Joe Henry and Mike Reid

30:11Because every living thing, you know, Bruce, every living thing has a pressure exerted on it by simply existing. And who we are physically, what we look like, what we say, do we have tattoos, do we have no tattoos, is a response to that pressure. And Joe's people in his songs are often confused, but looking for light. Always looking for light. And so that's me. I think confused and looking for light, I hadn't thought of that to this moment. That perfectly describes me even now at this point in life. Well, and it describes a lot of the songs as well on this album. Well, I think so. I think so. I hope, look, I'm not convinced the music that I found for these songs is up to those words.

31:05And I won't be. I can make a piece with it, and I can accept what's there. And I hope that the music does not get in the way. They tend to be very protective of Joe's words. And yeah, would I like to go out there? Sure. But then there's the composer obscuring the words. And I don't want to do that. I don't know if you've ever listened to Copland's Emily Dickinson song cycle or Samuel Barber songs, particularly Sure and The Shining Night, a great James A.G. and Barber being a great composer, but it's so in support of those beautiful, beautiful words. And, you know, I'm old now and I'm confronting my limitations.

31:49And so anything that gives me a chance to maybe exceed them or at least bang my head against them, I'm going to do that. It's interesting you mentioned how the music interacts with the words. Because when I sort of re-listen to the album as a whole, they're piano ballads. and I almost started to think of this album could have like an old 19th century. Oh, wonderful. You know, piano ballads cover. And particularly some of the phrases you used to introduce the songs almost sound like a kind of Stephen Foster. Oh, that's what a thing to say. Bruce. But then the lyrics are not moon, June. Yeah, what a nice spoon.

32:32That was never the intent, you know, that was not the intent. but I love you. Because look, to Joe's point earlier, we must, no matter if it's a little, you know, simple little three-chord country song, if it's a great blues song, if it's a Joe Henry lyric, a Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop poem, that kind of work is asking us to open up the bags of our lives on it. What does it fire within me? Joe's never sent me a lyric, Bruce, that it didn't fire something in me. Now, could I explain that to you at this moment? Probably not. Or I could and take up, be a lot of hot air, a lot of gas. We don't need that.

33:13But Joe's never sent me words that didn't fire something in me, a relationship to with the character, because I don't see, Joe, you should speak to this. I don't see Joe necessarily. To Joe's point, you cannot put two words together without it meaning something so it comes out of joe henry he is he is the vehicle through which it passes so it's going to be but i don't necessarily joe think your songs are all you i mean i'm thinking my no no no i could count on less than a single hand the times that i think i've written something that you know where i am in some way the character actually and yet let me interrupt you, Joe, because Bruce, I have an obsession right now with a Joe Henry song, and it's only going to get worse, I know.

34:03A song on this album? No. Oh, it's the Short Man's Room album. Yeah. And it's the song Short Man's Room. Because I am so passionately in love with the character in that song. And what do I love, Joe, what do I love about that is that it came through Joe. So, you know, it's not wholly, you're not totally not on the fringes of that. Oh, I don't say that I'm not involved. Yeah, all right. You know, I'm just saying I might just be the ring bearer, but I'm not necessarily the bridegroom of the story. And look, I won't pretend that I think that, oh, I'm just visited upon and I don't have any relationship, but I'm not conscious of that.

34:51And if I was conscious of writing about my own life, I think I would pull back, not because I'm afraid of revealing too much or my privacy or whatever. I just feel like my personal experience is too finite a space in which to launch any real discovery. You know, I've thought of that a lot, that, you know, in the 70s when I was a young person obsessed with songs and trying to figure out how they came into being. And it was the singer-songwriter movement that seemed to suggest the more honest you were to your real life, that's how good the song was. And in that regard, I think honesty is completely overrated.

35:38Or what are you being honest to? My own personal life is such a finite space to explore, but I take the same lens and point it out. I'm still witnessing through the lens of my own life experience. The goal isn't, you know, not like Cage, who was looking for ways to create music that had no trace of his ego in it, just to see what that would sound like. I'm not pretending that that's my goal. I just don't want to be limited by my own imagination. I don't want to be limited by the own, just the small experiences that, certainly when I was a young writer, that I'd had. I didn't think I'd lived enough life to write about.

36:20But my desire to reach out and create character, like Fellini used to say, I just create a character and find out what he or she has to tell me. That's how I felt about songs. Like, I want to begin a song in whatever way I can and then see what it does to me. See what it's asking me to do in service of it. Not in service of me. How can I be in service to it? And how can it tell a story that's bigger than I am? Are there any parts of you that you think launch some of these songs? Sure. I mean, I was just telling this on stage the other night. There's a song called Stray Bird. And I frequently don't know where a beginning of a song comes from.

37:07It just seems to be there like somebody sees a ladybug on them. There it is. You want to deal with it or not. In this case, the song Stray Bird, my wife Melanie and I were visiting my sister-in-law in the Hamptons on Long Island a couple of summers ago and watching our young nieces in the pool at dusk. and I just happened to look up and notice that the side of her house was on fire. The chef had left the heating grill too close to the cedar shingled house. And I look up, the house is on fire. Not a big fire, but was asking for attention. I grabbed somebody else's jacket. It didn't need to be mine.

37:53Took out yours immediately. Yeah. And put the fire out. Now, I have this wonderful young niece, and I knew that she was writing poetry in school. I think she was probably about nine in that moment. So I challenged her. I said, hey, Stella, let's both write a poem about what happened tonight and read it to each other at breakfast in the morning. Now, Stella didn't do the assignment, but I did. And it got me started. It wasn't the whole lyric, because then it went somewhere else where I wanted to make reference to her in some kind of way. not her, I just wanted to use her name by way of connecting it to her.

38:31But it does start, you know, the house caught fire just after dark on a cold night in July. That is precisely what happened. And that's what put that song in motion. My reaction to that moment and realizing that that wasn't the biggest drama happening in the story. That's just a place that came out of a real life experience. Not writing about myself, I'm writing something about my reaction to an actual moment. Okay, but then the song goes on, and I quote. This is like a 60 Minutes interview suddenly. Yeah, I'm all here for it. The man I was just yesterday is scarcely here to stand. His every sway now stripped away, the bird that leaves my hand.

39:16Oh, I know where this is going. And I can't right now say that you're wrong, because I hear what you hear. But was that a conscious thought in my mind? absolutely not and had i been aware of how potentially revealing that phrase is uh hats off to you for coming up with it so quickly i would have steered around that fucking thing with everything i had probably but when i saw it later i was like oh well this is 60 minutes it's like i'm showing you internal company documents yeah and you're like well i'm not sure that's No explanation for that. I'm sure that's not my signature. Yeah. That came through another part of the company.

39:57It's just such a beautiful, I mean, sway does a lot of work there. Yeah, it does. Because sway also means power, influence. Yeah. And it also means your balance. Yeah. And a bird flying away, which would seem almost weightless, how it would affect that. Yeah, and I love words that both are specific enough to be committed, but that have more than one way to be heard. So you're not nailing anything down to the floor. You're not limiting anybody's response to it. There's only one way in and out of this house. I try to leave as many doors and windows open as possible so that people can enter them however they might.

40:36I might not know what's the most significant part of any song. I know where I think the drama is, I think, when I've written something. But I frequently find out that people have really other responses than I do to it as a finished piece. And I would never suggest that my interpretation, once it's done, has any more relevance than somebody else's. Okay, well, we're going to go from the Hamptons to Pennsylvania, where you grew up. Tell me when music first entered your life. Oh, wonderful. Wonderful question. My grandmother, my father's mother, we grew up next to her, right next to the house. And her mother, my great grandmother, lived on a farm, oh, maybe seven, six miles away.

41:27and uh uh there there was an old on my grandmother's sun porch there was an old upright you know a lot of the keys didn't work but i remember bruce my first memory of life is uh probably about three when i was three sitting on that bench banging on the keys and then my great grandmother when she got very old and needed to be cared for they moved her down from the farm and i would play for her in that sun porch. And what I would play for her was really, I think, you hear a lot of things, you know, the Cage's point, you know, about four minutes and 33 seconds is his idea is that there is no such thing as silence.

42:09You know, you hear a lot of things. But intentional listening, you know. So to play for my great-grandmother, who would sit there in the summer, heat wrapped in blankets, you know, due to circulation, hymns. And I think the first music in my life that I became aware of intentionally listening to were the hymns in church. I loved, not necessarily praise hymns, I loved those songs of surrender where people say, you know, I'm lost, I'm broken. Where do I go from here? and I think in many ways that sort of those that music informs even to this day and what was the what was the church what denomination it wasn't it was just a yeah I would love to be able to sit here and tell you it was baptist and we were rolling in the aisles but no it was an old methodist just a methodist denomination and the whatever the hymns were I always I always tell young writers, they say, well, you know, in this climate, why write?

43:12Well, you got to get it into the world. Get it into the world. John Newton got off his slave ship. I thought he was a captain of it. I don't think he was, but he was on a slave ship and he had an epiphany about what was going on. And he went home and he prepared a sermon for the following Sunday. And during that sermon, preparing that sermon, he wrote the words, amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved to wretch like me now and i always tell young writers you cannot tell me john newton thought well in 250 years the whole world will know those words no you got to get it into the world you know get it but i heard that i just i love those that kind of music and then when i was 13 years old my father was worked in the i think it was a minor when he was younger and then he worked in the job to have in those days when i was a kid was in the pennsylvania railroad he worked in the railroad mom sold shoes when my brothers and I were able to take care of ourselves.

44:12And I rode my bike across town. I was about 13 to a dear buddy, Dave Barry. And he played me Van Cliburn and Fritz Reiner's recording of the Beethoven Emperor. And I had no idea in 13 years of living on this earth that such a sound existed. So those two things, I think, were things that kind of, the hymns were a gradual thing. The Beethoven, the Emperor and the birth of my children, I think are the only things that I can say, changed me in a moment, really, that made me, made me, I missed the experience Joe had, you know, being touched by the people he was. I was very slow to, you know, for example, I would be lying to you.

44:59I was very slow to Dylan. I was very slow to the Beatles. You know, they were up and almost broken up by the time I discovered Let It Be Your Abbey Road, you know. Do you ever see the movie 2001, Stanley Kubrick? Sure. You know, the scene of the apes around the monolith, right? And they're not sure they're compelled into it and they're frightened of it. that's what music was for me i was drawn into it my i had no real natural ability in it my abilities were in that were in the physical world were in the athletic world but i was so compelled and i must say you know the physical comes and goes as you well know i'm towards that dissipating time but the the thing being compelled into music has only gotten stronger and continues you said you were compelled towards it but afraid of it what were you afraid of i was overwhelmed i didn't know what that was i didn't know and then i went from the emperor i remember back in those days they had atlantic atlantic and pacific tea company the amp supermarkets first classical record i ever bought was a rock malnath second symphony for 29 cents in a bin there and i brought that home then there was a richard rogers uh victory at sea which is sort of a hybrid theater pop-ish classical.

46:21So it was just a gradual discovery of that music. All the while, when the pop, you know, there was a record by the Walker Brothers that I love, early Elvis. I can't say that I am or was an Elvis fan, but those early Elvis records. I remember, Joe, you're not old enough to remember. Was it Bobby Darin? Splish Splash you guys old enough and the Danny and the Juniors record called At the Hop and along with Beethoven and Bach then I was later on 20th century but I loved pop music I just loved it but then how did you start lessons yeah I started when I was my uncles and dad hauled that upright up the hill to our house and put it in our house.

47:15Got a tuner to come out and get the thing working. It would be very daunting listening to Van Cliburn and Brock Monosecond and not knowing how you... No, that was apes around the monolith. I was an ape around the monolith saying, what is this? I could put my hands on the keyboard, but I mean, equating it with what I was hearing? Now, we haven't mentioned that you, I'm pretty sure, are the first broken record guest to have played in the NFL. I always say, listen, I can't believe I get to work with Joe Henry. I can't. Literally even now, Joe thinks I'm Birmingham. I don't mean to. And I always say, Joe and I, when I say things to Joe, I always, what do I say to you, Joe?

48:00Try not to take this as a compliment. Yes. Because I don't mean it. I mean it, Bruce Moore's statement of fact. How about this? Try not to take this a compliment. You played for the Cincinnati Bengals. You know, yeah, I said, I won't say what I was going to say. What I was going to say was going to sound mean. But even though I'm working with Joe Henry in this opportunity, I am the absolute, I know unquestionably, the greatest pianist ever produced by the NFL. Yeah. So I can, you know, I may hear from that now, right? Yeah. Someone's got to come out now. Yeah. There's a defensive end. He's the kid who's so dominant for the Cleveland Browns.

48:43Oh, right. I can't remember his name off the top of my... But he's in love with poetry. He writes poetry. I've not read any of it. I don't know, but I know he loves it and he writes poetry. And you played for two years at Penn State. I think two... You guys were undefeated those years. My red shirt junior and senior year, I was red shirt. I had tore up a knee in a national wrestling tournament. So I was held out for a year. And then, yeah, we were undefeated in 68, 69. Did the, I guess I should ask you, you played for Joe Paterno back when he was starting. My sophomore year, this is, I'm going to date myself here.

49:25My sophomore year was Joe's first year as head coach. Wow. What was he like in the first year as a head coach? Very, very, very. He had that Italian, fiery Italian temperament. And I lived in fear of him, not because I couldn't fill his my hands with his little throat and that'd be the end of that it's because I feared disappointing him we sense and I have buddies I talked to an old buddy Steve Smear today we had a sense when you're a kid you don't know these things but we had a sense we were in the presence of a unique human being and we had no problem having faith in what he was telling us to do and that was the beginning it became something else apparently of course when it grows so monolithic um it's very easy to lose one's self and all that and that's a long conversation about you know what but but in the beginning joe was young he had been there as an assistant for 15 years i think you could tell when he when he took over that he was ready for that job.

50:31He had his own ideas about how to make this thing work. One last break and we'll be back with Mike Reed and Joe Henry. Do you ever wish your office felt better? Buzzy Space designs furniture and acoustic solutions that make workspaces more comfortable, more creative, and more fun. If you need a quiet corner to focus or a collaborative space to brainstorm, Buzzy Space has you covered. Head to Buzzy.space to check out their innovative solutions and make your office a place people actually love coming to. That's B-U-Z-Z-I dot space. You've said that football made you depressed, even in college. I look back on my life now.

51:16I'm at the age where you do an assessment of what your life has been. And I think the last time I loved playing that game, I was in high school. I think you've told me the same. Have I, Joe? By the time that it was a profession for you that you knew you did it well, but there wasn't a passion for it. It could have been the professionalism. Joe's son, Levon, is a—can I say, Joe, or maybe you should talk about Levon? He's a unique carbon life form, this boy. And I don't even want to use the word talent, Bruce. He's such a, well, look at me, I'm struggling. But Lee has said that he worries about pursuit, life, and music for fear that the economic parts of it will disturb what he is going to try to do or find.

52:11Am I saying that right, Joe? Well, pretty much, you know, Levon has said he's concerned that doing it as a business might damage his love for music. And I'm sure that his witness of my career, which has been both incredibly rewarding and also, you know, difficult. I've spent a lot of my working life out on the margins. and I think Levon has witnessed both my devotion to what I do and also observed that it has been extraordinarily hard for me at times and the difficulty has not necessarily been about I can't write a song. My difficulty has been the people who I connect myself with in hopes of carrying these songs out to whatever life they may have beyond me And I'm not surprised at all that he has looked at the business of it and wanted to protect as sacred his relationship to music because it's easy to get demoralized.

53:19He certainly has seen me demoralized. I'm not trying to pretend as if my life has been so extraordinarily hard, but my life in music has not been made easy either by the way the business is constructed nor the kind of songs I choose to pursue. Though Mike and I quote this to each other all the time. Rob Reiner recently made this wonderful film documentary about Albert Brooks. And at one point, he's telling a story to Rob that his manager had said to him at some point, Albert, you always take the hard road. And Albert said, the problem is, you think I see two roads. and that's how I feel about my working life.

54:05It's not like I've chosen the harder path. I'm walking the only path that I see and in fact it's a path that I can't see. What does the Tao say? The path that can be named is not the path. If you recognize it as a path, you're probably on somebody else's. It's not like I've chosen to be difficult or I've chosen to be an acquired taste or all the polite ways people talk about music that is not exactly what we would call popular, and I'm not disparaging myself. I've not really learned how to fully monetize what it is that I do. It's not a natural fit for everybody, and I understand that. I grew up listening to people who were not natural fits for everybody.

54:51I was really accustomed to going to high school and being in love with music and expecting that nobody that I knew would have any idea about it. So I've just always understood that the people that I held most sacred were somehow some kind of secret because I had it and nobody else did. Not that I didn't think that I was good at it, but I think about the old quote from Mark Twain, to be good is to be lonesome. And that made sense to me when I heard it Because when I was doing the work that I thought was the best work I could do, it was frequently the things that were the least resonant for other people.

55:35When I was on a label that was owned by Disney, when I made the record called Scar, I got called into the president's office who would never be paying any attention to somebody like me in that moment. I got called into Bob Cavallo's office. It was like a scene from a movie. He closed the door with a remote control. You know, I walk in and this big mahogany door just slams behind me as if, you know, as if by a will. And he's just heard this song that I've recorded with Ornette Coleman. And he said, you're not really going to put this on a record. I said, put it on a record? It's my opus. It opens the record.

56:17And he said, you know, we got into a little bit of a scrap about it. and he thought I was being difficult. He thought it was the most puzzling thing imaginable. Was that the Richard Pryor song? Yes. Yeah. He also made that difficult. He said, you know, you can't use Richard Pryor's name in a song title without his permission. I said, sure I can. He's a public figure. And by the way, on the same record, there's a song called Edgar Bergen. You're not saying, you know, get Candy Bergen's permission or it's over. But they were so afraid of Richard as a volatile figure, even though at that moment, Richard was strapped into a wheelchair up in Encino, unable to speak.

57:00But the idea that I was going to somehow transgress and open them up to an altercation with the Richard Pryor family, they said, I couldn't do it. They said, you have three choices. You can leave the song off the record, which I wasn't willing to do. You can change the title. I said, I can't. That tells you how to hear it. I never mentioned Richard in the song. I'm singing in first person. Or you can get his permission. The path of least resistance was the last one. And through some wild serendipity that my life is full of, which you don't have time for right now, I found Richard. And it led to me writing a screenplay, being asked by him and his wife to write a screenplay based on his life.

57:44And then when that fell apart as an enterprise, my brother and I wrote a book about him. It put all kind of things in motion. A great book about it. Thank you. Insisted that my only choice was to find Richard. They didn't know what they were doing for me in that regard. As my friend Alan Toussaint used to say to me, here you are off the beaten path again. I wasn't trying to live over there. That's just where I could afford the housing. I do want to talk a little bit because I'm interested very much in how you wrote melodies we haven't mentioned probably the song you're best known for is I Can't Make You Love Me which is first recorded by Bonnie Raitt and since it's been recorded by everybody I think it's been called Dawn Was called it the best song ever written so it's up there best song ever written Joe come on you got a comment to make on that What's that the equivalent?

58:43Declaring something the best song ever written is like what? Well, I wish I could hand it to you. I'm just somebody who stands in that line. I think it's a towering achievement. And the reason I think so is purely because you can listen to how flexible it is. Listen to Bonnie's version. Listen to Bon Iver's version. Listen to Prince. I was just saying to Mike in the cab. We were talking about it. Listening to Prince do that song, it's like watching. a grown man ain't candy. Just devouring it. And the flexibility of that. There's nothing about any of those versions. There's not one of those that doesn't pierce me.

59:24Nancy Wilson. Great version. That's one of my favorites. But it's what the great film directors might typically say to an actor. I don't need you to be overly emotive. Just deliver the words. This is a great script. Let it do the work. You just have to be here and let it move through you. I think this is one of those songs. Not that it doesn't invite people who can really dig into a song and take it somewhere. But you have to do very little, I think, for that song to put you in its crosshairs. Whatever the famous line is, we all long for somebody who longs for us. Yeah. I mean, it gets down to something that's that fundamental.

1:00:09And what does Tom Waits say? You know, I love beautiful melodies telling me terrible things. Ha ha. You know, it references something that is heart-wrenching. And it does so carried along by this sublime melody. You know, I can't imagine any great singer who wouldn't want to take it on. It's interesting when I was re-listening to it and listening again to this album in the light of it. is it's interesting how the melody is kind of stretched across the harmony. The melody is actually, and it's a slow song, but it's quite syncopated. Yeah. In a way that's sort of unexpected for that kind of song.

1:00:46Well, look, I'm thinking of, I saw a piece on William Goldman. And he said, he asked Sondheim in a conversation, Steve, when you write, do you know what you're doing? And Sondheim said, didn't even hesitate. He said, absolutely not. No. If I knew what I was doing, I would have never written a bad song. And I have done that. So look, if I knew when that music came out, that came out after, that was a different song for months and months. My friend Alan Shamblin and I worked on it. But when that particular phrase came out, you know

1:01:32I didn't even think of those I had two lines I can't make you love me you can't make your heart feel something if you don't you can't make your heart feel something that it won't and I wrote it as Mike would write as an uptempo bluegrass song and then we couldn't get any more lines And so I would put it away and we would go at something else. So that's all to say, Bruce, that if I knew what I was doing, I would have written 10 more of those. I managed to be musically out of the way and allow something to happen and then say, okay, let's continue to pull that thread. It must be said, though, that sometimes knowing what to do is knowing how to surrender to a song's emerging authority.

1:02:21You know, I have a dear friend, the poet who lives in the Bay Area, Jane Hirshfield. And everybody who knows me has heard me repeat this because it was so important to me when she wrote it to me in an email one day. She said, Joseph, don't ever forget that the poem has an intelligence the poet does not possess. But you have to know a fair amount, understand the fundamental truth of that. the song knows something that I don't know. And that's not me claiming to be some kind of mystic character that just gets visited upon like nobody else does. I'm just saying I recognize over and over again that when something is in motion, I'm attending to it, I'm involved, and I'm committed, but I know that I'm not the driver.

1:03:16You guys are determined not to let me demystify songwriting, aren't you? Because it's my whole job as a journalist. Bruce, I feel so badly for you. Yeah, you should. Because the great mysteries are not to be dispelled. They're to be abided. Hey, take your best shot. I'm going to dispel a small mystery then. Because I noticed you use a technique on a couple songs here that I've seen you, Well, particularly Walk on Faith, your song. That was a hit for you, right? Yeah, it was. I told you he did research. Wow, Bruce. Yeah, it was. I had a marvelous life going on as a little songwriter. People were cutting songs.

1:03:59I had two little kids. And Willie Nelson recorded a song called There You Are. It's called There You Are. And Bob Montgomery, the late, wonderful, the late, great Bob Montgomery, was that it was Columbia then, before it became Sony, said, boy, I love Willie's record. I love that song, but I really like your demo. Why don't you make a record? And I went, well, okay. Well, that's no way to make a record. So I tripped over myself, and the next thing I know, I'm leaving my family, flying down the highway on a bus with a bay full of T-shirts with my picture on it and wondering, okay, what is this? Let's accept the adventure.

1:04:45But I was too young and too stupid and too close to really understand accepting the adventure. Have you got any of those T-shirts in medium? I do. Yeah. I do. They're still in the canon. He's going to fire into the crowd tonight. Well, let me talk about the song because you do something in that song, which is, and I think it relates to your love of rhyme, but I love that there's a little delay before. And the last line is, I'm sorry, trust in love. Trust in love, yeah. Right. So that's not really, first of all, I got into, speaking of Sondheim, because he was fierce about perfect rhymes. And I know you invoke Rodney.

1:05:30Yeah. That's one of the things he tells the people at camp, right? Yeah, he's very much a stickler for really clean, hard rhyme. And I'm not in the least. You're not, Joe? No, no. I think sometimes the half rhyme is just a complete delight. There's something very human about the near miss that I'm just sort of in love with. and I'm probably, you know, here I am being more revealing about myself than maybe my songs have ever been. But I just, you know, it just seems so human to me. I don't feel that I'm a lazy writer. I've been accused of that by a particular peer of mine, and I mean in a loving way, because I don't write to a strict meter like a Burt Bacharach song, where every word matches a value of a note.

1:06:35I come out of much more of a blues tradition where if the right word is, if the right phrase has a few too many syllables, if there's not a really smart way to make that work any other way, you sing something as a pickup note, that's perfectly fair game. And I would hate to think, Joe, that you would encumber your words by saying, no, this has to be a perfect rhyme. It could be because of the place you go down into where your lyrics takes one. I can give you a couple that I find enormously satisfying. Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. Nothing's going to harm you, not while I'm around. Demons are prowling everywhere nowadays.

1:07:24days, I'll send them howling, I don't care, I got ways. Now, I find that enormously satisfying. But the meaning of what's being said there is pretty much on the surface of things. It's nothing to really, nothing to figure out, nothing for the rhyme to obscure. There's another Lorenz Hart, my romance, doesn't need a castle rising in Spain, or a dance to a constantly surprising refrain. I find that very satisfying. But those meetings of those two things are very on the surface. You don't have to go down with a light and try to investigate. So in that sense, Joe, I mean, I think perfect rhyme is something to shoot for.

1:08:12Sondheim was a stickler because he came from that in the old theater days. That was the tradition. and by the way in the walk on faith you know bruce it's a kind of sloppy rhyme really up with love you know it's not never give up it's not the rhyme so much as as the pause before the last oh that's interesting that that it's what you do with it and i you did it a couple times on on this one and i i think it makes the last rhyme so much more satisfying if there's that Oh, that's nice. That's a beautiful observation on your part. And very meaningful to me. When a suspended moment of pause is the hook.

1:08:52That's the hook, yeah. Sometimes that is really, really the case. Whereas the absence of something that is the thing that you can't take your ear off of. Right. Waiting for that moment of suspension. And then there's finally a relief of that tension. And that's the payoff. It's not in a word. It's not in the concept. It's in an articulation of suspension and release. I've taken up far too much of your time. I was going to ask about just about every song on this album. And, you know, City of Light, that beautiful line. And I'd love to know when this occurred to you. Now is the prize all along. You know, I'm sure that was a moment where, you know, the beautiful thing about writing intentionally in rhyme, and it's interesting, you know, I read a lot of poetry, but I don't read rhyming poetry, and yet I write and rhyme all the time.

1:09:46I find that reaching for rhyme frequently brings me to thought that I didn't have otherwise. I can kind of remember being surprised when that line landed and I was surprised all along, because I believed it when it happened. I believed it when I saw it land there on the page. But it was not anything I thought, like, it's a thought I've had, how can I say it pretty? You know, the rhyme invited me there, and then I just believed it. I also want to ask about the last song, So We May, which, you know, I mentioned to you the album almost reminded me of sort of a 19th century collection of ballads. This reminded me of a, it's like a national anthem, this song almost, So We May.

1:10:33It's about a possibility being laid out, and do we pick it up? Yeah, I think it is about personal responsibility, too. That's something I think about after the fact, nothing I thought about when I was writing those words. And that's a situation where I think Michael landed a melody for it that sounded, once I heard it, I knew it couldn't go any other way. It just sounded absolutely inevitable to me. It's a song that I think, I dare say, Mike and I are both particularly proud of. It happened like it was supposed to when I heard it. It's what it felt like. Do you guys have time for one more song?

1:11:15Sure. Yeah. Why don't we play Life in Time? Life in Time. Since it's the title song and I'm in the right tuning for it. We play that in C now, don't we? Yes, we do. Oh, that's good news for me.

1:11:33Okay. You ready there, buddy? Yeah.

1:12:06Worked my way through Michigan, finally crossed the line.

1:12:17Made my peace with solitude as years pushed on and by. But held your face as grace itself upon my life and time. Born my life in time

1:12:41Well I know well what people say When I go to town Though I keep my business straight Hold my tongue and my head down Moving like the ghost that I've become within my mind Where I've spent my days with you Throughout my life and time Throughout this life and time

1:13:29I watch a storm approaching now From this open door And welcome it might sweep away All that came before The end of the beginning of The finish of this line Drawn in yellow known to you Who's been my life in time Drawn and you don't know Do you who's been my life in time I went north when trouble came Never knew that I

1:14:31Carried you like fool's gold Across the borderline

1:14:42Made my peace with living out The years that passed me by Now I wear them like a broken crown Upon my life and time I wear them like a broken crown Upon my life and time Upon my life and time

1:15:24piano plays softly

1:15:47I think that's how we end it. Thank you so much. What an honor. Bruce, thank you. Thanks, Bruce. Great to see you. Wonderful. Thank you. Just great. In the episode description, you'll find a link to Mike Reed and Joe Henry's album, Life and Times, as well as a collection of songs spanning both their careers. Be sure to check out youtube.com slash brokenrecordpodcast to see all of our video interviews. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at The Broken Record Pod. You can follow us on Twitter at Broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan.

1:16:22Our engineer is Ben Talliday. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad-free listening for$4.99 a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music is by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond.

1:16:52Do you ever wish your office felt better? Buzzy Space designs furniture and acoustic solutions that make workspaces more comfortable, more creative, and more fun. If you need a quiet corner to focus or a collaborative space to brainstorm, Buzzy Space has you covered. Head to buzzy.space to check out their innovative solutions and make your office a place people actually love coming to. That's B-U-Z-Z-I dot space. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.