Pushkin.

Back in the spring, I was part of a traveling variety show called No Small Endeavor.

It's put on by a friend of mine, a theologian from Nashville named Lee Camp.

A bunch of us got in a big tour bus left Nashville for Louisville, then Indianapolis, then Grand Rapids.

Lee and I told a story about the famous showdown between the suffragettes and the anti slavery movement in the mid nineteenth century, and then a bunch of musicians played music to help us tell a story.

It was one of the most fun things I've ever done in my life.

Anyway, when you're traveling on a tour bus, you spend a lot of time talking to everyone else on the tour bus and along the way.

I got to know the musical headliner on the show, the singer songwriter Drew Holcombe, and I found him so thoughtful and fantastic and full of life that I invited him to come to New York and sit down with me at eight twenty fours in reopened Cherry Lane Theater.

And to my delight and I hope your delight as well, he said yes.

Drew is in his early forties, Beard lives in Nashville, but he's from Memphis.

He's maybe a country artist, although he would dispute that description.

His band is called the Neighbors and they've been together forever.

And if you've never heard his music, you're going to hear more than a little bit on this episode.

Because I gave him only one rule before we had our conversation.

You have to bring your guitar and it can never leave your side.

Here we go, all right, all right, welcome everybody to the Cherry Lane Theater.

It's gonna be a great evening.

I want you guys to welcome Malcolm Gladwell and Drew Holcomb.

Good evening.

I'll get it started with a song.

All right.

I am fairthe well Now, I am strong, I am goodbye, long way from home.

I am an orchard at the start of spring.

I am a mocking bird.

I love to you singing.

Now.

I'm gonna fly.

I'm gonna fly.

I am an old road walking on my feet.

I am laughing me weeping willow tree.

I'm a dog barkain a honey bee steam.

I ain't annoying you, bude.

I've got my wings.

I'm gonna fly.

I'm going to fly.

I'm gonna fly.

I'm gonna fly.

I'm gonna fly.

I'm going to fly.

I am moving, I.

Am flashing bones, I am a gunshot with my microphone.

I'm a boy at.

The window as the summer sun sets, an old man in winter, nothing more, nothing less, And.

I'm gonna fly.

I'm gonna fly, I'm gonna fly.

Tell me why you chose that to start with?

Well, that's my favorite one I've ever written.

I just figure when I get nervous, just play something you like.

You know, when when did you write that song?

I wrote that song probably January of twenty twenty two.

I always tend to write a lot of songs right around, mainly after New Year's It's a good time to kind of get in your feelings and introspection about your life, about the world around you, and it tends to be a creative season for me.

How do you decide you say that's the favorite your favorite song you've ever written?

Probably?

Yeah, Why what is it about that song?

Though?

Well?

It was it was something about the song kind of came out of this.

I just turned forty around that time, and I actually enjoyed all the way things that I felt after turning forty.

Everybody told me I should be afraid of them, but I actually really enjoyed them.

Also, was kind of born in old soul.

My mom said, I was born an old man.

I felt comfortable in that transition already, just because of sort of how I am.

I started writing a song with the lyric started I'm a boy at the window as the summer sunsets.

I have this keen memory for my childhood of being told to go to bed before the sun went down in the summertime, you know, and staring at the window and seeing my neighbor whose parents let him stay up, and being sort of full of jealousy but also sort of full of wonder.

And then also, even though I'm not old, I feel certain I feel old in certain ways, and I sort of this song is kind of in the tension, is me just sort of embracing the tension of that, And that tension feels more and more what I see when I look in the mirror.

And so when I'll play that song, I feel it's like a blanket for me, you know.

And I also finally let myself admit that I like my own music.

You're not supposed to do that, But I do like my own music.

Why you're not supposed to do that.

It's just a you know, cultural thing you shouldn't.

You know, if you drive down the street and see an artist listening to their own music, you might think, man, what an arrogant guy.

But which that happens to me with my kids sometimes because they want to hear my songs.

I just look at people, you know, hey, yep to me listening to my own song.

Yeah, how would you describe the genre that that song belongs to?

You know, I growing up, I was the music that I listened to a lot sort of fit in either categories of folk or rock and roll, some country, soul, folk rock was sort of how I framed it before this sort of ubiquitous word of Americana kind of came around, and it felt like they created a sort of a an institutional home for artists like myself who are definitely not country in the sort of commercial sense, and we're not rock in the sort of new radio sense, and we were a bit homeless.

There's a lot of us, and so it kind of created this.

So that's what I say now is Americana.

But one of the great things about being in a you know, quote unquote Americana artist is there's not really a lot of rules about what you make, how you make whether the song has five stanzas and no chorus or you know, horns or whatever.

You can kind of do whatever you want.

It just has to be sort of made by real people in a you know, in a real sense.

You're you're from Tennessee and you live in Nashville, but you you take great pains to distance yourself from country music.

Well it all started.

I'm from Memphis, which is, you know, two hundred miles west and a bit south of Nashville, and we were raised Memphians are sort of it's it's baked into your childhood and you're up bringing to hate Nashville.

Yeah, it's it's part of how you're raised.

For instance, I my parents, every fall we would drive to Knoxville, where they attended school, and we'd go to a Tennessee football game.

And that's a three hundred and eighty seven mile drive.

So in eighteen years, let's say we did it.

I don't know, maybe sixteen times in my childhood that I that I can recall, and so thirty two times through Nashville we stopped zero times and I forty goes right through the middle of town, and my dad would just say, there's a state capital, keep bomb moving.

So we grew up admiring.

You know, there was some country that sort of leaked into my childhood.

I think there's perceptions of folks outside of the South that like, everybody in the South just listen to country music.

We listened to motown and Bob Dylan and Amy Grant, you know, like it was this interesting mix of like gospel music and you know, black soul music and then all the my dad loved all the sort of contemporary seventies songwriter stuff, and so there was not a lot of country music in it.

Yeah, yeah, in my childhood.

I want to talk a little bit more about Memphis and Nashville in your mind.

What is the difference between Memphis and Nashville.

Well, practically speaking, I mean, Memphis is a very it's a hometown city, meaning that most of the people that live there grew up there.

I had family from there, grew up in the surrounding, you know, one hundred mile radius, whereas Nashville attracts people from all over the country, especially in the last fifteen to twenty years, and so it's a much sort of work.

Those two realities create different, very different cultures.

In Memphis, everybody knows each other and you know, where'd you go to school and who do you know.

It's a bit of that small town, big city experience, whereas in Nashville, so many young people move there because of what the city can offer them, the opportunities that may springboard out of living there.

And then it's a center for I mean the big employers in Nashville or the music business and healthcare, which are both sort of booming and transient jobs, Whereas Memphis it's you know, these big blue collar companies like FedEx and AutoZone, and so just creates very different cultures.

And then you know, racially, Memphis is majority African American town.

Nashal is very lily white, you know, so they're just they're they're very different.

My favorite story to tell about about Nashville and I moved there, was Memphis is a great food town, especially cheap food, you know, Tamali's and barbecue and great unique pizza, and it's just a very you know, being a river town, there's a lot of transients over decades, so you get a lot of unique food, and Nashville had basically nothing that I that I wanted to eat, and I would just complain to my wife.

I was like, that's nice here.

I know you're from here and that's why I moved here, but there's nothing to eat here that I want to eat.

And then fast forward almost twenty years and it's one of the greatest food towns you know, in the country.

Everything's there now, so it's it's changing.

It's it's a very sort of get evolving and fluid place.

Maybe you can explain my favorite joke.

It's my favorite joke because I I feel it has many, many layers, many of which I don't understand.

It's a joke from the Civil Rights Movement era.

Black man in Detroit wakes up in the middle of the night, it's one of those people who come off from the South, you know, and then turns to his wife and said, I had a terrible dream, and she said, what happened?

He said, I dreamt that Jesus came to me and told me to go to Birmingham.

And she says, did Jesus say go with you?

He says, Jesus said, he go as far as Memphis.

That's a great joke, isn't it that?

It's my favorite joke of all time.

It is, like I said, because it's a joke about Jesus who said he would be with us always, but not in Birmingham, not Burmiam.

Yeah, it's a joke about Birmingham.

Like, it's definitely a joke at the expression Birmingham, dark, dark joker.

But like, why did Jesus stop at Memphis?

Well, because, I mean, Jesus would love Memphis.

There's there's great food, there's great hospitality, there's great music, Like Jesus would thrive there.

Yeah, that was my experience.

Jesus thrived in Memphis.

You listened, Well, I want to go back to that mixture of things you would listening to as a kid, Motown, Amy Grant, What was the third one?

Bob Dylan.

That's a fantastic and unusual mix of things to be exposed to.

This is is this your father or your mother's doing?

Let's put both both.

Yeah, So my dad grew up in the and you know, my parents met in the third grade, and so they they grew up seven or eight like blocks from each other.

So there's this very sort of I one of twenty eight grandkids.

It's like a very yeah, there's a lot going on there.

That's just on my mom's side.

That didn't include my dad's side.

So wait, there's twenty eight grand kids on your bomb's.

Side, that's right.

Yeah, and I remember fourteen or fifteen, I can't remember, but yeah, yeah.

So.

Very like.

It'd be hard to overstate how sort of like central Christianity and religion was to my upbringing.

Part of that was that when I was apparently when I was like I don't even know how old, three, four or five years old, someone from the church came to my parents' house and they were everybody in their church was doing like a record clean out of things in their house that weren't honoring to God, and so they would get rid of all these records that when I heard about this in high school, I wept.

I was like, oh, Dad, you had all of these great records and original copies that they managed there out because it was the Devil's music that was really too bad.

You know, a lot of led Zeppelin got thrown out and things like that.

You know, I mean, come on, yeah, gotta get rid of it, which we could.

We'll come back to this.

But my first record I ever bought was Pearl Jams ten.

I was eleven year I actually got it for Christmas from Santa Claus and my dad broke the record by five pm on Christmas Day because we had to go through the liner notes together and there's drug references and he's like, you're too young for this and break.

So this was you know, an intense, an intense scene.

But that some of the things that made it through the gauntlet was Bob Dylan's evangelical records of course, you know, slow Train Coming Saved and there's another one.

And then because he still made it in there somehow his old records also got a pass.

Ye got grandfather in Yeah, and he was Jewish, so there's like a thing there too, you know, you're allowed to have records made by Jewish artists.

So and then Motown was like it was all you could listen to Motown except for like, what's the you know, the great the market record just blinking off side of Sexual Healing of course, well yeah, yeah, but the name of the record, what's going on?

Oh, what's going on?

Yeah?

Oh, sexual Healing would have been was on that record, wasn't it.

No, what's going on is earlier sex.

I was saying, sexual really is so far beyond.

Oh yeah, yeah, you can only hear that the only the only way you could hear that in my childhood was at a wedding by the by the cover band you know, and and so, and it still felt awkward for everybody.

But uh so, yeah there was so then any Christian music was okay.

Bob Dylan was okay, and motown was okay because it was just a bunch of love songs and clean oldies stuff, you know, before the music business cut.

You know, Amy messed up.

Can you explain to a heathen New York City audience who Ammy Grant is and why she's important?

Yeah?

Ammy Grant was sort of I mean, the whole genre of contemporary Christian music was there was Southern gospel, which is a whole different thing.

So it's basically take the songwriter model and people started applying it to their faith stories, which this all predates the whole Now, the big thing is all this big ensemble worship stuff, which was basically like every all these church bands trying to sound like coldplaying you two.

So Amy Grant was like this young songwriter and she was.

They created old radio sort of format around artists like her, and she became the most most famous and successful.

And then she had a crossover pop hit called baby Baby that sort of sent her into regular superstardom.

And yeah, she was just a very beloved woman and she's she's also as a human, she's like, she's honestly one of the greatest ones I've ever met.

Yeah, I know her because my wife knew her.

But I've moved to Nashville again sort of like country and Christian music.

This town sucks, you know, And then I got to know these people.

I was like, Wow, these people are all really great.

This is tough.

Wait what so wait what what denomination were your parents?

Yeah?

They they were They went like an independent Bible church.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it was non denominational.

It's very they're very proud of that.

Yeah.

I was asking you about other music that that made it in Yeah.

I think basically my parents were pretty okay with all the classics.

So we would go see you know, you could go see Paul Simon.

They built the Pyramid in Memphis when I was a kid, which was a new arena where the Memphis Tigers played, and so I got a job there in high school as a part of the event staff, and so I got to see all these concerts for free by telling people to stop smoking, you know, and had my little yellow shirt on, and you know, anything from boys to men as easy top to whatever could sell fifteen thousand tickets.

I was, you know, exposed to at a certain point that sort of the rules weren't really that well enforced.

It was a sort of a young when we were young, was very much that way.

But our alarm clock every day growing up was my mom played piano and she would play hymns like that was get up and go to school.

It was like up from the gravey your roles, you know.

She was like a whole her like whole play on get up and go to school.

You know.

But that's fantastic.

Yeah, that's great.

Yeah, daily it's got a great sense of humor.

Yeah.

I have a theory which I very grandiosely call Gladwell's theory of asymmetrical parenting, which is that at any given moment, when we account for our parental influence on our lives, we only talk about one parent.

It can change over time, but you try to sound on somebody you ask somebody, Yeah, so what are your parents?

People will never talk about their parents.

They will the minute you dig into it.

They only talk about one for a while.

So I would like you to give me an asymmetrical parental theory of the jew Holcomb childhood.

I completely disagree with that theory.

I'm not saying that you only get only one mattered.

I'm saying that at any given moment, only one matters.

Yeah, in a particular story.

Right, So it may be from you know, in high school it's only your mom, and then in college it's only you.

Yeah, that's my parents are going to listen to this probably.

You know, yeah, yeah, that's the whole point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think we were actually talking earlier back backstage about how as as dads, you sometimes get this free pass that it's almost like, and I've seen this, I have three children that, especially with my daughter, she sort of defaults to dad, you're doing great, You're awesome, even if my wife, Ellie has done all of the hard work that day the parenting space.

So with that said, I think that that's probably true in a lot of ways that my dad had sort of an outside influence.

What did your dad do well?

He was a dentist and then he hated it, so he quit and became a financial advisor.

Seriously true story.

This reminds me of one of my favorite stories about a friend of mine whose dad was an investment banker, and he once had a long heart to heart with his daughter and my friend about how he felt his career had been misspent and he made a series of terrible choices and he had squattered his life in a profession with no meaning.

And she was very moved by this because she didn't realize her father had this other side.

And she said, Dad, so what do you think you should have been?

And he says, I think I should have been a tax attorney.

That's kind of like what you're hearing here is kind of like, but your dad did.

Yeah, well, he he said that he was just very he was very sort of bored by the monotony of dentistry and how he's he's he's very extrovert, and he was trying to have conversations with people and they couldn't because you know.

Oh, he was one of those annoying dentists who's like asking you questions and you're six seventeen.

Well, and I think Honestly, I think it was a It was a serious crossroads for him because he'd spent he put himself through dental school selling jewelry out of a tackle box.

This is like he he worked his way really hard to get himself this you know job, and and this career.

But then a decade in he realized how much he really did not enjoy it and found a way out of it.

Took him.

It was it wasn't like an immediate transition.

He went to one day a week to doing the other thing, to two days a week doing the other thing, to half and half, and then eventually, when I was in high school, sold this practice and went the full time the other direction.

He loved music and he had wanted to pursue music in high school.

He wanted to be in a like a in a garage band.

And his dad, who was even more strict, you know than my parents' generation, basically was the cutcher here.

And don't you you know he has a story, he says, he tells the story about my grandfather.

They're driving in the car and my grandfather smoked cigarettes and non stop and Bill Withers lean on me was on the radio and Dad was like fourteen years old in the passenger seat, and it's that part of the song where if you need a friend, call me, you just call me.

And my grandfather was a jazz guy.

He hated popular music.

He said, finally takes a dragon cigarette after about this, the seventh or eighth that called me, and he goes, well, just call him, damn it.

So he had this like weird relationship where his father squashed his creative dreams.

And so I think when I sort of showed interest in this, he he just launched fully in with me.

Oh really, yeah, you know the first thing I told him I wanted to pursue music.

I had like an okay guitar and he's like, well, let's go to the guitar shop.

Let's get you.

Let's get you something nice.

You know, if you're if you're really gonna work hard at it, I'm in your corner.

Yeah.

That was his two rules, where if you're gonna work hard at it, And then he said, and promise me that if it's not working, you'll know when to walk away and move on with your life.

And he could say that from experience because he walked away from something.

You know, he didn't just stick with the career that he chose as a nineteen year old, really because he started dental school.

Back then, you didn't have to get a college degree to go to dental school.

You just had to get the preres, which he did in three semesters and then started dental school as a nineteen year old.

So did you play another song?

Yeah, sure, all right, I'll uh since this is sort of symmetrical.

Asymmetrical, I'm gonna go down the street to my grandparents' house.

I grew up five doors down the street from my grandfather, who was this sort of lion of a man.

He was a bit of a big fish personality.

He would tell these stories.

He didn't know how much of it was true and how much of it was fiction.

Lived a very interesting life.

Was a surgeon, was the chief of surgery in Tokyo immediately following World War II.

Operated on Admiral Dagano two weeks before he was executed.

Like, he just has these like wild stories in his life, and one of them was that he told the story about how he went to England with his friend who raised Labrador retrievers, who got invited to this dog trial at the Queens of State and so he went, and he was very old and couldn't walk around very well, and he came back with this wild story about how he got to ride around the Queens of State in the Queen's Land River with her driving it, and we were all like, sure you know, sure you did.

And he passed away about six years later, and we got a letter from the Queen Secretary sending her regrets of his passing and sharing how much the Queen enjoyed the day she spent with him driving around her estate in her land Rover.

So there you go.

I wrote this song about him many years after he died.

He just had a huge influence on me, and songs called dragons.

I was climbing a mountain.

A sleep in the moonlight goes to my Grandpaul came to me in a dream, as.

A star was hung above us.

He started singing this chorus.

He laughed loud as head and said this to me, take a few chances, a few early romances.

Go swimming in the ocean all New Year's Day.

Don't listen to the critics, Stand up bed witness, go slay all the dragons.

That stand in your wing.

He stayed up and talked until.

The sunrise of war and love and sorrow.

He said, stop spending all your money on forgiveness of sins.

Today's all you promised.

Don't trouble with tomorrow.

He faded into the forest, proudly singing this hymn.

Take a few chances.

A few early rommances.

Go swimming in the ocean all New is Day.

Don't listen to the critics, Stand up bell Winness, Go slay off the dragons.

That standing r Roy.

Woke up with a fever, surrounded by lightning.

All my windows were open.

I let the rain flooding.

The past felt like the present, with the future uncertain.

A sing like a spiral lost.

In the wind.

Take a few chances, do earthy romances.

Go swimming in the.

Ocean all New Year's Day.

Don't listen to the critics.

Stand up in bed Winness, Go slay all the.

Dragons that stand in your way.

Go slay the dragons that stand in your wamm.

Hmm, thank you, incredibly beautiful tribute.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's a beautiful man.

We'll be right back, and we're back.

Let's talk a little bit about the role of faith in your life and work.

Okay, yeah, So you grew up in a very religious family.

You went to seminary in Scotland.

Tell me about Yeah, I.

Think I've always sort of grown up.

I think a lot of people that grew up in a world that I grew up in sort of either chose to just join into that space as adults, or they sort of run the other direction and go through a deconstruction phase where they, you know, on a spectrum of sort of kindness to full vitriol, they depart from that space.

And instead I tried to navigate sort of a third way, which is I didn't have a personal experience with faith that sort of mirrored what I was told it was going to be like that it would bring all this meaning and stuff to my life.

And when I was seventeen, my brother passed away.

He was born a spine of and had all sorts of health issues, but still suddenly out of nowhere.

I was out of the country when it happened, on doing like a summer of Spanish immersion in Themican Republic, and it passed away and got home.

All the sacraments and words and instruments and communities of faith were sort of bubbled up in me, and it wasn't making sense for me.

So I had sort of a crisis of faith, and instead of turning away from it, I was still sort of trying to figure it out.

But music was really the thing that kind of helped me make sense of my life.

I'll never forget.

There were two records in particular in that era.

One was Van Morrison's Moondance.

The other one was David Gray's White Ladder that I would just drive in my car and just listening to records and sob and those records weren't even necessarily about grief, but they were grief records for me.

But I also didn't My experience with faith and the faith community was that while I was struggling to believe what they told me was the right thing to believe, I also was experiencing a lot of love and affection from them and had from a young age.

And so a lot of people's hurt and deconstruction is fed off of abuse or mistreatment or you know, And that was not my experience, and so I couldn't have that same sort of departure because I was loved well.

And so it's created this really interesting tension in me because I was also expanding the way my worldview is expanding in ways that didn't line up with a lot of what I grew up around.

But also we're talking about it.

You know, it's easy to lump people into these categories, and really the spectrum of people who helped raise me, they all have different different sort of spectrum of beliefs about different things, whether cultural, cosmic, theological, cultural, political, et cetera.

So I don't want to sort of speak about that community as one monolith.

But but at the same time, what I was finding and who I was becoming was getting farther from that.

And part of the way I part of that was going to seminary.

I went to Scotland.

They had a program at St.

Andrews University.

I could go for two weeks a semester twice a year and then write my papers.

And so, you know, I was just I was searching, but I was enjoying the search.

You know.

It was like it was less of a like frantic looking for the lost keys when you're trying to get out of the house, and more of a like I just want to keep looking at them, finding a lot of interesting things.

I'm reading a lot of interesting people just allowed myself to engage in reading and in music and in ways that was sort of open to it instead of looking for a fight.

And that's sort of the way I would say that I was raised is that the church in that era, the school that I went to, was a wall, and it was more of a wall and less of a bridge.

It's more about protecting the flock instead of building a bridge to the world.

And I would say my faith now is much more of like, I just want to be a bridge builder.

But I haven't necessarily, I haven't rejected some of the sort of central teachings of Christian Orthodoxy, but I have certainly rejected sort of American evangelical culture and has cost me a lot of fans.

But that's okay.

Memphis to Scotland is a long way.

Yeah.

My senior high school English teacher took a trip every year to the UK.

In the first place we went with Scotland, and that immediately within three days on that trip, I sai, I'm going to study abroad.

Here.

This place is Edinburgh's just this wonderland.

And you know, I loved English literature, I loved English history, you know, and honestly, like the South was settled by Scots, so a lot of it, you know.

So there was like when Braveheart came out, every Southerner in the world was like, yeah.

You know, was there anything about the of Scotland that appealed to.

Yeah, yeah, there's a There was a There was a pub down the street from my flat, Sandy Bell was the name of it.

And every night they had traditional Scottish music, you know, people playing instruments that I didn't even know what they were, but they put these traditional Scottish folk songs and they're always in with Loch Loman.

You take the high Rule and I'll take the little Rule, and I'll be in Scottland before Aria for me and my true lover, and they're to meet again on the Bonnie Bonnie banks of Lochlomond.

I was like, that's in the corner, crying about me and this mythical woman I'm gonna meet at the Bonnie Banks of Loch Loman.

Scottish accent's pretty good.

They got a lot of practice my kids.

My kids are always asking for it.

But there's something about the Scottish weather in the story that sort of that's where I started writing songs.

I was still sort of in the throes of my grief, and I was trying to process that grief.

And so as a student, I decided my senior thesis at in my program was going to be an oral history about my brother's life and death from everybody that knew him, and sort of the question was, why does a severely handicapped child have such like so, because when he passed away, there were like two thousand people at the funeral.

Two Yeah, there were like one hundred nurses from the hospital that had met him over the last fifteen years came and the entire elementary school he went to had a day out of school and they all came.

Yeah.

It was this incredible celebration of a very short but very sort of thorough life.

And so my sort of analytical side of my brain with the creative side of my brain was like, what if I just wrote an oral history of his life and interviewed this doctors, teacher, his neighbors, his cousins, and why did Jay matter so much to you?

So I was working on that in Scotland and that's when I started writing songs because I didn't really know anybody.

I always say that at that time I was alone.

I wasn't necessarily lonely, but I was alone, and I had taken my guitar and I just started writing.

And when I got back home from that semester, started playing these songs for some friends, and I think they were all expecting something completely different from my life.

I got laughed out a couple times before the song's like, wait, you wrote songs.

I know you play music, but like, aren't you going to be like history lawyer guy or something?

And I'm playing these songs, They're like.

Oh, these are What's the first song you wrote that you were proud of?

A song called Nightingale that I don't remember, but I do remember it being about my then friend and much later became my wife, Ellie.

But it was a it was a heartbreak song because she she had sort of ripped the heart from my chest in that era of my life.

So is that why you don't remember it?

It's just a yeah, I got to move on from that song.

Yeah, you can't have forgotten all of it.

No, I mean that was something like, well, okay, this is embarrassing.

I do remember the first line, Cinderella was a fairy tale.

One, that's true.

I don't remember where it went after that.

But there was something about she sang like a nightingale something, something that rhymes with true.

Wait, did you play this for her after she broke up with you?

Well, you made an assumption there that we dated in the first place.

Oh, at what point in the trajectory of you and Ellie did she hear that song?

I mean pretty soon after I wrote it, But I didn't tell her it was about her, you know.

She didn't figure it out.

No, she did not.

Oh, come on, well that's according to her.

That's you've talked to her about that.

But yeah, so that I mean, that was That was the first song I sang.

And I was playing it like for my buddies in college in college, and they're like, that's pretty good, you know.

But that that was before Scotland.

That was the first song I wrote, and Scotland's we started writing songs that I I don't know, just something started to click, but really I didn't.

It took me.

I moved quickly into sort of what I would call my twenty to twenty three year old Steve Earld Bruce Springsteen, Ryan Adams imitation phase, where I was really trying to write the rugged third person minor chord songs and it wasn't me, but I needed to do that to find to find my path.

But none of those songs are available on the internet.

Which Spruce, Which Spruce Springsteen?

There are many Bruce Springsteen's.

Which is your favorite Bruce Springsteen?

Well, my favorite Bruce Springsteen is Greetings from Raspberry Park Bruce Springsteen.

But I like them all.

But the one I was imitating was like the Nebraska Tom.

Say, Nebraska.

Yeah, I want to talk about Nebraska for a moment.

I because I was obsessed with that record.

Yeah.

And you know it's funny because music like that doesn't just influence musicians, it influences writers.

Yeah.

And the song that I always came back to was I know it's called but it's the one about the guy who's a police officer.

How a patrolman?

Hwre you patrolman?

I played that song one hundred times.

Man turns this back on his family.

He just ain't no good, he just ain't no good.

That was like as a kind of template for writing an emotionally powerful story.

It's just stuck in my head, it was.

It's so that song is so beautifully constructed.

Well, can you do you can you can you remember any of it?

I can play.

I can play the chorus probably, yeah, pay the chorus.

For those who don't know the song, this is it's I think it's one of his finest songs.

I can do a part of it.

My name is Joe Roberts.

I work for the State.

Sergeant out of Burdenville, Bear Snumber.

I've always been an honest man.

An honest man, honest as that.

My brother named Frankie, and Frankie ain't no good?

Is it bad that I sing along.

As the audience I don't know, but then you know goes on.

Yeah, we're laughing, drinking.

Nothing feels better than blood on, blood, taking turns, dancing with Maria.

The band plays now that you Flood.

Catch him w straight again?

Yep, any brother would do teach you how to walk that line.

It's two different courses.

Oh right, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Because because my favorite is uh like any like any brother would.

Uh man turns his back on his family.

Well, he just ain't no good.

Uh.

And then there's this, uh that line to me that that song.

I love it song for a lot of different reasons.

If you know, I'll just the song has been out for forty years, so I spoiler alert basically, you know this this the narrator is a state trooper higher patrolman, and his brother's a mess and he ends up injuring possibly killing somebody in a bar fight, and he gets called into the scene.

I was his own brother, and his brother he's chasing him out of the state in Michigan, and and he lets him go into Canada, you know, and lets him escape, and then he ends with that course and turns it back on his family.

He just say no good and uh, my brother, who's now been eight years sober.

There was a lot of years where that was like that was our dynamic.

You know.

I was the good rule following successful big brother and he was the you know, he didn't mind me saying that.

We were very close, but he turned his life around.

But I thought that was gonna be my life.

Was like, I'm gonna lose him to his vice.

And so I play that song on nights when I hadn't heard from him, and I love that song.

There's a lot of emotion in here.

A lot of emotion in here in no in you.

Oh yeah, I think that is a compliment.

I did not just folks made I know this, but we June I met a couple of months back then.

They're doing this thing which can't be described.

And it's a form of a variety show.

A variety show.

We hung out together.

It was on the bus with Drew, among other things, and you said something.

There are a series of things.

I didn't know anything about you, and you said something to me that just so surprised me, and I would you said that.

You just talked about how you have it.

You have you get angry.

Yeah, And I didn't see that.

I didn't see that in you, And I was so surprised to hear that.

I was sort of talk growing up that anger is bad, you know that.

What I've since learned is that anger is not bad.

It's rage that's bad, which just like sort of the that's not going to get all counselate on you guys, But that's been a big part of my journey as a as a person and as a music.

It's not the anger that's bad.

Angers like the red light, you know, it's what you do with it.

And so I've learned, instead of getting sort of physically upset, is to go, I'm so angry, what is it.

It's usually some sort of injustice.

Either it's me or the world, or my neighbor or my family, or is it's it's your yellow light that's flashing that you're lonely or sad or hurt.

And so I've learned that it's like my superpower.

Like when I'm angry, I know that I know that I've got to figure out what's going on instead of trying to tamp it down.

You know, have you ever written what is your what is the angriest song?

I have an idea that you've ever written.

Oh, that's great.

It's a song called Ring the Bells.

Yes, okay, you want to hear it?

Yeah?

Wait, you got to give the context.

Yeah.

I wrote this song with my I wrote this song with my friends Avener and Amanda Ramirez.

Avener as a Cuban American, Aman is an African American.

We wrote the song together, I think three days after Charlottesville White Supremacy Rally, when some very famous sort of American Christians were both sides in the situation, and we got real pisted and wrote this song together.

Ring the Bells this time, I mean it did the hatred very well.

Give back the pieces of my Jesus to take your counterfeit to hell.

Thank the drums.

This means war, not the kind you waiting for.

We say mercy won't be rationed here.

It's what we're fighting for.

Their fall is fair in love and war.

Then what the hell is.

Love even for?

If we can't sing it loud enough, we'll keep on at anymore?

Ring ring, ring.

Ring, Just a little bit of it.

That's that's what I That's the one I had in mind.

I was, we were I was very angry when I wrote that song.

Felt good.

Yeah, it's funny, it's it's you're you.

You play it like a man possessed.

Well, I was watching Daniel Tiger one time with my daughter, and there was.

I just loved to segue from yea possessed to someone who there's a lot of.

Well, it's very it's very related to what we're talking about.

So there's the scene where Dane gets up and the mom says, okay, Dan, we'na learn a song if you feel so mad that you want to roar, take a deep breath, then count to four.

And I was like, I'm sorry, Emmy Lou, she's four years old.

I'm like, that's not always true.

Sometimes what you need to.

Do when you feel so mad that you want to roar, take a deep breath, Yes, get it out, don't stuff that stuff inside of you.

We'll be right back with drews answers to the homework assignment I gave him.

I asked him to come up with his five favorite country songs of all time so he could compare his list to mine.

And we're back.

Can we talk.

Let's talk about musical influences for a moment.

Let's start with Amy Lou Harris.

I would love to when we were thinking about this evening about our list of iconic country songs, and one of my one of on my list is Boulder of Birmingham.

Do you know that?

No, that's the that is uh.

It is the one of the few songwriting credits she has on her first I think she only has one songwriting credit on her first nine albums, and that's Bouldered Birmingham, which she writes about Graham Parsons.

Oh yeah, and it is.

Actually we're going to play a little bit of it.

It is the most just play the first little like it's so heart wrenchingly beautiful.

And the I mentioned only because we were talking about grief and about emotion.

It is a song.

It's a song about grief, and it's the articulation of her sense of loss and longing.

Is just perfect.

Anyway here it is.

I think I will run.

In the close.

I would hold my.

Any say, race.

Away from bolted be give about actcy.

Act see.

I would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham if I thought I could see, I could see your face.

That's her, the way she articulates her sense of loss.

She sings with so much ache too.

Yeah did you do your homework?

I did my homework.

Yeah, you're one assignment.

I respect.

I Yeah.

I had some arguments with my wife when I picked this first one, because she's like, I don't think of that as a country song, and I was like, well, it was like a number three on the country charts.

But I think my favorite country song, or what I think is the best country song is which tall Lineman by Glenn Campbell.

I need you more than want you and I want you for all time.

There's a song about a Jimmy Web wrote the song and he talks about how I think it was his uncle was a lineman.

He always remembered seeing him up on the polls, working on electrical lines, and so the song came easy to him because he can imagine him, you know, being away from home for a long time, wishing for to be home with the one he loves.

And its stood the test of time too.

It's a very simple song about a workingman missing his love.

But that's my number one.

Your wife said that was not a country song.

She said she doesn't think of it as a country song.

What does she think of it?

As?

That was not clear to me.

We agreed on my my second one, though, which is which is Crazy by Patsy Klein.

Oh yes, okay.

I mean it's such a standard, but it is so good and I love that Willie Nelson wrote it, and then a couple of years later he kind of quit the industry, moves to Austin, Texas, and writes the most non commercial country record ever, that's You Redheaded Stranger, as a forty three year old, his career blows up.

I just love the story, and we've played a lot.

We've gotten to play a lot of shows with Willie over the years.

I've sang with him a dozen times.

You know, Willie Nelson, I didn't know.

Yeah, I mean we're not We don't like to call each other because he's you know, he's he's an older guy, and but I have.

Yeah, we've shared the stage and sung.

He does this really neat thing every night where he does at Medley of I Saw the Light will the Circle being broken, and one other blanket on and he invites you know, the opener to come out and sing it with him.

So I've got to do that twelve or fifteen times.

So he and Dolly tim are the two living legends left, you know, in that space.

And then my third one would be Joelene as a Tennessee.

And if I didn't mention a Dolly Parton song, I couldn't go home.

What's your other one or two?

Uh?

George Jones The Grand Tour, that's a sad song.

It's you know I have.

I might be more attracted to you, like are attracted to pure emotion, it seems like, and I'm attracted in country music too over the top grandiosity and the Grand Tour.

George Jones is like, he's like the he's in the best possible sense of the word, a caricature of a country singer.

Yes, voice, We're going to make the play just the beginning of a play.

Play the Grand Tour until the line chills me to the bone, step Ride, Come only.

Elf, you'd live to tell the Grand.

To pr along list so fantastic walks was Home, Sweet Home.

I have nothing here to sell you to.

Come saying that I will tell you.

Something things I know will chill you to the ball.

I mean the notion that you would write a song that, with a straight face, has the phrase chill you to the bone.

And you know he's got nothing, he doesn't have anything.

The chill get to the bone.

Some woman dumped him.

Yeah, that's it.

An empty house that this will chill you to the bone.

My empty house, my empty ass.

He's so I just can't get over the bath.

He's so genius.

Yeah, you love the melodrama.

I loved the melo.

Yeah yeah.

I once back in the day of mixtapes, I used to make these mixtapes constantly, and they were always named after for reasons I forget now, they were always named after popes.

So on the front of the CD case, i'd have an image of one of the popes, like you know, Pope Pious the twelfth or Emmanuel the sixteenth, and then the Soul Also, I made like ten of them because there were a lot of popes.

And I was once driving with some person who didn't know me very well, and I was playing one of these mixtapes, the Long Drive.

One of these mixtapes after another, and after like the third one, this guy Mike turned to me and said, what is the matter with you?

Every single song was some kind of melancholy, over the top weeper.

I'm happy if the tempo is never picked up.

Yeah, songwriting, you're always pulling from your library, you know, and you hopefully your library just keeps growing and growing.

And the trick is when I when I was young, you're imitating and then you get better at finding you when you find your own voice, and then you're just sort of taking cues from your library or not copying anybody, but you're you're going, oh, that's interesting.

That's kind of reminds me of this.

Let's you know, make it our own.

And the people that you've mentioned who are important influences for you, we just mentioned we talked before about oh about Paul Simon.

I'm curious what's the thread that links and also Tom.

I know that Tom Petty is someone that has had an influencer.

What what's the thread that links these influences.

I think all those songwriters, I don't know if there's if there's actually a perfect common thread between them, but something about all those songs or all those artists, they made records that really connected with me and helped me sort of see the world, if you will, and help me feel the world.

And that's the beauty of music is there's a bit of magic to it, and I'm sure there's scientific and sociological ways to explain them.

I'm not really interested necessarily in hearing them because I like the magic of it.

I like the myth that I don't know why this record speaks to me so much.

But when I hear you know, Tom Petty's Wildflowers, and I hear all I have to hear is you belong among the wildflywers, you belong in a boat out at sea at that in and of itself is just a beautiful sentiment, you know, executed with this, you know, the arrangement, the sonic sort of landscape of it.

None of the artists that I love seemed to sort of play by a certain formula.

Maybe they do sometimes on certain songs, or certain records.

But Tom Petty's a great example.

If you look at his sort of the arc of his career and listen to the records, they don't all sound the same.

There's you know, the different producers have sort of different eras and fingerprints on his on his work Jeff Lynn stuff is different than the Jimmy Ovine stuff.

And and I like that that they're always looking for something else to say, something else to sing, some new way to express human experience via music and instruments and electricity and all this stuff that makes this makes it work.

I asked you to sing one cover.

Yeah, tell me what you chose and why.

I Well, I did.

I chose this song because you and I connected over the song back when we met in April.

And I just saw this artist play at the Rhymann, which is a my favorite venue in the world and a serious underplay for him.

The last time I saw him in Nashville was the Bridgetone Arena.

He then he retired, and now he's come out of retirement to do these intimate acoustic shows.

I know that you have interacted with him a ton, and I've heard nothing but great things about him personally, and I think this is one of the great songs.

I also think it has what I consider the best first line of a song that I can that I've ever heard.

So this is this is Paul Simon's America.

Mm hmmm, let us be loves, will marry our fortunes together.

I've got some real estate here in my back.

So I bought a pack of cigarettes missus Wagners pies, and wall walked off to look for.

Erica.

Kathy, I said, as we boarded a grayhound in Pittsburgh, Michigan.

Seems like a dream to me.

Now.

It took me four days to hitch ick from sagging off.

I've gone to look for Armerica.

Laughing on of us playing games.

With their faces, she says, the man in the gabardine suit is a spine, I said, be careful his bow tie.

It's really a camera.

Well, toss me a saga.

I've got one here in my raincoat.

No, we smoked the last one, and how we'll ago Well, I looked at the scenery she read her magazine as the moon rolls over and over.

Open.

Feel o, Kathy, I'm lost, I said, though.

I knew she was sleeping.

I'm empty and a king, and I don't know why, m hmm.

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike.

They've all gone to look Formerica, all gone to look form Maerica.

We've all gone to look for America.

Let us be loves.

We'll marry our fortunes together.

He ups with thank you, said his concert at the Ryman that you saw earlier this.

Year, and it was actually, this was really sweet for me personally.

But we played two nights at the Rymond on May second and third, and then he played three nights at the Rymond May like twelve, thirteenth, and fourteenth, and I got to sit and watch a show right after I had played there and to see one of my heroes in the same spot that I was in eight days earlier, and he had the same reverence for the room that I always have, and it was it was a bit of an emotional and joyous and overwhelming experience.

And he did two sets.

He did the seven Hymns record from front to back, and then he came out and did sort of all the songs that you would want expect to hear in the second set, and it was just a yeah, it was wonderful.

So you were in the middle.

You you you were in the middle of writing a song about Cormack MacArthur.

Oh yeah, I was.

Tell me how that came about.

Yeah, you are so.

Cormick McCarthy is one of my favorite authors.

You know, Southern Gothic, dark, violent, into the world, apocalypse, human sort of morality play author right, very sparse and no country for old men, all the pretty horses, the road, so many great books that turn into great films, et cetera.

So he actually grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, which is where I went to school, but he had he left there and lived all over but it sort of landed in the desert and Santa fel Passo somewhere in there.

Unrelated to that, seemingly was.

I love old cars, and so I get this email from a company that auctions old cars just because I love just to look at them.

And I get this email in April, early April.

It says Cormick McCarthy's Ferrari it's being auctioned off, and so kind of like blue affuse in me because I'm like, Cormie McCarthy didn't drive.

It's like it's like, sure he actually did.

He drove this black Ferrari in the last years of his life, and so I had this idea of like writing a song Cormie McCarthy's Black Ferrari, but I couldn't quite find my the end, you know, I didn't find the end, but I thought, no, I want to.

I want to drive Cormie McCarthy's Black Ferrari through the desert and like and have a complete existential crisis as and I feel like everybody right now is sort of we sort of live inside of existential crisis.

That's that's like going to be the era that we live in.

We look back on it, we're like, that's the that's the air of the existential crisis.

There's just so much happening at such a speed that it's hard to keep up, and it's hard to know how to where to put your anger and where to put your your joy and how to how to live.

And I thought one of the ways it would help me is if I had Corey McCarthy's Black Ferrari for a day.

So I wrote this song, and first person I sent it to was you because we had talked about that.

Interview and I love old cars too.

Yeah, and we also we could.

Yeah, we connected our old cars and I was like, I yeah.

So I've never played this song before except for during soundcheck, So this is this is a debut and I really liked this song.

And if you don't like it, I don't really care that much because I like it a lot.

So let's see.

I remember how to.

Walking on the sidewalk through my neighborhood.

My neighbor's black cat is up to no good.

There's something in the air, something in the streets, like a red tail wading up in the trees.

There's levees and tolls and roadblocks and speed bumps.

Has it been a day, a week, or just a month?

Unwanted packages by the front door screen and EMPTYEP pages in my diary.

Cormac McCarthy's got a black Ferrari that he drives across the desert on a Sunday morning, and I'm dreaming about the wind in my face, nothing but my worn out suitcase driving that Ferrari, like Cormac McCarthy in my mind.

In my mind, UF fiasco falls like rain on our faces, a Mickey Mantle rookie card ruined in the basement, and nothing turns out.

Like you thought it would.

It's a little more bare food than Hollywood.

It's confusing the losing the booze and excusing the stage fright and all the troubles shooting.

Where do I.

Fit in amongst all the matter in this party?

He always feels like a lost soul's gathering.

Cormac McCarthy's got a black Ferrari that he drives across the desert on a Sunday morning, And I'm dreaming about the wind and my face, nothing but my worn out suitcase driving that Ferrari, like Cormac McCarthy in my mind, In my mind, engine and fuel and pain and chrome, muscle and bl blood and skinning bone.

Engine and fuel and pain and chrome, muscle and blood and skinning bones.

Cormac McCarthy's gotten black Ferrari that he drives across the desert an him Sunday morning, and I'm dreaming about the wind in my face, nothing but warm out suitcase of driving that Ferrari, like Cormac McCarthy.

In my mind, in my mind, in my mind, I'm driving Cornmac McCarthy's black Ferra.

In my mind, I love that.

I hope you.

Why you said you couldn't figure out how to couldn't figure out your way in?

What did you mean by that?

Well, I had this this like obviously the phrase in the rhyme Corey McCarthy's Black Ferrari.

It was like, this song gonna be like a funny song about how could this Maudelin writer have such a you know, cultural toy like this.

This doesn't make sense to me.

It should be a old Chevy pick up.

Right, Yeah, that's like that's the imagination, right, It's not that he had this car, so it's like a magnum p I car, you know.

And so then I was like, no, that's not the right frame because what I felt when I saw that that existed as a fan of his work, and it's also someone who would like to have a nineteen eighty nine Testerosa just for a day.

Even was that No, even the saddest, most sort of gothic, you know, the chronicler of American violence needed an escape, and so he had this Black Ferrari and he would just go.

I'd imagine him smiling, driving one hundred and twenty miles an hour across the desert in Santa Fe.

And there's not a picture in the world that exists of Corn McCarthy's smiling no, and so I relate to that.

I relate to feeling the weight of of you know, life and all of its like joys and tragedies, and that sometimes the simple pleasure might make it go away for a minute.

Has that song as it stands?

Now?

Have you worked on that with the band?

Or is at all you at this point?

Well, they've heard it, but we haven't know.

We wait till we all get in the room together before we sort of dive into it.

But yeah, what will happen to it when when you all dive in?

I don't know.

I mean, we'll we'll go through several iterations.

First thing we'll do is we'll make sure we're in the right key.

We'll do some practical things, make sure we're the right key, figure out the tempo, and then we'll sort of jump into the approach, you know, like what are the drums gonna be doing?

Are we are we?

Is this acoustic sort of is that the main engine driver of the song?

Or are we gonna do like a piano bass drums thing?

And then you know, just kind of like try a bunch of different things and then inevitably one of them, all five of us will go that's it.

That's the that's the approach.

Yeah, it's a really beautiful song.

Thank you, Thank you do.

I think we're I think our time is.

I have no idea ho much time we've been up for a while.

Though we've been up here a while.

Yeah, I feel are people lurking?

How should we end this?

I don't know.

I'm being sumptuous.

So if I ask you to play one more song.

Sure, Sure, I'll play a song I wrote.

There's a wonderful band in Nashville that has toured for many years called Old Crow Medicine Show Good.

My kids go to school with some of Ketsch's kids, who's the lead singer and writer.

And this is a great Nashville story.

We're dropping our kids off at school and he's like, what are you up to this week?

And I said, I'm just gonna be in my office doing some writing and you know, working, And he said we should write a song this week.

We'd never written a song together before, and so I said, well how about tomorrow morning.

So the next morning, we drop our kids off, we get coffee.

About eight thirty, we're writing songs, and we wrote this song about ten thirty that morning.

We both had just gotten back into doing normal shows again with a real with live audiences, and we had really missed that.

So this is such a fantastic only in Nashville story.

Yeah it is.

And then it was a great It was a great song for me.

It ended up being It's the song is called Dance with Everybody, ended up getting picked up by the NCAA for two years straight as the theme song for March Madness, which a song is not about basketball, and b I am like one of the world's worst basketball players in a big family of athletes, and so it brought me a lot of satisfaction that my song I was in.

I got to participate in March Madness.

None of my none of my athletics, six three cousins did.

So you walked into this room, you hardly knew anyone.

See full of strange, just crashing all the rooms with the band strikes.

By the end of the night's strange as normal.

I want to dance with everybody.

Who came through that dog, whether you came here to party or you came here to cry, whether that'll meet somebody, cheat somebody to get little get high.

So come on, all you people.

Hit two feet on your floor.

I want to dance with everybody and came through that door.

WHOA, let it all go?

WHOA, Shake up your soul, throw your hands in the air, throw your hat in the ring, grow your hips in your heart into everything, Get lost.

In the crowd, Get down on the floor.

I wanna dance with everybody came in that door.

Well, come, all.

Your saints and sinners.

Poets, profits and fools.

Are you cowboys, tricks and zipss trying so hard to be cool?

All you dreamers and schemers thirsty for more?

I wanna dance with everybody.

Came through that door.

WHOA, let it all go?

Whoa.

Oh, shake up your soul.

Royal hands in the air, royal hat in the ring, royal hips in your heart into everything, Get lost in the crowd, Get down on the floor.

I want to dance with.

Everybody came through that door.

Oh where, ohhey, ohhay.

Well, let's put us oude our differences.

We'll lace up our shoes.

Let's narrow the distance between.

Me and meet me in the middle.

Let's quit keeping score.

I want to dance with everybody came through that door.

WHOA, let it all go.

WHOA shake up your soul, Throw hands in the royal had read royal hips in your heart into everything.

Turn the world on a stream, Turn the winds on a dive, Turn the wheel to the west, and the water the wine.

Get lost in the crowd, get down on the swoon.

I want to dance with everybody came through that I want to dance with everybody who came through that door.

Oh, thank you so much, Drew, Thank you all.

This episode of Broken Record is produced by Lea Rose and Nina Bird Lawrence, with bend A, da f Haffrey and Lucy Sullivan.

Our engineers are Nina Bird Lawrence, Sarah Buguerer, and Ben Holliday.

Marketing by Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan.

Our executive producers are Jacob Smith and Justin Richmond.

Special thanks to Wage twenty four, to Wallowise Linton, and to the whole crew over at the Cherry Lane Theater.

My name is Malcolm Gabo.