[SPEAKER_02]: The part of me that is the singer songwriter, like the person who makes these kinds of songs, had just been left behind and other parts of my persona, like different archetypes, were in charge.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not to say that making songy slutter isn't a creative exercise it is, but it felt a little bit more like craftsmanship than art.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I didn't feel whole.
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't feel like complete because this aspect of myself
[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 Michaela Ann.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm Aaron Kray for Hayes.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the other 22 hours, an exploration of the creative life, lived in between.
[SPEAKER_01]: Today our conversation features singer, songwriter, producer, podcaster, and TV host, Rishikesh Herway, who was put out a half dozen records including his most recent release in the last hour of light, which is his first record in over 15 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: If his name sounds familiar to you, it's probably because you enjoy listening to music podcasts, and Rishikesh is the creator, producer, and host of the,
[SPEAKER_01]: a claimed podcast song explorer which features artists dissecting and telling the story of the creation and recording of some of their songs artists such as Alicia Keys R.M.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nine-inch nails say incredible podcast that I am and make a lot of our fans of.
[SPEAKER_01]: which was also adapted to be a Netflix series.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rich Cash is also created and hosted and produced to other successful podcasts on completely different topics.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we, as you can imagine, dive into this dichotomy of creative endeavors and approaches.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and we get to talk about what is the goal in creating?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it to lever our work?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it to express our work?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it to be competent?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a really beautiful and I would dare say tender, vulnerable conversation, overcoming negative self-talk, feelings of failure even when someone is seemingly very successful in certain realms and creating in order to feel whole.
[SPEAKER_01]: Please enjoy our conversation with Richie Kesher.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we always just like to start with how are you today?
[SPEAKER_00]: How are you really and where are you physically and creatively?
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks so much, thanks for having me on the show.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm in Los Angeles right now.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm in my little music and podcast studio, which she used to be my garage.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm a little bit out of it because I just got back home last night walked in the door around 11.30 PM after doing some tour dates.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm in that post-travel window and I should be just out of it in time too.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just as we leave again on Saturday.
[SPEAKER_00]: Take it back, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I notice on these toilets you kind of seemingly are melding your two creative outlets that I know of being conversation and your performance is that correct where there's a conversation beforehand and then you perform or is it all mixed together?
[SPEAKER_02]: No, it's the first hour is the conversation and then the second hour is the band performance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was so bummed to miss you here in Nashville and you were with Allison Russell who we've known a really long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've played shows with Allison years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you speak to the experience of one touring for the first time in a long time?
[SPEAKER_00]: And also doing it in this semi non-traditional way at least in terms of how people typically go out and promote records on tour, starting with the conversation before actually presenting the music.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think the operative word is non-traditional because I feel like there's been nothing traditional about my career in any kind of way, including the fact that I haven't toured in any capacity really in three years in terms of like doing headlining shows and I haven't put out an album in 15 years.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I had this weird other chapter of my life making podcasts,
[SPEAKER_02]: in between.
[SPEAKER_02]: I felt like in recognition of how non-traditional my arc has been and what I've been doing with my life for the last decade plus instead of making songs.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now that I am going on tour, I wanted to bring all the different parts of who I am and what my life has been into this.
[SPEAKER_02]: because I feel like the album is very much a snapshot of what my entire life is.
[SPEAKER_02]: I tried to really make it as honest and autobiographical as possible.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I felt like by having the tours be both the musical performance and also this conversational aspect, it would represent the entirety of who I am in a better way.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have had this podcast for three years, but we both went to Jazz School in New York City.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how we met and I'll speak mostly just for myself, but we both have had, I would say non-traditional career paths as well, going in and out of not just sticking to one lane.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I've sometimes struggled with that,
[SPEAKER_00]: and wondered would it be easier if I just stayed in one lane and I'm curious how you have felt about that and any relationship to identity of musician versus podcast creator and host versus back to musician, do you think about them in compartments ever or does it feel just really fluid for you?
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it in awe honestly does feel fluid internally, but I'm very aware of how externally I think it looks like where I'm afraid of how it looks like deletantism.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm definitely aware of by pursuing all these different things that I'm interested in, that maybe I'm only reaching like meager competence in all of them.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that started even before I ever made a podcast, even within my own music, I felt like I was really interested in not just writing songs but also singing and not just singing but also playing all the instruments and producing and not just making singer songwriter kind of acoustic stuff but also electronic stuff and I wanted to do remixes and there were so many different artists that I really, really loved.
[SPEAKER_02]: and I wanted to emulate.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so instead of just picking one path and being like, this is exactly the lane that I occupy.
[SPEAKER_02]: I really tried to do all of the different things.
[SPEAKER_02]: And while that was creatively, really exciting for me, I think often about how I might have ham strung myself a little bit by not choosing one avenue.
[SPEAKER_02]: Instead of having four different bands where I'm like, oh, you know, and these are my different identities.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was like, no, no, I do all of these things.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love all of these things, so I'm gonna bring it all in.
[SPEAKER_02]: That was what I told myself and what felt right, but I don't know that it was right.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm so curious about this, because these are questions I contemplate all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it not right because of the reception or lack of reception or quote unquote success?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because as you were talking, I'm like, is our goal competence or is it expression?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I think that sometimes I wonder if people turn to an artist or a person or however you want to think of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like they've tuned into a particular channel on their radio, where they're like, right now I want to listen to this.
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to listen to the pop station or I want to listen to the news.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you go to turn on the news and they're playing pop music, you'd be confused, be like, wait, this is not what I was asking for.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think people have many of items in front of them, and then they want to go to that item for that feeling.
[SPEAKER_02]: or something.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's not to say that artists can't explore lots of different emotional ideas or lyrical ideas, but I do think that people like artists to be of a flavor.
[SPEAKER_02]: It might be a deep flavor, it might be a complicated flavor, but still one that they can say, I'm going to this because I feel I want to be in touch with
[SPEAKER_02]: this, maybe.
[SPEAKER_02]: And instead of me being like, this is the one offering that I have, who's almost like, I treated my own music like a fan.
[SPEAKER_02]: Or I'm like, no, no, I also have a whole many of things that I want to tune into.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm going to do that as an artist.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, yeah, here's the song where it's just two acoustic guitars in my voice.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then here's one that's completely instrumental and completely electronic.
[SPEAKER_02]: And they sit next to each other on the same album.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I always thought that was really cool.
[SPEAKER_02]: And isn't it interesting to think about the ways in which those two songs might overlap?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, what is the subtle connection between those two things?
[SPEAKER_02]: Besides the fact that they come from me and the fact that they're sequenced on the same album, but maybe it's asking too much, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I love this type of thought practice because my other question is, are we artists to be what we think people want us to be?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's also like where art and commerce intersects, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Where it's like it's one thing if we're making an album.
[SPEAKER_00]: to express whatever a heart wants to express and it might feel schizophrenic to some people, but that doesn't matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if we're trying to build a commercial career, then maybe we have to try and fit into some boxes and I do think you're right that typically consumers
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of want to know what they're going to get and turn to the channel or turn to the genre, and it takes some depth to receive an artist's work and let yourself be surprised by them and taking on a journey with them and not just expect them to give what you want them.
[SPEAKER_00]: My go-to for an example is Linda Ronstadt.
[SPEAKER_00]: who never would stay in a box and made rock music and pop music and Spanish traditional tunes and did opera.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a little bit of a rub, right, of where we all have to decide where do I confine myself to operate within spheres that I maybe want to and maybe I decide I make one record of acoustic stuff and one record of electronic.
[SPEAKER_00]: you have gotten to go inside so many artists songs in depth and their own process has that influenced or changed how you feel about making things.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's funny because even actually within the context of song explode or I feel like I'm also guilty of this sort of deletantism.
[SPEAKER_02]: because there are other podcasts about music where they'll say like, this is a show for people who are interested in this genre of music.
[SPEAKER_02]: There could be a version of song, exploder that only covers hip-hop or only covers indie music or something like that, you know, or only covers film scores.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I stubbornly felt like, no, I wanted to cover it all, because I felt like there was something interesting about applying this question of how did you get from
[SPEAKER_02]: Across all these different genres, but I know that people listen to the show very rarely with like a sense of I'm going to listen every episode and Most people I think will look for the things that they're already familiar with so I might have hamstrung The success of the show also by might not just picking a lane for it and going deep I think breath instead of depth is a choice that I find interesting But isn't necessarily the most strategic
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, that resonates with me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am one of the listeners of song explorer that if it's been a while, I'll go and be like, oh, that looks familiar, but then I'll listen to things in the middle and to me, the throughline through everything is the process.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you said, it's bringing it from nothing to something.
[SPEAKER_01]: I grew up listening to everything from the talking heads to the band, to the grateful that with the common point being a band recording in a room to take live all creating like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's like the way of making records that's familiar to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: So rather than just listening to 8,000 variations of that, it's nice to hear, oh, a process and music isn't made in a vacuum.
[SPEAKER_01]: No matter how much we think it is, no matter if you grow up and you only listen to Bob Dylan, you're still absorb all this other things.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's nice to see that through line and listening to these varied artists and varied approaches.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in a way that's what we try to bring here as well, having navigated us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do we stay in our lane and have the same type of artists where we've branched out to having authors and poets and visual artists and photographers because we want the through line to be creativity
[SPEAKER_01]: We lived in New York City for 12 years, and this kind of something that we've noticed living in Nashville, which is amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an amazing city that tosses like it is music city because it is systemically set up for musicians to be a valid career choice.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so whether that's getting a mortgage or having a CPA that understands touring cycles and record deals and whatever that is, that's incredible.
[SPEAKER_01]: But
[SPEAKER_01]: It is far skewed to being, at least as artistic careers, far skewed to being only musicians.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, where a city like Los Angeles or New York has a varied degree.
[SPEAKER_01]: So in a way, national can kind of feel like a work conference a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because everybody's in the same industry, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think there is also a lot of strength in diversity, of approach and diversity of artists and song choices and approaches.
[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 these quiet honest conversations matter.
[SPEAKER_01]: The best way to support our work is simply to share it so if you can think of one person who would appreciate this show please pass it along and if you haven't yet please follow our show on your listening platform of choice or subscribe to our channel on YouTube.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a small action that may save massive difference for us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for being here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's get back to our conversation.
[SPEAKER_02]: to go back to your question about, if it influenced me, I do think that I made a conscious effort to do the opposite on the new album and work within a more constrained palette.
[SPEAKER_02]: And hand over the production reigns to somebody else.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the producer Phil Weinrobe has a very specific way of working, which is recording everything live.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it automatically, like all the songs on the album,
[SPEAKER_02]: they feel like a moment in time, they feel like they have a specificity because he produced and recorded and mixed it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then we've got people are kind of coming in and out of the studio, but just that documentation to me, this album feels more cohesive, sonically at least, if nothing else, but I hope also lyrically and just the overall context for it.
[SPEAKER_02]: feels more cohesive, but that was definitely something where I was trying to react against the way that I had worked before, kind of being all over the place and taking years to make my songs.
[SPEAKER_02]: So on the same album, there'd be songs that had been written and then also recorded years apart from one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that was going to be my next question because this record is beautiful and it feels very cohesive and like it's a novel rather than a collection of songs.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm also always so curious about how our creativity functions or flourishes or it doesn't within constraints or within absolute freedom and sometimes a blank page is as crippling as like too many parameters.
[SPEAKER_00]: And also, at least from the story that I've read from the information that you're bio and stuff about having a specific context emotionally and personally, if you feel comfortable talking about that, that influenced this record to then also inform those constraints.
[SPEAKER_00]: What that has been like, the urge to want to make this record after so long.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think I was thinking about these topics that we first were talking about at the beginning of the conversation, this idea of like, what is the expectation or like, what is the reception going to be, what do people want?
[SPEAKER_02]: All this stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: It looms so large in my mind and maybe took up too much space and eventually led me to stop making music just because I didn't know how to warrant continuing with my career because I felt like a failure basically.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when I got back to making music finally, after a decade of feeling that way, it was out of a sense that as it just gave that up, I think it could be right to say like, oh, it doesn't matter what other people think you've just got to love it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that that's true.
[SPEAKER_02]: Certainly for a lot of people, I think for me, it was almost whether I love it or not, became beside the point.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there was something kind of liberating about that idea of like,
[SPEAKER_02]: you just have to make it not because I'm so proud of it or I think it's so amazing, but just because it was necessary for my sense of wholeness of who I am and working with Phil was actually incredibly special because it did tap into so much of what I was writing about.
[SPEAKER_02]: which was my own life and the messiness of it and how much my own sense of wanting control and wanting things to be perfect and wanting things to like play out like some grand design hadn't come true not just in my own music but in everything because that's just what life is and so then recording it live and doing it within these narrow parameters felt like a wonderful metaphor for that.
[SPEAKER_02]: because it meant I had to just live with it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, like, that's just how it happened.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what happened on that day.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there are so many things that I was writing about that were in the song itself, like a documentation of that feeling.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's beautiful.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I like to say that that's why it's called a record.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a record at a time and a feeling in the experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was literally going to say, and that's why Aaron always says, that's why it's a record.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I just want to note and to Phil's horn myself, just he's such a brilliant creator.
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know him personally, but we're friends with his partner Maya.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, we've known her for years from broken.
[SPEAKER_01]: She's a past guest on this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I didn't make that connection.
[SPEAKER_00]: Amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I assume that you made this record at his studio in Brooklyn, correct?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, yeah, and so Maya would pop in occasionally and say hi with their baby.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so that was really, really sweet.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was nice to do it in that place and in that context.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's so much about the record that is about home and domesticity and about family.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so to do it in a place where that was right there, the evidence of that was right there was really nice.
[SPEAKER_02]: It made it feel a lot less clinical.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that reminder, I mean, you know, this is our recording studio in our backyard that Aaron built and we have two children, the oldest ones almost five and then we have a 16 month old and we've been making records together and separately for many, many years and it's such a different experience being so connected to home and kids being in and out or playing in the backyard and whether it's me making the record or him making record with other artists.
[SPEAKER_00]: Compared to my younger days of making a record where it was fun, sometimes it was party vibes, but a lot of times it was also like, we're going away, we're removing ourselves from life to make this record.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think there's a wonderful thing that can happen with that, but you can kind of encapsulate.
[SPEAKER_00]: but there's also this weird balance of preciousness and lack of preciousness like holding it lightly when all the themes that you're talking about in your music and that process of life is messy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing has ever black or white.
[SPEAKER_00]: Clean these are themes that also I feel they are the main themes of my life right now in my music that I'm writing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's often what comes with middle age.
[SPEAKER_00]: Grappling with loss for the first time, ageing parents, it's all really resonant, and you talking about that just having a child come in.
[SPEAKER_00]: And did you feel in the recording process more relaxed than in previous experiences?
[SPEAKER_02]: No, definitely not.
[SPEAKER_02]: as much as I think that it was poetic and a beautiful metaphor and a really important growth experience for me, both as an artist and as just a human being, I did grow because I was so far outside of my comfort zone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was in theory excited about this experiment of working without a safety net and doing stuff live, but it was so antithetical to how I made music my entire life, and not just music like how I make my podcast, like how I just make things.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a level of carefulness that I guess in some ways feels like it's part of who I am.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so part of the struggle for me was, oh, this is supposed to be a record of who I am, but if I don't have this aspect of who I am, is it actually like an honest depiction, you know, like for better or for worse, a meticulousness is part of my identity.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so how do I let go of that and still feel like it's honest?
[SPEAKER_02]: So those kinds of thoughts swirl around in my head before the making.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then when we were actually making it, I did ultimately decide I was gonna make it this way, but then I was just like,
[SPEAKER_02]: Am I blowing it?
[SPEAKER_02]: This is my entire record budget, and what if I don't like my own results, especially the singing part of it?
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I was so scared of that part, trying to sing live and not being able to go back and tweak a note here and there, you know, make sure everything was in tune, but Phil really pushed me on that and said, look, things being in tune is not
[SPEAKER_02]: the most important thing which really really felt like sandpaper against my you know the soft fleshy part of my persona.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's what I relate to artists of all of the things that you can change in a modern recording obviously I understand that intonation is a very personal thing it's a thing that there's a lot of ego and pride wrapped in but that's one of the easier things to support as a producer of mixer is the intonation and what you can't change is the intent and the delivery the humanness behind the voice that makes the voice so special is the connection point.
[SPEAKER_01]: within the song.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a producer here in Tennessee named Matt Ross Spang, who's done a lot of work.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he gave this great TED talk in Memphis about imperfections in music.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he took a no mountain high enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's like, I could not do it myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had an assistant take it and use AI to remove the vocals and we tuned the vocals.
[SPEAKER_01]: And right at the top of the chorus every time the vocals are actually like surprisingly flat, which I've never noticed because the emotion is so high there.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he had his assistant tune it to like perfectly
[SPEAKER_01]: And it just absolutely falls flat.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no impact to it at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no emotion.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a musical free fall in a way just to be like to trust your instincts and lean it out.
[SPEAKER_01]: The delivery of that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love the subtle metaphor of that, too.
[SPEAKER_02]: That like, ain't no man high enough.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then there are little flat.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, just go on their way up the mountain.
[SPEAKER_02]: That haven't quite got into the peak.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: I personally am really interested in where artists are as they're making a record.
[SPEAKER_01]: We started by talking about awareness of the audience in regards to album sequencing song selection approach.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm wondering if you could talk about your awareness of the audience given how much your life changed between the last time you recorded a record in this.
[SPEAKER_01]: It might not have been through records in Torim, but you're undoubtedly your profile has raised, you have a larger audience.
[SPEAKER_01]: Was that something that you were aware of in the making of this record?
[SPEAKER_02]: I had a few different thoughts about the idea of audience going into the record before even getting to the music side of things.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think my own relationship with whatever audience I have through the podcast that I make already felt fraught because the people who love
[SPEAKER_00]: on there.
[SPEAKER_02]: People love the REM episode of song explode or not because of me, but because they have such a deep relationship to REM.
[SPEAKER_02]: People love the 9-inch nails episode because they've lived with 9-inch nails music and it's meant so much to them.
[SPEAKER_02]: They might appreciate the context with which I've created this sort of format of the show and maybe even some of the questions that I've asked that responses that I've elicited, but ultimately I
[SPEAKER_02]: made like a vessel but what's filling the vessel is the artist and their song and their story and I can't take responsibility for that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I already felt like anytime anybody says like oh I loved this episode of the show or something like that I'm like well there's a huge asterisk there.
[SPEAKER_02]: my part of what you loved feels minimal.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I did these other podcasts that were popular in their own right.
[SPEAKER_02]: One was a TV rewatch podcast called The West Wing Weekly.
[SPEAKER_02]: And another was a pandemic cooking podcast called Home Cooking.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I made the Home Cooking podcast with my friends, I mean, Nostrad, who's a chef who has a huge, huge, million plus best-selling cookbook called Salt Fadass at Heat.
[SPEAKER_02]: And a huge audience.
[SPEAKER_02]: The West Wing I made with my friend, Josh Molina, who was on the West Wing and the West Wing itself, huge audience, you know, millions and millions and millions of people watched that show when it was on the air.
[SPEAKER_02]: And similarly, I felt like I had at best a co-starring role in those shows.
[SPEAKER_02]: And to me, more realistically, I was more of a footnote.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, I had the idea for making these shows.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was the producer.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was the person getting them off ground.
[SPEAKER_02]: But even though I was co-hosting them and I was on the mic, people who love the West Wing weekly podcast, I was not the number one reason why they love it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I wasn't even the number three reason.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love this TV show.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love the fact that you're talking about this episode.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh and you have Allison Janion as a guest.
[SPEAKER_02]: There were so many things that I felt like I'm very low in the minds of people who care about those.
[SPEAKER_02]: And some people did.
[SPEAKER_02]: Some people absolutely were like, I love the two of you, you know, whether it was me and Josh or me and Samine.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're like, I love your interaction.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love your dynamic.
[SPEAKER_02]: But that was a minority, I think, within already a niche thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: So given all of that, the idea of then trying to say to these people who have come to me in these ways that have nothing to do with my music, to then say, would you like to hear songs about my deep feelings in my life?
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know how much of those different audiences I could ever reach.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if any of those people who already might not care about me within those context of shows that I made are going to then go even a step further.
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's a very long way of saying, I was aware of audience in so far as I thought, maybe none of the stuff that I've built will ever cross over to this part, even though it's the most meaningful and the most central part of who I am.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's really interesting to weigh the differences between roles in your podcasts and what you do and then roles here.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's such an acid observation that our episodes function and are about the same way.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, yes, we're having conversations and there's a dynamic that we create.
[SPEAKER_01]: But generally, when people love the conversations is because they love our guests and they have this emotional response.
[SPEAKER_01]: Bob Dylan mentioned, people come to see shows.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is it not to hear it?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a hear him, but he's not to hear it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not to see him, but to see themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, not to see him, but to see themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: They hear the sun, and they see themselves in that, which I know is something that you talk about is the raunus of being real and being truthful is more probably relatable, the more honest you are.
[SPEAKER_00]: It brings back what you said, the motivation to make this record was even less about, like, I love it and I'm so proud, but that it felt necessary for you to feel whole.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, a lot of the things we talk about on this podcast is when you're building a lifelong career on your creativity, you are trying to make a living and sustain a livelihood, but then there's also
[SPEAKER_00]: your creativity that has nothing to do with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes it can align that the thing that you need to make does produce enough success that you can make a living and all that stuff, but sometimes it doesn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the importance of not ignoring the need to create, I think is something I see more and more people talk about.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm really
[SPEAKER_00]: passion about I just I'm off right now but I started a master's program in depth psychology of creativity and it's all Carl Young psychology and it's the foundational belief that our path in life is to become whole and how creativity part of becoming whole is bringing our unconscious self to our conscious self on a level plane field we've live in a society that's
[SPEAKER_00]: elevated and prioritized the conscious rational mind with that in order to be whole, we need to see all parts of ourselves and that creativity is an essential vehicle to that, especially when processing your stories and these songs of grief and loss and the things that we all have to grapple with.
[SPEAKER_00]: the way that storytelling can synthesize those experiences and embody them in ourselves, as well as for others, like that is how magic is real.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think also, you know, I've been aware of song
[SPEAKER_00]: and then I listen to this record and register story and that was the hook for me because that was the work that your themes and the things that resonated most with me right now in my life.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think when we are creative people like connecting all the dots here of like breath versus depth and is the point competence or expression when you have a lot of outlets you're going to reach
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the things that I became aware of in a kind of maybe Jungian way was that the part of me that is the singer songwriter, like the person who makes these kinds of songs, had just been left behind.
[SPEAKER_02]: and other parts of my persona like different archetypes were in charge.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not to say that making songy splutter isn't a creative exercise it is, but it felt a little bit more like craftsmanship than art, where you can imagine like making the best version of a chair over and over and over again.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Jeff Tweetie has something in his book, How to Write One Song, where he compares songs to trees.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that might be where I got the chair metaphor.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not like we're making chairs, we're making trees.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the idea of like, he's talking about Judd, you don't really judge a tree.
[SPEAKER_02]: It is singularly itself.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think that there was sort of a different archetype for me that was in charge or a few different ones that might have been in charge in making song,
[SPEAKER_02]: for many, many, many years, and so I didn't feel whole.
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't feel like complete because this aspect of myself was sort of in the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and those different parts of ourselves, I was just saying to air in the other day.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's so interesting because we can have, especially as kids, when we kind of are discovering our passions and our creativity, it's kind of this protected little world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you grow up and you have to work and you have to make money and you have ambition and the desire for success and all of this stuff can infiltrate this relationship that we have.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was saying to Erin recently, I've really noticed my relationship to especially different genres of music, have really been influenced or shifted.
[SPEAKER_00]: We went to a jazz conservatory in New York and my love for jazz got kind of beaten out of me, like it's cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes in school and it kind of became hard for me to listen to jazz for a long time and then my relationship to country music has changed from the years of living in Nashville and also just observing the commercial pop culture of country music and politics.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like grappling with my political civil rights
[SPEAKER_00]: human beliefs with music that was coming from people that were sometimes at odds with that, and again, nothing has ever made in a vacuum.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're just, I would imagine for someone like you, it would take a lot of effort to also protect those different parts of yourself, especially when you're on a ride of doing these other things, and then might not even notice until all of a sudden
[SPEAKER_02]: That's exactly what happened.
[SPEAKER_02]: That is 100% what happened.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was only maybe four years into making song exposure that I started to realize that there was a real issue.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, that I was feeling really unhappy and I couldn't figure out why that was sort of when this kind of thought process around.
[SPEAKER_02]: the different archetypes and who was in charge and who was being left behind started to formulate because I was like, why am I so unhappy?
[SPEAKER_02]: I was still making music.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was within the context of like film scores and TV scores and just sort of like projects for hire.
[SPEAKER_02]: Things where I was again creating, but it wasn't as deeply personal as my own songs.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was doing these other projects and I was getting to have all these exciting opportunities that they were bringing, things that I would never expected from my own life.
[SPEAKER_02]: but suddenly I like blinked and I was like, wait, for years later, why am I feeling so depressed?
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you have any help in working through that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you find any tools or resources of how to come back to it?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, I would credit two people who helped a lot.
[SPEAKER_02]: One was Lindsay and my wife Lindsay and I went to a couple's therapist.
[SPEAKER_02]: When we first got together, we sort of got together very, very quickly and very intensely.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then decided to have a very long engagement.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in that time period, we went to a couple's therapist as preventative medicine, you know, just to sort of be.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like we jumped in really fast with both feet and so then we're like, okay, now how do we actually learn to coexist with each other comfortably?
[SPEAKER_02]: So we started going to see a couple therapists and he was amazing and around our age and just really helped us translate things about ourselves in terms of how we related to one another.
[SPEAKER_02]: But in the process of doing that, we did a lot of individual work.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was all sort of in service of our relationship but I'd never done therapy before.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, your individual moods and mood swings and just emotional states obviously play a big part in your dynamic with your partner.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it was in conversation with him that I even got introduced to the idea of like young and the archetypes and this idea of our subconscious trying to make us whole.
[SPEAKER_02]: And honestly, that idea, even though we were many years later and not working with him anymore, that central concept of even, you know, as I was saying, like, going to work with Phil and being very outside of my comfort zone, but knowing that that was probably a good thing for me, really came from those kinds of conversations of, what is the thing that feels comfortable?
[SPEAKER_02]: Why does it feel comfortable?
[SPEAKER_02]: What am I avoiding?
[SPEAKER_02]: And like, what would I gain by going into a place
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the other person who I would say was incredibly transformational in my life was my friend Jenny Owing Young's who, I don't know if you know her from your Yep Rock days.
[SPEAKER_01]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_02]: But Jenny invited me to co-write a song with her at a time when I was deep in my writer's block and really when I had thought that I'd kind of lost the ability to write songs at all.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like maybe I had a finite number of them in me and I just used up all the slots.
[SPEAKER_02]: She just very cheerfully and without any awareness
[SPEAKER_02]: Hey, do you want to write a song with me and after a lot of internal debate about whether or not I even could and how do I like let down this at that point Friendly acquaintance.
[SPEAKER_02]: How do I let her down by saying like, oh, I don't think I haven't been to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: I eventually was like, no, I'd rather be polite And say yes, then be polite and say no, you know, and be like
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I said, yes, and then we wrote this song together, and through that, she really showed me that that part of myself was still alive, and not just alive, but like really desperate for oxygen.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, then we started writing together more and more, and I suddenly had this collaborator at the songwriting buddy, and she has many, many, many, many songwriting buddies.
[SPEAKER_02]: For me, she was the only one.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, but she was an incredible lifeline to kind of crawling out of this hole and finding my way back to the possibility of this version of myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's beautiful in that collaboration carried through this record.
[SPEAKER_01]: Correct, you wrote with a lot of different color writers here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I found that collaborating with Jenny just changed my relationship to my own ideas, because hearing her sing a line that I wrote that if I'd been on my own, I might have just done the thing that I'd been doing for a decade, which was coming up with an idea and immediately realizing why it was stupid,
[SPEAKER_02]: worth pursuing because I would never be able to make anything that resonated with all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: I would just go through a million negative thoughts in the blink of an eye and throw it away and that would be it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I would feel depressed and then I would go back to my regular life, just writing in a room with Jenny hearing her sing the exact same line that I had just been about to say like, oh, this is stupid.
[SPEAKER_02]: I would think actually that sounds kind of nice.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know,
[SPEAKER_02]: And that was so helpful and meaningful.
[SPEAKER_02]: And after that, I thought, well, I can't only rely on you.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have to see what else is out there.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Jenny introduced me to her friend, John Mark Nelson.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he became a really close friend and another, so I'm writing collaborator.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so then I started to think, okay, well, who else is out there?
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, writing with John Mark was very different from writing with Jenny, because he has his own sensibilities.
[SPEAKER_02]: And what we made was this,
[SPEAKER_02]: a Malcolm between where he was and what he loves and who I am and yet I still felt like it was me.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I just got excited about that experience and I did want to keep making music and I wanted to try and free myself from the gravitational pull of the black hole of my own self-criticism.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I reached out to other people and other people and slowly found people whose music I loved and felt some kind of kinship with.
[SPEAKER_02]: As potential collaborators and cold-called a few people and maybe not totally cold-called kind of like lukewarm-called people who I knew but hadn't worked with in that way.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: trying to make music again, would you be open to it?
[SPEAKER_02]: And then eventually that did lead to being able to write again on my own as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just kind of opened the door a crack and I was like, oh, okay, I maybe I can do this.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I've done this with other people, maybe I can do this on my own as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: So.
[SPEAKER_02]: all of that really changed my life and it's also part of the reason why I wanted to work with Phil you know is to just again surrender some of that control in service of actually having the thing exists to actually making the thing as opposed to clenching it so tightly with both hands that it never actually lives.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that approach, both in creating and in life in general, where there's just saying that always resonates in the back of my head and it's, if you do what you've done, you're going to get what you have.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you're trying to write by yourself right by yourself the same way and it finally you against all the internal voices and all that stuck at stick in the spokes and it opened up this whole thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just want to shine a light.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was shocked on cold calling people and jumping into co-rights with people that maybe you didn't have a personal connection with.
[SPEAKER_01]: felt comfortable before you could write with yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: I get goosebumps thinking about, I do a lot of writing with people that I don't know and I rarely write by myself, but I didn't grow up as a writer.
[SPEAKER_01]: I grew up as a sideman, producer, all of that, but I write for TV and film and placements and stuff and so I'll get put in via publishers with people that I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is nerve-wracking.
[SPEAKER_01]: For me, my imposter syndrome just is at 11 a media until somebody breaks the ice.
[SPEAKER_01]: My effort to change the paradigm is to try to be the one that breaks the ice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me be the one that does that so I can show myself that I'm in control a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: But just hearing you say that you went from right with warm acquaintances to just cold calling people to then finally is quite the steps.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and I think, you know, I feel so much can ship to your story because it's so, I have experienced a lot of similar things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just put out a record that I couldn't write for two years and thought I wouldn't ever write again and have the same exact experience that I came back to writing through writing with other people.
[SPEAKER_00]: It loosened my grip on it, instead of, you know, I was living in the like, already 10 steps ahead in the outcome.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I couldn't even begin the process because I was like, whoa, what it's bad or I can't even get there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then it just feeds itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just was packing up some stuff because we're actually moving.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I found an old journal from the time when I couldn't write.
[SPEAKER_00]: We had a brand new baby.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was a first-time mother and my own mother had a massive
[SPEAKER_00]: I was just talking about how I couldn't write, and I was like, I feel like my head is too full of my mom and Georgia or daughter.
[SPEAKER_00]: And reading back and then knowing now my experience of coming back to writing through people, I was looking at myself with so much compassion and also understanding that sometimes the times of not writing are actually necessary.
[SPEAKER_00]: to just let ourselves experience and I think the urge to create can sometimes get mixed up with this pressure to produce, which is different and always we should be making something and maybe the periods of time that we're not actually writing.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're just not yet ready that maybe we just need
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think that's really insightful and important because so much of that urge does come from an external idea of, like, I need to have a career, you know, like, I need to need a new album, every, whatever, year and a half, two years, you know, you gotta keep having output, but you need to also have room to just experience those life things.
[SPEAKER_02]: And maybe that will someday affect your, what you're writing.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I do feel like the glass can't be entirely full of thoughts.
[SPEAKER_02]: you need to have like some layer of idleness in order to write when you're in the midst of crisis, even if that crisis ends up being something that you write about later.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think you can write about it at the time because you need that sort of bit of nothingness to fill up with your art.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're at 100% capacity, just dealing with everything, there's no way.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then you feel guilty and you judge yourself or not making something in that moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, which in hindsight is crazy.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're like, well, I'm also supposed to be documenting and processing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe sometimes, yeah, that space between is really essential.
[SPEAKER_01]: We realize that we're getting near the end of our time.
[SPEAKER_01]: We like to be aware and respectful of the time that our guests give to us.
[SPEAKER_01]: We like to wrap our conversations up kind of in the same way.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a choose your own adventure question.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it could be either something that someone has told you along the way, or something that you have read, a sentiment, a quote that continues to resonate with you and keep your creative cup full or conversely, it could be something that you wish that younger you knew when you're first starting to build a career
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a quote that I've been thinking about a lot, and I implicitly referenced it at the beginning of our conversation, which is a story that's told by the choreographer Agnes de Mill in a biography of the choreographer Martha Graham, where Agnes, she's speaking to Martha about her own work.
[SPEAKER_02]: and how she's just disappointed with what she's made.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Martha says it is not your job to determine whether your work is good or not.
[SPEAKER_02]: Here's the quote.
[SPEAKER_02]: She says, there's a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action.
[SPEAKER_02]: And because there's only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and it will be lost.
[SPEAKER_02]: The world will not have it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions.
[SPEAKER_02]: It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
[SPEAKER_02]: You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you.
[SPEAKER_02]: keep the channel open.
[SPEAKER_02]: It goes on and you know Agnes says I only see the flaws in my work.
[SPEAKER_02]: I am not pleased or satisfied and Martha says no artist is pleased and Agnes says but then there's no satisfaction, no satisfaction whatever at any time.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that quote has lived so large in my mind recently because of this idea of you don't even have to believe in yourself.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have to keep yourself open and aware to the things that motivate you.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think I had a resistance in the moments of my greatest self-doubt to the kinds of messages that say, like, hey, you just have to love your work.
[SPEAKER_02]: You just have to believe in it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And yet I still feel like something's missing if I don't make it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Can I make work even if I don't feel like I know what the value is?
[SPEAKER_02]: Can I just get rid of the idea of value entirely?
[SPEAKER_02]: And this quote from Martha Graham made me feel so seen that like, it's not a part of the process at all.
[SPEAKER_02]: Whether you think it's good or not or whether you believe in it or not,
[SPEAKER_02]: and put it out there in the world.
[SPEAKER_02]: Other people will judge it or enjoy it or not enjoy it, it's just not part of your job.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that made me want to cry for some reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I wasn't going to read it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The queer divine dissatisfaction and blessed unrest.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's something that people need to hear over and over again because we're really standing in that belief and trying to live in that is really going against the grain of what
[SPEAKER_00]: our larger culture wants us to do when we've created these systems to just constantly be these false value systems of trying to quantify our worth or our score or our likability and I think that's the beauty and really trying to live a life of creativity of connecting to that ethos all the time which is hard work.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, Rishi Cash, thank you so much for carving time this morning to sit with us and share your experiences and your wisdom we really appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for having me.
[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 Rosenkash, New York Times by selling author Maggie Smith, Lucius, J.D.
[SPEAKER_00]: McCurson, and many others.
[SPEAKER_01]: This shows produced by me, Mary Chaffer-based with help from Michaela and all the music here is written, performed and produced by me as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our show is edited and mixed by Leeland Holden at Pod Punch and we are proud numbers of a Bluegrass situation podcast network.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for being here, we'll see you next time.