[SPEAKER_02]: It's the process, but it's also the hinge where we get connected with life.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we get connected with our own dreams, but other people's dreams too.
[SPEAKER_02]: We write to find out who we are.
[SPEAKER_02]: We write to find out who you are.
[SPEAKER_02]: We write to find out what's going on with our kids and why.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we communicate if you're communicating with others.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're in the process of being educated.
[SPEAKER_01]: We often define artists by their output, their records, books, movies, and the times they're on stage.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the art is made in the quiet, the struggle, and the mundane, the hours that no one sees.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm McKayla Ann.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm Aaron Kray for Hayes.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the other 22 hours.
[SPEAKER_01]: An exploration of the creative life, lived in between.
[SPEAKER_01]: In today's attention culture, we can become desensitized to overselling things and to very dramatic descriptors.
[SPEAKER_01]: But today, we are not being hyperbolic when we say that we are honored to feature a legend of American music in singer, songwriter, Grammy winner, Oscar nominee, the incredible Judy Collins, who at 87 years old has been a pillar of American music.
[SPEAKER_01]: As a whole, for over 65 years, she has famously sung songs by Shoni Mitchell and Stephen Sondheim.
[SPEAKER_01]: She has performed with everybody from Stephen Stills to William Nelson to Mike McDonald's and Jimmy Buffett to name anybody else.
[SPEAKER_01]: She is an activist still to this day.
[SPEAKER_01]: She has released over 20 albums.
[SPEAKER_01]: She has written
[SPEAKER_01]: numerous books including one that she's working on right now.
[SPEAKER_01]: She is still touring many many dates a year and as you'll hear in this conversation she still practices the piano every single day.
[SPEAKER_00]: This conversation was the kind that I think I dreamed about having when we talked about starting his podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is from someone who has a lifetime of experience and focuses in on the deeply human aspect of creativity that to be human is to be creative to look at ourselves as well as each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a beautiful conversation.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is one of those ones that will resonate with Michaela and I for years to come and we hope it does the same for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Please enjoy our conversation with Judy Collins.
[SPEAKER_00]: We always like to start with the first question of how are you today and that's a how are you really not a small talk how are you and where are you we know where you are physically but where are you creatively in your life right now?
[SPEAKER_02]: Good question.
[SPEAKER_02]: So today, I've just returned from a visit, not a trip seeing, but a visit for six days in California to visit my sister, Holly, who has a new place in Santa Barbara.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I spent a couple of days with her running back and forth on the beach.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I went down to Los Angeles to spend a couple of days
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm amazing.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been like, name home.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I was there for four days.
[SPEAKER_02]: I had a great time.
[SPEAKER_02]: I flew out by myself with one bag.
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_02]: Unusual.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's been a nice little home yesterday and got home at nine and greeted my cats.
[SPEAKER_02]: So they said, where have you been with other cats and children?
[SPEAKER_01]: they always know.
[SPEAKER_02]: I will be working on my book today.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've got a new book going and I will be practicing.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have an hour between this interview in the next one.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'll be practicing the piano which I must do every day and getting ready for this big tour that's coming up.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have been given by my management a few
[SPEAKER_02]: weeks that have been basically off.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, on the weekend, I'll go up to a show north of here for a couple of days.
[SPEAKER_02]: But basically, I'm getting some time to write, um, rest to exercise.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm always exercising.
[SPEAKER_02]: My life consists of doing prayer and meditation.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have a guru that I've had for many years.
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course, he's gone from the planet, but he's here.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I commit myself to reading, to doing my meditation, to stay sober.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just celebrated yesterday, I celebrated 48 years of sobriety.
[SPEAKER_02]: And congratulations.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's why I'm here.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the only reason that I'm here.
[SPEAKER_02]: And how I got sober and how quickly and how completely is a miracle.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was at a meeting in Los Angeles on Sunday night which was one of the most fabulous meetings.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're all fabulous.
[SPEAKER_02]: So what I do is I stay sober, I eat well, I exercise, I maintain my friendships.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I make sure that I'm always on the phone with somebody creating a dinner lunch.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm having my first party since the death of my husband at the end of 2024.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, maybe 25 people.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to do that because it's very important to open up and not only going out for dinner and so forth and so on and being on the road, but have people come and explore and enjoy my home.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've taken 55, six years to put together and I love it here.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The importance of staying in community really resonates with me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Being in touch with them about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: For me personally, I can get so lost in the work.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the work that we do is so solitary, whether it's writing songs or practicing the piano or writing a book, it's so solitary that I can realize, especially the phase of life that we're in with young children.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, I haven't spent time with the friend
[SPEAKER_01]: weeks.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I feel that, so I can imagine that the widely-ness that it brings to stay and intentionally and community like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I had a therapist when I first came to New York in 1963.
[SPEAKER_02]: I said something to him about, you know, I called so and so they didn't call back.
[SPEAKER_02]: He said it's here responsibility to make the calls.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in a way that's all you need, you do it, it's your responsibility, and of course people call you too, but to connect, and also to connect so that you get out of the studio, and that you are not in grossed completely, that I know a lot of people just spend the endless lives sitting behind the computer or the pen or whatever, working, but I also know people who do both.
[SPEAKER_02]: and they seem to have the happier lives, and I certainly do, because I've got to have that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I grew up in a family that was very, very active, socially, for a long time.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was part of our DNA, and I had forgotten about it when I got here, you know, and I was desperate with all kinds of problems.
[SPEAKER_02]: I had lost custody of my son, in a battle for custody, which I was not healthy for mental health, really, really, I was kind of nuts.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was drinking, so I was drinking until I got sober in 1978, but I worked very hard.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was a working alcoholic, so I was very clear I didn't for the most part, I didn't pass out.
[SPEAKER_02]: However, I had physical problems that made it necessary for me to be gone for two years from the business.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that two years was a big hole because I had canceled something like 45 shows because I'd lost my voice.
[SPEAKER_02]: And how it came back and when it came back is part of my new book because it was a miracle.
[SPEAKER_02]: Simply, you know, I see.
[SPEAKER_02]: Miracles happen to us because we stick around.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have a sign on my mirror that says do it now.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's another secret, I think.
[SPEAKER_02]: I met a man who wrote a book about Holden Callfield, what was he called?
[SPEAKER_02]: Catch her in the right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Catching the right?
[SPEAKER_02]: The hero was named after my Godfather Holden-Bolar and Holden-Chalfield.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, Selencher.
[SPEAKER_02]: I met a man recently who was writing a book about Selencher.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I know, and everybody knows, that Selencher disappeared after he wrote the book.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the man that I met at a dinner party recently said to me that he found out why Selencher disappeared.
[SPEAKER_02]: He disappeared because he has,
[SPEAKER_02]: He had a guru, one of whose life's lessons is to work, but not to be professional.
[SPEAKER_02]: But another was not to publish, but to write.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that actually sounds it was writing for all those years.
[SPEAKER_02]: He was also discontinuing all of his relationships with everything.
[SPEAKER_02]: Everyone, including my Godfather, Holden.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I, on the other hand, since I write a lot about my teacher, Antonia Brico, who was the great first woman to be a major conductor in the world, and about whom I made a film, which you made, Noah, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1975.
[SPEAKER_02]: She found a guru.
[SPEAKER_02]: All of her young life, she'd been told she couldn't be a conductor because she was a woman.
[SPEAKER_02]: And her guru
[SPEAKER_02]: don't let the men tell you what to do.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can be a conductor and then he's centered to Germany and paid for it and she could have her conducting schedule and learned how to do it and then her first job at 27 was with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1929.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it sees her one of the other.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have to get
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the story, that's the lesson of the stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that we often explore and something that I personally explore, I'm currently studying to get my master's in depth psychology of creativity, because this relationship of what our creativity does for us, and then also just how essential creativity is to be inhuman, and not that it's this special thing that only some talented people have,
[SPEAKER_00]: that we've commercialized and capitalized on by making it a profession.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm curious for all of us that relationship we have with the work and then the sharing of the work and then the reception of the work and the reward of whether you're trying to have a career, whether you're achieving accolades.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm curious if you can share your relationship
[SPEAKER_00]: to that, as you know, you became a professional, well-known, celebrated musician at a very young age and has your relationship to your writing and your music shifted as you've gotten so much success and how through the years that might wax and wane and if you can speak a little bit on that,
[SPEAKER_02]: I was raised in a very creative situation.
[SPEAKER_02]: My father was blind from the age of four.
[SPEAKER_02]: He would do anything and be everything and he was huge success.
[SPEAKER_02]: He has a 30-year career as a singer on the radio.
[SPEAKER_02]: He had a radio profession for all those years.
[SPEAKER_02]: He was the most creative, the most extraordinary person I ever knew.
[SPEAKER_02]: I always like to call him the man who saw everything.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I grew up in this environment where
[SPEAKER_02]: I think there's a creative bone in everybody's body and that all of us have talents that we can give.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, my mother was a wonderful cook.
[SPEAKER_02]: She was a wonderful delicious dinner date.
[SPEAKER_02]: She made the best kind of parties.
[SPEAKER_02]: She had friendships that lasted from her childhood.
[SPEAKER_02]: She was dynamic.
[SPEAKER_02]: She was interested.
[SPEAKER_02]: She had five kids.
[SPEAKER_02]: she took care of and lived with us, and he did everything.
[SPEAKER_02]: My father did everything, so she was not a person who waited on him hand and foot by any means.
[SPEAKER_02]: He would go anywhere, do anything.
[SPEAKER_02]: He was uncompromised as a compromised individual, and his creativity just overflowed.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I grew up in a family where creativity and industry don't necessarily match.
[SPEAKER_02]: Everybody is creative on some level.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just to get through life, you have to find a way to make something happen in your life that makes you happy and makes other people happy.
[SPEAKER_02]: What I've done when I've been able to do since I started at five playing the piano, but I was also writing poetry at two or three years old.
[SPEAKER_02]: I remember we were in California and I was a little girl I probably was four or five and it was raining outside.
[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't rain very often in Los Angeles but I heard it falling on the thing that covered the whole world was under the house and it was tin and it was the sound of the rain woke me up and so I was writing a poem and I went out to the living room and I read my poem to my family.
[SPEAKER_02]: I remember doing that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's interesting.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've just written a book of poetry called, sometimes it's heaven.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I did that because my husband said to me in 2017.
[SPEAKER_02]: I said, well, I'll do like 90 poems in 90 days or something like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he said, well, why don't you do it for 365 days?
[SPEAKER_02]: Then you'll have a book of poems at the end of the thing, which I did.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, and my agent got wind of it and said, we should publish it, which we did.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so on.
[SPEAKER_02]: and it's something that people can write poetry.
[SPEAKER_02]: People write poetry quite often, secretly, and they always do it when they're up against something, when they find an outlet for their discomfort and for their sorrow or for their joy.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I wrote, I've always written something, I actually had a period of about six years where I didn't write anything, and then I met Leonard Cohen.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I recorded his song Suzanne, of course, and we got to be friends.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he said, I don't understand why you're not writing songs.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I went over to, I was in another apartment then and I went over to my Steinway and I sat down because I was trained between this hour and the next hour I have to go and practice because you have to practice every day.
[SPEAKER_02]: And what I can say about creativity is that we all,
[SPEAKER_02]: have something to do that makes us happy that gives us a way to communicate.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh look, I've just baked x, y, and z.
[SPEAKER_02]: Would you like one?
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll take one to the neighbors.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think there's any limit to most people's ability to find creative resources.
[SPEAKER_02]: nowadays is more likely even than it was, but it's always been painting, it's drawing, it's singing to children, it's children wanting to know what this is about, what are these trees, what's on them, how come they grow so big?
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, children are a wealth of developing creativity from the time they're born.
[SPEAKER_02]: They have to be creative because they won't be able to learn to walk.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, having our daughter who's going to be turning five watching her create without any inhibition has been such a beautiful lesson because I think for me I'll just be for myself growing up.
[SPEAKER_00]: I started playing piano at a really young age and I started writing songs and I always was into music and arts and then as it became my career and I think also living in Nashville where
[SPEAKER_00]: It just started to kind of infect my relationship to my work sometimes.
[SPEAKER_00]: That sometimes outside opinions would inform my internal judgments.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I started noticing it, that's one of the foundations of this podcast, as we started noticing in our peer group, just like how unhappy a lot of people were.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, there's a lot out there about how hard the music industry is, but why the industry was then also impacting our sense of ourselves as artists and our ability to enjoy making music regardless of how many people ever hear it and watching a little child develop.
[SPEAKER_00]: and paint freely and say confidently, I'm an artist and right songs, she's saying like a five-minute opus that she made up the other day about wanting to marry her brother and that's not allowed.
[SPEAKER_00]: So she wants to marry a Pegasus instead.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's really expanded this feeling so I'm wondering have you have you ever had to keep your relationship sacred or healthy outside of any expectations.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely repeat your success.
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think part of it is luck.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have run into no real problems with anybody except my ex-husband, whom I call my starter husband with one of the people I live with.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have been blessed with, first of all, the idea of what the professional limits are, how you go through this.
[SPEAKER_02]: without getting sucked into something that's going to take you away from who you really are.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's powerful.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are a lot of people that I'm glad I haven't ever met because the dynamic in this life for me is to stay clear, faithful to my own line of
[SPEAKER_02]: feeling, thought, creativity, you have to practice every day.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have to do it now.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have to read.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have to be creative and interactive with your friends.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have to go and learn something.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was on the playing yesterday and I turned on a movie called Dark Waters.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the story of DuPont being caught in its criminality, its brutality, its insanity, its destructive activity in the world of water.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I have to find this on my phone because you have to talk about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a movie that is, let's see, it's done by Mark Ruffalo, who is a genius.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a man who keeps his eye on the ball.
[SPEAKER_02]: He doesn't screw around.
[SPEAKER_02]: He doesn't make things that are nonsense.
[SPEAKER_02]: He doesn't ever get off the...
[SPEAKER_02]: Clear trail that he has, one of my best friends was the whistleblower on the Catholic church in Boston.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he was the man who came to them with all the information about his having been abused by a priest.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Mark was in this movie Spotlight.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I just think Mark Ruffalo is a genius and he's so true to where he goes and where he stays.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he stayed on this.
[SPEAKER_02]: to pot situation for years and years when people don't or he was nuts, and he faced them down.
[SPEAKER_02]: DuPont did, of course, they kept growing around.
[SPEAKER_02]: They didn't want years that they were putting poison into the earth and destroying the lives of people.
[SPEAKER_02]: Apparently, what happened was that in the final legal battle, this was 2015 that it was finally settled.
[SPEAKER_02]: It started in 1996 or something like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, when they finally got into the courtroom, they were charged $670 million dollars to punt.
[SPEAKER_02]: They destroyed the punt.
[SPEAKER_02]: Depont destroyed millions of people.
[SPEAKER_02]: Apparently, the PFOS, which is the result of one of the agent orange products during the meet-not-more, they took the essence of that and put it into our water.
[SPEAKER_02]: They put it into our cooking stuff,
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, you know, the stuff that goes in the oven that won't blow up.
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, it was such a lift.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we always have to have that in our lives.
[SPEAKER_02]: We have to search out things that are going to inform us about the planet that we're living in, which is a very dangerous planet.
[SPEAKER_02]: In many cases, it is divided as beautiful but it's also dangerous as hell for a lot of people.
[SPEAKER_02]: Dye.
[SPEAKER_02]: from Teflon, and they can't help it.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're drinking the water.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we have to be worded not to drink the water of all the BS that comes at us, all the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: So part of the creative process is to stay away from things that are going to rot you from the inside.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's surprisingly more challenging than you'd think sometimes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Gladly, of course.
[SPEAKER_02]: Be careful of what you watch, what you hear, what you look at, what you can tolerate, keep your channel clear, keep your brain clear.
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, don't drink smoke full around with drugs, make a practice of taking everything you see on the radio or the television that tells you you can lose 75 pounds in four days.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that keeping your channel clear, there's so many facets to that because at the surface level for me, it's looking at everything with a discerning eye, question what you're being told by whatever advertisement or at this juncture, whatever administration, whatever talking point, really question what you're seeing, is this the truth, is this what's really happening?
[SPEAKER_01]: But then one step further is then how do you keep your heart peer in that?
[SPEAKER_01]: One year being forced to be skeptical of all of these things that you're seeing being told gets multifaceted that I feel in our stage in life right now, like with children, we want them to live in a world of wonder and often listen to all of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we, as parents, have to act as a shock absorber to the world that is out there, and to metabolize all of this that you were just saying, the due ponds of the world, and the tech companies of the world, whatever it might be, so that what comes out to them is sunshine,
[SPEAKER_00]: and from also knowing your career and your work and your activism, it's keeping your channel clear but also being wide awake and invested.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just saying what you said but like walking that tightrope of keeping your channel clear but knowing what's happening and using your voice and your work to try and impact and help other people have
[SPEAKER_00]: a better life, you know, who are not as privileged or are victim to infected water and all the things, especially that are going on and you've been doing this for a long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm wondering if you can talk about that, especially with coming up in a time of civil rights and women's rights and all that's happening today.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, how do you keep that hope alive?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or is it just acceptance
[SPEAKER_02]: May 1st is my 87th birthday.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm in an age where many of my friends are dying.
[SPEAKER_02]: And to face dying is another kind of challenge, which has you clear out your mind of what is going to destroy you if your friends are all dying.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because that's a very real component of growing up and growing older.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I had to listen to a wonderful artist
[SPEAKER_02]: 100 years old is written a book about what's exciting about being 100 years old and all the things you can think of that he's so alive he's actually an actor that I saw in probably 1976.
[SPEAKER_02]: I saw him being interviewed.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was on the verge of getting sober and also losing my voice and all kinds of things and I saw him on one of the afternoon shows and he pulled out a
[SPEAKER_02]: that he was not drinking anymore.
[SPEAKER_02]: I couldn't believe that I saw this famous person on television talking about this.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I stepped back and thought, oh, don't go near me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't go near me with that information.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not ready.
[SPEAKER_02]: I wasn't ready, but I saw him.
[SPEAKER_02]: Last night, as I watched, I also listened to his podcast on my phone on the way home.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I had been influenced by the story about dark waters and DuPont.
[SPEAKER_02]: I had a connection with somebody in DuPont, one of my siblings, father, who was a big deal in DuPont.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now I always thought he was a bad guy.
[SPEAKER_02]: always saw that.
[SPEAKER_02]: My family always saw that.
[SPEAKER_02]: We knew that under the veneer of the fancy neighborhoods in which he lived and the way he spent his money.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we always knew there was really something deeply wrong and criminal with this man.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now I know what it was.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, he was supporting the use of these chemicals in all these neighborhoods in the world, not just here.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I think that dealing with the things that happened to you at different ages, I was raised in a very active political family.
[SPEAKER_02]: We protested, my father said, you have to do something when you see something.
[SPEAKER_02]: He was an advocate for the blind, but he was also never used to cane or a dog, and so they...
[SPEAKER_02]: called on him and Denver to be the head of the help for the blind thing so he got a little short cane that he would stick in the drawer and then when somebody from Washington would come he'd whip out the cane we couldn't use it very well we didn't know how but it was always something in our family we'd sit around the table and talk about politics and talk about what was happening in the country and what we might do and where we might go so I was nurtured that way so I didn't have any problem with that.
[SPEAKER_02]: But when I was the minute I got involved, I had to go and protest.
[SPEAKER_02]: I had to go to sing at these huge, wonderful situations.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was asked by the people from Mias to go to Washington and talk about the fact that I had had an abortion and to try to support the issues over women's rights.
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course now I see Rovy White.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been stripped from the menu.
[SPEAKER_02]: women are not able to take charge of their bodies now so it happens again yes these things happen over and over again and they happen in different degrees now i find that there are a lot of things that i'm not going to do that i did when i was twenty nine when i was fifty when i was seventy five
[SPEAKER_02]: They're not the things that I'm going to do today.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to do things from another perspective.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is an inner struggle to stay up with the moment and to stay up with deaths.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm all wondering, of course.
[SPEAKER_02]: Why do we all live at a hundred year to basically less than?
[SPEAKER_02]: But no more than pretty much hundred years.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a sponge that lives for 500 years.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a turtle that lives for a fine.
[SPEAKER_02]: None of us live till we're 500 year.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm always, what's the point?
[SPEAKER_02]: Can we go on?
[SPEAKER_02]: Possibly the reason is and maybe it's set up that way that those around us that were close to are bound if they're older than we are to die So we have to then engage in something which defines that reality and makes it livable
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a huge challenge.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's another trip to Washington.
[SPEAKER_02]: To protest the war in Vietnam, which I did over and over again.
[SPEAKER_02]: But what is it about life's problems that come up?
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you have to find a way to do them.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, what I have done and thank God for it, because I learned it from my father is you go and do it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You do it now.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you have a career like I have, that I'm lucky enough, who's a grace of God,
[SPEAKER_02]: compounded my problems, and that I only was able to get through because I had a genius of a doctor who was able to find out how to get rid of what I had on my vocal cord, which is called achly mangeoma.
[SPEAKER_02]: Deep dive for what that is and what it does, because when I had that from drinking, there was no cure.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I had a genius of a doctor who found the cure and who applied it to me did the surgery and I was saying I mean how how possible is that?
[SPEAKER_02]: There was no cure in fact one of my compatriots in the business had the same thing and never saying again
[SPEAKER_02]: So these things come upon you and you have to take advantage of whatever is positive.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it does change evolution and growing into your own potential.
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll put up barriers and problems that you're going to have to figure out how to get through.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the main thing for me is that, why do I work?
[SPEAKER_02]: Why am I still on the road?
[SPEAKER_02]: Why in spite of evidence to the opposite?
[SPEAKER_02]: Why will I always be doing this?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because that's how I stay alive.
[SPEAKER_02]: That hour and a half, a hundred times a year, with an audience where I can do and say whatever's on my mind.
[SPEAKER_02]: When I can tell all the jokes I want to tell, when I can sing all the sad songs or the most challenging songs, I can sing, haddy Carol, the song by Dylan.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can sing anything I want on the stage.
[SPEAKER_02]: It gives me the freedom of expression.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, there I have a platform and I will always be using it.
[SPEAKER_02]: People say, why do you work so long?
[SPEAKER_02]: Why every night?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because it's the way to stay alive.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hey, just a quick pause from this conversation.
[SPEAKER_01]: The other 22 hours is an independent production built entirely on the idea that he's quiet on his conversation's matter.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for being here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's get back to our conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: We saw some old friends last week who were moving back from California to the Midwest and they're 40 and they are retiring.
[SPEAKER_00]: They have built a tech company and were a lawyer and we were talking about the fact that they were retiring and I was like, that just seems so wild to me, like not in judgment of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's wonderful if you have the means and you're able to.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think because they didn't have a career that they were passionate about, we're like, I can't imagine
[SPEAKER_00]: wanting to ever retire from making a music.
[SPEAKER_02]: No.
[SPEAKER_02]: The arts are not to be retired from ever.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, anybody who's the painter is going to paint kill they fall over the ledge.
[SPEAKER_02]: Anybody who's singing will never stop singing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you were referencing Salinger and stepping away and still writing without the preconceived notion of releasing those books.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or like you said, you're about to go practice your piano.
[SPEAKER_01]: The art is the process as much as it is the performance.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the process but it's also the hinge where we get connected with life and we get connected with our own dreams but other people's dreams too.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're right to find out who we are, we're right to find out who you are.
[SPEAKER_02]: We write to find out what's going on with our kids and why and we communicate if you're communicating with others.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're in the process of being educated.
[SPEAKER_02]: People will talk about what they're doing, what they're reading.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a privilege to interact with other people.
[SPEAKER_02]: What are you up to?
[SPEAKER_02]: How are you dealing with this situation, the politics of today?
[SPEAKER_02]: I turn off the television set.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have been a subscriber to the New York Times since
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm throwing it out.
[SPEAKER_02]: I cannot bear to read a lot of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I cannot bear to have certain things infect my mind and my soul and my thinking process.
[SPEAKER_02]: And also, of course, being sober is a different thing, too, because I have a day to live in.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have 24 hours in which I'm to get through not drinking.
[SPEAKER_02]: I also have 24 hours in which I can do what I want to do.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can think about what I
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't have to think about Trump.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't have to think about Iran even.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I'd like to do something.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll try to do something.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll do something, but I don't have to be preoccupied with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's part of
[SPEAKER_02]: the education of the brain and the education that we get from the arts, which lets us know that art is the direction that life is going.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if we sidetrack it with thoughts about him and thoughts about her and how terrible she is and how then we're lost.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've had the privilege of talking to a lot of artists who have had many decade-long careers.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've talked to Rosanne Cash, we've talked to Rodney Crow.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've had over 150 of these conversations, and the theme that comes up a lot, especially for artists who have been doing this a long time, is that we make art to know ourselves, but also what you said, to connect with the dreams of others.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there can be this unfair judgment and I even see it from people who want to write this feeling of like, well, is it selfish?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it narcissistic?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it naval gazing?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I hear over and over from these.
[SPEAKER_00]: beautiful people like yourself who've been doing this a lifetime of art that it's not just about us.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a portal of connection to others, whether it songs or writing, I read your one of your memoirs probably 15 years ago and it's so interesting to me how
[SPEAKER_00]: I was in my early 20s, I had entered a songwriting contest that tell your I'd bluegrass festival.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like a couple of years out of college and I was working at Nonsech Records.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I maybe was just leaving that job and trying to figure out how do I become a musician.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I still, when I think of your book, I remember the room I was in, Intel your ride, performing that day and like immersing myself in your story.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the stuff that happens when we learn about each other and also in the way that we learn it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I never foresaw that I would have a conversation with you when I was reading that book.
[SPEAKER_00]: that my future would lead me to be in a position where I get to ask you questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And still I felt like I knew you from that book, but also it revealed things about myself, for myself, my own wishes, my own dreams.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a really beautiful alchemy that happens.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm glad you read the book.
[SPEAKER_02]: Basically, it was the story of 1962 to 1972.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's that 10 years, which was a very rich, interesting time.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was a great way to deal with it.
[SPEAKER_02]: To write it, my agent is a good editor.
[SPEAKER_02]: She is very solid.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know whether she'll tear me apart for this.
[SPEAKER_02]: In particular, I send her, now I have to send her the next iteration of the book about the voice.
[SPEAKER_02]: She wanted me to focus on that and started from there and it opened up all kinds of ideas that I hadn't ever thought of.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like what is the human voice and what is the voice?
[SPEAKER_02]: What we all have them.
[SPEAKER_02]: We wake up screaming from the birth channel.
[SPEAKER_02]: We start saying, what's happening here, I mean, this is the voice is the vehicle.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a voice tells everybody around you what's going on.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're screaming, if you're going, man, if you can't stop screaming a night and you wake your parents, you've got a whole vehicle there that's going to tell the world who you are.
[SPEAKER_02]: What you're doing?
[SPEAKER_02]: Whether it's just talking or singing or shouting or you've got the equipment.
[SPEAKER_02]: to communicate when you're born for the most part.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, if you're a deaf mute, that's also possible you have to figure out how to make some kind of gesture or noise or some communication to get through to the rest of the world.
[SPEAKER_02]: writing is just I mean I've always written and I wrote journals for years and years and years and I said to my manager I said I'm gonna have to go to the Library of Congress where my archives are and go back and look at my journals because I haven't seen them for 20 years because they're imprisoned down in Washington and maybe Trump will get his hands on them.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean you'll learn something.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hopefully for all of us I hope he does.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that was so notable and many notable things in your book, but the relationship to songs from the time when you started making music that you were chasing songs down, or hearing about songs, or someone would call you and say, I've got this great song.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's so hard to understand from today's perspective of just having songs endlessly at our disposal and the way that you described it, it feels like songs were these special jewels that you were trying to uncover that I think culturally we don't get to have that same relationship to today.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, there's so much noise on the planet.
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of people don't like to, I love to tour.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love sitting in a car in the backseat, either on the phone or writing or gazing out the window and meditating.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a good place for me to be, actually.
[SPEAKER_02]: But when I get to a hotel and I walk up to the hotel and there's music blasting out of the hotel, then I get in the room.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's music blasting out of the television set.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I don't identify with this music.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can bet your buttons that I don't and it drives me nuts.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the rare thing that happened when I hit the stage of being 16 and walking away from Mozart and
[SPEAKER_02]: Delving into Joe Stafford singing twuzz in the merry months of May, Barbara Allen.
[SPEAKER_02]: That song hit me like a lead hammer.
[SPEAKER_02]: It changed my life entirely when I heard it.
[SPEAKER_02]: The funny thing was that Joe Stafford, we knew Joe Stafford from singing Trimpos, you know, all the songs of the old writers and so on.
[SPEAKER_02]: And she and her husband had made records.
[SPEAKER_02]: popular music for Capitol Records for years.
[SPEAKER_02]: She was a big star, but she was Scottish.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so she decided to make an album of Scottish songs.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a wonderful album.
[SPEAKER_02]: It has, of course, Barbara Allen.
[SPEAKER_02]: It has two brothers on their way about the Civil War.
[SPEAKER_02]: There was Shannon Doha, a couple of other things, you know.
[SPEAKER_02]: So she went with her gut to do this.
[SPEAKER_02]: They had to start a record label to do it because they couldn't do it on Capitol
[SPEAKER_02]: Word got out over the years that I had been launched into the folk music realm by this song by Joe Stafford.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so her people at Capitol got in touch with me when they did a collection of all of her recordings.
[SPEAKER_02]: And they called me and asked me if I could write the liner notes on the box set.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was such an interesting transition
[SPEAKER_02]: When she and I talked quite a long time before I wrote the notes and it's an interesting thing about communication modules, you know how you can get through the radio, through the record companies, through the lineage and then hit Paderd.
[SPEAKER_02]: But when I had my father to show me what to do, the Library Congress would send him these recordings.
[SPEAKER_02]: First of all, he had all the books he wanted.
[SPEAKER_02]: He read everything.
[SPEAKER_02]: He read the French.
[SPEAKER_02]: He read the English.
[SPEAKER_02]: He read the Southerners.
[SPEAKER_02]: He read all the people that should be read in an education.
[SPEAKER_02]: In Braille, and of course, the Library Congress has been doing this for a hundred years at least.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then they sent him all of the shows from Broadway, and then they sent him all the recordings of Shakespeare read by all the English authors.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we were surrounded all the time by music, by art, by speech, and somehow in that age, which was transitioning from radio to cassettes to other ways of listening, somehow those songs that I was going to do,
[SPEAKER_02]: Fall in love with.
[SPEAKER_02]: They all came to me in mysterious ways in 1967 and my phone rang out Passed out and I answered the phone at three in the morning and it was Al Cooper and he put Johnny Mitchell on the phone.
[SPEAKER_02]: She's saying me both sides now
[SPEAKER_02]: So 67, but the first thing that happened in 1963, I was at a party at Al Grossman's in the mountains, and I woke up from a dead sleep and I heard Dylan writing and singing, Mr. Tambourine Men.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I got up, wandered downstairs, and listened to him for a couple of hours.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, things like that secret channels of songs would get to me and hit me.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that was it, that's how it all happened.
[SPEAKER_02]: My mother used to say, you know, you think you invented this, but your father taught you how to do it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Which she did.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's so beautiful.
[SPEAKER_01]: We want to be sensitive to your practice time and not in front of you, upon that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we always wrap our conversation.
[SPEAKER_02]: We've got three minutes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Perfect.
[SPEAKER_01]: We always wrap our conversations up with the same question.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can choose which direction you want to take.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's either some kind of advice or something that someone has shared with you throughout your career in your journey or maybe something that you've read that continues to resonate with you and keep your cup full and keep you inspired.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or, conversely, you could share something that you wish that you knew when you were 20 and just getting started in making a career of your creativity.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, they're little things.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're like seeing the guy stand at the stop sign when you're in the car.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's trying to wear something khaki and he's got a little sign that says, you know, I'm a vet.
[SPEAKER_02]: You always open the window and give him 20 bucks.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't care where you are.
[SPEAKER_02]: Do it now, which is what I have on my mirror in the bedroom.
[SPEAKER_02]: And try to find something in your life that needs
[SPEAKER_02]: Help, someone, something, this little trip I just made to California.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a very important trip.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I always am working.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I integrate my family with all that, but to go out with them and my four great grandchildren and my beautiful granddaughter who is a survivor of her father suicide.
[SPEAKER_02]: She's an extraordinary woman.
[SPEAKER_02]: She was four years old when he killed himself.
[SPEAKER_02]: Try to find out what somebody has on their mind.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's another idea that I have.
[SPEAKER_02]: I wonder, what are you thinking?
[SPEAKER_02]: What are you doing?
[SPEAKER_02]: What's troubling you?
[SPEAKER_02]: Can we talk about it?
[SPEAKER_02]: be kind.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm trying to finish this piece about my ex-husband and how devastating his having gotten custody of our son has been to me over the course of time.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I've never realized until to now how it really beat me down.
[SPEAKER_02]: It really was, it was a number of years that he had custody.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was lost custody because I was in therapy.
[SPEAKER_02]: Nowadays, if he were not in therapy, would lose custody.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was a time when no woman lost custody of their kids, but me, I mean, of course I must not have been the only person, but okay, if your trouble seems bigger than somebody else's, go and find out what their trouble is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm, that's beautiful.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's so much in this last hour.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're congratulate you on having this wonderful situation where you can reach out to people and make them talk and make them feel better.
[SPEAKER_02]: And thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: It sounds like a wonderful life in Nashville.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I congratulate you on your family and on your work and the industry and reaching out to all of us and getting the talk coming.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because that's what I think that's the secret of life is talking.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're all in this together.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're all trying to figure it out.
[SPEAKER_01]: So thank you for your experience and what you've gleaned from all of these adventures.
[SPEAKER_02]: honored to be on your show.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we always say that our conversations are only as good as our guests are willing to go.
[SPEAKER_00]: How far they're willing to go, and you've been really generous.
[SPEAKER_00]: So thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're like no long way.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I selfishly wish this could be like a 10 hour interview, but it was not a long time ago.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to part two, just give me a call.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you have a wonderful piano practice.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks, Grand Darklars, and have a wonderful day.
[SPEAKER_01]: We know your time is valuable and we're grateful you chose to spend this hour with us.
[SPEAKER_00]: If this conversation resonated with you, know that it is just one of many.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have an archive of over 140 conversations.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you're looking for a way to go to next, you can find curated playlists by topic on our YouTube channel or simply scroll back in the speed to find our conversations with Rose and Cash, New York Times by selling author Maggie Smith, Lucius, JD McPherson, and many others.
[SPEAKER_01]: This shows produced by me, Mary Shaffer based with Help From a Kala Ann, and all the music he hears written, performed and produced by me as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our show is edited and mixed by Leland Holden at Pod Punch, and we are proud members of the Bluegrass situation podcast network.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for being here, we'll see you next time.