May 15, 2018 • 40 mins
Actress, producer, and singer-songwriter Rita Wilson joins Kristian to talk about her love of watercolors, and how her casual hobby has grown into a deep passion. Also, Trade Ya goes global, and KB breaks down the set list for this summer's Sugarland tour. (Tickets on sale now!)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, This is Christian Bush and welcome to episode nine
of my podcast Geeking Out. Every episode, I invite a
new person to talk about one thing that they're obsessed
with that has nothing to do with their job. The
only requirement is that they're totally geeking out on it
(00:21):
and they want to talk about it. From at home
perfume kits to custom made picture socks from build your
Own horse barn blueprints to vintage British driving gloves from
Destination bird watching two Japanese made cafes, tell me about
what you love, why you love it, how you got
into it, and what makes it awesome. Each episode is
(00:42):
presented in three chapters. In chapter one, my guest and
I will have a conversation about their passion. In chapter two,
we play a game I called trade It, where my
guests and I turn each other onto something cool we've
recently discovered. And in chapter three, I closed the show
by talking about music that I am currently geeked out
on and why I believe that curiosity is contagious and
(01:04):
that life is better with the soundtrack. So let the geakon.
Begin Chapter one. Today's guest is Rita Wilson. You might
know Rita from her role in Sleepless in Seattle or
on The Good Wife, or because she produced My Big
Fat Greek Wedding. But I know her because she is
(01:27):
a wonderful singer songwriter and one of my favorite people
to be around. We even co wrote the song that
you're listening to right now, which is called every Day.
This is from her two thousand sixteen self titled album,
and you should go and buy it immediately, seriously, push
pause right now and go to iTunes. All right, are
(01:53):
you back? Okay, enjoy our conversation. First off, introduce yourself.
I am Rita Wilson. I am an actor, a producer
and currently, within the last few years, singer songwriter. You
are partly thanks to you. And where are we? We
(02:15):
are backstage at the Geffen Playhouse because we just finished
doing the show Liner Notes that I UM produce and
participate in and its songwriters telling the stories behind their
hits and singing them. And you just played and I
just played it, and just at the end of a
four day run, yes of this and this is the
(02:37):
first of two weeks right um, And the Geffen Theater
is in the middle of U. C. L A. Yeah,
it's Um, it's the Geffen Playhouse, which is named after
David Geffen, the amazing music producer and now philanthropist. And
I've been I was born and raised in l A.
(02:59):
So this year actually is a part of my childhood.
I used to come here to see plays when I
was a kid. Yes, but I think it was originally
a Masonic lodge. So it's beautiful because it has that
courtyard in the front, and it has, you know, a
beautiful architectural vibe. It doesn't it's like old fashioned. Yeah,
it looks a little bit like a church on the outside.
(03:20):
It does, it does, but I think that was the
whole Masonic lodge thing to it. I think I love it. Yes.
So here on the podcast, the requirement is I'm interested
in hearing about something that you're um geeking out on
that it has nothing to do with your job. Okay,
(03:41):
So job is now off the table, not talking about that, um,
And what I'm interested in is kind of what you're into.
And I know what you're about to say because you've
already told me, but I just I want you to start, Okay.
So this happened a few years ago, maybe about ten
years ago, because I as a parent, and as a
wife and as you know, a woman, I guess I
(04:06):
am the person who does sort of like puts together
the family vacations and uh sort of keeps everybody busy
and gives them things to do during these vacations. And
sometimes you have to have things on downtime. So I
was packing up games or the kids would have projects
or something, and so we would all be really prepared
(04:29):
and we'd get to someplace we were going to for
vacation and I would look around and you know, my
husband would be, you know, writing something, and my kids
would be involved in some sort of project that they
had going or putting together some special sort of toy
or puzzles or whatever, and I would be like, I
(04:49):
forgot to bring something for myself. And then I realized
I didn't. I wasn't a puzzler. I didn't know how
to do anything crafty. I really didn't know what to do,
and it really stumped me. And so I thought, well,
what do I want to do? And I realized that
(05:10):
I had always loved watercolors. And I don't know why
I had loved water colors. I just think there's something
about the texture and the opacity of them, and how
kind of the water. I just love the water. Except
I had never painted water colors in my life. I
had never taken a drawing course, I had never done oils.
(05:33):
I knew nothing about art, and so I came back
from our vacation that year and I found an art
class in watercolors, and so I was like, Okay, I
am going to learn how to do this. And it
was crazy because I knew not one thing about it
(05:55):
and I don't know how to draw. So it started
out super base it, you know, like here are the paints,
and you know, here's the water, and here's how you
do a thing called a gradation of color, and here's
how you mix colors. And we learned about secondary colors
and tertiary colors and the color wheel, complementary colors and
(06:19):
all of this was the education educational background, and that
was basically year one. And then we started doing things
like painting blocks or square shapes or things that were
super simple and super basic. But as I started doing it,
I realized, like, wait a minute, if you do something consistently,
(06:45):
you will not get worse at it. And that was
encouraging to me because I was looking around at other
people everybody was a beginner, but some people had insanely
good inherent talent, and I was looking around, going, well,
that's not me. But what happened was I took the
class for five years and I actually learned stuff, and
(07:09):
a lot of the stuff that I learned was technique,
things like if you want to reserve some white on
a on a piece of paper, that there's this stuff
called masking fluid. And the masking fluid is basically like
something that you can put on the paper that when
(07:31):
you paint over it, it doesn't It keeps everything underneath
that fluid white, and at the end of the painting,
you rub that stuff off and then you have these
white spots. So like you could use that for highlighting,
right if you wanted to have a really big highlight,
because the thing with watercolor is you're trying to not
(07:53):
waste all of your white that's on your paper, because
once you paint over that white, you can't get it back.
I mean they're even try to get the white back,
but you don't use white paint necessarily to create white,
so thinks so you have to kind of think backwards exactly.
And um, so then we started branching off from boxes
(08:17):
and you know, kind of geometric shapes and things like
still life. So we would do flowers, we would do vases,
we would do um you know, whatever the teacher was
setting up. We would learn how to work with shadows.
But what happened was I loved it. I absolutely loved it.
(08:41):
And now I travel with a very specific set of
paints um I for anybody listening out there, I like
the Shrinky Yes Shrinky forty eight palette forty eight palette set,
which is a super um compact UH palette for with
(09:05):
forty eight colors in it. And I like arches cold
pressed paper forty pound because I like a rougher texture.
And I have these incredible brushes that are portable and
they're the number I travel with, the number two, four, six,
and eight, and sometimes a ten, just a separate ten.
(09:27):
But what I have found is that I can paint
on an airplane, I can paint at somebody's house. We
can paint on little tables. And I have girlfriends who
also paint now, so when we travel together we call
it sketch Club. And in the afternoon, after we've done
a hike or we've done something cool, we come back
(09:48):
and we like get out the paints and we do
sketch club. Now, one of the things I cannot do
is um portraits. I'm so bad at portrait. So I
took a portrait class. I was by far the worst
person in the portrait class. If you were being generous,
you would say, like, oh, Rita's portraits look like they
(10:13):
want to be Modigliani. I mean, the faces look so
strange in there. That's because I don't have a background
in drawing or figurative drawing or anything like that. So
it's a challenging no, nothing, nothing, nothing, but I am obsessed.
So like what I do now sometimes is I like
(10:34):
to paint if you're just sitting outside and doing a
landscape or something like that. But what I often do
if I know that I'm not going to be able
to be in a place for you know, three or
four consecutive days in a row, I'll photograph something and
I'll paint it while I'm at that place, and then
(10:55):
I take the photograph with me so I can continue
painting it after I'm done. Refer back to that, I
refer back to it. And also I do this thing
too where it's like if I see something and this
is actually just a good exercise if I see something
like last summer, I was painting this amazing, big kind
of rock island and I wanted it was such a
(11:16):
beautiful day and there was kind of a weird little mist,
and the sky was pink and orange and the sea
was very calm, and I wanted it to kind of
reflect the colors of the sky and this rock. And
I did maybe four or five of those in a
row until I got it right, because I became obsessed
(11:38):
with Nope, that sky is not right, Nope, that sea
doesn't look right, and uh, and that You just keep
doing it and doing it until you kind of get
to the point that you feel like, Okay, this is
kind of what I saw in my head that I
wanted it to be. This is awesome. This explained little
(12:00):
bit of your Instagram. Yes, yes, wondering. Yeah, so that's
what it is. I mean, it's hard to do. I
always think it's hard. I always feel like I'm starting
something and I go, I mean, you know, the the
hardest part is the drawing of it, the sketching of it,
(12:24):
the proportions, the perspective, um making sure that you know
it's balanced in the right way, And the fun part
for me is the actual painting and like mixing the
colors and getting the colors right or the texture right
or something, you know, like that the technique of it.
(12:46):
But the sketching can take That's that's the bulk of
the time, sketching it, I think. And then and then
I always get mad at myself because like, why am
I not looser? Why can't I just like do it
without like being so what's the word? Um? Trying too hard?
Like why can't I just be? And And sometimes I
(13:08):
just do that on purpose. I'm like, I have five
minutes to paint this, and I give a boundary. Yeah,
I give myself a boundary. I have five minutes to
paint this, and I just see what happens with it.
And then you know, and it sounds like junk. It
sounds like your version of golf. Yes, it's kind of
like you versus you. Yes, it is it is. Do
(13:30):
you have anything like that? What is your version of that?
I don't know. You know, I love board games. Do
you which ones? I'm a big board game fanatic. It
just depends on how do you like risk? Oh no, no, no, no, no, no,
it's like monopoly in our later section, I'm will start you. Okay,
that's what we'll do. We get to trade you. I'll
(13:50):
do that. Okay, good. But so let me ask you
a couple of so if someone was just trying to
start out in this, how do they start? Like, well,
if you had to recommend three things that they do,
they just anybody could do if they wanted to do this.
All right, Well, the first thing I would say is
(14:12):
try to find an art class near you somewhere, and
there's usually a lot of art classes. If there isn't
an art class near you, I would try to find
an art teacher that's near you. And if you can't
find an art teacher, there's always YouTube. I can go deep.
Oh yeah, but Russ, but you can go to YouTube
(14:33):
and you can just google watercolor tutorial, watercolor portrait and
they will do time lapse of like this is how
you do it? And so I have gone deep at
night into the watercolor tutorials definitely. But I think there's
always room and there's always somebody who's doing it near you,
(14:55):
so you can always find someone a good teacher. I mean,
there's there's people are so cree aative and actually, without
taking the watercolor class, I don't think I would have
done songwriting because it was so daunting to me that
I knew that if I stuck with it, and I
(15:17):
stayed with it, that I wouldn't get worse, and that
I would learn from the people that I was working with.
And that's what's good about being in a class, because
if you're in a class, you're you're seeing the person
next to you going, oh my god, that's great. How
did you learn how to do that? How did you
come up with that technique? You know, I want to
know how you got that. And somebody's coming up to
(15:37):
you saying, well, how did you do that? And so
you're constantly observing and um taking it in, you know,
so you're you're soaking it up as well. If this
keeps going, which it sounds like it's going to keep going, right,
I'm going to keep painting. Definitely. It's so soothing. I mean,
(15:59):
it's really calming to me. How if there's a point
where you think I think I'm I've I've come over
the edge, like is there a line that you've already found,
You're like, oh, you know, I blew off, Like I
missed picking up the so and so like like like
(16:20):
is there a line that you've found so far? And
if not, is there a line in the future past
which you won't go. I was on a plane trip.
It was in an international flight, and you don't need
a lot of room to paint, and you only need
a glass of water and you know, some paper towels
and I went deep. I was so tired. I should
have been completely sleeping on this flight, but I could
(16:44):
not stop painting. And I got to my destination completely exhausted,
but I couldn't I couldn't stop. I really could not stop.
I was like, I have to finish this. I have
to finish this, and I don't want to stop. And
I had my music on and I you know, my
little headphones, and yeah that I'm sure there would be
(17:06):
when you're working on something really um and you're really
liking it, you you don't want to stop. And but
I've learned, I guess over the course of just because
you're if you're a mom, you have to stop things
like okay, my kids need me. Um. I kind of
(17:27):
can pull myself away and then come back. But it's
it's really fun, this is awesome. Come on, I will
confess the only award that I ever won in middle
school was for watercolor. Come on, in seventh grade, I
painted a picture of the Only reason I remember this
(17:50):
is because my mom saved it. Um of like a
a beach shack and like a palm tree and whatever.
I had done the shading on the palm tree correct
and um, it was a pretty low bar that I
had to hit the sound grade. But that was my
only experience. When you still have it, did your mom? Yeah,
(18:10):
of course, Mom's frame think And now you look at
it and you're like, oh, no, dude, that's that's like
a coloring book. That's but um, I'm fascinated that this
is a form of expression for you that seems like
you didn't find till now. And then if I hear
you right, you feel like maybe you won't stop. I
(18:35):
don't think I'll stop. My mom was a really creative person,
and you know, when we were little, she sewed all
of our clothes. She made our bedspreads are curtains, and
you know, she was Greek. And I would go to
a store with her and I'd look at something, you know,
a piece of clothing or something like that, and she
(18:56):
would studiously look at it, and she'd kind of examine it,
and then she'd look at me and say, I can
make that for to you. You don't need to buy it.
And I'm like, as a kid, I just wanted store
bought stuff, you know, like please take me to J. C.
Pennies and buy me those jeans. And she's like, no,
you can't make jeans. Mom. She's like, I could make jeans.
(19:19):
And we would go down to the fabric store and
pick out fabric and get a Buttermilk or Simplicity or
Vogue pattern and she would make me my clothes. I mean,
crazy gorgeous things. I mean I look back on that
stuff now and I think she was amazing. But she
also could crochet, and she could crochet so beautifully, and
(19:41):
she has made me the most extraordinary bedspreads. And one
day we were in a Ralph Laurence store, and you
know how Ralph Lauren has a lot of vintage stuff
in it, and they had a vintage crochet bedspread, probably
from the twenties or something, all white, and I was
(20:02):
my mom was over there looking at the crochet bedspread,
and I was wandering the store and I came back
in about twenty minutes and my mom was sitting there
and she had her hand under her chin, and she
was just staring at the bedspread, staring at it. And
I said, Mom, what are you doing? And she said,
I'm counting the stitches because I'm going to do this
(20:25):
pattern when I get home. It was the most intricate pattern.
And she got home and she made she made it.
I don't know how she did it, and that is
what is on my bed. I mean, it's unbelievable. So there.
I think I always saw my mom being creative and
(20:46):
having something to do that was, you know, something she
did out of love really or her own creative endeavor.
But you know, I look around my house and there's
so many things that my mom made, so I know
I'm doing that now. I'm just painting a bunch. I'll
leave them around. The kids will like either want them
or not want them. You know, have you sold any no,
(21:08):
have you ever thought about selling them? Would you sell one?
I don't know. I guess if somebody wanted one, maybe
here's I got a suggestion. This is a silly one.
It's pretty Actually it's not a silly suggestion. I love
rock posters, which are these there's a whole culture of
people who are these designers and printers who print posters
(21:31):
just for one show. They do a design just for
one show and then they make it on a you know,
screen print or something and they make it. Um. That
might be kind of cool. You could make a series
of show posters. Wow, I like that idea. And then
you don't have to sell them, but you could use
them to Yeah. Well, like Joni Mitchell used to paint
(21:54):
a lot on her album covers and yeah, she used
to do a lot of paintings. She didn't she was
really good and amazing self portraits and all of that.
I did take one painting and I made um um
cards out of them, like Greenland cards. And then I
did this one painting that was um, I don't know
(22:17):
if you guys know what evil eyes are there? Those
like little symbols in sort of Mediterranean culture that are
supposed to be good luck. And so I did a
whole series of evil eyes and I printed fabric out
of that and made pajama pants up. It's like and
I know, and then I was thinking, well, maybe I
(22:39):
could do you know how you do lyric posters when
you go out on tour, and so I thought, well,
maybe I could paint my own lyric posters and then
handwrite the lyrics on there, like something like that. It
would be fun to do it, all right, Okay, Chapter two.
(23:00):
In every episode of Geeking Out, I see if I
can trade one thing I've discovered recently with one thing
that my guest has discovered. Anything is admissible in this
friendly exchange. I call trade it, all right. This section
of the podcast is called trade You. I'm going to
trade you something like one thing I'm kind of into
right now in exchange for one thing that you're into
(23:23):
right now. It could be anything. Could be like a
show you're watching on one of the services. It could
be like a record you're like, a book, could be
just like, for instance, the other day, I suggested, like,
I found this pillow that stays cold. What's that? You
know it's not that, But you have to listen to
the podcast, all right, So I'll start. Um. You had
(23:45):
mentioned this earlier when our conversation. Uh, I am into
board games, and this has happened in the past five
years maybe, and it started very um innocently. I think
as like an extent shouldn't like a trivial pursuit was
kind of too hard to some degree, and I came
(24:05):
across this one called bezer Wizard, which was this kind
of Swedish trivia game. It was it was Swedish design,
but it's in English and uh, and it became just
a funny thing to pull the cards out and just
talk to people in my house, and my kids were
smart enough to try to answer, and eventually, or pretty quickly,
(24:26):
I was like, well, do they have an extra pack?
I know all the answers already, So I got online
and I found the website I went through was a
website called board game Geek, but that was just where
it popped up first, right. I was like, where are
the extra bezer Wizard And it came up at this
and then it said, oh, this is an award section
(24:47):
of our highest award winning games for each year. And
I went back two or three years and I bought
one of the games. And all of these games are
things like your brain just doesn't quite get until you
see them. Okay, they've made apps out of some of
(25:07):
these things, like video like off your phone, but I
would start you on a game called Ticket to Ride.
So what it is good it's a it's a great title.
Love that song. UM. It's about trains and you you
draw destinations that you have, but you don't reveal which
(25:29):
destinations you have, UM. And then you have a certain
number of trains and each turn you can play a
certain number of trains or you know, depending on what
you have, and you have to have the certain cards
with the right colors to get the right track allocations.
And but nobody knows where the other guy's going. I
love this right, And what it is is that it's
(25:51):
a culture of um. Kind of this Eastern European game designers.
So they're they're from Poland, they're from uh, like the Netherlands.
They're also from like Norwegian. Some of them. These game
designers are Swedish and you they have this unbelievable um
(26:14):
conservancy of rules in order to create a game that
never repeats. And they've gotten better and better and better
and better at it. So I'll start you on ticket
to Ride and you just you just buy it, okay,
and and one night at your house you pull it out.
You can play it between two sounds like right up
(26:35):
my kid's alley and play between two people, or it
can get bigger you know, you'll expand out to a
certain number of people. But um, it's kind of like
the gateway drug to what the new board game world is. Okay, yeah,
because I still like board games, I don't want to necessarily.
I mean, I can only do a couple of online games,
like on my phone, but I don't really you know,
(26:58):
I get I get bored with them online. I'd like
to sit in a room and sit across froom somebody
and get very competitive. And you're going to love this. Okay, good,
And then when you're done with that, reach out to me.
I'll help you on step too. Okay, good, all right,
I will. So now I'm supposed to trade you something.
So now you turn me onto something that you think
I would like. Okay, I would like to trade you Antarctica,
(27:25):
the entire continent. Yes, but yes. Last year we went
to Antarctica with a bunch of friends and we went
on a boat called an ice breaker. And what that
is is a boat that actually can cruise through ice.
(27:50):
Because when you get way way way way down into Antarctica,
you are surrounded by ice. And one of the things
that we did was we slept in the ice because
you can't put an anchor down anywhere, so your boat
(28:11):
has to constantly be moving or you have to be, um,
what's the word jammed into the ice. So imagine that
you have a piece of ice and it's miles and
miles and miles and miles long, and it looks like snow,
(28:33):
but it's really ice, and maybe it's I don't know,
a foot thick, so maybe a foot or more in underwater.
And you're on this boat and you're like, all right, well,
we're gonna get ready to go to bed now. And
they take the boat and they just jam it into
the ice. They yeah, kind of, and then what happens
(28:57):
is the ice around it us sort of hugs the
boat and keeps it in place. So one night we
were sleeping and about one or two in the morning,
and of course down there it doesn't get dark, so
you have maybe two or three hours of nighttime and
that's it. It's like the rest of the time. But
(29:17):
we're sleeping and all of a sudden we hear this horrible,
horrific crashing noise and I was like, oh my god,
we have hit an iceberg. But no, it was just
the boat repositioning itself into the ice. So that we
wouldn't float away. But one of the things that you
I thought, like going into Antarctica and like, you know, what,
(29:40):
what are we going to do on this boat for
two weeks. We're gonna go crazy. You know it's gonna
be freezing cold. What are we gonna do? Honestly, the
time went by so quickly. We didn't have enough free
time because there was constantly whale watching, going out on
dinghy is, following whales, kayaking, following whales, hiking and looking
(30:05):
at penguin colonies, or just hiking and and looking at
icebergs and um watching icebergs calve, which means the part
of the iceberg falls off into the water. We saw
one iceberg that's so huge it's called B fIF K
(30:27):
that it is tracked by NASA. It's seventeen miles long,
four miles wide, and four or five feet tall. It's
like it's like Manhattan floating around down there. So I
would say Antarctica way more interesting than I ever thought
(30:47):
it was going to be. And I got to paint
down there, and we did sketch club, Oh my god,
we did. And you had to reserve all the white, yes, exactly.
That was hard to do when you're painting snow. Snow
is hard to do that a lot of white. Okay,
I only have one question about him. Okay, did you
like panic pack? No. We had a very specific packing list,
(31:13):
and I was very proud of my packing because you're
basically wearing things like ski clothes all day long and
then at night you're in sweats. It was like super easy. Yeah, okay,
that would be my only anxiety. Yeah, like very easy.
I would overpack just out of anxiety. Like no, I'm
gonna phrase no, no, no, Okay, that's awesome. We need
(31:35):
to thank you for being here. Thank you. Podcast loves You,
good Bye. Chapter three me geeking out on music, the
set list, the mix tape, the sequence, Why it matters
(31:58):
where your favorite song lives, Between the shrinking aisles that
used to carry music in your favorite store to the
streaming apps that flood your phone. I can see how
some people might think that albums are dead and the
music is in trouble. I, however, would like to propose
that music is alive and healthy, but that for now
(32:19):
we are in the age of the playlist. If you
squint your eyes the right way, a playlist is actually
a mixtape, and if you have a mix tape of
your favorite band, it's actually what you hope the perfect
set list would be if you ever got to see
them live. And if you trust your favorite band, really
(32:39):
trust them, then the list of their new music is
the running order of their current album. In each case,
I believe that one song supports the one after it.
It could be story or rhythm or key or even
shock that connects one song to the next. But there's
no class that you can take as an artist. To
(32:59):
get this right. You kind of have to go the
long way. The schooling probably looks like this. You make
mix tapes for every girlfriend through middle school or high school,
and then one day you join a band, and then
you keep changing the set list through hundreds or even
thousands of shows, and eventually the PhD level of this
skill happens when you make records. You pick the best
(33:22):
songs you can and you try to put them in
the best order. Today, I'm gonna tell you what I
know about song order from a mix tape to a
set list to an album, and show you how it
applies to the new Sugarland album and the tour we're
going on this summer. The mix tape. These I would
make in middle school in high school to try to
(33:44):
tell girlfriends how I was feeling about him. I happen
to really say how I was feeling out loud, you know.
I try to pick one funny song, when sexy song,
maybe a serious song, but definitely one as a test
to see if she even liked good music. And in
my mind it was a way to see if we
were compared hatible. I always seem to have an excess
song for the sexy, or yaz song for the cool,
(34:05):
or maybe even a Charlie Sexton song to see if
she liked him or not. But the first song in
the last ones were the big ones. I would start
a lot of times with this in excess song. I
was standing, what's never? And then I would close with
(34:38):
this you Tube song, And after a couple of days
I would ask her what her favorite song was, like
the answer was going to indicate whether we were compatible
or gonna make it. Mix tapes are the first real
exposure to picking songs and putting them in an order
(34:59):
that flows. Nowadays, you can do this by yourself on
Spotify or Apple Music instead of two cassette tapes, and
then you can share them with friends. I mean, I'm
not saying, but I'm saying, right now, there's somebody you like,
maybe you should make him a playlist. The next level
of the music list video game happens when you're in
a band and picking the set list. You could come
(35:22):
out of the gate with energy or ease the audience
into the night. Play your hits early, save them for
the end. The choice is yours. How you want the
roller coaster to feel to the audience when they write it.
In Sugarland, Jennifer and I like to divide the set
into three acts, the first being the welcome, the second
being the wandering, and the third being the run to
the finish. This summer, we're starting with the same first
(35:44):
song that is the first song on our new album.
The album and the song are both called Bigger, and
the song sounds like this. Well, the fun part is
that I stripped out some of the sounds and decided
to make it sound even bigger as an intro like this,
(36:16):
and I'm excited just hearing that. I love the top
of shows. You know. Next, we walk you through some
of the songs you know by us Stuck like glue.
All I want to do. I even try to move
us from more progressive instruments and sounds into more acoustic
and routs instruments within three or four songs. By the
time we're in already gone. We are the band that
you remember. This is exactly when we start messing with you.
(36:40):
Act two should contain the tension of any play. It's
where things go wrong, where the hero gets lost, and
in rock and roll terms, I would say it's where
you start asking what happened to your favorite band? What
are they doing? What is this song? This is where
you truly contemplate a bathroom break or another drink. This
is where songs like Incredible Machine, Though as the middle
(37:03):
part of the set starts to heighten, it will be
capped off with the production moment, usually something that transforms
us on stage as well as our audience. This year
it's a song called Burden of Cage. Sounds like this.
(37:26):
Quickly after we roll into Act three and begin to
climb into joy waves and waves. Song after song, you
try to move the energy up until you get to
the last song. If we plan an encore, it will
usually be two songs long, one for message and then
one for a goodbye, thank you it feels like maybe
(37:48):
an epilogue. I know it sounds corny that we put
this much care into it, but it feels like the
responsible thing to do. These fans are the lifeblood of
our work. This brings us to albums equence. This is
like the graduate level. When you listen to a sugar
Land record, you should listen for three things. Now, this
(38:08):
is just personal to me. One, how the first three
songs feel. Then for the album break which is where
you would turn the vinyl over. So that's the last
song on side one, and the first song on side
two that matters. Then for the last song on the album,
these spots are where all of the magic happens. To me,
I believe that the first three songs have to be unstoppable,
(38:31):
and without that buy in, a new listener is just
kind of gonna move on. Then, the last song on
side one says I Dare you to turn it over,
and on this album it's a song called leaning on Back.
(38:57):
The first song on side two is Babe, our song
that features Taylor Swift, and the album ends with a
song called Not the Only, which is coincidentally our first encore.
So you see how this works. So now you know
when our album comes out, go listen for the flow
(39:19):
of it, see how it makes you feel. And the
next time you put on your favorite record or go
see your favorite band, notice how much time they took
to build the album or the show. And if you
get the time, make a mixtape or make a playlist
for someone you love, put it in the right order.
(39:41):
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Geeking Out and
we are all hard at work here on the next one.
Are you obsessed with something amazing? I want to tell
us about it? Right to us at geeking Out with
KB at gmail dot com and you might be a
guest on an upcoming episode. Come find out more about
me and this pie podcast at Christian Bush dot com,
(40:02):
Christian with a K, follow me at Christian Bush on Twitter,
Christian Bush on Instagram, Christian Bush on Facebook, and Christian M.
Bush on Snapchat. Thanks to Bobby Bones for the opportunity
to build this podcast, Brandon Bush for the editing and
the soundtrack, Tom Tapley for the audio wizardry, and Whitney
Pastoring for being a great producer and making this whole
(40:23):
thing possible. This is Christian Bush gigging out. Thank you
for listening,
Hello, This is Christian Bush and welcome to episode nine
of my podcast Geeking Out. Every episode, I invite a
new person to talk about one thing that they're obsessed
with that has nothing to do with their job. The
only requirement is that they're totally geeking out on it
(00:21):
and they want to talk about it. From at home
perfume kits to custom made picture socks from build your
Own horse barn blueprints to vintage British driving gloves from
Destination bird watching two Japanese made cafes, tell me about
what you love, why you love it, how you got
into it, and what makes it awesome. Each episode is
(00:42):
presented in three chapters. In chapter one, my guest and
I will have a conversation about their passion. In chapter two,
we play a game I called trade It, where my
guests and I turn each other onto something cool we've
recently discovered. And in chapter three, I closed the show
by talking about music that I am currently geeked out
on and why I believe that curiosity is contagious and
(01:04):
that life is better with the soundtrack. So let the geakon.
Begin Chapter one. Today's guest is Rita Wilson. You might
know Rita from her role in Sleepless in Seattle or
on The Good Wife, or because she produced My Big
Fat Greek Wedding. But I know her because she is
(01:27):
a wonderful singer songwriter and one of my favorite people
to be around. We even co wrote the song that
you're listening to right now, which is called every Day.
This is from her two thousand sixteen self titled album,
and you should go and buy it immediately, seriously, push
pause right now and go to iTunes. All right, are
(01:53):
you back? Okay, enjoy our conversation. First off, introduce yourself.
I am Rita Wilson. I am an actor, a producer
and currently, within the last few years, singer songwriter. You
are partly thanks to you. And where are we? We
(02:15):
are backstage at the Geffen Playhouse because we just finished
doing the show Liner Notes that I UM produce and
participate in and its songwriters telling the stories behind their
hits and singing them. And you just played and I
just played it, and just at the end of a
four day run, yes of this and this is the
(02:37):
first of two weeks right um, And the Geffen Theater
is in the middle of U. C. L A. Yeah,
it's Um, it's the Geffen Playhouse, which is named after
David Geffen, the amazing music producer and now philanthropist. And
I've been I was born and raised in l A.
(02:59):
So this year actually is a part of my childhood.
I used to come here to see plays when I
was a kid. Yes, but I think it was originally
a Masonic lodge. So it's beautiful because it has that
courtyard in the front, and it has, you know, a
beautiful architectural vibe. It doesn't it's like old fashioned. Yeah,
it looks a little bit like a church on the outside.
(03:20):
It does, it does, but I think that was the
whole Masonic lodge thing to it. I think I love it. Yes.
So here on the podcast, the requirement is I'm interested
in hearing about something that you're um geeking out on
that it has nothing to do with your job. Okay,
(03:41):
So job is now off the table, not talking about that, um,
And what I'm interested in is kind of what you're into.
And I know what you're about to say because you've
already told me, but I just I want you to start, Okay.
So this happened a few years ago, maybe about ten
years ago, because I as a parent, and as a
wife and as you know, a woman, I guess I
(04:06):
am the person who does sort of like puts together
the family vacations and uh sort of keeps everybody busy
and gives them things to do during these vacations. And
sometimes you have to have things on downtime. So I
was packing up games or the kids would have projects
or something, and so we would all be really prepared
(04:29):
and we'd get to someplace we were going to for
vacation and I would look around and you know, my
husband would be, you know, writing something, and my kids
would be involved in some sort of project that they
had going or putting together some special sort of toy
or puzzles or whatever, and I would be like, I
(04:49):
forgot to bring something for myself. And then I realized
I didn't. I wasn't a puzzler. I didn't know how
to do anything crafty. I really didn't know what to do,
and it really stumped me. And so I thought, well,
what do I want to do? And I realized that
(05:10):
I had always loved watercolors. And I don't know why
I had loved water colors. I just think there's something
about the texture and the opacity of them, and how
kind of the water. I just love the water. Except
I had never painted water colors in my life. I
had never taken a drawing course, I had never done oils.
(05:33):
I knew nothing about art, and so I came back
from our vacation that year and I found an art
class in watercolors, and so I was like, Okay, I
am going to learn how to do this. And it
was crazy because I knew not one thing about it
(05:55):
and I don't know how to draw. So it started
out super base it, you know, like here are the paints,
and you know, here's the water, and here's how you
do a thing called a gradation of color, and here's
how you mix colors. And we learned about secondary colors
and tertiary colors and the color wheel, complementary colors and
(06:19):
all of this was the education educational background, and that
was basically year one. And then we started doing things
like painting blocks or square shapes or things that were
super simple and super basic. But as I started doing it,
I realized, like, wait a minute, if you do something consistently,
(06:45):
you will not get worse at it. And that was
encouraging to me because I was looking around at other
people everybody was a beginner, but some people had insanely
good inherent talent, and I was looking around, going, well,
that's not me. But what happened was I took the
class for five years and I actually learned stuff, and
(07:09):
a lot of the stuff that I learned was technique,
things like if you want to reserve some white on
a on a piece of paper, that there's this stuff
called masking fluid. And the masking fluid is basically like
something that you can put on the paper that when
(07:31):
you paint over it, it doesn't It keeps everything underneath
that fluid white, and at the end of the painting,
you rub that stuff off and then you have these
white spots. So like you could use that for highlighting,
right if you wanted to have a really big highlight,
because the thing with watercolor is you're trying to not
(07:53):
waste all of your white that's on your paper, because
once you paint over that white, you can't get it back.
I mean they're even try to get the white back,
but you don't use white paint necessarily to create white,
so thinks so you have to kind of think backwards exactly.
And um, so then we started branching off from boxes
(08:17):
and you know, kind of geometric shapes and things like
still life. So we would do flowers, we would do vases,
we would do um you know, whatever the teacher was
setting up. We would learn how to work with shadows.
But what happened was I loved it. I absolutely loved it.
(08:41):
And now I travel with a very specific set of
paints um I for anybody listening out there, I like
the Shrinky Yes Shrinky forty eight palette forty eight palette set,
which is a super um compact UH palette for with
(09:05):
forty eight colors in it. And I like arches cold
pressed paper forty pound because I like a rougher texture.
And I have these incredible brushes that are portable and
they're the number I travel with, the number two, four, six,
and eight, and sometimes a ten, just a separate ten.
(09:27):
But what I have found is that I can paint
on an airplane, I can paint at somebody's house. We
can paint on little tables. And I have girlfriends who
also paint now, so when we travel together we call
it sketch Club. And in the afternoon, after we've done
a hike or we've done something cool, we come back
(09:48):
and we like get out the paints and we do
sketch club. Now, one of the things I cannot do
is um portraits. I'm so bad at portrait. So I
took a portrait class. I was by far the worst
person in the portrait class. If you were being generous,
you would say, like, oh, Rita's portraits look like they
(10:13):
want to be Modigliani. I mean, the faces look so
strange in there. That's because I don't have a background
in drawing or figurative drawing or anything like that. So
it's a challenging no, nothing, nothing, nothing, but I am obsessed.
So like what I do now sometimes is I like
(10:34):
to paint if you're just sitting outside and doing a
landscape or something like that. But what I often do
if I know that I'm not going to be able
to be in a place for you know, three or
four consecutive days in a row, I'll photograph something and
I'll paint it while I'm at that place, and then
(10:55):
I take the photograph with me so I can continue
painting it after I'm done. Refer back to that, I
refer back to it. And also I do this thing
too where it's like if I see something and this
is actually just a good exercise if I see something
like last summer, I was painting this amazing, big kind
of rock island and I wanted it was such a
(11:16):
beautiful day and there was kind of a weird little mist,
and the sky was pink and orange and the sea
was very calm, and I wanted it to kind of
reflect the colors of the sky and this rock. And
I did maybe four or five of those in a
row until I got it right, because I became obsessed
(11:38):
with Nope, that sky is not right, Nope, that sea
doesn't look right, and uh, and that You just keep
doing it and doing it until you kind of get
to the point that you feel like, Okay, this is
kind of what I saw in my head that I
wanted it to be. This is awesome. This explained little
(12:00):
bit of your Instagram. Yes, yes, wondering. Yeah, so that's
what it is. I mean, it's hard to do. I
always think it's hard. I always feel like I'm starting
something and I go, I mean, you know, the the
hardest part is the drawing of it, the sketching of it,
(12:24):
the proportions, the perspective, um making sure that you know
it's balanced in the right way, And the fun part
for me is the actual painting and like mixing the
colors and getting the colors right or the texture right
or something, you know, like that the technique of it.
(12:46):
But the sketching can take That's that's the bulk of
the time, sketching it, I think. And then and then
I always get mad at myself because like, why am
I not looser? Why can't I just like do it
without like being so what's the word? Um? Trying too hard?
Like why can't I just be? And And sometimes I
(13:08):
just do that on purpose. I'm like, I have five
minutes to paint this, and I give a boundary. Yeah,
I give myself a boundary. I have five minutes to
paint this, and I just see what happens with it.
And then you know, and it sounds like junk. It
sounds like your version of golf. Yes, it's kind of
like you versus you. Yes, it is it is. Do
(13:30):
you have anything like that? What is your version of that?
I don't know. You know, I love board games. Do
you which ones? I'm a big board game fanatic. It
just depends on how do you like risk? Oh no, no, no, no, no, no,
it's like monopoly in our later section, I'm will start you. Okay,
that's what we'll do. We get to trade you. I'll
(13:50):
do that. Okay, good. But so let me ask you
a couple of so if someone was just trying to
start out in this, how do they start? Like, well,
if you had to recommend three things that they do,
they just anybody could do if they wanted to do this.
All right, Well, the first thing I would say is
(14:12):
try to find an art class near you somewhere, and
there's usually a lot of art classes. If there isn't
an art class near you, I would try to find
an art teacher that's near you. And if you can't
find an art teacher, there's always YouTube. I can go deep.
Oh yeah, but Russ, but you can go to YouTube
(14:33):
and you can just google watercolor tutorial, watercolor portrait and
they will do time lapse of like this is how
you do it? And so I have gone deep at
night into the watercolor tutorials definitely. But I think there's
always room and there's always somebody who's doing it near you,
(14:55):
so you can always find someone a good teacher. I mean,
there's there's people are so cree aative and actually, without
taking the watercolor class, I don't think I would have
done songwriting because it was so daunting to me that
I knew that if I stuck with it, and I
(15:17):
stayed with it, that I wouldn't get worse, and that
I would learn from the people that I was working with.
And that's what's good about being in a class, because
if you're in a class, you're you're seeing the person
next to you going, oh my god, that's great. How
did you learn how to do that? How did you
come up with that technique? You know, I want to
know how you got that. And somebody's coming up to
(15:37):
you saying, well, how did you do that? And so
you're constantly observing and um taking it in, you know,
so you're you're soaking it up as well. If this
keeps going, which it sounds like it's going to keep going, right,
I'm going to keep painting. Definitely. It's so soothing. I mean,
(15:59):
it's really calming to me. How if there's a point
where you think I think I'm I've I've come over
the edge, like is there a line that you've already found,
You're like, oh, you know, I blew off, Like I
missed picking up the so and so like like like
(16:20):
is there a line that you've found so far? And
if not, is there a line in the future past
which you won't go. I was on a plane trip.
It was in an international flight, and you don't need
a lot of room to paint, and you only need
a glass of water and you know, some paper towels
and I went deep. I was so tired. I should
have been completely sleeping on this flight, but I could
(16:44):
not stop painting. And I got to my destination completely exhausted,
but I couldn't I couldn't stop. I really could not stop.
I was like, I have to finish this. I have
to finish this, and I don't want to stop. And
I had my music on and I you know, my
little headphones, and yeah that I'm sure there would be
(17:06):
when you're working on something really um and you're really
liking it, you you don't want to stop. And but
I've learned, I guess over the course of just because
you're if you're a mom, you have to stop things
like okay, my kids need me. Um. I kind of
(17:27):
can pull myself away and then come back. But it's
it's really fun, this is awesome. Come on, I will
confess the only award that I ever won in middle
school was for watercolor. Come on, in seventh grade, I
painted a picture of the Only reason I remember this
(17:50):
is because my mom saved it. Um of like a
a beach shack and like a palm tree and whatever.
I had done the shading on the palm tree correct
and um, it was a pretty low bar that I
had to hit the sound grade. But that was my
only experience. When you still have it, did your mom? Yeah,
(18:10):
of course, Mom's frame think And now you look at
it and you're like, oh, no, dude, that's that's like
a coloring book. That's but um, I'm fascinated that this
is a form of expression for you that seems like
you didn't find till now. And then if I hear
you right, you feel like maybe you won't stop. I
(18:35):
don't think I'll stop. My mom was a really creative person,
and you know, when we were little, she sewed all
of our clothes. She made our bedspreads are curtains, and
you know, she was Greek. And I would go to
a store with her and I'd look at something, you know,
a piece of clothing or something like that, and she
(18:56):
would studiously look at it, and she'd kind of examine it,
and then she'd look at me and say, I can
make that for to you. You don't need to buy it.
And I'm like, as a kid, I just wanted store
bought stuff, you know, like please take me to J. C.
Pennies and buy me those jeans. And she's like, no,
you can't make jeans. Mom. She's like, I could make jeans.
(19:19):
And we would go down to the fabric store and
pick out fabric and get a Buttermilk or Simplicity or
Vogue pattern and she would make me my clothes. I mean,
crazy gorgeous things. I mean I look back on that
stuff now and I think she was amazing. But she
also could crochet, and she could crochet so beautifully, and
(19:41):
she has made me the most extraordinary bedspreads. And one
day we were in a Ralph Laurence store, and you
know how Ralph Lauren has a lot of vintage stuff
in it, and they had a vintage crochet bedspread, probably
from the twenties or something, all white, and I was
(20:02):
my mom was over there looking at the crochet bedspread,
and I was wandering the store and I came back
in about twenty minutes and my mom was sitting there
and she had her hand under her chin, and she
was just staring at the bedspread, staring at it. And
I said, Mom, what are you doing? And she said,
I'm counting the stitches because I'm going to do this
(20:25):
pattern when I get home. It was the most intricate pattern.
And she got home and she made she made it.
I don't know how she did it, and that is
what is on my bed. I mean, it's unbelievable. So there.
I think I always saw my mom being creative and
(20:46):
having something to do that was, you know, something she
did out of love really or her own creative endeavor.
But you know, I look around my house and there's
so many things that my mom made, so I know
I'm doing that now. I'm just painting a bunch. I'll
leave them around. The kids will like either want them
or not want them. You know, have you sold any no,
(21:08):
have you ever thought about selling them? Would you sell one?
I don't know. I guess if somebody wanted one, maybe
here's I got a suggestion. This is a silly one.
It's pretty Actually it's not a silly suggestion. I love
rock posters, which are these there's a whole culture of
people who are these designers and printers who print posters
(21:31):
just for one show. They do a design just for
one show and then they make it on a you know,
screen print or something and they make it. Um. That
might be kind of cool. You could make a series
of show posters. Wow, I like that idea. And then
you don't have to sell them, but you could use
them to Yeah. Well, like Joni Mitchell used to paint
(21:54):
a lot on her album covers and yeah, she used
to do a lot of paintings. She didn't she was
really good and amazing self portraits and all of that.
I did take one painting and I made um um
cards out of them, like Greenland cards. And then I
did this one painting that was um, I don't know
(22:17):
if you guys know what evil eyes are there? Those
like little symbols in sort of Mediterranean culture that are
supposed to be good luck. And so I did a
whole series of evil eyes and I printed fabric out
of that and made pajama pants up. It's like and
I know, and then I was thinking, well, maybe I
(22:39):
could do you know how you do lyric posters when
you go out on tour, and so I thought, well,
maybe I could paint my own lyric posters and then
handwrite the lyrics on there, like something like that. It
would be fun to do it, all right, Okay, Chapter two.
(23:00):
In every episode of Geeking Out, I see if I
can trade one thing I've discovered recently with one thing
that my guest has discovered. Anything is admissible in this
friendly exchange. I call trade it, all right. This section
of the podcast is called trade You. I'm going to
trade you something like one thing I'm kind of into
right now in exchange for one thing that you're into
(23:23):
right now. It could be anything. Could be like a
show you're watching on one of the services. It could
be like a record you're like, a book, could be
just like, for instance, the other day, I suggested, like,
I found this pillow that stays cold. What's that? You
know it's not that, But you have to listen to
the podcast, all right, So I'll start. Um. You had
(23:45):
mentioned this earlier when our conversation. Uh, I am into
board games, and this has happened in the past five
years maybe, and it started very um innocently. I think
as like an extent shouldn't like a trivial pursuit was
kind of too hard to some degree, and I came
(24:05):
across this one called bezer Wizard, which was this kind
of Swedish trivia game. It was it was Swedish design,
but it's in English and uh, and it became just
a funny thing to pull the cards out and just
talk to people in my house, and my kids were
smart enough to try to answer, and eventually, or pretty quickly,
(24:26):
I was like, well, do they have an extra pack?
I know all the answers already, So I got online
and I found the website I went through was a
website called board game Geek, but that was just where
it popped up first, right. I was like, where are
the extra bezer Wizard And it came up at this
and then it said, oh, this is an award section
(24:47):
of our highest award winning games for each year. And
I went back two or three years and I bought
one of the games. And all of these games are
things like your brain just doesn't quite get until you
see them. Okay, they've made apps out of some of
(25:07):
these things, like video like off your phone, but I
would start you on a game called Ticket to Ride.
So what it is good it's a it's a great title.
Love that song. UM. It's about trains and you you
draw destinations that you have, but you don't reveal which
(25:29):
destinations you have, UM. And then you have a certain
number of trains and each turn you can play a
certain number of trains or you know, depending on what
you have, and you have to have the certain cards
with the right colors to get the right track allocations.
And but nobody knows where the other guy's going. I
love this right, And what it is is that it's
(25:51):
a culture of um. Kind of this Eastern European game designers.
So they're they're from Poland, they're from uh, like the Netherlands.
They're also from like Norwegian. Some of them. These game
designers are Swedish and you they have this unbelievable um
(26:14):
conservancy of rules in order to create a game that
never repeats. And they've gotten better and better and better
and better at it. So I'll start you on ticket
to Ride and you just you just buy it, okay,
and and one night at your house you pull it out.
You can play it between two sounds like right up
(26:35):
my kid's alley and play between two people, or it
can get bigger you know, you'll expand out to a
certain number of people. But um, it's kind of like
the gateway drug to what the new board game world is. Okay, yeah,
because I still like board games, I don't want to necessarily.
I mean, I can only do a couple of online games,
like on my phone, but I don't really you know,
(26:58):
I get I get bored with them online. I'd like
to sit in a room and sit across froom somebody
and get very competitive. And you're going to love this. Okay, good,
And then when you're done with that, reach out to me.
I'll help you on step too. Okay, good, all right,
I will. So now I'm supposed to trade you something.
So now you turn me onto something that you think
I would like. Okay, I would like to trade you Antarctica,
(27:25):
the entire continent. Yes, but yes. Last year we went
to Antarctica with a bunch of friends and we went
on a boat called an ice breaker. And what that
is is a boat that actually can cruise through ice.
(27:50):
Because when you get way way way way down into Antarctica,
you are surrounded by ice. And one of the things
that we did was we slept in the ice because
you can't put an anchor down anywhere, so your boat
(28:11):
has to constantly be moving or you have to be, um,
what's the word jammed into the ice. So imagine that
you have a piece of ice and it's miles and
miles and miles and miles long, and it looks like snow,
(28:33):
but it's really ice, and maybe it's I don't know,
a foot thick, so maybe a foot or more in underwater.
And you're on this boat and you're like, all right, well,
we're gonna get ready to go to bed now. And
they take the boat and they just jam it into
the ice. They yeah, kind of, and then what happens
(28:57):
is the ice around it us sort of hugs the
boat and keeps it in place. So one night we
were sleeping and about one or two in the morning,
and of course down there it doesn't get dark, so
you have maybe two or three hours of nighttime and
that's it. It's like the rest of the time. But
(29:17):
we're sleeping and all of a sudden we hear this horrible,
horrific crashing noise and I was like, oh my god,
we have hit an iceberg. But no, it was just
the boat repositioning itself into the ice. So that we
wouldn't float away. But one of the things that you
I thought, like going into Antarctica and like, you know, what,
(29:40):
what are we going to do on this boat for
two weeks. We're gonna go crazy. You know it's gonna
be freezing cold. What are we gonna do? Honestly, the
time went by so quickly. We didn't have enough free
time because there was constantly whale watching, going out on
dinghy is, following whales, kayaking, following whales, hiking and looking
(30:05):
at penguin colonies, or just hiking and and looking at
icebergs and um watching icebergs calve, which means the part
of the iceberg falls off into the water. We saw
one iceberg that's so huge it's called B fIF K
(30:27):
that it is tracked by NASA. It's seventeen miles long,
four miles wide, and four or five feet tall. It's
like it's like Manhattan floating around down there. So I
would say Antarctica way more interesting than I ever thought
(30:47):
it was going to be. And I got to paint
down there, and we did sketch club, Oh my god,
we did. And you had to reserve all the white, yes, exactly.
That was hard to do when you're painting snow. Snow
is hard to do that a lot of white. Okay,
I only have one question about him. Okay, did you
like panic pack? No. We had a very specific packing list,
(31:13):
and I was very proud of my packing because you're
basically wearing things like ski clothes all day long and
then at night you're in sweats. It was like super easy. Yeah, okay,
that would be my only anxiety. Yeah, like very easy.
I would overpack just out of anxiety. Like no, I'm
gonna phrase no, no, no, Okay, that's awesome. We need
(31:35):
to thank you for being here. Thank you. Podcast loves You,
good Bye. Chapter three me geeking out on music, the
set list, the mix tape, the sequence, Why it matters
(31:58):
where your favorite song lives, Between the shrinking aisles that
used to carry music in your favorite store to the
streaming apps that flood your phone. I can see how
some people might think that albums are dead and the
music is in trouble. I, however, would like to propose
that music is alive and healthy, but that for now
(32:19):
we are in the age of the playlist. If you
squint your eyes the right way, a playlist is actually
a mixtape, and if you have a mix tape of
your favorite band, it's actually what you hope the perfect
set list would be if you ever got to see
them live. And if you trust your favorite band, really
(32:39):
trust them, then the list of their new music is
the running order of their current album. In each case,
I believe that one song supports the one after it.
It could be story or rhythm or key or even
shock that connects one song to the next. But there's
no class that you can take as an artist. To
(32:59):
get this right. You kind of have to go the
long way. The schooling probably looks like this. You make
mix tapes for every girlfriend through middle school or high school,
and then one day you join a band, and then
you keep changing the set list through hundreds or even
thousands of shows, and eventually the PhD level of this
skill happens when you make records. You pick the best
(33:22):
songs you can and you try to put them in
the best order. Today, I'm gonna tell you what I
know about song order from a mix tape to a
set list to an album, and show you how it
applies to the new Sugarland album and the tour we're
going on this summer. The mix tape. These I would
make in middle school in high school to try to
(33:44):
tell girlfriends how I was feeling about him. I happen
to really say how I was feeling out loud, you know.
I try to pick one funny song, when sexy song,
maybe a serious song, but definitely one as a test
to see if she even liked good music. And in
my mind it was a way to see if we
were compared hatible. I always seem to have an excess
song for the sexy, or yaz song for the cool,
(34:05):
or maybe even a Charlie Sexton song to see if
she liked him or not. But the first song in
the last ones were the big ones. I would start
a lot of times with this in excess song. I
was standing, what's never? And then I would close with
(34:38):
this you Tube song, And after a couple of days
I would ask her what her favorite song was, like
the answer was going to indicate whether we were compatible
or gonna make it. Mix tapes are the first real
exposure to picking songs and putting them in an order
(34:59):
that flows. Nowadays, you can do this by yourself on
Spotify or Apple Music instead of two cassette tapes, and
then you can share them with friends. I mean, I'm
not saying, but I'm saying, right now, there's somebody you like,
maybe you should make him a playlist. The next level
of the music list video game happens when you're in
a band and picking the set list. You could come
(35:22):
out of the gate with energy or ease the audience
into the night. Play your hits early, save them for
the end. The choice is yours. How you want the
roller coaster to feel to the audience when they write it.
In Sugarland, Jennifer and I like to divide the set
into three acts, the first being the welcome, the second
being the wandering, and the third being the run to
the finish. This summer, we're starting with the same first
(35:44):
song that is the first song on our new album.
The album and the song are both called Bigger, and
the song sounds like this. Well, the fun part is
that I stripped out some of the sounds and decided
to make it sound even bigger as an intro like this,
(36:16):
and I'm excited just hearing that. I love the top
of shows. You know. Next, we walk you through some
of the songs you know by us Stuck like glue.
All I want to do. I even try to move
us from more progressive instruments and sounds into more acoustic
and routs instruments within three or four songs. By the
time we're in already gone. We are the band that
you remember. This is exactly when we start messing with you.
(36:40):
Act two should contain the tension of any play. It's
where things go wrong, where the hero gets lost, and
in rock and roll terms, I would say it's where
you start asking what happened to your favorite band? What
are they doing? What is this song? This is where
you truly contemplate a bathroom break or another drink. This
is where songs like Incredible Machine, Though as the middle
(37:03):
part of the set starts to heighten, it will be
capped off with the production moment, usually something that transforms
us on stage as well as our audience. This year
it's a song called Burden of Cage. Sounds like this.
(37:26):
Quickly after we roll into Act three and begin to
climb into joy waves and waves. Song after song, you
try to move the energy up until you get to
the last song. If we plan an encore, it will
usually be two songs long, one for message and then
one for a goodbye, thank you it feels like maybe
(37:48):
an epilogue. I know it sounds corny that we put
this much care into it, but it feels like the
responsible thing to do. These fans are the lifeblood of
our work. This brings us to albums equence. This is
like the graduate level. When you listen to a sugar
Land record, you should listen for three things. Now, this
(38:08):
is just personal to me. One, how the first three
songs feel. Then for the album break which is where
you would turn the vinyl over. So that's the last
song on side one, and the first song on side
two that matters. Then for the last song on the album,
these spots are where all of the magic happens. To me,
I believe that the first three songs have to be unstoppable,
(38:31):
and without that buy in, a new listener is just
kind of gonna move on. Then, the last song on
side one says I Dare you to turn it over,
and on this album it's a song called leaning on Back.
(38:57):
The first song on side two is Babe, our song
that features Taylor Swift, and the album ends with a
song called Not the Only, which is coincidentally our first encore.
So you see how this works. So now you know
when our album comes out, go listen for the flow
(39:19):
of it, see how it makes you feel. And the
next time you put on your favorite record or go
see your favorite band, notice how much time they took
to build the album or the show. And if you
get the time, make a mixtape or make a playlist
for someone you love, put it in the right order.
(39:41):
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Geeking Out and
we are all hard at work here on the next one.
Are you obsessed with something amazing? I want to tell
us about it? Right to us at geeking Out with
KB at gmail dot com and you might be a
guest on an upcoming episode. Come find out more about
me and this pie podcast at Christian Bush dot com,
(40:02):
Christian with a K, follow me at Christian Bush on Twitter,
Christian Bush on Instagram, Christian Bush on Facebook, and Christian M.
Bush on Snapchat. Thanks to Bobby Bones for the opportunity
to build this podcast, Brandon Bush for the editing and
the soundtrack, Tom Tapley for the audio wizardry, and Whitney
Pastoring for being a great producer and making this whole
(40:23):
thing possible. This is Christian Bush gigging out. Thank you
for listening,
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