Joe Henry and Mike Reid

Joe Henry and Mike Reid brought two distinct but complementary legacies to Life & Times, their new collaborative album. Joe is a celebrated producer and songwriter known for his atmospheric, deeply literary approach to Americana. Over the decades, he's produced albums for artists like Solomon Burke, Bonnie Raitt, and Elvis Costello, while crafting his own work that blurs the line between folk, jazz, and rock. Mike Reid, a former NFL defensive lineman turned Grammy-winning country songwriter, has written hits like "I Can't Make You Love Me" and has long explored the tender spaces between strength and vulnerability.

Their album, Life & Times, captures conversations between two seasoned storytellers, their voices and perspectives interweaving across songs that examine memory, mortality, and the passage of time with unflinching honesty.

On today's episode, Bruce Headlam talks to Joe Henry and Mike Reid about how they developed a deep friendship over their shared love of poetry at a songwriter's retreat. They also discuss the artists and songs that first drew them to songwriting. And they reflect on their individual creative processes and how they've found new ways to inspire each other's work.

You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite songs from Joe Henry & Mike Reid HERE.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Joe Henry and Mike Read brought two distinct but complimentary
legacies to their new collaborative album, Life and Times. Joe
was a celebrated producer and songwriter known for his atmospheric,
deeply literary approach to Americana. Over the decades, He's produced
albums for artists like Solomon Burke, Bonnie Rait, and Elvis Costello,
while cracked in his own work that blurs the line

(00:40):
between folk, jazz, and rock. Mike Read, a former NFL
defensive lineman turned Grammy winning country songwriter, has written hits
like I Can't Make You Love Me and has long
explored the tender spaces between strength and vulnerability. Their album
Life and Times captures conversations between two seasoned storytellers, their
voices and perspectives interweaving across songs that examined memory, mortality,

(01:03):
and the passage of time with unflinching honesty. On today's episode,
Bruce Helm talks to Joe Henry and Mike Read about
how they developed a deep friendship over their shared love
of poetry at a songwriter's retreat. They also discussed the
artists and songs that first drew them to songwriting, and
they reflect on their individual creative processes and how they
found new ways to inspire each other's work. This is

(01:27):
broken record, real musicians, real conversations. Here's Bruce Hedlam with
Mike Reid and Joe Henry.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
I Show from the Grave. It's the show lumberd On.

Speaker 4 (02:09):
It's curtain and ladders climbing up with a dawn that
breaks like a heart, and house like a yawn of
the stretching and wild rolling sea, ever so fully.

Speaker 5 (02:26):
Cafe's with a ghost who sits down beside me with
tea and with toast in a rattle and sleeper. Carn
Trason the coast through the darkness between.

Speaker 6 (02:41):
You and me.

Speaker 7 (02:45):
Flag a Man down way.

Speaker 3 (02:47):
Comes back this way.

Speaker 7 (02:49):
I'll cut run it over, and there's hell to pay
for all we've been giving.

Speaker 8 (02:57):
And did not give away. Flag down a man going back.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
Maybe time yet we.

Speaker 8 (03:07):
Can try.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
Well.

Speaker 9 (03:22):
The barreling in couples and buffalo phones wave to the
cheering to those who would call with a look out below.

Speaker 8 (03:34):
I'm good luck to you all. Just as they drive
the nails.

Speaker 10 (03:40):
And hold back the years into keeping the lid close
for the roll on its side. Well as she goes
it's a drop in the bucket heard of her life,
fanst we know he see is how real love begins.

Speaker 8 (04:03):
Flag a man down when he comes back this way,
our plup on and.

Speaker 7 (04:09):
Over and their hell de pay all we've been giving
and not give away.

Speaker 11 (04:18):
Flag down a man going bad, Maybe timing, and we
can try.

Speaker 12 (04:51):
Well we have in our favor the time at our
backs were chasing our tails, and I could train on
the tracks, steaming and blowing.

Speaker 3 (05:03):
It's a most awful life.

Speaker 13 (05:06):
Of the too many words we have.

Speaker 3 (05:09):
I could rest here.

Speaker 8 (05:13):
On the rails for the night. I can go with
me in.

Speaker 7 (05:19):
The face of such flight of the engine that cut
all and on, not just.

Speaker 8 (05:27):
Carry us. Saw the way home.

Speaker 7 (05:32):
Fag a man down when he comes, stand in his way,
I would fall and old. And there's held the pain
for all we even giving and did not give away.
Flight down a man go in by.

Speaker 14 (05:52):
Maybe time yet we can try, Maybe time yet holding,
Maybe time yet over there, Maybe time.

Speaker 15 (06:04):
Yet, time yet we can try.

Speaker 1 (06:29):
It's beautiful.

Speaker 16 (06:31):
Thanks you.

Speaker 17 (06:31):
So we're welcoming to great songwriters, even legendary songwriters. Mike Reid,
who a dozen number one country hits.

Speaker 18 (06:44):
You know I've been told Bruce it varies from twenty
down to a dozen, and you never know what publication
they're referring to, so I guess maybe that has a
lot to do with it. I have feelings about Number
one records too, that you know, they're not only a
handful of them are really authentic hits. And when I

(07:04):
say hit, I even sort of regard that slightly differently.
To me, it's whatever song impacts people's lives, whatever they
take into their lives, and sometimes commercial hit songs are
a little more than distraction. That's fine, you know, if
you can write something that speaks to someone's life, good

(07:25):
for you.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
Just tell me you cash the checks?

Speaker 3 (07:28):
Ah I did.

Speaker 18 (07:30):
That's a very very fair thing for you to say,
by the way, Yes, I had when it came to that.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yeah, yeah, you know all the number ones.

Speaker 18 (07:38):
That one well, well, you know, the terrible thing for
me to say is that that's sort of principal thinking
is an affordable commodity.

Speaker 3 (07:48):
So you had to be careful not take yourself too seriously.

Speaker 17 (07:51):
I think maybe what you should say from now on,
it's not the number ones, it's the zeros.

Speaker 16 (07:57):
Tell you if you want a shorter answer, just ask
me how many number ones I've had.

Speaker 18 (08:02):
Yeah, but I would ask you how many impactful songs
you've written, Absolutely, songs that have that are deeply woven
within the fabric of people's lives.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
I mean, isn't han Jo isn't that sort of Well
that is the hope.

Speaker 3 (08:17):
Yeah, that is the hope.

Speaker 18 (08:19):
And I think even if you're you know, Bruce, if
you're a commercial quote whatever that means songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee. Yeah,
there's an element, I suppose where it's the business, there's
an element you have to be careful about the cynicism
of money. But I'd have no reason to think those
kids writing songs now don't want to do the same

(08:41):
thing that Joe Henry has done, which is impact people's
lives with the words and his music.

Speaker 17 (08:46):
Well, you jumped in and introduced Joe for me.

Speaker 3 (08:50):
Yeah. Good.

Speaker 17 (08:50):
When I mentioned Joe to people, I always say a
great producer of many many know Elvis Costello, Bonnie Ray,
Alan Toussant, But as a songwriter I think was Roseanne
Cash said you're the one who keeps raising the bar
for the rest of us.

Speaker 16 (09:04):
So well, that's high praise coming from her.

Speaker 1 (09:07):
Absolutely, and you've done it again.

Speaker 17 (09:09):
You guys got together to produce this album Life and Times.
We just heard the first song, Sleeper Car. Can you
tell me how this came together as.

Speaker 16 (09:19):
Far as how we came together to begin working at all.
We found ourselves both part of the so called faculty
at a songwriting camp in Nashville in August of twenty
twenty two that my dear friend Rodney Crowell runs.

Speaker 17 (09:35):
I have to stop you there because that sounds like
an insane amount of fun.

Speaker 16 (09:39):
Well, let me just say it's intense work because people
come from far and wide and they pay no small
sum of money to be there in hopes of learning
something that I don't know that can be taught. So
I have some high anxiety. In fact, you.

Speaker 17 (09:55):
Don't say a songwriting can be taught.

Speaker 16 (09:58):
I like what Rodney says. I don't know if it
can be taught. I believe it can be encouraged. And
I think people who have anything going on, and it
doesn't have to be something that I respond to, Is
it something that they are responding to. I think what
we can teach is refinement and strategies around just personally speaking,

(10:19):
just getting into motion, because I think that's the biggest
obstacle for people is just beginning, and they're all kinds
of things that I've learned to do for myself over years,
just to trick myself into some kind of motion, because
when that happens, invariably I encounter something that I can
work with.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
What are those tricks?

Speaker 16 (10:40):
This is going to sound over the obvious, but if
I'm sitting in a hotel room, for instance, or in
a moving vehicle, as I was when I wrote a
lyric just the other day, I just start somewhere describing
something that I see, and somehow just a descriptive gesture
will lead to you know, what's the response to that

(11:01):
thing that I see? And who is that character responding?
And next thing, you know, you're in the kind of
in the middle of some kind of a story. It
might not be a line your narrative, but something starts
to emerge if you pay attention to it. And I
just encourage people in that case to stay in the
seance of it as long as possible before you're ever

(11:21):
thinking about whether it has any use to you or not.
You know, John Cage said, don't confuse the creative mind
with the analytical mind. They both have a purpose, but
they're not the same animal. I like to try to stay,
you know, in that part of the river that's sweeping
you away for as long as possible before I get
up and climb out onto the bank and start looking

(11:43):
down at it and evaluating it, because once that's happened,
you're not being swept away, You're not being seduced any longer.
How long can the seance be sustained? So you're just
spooling off raw fabric, and then it's quite easy in
some regards to come back later to that raw fabric
and then you know, fashion a pair of slacks out

(12:04):
of them that you can walk around in. But that
first generation of raw fabric is the thing that stymies
most people. You know, how do you just get that
wheel turning to begin with? And then you can decide,
based on what kind of spools around you, where you
might go with it.

Speaker 17 (12:21):
You know, I would say, as someone who's been an
editor his whole life, I think those animals are actually
enemies in the wild. And I've seen this particularly in
other editors, really brilliant editors I've worked with at The
New York Times and elsewhere. They have to stop writing
because the analytical part of it just overams for sure.

Speaker 16 (12:40):
I mean, if I find that voice, if I'm in
the midst of writing anything in that first burst, if
I find myself for a moment even wondering, you know,
is this any good? Do I like it? Will my
wife like it?

Speaker 3 (12:55):
Well?

Speaker 16 (12:56):
Anybody who cares about what I do like it. I'm
done for the day, or at least for that period
of time, because I know I've taken myself completely out
of the stream, and it's easy to get there. It's
easy to stay in that analytical, judgmental part of it.
You know, how long can we stay free of judgment?

(13:16):
I mean that's translatable to so many aspects of our lives,
as much I so frequently.

Speaker 3 (13:21):
Is I agree with Joe.

Speaker 18 (13:23):
I don't think it can be taught like in that
when Joe and I were at the Rodney's camp. You know,
it's sort of like instructing or teaching people about the
fact about the experience of their own lives. Stanislavsky said,
acting is behaving truthfully in imaginary circumstances. And it may

(13:43):
be you don't have to have lived what you're writing,
but you have to. I think you have to understand
the emotional atmosphere of the thing, you know, and very
often I find in those camps, Joe, do you that
the people come and they think, you know, they're going
to find some you know, some technical secret. Yeah, more

(14:05):
complicated than just Hey, I'm sorry to tell you this,
but writing and teaches writing. If you can't spend all day,
I get that. But you can spend a chunk of
every day addressing it. I don't care, you know, if
it's fifteen twenty minutes. The more you get in the
habit of sitting down. Mary Oliver writes a beautiful ideas

(14:26):
about showing up for that part of you that desires
to be given voice to I always tell young writers,
you know, talent commitment. They're fine, that's fine, but they're
not quite enough. You have to be compelled to show up.
If you do that over the long haul, I think
things begin to happen you might not have thought would.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
And you were very disciplined in your writing, weren't you.

Speaker 3 (14:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 18 (14:51):
I get up every morning and often Joe and I
will text. He's in Maine, I'm in Nashville. We text
over the first wonderful cup of coffee, which is the
great sublime moment for both of us.

Speaker 3 (15:04):
I think, and.

Speaker 18 (15:06):
Then I will yeah, I will see what's on my mind.
But now lately I stay with him the piano because
as an old person, my hands have a tendency to
want to go to comfortable, familiar places. So when Joe,
for example, when Joe sends me a lyric of words,

(15:26):
I will often print them and walk take a walk
around the yard with them, or into a wooded area
there around the house, and into nature. Get them out
into nature, get them and I will speak them out
loud into nature, into the air to get the sound
of them in the world. And then that helps me

(15:49):
get a little closer to understanding what is the atmosphere
these words are conveying, and then can I find what
the musical sound might be.

Speaker 17 (15:59):
You know, when I talk to you, Joe, and this
was years ago, you would talk about using open tunings,
different tunings, anything to get your hands out of.

Speaker 16 (16:06):
That yeah zone, anything to disorient me a little bit.

Speaker 1 (16:11):
Yeah, Mike, you've played piano for a very long time.

Speaker 3 (16:13):
Yeah, since I was a kid.

Speaker 17 (16:15):
How do you you can't well, you can't retune a piano,
but you really don't want to do that. Is there
something you do with the piano to try and defamiliarize
your your fingers with what you're doing.

Speaker 18 (16:26):
Can I show Joe this little thing, Bruce, This is
what I do. And if someone's listening, they may because
we tend to sit down in an instrument. We you know,
we're gonna maybe look for some kind of progression, some groove, might.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
All those things you know how to do.

Speaker 18 (17:00):
So what I do is to get away from that
is I imagine a room of four people, right, and
no one is going to say anything until they absolutely
have something undeniable to say. So we'll start with a note.
And this note for me might be silence, might represent silence.

(17:23):
And this may go on in my little over that
first cup of coffee for minutes, you know, four or
five minutes until my left hand because that note is
going to tell me to go somewhere. The two decidedly

(17:50):
different things. One resolves attention. This creates a little bit.
So I start extremely small like that, very small, with
very small elements. Maybe at that point then a melody.
I have Joe's words in front of me. I may
begin to hear the sound of what they might sound like,

(18:14):
the voice driving them. And sometimes we'll write a verse
not write a verse. I will discover a verse with
just playing that one note or two notes. So that's
what I do to get away from those. And then
if you go to too, you know, you'll eventually find

(18:41):
your way back to something. But then I will go
and say, okay, this is I don't I'm not a
mystic of any kind, you know, but I think Arthur Miller,
the great playwright, referred to it as the hidden narrative.
You know, there is something that wants to be, that
wants to come through, and I do my best, and
I usually fail. I do my best to stay out

(19:02):
of the way of that and listen for it and
try to hear it before I insist me into the proceedings.

Speaker 17 (19:10):
And you said there were four people in the room
you started. We started with one, then you had the two,
the two, and then the next.

Speaker 3 (19:19):
There's three.

Speaker 17 (19:21):
Okay, you're not adding harmony, then.

Speaker 3 (19:23):
Well you may. It may be there's four notes.

Speaker 18 (19:27):
There four people who have decided I must speak.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
Now.

Speaker 18 (19:35):
Now at some point they're gonna they're gonna arrive at
some hopefully some reasonably agreeable conclusion. And so that you
might get that may arrive at that. I mean it's
a little thing that I do, and it could be
very possibly. I spend too much time alone in my

(19:58):
little workroom, and I end up doing unnecessary things. I
like small, small, small, small small. When I'm when I'm
lost and confused, I think less less less less might
be not more.

Speaker 16 (20:13):
You know, I've learned some of those tricks from you
know that that John Cage used to to do with
word play. Uh and and people like William Burrow's kind
of picked up on it from Cage. I think, well,
I'll just, you know, pick up you know, the nearest
book to me. There's always something close by, and just
open it at random and decide that at the top

(20:33):
of the left hand page. You know, I have to
incorporate a verb and a noun that I find one
or the other, and just by insisting that I utilize it,
it's going to suggest something, you know, And you can
try as hard as you want. It's impossible to put
two words together that mean nothing, because the mind is

(20:54):
trained to find some kind of sense, some kind of
gesture toward narrative in there. When you start looking for relationship,
you invariably find relationship. There's no such thing as no relationship,
you know, even if it's complete what we would call chaos,
that is a relationship to something interesting.

Speaker 17 (21:14):
You describe it that way, because I would say, and
this is going to sound like an insult, and I
don't mean it to be an insult. Your lyrics make
the listener work a little harder. I think you're going, yeah,
I know, like that's a bad thing. I want to
hit d it.

Speaker 16 (21:33):
I think it's perfectly fine that that people are invited
to be active as listeners. Almost every single night I
play a show, I make a point of saying to
an audience at the end of the night, listening is
not a passive activity, and I appreciate anybody who brings
their attention and time to bear. So yes, I expect

(21:54):
that people, if they're paying attention to what I'm doing,
they might have to work harder than they do when
they engage other things. I don't know, but I I've
had this conversation with Brad Meldal, the great pianist, who said,
you know, you can't read Shakespeare without really bringing your
full intellect there. You can't read Blake, you can't listen

(22:17):
to Beethoven, you can't listen to Coltrane without bringing your
real attention there, and that's part of what activates the process.
That's part of what makes music a vibrant connection between people.
If I'm only broadcasting out, that just sounds like pure
ego to me. The electrical current only is complete when

(22:41):
it becomes a circular loop. If I'm not feeling something
back from a listener, even if it feels abstract, even
if I'm home alone, something activates me into believing that
there's a vibrational element to what I've just written that
does not just belong to me. I don't believe that
I can alone have that experience. If it's buzzy to me,

(23:05):
it's because I believe that there are other people who
will catch that. If I push it.

Speaker 1 (23:11):
Forward, it's like lightning. It meets in the middle.

Speaker 16 (23:13):
Yeah, and I do think it's a mystical I sometimes
am shy to talk about it in mystical terms, except
that I just think that it is.

Speaker 2 (23:24):
We'll be back with more from Mike Read and Joe
Henry after the break.

Speaker 17 (23:31):
So, as listeners, when you got together, what did you
hear in each other's work that you thought would that
this would be a fruitful partnership.

Speaker 16 (23:41):
I can answer that question Honestly, I have no idea
when we met on that first day of this camp.
We just, by happenstance found ourselves walking across the grass
at Vanderbilt where this camp was hosted, and in line
together it's the dining hall. Thus we sat at a
table together, and we found ourselves really quickly. I didn't

(24:02):
have one notion that Mike knew who I was in
any sense, but we found ourselves really quickly talking about
the poets that we love in common, and that connection
was energizing to me to the point where in the
subsequent days, every time there was a coffee break, I
was looking for Mike. I was looking for this conversation

(24:24):
to continue. Yet when we parted company, when everybody left
the camp, we didn't communicate for a couple months. But
one day, I've been visiting my dad in North Carolina,
and I was stripping the bed before we left, and
I heard a couple of sort of unspool in my mind,
and for whatever reason, I stopped what I was doing

(24:44):
and I texted Mike and reminded him who I was,
and asked him what he'd like to try to write
some together. I don't really know other than the fact
that I understood that he comes from a different musical
tradition than I do, and I wanted to get out
of the same habits that he's talking about his hands
having at a piano. You know, I know because I

(25:06):
come out of a folk in country blues tradition. Melodically,
even though I studied the Great American Songbook, you know,
I'm a Duke Ellington freak. I've put myself into that
music as deeply as I can. I don't have a
lot of facility articulating music in that way, though I'm
my imagination is fired by it. And I'm sure that

(25:31):
I recognized in what Mike does and what his background
truly is that has little to do with so called
country music, that he understood a lot of nuance and
a lot of the elements that create that kind of
architecture that the Great American Songbook standards share. And I wanted.
I wanted to get free in that way. I wanted

(25:52):
to be able to move into that kind of nuanced
melodic invitation. I wanted to know what it would do
to me.

Speaker 1 (25:59):
Do you remember what the couple it was?

Speaker 16 (26:02):
Sure, it's the It's it opened, It's the beginning of
the song Room, which is song three on the record.
It's the first thing we wrote. I waked to a
room with a story to tell. Its silence was iron,
the strike of a bell. That's what I had. I
knew that that wasn't just a flat wall. I heard
that couple as a door that might be opened. That's

(26:24):
a pretty specific phrase to just announce itself in your mind.

Speaker 17 (26:30):
I mean, the reason I ask is that I know
my I reread some interviews you've given, and you talk
a lot about rhyme and how.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
You react to it. How did you react to that one?

Speaker 18 (26:41):
To underscore Joe's story about us meeting at that songwriting camp,
I did know his work, and when I was very
I was very anxious about setting across the table from
him because he did what I suspected in within myself
but couldn't get to. And I was such an admirer

(27:03):
of his that I thought I will have nothing to
offer this guy. But then that dissipated the minute we
began to talk about poets that we both loved. And
your idea that Joe's words make people work, I don't
really feel that way, Bruce. Joe's words immediately and starting

(27:26):
with room, and from then on my sense here's the
word that I used. They were summoning me towards something.
They were summoning me into a place that I suspected.
I knew it was alive, but maybe I couldn't get
there on my own. And when I started working with
these words and finding, you know, melodic snippets here and there,

(27:52):
it's the very first thing I said to him. He asked,
you want to write? And I said, well, I don't
know what I'm doing. I'm very slow. But if you
want to push off the dock into the fog, I'm
your guy.

Speaker 3 (28:05):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 18 (28:06):
The minute I think, what did Elliott say? One only
in the four quartets, one only gets the better of
words for the thing one no longer has to say,
or the way in which one is disposed to say it.
I'm not putting down commercial music or pop songs that speak,
you know, romantically to people's lives. That's wonderful. I think

(28:29):
we're here one time love something. You know, I happen
to love the things that summon me into a place
that is, by the way, not.

Speaker 3 (28:41):
Outside of me.

Speaker 18 (28:42):
They're summoning me within their asking. One never knows when
you're getting close to that hidden narrative, it happens and
it's exciting. But when it doesn't happen, I have found
there's not a lot you can do to fix it,
other than maybe a good night's sleep, get away from it.

Speaker 3 (28:59):
You know.

Speaker 18 (28:59):
I love, I absolutely adore the people in his songs
because every living thing, you know, every living thing has
a pressure exerted on it by simply existing. And who
we are physically, what we look like, what we say,

(29:20):
do we have tattoos? Do we have no tattoos? Is
a response to that pressure. And Joe's people in his
songs are often confused but looking for light, always looking
for light. And so that's me, I think, confused and

(29:41):
looking for light. I hadn't thought of that to this moment.
That perfectly describes me even now, at this point in life.

Speaker 17 (29:48):
Well, and it describes a lot of the songs as
well on this album.

Speaker 18 (29:51):
Well I think, so, I think, so, I hope. Look,
I'm not convinced the music that I found for these
songs is up to those words, and I won't be.
I can make a peace with it, and I can
accept what's there, and I hope that the song, the
music does not get in the world way.

Speaker 3 (30:09):
They tend to be.

Speaker 18 (30:10):
Very protective of Joe's worth, and yeah, would I like
to go out there, Sure, but then there's the composer
obscuring the words, and I don't want to do that.
I don't know if you've ever listened to Copeland Zenmilie
Dickinson song cycle or Samuel Barber songs, particularly Sure in
the Shining Night at Great James a g and Barber

(30:32):
of being a great composer. But it's so in support
of those beautiful, beautiful words.

Speaker 3 (30:37):
And you know, I'm old.

Speaker 18 (30:40):
Now and I'm confronting my limitations, and so anything that
gives me a chance to maybe exceed them, or at
least bang my head against them, I'm going to do that.

Speaker 17 (30:52):
It's interesting you mentioned how the music interacts with the words,
because when I sort of re listen to the album
as a whole, they are they're piano ballads, and I
almost started to think of this album could have like
an old nineteenth century Oh wonderful, you know, piano ballads
cover and particularly some of the phrases you used to

(31:14):
introduce the songs almost sound like a kind of Stephen Foster.

Speaker 1 (31:19):
Oh that's a.

Speaker 17 (31:20):
Thing to say, well, Bruce, but then the lyrics are
not in June what.

Speaker 18 (31:26):
A nice That was never the intent. You know, that
was not the intent. But I love you because look
to Joe's point earlier, we must no matter if it's
a little, you know, simple little three chord country song,
if it's a great blues song, if it's a Joe
Henry lyric, a Wallace Stevens Elizabeth Bishop poem, that kind

(31:47):
of work is asking us to open up the bags
of our lives on it. What does it fire within me?
Joe's never sent me a lyric, Bruce that it didn't
fire something in me. Now could I explain that to
you at this moment? Probably not, Or I could and
take up a lot of hot air, a lot of gas.
We don't need that. But Joe never sent me words

(32:10):
that didn't fire something in me. A relationship to with
the character. Because I don't see Joe. You should speak
to this. I don't see Joe. Necessarily, to Joe's point,
you cannot put two words together without meeting something. So
it comes out of Joe Henry. He is he is
the vehicle through which it passes. So it's going to

(32:32):
be But I don't necessarily, Joe, think your songs are
all you. I mean, I'm thinking my episode.

Speaker 16 (32:38):
No, No, I could count on less than that single
hand the times that I think I've written something that
you know where I am in some way the character.

Speaker 18 (32:48):
Actually, and yet let me let me interrupt you, Joe,
because I I have an obsession right now with the
Joe Henry song and it's only going to get worse.
I know this is a song on this album. No Oh,
it's the short Man's Room album. Yeah, and that's the
song Shortman's Room because I am so passionately in love
with the character in that song. And what do I love, Joe,

(33:13):
What do I love about that is that it came
through Joe. So you know, it's not why you're not
totally not on the fringes of that.

Speaker 7 (33:25):
Oh.

Speaker 16 (33:25):
I don't say that I'm not involved, you know, I'm
just saying I might just be the ring bearer, but
I'm not necessarily the bridegroom of the story. And look,
I won't pretend that I think that, Oh, I'm just
visited upon and I don't have any relationship. But I'm
not conscious of that. And if I was conscious of

(33:48):
writing about my own life. I think I would. I
think I would pull back. Not because I'm afraid of
revealing too much or you know, my privacy or whatever.
I just feel like my personal experience is too finite
a space, you know, from winch to you know, launch
any real discovery.

Speaker 9 (34:09):
You know.

Speaker 16 (34:09):
I've thought of that a lot that you know, in
the seventies, when I was a young person obsessed with
songs and trying to figure out how they came into being,
and it was there was the singer songwriter of movement
that seemed to suggest, the more honest you were to
your real life, that's how you know, that's how good
this song was, you know. And in that regard, I

(34:30):
think honesty is completely overrated or what are you being
honest to? My own personal life is such as finite
space to explore, But I take the same lens and
point it out. I'm still witnessing through the lens of
my own life experience. I'm not the goal, isn't you know,

(34:51):
not like Cage who was looking for ways to create
music that hadn't no trace of his ego in it,
just to see what that would sound like. I'm not
pretending that that's my goal. I just don't want to
be limited by my own imagination. I don't want to
be limited by the own you know, just the small
experience is that as certainly when I was a young writer,

(35:11):
you know that i'd had I didn't think I'd lived
enough life to write about. But my desire to reach
out and create character, like Felinius to say, I just
create a character and find out what he or she
has to tell me. That's how I felt about songs,
like I want to begin a song in whatever way

(35:31):
I can, and then see what it does to me,
See what is asking me to do in service of it,
not in service of me? How can I be in
service to it? And how can it tell a story
that's bigger than I am?

Speaker 17 (35:46):
Are there any parts of you that you think launch
some of these songs?

Speaker 16 (35:51):
Sure? I mean I was just telling this on stage
the other night. There's a song called stray Bird, and
you know, I frequently I don't know where the beginning
of a song comes from. It just seems to be there,
like somebody sees the ladybug on them. There it is
you want to deal with it or not. In this case,
the song Straybird, my wife Melanie and I were visiting

(36:13):
my sister in law in the Hamptons on Long Island
a couple of summers ago, and watching our young nieces
in the pool at dusk, and I just happened to
look up and notice that the side of her house
was on fire. The chef had left the heating grill

(36:34):
too close to the cedar shingled house. And I look up.
The house is on fire, not a big fire, but
was asking for attention. I grabbed somebody else's jacket, it
didn't need to be mine, and put the fire out.
Now I have this wonderful young niece, and I knew

(36:54):
that she was writing poetry in school. I think she
was probably about nine in that moment, so I challenged her.
I said, hey, Stella, let's both write a poem about
what happened tonight and read it to each other at
breakfast in the morning. Now, Stella, just Stella didn't do
the assignment, but I did, and it got me started.
It wasn't the whole lyric, because then it went somewhere

(37:17):
else where. I wanted to make reference to her in
some kind of way, not her. I just wanted to
use her name by way of connecting it to her
but it does start. You know, the house caught fire
just after dark on a cold night in July. That
is precisely what happened, and that's what put that song
in motion. My reaction to that moment and realizing that

(37:40):
that wasn't the biggest drama happening in the story. That's
just a place that came out of a real life experience.
Not writing about myself. I'm writing something about my reaction
to an actual moment.

Speaker 17 (37:53):
Okay, But then the song goes on and I quote,
there's like a sixty minutes interview. Suddenly, yeah, I'm all
here for the man I was just yesterday is scarcely
here to stand his every sway now stripped away the
bird it leaves my hand.

Speaker 16 (38:10):
No, I know where this is going, and I can't.
I can't right now say that you're wrong because I
hear what you hear. But you know, was that a
conscious thought in my mind? Absolutely not. And had I
have been aware of how potentially revealing that phrase is,
hats off to you for coming up with it so quickly,

(38:32):
I would have steered around that fucking thing with everything
I had, probably, But when I saw it later, I
was like, oh.

Speaker 17 (38:39):
Well, this is sixty minutes. It's like I'm showing you
internal company documents.

Speaker 16 (38:43):
Yeah, and you're like, well, I'm not sure. I'm sure
that's not my signature.

Speaker 17 (38:47):
You know that came through another part of the company.
It's just such a beautiful I mean, sway does a
lot of work there.

Speaker 16 (38:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 17 (38:58):
Sway also means power influence. Yeah, and it also means
your balance.

Speaker 3 (39:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 17 (39:03):
And a bird flying away, which would seem almost weightless,
how it would affect that.

Speaker 19 (39:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 16 (39:07):
And I love words that both are specific enough to
be committed, but that have more than one way to
be heard. So you're not nailing anything down to the floor.
You're not limiting anybody's response to it. As you know,
there's only one way in and out of this house.
I try to leave as many doors in the window
as open as possible so that people can enter them,

(39:29):
however they might. I might not know what's the most
significant part of any song. I know where I think
the drama is. I think when I've written something, but
I frequently find out that people have really other responses
than I do to it as a finished piece. And
I would never suggest that my interpretation once it's done

(39:50):
has any more relevance than somebody else's.

Speaker 17 (39:53):
Okay, well we're going to go from the Hampton's to
Pennsylvania where you grew up. Tell me when music first
entered your life.

Speaker 3 (40:02):
Oh, wonderful, wonderful question.

Speaker 18 (40:06):
My grandmother, my father's other We grew up next to her,
right next to the house, and her mother, my great grandmother,
lived on the farm, on a farm, oh maybe seven
six miles away, and uh, there was an old on
that my grandmother's son porch.

Speaker 3 (40:27):
There was an old upright. You know.

Speaker 18 (40:28):
A lot of the keys didn't work, but I remember, Bruce,
my first memory of life is probably about three, when
I was three, sitting on that bench banging on the keys.
And then my great grandmother, when she got very old
and need to be cared for, they moved her down
from the farm and I would play for her in

(40:49):
that sun porch. And what I would play for her
was really I think. You hear a lot of things,
you know. The Cage's point, you know, about four minutes
and thirty three seconds is his idea is that there
is no such thing as silence. You know, you hear
a lot of things, but intentional listening, you know. So
to play for my great grandmother who would sit there

(41:11):
in the summer heat, wrapped in blankets, you know, and
due to circulation hymns and I think the first music
in my life that I became aware of intentionally listening to,
or the hymns in church. I loved, not necessarily praise hymns.
I loved those songs of surrender where people say, you know,

(41:36):
I'm lost, I'm broken.

Speaker 3 (41:38):
Where do I go from here?

Speaker 18 (41:40):
And I think in many ways that sort of those
that music informs even to this day.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
And what was the what was the church?

Speaker 3 (41:49):
Well it wasn't It was just a yeah.

Speaker 18 (41:51):
I would love to be able to sit here and
tell you it was Baptist and we were rolling in
the aisles, But no, it was an old Methodist, just
the Methodist denomination. And whatever the hymns were. I always
I always tell young writers. They say, well, you know,
in this climate, why write, you know? And I well,
you got to get it into the world, get it
into the world. John Newton got off a slave ship.

(42:14):
I thought he was a captain of it. I don't
think he was, but he was on a slave ship
and he had epiphany about what was going on, and
he went home and he prepared a sermon for the
following Sunday, and during that sermon that were preparing that sermon,
he wrote the words amazing grace, how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me? And I always tell

(42:36):
young writers, you cannot tell me. John Newton thought, well,
in two hundred and fifty years, the whole world to.

Speaker 3 (42:40):
Know those words. No, you got to get it into
the world. You know, get it. But I heard that.

Speaker 18 (42:47):
I just I love those that kind of music. And
then when I was thirteen years old, my father was
worked in the I think it was a miner when
he was younger, and then worked in the job to
have in those days when I was a kid was
in the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Speaker 3 (43:01):
He worked in the railroad.

Speaker 18 (43:02):
Mom sold shoes when my brothers and I were able
to take care of ourselves, and he rode my bike
across town. I was about thirteen to a deer buddy
Dave Berry, and he played me Van Klibern and Fritz
Reiner's recording of the Beethoven Emperor. And I had no
idea in thirteen years of living on this earth that

(43:25):
such a sound existed. So those two things, I think
were things that kind of the hymns were a gradual thing.
The Beethoven, the Emperor and the birth of my children,
I think, are the only things that I can say
changed me in a moment really that made me. I

(43:46):
missed the experience Joe had, you know, being touched by
the people he was. I was very slow, you know,
for example, I would be lying to you. I was
very slow to Dylan. I was very slow to the Beatles.
You know, they were up and almost broken up by
the time I discovered Let It Be or Abbey Road.

Speaker 3 (44:05):
You know.

Speaker 18 (44:05):
Did you ever see the movie two thousand and one,
The Stanley Kubrick, You know the scene of the apes
around the monolith, right, and they're not sure. They're compelled
into it and they're frightened of it. That's what music
was for me. I was drawn into it. I had
no real natural ability in it. My abilities were in

(44:28):
the physical world, were in the athletic world. But I
was so compelled. And I must say, you know, the
physical comes and goes, as you well know, I'm towards
that dissipating time, but the thing being compelled into music
has only gotten stronger and continues.

Speaker 17 (44:44):
You said you were compelled towards it, but afraid of it?

Speaker 1 (44:47):
What were you afraid of?

Speaker 18 (44:48):
I was overwhelmed. I didn't know what that was. I
didn't know. And then it went from the Emperor. I
remember back in those days, he Atlantic and Pacific tea company,
the MP Supermarkets. First classical record I ever bought was
a rock Mountain of Second Symphony for twenty nine cents
in a bin there and I brought that home. Then

(45:08):
there was a Richard Rodgers Victory at Sea, which is
sort of a hybrid theater poppish classical.

Speaker 3 (45:16):
So it was just a gradual, just a gradual discovery
of that.

Speaker 18 (45:20):
Music all the while when the pop you know, there
was a record by the Walker Brothers that I love,
early Elvis. I can't say that I was that I
am or was an Elvis fan, but those early Elvis records,
I remember Joe do you you're you're not old enough
to remember?

Speaker 6 (45:38):
Was it?

Speaker 18 (45:39):
Bobby Darren split Splashed you guys, of course? And then
Danny and the Juniors record called at the Hop and
along with the you know, Beethoven and Bach then and
I was later on twentieth century, but I love pop music.

Speaker 3 (45:58):
I just loved it.

Speaker 17 (45:58):
But then how did you did you start lessons? How
did you?

Speaker 3 (46:01):
Yeah?

Speaker 18 (46:01):
I started when I was They brought that My uncles
and dad hauled that that upright up the hill to
our house and put it in our in our house,
got the got a tuner to come out and get
things working.

Speaker 17 (46:13):
And it's very daunte and listening to Van Clyburn and
well again that second and not knowing how.

Speaker 18 (46:19):
You know that was the apes around the monolith? You
know that was I was an ape around the monolith
saying what is this? I could put my hands on
the keyboard, but I mean equating it with what I
was hearing.

Speaker 17 (46:31):
Now we haven't mentioned that. You, I'm pretty sure, are
the first Broken Record guests to have played in the NFL.

Speaker 1 (46:39):
So you were.

Speaker 18 (46:39):
I always say, listen, I can't believe I get to
work with Joe Henry. I can't. I was just literally
even now Joe thinks I'm girming him. I don't mean
to I really And I always say Joe and I
when when I say things that Joe, I always what
do I say to you?

Speaker 16 (46:54):
Joe trying to take this as a compliment.

Speaker 18 (46:57):
Yes, because I don't mean it. I mean it. Bruce
Moore as a statement.

Speaker 17 (47:02):
Of Yeah, how about this. Try not to take this
a compliment. You played for the Cincinnati Bengals.

Speaker 18 (47:09):
You know, Yeah, I said I won't say what I
was going to say. What I was going to say
was going to sound mean. But even though I'm working
with Joe Henry in this opportunity, I am the absolute,
I know, unquestionably the greatest pianist ever produced by the NFL.

Speaker 3 (47:25):
Yeah, so you know I may hear from.

Speaker 17 (47:29):
That now, right, Yeah, someone's going to come out now.

Speaker 18 (47:32):
Yeah, there's a defensive ends. He's the kid who's so
dominant for the Cleveland Browns. I can't remember his name
off the top of my but I read he's in
love with poetry. He writes poetry. I've not read any
of it. I don't know, but I know he loves
it and he writes poetry.

Speaker 17 (47:49):
So, and you played for two years at Penn State,
I think two. Well, you guys were undefeated those years.

Speaker 3 (47:56):
My junior red shirt, junior and senior year.

Speaker 18 (47:59):
I was red shirted, tore up a knee in a
wrestling National wrestling tournament, so I was held out for
a year. And then yeah, we were undefeated in s
at sixty nine.

Speaker 17 (48:10):
Did the I guess I should ask you. You played
for Joe Paterno back when he was starting.

Speaker 18 (48:16):
My sophomore year. This is I'm going to date my
salf here. My sophomore year was Joe's first year as
head coach.

Speaker 17 (48:22):
Wow, what was he like in the first year as
a head coach?

Speaker 3 (48:25):
Very?

Speaker 18 (48:25):
Very very He had that Italian, fiery, Italian temperament. And
I lived in fear of him. Not because I couldn't
fill my hands with his little throat and that'd be
the end of that. It's because I feared disappointing him.
We since and I have buddies. I talked to an
old buddy, Steve Smear today. We had a sense, when

(48:48):
you're a kid, you don't know these things. But we
had a sense we were in the presence of a
unique human being, and we had no problem having faith
in what he was telling us to do. And that
was the beginning. It became something else. Apparently, of course,
when it grows so monolithic, it's a very easy to

(49:09):
lose one's self and all that, And that's a long
conversation about you know what. But in the beginning, Joe
was young. He had been there as an assistant for
fifteen years. I think you could tell when he took
over that he was ready for that job. He added
his own ideas about how to make this thing work well.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
Last break and we'll be back with Mike Reid and
Joe Henry.

Speaker 17 (49:38):
You've said that the football made you depressed even in college.

Speaker 3 (49:44):
I look back on my life now.

Speaker 18 (49:46):
I'm at the age where you do an assessment of
what your life has been, you know, and I think
the last time I loved playing that game I was
in high school.

Speaker 16 (49:56):
I think you've told me the same have I told
you were by the time that it was a profession
for you that you didn't you knew you did it well,
but there wasn't a passion for it.

Speaker 3 (50:07):
It could have been the profession.

Speaker 18 (50:09):
Well, Joe's son, Levon is a can I say, Joe
or maybe you should talk about Lee. He's a unique,
a unique carbon life form, this boy. And I don't
even want to use the word talent, Bruce. He's he's
such a well look at me, I'm struggling. But Lee
has said that he worries about pursuit life in music

(50:33):
for fear that the economic parts of it will disturb
what he is going to try to do or find
am I saying that right, Joe?

Speaker 16 (50:42):
Well, pretty much.

Speaker 6 (50:43):
You know.

Speaker 16 (50:44):
Levon has said he's concerned that doing it as a
business might might damage his love for music, and I'm
sure that his witness of my career, which has been
both incredibly rewarding and also you know, difficult. I've spent
a lot of my working life out in the margins,

(51:07):
and I think lee Von has witnessed both my devotion
to what I do and also observed that it has
been extraordinarily hard for me at times. And the difficulty
has not necessarily been about I can't write a song.
My difficulty has been, you know, the people who I

(51:28):
connect myself with in hopes of carrying these songs out
to whatever life they may have beyond me. And I'm
not surprised at all that he has looked at the
business of it and wanted to protect as sacred his
relationship to music, because it's easy to get demoralized. He

(51:48):
certainly has seen me demoralized. And I'm not trying to
pretend as if you know, my life has been so
extraordinarily hard, but my life in music has not been
made easy either by the way the business is constructed
or the kind of songs I choose to pursue. Though,
you know, Mike and I quote this to each other

(52:10):
all the time. You know, Rob Bryaner recently made this
wonderful film documentary about Albert Brooks, and at one point
Albert Brooks manager. He's telling the story to Rob that,
you know, his manager had said to him at some point, Albert,
you always take the hard road. And Albert said, you
know the problem is you think I see two roads,

(52:31):
and that's how I feel about my working life. It's
not like I've chosen, you know, the harder path. I'm
walking the only path that I see, and in fact,
it's a path that I can't see. You know, what
does the dial say? You know, the path that can
be named is not the path. If you recognize it
as a path, you're probably on somebody else's. It's not

(52:52):
like I've chosen to be difficult, or I've chosen to
be an acquired taste or all the polite ways people
talk about music that is not exactly what we would
call popular. And I'm not disparaging myself. I'm just making
a I've not really learned how to full, you know,
monetize what it is that I do. You know, it's

(53:13):
it's not a natural fit for everybody. And I understand
that I grew up listening to people who were not
natural fits for everybody. I was really accustomed to going
to high school and being in love with music and
expecting that nobody that I knew would have any idea
about it. So I've just always understood that the people

(53:33):
that I held most sacred were somehow some kind of
secret because because I had it and nobody else did
not that I didn't think that I was good at it.
But I think about the old, you know quote from
Mark Dwaine, you know, to be good is to be lonesome,
And I I that made sense to me when I

(53:55):
heard it, because when I was doing the work that
I thought was the best work I could do, it
was frequently the things that were the least resonant for
other people.

Speaker 3 (54:04):
You know.

Speaker 16 (54:05):
When when I was on a label that was owned
by Disney, when I made the record called Scar, I
got called into the president's office, who would never be
paying any attention to somebody like me in that moment,
I got called into Bob Cavall, who's office. It was
like I've seen it from a movie. He closed the
door with a remote control. You know, I walked into

(54:25):
this big mccoggany door just slams behind me as if,
you know, as if by will. And he's just heard
this song that I've recorded with on thatte Coleman. And
he said, you're not really going to put this on
a record. I said, put it on a record. It's
my opus. It opens the record. He said, you know,

(54:48):
you know, we got into a little bit of you know,
of a scrap about it, and he thought I was
being difficult. He thought it was the most puzzling thing imaginable.

Speaker 17 (54:58):
Was that the Richard Pryor song?

Speaker 16 (55:00):
Yes, yeah, he also made that difficult. He said, you know,
you can't use Richard Pryor's name in a song title
without his permission. And I said, sure I can. He's
a public figure. And by the way, on the same
record there's a song called Edgar Bergan. You're not saying,
you know, get Candy Bergen's permission or it's over. But

(55:20):
they were so afraid of Richard as a volatile figure,
even though at that moment Richard was strapped into a
wheelchair up and thensino unable to speak, but the idea
that I was going to somehow transgress and open them
up to an altercation with the Richard Pryor family.

Speaker 3 (55:38):
You know.

Speaker 16 (55:39):
They said I couldn't do it. They said, you have
three choices. You can leave the song off the record,
which I wasn't willing to do. You can change the title.
I said, I can't. That tells you how to hear it.
I never mentioned Richard in the song. I'm singing in
first person, or you can get his permission. The Path
of least Resistance was the last one, and through some

(56:00):
wild serendipity that my life is full of, which you
don't have time for right now, I found Richard and
it led to me writing a screenplay, being asked by
him and his wife to write a screenplay based on
his life, and then when that fell apart as an enterprise,
my brother and I wrote a book about him. It
put all kinds of things in motion. Great bo insists,

(56:22):
thank you, insisted that I that my only choice was
to find Richard. They didn't know what they were doing
for me in that regard, As my friend Allen Tussaint
used to say to me, here you are off the
beaten path again.

Speaker 1 (56:36):
I wasn't.

Speaker 16 (56:37):
I wasn't. I wasn't trying to live over there. That's
just where I could afford the housing.

Speaker 17 (56:44):
I do want to talk a little bit because I'm
interested very much in how you wrote melodies. We haven't mentioned,
you know. Probably the song you're best known for is
I Can't Make You Love Me, which is first recorded
by Bonnie Raid and since has been recorded by everybody.
The number of covers it's been called. Dawn was called
it the best song ever written, So it's up there.

Speaker 18 (57:06):
It's ever written. What Joe, come on, you got a
comment to make on that?

Speaker 3 (57:10):
What's that?

Speaker 18 (57:11):
The equivalent declaring something the best song ever written is
is like what?

Speaker 8 (57:16):
Uh?

Speaker 16 (57:16):
Well, I wish I could. I wish I could entity.
I'm just somebody who stands in that line. I think
it's a I think it's a towering achievement. And the
reason I think so is purely because you can listen
to how flexible it is. You know, listen to Bonnie's version,
Listen to Bonnie Vere's version, Listen to Prince. I was
just saying to Mike and the cab we were talking
about it. Listening to Prince do that song, It's like

(57:39):
watching you know, a grown man ain't candy just devouring
it and the flexibility of that, and in all those
there's nothing about any of those versions. There's not one
of those that doesn't doesn't pierce me. You know.

Speaker 1 (57:53):
It's Nancy Wilson.

Speaker 3 (57:55):
Yeah, it's my favorites, you.

Speaker 16 (57:58):
Know, but it's what the you know, the great film
directors might typically say, you know, to an actor, I
don't need you to be overly emotive. Just deliver the words.
Let it's a great script, Let it do the work.
You just have to be here and let it move through.
I think this is one of those songs, not that
it doesn't invite people who can really dig into a

(58:19):
song and take it somewhere, but you have to do
very little, I think, for that song to put you
in its crosshairs.

Speaker 3 (58:28):
Whatever.

Speaker 17 (58:28):
The famous line is, we all long for somebody who
longs for us.

Speaker 16 (58:33):
Yeah, I mean it gets sounded something that's that fundamental.
And when its time waite say, you know, I love
beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.

Speaker 8 (58:45):
You know, it.

Speaker 16 (58:47):
References something that is heart wrenching, and it does so,
carried along by the sublime melody. You know, I can't
imagine any great singer who wouldn't want to take it on.

Speaker 17 (58:59):
It's interesting when I was re listening to it and
listening again to this album in the light of it
is it's interesting how the melody is kind of stretched
across the harmony. The melody is actually and it's a
slow song, but it's quite syncopated. Yeah, in a way,
that's sort of an expect that kind of song.

Speaker 3 (59:15):
Well, look, I'm thinking of it.

Speaker 18 (59:17):
I saw a piece on William Goldman and he said
he asked Sondheim in a conversation, Steve, when you write,
do you know what you're doing? And Sondeim said it
didn't even hesitate. He said, absolutely not. No, if I
knew what I was doing, I would have never written
a bad song. And I have done that, you know.

(59:39):
So look, if I knew when that music came out,
that came out after that was a different song. For
like months and months, my friend Alan Shamberlin and I
worked on it, But when that particular phrase came out,
you know, I didn't even think of those we had.

(01:00:04):
I had two lines, I can't make you love me.
You can't make your heart feel something. If you don't
you can't make your heart feel something. That it won't,
and I wrote it as Mike would write, as an
up tempo bluegrass song, and then we couldn't get any
more lines, and so I would put it away and
we would go at something else. So that's all to say, Bruce,

(01:00:27):
that if I knew what I was doing, I would
have written ten more of those. You know, I managed
to be musically out of the way and be allow
something to happen and then say, okay, let's continue to
pull that thread.

Speaker 16 (01:00:41):
It must be said, though, that sometimes knowing what to
do is knowing how to surrender to a song's emerging authority.
You know, I have a dear friend, the poet who
lives in the Bay Area, Jane Hirschfield, and everybody who
knows me has heard me repeat this because it was
so important to me. When she wrote it to me

(01:01:02):
in an email one day, she said, Joseph, don't ever
forget that the poem has an intelligence the poet it
does not possess. But you have to know a fair
amount understand the fundamental truth of that. You know, the
song knows something that I don't know. And that's not
me claiming to be some kind of you know, mystic

(01:01:24):
character that just gets visited upon like nobody else does.
I'm just saying I'm recognized over and over again that
when something is in motion, I'm attending to it. I'm
involved and I'm committed. But I know that I'm not
I'm not the driver.

Speaker 17 (01:01:46):
You guys are determined not to let need to mystify
a songwriting, aren't you? Because my whole jobs journalists, I
feel so badly for you.

Speaker 16 (01:01:55):
Yeah, because mysteries, you know, the great mysteries are not
are not to be dispelled, to be abided. Well, but hey,
take your best shot.

Speaker 17 (01:02:06):
I'm going to dispel a small mystery then, because I
notice you use a technique on a couple songs here
that i've seen you well, particularly walk on Faith, your
song which was a that was a hit.

Speaker 18 (01:02:17):
For you, right, yeah, yeah, it was research wow, Bruce,
Yeah it was. I had a marvelous life going on
as a little songwriter, people cutting songs. I had two
little kids, and Willie Nelson recorded a song.

Speaker 3 (01:02:33):
Called there you Are. It's called there You Were.

Speaker 18 (01:02:37):
And Bob Montgomery, the late wonderful, the late great bab
Montgomery was that it was Columbia then before it became
Sony said, boy, I love Willie's record.

Speaker 3 (01:02:48):
I love that song, but I really like your demo.
Why don't you make a record?

Speaker 18 (01:02:52):
And I went, well, okay, well that's no way to
make a record, you know. So I did tripped over
myself and the next thing I know, I'm flying, leaving
my family, flying down the highway and a bus with
a bay full of T shirts with my picture on it,
and wondering, Okay, what is this. Let's accept the adventure.

Speaker 3 (01:03:14):
But I was not.

Speaker 18 (01:03:15):
I was too young and too stupid and too close
to really understand accepting the adventure.

Speaker 16 (01:03:23):
Have you got any of those T shirts? And medium
I do, Yeah, I do.

Speaker 17 (01:03:27):
They're still in the cannon. He's going to fire into
the crowd tonight. Well, let me talk about the song,
because you do something in that song which is and
I think it relates to your love of.

Speaker 1 (01:03:39):
Rhyme.

Speaker 17 (01:03:40):
But I love that there's a little delay before that
and the last line is I'm sorry, trust and.

Speaker 3 (01:03:45):
Love, Trust and love.

Speaker 18 (01:03:46):
Yeah, right, So that's not really First of all, I
got into speaking of some tim wonderful because he was
He was fierce about perfect rhymes, and I know you
invoke Rodney. That's one of the things he tells the
people at camp right.

Speaker 16 (01:04:03):
Yeah, he's very much a stickler for you know, the clean,
hard rhyme. Yeah, And of course I'm not in the
least no. No, I think sometimes like the half rhyme
is is just a complete delight. There's something very human

(01:04:25):
about about the near miss that I'm just you know,
I'm just you know, sort of in love with that.
I'm probably you know here, I am being more revealing
than than about myself, than than maybe my songs have
ever been. But I just, you know, it just seems
so human to me. I don't feel that I'm a

(01:04:45):
lazy writer. I've been accused of that by a particular
peer of mine, and I mean in a loving way,
because I I don't write to a strict meter, like
like like a Burt Backerac song, where every every word,
you know, matches of a value of a note. I
come out of a much more of a blues tradition

(01:05:08):
where you know, if the right word is, you know,
if the right phrase is it has a few too
many syllables. If there's not a really smart way to
make that work any other way, you're sing something as
a pickup note, that's perfectly fair game.

Speaker 18 (01:05:24):
And I would hate to think, Joe, that you would
encumber your words by saying though this has to be
a perfect rhyme. It could be because the of the
place you go down into where your lyrics takes one.
I can give you a couple that I find enormously
satisfying sometimes, Sweeney Todd, nothing's going to harm you.

Speaker 3 (01:05:47):
Not while I'm around.

Speaker 18 (01:05:50):
Demons are prowling everywhere. Nowadays I'll send them howling I
don't care. I got ways now that's I find that
enormously satisfying. But the meaning of what's being said there
is pretty much on the surface of things. It's nothing
to really nothing to figure out, nothing for the rhyme

(01:06:11):
to obscure. There's another uh lorenz Heart. My romance doesn't
need a castle rising in Spain or a dance to
a constantly surprising refrain. I find that very satisfying. But
those meetings of those two things are very on the surface.
There's you're not you don't have to go down with

(01:06:31):
a you know, light and try to do investigate. So
in that sense, Shoe, I mean, I think perfect rhyme
is something to shoot for. You know, some time was
a stickler because he came from that in the old
theater days, that was the tradition. And by the way
and walk on Faith, you know, Bruce, it's a kind
of sloppy rhyme really up with love, you know.

Speaker 17 (01:06:54):
It's not it's not the rhyme so much as as
the pause before the last Oh, it's that that that
it's what you do with it, and you did it
a couple of times on this one, and I think
it makes the last rhyme so much more satisfying.

Speaker 18 (01:07:09):
If there's that's that's a beautiful observation on your party.

Speaker 16 (01:07:15):
When a suspended moment of pause is the is the
hook sometimes that is really really the case, whereas the
absence is something that is is the thing that you
can't take your ear off of, you know, waiting for
that moment of suspension and then there's finally, you know,
a relief of that, of that tension, and that is

(01:07:38):
that's the payoff. It's not in a word, it's not
in the concept. It's in an articulation of suspension and release.

Speaker 17 (01:07:47):
I've taken up far too much of your time. I
was going to ask about just about every song on
this album, and you know, City of Light, that beautiful
line and I'd love to know when this occurs you now,
is the prize all along?

Speaker 14 (01:08:02):
You know?

Speaker 16 (01:08:02):
I'm sure that was a moment where you know the
beautiful thing about writing intentionally in rhy and it's interesting,
you know, I read a lot of poetry, but I
don't read rhyming poetry, and yet I write in rhyme
all the time. I find that that reaching for rhyme
frequently brings me to thought that I that I didn't
have otherwise. I can kind of remember being surprised when

(01:08:26):
that line landed. Now was the prized all along? Because
I believed it when it happened. I believed it when
I saw it land there on the page, but it
was not. It was not anything I thought, like, it's
a thought I've had. How can I say it pretty?

Speaker 3 (01:08:41):
You know?

Speaker 16 (01:08:41):
The rhyme invited me there, and then I just believed it.

Speaker 17 (01:08:46):
I also want to ask about the last song, So
We May, which you know I mentioned to you the
album almost reminded me of sort of a nineteenth century
collection of ballads. This reminded me of a It's like
a national anthem. The song almost So we May Well.
It's about a possibility being laid out and do we

(01:09:07):
pick it up?

Speaker 16 (01:09:08):
Yeah, I think it's I think it is about personal
responsibility too. That's something I think about after the fact.
Nothing I thought about when I was writing those words.
And that's a situation where I think Michael, you know,
landed a melody for it that sounded. Once I heard it,
I couldn't. I knew it couldn't go any other way.

(01:09:29):
You know, it just sounded absolutely inevitable to me. It's
a song that I think, I dare say Mike and
I are both particularly proud of. It happened like it
was supposed to when I heard it. It's what it
felt like.

Speaker 17 (01:09:43):
You guys have time for one more song?

Speaker 1 (01:09:44):
Sure?

Speaker 16 (01:09:46):
Why don't we play Life and Time? Since it's the
title song and I'm in the right I'm in the
right tuning for it. We play that and see now,
don't we?

Speaker 19 (01:09:56):
Yes?

Speaker 3 (01:09:56):
We do.

Speaker 16 (01:09:57):
Oh that's good news for me. Okay, you ready there, buddy?

Speaker 20 (01:10:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 19 (01:10:24):
I went north when trouble came, I thought it had
stayed behind.

Speaker 3 (01:10:35):
I worked my way through.

Speaker 14 (01:10:37):
Michigan, finally crossed the line, made.

Speaker 16 (01:10:47):
My peace with solitude. This year's pushed on by.

Speaker 6 (01:10:54):
Hew.

Speaker 3 (01:10:55):
Would you face this grace itself upon my life?

Speaker 13 (01:11:01):
And time on my life and time. Well, I know
well what people say when I go to town.

Speaker 4 (01:11:23):
Go, I keep my business street, hold my tongue and
my head down.

Speaker 7 (01:11:34):
Moving like the ghost that I've become within my line.

Speaker 8 (01:11:42):
Where I've spent.

Speaker 3 (01:11:43):
My days with you, throughout my life in time, throughout
this life and.

Speaker 6 (01:11:53):
Time, I'll watch a storm approaching now from this open to.

Speaker 7 (01:12:06):
And welcome in my sweep away all that came before
the end.

Speaker 8 (01:12:13):
Of them, be getting out, finish up, the sun.

Speaker 13 (01:12:20):
Drawn.

Speaker 8 (01:12:21):
And you don't known to you whose my life and time.

Speaker 13 (01:12:29):
Drawn?

Speaker 19 (01:12:30):
And you don't know to g whose pe my life
in time? I went north wind trouble key, Have.

Speaker 3 (01:12:56):
I knew that I.

Speaker 8 (01:13:01):
Carried you like fools gold across the border line, leading.

Speaker 7 (01:13:13):
My peace well, living out years that passed me by.

Speaker 3 (01:13:20):
Now I wear them like it broke in crown.

Speaker 8 (01:13:26):
Upon my life and.

Speaker 3 (01:13:28):
Time were of them, like it broke in crown.

Speaker 13 (01:13:37):
If all my life and time, all my life and time.

Speaker 1 (01:14:17):
I think that's how we end it.

Speaker 17 (01:14:18):
Thank you so much, what on honor Bruce, Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:14:23):
Just Craig.

Speaker 2 (01:14:27):
In the episode description, you'll find a link to Mike
Read and Joe Henry's album Life and Times as well
as a collection of songs spanning both their careers. Be
sure to check out YouTube dot com slash Broken Record
Podcast to see all of our video interviews, and be
sure to follow us on Instagram at the Broken Record Boy.
You can follow us on Twitter at Broken Records. Broken
Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing

(01:14:49):
help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is
Ben Holiday. Broken Record is production.

Speaker 3 (01:14:55):
Of the Pushcream Industries.

Speaker 2 (01:14:56):
If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider
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Are theme Music's by any Beats. I'm justin Richmond.