Rosanne Cash

00:00:08 Speaker 1: Pushkin. 00:00:12 Speaker 2: 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, enjoyed the episode? 00:00:31 Speaker 3: Do you recognize who that is? That's one of the most distinctive voices in modern music, Roseanne Cash Country Music Royalty. She's been making extraordinary music for forty years and that's the beginning of the title track to her latest album, She Remembers Everything you know. I recently looked back at some country music charts. Thirty years ago, the average age of the artist in the top ten was thirty five. Today is twenty. Country music is losing interest in its elders, which is a shame, because it's elders are better than ever. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to broken Record This week. My colleague Bruce Headlam sits down with Rose end Cash and her husband and musical partner John Leventhal at the Bridge Studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to play some amazing music and tell a few stories. 00:01:29 Speaker 1: The name of the album is she remembers everything, which it's an ambiguous, difficult song. The phrase on its own seems to have taken a lot a lot of meaning. Right now, how did you intend that to be received? 00:01:47 Speaker 4: I intended it as both a threat and a common And I wrote the lyrics to this song in Sam Phillips, who is just a beautiful woman in a beautiful song writer. She wrote the music. It was the first time we ever wrote a song together, and I was when I wrote the lyrics. I was thinking about trauma, early trauma and a woman's memory and how many things we lock up, and that it there's some comfort in thinking that it was a woman's memory is like a library. You may not know right off the bat every book that's on the shelf, but you could go in there and pull it out. And there's also some rage in that song. In a way, it's prescient because this was before the Me Too movement, before the Kavanaugh hearings, you know, when every woman I know felt completely crushed and discounted, and you know, we were told that we couldn't even trust our own memories. And the song actually took on greater residence for me after that. 00:02:57 Speaker 5: It's striking how it did, and we both really I remember the day we both realized it, like we just looked at each other and go, you have just entered the zeitgeist at the exact right moment. 00:03:09 Speaker 4: But it was personal and it's not like all those things didn't exist before for millions. 00:03:14 Speaker 1: Of women, you know, was that the kind of trauma you were talking about? Assault? 00:03:25 Speaker 4: Let's say I have my own stories, and I don't feel the specifics are as important as the fact that the story is believed and valued, just like every other woman I know who has these stories. And the trauma, I think childhood trauma, any trauma, it rearranges you in a way that you start acting in the world differently. And I started thinking, how long does it take to get out of that? How long does it take to become yourself? You know, in your sixth decade, are you still working on this? You're still crawling out from it? Are you still walking through the world like a thief trying to steal a little moment of joy or you know, some attention for yourself? 00:04:20 Speaker 1: Do you have an answer for that? No, because I'd love to hear it. 00:04:22 Speaker 4: I don't have the answer oh that, And in fact, I like that songs don't provide answers, they just provoke questions. 00:04:32 Speaker 1: Did the feeling you're talking about did that precede the Kavanaugh hearings? 00:04:40 Speaker 4: Oh yeah, definitely. 00:04:42 Speaker 1: I mean, I mean the expression of that politically. Did that go back to the election? Oh my god. 00:04:48 Speaker 2: Yes. 00:04:50 Speaker 4: I didn't stop crying for ten days after the election. And I have four daughters and a son, and my daughters were devastated. And one of them said to me, she called up crying the night of the election, and she said, I feel like I don't matter, and that pierced my heart. Whenever I think of that sentence, I just it breaks my heart. And at the same or at the same time, our son was writing his college filling out his essay for college, and one of the questions was what would you change in this world if you could change one thing, and he wrote sexism. That just came out of the blue. We didn't expect that, he said, because I have a mom and four sisters and I see how it hurts them. Well, those are the people we hope rule the world. You know, young men who were that sensitive. 00:05:44 Speaker 1: Or young women or young women. Of course, right growing up, there were albums and I know, you like these artists who looked at albums that way, like Joni Mitchell or Linda Ronstad, but they've thought very much in terms of albums. Do you think still in terms of albums even in this age? 00:06:01 Speaker 4: Oh yeah, and the time and you know focus that we've been on sequencing an album because it is an album to us. You know, it's like, what is track three? How are we going to start it? How are we going to end it? And even if there's not a theme there, there is a melodic or a narrative arc to it that makes sense. I'm actually not very good at sequencing. John is much better. And Tucker Martin, who is the other producer on this album, half the album was produced by him, half by John. He he's also good at sequencing. So I kind of left that to the gentleman. But you're right, Joni Mitchell, that Blue was a really really important record to me up to that point. I mean I was young, but up to that point I kind of just thought men were songwriters. I didn't realize that a woman could be a songwriter and that her inner life was legit raw material to create songs, music art and put it out in a public forum. That was That was a startling and revelatory moment for me. 00:07:14 Speaker 1: Then we'll get to the other songs in a minute. But are all the songs confessional in that way? Are they all parts of you? 00:07:20 Speaker 4: I don't like that word confessional because it makes it seem like a diary. And there is an an art and a craft of songwriting and poetic license and a rhyme scheme and a melody and a backbeat and all of those things to have to work together to make a song work at the same time. Yeah, there's nothing outside of myself on this album. Not nothing. 00:07:46 Speaker 1: It's also and I regret using the word. It's a word that's used with women's music. 00:07:53 Speaker 4: Absolutely, you don't hear about men's confessional albums. 00:07:59 Speaker 1: That's because we nothing to say. 00:08:02 Speaker 4: That's so not true. 00:08:04 Speaker 1: Well with that one, don't we try another song? What's next? 00:08:08 Speaker 4: Try being the operative word. We'll see how which one are we doing? 00:08:15 Speaker 5: Let's do Uh, let's do Jerusalem. But I need just hold hold the binary code in there for a second. 00:08:22 Speaker 6: I got to retune more broken record. 00:08:27 Speaker 1: After this, we're back with Roseanne Cash and John Leventhal. Uh. You talked when you were a young writer I'm not quite sure what you were doing about sitting down and taking apart songs by your heroes Guy Clark, Town Van Zand and I'm assuming Joni Mitchell and others. Is that something you still do even all after all this time. I guess what I'm asking is is songwriting like learning the alphabet or riding a bike. Once you know it, you know it? Or is it like playing a guitar you got to do your scales. 00:09:09 Speaker 4: Oh god, No, once you know it, you don't know it. I mean, part of the beauty of songwriting is there's mystery involved. You know, the same with any other really creative act. You start out not knowing what's going to happen, and then it starts to unfold, and then you can see the end of it, and then you edit, and then you just keep polishing, and you know, it's different every time. As far as examining other songs, absolutely, when I was really young and first starting out, I would write the lyrics down a Bob Dylan's song, Joni Mitchell's song, Guy Clark song and try to figure out why it worked and deconstruct the rhyme scheme. Where did they rhyme this one? And how did that work? And where did the bridge come? And does the chorus work? You know, and really try to dismantle it. I don't do that so much anymore because I think some of that knowledge is just intuitively gone in after forty years of writing songs. But I do pay attention and listen to how other writers create things and how they construct their songs, and you know, like a song that has a really subtle rhyme scheme and yet works and how did that happen? And chord changes, you know, all of it. It still is endlessly fascinating and wonderful and mysterious to me. 00:10:41 Speaker 1: If you hit a roadblock in your own writing, is that something you'll go back and listen to other things? 00:10:46 Speaker 4: Just for sure? I mean even I listen to other music and get inspired to you know, sometimes my competitive spirit gets inspired, like I really want to write something that good. I want to beat that Oh yeah, definitely yeah, And then yeah, it kind of makes you mad. And then other times it's just like, oh, I'm so moved. I want to find that thing in me. 00:11:11 Speaker 1: And then beat that person. That person is songwriting something you do for both of you every day? Is it? 00:11:20 Speaker 4: Is it you know what I the way I look at it. I don't sit down and write every day, but I am a songwriter every day. So I'm collating information and keeping notes every day and seeing something form just outside my peripheral vision every day. 00:11:39 Speaker 5: I try to be aware of it every day. Yeah, I mean, I'm a little weird, Like I am compelled to write music in a way. I can't turn it off, you know, which is great. So a few times where I wish I could turn it off, I can't turn off that thing in my head that wants to create or come up with something that I that I feel is potentially interesting. It doesn't always turn out to be interesting. But like you saw me here today, before we even started, like I played something on the guitar that struck me as unusual and the first thing I thought of, like, oh, I could write a song around that. 00:12:14 Speaker 4: I keep old lyrics, you know. I have files and files of old lyrics, and sometimes if I get stuck, I go back to something I wrote ten years ago, five years ago. 00:12:25 Speaker 5: Sometimes she'll show me or I'll find a bit of lyric that she hadn't really thought about as being either worthwhile or a song, and I'll just look at it and go, oh my god, let me, can I please strit music to this? It's a there's I think the song we're. 00:12:40 Speaker 4: About to do is yeah, this song everyone but me. I had written these lyrics that I didn't think were lyrics. I just thought it was something I was writing for myself because it was kind of an anguished piece, and I thought, I'm not gonna turn this into a song. And then John and I were in the studio one day and we were writing. I think we were working on crossing to Jerusalem and he said what else you got, and just impulsively. 00:13:13 Speaker 1: And you said, well, I know who's crossing the Jerusalem first. 00:13:19 Speaker 5: Well, that possibility always exists in the marriage. 00:13:23 Speaker 4: Oh. I pulled these this raw thing out and I said, I just don't really think these are lyrics, and he goes, oh yeah, let me write music to this. And I swear I think it was the first time we both cried in the studio. 00:13:37 Speaker 5: Oh geez, here we go. 00:13:39 Speaker 1: No really, okay, Well, take me back, how did that happen? 00:13:45 Speaker 4: He wrote the music to those raw kind of lyrics, and we both had tears running down our face. It was very moving. It was a great experience. 00:13:54 Speaker 5: But I didn't. What's interesting is that, I mean, I really loved Roseanne's lyrics and I was I felt good about the melody I wrote. Because I get older, I feel like I've accomplished something if I've written something really simple but has a kind of elegance to it that's not beholden to any particular style of music. But I didn't. I experienced Rosane's lyrics I think differently than she did. So the song was saying something different to me than I think what she quote unquote intended when she wrote it, which to me is my favorite kind of song and writing. Where Roseanne may have had some narrative or some idea or thought about where she was going with this lyric, but to me it represented something so much more universal than what I think she was writing about, about a general idea of loss and I don't want to get. 00:14:45 Speaker 4: Online again, but again trauma coming out of Yeah. 00:14:48 Speaker 5: See, I didn't hear it as trauma. I heard it more as this kind of universal sense that at some point you're going to lose something that you love. 00:14:56 Speaker 1: Well, it's unavoidable, hopefully it is universal, and. 00:14:59 Speaker 5: How you navigate and how you express it and what you feel about it and what you do with it is universal, and particularly as you get older, it's like, you. 00:15:08 Speaker 4: Know, mortality looms in some places on this album. 00:15:14 Speaker 1: Well with that, let's hear it. 00:15:17 Speaker 4: Okay, this is called everyone but Me. 00:15:21 Speaker 1: I mean there's a lot that's a loaded song. There's a lot in it. It does talk about parents. Yeah, And one thing I wanted to ask you about is people think, of course you were raised in Tennessee, that you were raised in the South. They're surprised to find you weren't. They might be surprised to find out you were raised Catholic. 00:15:43 Speaker 4: Yeah, my mother was Catholic, and you know, I was born in Memphis. We moved to southern California when I was three, and I was raised in southern California and my mom was a devout Catholic. In fact, my dad had to sign papers when they got married saying that the children would be raised Catholic. And I went to Cormat School for twelve years and grew up in California listening to rock and roll. 00:16:13 Speaker 1: But like all good Catholics, you left the church, left the church. But your mother was now she from. 00:16:22 Speaker 4: She was from San Antonio. 00:16:24 Speaker 1: San Antonio, but Southern Catholicism is a kind of a whole different thing, isn't it. 00:16:30 Speaker 4: Well, she her family was Italian, her father, I mean, her father was only a second generation Italian or first generation. 00:16:41 Speaker 5: They were Southern Italians, so yeah, it was Italian. 00:16:46 Speaker 4: So I mean my mom had a uncle who was a priest. It was pretty serious, right, Oh no. 00:16:52 Speaker 1: It'S very serious. Yeah, it's almost like being a Catholic in England, which is yeah, yeah, this kind of your real mind. 00:17:02 Speaker 4: Yeah, that's true. I left the church at sixteen, broke my mother's heart, but just you know, she thought I was going to hell. I just found you had to be determined, yet to be determined TBD. I found it immensely cruel and cynical that my mother, who was such a devout Catholic, was for all intents and purposes, excommunicated when she divorced my dad and not allowed to receive communion anymore. And she still showed up and sat in the front row every mass, you know, and worked in the church and everything. And I just thought, how could they turn away somebody who was so devoted. I don't want to be part of that. 00:17:52 Speaker 1: Well, there is there is a kind of sense in a lot of your work. I would argue that you've got that Catholic, particularly that kind of Catholic sense in a lot of your songs, of this kind of fight between the world we believe in and then there's the world we live in, and you tend to look at it. I would say, probably in terms of relationships. But it's a very it's something you find particularly in a lot it's Southern Catholic. That is your Flannery O'Connor is a great example of that. 00:18:31 Speaker 4: That is so interesting. I never thought about it that way, and I think that's true. And I think on this record it's less about that happening in relationships and more about it happening inside myself. And you know, there's still a good Catholic girl inside of me who wants people to like her and wants to do the right thing and believes in good and evil and morality. 00:19:01 Speaker 1: It's a it just seems to be a theme that kind of runs through and particularly your views on marriage and relationships. You know, some of these I think two of the songs are are dedicated to your husband, but they're not simple, easy songs. 00:19:17 Speaker 4: No, Well, he's serving with an. 00:19:19 Speaker 1: Easy going guy he seems to be. 00:19:21 Speaker 4: Yeah, right, well, yeah, when to see, marriage is complicated, it requires work, it's not it's not something you're given. You have to work for it. And you know, we've. 00:19:33 Speaker 5: Had work, work, work, We've had ups. 00:19:36 Speaker 4: And downs like any couple. And you know, there's some days I've wanted to get as far away from him as possible. But mostly, I mean, we really like being together. We've were together more than any couple we know, and we're really good friends. And we work together, raise a child together, live together, travel together. And it's not modern. I mean, I think a lot of modern relationships the people spend a lot of time apart. We don't, and we like it that way. 00:20:05 Speaker 1: Oh, both your parents ended up having relationships like that, didn't they. 00:20:11 Speaker 4: Yeah, where they were very close to the and with the other personal time. That's true, they did. 00:20:17 Speaker 5: Oh your dad in June had ways of yeah. 00:20:22 Speaker 6: Well, yeah, you're now at an age when when your father was a performer, when he was around your age, he was going through a lot of struggles commercially. 00:20:35 Speaker 1: I think at one point he was he dropped by his label that was then your. 00:20:38 Speaker 4: Label or yeah, that was just a dark time. 00:20:42 Speaker 1: Keep telling me how that happened. 00:20:44 Speaker 4: He was on Columbia, and really Colombia, that record label was built on the backs of him and Bob Dylan. You know, it was that that record label owed him so much. So he called me at home one day and he said, what's. 00:21:03 Speaker 1: Your royalty rate? 00:21:04 Speaker 4: Because I was on Columbia at the same time, And I told him, and he kind of rumphed. And then shortly thereafter the label dropped him, and I was furious, and I hated them for doing that, and I felt so bad for my dad, and I felt embarrassed about myself that I was still on the label. It seemed somehow disrespectful, even though I didn't have anything to do with it. You know, looking back at it, I thought, I think I should I should have left the label, should have just gotten off at that moment. But I didn't. And then Dad went to Mercury, and you know, then he had a real fallow period before he met Rick. And Rick came in like a spirit brother, and my whole family I think owes him a huge debt for what he did for Dad. I mean, he it was such a redemptive act. 00:22:11 Speaker 1: We should mention. You're talking about Rick Ruber It was one of the partners in this podcast and produced I think all your father's last five. 00:22:21 Speaker 4: Out the American recordings, yeah. 00:22:23 Speaker 1: Which are of course sort of landmarks. 00:22:25 Speaker 4: Yeah. I always thought of Dad like Matisse, you know, like Matis, starting with representational art and going into Impressionistic and then this burst of creativity at the end of his life. You know, when he did the Jazz Dancers. It's like he kept reinventing himself. And I think he that Fallo period on Mercury when he did all that kind of really some really shallow and pedestrian recordings. Then he just burst open when Rick came on. 00:22:56 Speaker 5: This, well, Rick gave him permission to be the artist he really was, and not sort of a musical artist plugged into some sort of song slash hit making Nashville machinery, which at that point was just a very bad fit for your father. 00:23:12 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:23:14 Speaker 1: I mean he needed someone to say, Johnny Cash. 00:23:17 Speaker 4: Yeah, what are you doing. You're Johnny Cash, let go of all of this. Let's just sit you down with the guitar, just you and the guitar, and let's get back to the basics. 00:23:26 Speaker 1: Well, let me ask you then, now, at this point in your career. First of all, when you looked ahead twenty years ago, where did you think your career was going to be. 00:23:35 Speaker 4: I'm not good at that. I've never been good at five year plans or mapping out my future or anything like that. I'm really more of a what's next, what's the next step, what's the next step? Person? The overarching looking forward vision I've had for myself is just to be a better writer. I just wanted to be a better songwriter and I want to be a better singer. 00:24:01 Speaker 5: I don't think either of us have ever thought about our career. Yeah, we just don't think like that. 00:24:07 Speaker 4: I mean, I've had to learn to think about some of that, you know, as the business has changed, you know, trying to adapt to that. But mostly I just want to write songs and be a better singer and be a better song and do good work, and do good work the work for the work sake. Absolutely, And the fact that I'm not burnt out at my age when I know so many people who are, I just feel so lucky and i feel like I'm still learning and getting better and what more could you want? 00:24:39 Speaker 1: Well, you actually are getting better. And I'm not just saying that because you're standing for feet from me. The people I know who've heard the record has said, Wow, she's actually getting better. And that's that's difficult for any artist. It's difficult for songwriters. Not many songwriters keep getting better? 00:24:59 Speaker 4: Is there Leonard Cohen did? 00:25:02 Speaker 1: Leonard Cohen did? Yeah? Is there is there a magic a musical fountain of Well, I shouldn't even call it a fountain of youths because that's not what it is. You know what of age? 00:25:14 Speaker 4: You know what? There's for me? To avoid getting bitter is huge because you know, bad things happen to you suffering. We all suffer, we all have losses, we all have missed opportunities. And I know people who've allowed themselves to become bitter, and it really shuts you down. It shuts down your access points to art and creativity in my mind, from what I understand. And the other thing is to stay curious. I'm really still very curious. I feel like a beginner and maybe that's just part of my DNA. My dad was always like that. He was always curious about what the nineteen year olds were doing. 00:26:09 Speaker 1: He used to have them on a show. I remember, Yeah, well I think. 00:26:13 Speaker 4: I did to get that from him, I got a good, strong work ethic and the ability to be curious for your whole life. 00:26:23 Speaker 1: Okay, well, let's go back and do some of that history, because you're gonna do a couple of covers. 00:26:28 Speaker 4: Yeah, this song was on the list my album, on the list and on the original list my dad gave me, and it's you know, it's just at the center of American roots music in my mind. Okay, this is Long Black. 00:26:42 Speaker 1: Fail more with Roseanne Cash and John Leventhal. After this, we're back with Roseanne Cash and John Leventhal. That's Long Black Fail. Of course, many versions. Your father's Lefty Frizelle the band did a wonderful version. 00:27:04 Speaker 5: I think wonderful. 00:27:06 Speaker 1: Danko, you've been the singer on that. 00:27:08 Speaker 5: Just unbelievable. 00:27:10 Speaker 1: There are some songs that when you flip the sexes, when a woman sings a song that's traditionally the narrator is a man, it can work. You can't flip this one. 00:27:20 Speaker 4: No, you can't flip it, And therein lies the beauty, you know. I love that old folk tradition of women singing about other women, women being narrators in a song and not changing the gender. You know, the Carter family did that quite a lot, and they're Gene Richie. There are plenty of other old folk songs where women didn't switch the gender. 00:27:41 Speaker 1: And is there a certain quality you think when a woman sings a what's a man's part? 00:27:49 Speaker 4: Yeah? I mean I think it. 00:27:52 Speaker 1: Sure. 00:27:53 Speaker 4: It provides a different kind of angle or prism to look at it through. I mean, I guess that people will hear it as a narrator rather than me talking about you know, it's almost like I come to I'm Rod Sterling or something and come to the front of the screen and present this story. 00:28:12 Speaker 5: I like the gender switch on that song a lot. It adds to the song in some ways to me. 00:28:20 Speaker 1: Yeah, and it was co written by a woman. 00:28:21 Speaker 5: Yeah, John Wilkins, Yeah, just an unbelievably great song. I mean I call this song the Humbler. It's like, Okay, your songwriter, show me you can do something like this, and we should go on to farewell. 00:28:36 Speaker 1: Angelina. Can you tell me a little why you chose that song? 00:28:44 Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I just love that song. I love the tradition he borrowed from to write this song. I love how obtuse the lyrics are. 00:28:56 Speaker 5: Talk about mystery. 00:28:57 Speaker 4: Yeah, talk about mysteries, right. 00:28:58 Speaker 5: And melodies and incredible. 00:29:00 Speaker 4: and then it's like all of this weird stuff going on in the verses, and then every time it comes back to farewell and Angelina. I mean, Angelina is such a beautiful name. Saying farewell, you know, in some very old world sense of saying goodbye, it just works perfectly. And I don't know many writers who can get away with lyrics this obtuse. 00:29:26 Speaker 5: He borrowed it from a Scottish song called Farewell Tarwathi, which was a Sailors song, but he just took it as Bob did in the previous first four or five years, and just recurploded it. 00:29:37 Speaker 2: Yea. 00:29:39 Speaker 1: It is one of those songs when I was listening to you. It is full of these very sort of two difficult metaphors, I suppose, but some of them seem to be It's also a song that there are times they seem very real. The fiends nailed bombs. 00:30:01 Speaker 4: Yeah, time bombs to the hands of the you know. 00:30:05 Speaker 1: what's happening with the sky. It just it seems to be a song that the kind of more outlandish images almost become concrete. Yeah, as time goes on. 00:30:17 Speaker 4: Yeah, I agree. And also it's very dream like, like you could, you know, the fifty two gypsies filing past the guards or something. It's like a film, you know, an abstract realism kind of film. You know. I did skip one verse, by the way. I hope Bob doesn't hear this. I know that I skipped the verse about the pirates. 00:30:46 Speaker 1: Have you written a song? Have you had this song in your mind when you've written another song, or have you ever tried to create the kind of effect he creates here? 00:30:55 Speaker 4: Well, my use of when I'm writing melodies, my use of minor chords just tends to this exactly. In fact, I would say overuse of that particular. 00:31:05 Speaker 1: Never heard a minor you don't love? 00:31:08 Speaker 5: Yeah, he was never an a minor to f that she does. 00:31:12 Speaker 4: That's exactly right. 00:31:13 Speaker 5: I mean, I argue about it. 00:31:16 Speaker 4: John cautions me again, said, and I do love it so much, And he said, yes, all of humanity loves it, you know, but just back off a bit. 00:31:25 Speaker 5: That's that's a podcast, Yeah, all on harmony and chord changes. Yeah, and sort of the diminution thereof last thirty. 00:31:33 Speaker 4: Okay, well, not to get too serious about it, but this folk tradition of this use of minor chords is very compelling to me and I write me talk, Yeah. 00:31:43 Speaker 5: I love Bob's early chord changes and melodies and how he appropriated Scottish hymns and you know folk balance and just would have a twist on them both harmonically and melodically. I just thought was just exceptional. 00:31:59 Speaker 1: Is that a particular gift to be able to hear a melody? Because you know, I hear a lot of those old songs. I can't hear what other people are hearing. I can't hear what's modern and what would translate to something else? Do you know what I mean? 00:32:13 Speaker 5: Much? 00:32:13 Speaker 4: Sure? 00:32:14 Speaker 1: You know some people can take an old melody and say if you turn it around. 00:32:17 Speaker 5: And do this, and I'm like, oh oh. 00:32:19 Speaker 1: To me, the trappings of the song, the original kind of arrangement, everything about overwhelms my sense of what I could pull out. 00:32:28 Speaker 6: Of the song. 00:32:29 Speaker 4: Well, that does take a particular gift to reappropriate something that's old, and I mean the Carter family did it too, you know, ap Carter find those old songs that were kind of part of an oral tradition that came from Scotland and Ireland and reinterpret them into Appellation Ballad. 00:32:53 Speaker 1: I do want to ask you. You joked earlier about writing for True Detective that they wanted something dark and depressing that was right down your alley, But you do on this album, having listened to it a couple of times. It is about age, It's frequently about dying and seemingly impenetrable spaces between people. But there is a kind of spirit of optimism. 00:33:20 Speaker 4: I'm an optimist. I always have been as dark as I can go. I'm still an optimist walking into a nightmare. I'm still an optimist. I just don't go to despair. 00:33:33 Speaker 5: Your heart's too big. 00:33:35 Speaker 4: Oh that's very sweet. 00:33:36 Speaker 1: This is going to sound like an odd question. Does it make it easier to write about the tough things in relationships and the tough things about growing older when you're ultimately optimistic? 00:33:49 Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess so. I mean I have a thick skin and an open heart, and I try myself to go to some dark places and come back. And one reason I trust myself to come back is because of John Leventhal, because he's been a tremendous grounding force in my life. I think I probably would not have come back had I not met him. And because of our children. You know, it's too selfish to stay in that place. When you have kids, you have to come back. 00:34:25 Speaker 1: You mentioned some political things have made you cry for extended periods, But do you believe ultimately, I guess in the personal relationships and political ones, you believe the long arc of history Ben Steward's Justice. 00:34:45 Speaker 4: I have to say I felt incredibly discouraged in the last two years, and I do have optimism. I just don't know if it's going to happen in my lifetime, which makes me really sad. 00:34:56 Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess it is a long arc, the long arc. So tell me now about feel me thing worth fighting for. 00:35:08 Speaker 4: I wrote the lyrics and t Bone Burnett and Lyra Lynn wrote the music. T Bone and I have been friends for thirty years and he was music supervisor on True Detective and he just called and said, would you write some lyrics for True Detective for this new season coming up? And I said, yeah, like what kind of songs? And he said, well, you know, songs that are about destruction and really dark and maybe a woman who has a lover who turns into a bird, and you know, he kept going on and on. I went, Okay, that's my wheelhouse. Sure yeah, And I sent him these lyrics and they wrote the music. But even these, there are two songs on the album I wrote for True Detective, and even those were not like commissioned pieces. They were not about characters. They were still me. 00:36:00 Speaker 1: Broken Record is produced by Justin Richmond and Jason Gambrel, with help from Miia Lobel, Jaquita Pascal, Jacob Smith, Julia Barton, Jacob Weisberg, and of course Malcolm Gladwell and Rick Rubin. Special thanks to Amon Drum and John Leeman of Bridge Studios in Brooklyn. To hear the songs featured in today's episode, check out Broken Record podcast dot com. This show is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Bruce Headlock.