I was doing the math.
You have four more Grammy wins than I do and 16 more Grammy nominations.
But there's a line that I really liked from I think it was your memoir, where you said I was a writer.
It would save me.
Tell me about that.
I always loved language from the time I was a toddler.
Like I would see a sign and ask my mother what it said.
Words really fascinated me.
And the rhythms of language were deeply important to me and to understand what words meant and how to construct sentences, all of those things.
I think that was just hardwired into me.
I was interested from day one.
And I started writing poetry when I was a preteen and I won a poetry contest when I was nine years old.
And I thought well, you know, people think I can write and I want to write and I basically that's been unchanged now for a half a century.
Like people think I can write and I want to write, it's still the same.
Tell me about the rhythms.
What was it about the rhythms of writing that you were really attracted to?
I mean, you can tell Laura Ingalls Wilder's rhythm, apart from James Joyce's rhythm.
Sure, of course right, if you, you're reading people's melodies, their internal sense of cadence and melody and rhyme through language.
I mean.
So it would make perfect sense.
I would become a songwriter, because both of those things fascinated me.
Well, that's what I noticed.
The biggest surprise prepping for this was how rhythmic the memoir is.
Like I noticed it immediately.
Like there are some sentences in there that are like 50 words.
And I was like, all right, now I feel the rhythm.
And then I went back and I started listening to your music.
And I was like, whoa, I totally see this sort of like figure eight shape between both of them.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Well, I wrote my memoir with that very thing in mind, that I didn't want to write it as a chronology or as a journalist.
I wanted to write it as a songwriter, which is really the way I write.
And you said figure eights, those ideas of repeating rhythms.
You know, verse chorus, verse chorus.
That really interests me.
It really is meaningful to me to write that way.
I mean even now, when I write essays prose essays and I still do that a lot there seems to always be a verse-chorus idea in my head when I'm writing it.
Okay, you got to break that down for me.
Well, as you said, figure eights, that makes sense.
Repeating rhythms, like returning to themes.
Words that resonate from one paragraph to the next that come back at the end to tie it up in a bow.
I mean, I'm not the first writer who does that.
But you know, those things um, make rhythmic sense to me and i love finding a new writer whose rhythm i hadn't known before.
You know, and i can hear the cadence of his or her speech in their writing.
Yes well, i like what you're saying about rhythms that i haven't heard before, because it's like uh, it's like a different energy type thing that you sometimes get get on the page.
So how is that circularity different in prose versus songwriting?
Um well, obviously there's no rhyme scheme in prose, so the structure of that house is different.
I mean, in my own mind i lay it out the same way like in the beginning of writing a song.
I can foresee what the structure is going to be, whether it's going to be like a narrative ballad with no choruses, that the story ends up winding in on itself, or whether it's a traditional Beatles verse verse chorus, bridge back to that and prose that can get clunky if you're that tied to that kind of structure.
It's a little harder to lay it out in advance if it's prose.
Although, like I'm writing a short piece right now and I can't find some of the rhythm of it.
So I keep walking away, coming back the next day, walking away and coming back the next day.
And it's starting to reveal itself.
It's the same with songwriting.
It's like, you know, you open the door, you have no idea what this room is going to look like.
You start exploring the crannies and find out what it is.
I mean, it's that way with painting.
I think it's that way with every creative enterprise.
It's that burst of inspiration.
Then you get into it, and then you hit a wall.
And you don't know where it goes or what it is.
And you keep working, slogging through the mud, through the self-criticism, through the editing.
And then something opens up again.
You see how to finish it.
How long does it take you to write a song?
Oh, God.
I mean, it depends on the song.
Some songs are... you know, like pulling teeth, and some come fairly easily with an edit.
There's always an editing process at the end.
I've never written a song.
I want to write a song.
But when you're editing, what are you going for?
Like I feel like with prose sometimes.
I kind of want it to be streamlined, right?
I want people to be able to understand it clearly and I want to make sure that there's sort of a.
The economy of language is really good.
But my bet is songwriting is a completely different art.
Sometimes you don't want people to understand clearly.
Sometimes I put the ambiguity back in.
Yeah.
A feather's not a bird.
The rain is not the sea.
I have no idea what that means.
But what's cool about that is those lyrics to me are very...
They're intriguing to me because I feel drawn to them, but I don't know what you're saying.
Exactly, right?
Exactly.
But that opens the door to your interpretation.
You know, you wouldn't want me to explain that to you, right?
I don't know.
I've been thinking a lot about that question over the past few days.
There's a mystery at the center of songwriting, and I don't want to kill that in service of clarity.
At the same time, there has to be a clarity of language.
That, like you said, it draws you in, even though you don't really know what it means.
But there's a clarity of intent behind the ambiguity, if that's not too wordy.
Yeah, but then how do you know that you found that?
Like, are you just in a room and you're like, I guess you trust your own intuition?
Do you get feedback on songs?
I used to not...
Want or seek feedback at all, particularly when a song was in process.
Never.
But now I co-write a lot with John Leventhal, my spouse and my partner, and he writes music and I write lyrics and he will get give unsolicited feedback sometimes as we're working on a song.
And then there could be an argument about it.
And then I go, yeah, okay, you're right.
That line is a little weak or that word isn't quite right.
So I'm more open to that kind of collaboration and feedback.
But you asked about the process of that, about whether it's intuitive or whether it's.
I think it's both.
It's part the discipline of being a songwriter for a long time, and it's part intuitive.
And also...
I have red flags in myself.
Like, if I overuse metaphors, particularly nature metaphors, if I overuse them, I start going ooh, that's kind of icky.
I shouldn't do that.
Or if I use a word or an adjective that I tend to overuse or that is too literal or too specific or too expected, then I kind of you know, I kind of feel uneasy.
I don't know.
I guess part of it is like following my uneasiness and Those little bursts of like yeah, that's right.
That works.
That's exciting.
That's new.
You ever feel like you're writing and you surprise yourself and you're like whoa okay, let's go follow that.
Yes, all the time.
Really?
Yeah.
I mean, I...
I was watching this documentary on Paul Simon last night and he was talking about that process too, of waking up in the night and getting lyrics and not knowing what they meant or where they were going.
The next night, getting more lyrics, I'm like, wow, that's really lucky.
Usually two nights in a row never happens.
But yeah, surprising myself, that's the most fun.
It's kind of crazy, right?
You can literally be writing, and you can find things...
Within yourself that you didn't know that you knew.
Well, often I find that I'm writing about something I don't understand about myself.
That you're processing?
Right.
Or that my past life or my future life.
You know, like I used to say, that they're like postcards from the future sometimes, that I can organize my own feelings and thoughts and experiences by writing about them.
I mean, in a way, it's like the writer's laziness.
Like, you don't figure it out, you write about it, and then you go, oh, that's what that is.
And then sometimes it's completely outside myself.
Like, I wrote a song with Elvis Costello and Kris Kristofferson called The Eight Gods of Harlem.
And the way that song started is that I was going down into the subway to get on the A train which goes to Harlem.
Yeah.
And this woman, this Hispanic woman, was coming up the stairs very slowly and she was talking to herself.
And I thought she said, «Ocho Dios, eight gods.» And I don't speak Spanish, so it probably wasn't «Ocho Dios.»
But I thought, eight gods?
Eight gods?
And the train's going to Harlem.
It's coming from Harlem.
And I kept thinking, eight gods of Harlem.
And that line just kept going over and over.
And I thought, well, what does that mean?
And then I read about another shooting, a child killed by gunshot.
And I thought oh, there's these eight gods that maybe look over these events that people reach out to.
I don't know.
It's kind of mixing up Hindu, Buddhist gun violence, snippet of an overheard sentence, you know.
How do you make that a song?
Well, we made it one.
How much do you think that you're your intuition for all this was honed through the time that you spent deconstructing.
Because what I'm interested in here is you have, like the left brain, the analytical mind, but then we're talking about this sort of right-brained intuition.
But looking at how you've developed your craft, so much of it has been a very deliberate practice from people like Bob Dylan and all these sorts of people actually deconstructing what's going on.
And then that leads to what you're saying here.
Well, I think that's part of discipline and part of educating yourself in the tradition you're writing in.
I did deconstruct Dylan's songs as a young songwriter.
I did deconstruct Guy Clark's songs story songs, narrative ballads, Appalachian ballads, rock songs, Beatles songs, Elton John, Joni Mitchell.
Why do these songs work?
And how particular are they to that person's life experience and voice?
You know, and hearing Joni Mitchell for the first time as a young teenager, I realized oh, a woman could be a songwriter.
Yeah, and also that her inner life was valuable and lent itself to poetry and was worthwhile to put out in the public sphere.
I mean, that was a huge revelation to me.
Like, for some reason, I always thought before then or I had an intuitive from the world around me that a woman should keep her feelings and her life experience to herself, that it wasn't as important as a man's experience and that men were the poets and songwriters.
When Joni Mitchell was Revelation.
Oh, this is an opening door.
So yeah, I deconstructed those songs and I deconstructed the people in back of the songs too.
How they well, I can't say deconstructed, but I was fascinated about who they were and how they got there.
And the discipline and the work required to get there.
So when you say deconstructed a song, what does that mean?
Well, I mean, when I was in my 20s I would actually write down Dylan's lyrics and look at them and go how did he get from that to that?
And why does that work?
And how far he stepped out of the expected here and then came back and brought it around, you know?
Yeah.
Like Positively 4th Street or Subterranean Homesick Blues.
Like, why does that make sense?
What did you get from Dylan with the drawings and the song lyrics?
His drawings?
Yeah, because you deconstructed those too.
I don't know.
I mean, I think Dylan is... like he just is art you know he's he's just what a dope compliment yeah i don't i mean i know that he is widely read and that he takes his work very seriously but i also think he has an open channel that not everybody has Okay, tell me about open channels.
Do you feel like you have certain frequencies of open channels?
Do you feel like it opens up on certain days, certain weeks, certain hours?
How do you think that process works?
Well...
We all do have those kind of places of connection and openness to some creative realm that is undefinable, that is mysterious, that is part of our spark of humanity.
And some people are more open than others.
Um, And I mean, I like this quote that Linda Ronstadt said, that I've re-quoted many, many times.
She said, refine your skills so you can support your instincts.
Okay.
That's right.
Well, I think also refine your skills so that you can keep the channel open.
So if it's open, then you'll get some good stuff.
Yeah.
Right?
Because you're only going to get the level that your skills have succeeded, have you've acquired to.
So I mean I'm talking about all this and right now I feel really lazy because I've had writer's block for a couple months, a few months, several months.
And it's felt a little dead and frustrated to me.
And then I went to France last month.
And did some visual art with some friends, some cyanotypes and monoprinting.
And I came back and I got interested in finishing these songs that I've been working on, which has happened to me before.
It's like if I...
One time I gave up writing completely and started painting, and then I wanted to write again.
So it seems like moving the focus to a different kind of expression or getting inspiration in different places recharges the engine.
You know you were talking about voice earlier and I know there were a few years where you kind of lost your physical voice.
Yeah.
And once you got it back, you're like, you know what?
I'm done being critical of myself.
I'm not going to do that.
I wish.
Well, okay.
At least you said that's my intent, right?
Yeah.
But tell me about writing voice.
Do you feel like you're given a certain voice in the same way?
How is it the same versus different?
I'm a much better singer than I was 50 years ago or 40 years ago, right?
Because I've worked at it.
I know its contours.
I know how to avoid areas that are weak.
I know how to strengthen those areas.
I know how to shift things.
You know, it's like I'm as aware... my voice and how to use it as I am my hands.
But I didn't know that when I first became a singer and I was flailing around like, how do I do it?
How do I do it?
It's the same with songwriting.
In the beginning, I was like, how do I do it?
How do I do it?
And just work really, really hard.
Now I know how to do it.
That doesn't mean that I don't still have doubt and self-criticism and real frustration and setbacks and writer's block and all of that you know.
It's a life.
What's the voice of self-criticism for you?
Oh, that's shit.
You've said that before.
Why can't you do it like, you know, fill in the blank.
She's a better songwriter.
You should stop.
Whatever.
The difference is that I recognize that as part of the process.
I used to believe it and go, oh, I can't do anything.
Now I just go, oh, yeah, that's part of it.
I'll get through that. you know, you're talking about how the voice changes over the years.
And earlier, we were talking about sort of the mystery.
And there's a song that Joni Mitchell has called Both Sides, Now that she made early in her life and there was one late in her life.
And just first of all, that's one of those songs that continues to reveal itself to me as i listen to it.
But also whoa, the way that she sings it after she has lived enough of her life to look at it from both sides.
Now it's crazy like you listen to her voice and you can just like hear the wisdom and traumas of experience.
This in her later rendition of it, Yeah.
So writing that song when she was that young, that was definitely a postcard from the future, because she hadn't lived that yet.
Right.
And then she grew into that song.
And you're right to hear it now with all of her experiences, a whole life in back of that song.
There's a deep beauty to that.
Tell me about the differences between the different styles of songs that you studied.
You're talking about narrative ballads and Appalachian music.
I just want to hear you talk through the different styles.
Well, I have love for all of it in the same way I don't just read one kind of book.
I listen to all kinds of music, and I appreciate the traditions and inside rules of each tradition.
Like Appalachian ballads...
I love those things that are connected to the deep, deep past, you know, to Celtic music, the story songs and the ballads and the way people pass down information from generation to generation through these songs.
So that there are the oral history songs and then also the...
The songs about real dark songs, about death and loss and travel when you knew you'd never see your family again.
You know the blues, the things that came out of the Delta and that suffering and then documenting the darkness and the violence and the beauty and the hope of that.
You know, and just how.
And just sexy, greasy, all of it.
I love all of it.
And then Elton, you know, everything from the Carter family to Elton.
I just, it all interests me.
And the disciplines of each one are fascinating to me.
Part of this American library.
No, we're just talking about the American songs.
I mean, we could go to other countries too, but not as well-versed.
Well, it was interesting to hear you talk through that, because suffering was like the core thing at the middle of the thing.
You know, and modern pop music, there's... I mean, it still talks about...
Breakups and loss, but not with the purity and depth of those other songs, those songs that the pop tradition came from.
A lot of it that's really driven by a track and a beat rather than lyrically centered.
You know, a lot of that, the lyrics are kind of just an adjunct to a beat.
Yeah.
And that's fine.
It's legitimate.
It doesn't interest me as much.
Yeah, it's funny that you say that, because this morning I saw that Shape of You by Ed Sheeran is now the most streamed song on Apple Music.
And so I was sitting having breakfast and I looked up the lyrics.
And it's what happened with a lot of modern pop songs.
Like, oh, that's what it's saying.
Oh, that's what it's saying.
Like, I never really realized that because the lyrics are like a tertiary thing.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm old school.
I like lyric-driven songs.
That doesn't mean they have to be complex.
You know, you listen to something like...
Annie Lennox is why, right?
I mean, a lot of it is just longing, just pure longing, just why, why, why, why, you know?
And it's just beautiful, fantastic record, kind of a perfect combination of the distillation of what the song's about lyrically and her voice and the track.
And I mean, it's one of those perfect records to me.
Well, one of the core themes throughout your life has been truth.
And there's two stories that come to mind.
The first was when you were a kid and then the journalists came to your house.
And you're like, why is everyone putting on these fake faces?
What's going on with this veneer?
I don't like that.
And then the second one was there was that song early in your career where someone told you hey, sing this.
And you're like, no, I don't want to sing that.
And I could sort of see as I read the memoir of, like no, I'm really going to lean into what's true and not try to put on this fake show for other people.
Yeah, pretense makes me anxious in other people and in myself.
You know, if I find myself being kind of pretentiously knowing more, or acting like I know more than I think I do, or whatever doesn't feel quite true to myself.
I mean, I have a real anxiety around that.
Maybe that is from childhood.
You know kind of looking at fame, my dad's fame, like going is this real?
Like, is that, is there a real connection there with other people?
What does that do to his life?
Is that truthful?
You know, those questions really did alarm and disarm and concern me.
Hmm.
The truth is is that my dad did have a real connection with the people who were his fans, who loved him.
And, at the same time, he didn't have a connection with the millions of people around the world who loved him right.
He had a connection with this idea of audience.
And he was respectful and cared about people's hard lives and their own sufferings, because he suffered himself.
So that is real connection.
Yeah.
As far as fame, I just saw how damaging it was.
So, I mean, it killed, it literally killed people.
And so it never...
I never had this idea of it just being glamorous, you know, of it being something to seek on its own merits.
I never thought that.
I thought, well, okay, you have to be strategic about this.
If you're going to be successful in this work, then you may get famous.
Be careful.
Yeah.
Manage it the best way you can and be as truthful with yourself as you can or it could destroy you.
What did you learn from your dad about songwriting?
Number one, his love.
He knew hundreds and hundreds and thousands of songs.
Yeah. like a student of the game.
He was a musicologist.
He knew thousands of songs and loved them, had a passion for the songs he loved, was interested in the songs he didn't love, you know.
Just interested in them because they were songs.
So that, and also I saw how hard he worked on his songwriting.
Like he took it very seriously and, And so I gathered respect for the art and nobility of songwriting first from him.
How much of songwriting...
Is like sitting down at a desk or something and handwriting or typing, versus just like getting a guitar or a piano and just kind of like mumbling how it turns until it turns into words.
Well, it's not just those two things.
Okay.
Both of those are true.
But it's also...
Just moving throughout your day and being aware and awake and listening to other people's conversations and images and ideas, and going to the Met and standing in front of a great painting.
Amen.
You know, songwriting starts happening.
Songwriting, to me, writing...
It just is.
It's the way of being in the world.
It's simple.
Yeah.
It's like a byproduct.
It's the product.
Awake and aware.
Tell me about those words.
Awake and aware.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's easy to fall asleep, isn't it?
You get involved, listening to the news or your daily life, or worry distraction, start falling asleep to what's real and what's right in front of myself.
I find distraction is not just like distraction from your phone or distraction from the news, or distraction from You know the list of things I have to do.
But distraction by worrying, distraction by anxiety has a real blanketing effect.
Like, it really...
It closes the space for anything bigger to happen, any ideas, any rhymes.
Well, no, rhymes take work.
I sometimes teach songwriting and doing master classes at colleges universities, and one of the first things I talk about is deconstructing a rhyme scheme.
Creating a rhyme scheme and deconstructing it.
And a lot of times brand new songwriters, young songwriters, don't recognize where they haven't, where they've set up a rhyme scheme and haven't followed it through, or where they've missed one.
You know and there are reasons that That those things work and are important to know.
It's like, Picasso was a really great representational artist.
He could draw, you know?
Mm-hmm.
You could do portrait drawing.
I was amazed when I went to the Picasso Museum.
Yeah.
Like the stuff that he made in the late 1800s.
Yeah.
His portraits.
You're like, this is Picasso?
Exactly.
And then you get a radical shift later on.
Right.
But the point is, is that he knew how to do the basics and then he let it go.
And when he let it go, it also informed the abstract art, right?
And the cubism and all of that.
So, I mean, to me, it's the same with knowing a rhyme scheme, knowing how to construct one.
If you want to let it go, great, but you better know how to do it first.
What else, though? young songwriters quite grasp.
I talk to them about not writing about themes.
Huh.
You know, don't write about loss and love and use these big words but get really specific about the details of it without saying the theme of it.
Right.
Right, like talk about the furniture of it, the window, the door, the coffee cup, the table, the slamming this, the clock ticking the wind that blew through, whatever it is, those things are what resonates.
So talk to me about that through the prism of a song like Sea of Heartbreak, which I know you really like.
Yeah, so Sea of Heartbreak, Hal David.
I mean he takes that metaphor of of the sea and the ship, and you know all of that.
And he.
It's like.
I think in a lesser writer's hand it would have been kitschy, but but the way it was uh, woven into the beautiful melody, makes it yearning, and like a painting.
It's like, that sounds like a painting to me.
And the the verses are Perfectly constructed, really tight rhyme scheme, set up in a really understandable, simple structure.
And then he takes that metaphor to the nth degree, but it works.
Like if you take...
These lyrics, how I wish you were mine again, my dear.
I'm on a sea of tears, a sea of heartbreak.
Like you're talking about not writing about themes, but when you really feel like the grief and the agony that comes after a breakup and that kind of love loss and the loneliness like this is what it feels like.
Yeah.
I mean, look at the first line.
The lights in the harbor don't shine for me.
Yeah.
It's just, it's perfect.
Tell me about anger in the writing process.
Are you thinking about my song Roses in the Fire?
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking about.
I wrote that song.
I was really angry.
And I did.
I mean it started with, you know, my then-husband had given me roses and I looked at him and I tossed him in the fireplace.
And I don't remember what he had done, but it was bad.
And...
I thought, even in that moment, I thought, that is a great line.
I throw your roses in the fire.
And then I just went with it.
It had the energy of real rage, those lyrics.
I haven't written a song that angry in a really long time.
Anger is one hell of a muse, though.
Yeah, it certainly is.
Outrage.
Because it's one of the emotions we're the most out of your head.
And you talk about writer's block.
So much of writer's block is just being in your head.
That's one definition of it.
Yeah.
And anger just strips you right out of that.
I mean, obviously you don't want to publish something immediately that you write when you're angry, but it's a generative emotion.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think you're right that it's kind of a wind that blows through your house.
And it's very clarifying.
Anger can be really clarifying.
Well, we were talking about worry and anxiety.
And who was it that said to you, don't stop working, just stop worrying?
I mean, I tend to worry.
I tend to be anxious.
And so if I've had writer's block for a few months, I worry about that.
You know, I have to constantly check myself, go, this has happened before, you know.
Or performance.
Like if I feel like I really screwed something up.
I wasn't great, I wasn't good, I wasn't even mediocre, my voice wasn't working properly, the audience wasn't.
Totally with me.
Whatever it was.
And then I worry about that.
And it's like my friend John Stewart said to me once.
He said, so you had a bad gig.
So what?
You want him to, like, re-hang the stars?
Get over it.
You know?
Go do your next gig.
So...
I mean, it is part of the beauty of live performance.
Is that it's that two hours, then it's over forever.
Right.
Cannot repeat it.
So my husband always says, if I come off stage and I go oh God, I didn't know this blah blah, whatever.
He goes, it's over.
Move on.
Don't stop working.
Just stop worrying.
How do you keep that as a mantra when you're feeling writer's block?
Um, well, like I said, I remind myself this has happened before.
I mean, after I had babies, like I had a baby, I wouldn't write for like two years.
It really freaked me out the first time.
And then the second baby.
I thought, oh you know, baby takes up all the creative energy and then it comes back.
How is writing from a place of grief different from anger?
Grief is just as clarifying as anger, if not more, in writing.
It has been for me anyway.
The kind of sharp purity of a feeling like that of profound loss Um, like there's no way out of it.
You know, you can talk yourself out of anxiety.
You can talk yourself out of worry.
You can talk yourself out of, you know, low self-esteem or whatever.
You can't talk yourself out of grief.
The contours of it are really there's.
It's a prism.
It's not one thing.
It's not just sad, it's not just being bereft, there's also anger and there's also a kind of weird exhilaration and um, like a storm that's moving through you.
And It may sound crass to say that there's information in there for art in those very moments, but there is.
And also, what else are you supposed to do with it if not write and create art?
Yeah.
I went to this show in Paris many years ago 20 years ago and an art show at the grand palais called melancholy and it was 800 years of death and madness and destruction in art hung chronologically whoa.
It was unbelievably great and you could see, like people, what people did with their fear and their devastation and their madness, like they put it on canvas.
And then you get to the Victorian era and it was very stylized and romanticized.
The Victorians love that stuff.
Yeah, it was really interesting how it changed over time.
And I was thinking, yeah, man, we've got to put it on paper and on canvas, or it can destroy us.
And you can feel it in music, right?
Because you can hear it in both the voice, and you can definitely in the voice when it feels like they're singing from a place of real grief.
Oh, my goodness.
I mean, sometimes you feel it more live when it's like really true.
They've been there and they're kind of going back to that place as they sing the music.
I don't even think that a singer like you're talking about has to mentally go back to the place.
I think it just lives in the voice once it's been experienced.
Ray Charles said you know you're a better singer at 50 than you are at 20 because your life shows up in your voice.
And I think that's absolutely true.
What's the influence of the Psalms?
Like, I know that you would read that for your dad.
And what's the line?
Lonely as a sparrow?
I'm the sparrow on the roof.
Yes.
Okay.
From Psalm 112, I think it is.
So talk to me about that.
Well, I was reading the Psalms to my dad in the last months of his life and his vision had failed, and that's what he wanted to hear.
And that was a really meaningful time and something to do with him.
And so, after he died, I went back to the Psalms to see what I had read to him, and that line jumped out at me.
I'm the sparrow on the roof.
So that was the first line of this song I wrote called The World Unseen.
And I was in the midst of a lot of grief.
I was consumed by grief.
And so the next line I wrote.
I took that line from the psalm and then I wrote I'm the list of everyone I have to lose.
Because that's how it felt like...
I felt there had been a lot of loss in my life up to that point, and there was more to come.
And I felt like, well, what is a person?
Do you just become a list of everyone you've lost, and that's what you carry with you?
Are you just these separate, specific arrangements of grief?
Is that what a person is?
Because if you haven't lost anyone, you will.
You know, it's a universal experience.
So, as I said, grief, there's a lot of information and a lot of contours and a lot of material for writing.
What's interesting about grief and anger is they're emotions that I think a lot of people are scared of.
And obviously, this is a show about writing.
And what I hear you saying is, hold on, hold on.
Those emotions are an invitation for discovery.
That's a very good way to put it.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote these letters about grief to his friends and family members who had lost someone, and they reached out to him and he wrote these magnificent letters back to the people and they were compiled into a book called The Dark Interval.
And I actually got to read the audio tape for The Dark Interval and really go deep into these letters.
And he never offered words of overt solace.
He gave invitations to live with the grief, to let it go like a storm through you, to follow it, to be respectful of the contours of it to, as you said, use it as an invitation to opening even further into your own life.
And I think you're right that people are very afraid of grief and afraid of anger and afraid of loss and all those things.
And it kind of keeps us frozen sometimes.
I think Nick Cave is an incredible example of someone who's taken tremendous loss and grief and used it to expand his heart and to connect with people and to expand his writing and his art.
Yeah, there's a boundlessness in both of those emotions.
And the word feels trite, but I think it's a good one.
It's like the content is all there.
Like the seeds are all there.
It's very fertile soil.
And just so often we just run away from it.
We run away from it.
And it just – it has me thinking just sitting here, of like what are the doors that are actually right in front of me that I'm just keeping shut in my life?
Am I brave enough to actually keep doing what I'm saying?
You know, like, is there a point where I'm going to go, no, that is not information.
It's too much.
I don't.
But at the same time, I don't think I have a choice at this point.
I'm a writer.
Like, I wouldn't know how to organize my life without writing about it.
How important is bravery and courage in songwriting?
Like, I always think of bravery and courage as, like, important.
You're a journalist, you know, you're going out, stand up for what's right, baby.
But, like, how does it show up in songwriting?
Well, it's not like I'm on the front lines feeding children in refugee camps, you know, while there are bombs dropping.
Right.
So it sounds...
Self-aggrandizing and kind of pretentious to talk about the courage required to write songs.
I think it requires courage to just get over myself.
How?
You know, like...
Just shut up and do it.
Stop tormenting myself with all of these reasons why, and reasons I don't, and reasons I should and reasons I can't.
Just do it.
One of the challenges that you had is you have to basically figure out who you are in the spotlight right.
It's very different for most people.
And there are two questions that you talk about in the memoir that I thought were very fruitful.
I'd love to hear you talk about them.
One of them is, who are you apart from your parents?
And the other one is, what do you do best in the world?
And be curious to hear you talk about those things in the context of writing.
Hmm.
Who am I apart from my parents?
First, it's taken me a long time to find out who I am in context of my parents.
You know to understand that my mother's discipline and her sense of routine and respect of routine and appearances, although troubling at times, was something that I retained, and how much is useful and how much is kind of damaging to me.
So yeah, her sense of routine and discipline is really helpful to me.
My dad, his work ethic was really, really tight.
He had a deep work ethic, respect for his audience, sensitivity to the suffering of others.
All of those things have been important to me and things that I think that I've assimilated as well.
Apart from them, Yeah, my mother's focus on appearances is really not helpful.
So I need to constantly be aware to not go there.
My dad could be very self-destructive.
I am not self-destructive.
So I toyed with it when I was younger, but that's something I am apart from.
And...
You know, I don't really have to live up to their expectations.
They're not around anymore.
And that's all in my head.
So who am I apart from that?
Would it be nice to not feel like I have to work so hard all the time?
Improve myself all the time?
I mean, that's part of my own little torment that I deal with.
Yeah.
What was the second question?
Apart from your parents and then...
What do you do best in the world?
Oh, what do you do best in the world?
I mean, are we putting writing away?
No, I want to talk about writing.
I'm like finding that as a writer.
Well, that's what I do best in the world, I think.
I think that that is my gig.
For whatever reason, that's my gig.
I'm a good writer.
But I also, I'm a good friend, you know, and I'm a good mom and I'm a good wife.
I do those things really well in the world, too.
And I'm curious.
Maybe my curiosity is the thing I do best.
How do you think about that voice and the things that stay stable over the course of a career versus the things that change?
Like you know, i put on the wheel the first song.
I'm like whoa, where is this the same person?
You go back into spotify or like is this the same artist?
Russ and cash.
Oh yeah okay, guess so, but like that's a new, that's new you, and so there is an evolution.
Yeah, But also it was fun, because then I'd go down the this is Roseanne Gash and like I try to kind of guess the year.
And sometimes I was like, oh, yeah.
And sometimes I was like 20 years off.
That's so funny.
Well, I mean, part of that is just a function of aging.
You know I mean.
Your voice drops as you age and you lose some top notes, but you might gain a couple on the bottom.
I mean, listen to Mavis Staples when she was young.
And now it's like she's, you know, it's two octaves difference just about.
So part of that is just aging.
But I...
You know, part of it also is a full life lived, either well or not lived well.
And part of it is refinement, I think.
What does that mean to you?
Well, discovering more who I really am as a singer.
Like losing any kind of ideas of what I should do or the pretense or the insecurity or, you know.
And then, as that goes along, then also i lose those three notes on top because i'm older and can't hit those anymore, so i have to figure out something else to do.
I mean, you know, i live with my voice.
I live with my voice on the page and i live with my voice physically, and they both changed a lot over time.
Yeah, I think I look out more as a writer than I used to.
I used to be very close circle.
One thing that's cool about your music is you can almost just read the lyrics without listening to the song.
Yeah, I mean, that's how I schooled myself in the beginning, is that the lyrics were central.
You wanted to have them exist on their own, as you said.
It's why I copied down Dylan's lyrics, you know?
It's like, this exists as a thing apart from the music.
I mean, it doesn't really, though, does it?
Songwriting, by definition, has to have a melody.
Right.
So it's not poetry.
It's not a poor cousin of poetry.
It's its own thing.
I'm still struck by the partial lyric thing of like how you get a little string of words and it becomes a portal into something bigger.
It's like you find the thing that then creates the momentum.
It's like, boom, I found it.
I found it.
Okay, let's go kind of explore.
And it just becomes this like avenue for discovery, that you can kind of start walking and somehow there's enough energy and momentum on that path.
And then the rest with work unfolds.
Yeah.
Well, it's the same with painting.
Like I said, you know that thing, that's the inspiration.
That's really thrilling and you get it started and then you hit a wall.
And then you step back, go for a walk, do something else.
Come back a day later, a week later, a month later.
Something bubbles up again.
Yeah, I know how to get through here.
And then eventually you see all the way home, you know?
I mean, it's the same process.
I know there are some people who write like something in 10 minutes.
In fact, there have been a couple of my songs that I did like that, that it came in 10 minutes and there was very little editing.
And those are freebies.
Those don't happen that often.
Yeah.
But yeah, when I was painting, I saw the process was the same.
The inspiration, the hitting a wall, the struggle, the opening, the ending.
How did learning to paint change how you see, how you look?
I don't know that I ever learned to paint, but I did it.
Well, that's interesting because most songs start visually for me.
Like, I wrote this song, I Was Watching You.
And the way the song began is.
I was just sitting at the piano playing some chords and I saw headlights on a road.
And...
Just kept playing.
And then the first verse came.
Headlights on a Texas road.
Hank Williams on the radio.
A church wedding.
They spent all they had.
Now the deal is done to become mom and dad.
I thought, what is this about?
And then I saw it was about the child watching from above as the parents become their parent.
And then the parent watching from above. after they leave.
And that was a beautiful experience to write that song.
But the point being is that most songs begin visually for me.
I'm very moved by this idea of making something and being intrigued by it, not fully understanding it.
Yeah, me too.
That is the beauty and the mystery, isn't it?
I never realized that.
I never appreciated it until this conversation.
About not knowing where you're going with something, a piece of work?
But even making something and being like, you just said I wrote that.
And then I was like, what does that mean?
That's.
I don't know, because I've written, you know, mostly prose in my life and that doesn't happen at all in prose, but it happens in poems and it happens in songwriting.
Yeah, it does.
I bet it happens in prose and you just haven't paid attention.
You might be right.
You might be right, but it's core to songs.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
One song that I set out knowing what I wanted to do, this song I wrote called The Killing Fields.
I knew I wanted to write a song about lynchings in Arkansas.
It was during the summer that George Floyd was murdered.
That was just such an intense summer experience.
And I think the veil got lifted for a lot of white people about white privilege and what the depth of what that really means.
Not that I pretend to know the depth of what it totally means, but the veil did get lifted a bit.
So I wanted to write about Arkansas, where my dad was from. because I had the year before gone to Montgomery, Alabama to the lynching memorial.
And, um, I was so deeply moved by that, and it kind of started this thought process.
And then that summer happened and I knew I wanted to write about it and I knew it wanted to be in the form of an Appalachian narrative ballad where there were no choruses.
I took up the beginning of a verse that I had for another song that I had not finished and I saw that I could twist that a little bit and have the opening be in present time, go deep into the past and then come back up into present time.
So it had this kind of bell curve to it.
So I could see it, but I didn't know how to get there yet.
And then it took quite a while to go through that and get to the end.
I usually don't have those kind of structural pictures in my head when I start, but that's one that I did.
But still, like we were saying, there was still the mystery of how am I going to get from this back up to here?
And then I could see what the last line would be.
What we were then is not who we are now.
But then how could I explain all that in the middle and kind of parse it out with images?
Right.
Well, the other thing that distinguishes songwriting from prose is listen to your favorite songs a hundred times.
I've never read an essay a hundred times.
Right.
Yeah, I guess that's true, right?
Well, that's something to do about the musicality of it.
And now music.
You know what music does to your cells and bloodstream and nervous system.
You know it's different.
I mean, it's music.
Yeah, but even poetry is sort of repeated in the same way.
I've been thinking about this line from Macbeth.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time.
And all these yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle, life is but a walking shadow.
A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying death nothing nothing, and like you, just.
You know, it's with poetry too.
It's like okay what okay what what, what?
And it's once again.
It's like over and over and over.
It's circular, it's rhythmic, and all of a sudden it becomes a part of you and you just keep stirring on.
It just keeps revealing itself to you.
You know Well, that's Shakespeare.
Yeah.
He's pretty good.
Yeah.
He's pretty good.
You're talking well.
The musicality of Shakespeare is like a whole other conversation, but the music is what hooks you back in.
If you listen to that song you love a hundred times.
You know because there's something about music in the brain.
You know, it's like the thing that survives when everything else goes away.
Yeah.
Like all the Alzheimer's patients who remember songs and not their children's names.
You know, music is still there.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
Even kids, it's like the first art form that you come to love.
And, you know, my grandpa passed.
I asked my aunt about it.
And she was with him.
And he knew he was going to die in like five minutes.
And he asked her to play a specific song by Mozart.
Beautiful.
It was like he needed to die with a certain song.
It was like he didn't need to be in any particular place with any particular person.
He just needed a certain song.
That's beautiful.
To see him out.
Yeah.
We all need certain songs to usher us into different phases of life, don't we?
I mean, I know, when I was getting divorced there were certain pieces of music I listened to over and over and over, just to help me do it.
Huh.
Thank God for that, that we can find songs to usher us into different phases of our life.
Totally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Totally.
What is the difference between a love song that's just totally trite and cliche and one that's real and true?
Well, I can't say that for the entire human race.
I mean, I know what it's... Yeah, okay, tell me about it for you.
For me...
For me, if I sense an element of trying too hard, or pretension or themes or earnestness that seems really misplaced or something, then it doesn't move me.
But a love song that is multifaceted and not just about one thing but that encompasses more of a prism of what the love is about.
Those things really move me.
Can't be too sweet.
You know, like Nick, speaking of Nick Cave again, Into My Arms, killer love song.
And it starts out with, I don't believe in an interventional God.
That's the first line you go, what?
Interventionist.
Excuse me?
What?
I don't believe in an interventionist God.
And then he takes us in this journey.
But I know that you do.
And, you know, if there is such a God, I just want to send you into my arms.
So beautiful.
Whoa.
So loving.
I want to ask you about dreams because you talk a lot about dreams.
You had that dream about the dilettante not being a dilettante where you come face to face with art.
What happened?
Well, this was in the 80s.
I was making –
I think I was in the middle of making an album, yeah.
And I had this dream that I went to a party And Linda Ronstadt was sitting on a sofa talking to this man.
Now remember I told you that, Linda Ronstadt, that thing she said I wrote down and I carried in my wallet that you have to refine your skills to support your instincts.
So I go in my dream, Linda is talking to this man on a sofa, and I knew that his name was Arkt.
As old man, I didn't know why I knew that, but I knew it.
So I went and sat next to Linda on the sofa and I tried to insinuate myself into the conversation.
This is in the dream.
In the dream.
This is all in the dream.
I tried to insinuate myself in the conversation.
And he didn't, he just looked at me coldly and said, we don't respect dilettantes.
And then he went back to the conversation with Linda.
And I was humiliated and I woke up from the dream and I was really shaken.
And I realized that I had been dabbling, that I had the ability to go much deeper in my writing and that I hadn't done it.
And I made a commitment to myself right then.
Wasn't going to be a dilettante.
That's a wrap.
That's a wrap.
That's a good last line, I guess.
Yeah.
