Americana Music Live with Drew Holcomb and Malcolm Gladwell

23:44And he says, I think I should have been a tax attorney.

23:52That'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 sort of bored by the monotony of dentistry and how he's a he's a he's very extroverted and he was trying to have conversations with people and they couldn't because you know oh he was one of those annoying dentists who's like asking you questions and you're like 17 things totally well and i i think honestly i think it was a um it was a serious crossroads for him because he'd spent he put himself through dental school selling jewelry out of a tackle box this is like he he worked his way really hard to get himself this, you know, job and, and this career.

24:36But then a decade in, he realized how much he really did not enjoy it and found a way out of it. It took him, it was a, 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. wanted to be in a garage band. And his dad, who was even more strict than my parents' generation, basically was the cut your hair and don't you... He has a story.

25:10He tells a story about my grandfather. They were driving in a 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 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.

25:42And so he had this weird relationship where his father squashed his creative dreams. And so I think when I sort of showed interest in this, he sort of just launched fully in with me. Oh, really? Yeah. The first thing I told him I wanted to pursue music, 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 going to 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.

26:20And he could say that from experience 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.

26:46This is sort of symmetrical, asymmetrical. I'm going to go down the street to my grandparents' house.

26:56I grew up five doors down the street from my grandfather, who was this sort of lion of a man. He was a bit of a big fish personality. He would tell these stories 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 Dugano. Two weeks before he was executed, He just has these wild stories in his life. And one of them was that he told this story about how he went to England with his friend who raised Labrador retrievers, who got invited to this dog trial at the Queen's Estate.

27:42So 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 Queen's Estate in the Queensland River with her driving it. And we were all like, sure, you know, sure you did.

27:59And 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 in her Land Rover. So there you go. I wrote this song about him many years after he died. He just had a huge influence on me. in songs called Dragons.

28:33I 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.

29:23He 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 is all you promised. Don't trouble with tomorrow. He faded into the forest, proudly singing this hymn. Take a few chances, a few 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

30:34I 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 sing like a sparrow lost in the wind 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 Go slay all the dragons that stand in your way

31:45Thank you. Incredibly beautiful tribute. Thank you. Yeah, he's a beautiful man. We'll be right back.

31:56Before you jump back in, you know that feeling when feedback, notes, and data are coming in from every direction? ChatGPT work can make sense of it all, turning scattered inputs into ready-to-review work. With your permission, ChatGPT Work can gather context from apps and files, summarize incoming messages, rebuild decks, and help finalize high-quality documents for your team or clients. Stay in control as you move from a goal to polished work faster with ChatGPT Work. Download the ChatGPT desktop app today and take on your most ambitious work. This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History.

32:34Life moves fast. At American Military University, they're ready to help you keep up. AMU's flexible, affordable online programs in cybersecurity, IT, space studies, and more are designed for service members, veterans, and their families. AMU provides the support you need to take the next step wherever life takes you. American Military University. Made for what's next. Learn more at amu.apus.edu. Okay, let's talk about something everyone has an opinion on, healthcare. Everyone can agree that something this important should work better than it does. Turns out, patients aren't the only ones who think that.

33:17Optum does too, and it's why they're working day in and day out to improve it. Never heard of Optum? Think of them as the engine of healthcare. They bring together clinicians, care teams, and the way you get and manage your medications. And they use data and technology to help the health systems we all use work better as a whole, not as disconnected pieces. Because they connect all these pieces, Optum can take a more whole-person approach to healthcare, like helping patients connect to mental health support quickly and bringing primary care and prescription deliveries straight to their home so people can stay on top of their health.

33:53Those things make a big difference. And they show that Optum really is trying to make health care better, that their clinicians, pharmacists, data scientists, engineers, everyone is putting in the work to improve it every day. See what Optum's up to at Optum.com. 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. I think I've always sort of grown up. I think a lot of people that grew up in a world that I grew up in sort of either chose to just join into that space as adults or they sort of run the other direction and go through a deconstruction phase where they, you know, on a spectrum of sort of kindness to full vitriol, they depart from that space.

34:59And 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 and 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 I 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.

35:38So I had sort of a crisis of faith. And instead of turning away from it, I was still sort of trying to figure it out. but music was really the thing that kind of helped me make sense of my life. I'll never forget there were two records in particular in that era. One was Van Morrison's Moon Dance. The other one was David Gray's White Ladder. 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.

36:23And so a lot of people's hurt and deconstruction is fed off of abuse or mistreatment or, you know, and that was not my experience. And so I couldn't have that same sort of departure because I was loved well. And so it's created this really interesting tension in me because I was also expanding the 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, different sort of spectrum of beliefs about different things, whether cultural, cosmic, theological, cultural, political, et cetera.

37:02So I don't want to sort of speak about that community as one monolith, 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 for two weeks a semester, twice a year, and then write my papers. And so, you know, I was just, I was searching, but I was enjoying the search. 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. I'm finding a lot of interesting things.

37:43I'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, is more of a wall and less of a bridge. It's more about protecting the flock instead of building a bridge to the world. And I would say my faith now is much more of like, I just want to be a bridge builder. But I haven't necessarily, I haven't rejected some of the sort of central teachings of Christian orthodoxy, but I have certainly rejected sort of American evangelical culture.

38:26and it'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 that immediately within three days on that trip I said I'm going to study abroad here this place is Edinburgh is just this wonderland and you know I 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!

39:08Was 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. I didn't even know what they were, but they'd play 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 bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond. I was like, I'd sit in the corner crying about me and this mythical woman.

39:49I'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 weather and the story that sort of, that's where I started writing songs. I was still sort of in the throes of my grief, and I was trying to process that grief. And so as a student, I decided my senior thesis 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.

40:422 ,000? Yeah, there were like 100 nurses from the hospital that had met him over the last 15 years came. And the entire elementary school he went to had a day out of school and they all came. Yeah, it was this incredible celebration of a very short but very sort of thorough life. And so my sort of analytical side of my brain with the creative side of my brain was like, what if I just wrote an oral history of his life and interviewed his doctor, his teacher, his neighbors, his cousins? and why did Jay matter so much to you? So I was working on that in Scotland, and that's when I started writing songs because I didn't really know anybody.

41:19I always say that that time I was alone. I wasn't necessarily lonely, but I was alone, and I had taken my guitar, and I just started writing. And when I got back home from that semester, I started playing these songs for some friends, and I think they were all expecting something completely different for my life. I got laughed at a couple times before the song. I was like, wait, you wrote songs? I mean, I know you play music, but aren't you going to be like history lawyer guy or something? And I played on these songs, and they're like, oh, these are... What's the first song you wrote that you were proud of?

41:55It'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 you can't have forgotten all of it no I mean that was something like well okay

42:32this is embarrassing I do remember the first line

42:41Cinderella was a fairy tale One that's true I don't remember where it went after that, but there was something about She sang like a nightingale Something, something that rhymes with true Wait, did you play this for her after she broke up with you? Well, you made an assumption there that we dated in the first place. Oh, I see. 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.

43:28But yeah, so that was the first song I sang, and I was playing it for my 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 phase, where I was really trying to write the rugged third person minor chord songs. And it wasn't me, but I needed to do that to find my path. But none of those songs are available on the internet.

44:15Which 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's. I was just going to say Nebraska. Yeah. I want to talk about Nebraska for a moment. I, because I was obsessed with that record. Yeah. And you know, it's funny because music like that doesn't just influence musicians, it influences writers. Yeah. And the song that I always came back to was, I don't know what it's called, but it's the one about the guy who's a police officer.

44:54Highway Patrolman. Highway Patrolman. I've played that song a hundred times. Man turns his back on his family. He just ain't no good. He just ain't no good. And 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. 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 Burtonville. Barracks number eight.

45:46I've always been an honest man. An honest man. Honest as I could. I got a brother named Frankie. 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. 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.

46:43And then there's this, that line to me that, that song, I love it for a lot of different reasons. I'll just, the song's been out for 40 years, so spoiler alert. basically you know the narrator is a state trooper, highway patrolman and his brother's a mess and he ends up injuring, possibly killing somebody in a bar fight and he gets called into the scene and realizes it's his own brother and his brother, he's chasing him out of the state in Michigan and he lets him go into Canada and lets him escape and then he ends with that course and turns back on his family, he just ain't no good. And my brother, who's now been eight years sober, there was a lot of years where that was our dynamic.

47:34I 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, 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.

48:05I'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 and 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 something. There's a series of things. I didn't know anything about you. And you said something to me that just so surprised me. And you said that you just talked about how you have a...

48:44You 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 you know that what I've since learned is that anger is not bad it's rage that's bad which is like sort of the this I'm gonna get all counsely on you guys but it's been a big part of my journey as a 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 wow 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 um is it's it's your yellow light that's flashing that you're lonely or sad or hurt um and so I've learned that it's like my superpower like when I'm angry I know that I know that I got to figure out what's going on instead of trying to tamp it down you know have you ever written what is your what is the angriest song I have an idea that you've ever written oh that's great um 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 uh with my I wrote this song with my friends Avner and Amanda Ramirez, Avner's a Cuban-American, Amanda's an African-American.

50:13We 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.

50:42Ring 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 If all is fair in love and war Then what the hell is love even for?

51:11If we can't sing it loud enough, we'll keep on adding voices up. Ring the bells! Ring the bells! Ring the bells! Ring the bells! Just a little bit of it.

51:35That's what I... That's the one I had in mind. I was very angry when I wrote that song. It felt good. Yeah. It's funny.

51:50You play it like a man possessed. 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 someone who... 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. If you feel so mad that you want to roar, take a deep breath, then count to four. And I was like, I'm sorry. Amy 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, Or take a deep breath and roar!

52:36Yes, 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 mine. Before you jump back in, you know that feeling when feedback, notes, and data are coming in from every direction? ChatGPT work can make sense of it all turning scattered inputs into ready to review work with your permission ChatGPT work can gather context from apps and files summarize incoming messages rebuild decks and help finalize high quality documents for your team or clients stay in control as you move from a goal to polished work faster with ChatGPT work download the ChatGPT desktop app today and take on your most ambitious work This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History.

53:32Life moves fast. At American Military University, they're ready to help you keep up. AMU's flexible, affordable online programs in cybersecurity, IT, space studies, and more are designed for service members, veterans, and their families. AMU provides the support you need to take the next step, wherever life takes you. American Military University. Made for what's next. Learn more at amu.apus.edu. Okay, let's talk about something everyone has an opinion on, healthcare. Everyone can agree that something this important should work better than it does. Turns out, patients aren't the only ones who think that.

54:16Optum does too, and it's why they're working day in and day out to improve it. Never heard of Optum? Think of them as the engine of healthcare. They bring together clinicians, care teams, and the way you get and manage your medications. And they use data and technology to help the health systems we all use work better as a whole, not as disconnected pieces. Because they connect all these pieces, Optum can take a more whole-person approach to healthcare, like helping patients connect to mental health support quickly and bringing primary care and prescription deliveries straight to their home so people can stay on top of their health.

54:51Those things make a big difference. And they show that Optum really is trying to make healthcare better, that their clinicians, pharmacists, data scientists, engineers, everyone is putting in the work to improve it every day. See what Optum's up to at Optum.com. And we're back. Let's talk about musical influences for a moment. Let's start with Amy Lou Harris. I would love to. When we were thinking this evening about our list of iconic country songs, and one on my list is Boulder to Birmingham. Do you know that? No. That is 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 and it is actually we're going to play a little bit of it just play the first little I've never heard this song I'm very excited it's so heart-wrenchingly beautiful I mention it only because we were talking about grief and about emotion it's a song about grief the articulation of her sense of loss and longing is just perfect.

56:21Anyway, here it is, I think. I would wrap my ass home in the bosom of Abraham. I would hold my life in a saving grace. I would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham If I thought I could see, I could see your face 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 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.

57:23And 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 for... to be home with the one he loves.

58:01And it's withstood 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 did she think of it as? That was not clear to me.

58:25We 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 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 didn't know Willie Nelson. I didn't know him. Yeah, I mean, we don't call each other because he's an older guy.

59:06But 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 the opener to come out and sing it with him. So I've got to do that 12 or 15 times. So he and Dolly, to me, are the two living legends left 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. You know, I might be more attracted to, You are attracted to pure emotion, it seems like.

59:57And I'm attracted in country music to over-the-top grandiosity. And the grand tour, George Jones is like, he's like the, he's in the best possible sense of the word, a caricature of a country singer. He is. That voice. In fact, we're going to make them play. Yeah. Just the beginning of, play the grand tour until the line chills me to the bone. Step rider, come on in. If you'd like to take the grand tour of the lonely house. So fantastic. Once was home, sweet home.

1:00:48I have nothing here to sell you Just some things that I will tell you 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. Yeah, yeah. I once, back in the day of mixtapes, I used to make these mixtapes constantly, and they were always named after, for reasons I forget now, they were always named after popes.

1:01:48So 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. And I was once driving with some person who didn't know me very well, and I was playing one of these mixtapes, the long drive, one of these mixtapes after another. And after like the third one, this guy Mike turned to me and said, what is the matter with you? Every single song was some kind of melancholy over-the-top weeper. I'm happy if the tempo is never picked up. Yeah, songwriting, you're always pulling from your library, and hopefully your library just keeps growing and growing.

1:02:37And 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 Paul Simon. I'm curious, what's the thread that links, and also Tom, I know that Tom Petty is someone that has had an 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 artists they made records that really connected with me and helped me sort of see the world if you will and helped me feel the world that's the beauty of music is there's a bit of magic to it and I'm sure there's scientific and sociological ways to explain them.

1:03:45I'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 Tom Petty's Wildflowers, all I have to hear is, 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.

1:04:24If you look at his sort of the arc of his career and listen to the records, they don't all sound the same. There's, you know, different producers have sort of different eras and fingerprints on his, on his work. Jeff Lynn's stuff is different than the Jimmy O 'Vine stuff. And, And I like that, that they're always looking for something else to say, something else to sing, some new way to express human experience via music and instruments and electricity and all this stuff that makes 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.

1:05:09back when we met in April. And I just saw this artist play at the Ryman, which is 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've ever heard. So this is Paul Simon's America.

1:05:57Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together.

1:06:06I've got some real estate here in my bag. So I bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner's pies and walked off to look for America. guitar solo

1:06:34Kathy I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh guitar solo Michigan seems like a dream to me now guitar solo It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw I've gone to look for America

1:07:07Laughing on a bus, playing games with their faces

1:07:15She says the man in the gabardine suit is a spy

1:07:24I said be careful his bow tie is really a camera

1:07:37Well toss me a cigarette I've got one here in my raincoat No he smoked the last one an hour ago

1:07:54Well, I looked at the scenery. She read her magazine as the moon rose over an open field.

1:08:15Well, Kathy, I'm lost I said, though I knew she was sleeping

1:08:24I'm empty and aching And I don't know why Counting the cars On the New Jersey Turnpike They've all gone We've all gone to look for America. All gone to look for America. We've all gone to look for America.

1:09:04Let us be lovers We'll marry our fortunes together

1:09:14That was beautiful. Thank you. You said his concert at the Ryman that you saw earlier this year. it was actually this was really sweet for me personally but we played two nights at the rhyming on may 2nd and 3rd and then he played three nights at the rhyming may like 12th 13th and 14th and i got to sit um 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 and he had the same reverence for the room that I always have. And it was a bit of an emotional and joyous and overwhelming experience. And he did two sets. He did the Seven Hymns record from front to back, and then he came out and did sort of all the songs that you would expect to hear in the second set.

1:10:14And 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. 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 etc so he actually grew up in knoxville tennessee which is where i went to school but he had he left there and lived all over but it sort of landed in the desert in um santa fe el paso somewhere in there um unrelated to that seemingly was i love old cars and so i get this email from a company that auctions old cars just because i love to look at them and i get this email in april early April, it says, Cormac McCarthy's Ferrari.

1:11:21It'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. 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, Cormac McCarthy's Black Ferrari. But I couldn't quite find the end, you know? 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. Yeah. And I feel like everybody right now, we sort of live inside of existential crisis. That's going to be the era that we live in.

1:12:07We look back on it, 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 joy and how to live. And I thought one of the ways it would help me is if I had Corey McCarthy's Black Ferrari for a day. So I wrote this song, and the first person I sent it to was you because we had talked about that interview. I love old cars too. Yeah, and we connected over old cars. and I was like yeah so I've never played this song before except for during sound check 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 so let's see if I can remember how to

1:13:13Walking 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 Ferrari Like Cormac McCarthy in my mind

1:14:06In my mind

1:14:12The 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 soul's gathering

1:14:41Cormac 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.

1:15:09In my mind.

1:15:16Engine 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

1:15:42Cormac 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 suitcase 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

1:16:26I 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 this like obviously the phrase and the rhyme Corey McCarthy's Black Ferrari it was like this song going to 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 to me should be a piece of old chevy pickup right yeah that's that's like that's the imagination right it's not not that he had this car so it's like a magnum pi car you know and so then i was like no that's not the right frame because what i felt when i saw that that existed as a fan of his work and is also someone who would like to have a 1989 Testarossa, just for a day even, was that, no, even the saddest, most sort of gothic, you know, the chronicler of American violence needed an escape.

1:17:42And 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 Cora McCarthy smiling. No. And so I relate to that. I relate to feeling the weight of life and all of its 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 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 but yeah what will happen to it when the when you all dive in i don't know i mean we'll we'll go through several itinerations first thing we'll do is we'll make sure we're the right key we'll do some practical things make sure the right key figure out the tempo um and then we'll sort of jump into the approach you know like what are the drums going to be doing are we are we is this acoustic Like sort of, is that the main engine driver of the song?

1:18:51Or 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 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. I feel 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.

1:19:40My 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. 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 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 by 10.30 that morning. We both had just gotten back into doing normal shows again with live audiences, and we had really missed that.

1:20:13So 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 it ended up getting picked up by the NCAA for two years straight as the theme song for March Madness, which, A, the song's not about basketball, and, B, I am one of the world's worst basketball players and 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.

1:21:00You walked into this room, you hardly knew anyone. A sea full of strangers just crashing on the rums. When the band strikes by the end of the night, Strangers no more I want to dance with 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 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 want to dance with everybody Who came to that door

1:22:00Well, come 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. Oh, hey. Oh, hey. Oh, hey.

1:22:57Well, let's put aside our differences. We'll lace up our shoes. Let's narrow the distance between me and you. Meet me in the middle. Let's quit keeping score I want to dance with everybody Who came through that door Whoa-oh-oh Let it all go Whoa-oh-oh Shake up your soul Throw your hands in the air Throw your hat in the ring Throw your hips and your heart Into everything 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 crowd Get down on the floor I want to dance with everybody Who came through that door I want to dance with everybody Who came through that door

1:23:57Thank you so much, Drew. Thank you all.

1:24:05This episode of Broken Record is produced by Leah Rose and Nina Bird-Lawrence with Ben Nadaf-Haffrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our engineers are Nina Bird-Lawrence, Sarah Bruguere, and Ben Tolliday. Marketing by Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our executive producers are Jacob Smith and Justin Richmond. Special thanks to 824, to Eloise Linton, and to the whole crew over at the Cherry Lane Theatre. My name is Malcolm Garbo. One last thing before you go. You know that feeling when feedback, notes, and data are coming in from every direction? ChatGPT work can make sense of it all, turning scattered inputs into ready-to-review work.

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