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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 on a big tour bus, left Nashville for Louisville, then Indianapolis, then Grand Rapids.
Leonide told a story about the famous showdown between the suffragettes and the anti-slavery movement in the mid-19th century.
And then a bunch of musicians played music to help us tell the 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 Holcomb.
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 824's newly reopened Cherry Lane Theatre.
And to my delight, and I hope your delight as well, he said yes.
Drew is in his early 40s. 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 going to be a great evening. I want you guys to welcome Malcolm Gladwell, and Drew Holcomb.
Good evening. I'll get us started with a song.
I am fairly well now I am strong I am long way from home I am an orchard at the start of spring I am a mockingbird I love to sing and I'm gonna fly I'm gonna fly.
I am an old road walking on my feet. I am laughing at the weeping willow tree.
I'm a dog barking a honey bee sting I ain't no angel but I've got my wings I'm gonna fly I'm gonna fly I'm gonna fly.
I'm gonna fly. I'm gonna fly I'm gonna fly I am moving, I am flesh and bone I am a gunshot with a microphone I'm a boy at the window as the summer sun sets An old man in winter, nothing more, nothing less Now I'm gonna fly I'm gonna fly I'm gonna fly Tell me why you chose that song to start with.
Well, that's my favorite one I've ever written.
I always figure when I get nervous, just play something you like, you know?
When did you write that song? I wrote that song probably January of...
2022. 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.
It tends to be a creative season for me.
How do you decide? You say that's your favorite song you've ever written?
Probably. Yeah. Why? What is it about that song that... Well, it was something about...
The song kind of came out of this... I had just turned 40 around that time, and...
I actually enjoyed all the things that I felt after turning 40.
Everybody told me I should be afraid of them.
I actually really enjoyed them. I also was kind of born an old soul.
My mom said I was born an old man. I felt comfortable in that transition already just because of sort of how, how, how I am.
I started writing that song with the lyric started, um, I'm a boy at the window as the summer sun sets.
I have this keen memory from 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 the song is kind of in the tension is me just sort of And 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 play that song, I feel it's like a blanket for me.
And 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 are you not supposed to do that? It's just a cultural thing.
If you drive down the street and see an artist listening to their own music, you might think, man.
What an arrogant guy. Which that happens to me with my kids sometimes because they want to hear my songs.
I just look at people and, you know, hey.
Yep, it's me listening to my own song. Yeah.
How would you describe the genre that that song belongs to?
You know, growing up, 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. One of the great things about being a 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 from Tennessee and you live in Nashville, but you take great pains to distance yourself from country music.
Well, it all started, I'm from Memphis, which is 200 miles west and a bit south of Nashville.
And we were raised, Memphians are sort of, it's baked into your childhood and your upbringing to hate Nashville.
Yeah. 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 387-mile drive. So in 18 years, let's say we did it, I don't know, maybe 16 times. in my childhood that I can recall.
And so 32 times through Nashville, we stopped zero times.
And I 40 goes right through the middle of town.
And my dad would just say, there's a state Capitol.
Keep on 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 the South that everybody in the South just listens to country music.
We listened to Motown and Bob Dylan and Amy Grant.
It was this interesting mix of like... gospel music and you know black soul music and and then all the con my dad loved all the sort of contemporary 70s songwriter stuff and so There was not a lot of country music in it in my childhood.
I want to talk a little more about Memphis and Nashville.
In your mind, what is the difference between Memphis and Nashville?
Well, practically speaking, Memphis is a hometown city, meaning that most of the people that live there grew up there, had family from there, grew up in there. surrounding 100 mile radius.
Whereas Nashville attracts people from all over the country, especially in the last 15 to 20 years.
And so it's a much sort of more, those two realities create very different cultures.
Um, in Memphis, everybody knows each other and, you know, where'd you go to school and who do you, you know, it's a bit of that small town, big city experience.
Um, 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 are the music business and healthcare, which are both sort of booming and transient businesses. jobs whereas Memphis it's you know these big blue collar companies like FedEx and AutoZone and so it just creates very different cultures.
And then, you know, racially Memphis is majority African-American town.
Nashville is very lily white, you know, um, So they're very different.
My favorite story to tell about Nashville when I moved there was Memphis is a great food town, especially cheap food. you know, tamales 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.
Nashville had basically nothing that I wanted to eat.
And I was just complaining 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 20 years, and it's one of the greatest food towns in the country.
Everything's there now. It's changing. It's a very sort of evolving and fluid place.
Maybe you can explain... My favorite joke.
It's my favorite joke because I feel it has many, many layers, many of which I don't understand.
Okay. 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 up from the South, you know, in the... 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 it go as far as Memphis.
That's a great joke. Isn't it? 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 Birmingham. It's a joke about Birmingham.
It's definitely a joke at the expense of Birmingham.
Dark, dark joke. But like, why does Jesus stop at Memphis?
Well, because I mean, Jesus would love Memphis.
There's great food, there's great hospitality, there's great music.
I feel 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 listened 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, is this your father or your mother's doing that's pushing you?
Both, both, yeah. Yeah. So my dad grew up in the, you know, my parents met in the third grade.
So they, they grew up seven or eight like blocks from each other.
So there's this very sort of, I'm one of 28 grandkids.
It's like a very, yeah, there's a lot going on there.
That's just on my mom's side. That doesn't include my dad's side.
Wait, there's 28 grandkids on your mom's side.
That's right, yeah. And I'm number 14 or 15, I can't remember.
Wow. Yeah. So it would be hard to overstate how central Christianity and religion was to my upbringing.
And 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 everybody in their church was doing 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 I, 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 made you throw out because it's the devil's music. that was really too bad.
You know, a lot of Led Zeppelin got thrown out and things like that.
I mean, come on. Yeah. Got to get rid of it.
Uh, I'll come back to this, but my first record I ever bought was Pearl Jam's 10.
I was 11. I actually got it for Christmas from Santa Claus.
My dad broke the record by 5 p.m. 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.
Break. This was an intense scene. But some of the things that made it through the gauntlet was Bob Dylan's evangelical records.
Of course. 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.
Yeah. Got grandfathered in. Got grandfathered in, yeah.
And he was Jewish, so there's like a thing there, too.
You're allowed to have records... made by a Jewish artist.
And then Motown was like... It was all, you could listen to Motown except for like, what's the, you know, the great Marvin Gaye record I'm just blanking on.
Oh, Sexual Healing, of course. Well, yeah, yeah, but the name of the record, what's going on?
What's going on? Oh, sexual healing would have been... It was on that record, wasn't it?
No, what's going on is really... I was saying sexual intercourse is so far beyond... Oh, yeah, yeah.
You can only hear that... The only way you could hear that in my childhood was at a wedding. by the cover band you know 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 got, you know, messed up.
Can you explain to a, heathen New York City audience, who Amy Grant is and why she's important.
Yeah, Amy Grant was sort of, I mean, the whole genre of contemporary Christian music, there was Southern gospel, which is a whole different thing.
So it's basically take the songwriter model and people start applying it to their faith stories and which this all predates the whole now the big thing is all this big ensemble worship stuff, which was basically like all these church bands trying to sound like Coldplay and U2.
So Amy Grant was like this young songwriter, and they created a whole radio sort of thing.
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 um 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. You know her. I know her because my wife knew her.
But I moved to Nashville again, sort of like, country and Christian music, this town sucks.
Yeah. 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 went to an independent Bible church.
Yeah. Yeah, so it was non-denominational.
They were very proud of that. Yeah, I was asking about other music that made it in.
Yeah, I think... Basically, my parents were pretty okay with all the classics, so we would go see – 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 and you know, and had my little yellow shirt on.
And, you know, anything from, Boys to Men to ZZ Top to whatever could sell 15,000 tickets I was, you know, exposed to.
At a certain point, the sort of the rules weren't really that well enforced.
It was sort of a young, when we were young, it 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 grave he arose. you know which was like a whole her like whole play on get up and go to school you know um But that's fantastic.
Yeah, it was great. Yeah. A daily resurrection.
She'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 this out on somebody.
You ask somebody, what are your parents?
People will never talk about their parents.
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 Drew Holcomb childhood.
Who matters? I completely disagree with that theory.
I'm not saying that you only only one mattered.
I'm saying that at any given moment only one matters Yeah, in a particular story.
You're toggling, right? So it may be from, you know, in high school, it's only your mom, and then in college, it's only your...
Yeah. My parents are going to listen to this probably.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the whole point.
Yeah. yeah i think we were actually talking um earlier back backstage about how as as dad's 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 in 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 outsized 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, my friend, about how he felt his, career had been misspent and he'd made a series of terrible choices and he had squandered 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 kind of what you're hearing here it's kind of like what your dad did Yeah.
Well, he said that he was just very, he was very sort of... bored by the monotony of dentistry and how he's very extroverted.
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 like 17 things in your head.
Totally. Honestly, I think it was a serious crossroads for him because he put himself through dental school selling jewelry out of a tackle box.
He worked his way really hard to get himself this job and this career.
But then a decade in, he realized how much he really did not enjoy it.
Found a way out of it. 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 his practice and went full time the other direction.
He loved music and he had wanted to pursue music in high school.
He wanted to be in a garage band. And his dad, who was even more strict, you know, than my parents' generation basically was the cut your hair and don't you, you know, he has a story.
He says, He tells a story about my grandfather, they're driving in the car and my grandfather smoked cigarettes nonstop.
And Bill Withers' Lean on Me was on the radio.
And dad was like 14 years old in the passenger seat.
It's that part of the song where it's, if you need a friend, call me.
You just call me. And my grandfather was a jazz guy.
He hated popular music. He said he finally takes a drag on a cigarette after about the seventh or eighth call me, and he goes...
Well, just call him, damn it. So he had this like weird relationship where his father squashed his creative. yeah dreams and so i think when i sort of showed interest in this he he sort of just launched fully in with me.
Oh, really? Yeah. The first thing I told him I wanted to pursue music was, I had like an okay guitar.
He's like, well, let's go to the guitar shop.
Let's get you something nice. If you're really going to work hard at it, I'm in your corner.
That was his two rules were if you're gonna work hard at it.
And then he said, and promised 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, because he walked away from something.
He didn't just stick with the career that he chose as a 19-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 prereqs, which he did in three semesters and then started dental school as a 19-year-old.
Can you play another song? Yeah, sure. This is sort of symmetrical, asymmetrical.
I'm going to go down the street to my grandparents' house.
I grew up five doors down the street from my grandfather, who was a sort of a lion of a man.
He was a bit of a big fish personality. He would tell these stories that you 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 Vigano, two weeks before he was executed.
He just has these 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 estate.
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 estate in the Queens 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's secretary sending her regrets of his passing and sharing how much the queen enjoyed the day she spent with him driving around. her estate and 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 in songs called Dragons.
I was climbing a mountain Asleep in the moonlight The ghost of my grandpa Came to me in a dream As the stars hung above us, he started singing this chorus.
He laughed loud as heaven and said this to me. take a few chances a few worthy romances go swimming in the ocean On New Year's Day Don't listen to the critics Stand up and bear witness Go slay all the dragons that stand in your way.
We 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're promised. Don't trouble with tomorrow He faded into the forest Proudly singing this hymn Take a few chances The worldly romances Go swimming in the ocean On New Year's Day Don't listen to the critics Stand up and bear witness Go slay all the dragons that stand in your way.
I woke up with a fever Surrounded by lightning All my windows were open I let the rain flood in The past felt like the present With a future uncertain I sang like a sparrow lost in the wind.
Take a few chances, a few worthy romances Go swimming in the ocean on New Year's Eve years day don't listen to the critics stand up and bear witness Go slay all the dragons that stand Go slay all the dragons that stand in your way.
Mm-hmm. Thank you. Incredibly beautiful tribute.
Thank you. Yeah. He's a beautiful man. We'll be right back.
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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 that decision.
Yeah, I... 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 on a spectrum 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. and that it would bring all this meaning and stuff to my life.
And when I was 17, my brother passed away.
He was born with spina bifida. It had all sorts of health issues, but still suddenly out of nowhere, I was out of the country when it happened.
I'm doing like a summer of Spanish immersion in the Dominican Republic.
And he 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 trying to figure it out.
But music was really the thing that 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 Moon Dance. The other one was David Gray's White Ladder. that I would just drive in my car and just listen to these 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 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, 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 sort of spectrum of beliefs about different things, whether cultural, cosmic, theological, cultural, political, et cetera.
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 that was going to seminary. I went to Scotland.
They had a program at St. Andrews University where I could go Two weeks a semester, twice a year, and then write my papers.
And so... I was searching, but I was enjoying the search.
It was less of a 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 and finding a lot of interesting things.
I'm reading a lot of interesting people.
It 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.
It was more of a wall and less of a bridge.
It was 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 that's 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.
And the first place we went was Scotland.
And immediately within three days on that trip, I said, I'm going to study abroad here.
This place, Edinburgh, is just this... Wonderland.
And, you know, loved English literature.
I loved English history. And honestly, the South was settled by Scots, so a lot of it.
So there was like... When Braveheart came out, every southerner in the world was like, yeah!
Was there anything about the music of Scotland that appealed to you?
Yeah, yeah. 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, people playing. instruments that I didn't even know what they were, but they played these traditional Scottish folk songs, and they'd always end with Loch Lomond.
You take the high road and I'll take the low road And I'll be in Scotland before you Where me and my true love are ne'er to meet again On the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond.
I was like, I'd sit in the corner crying about me and this mythical woman I'm going to meet at the Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond.
Your Scottish accent's pretty good. You got a lot of practice.
My kids are always asking for it. But there's something about the Scottish...
Whether in the story that sort of – that's where I started writing songs.
I was still sort of in the throes of my –
And I was trying to process that grief and so As a student, I decided my senior thesis 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 Because when he passed away, there were like 2,000 people at the funeral.
2,000? Yeah, there were like 100 nurses from the hospital that had met him over the last 15 years came. the entire elementary school he went to had a day out of school and they all came.
Yeah. 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, uh,
His doctor, his teachers, 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 would say that that time I was alone. I wasn't necessarily lonely, but I was alone.
I had taken my guitar and I just started writing.
When I got back home from that semester, I started playing these songs for some friends.
I think they were all expecting... something completely different for my life.
I got laughed at a couple times before the songs.
Like, wait, you wrote songs? I mean, I know you play music, but like...
Aren't you going to be like history lawyer guy or something?
And I play these songs and they're like, oh, these are... What's the first song you wrote that you were proud of?
It's 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 heartbreak song because she had sort of... ripped the heart from my chest in that era of my life.
Is that why you don't remember it? 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 truth.
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, thanks. 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 She didn't figure it out.
No, she did not. Oh, come on. Well, that's according to her.
You have to talk to her about that. But yeah, so that was the first song I sang, and I was playing it for... buddies in college and they were like, that's pretty good.
But that was before Scotland. That was the first song I wrote.
Scotland 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...
20 to 23-year-old Steve Earle, Bruce Springsteen, Ryan Adams imitation face.
Mm-hmm. 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 my path.
But none of those songs are available on the internet.
Which Bruce Springsteen? There are many Bruce Springsteens.
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 Jones.
I was going to say Nebraska. Yeah. I want to talk about Nebraska for a moment.
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 uh I don't know what it's called, but it's the one about the guy who's a police officer.
Highway Patrolman. Highway Patrolman. I've played that song a hundred times.
Man turns his back on his family. 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. That song is so beautifully constructed.
Wait, can you remember any of it? I can play the chorus, probably.
Yeah, play the chorus. For those who don't know the song, I think it's one of his finest songs.
I can do a part of it. Let's see. My name is Joe Roberts.
I work for the state. Sergeant out of Burdenville.
Barris number eight. I've always been an honest man An honest man Honest as I could I got a brother named Frankie, and Frankie ain't no good.
Is it bad that I sing along? Ask the audience.
I don't know. But then it goes on. Yeah, we're laughing and drinking Nothing feels better than blood on blood Taking turns dancing with Maria as the band plays Night of the Johnstown Flood.
Catch him when he's straight again. Yep.
Like any brother would. No, teach him how to walk that line.
It's two different choruses. Oh, all right.
Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Because my favorite is, like any brother would.
Man turns his back on his family, but he just ain't no good.
And then there's this, that line to me that, that song, I love that song for a lot of different reasons.
I'll just, the song's been out for 40 years, so I'll spoiler alert.
Basically, you know, the narrator is a state trooper, highway patrolman, and his brother's...
And he ends up injuring, possibly killing somebody in a bar fight.
And he gets called into the scene and realizes it's his own brother and And his brother, he's chasing him out of the state in Michigan.
And he lets him go into Canada, you know, and lets him escape.
And then he ends with that chorus and turns it back on his family.
He just said, no good. And my brother, who's now been eight years sober, there was a lot of years where that was our dynamic.
That was the good. rule following successful big brother and he was the He didn't mind me saying that we were very close, and he's turned his life around, but I thought that was going to be my life.
I was like, I'm going to lose him to his vice.
And so I'd 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? No, in you. Oh, yeah.
I'll take that as a compliment. I did not, just folks may not know this, but we, Drew and I met a couple months back as we were doing this thing which can't be described.
It's a form of a variety show. A variety show.
We hung out together. I was on the bus with Drew, among other things.
And you said, there's a series of things.
I didn't know anything about you. And you said something. me that just so surprised me and i would you said that you just talked about how you have a uh 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 taught growing up that anger is bad.
What I've since learned is that anger is not bad.
It's rage that's bad, which is like sort of the, this is going to get all counsel-y on you guys, but it's been a big part of my journey as a person and as a musician.
It's not the anger that's bad. Anger is 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, well, I'm so angry.
What is it? It's usually some sort of injustice, either against me or the world or my neighbor or my family, or it's your... yellow light that's flashing that you're lonely or sad or hurt.
And so I learned that it's like my superpower.
When I'm angry, I know that I've got to figure out what's going on instead of trying to tamp it down.
Have you ever written, 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 Abner and Amanda Ramirez.
Abner is a Cuban-American. Amanda is an African-American.
And we wrote this song together, I think three days after the Charlottesville white supremacy rally. when some very famous sort of American Christians were both sides in the situation, and we got real pissed and wrote this song together.
Ring the bells, this time I mean it Bid the hatred fare thee well Give back the pieces of my Jesus Take your counterfeit to hell Bang the drums, this means war Not the kind you're waiting for We say mercy won't be rationed here It's what we're fighting for And if all is fair in love and war Then what the hell is love even for?
We can't sing it loud enough. We'll keep on adding voices. ring the bells ring the bells ring the bells ring the bells Just a little bit of it.
That's what I... That's the one I had in mind.
I was very angry when I wrote that song.
Felt good. Yeah. It's funny. You play it like a man possessed.
Yeah. Well, I was watching Daniel Tiger one time with my daughter and there was this- But I just love the segue from Man Possessed to-
There's a lot of Daniel Tiger in my life as well.
It's very related to what we're talking about.
So there's this scene where Daniel gets upset, and the mom says, okay, Daniel, we're going to learn a song. 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 Drew's 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 mind.
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Candice Rivera has it all. In just three years, she went from stay-at-home mom to traveling the world, saving lives and making millions.
Anyone would think Candice's charmed life is about as real as unicorns.
But sometimes the truth is even harder to believe than the lies. true there's so many things not true you gotta believe me I'm Charlie Webster, and this is Unicorn Girl, an Apple original podcast produced by Seven Hills.
Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts. 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 on my list is Boulder to Birmingham.
Do you know that? No. That's the... That is 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 Boulder to 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, 30 seconds of it.
I've never heard this song. I'm very excited.
It's so... heart-wrenchingly beautiful and the I mention it only because we were talking about grief and about emotion.
It's a song about grief. And it's the articulation of her emotions sense of loss and longing is just perfect.
Anyway, here it is, I think. In the bosom of Abraham I would hold my life In His saving grace From Boulder to Birmingham If I thought I could 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. Your 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 Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell.
I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time.
There's a song about a... Jimmy Webb wrote the song and he talks about how his, I think it was his uncle was a lineman.
He always remembered seeing him up on the poles working on the electrical lines.
And so the song came easy to him because he could imagine him, you know, being away from home for a long time, wishing to be home with the one he loves.
And it stood the test of time, too. It's a very simple song about a working man 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 second one, though. Which is what?
Which is Crazy by Patsy Cline. 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 years later, he kind of quit the industry, moves to Austin, Texas, and and writes the most non-commercial country record ever that's Red Headed Stranger.
And as a 43-year-old, his career blows up.
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. Well, you know Willie Nelson.
I didn't know that. Yeah, I mean, we don't, like, call each other because he's, you know, he's an older guy.
But I have, yeah, we've shared the stage and sung.
He does this really neat thing every night where he does a medley of I saw the light.
Will the circle be unbroken? One other I'm blanking on. and he invites, you know, the opener to come out and sing it with him.
And so I've got to do that 12 or 15 times.
So, um, he and Dolly to me are the two living legends left, you know, in that space.
And then my third one would be Jolene. As a Tennessean, if I didn't mention a Dolly Parton song, I probably couldn't go home.
What's your other one or two? George Jones The Grand Tour that's a sad song It's, you know, I might be more attracted to, you are attracted to pure emotion, it seems like.
And I'm attracted in country music to over the top grandiosity.
And the grand tour, George Jones is like, He's in the best possible sense of the word, a caricature of a...
He is. That voice. In fact, I'm going to make them play just the beginning of...
And play the grand tour until the line chills me to the bone.
Step right in. If you'd like to take the grand tour of the lawn, So fantastic.
Once was home. Here it comes. Some things I know will chill you to the bone.
I mean, the notion that you would write a song with a straight face. has the phrase, chill you to the bone.
And you know, he's got nothing. He doesn't have anything that's chilling you to the bone.
No. Some woman dumped him. Yeah, that's it.
An empty house. This will chill you to the bone.
My empty house. My empty house. He's so, I just can't.
Get over the fact. He's so genius. Yeah, you love the melodrama.
I love the melodrama. 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 Pius XII or Emmanuel XVI.
And then... I made like 10 of them because there were a lot of popes.
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, and hopefully your library just keeps growing and growing.
And the trick is, when I was young, you're imitating, and then you get better when you find your own voice, and then you're just... sort of taking cues from your library.
You're not copying anybody, but you're going, oh, that's interesting.
That kind of reminds me of this. Let's make it our own.
The people that you've mentioned who are important influences for you, we just mentioned, we talked before about, oh, What about Paul Simon?
I'm curious, what's the thread that links?
And also, I know that Tom Petty is someone. that has had an influence.
What's the thread that links these influences?
I think all those songwriters, I don't know if there's actually a perfect common thread between them, but something about all those... song 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 I think 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 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, I hear all I have to hear is a, You belong among the wildflowers.
You belong in a boat out at sea. 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 seem to sort of play by a certain formula Maybe they do sometimes on certain songs or certain records.
But Tom Petty is a great example. If you look at the arc of his career and listen to the records, they don't all sound the same. you know, the different producers have sort of different eras and fingerprints on his, on his work.
The Jeff Lynn stuff is different than the Jimmy Ovine stuff.
And, uh, 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 is makes it work.
I asked you to Sing one cover. Yeah. Tell me what you chose and why.
Well, I chose this song because you and I connected over this song. back when we met in April.
And I just saw this artist play at the Ryman, which is a... my favorite venue in the world and a serious underplay for him.
The last time I saw him in Nashville was at the Bridgestone Arena.
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.
Thank you. Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together I've got some real estate here in my bag.
So I bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner's pies.
I walked off to look for a man Kathy I said as we boarded a greyhound in Pittsburgh Michigan seems like a dream to me now.
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw I've gone to look for a laughing on a bus, playing games with their faces.
She says the man in the gabardine suit is a spy.
I said, be careful, his bow tie is really a camera.
Well, toss me a cigarette I've got one here in my raincoat No, he smoked the last one an hour ago Well, I looked at the scenery She read her magazine as the moon rose over and over Open feet.
Kathy, I'm lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping.
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why.
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike They've all gone to look for a man We've all gone to look for America We've all gone to look for America. let us be lovers we'll marry our fortunes together That was beautiful.
Thank you. You said his concert at the Ryman that you saw earlier this year.
It was actually... really sweet for me personally, but we played two nights at the Ryman on May 2nd and 3rd, and then he played... three nights of the rhyme in May, like 12th, 13th, and 14th.
And I got to sit. and watch a show right after I'd played there and to see one of my heroes in the same spot that I was in eight days earlier, uh, And he had the same reverence for the room that I always have.
And it was a bit of an emotional and joyous experience. 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 expect to hear in the second set.
And it was just a... Yeah, it was wonderful.
So you were in the middle of writing a song about Cormac McCarthy.
Oh, yeah, I was. Tell me how that came about and where you are in that song.
Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorite authors. you know, Southern Gothic, dark, violent, end of 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 turned into great films, et cetera.
So he actually grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, which is where I went to school.
But he left there and lived all over, but sort of landed in the desert in Santa Fe, El Paso, somewhere in there.
Unrelated to that, seemingly. I love old cars, and so I get this email from a company that auctions old cars just because I love to look at them.
And I get this email in April, early April, it says Cormac McCarthy's Ferrari.
It's being auctioned off. And so it kind of like blew a fuse in me because I'm like, Cormac McCarthy didn't drive a Ferrari.
Ferrari. It's like nuts. 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, Cory McCarthy's Black Ferrari.
But I couldn't quite find the end, you know?
I couldn't find the end. I thought, no, I want to drive Cormac McCarthy's black Ferrari through the desert and have a complete existential crisis.
And I feel like everybody right now is sort of, we sort of live inside of existential crisis.
That's going to be the era that we live in.
We look back on it and we're like, that's the era 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 where to put your anger and where to put your... your joy and how to live.
And I thought one of the ways it would help me is if I had Cory 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, we connected over old cars. And I was like, I...
Yeah, so I've never played this song before, except for during soundcheck.
So this is a debut. And I really like this song.
And if you don't like it, I don't really care that much because I like it a lot.
Let's see if I can 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-tailed hawk waiting 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 empty 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 phrase. like Cormac McCarthy in my mind.
In my mind A fiasco falls like rain on our faces A Mickey Mantle rookie card ruined in the basement Nothing turns out like you thought it would It's a little more barefoot than Hollywood.
It's confusing, the losing, the boozing, excusing, the stage fright and all the troubleshooting.
Where do I fit in amongst all the matter?
And this party always feels like a lost souls 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 in my face.
Nothing but my worn out suitcase driving. that Ferrari like Cormac McCarthy in my mind.
In my mind Engine and fuel and paint and chrome Muscle and blood and skin and bone Engine and fuel and paint and chrome Muscle and blood and skin and bones 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 a worn out suit. driving that Ferrari like Cormac McCarthy in my mind.
In my mind, in my mind I'm driving Cormac McCarthy's Black Ferrari in my mind I love that.
Thank 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, obviously the phrase and the rhyme, Cory McCarthy's Black Ferrari.
Yeah. was like this song gonna be like a a funny song about how could this maudlin writer have such a you know cultural toy like this.
This doesn't make sense to me. It should be a piece of old Chevy pickup.
Right, yeah, that's the imagination, right?
It's not that he had this car, so it's like a Magnum PI car, you know?
So then I was like, no, that's not the right frame because what I felt when I saw that that existed was, As a fan of his work, and as also someone who would like to have a 1989 Testarossa, just for a day even.
Mm-hmm. was that, no, even the saddest, most sort of...
Gothic, you know, 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 120 miles an hour across the desert in Santa Fe.
And there's not a picture in the world that exists of Cory McCarthy smiling.
No. And so I relate to that. I relate to feeling the weight 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 that all you do at this point?
Well, they've heard it, but we haven't. No, we wait till we all get in the room together before we sort of dive into it.
Yeah. What will happen to it when you all dive in?
I don't know. I mean, we'll go through several itinerations.
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 in the right key, figure out the tempo.
And then we'll sort of jump into the approach.
What are the drums going to be doing? acoustic sort of is that the main engine driver of the song or are we going to 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 That's a really beautiful song.
Thank you. Thank you. Drew, I think we're... I think our time is...
I have no idea how much time. We've been up here a while, though.
We've been up here a while. Yeah. I feel the people lurking.
How should we end this? I don't know. Am I being presumptuous if I ask you to play one more song?
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.
My kids go to school with some of Ketch'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 going to be in my office doing some writing and, you know, working.
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. By 8.30, we're writing songs.
And we wrote this song about 10.30 that morning.
We both had just gotten back into doing normal shows again with live audiences, and we had really missed that.
This is such a fantastic Only in Nashville story.
Yeah, it is. And then it was a great song for me.
It ended up being, the song's called Dance With Everybody. and then ended up getting picked up by the NCAA for two years straight as the theme song for March Madness, which A, song's 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 got to participate in March Madness.
None of my athletic six three cousins did, so...
You walked into this room, you hardly knew anyone A sea full of strangers just crashing on the rungs.
When the band strikes by the end of the night, strangers no more.
I want to dance with everybody. Everybody who came through that door Whether you came here to party Or you came here to cry Whether to meet somebody, cheat somebody, get low or get high.
So come on, all you people. With two feet on your floor I wanna dance with everybody Who 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 Throw your hips and your heart into everything.
Get lost in the crowd. Get down on the floor.
I want to dance with Everybody who came through that door Welcome all you saints and sinners, poets, prophets, and fools.
All you cowboys, tricksters, hipsters trying so hard to be cool.
All you dreamers and schemers thirsty for more.
I want to dance with everybody who 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. Throw your hips and your heart into everything.
Get lost in the crowd Get down on the floor I wanna dance with everybody Who came through that door Well, let's put aside our differences.
We'll lace up our shoes. Let's narrow the distance between me.
Meet me in the middle, let's quit keepin' score I wanna dance with everybody who 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. Throw your hips and your heart into everything. thing turn the world on a string turn the winds on a dime turn the wheel to the west and the water to wine get lost in the Get down on the floor I wanna dance with everybody Who came through that door I wanna dance with everybody Who came through that door Thank you so much Drew.
Thank you all. This episode of Broken Record is produced by Leah Rose and Nina Bird Lawrence with Ben-Nadaf Hafri and Lucy Sullivan.
Our engineers are Nina Bird Lawrence, Sarah Bruguier, and Ben Tolliday.
Marketing by Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan.
Our executive producers are Jacob Smith and Justin Richmond.
Special thanks to Way24, to Eloise Linton, and to the whole crew over at the Cherry Lane Theatre.
My name is Malcolm Garbo. Ugh, come on.
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