I Can Never Let You Leave Me

Ten songs that skipped a generation. Featuring the music of composer and performer Lorrie Doriza and her grandfather Tony Rais.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Ephemeral is a production of I Heart three D audio
for full exposure, listen with that phones. One of the
biggest struggles for an artist is how to capture an
idea that is originally different, new. But sometimes that creative

(00:24):
energy comes from peering into the past, perhaps a pastor
you've never known. For someone like Lorie Theresa, finding that
inspiration is an integral part of daily life. My name
is Lorie Theresa, and I'm a musician, a composer, and

(00:44):
a performer. At this point, a lot of influence has
come to Laurie from her grandfather, Tony Rice. Tony Rice
is kind of a mystery, even after seven years of research.
I really only know about him through what my mom
remembers and the songs he saying. But knowing what I know,

(01:05):
I had introduced him as a gentle soul, a gentleman,
a romantic, a funny guy, a jokester, but ultimately a
totally resilient man who never let the most inconceivable tragedy
affect his kindness and his creativity. Like Laurie, Tony Rice

(01:33):
was a professional singer, whereas Lourie resides in twenty one
century New York. Tony's scene was post war Greece were
two styles of music. We're competing for prominence. Greece is
undergoing this musical Enlightenment period. There was so much musical

(01:55):
and artistic influence happening from all over the globe. One
of this I was of music that emerged from that
era is the rebetica music, which has influences from Asia
Minor and uses traditional instruments like the buzuki and the
ba lama. Buzuki is like a smaller mandolin. Blama is

(02:21):
like an even smaller buzuki. Rebetica music you associate with
Greek music nowadays, like if you ever go to a
Greek restaurant or the nather, is some sort of music
going on, and you're like, that's Greek music, right. This
kind of music was initially associated with the working class,

(02:42):
the social outcasts, criminal life. It was bad boy music, right,
was like the blues, the blues of grief yea. When
it was first introduced, it was kind of stunned by
mainstream society and often bands because of the content of

(03:05):
the songs. Many songs like this woman, We're simply are
you smoking? Songs describing in detail the pleasures of sharing
the not a dealing the song about doing drugs and
life in prison, oppression, poverty. These were people living difficult lives.

(03:25):
Their one reprie would be like smoking hashish in a
circle and jamming out pretty badass. You don't think about
that when you think of your grandfather's But that was
not my grandfather's scene. There was this other scene which
was in stark contrast to thistica movement called the Old

(03:49):
Athens Music or Light Greek music, so the complete opposite.
This was music that was largely influenced by the sounds
of Europe. From the Lead to Spain to France. You
had Greek composers writing tangos and sambas and fox track swing,
Latin bosa nova. Bolero h, the leader of the New

(04:15):
Athens movement of Light Greek music, was better known by
his stage name A Tick I Think. Came from a
wealthy background and lived most of his life abroad before
settling down in Athens, where he opened up his own
venue called A k A ticks Pen I feel like

(04:40):
it's a double play on pen and like farmhouse. This
kind of started this movement of vaudeville, theater, musical reviews,
and cabaret shows. The music and the culture associated with
this style was kind of the opposite, romantic and forlorn
and sentimental, and had no guzuki whatsoever, and it was

(05:03):
only Western instruments like piano, guitar, violin, upright bass. Maybe
this was a form of escapism at the time because
it was happening during the Second World War and maybe

(05:24):
people wanted to feel like they were somewhere else. So
basically you had this like West Coast versus East Coast
of the thirties and forties in Greece. I don't think
it was a particular rivalry or anything, but the music
was so different, but it was happening at the same time.
You were either a bad boy with a bad reputation

(05:47):
or you were romantic and a bohemian. I'd like to
think that they both eventually merged in the fifties and
sixties with this other kind of music called ede No music.
Even if you listen to Greek music now, the Greek
pop music, you'll hear guzuki and clarinet and like all

(06:10):
this lute stuff and all this stuff that's happening that's
very Greek inspired and very Middle easternly. But you also
hear like hip hop beats and all this like a
Western influence and structure. Somewhere in the middle of this
nineteen thirties culture class, Tony Rice made his debut. A

(06:33):
lot of his story remains a mystery, but here's what
we do. I want to say. He was born in
nineteen o two in Padra, this island in Greece, to
a poor family during the war First World War, coming
from nothing essentially. I think he was self taught on

(06:56):
the guitar and singing, and he was just kind of
discovered by accident, which like, wouldn't that be nice if
that happened to all of us. He was a screen
printer making basically posters in Padra. He was playing at
some little club or something, and attack just happened, of course,

(07:20):
to be in Padre. He went up to my grandfather
and allegedly my mom says, he was like, if you
come to Athens with me, I'll make you a big star,
which is like the classic thing that you hear about
in movies is born. He packed up his guitar and

(07:41):
he was like two pieces of clothing and he was
off the next day. You're right that he's a romantic
that's a very romantic notion. Oh yeah, So Tony Rice
moves to Athens and he starts singing at Atiqus Club.
I imagine a collection of creatives and artists. So you

(08:05):
have singers and you have storytellers. You know, I can
remember when kids used to like to have stories read
to them and mimes. What what? What a complete vaudevillian
theater experience. As people came to see the shows, they

(08:28):
started liking him. At some point, he was even playing
at the Royal Palace in Greece. By the way, did
you know Greece had a monarchy at some point? If
it isn't the illustious a word in your ear. Eventually,
what happened is he made a kind of name for

(08:48):
himself as a singer, and a desert is kind of
like a person who performs monologues and tells stories, and
it's also kind of speak singing style that was popular
back then, and so he was kind of well known
for that style. It's a kite by that, and composers

(09:13):
and lyricists kind of huddled around him and started writing
songs for him, which became the songs that he would
make famous. The chance that a team gave him had
paid off and Tony Rice paid it forward. In the thirties,
it was this new kid on the scene, Tony Maruda,

(09:37):
the poor kid orphaned, must have been like seventeen or eighteen.
He came to Athens with nothing, maybe to drachmas and
the shirt on his back, and he was interested in
singing and playing the guitar. My grandfather took him under

(09:58):
this wing and showed him the road. Oops. He gave
him his first suits and shoes and take care of
him as he started building his career pol Sopol Later on,
Tony Mruda became one of the most well known singers

(10:20):
of this era and went on to record many many
albums and a hit song with Sophia Loren That's Sophia Loren.

(10:46):
Including Atti and Tony Maruda. Tony Rice was associated with
some of the most well known artists of the dead
now legends. He also sang with people like you and

(11:07):
Nicos Junari's a k a Mr Greece which I think
speaks volumes. These are bigger names in Greece, so like,
if you type in any of these names, you'll find
their records. So he kind of paved the way for

(11:31):
other bigger singers. My mom really glossed over the fact
about how big of a deal Tony Rice actually was.
For years she would tell me stories about him, how

(11:52):
he was a singer and he sang at clubs. And
I was like, yeah, yeah, Mom, like me too. I'm
a singer and I sing at clubs. Big deal likely
to meet our new entertainer from Chicago. But he had
composers and lyricists writing songs for him, and people would
go to see him specifically perform these songs live. And

(12:16):
he was making a solid living being a gigging musician.
He was kind of living the artist's dream, getting paid
to do what you love and be around other creatives.
My mom was born in nifties, so now he had
a newborn and a beautiful and loving wife. To have

(12:36):
all of that after a war that completely ravaged your
country an inconceivable miracle the pool. But of course that
didn't last long, and it started a chain of events
that changed his life forever. When my mom was six

(12:59):
years old, my grandfather was diagnosed with throat cancer. I
don't know how long he knew about it, but the
only option back then for treatment was to remove the
vocal cords entirely so in a life saving surgery that
removed his vocal cords, and he never sang again. In fact,

(13:19):
he also never spoke again either. My mom doesn't even
remember what his voice sounded like. She only knew his
speaking voice through a machine. Talk about devastating, shattering multiple
dreams at once, aspirations, livelihoods, hopes all in one go.

(13:43):
Ten years later, his wife passed away suddenly, the love
of his life, my namesake, Grandma Laurie. And then he
was just left with my mom, no voice, no career,
and he had to completely do a one eight and
just do something else to support his family. It's kind

(14:09):
of amazing. It's like he took his creativity from singing
and he transferred it to using his hands, and he
became a carpenter, and he became really good at making
these beautifully intricate bird cages. In fact, he had one
that he had made in his house in his backyard,
this humanous walk in birdcage where he kept all of

(14:34):
his canaries and all of these other singing birds. And
he would be the only one who would be able
to walk in and just hang out with all these birds.
That's how he made a living. For the rest of
his life. He would still hang out with his composer
friends and they would go out to tavernas and stuff,

(14:55):
and he would play the guitar and people would sing,
and he was still very social. I can't imagine having
that kind of resilience and not being bitter and just
resentful for the rest of my life. But according to
my mom, he never showed any of that. He was
always kinds and funny and a gentleman. So they never met.

(15:22):
Grandfather and granddaughter would eventually get to connect in an
unexpected way in the Rice Stories of Family, the musical
but seems to have skipped a generation. So Tony Rice
was a singer and a guitarist, and his wife, Lorie

(15:45):
was a piano teacher and one, two, three, watch those things.
This performer extraordinaire, highly educated woman, which at the time
is kind of crazy, spoke multiple languages. And then they

(16:06):
had my mom, and when she was in her teens,
she was like sneaking off to take opera lessons until
my grandfather discovered that she was doing that. He would
not let her go into the music industry because of

(16:28):
how rough and questionable it might have been for a
woman back in those days, so that was the extent
of my mom's musical toe dip. My dad didn't really
play anything. My brother is a historian, so it was
basically just me being the weirdo of my family. I

(16:52):
started singing when I was very young, and then my
dad got me one of those small toy keyboards. Maybe
the year after he got me a slightly bigger one. Finally,

(17:13):
we rented this upright piano, and that piano has traveled
with me all over the globe in every apartment in
house I've lived in, from Belgium to Australia to Greece
to all of my apartments in New York, and it's

(17:35):
currently sitting in my living room. It's not a rental anymore.
I guess I guess you bought it at some point. Well, yeah,
we had. I think we made a good investment. Up
through high school, I took classical piano and classical voice,
but I wasn't a very good sight reader, so I

(17:57):
would just kind of make up melodies on the spot
and most people wouldn't notice. But of course the one
person who did was my piano teacher, and she was like,
you can't do that. You have to read what's on
the page. You're not Mozart, you know. That's when I
started writing music. In high school. I was writing these

(18:17):
epic prog pop seven eight minute long things. But then
I started music in college, and then later I got
my master's degree in studio composition a k a. Songwriting,
and that's kind of when things started for serious. One

(18:39):
of my first collaborations was with Stoop, who's better known
as the producer in the underground hip hop group Jedi
Mind Tricks. They didn't really know anything about the rap world,
especially not the underground rap world, but for someone like
me who loved singing and writing catchy melodies, it makes

(18:59):
a good pairing and contrast. We collaborated on a full
album called The Waiting Wolf under our band Vespertina. It's
kind of like this trip hop concept album loosely based
around Scheherazade and A thousand and one Arabian Nights. You'll

(19:23):
have th Jo Pulls, keep me your full welky a
my nerd, but it's a very sort of studious, fresh
front underground trip hop. You know that you've got some
people that went to college when you dropped Shaherazade, and

(19:44):
there I guess that's there's even some Rinsky course of
cop in there for all all the O G S H.

(20:06):
We released it actually ten years ago. It was my
first album and it kind of just went nowhere. After that.
I moved to Japan, and while I was there was
part of this group called the Good Johnson's Nobody Can

(20:28):
tell you. There's only one song where it's singing that did.
It's like j pop elector lounge, insane funny show. We

(20:56):
would tour around Japan in New York too, but it
was the complete opposite, obviously of Vespopina Night, good Night,
good Night school Scooby Scoob. When I got back to

(21:18):
the States, I just felt really out of touch and
I was going through a long depressive writer's block. I
don't really talk about this a lot, but I was
close to quitting music altogether. I just couldn't write anymore.
There was nothing like left, either putting on a show

(21:41):
or putting out anything. There's all this effort and money
and time and practice. You work on it, and you
work on it and you build it up, only the
find that no one cares. Or so it played out
in my mind. Right about two years ago, there was

(22:02):
this huge thing that happened for me. A couple of
friends of mine suggested I applied to via My Musical
Theater Workshop as a composer. I laughed, because I had
never done musical theater before, aside from people coming up

(22:24):
to me at shows and being like, do you do
musical theater and me being like incredibly offended that they
would even like put me in the same category, So
it never crossed my mind. The prestigious New York based
v m I Musical Theater Workshop has been training composers
and lyricists since including an impressive list of alumni. Alan Mankin,

(22:52):
who did all those Disney movies Aladdin, Feeling the Beast,
Bobby and Kristin Lopez who did Frozen and Coco. They
met at this workshop. Janine Sasori who did Shrek and
con Hone. They all got there to start. At this workshop,
you auditioned as a composer or a lyricist or both,

(23:13):
and then if you get in, you're surrounded and created
by other artists. What do you think of this? People
are just like you, but like way better and it's
a collective. It feels like that's what I was really
missing from the New York rock and pop scene, this
actual sense of community. So I auditioned and by some

(23:37):
crazy miracle I got in. I didn't changed my life.
I don't think I deserved it, of course, at the
time and I was terrified that I would be out
at as a total fraud. But ever since then, I've
rid through work really hard to just keep writing. It
turns out a major source of inspiration had already found

(23:58):
its way to laur but it would take some time
to materialize. Seven years ago, I was in Greece hanging
out my family talking about Tony Rice and Atique, and
on a whim, I did an Internet search for Tony
Rice and I got two hits. One was a Greek

(24:19):
Wikipedia article that mentioned his name in quick passing, and
then the other one was from a music library in Greece.
When I went to the music libraries online database, I
found the thing that started at all, which was the
cover of the piano and vocal score for a song

(24:42):
that had my grandfather's portrait. And I was like, wait what,
because up until that point I was like, Yeah, he's
just a singer and he's stang at a club, right,
I didn't know anything, And I was like wait, this
is an actual photo of him. The family was already

(25:02):
aware that there aren't any audio recordings of Tony Rice.
The technology used for proper recording to a while to
get to Greece, and while some people were able to
spend money on recording the albums, somehow it never lined
up for my grandfather. Who knows in what condition his
voice was like before he had the surgery, but he

(25:27):
lost his vocal cords just before he got a chance
to record any of his songs, and of course, without
any recordings of his songs, they quickly faded into obscurity,
and so did he. So yeah, I knew there wasn't
gonna be any recordings, but how did I not think
that they might not be sheet music? So the next

(25:50):
day I zoomed over there and I got a photocopy
of the sheet music, brought it home, plugged in my
headphones into my dinky little keyboard that I still had
at my parent's house, and I started playing through it.
I think at the time I even transcribed it into
a session so I could later arrange it. Tony's face

(26:15):
on the cover of this score indicated that either the
song had been written specifically for him, or made famous
by his performance, if I could find this one piece
of music, were there more? Like I said, my brother
is a historian, so he's a little better at finding
stuff than I am. And he also lives in Greece,

(26:36):
so he can go to these places in person. We
started doing some internet searches. We found this random website
which had the title and the composers, and then we
tried to cross reference it with the libraries. We talked
with archivists and collectors and YouTubers and like questionable people

(26:59):
on face spoke just like anyone. We could hunt down
to see if they had sheet music. Every time I
saw his photo on a cover, or every time I
saw his name in the credits or mentioned in a dedication,
it just blew my mind. It took about two years.

(27:22):
My brother found most of them, and we got ten songs,
and I know there's at least one more that we
couldn't find the sheet music for. So there's probably more
out there that I don't know about. And you never
mentioned that you were doing this project to your mom
about her father. Nope. So in fact, the first song

(27:45):
that I discovered, the one that I brought home and
played on my dinky keyboard. This was a song called
I Wish I Never Met You, which was kind of
an ominous start to this whole thing. But I really
didn't have enough at that point. And then by the
time I did, I was like, Okay, mom's turning seventy.

(28:06):
We're gonna put this together and we're gonna give it
to her for her birthday as a gift. That seems
like a good deadline. I thought we were going to
do like a live show. She lives in Greece, so
I was gonna fly out there for her birthday and
do this show. And then the pandemic hit how are
you going? Never mind? Because I was like, Okay, well

(28:29):
what now? And this was how Loris stumbled upon her
next project, an album featuring new performances of the songs
of Tony Rice. I mean, I didn't think it was
gonna be a whole album. I thought it was going

(28:51):
to be maybe a handful of songs and piano and
voice at most. But then I guess, like most things
that I start, I got obsessed and then it became
more and more intricated. Started off, Okay, we'll record piano
and vocals, but how do we do that? A lot
of these songs were for a baritone or tenor voice.

(29:13):
I don't know what Tony Rice's voice type was, but
I want to assume he had this buttery, baritony voice.
I'm a soprano, a high soprano, so things were either
moved up or down, depending to make sure that it's

(29:34):
set in a nice comfy range with my voice. But
it soon became clear that all these songs were begging
for more. Thus began the endeavor of arranging the scores
for orchestration. It started off as a software score, transcribing

(29:57):
what you have in the sheet music, which is the
vocal score in the piano score, and then you extrapolate
the chords and everything, and you just start adding different
textures and instruments to create a fuller sound. In this process,
Laura enlisted the help of her BMI Workshop cohort Dan Wilson.

(30:21):
We worked together on trying to figure out what it
used to sound like when Tony Rice performed it, doing
research and looking at what the instrumentation was, even like
looking at old photos of the live performances and seeing
what people were holding in their hands. We have some

(30:41):
idea of what it would have sound like, because there's
other recordings at the time. So I did a lot
of listening to old recordings of fatigue and even the
Golden age of Hollywood kind of music, like Fred Astaire
at DEEPPF, trying to figure out what is it about

(31:02):
those arrangements that make you think about that time, different
tricks you used, for like the violins to do like
a little swoop and a swell and like a little
harp thing comes in and you're like, oh, I'm in
the forties. For me, it was really important that the

(31:24):
arranging reflected the emotion and the feeling of the song
because it's in Greek and I assumed some non Greek
listeners might be listening. How do you make those listeners
hear the feeling and feel the feeling without knowing what

(31:45):
is being said? Your name? I mean, it took a
few tries. I think I could never let you leave me.
Took like seven or eight arrangements until it was like,
that's a good arrangement and Matt props to Dan Wilson
for figuring it out and doing an amazing job to

(32:09):
capture that nine decades old sound. Laurie and Dan arranged
the piano scores for a symphony's worth of instruments. We
used string quartet upright, bassed clarinets out of sacks, harp, flute, guitar,
we even used nylon guitar for spend sounding song and

(32:32):
piano and voice stone gosh more Pull me Up and
make it room working loathing on Starsho use Chlomia l Loathing.

(32:54):
Then after we did the arrangements, then we had to
reach out to the musicians and find musicians that had
the capability to record remotely. I think that was the
most difficult part, getting people to record separately and make
it sound like you were in the same room together.

(33:21):
As a musician, you need rehearsal time with other people.
And back then when they would record, they had one
or two takes and they were just really well rehearsed.
But we didn't have that. We just kind of had
a lot of pre production and post production and then
the recording was whatever it is, we just have to

(33:42):
make it work. I wanted, you want to give them
the basic stuff click track and the scratch vocals and
scratch piano as a reference stun Goods and I had
a reference track that I had exported from my sabellious

(34:04):
session and you know, it sounds very like Middy, and
then people would record on top of that and send
it back to me. But the strings, for example, I
think we did like five violins, five viola is, four cellos,
two basses. Strings are all about the blend, so we

(34:27):
had a lot of overdubs. It was one person who
was doing both violin and viola, and she would take
multiple tracks. I think we did like five or so,
and then I would send the violin and viola tracks
to the cellist and the basis that they could put
that in their mix and kind of play along with it.

(34:49):
For woodwinds, for example, that was just kind of live.
I think they just played to a backing track and
a click track, and then we would re record the piano,
re record the vocals, edit edit every single thing, and
then try to put it all together. Mix edit, edit,

(35:09):
more mixing, mastering, more mastering. Mm hmm. I should mention
that this is a completely scrappy endeavor. This was all
self financed. This was not something that was meant to
get out of control like this, But it was important

(35:31):
for me to have musicians that I like working with
and pay them during this time where no one's working.
We all what did the kind up? And get? Guys
got why? I want to think that it captures this

(35:51):
old style of recording. You get what you get in
one or two takes. That's just kind of part of
the beauty. The ten songs that came together for the
Tony Rice project give a sense of both the old
Athens sound and the range of the performers abilities. So
we said, lu lothing see us skips you moved because

(36:16):
music is super romantic and sentimental and forlorn. There's a
few tangos in there that are about deception and cheating
and I'll never look your way again. If you see
me on the street, look the other way. There's a
few upbeat ones that are a little more I'm currently

(36:37):
in love not I was pity then he say you're mad,
just full of romance and sensitivity. Lick you up. My
brother Petros he helped me translate all of these songs.

(37:01):
But there's one song where I wrote an English verse,
and that's the song I Could Never Let You Leave Me,
which is the title trackhoation she see Stacy no God
being much better. When we got the sheet music for it,

(37:23):
there was only one verse in Greek it was a
verse in a chorus, and I was like, he needs
at least one more verse. What if I did this
like Levan Rose Louis Armstrong French and English verse and
put it together. So you're asking us to to take

(37:45):
a love and tear it. All of it's basically almost
exactly the same lyrics as the first verse in Greek.
So I know that interests your love. Honestly, that was
the first song that broke me. So up until now

(38:05):
I had found mostly tangles about cheating and deception, and
then this score came along and I printed it out
and I set it up in front of my piano
and started discovering it for the first time, measure by measure.
By the time I got to the fourth measure, I
was already crying. It was the most beautiful song I

(38:28):
had ever heard. And I know this sounds dramatic, but
I felt like with every measure I was wiping tears
and it just broke my heart. Can you hear this
with me? These are the first four measures. It's just

(38:56):
something about this chord. Yeah, look, court is it g
B F a flat b G seven G seven with
the nine G seven nine it's a G seven nine

(39:21):
plus nine plus six plus six. I looked it up
and it's either a G six flat nine or maybe
an inverted F sharp minor seven sharp four nine. Just
it's just it's just how does that not break your heart?

(39:45):
Even that first one? So like Gershwin esque who came
up with this absolutely genius. That's the thing, like when
you don't know what the court is, when you're like
playing it and it just hits you. Oh my god,

(40:08):
So I was. I was just playing measure by measure,
just stumbling through it with my bad site reading being
a sloppy mess. The title of it in Greek is themamufiis,
which I translated to I could never let you leave me,

(40:31):
but more closely translates to I just can't let you
go or I will never forget you. Though that was
a perfect double meaning to use and tribute to my
grandfather and his legacy. That's a final thing. M Through

(41:07):
the process of performing and reworking these songs, Lorie developed
a deep connection with the source material, even when it
wasn't easy. They these songs happened so also be very
beautiful and very well written, and it's very enjoyable to sing,

(41:27):
but there's a few on there that were tough, and
the only two songs that you may have heard of
before Sorious Granada by Augustin Laura, famous Spanish composer. Yes,

(41:48):
my Nancy. This was typically reserved for this big tenor
arim moment that was vocally challenging, but I can picture
the dramatic scene on stage lay the one song by

(42:26):
a Thick that's on the records, Life's passers By. It
was probably the toughest to record. Pretty most footing scare
most most said no more mystic, But it's basically talks

(42:46):
about how you've become like an old man and you
have nothing and no one is there for you, and
even drinking won't kill you, and you're just at the
lowest point in your life where you just want to
die and everything you try doesn't work. People don't go kind.

(43:13):
There's no redemption in the song. It's just it's just
heartbreaking that listen. It just like keeps digging itself deeper
and deeper and deeper until you're underground, Like don't listen
to it at a party, total down her. By the end,
I'm I'm already crying. Every time I recorded it, Singing
that on stage would completely break me. Here this year

(43:39):
to stop your dog my guess it's not good good?

(44:12):
So you've got the record? When do you clear your mom?
And did all of this November twenty two, on her birthday? Yes, yes,
we were working right up until that zoom call, until
like ago, mastering one of the tracks that wasn't sitting right.

(44:39):
I had to make her a video to prep her
on like what she's about to experience. You know, this
was research involved people that made it happen that we discovered.
There's still missing pieces, but there are ten songs and
just I don't know. I just enjoy it. O good,

(45:00):
you like it? Okay, here go m And I don't
think she totally grasped the enormity of it at first.
How did you gather all those musicians to plue play?
It's amazing? But she does now. I hope this is
a good seventieth birthday. Yes it is. She didn't know

(45:25):
about these songs at all, or about the sheet music.
This was the first time she'd ever heard them as well.
And she's already my number one fan. So for me
to sing these songs was I guess, like the cherry
on top. It was a very nice gift for me,
not only that I heard your voice and dance voice

(45:45):
and all these music, but because I had, you know,
something from my father. It's wild too that I mean,
because she never heard him sing the songs. No, she
had no idea that these existed. Plus I find it strange,
but maybe makes sense that in our attic or basement

(46:08):
we didn't have any of the sheet music of his.
This is a complete fantasy, but I picture Tony Rice
discovering that he has to do his vocal surgery and
remove his vocal cords and then taking all of this
sheet music on all of this music that he had
worked on for twenty plus years and just lit it

(46:31):
on fire and then went on with his life. If
I was in his place, I would probably do something similar.
I Can Never let You Leave Me was released in March.

(46:51):
I'm self releasing it, I'm self funding it. This is
kind of like a passion project that I didn't think
would see the light of day because it was just
for my mom. Then I just got so deep into
it that I felt like people need to hear this.
The Fia Sutlika say he Nike Africa. You're die night,

(47:18):
You're that's a This isn't my my demographic or anything.
I don't know who this is for, but I just
wanted out there going madya shu here Luckily cast thy good,

(47:39):
keep see loud. The Tony Rice project required a lot
of amazing feats, from Laurie and Petros's dogged research to
the fourth sight of Greek archivists, from the skill of
composers writing almost a century ago, to the diligence of
musicians working from home during a global pandemic. We said

(48:03):
lu lothing. But at its core, the source of inspiration
in this music is ineffable, the brilliance of one artist
filtered through the creativity of another. Mad pele truth he
sails this sing If you can't do she he said, Hey,

(48:32):
these hards weird. Through this journey, I was able to
discover a lot about what kind of person an artist
my grandfather was. But we never got to hear Tony
Rice himself sing these songs. I hope that we can
hear his voice through mine, and that these songs won't
be forgotten again. There let me stood seek say yaman yashion.

(49:09):
In many ways, I do think we're very similar. He
had this community of musicians like I have my community
of musicians. Now, I think we're both big softies for
both animals and the humans we love, and the kind
of music that we like. We're both sentimental performers whose
careers haven't quite gone as planned. We're both great cooks,

(49:33):
and we love entertaining and making people laugh. I never
met him, but after all this, I feel really connected
in a way that I can't quite explain, but I
hope he likes it. The bard of big gassion. Maybe
a study keeping ptyshy kidding say y'ama at eyes, flick

(50:03):
your waver bess h wh what is you may she

(50:40):
does steelfy you know, going my spitters past your faces
no bo fgis it looks shai don't love first made
it so stucky home with your mother, feeling with yours

(51:07):
who being nothing um the feece so cover good yes
and d VT shoes. She's a road. It's a phenon

(51:27):
sty doorbosness, I blabor miss mind you fool those who
serpoll theyp start the person or if you want to start,

(51:55):
there's a fena no fee cat yourr spine lovey. So

(52:18):
you're asking us to pall to take a love and
tear it all of her. Say when do you think
you'll go? She s, I know that in truth you
love me. So you flooded my funk hurting full of

(52:41):
fis and the fathom's loss and ways if if you
leave were willing bad, I like you jam wanta Look,
I could never let you leave, would have made you

(53:09):
my god to deeply to you and devilte my life
to you. When snow smoothing, I could never did you

(53:36):
read You're the sunshine on? This episode of Ephemeral was written,
assembled by Williams, and produced by Matt Frederick, Trevor Young
and Max. Williams explore the songs of Tony Roy, Best

(54:00):
Britina and the Good Johnson. Wherever you stream music and
pay it forward with your own copy, I can never
let you leave, or in Greek them over at Lori
thereasa dot com and hear more from us at a
fem dot show that's next time on. It's hard to

(54:46):
overstate the importance of the space of the video store
right over ten thousand videos. Whether it was a shabby place,
or whether it was a let's see blockbuster, or whether
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memorabilia or whatever. The space of the store is hugely
important because it's a social space and a physical space,

(55:10):
creating this new sense of a physical relationship of shopping
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(55:30):
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