Rick Rubin
In addition to being a podcast host, Frederick Jay “Rick” Rubin is an American record producer and former co-president of Columbia Records. Along with Russell Simmons, he is the co-founder…
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Elvis Costello seemed to arrive fully formed with his 1977 debut, My Aim Is True. The look, the voice, the wordplay and the attitude were already there, along with songs like “Alison,” “Watching the Detectives” and “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” that helped establish him as one of the most distinctive songwriters of his generation. But behind that seemingly sudden arrival were years spent absorbing everything from Motown and country to Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman and the California folk-rock of the late ’60s and early ’70s, as Costello worked to find a musical language of his own.
Now, nearly 50 years later, Costello is revisiting that evolution with an expansive new anniversary edition of My Aim Is True. The collection reaches back to songs and demos he recorded before the album, tracing his early experiments as a songwriter through the sessions with producer Nick Lowe and the American band Clover, and eventually to the formation of the Attractions.
On today’s episode, Bruce Headlam talks with Elvis Costello about how he found his voice as a songwriter, the music that shaped him, and the stories behind some of the songs on My Aim Is True. They also talk about the “angry young man” persona that followed Costello through his early career, what he learned about music from his parents, and what he hears now when he looks back at the young songwriter he was nearly half a century ago.
You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite songs from Elvis Costello HERE.
Pushkin. So Elvis Costello, welcome to Broken Record.
00:13
Speaker 2
Good to be here.
00:14
Speaker 1
And you are going to talk about your new release of your old release. So tell me what it is.
00:21
Speaker 3
It is the 49th anniversary set presenting My Aim is True, my first record, recorded over the back end of 1976 in the first, you know, the first few days of 1977, released in 1977. And other recordings spread over.
00:46
Speaker 2
Four other discs.
00:48
Speaker 3
They are The Blueprint, which is a collection of acoustic guitar performances, songs I wrote in 1975, half of which I sort of held to myself for fear that they maybe revealed my, you know, my, stumbling steps to get to a style I mean they're to my mind at the time I put them away in a drawer because they sounded too much like the people I I liked when I listen to them now I just hear me and I'm you can have a vague sense of somebody I might have heard and songs I tried to write in a different style entirely than the one that informs Mime is True and then of course the demos which you know you can see that coming in coming into focus some recordings I made Prior to that, which were my first attempts to make any recordings with a band. And then the formation of The Attractions, who were put together to, as it were, promote or at least play the music from Miami's True, because the band that played on that album were an American group, Clover, who were not available to me after the recording of the record.
01:50
Speaker 2
They had their own career.
01:52
Speaker 1
You're stumbling attempts to find a style. And I do want to talk about how you developed that style I remember seeing your album when it was first in the record store. And there are artists, I think probably Springsteen's an example, where you follow them along as they develop their style. You were one of those artists for me who seemed to emerge fully formed with that first album. You had the attitude, you had the glasses, you had the great lyrics. So to me, going through this record and this package was fascinating because it's so interesting to see how that came about.
02:31
Speaker 3
You know, I sort of started writing songs when I was about 14, 15 maybe, played in public around that time for the first time, and then, you know, did all the usual things of learning, playing other people's music. I joined a band in Liverpool that immediately became a duo because we realized the singer couldn't sing at the bass player, went to university, which is a very typical teenage band experience.
02:57
Speaker 2
And we carried on for a year or more.
03:01
Speaker 3
And I realized that I had to return to London where I had been born. My parents are from Merseyside. And so my first experiences of even running music evenings were going against the grain of the folk music of Liverpool, which was mostly traditional. And we were trying to sing our own songs and songs by people we liked who were mostly Californian acoustic musicians. And the birds and the band and things like that. I went to London and the beginning of the pub rock scene as it came to be known, although it was never called that by the participants, it was simply bands taking the music directly to the audience rather than going on to the big glamorous stage with dry ice and lame pants. They were just walking up in their day clothes and playing music directly to an audience that could buy a ticket at the door. And Nick Lowe was in a band, Princey Schwartz, who I loved. And I had met Nick when Princey's came to, um, the cabin. I'd met him in the pub opposite the cabin. I got talking with him and then I turned, then I became the guy that would turn up at their gigs and ask him questions. You know, I was trying to find my way. I wasn't asking for favors. I was just asking advice about things, about songwriting and that. I don't remember what our conversations were really about. It was just, I thought he was cool and, you know, we hung out. And, uh, I put a band together for a little while, which were really just a collection of people who happened to play the instruments that made up a band. We didn't really have any other recommendations for being a group than that. And we stumbled around playing a few shows and field by songs. And we took the example of Ebenezer Schwartz in picking particularly obscure songs from American R & B repertoire to put in our set. And the only song that people recognized was bob dylan's knocking on heaven's door which was then in the charts everything else we played was like willfully obscure including my songs which were you know they were the first steps of course that kind of ran out of steam after we did a one recording session and i i went back to that studio with my acoustic guitar a few months later dave robinson was running the studio over a pub which in itself had a basement venue the open anchor and he let me just play every song I had while he was twiddling the dials. He was really working still on the studio. And I think Dire Straits may have done their demos there.
05:31
Speaker 2
I believe they did.
05:32
Speaker 3
And Graham Parker's first record was recorded there. So I just played every song that I had. I'd bought Bruce Springsteen's first record when I lived in Liverpool. I'd listened to that record back to back. And I had one song that sort of sounded like it was, to me, it sounded like I'd me trying to write like that. Another couple of songs sounded like I'd heard Van Morrison around the time of his Bannon Street Choir.
05:58
Speaker 2
All these ideas in my head was I was.
06:00
Speaker 3
Trying on those, as I put in the liner notes, it's like a man trying on hats, you know, does this suit me? And I put those songs away, and then I proceeded on to a style of writing which was informed by records that I loved, particularly Randy Newman's records, but also including Dr. John's Gumbo and Van Dyke Park's records. So they would be literally Americana, not the Americana music of today, but they had a lot of American references and a lot of arcane references. And I was really trying to work out how I could sing about the way I felt, 21, married with a son, on living in the suburbs where nothing in the world I was wanting to enter was within my reach. I had no way to make myself into a suitable face for pop music. And even the scene that was beginning to emerge in 75, I'd had a go at being in it. And those same venues were the venues in which punk began. And I wasn't in tune with that musically. So I proceeded to write these songs that were willfully styled to sound as if they'd been found in a trunk in 1927. And that's the way I wrote Jump Up and Wave a White Flag and a few of the songs that are on this collection. They were experiments of writing songs that were really from the heart.
07:33
Speaker 2
And if you actually read the.
07:34
Speaker 3
Lyrics of Poison Moon, it really talks about being like an outsider. And I didn't know harmony in any formal sense. So everything was just instinctive. Everything was just All my musical learning was from records. I never played a scale in my life. I can't read music.
07:52
Speaker 1
You can to this day?
07:53
Speaker 3
I can write it down and I can orchestrate, but I can't sight-read music back because I never trained my eye to my hand, which you have to do, obviously, as a piano player or as another kind of formal instrumentalist. So I saw that Nick Lowe had released a single and there was this new label, I'd had this demo tape, which I'd made in my bedroom, sent back to me by five, six, seven publishers or record companies that didn't see anything in it at all. And I left my tape there at this little office, never expecting to hear anything about it. And I got a call saying, we want to talk to you. And within a month, I was in the studio with Nick producing, playing bass. And I was introduced to John McPhee and Mickey Shine from Clover, whose records I actually owned. They were pretty obscure. They were on Fantasy, two albums on Fantasy. They had a new lineup with a different drummer from the original band, with a different keyboard player, or I think a keyboard player at all, Sean Hopper. And of course, they had two singers, the original singer, Alex Cole, and Huey Lewis, who was kind of the rabble rouser second lead singer. And I was put into the studio initially just with two members, with Nick playing bass and We cut Mystery Dance, which was, you know, a very simple rock and roll song. And I said I didn't want it to sound like a pastiche. I said I want to play it all downstrokes, you know, so that it was kind of, I'd heard the Ramones by then and I'd heard the Modern Lovers. I thought it needed to be more, actually less swinging in some ways, you know.
09:31
Speaker 1
What's interesting, one thing that, re-listening to this album, is I realized how much of it really had swing to it.
09:38
Speaker 3
Oh.
09:39
Speaker 1
Which is not what you did particularly with the attractions.
09:43
Speaker 3
That's very good that you say that because it saves me from saying it seemed like I'm wise after the fact. But one of the reasons I was excited to meet John McPhee was not just that I had these two records which they'd made. It would have been modest they hadn't made much kind of penetration, they were cult records to say the least. He played on Van Morrison's Tupelo Honey and I wasn't a psychedelic Van Morrison fan in that it took me a while to get to Astral Weeks, but from Moondance on, particularly Bannon Street Choir and Tupelo Honey, These records just made me crazy. And I just wanted to do that. And to have John, who could play pedal steel as well as guitar, but more importantly, Johnny Shambodi, the bass player, who was the most swinging bass player I played with other than Jerry Sheff, who was in the TCB band, later on. But John brought this thing. And I had these models for songs, some of which I'd been working on for a couple of years. And in my head, That figure that's Sneaky Feelings, if you play it slower, it's like... You ain't living till you're loving. In my mind, that's what we were playing, but I couldn't relax enough to be like, and I couldn't sing like Marvin Gaye, as I just proved. I'm not warmed up for singing, but I'm just illustrating. That in my mind, that was the music we were playing. We were playing like Marvin or like the Motown band. But of course, I never mentioned any of that to the global players. I just let them find it because I had no experience of directing musicians of any caliber.
11:33
Speaker 2
And I thought, well, they know what they're doing. These are guys that have already recorded.
11:37
Speaker 3
And everything they played sounded great because not only do you hear these songs being interpreted in a number of different ways.
11:45
Speaker 3
Starting with Clover, then the attractions taking them over, and playing quite faithful to that original model, I have to say, for the first 20 minutes. And then, you know, six or seven months later, you can't even recognize the songs, much less the people playing them. It's a completely different type of music. And then at the end, reunited with Clover, you know, 30 years after we made Miami's True.
12:11
Speaker 2
And guess what?
12:12
Speaker 3
When we went to rehearsals, I said to Pete Thomas, who was deputizing as the drummer, I said, it's the tempo, right? He said, it's the tempo from the record. I said, well, we've never played it like that. He said, I know, but trust it.
12:24
Speaker 2
And we did. And guess what? Back came that swing and feel.
12:28
Speaker 3
So sometimes that first information that you get about music, the attempts to copy aren't as important as the leap into the dark often that you make in finding your own voice. And frankly, for me, it was literally about being able to be in a room. Because when I tried to play those intimate songs I was talking about earlier, I would write them at home and they would sound attractive to me. And then I'd take them to a folk club where I was getting booked in 75 as in 76. I'd play down the bill from people I wouldn't be headlining. And when I played those more introspective songs, my people just talked over them. because I didn't have the relationship with the audience that they trusted me. All the people whose music I was listening to at that time, whether it be Randy Newman or Joni Mitchell or John Prine, of course, it established that relationship that allowed them to sing intimately and didn't need to speak out and shout.
13:25
Speaker 2
I just need to speak up for myself.
13:27
Speaker 3
And then I did. And that's my mistrue. And to be really honest, a handful of those songs are really deeply felt. And a couple of them are kind of dashed off. kind of as the sort of things that serve me well to kind of be in that moment. They don't bear too much scrutiny. They sound good as records, but they don't sound, you know, you would never read the lyrics out and say, hey, listen to this.
13:50
Speaker 1
Well, we're going to put a lot of scrutiny on them, see how much they can take. Talking about how you absorb music, how you relearned it, it's reminding me of a story from your book, which I loved, your father was a musician. He was a big band musician. You share that with Paul McCartney and Paul Simon.
14:10
Speaker 2
Whose fathers were all.
14:12
Speaker 3
Very different sort of experiences, of course. My father was originally wanted to be a bebop trumpet player. He came out of the RAF and he played the trumpet and like most everybody else, adored Louis Armstrong. And then he heard Dizzy Gillespie and he wanted to play that new music and got in a lot of trouble and on Merseyside trying to play that music.
14:31
Speaker 2
I don't know how good it was because there's no recordings. But I mean, that was his ambition.
14:36
Speaker 3
And when my folks went to live in London in about 1950, it was my father's idea to get into what was then called modern jazz scene. And when I was born, he took the pragmatic role and took a job as a trumpet vocalist and ended up being one of the featured singers and probably the best known and most successful singer dance band. They were a dance band on the Glenn Miller model. So the kind of music which people still really loved from the Second World War times, because Glenn.
15:08
Speaker 2
Miller was a heroic figure in England.
15:10
Speaker 3
My father then just had to sing what was put in front of him. He had to sing the hits of the day. And then by the time I became more aware of what it was he did, it would have been around 1963, they had a radio show that was a lunchtime radio show which was literally called the Joe Lost Pop Show.
15:30
Speaker 1
There's a wonderful scene where you are watching your father and he's got a very early, I'm not sure if it was a tape or it was a single, of Please Please Me.
15:40
Speaker 2
Oh, it was a 45.
15:41
Speaker 3
They would be sent A labels, you know, which were overprinted with an A so the DJ knew which side to play. Or sometimes even acetates from Dick James, from Northern Songs. And so all the records on my record shelf that are A-labels or acetates are songs my father sang on the radio. As strange as it might be that they include my generation and reach out and I'll be there and see Emily play by the Pink Floyd. It's still the only Pink Floyd song I can stand to hear. But that's just me. But that's what it was. It was a very odd introduction into the mechanics of learning songs because I heard my father doing it repeatedly.
16:24
Speaker 1
He.
16:25
Speaker 3
Wired a deck of Decalium, which was one of the first portable record players up. So the arm would just keep coming back onto the record rather than dropping another record in the stack. And he would listen to the record until he'd memorized it. He usually had sheet music as well or a lyric sheet. But a lot of these songs were harmonically quite simple. But they still required him to learn them, to sing them live. And he only had a few days to learn them. He was learning five or six songs a week.
16:51
Speaker 4
Mm-hmm.
16:51
Speaker 2
And also recording them as well.
16:53
Speaker 3
Sometimes he would go and do sessions, which was like a little bit of pin money, as they say. You know, it was like off-the-books money where he would go and record cover versions of the same songs for producers that issued budget records of this. So there was this whole industry of songwriting, publisher, covers, radio performance. That's what I grew up with, that insight into it. Strangely enough, I never picked up an instrument. I never was moved to learn. I didn't take piano lessons. I think I took violin lessons for a week until they told me stop doing that. The usual horrifying things with the recorder that they make children go through. But I had a guitar from the time I was about nine, I think, that was bought as a souvenir from a trip to Spain. But I never learned to play it until I was 14 or something.
17:46
Speaker 1
And when did the songwriting start?
17:48
Speaker 2
Almost right away. I didn't learn three chord tricks.
17:52
Speaker 3
I learned the song Man of the World by Fleetwood Mac, which I think is 1968.
17:59
Speaker 2
So I would have been 14.
18:02
Speaker 3
I have no idea why it was that song because it's a very complicated song for a novice.
18:07
Speaker 2
And I patiently, a.
18:09
Speaker 3
Lad who I didn't really know played the guitar. He was a couple of years older than us. and heard that I liked that song, and he gave me a piece of paper with the words on it, with the chord symbols over it. I wish I had it, you know, the actual chord diagrams, not just the names of the chords. And so I painstakingly learned how to play this song. It took me ages, you know, it took me months. And the unlocking of that harmonic labyrinth, frankly, compared with most three-chord songs, made other songs seem really easy to learn. And I... quickly learnt a lot of other songs. I heard all these other things I couldn't play. But these few songs I could play and I immediately started writing and there was an opportunity to play in public at a local church basement that had a weekly folk club and I went down there a few weeks and saw a few artists and saw that people put their name down as to be what they call floor singers, like open mic singers. I happened to put my name down and went up there and sang my one song in E minor and made a terrible job of it. You know, I was really mortified, like didn't do that for a while. And then I suppose the next year I went to live in Liverpool and there was more of a music club scene there, which took a little penetration because they didn't really want to hear original songs. Me and my partner, Alan Mays, we used to end up having to Negotiate with club owners to open up a music night on a Tuesday night when they might not have even bothered to turn the lights on at all, you know.
19:43
Speaker 1
Did you it's going to sound like an odd question but did you like being on stage.
19:48
Speaker 3
No never no Alan was the much more confident he was better looking than me and he was a better guitar player and the only thing that he would say and I'm is that we tried to write songs together and I said it was impossible because I would finish them before I had the idea that was the only thing in which I was you know more Evidently, I'd say it's gifted, but I had capability. And they were really halting sort of compositions, but I wrote faster than him.
20:19
Speaker 2
I was able to complete the thought.
20:21
Speaker 3
And we used to sing mostly other people's material, but again, nothing from the charts. We were singing mostly Californian music, sung by the band, sung by the birds, you know.
20:34
Speaker 1
Your love of Joni Mitchell is well known, but it surprised me that you liked so many of those California bands. It seems so different to me from your own work.
20:43
Speaker 3
Oh, with Joanie, it's an exceptional thing as I came to understand it more and actually followed her development as a musician album by album. A friend of mine and I went to Manchester because the show, a lot of tourists didn't come to Liverpool in those days. Liverpool was quite, you know, it wasn't the richest town. And we'd go to Manchester to see people play. And we went to see Joanie, I think the Free Trade Hall maybe, And she played the songs from Blue. That was a couple of months before the record came out, which was something that used to happen then because people couldn't so easily, you know, they couldn't capture it on their phone and put it online. So artists would debut songs in concert first. But Joanie, you can imagine her singing River and Case of You. And then you've got to sort of memorize them on one hearing. and have the feeling of them and the playing. And then you went and sat and we listened. We went and bought the record the day it came out and sat at Tony's house and listened to it for a whole day, like a whole day and night.
21:45
Speaker 2
We just listened to it. So it went in deep.
21:49
Speaker 3
But when you get to the next few records, the harmony gets even more intricate and she started.
21:53
Speaker 2
To introduce other musicians.
21:56
Speaker 3
I know enough about it now that some of those musicians thought they knew better than her what the chords were. They didn't actually. Her chords were more interesting because they were more unusual. Sometimes the jazz musicians would adjust it to what they thought she was playing. But what she was actually playing was much more original. That's how you get to Chord and Spark and particularly Hissing on Summer Alarms. And that music is just, there's still nothing like it. The only thing that's like it a little bit is Prince. And that's why I think he admired her and she admired him. This is the only thing that sort of has that kind of imagination.
22:38
Speaker 1
There's a wonderful clip on YouTube from a party at Gordon Lightfoot's house during the Roll of Thunder tour.
22:47
Speaker 2
Where she plays Coyote.
22:48
Speaker 1
She plays Coyote.
22:49
Speaker 3
And McGuinn and Dylan are just looking at her and they know they can't follow her because she's playing on an open tuning.
22:54
Speaker 1
That's exactly it. They play along and then they look at each other and think.
22:58
Speaker 3
Everything about the performance, and the same is true of the performance on The Last Waltz, Everything is so perfectly weighted. Her phrasing is perfectly weighted. You know, it's a very difficult, long narrative song, and there's no common idioms in it at all, hardly. There are lots of very unexpected kind of things happening within the narrative of the song, and complicated ideas, you know.
23:22
Speaker 2
Like, what is the line about?
23:23
Speaker 3
My scent on his fingers while he's watching the waitress's legs.
23:28
Speaker 2
It's like, what the hell?
23:30
Speaker 3
It's a very erotic kind of, Image, but also kind of cold as well, like the whole dynamic of that song. It's the unique perspective. It's not anything I'd ever like try to write like, but it was the fact that you could write like that. So many people say, my elder brother played me this record by Dion and the Belmonds. Even if you chronologically couldn't have known that music firsthand. Well, that's why I didn't know who Elvis Presley was. Because my parents never listened to any of his records. And I knew he existed. And I knew it was a name that people really liked. But I'd never heard any of his records except by chance. Except a neighbor played me It's Now or Never. And she was a Cliff Richard fan. And she said, do you think this guy's as good as Cliff?
24:16
Speaker 2
And it was Elvis.
24:18
Speaker 3
And I'd never heard an Elvis Presley record played on a record before. And to an eight-year-old, I've got to be honest, it sounded like opera. or what I thought opera sounded like. I hadn't ever heard any opera, but if you think about it, you can imagine it was like, I don't understand what this, it's not like it's bad, it's well sung, but it's not, what am I supposed.
24:37
Speaker 2
To do with this?
24:39
Speaker 3
And your responses at that age are very uncomplicated, like you either like it or you don't like it.
24:45
Speaker 2
You can't really analyze it.
24:47
Speaker 3
Later on, John Lennon, next thing, a couple of years later, John Lennon sang how important Elvis was. I still wasn't really curious about, And I had no access. And all I saw were like trailers for his movies. And they truthfully looked a bit square. And then like the Motown review came in 65. I'm like, you could have Stevie Wonder or you could have this music, you know. It wasn't until like Suspicious Minds that I thought, oh, now I get it. Now I get why he's great. And so when I made My Image True, I'd never heard the Sun Sessions. You know, I'd like, you might say Mystery Dance. is a little bit like a 50s sounding song. But I learned that through the Beatles. Carl Perkins, I knew who Carl Perkins was. And I knew Chuck Berry. I knew Chuck Berry well. And Little Richard, he was far and away my favorite rock and roll singer. Him and Jerry Lee.
25:45
Speaker 1
When did you first hear Little Richard?
25:48
Speaker 3
When he was on TV when I was a kid. And he'd just come out of being a gospel singer and he came on Granada television. And it was backed by the Sands Incorporated And he was doing his Lucille and things like that. And he put out a new single, I think 64, Bama Lama Bama Lou. That was the first Little Richard record I owned. And I was far and away at Little Richard. It was just like, you couldn't be like that or anything. I never ever thought of going to the piano and seeing if I could play that even. But just in terms of the thrill of his voice. And the same with Chuck Berry. The first record I heard of Chuck Berry that I owned was not one of the ones from the 50s. The first Chuck Berry record I heard was No Particular Place to Go, which again was after he came out from when he was incarcerated. Just read the words down. It's incredible. Like all of those songs, they're just incredible. You could say they're poetry. They're so well constructed.
26:47
Speaker 1
Did that influence your lyric writing?
26:49
Speaker 3
It wasn't conscious, but I mean, I think the compression of syllables per line It never frightened me. Like a lot of words, it's a common observation that I use too many words, but they're not. I'm just using as many as I need. And that's true. And sometimes I'm aware that I'm overpowering the ability to gather them. And I think if you gather the sense of what I'm saying, then later on you'll hear the emotion or the intensity of it, you'll gather the rest of it. Because I think you'd be hard pushed to Together, Too Much Monkey Business or Maybelline at One. That was the whole thing. It's like a movie with a great ending. You go, that was a thrill. I have to go back to the top of the ride to get to that thrill. That's how Chuck Berry songs work. It's like he's throwing so many ideas at you.
27:41
Speaker 1
What you're talking about reminds me of, of course, the first song on My Name is True, which has a lot of words. Welcome to my working week.
27:48
Speaker 2
Yeah.
27:49
Speaker 1
And it has this sort of cadence I hear in a lot of your songs, which is The syllables come a little slower in the beginning, but then it really accelerates towards the end.
28:01
Speaker 2
I don't know where it comes from. It's not a conscious imitation of anybody.
28:05
Speaker 3
I think there are some songs within the blueprint where I'm experimenting with the kind of, you know, lyrical voice that I heard in other people, and I'm trying to get close to that way of using words or the kind of images that are incorporated to explain things. But I wasn't sitting around analyzing stuff.
28:21
Speaker 2
I was just doing it too fast, you know?
28:24
Speaker 1
There's some wonderful reproductions of lyric sheets. You said you always kept notebooks.
28:30
Speaker 3
I did meticulously early on. And I still like to write with a pen. I probably will commit too many things directly to a screen. But I'm trying all the time to get back to writing because I think the rhythm and the editorial, which some of these notebooks reveal, is a different use of the mind than reading lines on a screen where they're all the same they all appear to be the same length because there's no rhythm to the to the physical handwriting the problem is you get excitable you your your own handwriting can be illegible so i might write a brilliant verse and not not be able to read it back i train myself to be able to write in the dark oh yeah it's not that much of a trick and it was a familiar thing for me to wake up and with something would be on my mind and I'd try and write it down or enough of it. It wouldn't be a whole line. It would be just a couple of words. I knew that if I turned the light on, that that line would disappear. And we've all had that experience, surely, of like apparently being in a story or hearing music in a dream. And then you wake up and you think you've got.
29:35
Speaker 2
It in your head.
29:36
Speaker 3
But if you're a musician, and you go to the instrument almost instantly, you can't gather it.
29:41
Speaker 2
I've had that happen lots of times.
29:43
Speaker 1
And you've lost it.
29:45
Speaker 3
Yeah, just a melody would come to me in a dream.
29:47
Speaker 2
Oh, that's a great tune.
29:48
Speaker 3
And I wake up and I think, and I go and go to a piano or go to a guitar. By the time you've got the guitar out of the case, you've forgotten it.
29:56
Speaker 2
And I guess if you.
29:57
Speaker 3
Can't gather it, then maybe it was only it only had its reality in a dream, like a lot of things in a dream are illogical.
30:04
Speaker 1
But that's how Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes came.
30:07
Speaker 2
That's kind of like a visitation.
30:09
Speaker 3
That's a thing that's happened a number of times, and I don't want to make anything that mystical about it, but it came to me on the back end of a train journey from London to Liverpool. And I remember the image coming into my head as we pulled out of Roncorn Station and went over the bridge, across the Mersey, and into the city. And by the time my got to lime street i had the whole song in some sort of embryonic form and then had of course no tape recorder no voice memo device in those days just a notebook i'd scribbled a few lines down in and a tune going around my head and i usually got the bus to my mother's i didn't have a lot of money on this occasion i i ran to the cab rank and got in a cab and said take me to my mother's address and uh I tried to sing the song in my head all the time so that I wouldn't lose it. And then got to the house and barely set a load of it and ran upstairs. You know, my old guitar was still sitting on top of the wardrobe and I played it and played it. She must have wondered where I'd gone because I must have been gone an hour playing it until it was imprinted on my memory. So I play it and I probably changed it a little bit, you know. And even within this box set, there's the structure of the song. The rhythm wasn't set originally. The lyric and most of the narrative was there But before we were putting this box together, a friend of mine wrote to me after a long time of not being in touch and said, I found a tape that you recorded at my house in 1976. And I must have just been playing through my new songs. And there's a version of The Angels From Where I Wear My Red Shoes. And the rhythm of it is like Wooly Bully by Sam the Shaman and the Pharaohs. I hadn't found what I later sort of felt was like the birds kind of spacing. The song was set to a totally different motive originally.
32:01
Speaker 1
What were the other influences on your lyric writing? Your lyric writing is so strong, so unique. What were you reading at the time?
32:09
Speaker 3
I was reading Pulp Fiction, a lot of it. You know, like, that's what's in Watching the Detectives. I read a lot of Graham Greene when I was a teenager. He was somebody that I think became his impact... on stories and the kind of outlook and the moral point of view is in some later songs, but I wouldn't say he's evident in these songs. But I didn't really have any pretensions to any literary sort of.
32:40
Speaker 2
Elevation.
32:42
Speaker 3
It's very notable that my first five records don't have printed lyrics because I honestly believed at that time, and I've since revised it, that they had to be heard or understood all at once with the music. And I kind of thought it a little bit redolent of the things I didn't respond to about Californian music that I had loved. There was a sort of, a slightly precious sort of, now my art, you know? And I didn't think that's what we were doing, particularly not that year.
33:11
Speaker 1
I had wondered if your interest sort of in gangsters and the underworld came a little bit from your father's occupation, because he must have known some characters.
33:23
Speaker 3
He would talk sometimes about somebody called Sid the Thief or something like that. There's characters in the dance hall he would sometimes tell me or tell that he would be. My parents put up when I was quite young, but he would come for supper or come for a Sunday lunch. And he regaled us with various stories about different colorful people. And I got to kind of like hang out with him. Sometimes when I was a young teenager, I'd go to a lock-in with him on a Sunday afternoon in a pub that was run by his former singing partner. And hear him and his friend, who was the guy who wrote Hard Day's Night, Alan Owen, who was a would-be Brendan Behan kind of character. And they would talk very expansively about colorful people. And I probably, in my mind, I've embroidered it a little bit to seem like we were in a Daman Runyon book, but it wasn't really like that. It was just some people kind of having a drink, you know. And I'm sitting there with my shambi in the corner, like, wondering about the adults, you know.
34:18
Speaker 1
Do you remember writing particular lines? I'm thinking of she's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake, which I think would make any pulp writer pretty proud.
34:28
Speaker 2
I wish I could say I did.
34:29
Speaker 3
I remember the speed with which I wrote that song might have overwhelmed that because I wrote it in one sitting. So, you know, I don't think I had time to stand back and admire my own work if I even had that impulse to do that. I have had occasion in going back to assemble this set of when we went back to the notebooks that I kept that you mentioned before. Of course, one of the things, one of the reasons that second disc in the set is called The Blueprint is because it quite literally is the blueprint in some cases where I had whole couplets, whole stanzas, whole entire lyrics that I kept and I discarded the music thinking that the songs didn't speak up for themselves enough in the musical setting and found entirely different musical settings.
35:21
Speaker 2
So Leave a Man.
35:22
Speaker 3
The lyrics of Leave a Man Become Accidents Will Happen, the words of I Can't Turn It Off become Watch a Step, Citizen Junction becomes King Horse.
35:32
Speaker 2
And those are very different music. They're not even remotely the same.
35:37
Speaker 1
Are the words always written with music in mind?
35:41
Speaker 3
No, they all exist in music and are on this record in the original drafts. And there are in the notebooks some titles and even some whole lyrics that I don't have music for. There's one called Sad Holiday that has lyrics that ended up in Lipstick Vogue. But I have no memory of what the original tune.
35:59
Speaker 2
Was of that first iteration.
36:01
Speaker 3
It's only the ones that I thought well enough to demo when I was given the opportunity. I didn't own a tape recorder of any consequence, so I used to borrow one, RIVOX, to record my.
36:15
Speaker 2
I only made a couple of these bedroom demos.
36:18
Speaker 3
And then I had the opportunity to go and record in Dave Robinson's studio open anchor. And the other things that are in this set are literal demos that were recorded at Pathway Studios between my first recording session with Nick Lowe and John McPhee for Mystery Dance and the beginning of working with Clover as a band. And I cut six songs in one take, which were most of Miami's truth. because I wanted to kill this idea that Stiff had at that time, that they were going to put me on one side of the record and Eric on the other. Kind of like two, what's it called? Two guitars, two fabulous guitars. There's a record with Chuck Perry and Bo Diddley that's one side each, you know? And I remember there was like lots of ideas came through in those early days, because I was still working in an office. I'd go to Stiff and they'd say, we've got this great idea. We're going to put you on half a record. And that's not going to happen. I was not good at speaking up for myself, but I just had to illustrate it. And once they heard the other songs, it just made a nonsense of it.
37:28
Speaker 1
Were you very competitive as a songwriter, as a performer? You were surrounded by some great talent. I mean, Ian Curry.
37:37
Speaker 2
It wasn't that confident. Ian, I really loved. We toured.
37:39
Speaker 3
The first sort of theater tour that we ever did was on a package tour with Nick Lowe and Reckless Eric and him. And There was a degree of competition because the original idea of the tour was very democratic. And there was a rotating bill, which meant that, you know, after about three nights or one, really after one time around the circle, the first four shows, it became really obvious that the other two acts could not follow either us or the blockheads.
38:11
Speaker 2
They just couldn't.
38:11
Speaker 3
It just didn't work as show business. And I probably knew that as well as anybody else. that was on that tour because I'd watched Show Business at work with my father. I said, just in showcraft, this doesn't work. Nothing against the quality of the individual songs. Ian's so dramatic. He really should have closed every night. He had the command as a performer. I was still learning it. But, you know, you couldn't say one was a better band, but we could both really play. Both bands could play. The other three anyway, not me, but the other three could play. The Blockheads were a great group. So, of course, it was a bit competitive, but only in a sense of it. I'm sure all package tours, you know, are. I mean, Joyce Moore told me once that, you know, Sam, he loved Wilson Pickett, but it was always difficult to play on the bill with him because if you played before him, he'd be angry with you that you were headlining. And if you went on before him, he'd accuse you of trying to upstage him. So I don't know how true that is, but it rings true, doesn't it? You know, because musicians can be competitive.
39:15
Speaker 2
Yeah.
39:18
Speaker 1
In the liner notes, there's a lovely quote from Roseanne Cash who talks about this album coming out. And she says that you know, when she heard My Aim Is True, she realized she had to up her game, and that a song like Seven Year Ache wouldn't have been written.
39:36
Speaker 3
That was a big compliment that she paid me. I mean, she's such a terrific lyricist. But everybody has to learn. And if you think about the comparative shadows of our fathers, she lived in the much bigger shadow, not because she wrote anything like Johnny, but because people wanted her to be her father's daughter initially. And for her to stay, she was living in California, and for her to be, to have such a singular but separate voice and in more recent years to have managed to kind of actually acknowledge the gifts that both her parents gave her And that musical understanding is something I can really relate to. That's probably one of the areas that why we're friends, because we can understand that really well.
40:26
Speaker 1
I wanted to ask you about writing Stranger in the House and Just a Memory. They're such perfect songs for those artists, for Dusty Springfield and for George Jones. Did you have them in mind when you wrote those songs?
40:44
Speaker 3
George's records were hard to get in england you know i learned about george jones and merle haggard and even to a degree johnny cash who's most of his hit records were novelty records like boy named sue or you know one piece at a time most of the ones that i was aware of i knew about hank williams for some reason i kind of got into hank williams but then i started to trace forward and i found that so i just had lots of different people's style.
41:09
Speaker 2
It was the simplicity, simple chords, and.
41:13
Speaker 3
The structure of the song paying off to a refrain and the pace and the rhythm. Billy Sherald told me he knew it wasn't a Nashville demo because it had an electric rhythm guitar on it, and that's.
41:26
Speaker 2
How he knew it. It wasn't recorded in Nashville. They never would have let anybody play the rhythm part on an electric.
41:31
Speaker 1
I couldn't afford a thousand strings.
41:33
Speaker 2
But it was styled.
41:36
Speaker 3
In that Weeper style, you know, that I by then had absorbed quite a lot of George Jones and Graham as well. I'd say Graham Parsons was also probably in there. Because I figured if the Rolling Stones could record Wild Horses, then somebody could record Strange in the.
41:52
Speaker 2
House, you know, just as easily. You know, I felt lucky to do that.
41:56
Speaker 3
I think the thing about the song, it's related to Alison in a way, in the lyrical sense. in that it has this sense of dread about what may happen in a deep love that maybe you're not wired to be constant. And I suppose when I think about it, it was a kind of horrible realization. I think it was perhaps more true to life. I think I was role-playing when I wrote the song, and then the song came true. And that's true of both of those songs.
42:28
Speaker 1
Is that true of a lot of your music?
42:32
Speaker 2
Thankfully, no.
42:34
Speaker 3
You asked about the other one, Losing You. There is a song called Losing You on the Blueprint, which is a completely different song, except for the chorus, which is the same words as the later ballad. And I dispense with all the more arcane, and I have to say, Asbury Park-ish kind of imagery of the original draft, which was my attempt to write like a greetings from Asbury Park. That was shameless, I felt. I thought it was obvious, but you might not think that when you hear it. But I was definitely trying to do that. And it pays off to this pretty pure chorus, pure pop chorus. So When I had time to think about it, I thought those sentiments needed more longing.
43:20
Speaker 2
And I came up with the ballad melody, which we recorded in 1980.
43:23
Speaker 3
And that was totally dusty in my head because she already had a song called Losing You, so I changed the title to Just a Memory. And then my dream came true. She did actually pick it up without my bidding. And the next thing, I had a call while we were recording Imperial Bedroom. Would I take a call from her? And the call came through while we were in a session. And she said, I love this song that the producers played me, this demo, but it's too short. It was only one minute and 30 seconds or something, the demo, or one minute and 40. Can you write another verse? But nothing too lovey-dovey. That's what she actually said. And my heart broke, you know, like, And I did have wrote another verse for her. So, you know, that's only happened a few times. It happened with her and it happened with Chet Baker that I dreamt the song and then the person who was intended for it actually recorded it.
44:25
Speaker 1
That was almost blue. So that brings us to Alison, about which much has been written. What interests me, particularly when you listen through on the album, is.
44:39
Speaker 1
It's much more adventurous harmonically than the songs that preceded.
44:45
Speaker 2
Well, it was written in the informed by Tom Bell.
44:51
Speaker 3
Oh. Yeah, because I'd heard Ghetto Child by the Spinners, what you call the Spinners, what we call the Detroit Spinners, because there was a Spinners group in England, so they had to adopt Detroit Spinners. And that record, with its sort of halting, Life ain't so easy in your that phrase, that's Alison.
45:10
Speaker 2
That's where it comes from. You can hear that, right?
45:13
Speaker 1
That's where the rhythm comes from.
45:14
Speaker 2
That's where the rhythm comes from.
45:15
Speaker 1
But also you're using borrowed chords. It starts on a suspended chord. It's much different than the things.
45:22
Speaker 3
Well, that's Mark Taplin. That's listening to Mark Taplin. That's just, I mean, McPhee on the introduction is playing something different, but the suspended chord, the suspended five chord is, you know, that's something you hear in Tracks of My Tears and things like that. I knew those songs. And specifically, that's the way Marv Taplin played. I was nowhere near as capable a guitar player as he was. But those little things where you sort of hear something that makes you thrilled, and you try to find a thing that satisfies you to the same degree.
46:01
Speaker 1
I do want to ask you a little more about Alison.
46:05
Speaker 3
Yes.
46:07
Speaker 1
I think it was the only song I looked up on Wikipedia to see what other people thought.
46:12
Speaker 2
That'll make that, there you'll find the truth.
46:14
Speaker 1
Yeah, well, that's why I went there. Which is, some people argue it's a murder ballad.
46:21
Speaker 3
No, it's not a murder ballad. Neither is watching the detectives. It's describing the things that somebody's watching on the television. Alison is the sense that your nature may kill the love that you cherish most.
46:40
Speaker 1
You see, I find Alison.
46:41
Speaker 2
That's exactly what it is.
46:42
Speaker 1
I've always found it an incredibly tender song.
46:45
Speaker 2
It is.
46:46
Speaker 3
It's a love song, but it's a love song with the possibility of failure written into it. So it's a little bit like these lines, you know? Somewhere a broom is sweeping up the broken pieces of yesterday's life.
46:59
Speaker 2
Somewhere a queen is weeping. Somewhere a king has no wife.
47:02
Speaker 3
That's where I got it from. That's Hendrix. I got two lessons from Hendrix. One was that song. Moon Cries Mary, and the other was the switch in songs on live television. They were the two things I learned from Jimi Hendrix. I never tried to play like him. I actually truthfully love him most of all. It's not to say you don't love him as a guitar player, but I love him as a ballad singer because I can hear the Curtis Mayfield and everything in him. And that's truthfully the two things that I actually took directly from him is that That's the conception of the lyrics of Alison is that song. And not that song in its entirety, just those couplets. You add that to ghetto child and you've got like a pretty heady mix of cues.
47:46
Speaker 1
I don't think you were influenced by this song, but it reminds me of a song. I think you talked about liking once, which is Paul Simon's tenderness.
47:55
Speaker 2
Oh God.
47:56
Speaker 1
And the line there of course is, but there's no tenderness beneath your honesty. And to me, That's exactly....
48:06
Speaker 2
Everything put together falls apart as well.
48:08
Speaker 1
What's happening, the balance of tenderness and honesty in Alison, I find it heartbreaking.
48:15
Speaker 2
Thank you. Well, it was intended to be. You just couldn't talk about these things out loud at that time. It was very difficult.
48:25
Speaker 3
People don't want to hear you say these things. I can say them now because it's 50 years ago and it doesn't matter anymore.
48:31
Speaker 4
Yeah.
48:33
Speaker 2
But, of course, I had studied Paul Simon really, really hard.
48:39
Speaker 3
I mean, you know, when I first had April Come, She Will and things like that, I wanted to play like that. I tried to finger pick. I couldn't grow my fingernails. I didn't know that you put varnish on them. I kept breaking off and I had to take to, you know, then I got a little louder as a singer and then I realized I had to play with a pick. But when he got to that period, like from things like Peace Like a River, where he's obviously acknowledging all of these things that it's kind of like his gumbo. It's like he's actually putting the people who his music he loved in the arrangements. That's One Soul of Towns and so forth. And Ted Ennis is one of those songs. it's and yeah it's it's more knowing and it's more mature than my songs but then he was more mature he was older than me when he wrote that song it wasn't the same age as I was when I wrote us and I was 21 or 22 maybe just 22.
49:32
Speaker 1
Well I think you've got every reason to be.
49:33
Speaker 3
Proud of it thank you anyway thank you uh not as good as Paul's songs though not not as good as Anybody that's written an American tune, you can't challenge them.
49:42
Speaker 2
You just can't.
49:43
Speaker 3
Right.
49:44
Speaker 2
All for that matter, The Seven Psalms, which is a beautiful piece of music.
49:47
Speaker 1
This brings us to I'm Not Angry. I think the obvious question, because you were always described as the angry young man. Were you, in fact, angry at this point in your life?
49:59
Speaker 2
No, I think I was probably just frustrated at the weight.
50:03
Speaker 3
And it could have been as, isn't it said that like when the ship comes in, was written about being denied a hotel room.
50:11
Speaker 1
No, I didn't know that.
50:12
Speaker 2
I've read that story. I don't know whether it's true. It's repeated quite often.
50:17
Speaker 3
You know the song I'm talking about, the Bob Dylan song, that it was when he was on tour with John Baez and they didn't like the look of him because.
50:23
Speaker 2
He was a bit scruffy and they wouldn't give him a room.
50:25
Speaker 3
And he wrote that whole song about that one barrier being put up. But of course the song means so much more. And I think quite a lot of the time, I just found the language that I thought represented things I felt, but I'm not angry. How can I be angry if I'm the guy that wrote Arson? You can be both on different days, but that's about betrayal, that song. But the song, musically speaking, I think the song's a little bit of play acting as well. Again, in a sort of songwriter, certain thing combination, I think when people say, oh, this is very true to life, it's very autobiographical, and what's the word?
51:03
Speaker 2
Confessional.
51:05
Speaker 3
Hate that you know for me the absence of craft is the thing that stops it from being enduring often now that's not true of everything there are some very raw unfiltered records that are that i really dearly love but they talk about johnny mitchell's like blue being confessional oh i don't know i don't know whether you're right about that listen to the craft listen to the songwriting technique that underpins it musically and lyrically and even if it was spontaneous composition its composition at such a high level that it belies the idea that any old idea would have, would have served the means, you know, and I suppose that's what I'm talking about. I'm not trying to retrospectively claw back the idea that was ever any frustration or anger, but it was much more just not knowing who you are, what you are, what you need to be. That's expressed a lot in the This Is Model songs particularly, but which I sort of, mention that in the in the notes for when we take these songs in the road with the attractions and those and the songs i just newly written with them in mind obviously overwhelmed the my mystery songs to the last degree i'm not angry as it's don't fear the reaper you know the gothic riff of it the basic chord signals is logical and that's what i felt it's like i love that don't fear the reaper i think that's from that time it was on the radio and i think i just sort of like Oh, I need a riff like that. And of course, I never told anybody that. McPhee just did what he felt and it was perfect. What he did was perfect. I couldn't play like that. I couldn't play that kind of lead guitar that he does. And he gave it that kind of rock and roll feeling. But then the chorus is quite musical. I know you, I know what you're doing.
52:52
Speaker 2
I know where you've been. And that could be a pop song from any year. That's not a rock and roll. melody, rock and roll motif.
53:03
Speaker 1
You say it's about betrayal. It seems to me a lot of your songs, not particularly that song, you were writing at a time, I think probably more so in England than here, when appearances, propriety, being a certain figure in public meant much more. And you are often writing about the conflict of that in people's private lives. their dark sides.
53:32
Speaker 3
Yeah, I don't know whether I was standing back and writing about them. It was just happening quickly. But like I say, the character to some degree was being formed and the character overtook me or took me over, whichever way around you want to say it. In 77, there's a little clip that the fourth CD in this collection, Becoming the Attractions, it's a sort of documentary account of the band coming into existence, having these Miami's True Songs to play initially. And then we have pop stardom of a minor kind. And I included even just a fragment of an interview. I love that interview. This woman could not have been kinder. She was genuinely curious as to whether I would survive the process of being in a pop group. And she asked me straight out if I was, are you an angry songwriter? And I answered the question quite literally because I had no guile when somebody just asked you directly, Whereas what you would usually get was somebody who would come with a complicated theory that, you know, a music journalist particularly, come with a very complicated theory about what they had worked out and wanted you to agree with that, with your answer. So my response to that was sometimes to really exaggerate what I felt. So hence the revenge and guilt thing. I said that when I was, I'd had about five Pernos. And I was just like unguarded. I thought, okay, you want to hear, you want to get here angry?
54:55
Speaker 2
Here it is.
54:56
Speaker 3
And a guy bought it and repeated it. And I mean, I know this guy. He's a very good writer. I mean, he was a very good writer. But I don't know that he knew that I was putting him on. I think he took it at face value. And even if he did know I was putting him on, everybody else thought it was at face value. And that became the calling card for those first few years until it didn't serve purposes. I also recognized that by saying something like, I'm not angry, which obviously doesn't sound like that on the record.
55:24
Speaker 2
Yeah.
55:25
Speaker 3
It's about those circumstances, about holding back the most explosive part of your anger about the situation that's described in the betrayal that's described in the song. There's a degree of distance in that. There's a degree of songwriting. This is not to say it's not emotional, but to say there's a degree of craft. Like I said, the melody of the release is proof of that. It isn't just raw and filtered kind of raving. So I think that I worked out quite quickly there were two things that could keep people away from me. One was seeming like you shouldn't ask me and the other was I'm going to drink a little bit here and I won't hear you. And in that space, I heard Wayne Shorter say this in an interview, so I take Wayne's example. He said when he drank brandy, it created a zone around him in which he could do the creative work. And I absolutely understand that idea. That's not the reason to become a heroin addict or something, you know. But For a little while, the gin kept people away from me. They couldn't be where I was. They couldn't call me in that zone.
56:33
Speaker 2
Nobody.
56:35
Speaker 1
Well, the bad news is I'm a journalist with a theory. So get ready.
56:39
Speaker 2
Okay.
56:42
Speaker 1
Take some of that coconut water.
56:43
Speaker 2
Yes.
56:45
Speaker 1
What I was saying earlier about people's dark lives being revealed. To me, it animates some of your best early work. Sunday's Best. manner of time, even King of America.
56:58
Speaker 2
Yeah.
56:58
Speaker 1
I think there are a lot of examples. You said confessional. We live in a very different age now. We don't live in an age where people feel they have to hide their dark side. If anything, it's the first person.
57:12
Speaker 2
That's their calling card. Yeah.
57:13
Speaker 1
It's the first person.
57:15
Speaker 3
I would never last five minutes. I wouldn't have lasted the scrutiny of social media or anything if I'd started now with the way I felt. I mean, there are lines in the song that if you knew how I felt, it'd bury me alive.
57:32
Speaker 1
I'm not worried about you revealing anything. What I'm asking is, as a writer, is it harder to write now about people where there's not that binary or at least that.
57:45
Speaker 3
I never think about it because, you know, I don't know that I cast myself in the present tense in that sense, you know. I have a lot of songs, and I have a lot of songs which I don't serve and would serve me. And if I have any time left, it might be to address some of those, even ahead of these songs.
58:07
Speaker 1
Interesting.
58:07
Speaker 3
Yeah. That's the honest truth, and I'm not saying that in a melodramatic way. I'm not saying, oh, I'm about to leave. I'm not planning on going anywhere.
58:14
Speaker 2
But whether I even.
58:17
Speaker 3
Consider some of these things, they've been well considered, and I'm very grateful for the attention And of course, everybody that's skeptical about this set will immediately observe that these records have been reissued before. And they've been anthologized even to a degree, but never quite as encompassing as this set.
58:38
Speaker 1
I wanted to ask you one more question, which is that you mentioned your father in this set. You talk a lot about him in your wonderful book. You also talk about your mother who didn't play an instrument, but you said understood music.
58:52
Speaker 3
Yeah.
58:52
Speaker 1
In a very profound way.
58:53
Speaker 2
Much more.
58:54
Speaker 1
Do you remember when she first listened to this record, what she thought?
58:59
Speaker 3
You know, when she passed, I went and had to clear her house, and she had pristine copies of all those early records. She really followed what I was doing. Mama didn't play an instrument, didn't sing in public, but had a good musical sense. And why I know that is true, because she left school at 14 and was a record sales assistant. And she used to say when she discovered she had some kind of ear was when, before there were, of course, long, long before there were computers, there were just record catalogs. And people would come in requesting songs. And she said, well, what's the name of the song? And they'd go, I don't know. Well, who's it by?
59:36
Speaker 2
I don't know.
59:37
Speaker 3
Well, how are you going to say it? It goes like this. And they'd start singing some semblance of the melody. And she would sometimes recognize it and be able to point them in the direction of a recording or even the sheet music so they could play it for themselves. She became known as the girl who knew a bit about dance, band, and jazz. That's how my parents met, because my dad was a local trumpet player. And, you know, it sounds like a sentimental story, but it really just highlights the importance of the physical object of the record, certainly in my lifetime. She had friends who were more knowledgeable still, would put records in my way that, you know, much later on became the foundation of my ability to be able to hear orchestral themes as separate to song-like form, you know. And after my dad left, she was the one who raised me. She was at the last show I played in Liverpool before the emergency. And that was the last time I saw her because of the restrictions on travel and quarantine. Every time I'd go to visit her, they'd change the rules and it wouldn't be possible. So unfortunately, she passed on that time. I mean, she had lived a very difficult last few years after a stroke. So I know that music was a great solace to both my parents as they dealt with the respective issues, My Mother a Stroke, My Father Parkinson's, music penetrated and bore them up in that, for which I'm grateful.
1:01:04
Speaker 2
Okay.
1:01:05
Speaker 1
Well, thank you so much for coming in.
1:01:07
Speaker 2
It's been just wonderful. It's been a pleasure. It's really, really very surprising in a lovely way. Thank you. I do mean that sincerely. Thank you.
1:01:17
Speaker 4
Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Talladay. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad-free listening for $ 4. 99 a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast Subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music is by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond.
The Hosts
Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell is co-founder of Pushkin Industries and host of the hit podcast Revisionist History. He is a journalist, a speaker, and the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Tipping…
Justin Richmond
Justin Richmond is producer and co-host of the music podcast Broken Record with writer Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times editor Bruce Headlam, and music producer—and Def Jam co-founder—Rick Rubin. Justin…
Bruce Headlam
Bruce Headlam is one of the co-creators of the music podcast Broken Record. He worked at The New York Times for 19 years, including two years running the 50-person Video…
Leah Rose
Leah Rose is a senior producer and hosts episodes of Broken Record. A former music editor at XXL Magazine, she also served as an on-air personality for Eminem’s SiriusXM channel, Shade 45.…
