The Sunshine

Nabil’s dad is not exactly in the picture when he grows up. But he is in other pictures, many in fact. He’s a famous jazz musician and throughout most of Nabil’s life, he’s only a stone’s throw—and yet, a world—away.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. If I ever
ran into my father, would either of us recognize each other?
If I saw someone who I was positive was him,
would I approach him or would I let it go
in order to save myself the humiliation of not being
recognized or a brief, hurried encounter. There was always the

(00:21):
chance that I'd catch him at the perfect time when
he was available and interested, even if only for a
few minutes.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
That's Nobile Airs, music industry entrepreneur, podcast host, musician and
author of the recent memoir My Life in the Sunshine.
Nobiles is a story full of grace and grit and
talent and the many ways longing can shape us over
the course of a lifetime. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this

(01:07):
is family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. So I usually begin by asking my
guest to describe the landscape of her childhood, but in
your case, I'm actually going to start by asking about

(01:28):
the landscape of your mother's life in the couple of
years before you were born.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
Yeah, that's an interesting way to look at it. I've
learned so much about it in recent years. She would
say that she had a fairly unhappy childhood. She was
a you know, on paper two parents, a father was
a lawyer in New York City that lived in Long Island,
had a younger brother, you know, very sort of picture perfect.
But I think she just had a hard time as
a teenage ballet answer who had her teacher who you know,

(01:56):
as I think, physically abusive. I think would hit her
with the yardstick that stuff that she wanted to do,
but that didn't turn out the way she wanted. And
when soon as she was eighteen, moved to New York City,
and this is nineteen sixty nine, kind of an incredible
time to be able to do that, you know, by
yourself as a teenager, and had an apartment in Greentted Village.
She's very close with her younger brother. My uncle Alan

(02:17):
was two years younger, so he would come visit her.
So I think the way she describes those years is
that she was kind of lost, just had sort of
you know, normal jobs. They worked in movie theaters. So
she had a great apartment in a great neighborhood and
was just trying to figure out what to do and
didn't really feel any direction. Was done with dancing, kind
of retired already, and the way she divisited, really wanted

(02:39):
to give someone a better childhood than she had and
wanted a best friend. In this park Ampton Square and
still there in Grantwich Village, and she would walk by
and see kids and see parents playing with those kids,
and she said to herself, Wow, I really want to
be a young single mother, and I want to give
somebody a really great life, and I want to have
a best friend. So that was the sort of seed

(03:00):
that she planted, and that kind of became what her
life was about. But she wasn't looking. She wasn't actively
looking for a father or me or a husband. I
think she wasn't even concerned with a relationship at the time.
And she was nineteen twenty. And when she was twenty one,
she was at a jazz club, the Village Gate, very
famous jazz club with my uncle who was a jazz musician,

(03:21):
and they ran into Roy Ayers, who at the time
was already pretty well known jazz musician, and Alan met
him a few times. I think they've even played together.
So they were talking and my mother's words are that
the second she saw him, she just thought, that's him.
This is the person I'm going to have my child with,
and very clearly not this is the person I want
to marry, or this is the person that I want

(03:42):
to be with. But really like she saw the father
of her child and that is where things kind of
changed for her.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
It's such an extraordinary thing, and I think it really
bears talking about how incredibly unusual that would have been
for a young, middle class Jewish young woman in nineteen
sixty nine to sort of have that vision for her life.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
Right right, Yeah, I mean, what's funny, It didn't seem
that strange to me. I always knew that story until
I finally really sat down and started getting more details
and learning more about her her mindset at the time.
So only recently did I even consider, wow, that's wild.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
You know, well, I think we almost never think that
about our own lives or our own childhoods, maybe until
we get old enough to have some perspective on them
in sort of the wider world. But you know, my
senses that she was she had such certainty about what
she was doing. So she and Roy have you know,

(04:42):
something of a relationship. I mean, they see each other
on and off right.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, I think barely. I think I think three times
over the course of a year or so, like really
not dating, and she would say that she was, she
was in love with them at the time, but she
was also very very aware that that's not where he was.
I think he was very upfront about it. You know,
he's a bit older at the time. If she was
twenty one, I think he was about thirty. His star
was really rising, he was touring, he was doing all

(05:09):
these things, and I think he was very clear that
he wasn't looking for a relationship. I wondered if maybe
she would have been more into it had he been
into it, But it didn't change the fact that there
was one thing that she wanted from him, and it
was a child. The story is that she and my
uncle left an event one night and she realized, oh,
I'm really close to Roe's apartment. I wonder if he's home,
I'm going to get pregnant tonight.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
Noabille's mom's plan worked. She indeed got pregnant that very night,
and Nabil was born in New York City in nineteen
seventy two.

Speaker 1 (05:45):
He lived on Downing Street in Greenwich Village. I know
the exact building. We walk by it all the time now,
which is great. And then when I was one, I
think we moved to Boston or Cambridge, Massachusetts. My uncle
Alan was going to Berkeley School of Music. He was
in college at this point, so we moved there to
be with him and so he could kind of help
with me. There's lots of pictures some then, but I

(06:05):
don't remember that. But what I do think, I remember
I was always into music. I mean, at a very
young age, there were always records on. We were always
hanging out with musicians. I saw live music certainly before
I can remember. We know I was at concerts as
a baby. So I was playing drums a lot, on
pots and pants and on like a big African drum
that the friend gave us. And so my uncle Alan

(06:27):
bought me a drum set when I was two and
a half years old. But this is like a real
drum set, not like a kid's drum set. It was
a full sized adult drum set that was really beat
up and had some sharp edges and it was kind
of rough. But I remember him. We had a basement
apartment and I remember him walking the drums down the
stairs one at a time, putting them on the ground
and be hitting them. And I have a memory of

(06:49):
what one of the symbols sounded like because I was
so surprised when I hit it, and it was so
loud and it really scared me and it created this
kind of ringing in my ear. And that was, I mean,
even at two and a half, a turning point in
my life, and that, you know, established who I was.
And if anything, he didn't do it to make me
a drummer. He knew that it was already happening. I

(07:10):
think he did it to sort of facilitate what existed.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
I love that and it makes me laugh because in
many other families, the idea of you know, an uncle
bringing a drum set to a two and a half
year old child.

Speaker 1 (07:25):
Thanks thanks uncle, Thanks so.

Speaker 2 (07:26):
Much, uncle, Alan. But your mother was it, doesn't It
sounds like she was completely on board.

Speaker 1 (07:33):
She was completely loved it. It would always encourage me
to play. It didn't again. Another one of those things
that in my mind doesn't seem strange at all until
I really look back and think about it. Decades later.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
When no Bille is a child in Cambridge, his mom
attends community college. She's dedicated to giving her son the
best life possible. She's determined to secure a more stable
financial future for them, so they moved to Amherst, where
she finishes her undergraduate degree at UMass and then gets
her MBA. Nabiel calls these the golden years. His beloved

(08:14):
uncle Allan has relocated to New York, but Nabil and
his mom still get to see him regularly. They travel
back and forest into New York City as much as possible,
And keep in mind, this is the seventies and New
York City is a particularly cool place to be, but
Amherst is a great place to be too. Nabil goes

(08:35):
to an incredibly diverse and wonderful public school, and though
he and his mom are on welfare eating off food stamps,
to Nobiel, it never feels like they're poor. To Nabiel,
it feels rich, golden.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
We lived in this development called North Village Departments, which
was UMass sort of university funded student housing. So it
was maybe one hundred and fifty or two hundred of
these like almost like barracks. I think, you know, we
would call them projects now, but it didn't feel like
projects because they weren't tall, brick buildings. They were single story,
kind of connected at the sides. It almost looked like

(09:15):
condos really not quite as nice with big shared backyards.
And the only people who could live there were either
students at UMAs or professors at UMAs or someone who
had something to do with the university, and you had
to have children. So it was sort of this wild
free for all again seventies, no bike helmets, no you know,
no police, no concerns about anything. No one got hurt,
nothing bad was happening, So it was amazing. There was

(09:37):
children of all races, of all religions. It was so
truly diverse in every way, and so many kids who
had single parents who were going back to school. So
it was weird for me as a kid. For you know,
I'd be seven years old and amrist with a single
white mother who was still in her twenties and on
welfare and a black father who wasn't in the picture.

(09:58):
And I was a totally normal kid. I knew kids.
So with the worst situation, there were kids who's you know,
whose dads were in prison and that's why the mom
was there. Like it was really it was so unique
and that our situations were all different but we were
all similar in that we all had weird situations and
so everyone it wasn't weird at all. I was totally
a normal kid and loved it. So it never even

(10:18):
occurred to me that, yeah, everyone else has a father,
and look at you know, look at Joey out there
playing baseball with his dad like that. I mean, of
course I still thought about my father occasionally, but he
was never We had a few of his records. This
biggest record came out in nineteen seventy six, and now
I think we moved to Amherst in seventy seven, so
even he played there once and that's the first time

(10:38):
I remember meeting him. My mother took me. He played
at the huge football stadium that's still there at UMass.
It was Grateful Dead, Patti Smith and Roy Yers. That
was the concert was the spring concert in May of
nineteen seventy nine. And what's funny is I remember the concert,
but I don't remember the other parts of it, which
my mother later told me. But we went early and
tried to go backstage. You know, this is Roy's son,

(10:59):
and we want to talk to him. My mother is
very good at being pushy and getting what she wants
New Yorker and they let us in, and I don't
remember that. And so she said that we talked to
him for a while, that he was really nice and
really friendly, and over the years, and there'd been a
couple other times we ran into him on the street
in New York and we had talked to him for
you know, thirty seconds or one minute. But I think

(11:20):
I even then might have realized what she was doing
was showing him that she did it and that we
were in good shape, and that not that he didn't
need to worry, because I don't think she thought he
was worried, but more that that thing, you know, that
she said to him, I want to have a child.
I want you to be the father. You don't need
to be involved. I think as much as he was
keeping his end of the deal, which was pretty easy,

(11:42):
I think she wanted to show that she was keeping
her end and she was doing a really good job
and that maybe it wasn't as easy.

Speaker 2 (11:49):
Yeah, there's there's something that's really moving about that that
throughout it, it feels like both you and your mother
when it comes to Roy, there's this sense of look
how it turned out, Look how it turned out?

Speaker 3 (12:03):
And you could be proud. We're proud, all right.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
No Bil is seven years old when he and his
mom go to that concert, and even though he didn't
retain much memory about the encounter, there is a memento
of that concert that he or perhaps his mom kept
for years, tucked away in a photo album, a backstage
pass on which no Bil evaluated the performers. In his
Little Boy script, next to Patti Smith and The Grateful Dead,

(12:34):
he wrote boo, and next to Roy Ayer's name, na
Bil wrote, yay.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
That's such a funny detail to look at years later.
I mean, obviously, when I sort of tried to convince
myself that actually I had a great childhood and it
didn't feel like he was missing, and all these things
that said for so long, that is this weird little
bit of you know, three letter proof. That's at least
how I felt, whether it's true. The fact that I

(13:01):
wrote yeah next to his name meant he's on my
team or I'm on his team, and those other two
teams are the opposing teams and a child brain.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
The following year, Nobul is eight when he sees his
father again. Alan knows Roy a bit, and he brings
Nobile to Electric Lady Recording studio where Roy's recording. This time,
the visit leaves more of an impression.

Speaker 1 (13:26):
I can see it so well, I can smell it,
I can really remember it. Between seven and eight was
when my brain developed in such a way that memories
are different or emotions are different. The UMass thing was
no big deal. It was fun to see. I don't
even remember talking to him, which I apparently did. But
one year later, I was with Alan in New York Allan,
I guess ran into Roy on the street and happened

(13:46):
to mention that I was in town, and Roy said, oh,
I'm recording an Electric Lady. Bring him by. So one
night we just showed up. I was so excited because
I was so into music. I was eight years old,
so I was a huge Kiss fan. This is you know,
if you were a boy in the music in the seventies.
That was my band and all of their albums. So
maybe not all of them, but definitely those early seventies
albums were recorded electric ly. They said so on the

(14:08):
album covers. So I was going in. I was not thinking, oh,
this is such a big deal. I'm going to meet
my father. It was nothing like that because my mother
Alan never made it a big deal because I think
they didn't want it to be. So I remember being
so nervous that I might meet Kiss, Like, surely they're here.
They just work here, right, all their albums say so,
and I didn't. But we walked into this room, into

(14:29):
one of the studios, and there's kind of a lounge outside,
and it's like a classic and I guess the recording studio.
I mean, it's one of the most famous in the world,
but something you would see in a movie where you
go into this lounge and you can see the mixing
board and then there's this huge wall of kind of
soundproof glass. So there's music happening there but I can't
hear it. But I see Roy in there with headphones on,

(14:49):
singing into a microphone. I'm so excited again, more about
the music in the fact of that where we are
and what's happening. That's the thing at that point. But
when he comes out, it's no big deal. There's lots
of people there, people from his band. They're all super
cool and I'm sure talented. It feels very like sort
of special charismatic room, and he kind of just like

(15:10):
points to everyone. They're obviously ordering dinner, and he points
at me and he says, do you want some tempora?
And I remember him pointing at me, and I just
remember thinking, like you know that feeling, and like you
end up in a conversation with someone and you feel like, wait,
did I forget that we've already been introduced and all
these things have already happened. How is this person so
far ahead in the conversation? And that's what I remember feeling, like,

(15:33):
just thinking like, well, do do you even know who
I am? Or should I know who you are? You're
just asking me if I want tempora? And I said no,
and then he kind of just bounced around. He's, you know,
very charismatic center of attention, especially at his recording session,
and I remember not speaking to him anymore, and eventually
with Alan just leaving, and much like my mother the

(15:54):
times we met him, it wasn't a big deal to Alan.
He never there was no like so sorry, I wish
your father was more interested in your life. There's never
anything like that. It was really just like cool, that
was fun. What do you want to eat? Or where
do you want to go? I think everyone was sort
of careful to not let me be disappointed, but still

(16:14):
let me kind of have whatever limited window I could
into my father's life. But I do remember that feeling
disappointing or at least very confusing, like knowing, well, he
invited me here, but he didn't seem at all interested
in talking to me. That's very strange, and that felt
like a lot to process for an eight year old.

Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yeah, huge, and you know he doesn't even say.

Speaker 1 (16:36):
Hello, right exactly. It's a big word to miss.

Speaker 2 (16:42):
Do you think that Alan and your mother that either
of them or both of them felt, you know, privately
felt like, oh, that's fucked up, but wouldn't want you
to experience them feeling that way, or do you think
that they didn't feel that way.

Speaker 1 (16:59):
I think I thought it was fucked up. I think
my mother maybe felt a little more in disbelief that
he wouldn't be more interested because I'm so fascinating, I'm
telling you her, but I think that's what she felt.
Necessarily mad or not that it was crazy, but just
just like really, yeah, disbelief is the word, Like, don't

(17:22):
you get this, this thing that you helped to make
is sitting here like you should be more engaged and
I think Alan, he's not like this, But I mean
he is lifelong used to musicians, and a lot of
them are narcissists, and a lot of them are only
doing the thing that progresses their thing, And so to him,
I think that's just who he was, and he wasn't

(17:44):
surprised by that, and even knew that before it existed.

Speaker 2 (17:48):
It seems like it contributed to some really healthy bedrock
of for you.

Speaker 1 (17:54):
Yeah, I never ever heard a bad word about my father.
There was never like, oh, he doesn't send money, and
if your father weren't around, we could have a better house.
Like There's just nothing like that. All the things that
I think people think I was feeling or hearing this
didn't exist. And the rare instances that he did come
up in conversation, my mother or uncle would say things like, oh, yeah,

(18:15):
he's the talented, wonderful, charismatic guy who helped bring you
into the world.

Speaker 2 (18:22):
When Nabile is nine, he and his mom moved back
to New York City with her newly minted MBA. She
gets a job at American Express, and when Nobile is ten,
his mom takes him to hear Roy play at the Village.

Speaker 1 (18:36):
Gate was really close to where we lived, so we
just went there early, thinking of course he'll be there early.
And we were inside the club. There's nobody there. The
club was empty, maybe they were just practicing or sound checking.
And ran right into Roy and a woman who I
think we assume was his wife. He was married soon
after I was born, and they're still together, but I

(18:57):
don't know for sure who that was, but it seemed
like it, and it was this really quick moment just
said hi, didn't introduce us to the woman. It very
now I'm remembering then too. At the times I talked
to him, it felt very much like I'm really busy,
I'm doing a lot, I gotta go. Always felt like that, like,
even if he was charming and felt sort of present,
it always felt like he had one foot out the

(19:17):
door while you were talking to him, you know. And
that was probably a few hours before he actually played.
And I don't remember this part of it, but this
is what my mother told me that, you know. Later on,
I was like, let's just go home, and she said, wait,
don't you want to stay and see him play? And
I said something like, well, he didn't have time for us,
so why would I have time for him, which is

(19:37):
definitely obviously another look into me being another year or
two older and starting to feel the idea that, you know,
this guy's never been missing. But the more I'm exposed
to him, the more I realized that something feels off
about it.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
And then another New York run in, not just with
Roy this time, but also with his children. Now Bale's
have siblings.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
So my mother had never driven in her life, was
taking driving lessons in New York City, which is I
just can't imagine doing that as like, you know, thirty
year old or something. And so sometimes we would have
the instructor wherever we felt like going. I would come along,
of course, because I went to everything, and the lesson
would end at some destination since we had a car.
So we lived in the village of just Way downtown,

(20:29):
and we had friends, my mother's friend Jenny and her
daughter around my age, and they lived on the Upper
West Side, which you know, was not terribly far. It's
a subway right away, but we got a car for
a minute, so we had the instructor drop us off there,
and I think her daughter went to the same school
as Roy's kids, who are all We're all around the
same age, as kids are maybe two or four years
younger than me. And she said, there's this, you know,

(20:50):
this great fair at the school on a Saturday afternoon's
let's all go there. And so we went. And it
was this very sunny day and kind of lots of
kids and people around and you know, food and all
that kind of stuff, music, and we were walking down
this kind of sunny trail and I remember we stopped,
and of course I didn't know why. I mean, my
mother ran into someone, and she's so social and so gregarious,

(21:11):
and so she was just talking. But I realized it's like, oh,
this is this is Roy, who's with a woman and
two kids. And I think, you know, just a couple
hours earlier, it had been casually dropped that his kids
went to the same school. So I think I pretty
quickly put it all together. And I remember being a
little taller than those kids and Roy and my mother
talking briefly, and her sort of I could tell even then,

(21:34):
I remember her voice did this thing. It's just a
sort of it's a slightly I want to impress you thing.
I could just tell the difference in the tone we're
talking to somebody who she thinks is important or something
like that. I could just I remember feeling that at
the same time, I remember these two kids and kind
of looking at them and them I can't imagine having

(21:55):
any idea who I might be, but me having some
idea who they were, just my two half siblings, and
just thinking, this is very strange to be standing here
doing this, not really knowing what to think still as
a nine or ten year old, but just being again
at this position where this you know, it's so strange

(22:15):
how easy it still is in New York. You run
into people, but it's really weird. But it's your father
who you don't know. And it happens all the time.
They're seemingly all the time.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
And once again there's no hello, like there's no introduction. Now,
not that it would have been really likely or feasible
for him to say, you know, this is not he's
your half brother, but no, just absolutely no, you know,
no need to make everybody comfortable.

Speaker 1 (22:43):
No. And I remember my mother complimenting him and him
sort of doubling down more like, you know, it's like
the equivalent of her saying, well, you look great, and
him saying, like, I know I looked great, don't I
look great and tell me more about how great I look.
That's what it felt like. That's what it felt like.
The conversation was not like, oh, so do you what
if you went up to It wasn't reciprocal in that way.

Speaker 2 (23:05):
So shortly thereafter you and your mom moved to Salt
Lake City. Yeah, and that was precipitated by a job
for her and also kind of a desire to get
out of the city.

Speaker 1 (23:18):
Yeah, that was the big thing. I think she know,
she got her MBA. She did everything she was supposed to.
She had not she wasn't rich, but like, you know,
a much more high paying job in New York. We
had a great apartment in the village. I went to
Little at Schoolhouse. This an incredible liberal private school. So,
you know, we were doing it. Four years ago we'd
been on welfare and now we're living in New York
City doing everything. But she really hated American Express. She

(23:41):
was not built for corporate life and was wearing suits
every day, and it was very high pressure and people
worked late, and everyone was trying to get ahead and
she wasn't. She just wanted to have a job and
got paid and come home. So they moved a big
part of the company to Salt Lake City and sort
of offered anyone who was willing to go. This is
great incentive. I think it was the same or more

(24:02):
money in a city that at the time probably cost
significantly less to live in and the kind of the
most family city in America. So the promise of like true,
nine to five people leave work. It's very family based.
So we went and visited, and I remember that took
very well, and I really surprised to how much we
liked it. So we moved there, which was a crazy,

(24:22):
crazy thing to do for our you know, for who
we were and what our life was. To pick up
and move to Salt Lake City in nineteen eighty two
is just a massive change.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
That's something that really struck me, you know, when I
think about what you were talking about about Amherston and
the way that you grew up until age seven in
this world where you didn't have any concerns about being different,
or about racial identity, or about kids don't really as

(24:57):
a rule want to be seen as as different or
even special, you know, just they just don't want that.
And that was so foundational for you getting all the
way to age seven, really in this kind of weird utopia.

Speaker 1 (25:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:09):
And then you.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
Get to Salt Lake City, which has got to be
one of the whitest places on that on the planet.

Speaker 1 (25:16):
Yeah, and even more than that, so not only one
of the whitest places, but I mean truly the most
family places because of the Mormon Church. So everybody had
a mother and a father, and lots of people had
three or four siblings and so that so it wasn't
just the having the black father thing, but also just
having one parent, just the two of us. That was

(25:37):
really I feel like we stood out just by existing
anywhere in the grocery store, at the bank, you know,
it was really so different.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
So was that a change for you, like emotionally and
you know, sort of interest in the realm of feeling,
you know, going from you'd been in amatest, you'd been
in New York City.

Speaker 3 (25:56):
Both were places that made a lot more sense.

Speaker 2 (25:59):
Yeah, and now you're in this place where you you know,
you really have to kind of fight to belong.

Speaker 1 (26:07):
Uh huh. Yeah, it definitely was. And I don't know
where this instinct came from. If it's from my mother,
if it's somehow genetically from my father, if it's from
my uncle. But I think I'm because I never thought
about these things and amhers and even New York, of course,
was totally very diverse, and there are lots of kids
so single parents, and suddenly I definitely noticed I was different.

(26:29):
I mean simply visually, my skin was darker. I had
a pretty big afro at the time, so it was
much more I think, noticeably black than I am now,
where I'm largely balding in my fifties. It was very obvious.
And then, of course my name Deal, which is Arabic
and has nothing to do with my race, but the
assumption is constantly there. So you know, you have this
ten year old kid from New York with darker skin

(26:50):
and afro and an exotic name. To my mother's credit,
we were in the best place you could be in
Salt Lake City, the best neighborhood, really close to the
University of Utah. That there's anything wrong with the Mormon
churchs I had incredible experiences with all my Mormon friends,
but the least Mormon part of the state that you know,
where eventually there was an openly gay mayor and the
sort of you know, the blue dot in the Red

(27:11):
state is exactly where we were. We were in the
right place. But kids would just ask me things that
didn't feel like they were making fun of me. It
didn't feel malicious, but they were so curious because I
was so exotic, and this is, you know, again like
before the internet, before so many things, So where's your father?
Can I touch your afro? What's your name mean? And
I just, amazingly was never used to those questions at

(27:34):
ten years old. No one was really asking me those
things because it wasn't special, and I loved that. So
suddenly I realized, Okay, no one's being mean to me,
but they're really curious. So I was always open about
my race. I would say my father's black and my
mother's white. I definitely said that they're divorced, which of

(27:55):
course wasn't true. They were never married, they were never together,
and I think even at that age, it felt like
a betrayal to my mother. I felt terrible saying that,
because she'd done such an incredible job and carried through
with everything she'd planned with flying colors. Felt like, this
feels bad that I have to say this thing that's
not true, that is so much less impressive than proof.

(28:16):
But it was the easiest way to stop the conversation,
and that was the goal at ten years old, not
to explain, you know, it was my whole life story,
So divorce shut it down. No one would ask questions
about that because as a kid in the eighties, people
were at least sort of used to divorce. They fell
bad for you, and they moved on. So that's kind
of it was the first time in my life when

(28:37):
I sort of found myself, you know, sort of lying
about who I was to shut down the conversations. What
was so fun is that Alan would come visit us
all the time in Salt Lake and I would go
to New York all the time to visit him. That
was sort of part of the deal when my mother
and I moved there and I would go to New York,
I don't know, sometimes four or five times a year,
I feel like. And it was so fun because then

(28:58):
it was like, Wow, there were these move movies that
haven't even opened in Salt Lake that I can see.
There are bands that I can see. That was such
a huge thing, and that's a lot of I think
how I got along in Salt Lake City, which I
really did. I really liked it and had friends and
was happy there. But a lot of it was that
I was the kid who went to New York all
the time, who had a record collection, who knew things
people didn't know, who could talk about dans, who had

(29:20):
a drum set. Like That's who I became, and that
was really what I leaned into. And I let that
make me more unique than my name or my hair
or anything like that. And I don't think I got
that then, but it's definitely what I was doing, and
I'm really glad I had all the tools to do it.
So as I got older in high school, I wanted
to get a job so I could make money to

(29:42):
buy drums and buy records and all the things I loved.
And so Alan said, come to New York for the summer.
I'll find your job. My friend is a lawyer. He
wants a messenger at his law firm, which is amazing.
So I had this crazy job for two summers, the
summer between sophomore and junior and junior and senior year,
where I would stay my uncle's apartment in Chelsea and
would go to work every day from nine to five

(30:04):
at this sort of fancy law office in Midtown. It
was really small, firms to a couple of people in
the office, and I would sit at the front desk
until they needed me to do something. And when they
did a run around the city, I'd get some papers
and you have to run them downtown to some other offices.
And I just really got a different look at the
city than when I lived there, when I even visited,
because you know, we just lived in cool neighborhoods and

(30:26):
went to the same place. But this was New York City.
This is you know, running up and down crazy streets
and elevators and office buildings. So I really started to
see this thing. This is the late eighties. You know,
I grew up in these these very racially diverse places
where everyone did everything. Now I live in Salt Lake City,
which is extremely white. But now these summers, I'm in

(30:47):
New York, where there's still a mix, but there's obviously
roles for each of the different races. And I started
to notice that all the people I was delivering papers
to and taking papers from were white, and they were
in a nice air condition offices, and they were wearing suits,
and they were never friendly to me. They wouldn't even
look at me. But the people who were friendly were
the people who held the doors open. They are the

(31:08):
people who you know, worked on the streets, and those
are the black and brown people. And I was I
really every day would just see it as I walk
down the street in New York. It was just it
was impossible for me to not see this really obvious
division that I still see there and I still see
in tons of cities. But that was the summer I
really noticed it and realize, I, now, this is this

(31:29):
is kind of what the world is like. Salt Lake
is not what the world is like, and unfortunately Amherst
is not either.

Speaker 2 (31:36):
And you also promised yourself that you weren't going to
be like that when you became successful.

Speaker 1 (31:43):
It was just like I wasn't visible. I was just
the person holding the paper that needed to be signed.
But you know, I would get to some hot shot
and they would sign the papers, but they wouldn't look
at me, they wouldn't say hello, they wouldn't do anything.
And I just thought like, this is so weird. Why
wouldn't you I'm standing here, can you say hi? Or
or something like that? And it, yeah, it really did
sort of create this feeling and be like, well, I'm

(32:04):
never gonna do that. That's such an easy thing to do.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
There's this echo there of I mean, who else who
else didn't say hello? And who else was like, you know,
I gotta go, I gotta go, you know, and didn't
look you in the eye. So it's interesting, like you were,
you're kind of continuing to play that out in a
totally different way.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
Yeah, it is really easy to see that parallel. I mean,
these are very They all sort of become big moments
that have something to do with each other, even though
you know, one person is my father and other people
are completely faithless. It's a kind of similar feeling. And
it's weird because it's not it's not necessarily a feeling
like I'm super important, don't you see me. It's just
a feeling of like, don't be an asshole, I'm here.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
As Nobille nears the end of high school, his mom

(33:12):
suggests to him he might want to change his last name.
She's recently changed hers from Brausman to Blair.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
She was working at I Think Fidelity Investments. She moved
around to jobs in Salt Lake, but was working in
HR and I think was doing a lot of exit
interviews with people at layoffs. They would lay them off
and realize like, oh, I don't like everyone who just
got fired knowing my name potentially coming after me, which
is you know, some New York street smarts. So she
just started using a fake name for fun, and Blair

(33:43):
sounded like a soap opera star.

Speaker 2 (33:45):
So why did she think that you should change your surname.

Speaker 1 (33:50):
I was born to Bill Braufman, so that was, yeah,
that was my name till I was seventeen, and I remember,
of course it was hard to spell. Always be r
au f as in frank m a n. Still, you know,
it took three times to get through that, and I
think when she changed it to Blair, even fictitiously, she
realized like, oh, wow, you say it. No one even
asks how to spell it, let alone. You know what
makes you repeat it? It was she realized how hard her

(34:13):
real name was when she started using a fake name.
And so that was right around the time I got
accepted to college outside of Seattle. I was planning to
move and a place where I really didn't know anybody.
I was kind of in a way starting a new life,
and she just said, you know, you should think about this.
It's been really great for me. Your life could be
much easier. You're going someplace where you don't know anyone,
it's a totally clean slate. What do you think? And

(34:36):
I was open to the idea, and I remember thinking
about making up names and thinking like, huh, well, Airs,
I like it sounds really good. I remember very specifically,
thinking sort of mathematically, which is the way my brain is.
My first name is Nippil, it's five letters. My middle
name mall that's five letters, and Airs is five letters.
So I thought, well, that's kind of cool, five five
and five. And of course it's the only name that

(34:58):
there actually is a connection. But it wasn't to actually
connect myself to my father. I mean, in nineteen eighty
eight or eighty nine in Salt Lake City, he was invisible.
He did not play there. There wasn't a huge jazz
scene in Salt Lake. I'm sure a few people knew
who he was, but nobody ever asked me about it.
You know, he was not part of my life in
Salt Lake. He was almost forty then, so as someone

(35:19):
who was into music and was a teenager, in my mind,
I would have thought like, wow, well, forty, his career
is obviously over. It beaked in the seventies. I had
no idea how much bigger he'd become, So it wasn't
at all, Oh, well, people will know that I'm his son,
That's why I want to do this. In fact, I
assumed that had nothing to do with it. No one
would ever know who he was. He was done. It
was really just that it sounded good and I liked it,

(35:41):
and I trusted my mother. The way I remember it
was so simple and felt so transactional as opposed to emotional.
It really felt like, this is easy, this makes sense,
and there's no risk, so sure, let's do it, I
think at that time and the last time I actually
encountered him in person very soon after we moved to
Salt Lake when I was still ten, and now I'm seventeen.

(36:05):
I definitely have not run into him in New York
this whole time. Don't hear his music in Salt Lake
City like he really Seven years is a long time
for a seventeen year old from ten to seventeen, so
in my mind, he was pretty non existent.

Speaker 2 (36:19):
When Nabil is away at college, his mom falls in
love with a man named Jim She hadn't been dating
or prioritizing her personal life over the years, but now
that Nobil has grown, it's her turn. At their wedding,
an unexpected feeling overcomes Nobil. I wish Roy could see this.
He thinks. He doesn't really wish that Roy were there

(36:42):
per se, but he does wish Roy could see how
happy his mother is, how happy they both are, how
well they're doing. Of course, Nobil is reminded that this
is just what his mother had always done too, wanting
to prove to Roy somehow that life had marched tolly
on without him. After the wedding, life continues to march on.

(37:06):
Nabielle finishes school, he plays and tours with successful bands.
He opens his own record store in Seattle, Sonic Boom Records,
which becomes a big deal. Things are really taking off now.
Bille registers that he has a very strong drive to
succeed creatively, to make things happen, and he finds himself

(37:27):
wondering where does it come from. His mother and Alan
had been ambitious in their own ways, but this propulsive
energy is something different.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
As I get into my thirties, I guess even the
late twenties to think I start to realize, like, wow,
I'm at a point in my career, in my life
too where a lot of people are asking or commenting
saying the sort of how do you do all these
different things? And to me, it never felt like I
was doing a lot of different things. It always feels
like these are all the same thing. There's just these
different facets of it, are different versions. But for a
long time I coloonna record store my friend and business partner, Jason,

(38:02):
and that was great and I loved it, and that
was I guess what I would call my real job
at the time. But also played in bands and always
toured and loved doing that and that was the really
fun part of things, being able to leave town for
a month and drive around the country and play drums
and come back and still have a job. And I
was also I started my own record label, so I
was putting out records by other bands that I liked,

(38:23):
and it was all to me, it's all this music.
These are just three different things, three different departments. This
is one thing. But I definitely just started to feel
and maybe even recognized that I didn't know a lot
of other people who had it, because to me, it
didn't feel unique or special or different, but just this
absolute internal drive and push and momentum that whatever I did,

(38:46):
I just really wanted to be all in. Even if
it was several different things, they were all really important.
That's why I was doing them. I wasn't doing them
to havelf do them. And I think around that time
and my father had not only never stopped too but
sort of picked up more. In the nineties, hip hop
obviously became a big thing, and so many of his
songs were sampled so many times, so he started to

(39:09):
have a resurgence. He was also still putting out new
music and touring, and I noticed that I paid attention
to it. That was in the business. And of course
now that I had his name, people would often ask
me if there was any relation, or you look like him?
All these things started to come up, the stuff that
I never thought would happen when I chose that name.
So to me, it was logical. I'm watching this guy who's,
you know, in his fifties and sixties, which again, when

(39:31):
I'm twenty eight, still seems pretty old, watching him continue
to tour the world, and I'm I'm feeling this really
intense push and pull and not seeing it and the
people I'm closest to and sort of, yeah, I think
come to the conclusion that it had to be from him.
There has to be some connection.

Speaker 2 (39:47):
There's also this great irony that happens a little bit later,
which is that as you become more and more successful
and you do have the Air's last name, and people
you know know or assume that he's your father, of
people thinking that there was nepotism involved.

Speaker 1 (40:03):
Yeah, That's the funny thing that there are points when
I've never been as upfront and truthful about the story
with my mother and my father, simply to defend anyone
thinking like, oh, oh, your job in the music business,
right your father's Oh no, no, it has nothing to
do with it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
When Nobil is in his mid thirties, he starts to
see a therapist to help him unpack the myriad layers
of life.

Speaker 1 (40:34):
My mother was in therapy for a long time when
I was growing up, the whole time we were in
Salt Lake and I was and this is in the eighties,
this is before everyone was in therapy. And she was
very open about it, and I think it helped her.
And so I was always kind of fascinated by it
and sort of wanted to do it. And I don't
know if it's because I'm not the most sort of

(40:54):
vocal emotional person. I mean, a lot of the stuff
that we're talking about is not telling people in my
life story for life of reasons, kind of protecting myself
and having this mother who is so so open, sometimes
too open for me. Sometimes it tries to me crazy,
and so in some ways I think I'm trying to
be the opposite of her, like a lot of people
do with their parents. But when I was thirty four,
I went through a big breakup, and I'd been a

(41:16):
littleman for a long time. This breakup just's felt like, huh,
maybe I should try therapy. That's the kind of thing
you do when you go through a breakup.

Speaker 2 (41:24):
Well, and as is the case with any therapist, your
father's story would be total catnip for a therapist who
would want to dig into what that felt like for you.

Speaker 1 (41:35):
Yeah, right, exactly. Session one minute, one second one was
let's talk about your father. As soon as I started
doing it, and I assume that that's so we del
at the same time. It was, you know, I wasn't
like no, I don't want to talk about that. I
think I was interested in again this very positive idea
of therapy. It didn't mean anything was wrong with me.

(41:55):
It was a place to safely talk about the things
I've never felt safe talking about, and that's top of lists.
So my therapist getting into that felt like, oh, wow,
this is interesting. I can finally talk about this. It's safe.
There won't be judgment, I think, and it definitely it
didn't change my mind about things, but it was interesting
to just at least be talking about it on a

(42:16):
regular basis, and I think it led me to wanting
to meet him.

Speaker 2 (42:20):
So then you hear that Roy's playing in Seattle at
the Triple Door. It also occurs to you that you know,
you're you're in your mid thirties, he's nearing seventy, okay,
and there's a little bit of a feeling I think of,
you know, if not now when?

Speaker 1 (42:36):
Yeah, that was it. I mean, he would play in
Seattle pretty much every year, as I recall, I would
see it listed in the in the paper. Sometimes people
would say something, you know, oh, I see your dad's
playing again. I own a record store. All I'd do
all day long is talk to people customers, regulars who
come in. So it's not like I was hanging out
in the law firm hearing these things. Like I was
in the place where people are going to talk about it,

(42:57):
and every time it didn't. I don't remember it really
even if acting me, I just remember thinking, Oh, yeah,
he's coming to town again. He does it every year.
I never really seriously thought about going to see him.
I think I would sometimes deliberately be out of town,
which is obviously something to sort of protect myself or
to at least maybe even to just say to people like, oh,
I'm going to be out of town. I think I
would actually book a trip just to make it easier.

(43:19):
So obviously the therapy dug up all of this, and
pretty soon in I saw the listing or someone told
me that he's coming, and for some reason, when she
said that it was someone in the store, it just
hit me differently. All these new thoughts came up, and
it wasn't like, oh I better book a trip out
of town or I don't care. It was huh, I
need to figure out how to see him. It totally flipped.

(43:41):
It was one eighty. Definitely part of it was the
age thing that he was nearing seventy. It's sure he
comes back every year, but one of these years he
might not. And it wasn't even necessarily he's going to die,
but it was seventy, like, certainly he might not tour
again next year. That's getting pretty old. So I decide
it's time. And it's very easy to sort of justify

(44:02):
my need or my want by the very pragmatic logical stuff.
My thinking was, you know, every time I go to
a doctor and he asks about my family history, I
can't tell him anything about my father's side. And now
I'm thirty five, and these are things I'm going to
want to know someday. So for those reasons alone, it
would be great to talk to him and try to
get some medical history and family history. So that was

(44:22):
at least the easy thing to tell myself, and probably
not tell other people, because I definitely I'm not that
kind of person. I doubt I told anyone I was trying,
because that would make me feel bad if I didn't
see him, to have to tell people that. But I
decided to try to reach him, and I told my mother.
We still talked all the time, and we still do now,
and I'd never heard her. She turned into a totally

(44:46):
different person. She was so worried and so protective and
warned me of so many different things, and like she's
been hiding all this stuff for thirty five years waiting
for this moment, which was just like, Oh, why are
you going to do that? I put yourself out there
like that, even if you get a hold of him,
he's not going to show up. He's so flaky, You're
really setting yourself up. It was I could really hear

(45:07):
in her voice how scared she was for what I
was going to encounter. And she definitely always talked about
him as like he's a musician, he's kind of flaky.
He was always hard to pin down. But it really
came out in a much much stronger way on this
phone call when I decided I wanted to.

Speaker 3 (45:21):
Meet him, because she was protective of you.

Speaker 1 (45:24):
So protective. It was so obvious, and it also then
really just colored in for me a bit more about
her relationship with him, and maybe I remember thinking, oh,
I think maybe she was a little bit more into
him than she kind of led on. But regardless, I
just said I think I actually told her not so
much because I wanted her to know but because I

(45:45):
wanted to know if she knew how to get a
hold of him, and she was the logical first step,
and she said no, I found his booking agent online
and email and sent this sort of very safe email,
knowing that if he saw it, he would know who
I was. I said, you know, my name's Nabia. My
mother was Louise. She used to know Roy back in
the early seventies, and they were kind of dropped all
these clues, but that's it, and just said, I see

(46:06):
he's coming to town soon. I'd love to get together.
Can you give him my number or whatever. I didn't
hear back, but I mean the feeling of sending that
email was just like, I can't I mean, I remember
my heart was racing. I can't believe I just sent
it and now, and I was so nervous right after
I sent it, of all the things that might happen,
and the biggest of which what my mother won me,

(46:28):
of setting something up but him not following through and
me standing there, you know, waiting for him, or something
like that. I really really felt terrible, and I was
angry at myself for trying. Why did you put yourself
out there so much. What do you open to get?
All this stuff was going through my head to the
point where when I hadn't heard back, maybe even the
next day, the first thing I did was email my

(46:49):
friend who was the promoter at the show at the
Triple Door, and I just said, you know, spilled this
out an email. I was like, I don't know if
you know this. Roy is my father. The show is happening.
I tried his booking agent, but if that doesn't work now,
I'm at a point where I can't reel it back
and I need to just show up. Will you let
me backstage in three months or It was so unnecessarily early,
but I was just so so I had so much

(47:11):
anxiety about it. And he said sure, he can come
backstage at the show. And there was this thing in
my head that was, unless I hear back from him,
I'm going to show up that night and walk right
in and say hi, and that's going to be really,
really difficult, and I really don't want to do that.
So I had a little bit of time, and maybe
a week later, I just emailed the booking agent again

(47:32):
and said, Okay, that last email was kind of soft.
Roy is my father. I haven't seen him in however long,
I am going to this show no matter what, and
I'm going to talk to him. It would be a
lot easier if you could help facilitate that, like kind
of threatening email something that is really not my style,
but it was so it was just weighing on me
so heavily, and I was so scared for you know,

(47:55):
I'd rather send a threatening email than show up and
risk who knows what. And the agent replied right away
and said, yeah, yeah, I'm forwarding this to Roy, like
my female and I was like, oh god, okay, And
so at least that to me sort of put it
out of my head. And I was going to the
therapist too. But to me, however far away, the show
was still weeks away. There's nothing to do now, this

(48:16):
guy's forwarding it to Roy, my friend's getting me backstage.
There's nothing for me to do until that day, either
I hear from him or I don't. But you know,
there's no reason to make myself sick every day. And
out of the blue, one day, I wake up to
a voicemail from a New York number and I'm like, oh,
I wonder what that is. And I listened to it
and it's him. It's Roy, my father. The first time,

(48:37):
of course he's ever called me, and maybe even the
first time I've heard him say my name, which I
thought was interesting, and he has this very like, calm,
nice voice, and he just I can't believe I didn't
save this voicemail, just thinking myself, but but he just says, Hey,
it's Roy. I hear you're in Seattle. I'm gonna be
there soon, you know, Okay, call me back, like really,

(48:57):
like as if we were buddies, or as if we'd
out last year, like very sort of but in a nice,
not hurried, like very welcoming voicemail. And I listened to
it several times. I was so happy, and I can't
tell if the happiness was wow, my father called me
and said my name and was nice, or if the
happiness was, man, I'm so glad I don't have to

(49:20):
go crash his backstage, which and I'm sure it was
a combination, but it was just sort of relief and
a bit of acceptance and all this stuff at the
same time. It was really a really intense morning. I
remember really clearing my head for some reason, thinking like,
when I call him, it needs to be perfect I
can't just like call him right back right now. I
need to go to work, look at the numbers from

(49:41):
last night, drink my coffee, do my little morning routine,
and then call him when my brain's kind of clear.
And I do and he picks up, and it's just
as wonderful as the voicemail is super friendly, and it
turns into you know, great, I'll pick you up at
your hotel the day of the show. We'll go to
lunch and I'll see you then. And it's in a
week or something. And I call my mother all excited,
you know, kind of a nicer version of you know,

(50:02):
everything you're worried about is not going to happen. He's
so great, and she's just like, he's not gonna come.
And this is, you know, this is not who my
mother is. This is not me with like god, Mom,
you always do that. It's the opposite of that. So
it still really shakes me, just that, just about this
specific thing and a specific person, how little she believes
in him and how worried she is about me. But

(50:24):
he does. And I remember weirdly pulling up to the
hotel and thinking I should be so nervous right now,
but I'm not even a little bit nervous, and maybe
it was because of the ease of those phone calls,
but I just parked the car, walked in and saw
this guy who was obviously him, and we both kind
of smiled and pointed each other out, and just like

(50:45):
immediately it was easy. It just it really did feel natural,
as if we'd talked before, or as if we'd hung
out before, and this was a continuation of something something recent.
There was no like, God, I can't believe him looking
at you. It just wasn't that at all, very unique, weird,
special experience. He said he wanted sushi, So there's lots

(51:05):
of great sushi in Seattle, but we were supposed to
go to my favorite place. We pulled up and it
was closed on whatever day of the week that was,
and I remember feeling so like I was trying to
impress him, you know, with great sushi in Seattle. Now
I have to go to this other place that's still
really good, but not as good. So definitely these funny
things of like do I care that he's my father
or do I not? I'm not sure, But to me

(51:28):
that was a moment of me caring that I was
trying to impress my father, and we so we have sushi,
and I just kind of launch in till I mean,
I brought a notebook and I said, you know, do
you mind if I take some notes. I have a
lot of questions. He was like, yeah, that's fine. He
was very calm, very present, didn't feel like he wanted
to leave or had to leave. And I asked about family,

(51:49):
and I asked about medical history, and he told me everything,
told me about his three sisters and as much as
he could about his parents, and I was furiously writing.
And also when I would look at him, it was
just so intense to sit across the table from this
person who looked so much like me. He was thirty
years older, but he would like even just like scratch
his eye or laugh or make some kind of gesture,

(52:10):
and it was seriously like looking into a mirror. And
I just couldn't believe for how little time we'd spent together,
which was seriously, what maybe five minutes of my life
in five different spurts up to that point, to look
at him and see how insanely much not looked, but
how much he felt like me, and how wild it
was to see that, and feel that it was really

(52:31):
intense and incredible and really cool. And I think he
noticed it too, and he pointed at me and he's like,
oh you got He pointed to his head and he's like,
oh you got You lost your hair before I did,
said things like that. But also what was happening He
pointed to his cheek bones, He's like, oh, you got
these two Native American blood. So what was happening for
me was not just the connection thing, but he was

(52:52):
absolutely confirming that I was his son, which I didn't doubt,
but I wondered if he doubted. And the fact that
he was saying, oh, you got this from me, you
got this from me, and surely saw the same manners
and things that I saw, I think made it undeniable.
And he was just very obviously you know, knew it.
And so those things were great. I mean I really

(53:15):
was trying to drag out the lunch. It was only lunch,
but they were like, do you want dessert or coffee?
And I would you know, at a meal like that,
you look at the other person and say, I don't know,
what do you think? I was just like, yes, yes,
you know. I keep bringing us things because I need
to take this longer. Can you take a while, because
I just wanted more information, and at the time, even
though I wanted it to happen more, I think I

(53:36):
knew this is it. This is never happening again. I
really felt like that, like I have to get everything
I can right now, because no matter how natural and
great and this feels, and how much it feels like,
I'll be able to do this from now on, I
don't think that's true. I think I knew that, and
so I was just trying to get it all in.
And there's a moment towards the end where he looked

(53:57):
at me and he said, you know, I'm proud of you.
And it really hit me in the wrong way. It
didn't hit me, especially after everything I was feeling and
feeling connected and seeing are similar mannerisms and everything. It
just went through my brain too quickly. It went right
to the other side. It didn't go to my heart.
It went to my brain. And I didn't say this,

(54:18):
of course, but what I thought was, Oh, you should
really just say you're proud of yourself, because you're just
looking at me thinking you did a good job and
you got away with a lot. That's what it felt like,
but I didn't say that. Of course.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
Well, it's so interesting because you know, for your whole life,
when it came to your father, both for you and
your mother, there always was this feeling of, you know,
wanting him to see, look how well we did. But
it didn't have the quality of so that you'll be proud,
like it's actually not about you, right, So it was

(54:51):
more like you and your mom. It was about your
mom saying or showing that she had done this amazing thing.
She had had this vision for the way she wanted
to live her life and what she wanted to do
that was very much out of step with the times
that she was living in, and she did it. So
for him to turn to you and say I'm proud

(55:12):
of you almost has like a whiff of ownership exactly.

Speaker 1 (55:15):
That's exactly what it felt like. And my initial knee
jerk was you don't get to take any of this.

Speaker 3 (55:25):
We'll be right back.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
This lunch strikes another sour note when Nabil's have siblings
and to May and Ayana come up in conversation.

Speaker 1 (55:50):
That's the first moment where I feel sort of non openness.
I suppose everything else I've asked you know, tell me
about your mother, tell me about how you got into music.
It was really just like an interview, and he just
mat went into it, told me everything, and I asked
about family. Another kid, you know, one is in North
Carolina in two May, and so I wasn't as focused
on him because I've lived in Seattle and I was
in New York a lot. And Iana is in New York.

(56:10):
And I said, wow, I'd love to meet her. I'm
in New York all the time. And he sort of
physically I could see it, like, you know, that's that
was the first thing I said that just gave him
some reservation, and he kind of he said something I
don't remember exactly what, but it's something like, oh, that
might take some time, or something that was, you know,
a bit political and not no and maybe even reasonable too.
But it was just the first thing that I'd sort

(56:32):
of felt like, oh, Okay, I'm definitely not just getting everything
I want from sitting here for an hour an hour
and a half. And I really loved the idea of
my half siblings, so that was disappointing.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
Later that evening, Roy plays his show No Bill attends
but doesn't go backstage after all. He goes right home
after the performance, feeling content he'd asked enough of the
day and of his father. Things had mostly gone so
well at lunch, Why risk heaven another interaction that might
not go as smoothly, But quickly after this connective day

(57:06):
with Roy, a tidal wave of longing comes crashing into nubil.
That long, friendly lunch had unleashed something in him that
was either really buried or not previously there at all,
a longing for a relationship with his father.

Speaker 1 (57:25):
I was in New York easily five or six times
probably that year, and so there was absolutely just like, wow,
I need to not only do I want to meet
my sister, but I would like to sit with him again.
I want to learn more. And there weren't specific unanswered questions.
I think I got everything specific in that one interview.
It would have been very easy to say I did it.

(57:46):
I don't need anything more. I have all the information
I'm going to get. I met him, we connected, It
was positive the end, and I know maybe I should
have done that because what happened was, and I think
I said to him at that lunch like I'm in
New York all the time. It would be great to
like get coffee, and really, what I was saying was like, look,
I'm thirty five, you met me. I'm not crazy, I'm

(58:07):
making you look good. I'm not asking for money. I'm
not asking for anything. You got office Scott free let me,
you know, hang out with me once in a while
and give me some more information. That's I think what
I was saying pretty plainly, and he said yeah, of course,
And so to me, I was like, Wow, this will
be cool. I'll get coffee with him again in New
York and maybe I'll learn some more and maybe I'll
eventually meet my half siblings, and connecting with him might

(58:30):
be part of that, because really my target was the siblings.
And so every time I went to New York, I
would email him first, I would call him. I was
really always trying to set it up, like are you
in town, And that's when it kind of turned into
he never emailed me that so I was like, Okay,
if he's not good on email, that's fine. I would
call or text and sometimes he would pick up and
I would have to explain who I was. And that

(58:52):
was maybe the worst feeling of all the bad feelings.
It was felt more like being a kid at elected
Lady or someplace where you know, it's hey, it's no Bill,
and he'd say who is this? And I should just
feel like the logical thing would be to say the
Bill your son, but I was never gonna say that
because that's not what I felt like, and so I

(59:13):
would say the bille in Seattle or like in the
Bille Louise's, like, you know, anything but your son. That'd
have to do this weird, weird dance to try to explain,
and then he'd be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, how's
it going, you know, And it always really quick, always
felt like he was doing seven other things at once,
and it didn't even feel personal. It just felt like,
this is what I'm like on the phone. I'm busy,

(59:35):
and so I was always so nervous. I'd have to Rushian's,
you know, I'm gonna be in New York next week,
I'm playing or I can come meet somewhere and he'd
be like, oh, oh, I'm gonna be in Russia and
be like what, And then we'd hang up and I
would go to Royers dot com and I would see
who was playing Saint Petersburg next week, And so it
was almost this thing where I felt like he was
being dishonest because these crazy stories, except he was actually

(59:56):
being honest. So sometimes it was true, but other time
it was just like, Okay, call me when you get
to town or something like that. But it was always
a kind of brush off and it never culminated in anything.
And every time on those trips I was thinking about
him definitely sort of reverted it to a needy kid
in some ways for the first time in my thirties.

(01:00:16):
And eventually, almost exactly a year after that first Seattle night,
I see that he's playing in Seattle again, and it's
at a different club. It's one block from my apartment.
So in my head, I'm like, Okay, let's reset everything.
Maybe he's just not good when he's home. He travels
a lot. It's been too much to try to do
all these New York things. I'm just going to try
to recreate last year because that works so well. So

(01:00:38):
so I called him and said, you know, I live
a block from the venue you're playing in Seattle. It
would be great to see you that night. Maybe the
whole band come up, come up, and I'll make dinner
for everybody. And I was just thinking about how to
make it easy and how to make something work. And
he was very short, just kind of like, oh, that's
kind of a crazy night, you know, to just come
to the show. Just come to the show. I remember
that's how the call ended exactly. He said that twice

(01:00:58):
and I don't know if he hung up on me,
but that's how it ended. And so, still being a
person in the band, I was giving him credit. I
thought like, Okay, you know, some people don't like to
eat before concerts, some people don't like to make plans
before concerts. All this. Come to the show as he suggested,
and I did, but I didn't feel good at it.
And I remember it sort of manifesting itself musically at

(01:01:18):
the first pil concert. I loved the music. I was
so amazed. I had so much fun watching the audience
love it. I felt connected to it. And I think
it's partially because I felt connected to him that day.
And a year later, I was watching it and I
just wanted it to end, and I remember thinking, man,
is this the same band they felt sound as good?
They're playing this song too fast, They're playing this song

(01:01:39):
too slow. This crowd looks weird. Who are these people
like that everything felt negative about the concert, and I'm
sure it's because of my mindset and when it ended.
This is more of a kind of small club. The
other place was a theater. The band walked off the stage,
and I had this terrible feeling like this is the
only chance I'm going to get to talk to him.
He might be walking into a backstae, but he also

(01:02:01):
might be walking straight out to a car and that's it.
So I thought that would be the only chance I
had to talk to him. I didn't want to wait
and see if he left and find out he did.
So I touched his shoulder and he looked at me
and I said, hey, wrong, it's no bill, and he said, hey,
how you doing. I gotta go, and he pointed, you know, anywhere,
and then just kind of walked off. And I remember

(01:02:21):
the feeling. It felt like a movie. The way my
hand felt and his shoulder left it. It was really
just like that's it. That was like, that was the
moment I get And I looked around with my two friends.
So I'd brought my bandmate and his girlfriend. They knew
the whole story, and they just had these really devastated
faces on, which made me feel even worse, and that
was it. That's the last time I saw him.

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
Over the next several years now, Biale's life continues to
evolve in wonderful ways. He moves back to New York,
finds a place in Fort Greene, a neighborhood he loves.
In two thousand nine, he takes a job as general
manager of a UK record label called four AD, and
eventually the label becomes part of a larger company with

(01:03:08):
multiple record labels, and Nabil becomes us president of Beakers Group.
All the success is the backdrop to a random voicemail
one day, when Nabil is least expecting it, a message
from Roy just calling to say, hey, thinking about you.

Speaker 1 (01:03:27):
It didn't make me feel good, and I'm sure that
was how he thought it would make me feel, but
it really immediately made me feel like maybe he just
had some guilt and hadn't called me back. And there's
no part of me wanted to call him and risk
getting him at the wrong time, which was always be
most of the time now and trying to make things worse.
I think I decided to just leave that one as

(01:03:48):
it was and not make any action. And there was
no invitation. It didn't say call me or let's do something.
It was just thinking about you.

Speaker 2 (01:03:57):
Though there's no part of Nabil that wants to call
his and risk getting him at the wrong time. There's
still the matter of his two half siblings, M two
May and Ayana. Now Bil reaches out a number of
times to Ayana, but she doesn't respond. He does meet
M two May and finds himself thinking more deeply about
what makes a family a family. Is it shared history,

(01:04:21):
is it jeanes, Why does it matter or what really matters?
And why he wants to know more so he sends
away for a DNA test.

Speaker 1 (01:04:33):
The twenty three and me thing was so fascinating. I
think it came from obviously it sort of failed attempts
to connect further with my father, failed attempts to connect
with my sister who just never got back to me.
And then I did meet with him to May. He
was actually quite open and we had lunch, and I
think it was actually just the idea that we got
along fine and he was very nice. I didn't feel

(01:04:53):
like a connection, and that really surprised me, and so
I kind of felt like, so that's it, that's everyone
I'm ever going to meet, and everything I'm ever going
to know about that side of my family. That seems impossible.
And I know so much about my mother's side, she's
so good at keeping track. I have pictures, family trees,
and my father's side. That's it. So let's try twenty

(01:05:13):
three in me this thing that everyone's doing, just to
see what happens. It wasn't an actual goal. It wasn't
let me find out about this person. It was really
just like, let's see what it yields. And I did
it and got the sort of grid back and the
graph and everything telling me that I was fifty one
percent Ashkenazi Jewish, which was pretty fascinating and which means

(01:05:34):
my mother is like one hundred two percent. Yes, And
you know, nothing surprising at all, nothing that interesting. It
was like, ah, this is fun. And then got a message.
Of course, I turned on the messaging thing because I'm
trying to find people. Got a message from a guy saying,
you know, we're distant cousins. It wasn't like a huge deal,
but he said, I have an heirs family tree you

(01:05:54):
might want to see. Do you want it? He emailed
me this document and it was incredible. Guy Samuel Ayres
wrote it in nineteen sixty three. He's my great uncle.
And I immediately kind of flipped through it. It was
a scan of what was a sort of loosely printed
book it looked like, and so I scrolled to the
end to look at the actual tree part, and I
saw Roy, and I saw his three sisters, and I

(01:06:18):
saw his parents' names. All of that match the NFL
had given me. So I immediately, you know, assumed, wow,
this is incredible, this is authentic, this is it, and
then read the whole thing, and it starts with one
man who was enslaved in eighteen twenty four. He was
born in eighteen twenty four, Isaac Ayres. And it goes
through everybody, and it goes through all these branches that
tells stories about people, it has their photographs. It's this

(01:06:41):
incredible document and it just blows my mind that this
has just been sitting probably lots of places, and this
guy was nice enough to see me connect and send
it to me, and so that just sent me down
this even I'm already being kind of relentless, but just
this even more relentless search where I realized, well, now,
I mean, now I have to research more about these

(01:07:02):
people and it's so hard to research and slaved Americans.
I can't get anything else. But what I can get
is information on the slaveholder who is mentioned as a
doctor in this town of Ashland, Mississippi, which is a
small town. It's really easy to find stuff on him.
And on this website find a grave. I'm looking at
his gravestone and there's a note from a woman named

(01:07:23):
Karen saying, you know, bless our ancestors or something like that.
And Karen's email is sitting there, so I email her
and it's a weird, crazy email to right saying, you know,
I think I think your ancestors owned mine. I'm not
after anything, just information. I have a job. Whatever the
things you say, you can relate all the things that say,

(01:07:45):
I really don't want anything. And then even more with
the slaverything. I'm not coming after you. I'm not going
to murder you, I'm not going to out you. I
just want information. And sent that just thinking like wow,
I mean I'm never going to hear from her, but
I had to send it. And the next day it
was incredibly open welcoming email from the so MA named
Karen saying, wow, you know that's an incredible story. I

(01:08:07):
happened to be a hobby genealogist. I know a lot
about those times and those people, and I'm happy to
share information. And that just turned into this long email
for it. We never spoke emailed constantly and it would
be half very specific here's some documents from the farm
in eighteen sixty that I found, and then half really
simple personal stuff about her and her husband and what

(01:08:30):
they were making for dinner that night, and then I
would respond the same way. And the day that I
bought my wife her wedding ring, I got an email
from Karen and had my reply, you know whatever, thanks
for the information about the farm. By the way, I'm
so excited I just bought a ring I'm proposing to Aja.
It became this really incredible thing where she felt so
so close in so many ways, and it was really

(01:08:51):
fun to get that ring and think, wow, I can't
wait for Karen to know about this. Really, we developed
this deep important connection and I'd never even spoke into
this person.

Speaker 2 (01:09:01):
It's so extraordinary and like it so underscores the whole
idea of you know, what is family? Who do we
connect to and why? I mean the connection that you
had with Karen, is that, as you said, her ancestors
owned your ancestors, and then all of these generations later
because of generosity of spirit and curiosity and openness, it

(01:09:25):
becomes a completely different thing. Yeah, and you know, and
then you describe your meeting your half brother and not
feeling a connection, you know, which is your story is
so much about how DNA matters and doesn't matter, and
it really just basically depends on who the people are,
what they're bringing to the table, what they're looking for,

(01:09:47):
and whether they connect or they don't connect.

Speaker 1 (01:09:50):
Yeah, that's exactly it. And that's that's really where I've landed.
And then, you know, when my book came out in
June twenty twenty two, and I did a lot of
book to her in because I'm a and person and
really wanted to do that. I wanted to meet people,
and it was fascinating when you know, sometimes I'd meet
someone who was a cousin, which was great. Sometimes I'd
meet someone who was in my father's band and just
came to tell me some story from him about the seventies.

(01:10:13):
And all of these people felt like really strong connections,
and it's because they found out about my story and
they came to sort of help me or to give
me something, or even sometimes it felt like seriously, to
like give me a little piece of myself. They read
this thing that sort of talked about what I'm missing,
and they thought, well, I have some of that. So

(01:10:34):
I'm going to go to this book talk in topio
and tell this guy about what it was like when
I recorded the keyboards on that song in nineteen seventy two.
It's really fascinating to have a stack of these stories.

Speaker 2 (01:10:45):
Now, that's so beautiful, Nobil. The idea that people were
showing up to give you little pieces of your life
or your history, like to sort of, yeah, to gift
you with these memories and these moments. But it also
comes from having done the writing, you know, having put
the story out there in the world so that that

(01:11:07):
would be possible. You have all these relatives who come
out of the woodwork, who find you, who read something
of yours, and you know, word spreads, and the ones
who reach out to you are incredibly embracing of you
and embracing of you as Roy's son, embracing of you

(01:11:27):
as their relatives, their nephew, their cousin.

Speaker 1 (01:11:32):
Yeah. So as a result of the family tree in
the Karen story. I wrote the story for NPR code
Switch that they published on Thanksgiving, and that got kind
of shared and some cousins read it. And these are
very close cousins. This is Roy's sister's daughter, so my
first cousin, and she messaged me on Facebook saying, this
is amazing. We're cousins. Let's talk. And even just that

(01:11:54):
idea was so sort of a lightning bolt, like, wait
a minute, I have close relatives who are interested and connecting,
and so we immediately got on this phone call, taught
for a while, connected so much. They live in Los Angeles,
and at the end of the call, she said, oh,
by the way, you should call your aunt, michelle A.
She wants to meet you. And I thought that all
three of my father's sisters had passed, but michell A

(01:12:15):
was still alive. So I call her immediately, and this
is my father's sister, my aunt. This is as close
as it gets. And this woman is just wonderful, so delightful,
so many questions. Really immediately feels like my aunt. I
go to La Fast for a work trip and have
lunch with her, and I mean she's in her seventies.
She shows up with this heavy bag full of photos,

(01:12:37):
photos of my grandparents, photos of them as kids, family photos,
really incredible stuff. And you know, she unfortunately passed away
last year, but I got to have a few great
days with her, one of which is a big part
of the book. But I said, you know, I would
love to go to the cemetery sometime and see my
grandparents grave, your parents, And she takes me to the

(01:12:59):
cemetery in England would and it was just this incredible
moment where the two of us we walked there kind
of she's old and needed help walking, so we were
kind of locked arms and stood over my grandparents grave
and she just introduced me to my grandmother as if
my grandmother was standing there, and said these really nice
things about me, and again just sort of legitimize, like
you know, I am your daughter and this is my nephew,

(01:13:22):
and we are all related and all connected. And it
was very powerful, incredible experience.

Speaker 2 (01:13:31):
Here's Nobiel reading one last passage from his remarkable memoir
My Life in the Sunshine.

Speaker 1 (01:13:42):
Beloved father and mother lay below airs. Their names and
dates were below that roy E nineteen oh five to
nineteen sixty nine and Ruby m nineteen oh seven to
nineteen eighty five. They were close in age, I thought
to myself, But Ruby outlived Roy by a long time years.
As if at a ceremony, Michelle and I stood naturally

(01:14:04):
facing the grave, looking down with her arms still linked. Hi, mamma,
she spoke, in a voice similar to the one she
used with her husband' z, but less as an equal,
more with the tone of a daughter than a wife.
This is your grandson, Nebille, she spoke, slowly, allowing the
moment of my introduction to hang a bit longer. It
was moments like these, the moments of affirmation that I

(01:14:27):
cherished the most. Rory staring at me and saying she's
looking at family, and now Michelle telling my grandmother that
I was her grandson. When I hear everybody loves the sunshine,
which happens more often than ever, the opening chords still
catch me off guard, but now the lazy synthesizer melody
allows me to relax. I hear and feel it with

(01:14:50):
a new sense of appreciation, a new sense of connection.
As my father's voice shoots out from the speakers and
into the warm light, I smile and quietly sing along
my Life, My Life, My Life, My Life. In the Sunshine.

Speaker 2 (01:15:16):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacour is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.

Speaker 3 (01:15:24):
If you have a.

Speaker 2 (01:15:25):
Family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a
voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode.
Our number is one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's
the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram
at Danny Ryder. And if you'd like to know more

(01:15:48):
about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my
memoir Inheritance.

Speaker 3 (01:16:03):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeart