Norah Jones Begins Again

00:00:08 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Just a quick note here. You can listen to all of the music mentioned in this episode on our playlist, which you can find a link to in the show notes for licensing reasons, each time a song is referenced in this episode, you'll hear this sound effect all right, and enjoy the episode. This is Wintertime, a song off Nora Jones's album that came out this past spring. Begin Again, Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce had them of absolutely fallen in love with this tune. Wilco's frontman, Jeff Tweety started writing it some time ago before discarding it somewhere along the way. During a recording session with Nora Jones. The two of them picked it back up and brushed it off together to make this In case you don't remember, Nora Jones had a massive hit seventeen years ago with her debut single Don't Know Why, which has basically become a standard in the American songbook thanks to her minimalist performance. After that, she did a run of solo albums, but also did a lot of collaborating a song with Ray Charles, the song with Willie Nelson, whole albums with producer Danger Mouse, but recently, Nora's discovered a new way of collaborating. She talks with Malcolm and Bruce about why this new way feels so good. She also takes a seat at the piano and plays through some of the new songs on her record, and also talks about some of the ways she coped with her son and fame in two thousand and two. This is Broken Record Season three, liner notes for the Digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Here is Malcolm and Bruce's conversation with Nora Jones from Bridge Studio in Brooklyn. Bruce and I are mildly obsessed with wintertime, and we thought we would start there, not the season, the song, not the season. We want to go as deep as you want to go on that and where it comes from and how you went about writing it, and well, I don't want to disappoint you too much on that one. But I went to record with Jeff Tweetie in Chicago and which was really amazing and fun. We wrote several songs together and this was one that he sort of had the scraps already, yeah, lying around, so we picked it up and dusted it off and tweaked it and put some clothes on it and changed it around, and then it sort of came even there. I have another questions, when did you first meet Jeff Tweetie. It must be at least ten or fifteen years ago, probably no more, because I think I met him for the first time on my first record when I did the Jewels Holland Show, so that must have been two thousand and two. Gosh. Yeah, it's been a long time. And Wilco did it as well. And I was already a fan because that was right when Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was out, and over the years, I've just sort of seen him around a lot. We worked with a lot of the same people and we've always been really friendly. Wilco had me and my band put some boots come hang out with them when they open up for Neil. They let us sit in on Jesus et cetera, which was really fine. That must have been fun, yeah, which you've done too, which we covered. Yeah, So we covered Jesus et Cetera in this band a man called Puss and Boots, Sasha top Set and Katherine Popper and myself and we did the Bridge School with them one year and and Cat and Sasha are pretty saucy, and Cat goes up to Tweety and says, hey, dude, are you going to do Jesus et cetera in your set? And he's like, oh, no, no, we might do that. And she's like, well, we're pooting in in our set and we're going first. So so we literally just like went ahead and play their song before they went on. We just enjoyed each other's like kind of rimming each other after that. Yeah, no, is that? So there's two categories here. There are categories of people that you're fans of and categories of people that you want to work with. Are they the same or are they different? Well, I think in making lists of collaborating with people, because this is what I'm trying to do right now is just do these singles and work with different people and with low pressure stakes, you know, like just one song. It's the only goal. And I figured out that, yes, they are different. I can be a fan of someone and have no idea how to insert myself into their world or them into mine. Yeah, that doesn't mean it can't happen once you get in the room. It might be totally magical, But unless I have some kind of an idea of something I want to try. Then I'm not going to just reach out somebody and said let's go get in a room and just stare at each other. You know, it's easier. I can imagine. It's not hard for me to understand that you would listen to Will go and meet Jeff Tweety and say, oh, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I think we should probably do a record together at some point. And it was so fun and you know, we both play enough of enough instruments to sort of just have the two of us with the drummer. His son, Spencer Tweety was playing drums, and we did all the stuff with just the three of us, and that kind of recording is really fun. So you have this idea now that you want to do these kind of one offs with people that are where did that? How did you come to that? It's really it sounds like a really really but I'm surprised that more people don't do that. But I'm well, I think a lot of people do do it, but they don't like call it what it is. Maybe, But it was actually my husband's idea. He was saying, you have all these resources to do something easy like this, why don't you do it? It's like, gosh, why don't I that's a great idea and what a fun way to just make music. I have little kids, you know, I don't want to My attention span is very short, just like everybody's nowadays. But you know, it's it's really fun to be musical and be doing things and have it come out quicker than if you do a full album, you know, and that's why is sort of the nature of the internet and everything. You know, it's it's good. But now you've questioned, why is it easier to work with someone who you may know as a friend but haven't actually worked before than it is to work with someone who you've been writing songs with the making music with for ten years. Well, for me, I mean I don't like to take a long time to record music or write songs or I mean I'll think about a song if it's not done. You know it's not done and you want to tweak it. But you know, some people go in and they take three years to make an album. That's not how. I get bored and I want to move on to something else. So for me, I mean, it's fun three days in a studio with someone, it's plenty to get one song, and in all these cases we've gotten three to seven songs each session, which has been great, and maybe not all of them are amazing, but it's really fun. It's just a fun way to work. It's low pressure to get somebody to commit to something, somebody who maybe I don't know that well or is very busy, I don't know. For me, it's not scary so much as it is it has been a little bit stressful because there have been many of these sessions where I've gone in and I'm so underprepared. I'm like, Okay, I don't really have a full song at all in case we can't come up with anything, because I try to have something in case, you know, we're drawing blanks in there. What is what is another day? Dumb question? What is something? I have all these voice memos on my phone, you know that I make in the batstub because that's the only piece in quiet I get. And you know, some of them are just like a small snippet of a melody. It's like na da da da da da, whatever it is. And sometimes those little somethings stick in my head for months or years and I'll go back to them. And that's like when I worked with Thomas Bartlett, that's all I had was I had a few lyrics and I had a few melodies, and we just turned them into songs in the studio. And I guess my point is, like, sometimes I'm a little stressed and underprepared when I'm going into these sessions, but I know and I have faith in the process and that when I get into the studio and I can focus and like all the noise isn't surrounding me and I'm with somebody who inspires me and hopefully they are the same, then it happens and I don't know, we haven't gotten nothing yet. Yeah, I'll say that how many how many ideas would you have on your phone right now? Right now, I'm pretty dry, but I have a lot of old ideas. Yeah, so you can't change phones because you're well, yeah, exactly, you're locked in. I'm locked in. Yeah, I missed my own voice recorder. Sometimes what's the longest time that's a lapse between a stippet of an idea and a song It actually appeared on an album. There's a song I wrote with this friend Ilhan Risanna used to be in a band called wax Poetic when I first moved to New York in like nineteen ninety nine, and we wrote this song together and that band didn't make another album and it kind of petered out and it continued without me. I wasn't in it anymore. But then I kind of dug up that song and put it on my third out about So that's how many years I have you beat? Because I just did that podcast episode that was inspired by an interview that I did in nineteen ninety two. Wow, And I thought about it for that long, For twenty five years, I always wanted to do something and finally did it. So I love other words. My point is, you know you can revisit the stuff when you're as old as I am. Yeah, these ideas don't really leave your sort of being until they become something. But I think for a lot of people listening to old ideas, it would make them intensely uncomfortable because they would hear the mistakes, the things that aren't so good. Are you like that at all? Can you can you turn off whatever critical voice you have that? Yeah, I'm not too critical of myself because I learned when I. When I first my first record came out, I had just started writing songs because that voice I could not turn off until then. I wrote songs in high school and they were so horrible. I was so embarrassed and I never wanted to do it again. Did you perform them? Well, Like, I went to this performing arts high school, which was amazing, and so we were all very encouraged. So like it ended up on the you know, the high school tape. So yeah, I you know, it was out there and I was like, I want to put it back in. I don't like it, but yeah, when you're young, that stuff can be a little embarrassing, and so I definitely shut down. And then I got into songwriting. When I moved to New York. I only had two two and a half songs on my first album because I was really new at it. And then after that, after a couple of albums, I got more and more into it. And then I got really kind of down on myself and frustrated. And then I had this whole thing with songwriting, and I finally realized I don't have to show anybody anything. Just finish the damn song, do as much as you want to and make it as cheesy as it is or whatever, and then in the end you can discard it. You don't have to show the world if you don't like it, but see it through. That's a good lesson for It's a good lesson for a lot of things, but especial. But that's what kind of freed you up to, kind of freed me up. Yeah, because you did start writing after you became famous. I started writing more, yeah, yeah. And you learned the guitar yeah, after you became famous. So that takes a nerve. I mean for me, I was just trying to stay inspired. The fame and the kind of crazy whirlwind that was my first record. It took a lot of took a lot away from like the point, which was staying inspired and making music I really loved. You know, were you working with somebody in the kind of pairings that you're describing now, how often do they make you realize you may have been wrong about something, like you're talking about how you have these old things and sometimes they don't work. How often does the second voice in a room say, wait a minute, that does work. I love it when that happens. That's my favorite thing. It does happen. Yeah, it happens sometimes. You know, when you get in a room with somebody you're like, well, I have this idea. It might be stupid, or like it's your nature to be self mine anyway, to be self deprecating, and I be like checking out this awesome idea. But you know, like, oh, I don't know, is this dumb? Check this out? No, that's not dumb. That's like what you want to hear for sure. Yeah, or their particular collaborators who are just good at that, at hearing things that you don't hear. Brian Burton, I mean Danger Mouse is he's really good at that. He's amazing at it. And not only musically he has hooks for days, but also lyrically, he's really good at it. He was someone I was really self conscious, Like, I wasn't nervous about the project, but when it came down to lyrics sometimes I was sort of nervous to show him my lyrics sometimes because it was very it was all very personal. Lyrics are very different than showing a musical idea. They're way more exposed, I think, and naked, especially for some one who's a little late to the lyric party. You know, so I was definitely more self conscious showing him my lyrics, and I don't know that he was, but his lyrics were really great. The more we wrote together, the more self conscious like out because I realized his lyrics were so great. But I was also very comfortable with him, so I thought, well, he's like my big brother. Let's let's just do this. But he's really good at that. Is there a song that comes to mind from your collaboration with him that you think is so the best example of the two of you rook and you get. The whole album was super collaborative. Yeah, there wasn't a lot of like scraps that were brought to the table as much as you know some other things, but lyrically, like, I've been going back and I love playing songs from that album. Sometimes there's songs from old albums that I just that I still like but I don't really connect with at this moment in time. Doesn't mean I won't again, it doesn't mean I never have. But that's how playing live, that's kind of how it goes. Pick songs that you're connecting with in the moment, and some of the songs when I throw them into the set from that record. It's like, whoa, these lyrics are so great. I'm so happy, you know. Yeah, We've been doing a song called stay Goodbye and the lyrics are really good. I think, do you try and do it in thee because I had that album had such a great sounds. It's his sound, that's him, Yeah, And I don't mean that like he makes the same sound over. No, he's a little like Brian Eno. He's sort of it's like he's created a little universe somewhere that you kind of flowed into. Do you try and kind of reproduce that on stage or do you do it in a different setting? I did more and when we toured that album, and we had a great band who could do it without it being contrived, you know, like we only had it was a five piece band. It was me, a keyboard, organ player, guitar, bass, and drums. It wasn't like it wasn't like we were obsessed with recreating the album sound, but we did a good job of doing it. Now, however, I'm really into stripping it back a little bit and not trying to recreate it. And I'm into rearranging some things, and especially with that album because the soundscape was so specific. Unless it's a natural thing for me to recreate live, I'd rather not try to be married to the sounds and just serve the song, because they're great songs even without all that. And that's the great thing about that album. When we come back, Malcolm and Bruce picked back up with their obsession with the song winter Time that Noah wrote with Wilco's Jeff Tweety. We're back with more from Nora Jones. So, Jeff Tweety, do you call him upet hey tweet? Calm tweet? No, you're just kidding. How did you? Who? How did you? I want to? I want, I want, I want the absolute details on this. You just call him out of the blue and said, hey, let's work together. Well, Jeff Tweety, I used to have his phone number, but he stopped returning my my text and then I got this text once from him, like I hadn't heard from him in two years. He's like, hey, I just got all your texts. I'm sorry. I didn't really check my phone much. I was like, dude, that's fine, but that was like a long time ago. But so I didn't know if I had his inphone anymore. But yeah, Tom Shick is a great engineer who I used to work with in New York a lot, and he moved to Chicago to be Jeff's house engineer at his studio and he so Tom's an old friend of mine. So I had just told Tom, I said, Hey, here's what I'm trying to do. See if Tweety's into it. I would love to do this with you and him, because that would be a dream to go to Chicago, check out the studio, finally work with Tom again and work with Jeff. Let's keep going on this narrative. Show up, you're you walk in? Do you what do you have with you when you enter the studio to work with Jeff Tweety. I had a couple of scraps. I was very underprepared, but I had I had a couple little tiny ideas. One of them was completely written santaneously on the couch, and that's the version that's recorded pretty much. It's called song with No Name, and we were just sitting I think that's the first thing we did the first day. We were both kind of shy, even though we knew we shouldn't be. I think he was a little shy and I was a little shy about just jumping in and giving all our ideas. You know, we're sensitive people, we're artists, right, So we're just sitting on the couch. He has a collection in sane collection of guitars, so I just picked one up and it was tuned really weird, and so we both just started playing. I'm not a great guitar player, but like, it's just a little acoustic part, and he and I just both started playing this part together. And Tom is such an amazing person to work with because he just had a mic set up and he just breast record and so we just started playing it and then I started like and then I started singing, and I was just singing gibberish words that were just coming to me, and it was cool. And then, you know, three days later we went back to listen to that because we kind of moved on and started doing the real stuff. And then Tom was like, checked this out from the first day and it was awesome, and we both really loved it, and we added a bunch of other instruments to it, and we just kept exactly what we had done on the couch. There was one lyric I remember thinking I was like, Tom, I wish I could change that lyric. He's like, well, you can't really change it unless it sounds really similar, and we double your vocal and you could kind of flub it. But because it was just we were on the cauch, we were all singing, and we was singing with the guitars and everything, so I just left it. But how much when you first start was everything made up in the room on the couch of that song? Yes, melody and lyrics and the main guitar party, yes, yeah. And when you start that process of improvisation the very first iteration, how much do you have? Do you have? Like ten seconds? Do you have twenty seconds? When you first said it? When it first comes to you. Well, we started doing it. I mean, I don't know how much he recorded before we sort of had the take, but probably we were playing like five minutes, maybe you just playing the part and I was humming along. And then he's like, all right, well let's just try one with what you have. And then and then it started and what's he what's Jeff Tweedy doing when you're you're humming and playing on the couch. So he's playing on the couch thing as well. Yeah, yeah, he's a beautiful guitar player. So yeah, well that's the thing about these collaborations, like I might have nothing and be kind of panic what if we get nothing, But then you sit with somebody who's inspiring, and it's just it's beautiful. I mean, I guess he's so and he's so incredibly prolific and it has been so that way for so long that I guess there's no anxieties about him drawing up blank No. And it was interesting because I had this one idea because the way I work in the studio, the way I worked with Brian, and the way I have worked recently is sort of just like, let's write it all down. Okay, what about this idea? What about this? And I had this one idea and we started this other song that again has not been released, but he really wanted to take it home. He said, I do my best lyrics tweaking when I'm like at four in the morning. I'll go to bed and then he says, he wakes up and he does it and then he goes back to bed. Really, and I was like, okay, but I'm dying to do it now. I want to do it right now, you know, I was kind of like, ah, but I was super happy to have him do it. I didn't. It wasn't that I needed to be part of it or control it. I was just impatient, you know. Did he show up the next day, showed up the having done that. I think it was on wintertime. He tweaked some stuff. But yeah, and then there was this other song where I actually did that because I think he kind of inspired me a little bit, and so and then this other song I had done it. I didn't wake up before I am, but I did it before I came here. Now do you Typically, once you've got a melody, your melody, and then words later, not really no, Usually melody words come together, at least some words, and then those words are so cemented in the melody it's impossible to remove them. It's like really hard to change the lyrics. But sometimes there's a melody that has no words, and sometimes more recently and not in the past for me, but more recently, I've had a lot of words with no melodies. But usually it's both and then they kind of you kind of I don't know. It's easier to kind of morph morph from a lyric melody that's already married, is it hard? Once you've got the words to come up with a melody, then it's really fun to find a melody for like a poem or a lyric, because I've done that with other people's words before and it is very freeing. It seems more free. But when you have a melody and you're trying to fit lyrics to those nooks and crannies, that is definitely hard, harder unless it's just already kind of inspired with it. We did an interview with Linda Perry, who worked with Dolly Partner. I don't know who you've worked with Dolly Parton, and she told this amazing story. They did I guess six songs for the Dumpling soundtrack and they worked all these songs then, and Dolly partner the whole time as well. I don't write much anymore really, so anyway, she went back. She wrote the lyrics to all six songs in one day. Who did Linda did, no, No, she just went ahead and she's like, all right, I'm Dolly, I got this. Yeah, And they were I don't know they were. They're fabulous. Of course, she's an amazing songwriter writing is a weird thing. I used to get freaked out because they didn't have any ideas or wasn't inspired, and I didn't have anything happening. And I have a lot of really close friends who are songwriters, and sometimes I see them go this through the same thing. But I've seen myself go in and out of it, and it's like something always happens. Eventually. You go through phases. You go through phases where you're not writing, and then you go through phases where you're writing a lot. And sometimes I wasn't in between, but it's nice to not freak out when you're not because you know it'll eventually come again. Did you listen to a lot of country music growing up? Yeah, I mean my mom is from Oklahoma, so my grandparents and my mom absolutely I grew up on Willie Nelson and Bob Wills and men, Linda Ronstadt and a lot of great music. But it wasn't until I moved to New York when I was twenty that I kind of realized, oh, yeah, I love that music. I didn't really think about myself as ever singing that kind of music. And then I moved to New York and I was like I'm from Texas. People give me some, give me some three chord songs. And then when I started writing songs, I started writing on guitar because I lived in a tiny shoe box in the East Village. I didn't have a piano, and all those jazz chords that I had learned in high school and college that I love so much, I sure didn't know how to play those on guitar. I knew like five chords on guitar. So the first song I wrote when I moved to New York and I finally got out of my head and it was probably four in the morning, and I wrote come Away with Me, which is really just a few chords, and it's really kind of a country song. I mean, that's sort of what it is. And I wrote it on guitar and I can barely play it. So it would have happened if you'd moved to Nashville and not New York. No, right, I don't know. I probably would have gone full like anti country. I don't know. I don't know, or I would have gone full country. You were born in New York, yeah, and then your mother moved to We moved to Dallas when I was four because she was from Oklahoma and her dad sick. I don't know why we moved, actually, but I feel very from Texas. But yeah, I was born in New York and I moved back here when I was twenty. She's something of a character. She was in the music business. Did she just have a lot of records that you could listen to? She was a music fan. I mean, yeah, she did. I grew up listening to Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin and old country music, Judy Garland and Brazilian music. She lived in Brazil when she was in her early twenties, and she had all these great Brazilian records. Do you remember a first record or two that kind of from her? Whatever got you interested in being a musician? Well, she she was always playing Aretha Franklin and at Christmas she would always play like Luciano Pavarotti. And we went to church. We would when we moved to I mean, I don't remember much about New York because I was three or four when we left. But when we moved to Texas, we started going to this Methodist church and I joined the church choir, and the choir teacher was a former Catholic so we were singing all these Latin hymns, which was very funny for this text as a Methodist church. But so that's kind of where I got my start, and I think she recognized my joy in music, and she got a piano and got me piano lessons and stuff. I want to go back to Jeff Tweedy into wintertime. I still want to know about So you said something at the very beginning that he had a few discarded scraps. Yeah, and you guys brushed them off. So how much of a scrap did he have? Do you remember? It was a pretty big one. I mean the song was definitely sort of a shell of itself. And he played me a bunch of we got and got stuck one day, like the second day, we were a little stuck, and I was like, you know, I showed you mine, now show me your scraps. Basically, do you have anything? And I mean he is prolific and he records constantly. Yeah, and he has his own studio. So yes, he's got a lot of scraps. And they're fully like some of them are recorded with a full band, but they're not necessarily finished or the way that they end up and you play me a bunch of stuff, and it was all really cool. But there's this thing that's happened to me over the last ten years where it's it's become harder and harder for me to cover other people's songs because I'm I'm enjoying making my own songs now and so for me, you know, to connect with someone else's words and music enough to sing them. And it's not that I don't want to sing them, but to be able to own it, you have to own it. To cover a song, I have to basically sing it like it's mine. So nothing was completely catching me in that way. And then and then Wintertime came on. I was I love this. What was it in Wintertime that you did react to? Do you know? Was it the lyric or the feeling of it? I liked the feeling of it. The lyrics were kind of half there, and yeah, I just it just felt good. I liked the tempo. I liked the vibe. It's funny when you write with somebody else, everybody has a chord structure that they tend towards, and his is specific to him and it sounds like Jeff, you know, And what is that there's like a lot of minor twos and instead of four chords, and I liked it, but I liked it had a real flavor, had a real hymn flavor. You know. When we come back, Nora Jones sings, she breaks down her song Wintertime and explains how the minor two chord is part of the Wilco sound. We're back with Nora Jones breaking down the song she co wrote with Jeff Tweedy, Wintertime. So that's our favorite song on the album. What's your favorite song? I really like, I mean, I like them all, but I really like just a little bit. I really liked that one because we've been playing it live and it's really fun to play live. I also really like My Heart is Full because live it's taken on a whole new life. And that's sort of like, you know what I'm saying about these songs being alive, staying a lot, keeping them alive. It's a whole other things changed when you're playing that one live. Well, my Heart is Full I did in the in the studio with Thomas Bartlett and he's got all these cool electronics and it's amazing, but live is just bass, drums, piano and organ, and sonically we can take it to an intense place, but it's not the same exact sonics, you know what I mean. Can you give us a taste of that one so it gets like more primal, you know, than electronic, which is sort of how it is on the album. Anyway, what's the relationship in your mind between the live version and the and the album version? I mean, do you do you do you start to favor one over the other? Yeah? I think I usually start to favor the live version because it becomes its own thing and it's hard to you know, you can't go back in time and change it. But but that doesn't mean that I always do. It's just when you're in the middle of a tour and you're starting to feel something differently. It's It's a funny thing because song's morph and usually they start in the studio. You're not playing them live a bunch before you go into record, though I've done that before too. Yeah, and that is a whole other thing. You find an arrangement that really works live and then you go in and try to capture it, but it never quite has the magic of singing a song for the first time. Kind of and capturing it for the first time. For me, it just depends. So when you're sitting down, is that song I don't think? Did that have a lot of piano on the No, there's no piano on the recorded version, but on live it's instead of doing you know, instead of trying to get a delay and repeat my voice, it just you know, and then we add an instrumental section. It's fun. Don't stop? Is it so much fun? Get give me? That's so you did another one? There's another one that you really love off the album, which is oh, just a little bit, just a little bit, that's right. Yeah, how did that one? Who's how did that one come about? My friend Sarah Oda had a song that she gave me because I was going in the studio and I was completely unprepared. Again, this is completely unprepared, except I was so prepared. We got seven songs in that three day session, so I actually was super inspired, but more scattered maybe. Yeah. I had a lot of snippets. I had some finished songs because I was going in with Brian Blade and Chris Thomas, who is a little band I've been I had been playing with. Anyway, she gave me this song in case I needed something, because I've recorded her songs before and the song was cool. She had a melody and everything. It wasn't unfinished really, it just didn't have any instruments on. It was just her singing the melody and I had the lyrics sheet and we were kind of going in a different direction. That song kind of got pushed on the back burner and we were kind of in a lull, and so I went to the organ instead of the piano, and I just started sort of and I started singing her lyrics because they were just there, just because I was singing gibberish. But then I just saw her lyrics here and I started singing her lyrics over what we were playing, which was completely separate from the song she had written, and I took her lyrics and I accidentally just like put them into this new song and then we called it space Cham and we never listened to it again, and then the engineer sent it to me the next month and was like, this was kind of cool. Do you remember this? And I asked her, I was like can I can? I? You know, is it cool that I used the lyrics in this way instead? And She's like yeah, that's fine, as long as I can record this song and the other way someday. I said, that's fine. But what I really like about it is that her i'm structure. Her original song was I'm not going to sing you the melody, but it was like, I'll sing you the rhythm of the way her melody was. It was I'm not the one you can ignore. I'm not like those you've had before. That was like the rhythm of it, And so I feel like the rhythm of the rhyme scheme got kind of flipped around, and I don't know, I think that's kind of interesting because it was written with one intention but then flipped around. It's kind of backwards in a cool way. Can you give us so? So here's so, you know, I added things here and there, and her basic lyric is just the It was kind of turned upside down rhythmically, totally unintentionally. It was just sitting in front of me, you know. But does that happen a lot with music? You get the people things people give you. I don't often do that, but I did write another song on this EP from a poem from a friend called begin Again, And you know, her lyric was I feel like the rhythm of the rhyme scheme was a little bit more true to what she wrote. But yeah, like I said, I don't do it a ton, but I do like the idea of lyrics and music coming from two different brains and putting them together. It's completely not how probably the one person would think. You know that you sound like artistically you're you're growing more and more open? Yeah, for sure? Is that just? Is that just come from increased self con what's the what's the reason for that? Is that that's because usually, don't you think of people usually go in the opposite direction as they get ultimately get more set. Now, I don't know. I don't want to though. I think I've become more and more open for sure, and I like it. I've I've been more inspired by it. I learn new things and I'm better for it. You know. I know what I'm good at, I know what people Some people think of me as what I do, and that's fine, but I like to open it up and sort of try different things. Yeah, I don't think I ever go outside of myself in a way that's not true to myself. Thanks to Noah Jones for talking and playing us through some of the tracks on our album Begin Again. If you couldn't tell Malcolm and Bruce swiftthrow. You can check out more of the album by visiting Broken Record podcast dot com and subscribing to our playlist for this episode. You can also sign up for a behind the scenes newsletter while you're there. Broken Record is produced with help from Jason Gambrell and me Lobelle. Our theme music is by the great Kenny Beats. Stay tuned for next week's episode, our very first live taping of the podcast. It's Malcolm Gladwell and conversation will flee from the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the Palace the Peter in Los Angeles. So thanks for listening and stay tuned for next week. I'm justin Richmond, h