Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin RichmondToday we have Aoife O’Donovan on the show who was nominated for two Grammy awards this year: Best Folk Album for her latest release, All My Friends, as well as Best American Roots Song for the album’s title track.
Aoife is a wonderfully prolific singer and songwriter from the Americana tradition—who also has an academic background, having studied improvisation at the New England Conservatory of Music. Her latest album is a gorgeous set of songs inspired by the life and work of suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, and it celebrates the 100 year anniversary of women securing the right to vote in the United States.
In Aoife’s conversation with Bruce Headlam on today’s episode you’ll hear her perform some songs live and hear her talk about how this project crystallized for her, and some of the challenges it posed.
You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite Aoife O’Donovan songs HERE.
Pushkin Today, we have Efa a Donovan on the show, and to be honest, couldn't have been better timing. Only a handful of days ago Grammy nominations came out and our guest Today was nominated for two awards, Best Folk Album for her All My Friends record and Best American Root Song for the album's title track. Ifa is a wonderfully prolific singer and songwriter from the Americana tradition, who perhaps also surprisingly has an academic background, having studied improvisation at the New England Conservatory of Music. Over the years, she's performed with many different groups and with orchestras and symphonies, and since twenty ten she's put out a handful of beautiful solo works. Her latest Grammy nominated effort, All My Friends, is a gorgeous set of songs inspired by the life and work of suffragist Carrie Chapman Kat and celebrates the hunt year anniversary of women securing the right to vote in the US through the nineteenth Amendment. Innipha's conversation with Bruce Headlam on today's episode, you'll hear more about how the project crystallized for her and some of the challenges it posed. She'll also play some songs, so enjoy and EFA congratulations on the Grammy Knot. This is broken record liner notes to the digital age. I'm justin Ritchman. Here's Bruce Headlam and Efo Donovan.
Let's start with your new album this year, All my Friends. Can you tell me about the the genesis of it, how it started, where it came from.
Yes, I made this album over the last several years. Actually, it was the longest sort of extended period of time I've spent making one album. The music started with this little seed of an idea that I got from the Orlando filharm Orchestra. They commissioned me to write a piece, a twenty minute piece or you know thereabouts, of music honoring the Nineteenth Amendment, in memory of the Nineteenth Amendment, having something to do with the nineteenth Amendment. It could really be whatever I wanted it to be. It didn't have to have text, it didn't have to be anything other than that I had to write it. So with that framework in mind, I wrote the first five songs on All my Friends, the first five songs that became All my Friends, and then kind of sat on that performed it. With Orlando, performed it with the Knights in Central Park, performed it with a couple of orchestras, and never really thought it would turn into an album, but it did. I was commissioned then by Freshcrass Festival to write another collection of songs that I tied into the original five, and that is what the album is.
Had you ever written orchestral music before?
I hadn't, and I had, you know, performed with orchestras in the past. I have charts for my pre existing repertoire, but I had never written songs the intention for their you know, their original form to be orchestral, and so it was. It was a pretty daunting task. I was so lucky to work with an orchestrator and arranger, this woman named Tanner Reporter, who really helped me take my melodic and harmonic ideas and she is the one who put them on the page and wrote those kind of wacky woodwind parts that I could never you know, who knows what cleff those guys are in.
H Yeah, I know they use those two in between claffs. So it's just like it's the tenor cleff. Like you're done. It's like Viola's to the same.
Exactly child too, Cleff, I think is viola.
But yeah, okay, one of those. Uh so it sounds like a theater piece in a way. Was it ever conceived of as like were people ever going to be on stage doing it in character?
No, that was never my intent. It's funny. I feel like I was sort of this this theater kid in high school, but I was really always just a musician because I am actually a horrible actor, and I was always, you know, the last person in the callback. It was always between me and one other person. And the only reason I was there is because I could sing. But I never got those lead roles because in the end I would start laughing or break the fourth wall or just lose my pool. And it was never never for me.
That's not what they needed in maime.
The The funny thing about All My Friends is that it came out in March, which is the same month that a great Broadway show about suffrage also went up by Shanna tab called Seffs. And it's been cool to sort of have people come up to me and say, have you heard of this? This musical stuffs and it's you know, really dealing with a lot of the same topics, although a pretty a different, a different, you know, more nuanced to take obviously, I think she did. She went way deeper into the story and really created full storylines for all of these historical characters, minus more of a kind of I wouldn't say surface level, but it's a it's a miniaturized version of that.
Okay, but it was. Your songs were inspired by one particular, Yes, Suffragett. Can you tell me suffragist? I'm sorry, no, it's okay, Wow, am I am? I out of date?
I was corrected actually initially by somebody who sent me a very nice email at the very beginning of this. This is many years ago when I first started even talking about that I had been commissioned to do this, and I was using the term suffragette, and she said, you know, I think that you might want to look into this because I really believe that the term that is more sort of accurate is suffragist, because you know, putting ette is maybe a diminutive, it's not necessarily.
Yeah, yeah, okay, So tell me about the woman who.
Inspired Carrie Chapman. Kat is who inspired a bunch of songs on this record. And I was really able to use her just her experience, her womanhood, her the tenacity, and the way her speeches, her letters, her words, her voice to kind of really that that's really what gave me the kind of the legs that I needed to really get this piece moving. I was reading a book called The Woman's Hour by Elaine Weiss, a great writer who was also a consultant on the musical stuffs, and it opens really with the story of Carrie Chapman Kat being at the forefront of the final days of marching to get the thirty six state their ratification of Tennessee, and sort of her involvement, her take. And when I went and started kind of googling it and looking into it, I found so much text that she had written, so many speeches and all these letters and correspondences that she had had, and I was really just moved by them, and her voice just seemed to kind of jump off the page, and I wanted to sing these words.
What was that like, trying to write to someone else's voice. I don't know if you've really done that before. Well, you've done songs in other people's voices, but in this way.
Setting, Yeah, it was difficult, But I think what made it easier, honestly, is the fact that when I wrote this music initially, I wrote the music first. I didn't start with text. I didn't actually even at that point the arrangements the charts needed to get made. This is November December of twenty twenty. The piece was supposed to be premiered in May of twenty twenty one. I needed to get the arranger of the music so that the arranger could start arranging it, so that the orchestra could get it, to do the markings and start learning it. So at this point I was working on my previous album, Age of Apathy, and coming out of a real deep writer's block, you know, kind of dark I don't even want to write anything. I have nothing to say period in my life. And I somehow managed to like find the inspiration to write the music and kind of get the basic idea of what I wanted to do these five songs that were going to kind of connect with each other, but I wasn't sure exactly what the text was going to be. And it wasn't until a few months later that I kind of got the meat for the story and really put it together that way.
So when you were writing those charts without this character, without these songs, were you were you writing a top one? Were you doing a melody?
I was doing a melody, yup, And I did have some placeholder lyrics, and some of the songs did have some lyrics all my friends. The first song had the first verse. I was really just sort of envisioning that that sort of just that idea of all my friends, you know, you come and go and there are highs and lows in your life, and kind of it could really apply to anything. And I ended up making it much more socific as the song went on, and the song daughters also were you know, you're really am not singing from Carry Chapman Kat's perspective, that's kind of from my own perspective looking back, and that that song had maybe half of the lyrics in, but the other the other three were just total just melody, melody lines and harmony lines and melodic ideas and harmonic structure.
You may be the first songwriter to put words I'm sorry put a melody to the words by Woodrow Wilson. I really noted lyric.
Right, It's really funny. You know, he's a really complicated character in American history. And a lot of negative connotations. And he was not, you know, by no means a great a great guy, but he really was an ally of the suffragists. And it's it's interesting to sort of from historical lens, say, Okay, there are these people in our country's history who really sucked in many ways. But what did they do to advance this cause even while they may have been pushing back other causes for justice. It's it's something that I think we do have to grapple with as Americans, right.
And the song is called war Measures.
The song is called war measure, and it comes from a letter that he wrote to Carrie Chapman Kat responding to her, and he's saying, Okay, you know, the women are a war measure. We could not win the Great War without women staying home on the front lines, at home and and sort of picking up the slack. And that was his angle, one of his angles to say that you know, you guys deserve the vote because look at all the stuff you're doing here.
He felt it was a debt. He kind of owed them, and that was that sort of was that a political argument he was making, like I've got to make this argument and this might work.
I think it's hard to say exactly what the what the motive was. I feel like it's you can really apply it to today too. There are so many, you know, people have their hands in so many different pockets and politics, and and how do you please everybody without alienating this other, you know, without alienating your base, so to speak. Right, So, I'm not sure, but that song is kind of one of my favorite ones to sing because it's I kind of tried to make it kind of like a body sort of like raucous, kind of barroom type of song. It's still obviously very folky, but with the brass, and it's it's a fun one to do live, you know.
Speaking of people with complicated legacies, a lot of the original suffragists, Susan B. Anthony and some of the slightly more famous ones at one point separated their cause from African American enfranchisemen. But Carrie Chapman Cat didn't. She's interesting in that way.
She didn't. But she also was separate from a younger kind of cohort of suffragists. And there were many different factions of the whole movement, and I think it's just it's a lesson that gosh, it's so hard to get anything done. And I feel that somebody like Carry Chapman Kat, who you know, we don't know her, she's no longer here, but after the nineteenth meant she did become a big champion of the civil rights cause and was involved in that after she had, you know, helped to pass this legislation. I don't know, it's yeah, it's it's sort of hard to sort of look back and cast judgment for me as a as a human being. And that's that's been a difficult thing as I've kind of done this record, because there there have been people who have stood up and say, well, why you know she somebody who stood up at a show recently and kind of called me out for saying that, why did you choose to highlight Carrie Chapman Kat and why didn't you choose to do this in the voice of I to b Wells, And I was sort of like, well, I think that would have created a whole you know, you kind of can't necessarily right, I don't know.
What I'm saying, right, but that would be that's an awkward.
That would be another sort of awkward situation.
Yeah, that's that's a different awkward.
But initially I actually had wanted to do that. I had wanted to make this piece be from five different suffragists perspective, and that's something that maybe I'll do down the road. And I think that Shina did that pretty well in Stuffs, where she really did take all those characters, and again, that's a much that's sort of like a life's work type of piece. But this is my sort of first dip, dipping my toes in the water of even anything topical. And at the end of the day, I think my statement is that I'm just a singer. I'm just a folk singer, and this is sort of my way of telling this story through my own art form, which is ultimately folk songs. Me and a guitar singing these songs, trying to connect them with people, with the audience and with the musicians that I'm playing with.
You mentioned that the last day to ratify the nineteenth Amendment was or the state that.
The thirty six stage they made it the law yes.
Was Tennessee, and she did not. And she was pushed to argue against giving black women the vote because that probably would have passed through the leasier but she didn't do that right now, she did say some things about an interracial marriage and some other things. She was a creature of the nineteenth century. Far from perfect.
It's true, It's true, and just sometimes I think a lot about what these women were dealing with and what they were experiencing as they were growing up. And there's another song on the record sort of much more from my perspective called Someone to Follow. But I really started that song thinking about what were the mothers of the suffragists, Like, who were the women that raised these women who ended up really changing the world, and were they Was there feminism championed by their own mothers and grandmothers? I mean likely not in most cases, but I suppose we'll never quite know the answer to that.
Well.
In the case of Carrie Chapman Kat, she had sort of a traumatic life exactly growing up. She wasn't wealthy. Her first husband died very soon after they were married.
Right when she went to San Francisco, and he died pretty soon after that.
So you know, it wasn't she didn't have an easy life.
No, and she really had to overcome a lot to sort of And there's a song actually called the Right Time that's kind of about my imagining of her early life and how she kind of got through that.
I thought that was a very interesting song because so many of the other songs are they're not marching songs exactly, but they're kind of exclamatory and what are we going to do? And suddenly you have this song where it's more self conscious and it's questioning.
Right, when is it going to be the right time?
Is that something you got from her letters, from speeches or is that just something you tried to imagine. There must have been a point in which this complete powerhouse thought to herself, is this going to work?
That really is from my imagination that song. But I think that any strong woman can relate to that idea of even whatever the facade is, whatever the front is, even if you're the most confident, successful person in the world, you obviously have moments of self doubt or of wondering, am I on the right path? Is this the right thing to do? Will anybody remember me after I go? Is it my time? Is it my time?
Do you want to give us a song?
Sure?
All right?
Don't you just play that song?
Song? Play any song you like?
Great? This is so fun.
And it easy to cn.
My particle Sharlock movies. Try to lose a lamb all the way, don't care anything, love it Bell. I'm a fuck woman. I keep matching. He'll turn.
Farewell, Long Charge City.
I geese something to talk of.
Bell's gonna be the red time, Better's gonna be the retime berator.
I feel my pal growl the personal thick skin.
I'm gonna moan bottle baby, They'll give.
Him something to think about. What's gonna be time be W's gonna be the red.
Time, That's gonna be the rod, That's gonna be the RITI.
A good said Francisco with the cool acles down. See the Golden Gate.
Sings so bad?
Will you miss me when I'm gone? Will you miss me when I'm gone? Will you miss me?
Will you miss me? And gonna be time?
Mill Rotside.
Gonna be the right side, gonna.
Be the rights are mill ROTSI gonna be the right side mill ROTSI.
It's beautiful. I won't turn this into a masterclass, but I want you to walk me through the first few chords of that. Okay, for our guitar.
Set, there some drop d M and I'm kind of playing like an f shape with the low D and the base and capo five and then walking up a lot of hammer on ye and then kind of there was on the record. There's kind of like a little harmonica part that's like.
And capo and the fifth threat. For those playing along at home, yep, okay, let's find out where all that we're all that great figurant picking came from.
We'll be right back with more from Efo Donovan after the break. We're back with more from Efo Donovan.
Did you grow up in a musical family?
I did. I grew up both my parents are musicians. My father was an incredible singer, guitar player, radio host.
He was a professional music.
He was a professional well he was a professional music guy. He had a radio program on WGBH and was a much beloved member of the Boston music community. He's from Ireland. He passed away about a year ago, very sadly, and we missed him so much. He was really the person who I would say both of my parents were kind of my biggest cheerleaders and champions growing up playing music, and unlike many people who grew up with musician parents, I really wanted to be them. I wanted to have their life. I loved their social life, their music community, their friends. They would always have you know, bands staying at our house. They would always have these epic music parties at their house where my mom would play the piano and people were just standing around the piano singing all night. And when I was in high school, my friends and I we would like it was like a cool thing. At least I guess I thought it was cool. Maybe it wasn't, but I'm so glad that that it turned out that way and that I didn't rebel against it, and you know, only want to, I don't know, do something totally different.
Was it traditional Irish music they played my not really.
My dad's radio show is mostly traditional Irish music, but it's it's really just kind of songs, kind of like the culture of a sing song. You know, anybody who spent time in Ireland and in kind of that community knows that phrase. There's a thing that people do called the sing song. And my whole dad's extended family we love a sing song where you just get around and everybody kind of has their cover that they sing their song, and my mom notes all the songs on the piano, or somebody passes around a guitar and you just kind of it's like a jam basically a jam, but a jam with all singing and no instrumentals and no solos.
What was your first sing song performance?
My well, my first.
Maybe very happy. The answers like tainted Love or something by it.
Well, no, you're going to laugh at this. So when I was much younger, one of my favorite songs to sing that I really sang first at karaoke at the Inchridoni Hotel, and I think it was like nineteen ninety four, maybe I was probably like eleven or twelve. I sang Leader of.
The Pack, Wow A mad him at the Candy Star Fabulous.
I got to bring I got to bring that back. I just realized I need to bring that one back from my karaoke repertoire.
So that's the first song you did Leader the Pack, that.
Is in the first batch. But as I got a little bit older, I really used to love to sing the Dimming of the Day. That was one of my party pieces that I would do with my parents.
Richard Thompson's song Okay, any other Richard I've We've interviewed Richard Thompson we're going to do it again.
So I love to sing nineteen fifty two Vincent back Lightning that. That really became more of a sing song song as I got a little bit older. I used to do that song all the time.
Can you do the guitar part to that? Because I kind of.
Have my own like version of it that I do, like, I don't do. Nobody can play like Richard Thompson, but I do just like that.
It's beautiful. Yeah, he's amazing.
He does his own. I mean, it's you can't. I feel like with Richard Thompson, you can't try to imitate his guitar playing. You just have to kind of, you know, do a hero too much going on. That song speaks for itself yet.
And so when did the guitar start for you or was it guitar your first instrument?
Guitar was absolutely not my first instrument. I played piano growing up and mostly but really mostly I just sang and I didn't start playing guitar. I mean, I took some guitar lessons in high school and could kind of play basic chords and my first band, Crooked, Still, I didn't play guitar at all in that band. I just sang, and it wasn't until that band really stopped touring. I mean, I was playing guitar, you know, for I would do the occasional solo show in New York at Rockwood, or I was writing songs on guitar, but I didn't really start playing guitar and kind of developing my guitar style until I would say, gosh, until I've played turned thirty. Probably until you know, the last ten eleven years.
Was there a particular song or experience that made you think, yeah, I can do this.
I waiting for that. I still am like, can I play the guitar?
It was Leader of the Past.
Well, no, honestly, I feel like it. Actually, probably when I started to get more serious about the guitar was when I decided I was going to make a solo album, and I knew I was going to have to, you know, lead a band and play all of these songs on the guitar. And my mind, you know, I would hear these things in my head that I would want to play on guitar, but I needed to figure out how to play them on guitar. So it was sort of I feel like the songs helped me find my way around them, you know.
What I mean.
I had the songs, but I needed to my hands needed to follow my brain.
Really yeah, that's interesting. I think for so many people it's the other way around, which is they just start shapes on the guitar and then the songs come out of that.
Yeah, that's not the way it is for me.
Yeah, did you figure them out on the piano or I would just.
Like figure them out of my head and then then I would have to find I would could hear them in my head and have to find them on an instrument.
Really yeah, that's amazing. When did the song start?
I started writing songs, I mean, gosh, when I was really young. I remember the first the first two songs that I feel like we're complete songs I wrote with my friend Sarah Heaton, who was an opera singer. She's in the met Chorus, and we had a band in that We were in seventh grade, and the band was called Fairy Missed FAE r I E. It's very inspired by the Indigo Girls and by the story that great band with Jennifer Kimball and Jonathan Brook Oh, And I think we basically just wanted to be either of those two female duos, and we made this little cassette demo of these two songs. One of them was an original called Lover's Secrets that I had the tape somewhere. It's really it's kind of a hilarious, but it's a good song for two twelve year olds. And then we set the E Cummings poem Maggie and Millian Molly and May to music and I played it on the piano.
That sounds like a really good idea.
It was cool.
It was like Maggie and me and Molly and May went down to the pitch to play one day.
It had all these cool sort of major to minor mode things going. It's cool.
I think more people should probably do that. I just I think I heard, you know, Andrew Bird did a song by Oh my God, her name's just flown out of my head. She's only the most Emily Dickinson, thank you. And I thought, well, this is going to be terrible. I thought, actually this is really good. I bet yeah. It actually really worked. And you sort of think, oh, this is going to be too dramatic in high school, but.
Now it was I think, is your I mean somebody like Andrew bird is definitely up for the challenge.
Mm hmm. Maybe we should leave it to him. And then you went to New England Conservatory.
I did.
In fact, if you look up I just did this. I thought, well, just like when you look up New England Conservatory alumni, the first picture is Correta Scott King. Oh gosh, and you're the second on Google.
Wow, maybe that's maybe that's just your Google. You ever wonder that because they knew you were searching for me?
Do I have a Google?
I don't know, don't you?
Isn't that like?
That's is that really true? Me and Coretta Scott King? What what company to keep?
Maybe it was? Well and Rose Kennedy is up there, so they've they've covered the rest of the the Boston exactly.
There's covering their basis.
They've got the lace curtains.
I love it that. Yeah. I Corretta Scott King, my mother in law, my late mother in law, was a new in the conservatory.
I v.
Jacobson. It was one of the things that my husband and I first like bonded on was that I went to ne C and his mom had gone there. She was a flute player. But it's it was a great, a great place for me. It really, I have to give it so much credit for opening my mind in ways that I never could have imagined.
How did you because you went in as someone were you considering an opera career.
I went into the Contemporary Improvisation department, which at that time, this is in two thousand when I started, I really it was basically part of the jazz department. It was separate, but it was there were so few kids in c I that it was. I think there were like three undergrads when I started, so we were really kind of lumped into the jazz department, even though I was not a jazz musician at all. I knew nothing about jazz. I still know nothing about jazz, but but it was it kind of kicked my ass in a way because I was around all these people who were so musically virtuosick. They had this deep theoretical, you know, language that they could speak. They had these great chops, this great rhythm, and I felt a little bit like, oh my gosh, what am I doing here? What do I have to offer? But it was it was really fun. I remember actually those first couple of weeks getting together with kids in the basement of the dorms and having these like just like late night jam sessions, just improvising, singing, making up a shit and just kind of going for it.
Were you playing guitar at that point?
Not really.
I was really still mostly just singing. I don't even think I was playing. I don't even know I had a guitar with me. I was just singing and playing piano.
Right, that's amazing. And is it four years you did?
I actually did three years. So I switched halfway out. I switched from the bachelor's program my third year. I really wanted to tour and I knew I knew I didn't want to stay in for four years. So I switched to an artist diploma program.
And then what did it give you? The theory? If are you now going to point out, you know, C minor thirteenth, Well, you.
Know, it's funny, it did. It definitely did give me all that that theory that I use and I do use all the time. I think that people people always say, oh, you know, Bob Dylan couldn't read music, or you know that people love to sort of shout out these things like, you know, just because you can do this, it doesn't. It doesn't mean you're better. And that's absolutely true. Many of the greatest musicians that I know don't know you know, a third from a fifth. But I will say that as a side man and as a collaborator, it's so handy to have have that skill set in your back pocket, and it just makes things go a lot faster to be able to know what the chords are when you when you want somebody to play along with you. You can shout out the chords. You can shout out the key, you can shout out the shapes, you can say the numbers, or you can say the actual chord. You can trans postings quickly in your head, all of those things. I think that if you're you know, young people listening, if you're considering a career in music, like it doesn't hurt, definitely doesn't hurt.
It's better than shouting out you know Bob Dylan, well, he couldn't play, you know what I mean.
It's I think that people sort of love to and and it's it's great. There are many people, like I said, who I love to play with who don't speak that language, but I mean no disrespect.
But they bring they bring something else. To the table. So then what we were first you said you wanted to tour. What were your first steps as a professional.
So around that time that my band Crooked Still started. It was a string band where we did mostly mostly old bluegrass songs, old you know, source recording old time songs that we would find and rearrange for our untraditional instrumentation. We had a crazy cellist named Rashaan Eggleston who really was one of the first people to do that the chop on the cello. He was at Berkeley, Greg List, this great bancho player who was getting a peach Sheett at the time and teaches at Berkeley College of Music. And a bass player who was also at any scene in Corey Tomorrio. We were a quartet. We started playing gigs my freshman year of college and really started touring. And that's kind of what I wanted to do, was go on the road and be with Crooked Still and make records and tour.
And then you also did you did radio, You did the Prairie Home Companion.
Yeah, that was a couple of years later that that started. That was a huge, huge part of my life for in both configurations with Garrison Keeler first for many many years, and then when it changed over to Chris Seely, I was in the house band for that as well, and that was some of those experience, really some of the happiest, most fulfilling musical moments of my life. To put it in two words, it getting to do that every week. I mean, talk about a good course in having to have your chops be at a certain you know level. Chris is obviously I've worked with Chris for many years. We have a band together called Goat Rodeo Sessions. But he in that context where he's calling the shots and you're showing up on Friday and learning, you know, thirty songs. I mean literally often it would be just so much music because you would do sort of half song snippets of this. You would do song of the week. You would many times be in the band for whatever guest was on the show, So you'd have to learn, you know, all of Trey Anasasio's songs, all the parts for that, all the harmony of parts, et cetera.
It's just one song just goes on a long time. What were the would you'd only have a day to rehearse it.
You'd show up on Friday morning, and a lot of the times you would not even get. For the first couple of years that Chris was doing it, he was doing this thing called Song of the Week and he would be writing the song all week and he often wouldn't finish it until the middle of the night on Thursday. So you would wake up on Friday morning with an MP three in your inbox and have to basically learn the song by the rehearsal, which usually started at twelve wow. And then you would have the rehearsal from like twelve to ten, and then you'd go back the next day and started sometimes as early as like seven thirty in the morning, and then do the show. It was such a rush. It was really really fun.
Yeah, it must have been. It must have just been a terrifying in that.
But everybody's in it together, so it's this sort of real communal, communal terrifying thing of just saying, Okay, we got this and it's live radio. That's the thing. It's live, and that it happens and it's over.
It sounds like you're like playing in the NFL or something. It's just like doing an award show every week.
Yeah, it was so much fun.
Tell me about something I wasn't going to ask you about the guests, but now that you mentioned it, can you remember any experiences that stand out with the guests?
Oh, my gosh, I mean it, tons. I mean that first show, this is right when Chris took over. That was the one with Trey that was like just such a blast. There was one that we did with Craigorye on Isaacov that was really special we did. I got to sing with Renee Fleming with Garrison actually the first time. That was another time that I got to sing with the guest. Bonnie Vera got to sing with Bonnie on that show. The list goes on and on. It was every week it was somebody different who was incredible and getting to just sing harmonies with.
I talked to someone who did this analysis of Renee Fleming and they just they ran her voice through and apparently she can hit just dead center of every note.
She's she's a real magical singer.
Yeah, and no slide when she's going up to it. Just he said it was surreal, like you never see someone who can sing like that.
Yeah, and she's still she still got it.
Oh yeah, So tell me then you had that project. You've had other projects. You did go Rodeo with Yo Yo Ma. I guess you should explain.
That that really came through Chris and Edgar Meyer are both and Stewart. I mean, that's kind of my world there the bluegrassers when that started in two thousand and eleven, I think that's when when that started. They were writing music and they knew they wanted to have some vocals on the album, but Chris didn't want to do it by himself, or Edgar thought that it should be a duet. And I think he had heard Chris and I sing Farewell Angelina. I tell your ed a couple of years before, and he's like, what about you and if I do a couple songs. So we wrote those two songs that are on the first record together, and then for the next record, which was almost a decade later, I actually got together with them and wrote the music and the lyrics for those two songs that are on the newer one.
And they don't you know people who you know? I grew up with certain classical popular music crossovers you Hoodie Menu, and famously did albums with Stephan Gripelli, the Great Jazz violinist, and you know, it never really it was a kind of a party trick that never really worked, but it was nice to be at the party. This is something completely different.
Well, yo yo is I think he has managed to avoid falling into that trap of being somebody else's party trick. He's there's not really any musical figure quite like him, I think alive today, and I don't know if there really ever has been or will be. He's a one in a million guy musician, player, cellist, and his taste for creating something special is infectious. He really he pulls people together, He sits back, he does his thing, and he lets everything else kind of come around it and sort of envelop it in whatever it's doing, do you know what I mean? So in Goat Rodeo, he's not being asked to do the same stuff that Stuart and Ager and Chris are doing. He's being asked to be himself and play these gorgeous melodic lines and harmonize with the other string instruments and provide the rhythm that only he can do in his way. And then they managed to sort of create what almost sounds like a chamber orchestra with just these four instruments and it's really special. I think it doesn't sound like crossover at all. I think it just sounds like music.
It it sounds like it's his own thing, That's what I mean. It doesn't it doesn't have that kind of you know, Pava Rotti sings the classics and I think.
That Yoyo achieves that as well, and other sort of collaborations that he does across the board, the Silk Road Ensemble, you know, and it's when it first started, it was really a lot of that sort of world music and bringing people in and it never sounded cheesy or forced to me.
No, He's just a great experiment.
Exactly exactly, and it's really honest and authentic. And I think that that's when you can sniff that somebody's doing something to be a crossover thing. That then that's when you start to lose me.
Yeah. So your first album was Fossil and if someone looked at the album, looked at the photo, looked at the titles, they would think, oh, someone's doing a traditional Irish album. They're doing but it's you, it's me, your.
Song, it's exactly, it's all my songs.
How did did that come naturally? Out of the songs you'd been doing before or is that something thought now I'm gonna I'm gonna make everybody think it's one thing.
No, that really did come naturally out of the songs that I had been working on, you know, your first solo album. Obviously, I was twenty nine when I made it, so it was everything that I had, not everything, but the ten best songs that I had written up to that point, and I really had, you know, quite a few to choose from. But that was a I really wanted to do it. I wanted to make a solo album. I wanted to work with Tucker Martin. That was kind of a dream of mine in my twenties was to get to make a record.
With Tucker and it's and tell us about why.
Tucker Martin had made some records that really just knocked me out when I was in that in you know, the early two thousands. His records with Lower Years I loved so much. I still love so much. But it was in particular a record he made with Sarah Siskind, who I first met in I think two thousand and three or two thousand and four, a great singer songwriter. She was filling in in a band that I was in called The Wayfaring Strangers, and she this was before she had had, you know, the sort of viral success she ended up hapening having with Bonnie Vera covering her song and with you know, writing for the TV show in Nashville and doing all this stuff and being quite an alouded writer that she is now. But she made this record called Covered. She gave it to me, gave me a copy of the CD in two thousand and three or two thousand and four, whenever it was, And I remember getting home and putting it in my car and just I was like, what is this music? What is this production? Who made this record? Someday I want to make a record with whoever this guy is. And it really happened. It's just really cool.
And then you were you were covered by Alison Kraus.
Yeah, so that happened before I made my record. And I remember getting that that call she she covered my song Laid My Burden Down. She first covered it for a movie called Get Low with Bill Murray and Robert Duvall, and then they ended up recutting it for a Union station recorded.
Affirming, Oh it was it was.
I think that That was the moment where I was like, maybe maybe I can, you know, write songs and I can sing.
Them because she's a little well, she's a little like yo yo ma in that whatever else she does, she's got incredible taste.
She really does.
She doesn't hit too many bad notes.
Yeah, talk about singing in the center of a pitch.
Yeah, no, incredible, incredible voice. Did it change the way you were writing at that point? Was it still just I got the song in my head?
All?
Yeah, it didn't really change my approach to the craft itself, but it definitely gave me probably a much needed boost of confidence to say, Okay, I can be I even still you know, am like, am I a songwriter? Am I a singer? Songwriter? What is it exactly that I do? But that was the first moment where somebody else said, Okay, we like this song and we want to sing it. And that's that's a huge compliment to any songwriter.
H And then there's a check coming. That's another nice thing.
Yeah, you're right, Yeah.
That's a good thing too. But you said you ran at a writer's block. Was that before the age of apathy or.
That was before the age of apathy? So after Fossils, I made a record called in the Magic Hour, did a bunch of stuff in the interim my band I'm with Her, et cetera. When when COVID hit is really I just come out of a two year tour with I'm with Her. My child was two a little bit more than two. She was two and a couple of months, and I really hadn't hadn't stopped in a long time, and I had made no time to sort of sit and be creative and think about what I wanted to say and what kind of songs were going to come out. So that whole first six months of COVID I was really just, like you know, I think many people were kind of stricken with what am I going to do? What am I going to do? And out of that, it was really when I moved to Florida that somehow something kind of got unlocked and I was able to sort of reaccess that side of myself. And it's I'm so grateful because it's once the door kind of got pushed open, it's just continued to be fruitful.
Okay, but it was six months COVID. Yeah, I'm not sure that's right.
I'm sure there's there's much more writers blocked down the road for me.
So well, then you made Age of Apathy with one of our favorite people here, Joe Henry, one of the greats, one of the greats. How did that come about?
I first met Joe in twenty fourteen in Cincinnati. I was doing a show with the Cincinnati Pops called American Originals where we were singing the songs of Stephen Foster and it was Rosanne Cash. That's also where I met Rosann Cash has become a friend. Joe, Henry, Don Flemons was there, The Great Band Over the Rhine was there. It was a really special weekend of music, and I really had it off with Joe. And you know, I didn't see him that often over the next decade or eight years, but I knew again he was somebody who I was like, I want to make a record with Joe. I love the way his records sound, his solo records. I love the way his the records he produces sound. And I just knew we had a kinship, we had a vibe, and I knew he was the right person for Age of Apathy. When I got to Florida and I started making the demost Rage of Apathy. I think I'd made like three demos and I just kind of cold called him and I was like, can can we talk? Are you interested in making this record? It's covid. We're not going to be able to do it in a traditional way where we're in the studio together, but I think this will work if I make these demos and send them to you and you send them back. And it worked so well, it was so much fun.
Well, you're lucky it was Covid because he's in Maine. You don't want to go there, and we.
Had just moved too. Is really he had just gotten to main and when we were starting these conversations.
Yeah, he don't want to do that.
No, I'm from Massachusetts. I know.
Yeah, of course, you know, just as in the side. Roseanne Cash one of the first people we interviewed for the show and Joe both helped us. Malcolm and I did a book with Paul Simon and they both contributed chapters, but the producers cut Joe's and I was so disappointed. Ah, I know, he did this amazing riff on the song duncan I don't if you know that side I do, and.
It's exact I feel like I've heard Joe play that song before.
He's played it, but he did this. He did this big thing about how it's like the Boxer but different in the same way that to have and have not is different from Casablanca but kind of the same. Okay, it was so genius.
I got to read that book.
Well, it's an audiobook. And then Roseanne and her I don't know if you know her.
Husband, yeah, John, of course.
They did.
Only living one New York and they just talked about the production because the production of that song is so increased.
Is it on the audible or how do I get this?
I don't know how you fd that's terribly.
I'll find Yeah, that's so cool. That one of the and I still say that the best nights of my life, the best, the top three nights of my life. I was seeing Paul Simon and Madison Square Garden really in twenty eighteen. It really was. It was just one of those moments that gosh. I actually went with Sarah Drose the two of us went, we bought tickets. We were in the thirteenth row and we had we were sobbing the entire time.
It was.
It was so good.
Yeah, so many good songs.
So many good songs, and also what a great performer. My favoritavorite part of that show was how much better he sounded at the end of the concert than he sounded at the beginning. He was so warmed up by the end. Oh, interesting, I didn't want it to stop. He was just he really felt like his voice was just opening up and opening up and opening up. And then by the last couple of songs he had every shade.
We'll be back with the rest of Bruce's conversation with Ifa A donovan after the break. We're back with the rest of Bruce's conversation with ifa O'Donovan.
So, a couple songs I wanted to ask you particularly about. There's a lot of great songs on Age of Apathy, it's such a good album, but Elevators was one of the songs that, for some reason I was really taken with. Can you just talk a bit about that song?
Yeah, that song is one of my favorite songs on Age of Apathy. Also, I remember starting to write that song and just kind of having this movie playing in my mind of me watching like a movie of myself in the rear view mirror, like of my youth, sort of my more wild days as a touring musician, and just the concept of have I been here before? Like waking up and looking out the window literally, and the first line is I was looking out the window wondering, like, you know, if I've been here before? That looks the same, that looks the same, that looks the same. And how when you are a musician and you live on the road, you tend to be able to pinpoint events based on the randommest things like who was I dating at the time, or who was my bandmate dating at the time, or all all these things that just end up being sort of silly and trite, but really are coloring the fabric of your life in this funny way. And that's kind of where that song came from.
And you need that because every day you're just waking up at a holiday.
And express every day is the same in this one way, and it's so monotonous to get to get in the van and to stop at the gas station and get the same snack that you always get at the gas station because you're sick of you know, for a while it's smart food, and then you switch to some other sort of healthy thing like oh, I'm going to eat beef jerky this tour or something. But it's in field. Musicians just had this. You have your routines that you go through when you're on tour all the time, and there's sort of no clear way to mark the time, like when was I in this venue? And then you see your name on the wall and you're like, what, I don't even remember writing that, you know, it's really it's very trippy.
Yeah, it was your beef Jerky tour.
Yeah, it's like, oh yeah, oh that was a tour that like her boyfriend was there with us for like that, and that was so awkward, like, you know, just just weird memories like that.
Sure. Oh, so I want to ask you. We're now up to your current album. I want to ask you about Daughters. Yeah, tell me about that song.
That song was one of the first songs that I think I wrote in its entirety four age of Apathy, and I think I mentioned at the beginning of the interview that I did have some of the lyrics intact before I sent that one off to the arranger. I was imagining or I was just sitting there thinking about, you know who, who were these women who were the suffragists, and what did they think we were going to be saying about them? They did they know how important the work they were doing was. And when I get to the chorus, I'm singing, I say, all your enemies never leave your side, and it's just sort of that idea of you know, no matter even if you've even if the fight has been one, there's still going to be a shadow of your opponent next to you forever potentially. But how do we overcome that? And how do we how do we get past that? And my favorite part of that song and that recording is the San Francisco Girls chorus singing behind me on that chorus where I'm singing.
Oh, your enemies never leave your.
Side, they will always be their daughters. Dry your eyes, and they're singing behind me saying kind of echoing me, and it's this really sort of powerful physical thing. When I listened to it, when I got their parts back, I just that's exactly as I wanted to sound, and I wanted to be me. And this does tie into the song. We were just talking about elevators, talking to your younger self, talking to the past version of you were talking to your mother when she was a child, or your grandmother when she was a child's and then looking forward talking to the daughters of your daughters. It's really just sort of the line keeps going m.
Hm because it had this theme about your enemies always being with you. There was one line that really struck me as strange, and that is the line about protected and serene, rich women still honing their malevolent skills.
That part is about is about the people who were opposed to suffrage and often the people who and I feel like we still see this in today's political climate. It's often people with great privilege that are the most fearful of change because they're not the ones who are being negatively affected by the lack of progress.
We're not going to turn this into debate, but the suffragette movement, and it's been criticized for this more recently, did rely on often very prosperous benefactors. Of course, I mean famously Alva Vanderbilt, who had changed her name by that point, but put a lot of her family money right and it it's it seemed like a strange note to hit because a lot of those women were regarded as privileged. They wouldn't have been able to do it without.
It, right, No, you're you're you're you're not wrong. But I think that that that in that in that line, I was sort of talking about the people who who were nay, the antis, the people who were against it, who were you know, there were there were. It wasn't that all the rich people were pro No, no, I'm sorry, suffrage. So it was just one side of it growing bulging the treachery some.
Yeah, you know, I may have been I didn't talk about this with my wife. I may have been channeling my wife a bit though, who sort of felt that in the last few years, being a certain kind of woman has not exactly insulated you from criticism. Yeah, and you got it with the why didn't you do well?
Of course?
And it almost seemed like everybody comes from some kind of privilege.
Well not everybody does, not everybody, of course, but it is I mean, I think it's important to acknowledge and to be aware at least that's that's what I'm trying to do as a person in the world, to be aware of my own privilege and how of course I'm very privileged to be able to sing these songs and to write these songs. But that line I think I was trying to you know, later in the song, it kind of comes back like, you know, the women in the fields and countain houses. I'm really talking more about the common woman. As the song goes on, and the next and the next stands up after the chorus comes back, and you know, the women in the shops and in the farms, they're all around us. They got babies crying at their breasts. You know, the veins of these women are not filled with milk and water. These are mothers of bold American daughters. Just really trying to make it more of a sort of an everyman, every woman type thing, if you will. That that was kind of the maybe I it was a missedtep, but.
I think, no, no, no, no, I don't You're not to You're not to sit there saying maybe I'm not a song right, And that is.
Why, that is how I was trying to sort of tie it into. These women are sort of sitting in their gilded homes, not out there. You know, even if they were, you know, going to vote yes, which they couldn't vote obviously, but even if they were pro suffrage, it wasn't necessarily affecting them in the same way that it was affecting the women who you know in the Frontier.
And by the way, that line that the mothers of bold American daughters is just such a great, great line.
And I love singing that song. I love singing that song live.
Yeah. No, it's got such a kind of The other one I wanted to ask you about was because I think it's one of the You've got a lot of beautiful, very long you write very long melodies, by the way. That's but that's a good thing, right.
I mean, you know, it is what it is. Some people are like, yeah, I think I read a review once a record of mine, and they were like, her melodies, they're not exactly the kind that you can sing along with. She sort of meanders from one I do to the next.
And it was it was it was I think the answer to that is don't recretic.
No, and I think it was. It was still a positive, It ultimately was positive, but it it kind of cracked me up because I'm like, yes, that that is exactly what I'm doing.
Isn't that what all melody? Yes do? Yeah, but I think one of your loveliest is uh, America, Calm on this, thank you so much on that record. Tell me about writing that one.
That one I think I really just got in my head is kind of this march of like dude like that, that real ascending melody to kind of and all the octave jumps. It's very hard melody to sing.
Live it is. There's big jumps.
But it's funny that I had that melody before I had the phrase, because I feel like that it's it's some like F I think is what it is. And I play this one thing that like I tuned my low string up to an F on this one, it's like, what is it?
Democracy up?
It's really low and then really high at the same time, and it's very jumpy and the.
Way I've never seen it, I guess it's like a drop D tuning, but it's an F tuning.
Do I actually write a lot of songs in that tuning?
Is that common?
I don't know. I don't know anybody else who does it, but I've never heard of it. I can't say that I invented it, but I don't know anybody else who does it.
Well, then I think you can say you invented it. I would patent it.
I'm sure Jony's tried it.
She's tried it all. Are you a fan by the way of Johnny.
Come on, huge fan, biggest fan.
Okay, I would say some of your songs I can hear that influence a little bit. Elevators actually is a song. I can hear a bit of that.
I'm a very big Johnny Mitchell fan. I love I love all of her music and her melodies and her her writing is just I think unparalleled.
It's funny because in the interviews I've read with you, you don't mention Jhonny Mitchell.
I feel like I do when I talk about my influences. I feel like I would say Johnny Mitchell and Paul Simon are of the two people who I would say are my most old school, biggest influences.
Okay, those are good influences to have.
And I did a recording of term Meanama Radio And actually one of my favorite Live from Here performances was Coyote that I got to do at Town Hall with Chris and the Live from Here band.
What's that Like to That's a really hard song.
So it was so fun. That was really one of my top musical moments. Of my life.
There's another YouTube clip then you should look at, which is because I'm Canadian, of course, my number one is Gordon Lightfoot Love Gordon Lightfoot. Gordon Lightfoot had this house in Toronto. He was famous for having these parties that nobody remembered later. But if you look it up, there's a party at his house and I think he's there, and Dylan's there, and then she starts playing an early version of Coyote.
I feel like I've seen this clip on Instagram or something.
Yeah, and at some point they're looking at each other and you realize, you guys are kind of out of your depth here, like they're trying to play along and they're like, we can't tell what she's doing.
They should have gone to music school.
I'm not sure what to help because I think her stuff is so idiot and that song is very idios And yeah.
I wasn't playing guitar. I was just singing when I did it.
I didn't even know what her tuning was, right, I.
Think an open sea tuning, I'm pretty sure.
Okay, but it's got a very Yeah, it's got its own thing, so cool. Yeah, you should look it up if you haven't seen it because because there is kind of a nice moment where they're like, oh man, we're screwed. We got nothing, we got nothing. Maybe we get the bass note.
Maybe not too many notes.
Too many notes, too complicated, you know, in this album, because the album is it's not, as I said, it feels like a theater piece. It feels very much of a piece. Then it takes this shift this album, and I'm sure it was a very deliberate shift, but the last two songs go in a completely different direction totally. Yeah, starting with over the line.
Over the finish line, Yeah, oh, over the.
Finish line, Pardon Me, which has just a very different mood, very different lyrics. Do you want to talk about that?
Yeah? Those the way this album ends. I think this was unexpected, and maybe I wasn't quite sure, to be honest. From the beginning, I was sort of like, how am I going to release this music? What am I trying to say with this as an album? Because usually you put out an album and it's like neat, it's you know, ten or twelve songs, and you can play each song and there's little snippets and some of them are happy and some of them are sad. And some of them are slow and some of them are fast, and you have, you know, an album's worth of material. This record was just a totally different beast. So the last two songs, I felt that I had to sort of finish my thought. I had to kind of come from the past into the present, but then take a slight detour to a different part of the past. It's almost like the sort of time travel thing that I'm doing over the finish line is the second to last song on the album, and it's a song that I'm singing from really the only song where it's entirely from my perspective, you know, me Ifodnevan twenty first century Woman, Mother Citizen, you know, artists looking back at what I've just said, you know, I think that there's a lot of sort of referencing of the previous songs that you've just heard. When you get to that point in the album, I'm kind of talking back to Carrie Chapman Katt almost and talking about the current state of affairs and about how I feel that it's almost kind of ties into Age of Apathy in that way that we're sort of not connecting in the same way, and what can we do about it, and I don't think I really come up with an answer in the song. It's more just a you know, if I could, if I could change in mind, whose mind would I want to change? If I could make something that would get us over the finish line, and then it's almost like I throw out my shoulders and say, we're living in hard times. And it's an intense song to sing, and Aus Mitchell saying harmony on it so beautifully, and I feel like really helped me kind of get the the feeling across the urgency that I was sort of talking about before, just what what can we do and how do we do it? And at the end of that song, I quote Carrie Chapman Kat and I sing, you know what is this democracy for which the world is battling? The song that I just haught saying that long line in the previous song, And then you know, i'd ask Carrie, I feel I feel that we might have made our beds here, like have we? And it's it's really just a question.
It's a very uh it's a down song.
It's a down sound. There's nothing happy about it.
And that what you were feeling even after you after you wrote the rest of.
These songs, it really is.
And it's funny because you know the question America Come, the song that comes right before this where it really ends with me and the girls and the brass and we're singing, you know, it's it's almost like a chant, like holding her torch hi like America America. And then I think it's kind of the whiplash that that we that I certainly have felt over the last you know, eight years of existing and this this time, this crazy time, and I sang about it in Age of Apathy, but the whiplash of kind of going back and forth between feeling really hopeful and just really dejected and wondering how we can do about it and what is our role? What is the role of the artist. And throughout this.
It reminds me of American tune the Paul Simon.
One of the great songs, right.
But it's more downbeat.
Yeah, I mean American tune at least has that like really soaring bridge.
You cut out the soaring.
Bridge, no story bridge in this one.
Well, it's interesting because the end you are addressing this to Carrie Chapman Kat the album is really springs from and I was particularly in the combination with America come. By the time I got to the end of that song, I was thinking, I was wondering, what do you think when you talk about we're living in a hard time? What do you think? What do you think? Her answer to you would.
Be, well, I think that the crazy thing is. And I read a lot of historical fiction, you know, just looking gosh, hard times have are always hard. Times are always crazy when you think about I read recently, I read Libra by Don DeLillo, great book, you know, Lee, Harvey, Oswald, Kennedy, the whole that whole time period was so crazy, like that that was so crazy. I feel like it's crazy now, but it's crazy in a different way. And everybody always thinks that what they're going through was like the crazy is like shit's crazy. Times are so hard, times are so hard. Technology this, you know, But if it wasn't technology, it was TV, or it was the Cubans, or it was whatever, whatever the fear DuJour is. And I think that that's kind of what made me want to program the record this way in After that song, it goes into the lonesome Death of Hettie Carol, which is living in hard times, you know, one hundred percent living in hard times, that those times were horrible for Hettie Carroll and for anybody in her situation.
And was that a song you'd we're talking about the Bob Dylan's song, of course? Is that a song you performed before?
I performed it live a few times with orchestra, with full orchestra.
Because it does end on a very.
It ends in a very very bad note.
No, but I don't mean the song itself, but it just ends the album on a strange it does.
No, it does.
And what's always interesting to me about that song is, you know he took the melody from another folks song. I think an Irish folk song probably.
I can't remember what the name of it is, but you're.
Mary Hamilton, right. But I think a lot of people in casually hearing that song thinks it's about think it's about something that happened long ago. It actually happened in the sixties, nineteen sixty three she was killed, right, But he makes it seem as though it's like something from old Baltimore exactly.
But no, it's very recent, right, And I think that that I really thought long, hard about it. If I wanted to put that song on the record at all, if I wanted it to just read these neat eight songs, and I think of it almost as a coda to the album. It's almost like the album does you know, psychic the end after over the finish line, and then you kind of go into this sort of dreamscape of just one more thing, just one more thing. And that arrangement. I find it so compelling. My friend Gabriel Kahane did that orchestral arrangement and it's very stark. It starts with, you know, just me singing the opening stanza. After of course, the battle hum of the Republic and the orchestra comes in and it turns into this kind of wild there's like a Viennese waltz section that he puts in and then but it does end, you know with now you know, bury your face deep in the rag. Now is the time period of years.
It reminds me a little. I'm just thinking of this now of the Falkner book that has the Bear Go Down Moses.
One of the few Falkner books I haven't read.
Well, you should because it ends well, you know, it has the Bear, which is that famous short story which is indecipherable okay, but it ends with a very contemporary scene in an American police station and a mother's there and her son's been arrested. It has that same kind of feeling. You should read it. It's on the Broken Record reading list.
Great. I mean, I'm a huge Faulkner fan, but I really I guess, like you know, Absolute Masalem Gazila, Dying Sound and Fury.
Yeah, we'll try this one.
Okay.
The short stories, but they're they're connected, right, and it's.
Well, I'm excited. I'll go to the books around the wheel.
They're kind of brilliant. Do you want to play another song?
Share?
Take us out?
What do you want? You want elevators or do you want a new song?
Uh?
You should play whatever song you think is gonna is going to really move product? What would that be?
Oh cares about products? But now I kind of want to play Elevators because I haven't played it so long. And it's like fine, right, okay, okay, great?
Looking up and do it feels like a shady patch of clean hand the big bookstore, run out of the corn and.
Then passed the swinging back in the back of the cutlass. A man in America Merica.
I've spun out my trying to rum wells in America, I swear so running for the back door, a fine like bread crawls down the country road, and.
The only thing the matter was Latin.
My Lord had an excellent station. I stopped for.
A drink and I washed the memories down the dirty bedroom sake in Amica America, I'm.
Sculling out my hair trying to remember.
Wellmost in Ammica, running for the back door. Hello, its old songs, empty bottles, so long after me nights when I was young, the ice smelt it and gets a long.
Hello spoken the last nothing less.
I finally figured out that everything was lost, so I climbed in my legon and I started colts.
But I don't be for every added up to the lake. Where is what's good here?
And a wondowing gonna make of America America?
I was brown up mayor trying to the wirls in America.
I swear a s one for all the bed.
Running, running, run fun and that old songs anti battle so long.
That to mad nights, when now was he gone.
I smelt it on my time, Hello spoken glass nothing, Hello, Thanks so.
Much Sef for coming by to talk about her project My Friends and for performing some songs, and again, congratulations on the Grammy nominations. Best of luck to you. You can hear all of our favorite Efo Donovan songs on a playlist at broken record podcast dot com or in the episode description for this episode, and be sure to follow us on Instagram at the Broken Record Pod. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced by Leah Rose with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Tollinay. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app.
Our theme music's by Kenny Beats.
I'm justin Richmond.
