Pushkin. Just a quick note here. You can listen to all of the music mentioned in this episode on our playlist, which you can find a link to in the show notes for licensing reasons, each time a song is referenced in this episode, you'll hear this sound effect all right. Enjoy the episode. Joe Henry is likely one of the best living singer songwriters that you've never heard of. But even if you don't recognize his name, you've probably heard his work. He's been at it for thirty four years, having released fifteen solo albums on three Grammys, and produced music for the likes of Elvis Costello, made his staples Bonnie Rait and his sister in law Madonna. Yeah that Madonna. During her cowgirl phase in the early two thousands, she turned Joe's song Stop into her hit Don't Tell Me. Joe Henry's latest studio album, his fifteenth, The Gospel according to Water, was released in November, almost exactly a year after he was diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer. In this interview with Bruce Headlam, Joe talks about the artist who gave him strength after his diagnosis, and also about working with Elvis Costello. In the late great New Orleans legend Alan Tucson, just weeks after Katrina. This is broken record liner notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Richmonds. Here's Bruce Headlam and Joe Henry from Pasadena, California. Joe starts things off by playing something from his new album, a song called the Fact of Love. Thank you for coming, thank you for having me. And that was a song from your new album, which we want to talk about. But by way of introduction, longtime singer writer, probably one of the best songwriters of the last one thousand years or so, So tell me about that song first, the Fact of Love. It's called it was the last thing I wrote before recording the new album. When I recorded this new record, I did not know I was making a record. I needed to record some demos. I had this rush of new songs. I'd never had a batch of songs appear so quickly, to the point where I'd not even made iPhone demos, you know, to keep track of the basic architecture. And I can't read or write music. So when I learned something it's no I wish I had. I wish I had How do you write the lyrics down? And then I just think that if I go back to them, the music will be embedded, and mostly it is. Once in a while something slips away, which is why I try to get into the habit of making a really just rough phone recording of something when it's brand new. But these songs came in such a flurry that I would have a new song and think, oh, I should just quickly sketch this out, and then another song would begin to appear, and I think, oh, I better pay attention to this one, and then I just do both of them. Well, pretty soon I had ten or eleven songs that had no reference at all other than lyrics written on a page, and I thought, I really need to document this in some way so I don't forget them, and also so that I can stand back and evaluate them in some way, which you can't just do as readily when you're performing them to hear them. So I went to an old friend's studio downtown and just blew through everything with a few friends. Didn't even listen to playbacks of much of it, just trying to get them down. And I got home with them and realized that something more had happened. But also say that the songs came in such a rush, Bruce that at one point I just wanted them to stop, which is not a common thing for a songwriter to think aspiring songwriters, Oh, they just showed upday, somebody just on the front law. Sometimes they grow up like dandelions overnight, you'd be amazed. But I really needed to get them in hand. I really wanted to play through them enough to get fluid with them. And it's a really different engagement for me to be practicing finished songs than writing songs. Maybe two days before these sessions that we're supposed to be demos, my wife was finishing a piece of sculpture. She's a visual artist, and I said, I was walking past and I said, there's a piece of unearthed stone that looked like a torso and she was painting on top of it. And I said, what do you call that? And she said, UM, it's called the fact of Love. And I remember just going, fuck, I hear it sounds spring loaded. I know that if I pay attention to this for a moment, that there's a song there and there, and very quickly, And once I finished that one, I kind of thought, Okay, that's that feels like a pretty complete bracket when I think about what the earliest of these songs is, and I really realized that that needed to happen, and then I could step away from that part of the process. Was your wife happy you took the title for I think she was. I didn't change the name of it to my pending divorced I think she was really pleased. Um. You know, I find a lot of songwriting begins that way. For me, A phrase, an image, a word that I don't know how it was to describe it, except that it is spring loaded. And I have this sensation that, very much like opening a bottle of champagne, you sort of get one time for the cork to really pop, and if you're not prepared to deal with with that, you don't. You don't engage that because it'll go flat. Did that that opening phrase and some of the guitar work, did that come with the initial song or those things you put on later? Or was at on a separate track somewhere? How did that Does it come together? As it happens differently all the time, Bruce, But in the case of that song, I'd heard that title late in the evening. The next morning, I was up very early it was still dark, and I picked up a notebook and I just remember kind of writing essentially those three verses in chorus. Just wrote it down like I was taking dictation. A lot of the records sort of appeared this way, and for whatever reason, and this is not common necessarily, I walked through the room. I have a lot of guitars laying around, and picked one up, put the capo on the fourth fret as if I knew that that's where it lived melodically as a key. I didn't know that. I had no reason to think it was in F sharp. I just put the capo there for some unknown reason, and just put the guitar my lapp and played that opening motif. I didn't think about it. I just reached and it was sort of there. I'm making this aw sound very mystical because it is. I'm not being evasive. It's just the way that it happens. You know, there's a there's an inherent quality to music, as there is to living, that is inherently mysterious. And I do think, and I've said it in other moments, our job is never to dispel mystery. Our job is to abide mystery and stand with it, be an alliance with it, because there's a big part about living that's just inherently mysterious, always has been, always shall be. And the sooner we make peace with the fact that there is something else at play that we do not control, I think the more we can sort of be in collaboration with whatever life is asking. You know, I think back to Joseph Campbell when he said, you have to let go of the life you imagine so you can have the one that's actually waiting for you. And there's a certain kind of surrender that I think is essential to almost all productive living, but creative life in particular. You know, you just sort of have to surrender into process. And I don't mean surrender as in resignation. I mean surrender as in radical acceptance. Speaking of resignation radical acceptance, you had a tough year and a half. Do you want to explain a little bit of that? Sure? A year ago Thanksgiving? So you know, what is that fourteen months ago something like that, I got a diagnosis of stage four prostate cancer. And when I got that phone call, and it really was like a movie, you know, picking up the phone very innocently one day, you know, I felt like Bob Newhart, Hello, and there it was. You know, It's like somebody opened a door onto a cyclone and my family and I all stepped into it. I was not prepared, even though I'd been in some i'd head back pain for well over a year. I had been misdiagnosed three times. And I also, you know, I'm a touring musician in my late fifties, and I was in a really serious car crash when I was a teen. So back pain is something I've just sort of learned to live with. It's not intense, but it's present. It has been enough often enough that it was easy for me to think, I've just come off the biggest touring cycle of my entire working life. And I don't know any musician in their late fifties to tours who doesn't have back issues. It was easy to just sort of accept that it was no significant thing until it was. And next thing I know, there's somebody. I'm sitting in front of a doctor who very irresponse, irresponsibly I've I've learned he had very little to go on, just sort of blurted out to my wife and I that he thought I had like three to seven months to live, you know, And I lived with that as a new truth, you know, for a full week until I met my oncologist that I worked with at UCLA, who assured me that's not, in fact what I was forced to accept, you know. He said, I look at you know, I look at your whole life, not just this diagnosis. And you know, I think of this as as chronic disease management. It's not a terminal diagnosis. We help a lot of people like you. But I really did live through, you know, a week of real terror. The terror didn't end there. It changed shape, became a little bit more stealth, but I still had a you know, a pretty rough go and even though I responded to treatment almost immediately, I mean almost immediately, I was out of pain physically, but the psychic specter of that shadow is something real, and it changed me, you know. I mean it's kind of supposed to. What did it do to your songwriting? During that time, I was writing with a new urgency. I've always written a lot. I try to be writing all the time. Does mean that I always finish a lot of things. But at the time when I was first diagnosed and my wife Melanie was encouraging me to maybe seek out a support group. There's a lot of good ones around. They help a lot of people. And I said, look, I don't know that I won't get there eventually, but that's not how I process things. I don't see that as my path right now. I'm going to have to write my way through this, because writing is how I sort of process anything of significance in my life. And I realized that the way that fear and sadness had put a cap on my imagination, every time I could get something going, whether it was a palm or a song, that my imagination re engaged, I could see beyond what felt like an immediate and restricting way of thinking, and all of a sudden, sort of psychically, the doors and windows were open again, and I could see beyond, you know, just the immediate fear of a moment. And so I just kept writing. And I know in retrospect that I was writing to live, because that's that reconnected me to myself in a way that my diagnosis when it first happened, cut me off from who I believed myself truly to be. Did it were your days? Though? That that fear just closed all that down sure, Oh absolutely. I still have days like that where I'm not fit company for anybody. There's less of that because I'm in remission. Now. I feel better than I have felt in a couple of years. Actually, last year I felt like I at the beginning of the year, I was in a trench, And this year kind of feels like it has begun, like I've I've been shot out of a cannon. You know, when you were in that trench, what music did you listen to? A lot of Lewis Armstrong, a lot of Charlie Parker, a lot of Robert Johnson. Those were, Um, I've always been really important musicians for me, But for for I started to say, for whatever reason is if I don't know? Um, well, what's the reason that? Because those artists in particular, I feel that their humanity is so rawly and viscerally available. You know, I hear music that was recorded last month and it already sounds like, you know, an artifact, like one of those mosquitoes they bring out of the Pyramids, trapped an amber. You know, I can see it, but it's not alive. For me and time I've listened to Robert Johnson and I've been listening to him since I was fifteen. He sounds like a living person jumping out of a speaker. Charlie Parker does that to me too. I can't. It's not background. To me. It is like somebody walking into a room, and I am endlessly affirmed by the spirit of that music. Not to mention the fact that, certainly, in the case of Bird, he was in other respects not the most functional adult in the room. You know, he was a disturbed and troubled man. Yet not in spite of but I think because of he puts so much raw beauty into the world, and it makes me think a lot about the African American experience in particular, where I look back at some of my greatest greatest heroes, you know, Lewis Armstrong, Duke Ellington in particular, and think about the brutality that experienced and yet their response to it was incredible beauty. We'll be right back after this break. We're back with more of Bruce's conversation with Joe Henry. You know, you describe yourself primarily as a sort of a storyteller, and you you reject the kind of confessional model of songwriting. I think you've literally said, and I have the quote here the greatest misconception of American popular music that if you're being honest, you're being entertaining, and you tend to tell stories even in your own work, even the first and second person, but they're they're obviously about characters. Yeah, did that change a little with this album? Are there are there elements of this album you feel came directly out of your recent experience? Well, there's always elements I can recognize after the fact. I don't often and don't to be aware of that when I'm writing. Sure, I mean, there are things that now look back and going to go, well, that's that's really obvious to me, why in that moment that's what would appear. But look for starters, Bruce. I think that that all artistry, regardless of the medium, is storytelling, from the most abstract painting to film to you know, I think it's all storytelling. It's not all linear narrative, and yet they all seem to provoke or want to provoke some sense of narrative that we reach for. And I think musically is especially potent because it, you know, it's not nailed to the floor, you know ingmar Bergmann said, that all art aspires to work the way that music works, you know, because it's it's there's no defense against it. It appears like weather, and it changes the day. And I think, certainly the songs that have been most important to me my whole listening life, our songs that are specific enough to engage me and make me think of that something real is transpiring. But they're not so overt as to nail everything to the floor. There's not just one way to enter and accept this story. I know that as a writer, I'm fairly impressionistic. I do think I come out of a very particular folk tradition. And when I say folk, I'm saying that very broadly. And you know, I mean what he got through as a folk singer. So is Joe Strummer, you know. So was Bob Marley, you know, so is Lewis Armstrong. You know. But it's funny that in only just a few years ago I had a brand new record out. I'm trying to think which one it was. Maybe it was Reverie. Anyway, I had performed the whole of it the night before in Los Angeles, and my son was in town from Brooklyn. He plays with me frequently, and I was sitting out on the front yard under a big pine tree the next morning with my wife, Melanie, and my son lev On and my wife. You know, we've been together. We've been married almost thirty three years. We've been together longer than that. And I met her when I was sixteen and she was fifteen. She said, it finally dawned on me. I don't know why it took me so long that you were a Southern writer. You know. I mean, I'm from North Carolina. Originally, I didn't really come of age there, but it is part of my DNA. Both my parents are natives in North Carolina. And she said, all the you know, your door, wealthy Flannery O'Connor all makes sense to me now in a way that it didn't before. I don't know what it was about that batch of songs, that performance that allowed her to hear me as coming out of a tradition of Southern writers. Were your parents Southerners? They are still are, They're still with us, and they still they moved back to North Carolina, you know, we moved around a lot when I was young. My father was an executive engineer for Chevrolet, and not true anymore. But back in the day, if you were a lifer in that racket, you know, all roads led to Detroit. So we moved to Detroit area just as I was beginning high school the summer before my tenth grade year, so that would have been summer of seventy five, and my wife, Melanie, her family lived there and we went to the same high school. I met her there. I was friends with two of her older sisters before I met her. But I feel like I came of age, you know, among the Great Lakes. But I do know that in my core, I am a Southerner, even though I spent a lot of my early life trying to distance myself from that legacy, because what I thought about the South as a young person was not something I was proud of. Your parents were also devout where they they are. My parents are Southern Methodists. Oh was out right, So I was, you know, I went to church as a young person, just like I went to school, which means if I wasn't sick, that's where I went until I was, you know, fifteen, and my older brother David was seventeen. We were very close and at that point of our lives, we were staying up you know, terribly late of a Saturday night listening to music and such. And it was one Sunday. My mother came and tried to rouse this out, and we were not sprightly, and she said, well, I'm not going to force you to go, and I said you're not. She said, you're fifteen. You have to make your own decisions about this, and then I didn't. I didn't return. I want you to play another song, but first I do have a bone to pick with you at which is I think maybe the first song I ever heard of yours was the Ohio Plane Crash. And I mean that song I just thought was incredible. It captured experience so beautifully because when I was a kid, I saw a plane crash on an air show on Lake Ontario. And then I found out years later you made the whole thing up I did. Isn't it better that I did it? Maybe? Well you either either that or I now can only remember that experience yea through your song. But your song is about a kid, right because they're la dangling. You know what that song was about? For me? If I throw my mind back, there was the idea and it's in some ways it's it hinges on a concept that I learned from again I'm talking about I'll talk a lot about short story writers. They've been as impactful to me as songwriters. Um, it's something I learned from both Raymond Carver and Alice Monroe. And I just talk endlessly about Alice Monroe. I love her. But this concept of telling a dramatic story and decidedly undramatic language, and the idea of the Ohio Airshow plane crash was that with this tragedy as a backdrop, there is an estranged couple sort of you know, living within each other's proximity, not necessarily comfortably in in a shared moment. And so I thought the idea of staging this kind of bland disconnect between two lovers while as a backdrop this plane crashes. You know, the plane crash is not the story. The couple's estrangement is the story. The character speaking has is a strange from his lover, and he's at this gathering, this you know, holiday, this air show and sees his ex in the in the crowd, and he's and he's sort of reflecting on you know, not you know, that odd magnetic poll or maybe the opposite side of a magnet. That is that you still feel that that there's energy happening, but it's repelling. It's repellent. It's not you know, connecting. Could you play another song for us? And then, well, I can. I played you the last song that I wrote for the new record. I'm going to play you the earliest of them, all right. My wife and I were last fall for two months on the west coast of Ireland. I was invited to do a writing residency at a small art college. I was starting to have real pain episodes then. I don't mean to lean too heavily into that. It just was a It was a specter of what was happening, even though I didn't I didn't know what weight to give it. But I only bring it up now because I hear this song now completely sharing the same language of the songs that followed after I knew what was going on, and I just think I feel like, in some way, you know, my body knew the songs, knew something before I consciously knew something. You know what I mean? You should have gone to the doctor and said, listen to this. Yeah, yeah, this is called mule. Based on our conversation. I don't want you to overinterpret your own work. But I would like to know where the line silence deepest sound came from. Well, in this little village where we were on the west coast of Ireland called bally Vaughan, it just became really evident to me two things while I was there. The silence that I heard there was unlike how I thought to characterize silence. You know, it is not just the void of sound. Silence itself has a character. And I was really aware that the silence I was hearing was not fragile. It couldn't be just defeated by a random sound, a random sound, a cow, a truck, a train. You know, nothing ended the silence. It just punctuated it. It let me know something about its character, its depth. But I realized that there was a silence there that was part of the landscape, part of the culture. It also makes me think of your own recording style. You've produced a lot of records. You can't you record very quickly. You tend to do it with people sitting in a room playing this the sound bleeds. Why do you like that sound? Because it's human? You know, if people were sitting in this room playing music together, there's a you know, the sort of a vendette diagram where things overlap, and if you're sitting here, you read it very naturally that, you know, the harmonic overtones of an instrument bleed into those of another. But when people in so called modern recording world, you know, this idea of isolating everything, and then when you're mixing trying to use reverbs and delays and such to recreate an atmosphere that was very naturally and more compellingly actually in the room if you knew how to take that picture. I just find that endlessly and chanting. I don't know why. I know that on the records that I've made and a lot of older records that I love. You know, a lot of what the drums sound like is how they're hitting the piano mic across the room, and that describes space. You know, you hear people playing a room together, you hear the size of the room. You know, the difference between them playing in a like a gymnasium sized studio and in a living room. You know, when sound finds limits of walls and ceiling, you know, you it's describing space. I'd like to be able to picture where people are. Place matters and I can vividly imagine where this is taking place. You know, those records where some of the energy is understood because of the limitation of the room, how instruments are colliding. I think about a record called Money Jungle that Duke Ellington made in the early seventies with Max Roach and Charles Mingus, and it's an intense record. You know, these upstarts of Mingus and Max Roach, you know playing, you know with this grand gentleman. He was the wildest of them. Duke was the most adventurous of all of them. But you can really hear their sound hit each other and hit the walls. You can feel natural compression of the space. And I like being able to picture them on top of each other up close, which they had to have been for that sound to be created. Before we started, I mentioned to you that one of my favorite pieces that you produced was Ann Peebles covering Bob Dylan's Tonight I'll be staying here with you from a great, great record you made. Thank you. You're great players, and your Billy Preston and Alan Toussant and all kinds of people. You said, she she wasn't she didn't hear that song, How did you how did you make that song hers? Or how did how did you help her make that song? Hers? I well, as I recall, I sent it to her and she was a bit unmoved. Not that she didn't like the song, she just didn't necessarily hear it in the context of the project as I had pitched it. And I just said, I think you're maybe stumbling on the production or Bob's voice, like you think, oh, that's a country song, but you know, country music, soul music structurally shares so many of the same so much of the same vocabulary, And all I had to do really was to ask and to think of it as a soul song. I said, just try singing through it, you know, at the piano or something. Just try singing through the song and maybe not worry about, you know, the reference recording. And then I think she heard it immediately because she sent me a demo of just heard a piano player playing through it and it was completely gorgeous. Right. I want to just mention two producers you've worked with, not even as producers, just just to know what you learn from him. The first is Alan to Song. What was it like working with him? Did he give you You were producing him at that point. Yeah, he produced so many Yeah, great great songs. What was that like? Oh man, how do I talk about that? Alan changed my life? You know, and when he passed, my wife saying, well, you'll never have another friendship like that one, because he was a you know, he was what my southern people referred to as a touched individual. You know, he was always an only part way of this world. He was always partly of another. He was a bit of a supernatural character. And I just seemed to when I met him. I just seemed to understand that we were maybe a very unlikely duo in some ways. But we worked together on many projects over ten years. You know, we traveled together. I took him to Germany to a festival I was creating, had him play, you know, with Michelle and Dago Cello at that festival. And you know, when I was producing Aaron Neville, Alan was the piano player. We went to a lot together. Even though truth be told, that I'm not I don't offer this up with any disrespect to Alan's son and daughter, who would you know, were his managers, But they and Alan's business partner didn't think that what I was asking Alan to do when I was producing the Bright Mississippi and American tunes. You know that those were not good ideas. They really thought he should walk the other way. And I don't know why, even with his own choir, they're singing in his ear saying at I don't know why you're doing this. This is not what you should be doing right now. And then he would say, yeah, but I'm gonna go with him anyway. I don't really understand that. We seem to have an unspoken understanding of each other. And I thought he was a miraculous man and many any ways. And one of the things that inspired me about him was as deep as he'd been in it. You know, he was already in the rock and roll Hall of Fame by the time I met him. Not that that means anything in particular other than he was a made man. You know, he was already on the mountain that he was so willing to be outside of his comfort zone. And he was significantly outside of his comfort zone. He was very uncomfortable coming into those pair of records. He had allowed me, he had invited me to create a concept for him and I in the case of Bright Mississippi. I picked all the music, I populated the room. I gave him these songs to learn as an assignment, you know, And I'm still I still marvel at the fact that he was willing to go there. You mentioned the little piano break he plays behind Anne in It's not I'd be staying here with you, And that was something I learned from him right away. It was the first thing I asked of him on that first day. We had cut the tune, and then I had this idea that I wanted him to play a piano break after the bridge and okay. He sits at the piano and he plays through, and I go on the talk back nervously and say, would you like to hear that back? And he said, I know what happened? What did you think of it? And I said, well, I guess you know what I think I need to hear it back. He said, okay, I'll wait, and I listened back and I said, I like it a good bit. Okay, then, but that thing of not really owning what I needed, and you know, under the guise of oh, you probably want to hear that back, and then I'll base my response on how I think you feel about what you just did, and he was he wouldn't have it. He was sort of respectfully insisting that I occupied that chair, and he did a few things like that, like the day Mavis was there and that was a beautiful reunion between the two of them, and he didn't have to do this at all. But at one point, maybe Us speaks to him across the control room and she was having such a great time. She said, Alan, this is so great being here with you. And when I make my next record, I'm gonna come straight down to New Orleans to you. He said, oh, maybe, as that's fine, but when you do, bring him with you, because he's the reason we're here. He's the reason this is happening. And I thought that was just the most generous thing. It was just overwhelming. Yeah, yeah, it just seems like and he had to be impeccibly dressed when he said he was always always. When we were making the The River and Reverse, you know, we jentaled most of the work in Los Angeles. But Alan's feeling was, if this record is gonna have my name on it, this is on maybe like ten weeks after Katrina happened, he said, that's the album he did, yeah, Elvis Costella, Yes, and Alan said, if this is any way that any of this project could be done in New Orleans, I want it to be. You know, I don't want to just talk about I hope music comes back. I want to be part of bringing it back. And at that point we weren't even Elvis through it to me and said, that's up to you. You're the producer, you know. And I said, look, I don't even know if that there's drinking water there. I mean there's a war zone. And I called at the time my younger brother, his brother in law at the time, was a doctor in New Orleans. So I got in touch with him and said, what's the scene down there? I mean, as their food, as their safe water. I don't you know the idea that we would come down there. I don't want to feel like a photo op, which you couldn't have because it was Alan's home. He had every reason and every right to go want to work there, but I wanted to be respectful of the moment at the same time, and this doctor that I called said, you know, look, if there's any way that you can come and work here, you should. People need to see something other than devastation happening here. So in the very end, we moved the entire camp, you know, for a couple of days down down to New Orleans, and that was just remarkable to be there with him. And I remember, I bring this up because you mentioned the way he was dressed. That when I was packing to go down in New Orleans late one night after a session, we're leaving the next morning, and I was packing the suit and my wife said, I don't think you know where you're going, you know, and you think you're gonna be wearing a suit. And I said, look, if you think Alan's going to step it down because of what we're walking into, I think you're crazy. And sure enough, when we got down there, he was even more regal, you know. He walked down there like a you know, like a like a prince from Africa. Yeah, I was. I was once on a plane with them, and I I never used to dress up for planes because I thought, now, you just want to be comfortable. I mean, I wasn't one of those guys that were like track suit yeah. Yeah, but but I was with a plane with him and he was he was in line ahead of me, standing Ramrod straight in this beautiful suit, and I said, yeah, I've got to dial it up. Yeah. Look at him, he looks comfortab I don't look comfortable. Yeah. I remember once we were in a session somewhere and somebody I don't know who would have said it like Alan, you want to take your jacket off, be more comfortable, and He's just wheeled around and said, what in the world makes you think I'm not comfortable? He was so rarely that pointed, but it was always wonderful moments when he would just be take you to task, like him saying to me, I know what happened. What did you think about what happened? Do you want to do another song? Sure, I will play this song called Orson Wells. We'll be right back with more from Joe Henry after the break, We're back with the rest of Bruce's conversation with Joe Henry. But first let's finish the song Orson Wells. Why is it called Orson Wells. I don't know, other than just that he was the messenger. He was the delivery system of this song. You know, I remember distinctly my wife and I were flying for the for like thirty six hours up to San Francisco to see a really dear friend in a play. And we got on the plane at Burbank, you know that flights about fifty minutes long. And I just do what I frequently do. I just opened a notebook and I just sort of watched my handwrite Orson Wells at the top of the page, and I don't know. I mean, I knew I wasn't running a song about Orson Wells. But for whatever reason, he was an evocative specter, and I knew that if I just if I listened, he was going to tell me what this song was that that was there to be written. Are there really great songs? Like is there a great Beatles song that has no effect on you? And you just think, yeah, whatever reason, doesn't a lot of them? Actually? Well, look, I like the Beatles, is fine, I really do. I like John in particular. I like Georgia. But I the Beatles didn't do to me in real time what they did to most of my peers. You know who did that for you? Bob? And I mean that's probably a pretty obvious in a way because his records are so especially his records are the middle sixties, but not only desire to which I think is incredibly underrated. There's a rawness to it. You can't miss, you can't miss the immediacy of it. You know. I hear the Beatles, and they're beautiful records. I mean, I'm not saying they're not beautiful records, but you know, I hear them, I hear the work, and I'm not as seduced by that as I am when I know that I'm witnessing, you know, like you're driving late at night and there's all of a sudden you you've ever had this experience. I had it once, driving late at night on a freeway somewhere in West Virginia and they're out in the middle of a field as a house completely on fire. You know, No, Joni Mitchell wrote a good song of it. Yes, Um, it's just the witnessing something that's is immediate and it's urgent. What's happening? You know. I listened to just like Tom Thumb's Blues or listened to you know, sooner or later one of us must know or something like. I can't miss that. This was like people just fucking hanging on, Like I mean, it's a runaway train in a way, and I'm endlessly engaged by that kind of real time urgency in a way that I'm not so much when I hear careful construction, you know, like when I was, you know, really young. I mean Bob happened to me when I was about eleven, and other music I was hearing at the same time that, like the you know Beatles, as an example, I was not, you know, held in thrall in the same way to to the labor. I heard of that being constructed as I was in witnessing a house burning off in a field on the side of a road. You know what I mean. Does that make sense? I'm not trying. You're often compared with Robbie robertson m I didn't know that. Who is I think that very seriously and I appreciate it. You know. I'm a man who named his son Levin. So I would have traded and and people think this is a little bit of sacrilege, you know, I would have traded the entirety of the Beatles catalog to have made music from Big Pink, you know. But that's music that is both feel spontaneous, but also it's highly polished. Sure, and I don't mind if it's constructed. I just don't want to be. I just don't want to know that it is. I don't I don't want to be telegraphed the meticulousness of the of the hand at work. I don't want to. I don't want to see the hand at work. I want the mystery to take over and take me over. Look, I'm a Sinatra freak, and those are meticulous records. You know. He did like thirty three takes in a row. I've got you under my skin. He knew that that was a something to be seized. And nonetheless, when I hear it, I hear a moment, I hear like you know, the house burning, I hear it happening. Sure I know now as an more educated person, how that went down. Like I said, I just you can still hear it. I want to. You know, it's all theater, Bruce. You know it's all phony. You know in that regard, you know the idea of even people who have this idea of purity. It's like, I record live in a room because I hey, it's an incredibly financially responsible way to work frequently, and it's the most direct line if you want the sound if you are playing in a room together then you get people in a room together and they play that's what you care about. You know. Now you're in the middle of this incredible career. You've done all this brilliant music, you've you've recordered, all these brilliant people. You're still described as you know, the critics darling and all that stuff. But you've had You've had the experience with your sister in law, who's Madonna. We haven't mentioned that, but she took one of your songs and made a big points for being this far into an interview without bringing by the lay. Well, I bring it up because I actually loved that album Hers and I thought before I knew it was yours, I thought it was. I think there are a lot of good songs on that album, by the way. But yeah, you know, critics, Grill Marcus could be very hard on people for not seizing the biggest possible stage. You know, he said that about Randy Newman. You know, you've got to go out and prove it. The proving ground is sixty thousand people in the stadium who all sang along. Well, you've had that experience. What's that like, Well, it's freakish because I haven't had that experience much. You know, well, I'm saying you had it with that song. I did. And I was at a an arena once in Orange County when she was doing that tour, which was running from nine to eleven. Um. I only bring that up because it just the air was electrified, you know, the country was in a very particular state of mind, and people gathered together and I had you know, I had pitched to her kind of something that she's doing now she's doing the theater tour. You know, I had said, look, why don't you just like park the whole cirque to soul a thing? Like she needs career advice from me? What your career look like mine looks? You know, you walked the streets effortlessly as if she wanted to. Um. But anyway, I had pitched this idea to her to like, you know, you don't need Cirque to sola happening on stage. You don't need all that. You know, you went a new concept. Think about what Marvin Gay would be doing if he's alive right now. Put together the most funky, badass like five piece band and co present yourself as a musician. What about that as an idea? You know, and she said, well, I don't know how that would play an arenas. That said, well that's the I have my idea. Get out of the arenas. You know, go check into the nicest hotel in every city and do ten nights somewhere you know it gets comfortable, and then explore it all. To say that that night, the first time that I've ever seen her performance were the mask you know, the grid of the night, which was incredibly intricate with stay, you know, elaborate, you know, choreography whatever. But at a moment when she did that song Don't tell me, she came out with she had an acoustic guitar, she sat on a stool, she had another guitar player on an acoustic guitar, and she had a beatbox. And we were in the like the second row. And you know, before that she'd just been in character, you know, Madonna, in corporate logo Madonna, you know even that's her real name. You know, there's a d M. Yeah, and you know it's all out here. But when she sat down to do that song, she looks straight at me and she said, this is for you, and did it like too, because guitars and a beat and at one point, the music all stops and twenty thousand people are all singing it. And that was a really unique moment, not only because it's really affirming just as a songwriter who operates decidedly out of the mainstream to have a moment like that, but it also reminded me that, you know, I've been told my whole career that my songs are obtuse, that they're too difficult, that they're not coverable. There you know, and I realized that it wasn't really about that as much as it was about the delivery system, because that's got some really cryptic, you know lines in it too, But there were twenty thousand people singing them, you know, wrapped in a different package. It went down really differently. You know, I'm not saying you're going to be your sister in law, But is it a feeling that, yeah, that's that's where the music belongs now? No, No, I don't feel that way. Might it belongs in for some people? It's not not been my path, you know. Um, you know who Bob Neworth is, well, he was he was Bob Dylan's like a sidekick and the Don't Look Back film, and he's a songwriter and a painter and a beautiful man. And when we met many years ago, he pulled me aside one night, like a Dutch uncle and said, you know what your problem is. I said no, but I think you're about to tell me. And he said, you you haven't created a persona, said everybody that you admire, whether it's Bob, or it's Tom Waits or I don't forget who else he listed, you know, they've gotta they've gotta they've created a public persona that's really persuasive and and you need to do that or you're not gonna get over. And I realized that I couldn't and I wouldn't. That's just not where I come from. I think I made a decision really early on, whether I was conscious of it or not, is that to like, Look, I'm not trying to create a mean Tom created this beautifully persuasive character that walks out ahead of his songs, and before he sings a word, you already have a sense of their language in their context because he has this character that you recognize and it's consistent. But I realized that that what I was going to try to do is write songs that were seductive enough that I could just disappear into them. You know, I know want the songs to be fodder for my character. I wanted to feed myself like a bunk of wood, into the fire of the songs and go up in sparks. You know. I wasn't trying to create a character that I had to like, Oh geez, what happens if I go out to get a paper and I'm not dressed like like my character? You know, if you become you know, that's a disaster. Okay, well listen. Thank you so much, Bruce, Thank you, thank you. It was really it was a pleasure, and I appreciate you doing the you know, doing the homework. Thanks to Joe Henry for playing songs off the new album, The Gospel according to Water and for talking to Bruce about the inspiration behind his work. If you're sure, to check out his new album plus a playlist of our favorite Joe Henry songs plus a playlist of his own at broken record podcast dot com. Broken Record is produced with help from Jason Gambrel, Neil LaBelle Lea Rose, Matt Laboza, and Martin Gonzalez for Pushkin Industries. Our theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond. Thanks for listening.