden seats you sat there and picked chunks of potato out of the bucket and threw them into the trough.
7:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Then the machine would cover the
7:45
[SPEAKER_03]: And then all the beans would come up in another farm and you go over there and walk the beans.
7:51
[SPEAKER_03]: And then as someone, there's always something that transport from one farmer to another farm and work in these little crews of crabby teenagers.
8:03
[SPEAKER_03]: And then at the end of the, at the end of the season, you were harvesting and basically for me that my uncle's farm unity, there's a conveyor belt that went from the trucks that unloaded the potatoes into the storage facility and you would pick out the rocks from the potatoes that the harvestry couldn't distinguish between rocks and potatoes apparently.
8:25
[SPEAKER_03]: So big rocks out, even your, you know, crab-y teenage crew there.
8:31
[SPEAKER_03]: And then it was over.
8:33
[SPEAKER_03]: And at the end of the summer, my dad sometimes gave me a 100 bucks or so.
8:37
[SPEAKER_03]: And that was my first job.
8:41
[SPEAKER_01]: What did you tend to do with your money at the end of the summer?
8:45
[SPEAKER_03]: I bought, I bought records.
8:47
[SPEAKER_03]: All I spent money on was records.
8:49
[SPEAKER_03]: My parents fed me and they even bought me a bicycle.
8:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And I bought records with my money,
8:58
[SPEAKER_03]: with nobody mind it because my family, everybody like music and my family.
9:02
[SPEAKER_03]: So nobody cared about me buying records.
9:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you started to learn to play guitar, what was your relationship like with discipline?
9:13
[SPEAKER_03]: My relationship with discipline was, was and is horrible.
9:19
[SPEAKER_03]: I have none.
9:20
[SPEAKER_03]: I have none.
9:20
[SPEAKER_03]: I,
9:23
[SPEAKER_03]: I was eight when I got my first guitar, and it was because of a record of my dad's collection, Man's Lipscomb record called Texas Songster.
9:33
[SPEAKER_03]: And I loved it so much, and I listened to it all the time.
9:37
[SPEAKER_03]: And my mom and dad got me a guitar.
9:41
[SPEAKER_03]: My dad was more behind that than anything.
9:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And I just sat in front of the speakers and tried to make sounds like Mansmeade.
9:49
[SPEAKER_03]: And you know, I never took lessons.
9:53
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, the teachers that I had at that time were records and the guitar store in town was a really, really welcoming kind of community space.
10:05
[SPEAKER_03]: The old heads in there would sit in the showroom, I guess, and just play and you could pick up tips and stuff and
10:14
[SPEAKER_03]: And so discipline for me wasn't so much about discipline.
10:17
[SPEAKER_03]: It was more about obsession.
10:18
[SPEAKER_03]: And I sat and wanted to play so bad.
10:23
[SPEAKER_03]: I kind of wilt myself in the learning every song on that man's record wrong.
10:28
[SPEAKER_03]: But you know, I didn't find that out too much much later.
10:32
[SPEAKER_03]: When I moved to the Twin Cities, when I moved to Minneapolis from Austin,
10:38
[SPEAKER_03]: I still hadn't really seen anybody do the kind of music that I wanted to play and I didn't I didn't see it being done until I got to Minneapolis and I saw Dave Ray for the first time playing the blues and like all that's what that's what's happening you know and it was a total revelation to me because in the you know late 70s and early 80s it there wasn't
11:00
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't realize that there were films of some of these older films, a man's website's company, and I didn't know that.
11:06
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I just, you know, he's those, those guys were mythology to me, you know, and so when I got to the cities, you know, I was part of my so-called discipline, I guess, was then just going to show us constantly.
11:22
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I saw a Dave play every week.
11:24
[SPEAKER_03]: I saw a spider John play every week.
11:26
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I went to all the music I could go to.
11:29
[SPEAKER_03]: I, you know, and I couldn't hold down a job.
11:32
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think discipline is the exact wrong word to use anything that I've ever done.
11:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Just imagining, like, I was thinking about what you've had to say about how you kind of approximated the corrupted Travis picking of Mansliffe's comb and Reverend Gary Davis.
11:51
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you think your relationship with the guitar might have turned out differently if you'd come up in the era of YouTube tutorials and like seeing the visual technique in front of you readily?
12:07
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know, that's something I haven't really ever taken time to think about because that must be really, really different.
12:16
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, in in
12:18
[SPEAKER_03]: in my house and I grew up in a small town and there wasn't, you know, the library in town was amazing.
12:26
[SPEAKER_03]: The record collection of the library was absolutely stunning and I think they had almost every folkways, Smithsonian folkways record that existed so you could check those out, you know, and I did that.
12:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And I bet they have yours now.
12:40
[SPEAKER_03]: That library's gone.
12:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Damn, but final times.
12:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, exactly.
12:48
[SPEAKER_03]: But that's, that's, though, they have a new library now, though.
12:50
[SPEAKER_03]: They probably, they might.
12:52
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know, the new library is really nice.
12:55
[SPEAKER_03]: I haven't been in there.
12:56
[SPEAKER_03]: But the thing about that time was, your options were pretty limited.
13:01
[SPEAKER_03]: Having, like, in Austin, Minnesota in 1976, five, to have a man's lips comb record in the house.
13:13
[SPEAKER_03]: a lightning hopkins record that I dearly loved.
13:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Albert came, even a couple of volumes from the Harry Smith anthology, you know, where there, and Dad's record collection was just weird.
13:23
[SPEAKER_03]: It was, it was sing along with Mitch was in there.
13:26
[SPEAKER_03]: There was the soundtrack to the Mary Poppins film was in there.
13:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Just a weird, he loved music.
13:31
[SPEAKER_03]: He loved everything.
13:32
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, he listened to all of it.
13:34
[SPEAKER_03]: When I first got into punk rock, he came downstairs and my room and listen to the clash with me because he thought that was great.
13:40
[SPEAKER_03]: He loved them.
13:41
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that my point was that the scarcity of resources was part of my learning process.
13:50
[SPEAKER_03]: And I believe knowing my personality, I believe that I would be very overwhelmed if I were trying to learn anything right now because there's so much going on.
14:01
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's almost too much for me.
14:07
[SPEAKER_03]: to deal with because it goes by so fast and I can have a slow person, you know.
14:13
[SPEAKER_03]: So I don't think I would do, I don't think I would do well, actually.
14:17
[SPEAKER_01]: It can be really overwhelming, and especially because there are so many choices and it's hard to tell what is of quality anymore.
14:25
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like there's a sense that if you're getting something on a vinyl record, like one or more people have spent a long time making sure it's worth.
14:35
[SPEAKER_01]: pressing.
14:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
14:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Where is a YouTube video you can throw up in a few minutes?
14:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
14:41
[SPEAKER_01]: No disrespect, but yes.
14:44
[SPEAKER_03]: No, it's you know that the editing is different.
14:48
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, and I think that even
14:52
[SPEAKER_03]: For me anyway, I take the way I take stuff in is really slow, like albums, you know, and I never even like 45s because it's just one, it's, you know, where's the rest of it?
15:06
[SPEAKER_03]: It's kind of what I always think, you know, I got to walk over here and turn it over and hear what's on side be.
15:12
[SPEAKER_03]: I've always liked that the larger format, you know, where you can think into it, and with these days with the YouTube and stuff, you know, things go by too quickly, and I think you're right, I think they do maybe get thrown up without enough pause.
15:32
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.
15:33
[SPEAKER_03]: I do it too though.
15:35
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't do my own things because I don't really have that kind of capacity in my brain.
15:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Mark does stuff.
15:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, like your social media content?
15:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
15:45
[SPEAKER_03]: I send stuff to Mark.
15:46
[SPEAKER_03]: I write stuff where I make a little video.
15:49
[SPEAKER_03]: And I do the same thing.
15:50
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, he says, oh, make a video.
15:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, sure.
15:53
[SPEAKER_03]: It's easy.
15:53
[SPEAKER_03]: I just turn on the phone thing and make a video.
15:56
[SPEAKER_03]: And
15:59
[SPEAKER_03]: But I wouldn't do a record that way, ever.
16:01
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, or write anything, you know, I mean, maybe it's just a different type of a thing.
16:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It's supposed to be a femoral.
16:08
[SPEAKER_01]: It's funny that it sticks around on the internet.
16:20
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to talk more about like the development of your style as a solo performer.
16:24
[SPEAKER_01]: When did singing come into the picture?
16:27
[SPEAKER_01]: in terms of playing and singing together once he kind of had your guitar obsession locked in.
16:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, oh, right away, you know, because I wasn't, you know, I didn't get an instrumental music too much later and listening to like, man's enlightening, though both of those records, blues in the bottle and Texas songs are their lyric heavy records.
16:46
[SPEAKER_03]: There is a really important
16:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And especially with with with with with man's you know the the figures are repeating you know lightning there's a little more you know ethereal but but with man's the figures are repeating so once you got the figure down there's There you could do that all day and I did when I was a kid if I if I if I nailed it one of his riffs I would just sit there and play it over and over and over and over again and you know you get bored so you'd have to start singing the words
17:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And I imagine it was hilarious because it's, you know, it's kind of, you know, dumb white kid in the Midwest, you know, singing about hard times in Texas, you know, is kind of silly, but yeah, I started trying to curl along with the song's right away.
17:25
[SPEAKER_03]: I never, I never felt about singing very the way I do well guitar playing.
17:33
[SPEAKER_03]: And as I kind of went along on my journey, I mostly now listen to instrumental music.
17:41
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what I love the most.
17:43
[SPEAKER_03]: And when I sit in practice now, I don't really, if I'm practicing, like the record for the show, yes, I'm singing, so I can get practice with that.
17:54
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm just practicing for myself, I'm not singing.
17:58
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it was an interest him to me and I don't really care for this on to my own voice, but you know, someone's got to sing these words and it's probably got to be me, so.
18:09
[SPEAKER_01]: That's so funny.
18:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a singer-songwriter also and I've always felt the inverse way.
18:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I'm a singer and someone's got a company this lady, so pick something up and play.
18:22
[SPEAKER_01]: You have toured a lot internationally.
18:25
[SPEAKER_01]: You are a beloved artist in a lot of different places around the world.
18:30
[SPEAKER_01]: What has seen a great deal of the world and bringing your music there taught you about Minnesota that you didn't know about your home growing up?
18:42
[SPEAKER_03]: a lot.
18:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Minnesota is a really unique place.
18:45
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that, you know, where I grew up in Austin, it's relatively flat.
18:50
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of farm land around there.
18:52
[SPEAKER_03]: And it felt to me to be the most boring place in the world because I was, you know, kid, and wanted to leave.
19:00
[SPEAKER_03]: By the time I, you know,
19:02
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is deep in over the years.
19:04
[SPEAKER_03]: It just, Minnesota has got a really, really deep, kind of musical involvement.
19:11
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a lot of music here.
19:12
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of different kinds of music here.
19:14
[SPEAKER_03]: And it changes a lot.
19:17
[SPEAKER_03]: It kind of goes through its seasons of different things that happen and all things that are still there.
19:26
[SPEAKER_03]: the traditions that like the Scandinavian traditions that Minnesota has always had a still very much alive and festivals and stuff all over the state.
19:36
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's just a lot of music here and I thought that that must be that when I moved many apples in the 80s and you could go out every night of the week Sunday Monday doesn't matter.
19:48
[SPEAKER_03]: You could go out every single night of the week and see original music, you would you hard press to find a cover band, but see original music any night of the week.
19:58
[SPEAKER_03]: I am
19:59
[SPEAKER_03]: hadn't traveled yet thought that's just that's everywhere.
20:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Everybody always does all the time and it's not and I've found I've you know as I travel and like I realize that there are places where people just that they don't have access to that and Minnesota is a little bit you know I don't know if it's unique but but it certainly is gifted and how much music is going on here and how many you know how much people are willing to to
20:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Because writing science is a little bit of a, you're putting yourself out there, you're sticking your neck out, you know.
20:36
[SPEAKER_03]: And how much people are willing to do that here?
20:41
[SPEAKER_03]: I find, and maybe that's not unique, I don't know, but it's something that I've grown to appreciate a lot more.
20:47
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm really grateful for it.
20:49
[SPEAKER_03]: I've realized over the years of traveling that I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
20:54
[SPEAKER_03]: And I used to think, oh, I'm going to go live just anywhere else because everyone's better than here, but you always take that about your own town, I think.
21:01
[SPEAKER_03]: I definitely don't think that anymore.
21:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Who would you say is your audience?
21:08
[SPEAKER_03]: I have a really nice audience.
21:10
[SPEAKER_03]: It's hard, I don't know, you know, I played a festival this week, and there were kids, kids there, like young people, teenagers, and free teenagers, and there was people in their
21:23
[SPEAKER_03]: and a bunch of people in between, I don't know, they're really nice, and I haven't, you know, I've found that wherever I go, that kind of the theme that seems to be there in the audience is, they all seem to be pretty kind of folks, and they're, you know, they're for the music, I guess, you know.
21:50
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it's hard because, you know, being a, I love performing, I love meeting folks and playing guitar, but, you know, when you get, when you get kind of to the point where you're going to play, everybody goes away anyway, you know, then it's just you and you get to play the guitar again, and that's what you've been waiting for all day, so the audience is up to at that point, I don't know because I'm busy and it's hard for me to communicate with them at that point.
22:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to sit with that.
22:23
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a deep and simple observation about the job of being a folk singer in particular.
22:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and it's not meant to be dismissive.
22:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, no, not at all.
22:34
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that, because I know a lot of singer-songwriters who are invested in a relationship with the audience, which I love.
22:44
[SPEAKER_03]: I feel like I want to have that, but I'm also so obsessed with what I'm doing that it's hard to do both things and I want to do a good job.
22:54
[SPEAKER_03]: So I find myself concentrating primarily on living in the moment of the song and the guitar and the sound and I think that audiences can
23:15
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, and that that I think is appreciated.
23:18
[SPEAKER_03]: That's convoluted way of saying all that.
23:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.
23:23
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, sometimes being present in your in your music and giving a gift to the audience requires a shutting out of the other people around you because otherwise the whole machine doesn't work because you're the little song engine and the song engine can also be shaking hands with everybody.
23:44
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's exactly right, I think that's right.
23:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that people appreciate that, too.
23:50
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I, well, I'm like the artist I love that I've tried to, that I think about when I think about my career and I think about other people to do the same thing.
24:03
[SPEAKER_03]: It's usually like solo.
24:07
[SPEAKER_03]: mostly guitar players, you know.
24:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
24:09
[SPEAKER_03]: But and when I've seen them play, well, here's a good example.
24:13
[SPEAKER_03]: I just, I just did two shows with Gwennifer Raymond.
24:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, wow.
24:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely amazing musician.
24:22
[SPEAKER_03]: So inspiring.
24:23
[SPEAKER_03]: I was, I was thrilled beyond belief.
24:27
[SPEAKER_03]: She has, I think she has a deeper appreciation for her audience.
24:30
[SPEAKER_03]: She's very respectful of her audience.
24:32
[SPEAKER_03]: She pays them no attention at all.
24:35
[SPEAKER_03]: When she gets on stage and puts her fingers on her guitar, you can tell everybody goes away for her.
24:42
[SPEAKER_03]: She's 100% invested, and she might as well be inside the guitar.
24:47
[SPEAKER_03]: It's incredible.
24:48
[SPEAKER_03]: At the end of her set, she tells the audience, thank you, that might be the first thing she said to them all, even, you know.
24:56
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the amount of care she puts into her set is transmitted to the audience.
25:04
[SPEAKER_03]: No one's mad that she didn't talk a bunch or acknowledge them.
25:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Everyone's just thrilled to be, you know, in front of a stage where someone of that much talent is playing.
25:18
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm not really sure if that gets to the question at all, but I think that there's something to be said for just doing your thing and you can be respectful and give people, because I realize people want to take it, people park the car, they've got babysitters, they did a lot of stuff to be there and need to take that into account.
25:42
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's maybe the best way to do it
25:48
[SPEAKER_03]: hopefully.
25:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, we're on the basic folk podcast.
25:52
[SPEAKER_01]: So I have to ask you one of my sort of canon questions.
25:56
[SPEAKER_01]: What to you Charlie Parr is full music?
25:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, you know how hard that is to answer.
26:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've gotten a different answer from every single guest, which is part of the fun of it.
26:10
[SPEAKER_03]: I kind of suspect that there's actually no such thing.
26:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
26:13
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that it's a good catch all for, you know, for whatever you want it to be.
26:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Because, you know, I play, like, play shows and there's certain songs in my, in my, I don't, normally during a set, I do a few covers.
26:32
[SPEAKER_03]: I always do a spider-jad corner song because he's my north star.
26:36
[SPEAKER_03]: And I do like an old old old, I guess you call him a blue song, a man's song, you know, and people call that blues, I think of it as folk music, you know.
26:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Which is radical because, you know, the blues was just black people's honesty and to include it in folk, I think is radical and important, but go on.
26:59
[SPEAKER_03]: I think you're right, and I think that there's, I think that there's both something really good and healing about having a category like that that will encompass the blues and encompass jazz, because if you listen to the first version of St. James and Firmary Blues, this Armstrong did in 1927,
27:26
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, spider chocolate that song too.
27:29
[SPEAKER_03]: And it feels like a folk song.
27:31
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's probably not.
27:33
[SPEAKER_03]: It's, you know, if you wanted to really get down to, you know, it's probably a jazz song.
27:37
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.
27:38
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, these categories were ridiculous and in the 20s when they started making records, these categories didn't exist.
27:45
[SPEAKER_03]: These categories were divided into black music and hillbilly music or music or whatever.
27:56
[SPEAKER_03]: It's made up.
27:57
[SPEAKER_01]: That's why I like to tell people I make country music just to make them a joke.
28:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I do too.
28:08
[SPEAKER_03]: I like the term folk music, though, because I like the word folk.
28:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Because it both lets us all have our thing and lets us all be together, too.
28:21
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, and I really liked that, and I think that's important.
28:24
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that, you know, recognizing that we all have our thing, and recognizing that we're still all a piece of the same cloth, there is really only one thing, you know.
28:40
[SPEAKER_03]: There's, you know, I think that's important.
28:43
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think the word folk music is a good enough term, because I don't like Americana.
28:50
[SPEAKER_03]: as a turn very much that that robs me the wrong way a little bit and I'm not even sure why.
28:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I have the same way and I've come at first it felt like a good umbrella, but sometimes it feels like a gated neighborhood to me.
29:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
29:07
[SPEAKER_01]: It's political in an exclusive way.
29:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's a really good way to put it.
29:12
[SPEAKER_03]: I agree with that.
29:13
[SPEAKER_03]: I've always kind of come back to
29:18
[SPEAKER_03]: the idea of like reassessing, you know, songs as, as, as folk songs.
29:24
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't, I think that, you know, going too far down the road of like trying to stuff things in boxes as dangerous.
29:31
[SPEAKER_03]: Mm-hmm.
29:32
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, I usually just kind of leave it, you know, this is, this is folk music.
29:38
[SPEAKER_03]: Big Bill Bruise was right, you know, it's all folk music.
29:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course, it's can't play it.
29:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so I'm, I've been wanting to talk to you about cheap wine since I first heard it in 2016.
29:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I was a songwriter just starting to find my way in New York and I think I saw you play that song at Rockwood Music Hall.
29:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Hello, Rockwood.
30:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it's so good.
30:02
[SPEAKER_01]: It's such an important place.
30:03
[SPEAKER_01]: And the narrator in that song is kind of frozen in place, going through the motions, turning the labels out every single night,
30:11
[SPEAKER_01]: and all the while kind of quietly resenting the clientele.
30:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And it feels very related to the enclosure of property, right?
30:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Like that the narrator says, I have a business here to run, I have property, he had nothing.
30:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's sort of a get off my porch fear-based thing if I'm reading it right.
30:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's so beautifully described from that sort of unlikable person's point of view.
30:36
[SPEAKER_01]: But from everything I've read about you and your music and the interviews that you've given,
30:41
[SPEAKER_01]: It seems like a core pillar of your life is remaining empathetic and remaining open-hearted.
30:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So I just want to know with that song in particular, how did you get into the mindset of the get-off my porch, you know, all these old ladies being sick of everything?
31:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Like how did you go into that emotional space without staying there?
31:04
[SPEAKER_03]: The song is part of a story that I was trying to write.
31:12
[SPEAKER_03]: At one point, I was going to write a book, and it was going to be part of that, and it didn't work out.
31:19
[SPEAKER_03]: It was terrible.
31:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And I mined songs from the book, G-Plying, a song called King Earl, other songs that have to do kind of different vantage points of the same event.
31:32
[SPEAKER_03]: And the basic event is a liquor store owner's literally at the end of his kind of tether
31:43
[SPEAKER_03]: murders and how is the individual and hides his body in a dumpster, then tries to blame somebody else for it, you know, that's basically the whole story.
31:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And I, I really hesitate about, you know, doing, doing, you know, um,
32:03
[SPEAKER_03]: demonizing, just kind of giving the blanket demonization of folks.
32:09
[SPEAKER_03]: It's because it's got to be more in there, right?
32:11
[SPEAKER_03]: There's not all there is.
32:14
[SPEAKER_03]: There used to be this beautiful old song about the tramp on the street as someone's son, someone's mother's son is in this situation.
32:27
[SPEAKER_03]: And I try to keep that in mind.
32:33
[SPEAKER_03]: gross and, you know, the fairies, something else is in there, though, something else have this individual.
32:42
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it can't be, it can't be just that this person just like appeared in the world this way.
32:49
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, we don't know, they don't do that.
32:51
[SPEAKER_03]: I have terrible days, right?
32:53
[SPEAKER_03]: horrible.
32:54
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know,
32:56
[SPEAKER_03]: probably more than I'd like to admit, I'd like to think that someone in the world would say, well, you know, there's something else going on.
33:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Something else has happened.
33:07
[SPEAKER_03]: And with that song, especially, and with some other songs, too, that
33:11
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, saying about unsavory characters, I've got them in my family and you know, you've got a kind of dig deep before you find the grain of like, oh, here's the little, there's the little child, you know, that it is in there, and sometimes it's not worth the work.
33:27
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm afraid.
33:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe with that guy too, you know, I don't know.
33:31
[SPEAKER_03]: He's
33:34
[SPEAKER_03]: I finally finished the written story.
33:36
[SPEAKER_03]: It's in a book that I put out of stories.
33:39
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's terrible.
33:40
[SPEAKER_03]: I was writing and thinking, this is awful.
33:42
[SPEAKER_03]: I hate this guy.
33:45
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was hard to find empathy with him.
33:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And in the story, he made to very violent end.
33:49
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.
33:51
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't really know how, I don't know if there's a process for that, I guess.
33:59
[SPEAKER_03]: And even in the new record,
34:02
[SPEAKER_03]: The characters in there are all just so flawed and looking at whatever the songs I've written in general seems like that's who I'm talking about generally and maybe it's because that's what I feel like I am generally in my experience, you know, you start writing about the things
34:31
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, I'm a extremely flawed and difficult individual, but in writing away from what I am, I've written farther down that road instead of, you know, up a more optimistic kind of path.
34:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
34:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's talk about rooming house.
35:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And because it is, in some ways, a play made of songs, let's set the scene, where did it begin with you?
35:10
[SPEAKER_01]: What was the seat of the idea?
35:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it the house?
35:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it a character?
35:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it a feeling?
35:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it a plot?
35:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Like event?
35:17
[SPEAKER_03]: The house is definitely a character, all at home.
35:21
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's because when I first moved to the Twin Cities from Austin, that's what I could afford to get.
35:26
[SPEAKER_03]: It was around $56 a month.
35:31
[SPEAKER_03]: You could get a room in a house.
35:33
[SPEAKER_03]: And all of us folks could afford to live there.
35:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Had a common area, a common kitchen, we shared bathrooms.
35:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Everybody had some issue or another.
35:47
[SPEAKER_03]: behavioral disorder or, you know, unpleasant smell or whatever they had, they all had it and I was a teenager and I felt so comfortable and I don't know why and in my my dad who was a pretty interesting character himself, he would come up and visit me and he would end up in the in the common area just hanging out with the other
36:16
[SPEAKER_03]: House made, you know, he just thought it was great.
36:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And maybe I got it from him.
36:22
[SPEAKER_03]: I just, I just felt at home, and the house itself had this weird, and I moved, you know, that house to another house.
36:33
[SPEAKER_03]: I lived in several rooming houses around the Twin City.
36:36
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was always kind of the same.
36:38
[SPEAKER_03]: And now some people, you're like, you're dangerous, you know,
36:46
[SPEAKER_03]: people were generous and kind, and it was a vibrant atmosphere.
36:52
[SPEAKER_03]: So the house became a character, and I didn't really think about, I thought about, you know, I wanted to write a book about a rooming house, and I started, I outlined it and everything, and then the record just showed up, you know, here's the writer, you know, that it's the records, you know, it's going just kind of,
37:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Come on, you stop everything you're doing, and you pay attention, and you can have that.
37:16
[SPEAKER_03]: If you don't, it'll go on to someone else.
37:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Isn't that the best feeling in the world?
37:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, you get the tingles, you clear your calendar, and you sit down with the notebook.
37:24
[SPEAKER_03]: You're so fopping you're ready, because it's ready for you, and you need to it then.
37:28
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's what happened.
37:29
[SPEAKER_03]: I was writing the outline for the book, and also, I'm like, no, no, no.
37:33
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a record in here, and it showed up, and I wrote the whole record relatively quickly.
37:39
[SPEAKER_03]: editing it took a little longer, but, you know, the story, there was going to be several stories.
37:45
[SPEAKER_03]: It was going to be the book.
37:46
[SPEAKER_03]: It was going to be several chapters about each member of the house.
37:49
[SPEAKER_03]: The record turned out having an arch, an overarching kind of narrative about one particular ten-end of the house who's dying of cancer, and eventually ends up dying, and kind of the problems that everybody in the house encounters around this person's illness and
38:09
[SPEAKER_03]: no one in the greater world cares that you don't have any money.
38:12
[SPEAKER_03]: You get the money and you get the services, you don't get the money, you don't get the services, you know.
38:18
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that's kind of, that was the germ of that I guess.
38:21
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to talk about the way that you recorded it.
38:24
[SPEAKER_01]: It's mostly like duo performances between you and drummer Dave King.
38:29
[SPEAKER_01]: So how did you create the atmosphere that was going to be conducive to getting all these recordings done?
38:40
[SPEAKER_03]: is a super intuitive musician.
38:43
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know that I've ever played with anybody who I don't have, and I don't have a lot of experience playing with other musicians.
38:51
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm a soul artist, you know, with Dave, you feel immediately like you're having a conversation, like a really good one, like with someone that you know and trust, you just fall into a conversation that is amazing and you don't want it to end.
39:09
[SPEAKER_03]: We didn't rehearse a lot because these songs were the lyrics were the lyric heavy songs.
39:16
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
39:17
[SPEAKER_03]: And I wanted them to be modal, more than cordal.
39:21
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I really wanted that kind of vibe.
39:24
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm like writing figures that have kind of the the bareest hint of melody to them.
39:33
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, and I never could decide on what to do with them.
39:36
[SPEAKER_03]: There was one song that, you know, two songs that had just, I guess, this is the song, this is how it goes.
39:42
[SPEAKER_03]: These are the chords.
39:42
[SPEAKER_03]: This is the lick.
39:43
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, two songs did that.
39:45
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything else, like a title track, the other ending, which still doesn't have a, isn't nailed down.
39:53
[SPEAKER_03]: We went to the studio and just started playing.
39:58
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was about four hours later when we left the studio with the record.
40:06
[SPEAKER_03]: And so we did two takes of everything just because and we ended up using the second take because it always seemed to fell, it felt like the second take we were in the conversation.
40:20
[SPEAKER_03]: The first take you had that portion of the song where you're like trying to get to know what you want to talk about, you know, so we use the second take of every track actually, but they're all a lot of it.
40:32
[SPEAKER_03]: It's been the last time with with jealous Jacqueline Olton is entirely improvised and no idea what I mean, I was like,
40:41
[SPEAKER_03]: We played for a long time and it was so much fun and I was really enjoying it.
40:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And then thought, I got a sing something.
40:48
[SPEAKER_03]: I got a sing these words.
40:49
[SPEAKER_03]: I got some of these words have to fit into this thing that we're doing.
40:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And the first take felt a little clunky, the second take, I knew what I was doing then.
40:58
[SPEAKER_03]: But so it felt very improvisational.
41:02
[SPEAKER_01]: That last song, I feel like,
41:05
[SPEAKER_01]: in the long and kind of patient instrumental, I felt John die.
41:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I felt that happened in the music.
41:14
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that track is really breathtaking.
41:17
[SPEAKER_01]: It took a must of taking patients to let it unfold as it wanted to.
41:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, patients is probably a good word.
41:26
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it's just, I think with a lot of music,
41:34
[SPEAKER_03]: I never want to have, I don't, I never want to use the phrase while I, I got through it, you know, I don't like that phrase.
41:42
[SPEAKER_03]: I like, I, with any song, any song at all, you know, that I'm playing the cover song, whatever it is, I want, I want to feel like I'm living in there for a little while.
41:53
[SPEAKER_03]: I want that, because you know, your, your musician, you feel like time is different inside songs than it is outside of them.
42:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And thank God.
42:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank God, absolutely.
42:04
[SPEAKER_03]: I want that.
42:05
[SPEAKER_03]: I want that.
42:06
[SPEAKER_03]: I like how time shifts.
42:08
[SPEAKER_03]: I like things that make time, because time is fake, really.
42:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think- Say that, I agree.
42:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Mariah Carey has famously said, she does not believe in time.
42:20
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not a physicist or anything.
42:24
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, maybe I am not a physicist, but I do think the time is not what we think it is for that way.
42:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I agree.
42:32
[SPEAKER_03]: And you can adjust it inside songs, which if you have that perspective, you know, if you're just getting through it, you know, just play this song and get through it, or make something else happen as not music.
42:47
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, like I want to get paid.
42:50
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm working for drink tickets tonight, you know, play these songs, play a, you know, someone requests a song you don't want to play, you know, which I don't do that, and I'm sorry, I've apologized to people, I can't play songs that I want to play, because I want time to, I want time to work.
43:09
[SPEAKER_03]: And so the thing about playing with Dave and the studio was it did it immediately, like a meat we sat down and started playing it immediately, like you can feel time change.
43:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's what I want.
43:21
[SPEAKER_03]: And that last song with Jacqueline literally, no separation at all.
43:27
[SPEAKER_03]: It's all bleed because Jacqueline and I and Dave said as close as we could together, you know, drums kind of in the way, but I was like right there.
43:38
[SPEAKER_03]: I could touch either one of those two easily.
43:40
[SPEAKER_03]: And that being in that proximity, you know, it added so much to my ability
43:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I love that.
43:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to bring our listeners attention to the very top of the record, where we meet our narrator, who's talking about John, who's kind of the main character, but giving the backstory that John has been in the room house since he was abandoned by his mother at the age of 12, which really does this thing that you're talking about of like taking someone
44:18
[SPEAKER_01]: and getting into the shoes of that somebody's kid.
44:21
[SPEAKER_01]: So what's your relationship like with your inner child, like these days and around this album creation?
44:27
[SPEAKER_03]: I have a complicated relationship with my inner child.
44:29
[SPEAKER_03]: I have a long history of mental health problems, clinical depression and severe anxiety, and therapy encourages you to take a look at what my little child is doing.
44:47
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't do that for a long time, and the amount of abuse that I heaped on that child is outrageous.
44:57
[SPEAKER_03]: And now it's very different, I try to listen and nurture that child, try to pay attention to that history and take that into account when I'm going forward with whatever thing
45:16
[SPEAKER_03]: It's hard.
45:17
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like a daily practice now, which I have a lot of those because one thing I've learned throughout my life is this is it.
45:26
[SPEAKER_03]: This is what I have today is today.
45:29
[SPEAKER_03]: It's this moment and bring my plate to the table even if it's empty because that's what is happening right now.
45:38
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's been it's been hard.
45:40
[SPEAKER_03]: It's been a difficult relationship.
45:42
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that it's really important and good and meaningful in that it's ongoing.
45:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't expect it to ever, I don't expect there to be a resolution in my life.
45:52
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's fine except that as long as I'm working on it.
45:58
[SPEAKER_03]: As long as I'm still journeying, getting another mile under my feet, I'm it's very satisfied with
46:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that's really useful.
46:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Strategy.
46:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I think for those of us that deal with depression and anxiety, trauma, all of it, it can feel really big.
46:19
[SPEAKER_03]: It's huge and one thing I learned is that, you know, when I get up in the morning before I do anything else, I try to, I try to sit and just think a little bit about gratitude, you know, what, because
46:33
[SPEAKER_03]: think if you forget about gratitude, you know, it's easy to just go down in a real dark space and stay there for a long time.
46:41
[SPEAKER_03]: If I wake up in the morning and get out of my head and think, you know, I have, I have an initially when I started doing that, I was like, I'm like, hard pressed and crabby about it, like, okay, well, I'm grateful to be alive when I
46:56
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, but now the list of things that I'm grateful for is massive, you know, and includes a lot of stuff about myself that I couldn't say before because I did low self-esteem and confidence issues prevented me from saying I'm grateful for the person that I am.
47:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And now I can say that every day and I can even say that I allowed to a relative stranger, you know, which is which is unique for me, you know.
47:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that's been a huge part of my, I don't want to call it a recovery because I don't think that that's the right word.
47:25
[SPEAKER_03]: But my relationship with mental health issues is, you know, gratitude has been a big part of making that sustainable, making that survivable for me.
47:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Now in your liner notes for rooming house, you talk about the ways in which people create little spaces of privacy for themselves in shared or crowded situations,
47:48
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you put up a number two on your bedroom door as a kid and told your parents, you were just their neighbor in an apartment building, you know, and kind of even more pointyly the observation that your mom's socks had more privacy than she did in her house growing up.
48:07
[SPEAKER_01]: So do you do you you're in for privacy?
48:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And then on the other side of that coin, like, is solitude
48:16
[SPEAKER_01]: or have a relationship with those kind of go together for me.
48:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
48:20
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm an introvert, hardcore, card carrying introvert from one of those of kid.
48:27
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, that time when I was a kid, when I get a little allowance, wrote my little bike to the hardware store, bought a number two road back and taught it on my door.
48:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
48:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Which I don't know where that came from.
48:42
[SPEAKER_03]: I also cleared my room out at that time.
48:45
[SPEAKER_03]: It was two o'clock in the morning and I was six, seven, I don't know, I took everything out of my room and put it in the hallway because I just, that's not important to me.
48:56
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I don't want that.
48:58
[SPEAKER_03]: My mom and dad woke up in the middle of the night like, what are you doing in it said, I don't want these things in my room.
49:03
[SPEAKER_03]: It's bothering me to have these things around me.
49:06
[SPEAKER_03]: and you know what they are, you know, why don't I need these?
49:09
[SPEAKER_03]: And they just shrugged and started carrying things down stairs with the basement, and storing them down there, you know, that you'll want them back again someday, maybe, maybe not, I never did.
49:18
[SPEAKER_03]: So as a person who, like, coming to grips with being an introvert and how weird it is because you do need other people, you do need to form relationships with people.
49:36
[SPEAKER_03]: And the danger, I think, is avoiding both of those things.
49:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Because I can go on for a long time, like avoiding myself and avoiding that inner child and avoiding the issues that have come up in my head, avoiding my partner, avoiding my sister, even my kids sometimes, just.
50:04
[SPEAKER_03]: the process is spend time with myself quality time where I'm learning about myself and taking care of myself, mentally and physically, I guess too.
50:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Trying to make sure that I'm okay then when I'm strong enough, spend time taking care of the people that are in my life and making sure that I am
50:31
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, giving attention to that relationship that it needs, so I can do both things instead of neither, which I spent a long time doing neither, you know, just denying anything.
50:43
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think that now I finally at 59 years old, I feel like I have a balance of this is, you know, my space where I'm at and I can do it anywhere, you know,
51:00
[SPEAKER_01]: When I'm in the tour van, I put on my bonnet, a hoodie, and a little eye mask, and I can sleep anywhere.
51:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And it also brings a sense of like spiritual centeredness that like, no, it's almost like the peek-a-boo instinct that we can tap into as adults.
51:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, no one can get to me, and I, and no one else is there, you know?
51:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I can't see you, so you must not be there.
51:22
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I think that I think that I finally kind of found that balance of,
51:26
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, here's my space and I take it with me wherever I go and I'm confident about it because it's mine and then here's my world of, of, of comfort with everybody else in it, you know, the separate that but also part of that, you know, and just kind of uniting all that stuff because, you know, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a big important kind of,
51:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Bans, I guess, that you have to do to make sure that you're okay all the time, or you know, that you're okay in the world, because a lot of my life, and I can't speak for anybody else, but a lot of my life, you know, in denying myself and running from relationships, there's nothing left.
52:16
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it's so dangerous.
52:18
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm a survivor of suicide, and that's where
52:22
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, you're running from everybody else and denying yourself, what's left?
52:28
[SPEAKER_03]: There's nothing left, but just this cavity of nothingness.
52:32
[SPEAKER_03]: And when I filled the cavity with gratitude and compassion and empathy for myself, first, so I could put my mask on before I helped others.
52:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
52:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything got different from me.
52:46
[SPEAKER_03]: And it feels better now.
52:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's not best or done.
53:17
[SPEAKER_03]: In that particular song, this is a person who had been in a relationship and who had invested a lot in a relationship with someone else.
53:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And that person hadn't invested anything in the relationship.
53:34
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's almost two surface level in a way that lyric, because it's just obviously this person just disappeared
53:47
[SPEAKER_03]: big deal to my person who had invested everything and now is kind of, you know, left in the literature, whatever.
53:58
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's almost, it's almost too thin, but it's, it's, it's, it felt kind of right for that particular song that this just, you know, you didn't take it seriously.
54:11
[SPEAKER_03]: I did.
54:12
[SPEAKER_03]: I was here.
54:14
[SPEAKER_03]: You weren't here.
54:15
[SPEAKER_03]: And what you do now, you know, because you can't, you can't, you can't fix it, you can't punish someone else for it, you know, they're gone and you're only punishing yourself now.
54:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Right me.
54:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, this particular character is calling out to someone else, but in another sense, you know, who hasn't been a little guilty of that.
54:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
54:57
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, you get, you get, and especially I think in the life of the musician, you know,
55:03
[SPEAKER_03]: you, it's a unique and really strange responsibility.
55:09
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think thinking about it as a responsibility has helped me a little bit because you come in and out of people's lives in this really strange way.
55:19
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think about people listening to my music.
55:22
[SPEAKER_03]: And I brought up short, like go to New England, and there's someone there, it's like, I listen to your music all the time, and I'm like, what, why would you do that?
55:34
[SPEAKER_03]: That's, you know, that seems weird.
55:37
[SPEAKER_03]: But what they're saying is, I have entered into a relationship with you.
55:42
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, now you are here in the person and I believe that I know you because of this relationship.
55:51
[SPEAKER_03]: And so then you have to be kind of careful because that's real, really, really real.
55:58
[SPEAKER_03]: I have a relationship with Bob Dylan.
56:01
[SPEAKER_03]: If I ever met Bob Dylan, I would probably say some stuff to him that would alarm him, you know, because of that relationship.
56:11
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't expect him to have a feeling of responsibility for me,
56:20
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm traveling that that happens that happens to me, it's happened to someone else.
56:26
[SPEAKER_03]: So when someone is having a reaction to things like that, that I can be there, I don't have any answers.
56:34
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not, I don't, I'm not like that.
56:38
[SPEAKER_03]: But I can be there.
56:40
[SPEAKER_03]: So you'll be very disappointed to learn what I'm really like, you know, with the songs are like,
56:48
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm here, you know, at to talk about it or not to talk about it.
56:52
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the way I've dealt with with that sense of responsibility.
56:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you show up.
56:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, show up.
56:58
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think it's, I think it's real because yeah, when songs say you, I do the same thing like me.
57:04
[SPEAKER_03]: I do.
57:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I better look at myself.
57:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I'm, and Dylan has a good, he's got, he does that to me, you know.
57:13
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't feel so good about myself anymore.
57:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
57:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to talk about the character of Illness on this record because I feel like when Illness reveals itself like in the bigger sense, like beyond just like the food poisoning which I believe had to do with the colds law.
57:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Like that's what they say.
57:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Mayonnaise is really the culprit in so many ER trips, but the sort of bigger chronic Illness character.
57:45
[SPEAKER_03]: a real event.
57:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, really?
57:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Our journalism, then it is so I'm right.
57:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Rough.
57:49
[SPEAKER_01]: That's so rough.
57:52
[SPEAKER_01]: It's such a brutal way to start the, to like, start that story.
57:56
[SPEAKER_03]: My rooming house, we didn't, you know, nobody had a lot of money.
58:00
[SPEAKER_03]: I wouldn't keep a job because all I want to do is go to show us, so I'd bust my money.
58:04
[SPEAKER_03]: I sat on this, on the steps and down this street and play guitar.
58:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Nobody had a bunch of money, but this certain company in town would unload their out of date merchandise into the dumpsters every Thursday.
58:20
[SPEAKER_03]: We'd all get over there as fast we could, you know, because they do it like at five in the morning, you get there as fast as you could and it was mostly coleslaw and potatoes out in these buckets, you know, you get like a like a
58:40
[SPEAKER_01]: sticking your life in your hands.
58:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Ever you get excited, you know, take it home to the house and split it up, you know, and you've got all those calls on.
58:48
[SPEAKER_03]: And inevitably, you know, it was like, I don't know, maybe that was the best thing to do with it.
58:54
[SPEAKER_03]: But we did it week after week after week.
58:57
[SPEAKER_03]: That, that, that just fucking online.
58:59
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I, I, well, that's where that came from.
59:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, well, that's a type of courage.
59:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you have a song on this record called What's So Funny About Universal Healthcare.
59:09
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, kind of what we're driving at is that like illness kind of has this sarcastic cruel comedic character on this record and and it makes me think about what is so funny about universal healthcare like a lot of people talk about it as this sort of pie in the sky idea for the impractical like very naive and funny and you get poked fun of if you believe in things like this.
59:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So, like, what does that conversation and that type of comedy teach you about, like, wherever at with empathy in our culture?
59:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, that's, that's a touchy one because I was raised by empathetic people.
59:56
[SPEAKER_03]: It's, and I don't, I don't have a lot of experience with people who are against that and I know they're out there because they put, they say stuff like, oh, you know, empathy is actually evil.
1:00:08
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a sin.
1:00:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, what are you talking about?
1:00:12
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I could go way down that road, but for in my personal life, it's extremely important to me.
1:00:21
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't want people to be sick.
1:00:23
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I don't want people to be suffering and not get to go to the doctor and get help for it.
1:00:28
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know who does that.
1:00:31
[SPEAKER_03]: I think when you start to monetize stuff, you monetize yourself right out of that idea that I don't want people to suffer.
1:00:44
[SPEAKER_03]: You monetize yourself into this place where, well, everybody got a pay for water.
1:00:50
[SPEAKER_03]: that that's not going to work.
1:00:52
[SPEAKER_01]: It's crazy.
1:00:52
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm in Puerto Rico now.
1:00:53
[SPEAKER_01]: They're rationing their water.
1:00:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, yeah, that's where it leads.
1:00:57
[SPEAKER_01]: You're so good.
1:00:58
[SPEAKER_03]: And it leads to worst places than that at bad.
1:01:00
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, down the road, it's going to get, it's going to get hard.
1:01:04
[SPEAKER_03]: And I, I also don't, I don't like a hierarchy very much.
1:01:12
[SPEAKER_03]: it feels fake.
1:01:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Why are you suddenly telling everybody else that they can't have health care?
1:01:19
[SPEAKER_03]: You have health care.
1:01:20
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the person who's at the top is no different than any of us.
1:01:30
[SPEAKER_03]: I work for a long time.
1:01:32
[SPEAKER_03]: as a team of outreach workers who, you know, brought out supplies to unhoused people.
1:01:38
[SPEAKER_03]: We specifically worked with people who couldn't get into the shelter system for one reason or another, you know.
1:01:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And what I learned from that experience was, I'm better than nobody.
1:01:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
1:01:52
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't think that our leaders are better than them either.
1:01:55
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, hierarchy is fake.
1:01:58
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't know who's got the guts to say, I'm gonna judge who gets health care and who doesn't.
1:02:04
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's kind of a cowardice to leave it to money.
1:02:11
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, say, I don't want to do it.
1:02:13
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't want to say who can get health care and who can't.
1:02:15
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'll leave it to money.
1:02:16
[SPEAKER_03]: And people who are suffering with poverty, they don't get it because they don't have money.
1:02:22
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's money's fault now.
1:02:24
[SPEAKER_03]: So I don't have to be blamed for it anymore.
1:02:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm.
1:02:28
[SPEAKER_03]: That's how, and like I said, I'm not an educated person.
1:02:32
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know any of these things.
1:02:33
[SPEAKER_03]: This is my intuition talking, and I'm always speaking for myself, but I don't want
1:02:39
[SPEAKER_03]: people to have to suffer just because they don't have a dollar to pay for a doctor, you know, I don't have health insurance, but I'm very grateful and fortunate that I'm in a position where I can put a little money away once in a while.
1:02:53
[SPEAKER_03]: So some does happen, I can pay for it, you know, it's and I don't want to forget the entitlement that I am that I'm getting from that.
1:03:04
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, when I look around and see people that that's not an option, you know, so I think that the, you know, the illness, illness gets a character because it draws strength from all this hostility and aggression and monetizing and it gets stronger and stronger and stronger until it kills people in the, in the, in the story, you know, so it is a character in the story and it's male level and.
1:03:34
[SPEAKER_03]: And yeah, sometimes cruel things have a weird sense of humor.
1:03:40
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a great answer to a complicated topic.
1:03:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I appreciate you bringing up your own life circumstances because
1:03:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I think one of the, my favorite things about doing this podcast is peeling back the layer of the steep around what it is to be a successful artist because I think our listeners would agree and I believe that you are incredibly successful in so many ways.
1:04:03
[SPEAKER_01]: But in the society that we live in being successful and being respected doesn't necessarily mean always having all of your needs met or having a lot of money or having a safety net like.
1:04:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's so important that we recognize we're all so much closer to being in catastrophe than we are to being wealthy, you know, we all have so much more in common than we do realize.
1:04:30
[SPEAKER_03]: I think so too.
1:04:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, and listening to listening to stories from people who ended up living outside, you know, mere steps away from that
1:04:42
[SPEAKER_03]: last paycheck, or that apartment that they had, or maybe even much more than that, success, and steps away.
1:04:53
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not a long, drawn out, falling down a long shallow hill.
1:04:57
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a cliff, and then you're at the bottom.
1:05:01
[SPEAKER_03]: And once you get there, you find so many other things that join you there to make your life harder once you don't have an address anymore.
1:05:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Once you don't know where you're going to go to the bathroom, your cold and night, it's just one thing, after another, that ball up and it feels sometimes so insulting to have such a wealth, such a huge amount of wealth.
1:05:35
[SPEAKER_03]: And one block later,
1:05:38
[SPEAKER_03]: is is a family living in a car.
1:05:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
1:05:41
[SPEAKER_03]: That's insulting.
1:05:43
[SPEAKER_01]: It's insulting to our humanity.
1:05:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly.
1:05:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to jump to an interview that you did in 2013 with the American soundtrack.
1:05:52
[SPEAKER_01]: They asked you if you had a chance to put together a list of songs.
1:05:56
[SPEAKER_01]: that would serve as a soundtrack to your life.
1:05:58
[SPEAKER_01]: What would you choose?
1:05:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And you chose songs by Henry Flint, Tom Bell, Woody Guthrie, Mississippi John hurt, and Robert Pete Williams.
1:06:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I wonder if since 2013, you would add anything.
1:06:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Are there any other songs that you feel are like core to the movie of your life?
1:06:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
1:06:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, music's always happening, right?
1:06:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Music is an evolution.
1:06:22
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a constant evolution.
1:06:24
[SPEAKER_03]: I'd probably keep all those songs
1:06:26
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, because, you know, and, and, and sometimes it's not even a song with Robert P Williams, it's not songs at all.
1:06:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Robert T constantly wrote songs, it's a genius.
1:06:38
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
1:06:40
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think he's under appreciated.
1:06:42
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think that that folks like dig into, when I first heard Robert P Williams, I, you know, my ears weren't used to that.
1:06:53
[SPEAKER_03]: what's happening, and I learned really quickly that it's my job as a music appreciator to figure out what's going on.
1:07:05
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not gonna like all the music immediately and sometimes I won't like it at all, ever, but I at least have to figure out what's going on there.
1:07:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Here's a great example.
1:07:23
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, and it's great.
1:07:25
[SPEAKER_03]: I love it.
1:07:26
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know if it's the music my life, but it's absolutely something that I appreciate, and the journey that it took me to appreciate the genius of Robert Pilionus, and the fact that the songs always changed.
1:07:45
[SPEAKER_03]: always.
1:07:46
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that only, and it was probably the song I picked, but the song that he did, he, he, he kind of wrote and then didn't mess with a lot was grown so ugly.
1:07:54
[SPEAKER_02]: What a genius piece of music.
1:07:56
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, because he's talking about so many things at the same time.
1:08:00
[SPEAKER_03]: He's got this capacity to be talking about.
1:08:02
[SPEAKER_03]: I went to the mirror and I called my hair and I, and I, and I jumped back because I'm like, that's not me.
1:08:09
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, what's he, he's talking about like five things at one staring, it's brilliant.
1:08:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely the most brilliant piece of music.
1:08:16
[SPEAKER_03]: And I wanted to cover it, but I can't.
1:08:19
[SPEAKER_03]: You can't play.
1:08:20
[SPEAKER_03]: He would.
1:08:20
[SPEAKER_03]: He would.
1:08:22
[SPEAKER_03]: And a lot of those, a lot of musicians with their own voices, you know, a spider-jotted coloners and other great example.
1:08:31
[SPEAKER_03]: He's a cipher.
1:08:32
[SPEAKER_03]: He's a set of one, you know, and to me,
1:08:38
[SPEAKER_03]: Spyder John and Robert Pete, they are like the embodiment of the folk process, you know, they take in music and push out things that are themselves now.
1:08:49
[SPEAKER_03]: And instead of trying to copy them, I realize that I can't play grown so ugly, I can be me.
1:08:54
[SPEAKER_03]: And I can write something that reflects my version of grown so ugly, you know.
1:09:01
[SPEAKER_03]: and then I can sit down and listen to Robert Pete Williams all day long and just like reveling in the massive amount of talent the man had.
1:09:10
[SPEAKER_03]: You feel like that whole record makes me feel like it was playing the music was playing before those guys ever sat down.
1:09:23
[SPEAKER_03]: They joined it, they amplified it, and when they stopped the music just kept going.
1:09:30
[SPEAKER_03]: because it feels like it's still going.
1:09:32
[SPEAKER_03]: And a lot of songs do that.
1:09:35
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of music does that for me, but that really does it for me.
1:09:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Just really makes me feel like music is eternal.
1:09:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Like it wasn't created and it cannot be destroyed.
1:09:46
[SPEAKER_03]: And we are privileged to get to participate in it for a second.
1:09:50
[SPEAKER_03]: But we can't make it up.
1:09:51
[SPEAKER_03]: We can create it.
1:09:52
[SPEAKER_03]: We can go to it and be a part of it and be grateful for that.
1:10:00
[SPEAKER_03]: go make dinner and go to bed, it's still going.
1:10:04
[SPEAKER_03]: And it'll be going in the morning when you wake up.
1:10:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe you are a physicist.
1:10:08
[SPEAKER_03]: I am a physicist for sure.
1:10:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you willing to do a lightning round where you answer a handful of questions super quickly?
1:10:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, let me give the drink a coffee.
1:10:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, yeah, first thing that comes to mind is the instructions.
1:10:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Cheers.
1:10:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, yeah, I could.
1:10:31
[SPEAKER_03]: I think I can do this.
1:10:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, favorite snack to enjoy during a long car drive.
1:10:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Those little pretzels, pillows, pretzels with peanut butter inside.
1:10:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, so good.
1:10:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Call those.
1:10:40
[SPEAKER_03]: I could eat those all day.
1:10:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Muddy bodies are those the ones that are installed.
1:10:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Just pretzels with peanut butter inside them.
1:10:43
[SPEAKER_03]: You're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're
1:10:57
[SPEAKER_01]: scale matters.
1:10:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, what's your favorite post show beverage?
1:11:01
[SPEAKER_03]: Water actually, I drink a lot of water.
1:11:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Good.
1:11:04
[SPEAKER_01]: What is your favorite city to visit on tour?
1:11:08
[SPEAKER_03]: That's hard.
1:11:09
[SPEAKER_03]: That's really hard.
1:11:11
[SPEAKER_03]: There's so many good places.
1:11:14
[SPEAKER_03]: I really love Berlin.
1:11:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Really too.
1:11:17
[SPEAKER_03]: I love Chicago.
1:11:18
[SPEAKER_03]: I love going to Chicago.
1:11:21
[SPEAKER_03]: I like I don't know if I have a favorite.
1:11:23
[SPEAKER_03]: That's that'd be that'd be hard.
1:11:24
[SPEAKER_01]: That'd be really hard But those are two good ones.
1:11:26
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't need to go into the absolute favorite
1:11:29
[SPEAKER_03]: right because i mean those are two good ones for sure you've done this you know it's because every you know every time you go out and you're like you go to to someplace you wouldn't have thought of livingston montana yes you know like oh my god this is the best place that i've ever been in my life and then and then you get back in the in the truck and you you keep on going knows you know you find yourself in and you know Portland and like oh my god this is the best city this is it
1:11:56
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, and it feels like that all the time, I suspect sometimes that it doesn't matter where I am.
1:12:01
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that like neighborhoods, you know, I think of cities like neighborhoods sometimes, because not on this long enough that I've got friends there, and I know, and it's about that.
1:12:12
[SPEAKER_03]: It's about that atmosphere.
1:12:13
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm excited to be around people that I know that are going to be here, maybe.
1:12:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't.
1:12:20
[SPEAKER_03]: The last time I was in Berlin was really special.
1:12:26
[SPEAKER_01]: What's your least favorite nickname for the name Charles?
1:12:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Chas.
1:12:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Chas is bad.
1:12:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I didn't even think about that one.
1:12:35
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll tell you something though.
1:12:37
[SPEAKER_03]: My name's not Charlie.
1:12:40
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a nickname.
1:12:42
[SPEAKER_03]: My dad, when I was born, my dad was in the hospital.
1:12:44
[SPEAKER_03]: He was a laborer.
1:12:45
[SPEAKER_03]: He had a broken back.
1:12:47
[SPEAKER_03]: He was in the hospital.
1:12:48
[SPEAKER_03]: He could come to my birth.
1:12:50
[SPEAKER_03]: He wanted to name me Charlie after his father.
1:12:55
[SPEAKER_03]: both attended the verse, birthed my mom, obviously.
1:12:58
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a son and old fashion, and so they named me Jeff.
1:13:02
[SPEAKER_03]: And so my name is Jeff.
1:13:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Secret Jeff.
1:13:07
[SPEAKER_03]: The secret is not a big deal.
1:13:08
[SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, so then I was always a joke in my house, while there comes old Charlie Park, you know, you know, I was a little kid, you know.
1:13:16
[SPEAKER_03]: And so a lot of my friends started calling me that, you know, and it just felt natural, is that that would be the name that I kind of adopted.
1:13:25
[SPEAKER_03]: because of my dad, my dad and I had a really close relationship.
1:13:28
[SPEAKER_03]: And he died in 1995.
1:13:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And so especially when he died, that felt like that should be my name.
1:13:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:13:36
[SPEAKER_03]: No, no offense to my mom and my sister because Jeff has a fine name too.
1:13:39
[SPEAKER_03]: And I've never changed illegally.
1:13:41
[SPEAKER_03]: It's how to be deal.
1:13:42
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll answer it either.
1:13:43
[SPEAKER_03]: One of them, but Chaz is not something I enjoy.
1:13:45
[SPEAKER_01]: No.
1:13:47
[SPEAKER_01]: One thing we know for sure, Chaz is not on the table.
1:13:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Would you rather swim in a pool, a lake, or the ocean?
1:13:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Lake.
1:13:55
[SPEAKER_01]: What is your biggest pet peeve?
1:13:58
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't want to enjoy loud noises very much.
1:14:03
[SPEAKER_01]: What's one song you wish you wrote?
1:14:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, geez.
1:14:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Grants all ugly.
1:14:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:14:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And finally, what is the best place to eat lunch in Duluth, Minnesota?
1:14:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, Uncle Louie's cafe.
1:14:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's go.
1:14:27
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll see you there.
1:14:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Charlie, part of your legend and such a great guest.
1:14:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for joining us on Basic Folk.
1:14:35
[SPEAKER_03]: I appreciate those amazing questions.
1:14:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Those were really good.
1:14:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been waiting a long time to interview you.
1:14:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I love all the guests that come on this show, but I just have spent a lot of time with your music, and it's an honor to be able to chop it up.
1:14:48
[SPEAKER_03]: That's an honor to be here.
1:14:49
[SPEAKER_03]: I really appreciate all the thought and carry a put into those questions.
1:14:54
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a little early in the morning for it, but I was here.
1:14:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'm on eastern time, so thanks for showing up for it.
1:15:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely, thank you.
1:15:07
[SPEAKER_00]: This episode of Basic Folk was produced by Anthony Cabrera.
1:15:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Our music is composed by Dietrich Strauss.
1:15:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Basic Folk is a production of the Bluegrass situation.
1:15:16
[SPEAKER_00]: You can find all of our episodes there.
1:15:18
[SPEAKER_00]: You can also find us by searching for Basic Folk on the Series XM app, folkalli.com or folkalli's mobile app.
1:15:26
[SPEAKER_00]: You can also find us at Basic Folk.com.
1:15:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Or wherever you listen to podcasts.
1:15:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, thanks for listening all the way to the end.