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, enjoyed episode. In the nineteen seventies and eighties, there was a revolution in Nashville that was every bit as important to country music as the Beatles were to rock and roll. A new generation of songwriters came along who didn't just want to write about cowboys and pickup trucks. They wanted to write about emotion and conflict and to bear their souls. My name is Bobby Braddock and I'm bald, and I write songs and borderline mentally ill. I'm Don Henry and I've been very spoiled being able to enjoy what I love doing for the longest time, and I still continue to do it to this day. I'm Don Schlitz and I'm with no particular talent at all. I was twenty years old and eighty dollars and got off a bus and I was in Nashville. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Broken Record. For this episode, I went to Nashville and sat down with three of the leaders of that revolution. Don Schlitz, who has written some of the greatest country music songs ever, Don Henry, the junior member of the Revolution, and the great Bobby Braddock, elder Statesman. Those of you who listened to my other podcast, Revisionist History, know that I can't set foot in Nashville without checking in with Bobby Braddock. It would be like going to Iceland and not saying Hi to New York. We all met at Sony Tree Studios on Music Row. We talked for hours and could have talked for a lot longer. In fact, we could devote an entire season of Broken Record just to those crucial Nashville years. So consider this a start chapter one in the oral history of the New Nashville. I made sure there was a piano for Bobby, and the two dons brought their guitars. I told them all they had to sing for their supper. Don Schlitz kick things off, and it only took two years to get cut. Why because it was it was too long, It's too linear melodically, there's no romantic situation. It took too long to go to the course. I don't know. I liked it. A lot of people liked it, and it finally nobody would cut it. And my publisher put out the demo and send it to radio, and they started playing a couple a friend of mine and and Hume Moffit cut it and put it out, and Conway Twitty's son put it out Charlie Tango, and suddenly there were three cuts of it on the on the charts, and then it was gone. I was still working as a computer operator. Oh you just you was still in Oh yeah, yeah, sure, oh yeah, you know, you know, writers got writers got to eat. But why I think is great about that song? It's full of life lessons like I don't play poker, but I don't think then I played a lot of poker, and I would always think about the lines in that song. Okay, no wonderful, you know, And I use that and and that's like a metaphor for the real life lessons that matter more than poker. And it's it's full of those. And you can just you could write that down and carry it when you and get it out and look at it when you're in an a tight situation. You know, does that does that song change? Does the success of that song change what people consider to be acceptable in a country song? I think it, I know, and with all humility, what it changed for me. For eventually Kenny Rogers cuts it and with that great voice, they make it up tempo, they move the chorus up. And that made it so I could write whatever I wanted to write the rest of my life. And I one thing I did not want to write was that song over and over again. So I got to write different songs. I got to emulate my pals who were also my heroes, though you know you wouldn't tell them that. And you write what you want to write, and you learn that you can amazingly enough. You have good taste. There's an an interesting thing that happened with Braddock and Harlan and Manny Bob McDill in this town that you can see a difference between Nashville songs or the songs that were written on music Row that stopped being corny, stop being that you'd sit on a haybell and sing, or on a barstool and have to sing, But you could sit by yourself quietly in a room and go like that song is about me. That song is about real issues that I have. It is not uh and and we While we have heroes from that era like Randy Newman, Bob McDill, Bob McDill, sorry, Bob Dylan and as you know, Gordon Light for those and great writers Joni Mitchell, I know you were, Paul Simon, Yeah, Paul McCartney and John Lennon and the Keith Richards and Emma Chair who we're writing songs that we love. There's an awful lot of and Holland does your Holland do not leave out notice writing a motown and stack that were feeling feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, and we're writing a story. I think Christofferson had an awful lot to do in popularizing that. I think Braddick had a lot of doing popularized that there is a sequence of events that happens. And as opposed to telling you I feel this way, I feel this way, we're saying this is what happened, period. And I think feelings go beyond words. That's why some of my me it's hard to differentiate between maybe if I say my favorite song, it might be one of my favorite records like I put Gold Restou on that Mountain on my list because just what happened in that studio and Ricky Skaggs and Petty Lovelace was singing with Vins on that thing. I still get tears in my eyes and chilled much when I hear the thing, And you know, it's a great story, but they could be singing it in Greek, you know, and I still love it. Well. You know. We also had the advantage, at least Don and I did it of tuning in the country radio and having people like like Christofferson or Tom T. Hall who were writing stories and a lot of times you had to sit in that chair and listen all the way to the end to get the payoff. So you had people that is unlike today where you want to payoff in ten seconds. Uh. People were willing to listen a little longer for something. There's there's there's a collective ADHD now where people don't want to I mean A and R people that they'll if it takes too long, like I song he started levering her today, whichever curly putman, nobody would possibly cut that now because it takes too long to get to the payoff. They even they're even wanting now the second verse to be just a little tiny verse, you know, whereas the second verse for us was, you know, we were told if we had a great first verse, that might be your second verse. Yes, it has to be, because you want something to build up to mean, what's what's a what's a A great example, another great example of a a song with a delayed payoff. Well, that that was one for sure. Is long? Is long? Is longok? Vail? Well, you you find out pretty quick that it's his best friends. He was in the arms of his best friend's wife kind of by the second and yeah, so you know he can't he's got a decision to make. And well, and then you know that if she wants do you guys know that song well enough to play it? John probably can you. The most powerful part of that, I think is when you say she walks these hills in her long black veil. Danny Dill and Mary John welcome Danny deal. I think was primarily the lyricist on that I heard they now is this true or not? They wrote it on the way of the session. Is that true? I don't know if that's true or not. But but uh. I had a song called Golden Ring. We were talking about where we should sue Conway when you had I Love to Lay You Down, and I said, and I told my publisher, I said, but they do that. Then Danny Dill and Mary John Welcome may sue me for stealing the melody from Long Black Veil. And I told that story to Mary John Wilcom. She said, we came pretty damn close to doing. Really, my goodness, that's strange. Well, I like this theme that we're on well, of these kind of story that are because a lot of you guys are seemed to be have worked in that well. I was a huge and still I am a huge Randy Newman fan. And the thing that struck me about Bobby before I even really got to know him, was that he was basically the country music version of that. And I think the thing that really woke me up to that was, Unfortunately, when I heard he Stopped Loving Her Today. I knew the title of it before I heard the song. I wish I'd heard it without knowing what the name of the song was, because the first line is he said I love you till I die, and I I just started laughing. So hard. I took the record off, I went because the title is he Stopped Loving Her Today, and the first line is he said I love you till I die. And I went, oh, he's dead. This guy's dead man instantly, and I just started and I think, what I loved about Bobby and what I loved about the Lubin Brothers and Tom T Holmes so much stuff. Is that a threat of irony that you wouldn't call it laugh out loud humor, but it's it's just so ironic, And to me, that's what Randy Newman taps into constantly. And so when I heard that song, and you know, every verse of he Stopped Loving Her Today ends with a joke. I mean, you know, you know we all went to see her, she we all wondered if she would It kept running through my mind those time he's over her for good. And then the thing about the smile, first time we'd seen him smile in years, Well, that's a joke. It is. Those are joke, and almost every one of them ends with that. But by the time you get that joke, it doesn't make you laugh. It makes you just get this biggest lump in your throat and you realize what a comedy tragedy life is. See. I always love the juxtaposition between something that me too, and I have written songs that I thought were funny songs and people took them very seriously and vice versa. Absolutely, it's happened to me over and over for year. I love writing a song that it's it's really very serious, but it's kind of taboo subject matter, so people laugh nervously over that. And that's what happened to me when I heard he stopped Loving Her today, and I use it today to this day. I get to tour and teach on some of these shows that I do, and I put that song up right away because I show people what you can do in such a short amount of time, how you can tell a huge story. And it uses all the little technical things about about that little running joke, even theduction of it, which is brilliant. Billy Cheryl, I think to me, I hold it up there with a song like we talked about earlier, like sale Away, which you can almost use and show students or anybody who's interested how you can unfold a story. We'll be back with more of my conversation with Bobby Braddock Don Schlitz and Don Henry. We're back with Bobby and the Two Dons. Don Henry, a self described hippie from California, wrote a hit record from Miranda Lambert with songwriter Philip Coleman, who's from West Tennessee. The song All Kinds of Kinds is an ode to diversity. I asked Don to play it for us. You know, we knew when we wrote that we had to kind of as oddballs go. We were odder than the people we were picking out the front, so we had to put ourselves in there at the end to show you that. It's that you know that we were there too. Otherwise it's just a you're getting on a soapbox and you're pointing fingers, and you really got to pay attention at point and the finger at yourself to make that kind of stuff work, at least from my experience, and that that's how it finally came together at the end for us. I love what she did. She she twisted it around a little bit. One of the things she said on that tag was and sent to some point of fingers. She says at some point the finger. Yeah, that's why she says it, which I think is great because she kind of owns that song. It sounds like she wrote it, and I like that. She's she's impish, perfect song for her, She's perfect. It sounds and that's what she told frank Lydell, who produced that record. She said, it just sounds like something I would write. And that made me feel good because she's a really good writer. Yeah. Yeah, were you thinking about her when you well, you know, we were, in fact when we wrote that. It was it was probably probably ten years before she moved to town. She was probably fifteen years old. Do you guys, do you when you're when you're writing songs and if you're not writing with the artist, but you're writing a song, do you have in your head anybody singing it other than yourself? No? I don't. I mean, I just want to sing it at the Bluebird Er. If I'm trying to emulate one of my heroes, like a Jonie or something, I'll say, Okay, what would Jonie do? And I'll try to bring that out. But it's not like I'm writing to pitch that you have Mitchell in your head. I love Joni Mitchell. When I'm looking to write a song and I can't really get into the groove. I'll get up early in the morning and get things going and put on Joni Mitchell, wow, Ry Newman, Paul Simon, sometimes people like Van Morrison. I really liked that because I just like the way he writes words. The great music can pump you up and make it. If you could only listen to one Joni Mitchell song in the morning to get you going, what would it be well for writing and for working on that It's it's a tough one, but but for me it's it was on my list, and it's both sides. Now it's clouds because I remember distinctly as a youngster hearing that song and going, oh see what she did there? You know, that kind of a thing, And that's that same anchor of a chorus that has a little bit of a twist each time it comes back around, and I think, well, that keeps the lessener from being bored, doesn't it. And yet it's just filled with life lessons written by such a young person at the time, and I think by hearing something like that at an early age, it helped make me wiser quicker, you know, as much as I loved bubblegum pop, to hear Joni Mitchell sing that, it was like, oh, this is what you can do with It's pretty cool changes, it's pretty amazing. Yeah. But the one Man Man by the Quick Lunch Down, he's playing real good for free. I mean, what a great country song that is. Can you guys do a little bit of that altogether? Is that possible? I don't know enough of it. Clouds from both sides now, from up band down, and then give or take and win or lose. It's cloud clouds illusions. I recall, I really don't know clouds at all. It's funny because she originally did it in that day. Yeahbody knows. Well. What I like about that thing is is it's kind of it's it's very textbooking and it's very technical, but when it's when it's going down, it's seamless, and it doesn't feel that way When you were talking about how to hear that from someone so young, it's a totally better song written sung by someone who's obviously really young, right, because it's no longer that it's not the cliche of the older person looking back. It's this weird, fascinating thing of this super young person saying you're not going to believe this amazement. But I have looked at life from both sides now right by constantly, you know, looking at his I mean it was the first time I heard the Girl from the North Country. My dad used to sing that one all the time to me, and I didn't even know who Bob Dylan was when he my dad would sing it. And then he had that Free Willing album, and I remember thinking that this was completely different than anything I'd heard because this guy was really young writing about such wise stuff. It was really cool. We'll be back with more broken record after this. I'm back with Bobby Braddock, John Henry and Don Schlitz. Drawing back to you can you give us? Now? I'm interested in a song that really not one of your own, a song that really kind of changed the way, transformed the way you thought about songwriting, that opened a door for you. Fairly easy to explain. My first company I went to in Nashville when I was twenty was Pete Drake Music because Pete Drake had played on John Wesley Harding and there was a young man named Buzz Raven was listening to song zero, but I played, you know, I walked in that hair down halfway down my back, and I was twenty years old and didn't look like a person that would be in wanting to be a country singer. And so I went up and played a few songs for him at the publishing company and he said, well, I don't really know what we're doing here yet, what I'm doing here yet, but let me make a phone call for you. You You gave me a number person to go see. He says, you go see him in a couple of days, he'll be expecting you. So I go over this company, this building walking. I didn't have a car in this hot day in April, you know, heavy guitar case. And I walk in and back then you could walk in, and I said, I'm supted to see somebody. My name is and somebody yells back, oh, I know what this is about. He comes out, and this guy with curly hair and wireroom glasses comes out and says, coming back and play some songs. So I went back and I pulled my guitar out and I've played a couple of songs and he says, we'll play me another. And I'm pretty sure that I'm this guy's big break. You know that I am it for him? And I'm going through and I play about eight or nine songs, and I'm thinking I'm being discovered. This is absolutely amazing and wonderful. I'm twenty years old and this is how great for this guy. He's like ten years older than me. And he says, let me show you what I do. And he's coming in here. It takes me into the little record room and says, well, it's just a single, and I knew that didn't mean it was very much because it wasn't on an album and it's a small label. It's a friend of mine. It's the B side, And he puts on this song in the and it starts to play, and live held it all in me. Lord knows, I've tried. It's an awful awake now you boys. The song was Amanda. I wish I could, but I can't do it justice because the singer was Don Williams, and it was on JMI Records. It was its twelve lines, uh, and it was a song called a Man. And that he didn't tell me that he'd written it by himself, or that he'd also written the A side, which was Come Early Morning, which was the number one song in America at the time. Uh, And I'm sitting there listening, going like, oh, you know, I've got a long way to go. And I think that what had changed for me was realizing that I didn't know a whole lot and talk about Bob McDill was the man, and he became my mentor and basically the only person that would see me for a few years when I was first here, and the only person I would go in and take songs to. And Gorcy passed on the Gambler, which was, you know, so he everybody makes mistakes, but he went on to write a large portion of the Don Williams songs that that that helped change this town. And I wrote, good old Boys like good old Boys like Me. It is his masterpiece. Give us, give us a taste of it. Hey, we were we were lucky, at least I was. I had just come to town at seventy nine, so all this stuff was happening. The Gambler had just been a huge hit, and then a year later he stopped loving her. Today was of course good old Boys like Me and stuff like that. So that was the bar that I had to come in, and I thought, well, that's an impossible bar to reach. But It was glorious and it was fun to try, but it was a wonderful club to join. It was it was, And I think that that's frustrating now. Is that a song that would say something like Hank and Tennessee, or a song like he stopped loving her today or unfortunately the Gambler would not be recorded today. And that's frustrating feeling. And so that bar that I held so high, it's a different bar now. I'm not saying that I don't know because I don't participate in that world like I did back then. But what I wanted to say about Amanda being so simple is then we ended up going with when Paul over Street, and now we're writing songs and actually I would find oh goodness gracious in the in the middle, I would find an idea, real simple, that's your song? Yeah? Really, yeah, I had no idea. It hit twice. It's one of my favorite songs. I've only ever heard the I think it's an astounding song. I haven't even heard the version by Elson kraus Reed. Keith Whitley recorded it first and then he passed away. Sadly, he was one of our great singers and tragically and there was a tribute album made it, and Alison Krause sang it, and then there's this movie comes out, And my understanding is in the movie The People, Ronan Keating is the guy who's name from a group called Boyzone, calls Alison Krause's office and asks for permission to sing the song, at which point I think they said, you know, you really probably should talk to the publisher and the writer, and they put it in a movie called notting Hill, and it was a pop record all over the world. Actually, actually it occurs at forty five and a half minutes into notting Hill. So if you see it, as I often do on television because it runs all the time, and you can just time it, DOLLI yell Stacy, it's on, It's on. If there was ever ever, if it was ever a perfect voice at Salison Kraus an amazing voice when you sing a song, I would love to sing when I sing a song rather than one of the my favorite thing I've done in two or three years, and show you how I just changed a line. I knew that I needed to change that line to make it fit today's market. I hope I can read these lyrics here, and I'll probably just make all kind of mistakes and blow the whole thing. But I don't try this anyway, thank you. I don't. I couldn't even hear all the words. What is what is the line you changed? Here's a line I changed. Okay, That's why I was wondering if I should take the top down off the pen. Uh. What I had originally said, I try to be a good man and everything. I try to put myself in the character of this guy who's kind of a typical Southerner and being a Southerner. Even though I really evolved, I mean, I still have a lot of these things in here that that I don't like about the South. I was that way myself. I mean, well was it. I was a teenager. I was a hardcore secret segregationist. I didn't think blacks and white people should go to school together. I really believe that shit. So the line I have here was I try to be a good man and everything I do. And the line I had was, you know, I love Jesus and I love my country too. And in the early two thousands, you could do that. You could do that when the country demographic was very conservative and there were all these patriotic songs and country radio. Now, if you had something like God and country right together, I think they wouldn't play it because it would sound like it was political, and they just don't want to go there because of the demographic country demographic. It's like it's like America itself. It's split right down the middle, and it's controversial. They don't want controversial. They don't want somebody to turn the dial. They don't want to lose half of their audience. So but you can still sing about Jesus occasionally, you know, you'll hear Jesus in the song, and you sure sing about whiskey. So I thought, what I'm going to do there? Then it said, yes, I love my whiskey, but I love Jesus too, And I think that made it probably exceptable. Can I can I point out the the hilariously absurd irony of that that it's moreible now for us to talk about whiskey than country. Huh. You can talk about whiskey's fine. Whiskey is not divisive, but country is. Like Bobby, I played Indeep, I played a little bit of Forever and Ever. Can you play that? Yeah? Alright? Second little backup vocals, Are you a union? Are all right? Adam? He's not union? No card. That was Don Schlitz, Don Henry and Bobby Braddock from Sony Tree Studios on Nashville's Music Row. Broken Record is produced by Justin Richmond and Jason Gambrel, with help from Bruce hadlam Me Label Jaquita Pascal, Jacob Smith, Julia Barton, Jacob Weisberg, and of course el Hafe, Rick Rubin. Special thanks to Adam Engelhardt, who engineered the session in Nashville to hear the song speech you in today's episode, sung by the artists who made them famous. Check out Broken Record podcast dot com. This show was brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

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, enjoyed episode. In the nineteen seventies and eighties, there was a revolution in Nashville that was every bit as important to country music as the Beatles were to rock and roll. A new generation of songwriters came along who didn't just want to write about cowboys and pickup trucks. They wanted to write about emotion and conflict and to bear their souls. My name is Bobby Braddock and I'm bald, and I write songs and borderline mentally ill. I'm Don Henry and I've been very spoiled being able to enjoy what I love doing for the longest time, and I still continue to do it to this day. I'm Don Schlitz and I'm with no particular talent at all. I was twenty years old and eighty dollars and got off a bus and I was in Nashville. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Broken Record. For this episode, I went to Nashville and sat down with three of the leaders of that revolution. Don Schlitz, who has written some of the greatest country music songs ever, Don Henry, the junior member of the Revolution, and the great Bobby Braddock, elder Statesman. Those of you who listened to my other podcast, Revisionist History, know that I can't set foot in Nashville without checking in with Bobby Braddock. It would be like going to Iceland and not saying Hi to New York. We all met at Sony Tree Studios on Music Row. We talked for hours and could have talked for a lot longer. In fact, we could devote an entire season of Broken Record just to those crucial Nashville years. So consider this a start chapter one in the oral history of the New Nashville. I made sure there was a piano for Bobby, and the two dons brought their guitars. I told them all they had to sing for their supper. Don Schlitz kick things off, and it only took two years to get cut. Why because it was it was too long, It's too linear melodically, there's no romantic situation. It took too long to go to the course. I don't know. I liked it. A lot of people liked it, and it finally nobody would cut it. And my publisher put out the demo and send it to radio, and they started playing a couple a friend of mine and and Hume Moffit cut it and put it out, and Conway Twitty's son put it out Charlie Tango, and suddenly there were three cuts of it on the on the charts, and then it was gone. I was still working as a computer operator. Oh you just you was still in Oh yeah, yeah, sure, oh yeah, you know, you know, writers got writers got to eat. But why I think is great about that song? It's full of life lessons like I don't play poker, but I don't think then I played a lot of poker, and I would always think about the lines in that song. Okay, no wonderful, you know, And I use that and and that's like a metaphor for the real life lessons that matter more than poker. And it's it's full of those. And you can just you could write that down and carry it when you and get it out and look at it when you're in an a tight situation. You know, does that does that song change? Does the success of that song change what people consider to be acceptable in a country song? I think it, I know, and with all humility, what it changed for me. For eventually Kenny Rogers cuts it and with that great voice, they make it up tempo, they move the chorus up. And that made it so I could write whatever I wanted to write the rest of my life. And I one thing I did not want to write was that song over and over again. So I got to write different songs. I got to emulate my pals who were also my heroes, though you know you wouldn't tell them that. And you write what you want to write, and you learn that you can amazingly enough. You have good taste. There's an an interesting thing that happened with Braddock and Harlan and Manny Bob McDill in this town that you can see a difference between Nashville songs or the songs that were written on music Row that stopped being corny, stop being that you'd sit on a haybell and sing, or on a barstool and have to sing, But you could sit by yourself quietly in a room and go like that song is about me. That song is about real issues that I have. It is not uh and and we While we have heroes from that era like Randy Newman, Bob McDill, Bob McDill, sorry, Bob Dylan and as you know, Gordon Light for those and great writers Joni Mitchell, I know you were, Paul Simon, Yeah, Paul McCartney and John Lennon and the Keith Richards and Emma Chair who we're writing songs that we love. There's an awful lot of and Holland does your Holland do not leave out notice writing a motown and stack that were feeling feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, and we're writing a story. I think Christofferson had an awful lot to do in popularizing that. I think Braddick had a lot of doing popularized that there is a sequence of events that happens. And as opposed to telling you I feel this way, I feel this way, we're saying this is what happened, period. And I think feelings go beyond words. That's why some of my me it's hard to differentiate between maybe if I say my favorite song, it might be one of my favorite records like I put Gold Restou on that Mountain on my list because just what happened in that studio and Ricky Skaggs and Petty Lovelace was singing with Vins on that thing. I still get tears in my eyes and chilled much when I hear the thing, And you know, it's a great story, but they could be singing it in Greek, you know, and I still love it. Well. You know. We also had the advantage, at least Don and I did it of tuning in the country radio and having people like like Christofferson or Tom T. Hall who were writing stories and a lot of times you had to sit in that chair and listen all the way to the end to get the payoff. So you had people that is unlike today where you want to payoff in ten seconds. Uh. People were willing to listen a little longer for something. There's there's there's a collective ADHD now where people don't want to I mean A and R people that they'll if it takes too long, like I song he started levering her today, whichever curly putman, nobody would possibly cut that now because it takes too long to get to the payoff. They even they're even wanting now the second verse to be just a little tiny verse, you know, whereas the second verse for us was, you know, we were told if we had a great first verse, that might be your second verse. Yes, it has to be, because you want something to build up to mean, what's what's a what's a A great example, another great example of a a song with a delayed payoff. Well, that that was one for sure. Is long? Is long? Is longok? Vail? Well, you you find out pretty quick that it's his best friends. He was in the arms of his best friend's wife kind of by the second and yeah, so you know he can't he's got a decision to make. And well, and then you know that if she wants do you guys know that song well enough to play it? John probably can you. The most powerful part of that, I think is when you say she walks these hills in her long black veil. Danny Dill and Mary John welcome Danny deal. I think was primarily the lyricist on that I heard they now is this true or not? They wrote it on the way of the session. Is that true? I don't know if that's true or not. But but uh. I had a song called Golden Ring. We were talking about where we should sue Conway when you had I Love to Lay You Down, and I said, and I told my publisher, I said, but they do that. Then Danny Dill and Mary John Welcome may sue me for stealing the melody from Long Black Veil. And I told that story to Mary John Wilcom. She said, we came pretty damn close to doing. Really, my goodness, that's strange. Well, I like this theme that we're on well, of these kind of story that are because a lot of you guys are seemed to be have worked in that well. I was a huge and still I am a huge Randy Newman fan. And the thing that struck me about Bobby before I even really got to know him, was that he was basically the country music version of that. And I think the thing that really woke me up to that was, Unfortunately, when I heard he Stopped Loving Her Today. I knew the title of it before I heard the song. I wish I'd heard it without knowing what the name of the song was, because the first line is he said I love you till I die, and I I just started laughing. So hard. I took the record off, I went because the title is he Stopped Loving Her Today, and the first line is he said I love you till I die. And I went, oh, he's dead. This guy's dead man instantly, and I just started and I think, what I loved about Bobby and what I loved about the Lubin Brothers and Tom T Holmes so much stuff. Is that a threat of irony that you wouldn't call it laugh out loud humor, but it's it's just so ironic, And to me, that's what Randy Newman taps into constantly. And so when I heard that song, and you know, every verse of he Stopped Loving Her Today ends with a joke. I mean, you know, you know we all went to see her, she we all wondered if she would It kept running through my mind those time he's over her for good. And then the thing about the smile, first time we'd seen him smile in years, Well, that's a joke. It is. Those are joke, and almost every one of them ends with that. But by the time you get that joke, it doesn't make you laugh. It makes you just get this biggest lump in your throat and you realize what a comedy tragedy life is. See. I always love the juxtaposition between something that me too, and I have written songs that I thought were funny songs and people took them very seriously and vice versa. Absolutely, it's happened to me over and over for year. I love writing a song that it's it's really very serious, but it's kind of taboo subject matter, so people laugh nervously over that. And that's what happened to me when I heard he stopped Loving Her today, and I use it today to this day. I get to tour and teach on some of these shows that I do, and I put that song up right away because I show people what you can do in such a short amount of time, how you can tell a huge story. And it uses all the little technical things about about that little running joke, even theduction of it, which is brilliant. Billy Cheryl, I think to me, I hold it up there with a song like we talked about earlier, like sale Away, which you can almost use and show students or anybody who's interested how you can unfold a story. We'll be back with more of my conversation with Bobby Braddock Don Schlitz and Don Henry. We're back with Bobby and the Two Dons. Don Henry, a self described hippie from California, wrote a hit record from Miranda Lambert with songwriter Philip Coleman, who's from West Tennessee. The song All Kinds of Kinds is an ode to diversity. I asked Don to play it for us. You know, we knew when we wrote that we had to kind of as oddballs go. We were odder than the people we were picking out the front, so we had to put ourselves in there at the end to show you that. It's that you know that we were there too. Otherwise it's just a you're getting on a soapbox and you're pointing fingers, and you really got to pay attention at point and the finger at yourself to make that kind of stuff work, at least from my experience, and that that's how it finally came together at the end for us. I love what she did. She she twisted it around a little bit. One of the things she said on that tag was and sent to some point of fingers. She says at some point the finger. Yeah, that's why she says it, which I think is great because she kind of owns that song. It sounds like she wrote it, and I like that. She's she's impish, perfect song for her, She's perfect. It sounds and that's what she told frank Lydell, who produced that record. She said, it just sounds like something I would write. And that made me feel good because she's a really good writer. Yeah. Yeah, were you thinking about her when you well, you know, we were, in fact when we wrote that. It was it was probably probably ten years before she moved to town. She was probably fifteen years old. Do you guys, do you when you're when you're writing songs and if you're not writing with the artist, but you're writing a song, do you have in your head anybody singing it other than yourself? No? I don't. I mean, I just want to sing it at the Bluebird Er. If I'm trying to emulate one of my heroes, like a Jonie or something, I'll say, Okay, what would Jonie do? And I'll try to bring that out. But it's not like I'm writing to pitch that you have Mitchell in your head. I love Joni Mitchell. When I'm looking to write a song and I can't really get into the groove. I'll get up early in the morning and get things going and put on Joni Mitchell, wow, Ry Newman, Paul Simon, sometimes people like Van Morrison. I really liked that because I just like the way he writes words. The great music can pump you up and make it. If you could only listen to one Joni Mitchell song in the morning to get you going, what would it be well for writing and for working on that It's it's a tough one, but but for me it's it was on my list, and it's both sides. Now it's clouds because I remember distinctly as a youngster hearing that song and going, oh see what she did there? You know, that kind of a thing, And that's that same anchor of a chorus that has a little bit of a twist each time it comes back around, and I think, well, that keeps the lessener from being bored, doesn't it. And yet it's just filled with life lessons written by such a young person at the time, and I think by hearing something like that at an early age, it helped make me wiser quicker, you know, as much as I loved bubblegum pop, to hear Joni Mitchell sing that, it was like, oh, this is what you can do with It's pretty cool changes, it's pretty amazing. Yeah. But the one Man Man by the Quick Lunch Down, he's playing real good for free. I mean, what a great country song that is. Can you guys do a little bit of that altogether? Is that possible? I don't know enough of it. Clouds from both sides now, from up band down, and then give or take and win or lose. It's cloud clouds illusions. I recall, I really don't know clouds at all. It's funny because she originally did it in that day. Yeahbody knows. Well. What I like about that thing is is it's kind of it's it's very textbooking and it's very technical, but when it's when it's going down, it's seamless, and it doesn't feel that way When you were talking about how to hear that from someone so young, it's a totally better song written sung by someone who's obviously really young, right, because it's no longer that it's not the cliche of the older person looking back. It's this weird, fascinating thing of this super young person saying you're not going to believe this amazement. But I have looked at life from both sides now right by constantly, you know, looking at his I mean it was the first time I heard the Girl from the North Country. My dad used to sing that one all the time to me, and I didn't even know who Bob Dylan was when he my dad would sing it. And then he had that Free Willing album, and I remember thinking that this was completely different than anything I'd heard because this guy was really young writing about such wise stuff. It was really cool. We'll be back with more broken record after this. I'm back with Bobby Braddock, John Henry and Don Schlitz. Drawing back to you can you give us? Now? I'm interested in a song that really not one of your own, a song that really kind of changed the way, transformed the way you thought about songwriting, that opened a door for you. Fairly easy to explain. My first company I went to in Nashville when I was twenty was Pete Drake Music because Pete Drake had played on John Wesley Harding and there was a young man named Buzz Raven was listening to song zero, but I played, you know, I walked in that hair down halfway down my back, and I was twenty years old and didn't look like a person that would be in wanting to be a country singer. And so I went up and played a few songs for him at the publishing company and he said, well, I don't really know what we're doing here yet, what I'm doing here yet, but let me make a phone call for you. You You gave me a number person to go see. He says, you go see him in a couple of days, he'll be expecting you. So I go over this company, this building walking. I didn't have a car in this hot day in April, you know, heavy guitar case. And I walk in and back then you could walk in, and I said, I'm supted to see somebody. My name is and somebody yells back, oh, I know what this is about. He comes out, and this guy with curly hair and wireroom glasses comes out and says, coming back and play some songs. So I went back and I pulled my guitar out and I've played a couple of songs and he says, we'll play me another. And I'm pretty sure that I'm this guy's big break. You know that I am it for him? And I'm going through and I play about eight or nine songs, and I'm thinking I'm being discovered. This is absolutely amazing and wonderful. I'm twenty years old and this is how great for this guy. He's like ten years older than me. And he says, let me show you what I do. And he's coming in here. It takes me into the little record room and says, well, it's just a single, and I knew that didn't mean it was very much because it wasn't on an album and it's a small label. It's a friend of mine. It's the B side, And he puts on this song in the and it starts to play, and live held it all in me. Lord knows, I've tried. It's an awful awake now you boys. The song was Amanda. I wish I could, but I can't do it justice because the singer was Don Williams, and it was on JMI Records. It was its twelve lines, uh, and it was a song called a Man. And that he didn't tell me that he'd written it by himself, or that he'd also written the A side, which was Come Early Morning, which was the number one song in America at the time. Uh, And I'm sitting there listening, going like, oh, you know, I've got a long way to go. And I think that what had changed for me was realizing that I didn't know a whole lot and talk about Bob McDill was the man, and he became my mentor and basically the only person that would see me for a few years when I was first here, and the only person I would go in and take songs to. And Gorcy passed on the Gambler, which was, you know, so he everybody makes mistakes, but he went on to write a large portion of the Don Williams songs that that that helped change this town. And I wrote, good old Boys like good old Boys like Me. It is his masterpiece. Give us, give us a taste of it. Hey, we were we were lucky, at least I was. I had just come to town at seventy nine, so all this stuff was happening. The Gambler had just been a huge hit, and then a year later he stopped loving her. Today was of course good old Boys like Me and stuff like that. So that was the bar that I had to come in, and I thought, well, that's an impossible bar to reach. But It was glorious and it was fun to try, but it was a wonderful club to join. It was it was, And I think that that's frustrating now. Is that a song that would say something like Hank and Tennessee, or a song like he stopped loving her today or unfortunately the Gambler would not be recorded today. And that's frustrating feeling. And so that bar that I held so high, it's a different bar now. I'm not saying that I don't know because I don't participate in that world like I did back then. But what I wanted to say about Amanda being so simple is then we ended up going with when Paul over Street, and now we're writing songs and actually I would find oh goodness gracious in the in the middle, I would find an idea, real simple, that's your song? Yeah? Really, yeah, I had no idea. It hit twice. It's one of my favorite songs. I've only ever heard the I think it's an astounding song. I haven't even heard the version by Elson kraus Reed. Keith Whitley recorded it first and then he passed away. Sadly, he was one of our great singers and tragically and there was a tribute album made it, and Alison Krause sang it, and then there's this movie comes out, And my understanding is in the movie The People, Ronan Keating is the guy who's name from a group called Boyzone, calls Alison Krause's office and asks for permission to sing the song, at which point I think they said, you know, you really probably should talk to the publisher and the writer, and they put it in a movie called notting Hill, and it was a pop record all over the world. Actually, actually it occurs at forty five and a half minutes into notting Hill. So if you see it, as I often do on television because it runs all the time, and you can just time it, DOLLI yell Stacy, it's on, It's on. If there was ever ever, if it was ever a perfect voice at Salison Kraus an amazing voice when you sing a song, I would love to sing when I sing a song rather than one of the my favorite thing I've done in two or three years, and show you how I just changed a line. I knew that I needed to change that line to make it fit today's market. I hope I can read these lyrics here, and I'll probably just make all kind of mistakes and blow the whole thing. But I don't try this anyway, thank you. I don't. I couldn't even hear all the words. What is what is the line you changed? Here's a line I changed. Okay, That's why I was wondering if I should take the top down off the pen. Uh. What I had originally said, I try to be a good man and everything. I try to put myself in the character of this guy who's kind of a typical Southerner and being a Southerner. Even though I really evolved, I mean, I still have a lot of these things in here that that I don't like about the South. I was that way myself. I mean, well was it. I was a teenager. I was a hardcore secret segregationist. I didn't think blacks and white people should go to school together. I really believe that shit. So the line I have here was I try to be a good man and everything I do. And the line I had was, you know, I love Jesus and I love my country too. And in the early two thousands, you could do that. You could do that when the country demographic was very conservative and there were all these patriotic songs and country radio. Now, if you had something like God and country right together, I think they wouldn't play it because it would sound like it was political, and they just don't want to go there because of the demographic country demographic. It's like it's like America itself. It's split right down the middle, and it's controversial. They don't want controversial. They don't want somebody to turn the dial. They don't want to lose half of their audience. So but you can still sing about Jesus occasionally, you know, you'll hear Jesus in the song, and you sure sing about whiskey. So I thought, what I'm going to do there? Then it said, yes, I love my whiskey, but I love Jesus too, And I think that made it probably exceptable. Can I can I point out the the hilariously absurd irony of that that it's moreible now for us to talk about whiskey than country. Huh. You can talk about whiskey's fine. Whiskey is not divisive, but country is. Like Bobby, I played Indeep, I played a little bit of Forever and Ever. Can you play that? Yeah? Alright? Second little backup vocals, Are you a union? Are all right? Adam? He's not union? No card. That was Don Schlitz, Don Henry and Bobby Braddock from Sony Tree Studios on Nashville's Music Row. Broken Record is produced by Justin Richmond and Jason Gambrel, with help from Bruce hadlam Me Label Jaquita Pascal, Jacob Smith, Julia Barton, Jacob Weisberg, and of course el Hafe, Rick Rubin. Special thanks to Adam Engelhardt, who engineered the session in Nashville to hear the song speech you in today's episode, sung by the artists who made them famous. Check out Broken Record podcast dot com. This show was brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.