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[SPEAKER_00]: Today's episode with Jonas Born was originally aired on September 18, 2020.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope that you
[SPEAKER_00]: But my guest this week moved to New York City to study film and ended up a musician.
[SPEAKER_00]: Joan Osborne enrolled at New York University to study under legendary documentary George Stoney, but ended up singing in various night clubs in Manhattan and then destiny took its course.
[SPEAKER_00]: She signed a Mercury Records and in 1995 released her debut album, Relish, which featured the Multi Platinum Hit, one of us.
[SPEAKER_00]: For any of our listeners who are too young to have remembered it, that song was a ubiquitous smash played everywhere in the country and around the world for about two years straight anywhere you went.
[SPEAKER_00]: Since then, she's continued releasing critically acclaimed albums
[SPEAKER_00]: She's headlined the Lilith Fair, she's toured with the Dixie Chicks, the Dead, Phil Lash, and many others.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was featured in the 2002 documentary film, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, and toured with Motown Sidemen, the Funk Brothers.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's been nominated for 8 Grammy Awards.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's appeared on the Tonight Show, The Late Show is David Letterman, and Saturday Night Live.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's recorded for Mercury, Interscope, Polygram, and Universal Music.
[SPEAKER_00]: The New York Times has said she sings with fourth whiteness and finesse.
[SPEAKER_00]: American songwriter once said of her debut that it was that rare breed of album where critical consensus popular approval in enduring appeal unite.
[SPEAKER_00]: A few weeks ago, Joan was kind enough to jump on the phone with me and tell me about her journey so far.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jonas went, thanks so much for being a part of the working songwriter, you grew up in Kentucky, made an early move to New York City.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1980s, that must have been quite a culture shock for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you describe your impressions of the city when you first arrived?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I actually first came to New York City via the port authority.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was on a bus, and if you are familiar with New York City, you know that
[SPEAKER_01]: Port Authority is kind of this teeming mass of humanity right next to the whole time square area.
[SPEAKER_01]: So coming into New York City in that way was kind of shocking.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, of course, I knew what to expect that it was a big city.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the details of it, you know, I didn't really, they were all very new to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, I, I loved New York City from the moment I came here and I loved that you could walk down the street and see every kind of person, every nationality, every fashion sensibility, every sexual orientation, everything, all out in the street and just the, the mass of people, you know, I, I found it really liberating and I think coming from a town that was
[SPEAKER_01]: pretty small and everybody kind of knew everybody and to be sort of dropped into the midst of New York and this vast, you know, canvas of people was amazing and I still love that about New York.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it sounds more of a feeling of exhilaration rather than intimidation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, there was a fair share of both, let's put it that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was up for it but, you know, it was not always easy, you know, of course I was
[SPEAKER_01]: I was a student.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't have any money.
[SPEAKER_01]: I, you know, was living in the crappy apartment.
[SPEAKER_01]: I, you know, woke up one morning with a cockroach perched on my upper lip, you know, it was pretty, you know, it was pretty down to the bone, you know, as many students are, you know, and you know, I didn't have money for a raincoat or.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I didn't have good shoes, and I had to walk everywhere, so it was rough, but that energy of being in the city really kept me going and kept me excited.
[SPEAKER_00]: That sounds like the legit baptism by fire of moving to New York City.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you move there to study film.
[SPEAKER_01]: What discipline of film were you studying and what drew you to that?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it first I just wanted to learn everything that I could, and I didn't know what particular discipline I might go into, but I started pretty quickly to gravitate toward documentary films, and that really sort of became my focus, and I thought that's what I was going to do with, you know, for my career and with my life was, was getting involved in documentary films and make documentaries, and I think the thing that really,
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of galvanized me about that is just that, you know, the characters that you would meet in documentary films were so interesting and so unique and so much more, you know, individual than anything that you would see in a fiction film that I just was so turned on by that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I had some great teachers too.
[SPEAKER_01]: I studied with George Stony who sort of alleged in documentary film and it really that really
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, kids growing up now who have Netflix, everyone is so used to having documentaries at their fingertips.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's almost like a glut of documentaries, but I mean, I can imagine in the 1980s, that was still a very kind of nascent art form.
[SPEAKER_00]: It must have been a small community of people that were making those professionally.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think it was a smaller community than the fiction film community, and documentaries were sort of notorious for being
[SPEAKER_01]: The place where you go to, you know, for all your dreams of economic security to die, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't exactly a plate.
[SPEAKER_01]: You were not going to get rich making documentaries film.
[SPEAKER_01]: And even somebody like Ken Burns, you know, will play the same thing even now.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, there's all these different opportunities for people to see documentaries which didn't exist back then.
[SPEAKER_01]: So people tended to do it for the love of it and the sense of real, like a sense of a calling to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, well, speaking of that, then economic insecurity, you went from the fine frying pan into the fire then to go into the music business.
[SPEAKER_00]: So tell me, you got your sort of professional start.
[SPEAKER_00]: It seems sort of like casually singing in some clubs in New York City for fun or where you, or you exploring that as a new avenue, how intentional was your shift into music?
[SPEAKER_01]: really just that I kind of stumbled upon this music scene that was happening kind of all around me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had gone out for a drink with a guy who lived in my building and the bar that was on the corner happened to be a blue bar and this was late at night so the band had finished but piano player was still there playing just for himself and for a handful of patrons that were still in the bar.
[SPEAKER_01]: and my friend dared me to go up and sing a song with him and said that he would buy the drinks if I did that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, being the broke student that I was, I'm like, OK. And I went up and introduced myself to the piano player and we, you know, talked for a second and figured out that there was a song that we knew and figured out that, you know, there was a key that I could probably sing it in.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I sang the Billie Holiday song, God Bless the Child, you know, just really sort of impromptu like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: said, well, you know, that's pretty good.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have an open mic night here once a week, why don't you come down and sing again.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I started going to this open mic night.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I started meeting, you know, a lot of musicians and I started hearing about other clubs that had open mic nights.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I just kind of slowly, you know, it sort of slowly dawned on me that there was all this music happening around, you know, I hadn't really been that aware of it because I was so concentrated on studying
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think there was something about just the act of singing that really opened up these places in me that I had been kind of closed off to.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, filmmaking is a wonderful art form, but it's an art form that is much more intellectual and it's much more about technology, whereas music in particular, singing is about your body and it's about
[SPEAKER_01]: your soul and it's this very physicality of it and the very heightened emotional you know part of it that I think I was that I had been sort of closed off to and music really opened that part of me up and it was very exciting it was frightening to sort of be vulnerable on that way especially if you're standing on a stage in front of a you
[SPEAKER_01]: It can be frightening and intimidating, but it can also be very liberating.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's what really turned me on to music.
[SPEAKER_01]: And eventually, I got so involved in music scene and was spending all this time going out to clubs and seeing bands and spending all my spare money on, you know,
[SPEAKER_01]: I realized that I was kind of hooked and I thought to myself, well, if I don't follow this and see where it goes, I'm always going to regret it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's when I decided to try to do music seriously.
[SPEAKER_00]: that must have been sort of daunting though there's this idea of the sunk cost fallacy which it's much harder to walk away from something once you have a lot invested in it you had time and your own money you were putting yourself through school invested in film school there had to be a part of you that said no I'll just stay the course was that the case or were you completely sure about making that switch to music?
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I wasn't sure about it at all, and I definitely, you know, had some reservations about doing it, but as I said, I, you know, I was still young and I felt like if I don't at least give this a try, I'm always going to wonder what would have happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I think that was probably true.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think if I had continued to follow this, you know, course of being
[SPEAKER_01]: And not that, you know, being a filmmaker that probably would have been a very satisfying career and could have also been a great life, but there was something that was just more insistence to me about music.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, before you got to your breakout record with Mercury records and the album relish, I noticed this was very interesting to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a good amount of time between when you first started singing clubs and when that break through happened and you even started your own label in 1991, Womanly Hips, which
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, people who are in the music business now, that's a normal thing for a singer songwriter to start their own label.
[SPEAKER_00]: Back then, it was positively revolutionary in a way.
[SPEAKER_00]: How did you decide to start your own company like that and how did it work on a technical level?
[SPEAKER_00]: How did you put it together?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I decided to start my own label because I had started playing in clubs in New York
[SPEAKER_01]: playing with my own band like five nights a week in New York City and I realized I needed to kind of stretch out and so on the advice of the guy who was managing me, managing me at that time, a guy named Paul Ricelli, I started looking for work in cities nearby and we would go up to Boston and we would go to Rochester and we would go to Burlington, Vermont and we go to Washington DC, we go to Philly, we'd go to
[SPEAKER_01]: Grant and PA, we would go anywhere that was within a day's drive and we started building a following that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: And wherever we went and wherever we played, people were always coming up to us after the show and saying, I want to buy your music, where can I buy it?
[SPEAKER_01]: And we didn't have anything to sell them, we didn't have a record to sell them.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it was literally just because I needed to make a record because people were asking for one.
[SPEAKER_01]: And nobody was standing around looking to offer me a record deal.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I thought, well, you know, I guess I need to figure out how to do this by myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I went to a bookstore and I found this book called How to Release Your Own, you know, record and just, you know, sort of went through the steps.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, you say that it was revolutionary, but, you know, this comes after, you know, this was in the 1980s and there were plenty of, you know, punk labels and DIY labels that have been doing this kind of things since the 70s.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there was information out there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there was a bit of a blueprint and a map of how to do this for yourself, that was there for me to follow.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it wasn't like I just made it all up on my own.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were books and, you know, this was before the internet.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there were no websites, but there were books that you could find that sort of laid out the steps for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what I did.
[SPEAKER_00]: I got you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I guess we a lot of that punk DIY stuff and also God rest his soul John Prime kind of did that a bunch of movies with boy records.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's just born of necessity when you can't wait around for someone to come along and pick you, you know, if what you really want to do is get your music out there.
[SPEAKER_01]: If no one's standing around waiting to give you a record deal or to make you famous
[SPEAKER_01]: you just have to figure out how to do it for yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Indeed, and I can't think of a better reason for making a record than a bunch of people coming to a show in saying, I'd like to buy your record.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's a great reason for the record.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we knew we could sell at least some of them, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, totally.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, so eventually after that, after really pound in the pavement all over the East Coast and regionally,
[SPEAKER_00]: someone did come to you and say, I want to sign you, it was mercury records, you go into make your breakthrough album relish.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you talk to me about how that whole process worked and the making of that album?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, we were playing a show in Philadelphia and a guy named Rob Heimann who was a member of the band, the Hooters, was at the show and he came back to these
[SPEAKER_01]: you know the music that he'd heard and he said I have a friend who's just starting an imprint at Mercury record and I think you should go talk to him this is exactly the kind of thing that he's looking for.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I went and spoke to you know Rob friend who happened to be a guy named Rick Tertoff and Rick Tertoff was a producer who had had some success with Sophie Hawkins Sophie B Hawkins and also with Cindy Lauper.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had some huge huge hits with Cindy Lauper.
[SPEAKER_01]: and had produced her first record.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I went and met with him and he was just starting his own imprint at Mercury Records.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, he was just really very chill guy, very smart, you know, soft spoken, but very thoughtful.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we sat in his office and we had this very long conversation and, you know, we kind of just got to know each other.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I thought to myself,
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, the stereotypical record business dude who's all hiding and, you know, promising the moon and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's just trying to take time to get to know me and get to know what I'm about.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I really appreciate that about him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, we ultimately came to an agreement that we would work together.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was a fan of Cindy Lopper, and I respected that he had produced her.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was a fan of the work that he'd done with
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, so we ended up working together with him and with Rob Hyman and also a guy named Eric bazillion, another member of the Hooters, the four of us work together in the studio to write and record the album that would become relish.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, it was a very lengthy process and it was really, you know, this word gets you to love, but it was really organic, you know, we sit around in the studio and people would have ideas and
[SPEAKER_01]: And that would, you know, somebody would have an idea for a chord progression and that would spark a melody idea and I pull out my notebooks and throw some lyrics and some, you know, some singing at it and, you know, some of the ideas went nowhere and some of them became songs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's, that's see when I was a kid.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought that's how every album would get made.
[SPEAKER_01]: Surprisingly, if you like it, it's any way you can do it as the right way to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, definitely, but that does sound like a really edifying process to be able to sit around with people that you respect and dig and just make art with them for the sake of making art at a certain point sounds like.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, I don't think anybody necessarily thought
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, it was we were going to make some giant hit record.
[SPEAKER_01]: I certainly didn't think that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I just, I just wanted to do something that I liked and that would be cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, the people that I admired were people like Tom White, you know, who had an amazing career, did his own music in the way that he wanted to never had a giant hit, but was always had an audience that was there, ready to go along with whatever he was interested in doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to me, that was sort of, you know, the ideal was to have a career like that, and it was kind of a surprise to me that, you know, relish ended up being, you know, the hit that it was and getting that kind of attention that it got and selling as many records as it did.
[SPEAKER_00]: At what point obviously the song that took off from relish was one of us, when that started taking off, was there a particular moment when you realize that your life was professionally at least was going to be different afterwards?
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, you know, I'm not really sure if there was a single moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we were on the road myself and my road band.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, from the time that relish was released, we went out and toured and toured and toured and toured.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it wasn't until many months into us being on this sort of endless tour that we saw in one of us started to get attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we started to, you know, we revisiting radio stations that we really went and, you know, we started to hear back from, you know, from people in the shows and from the people at the radio stations.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, this song's getting
[SPEAKER_01]: a lot of traction people really like it.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're requesting it and it's climbing up our charts and whatever and and you know, we were happy about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we were sort of in the day to day reality of you get up in the morning.
[SPEAKER_01]: You get into the van.
[SPEAKER_01]: You drive to the next town.
[SPEAKER_01]: You unload the gear.
[SPEAKER_01]: You do your soundtrack.
[SPEAKER_01]: You go.
[SPEAKER_01]: You dinner somewhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: You do your show.
[SPEAKER_01]: you try to find the hotel, you wake up and you go up and crash and that's just your day-to-day reality.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, it wasn't, it never really dawned on me, I don't think of like, here's this moment of like, oh my gosh, I'm going to be famous, you know, it all sort of, it just kind of the venues got bigger and the crowds got bigger and the responsibilities to publicize things
[SPEAKER_01]: as the record became more popular as a song, one of us became more popular, there was more work to do to support that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But really it was kind of just an extension of what we had been doing before.
[SPEAKER_00]: it sounds just like a very good and positive version of the frog being boiled in water and not knowing that the people just like the best possible version of that um so you you were torn a ton then and your life must look very different for the next you know uh let's say four or five six years after that album came out you must have been doing a ton
[SPEAKER_00]: How did you handle that?
[SPEAKER_00]: What was it uniformly good?
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it a mix like that seems like fun and exciting, but I can see there being some stressful parts of that and some overwhelming parts of that as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, I mean, all that you say is the very true, there were definitely parts of it that were incredibly exciting and to be able to travel around the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: play music for people in front of bigger and bigger and bigger crowds and you know playing events like the rough-keeled festival and playing you know for the Olympics in Atlanta and you know going on TV and doing the David Letterman show and doing the tonight show and you know all those things were really cool and really exciting and I have to say that being on television
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not a huge thing for me, but once my family saw me on television, you know, my parents who had not been particularly supportive of, you know, my choice to do music, suddenly they were all in.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, there was, oh, I understand now, I get it now.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, so that part of it was really exciting.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, there were certainly parts of it that were not super exciting.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'm kind of a private person.
[SPEAKER_01]: Suddenly, I was very recognizable and people, you know, everywhere I went, people were like, oh my god, that's Jonah's born and would be, you know, following me around and, you know, people would pull their cars over onto the sidewalk if I was walking down the street and, you know, jump out and try to follow me and, you know, it was crazy stuff like that, none of which I really enjoyed.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that was maybe not so great.
[SPEAKER_01]: And also the, you know, the pressure of
[SPEAKER_01]: putting out a follow-up to the relish record.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it really did a number on my head because I was not able to come up with a follow-up for years and had like the sophomore slump, like the textbook example of the sophomore slump.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was a tough thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I have to say, I think coming out of that, it taught me a lot about
[SPEAKER_01]: Just, you know, you really have to get out of your own head and you really have to be in love with the process of making music and forget about any product and forget about, you know, what might happen with it and and will it be successful and will it not be successful and you know they're you have to make a space for yourself where you forget about all that and it's not an easy thing to do and I wasn't able to do it for a long time, but it's it's really necessary.
[SPEAKER_00]: It sounds like one of the ways that you were able to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually, I played a festival with you years ago, like 10 years ago, I saw you playing with trigger hippie, and it was the first time as a young person playing music, because I'd known your music, and loved it when I was a kid in the 90s, and it was my first time seeing an artist that I really dug, and I was like, oh, they're,
[SPEAKER_00]: if you work really hard and you're smart about it, there can be whole different lifetimes within your musical journey, you know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it seems like that second part of your musical journey really began, you sort of forged a relationship with lack of a better word, kind of the jam community, you play with Phil Leshebunge, with Jackie Green and everybody in
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you dubbed it a sophomore song, but it's more the idea of disconnecting the expectations of music with the process of creating it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, it's certainly, you know, I think the first kind of for a that I had into the jam scene was actually before I had a record deal and when I was still playing in New York, I used to play this club called Wetlands, and that was a real
[SPEAKER_01]: and Warren Haines, and it was quite a center of that whole community.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I knew about that community and I had sort of a place in the New York city version of that community.
[SPEAKER_01]: And some of those fans, there was a loose network of those fans who would talk to each other and so people from the Jam community would show up at our shows in Burlington, Vermont, say, or Buffalo, New York.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it wasn't until I worked with the dead.
[SPEAKER_01]: that I think that really, that association really kind of took off, you know, when they decided that they were going to go out and do a tour together before remaining members after Jerry Garcia passed away, you know, they knew that they were going to need some additional musicians to fill up the lineup and just so happened that the booking agent that I was working with at the time was also working with them and he suggested me and so they
[SPEAKER_01]: Bobby and Phil and all the guys and we did a show together at the Warfield in San Francisco and it just kind of felt Natural you know that their music that the dead music comes from this this place of You know taking all these different strands of American music like the blues and bluegrass and folk music and Appalachian music and sort of weaving it together
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was one of the things that we were trying to do on relishes, take these different strands of this American roots music, and weave it together to create something new.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think we had this shared vocabulary, the guys in the band and myself, and we're able to come up musically with things where I was able to sort of follow what they were doing, and I was able to find my parts within their songs.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it just seemed to work, so they got the gig and went on the road with them and did a whole big summer tour with them and that was, I think, what really exposed me to the Jamban scene.
[SPEAKER_00]: And how did that tour in that experience?
[SPEAKER_00]: How did it change your creative direction?
[SPEAKER_00]: Did it change your creative direction or did it just emboldened you to follow a direction that you were already on?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, I think that's a good question right after I did that tour with them, I ended up doing a record down in Nashville.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, I think it was partly from my association with them.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was partly from, you know, the fact that Willie Nelson was the co headline are on a lot of those dates.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was, Willie's music every night.
[SPEAKER_01]: And just before I had gone on tour with the dead, I did a tour opening for the Dixie Jixx, and their music was in my head every night.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it just seemed to me to be the right moment to do something that had a country flavor to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I went in road bunch of songs, and also, you know, sourced a bunch of songs, myself, and the producers deep-bucking him, sourced a bunch of country songs, and I wrote some things, and went into the studio in Nashville right afterwards.
[SPEAKER_01]: maybe, you know, created this sort of musical, you know, background in my life for the months before it that made it easier to write those kind of songs and to function in that sort of country vein.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's pretty hard to do a long tour with other acts and then try to write afterwards and not have a good deal of their music creep up through what you're writing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think that's part of what we do as musicians.
[SPEAKER_01]: We listen to other people's work.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're influenced by it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't mean that you're necessarily copying them.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think that that's a great way to learn how to become a better musician and the better songwriter is to look for people that inspire you and listen to that and steep yourself in that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then even if you're literally trying to copy someone else's style, it's not ever going to sound exactly like that because you are yourself and you are a unique musician here and unique singer.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's going to come out sounding different even if you're trying to copy them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you're not trying to copy and you're just taking some ideas and borrowing some stylistic points from them,
[SPEAKER_01]: Then I think that's a great way to learn about what you're doing and how to become a better writer and performer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Professional songwriters with a budget behind them have their songs radio tested in different markets to discover how their sound compares to the sound of the songs at the top of the Billboard charts.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as an indie songwriter, what do you have?
[SPEAKER_00]: You play an iPhone recording of your latest demo to your Uncle Larry, after he's drank, like six Mickey's hand grenades, and he tells you that it sounds like his favorite erosmith song from 1978.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where can you get some better feedback?
[SPEAKER_00]: Core Sound.
[SPEAKER_00]: Core Sound is a professional AI-based music analysis tool available now as an iOS app.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corsound determines the relevance of your music to the tops of Apple music using the most advanced neural network algorithms.
[SPEAKER_00]: You simply download the app, upload your song, select a genre and market for comparison, and Corsound does the rest.
[SPEAKER_00]: It lets you know how much your sound has in common with the sound of today's most popular songs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Core sound is now available in Apple's App Store.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, let Uncle Larry mercifully pass out in the bark lounge on his back porch and leave the feedback on your songs to core sound.
[SPEAKER_00]: You heard Joan talk about the pressure of writing a follow-up to her debut album, and how difficult it was to bear.
[SPEAKER_00]: She said she fell into the familiar doldrums of a sophomore slump, which it should be noted, only occurs when expectations have been set so high that they're nearly impossible to attain.
[SPEAKER_00]: Facing the empty page is daunting on its own, but adding the pressure of expectations from fans around the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: an often fickle music press, and a bottom line to focus to record label, and I'd imagine that it becomes insurmountable.
[SPEAKER_00]: I truly believe that facing an empty page is facing a kind of abyss, it's the abyss of the present moment, truly and fully noticed and considered.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's terrifying.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wonder if writing her follow-up to her debut, Joan felt something like what's described in this poem by Jim Harrison entitled The Present.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cost of flight is landing.
[SPEAKER_00]: On this warm winter day in the southwest, down here on the edge of the border, I want to go to France where we all came from, where the accident was born near the ancient caves near Lasso.
[SPEAKER_00]: At home, I'm only sitting on the lip of this black hole, a well that descends to the center of the earth, with a big telescope aimed straight down, I see a red dot of fire and hear the beast halling.
[SPEAKER_00]: My back is separating with disease, the heart lurch is left and right, the brain sings its ditties.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everywhere, blank white movies wait to be seen.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sky-lark dove within inches of the rocks before it stopped and rose again.
[SPEAKER_00]: God's toes are buried deep in the earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's ready to run, but where?
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to talk to you about creativity a bit and specifically through the lens if you're new record.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you're creating this new record trouble and strife, looking back on it now, how do you think your creative process has changed since you first began?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I don't know if I can speak to the entire creative process, but just for this particular record, it was a different kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: given myself sort of a deadline and I had hired the band to come in and work on some songs with me in the studio.
[SPEAKER_01]: And up until like the week before, I didn't really know what we were going to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: And about four days beforehand, I said to myself, you know, we could work on some more Bob Dylan songs, who had just released an album of Bob Dylan covers.
[SPEAKER_01]: We could work on some songs from another songwriter and, you know,
[SPEAKER_01]: write some stuff myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I said, you know what, I'm just going to try and see what I can come up with.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I pulled out all of my songwriting notes and little, you know, iPhone recordings that I had made over the last, you know, handful of years and went through them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the space of three days, I wrote like 14 new songs.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I had never, I'd never in my life done anything like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had always, I've always been the kind of, you know, writer who just,
[SPEAKER_01]: takes forever and, you know, procrastinate and, you know, worries ideas to death and, you know, I had never, you know, done anything like that, but there was something so liberating about having this hard deadline about having, you know, just like locking myself into this room and, you know, pulling out all these ideas that I had sort of, that I had sort of banked and saved
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, for whatever reason, maybe because I'm at this point in my life where I care less about what other people think about me.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I don't have to worry about, is anybody going to like this or not.
[SPEAKER_01]: I really just had to worry about, do I like this?
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe it's because I've been doing this for a long time, and I, you know, have learned how to, you know, to just do it without,
[SPEAKER_01]: without, you know, getting in my own way or without stressing about it so much, you know, certainly I've a better guitar player than I was when I first started out.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not a great guitar player, but, you know, as a songwriter, I can, you know, sit and remember with a guitar and come up with melody ideas and, you know, chords structures and, you know, parts and things like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I don't know exactly why, but it all came together in a pretty quick way.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, probably seven or eight of the songs on the record were written in that one big three or four day rush of writing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Man, 14 songs in three days is quite the bounty.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love what you were talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're all those iPhone demos and little scribbles.
[SPEAKER_00]: You put down a call that the bone pile.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's so the bone pile is your friend, man.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're just thinking, it's past you for getting up in the middle of the night and warbling into your iPhone.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got to get it in the moment that it comes to you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's, I think as much as technology,
[SPEAKER_01]: is you know mixed blessing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm glad that I've got my you know iPhone there that whatever you know I've got an idea.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can you know grab my phone and even if I'm out somewhere I go run into the bathroom or something and you know sing this little idea into the iPhone and then I've got it because otherwise if I wait till I get home if I wait till the proper moment that idea well gone and never coming back again.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you got to grab it when it can.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, you really have to because everything can hinge on on phrasing, like a decent song can go to a beautiful song, just if the phrase is perfect, and if it's not perfect, it's just a dime a dozen, and this way you don't have to be one of those weird people that carries around.
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember back in the day, let's say 10 or 15 years ago, where you just had to have one of those records with like the mini analog tape in it?
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, I used to have a little, a little cassette tape in the middle,
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I have my notebook and my little cassette tape in my purse and, you know, that's stuff's great too, but it's, you know, the iPhone is a little more convenient because it's
[SPEAKER_01]: you know you're always going to have it on your Saturday.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, so it sounds like those three days creating this record were sort of anomalous for you to be that productive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you describe to our listeners what a typical day would look like for you creatively.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're off the road, you didn't have any, let's say for that day parental responsibilities or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a day dedicated to being creative.
[SPEAKER_00]: What does that day usually look like for you?
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, boy, those are rare days where I don't have parental retirement.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know the feeling of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, but, uh, you know, it's less that it's an entire day and it's more like a three-hour chunk of time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and, you know, frankly, you don't need an entire day if you do it on a regular basis.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, if you are expecting to do everything, you know, for, for a month and one entire day, then, you know, that's, that's not a good practice.
[SPEAKER_01]: You want to, you want to have, you know, chunks of time.
[SPEAKER_01]: littered throughout the week and throughout the month.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, what, as you say, what I normally will do is fit and go through the little bits and pieces that I've been collecting.
[SPEAKER_01]: And even if it's a bit bit and piece that I have listened to five or six times before and nothing came of it, I'll go back and listen to it again because, you know, I might, I might have the key to it in that moment or I might be able to combine it with this other lyric that I just wrote the other
[SPEAKER_01]: So you know, it's, you want to be able to, you know, have all these bits and pieces to work with.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes I will start out reading some poetry, you know, reading some Walt Whitman or reading books of lyrics from other songwriters like Nick Cave or Lou Reed and just to try to prime the pump in that way is not that you're gonna seal their words but that it sort of trains your brain to think in a poetic way.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you've got, you see something out your window or someone you overhear a snippet of conversation that sounds interesting, you're able to take that little snippet and if your brain is thinking in a poetic way, you can expand upon it and maybe that becomes a lyric, maybe that becomes a chorus, maybe that becomes that one little lyric that you're missing from a song that you wrote three weeks ago but haven't been able to finish.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you sit down and you just maybe drink a bunch of coffee,
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, maybe you, you know, I try not to listen to too much other music like I will listen to other music to kind of get myself in that frame of mind, but I try not to get to into that because otherwise I'll just listen to records and not think of my own.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I have to, you know, I'll listen to a little bit of music, but I don't want to spend the entire, you know, three or four hours doing that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you try not to, you know, but of course, things are going to come to you like, oh, I forgot to call so and so back or oh, I have to go to the store and pick up this.
[SPEAKER_01]: You write it down, you set it aside, and then you go back to your creative work.
[SPEAKER_01]: And just let your mind wander, you know, let it let it off the leash, you know, let it do what it meant to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, your mind is really, you think, you know, I have this writing exercise that I do.
[SPEAKER_01]: I call it spiderwebbing, where you take an idea, or you take a phrase, and you put it in the center of the page, and then you draw circle around it, and then you just allow yourself to associate other things, and you write those little associations down around the central idea, and then you connect those different associations to each other, and that's the way your mind works, it doesn't usually work in a linear fashion where you can sit down and write a song or a poem from beginning to end, normally,
[SPEAKER_01]: your mind works in the sense that it's grabbing these little associations, you know, from visual associations or word association, from other parts of your life and attaching them to that central idea and that's where you get, you know, the real interesting stuff and that's where you can sort of fall into that flow and stop thinking and just, you know, just a great place to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: That sounds like a wonderful place to be and it sounds...
[SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting, like what you just described, you said on the one hand, you're letting your mind kind of roam like a dog let off its leash.
[SPEAKER_00]: And on the other hand though, you very consciously decided where you've allowed that dog to roam, like where you put it down.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's so critical, putting yourself in that place, either reading poetry, lyrics, doing an exercise, like you just described.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it really puts your mind in a place
[SPEAKER_00]: that it it transports it it's kind of like um i don't want to talk too much here but it's sort of like if you need to put a new roof on your house you've never noticed your neighbor's roofs before but now when you're driving around the neighborhood all you notice is other people's roofs until you have a new roof put on then you never notice a roof ever again in your life and um yeah when you're heading into a creative world you want to be putting in information like that so that uh your mind starts to notice those different connections in a way that maybe it wouldn't be
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, it's the more that I do this, the more I realize that, you know, we have this image of writing or being an artist as, you know, you're seized by this, you know, creative muse and it just comes through you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, that's, that's all great and that can happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: But most of it is just, it's a practice and it's like a, it's a, it's a crafted
[SPEAKER_01]: And you, you know, you just make sure that you practice it enough with, you know, enough times, enough times a week, enough times a month, whatever, that you can, you know, get into that mindset and have enough material that you will then look through it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, most of the stuff you write, maybe you never want anyone to see.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you may never show it to anyone and you may be totally embarrassed by it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's awful.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's that 10% that you're like, oh, I really like this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I really am onto something and that's the goal.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you just have to have that discipline in that practice to do enough of the work so that you're going to have a giant pile of it so that 10% that you like is going to be enough where you can make a song and then you can make an EP and then you can make an album and then you can have a set worth of material to play in front of an audience.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's all it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just the discipline and the practice.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's building the house, that's a beautiful way to put it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You gave a really interesting quote about songs years ago to the Washington Post.
[SPEAKER_00]: You were speaking about one of us, and you said, we have this theory that this song is a living creature with a mind of its own that used Eric to be born and used me to spread its message.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a living creature and we're at its service.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that still how you feel about songs and also if it is,
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you put yourself in a position to be at the service of as many good songs as possible?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I do sometimes think that and I think it came to me because of something that's in Morris and said about being the radio, the music is out there and all you what your job is is the artist or the singer or the musician is to be the radio that allows yourself to be a channel
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think, you know, the thing that I said about a discipline and a practice for songwriting, that's what it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's making that space and that time and that clarity for yourself that you can hear the things that are coming in.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because your stuff is coming into you all the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, this might sound a little bit new agey, but who knows where all that stuff comes from, where the ideas come from, where, you know, it could just be that your senses are picking up the
[SPEAKER_01]: and creating something within your mind, or it could be coming from someplace else entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So no matter where it comes from, you have to make yourself open enough to hear it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you have to humble and you have to understand that you don't know everything and that you're still searching and you're still listening.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's how you can receive those great ideas.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I don't think you have to subscribe to any particular religious practice to just simply note that we're songs and the initial kind of kernel for them or any creative work obviously comes from some other worldly place.
[SPEAKER_00]: It obviously comes from a place, the best of it, that the writers themselves can almost take no credit for in some way.
[SPEAKER_01]: three classics like tiny dance and two other songs like in and after new you know like of course he's brilliant and he's hugely talented and he's out and young but you know all of that in one afternoon I mean come on you know that's a real gift and and who knows where it came from um... it maybe it just came from the years that he had spent doing all the work in music that he had done and it was just that day that you know the payoff came
[SPEAKER_01]: or maybe it came from somewhere else, who knows, but thank goodness it did come.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was ready to receive it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was ready to receive it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's just it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was ready and I'm sure, well, all writers after that think to themselves, like, okay, well, how do I, how do I just receive that again?
[SPEAKER_00]: Can I just do that every day?
[SPEAKER_00]: Can I just do that one one one one one one one one one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, when you, I'll end here.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you released one of us,
[SPEAKER_00]: The cultural milieu in the United States nationally was a bit different than it is now.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a bit more conservative.
[SPEAKER_00]: In some ways, it seems like at the time that song would have been controversial to some people, particularly religious people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you're putting that in album now.
[SPEAKER_00]: that is a very, um, it's confronting the political moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say in a very, um, straightforward, uh, like sort of frontal assault, um, did you feel that at the time that you're out of step with the cultural milieu or that it was challenging?
[SPEAKER_00]: And, and how does that feel now, uh, releasing an album that is similarly provocative, I would say?
[SPEAKER_01]: You mean, did it, did I feel like I was being provocative by releasing the song,
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: I did not, and it's a song that Eric Brazilian wrote, so I can't take credit for bringing it into the world, but I was sort of surprised that people who were conservative religious people responded to it in this negative way, because I feel like this song, this sort of question of what if God was one of us and
[SPEAKER_01]: If you were a stranger on the bus and all of that, it really sort of refers in my mind to the biblical story of the good Samaritan and the quote, I don't know the exact quote, but Jesus said something like, as you treat the lowest of people on this earth, that is the way that you're treating.
[SPEAKER_01]: You do this to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it sounds, to me, that's what that song brings to mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, how can we look at each other and realize that there is God in all of us?
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, you know, certain, you know, conservative Christian people thought that that was really blasphemous and they didn't like it and they pick it in my concerts and I got death threats and, you know, it was kind of intense there for a while, but, no, I did not expect that.
[SPEAKER_01]: the songs are more overtly political and I, you know, I have that intent to express, you know, my thoughts and my views about what's going on in the world today.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, there's so much corruption and there's so much abuse of power and, you know, as a, as a person, as a citizen, that makes me furious.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as an artist, I feel like it's part of my job is to, you know,
[SPEAKER_01]: make music that has something to do with what's going on in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, you know, maybe somebody else doesn't want to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some other artists might decide that they don't want to engage with politics and that's fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: But for me, I just felt like I have this platform and I wanted to say something about what's going on.
[SPEAKER_01]: And also to say it in a way that allows music to do what it does best, which is to lift people up.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'm not interested in lecturing people.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to write songs that had a point of view, but that also were joyous and we're energizing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's one of the things that we need from music right now is to allow us to stay connected to a sense of joy and a sense of energy because we really need that right now.
[SPEAKER_01]: We need a place to go.
[SPEAKER_01]: in our minds to rejuvenate us and music has such power to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So those were really sort of like to, you know, the things that I intended with this record is to put my voice into, you know, into, let's see, how can I say this better?
[SPEAKER_01]: To express what I'm feeling about the current moment and to call out people who are
[SPEAKER_01]: to be joyful and to be energetic and to let the music be uplifting.
[SPEAKER_00]: To be the happy warrior, I like it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And also, again, if you use this analogy that you used early, if you're just a radio bringing in the signal, then you know, don't blame the radio for the signal that's coming in on, you're number 980 or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, thank you so much for being a part of the working songwriter, podcast, I admire you deeply, and I'm just so touched that you would take the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you very much.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, well, thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_01]: This has been a real pleasure.
[SPEAKER_00]: This month's show was brought to you by Banzugl, built by musicians and four musicians.
[SPEAKER_00]: Banzugl is an all in one platform to build a beautiful website for your music.
[SPEAKER_00]: Use promo code TWS, the initials of our podcast, TWS, to get 15% off the first year of any subscription.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jonah Osbourne's latest album is entitled, trouble and strife, available everywhere music is sold or streamed.
[SPEAKER_00]: If before we meet again, you sit down to write, please remember.
[SPEAKER_00]: An expensive drug habit is not a song, a compelling Instagram account is not a song, and most importantly, reverb is not a song.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let all that take care of itself, and for you, just keep your eye on the song.