Roxane Gay:
You can’t tell the story of third wave feminism, punk music, and the Riot Grrrl Movement without telling the story of Kathleen Hanna. Hanna was the lead singer of Bikini Kill and later the bands La Tigre and the Julie Ruin. Over the past 30 years, Hanna has made music and art. She has made necessary joyful, fierce, angry noise. Her feminism, her politics and her activism have deeply informed her music, and her music continues to inform the culture. Now, for the first time, she tells her own story in a new memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk. Kathleen Hanna, welcome to Design Matters.

Kathleen Hanna:
I am very, very happy to be here.

Roxane Gay:
As am I. This is a really exciting day for me. In the prologue of Rebel Girl, you share that you didn’t want your memoir to be a list of all your traumas, and so you left a lot of that on the cutting floor. And as someone who often writes about trauma, that was really interesting to me because a lot of times when we talk about trauma, people assume that trauma is the only thing that defines our lives. And especially for women, that reduces us to suffering and nothing more. So I would love for you to talk a bit more about why you made that decision to leave some of that on the cutting room floor. And then how do you tell your story without some of those stories?

Kathleen Hanna:
That’s a great question. The book was 600 pages because I wrote it in TextEdit. Yes, I am a first time author, so I wrote my book in TextEdit. And when my friend Ada Calhoun, who’s a fantastic editor and writer herself, put it into the correct format, she said, “Your book is not 325 pages like you thought. It’s over 600.” So with that in mind, we just had to cut a lot anyway. And I had already started thinking about how much trauma there was and how an audience could deal with it, even though I was really writing it without thinking of an audience. I just wrote it and made it for myself as something I felt I needed to do. But I also didn’t want to retraumatize other people. And a part of the process was me realizing that I always look at the negative.

And in kind of recovering these stories about my life that were less than stellar, I also had to go back in and find the joy. And in doing that, it not only balanced out the book, but it balanced out me as a person and gave me a new attitude towards gratitude. And so I wanted to make sure that I didn’t cut too much because I wasn’t just raped once. I was raped many times. And there’s actually some rapes that are not even in the book. My whole joke was like, “I left an ass raped out. Come on. What more do you want from me?” But one of the things that I’ve been dealing with last week because I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, and I’m sure you know this from being on press junkets yourself, weird themes will come up where people will just in one day ask you the same question that you haven’t been asked.

For whatever reason, the question that was asked of me kept bringing up the cumulative effect of the massive amounts of sexual harassment that I had to contend with at venues all over the world for years and years and years up into Le Tigre where in the book I make it look a little sunnier of like, “Now we’re finally going to get a sound person and not have to deal with all this crap.” But we didn’t get a sound person until four years into the band. So I was still dealing with a sound man who threatened to stab me. And then when I go and I look for help from the people who work there, they’re like, “Oh, he’s a harmless weirdo.”

Roxane Gay:
There are a lot of supposedly harmless weirdos-

Kathleen Hanna:
Harmless weirdos.

Roxane Gay:
… in the world

Kathleen Hanna:
Yeah. Until they shoot up a classroom and say feminist against the wall.

Roxane Gay:
Correct.

Kathleen Hanna:
Yeah. But dealing with stuff like that cumulatively ended up being its own massive trauma that I’m still wading through today. The fact of walking into each venue and having a different form of sexual harassment happen or just hatred of women or the angry feminist thing precedes you to the venue and men who feel threatened by it are then just, they’re already ready. They live in this town, so they’re ready for you. They’re ready to flip all the seats up in the women’s bathroom because they think it’s funny, which is not a big deal. But when it cumulatively is constantly happening-

Roxane Gay:
Absolutely.

Kathleen Hanna:
… plus, they won’t do sound for you because they think you don’t know how to hold a mic and you have to walk through the drawings of dicks and women being assaulted on the wall next to people’s band names and sit there while you’re waiting to go on stage and have bouncers threaten you, it’s like then you got to go on stage and pretend everything’s okay. And I do feel like that’s in the book, but recently I’ve been sort of like, “I wish I had a page that was just a list of the worst of the worst to give that feeling of being dehumanized, constantly treated like you’re not supposed to be there” that adds up.

Roxane Gay:
How do you, especially when you were younger, how do you each day find the strength, the energy, the armor to go back into another venue knowing that you’re going to bring with you the accumulation of all of these macro and microaggressions and that you’re going to get more and then you also have to perform and make music and entertain? How did you do that day after day and year after year?

Kathleen Hanna:
I mean, I just called to say I have no boundaries, you know?

Roxane Gay:
Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Kathleen Hanna:
I feel like self-care wasn’t a conversation. I felt like I’d been kind of tamped down until I was 17 and I left home and then I started writing stuff and making lyrics and poetry, and I all of a sudden came alive. That spirit of wanting to find the connection between my lyrics and my singing and other women was so strong. And I had a lot of workarounds. I told myself, “If people didn’t hate you, you wouldn’t be on the right path.” I did have these ways of seeing it didn’t have anything to do with me and reminding myself, “This has nothing to do with me.” And then it was the being on stage. I mean, I really would, as Valerie Salinas said, “Swim through a river of shit” just to be on stage performing. And seeing 16-year-old girls cry in the front row while they sing your lyrics, kind of an experience you don’t want to miss if you ever have the opportunity to do it.

Roxane Gay:
Sure. For sure. One of the things that struck me, especially early on in Rebel Girl, was your articulation that you finally get to tell your own story. And as someone who has been in the public eye for decades now, what does that power feel like to be able to articulate your own story instead of having other people do it for you, whether it’s fans or journalists or anything like that? And then how do you navigate other people telling your story and also thinking that they know the whole of your story?

Kathleen Hanna:
I think I’ll tackle that first one first. I have many policies in my head as if I’m a corporation. And one of my policies is I don’t speak to nonsense. So if my story is told wrong by somebody else, I’m not going to get pulled off the path I’m on to deal with it because it’s a time waster for me and I just don’t care enough. I feel like I learned very early on through some scrapes with public scrutiny in the press that there’s no point, there’s no justice. You know what I mean? You’re not going to get the justice through this mediated system of the press. You’re not ever going to be able to tell your story unmediated or your side of the story. So I just sort of don’t really care about when people tell a narrative about me that’s incorrect because sometimes it might hurt my feelings or something, and so I write about it in my journal and then I walk away. Because I think it’s important to give yourself space to vent about it to friends or-

Roxane Gay:
Absolutely,

Kathleen Hanna:
… whatever, and not be like, “I have to be so thick-skinned that I don’t feel anything and I just don’t ever take it personally.” Because I do sometimes take it personally. And on a bad day where I’m feeling really insecure, I might even seek out bad things people say about me, which is a whole other can of worms, but that doesn’t mean I need to publicly speak back to it.

And then the second part is I really didn’t write this book to set the record straight in any way, shape or form. I wrote it because I had to. I wrote it because I did feel silenced, and so that’s a part of it. And it’s a really fine line between setting the record straight and telling your story if you’re somebody who’s been in the public eye, which I’m sure you relate to.

So I told it for myself without an audience in mind just because I needed to turn my life into some kind of narrative so I could wrap it in a bow and leave it. And I could say, if you want an explanation of how I was involved in Riot Grrrl, turn to page 176. It feels good to just say this stuff because you go through all this stuff and you know it’s like a really advanced form of lyric writing. In writing a song, I really learned that if there was somebody who was bullying me in a really particularly horrible way and I didn’t want to give them that tension, I didn’t want to turn around to the person doing spitballs at my head and give them the attention that they were trying to get. And with a lot of men, they do stuff because they want to see the look of humiliation and fear on women’s faces, and they get off on it. And so I don’t want to give them that.

So part of the thing that I would do is just write a fucking mean song about them. And then I get royalties on that song, “Fuck you. Thanks for the inspiration.” There’s something really powerful to me in that. And so there’s something really powerful for me in writing out my story. And I’m terrified to say this because women and all marginalized people supposedly only spew and rant, like everything’s autobiographical. But I did just write it all down and vomit on the page and all of that stuff for 600 pages, and then I went back first with a butcher knife and then with a scalpel, and I was really strategic about the way I edited it. And that felt like I’m taking these things that were once very painful and I’m making them into something cohesive.

Once I put it all out, I was able to look at it and look at myself as a character and really kind of grapple with, “Whoa, that was not okay. What happened in that situation or what I did in that situation was not okay.” And so I was able to look back at things as I was editing especially and grapple with my successes and failures.

Roxane Gay:
Yes. Writing a memoir is very humbling and very eye-opening in the ways that it encourages you to do that reckoning not only with yourself but with others. One of the stories that really struck me was, in college, how you shared how your peers just couldn’t seem to offer you and other women meaningful artistic critique while you were creating meaningful art. And at the core of that is really not being taken seriously, which women continue to deal with. So how did you learn how to take yourself seriously as an artist?

Kathleen Hanna:
I was really lucky that these weirdo photographer girls went to my school and I looked up to them and we started a group outside of school where we were sharing articles from High Performance Magazine. I found a bunch of stack of heresies in an old bookstore that I read. And so I was really getting support from written material that I was finding and from friends in real time who were having the same experiences. And once I found one person to say, “Hey, the way I’m being treated like in my visual art classes, this is what’s happening,” and then another woman said, “Oh, that’s happening to me too,” then it became, there’s eight of us. And then we started meeting, and then I got the support that I needed. And I really started realizing how much more there was for me outside of college than there kind of was within it. Although I’m so happy I got to go.

Roxane Gay:
Yeah, of course, of course. And it is always interesting to realize what you can learn in the classroom and then of course what you can learn beyond the classroom.

I’ve been watching a lot of your performances over the past week. And particularly in the earlier ones, I was struck by the unapologetic anger that you brought to the stage. Women are often told that anger is unbecoming and that there’s just no place in proper womanhood for it, and yet you make space for anger in your work, which is incredibly refreshing. How did you come to embrace and celebrate anger, especially on stage where anger is sometimes being given to you from the audience and you just seem to give it right back?

Kathleen Hanna:
I mean, in a way, you answered the question for me. It’s like walking into a club and getting treated like crap, and then having guys yell, “Shut up” and take it off during the whole performance. How can I not get angry? I wasn’t making strategic artistic choices at that point in my life. I did kind of consider myself a feminist performance artist first and a singer second. And I did understand that I wasn’t performing rage, I was actually feeling rage. And that publicly feeling that rage was cathartic to other people.

Roxane Gay:
Absolutely.

Kathleen Hanna:
I don’t know. I always go back to this story about when Arthur Ashe first saw John McEnroe play and John McEnroe was such a brat yelling back at the refs and calling them names. And Arthur Ashe, who was one of I guess the first really famous Black tennis players, didn’t have that ability because he had to walk into every room and be the ambassador and be kind and be generous. And in his book, he talked about how he saw John McEnroe just being a brat. I thought at that point in the book, it was going to be like, “And I felt bitter and I felt like I’d been robbed and I had to always hold my tongue and look at this white kid with all this privilege who’s doing this shit.” But no, he was attracted to McEnroe and wanted to coach him because he wanted to be close to that.

I always thought that was a really amazing thing. And I feel like… I mean, definitely I’m nowhere near an Arthur Ashe, but I always felt like it was really telling that it’s like to see someone, whoever, having rage when you so needed to express it can be cathartic and can be something that’s almost like you’re repelled by it, but also attracted to it.

Roxane Gay:
When you started seeing girls to the front at concerts, it was really revolutionary. And as someone who we’re very close in age, I remember how horrible concerts were for girls getting just shoved out of the front and getting harmed in ways that were sometimes intentional and sometimes not, but harm was done nonetheless. Did you know how revolutionary it was to create that space for girls to come to the front?

Kathleen Hanna:
I didn’t really think of it as revolutionary. I remember thinking like, “Punk wasn’t meeting up to my expectations.” I was like, “I came here because I wanted something that was different than the mainstream, and I wanted a place that was progressively political.” I wanted a place that was challenging classism, not in lazy ways like you have to charge $5 at every show, because that can exclude musicians who don’t have money and can’t afford to play $5 shows for their entire careers. But what I found was kind of more of the same. I was just like, “Well, we have to change things.”

And also I always thought a lot of the stuff that we did was really, I wouldn’t say banal, I don’t know if that’s the right word, but I didn’t feel like it was very revolutionary at all. I felt like it was just totally normal. I was like, “Okay, there’s only four girls here and they’re all in the back and we’re playing music directed at women and they can’t see.” We want them to start bands, so we have bands to play with on tour because there’s not enough girl bands, though there were a lot of great ones at that time and before. So I’m standing there and I just think, “Oh, I’ll invite them to the front.” I didn’t write about it, an essay about it or anything like that. It was just like, “Hey, come up here.” And then it started to become a thing and

it worked.
People were so angry, men were so angry about it. I mean, we had to write pamphlets that we handed out that said, “This show is an experiment. If you’re a straight white male…” And we didn’t say cis back then, we would hand out these fires that were like, “Here’s why we’re doing this. Please let this experiment happen.” Because the violence would just erupt, and we were trying to do anything to keep more violence from happening.

I mean the anger, it was very intense, but it changed over time to be the more girls came up front and then the more violent the men in the crowd became, the more they became actually our security team because we didn’t have management security. We often had a roadie, but no tour manager, no sound person. We needed them. It wasn’t just this altruistic, “Let’s change the scene thing.” It was also like we would ask them to walk us out to the band after the show and they would protect us from guys who were trying to get up on stage.

I didn’t like putting other girls in that position, but it just is how it turned out. And then it became a schtick. Then it became me cosplay. It felt like cosplay. It was like I’m looking out and I’m seeing audiences that used to be 1% female or female identified, non-binary. I saw all of a sudden so many more people who weren’t straight white dudes at the shows taking up the front, and I didn’t need to say it anymore because we’d gotten bigger and more people were coming and more women were coming. And so it started to be like, “Well, you have to say it because that’s your thing.” And I was like, “I just believe everything should be kind of site specific.” And to sound like a corny MFA candidate, but I was like, “I’ll say that if it makes sense. But if it doesn’t make any sense, it can be dangerous in a crowd of now 500 to 1,000 people to try and get people to change this pact. To try and get people to move around the room can actually create safety problems.”

And so it wasn’t safe to say. And there were already, as I mentioned, a lot of women in the front, so I wouldn’t say it. And then sometimes people would get angry at me and I’m like, “I’m not going to cosplay this angry woman, trope, who always says the same thing.” And then now at the reunion, it’s taken on a whole new meaning.

Roxane Gay:
Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure.

Kathleen Hanna:
Yeah.

Roxane Gay:
Especially then, but also now, when you are a public person, when you have a persona that people think is you, they expect things, whether it’s to say girls to the front or to be angry or to do any of the things that you are known by. How do you resist that pressure to be what people want you to be and instead just be yourself? Or, do you?

Kathleen Hanna:
Ooh, that “Do you?” is really.-

Roxane Gay:
It’s so hard to do.

Kathleen Hanna:
… like a mystery novel. I was like, “Or do I?” I’m really lucky I have a really great support system of friends and I have a dog, and my dog doesn’t care if I just played a show or wrote a book. And so I don’t really see myself as iconic. How sick are you of hearing the word iconic? I mean, is it just me?

Roxane Gay:
No, it’s funny because my next question was how does it feel to be called a feminist icon? Some people would see it as a blessing, but it’s kind of a burden to have that label put on you when like you said, your dog doesn’t care. You’re just Kathleen to your dog.

Kathleen Hanna:
And to me, I’m still the girl who went on tour thinking everybody was going to be like, “Oh, yay!” They’re actually bringing really obvious feminism to the table of punk. “Yay!” And that’s not how it went. But I’m still that person inside. I’m still that optimistic. “Everyone’s going to love this,” and then they don’t. And then I’m disappointed and then I just make more art. I mean, I dealt with a lot of disappointment through my life. I mean, I’ve written phrases that were like, Our fan team was called Girl Power, and then we saw as now it’s written on t-shirts at Target, and the Spice Girls use it and all that stuff. But I was able to look at things and be like, “You know what? I’m an artist. I can just keep making stuff.”

Roxane Gay:
Yeah, absolutely.

Kathleen Hanna:
I don’t care if it gets ripped off. I do get distressed by just branding in general. In the ’90s, before branding was kind of a concept that people were talking so much about, it was about hypocrisy and that word. My bandmate Toby came up with this phrase hypochrobrats, where she’s like, “We are hypocrites because we change and we grow and we’re brats. And we can be both.” I love the idea that just because you say that you’re politically progressive, or if you do that in your art in any way, what I have found in my life is that then it will become, “But you’re wearing leather shoes. But you did this.” And then it’ll become this whole thing where people are looking for a reason to tear you down, and so they’ll try to find the things that make you hypocritical to what they think your political viewpoint should be as a way to discredit you.

I just had to step away from that and be like, “I don’t care.” Because the most powerful thing I can do is be a three-dimensional person who changes publicly. The most powerful thing I can do is not stay on an indie label forever because that’s the expectation. Try being on a major label and then publicly talk about how I kind of hated it, it wasn’t my thing, and I really prefer to be on small indie labels and to work independently. But I had to try it to see. And if we get caught in some kind of brand mentality of like, “You’re outside your brand because you’re supposed to do this or do that,” it doesn’t allow us to change and grow. I want to do new things that I couldn’t just stay stuck in one sort of three paragraph thing that ends with “Girls kick ass.”

Roxane Gay:
In a lot of your concerts and in a lot of your work, you openly talked about sexual harassment and rape and the kinds of violence that women and non-binary people or really that everyone deals with, but particularly women. I know that that always encourages people to then share their own stories with you because you kind of open the door and you create this space of recognition. How did you handle and how do you handle carrying your own stories and then having to receive all of these stories from other people?

Kathleen Hanna:
I mean, for a long time I didn’t deal with my own story at all. I mean, really hard to admit, but I’m 55 years old and I’m still processing a lot of this stuff, partially because I prioritize the care of others over the care of myself, which is a familiar story to a lot of people.

At first, when I was touring with my band Viva Knievel, which was pre-Bikini Kill, I was working at a rape relief domestic violence shelter as a volunteer. And I had learned how to answer crisis phones and how to give resources to people, how to repeat kind of things back that women were saying and help them find their way to psychological and physical safety hopefully in the best case scenario.

So when I went on tour and there would just be two women at a show and I would talk about these forms of violence in between songs, they started coming up to me and saying, “I’ve never told anybody this.” And at first it was the biggest honor. I felt like a woman seeing me on stage and hearing me talk about something and then feeling safe enough to share their story with me felt like I was really honored that they trusted me and I was honored to be given access to their lives.

I would do all that I could to pass on resources and really try to get them to call a local rape relief or domestic violence shelter because that ended up being a huge thing that people were like, “I couldn’t call a place like that because it’s for people with more serious things than me.” And these are women who’ve been gang raped who are telling me someone else has a more serious story. Everybody else has a more serious story. Your pain doesn’t not exist because someone else has it worse. And not dealing with your own trauma isn’t going to make that person’s situation any better. Dealing with your trauma is going to give you the space that you can help other people. But anyways, sorry, I’m going off. First it was a-

Roxane Gay:
No, it’s an important thing.

Kathleen Hanna:
It was a total honor. And after seven years of it, it was no longer feeling like such an honor. It was feeling like a burden. And that’s not to say that I didn’t love every conversation that I had with women who came to our shows. It’s to say that it started taking its toll on my mental health. So in Le Tigre, I started pulling back. We put up a website that had resources not only having to do with sexual assault and domestic violence, but also coming out, kids who were coming out to their parents. I got so much mail in Bikini Kill, kids coming out to their parents and kicked out and feeling absolutely devastated and alone.
And so in Le Tigre, we also put up resources for queer kids. And it felt really great. It felt really great to say, “You know what? I started to say I can do this so that I’m not pretending it’s not happening. This isn’t a big part of our fan base and we can support our fan base without them getting personal one-on-one, face to face contact with me because I was exhausted and I wanted to spend more time on my art.” And that allowed us to have visuals and costumes and dance. Because I wasn’t so wrapped up in the stories of other people and trying to get them help all the time, I was able to protect myself emotionally and be a better performer.

Roxane Gay:
It seems like you’re able to reinvent yourself creatively and to try new things when one project sort of comes to an end and you just seem to be able to throw yourself into something else. How has this ability to reinvent challenged you as a songwriter and now even as a book writer, and how do you find the energy to stay creative?

Kathleen Hanna:
That’s so hard.

Roxane Gay:
It is hard.

Kathleen Hanna:
Like, I don’t know. I mean, I’ve been really fortunate in that I don’t want to give advice because my life is kind of a mess. But I’ve always searched for great collaborators and I’ve always chosen intellect and personality and humor over craft or formal ability in my collaborators. That has been really successful for me because I’ve worked with people who were learning something new together.

I love the beginning of a project. It’s like the butterflies of when you’re first in love. The thing I loved about punk was that anybody can do it, idea. Of course, it was frustrating when I found out anyone meant white guys could get up there and not know how to play their instruments, but if girls did it, it was like, “You guys better go back and take some lessons because you suck.” But I’ve always sort of loved messing with authenticity after being called fake, a fake band for so long, like, “You’re not a real band. You’re just getting attention because you’re women or because you hate men” or whatever.

Roxane Gay:
Okay.

Kathleen Hanna:
Yeah, fine. And then in Le Tigre, I got to challenge the notions of authenticity by not having a live drummer and using backup tracks and having costumes and goofy dances and being like, “I’m not going to be cool. I have no investment in cool. I want connection over cool.” And working with people who want connection over cool has given me the ability to sustain my art practice because it stays fun when you work with people like that.

The book was a bit harder. The book was more like, you know those little crème brûlée blowtorch things, like it’s like I had that going on my face all the time. I just felt so… You’ve written a memoir.

Roxane Gay:
I have.

Kathleen Hanna:
It can be like you get this creepy look on your face and you can’t talk to anybody. I just felt like I had to stop writing for large periods of time and take care of myself or try to. But yeah, I think that I’ve had sustainability and been able to change the medium because I love music and I really care about feminism and I care about changing the world and making the world a better place. And so mixing the stuff I care about with whatever medium I’m working in gives me the energy to continue because it’s not just empty formalist experiments, although I enjoy those as well.

Roxane Gay:
There’s something to be said for them. One of the things I read in an interview you did recently with Rolling Stone was when you talked about the writing process and navigating the isolation and of course having to deal with the fallibility of memory. How did you give yourself permission to have a fallible memory and understand the difference between truth and accuracy?

Kathleen Hanna:
Well, I was really lucky because Bikini Kill was touring while I wrote the book and Le Tigre as well, both bands got back together and reunited. And so during the process of writing, some of my breaks were to go on tour. And so I was able to talk to my bandmates about, “Hey, do you remember this happening?” And there were certain situations where bandmates would go, “It didn’t happen like that. It happened like this.” And to have two different people have two different stories, and then my story, it gave me a lot of courage because I was like, Sometimes I would be like, “Oh, okay, well that happened in Spain, so I’m going to mention it was in Spain.” But a lot of it was subjective. A lot of it was like, “Well, you saw it from that side of the stage and I saw it from this part of the stage” You know what I mean? We all saw it through our own different specific lenses. And I realized that as long as I wasn’t getting something entirely wrong, that it really was my opinion and my memory of what happened.

I did check large facts. I did check dates. I did do a lot of research to make sure that I wasn’t completely off. But finding that my bandmates remembered stuff I didn’t about certain situations, there were certain situations that I left out of the book where I actually took revenge on people, very small acts of revenge, but I wrote a note to someone who wronged me and was just like, “Let them have it” in red crayon. And I forgot that I even did that. And hearing that from my bandmates made me feel really satisfied because I didn’t remember that little mini act of speaking back to power. And so that was really helpful, but it was also like they didn’t care that I remembered it different. They weren’t mad or upset or we should all have the same experience of this. They were like, “Oh, well, that’s your opinion.” And us having different opinions actually made my opinion more powerful to me.

Roxane Gay:
What does writing allow that performance doesn’t?

Kathleen Hanna:
Wow. I will say this. The thing they have in common is that they’re both incredibly therapeutic for me personally. And in writing this book and in touring again, I’ve finally been able to say that out loud because the stereotype… I’ve been told my whole career, “What you do isn’t really art. It’s just therapy.” And when we live in opposition to stereotypes, I feel like I’m still relying on stereotypes to define myself. And so I’m just coming out and saying like… I don’t know if you know what EMDR is. It’s like this modality of a therapy that can help you kind of process memories and

put them in a place where it’s in your memory bank instead of your “it’s happening right now” bank. I’ve walked off-stage with Bikini Kill and with Le Tigre and felt like I just did EMDR. I felt like I left a bunch of really toxic crap on the stage. And I also felt like I left in a wake of joy.

I mean, the real difference to me is performance is so physical and I definitely am one of those above the neck thinkers that I stay in my head a lot and I don’t have the mind-body connection that of course I’m supposed to be striving for. I feel like I attain that to a tiny degree when I’m on stage and I’m able to dance and throw my body around and control where the air and my vocals are coming from in my body, which is a really interesting process of being kind of this human computer that I really enjoy the technical part of singing. And so there’s so much more physicality to being on stage.

The thing I love so much about writing is that I’m not being seen, physically seen. I like that I can just have a spaghetti stain on my shirt and my sweatpants and I can write anywhere. I don’t have to have an office. I don’t need a crew to do it. I don’t need a venue. I don’t need to drive somewhere far away. I don’t need to sit around for 12 hours to wait to write. I can do it whenever I want. I love that about it. I don’t like the isolation. I like the not being seen part, physically seen, and I like working alone and not having to do everything by committee, but my favorite part is actually when I hand it over to an editor and I start getting notes and it becomes collaborative because I just feel like by nature, I really enjoy the collaborative part. I like working with other people. I get lonely.

Roxane Gay:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. As a writer, primarily, I love the alone part. That is great. I do also though love the collaboration because then I get to get out of my own head and out of this vacuum I’ve been in and get some real perspective. And I’m very fortunate to have an amazing editor and have always had really great editors to sort of keep me honest and to help me help myself, which I really appreciate because toward the end of writing a book, it can get very lonely and you’re just like, “Ugh, man, I don’t know what I just did. I just don’t know.”

The title of the memoir, Rebel Girl, has varied connotations, not only for you, but for your audience, I’m sure. How do you think about the idea of a rebel girl now versus when the song “Rebel Girl” first came out? And do you still see yourself as a rebel girl?

Kathleen Hanna:
I don’t.

Roxane Gay:
That’s interesting.

Kathleen Hanna:
I had weird things about calling it Rebel Girl because I’m not a girl anymore. I had weird things about calling it that, because I feel like the word “rebel” has a lot of negative connotations. It was originally a Joe Hill song actually about a female labor organizer, which I love that history of it. But it has become very feminist bumper sticker. “My other broom is a rebel girl,” or whatever. But it was a good title. And it’s a song my friend, James, who just put out an amazing book called Black Punk Now that I always want to plug because it’s one of those things that’s not only just an amazing book, but an instant classic, I was having lunch with him and he’s like, “You really need to call it Rebel Girl.”

My editor had been pushing for that. Everybody was saying, “That’s what you should call it.” And I was really resisting it, and then I was like, “But I did write that song and it is kind of the most popular song I wrote.” And “Deceptacon” isn’t… That’s another the second most popular song I ever wrote. And “Deceptacon” is not a great book title. It’s just a good title. And it’s a cute picture on the front. And why not? But I addressed it in the book, my ambivalence about that title and how I feel sometimes more like a dirty napkin than a rebel girl, but Dirty Napkin is a terrible title for a book.

Roxane Gay:
Yeah, I laughed out loud when I read that line.

Kathleen Hanna:
Oh, good.

Roxane Gay:
Yeah, no, I did because I thought, “Dirty Napkin. Actually, I would love to read a book called Dirty Napkin.”

Kathleen Hanna:
Maybe that’s part two, Rebel Girl Part II: Dirty Napkin.

Roxane Gay:
My last question is something I love to ask creative people. What do you like most about your work and how you do it?

Kathleen Hanna:
I really love the process of making stuff. I just like making stuff. I love making some instrumental music, putting it on my computer, and then just singing 20 different tracks of nonsense lyrics. Giving myself a week, coming back, and starting to listen and hear what is this song about. And that process of discovery and of being in the unknown place and not being so attached to language that I need it for survival, that I can let language be playful, I love it when that happens, when I become less attached to the direct meaning of words and more attached to the phrasing, the rhythm of them, and in singing the tone. That’s always a beautiful part of making work to me, is the way… All of my work has to do with language even when it’s visual. My relationship with language is the best part of my work, is to watch that relationship change and grow and sometimes be in a really bad place, and then we get together and we have a great relationship again. Those times are when it’s a song I want to sing over and over and over again.

Roxane Gay:
That’s awesome. And I always love hearing when people love the actual process of making and exploring and seeing what language can do. Kathleen Hanna, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Design Matters. It was a real pleasure to talk with you.

Kathleen Hanna:
Oh, such a pleasure to talk with you.

Roxane Gay:
Kathleen Hanna’s memoir is Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you so much for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Roxane Gay. Debbie Millman will be back and is looking forward to talking with you again soon.

Debbie Millman:
It’s likely we all know something about the foundational American story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. She was his property and she bore six of his children. When Jefferson died after a 30-year relationship, he didn’t free her in his will, as was often common at the time. Suzan-Lori Parks has staged some of the most important works of contemporary American theater, and as a result, she has won nearly every artistic accolade, including a Pulitzer Prize, several Tony Awards and a MacArthur Genius Grant. Her latest play is a play within a play titled Sally and Tom. In it, she presents the story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson and explores the complications and contradictions of their relationship with candor, pathos and a group of phenomenal actors. Sally and Tom is currently on stage at the Public theater in New York City. Suzan-Lori is also a novelist and a member of the band Sula and the Joyful Noise. Suzan-Lori Parks, welcome to Design Matters.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Thanks for having me here, Debbie. This is fun.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Suzan-Lori, I know that in addition to all you do artistically, I understand you’re also an advanced brown belt in karate.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Oh, that’s so kind of you to mention, Debbie. Yes. I would say I was an advanced brown belt in karate. It’s the traditional Seido Karate, traditional Japanese karate, and that was a long time ago. 1996 is when I was among with all the other students invited to take our black belt test. And I woke up the next day and said, “I need to be doing yoga.” And so I happily left the dojo, a lot of good friends there, and started my yoga practice that I’ve had since then. So I don’t know if I’m actually a brown belt, advanced brown belt anymore. I think I’m just a leather belt or a tweed belt. That’s what [inaudible 00:02:13] belt. There you go.

Debbie Millman:
You were born in Fort Knox, Kentucky down the road from Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Your father was a colonel in the United States Army. And you spent your early childhood in Odessa, Texas while your dad served a tour in Korea and two in Vietnam. How did your family manage while he was away so much?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Well, yeah, it’s what families do when one of the parents or sometimes both of the parents have to go away and difficult things. I think Army families or families with one or more parents of the service have organizational principles that other families might not understand. My dad served a tour in Korea and then two tours in Vietnam. I wasn’t born when he was in Korea, obviously, but when he went to Vietnam, it was the summer of ’68, and we were living in California at the time at Fort Ord.

He got the assignment, he had to go to Vietnam, and my parents decided that the smartest thing to do would be to go to West Texas where my mom is from and live there because a black woman with three small children living alone was not the safest thing to do in 1968. And so we got in a car and we drove as we often did to the next place we were going to live. And so we drove down to Odessa, Texas and rented a house down the street from my mom’s mom and dad and family, and had a amazing time. Loved being in Texas while dad was away in war. And it was very intense. And I know my mom now speaks of how worried she was all the time, but she didn’t share that with us, little, small, little children.

Debbie Millman:
Your dad was also an avid fan of opera, and when he came home, I understand he would walk around the house lip-syncing to Puccini and Wagner. Did that instill in you an early appreciation of opera?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
It instilled in me an early appreciation of the bazaar. My dad was 6’4, a darker shade of soul, handsome, charismatic, very deep thinker. One of his favorite books was The Inner Game of Tennis. If anybody’s read that, it’s a brilliant book about how to utilize the capacities of your mind. But yeah, and for fun, yeah, he would play tennis and he would turn on the reel to reel. Back in the day, that’s what a lot of music was on, turn on the reel to reel and have his Wagner or Puccini blaring throughout the house. And he would walk around lip-syncing and it was absolutely fantastic. It was very bazaar and beautiful. I mean, I tell people that my dad wanted to live large in a world that didn’t want him to live at all. And that was very moving to me to watch a guy who grew up very, very impoverished, only joined the army because he wanted to go to college.

There was no money for him to go to college. And the ROTC was the only way he could go to college. And then of course, the conflict in Korea and all those conflicts that turned into wars happened and he was kind of swept up in that. But it was very moving and very beautiful. My mom was a big fan of jazz, still is a big fan of jazz. All the greats, Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn and Dave Brubeck. And she would always be trying to teach us how to jitterbug dance. I don’t think I ever learned, actually. She still tries to teach me when I go to visit.

Debbie Millman:
You also began writing poems and songs that even created a newspaper with your brother titled The Daily Daily. What made you decide to do that and do you still have any of those issues?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
You know everything about me. Wow, my gosh, you know everything about me. It was a weird, what made me decide to do that. I’m always a… I just still today. And you see it in 365 Days\/365 Plays or Plays for the Plague Year, certainly where I just look out the window and go, “What’s going on?” And that’s what I did as a fourth grader. And we lived in Burlington Vermont. My dad, returning from Vietnam took two years away from the Army as was allowed. He got his master’s degree and we lived in Vermont. And I would sit up in our attic and look out the window. There’d be things going on. And I thought, “Let me write a newspaper called The Daily Daily.”

Debbie Millman:
And did you distribute it to your friends or your family or-

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Oh, sure, sure. I mean, we didn’t have the photocopying capabilities of distributing things back then, but sure there was a… I typed it up on a little manual typewriter and passed it out. It’s weird to hand out copies of the news to people who be like, “Well, you’re talking about me there. When I chased my cat across the street, when I tried ice skating or when I kissed Scott Young at the tennis court

,” whatever. And I would watch all these things. I was also enamored of the book Harriet the Spy and Harriet, she did that. She walked around. I’m looking for it on my bookshelf. Where is it? There it is. Louise Fitzhugh. Louise Fitzhugh is the writer. And Harriet the spy would walk around her neighborhood with a notebook and she’d write down things. And I thought, “That’s kind of cool.” But also, I loved writing songs. I would make up songs to go along with whatever was on the radio, it was a hobby, a little fun thing I would do.

Debbie Millman:
In 1974, you and your family moved to Germany where your father was stationed, and you lived in Frankfurt, Gelnhausen, Oberwesel and in Höchst, which was a very, very old small town. And you attended local schools there from sixth to ninth grade. And you’ve said that when you were living in Germany, you and your family were often the only Black people that some people had ever seen live and that people would just stare at you. How did you manage through that experience?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Yeah, we lived in Gelnhausen. We lived in Frankfurt, we lived in Oberwesel, we lived in Höchst. My parents sent us to German schools because they thought that that would be a wonderful experience and it was, we learned German. I was fluent in German after about three months, you just inhale the language. That was my experience anyway. And yeah, the only Black person in the room or the only Black person anybody ever seen, it had also happened in Vermont. I remember going to the state fair, the Champlain Valley Fair, it was called. And we walked into the fair, the fairgrounds.

It was very lovely. And it was a group of people who went [inaudible 00:09:46]. And there I was with my mom, and my mom is a lighter skin complexion than I am. It’s hard if you’re just listening to this, but in the community, we call it light skinded. And so ma is light skinded and so they weren’t exclaiming about mom, they were exclaiming about me, and they proceeded to come up to me and pet me. And I stood very still. Yeah, I stood very still. And what do you say? Similar things happened in Germany and more recently, quite honestly, I was in Cambodia at the Temple of Angkor Wat as a tourist with a guide, all by myself that I’d gone there and there I was looking at a beautiful statue. It was gorgeous. Angkor Wat is so amazing.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. It’s magical.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Standing there, right, it was magical, totally. And I’m standing there and looking, and then I hear behind me, “Oh,” same kind of, “Oh,” that kind of thing. And I was kind of alarmed and I turned around to see what the commotion was. There were a group of people, they later told me through their tour guide that their group of people from China, they were all pointing vigorously in my direction. Of course, I thought they were pointing at the statue. And I moved aside so they could get a better look because they had their cameras out and they rushed toward me. And I kept moving aside, realizing all the while that they were running toward me. And they mobbed me. And I stood very still. I’d been through this before. You see? You stand very still. And they pet me and they took pictures with me. I put a modest smile on my face and flashed a peace sign. And then they went on to look at something else.

Debbie Millman:
How did you keep your composure?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
I embraced the difficult things. I work to see the humanity in all of us because it’s there. What am I going to do? Get mad at some… I mean, I don’t know, they’d never seen one of me before. Conversely, I went to Cuba with a wonderful group. I think the MacArthur-

Debbie Millman:
Fellows.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
MacArthur Fellows.

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:12:04]

Suzan-Lori Parks:
MacArthur Fellows. That’s it. Thank you. MacArthur Fellows. And I walk down the street of Cuba in Havana, and everybody, men, women, and children are saying, “Linde, linde.” And I’m like, “Yeah, this is where I’m from.” So it’s all good. You just got to keep going.

Debbie Millman:
You came back to the United States just in time for you to finish high school. And despite your love of writing, you had a high school teacher that actually told you that you would never be a writer.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Yeah, they didn’t tell me I would never be a writer. They told me that with my skillset, it might not turn out the way I had hoped. Just to be clear, when I was a student in high school, there was a, I guess you could say rubric by which one’s intelligence or suitability for certain professions was determined. If you wanted to be a writer, spelling was one of those yardsticks, if you will. Maybe that’s the right word. I was never a good speller. So I would draw a circle around that. If you can draw a circle around the word spell and then speller and draw a circle around the word speller in your mind. Okay, so remember that. So the teacher, she’d give us … what do you call it? Spelling tests every Friday. Give you the list of words on Monday, give you the test on Friday.

I would study really hard because I loved school and I was a good student generally. Every Friday I failed the test because I liked to make things up, see? So I was like, “Oh, that could go like this. That’s spelling of that word. Oh, it could be like that.” That would always … So I failed the spelling test. And so in looking at my grades at the end of the year, and I said I wanted to be a writer, she suggested, I think with a certain amount of care, “You might be better suited to science.” Where my grades were very, very high. It would ace my physics tests, for example. And I said, “Yeah, that’s cool spelling.” So now all these years later, there are architectural shapes in my place called spells, and I am a very great speller, actually. I just had to find my own way to do it.

So it was cool. Again, it’s like … And the funniest thing, I was doing a lecture … nah, I don’t know where, somewhere, Illinois maybe about 15, 20 years ago … no, maybe 10 years ago. And a former classmate from that school came up to me, and his name was Steve. And he said, “Oh my God, SLP, you mean she told you that you shouldn’t be a writer because you’re such a lousy speller?” And I said, “Yeah, bro, that’s how it went down.” And he said, “She told me the same thing.” And I said, “Well, what did you become?” Well, he’s a medical doctor, so he’s doing all right too.

Debbie Millman:
You also started playing guitar in high school as well and fell in love with it. Did you have thoughts at that point of potentially becoming a musician?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Yeah, I had started playing piano as a kid and violin as a kid in Vermont after dad came back from Vietnam. They had a little money saved, mom and dad, and they spent all of it on a baby grand piano. That’s how much they love music. They wanted music in the home. And we took piano lessons and I enjoyed piano lessons, we all did. And I also gravitated to the guitar. I was just telling a friend today that there was a show on PBS or something. I think it was Pete Seeger had a show, maybe it was called Hootenanny or something. Maybe I’m just making that up. But Pete Seeger had a show and he would invite artists, musicians onto his show. And I believe he had Libba Cotton on his show, Reverend Gary Davis on his show, and he himself, of course, played the banjo brilliantly.

And I would watch that show and think, “Oh wow, now there’s something to do.” And again, I was always making little songs to go along with whatever was on the radio. But yeah, it was in high school … Before high school, I actually think I started playing the guitar. And then … Yeah, it was at a time before MTV and all the internet and all that where if you didn’t see something yourself, it was hard to believe it was actually happening. You had all these people around the world who’d never seen a living, breathing, Black person before, and you had all these people around the world who’d never seen many Black people playing the guitar or the banjo. And so the assumption was that Black people didn’t play the guitar, which I was told by my Black and white friends alike.

Debbie Millman:
You were told that you couldn’t do an awful lot of things as you were growing up.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
I know. I know. The road is littered with things that I’ve been told not to do, or, “You know what? How about take this path?” And I really do take the note. I was a science major in college to start with, and then I drifted over into the English department because I blame it on Virginia Woolf.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I read that To the Lighthouse really changed your life.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Yeah, To the Lighthouse.

Debbie Millman:
I love book, it’s one of my all-time favorites. Oh, my God.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Isn’t it great?

Debbie Millman:
That first page is one of the most beautiful openings of any book, I think.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Oh, say something … I don’t remember the first phrase. Tell me something.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, I don’t remember. “Mrs. Ramsey said it was going to be fine. It was going be fine.” And I just love that. “It’s going to be fine.”

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Yeah. I love how she dies and Virginia will puts that in parentheses. I think that’s brilliant. Just brilliant. Yeah, that’s it. “Will it be fine? Will it be fine? And I’m knitting socks for the lighthouse keeper’s son.” And finally the woman, the painter, whose name is-

Debbie Millman:
That, I don’t remember that. That, I don’t remember.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
I can’t remember. Oh, I can’t remember. We’ll remember it by the end. Nobody look it up. I love not knowing things and then just having the uncertainty hang in the air’s. It’s a game.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, I hate that.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Oh, I love it. I’m just like, “You know what? It’s negative capability like Keith’s talked about.” We don’t know. It is knowable, but we don’t know, and we’re just going to not know for … Lily Briscoe. There you go.

Debbie Millman:
There you go. Thank you.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
It returns. And I think she’s painting and she finally finishes her painting. To the Lighthouse. Yeah, To the Lighthouse was my lighthouse. How about that?

Debbie Millman:
Beautiful.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Thank you, Virginia Woolf. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
You started writing again and took a class, you applied to take a creative workshop taught by James Baldwin at Hampshire College. You got in and got to work with James Baldwin alongside 15 other students every Monday afternoon. And I believe you were first introduced to James Baldwin when your parents gifted you his book, The Fire Next Time for Valentine’s Day when you were in the fourth grade. That’s a really interesting gift from a parent.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Yeah. My parents were people … Again, my dad was in the Army. My mom was a college professor. They’d met in college. One could say they were very sort of traditional, dad being in the Army. They were also quietly radical. To send us to German school. No American parents, white, Black or other were doing that, zero. And then to give me … When I said, “I’m interested in writing.” I was sitting under the piano writing my novel and they were like, “Okay, well if you’re interested in writing, here’s a book.” I read a little bit of it. Honestly, I think I studied the back cover of the book more than anything, because I just would look at his face and be like, “Wow, here’s a writer.” And then, yeah, 10 years, 11 years later, something like that, there I was, and he was at the head of this library table at Hampshire College teaching us creative writing. 10 years, that’s all it took.

Debbie Millman:
You started writing again, and I read this really beautiful paragraph about your experience writing The Wedding Pig, and you said, “I was typing as if people were standing near me talking and I kept thinking, ‘If I turn around, they’ll leave.’ And I just copied down what they were saying. It’s been that way ever since.” And I’m wondering, since you wrote that and said that, is it still that way for you?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
That’s lovely. I’ve forgotten. Yeah, that’s exactly what it was. I was in my dorm room, it was around four o’clock in the afternoon and the sun was setting, so it was, I guess in the fall, beautiful. Mount Holyoke College is such a beautiful place, and it’s just great academics too. I really enjoyed my time there. And so the sun was setting and I was writing, and I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, Debbie, where you’re writing and it feels like you are digging the ditch, put the spade in the earth and flip it over your shoulder.

Debbie Millman:
I call that torture.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Oh. Well see, and there you go. I just call it digging. You see, I think … I realized through just these few minutes talking with you, I have a high tolerance for what most people might call difficult. So anyway, so there I am digging. I would call it doing the work. And then it’s as if I’m not digging at all. It’s just being dug. That is a great feeling. That never happened to me before, because again, I started as a writer by looking out the window and going, “Oh, what’s happening? Oh, someone’s chasing her cat or kissing a boy by the tennis courts.”

That was my way of writing, reporting basically really in an interesting kind of weird … or voyeurism in a weird kind of way. And now I was being visited. Yeah, it did feel like if I turned around, they would leave. And it has felt like that before, but I think it’s stronger now. I can actually tune in. When we’re in rehearsal and I need a new line, everything can be swirling around. Or when I need a new verse for a song. And the other day, the guys, we were rehearsing and I wrote a song, which is two chords, and they’re making fun.

All the songs we perform in the band Sula and the Joyful Noise, I’ve written. And I just love them, and the band is very supportive and the band loves them too. But they were joking with me about this one. Because they liked to do things on the changes, and there weren’t enough chord changes. And so I just went home and just wrote a bridge, three more verses, whatever, I came in like, “Here.” So yeah, sometimes it feels easier to tune in to the channel, if you will. And I can move my head around with the confidence that-

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]

Suzan-Lori Parks:
I can move my head around with the confidence that they won’t leave me.

Debbie Millman:
That’s beautiful. I call that the zone. It sometimes happens when I’m doing research and-

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Oh, cool.

Debbie Millman:
…hours will go by. That’s one of my favorite parts of doing this show is sort of embodying my guest for the time that I’m working to prepare, and it’s been really fun with you.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Oh, cool.

Debbie Millman:
Your first produced play was the one-act show Betting on the Dust Commander, and it debuted at The Gas Station, which was a bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1987, and the show ran for three nights. You used an extension cord for the lights up, lights down cues, and plugged and unplugged the extension cord yourself. Do you still have that extension cord?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
I not only have the physical extension cord, I have the psychic extension cord because Debbie last night, Sula And The Joyful Noise played a fantastic gig at the Francis Kite Club, which is kind of a kitty corner across the street from where The Gas Station used to be. It’s in spitting distance.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
And I was hanging out there with one of the owners, Kyp Malone, who’s a great musician from TV On The Radio and the booker, John Weiss. I said, “My first play in New York was like a spitting distance from here at The Gas Station. He lives across the street from where that was.” We had this memory lane, and then he said, “If you want more lights on the stage,” where we were performing last night, he brought out a clip light.

And I was like, “Dude, this is so amazing.” So I’m still very connected to that experience. It was cool last night to be there and sort of starting my public musician life for real, and having it that be one of the first places that we perform as a band.

Debbie Millman:
You met George C. Wolfe after he came to see or play The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, A.K.A. The Negro Book of the Dead. And he told you at the time he was going to run a theater and he was going to do your plays. Did you believe him?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Oh, well, I believe the first part that he was going to run a theater, oh, sure. Because George C. Wolfe is a genius, talented, kind, righteous brother, force of nature kind of person. So when he says something, “I’m going to run a theater,” I said, “Yeah, you sure are.”

“And I’m going to do your plays.” The second part, I was like, “Well, I don’t really… maybe.” Everybody was telling me that they were going to do my plays.

Debbie Millman:
Well, yeah, that was after you won the Obie.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Yeah, for Best New American Play in 1990. So after that happened, in my experience, everybody was saying, “We’re going to do your play.” So I didn’t really think too much of that part, but it sure was exciting when he became artistic director of the Public Theater and actually started doing my plays, The America Play specifically in 1994, 30 years ago. I sound like those people when they saw me, 30 years ago in the Martinson Theater where Sally & Tom is now playing. It’s a bunch of circles, people, it’s just a bunch of circles. Good circles, good spirals, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
He also produced and directed your play Topdog/Underdog at the Ambassador Theater. Is it true that you wrote that play in three days?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
It is true [inaudible 00:27:46]-

Debbie Millman:
Do you usually write that quickly?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
No, not at all. What I did for that one… No, Sally & Tom took 10 years. Part of the, in my experience, the life of, in the arts, is to not trip on things that might trip you up. So, oh, you’re right, Topdog/Underdog in three days, and so many people think it’s, “Oh, it’s amazing, oh…” They’d sound again. Right?

Or Sally & Tom, it took me 10 years. People think it’s amazing.

What I love about both experiences is I love the work. I love the digging and the being dug and how you trade… Sometimes I’m holding the spade, sometimes the spirit is holding the spade. We’re getting the work done. It’s good.

Debbie Millman:
Topdog/Underdog went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama, which made you the first ever African American playwright to win the award. The New York Times theater critics have since declared Topdog/Underdog, the best American play of the previous quarter-century, and the best since Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in 1993. And a revival of the show won both the 2023 Tony Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award.

In 2001, you received the MacArthur Genius Award. Suzan-Lori, has winning so many awards impacted the way you write or the way you think about your writing, or the expectations of your writing.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
These are such good questions. The expectation from whom? From me?

Debbie Millman:
Yourself, yeah.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Oh no… Well, you said you were embodying me, so I would think you’d probably be better at answering the question than I would be. What do you think? What would you answer when you were embodying me? Say-

Debbie Millman:
If I were embodying you, I’d be like, “No.”

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Right.

Debbie Millman:
If I were speaking as me, I would say everything impacts the feelings that I have about what I do, which is both a good thing and a terrible thing.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
And both are true right?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Light is a particle and a wave. So both are true. And yet my relationship to the awards are right-sized. I win awards that I have done the work for, and it feels right. Topdog won the Pulitzer, it felt right. Damn good play. It wasn’t a shoddy piece of work, and it lasts through my lifetime. The praise for Sally & Tom, it’s a good one. I can feel when it’s good. I’ve worked on it very diligently and joyfully, joyfully. So much love I’ve put in that play. So many good jokes.

Debbie Millman:
I was actually going to ask you about the humor, but congratulations on what I think might be the best New York Times review of a play

of all time that came out a few days ago.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
I haven’t read it. See, I haven’t read it. I haven’t read it.

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
When the producers jump up and down, then I know it’s good. And they say, “It’s good.”

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Oh, okay. Oh shoot. Okay, someday I’m going to read it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I have to tell you, it’s actually… It’s like orgasmic.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Oh wow. Okay, okay.

Debbie Millman:
It really is, I think the best review I’ve ever read of anything; it’s that good. But in 2023… Well, first of all, why did it take, or how did it take 10 years to write Sally & Tom?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Well, there’s just a lot going on, there was a lot going on for me. I was being a mom, and that takes extra wavelengths.

But I just want to go back to I haven’t read the review. Yes, things do impact what I write, but not in that kind of like, “Oh, if people say I’m good, so I’m going to be worried.” It’s not that. It’s more like I’m very mindful of anything I let in my head or life as much as I can be, and having a kid whose life is, “Oh, TikTok,” or what have you, I’m just being very mindful about what I let into my head or life as much as I can be.

So yeah, but there’s a lot going on. So because it’s a play about people making a play, there are at least 16 characters in the play.

Debbie Millman:
And they play different parts.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Yes. I’m sorry, Debbie. So there are eight actors, I would say, who play more than one role, and that’s by design. And I hope in the future, that’s how the play will be done.

Because some of my plays would double casting, people think, “Oh, it doesn’t really… We’ll just do it…”

But it’s very, very, very, very, very deliberate and joyful because the character in 1790 gets to experience what the character in 2024 gets to experience, and vice versa. So there’s a lot going on in that play. There’s a lot of, I say freight to move. There is a lot history to process, you could say download, there’s a lot of buffering going on. You have to really process a lot of stuff to get to the song of the play, the beautiful song. I felt like Thomas Jefferson had invited me into his house and I listened to him and I listened to Sally and then, “Oh, there was James also had something to say.”

Debbie Millman:
Sally’s brother.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Sally’s brother James. And they all were singing, and of course other people in the household were singing. And then you realize, but it’s not just history, it’s us. And we are singing too. And all these stories are beautiful and painful and worth embracing and worth considering.

James Baldwin has this wonderful quote, darn, let’s see if I can remember it, “History is trapped in people…” No, “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in us.” Sorry to butcher it, but something like that. So the idea that we are trapped in history and history is trapped in us, and this double play, this playmaking, this play, let’s play with this. Let’s, in a loving way, and see what they say when they know that I love them.

Debbie Millman:
That’s very generous.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
I stood still while they pet me on the head, because I am doing the Work, capital W, for the highest cause, make no mistake.

I say that writing is my love language, and guess how much I love you when you find yourself in one of my plays? Whether I intended to write you in Plays for the Plague Year, or you just connect with something that’s me saying, “I love you, I love you. I don’t even know you.”

And I feel like that is my work as an artist to communicate that to people. There’s a lot of loving in Sally & Tom.

And it took a lot of getting out of the way. That’s probably what it was, right? There are eight characters or actually 16 characters in multiple time zones all singing this song, love letter to America, love letter to theater, and yeah, there’s a lot of anger that you have to process. There’s a lot of shame, there’s a lot of doubt. There’s a lot of desire to go, “Rawr.” There’s a lot of that, you have to just-

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:36:04]

Suzan-Lori Parks:
… desire to go, “Rawr.” There’s a lot of that, you’ve got to just process that, you have to channel that, you have to clean it up or figure it out or sort it. Buffering. When your computer says, “Buffering,” or when the little colored wheel goes around, that’s your computer saying, “I’m working on it.” There’s a lot of that, and I think now, as it is now, that Sally and Tom is a diagnostic. Like if you go to your doctor and you get an annual checkup, they run the tests, or you take your car into the servicing center, they run the diagnostic and they see where…

So, in my experience, I’ve had friends go to see the play, when they say something like, “But I don’t understand why such-and-such, why [inaudible 00:36:50] goes back and says hello to his friends after he leaves,” Something like… I say, “Wow, that’s where you’re holding. That’s where you’re clinching.”

“Why this happens in act one.”

That’s why you’re clinching. I know that because I experienced it as well. In the very end of the play, the gesture that happens between Sally and Tom, it wasn’t scripted until I saw it for the first time in front of an audience and knew that the gesture had to change, and I had been clinching, I had been clinching, and instead of clinching my fists in earned and righteous anger, I opened my hand, and that’s Sally’s gesture in the play. And I have a spiritual understanding that forgiveness is necessary for freedom to happen. No one said it would be easy, but that’s part of the work. So when Sally opens her hand toward the end of the play, it wasn’t happening in the first couple of performances, definitely, because I didn’t want it to happen.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I think that being in the audience, I struggled with whether or not she should feel love, optimism, forgiveness for Thomas Jefferson. There’s so many contradictions and conflicts that you’re trying to process at the same time, in addition to there being so much humor that you want to laugh, but then you’re not sure if you should laugh. I know that that’s intentional, but there were times when I wanted to say to the person sitting next to me, “This isn’t funny,” but it was, but it was for a different reason.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Exactly.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Right, right, yeah. We bring different experiences to the theater, which makes it such a necessary art form. There are so many things about theater that make it absolutely necessary to the continued positive, progressive motion of our culture. And just to be very clear, Sally and Tom does not make light of slavery-

Debbie Millman: No.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
… we are not laughing at enslaved people. We are also not laughing or making a buffoon out of Thomas Jefferson. Light is a particle and a wave. Sally says to Thomas Jefferson, “Liar, coward. I hate you.” She also says, “Did I love him? Did I hate him? It was both.”

Debbie Millman:
Right.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
And we have to learn or continue to exercise the muscle of entertaining a multitude of possibilities. That’s our human superpower. Not even human, that’s our universal superpower. I think it extends to beautiful creatures, like puppy dogs and tables and chairs, where you can just expand your mind, like Scout says, “Expand your mind.” So it’s seeing the entirety and the beauty of the entirety. You see both sides, you see all sides. It’s not just a play about race relations, a lot of people… And I think that’s why people are moved by it, because there’s a Korean American character in the play who speaks of her experience, there are two guys who fall in love in the play, and so it’s not just about heteronormative love. It’s us, it’s all of us, it works to be all of us as much as it can be.

Debbie Millman:
Suzan-Lori, there’s a bit of dialogue, or actually, a monologue, at the end of act one, the character of Thomas Jefferson speaks to the audience, and I’m wondering if it’d be okay to read some of that, if I could read some of that?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
I don’t know, what is it that you’re going to read?

Debbie Millman:
“I’m Thomas Jefferson, and I owned people, I owned them. Contemplate for a moment, if you will, the depth of what that means.” He tells us that, at Monticello, there were more than 600 enslaved people, and that, on his deathbed, he didn’t free them. He tells us about Sally. “I was in my 40s when I met her. She was just 14. Hate on me, go ahead. I’m Thomas Jefferson. My face is on Mount Rushmore. I am the man. Love me, hate me, go ahead. I stand at the intersection of the horrible and the splendid and the dizzy-making contradiction that is all of us.”

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Yeah, that’s Thomas Jefferson. He’s standing there telling us some of the things that he did that we might have issue with, he’s very upfront about it, and he knows that some people will still honor him and no minds will change, and that’s okay. But I think it is important for him as a character, because all the characters in the play are on a continuum of freedom, they’re all moving toward freedom, and to get to freedom, you have to pass through forgiveness. And what Mike says in act two, “Forgive me, forgive me,” he’s speaking for himself and for his character.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
The content of his character, who is Thomas Jefferson?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Mike disappoints me in the show. I was surprised at how much he disappointed me. I wanted him to be a better person.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I wanted him so badly.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Absolutely, yes.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Yes, yes, yes. And in that, I think you give him the chance that he needs.

Debbie Millman:
One of the centerpiece conflicts in the show is whether or not to cut a monologue performed by James Hemings, which was Sally’s brother, and the company’s financier wants Luce, the playwright, and the actress also plays Sally, to eliminate it because he thinks it’s too woke. He also wants Sally and Tom to have a more optimistic ending. Do you think that that ever could be possible?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Oh, you mean the ending that they have in the beginning of the play of Sally and Tom, they discard?

Debbie Millman: Yeah.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
So I think optimism is necessary, but optimism… They say, Mike and Luce say in their first scene together, when Luce says, “This is not a love story,” and Mike says, “It’s more like a truth and reconciliation story,” she says, “Exactly.” And I think truth and reconciliation, the possibility of forgiveness, and the possibility to look at your history and wrestle with it as a way to go forward, is a superpower, and I think we can use more of it these days.

Debbie Millman:
Given the sold out run at the Public Theater, given the remarkable reviews, do you and the producers have plans to bring it to Broadway?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Oh. Since opening, I’ve been focused on my band. I haven’t had conversations about taking it to Broadway, not that the conversations are not happening. It took 10 years to write, I poured so much love and intellectual muscles, I put so much love into that play. I’m so pleased that the transmission is happening, which is really an artist’s delight, I’m very grateful.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk to you about your band, Sula and the Joyful Noise. I believe your husband is also in the band.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
He is.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve been playing. Tell us a little bit more about how you started the band and-

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Sure, sure.

Debbie Millman:
… more about the kind of music you play.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Yeah. You could call it neo-soul, rock and soul music.

Debbie Millman:
And you write all the music?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
I write all the words and music, I write all the songs. We have drums and bass and a vibraphone player, vibes and synth he plays, and then trumpet, and then horns and lead guitar. It’s a great group of musicians. We’ll release the music as I feel like it’s time, I’m not in a hurry. I just like playing it live. There’s some great tunes, and I’m very proud of them.

Debbie Millman:
My last question, when is your next novel going to be coming out?

Suzan-Lori Parks:
I know. Soon, soon, soon. Yeah, Random House, yeah. It’s in the works, I’m working on it.

Debbie Millman:
Wonderful.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Thank you so much, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:
Suzan-Lori Parks, thank you for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Suzan-Lori Parks:
Thank you, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:
Suzan-Lori Parks’ play, Sally and Tom, is currently playing at the Public Theater in New York City. You can read lots more about Suzan-Lori Parks and Sula and the Joyful Noise at suzanloriparks.com, and that’s Suzan with a Z, not an S, sort of like Liza. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Debbie Millman:
If it weren’t all true, Carrie Brownstein’s career would seem like fantasy fiction. She’s a celebrated musician first and foremost, but she’s also a comedian, a writer, a director, and an actor. In today’s interview, we’re going to talk about the band she co-founded, Sleater-Kinney, which has been called one of the greatest bands of all time. They just released their 11th album, Little Rope, but I’m also going to ask her about the now classic television series, Portlandia, which she co-wrote and starred in alongside Fred Armisen. Along the way, we’re going to talk about her memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, and everything in between.

Carrie Brownstein:
Thanks for having me.

Debbie Millman:
Carrie. I understand that you’ve described your look as akin to Mick Jagger in sweatpants.

Carrie Brownstein:
Really?

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Carrie Brownstein:
I don’t remember saying that. But you know what’s weird? I’ve seen Mick Jagger in sweatpants. My only time ever meeting Mick Jagger he was in sweatpants, so maybe I somehow conflated those two things. When I saw him, maybe I thought, “That’s what I look like.”

Debbie Millman:
I actually think of myself as a little business casual, no matter if that’s appropriate or not. I’m business casual in my everyday life, but sometimes I’m also business casual on stage with my band, and I think this is when I should have not been dressing business casual. I look like I can go from stage to being a flight attendant on Delta right after the show.

Carrie Brownstein:
What made you attracted to the business casual look?

Debbie Millman:
I think early on when I was playing with Sleater-Kinney… I grew up in the suburbs, and I think my idea of dressing up was to just look a little like, okay, you just put a blazer on or you put a button-up shirt on. So in my mind, I thought, “Well, I’m going on stage. Probably should wear a loafer.” It’s not how rock stars dress, or should.

Carrie Brownstein:
Any particular favorite designers?

Debbie Millman:
In the current era, I really like Stella McCartney. I like Rachel Comey. I like Proenza Schouler. But that’s not what I… Also, let’s just admit, I have a lot of J. Crew, too.

Carrie Brownstein:
Well, Jenna Lyons day was quite nice, her time there.

Debbie Millman:
She was nice, yeah. Right now I am wearing a J. Crew sweater and Everlane cord, so pretty basic. Pretty basic over here.

Debbie Millman:
You said that you grew up in mostly the suburbs. It was the suburbs of Seattle, mostly in Redmond, Washington. And you wrote in your memoir that Seattle was your beacon and your muse, but it was never really yours. I’m wondering if you can explain that a little bit.

Carrie Brownstein:
I think because I was outside of the city and I never really came of age there, that’s… I had some formative experiences there, but I was always on the periphery. And when I finally found my voice and tried on the boldness and the brazenness that comes along with electric guitar and forming a band, I was in Olympia, Washington where I went to college. Seattle was something I sort of looked up to. I imagined that I would end up there eventually and I never did. It always just feels like the thing I thought I would be and something I thought I would be a part of and then never was. I feel sort of adjacent to it.

Debbie Millman:
In elementary school, you’ve described yourself as confident and popular. You were an early round draft pick for teams in gym class. I never was. You won the spelling bee. You attended every crucial waterpark birthday party and sleepover. You were active in music, sports, school plays, and was elected vice president. Would you say that at that time you were a bit of an overachiever?

Carrie Brownstein:
What a tool. God. That’s the kind of kid I would just loathe now and be like, “Ugh.” I was a little bit of an overachiever, I mean when you list it all like that. That’s not how I felt, but I think I was confident. I think I had, at the time… And this is sort of right before I lost all of that confidence. But yeah, I was a little bit of an overachiever, I guess. I mean, if I’m just listening to that list and feel exhausted by it, then yes, I was.

Debbie Millman:
But you had quite a range. I mean, you were sort of smart by winning this spelling bee, so that was one aspect of you, but you also were active in sports.

Carrie Brownstein:
I was an all-rounder. All-rounder. You could also call me a child dilettante, too.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, in what way?

Carrie Brownstein:
No, I think I just… Yeah, I think I connect. Even now, I connect with people via… I’m introverted, and I like activity-based hangouts. I ended up mostly being raised by my dad. But even when my mom was still around, we were kind of in the way that… And this is very essentialist, but in the way men like to hang out with each other through activities, that’s kind of how my sister and I were sort of ushered into our social lives. We sort of were mimicking our dad’s way of interacting, so it was my way of being around people because sort of one-on-one interactions were trickier for me, and sometimes still are, just because I get nervous and shy.

Debbie Millman:
Your dad took you to your first concert when you were in the fifth grade. Tell us about who you saw.

Carrie Brownstein:
Yes. Well, in 1985, Madonna was touring for her seminal album, Like a Virgin, so she was on the Virgin tour. She actually started that tour in Seattle. She played three nights at the Moore Theater, which is… Actually, it might be the Paramount, so someone can fact check that. Anyway, a really small theater, 2,000 capacity. Beastie Boys were opening. They were booed off stage, by the way. People hated those guys.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I read that in your memoir and was laughing out loud.

Carrie Brownstein:
People just thought, “What a bunch of brats up there.” I went to the first night, and it was incredible. I mean, there were costume change after costume change and all the hits. It was exhilarating,

Debbie Millman:
And I believe you dressed up as Madonna at that time.

Carrie Brownstein:
I mean, my very young version of that. My parents were… They weren’t strict, but you can do a lace glove like Madonna, but you’re certainly not going to have a bra… I probably wasn’t even wearing a bra. What would we be showing? It was very chaste. It

was a truly virginal version.

Debbie Millman:
I believe that it was seeing that show, that first ignited the feeling that you would much rather be the object of desire than dole it out from the sidelines. Did you have a sense of what that feeling meant in regard to who you wanted to be or become?

Carrie Brownstein:
I think it was actually a slightly later show. It was George Michael’s Faith tour.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, okay.

Carrie Brownstein:
Because I remember at that show my friend turned to me, and she basically said that she wanted to just make out with George Michael. She was just-

Debbie Millman:
It was slightly more-

Carrie Brownstein:
It was dirtier than that.

Debbie Millman:
… lascivious in the book.

Carrie Brownstein:
Yeah, it was dirtier than that. What she wanted to do to George Michael was unholy. I mean, I was sort of surprised, taken aback because the way I was watching George Michael was thinking, “I don’t want to do something to him. I don’t want to be like a side piece or accessory. I want to be that. I want to be the person that’s on stage that is making people feel excited. I want to have people projecting their fantasies and imaginations onto me.”

Debbie Millman:
That was the moment where I thought, “Oh, I’m in a different place than my friend. The way that I’m experiencing this is not sort of witnessing. I want to participate in this not just as a fan.” I think that really sowed the seed for me wanting to perform.

Debbie Millman:
Though your first music lessons were on the piano, you gravitated to the guitar. And when you were 15 years old, you bought your first guitar, a Canadian-made solid-state amp with a cherry red Epiphone copy of a Stratocaster. It was the first big money purchase you made with your own money. How did you make that money?

Carrie Brownstein:
I worked at the Crossroads movie theater in Redmond. I worked Saturdays and Sundays. I just saved up my money. By the way, big money, it was like a $300 guitar. That was a ton of money for me at the time.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah.

Carrie Brownstein:
But as far as guitars go, that’s not like a big ticket item, but it was a huge amount of money for me. And I just saved up. I started working that year, actually, at the movie theater. My weekends were pretty boring because I just went to the theater at 11:00 and I left at 7:00 and didn’t do much after, but it was a good lesson.

Debbie Millman:
I think my parents, rightly so, they were like, “Well, you’ve gone through these phases. You sort of have these pursuits that you get really excited about. You did tennis for a while. We got you…” They just were like, “If you’re really going to do this, maybe you’ll stick with it if you have more invested in it,” and they were right.

Debbie Millman:
You took guitar lessons from Jeremy Enigk, a music and part of the band Sunny Day Real Estate, and Jeremy and the band are often cited as pioneers in second wave emo. He taught you chords by way of playing “The Last Day of our Acquaintance” by Sinéad O’Connor, wherein you’d play along to the two-chords song, which I couldn’t believe that it was two chords, while Jeremy sang. Then, he’d get bored and play R.E.M.’s “The One I Love” or U2’s “New Year’s Day.” And you felt that even with just a few chords everything was in your grasp. At that point, did you think you wanted to be… Were you sure at that point, “I’m going to be a musician”?

Carrie Brownstein:
I wanted to be a musician in the moment. I was really raised to think that I have to go off to university, probably get a graduate degree, music seemed like a hobby and certainly a way of harnessing my emotions as a teenager, making myself heard and giving myself a voice when I just felt like I didn’t have the words or just sort of lacked coherency. I was excited to have that tool at my disposal and to have a way of expressing myself that involved volume and was naturally angsty, putting the guitar through a distortion pedal or turning the gain up on the amp. It seemed to match this rage and discomfort that I was feeling, or just confusion, the confusion of adolescence. But, I didn’t really think, “Well, this is what is going to sustain me for the next 30, 40 years.” I just thought, “This is great that I have this now. I can form a band and be around people and be part of this community.” Wasn’t thinking too much beyond that.

Debbie Millman:
While all of this was happening, your home life was becoming more and more unstable. Your mother had an eating disorder, and you’ve written that her illness permeated the landscape of your psyche, and you developed a kind of general anxiety and sense of unease. And this manifested in nightmares where you would wake up scared of a fire or that all of your hair was falling out. Did your parents understand what was happening to you at that point?

Carrie Brownstein:
I don’t think so. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, which I definitely do, they had a lot going on. My mom was dealing with her own illness, physical and mental, and my father was trying to keep her feeling safe. Of course, he was worried about her and then basically take on the role of sole parent while my mom was hospitalized for a few months. I think they were concerned about my sister and I, but I don’t really think they had the wherewithal or the bandwidth to do much more than sort of make sure we were fed and off to school and getting our homework done. They had a lot going on.

Debbie Millman:
You were 14 when your mom left your family to seek a cure for her eating disorder. You wrote in your memoir that in doing so she left another form of sickness and longing behind. Did anyone explain to you what was happening? How did you experience her leaving?

Carrie Brownstein:
I mean, it was explained as, I guess, that they were splitting up. But what we really didn’t understand was that she was forging a path that, in her mind, necessitated leaving behind her role as at least a day-to-day mom, the quotidian tasks of motherhood and nurturing, that that was kind of going on the back burner. We didn’t really realize that until she was gone and there wasn’t any sort of structure for custody except that we were just with my dad. There was no arrangement like, “Well, you have to see your mom,” or, “She wants you guys around on these days.” It was just, “That’s it.”

I think it sort of took a second for us to realize we’d been left. For me, I was a little bit older than my sister, so I was able to use that irascibility that starts to take hold when you’re 14. You can be defiant and reject, like, “I’m going to leave you first.” You have a little bit more of that gumption. But yeah, the truth was that we’d been kind of left behind.

Debbie Millman:
When did she come back, and what was it like when she came back?

Carrie Brownstein:
I mean, she would pop in and out every once in a while. She was not too far away, but there just was no sort of formal routine for us seeing her. It was sporadic and really, really confusing.

Debbie Millman:
All through this time you were still playing music. And in your junior year of high school, you formed a band with a few other people called Born Naked. What kind of music were you playing?

Carrie Brownstein:
Oh, we were playing rudimentary punk music, for sure, three-chord punk songs. Our singer, Lex Bratty vocalist. It was fun. It sounded like the punk music coming out of Olympia would sound like. It was definitely minimalist and more about intent than the actual product, I think.

Debbie Millman:
At 16, you wrote a song called You Annoy Me. You’ve stated that you sometimes feel that you’ve been writing that same song ever since. I’m wondering if you can talk about why or how and what maybe some of the lyrics were. I couldn’t find it.

Carrie Brownstein:
The first line I think is, “The way you look really annoys me. The way you talk really bores me.” That’s the opening two lines there. I think that it feels like a perennial theme in that… My friends call me Carrie David after Larry David. I have this kind of constant dissatisfaction, glass is half full. I have to be kind of poked and prodded into optimism, I think. Of course now I have a little more self-awareness to realize if someone else is annoying me, it’s probably a projection. In what ways am I annoying myself? In what ways am I not measuring up? So yeah, self-awareness sets in. But I think that can be my default mode. And the older I get, I try to rest myself of that and take a deeper look at why I’m feeling dissatisfied, or disdainful, or grumpy.

Debbie Millman:
How do you feel like you’ve been writing that same song ever since?

Carrie Brownstein:
Well, I can hear iterations of that song, not musically. Musically, I’ve progressed. But in a lot of the, especially early Sleater-Kinney songs, there’s a brattiness. There’s a get out of my way, leave me alone, I need to be by myself, this sort of lone wolf theme that keeps cropping up. But hopefully, I think maybe in the last couple years, there’s less you-annoy-me songs. Maybe more I annoy-myself songs

Debbie Millman:
At that time, Nirvana’s Smells like Teen Spirit came out. For you and your friends, Nirvana was a local band. I think you saw them play in your high school gymnasium. Is that true?

Carrie Brownstein:
College.

Debbie Millman:
College gymnasium.

Carrie Brownstein:
Yeah. The first college I went to was a state school in Bellingham, Washington, which is a small town really close to the Canadian border in-

Debbie Millman:
Beautiful, beautiful town.

Carrie Brownstein:
It is beautiful.

Debbie Millman:
Beautiful place.

Carrie Brownstein:
Very verdant. Anyway, Mudhoney, who was another Seattle grunge band on SubHub records at the time, were playing. It was very exciting. “Oh, Mudhoney’s coming to our college.” So, I got tickets, and I went in, and there was a surprise opener, and that opener was Nirvana, who had just released Nevermind earlier that year. I think they were really good friends with Mudhoney and said, “Hey, we’d like to come and do a secret show.” That’s a pretty special university show to watch. And they played all the hits, I mean, Smells like Teen Spirit. That album was probably already platinum at that time.

Debbie Millman:
Shortly thereafter, you started to become aware of the music scene in Olympia. You heard bands like Bikini Kill and Ratmobile and Heavens to Betsy. You’ve said that for the first time you heard your story being explained and sung to you, that you were being seen and recognized. I’m wondering how that music did that to you. What did it speak to you? What was it saying to you?

Carrie Brownstein:
I think it took a certain female experience and centered it and was fearless, and unapologetic, and unsparing in the specificity and the detail and just not sidelining those stories. It spoke to pain, and longing, and specific narratives that I could really relate to and had anger and fury, and was unafraid to express that in music. I just thought, “Oh, this is really the first time.” I mean, I’ve been listening to punk, and indie, and alternative music, at least by then, for a couple years and certainly had related to it. But all of a sudden there was a blueprint, and I think I could see myself on the landscape for the first time. People need that, right? Anyone needs to be able to see themselves in order to do it and to make it and have an example. It gives you faith and gives you the ability to try. It’s helpful to have people come before you, for sure.

Debbie Millman:
You also wrote that it was crucial to finally recognize yourself in the world. What were you beginning to see?

Carrie Brownstein:
I felt like I just didn’t have a voice or a means of expressing myself. Punk music, and particularly the music coming out of Olympia, it just became this container, this world that I could set myself in. I think what I was seeing was someone who was worthwhile, someone who could find the words, especially if the way of conveying them was through music, that there was a way out. I think that’s what I recognized, was a way out from who I was, which was someone who was very insecure, and diffident, and lonely, I think.
So, I recognized community. I recognized collaboration in these fellow travelers, and I dove into it. They’re also just queerness. I just recognize all these facets of myself that were very nascent and not even that clear to me yet, but my world just opened up.

Debbie Millman:
You left Western Washington University in Bellingham and transferred down to Evergreen College in Olympia in order to be closer to that music scene. I understand. Though, that you first met Corin Tucker, the lead singer of Heavens to Betsy, in Bellingham. What was that first meeting like?

Carrie Brownstein:
Corin played in a band called Heavens to Betsy, which was a two-piece, very deconstructed, unconventional music, which a lot of the Olympia scene was. They were playing a show at this space called the Show Off Gallery. It was them, Mecca Normal, it was a very avant-garde two-piece from Vancouver, and Bikini Kill, who were probably the most well-known riot grrrl band of that era, and very well-known band today.

But, Bikini Kill canceled, so it was just these two other bands. I went in and watched Corin sing. I’d seen Heavens to Betsy before, before I’d gone to college, and I went up to her afterwards and told her I was a fan. I said, “I think I’m going to drop out of Western and transfer to the Evergreen State College, which was in Olympia.” She basically said, “Yeah, you should.” I mean, I sort of took that as permission from this person I’ve never even talked to before. She said, “Well, why don’t you give me your address? I can send you my fanzine or keep in touch?” I think I knew I was getting out of Western because she had basically ordained it, and I wrote down my dad’s address in this notebook for her.

She remembers me as being very… She said very nerdy and shy, and I think I was. But yeah, so I dropped out two weeks later and my dad was not happy. He just thought, “That’s it. You’ve ruined your life.” But I did apply to Evergreen and transfer, so I finished college.

Debbie Millman:
You described Corin’s guitar this way. It was handmade by her and her father, and you described it as a crude piece of machinery painted matte black and looked like a home appliance that had been melted down in a fire. She also played with the tiniest of amps, an orange Roland cube with one speaker, no pedals, and no tuner. You’ve written that the ugly parts were edged in disgrace and disgust. It bordered right on ugly the whole time. But you’ve written this in a way that makes it feel very beautiful and something you really liked. I’m wondering if you can talk to that a little bit.

Carrie Brownstein:
I think feeling like the music that Corin was making, this grotesque grumbling sounds coming out of her guitar and the way her voice could sort of pin you to the wall, it was scrawling and screeching. It had moments of, I think, gracefulness to it as well. It just felt truthful, honestly. I just thought, “This is just real.” Not everything is pretty and beautiful, and female singers don’t just have to be folk singers that are a salve for people’s hurt. Another way to process hurt is to meet it, to scream back at it. And I loved that sort of beautiful ugliness of that music.

I think at the time I sort of felt like a distorted version of a person, and the music really matched that. It was kind of being splintered apart. In the moments where it came together, you just thought, “Aha! I can be both. I can acknowledge the parts of me that are broken, but also stand up, too.”

Debbie Millman:
You started your own punk band, Excuse 17, in 1993 with Becca Albee and be Curtis James and recorded two full length albums, a single, and you contributed to the Free to Fight compilation album. And you also started to tour the US as the opening act for Heavens to Betsy. What was it like to first start performing live?

Carrie Brownstein:
It was fun, and it was really scary. I mean, when you say performing live, one thing to remember is these were not traditional venues, so it’s not like I suddenly was on a big stage in a beautiful theater. I was in basements, some kind of ramshackle, jerry-rigged club or venue or space that had just opened up. Everything was a little bit derelict, so it was good that we started there because there was nothing real polished about us as a band or my sort of performance on stage.

But, it was really exciting being in those small decrepit spaces that didn’t live up to any fire code. It was wonderful and wondrous. And what I really remember about it was getting to see the US for the first time. I just had grown up in the Pacific Northwest. At this point, I’d never been to Europe. I’d only ever been to Vancouver, Canada. What I remember was just that comradery and meeting like-minded people in all these cities and just feeling less isolated. This is pre-internet. Just the only way you could reach people was to go there in terms of actually meeting them and getting to know them. You could have a pistol area relationships. But in terms of the face-to-face, you had to go to their town. It really was eye-opening in that way. Performing, I sort of got my sea legs a little bit as a performer.

I think the other thing people forget pre-internet is it’s a mystery what… You rehearse in a space, but you don’t necessarily understand. Even a club or some kind of fly-by-night venue, they still have a PA. They still have monitors, if you’re lucky. There’s a sound person. These are new things. You don’t watch a YouTube video. I didn’t go to a school of rock where you learn what all these things are. The tour was a full… It was just demystifying all these things that I really didn’t understand. When you get on stage, you need a monitor mix. That’s what you hear. The audience is hearing something through the PA speakers. But I was like, “Oh, what is that? How do I explain myself?” It was a real lesson in learning how to communicate and take these chances, but it was really scary, that first tour.

Debbie Millman:
In your memoir, you write about how you were anxious to pour your guts out, and many of your songs with the Excuse 17 are a sonic and lyrical purging, like a caged animal who upon release head straight to the recording studio. I’m wondering, given how you’ve mentioned that you were introverted and shy, where did this stage persona come from and what’d it feel like to have that persona on stage given your introversion?

Carrie Brownstein:
I don’t think it fully came to be in Excuse 17, but there were shades of it. Again, punk is a great place to practice loudness. You are turned up in terms of your amps, and often you don’t have a great monitor mix, so you better be singing loud or literally screaming. In screaming, which I did a lot of Excuse 17, I just literally found my voice, literally was more in touch with my anger. Performance-wise though, I’ve seen video of myself back then, I’m not moving around very much. I still feel kind of stuck in place.
I had this little leg move I did. Not like Chuck Berry, but a little bit of a Buddy Holly, I guess, sort of my foot sort of moving back and forth. That was as bold as I got back then. But the music, it’s bigger than you. That’s, I think, is the first thing that really gives you license because you’re like, “Oh, this music can hold me. I have felt so unheld and just free floating in life for a long time, and now I have this sonic vessel that allows me a sturdiness and ballast.” Then, once you accept that, once you realize that, you can start taking steps forward, and I think I did. Excuse 17 was sort of the early iterations of that, but I didn’t really have a full stage persona yet, which I still don’t quite have, but I definitely… It’s very rudimentary compared to what came later.

Debbie Millman:
You don’t think you have a stage presence now?

Carrie Brownstein:
Oh, no, presence, yes, but I wouldn’t say I have a persona where I sort of get on stage and fully transform. I think there’s always something of me that comes through. But I definitely have a stage presence, yes. I move around on stage in a way that I never would in real life. I don’t quite know where that comes from, except to say that, again, the music as a place that I understood as just having me. It has me. It’s not going to let me go. And this is a world that I’ve built, this with my cohorts and collaborators and with the audience is a steadiness that I’ve built.

Debbie Millman:
I would describe your stage presence almost like punk ballet. There’s something very balletic about it. How did you learn how to windmill, to do the windmill?

Carrie Brownstein:
I don’t know how I learned to do it. I don’t think I practiced it, but I realized I was able to do it. It’s interesting that you say balletic because I am coordinated, but I wouldn’t say I’m the most graceful person. But on stage, I’m able to sort of mimic a gracefulness that I think I don’t really in my day-to-day life.

But things like the windmill, it’s interesting, on stage, I just possess a fluidity that I just don’t have anywhere else. Something like the windmill, which I probably just auditioned one time on stage, without knowing whether… I mean, even Pete Townsend, I think, actually pierced his hand, like a whammy bar. It’s not the safest move. But luckily, yeah, I came back around and was able to strum the strings, and I just thought, “Oh, okay. I guess I can do that.” It wasn’t me auditioning that in my room or something. I just did it on stage. But, the stage just gives license for those kinds of things, including failure and error and a lot of things that could go wrong. But I think I like that. I’m willing to take those risks on stage, risks I would not take in real life.

Debbie Millman:
Now, Sleater-Kinney started as a side project with Corin, and you named the band after one of your practice venues. When did you decide this was it, you’re both leaving your other bands and starting your own band together?

Carrie Brownstein:
Probably around 1995. It’s a weird story because… We were in a very insular but vital artistic music community. In Olympia, there were a lot of bands. We were gleaning a lot of influence and inspiration from our friends, but it was also sort of suffocating in its smallness.

We actually went to Australia and sort of took ourselves to the other side of the world, and it just allowed us to see ourselves in a different way, to just dare to imagine ourselves existing outside of Olympia, bigger than Olympia, just let’s reinvent.

I think it was during that time that we decided we probably wouldn’t continue with our other bands, and that was tough. It’s been a long time now, and Corin and I have spoken recently about that wasn’t easy. I think our other bands felt a little betrayed by that, like, “Oh, you guys are just going to form this thing.” Then, it ended up being bigger than those other bands. I think, obviously, that’s difficult, too. But, we had this chemistry, Corin and I, that was undeniable. We were creating something very singular together, and I think we didn’t want to let that go.

Debbie Millman:
You said that when you started playing with her it felt like you’d met your musical match?

Carrie Brownstein:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, we just are really intuitive together. We can sort of finish each other’s musical sentences. I think because we are both self-taught, the way that our guitars interlocked and the way our vocals would play off each other, it just felt very different than anything else we’d done. To this day, there’s certain ways that I play that I can only play with Corin, and that always makes it more unique than something I’m doing with another collaborator. I really value that.

Debbie Millman:
As the band grew in popularity and stature, critical response, you began to grapple with issues that you said you’d face for years, the requirement that you were going to have to defend or analyze decisions like why you were an all-female band or why didn’t you have a bass player. You realized that those questions and talking about that experience had become part of the experience itself. Was that something that you resented or just figured it was part of the equation?

Carrie Brownstein:
That’s a good question. I did resent it sometimes. What it is is it’s an energy suck. We just wanted to talk about the music. I would just think have you ever asked a band of men, “Why are you an all-male band?” I know you’ve never asked that question, and I just thought, “Oh, all the time saving that those guys get to do. They don’t have to waste a single moment thinking about these other things and having to speak for everyone.” Just not being able to be seen as an individual or a specific entity, that was frustrating. I don’t know if I was resentful, but it was frustrating because we didn’t want to have to do that. We didn’t want to have to spend our time doing that.

Debbie Millman:
Years ago, I interviewed David Lee Roth, and I kind of wish now that I’d asked him, “So, why were you in an all-male band?”

Carrie Brownstein:
I wish you had. I wish you had.

Debbie Millman:
Me too. As you moved into the late aughts and early 2000s, the band continued to grow in fame, in stature. But you stated that to court fame, money, and press felt dirty and sweaty. It implied that you wanted to be accepted and loved by the mainstream, the same people who had rejected, taunted, and diminished you in high school. You wrote that it sounds silly now, but at the time, these categories seem finite, immutable, and significant. Has your relationship to fame changed over the years?

Carrie Brownstein:
I mean, I think it’s still something that I don’t really value as a category. I try to examine things more from a place of feeling gratitude, like, “Oh, I’m grateful for access to certain things. I’m grateful for certain privileges that come with success.” But in terms of what I value and who I want to be around, it has very little to do with fame or celebrity.
I find it a strange thing to sort of worship or put too much of a premium on. I just want to be around kind, smart, interesting people in all walks of life from all walks of life. I have a lot of hobbies that purposely sort of bring me around people who I would never meet through film, music, or television.

Debbie Millman:
What kind of hobbies?

Carrie Brownstein:
Dog agility. It’s interesting with dog agility because we all think of like, “Oh, what’s a diverse group of people? What’s an interesting intersection of people?” Well, you actually have to step out. Dog agility is very interesting. I mean, it is people… I just like, “Oh, I would never meet you.” This is not academia. This is not the arts. It’s wonderful. I love it.

Also, now I do a lot of pickleball, and I’m hanging out with a lot of older people and younger people. Anyway, I just love these kinds of hobbies or pursuits that really get me outside of a social group that I would normally be around and make genuine friends there and have a common interest that we form our friendship around. I love it. It’s one of my favorite things.

Debbie Millman:
In 2005, Sleater-Kinney… Or 2006, I’m sorry, Sleater-Kinney took a hiatus. It had been about 12 years and seven albums together. You took an indefinite hiatus. And speaking of dogs, you dove headfirst during the hiatus into volunteer work at the Oregon Humane Society, and you won the Oregon Humane Society Volunteer of the Year Award in 2006.

Carrie Brownstein:
I did, yes. I also worked at the time as a trainer at a private facility and got a job at the humane society as well. I was not just a volunteer. I also worked in their training department, and I was the assistant in a reactive rover class. Then in the other, at the private facility, I was an assistant in just more like basic obedience. I was all in with that. My social life was all… My best friend that year was a woman named Jean, who was probably 70 years old. We hung out all the time. We went on dog walks together. I stayed at her house on the coast and became friends with her son. I really dove into that world, and that was pretty much my main social group for at least a year.

Debbie Millman:
My first dogs, which I got back in 2000, after going through a particularly depressive experience, I think I credit them with opening my heart. My wife was never a dog person, but she knew when we met that I’d had a history with dogs. And both of my dogs, who were very close to each other, they were like soulmates, had passed away at 17 and 18-

Carrie Brownstein:
Wow.

Debbie Millman:
… six months before we met. So, she knew that I had this giant hole in my heart for dogs. And despite not being a dog person, she got me a dog three years ago.

Carrie Brownstein:
That’s sweet.

Debbie Millman:
Now she is a dog person. She is even more of a dog person than I am. So, I do think that dogs can save and change our lives in the most profound ways.

Carrie Brownstein:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
Did that job at that time help you get over some of the loss of Sleater-Kinney and the sadness that you were feeling about the band going on hiatus?

Carrie Brownstein:
Absolutely. For one, it just was a way of understanding, just broadening my comprehension about life and loss and giving me a task to do. I think dogs, or animals in general, their needs are very clear and they’re simple. You realize that humans aren’t that much different. Most of us want to be loved and protected. You start to see all these through lines, and it really is so clarifying, I think. It also just teaches you patience.

One of my volunteer jobs at the humane society was just cleaning out the cages. You see, obviously, the literal feces of these dogs, but you just sort of see this is just a temporary thing for most of them. They’re just living in this cage. There’s just so much humanity in here and there’s just… My only job is to just make sure for this moment that this dog has an okay life as we are stewarding them into the next phase. I just thought, “Well, that’s how it should be with everyone.”

Whenever I have an interaction with someone that’s finite, I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again, it should be as pure as what I’m doing with these dogs. I don’t know what state someone else is in. My job is just to be kind and open and leave them feeling either the same or better than when we started this conversation. I think that clarity of purpose really helped me just have perspective on the band and also just appreciate what we had done, not just mourn the hiatus, but appreciate the journey we’ve been on.

Debbie Millman:
One thing that I’ve come to realize about dogs that I try to consider what it would be like as a person to be this way is just how unselfconscious they are.

Carrie Brownstein:
I know.

Debbie Millman:
I mean, Max, my dog, doesn’t really like when anybody’s looking at him when he poops. That’s probably it. Everything else he’s just completely okay as is, and I love that about him.

Carrie Brownstein:
I love that, too. Sorry, my dog is barking. There’s probably someone… Hold on. I do need to at least bring Banjo in here. Hold on.

Debbie Millman:
Okay. Absolutely.

Carrie Brownstein:
Banjo, buddy. Come here, monkey.

Debbie Millman:
In 2005, you began working with Saturday Night Live alum Fred Armisen on a series of comedy sketches for the internet titled Thunderant. What first inspired you two to do that together?

Carrie Brownstein:
Fred and I met through music because he is a drummer and we’d been in the same circles for a while. He had just started on SNL, but was still… Like in the cast, but not one of the main stars of the show.

He reached out. He said he wanted to collaborate. I assumed he wanted to do music. He said, “Well, actually, I…” I think it was the year John Kerry was running for president, so it would’ve been 2004. He said, “I have to make this video for their campaign.” He’s like, “My idea is that you’re a host of a cable access show and you’re running it out of your basement, and I’ll play Saddam Hussein as like…” He’s like, “When I see pictures of him…” He’s like, “He looks like one of those aging rockers. He’s got this beard now, and he just looks like a Paul Weller.” I was like, “Okay.” So, I played Cyndi Overton and had the first interview with Saddam Hussein, who he did. He played with a British accent and had a guitar the whole time.

I don’t know if Fred ever turned that into the Kerry campaign. I can’t imagine that they would have used it. I mean, they’re not going to put Saddam Hussein in a campaign, a viral video ad. Anyway, that encouraged us to keep making videos. So, we would just get together every once in a while. The next thing we made, actually, was the feminist bookstore, which became a recurring sketch on Portlandia.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. One of my favorite.

Carrie Brownstein:
We really enjoyed it. Fred would fly out to Portland. Although, I think we did one in New York, too, where he was living… We would just make these videos and put them up online and send them to our friends, and it was really fun. We kind of developed a language and we built our own chemistry. We were just like, “Oh, we have this sensibility now. These are ideas. These aren’t just disparate sketches. We’re creating a world here.” So then we took it out as a pitch for a show.

Debbie Millman:
And you pitched it to Lorne Michaels. He proved it in 2011. Portlandia debuted on the IFC network, and it was an immediate success. I know

that when you were in high school you were, I believe, the star of one of your high school plays, but did you feel surprised by this sort of naturalness at which you could enter into this new world of acting and comedy?

Carrie Brownstein:
Yes. And I was absolutely surprised. I had terrible imposter syndrome. I felt like I’d snuck in through some kind of side or back door. What’s also amazing is that if this had been created in any other way, I think that someone would’ve said… I mean, Fred was working with Kristen Wiig, and Amy Poehler, and Maya Rudolph, these heavyweights, heavy, brilliant, brilliant comedic actors, and somehow Lorne… This is why he’s genius and he just has that acumen. He just thought, “No, this is… You guys are friends.” Not that Fred isn’t friends with those other people, but, “You guys have this specific way of being together that if we just sub out Carrie for someone else, it will change the nature of the show.” So, I felt very lucky, but I also felt like I had a lot to prove.

I remember when we were shooting the pilot, Fred and I had done every scene together, and then all of a sudden we were doing a shot. It was the Put a Bird on It sketch. It was just me, and our director, Jonathan Krisel, yelled, “Action,” and I just thought, “Oh my God. It’s just me. What am I going to do here?” I was really nervous.

I really credit Stacey Silverman, who is a wonderful writer. She had written for Colbert, and now she writes for a ton of comedy shows. She just had a lot of faith in me, especially as a writer. I think becoming more confident as a writer in terms of writing the sketches helped me become more confident as a performer. Fred was really helpful, too. But yeah, I was terrified.

Debbie Millman:
Your beloved feminist bookstore sketch, which you’ve just referenced, Women First, stars your characters Tony and Candace. This was one of the first of a range of characters that you and Fred played together where you were cross-dressing with Fred appearing as a woman. Later, you appeared as a man, most notably as Andy, the men’s rights activist, or Lance, husband to Fred playing your wife, Nina. You were so great as Andy. I wouldn’t have even known it was you, truly.

Carrie Brownstein:
That kind of gender expression is just really… It’s very freeing. It also grants you, I think, a little bit of an understanding, too. I was like, “Oh, yeah. Okay. This is a different headspace to get into for a little while.” I loved it. I missed that.

Debbie Millman:
Portlandia ran for eight seasons. The show received 22 Emmy nominations, won three, and in 2011 won the prestigious Peabody Award for its good-natured lampooning of hipster culture, which hits the mark whether or not you’re in on the joke. In 2015, Jerry Seinfeld stated that Portlandia was one of the best comedies of all time. And that very same year, Stereogum chief editor Tom Breihan stated that Sleater-Kinney was one of the greatest rock bands of the past two decades. Did you believe any of it?

Carrie Brownstein:
I feel like that stuff is so arbitrary and subjective, and of course it’s a lovely thing to hear, but you can’t really hang your hat on that. You have to take it with a grain of salt. Because if you put a lot of faith in that or give that kind of stuff too much power, you also have to give the negative feedback a lot of power, too. I think my role is to hopefully tune both those extremes out as much as I can, even though it’s flattering. It’s so arbitrary.

Debbie Millman:
2015 was a big year. The band reemerged with the launch of the album No Cities to Love. And your most recent album, Little Rope, was launched earlier this year. While you were making it, Corin was by the American Embassy in Italy that your mother and stepfather had been killed in a car accident while they were there on holiday. I’m so sorry, Carrie. I’m so sorry that this happened.

Carrie Brownstein:
Thanks. I appreciate that. I will just clarify that Corin just got a call that they were trying to get a hold of me. So, she didn’t actually have to deliver that news.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, okay. It was hard to read. I’m sorry I didn’t get that quite right.

Carrie Brownstein:
Oh, no. That’s totally fine. That’s totally fine.

Debbie Millman:
Most of the songs for Little Rope were already written by the time of the accident. Can you talk a little bit about how grief mitigated into the work, perhaps in ways you didn’t expect?

Carrie Brownstein:
Yeah. That time was so awful and disorienting. It’s been good to contextualize all this because music for me was something that had existed for so long, and I knew how to write songs. I didn’t know how to grieve my mom. I sort of was able to transfer just some of that confusion into a choreography that I knew, which was songwriting and playing… It was even more simplistic than that, more reductive. I just literally played guitar. I hadn’t played that much guitar since I was in high school. I mean, obviously I’ve played guitar for many years now, but I don’t usually just sit around for eight hours a day. I just needed somewhere to put my hands to place myself in time and space and literally in a room. It was so comforting to put my hands on the neck of the guitar and feel my fingers move along the frets. It helped ground me. It became a ritual and just started to give shape to days that felt very foggy and misshapen.

The other thing was, I think when you lose someone, you lose the ability to do anything for them, and you sort of miss that ability to reach them, to connect with them. So, I transferred a lot of that caretaking, and nurturing, and tending to onto the album because I couldn’t tend to my mom.

I think more than the songs sort of being about grief, the sorrow just informed the way we approached the record, the way I approached it, and just the stakes felt very, very high. Just didn’t want to put anything out into the world that wasn’t fully formed, wasn’t intentional, didn’t have life to it.

Debbie Millman:
I read a review, and I thought this was a really, really apt line, “The songs feel despondent and treacherous at times, but at others they’re hopeful and gleaming.” I think it’s a really complicated, really beautiful album. What do you think Little Rope tells your audience about who the band is now?

Carrie Brownstein:
I think it tells them that we’re a band willing to reckon with the present, that we’re not steeped or trapped in our own history except to bring it along with us. We’re not stuck there. We’re not sort of tricked or intoxicated

by nostalgia or sentimentality, but we’re willing to carry the weight of our history, and our failures, and our frailty along with us and transform it into something that exemplifies strength and that we have a willingness to keep going and persevere and to connect. That desire to connect and commune with an audience is ever present and ongoing, and that we’re uninterested in no longer telling our story, that we have, I guess, enough confidence and willingness to keep the chapters going, keep the narrative going. I think it just expresses a willingness and also a celebration at the same time. Not something that’s a burden, but something that’s a real joy.

Debbie Millman:
I have one last question for you. In your memoir, which was published several years ago, you wrote that much of your intention with songs is to voice a continual dissatisfaction, or at least to claw your way out of it. I’m wondering if that’s still the case.

Carrie Brownstein:
I think in some ways it is, but I don’t feel just wholly dissatisfied. It’s too cynical to be steeped in dissatisfaction. Also, there’s something whiny about that. I’m like, “Ugh, come on.” Dissatisfaction, what does that mean? That’s sort of your own making a little bit.

Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s a tough world out there, especially now.

Carrie Brownstein:
It’s a tough world, but it’s tougher for other people. I guess that’s how I feel. Sure, existentially, if you’re lucky, it’s just existential. If you’re less fortunate, those can be very real threats, corporeal threats.

So, yes. I mean, I’m not saying that I can’t be dissatisfied, but I guess what I’ll say is that I try to at least question what I’m dissatisfied about. But I also like to be a voice for those of us who are discontent, for those of us who are still clawing, and fighting, and wrestling, and thrashing about. Those are my people. Those are my people who just are restless by nature, and that restlessness can be born of many things, and I love that. I want life to feel urgent. I want art to feel urgent. I want people to leave everything on the stage, leave everything on the page, leave everything on the screen. Just put it out there.

I don’t know if it’s dissatisfaction, but it’s definitely a restlessness and a desire to keep wanting and to not settle, to just not look out and think this is okay. I will continue writing for myself and for other people who think this is not okay.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you, Carrie Brownstein, for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Carrie Brownstein:
Thank you, Debbie. That was a wonderful interview.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Carrie Brownstein’s memoir is titled Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl. Her latest album with Sleater-Kinney is titled Little Rope. You can find out more about the band on their website, sleater-kinney.com. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
My first show was so bad. I was so bad. I was super uncomfortable on stage, not particularly capable. And the second show was at The Living Room. That one was much better because I realized that the best strategy was just to be myself.

Announcer:
This is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 15 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, a conversation with Lucy Wainwright Roche about her musical family, her career as a singer-songwriter, and her musical tastes.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
I really like sad music a lot. Most of the songs I love are really sad.

Announcer:
Here’s Debbie.

Debbie Millman:
Despite the fact that Lucy Wainwright Roche comes from music royalty, her father is Grammy Award-winning folk artist, Loudon Wainwright III, her mother was one third of the legendary folk trio, The Roches, and her half siblings are Rufus and Martha Wainwright, she started her career as an elementary school teacher. Eventually, she began singing backup in her brother’s band. And by 2010, she had recorded and released her own CD. When you hear her beguiling voice and listen to her songs, you might conclude she had no choice in the matter.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
(singing)

Debbie Millman:
Lucy Wainwright Roche is here in the studio today to talk about her life, her career, her family, and her music. And maybe she’ll sing a song for us. Lucy Wainwright Roche, welcome to Design Matters.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Thanks for having me.

Debbie Millman:
Lucy, I understand that you’re a rabid Eminem fan and even know every word to “Cleanin’ Out My Closet.” Is that true?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
That is true. No one has ever heard me sing it except for my mother.

Debbie Millman:
Well, would you consider singing it now?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
I don’t think I can. I think that would take some real preparation. And maybe I might have to be overly exhausted to do it.

Debbie Millman:
Darn, too bad you’re not tired today. When did you first discover Eminem, and what was the allure?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
I just heard him on the radio, that song, “Mockingbird,” one of the songs about his kid. And many of his songs are so heartbreaking and incredibly fit together. It’s just jaw-dropping to me. And he actually reminds me of my dad, writing wise, a little bit too. Which my dad, I don’t think, would be into.

Debbie Millman:
I could see that.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
When he talks about his family and his kids, it reminds me of my dad.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, there’s a certain candidness to both of their writing that I can see. I wouldn’t have ordinarily thought that. It would never have occurred to me. But I think you’re right.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
When he talks about his family and his kids, it reminds me of my dad.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, there’s a certain candidness to both of their writing that I can see. I wouldn’t have ordinarily thought that. It would never have occurred to me. But I think you’re right. Lucy, you were born and raised in Greenwich Village, New York City. Your parents split up when you were two. And I’ve read that you lived with your mom, Suzzy Roche, in a tiny one bedroom apartment, where you had the bedroom and she had the living room. Your mom has said that while it was often financially stressful, you never had the sense you were poor. Have you and your mom always been close?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yes. My mom and I are really enmeshed, you might say. And we talk most every day and text a lot. And we work together too, so we sometimes tour together. And we shared a hotel room when I was a kid and we share a hotel room still.

Debbie Millman:
I can’t even imagine what it must’ve been like to grow up with Suzzy Roche as your mother. I’ve been a fan of their music, a rabid fan, I might say, and I could probably sing many, many songs on the spot. Not that I’m going to, but I’m just letting you know.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Well, that I could do too. We could do that together.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, let’s sing Hammond Song together.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Okay.

Debbie Millman:
But I’ve been a fan of their music since 1979. What is your favorite song?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
I would say one of my all time favorite Roches songs is One Season. I love that song so much. It holds up. With every passing year, I relate to it more and more, which I’m not sure is a great sign about me in general. But the song is just, it’s so good.

Debbie Millman:
Well, their music is timeless. I think every single one of their albums still hold up.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah, I think so too.

Debbie Millman:
How much time do you spend with your dad at this point in your life?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
We also work together. I open for him sometimes, and then sometimes me and my mom and my dad do shows altogether. So it goes and fits and starts with the whole family. So maybe I’ll see him a lot over a space of a couple of months where we’re working, and then not that often. But he’s in New York and so am I, but we’re both on the road. So part of the thing about everybody is just that we’re all… You have to catch each other in the same city at the same time, which is a little hard. But my dad is very good at keeping in touch, so he likes to meet for dinner and he calls. If I don’t see him, we talk on the phone.

Debbie Millman:
I don’t want to spend that much time talking about your family because I want to talk about you and your music and your life. But I thought it would be fun to ask you for one sentence descriptions of your immediate musical family. And we’ll start with Anna and Kate McGarrigle, each individual?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Well, yesterday was, or I think the day before yesterday, was Kate McGarrigle’s birthday. She has passed away now, 10 years ago. This is more than a sentence. Okay, a sentence. I didn’t know her well, but if we’d had the chance to get to know each other, I think we would’ve liked each other.

Debbie Millman:
And what about Anna?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Anna, I don’t see her often, but when I do, she’s mysterious and lovely.

Debbie Millman:
Maggie Roche, the late great, brilliant Maggie Roche?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Oh man. One of the most brilliant and loyal people that you could ever know. Also, really loved cheese.

Debbie Millman:
Terre Roche?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
She is absolutely fascinating to talk to on any topic, absolutely any topic. Yes, and also just one of my all time favorite people.

Debbie Millman:
Loudon Wainwright III?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
It’s funny, the thing that comes into my head is that I think he’s a great dad, which I don’t think is something that he’s known for. I don’t think people think that about him. But I would say he’s been a great dad to me. Sometimes that looks different than what you think it might.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, absolutely. Martha Wainwright?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
When her light shines upon you, it’s the best feeling that there is.

Debbie Millman:
Rufus Wainwright?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
We are very different in our way that we are in the world. But he has this deep, sweet, sentimental thing about him that just keeps everybody very connected in the family.

Debbie Millman:
And then, finally, your mom, Suzzy Roche?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
She almost always is exactly spot on with whatever she says or does. There’s so many things to say about all of them, but yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I do have to say, and I ordinarily don’t brag on the show, but I have the noted distinction of having seen every single person that I just mentioned in concert.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Really?

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
That’s so cool. It’s like a collection of cereal box toys and you have them all.

Debbie Millman:
But I have never seen you perform all together, other than The Roches. It’s everybody has been solo.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah. Well, we have done that. We went on a cruise altogether and performed on the cruise altogether. That was intense.

Debbie Millman:
And didn’t you also do that when you were in Alaska? Didn’t you all travel together, and then take the audience on buses and trains with you?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
We did, in Alaska, yes, we did.

Debbie Millman:
How did that work? Did you just pick people up along the way?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
It’s this thing called Roots on the Rails. These lovely people run these things where musicians come in, and the audience come, and it’s an all expense paid trip. And, oftentimes, they’ll be on trains for a lot of the time, and even sleeper trains. One of the ones that I did, we slept on the train. The one in Alaska, we didn’t sleep on the train, and it involved some buses as well, and some boats. So the audience came with us. There were maybe 45 audience members, and then me, and my mom, and my dad, and my brother, and my Aunt Sloan. Martha couldn’t come because her son was starting kindergarten.

Debbie Millman:
And was your grandmother selling CDs?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
She wasn’t with us on that, but she used to sell the CDs, when I was a kid, with The Roches. But it was fun. We saw whales. I basically was like, if I see a whale, it was worth it. And I did, I saw a whale.

Debbie Millman:
How old were you at that time?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
It was just a couple of years ago.

Debbie Millman:
Oh. So I read that when you were four or five years old, that was when you first graced a stage. It was at the great Bottom Line nightclub in New York City, where Rufus and Martha Wainwright were performing. Talk about what happened?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
They got me up on stage. I think it might’ve been a Christmas show or something, a Roches Christmas show maybe. And I got up, and I was supposed to sing, and I just burst into tears. And my dad had to come and get me off the stage. I remember that he came up to the edge of the stage and lifted me off the stage. And my mom thinks that probably the whole audience thought that it was child abuse because they were like, “Get up on the stage.” But I think I thought I wanted to do it, and then I got out there and I was like, “Oh geez.”

Debbie Millman:
And were you just shy? Were you afraid?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
I think I was just shy. I was very shy as a kid. I did not… Not with the people closest to me but, in school, I didn’t talk and stuff really at all until about second grade. I had a teacher who got me to talk. And then, now, I talk incessantly.

Debbie Millman:
I understand you first tried to play the guitar when you were about seven. Were you trying to teach yourself? Who was teaching you?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
My mom and my Aunt Terre. My Aunt Terre was going to teach me. And they got a left-handed guitar because I’m left-handed. And I think she tried to teach me “Old McDonald” on the guitar, and I just wasn’t feeling it. And we all gave up. And then it wasn’t until I was in high school that I started to play the guitar. And I play the guitar right-handed. I don’t know if that was part of it. Maybe I’m not that left-handed or something. But, also, seven is young for the guitar because it hurts your fingers.

Debbie Millman:
I’m left-handed also, and I can play five chords on a guitar, but I play with a right-handed guitar as well. And I’ve tried to switch, thinking that I’d be able to play better that way, but I can’t.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah, me too, same. And, also, by the way, five chords is all you need.

Debbie Millman:
Neil Young did it in three.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah, you’re ready.

Debbie Millman:
I don’t have the gene. It’s my biggest regret in my life that I don’t have that gene.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Really?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. And one of the things that I really wanted to ask you, and I ask every musician that comes on the show this question, how do you write a song?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
I often feel in a panic like I’ll never write a song again. So I’m a little bit in that phase right now. And I also often have a blackout about what happens when I write. But that aside, I usually sit with the guitar. And I’ll either get something on the guitar that I like or some kind of melody that goes with it. And, sometimes, I’ll get stand-in words that I just put in to get the shape of the melody, and then I’ll replace them later. A thing that happens to me a lot is I’ll get a verse and a chorus. And then I’ll be like, “Well, I said that.” And then I’ll be like, “Oh geez, I have to finish this somehow.” And it’s hard to get past that initial idea for me. But, oftentimes, you go into a zone and I’m not even sure what happens. But, man, I am so grateful every time it happens. And it’s especially great when you don’t turn on the song that you just wrote. That’s a thing that happens a lot.

Debbie Millman:
When you hate it?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah, as soon as you do it. My mom says that it’s like a cat who coughs up a hairball, and then jumps back and looks at it like, “Who did that?” And I think that’s a pretty good description. It’s hard to not turn on your work, I think, either partway through or afterwards. After I’ve made a record, I usually do not want to hear it ever again. It’s that same feeling of somehow it just presses your buttons in a way that other people’s stuff doesn’t.

Debbie Millman:
Do you ever, once a song is finished, ever go back and rewrite lyrics, or change the chorus, or do anything to augment it in some way?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
I haven’t ever done that. There’s a song on my new record that I really like still, miraculously. But there is a lyric in it that I wish I had changed. And I haven’t changed it yet, but I would say I feel regret about it.

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:15:04]

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
… say I feel regret about it. So I’ve thought, well, maybe you could change it. Just because it’s not the official recording, I could change it in shows. So I’m thinking about changing it because every time I get to that part I’m like, “Ugh, I wish I hadn’t written that.”

Debbie Millman:
Well, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Nicks have changed lyrics. I’ve heard Stevie Nicks changed the lyrics to “Landslide,” which is sort of shocking. And then Joni Mitchell has changed lyrics to “Hejira” with whoever is playing saxophone with her.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
She’ll say, “Michael Brecker,” or whoever might be playing. She started it, I think, with Michael Brecker.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah. I was listening to a recording of Joan Baez doing “Diamonds and Rust” recently, and I was trying to play for someone this thing that I’d heard her do in a show. And then I discovered that it wasn’t in the original, that she had changed something, and she was doing it in performances but not-

Debbie Millman:
What are the lyrics that she changed?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
The lyrics that she changed are, “If you’re offering diamonds and rust-“

Debbie Millman:
I’ve already paid.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
“I’ve already paid,” is the original one. But when I saw her do it more recently, she said, “If you’re offering diamonds and rust, I’ll take the diamonds,” which I thought was really good.

Debbie Millman:
Very, very good.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
So that’s a change I could totally get behind.

Debbie Millman:
Well, one of the things that I heard Joni Mitchell say in one of her live recordings was that when you’re standing in front of an audience and they ask you to play a song, she thought it was interesting that nobody ever asks a painter to repaint a painting, but yet we’re always asking performers to redo these songs that are such a part of our lives.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
And she jokes nobody ever asked Van Gogh to paint a sunflower again.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
That’s true. That’s true.

Debbie Millman:
So I know your family also tried to get you to take piano lessons and you weren’t interested either, but there’s a lot of piano on your records, and I’ve seen you play piano. So when did that take hold?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah. I don’t really play the piano enough to play anything. I wish that I had stuck with lessons. I know. How many times do you hear? I remember as a child, all the adults saying that they wish they had stayed with piano lessons, and I now am an adult who wishes that. I quit because I thought that my teacher didn’t smell good.

Debbie Millman:
That’s a good reason. That’s a really good reason.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
I thought he smelled bad.

Debbie Millman:
I stopped physical therapy on my thumb because of that, and I really regret it. Yes.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
I didn’t just think he didn’t smell good, I thought that he smelled bad. And I refused to keep doing it. And that wasn’t the best decision I ever made. I wish I had, because I love the piano. And on my last record, my most recent record, there’s a lot of piano. And mostly the producer, my friend Jordan Hamlin, she played most of it. And I adore the piano on recordings, so I wish that I had stuck with it more. And I’ve thought about taking lessons now as an adult, and it’s on a list of things I think of doing and don’t. But maybe I will someday.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote your first songs in high school, but you then gave up music and stated that the last thing you wanted to do was get up on stage and perform. Was that because of your shyness or because of feeling your family vibe?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah, I think in high school I did write my first songs. My first song that I wrote was about babysitting. It was about this kid that I babysat for all through high school, and then he and his family moved away and I went to college. And it was about the heartbreak of that. But in high school I got really interested in teaching, and I volunteered a lot in the lower school classrooms at my high school. And I was moving in that direction. And I think I’d been living in the soup of the music thing for so long that I walked towards college, kind of dropping all of that behind me.

And when I was in college, I did a lot of booking. And my brother came to play and other people I was fans of came to play, and other family members came to play at college, and I booked them but I wasn’t really interested in performing. And then I think it kind of… towards the end of college I started to notice the absence of that.

Debbie Millman:
You attended Oberlin College in Ohio and graduated with a degree in creative writing and then went on to get a master’s degree in education from the Bank Street College of Education in Manhattan. What made you decide you wanted to become a teacher?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
I always loved working with kids. I really just always wanted to do that. And to this day I’m torn about not doing it.

Debbie Millman:
There was this wistful look in your eyes as you said this.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I have read that you think there are some similarities in terms of engagement with an audience and with students but now, especially being on the road as much as you are on your own, it must be hard to not have that collective energy around.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah, definitely. It’s one of the amazing things about being a teacher, is just the day in and day out-ness of it and the sheer number of hours that you spend with these people. And even though you’re not with their parents, it’s a very intimate thing, dealing with people’s families and children and struggles in school. And you’re a really big, present part of peoples’ everyday lives. And now I’m not like that at all. I’m literally passing through town, and that is what my life is. So it’s really different in that way.

Debbie Millman:
You taught both in Durham, North Carolina and New York City. How different were those experiences?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Well, in Durham I didn’t have my degree yet and I was teaching mostly preschoolers, so they were really

little. And three year olds, most of them are three, I feel like three year olds are really interesting because they sort of get what’s going on and then they also have this total belief that anything could be happening. They’ve been being told all these weird things like, “You grow inside of another human being.” In some cases, “Santa Claus comes down the chimney.” All these things. They’re like, “Oh, okay. Sure.” They’re just-

Debbie Millman:
They believe everything.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah. And they’ve got it kind of figured out, but then it’s also kind of confusing. So that was really fun. Then in New York I taught second grade and then third grade, which is a whole other thing. I love second and third grade. I think it’s a very industrious age. People want to be doing stuff and making books and creating their own thing. And one of the things I loved the most about that time period was I got really into telling stories with them.

We set out trying to write stories, but some kids are really limited by the physical demands of actually writing. So we started doing storytelling instead, where they would tell stories from their own lives in front of the class. And that was a hoot and so great. And also taking away the writing, the actual physical writing of it, meant that they could get the story structure thing sorted out without that, in case that was a stumbling block for them. So I loved that. I miss that.

Debbie Millman:
Were you bringing music into the classroom as well?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Not really. I was pretty shy. I was really shy as a teacher. I think I would be a better teacher now because I think, after all these years of doing shows, I’m less shy. The only songs I taught them were the songs that I was taught in elementary school. So I taught them the “Fifty Nifty United States” song, where you list all the states in alphabetical-

Debbie Millman:
Alabama.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah.

Together:
Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
And I remember on the first day, when my teacher taught us that, I just thought, “I’ll never be able to learn that.” And then you do. And I remember on the first day in the second grade class, me singing it for them and them being like, “Well, we can’t do that.” But they all know it.

Debbie Millman:
And they probably still do.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
They probably still do. And there was a song about parallelograms that I learned in elementary school that I taught them. Those were the only songs that I taught them.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to give up teaching and join what the Wainwright family calls the family business?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
In 2005 my brother, who you might think isn’t paying attention to anyone else, that’s not true, though, about him. He kind of has a covert eye on everybody in a way you might not expect. And he was like, “I think you should come out on the road with me this summer.” And I did. I went on his tour bus and I sang back up with him. I never spoke a word on stage. I was painfully shy during all of that, but it was really fun. Touring on a tour bus is really fun, and living in his life for a minute is really fun.

So when I went back to teaching after that summer, it had kind of gotten under my skin a little bit. Like, “But I really like that world and I miss that world.” And I think I, after another year of teaching, decided that if I was going to give it a shot, I better just do it. And thinking, well, maybe I’ll come back to teaching. And so then after that next year I left.

Debbie Millman:
There are some wonderful versions of you and your brother singing “Hallelujah” on YouTube, which are just gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah, that’s we sang. That’s the first one that we ever did together. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Your first gig, your first solo gig was opening for your father in 2005 at the Rockwood Music Hall in New York. What was that like?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
It was really bad. My first show was so bad. I was so bad. I was super uncomfortable on stage, not particularly capable, and not doing myself any favors. And the second show was at the Living Room, which also is closed, I think. And that one was much better because in that time I realized that the best strategy was just to be myself.

Debbie Millman:
That’s a very fast learning curve.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Well, I think it was such a debacle trying to-

Debbie Millman:
Did you cry on stage?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
No, no, no. Not that time.

Debbie Millman:
Your dad didn’t have to come get you?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah. But I was crying on the inside, and I was behaving like a weirdo. I think I had watched so many performances that I think maybe I thought something else was happening, but really people are best when they’re channeling their real self. And once I figured that out, it got a lot better. That’s not to say that the Living Room, the second show, was fantastic, but it was less… it felt better.

Debbie Millman:
When did you start to feel comfortable, fully comfortable and fully yourself on stage?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Probably within the first year of doing shows. There’s nothing like just doing 30 shows in a row to get your act together. Literally.

Debbie Millman:
Literally.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah. And nothing else can do that except for doing the shows.

Debbie Millman:
You had to really want to do it, though, if that first experience was, as you put it, terrifying and also terrible.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah. I think I wanted to live the shape of the lives of the people who I grew up around. I don’t know if that was the best decision, but that’s what I wanted.

Debbie Millman:
Why?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Well, I knew full well going into this that this was, in most cases, not lucrative and, in most cases, not super stable. I knew all that. I have no excuse for… I didn’t go into it blind at all, but I definitely have come up against the reality of that, and feeling like, wow, what was I thinking? At the same time, my whole life is built around this now, and amazing things… I’ve gotten to see amazing things that I never would’ve seen. But at the same time, I think one thing about it is, when I started out, all of my peers were

starting out and they were doing whatever job. Usually not the job they really wanted, but maybe working towards the job they really wanted.

And I left teaching and went out to do this. And everybody was sort of like, “Wow, that’s cool.” And then 10 years later, everybody’s life is really developed into a much more stable… they’ve ended up in a certain spot, and I’m still doing the same thing, and it’s a lot less cool-looking.

Debbie Millman:
But you’re making music.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
That’s true.

Debbie Millman:
You’re living a completely creative life.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
It’s true.

Debbie Millman:
Your first album was the eponymously titled Lucy and was released in 2010. And I understand you and your mom were touring at that point to raise money to make the album. Did you self-produce the entire thing?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
My stepdad, Stewart Lerman, he produced that first record. And my first couple recordings, I made two EPs and then that record. And those recordings were made really in the seat of the family. So Stewart produced them. I worked with him a lot one-on-one. The Roches sang on that first record. I think my dad also sang on that first record. So it was very much totally insulated in the world of the family, which, the two records after that have been really different in that way.

Debbie Millman:
Would you do a song from that album for us now?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Sure. Sure.

Debbie Millman:
And if you can also tell us a little bit about the song you’re going to sing. Your songs are stories.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Okay. This song is called “Open Season.” I wrote it after I took the F Train out to Coney Island one day in the winter and they happened to be taking down Luna Park, the old amusement park there, without any fanfare whatsoever. I just showed up and they were removing this giant rocket ship that was up.

Debbie Millman:
That’s sort of poetic.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
I know. I was like, “Better get home and write a song.” This song is a song that a lot of people request. It’s also a song that, whenever I’m in a relationship, people are like, “I really like that song but it’s about So-and-So,” like the person before or whatever. And I’m always like, “No, it isn’t.” So that keeps getting said to me. I don’t know what to make of that. But anyway. Good? Okay.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
(Singing).

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:30:04

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. That was beautiful.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Thanks.

Debbie Millman:
Lucy, you’ve been described as a master of musical melancholy. Would you say that that is accurate?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Well, I mean that’s a nice compliment because I really like sad music a lot, and I don’t think I’ll ever have the feeling towards my songs that I have towards songs that I love. Most of the songs I love are really sad.

Debbie Millman:
What are some of your favorites?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Oh man. Well, there’s a song called “Holy” by Chris Parika that I love so much that’s so sad, I just listened to it today. I can’t listen to it without crying and I really love it. Someone like Patty Griffin has a lot of really sad songs.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve opened for her, what was that like for you?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
It was great. I’m a big fan and I don’t know her well and I did a few shows with her last year. It was great. Her audience is great, and I got to watch her show every night and she’s so amazing and wonderful, so that was great.

I also love songs that maybe don’t sound that sad but strike me as sad. Like the Paul Simon “Crazy Love” on the album Graceland. It’s almost upbeat, but it breaks my heart, that song, and I really love to take upbeat- sounding songs and turn them into what someone coined, “Sad snoozers.”

Debbie Millman:
I like “Master of Musical Melancholy” better. I saw that. I wasn’t even going to ask you about that. I don’t think that there’s a better example of you doing that than the song on your album that you released in 2013. The album is titled There’s a Last Time for Everything, which features your really unusual and brilliant cover of the Swedish Pop star Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend.” The original is a club beat-heavy pop dance anthem and the entire video of her doing it is of her dancing in a gymnasium.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
It’s such a great video, it’s such a great video.

Debbie Millman:
But you perform it with a few chords on an acoustic guitar and a small choir. I was wondering if you would do that for us as well, but also tell us about why you decided to do that song. What is it about that song?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
When I was making that record, Jordan, the producer and I, took a drive to see Neko Case in Atlanta. We drove from Nashville to Atlanta kind of in the middle of making the record and we played that song and we both loved that song. And about halfway through the song we sort of both looked at each other and thought, “Could we possibly?” And we did. And I’m so glad we did.

I love that song because it’s so unusual, what she’s saying, the way that she’s saying it is not something that I’d heard quite that way before.

Debbie Millman:
I heard it described, or I read it described as a reverse “Jolene,” the song by Dolly Parton, which I think, “Yeah, that’s actually true.”

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah, totally. That’s true. Yeah, I just love it. And then when we tried to do it slowed down, which is my mode that I want to take every song into it kind of really worked. In fact, a lot of people think it’s my song and then when I tell them that it’s a dance song, they’re just totally shocked; because I think when you hear it slowed down, it doesn’t seem like it would be a dance song at all.

In fact, the other day somebody came up to me at the CD table and said, “Oh my God, the other day I was in the store and suddenly this dance remix version of your song “Call Your Girlfriend” came on the radio and I was like, ‘Oh my God, she’s gotten so big that they’re remixing her songs as dance song.'” And I was like, ” to worry. I haven’t gotten so big as that. That’s the original.”

Debbie Millman:
Like Tom’s Diner.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
So I love that song and I’ll definitely do it for you if you want.

Debbie Millman:
Yes, please.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
(Singing).

Debbie Millman:
Thank you for that. Lucy, what made you decide to record this album in Nashville?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
The last two I did in Nashville, the first one was in Jordan Brooke Hamlin’s basement. We did that in about a week, and then we decided to make another record together. And at this point Jordan is working out of a studio called Moxe, that is a really beautiful, amazing place. We took a lot longer to make this record. The one before was very quick. This one we made over in chunks over a year and a half or so. Yeah, it was a great experience.

Debbie Millman:
Does location impact your songwriting?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yes. There’s a lot of place in a lot of my songs probably because I spend a lot of time driving around, so there’s a lot of wherever I am seeps into the songs. Most of these songs I wrote in New York, some of them I finished in Nashville. But the beauty of the location of the place where we made the record did play into the recording because for example, when I did my vocal, she has this recording room that faces the woods with these big windows. And so you do a take in the morning and it’s beautiful. You do a take at sunset and it just was very pleasurable to sing.

And I think I sang in a slightly different way. You know how when you personally make a shift it feels big to you? Probably people who heard the record maybe didn’t notice that. But for me there were a lot of things about this record that were like a shift for me.

Debbie Millman:
Your family has famously written about each other. It started with your father, one of his songs written shortly after Rufus was born as titled “Rufus is a Tit Man.” He also wrote about you several times, one song he wrote with your Aunt Terry after you were born as titled “Screaming Issue,” which is about your plaintive, constant crying. He also wrote, “I’d Rather Be Lonely”, about your sister Martha, who countered with her own song to him “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole” which I’ve actually seen her perform live and it is just a tour de force.

Rufus has written Lucy’s Blue for you. Have you written any songs about any members of your family?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
I have, largely I’ve stayed out of any controversy amongst the family in part because my writing can be a bit vague sometimes, so maybe they haven’t noticed. This record has a song that is about my family on it as a whole.

Debbie Millman:
And you’re talking about Little Beast, your new album?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yes. And the song is called “The City,” and I wrote it on a night where the whole family was together in New York. I think it might’ve been my dad’s a record release of his, I was on tour with the Indigo Girls and I had a night off and I had considered flying home to be in this show that my brother and my sister and my other sister who isn’t a performer was going to be in, and my mom, and my aunt, and everybody was going to be in it. And I decided not to go, and it was a hard decision.

And so I had a night off in Petoskey, Michigan on the Indigo Girls Tour, and I sat in the hotel and I wrote “The City,” and that is about the family-

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:45:04]

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
I wrote “The City,” and that is about the family business, I would say.

Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting because the song is about the pressure and uncertainty of life as a touring musician. And after I listened to it, I actually went to your website to see your tour dates and it seems as if you’re on the road all the time. It seems as if you did 200+ shows last year.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah, I’m away a lot. I’m trying to shift that a little bit just for…

Debbie Millman:
Sanity’s sake?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
So it’s interesting because it was vague enough where I really thought it was about your life and not the life of your family.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s sort of about the circus of the whole situation and everybody’s writing about each other and how people’s lives and relationships and pain seep into the work that they do and stuff.

Debbie Millman:
Does it ever bother you that there’s so much about your childhood and upbringing in a lot of the songs of your family?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
No. Honestly, it is hard for me to imagine what my concept of my close family members would be if you subtracted the songs because I listened to all those people’s records and usually you don’t have that kind of a window into people’s inner life or work in that particular way. And so it’s hard for me to imagine my dad without knowing his work because he’s talked so much about himself in his work, and so it’s kind of valuable information to have.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I think the only other thing that comes close is Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors, which everybody loved to sort of read into. Was this about Mick? Was this about Lindsay? Was this about Christine? Was it about Stevie and Mick? Or Stevie and Lindsay?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Totally.

Debbie Millman:
But yet that’s your life all the time. That was one album in the 70s.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Right. And this is true about music with everyone, not just the family, but everyone has their own relationship to these songs. You take them into a private space and you experience them. So I recently was in LA singing some backup for a show that Rufus was recording for Audible for a project he’s doing with them. And we did one of my dad’s songs, “Your mother and I,” which he wrote about me or addressed to me when my parents were splitting up. And amongst the siblings, we haven’t probably discussed a lot of everyone’s feelings about the songs, but he chose the songs and he was going to sing that song. And during rehearsal he started to sing it and he just burst into tears. We had to stop.
And it was interesting because we just all are having our own emotional reaction to everyone’s work, and it’s private also, so you might not know. I wouldn’t have thought that would happen. But it’s also a great thing to be able to appreciate each other’s work where I think we’re different enough that we don’t get in each other’s way, but we can still collaborate, which is a nice balance, I think.

Debbie Millman:
Your third album, your most recent album is titled Little Beasts. It was released last October. I think it is maybe your saddest, but definitely your most extraordinary album yet. I think we really see your evolution as a singer and a songwriter and a performer, and the confidence in your lyrics is just beautiful. The song “Quit With Me” is a duet with Matthew Perryman Jones. It’s about two people who love each other very much, but must break up. The tune, “5th of July” looks back at how you felt during and after the 2016 presidential election. The album is really quite extraordinary and I believe it shows your brilliance in a way that is really singular among the Wainwright Roches.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Congratulations on this release.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Thank you very much.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to release this album on your own?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
I’ve never worked with a record company. I’ve always just called up the Printing Plant in New Jersey and had the records pressed and sold them. That has been my business model. I sort of live in this funny little section of the music business that’s still alive where people buy records. I think they buy them mostly so that you’ll sign them and you can talk while you sign them. I don’t know how many people put them into a CD player, but owning my own music has been the key to staying afloat for me.

Debbie Millman:
I was wondering if you could do one last song for us before you leave?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Sure.

Debbie Millman:
My favorite song on the album is titled “Heroin,” which isn’t exactly about what it sounds like it’s a crafty little song. Can you tell us about it and then play it for us?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Sure. I think this whole record is probably the most personal record that I’ve made, and part of that is that I just decided, lyrically I wasn’t as constrained as I normally am. I let myself say some things that I wouldn’t normally or I didn’t kind of edit things out that I might’ve shied away from before.

Debbie Millman:
Any examples of what you’re talking about?

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah, I mean, I think the song “Heroin” is probably one of my most personal songs. It’s completely autobiographical and it’s painful, and I didn’t stop that from existing. Again, it may not show up that way to others, but to me it felt like it was a vulnerable thing for me. The whole record was kind of like that, but definitely that song. I love it when I hear that somebody connected to that song because I mean, I love it when I hear that anybody’s connected to any of the songs. It seems like a miracle and it’s such a great thing, but that song meant a lot to me, and so you hope when you put them out in the world, someone will hear that or it will mean something to someone.

Debbie Millman:
It very well may be my favorite of your songs, so there you have that.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
That’s so great. Let me see. But yeah, this song has some place in it. This has some driving in it, some place in it. Have you ever driven on the Million Dollar Highway in Colorado?

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
It’s so scary.

Debbie Millman:
It’s really scary. I’ve driven cross country and there were moments on that road where actually I was driving with someone else and we were taking turns, so when one of us wasn’t driving, we’d be sleeping. And there was a moment where I was like, “Okay, you got to wake up because I can’t do this by myself.”

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah, it’s quite harrowing and I like driving, but it was a little bit too scary, which I guess is what the song’s about (singing). I didn’t say this, but actually I’ve gotten some letters from people who are really concerned that I have a heroin addiction thing, which is actually not, I feel like if you really listen to the song, it doesn’t seem like that, but people are worried.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I mean, it does say the word heroin in it.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
It’s true.

Debbie Millman:
I’m sure Lorde got the same thing even though she was not talking about it at all.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah, totally.

Debbie Millman:
And then those that did didn’t.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah, right. I don’t think that a lot of people know that the “Needle and the Damage done” is a song about heroin and Neil Young’s struggle with it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, probably not. But there you have it.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Everyone’s all, but I guess that’s the mystery of understanding.

Debbie Millman:
But I was concerned enough to go and look at the lyrics, not because I was worried, but just because I wanted to know the history of the song and really understand what you were talking about or singing about.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Yeah. My friend said to me that sentence, she said, “It’s like saying Happy birthday heroin. Going back into something you should stay away from.” So she said that, and then I was like, “You’re right.”

Debbie Millman:
Cool.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
I have a lot of problems, but that’s not one that happens to be not one of them.

Debbie Millman:
Lucy Wainwright Roche, thank you for making such beautiful work and sharing it with the world.

Lucy Wainwright Roche:
Thank you so much.

Debbie Millman:
You can find out more about Lucy’s music and concerts on her website, LucyWainwrightroche.com. It is now the 15th anniversary of Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening all these years. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Announcer:
If you love this podcast, please consider contributing to our brand new Patreon community. Members get early access to the podcast, transcripts of every interview, invitations to live shows, Q&A sessions with guests, and a brand new annual magazine. You can learn more about this at patreon.com/debbiemillman. If you subscribe to this podcast through Apple Podcasts, please write a review or link to the podcast on social media. Design Matters is produced by Curtis Fox Productions. The show is recorded at the School of Visual Arts Masters in Branding program in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor in chief of Design Matters Media is Zachary Petit, and the art director is Emily Weiland.

Debbie Millman:
Folk, blues, gospel, rock, funk, Toshi Reagon writes it, plays it, sings it, and produces it all. Her genre spanning work includes an opera, the Parable of the Sower, based on the dystopian novel by Octavia Butler. She’s been making albums since 1990, and her commitment to social justice rings loud and clear in her songs, and in her beautiful, expressive, and powerful voice. She’s here today to talk about her life, her music, and her career. Toshi Reagon, welcome to Design Matters.

Toshi Reagon:
Ah, thank you for having me.

Debbie Millman:
Toshi, I understand that the first big rock concert you attended was when you were 13, and it was to see the band KISS. So were you a big fan of their music?

Toshi Reagon:
Oh, obviously, I really loved KISS when I was a kid, and I still soft spot for them now. But they’re a very exciting band for young folks or for anybody, but they are very committed to their sound and very committed to the theatrics of the characters they were playing. I started playing drums like really young, and so they were like a fun band, I could put on headphones and play along. And later in life, when I was hanging out with Lenny, Lenny Kravitz, he’s a huge fan of KISS as well, so we both got to go see them together. And then, because he’s really famous, I got to meet everybody. So that was a big highlight to meet them, finally.

Debbie Millman:
I have a confession to make, KISS was also my first rock concert as well, Nassau Coliseum, 1977. I was about 14 or 15. You saw them at the old Capital Centre in DC, right?

Toshi Reagon:
That’s right. In the back, I was on the wall, the highest place you could go, and then I touched the wall. I was in the last seat.

Debbie Millman:
You’re a little bit younger than me, so I think we probably sort of discovered them and fell in love with them about the same time.

Toshi Reagon:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Toshi your parents were active in the civil rights movement as you were growing up, which is sort of an understatement, but, nevertheless, your mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon, founded the Grammy award winning, all women, all African American ensemble, Sweet Honey in the Rock, in 1973. Your father Cordell Reagon was a leader in the civil rights movement in Georgia, and co-founder of the Freedom Singers. And you’ve said your mom’s value system of resistance was already set in motion by the time she started college, and was working as the NAACP youth secretary. When was yours set in motion, given how you were raised?

Toshi Reagon:
I was really primarily raised by my mom, but it was very beautiful and active community. We lived in this house in Atlanta, and on the top floor was Vincent Harding and Rosemarie Harding, two, I think sometimes we say, civil rights activists, and then we miss a whole bunch of what people do. And the civil rights era, which comes out of the Southern Freedom Movement are specific things that we know about, but these people are just casting such a wide net vision and leadership. And, now, I know they were very young in their lives, like early 20s, and so it’s kind of extraordinary.

Toshi Reagon:
So I was like really shaped by activism, when I was three, two, four, because all of the that were around me were, and that was what they all talked about and how they raised us. They were not going to like send us some place to go to school where we could be attacked for being black. So they were very, very specific in how they were raising their children. And we really understood that.

Debbie Millman:
You are folk music, legend Pete Seeger’s goddaughter. You were named after Pete’s wife of 70 years, Toshi Seeger. Your mother often performed with Pete, were you close with the entire family?

Toshi Reagon:
I mean, Pete and Toshi, I was close to, but I always like to say, “Pete Seeger was married to Toshi,” and I’m like, “And he’s Toshi’s husband,” and Toshi is a phenomenal, expansive, amazing, incredible woman. I don’t know if Pete would’ve been able to be folk legend Pete Seeger without her. And she really is the one that pulled together this idea of the Freedom Singers traveling across the country. It was my mom and Toshi who communicated, in order to get them around the country. And that idea that you can do anything yourself that you need to, I really get very strongly from my mom and Toshi. And from Pete, I get what songs can do, and how songs can pull people together.

Debbie Millman:
Despite declaring at four years old that you wanted some Jimi Hendrix albums, you’ve stated that your real goal in life was to be the first black woman in the men’s National Football League.

Toshi Reagon:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide you wanted to do that?

Toshi Reagon:
I mean, I really love football. Football’s like, it’s so much fun, and it’s such a great outlet for adrenaline. Now, of course, once you start throwing on pads and really hitting each other, it’s quite a dangerous game. And I never got that far, before I had a hip accident playing sports, but I did at one point get to play with some guys that were much bigger than me, high school guys. And we would have these like big games on the field of Coolidge High School. They weren’t like with pads or anything, but they were tackle games, and they would have first downs and things like that. And this is my big moment of football is that I gained a first down in that game.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Toshi Reagon:
And I got hit.

Debbie Millman:
That’s impressive.

Toshi Reagon:
It was very impressive. I got hit by like 16 year olds. I think I was probably 11, and I got hit by like 16-year-old guys. And I was like, “What the fuck?” It hurt really bad, but I got up. And then I was like, “Yeah, I’m okay. I’m okay.” But definitely by… I don’t know, I see some women really joining the teams now, and I think it’s great. But I I’ve been boycotting the NFL for like eight years, because they’re just a hot mess. That’s a sport that could transform the cities that they’re in.

Debbie Millman:
You mentioned a serious hip injury. You didn’t get that injury from football, you got that from softball, is that correct?

Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. I got that on softball.

Debbie Millman:
So you were just a general all-around athlete.

Toshi Reagon:
I love sports. I still, to this day, love, love sports. I think that it’s… Yeah, I love it.

Debbie Millman:
It wasn’t until that hip injury that you began to reconsider your future goals, and I believe that’s when you picked up the guitar.

Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. It’s kind of a mush of things. In our family, you sing, so I was musical. If you go to my grandma’s in Georgia, everybody sings and people sing out church culture. So was not like you separated you’re singing from anything in your life. So I started singing when I was three years old. I never did not sing in my entire life, but I was like, “I’m going to be a football player,” but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to do music.

Toshi Reagon:
And Rosie Lee Hooks gave me a guitar, probably, when I was about 10, so I already had a guitar. But I think when it was like, “You can’t run,” I was like, “My focus is going to be music.” And then that’s when all of the things started to come together.

Debbie Millman:
I read that you chose guitar, specifically, because your best friend, Daniel Lopez wanted to learn how to play.

Toshi Reagon:
He’s going to love this. Yes.

Debbie Millman:
And you practice together every night over the phone-

Toshi Reagon:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
… so much so that your mother bought you your own phone.

Toshi Reagon:
Yes, she did.

Debbie Millman:
Why were you practicing over the phone and not in person?

Toshi Reagon:
Well, he lived in Virginia and I lived in DC, and the school we both went to Burgundy Farm Country day School was in Virginia. So, yeah, I would ride out there, but after school we both went home, and then as soon as we got home, I’d run up to my room and then we’d be like teaching each other, how to play Neil Young songs like string by string. It was awesome. It was one of the best things I ever did in my life.

Debbie Millman:
Despite learning how to play guitar with Daniel Lopez, you hijacked your brother’s drum set-

Toshi Reagon:
I did.

Debbie Millman:
… and would repeatedly play along with the LaBelle album Nightbirds.

Toshi Reagon:
Yes, I did.

Debbie Millman:
And then I understand you moved on to conga, and then songwriting. So talk about when you first started writing songs, how you started to write songs. I find songwriting to be one of the most mysterious, magical entities that exists.

Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. I mean, I think, I always had songs in my head. When you’re young, you make up songs all the time. Kids are always like, “Da, da, da, da, da, da.” But I think because music was our love and communication language in my family, there was no singing that wasn’t taken seriously. My cousin [Kabanya 00:10:08], when she was two, we all banged on the piano, but all of a sudden when she was two, we were like, “Wait a minute, that makes a little bit of sense, what she’s doing.” And Kabanya is like an incredible singer and pianist. But when she was two, she was taken seriously, her voice was taken seriously. My voice was taken seriously, the second I like said any words. And I think that made like the idea that I could write songs very seamless.

Toshi Reagon:
It wasn’t like, “I have written a song.” It just was like one day I’m writing a song, and it was taken seriously. This is before we had all of these portable devices where you could like record yourself. So I rigged up two cassette machines and I would do like, multi-track recording, which sounds crazy, on these two cassette machines, and my mom would listen to it and then she would critique it, “Why does it sound bad?” And I’m like, “Because I don’t have the technology. I have to go into a regular recording studio.” And then she started taking me to the studio with her. So songwriting in itself, I don’t know that it’s so far away from anybody. And then when you do it as somebody like take your voice seriously, and it’s the same thing as anything one would do.

Debbie Millman:
Do you remember the first song you ever wrote?

Toshi Reagon:
Yeah, I wrote this song when I was first teaching myself guitar called, I love you. And it’s like the simplest thing you could play on the guitar. And the simplest melody you could play on the guitar, and you could sing. And it just was some basic lyrics about, “I’m going to hold you tight, because I love you,” or something like that. I was like 12 or 13. I got a little bit more better at it, as time went on.

Debbie Millman:
And I believe you started your first band when you were in high school, it was a cover band, right? You played Led Zeppelin-

Toshi Reagon:
Yep.

Debbie Millman:
… Neil Young, the Beatles. Did you play KISS?

Toshi Reagon:
Nobody liked KISS as much as I did, so we did not play KISS songs.

Debbie Millman:
I’m surprised, I think you guys could have at least played Beth, that’s sort of a crowd pleaser.

Toshi Reagon:
No, that wasn’t my favorite song. I like, I Stole Your Love and all of the… To this day, I try not to make people play things they don’t want to play.

Debbie Millman:
And you were the drummer, not the guitarist, at that point.

Toshi Reagon:
I played a lot of different things. So you know how it is in school is like, three or four drummers, three or four guitarist, three or four this, so sometimes I played drums and sometimes I played guitar and sometimes I just sang it. This just was whoever was around.

Debbie Millman:
I read that you also learned how to play the bass, because your bass player didn’t show up for a gig.

Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. We had the flakiest bass player, Les [Hazar 00:13:01] and he would just like, not show up for things. And so, yeah, that made me have to play the bass, which is one of my favorite instruments now, so I thank him for not showing up. But, yeah, and a few times on gigs, a bass player has not shown up, and I’ve been like, “Okay, I’ll play.”

Debbie Millman:
So it just comes naturally to you. Did you ever take formal lessons in any instrument or vocal lessons?

Toshi Reagon:
The instruments when I was seven, my mom tried to get me to play guitar and I hated it. I don’t know if it’s that the teacher was bad or that I just didn’t like that idea of learning. It didn’t make sense to me. So the guitar, I really learned on my own, in collaboration with Danny and other people. And June Millington is one of my musical moms and definitely, if she has a guitar protege, I’m probably her first one. And the people that I play with, I was very inspired by. And voice lessons, I definitely had to take voice lessons. My mom made me as soon as she saw me like singing in bands. She’s like, “You have to take lessons,” and it’s not so much like singing lessons, but it’s like, how to use the instrument of the voice.

Toshi Reagon:
She saw I was going to tear my voice up. And so we had, the biggest fight, me and my mom ever had, was over me taking voice lessons, which I hated. Then I did exactly what she said I was going to do, I injured my vocal chords. I couldn’t talk for six weeks, and then I learned to listen to my mom-

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Toshi Reagon:
… when she says, “Go to voice lessons.”

Debbie Millman:
Why did you hate it so much? Was it the formality of it? The rigidity-

Toshi Reagon:
It’s not… It wasn’t… It just really clashed with my 14-year-old self. It is very formal, and singing isn’t a whole body experience. I think like a lot of us have access to singing, and we don’t ever think about like my whole body is singing. We’re just thinking about our voice and how we feel when we sing. Like so many things that we, it’s the entirety of a universe of systems in your body that create what is your voice, what it is that you do. It came so easy to me, I just couldn’t imagine at 14 that there was any way for it to leave me or that I could do something wrong.

Toshi Reagon:
Now, when I work with vocalists and their grownups, a lot of vocalists still don’t have that understanding. And so, they’ll say, “I get really tired in my throat,” or, “My shoulders hurt,” or, “My lower back hurts.” And it’s like their body trying to figure out how to make the sound that they wanted to make, but they’re not activating the systems, the physical systems. At some point, you have to learn how to use that, or you will not have your voice. Your voice will quit.

And Pete Seeger’s a great example of this. Like Pete is classic. Pete position is, his neck is stretched out, and he’s singing and he is looking up, and that lasted for a long time. And then one year he couldn’t make a sustained sound, and people will see his grandson Tao started touring with him to do the singing, because Pete could talk, but he couldn’t sustain notes. And then, miraculously, I don’t know, some few years later he started to be able to sing a little bit, again, which probably was representative of a lot of rest.

Yeah. Y’all singers out there, find somebody, not a singing teacher, a voice teacher that will actually incorporate the wholeness of your body into your singing. And don’t do like I did, unless you want like a six week silent meditation, which people are really into now.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, actually, I was going to say, I know a lot of people that pay a lot of money for that. Toshi, you’ve said you have three musical moms. Your mom is first, and you consider her the queen. And then two others, Nona Hendryx, who achieved success both as a solo artist and as part of the band LaBelle, and June Millington, a Filipino American guitarist, songwriter, producer, educator, and actress, who also co-founded the Institute of American Arts. And I was wondering if you can talk about how all three of your musical moms influenced you.

Toshi Reagon:
Wow. We might need another episode on this.

Debbie Millman:
That’s cool.

Toshi Reagon:
It’s pretty deep. I really think about my mom that we have traveled together before this lifetime, and in this lifetime, we are mom and daughter that this is part of one of our journeys. When people ask me what they should do with their kids, I know they’re asking me about music, and like how expose them to music. And I think what my mom did was like, it’s the above of grace unlimited. I know when her parents saw me, when I was a baby, I was the representation of their incredible efforts to exist.

Toshi Reagon:
These black people on both sides of my family, navigating the violent, racist institution of the United States of America on both sides of my family. Understanding the preciousness and the miraculous gift of life, and coming up through the time of our ancestors, when they had to live through generation after generation after generation of ownership of their bodies and anything their bodies created, including life. And to the unimaginable acts of watching somebody either take you away from your kids or take your kids away from you, to understand the multitude of systems that you put in place to house yourself and house your people, when people think you are criminalized, the second you come up with unique idea of being free.

For those people to get to the year 1964, and see the first generation of our family that’s not going to pick cotton, it’s such a big deal. It’s such a big thing, is I don’t even have the expansiveness of language to cover it. And every single person looked at me like I was a reason for every single thing they have ever done in their lives to get to that moment. And, my mom, I’m the first child, I’m the first grandchild on my mom’s side of the family. But my mom just took me everywhere. There was no place that I couldn’t go with her. And I think if there was a place I couldn’t go, she would maybe think she was going to the wrong place. And she just joined me to who she was. And then when my brother came, she just joined him as well.

And I think that the sound of our people, a lot of people make this line, like, when is art important? When do you need art? And what is the position of the artists? And it’s, what is the position of people? When are the people’s voices important? When do the people use their voices for this? What is the technology of sound? What is the technology of sonic holding resolution of home, when people tell you, you don’t have one?

That’s where I come from. I almost say, before I’m an artist, I’m a person who has to survive in this wicked world, and the instrument I use is my voice and song. And then, oh, there’s an entity called art, and oh, it can be commercialized. And oh, I could make a living. This is all after that. But my mom brought me into the world and set the standard for how people should look at me and receive me.

She and my family, let me know that that was important to pay attention to. You shouldn’t just blow that away. You should know, like, no, they really looked at you like you didn’t belong here, and now you get to make a decision, if you want to stay. And now you know what you need to do, if you want to stay. To be born and have people communicate that to you is a good thing.

And that’s why I got these other two amazing moms, because they kind of come from each in their own way, a similar line. June Millington is the first woman I saw play electric guitar and use effects pedals. So my mom told me that day when my hip broke and I couldn’t be a football player, and I said, “I’m going to be a musician.” My mom said, and you probably researched this already that, “Well, learn how to be a producer and stay away from drugs.”

Debbie Millman:
I was actually going to ask you that specifically.

Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. So I ended up being an intern at Roadwork, which was like an all women’s production and booking agency started by Amy Horowitz. So I worked on all of the concerts, and Chris Williamson was doing like a concert at Constitution Hall. It was really bananas, because that was like a big hall, 3000 people I think, and it was just filled with lesbians. It was like-

Debbie Millman:
A total fantasy.

Toshi Reagon:
… it was amazing. Yeah. It was like so many lesbians. And then June was the guitar, she had produced Chris’s record. I, basically, followed her everywhere. And then she doesn’t know why, she said that, just when she met me, she said, she saw me walk into the room, I was a kid, and she was like, “Okay, that person’s mine.” And then from that moment on June started to teach me. So the next day I went to where she was staying, and she did one of her songs, and she wrote me out a chart, and I couldn’t really read charts. But June Wilmington’s charts are very beautiful and classic, and you can understand them, and she taught at me how to play the song in a guitar.

And then after that she would send me cassettes of everything she did. I would get a cassette in the mail. And I like to say, “I’m her first student.” Now they have the Rock ‘n’ Roll girls camp and all of these things. She would send me how she made records, how she wrote songs.

And then Nona, Nona was like the first woman, other than my mom or women in Sweet Honey, that I identified, that when you looked at the back of a record, the song was written by them. And LaBelle was such a big band, and then when we got the record, I saw like songs written by Nona Hendryx. And I can’t tell you what that meant to me. It was so important. When you looked on the back of Motown records, it was so many songs that just said the corporation, the corporation, the corporation. And then every once in a while, it’d say Ashford & Simpson or Stevie Wonder.

But it was like the… And I’d be like, “Who’s the corporation? What does that mean?” In LaBelle records, you had the name, and then it would say Nona Hendryx. So I always wanted to meet Nona Hendryx, when I was a kid. She had one of my favorite voices and she wrote the best music, the most interesting, journeying music, complicated, complex, meaningful lyrics and situations. And so when I had a record deal with Electra, the best thing that came out of that deal, because a record never got released, was Nona Hendryx.

They were like, “Is there any producer you want to work with that’s already successful?” They want names. And I was like, “I want to work with Nona Hendryx.” And they got her. The first time I was in a meeting with Nona Hendryx, I levitate. And from that moment on, Nona has been like a beautiful guiding light, and also just an expert in songwriting. And she produced, one time, a vocal track for me. And just that like couple of hours of working with her really, really influenced how I produce myself and produce my vocals.

So the three of them, it’s a pretty heavy team. And I feel really grateful. And out of all of them, there’s one thing, when my mom told me to be a producer, her idea was that, I had to be able to present myself, because I didn’t have time to wait for people to decide. You can do it. And Nona, because she had had a lot of experience in the business, Nona was the person who was like, “These people are not your friends,” and to take every opportunity like its ingredients, but know what it is that you want to make. And then pick the ingredients you need and leave the rest. And June was the person who was like, “There is a system to recording sound and recording sound very well, take your time and learn the systems that please you and make you happy.” And all of those significant, really significant systems help to create, along with my own intentions, what I do.

Debbie Millman:
In addition to your mom saying that you needed to stay away from drugs and learn to be a producer, she also said, as you were becoming a musician and started to play with her, that she was going to treat you like everyone else. And you had to show up, and if you sucked, she didn’t want to work with you. Were you ever worried you couldn’t-

Toshi Reagon:
Well, she never actually said that, but she just did it. There would never be like, she won’t work with me, that would never happen. But when you’re little and you go to work with your parents, you get to see them in action. And so I would go to work with my mom and I would see her doing the DC Black Repertory company song workshops, and then creating things. I grew up in that atmosphere. So once I started doing it, I was shocked, but she treated me exactly the same. And she had the same expectations. And she doesn’t give you a lot of preparation. She doesn’t explain anything to you, she’s just like… As I got older and she started having me work with her, which like kind of, started when I was 16 and she saw I started having talent in the studio, and I started producing things.

The score for Africans in America, that’s mostly like a lot, the two of us, she did not tell me what we were doing. She didn’t say, “Hey, you know what? We’re going to work on a score. We’re going to do this, and we’re doing that. And it’s four different films, with four different directors, and we’re doing the da, da, da.” I just showed up one day in the studio, and she put a microphone across from her. And then she did like this, which meant, sing what I sing. And then I did not know the song. I did not know the words. I did not know anything. And I just started singing what I would hear in her mouth. And as soon as I got it, she switched lines. And that’s how we did the vocals for almost that entire project. If you go listen to Africans in America, you’d be very impressed with us.

But with me, because she never said, “Hey, this is what I want you to do.” She was like, “Ah, I think it’d be a great idea, if you did Still Away on electric guitar. Here, I’ll sing the line, I think.” And then I would play it on a guitar, and, “Oh, what if you harmonized it?” And she did it. So more comes out of that congregational singing that I think she grew up with, which is like, nobody ever taught you a song. You learned the song from being a part of the singing, and that’s how she did me. And that’s how she does everybody.

Even with the Freedom Singers, after my father died, they had a show and they asked me to do my dad’s parts. Nobody taught me what his parts were. I was just sitting there like, “Isn’t somebody going to tell me?” And they just started singing, and I was just like, ah, ah, ah, trying to figure it out. And when I messed up, they didn’t go back over the song and correct me, they went on to the next song.

Debbie Millman:
Has this influenced the way you manage your own sets. I understand that when you’re performing, you don’t ever have a set list. So you just write down 30 to 40 songs you’re feeling good about and then see what the energy is like. So-

Toshi Reagon:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
… it seems like that might have influenced the way you perform now.

Toshi Reagon:
It totally did it. It came from my dad, with the Freedom Singers never programming a set. Then my mother, with Sweet Honey, never programming a set. And then me, with Big Lovely, never programming set. And honestly COVID has forced me to program the sets, because we don’t rehearse, really, or we have very little rehearsal to limit the amount of time that we were together, if we were doing something. And a few of the things we did on video, we had no rehearsal, so I had to say, “Okay, we’re going to do these songs,” so people could practice on their own. So I have to do it. I look forward to being able to get back to that though.

Debbie Millman:
In 1983, after saving up for studio time, your mother booked you in a studio to record a cassette of songs called demonstrations. And I have tried to find that everywhere, I have not been able to find it. How would you describe that music today?

Toshi Reagon:
Oh, I’ll send you one, it’s on cassette. I mean, it’s a young Toshi, first time being in a studio. She didn’t come with me. She was like, “Here you go,” and she dropped me off. Thank God for June Millington, because I knew a little bit about what I was supposed to do, because… But it’s a young me. It’s some of my first songs, and I think it’s pretty cool. It’s the only recording of my friend Curtis McShane who I went to high school with. He’s a really good guitar player, and he passed away very young. That’s how I remember, how important it is to record, and how important it is to like put down your ideas, and leave them behind for other people to find and hold onto, eventually.

Toshi Reagon:
So it got made into like hundreds of cassettes and then the company that was distributing them closed down. They sent back like the last 50 of them, so I should transfer them and put that out.

Debbie Millman:
Yes you should.

Toshi Reagon:
It’s [crosstalk 00:32:50].

Debbie Millman:
You should. Your first official album was titled Justice, which was published by Flying Fish Records in 1990. How did you first get that record deal?

Toshi Reagon:
I mean, it’s not as hard… I mean, I think I’m sure I got it because Flying Fish put out Sweet Honey records, and they didn’t have to pay for it, I paid for it. So I think that’s how it happened. And now I think another label has it, and I’m like, “Give me back my record, that I paid for a long time ago.” But I love Justice. Justice is one of my favorite songs, and by then I was like covering the Police song, Walking in Your Footsteps. I like a lot of the music on that record, and I’m glad that it’s still accessible. And it’s also amount of time I went on tour with Lenny, his first world tour.

Debbie Millman:
Well, how did you first meet? Yeah, can’t just drop that, when I went on tour with Lenny. Yeah. You and Lenny are very close, but you were a fan of The Cosby Show growing up. And had a premonition that you and Lisa Bonet, and then by extension and her, then husband Lenny Kravitz, would end up being friends, and that premonition ended up coming true. How did you first meet them?

Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. And I want to be really clear, because people hear this story and I’m so surprised, I must have said it somewhere, but, yeah. So I did, I was looking at The Cosby Show like everybody, and it hit me, I was looking at it, and I was like, “We’re going to be best friends. It’s going to be like my sister,” and everybody laughed at me. Because at that time everybody wanted to be best friends, and everybody wanted Lisa to be their best friends. But-

Debbie Millman:
Don’t they still? Don’t they still?

Toshi Reagon:
They still do. Lilakoi Moon is one of the best people who ever hit the Earth, so I think everybody would love to be friends with her. But it happened because they were making a big video in Central Park for Lenny’s first record, Let Love Rule, and my friend was friends with the stylist for the video. Everybody was like starting out at everything. So Arianne Phillips and my friend and Lisa Taggar, and they were like, “You want to watch it?” Because making videos was a big deal back in the day. And so we were just watching, and then at some point Lilakoi was like, “Can you go over and dance in the video, because I like your hat,” or something like that. And so I was like, “Okay,” and then was just like being an extra in a video. And then later they invited me to come to their house, at some point, and they were serious.

That was the beginning. And then Lenny said that thing, like, a lot of people say to you in your life, like, “When I go on tour, I’ll call you up and you can come open some shows.” And he really did. I got to open like five shows in Calgary and Portland and these different places. And then he was like, “I don’t want anybody else to open for me, because the vibe is really cool. So you open the rest of these shows.” And I don’t even know if my Justice record was out, but I didn’t have… People paid big money to open shows at that point, so another band had already paid. And so he would put me on in between that band and the main act. And I got to open for him all over Europe and the United States. I have a lot of great stories from that time. It was really a magical time.

Debbie Millman:
I’m sure it was. What was that experience like, not just opening for him, but just the whole tour experience and being part of that music scene at that time?

Toshi Reagon:
Well, I mean, first of all, it was like being on a big learning curve, because I hadn’t played a lot of big places, and all of a sudden I was playing in front of thousands of people. But the vibe was really good. I mean, he was a really cool person to open for. I think the best story I could tell you is, I think it was the third show I opened, we were in Portland. And at this point, people had started to catch on that I was going to open, and so the crowd was really into it.

And then I’m performing, and I see this man, who’s one of the crew members for the venue, walking towards the stage. And he’s got this package, and I’m like, “What’s going on?” And then he hands it to me, and it’s a necklace. And he’s like, “Lenny saw you play, and he wants you to have this.” And I was like, “What?” And it was this beautiful silver necklace, and it had these really beautiful stones in it. And he had just seen me playing and liked what I was doing, and he gave me this necklace. And I thought, “Wow, that’s pretty cool.”

Debbie Millman:
That is very cool. It sounds like such an amazing experience. And to be recognized like that by someone like Lenny Kravitz must have been a really special moment in your career.

Toshi Reagon:
It was. It was definitely a special moment. And it was also, I think, a moment where I felt like, “Okay, this is real. I’m doing something that people are noticing and appreciating.” So it was a great validation.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. So your musical journey has covered various genres. You’ve played rock, folk, blues, and you’ve been described as a genre-defying artist. How do you approach this diversity in your music, and what draws you to explore different genres?

Toshi Reagon:
I just think it’s natural for me. I grew up in a household where there was so much different music. My mom was into rock music, my dad was into folk, blues, and gospel. I went to a school that had a lot of different kinds of music. And then, growing up in D.C., I was exposed to punk and go-go and all these different things. So for me, it’s not even a conscious choice. I just love all kinds of music, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have been around and exposed to so many different genres.

I just follow what feels good. If a song feels good to me, I’ll play it. I don’t care what genre it is. And I think that’s the beauty of music. It doesn’t have to be constrained by genres. It’s really about how it makes you feel, and that’s what I go for. I’m not thinking, “Oh, this is a rock song, or this is a folk song.” I’m just thinking, “Does it feel good? Does it move me?” And that’s what guides me.

Debbie Millman:
I love that approach. It’s really about the emotion and the feeling that the music brings. And I think that resonates with people, too. When they listen to your music, they can feel that authenticity and that emotional connection.

Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. I think that’s what people connect with in music. It’s not necessarily the genre. It’s the emotion, it’s the feeling, it’s the authenticity. And I always try to bring that to my music, regardless of what style it might be. I think that’s what resonates with people.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Now, looking at your activism, you’ve been involved in various social and political causes. Your music often reflects these concerns, and you’ve been a part of events and movements for social justice. How do you see the relationship between art and activism, and how does that play out in your work?

Toshi Reagon:
Well, I think art has always been connected to activism. If you look at the history of music, especially in the United States, music has always been a part of movements for justice, for freedom, for equality. It’s always been a way for people to express their feelings, their resistance, their joy, their sorrow. So for me, the connection is natural. I don’t see them as separate things.

Art has the power to move people, to inspire people, to make people think. And when you’re talking about issues of justice, when you’re talking about fighting for equality, fighting against oppression, art becomes a really powerful tool. It’s a way to communicate messages, to bring people together, to give voice to things that might not be heard otherwise. So, for me, the connection is very natural.

In my own work, I’ve always tried to bring a social justice lens to what I do. Whether it’s through my lyrics, my performances, or the causes I support, it’s about using the platform that I have to contribute to positive change. I think it’s important for artists to be engaged with the world around them and to use their voices for good.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. And I think, historically, we’ve seen how art and music, in particular, have played such a crucial role in various movements for justice and social change. It has that ability to bring people together, to create a sense of solidarity, and to communicate messages in a way that can be very powerful and impactful.

Toshi Reagon:
Absolutely. I think, for a lot of people, music is an entry point into social and political awareness. It’s a way to get people engaged, to make them feel connected to a cause or a movement. Music has the power to create a sense of community and to inspire people to take action. So, it’s always been a part of social justice movements, and I think it will continue to be.

Debbie Millman:
Definitely. Now, as we look at the current state of the world, there are still many ongoing challenges, and people are actively engaged in various movements for justice. How do you see the role of art and artists in addressing the current challenges and contributing to positive change?

Toshi Reagon:
I think artists have a crucial role to play in addressing the challenges we face today. We’re living in a time where there’s so much happening, whether it’s issues of racial justice, climate change, economic inequality, or other pressing concerns. Artists have the ability to shine a light on these issues, to bring attention to them, and to inspire people to take action.

Artists can use their platforms to amplify voices that might not be heard otherwise. We have the power to create work that challenges the status quo, that questions the way things are, and that envisions a better future. I think art has the ability to spark conversations, to provoke thought, and to engage people emotionally.

In times of social and political turmoil, art becomes a form

of resistance. It’s a way for people to express their dissent, their anger, their hope, and their vision for a more just world. So, I see artists as cultural workers, as storytellers, as truth-tellers, and as activists. We have a responsibility to use our voices for positive change and to contribute to building a more equitable and just society.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. And I think what you mentioned about storytelling is so important. Art has that ability to tell stories in a way that can really connect with people on a deep level. It humanizes the issues, and it makes people feel and understand in a way that maybe other forms of communication might not be able to do.

Toshi Reagon:
Exactly. I think storytelling is a powerful tool for empathy and understanding. When you hear a story, when you hear a song, it can create a connection that goes beyond statistics or abstract concepts. It brings the human experience to the forefront. And I think that’s what art does so well—it speaks to our shared humanity, our shared struggles, and our shared aspirations.

Debbie Millman:
Definitely. Now, shifting gears a bit, you’ve been involved in a wide range of projects throughout your career. Is there a particular project or collaboration that stands out to you as especially meaningful or memorable?

Toshi Reagon:
Wow, that’s a tough question. I’ve been fortunate to work on so many amazing projects and collaborations. One that stands out to me is the collaboration with Bernice Johnson Reagon and Amina Claudine Myers on the project “The Temptation of St. Anthony.” That was a really special and unique project.

Bernice Johnson Reagon is my mother, and Amina Claudine Myers is a fantastic pianist and composer. The three of us came together to create this multimedia performance that was based on the life of St. Anthony. It involved music, spoken word, visuals, and it was a really immersive experience. We performed it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and it was just a powerful and memorable collaboration.

Another project that stands out is the work I did with the dance company Urban Bush Women. I composed the music for their piece “Walking with Pearl…Southern Diaries,” which was a tribute to Pearl Primus, a pioneering dancer and choreographer. It was an incredible experience to create music that was integrated into the dance piece, and it was a beautiful homage to Pearl Primus.

There are so many other collaborations that have been meaningful to me, whether it’s working with my band Big Lovely, collaborating with other musicians, or being part of events like the Women’s March. Each project has its own significance, and I feel grateful for the opportunities to collaborate with talented and inspiring people.

Debbie Millman:
It sounds like you’ve had such a rich and diverse range of experiences in your collaborations. And I can imagine each one brings its own unique set of challenges and joys, but it’s wonderful to hear about the different ways you’ve been able to express yourself through these collaborations.

Toshi Reagon:
Absolutely. Each collaboration has its own energy, its own dynamics, and its own creative process. It’s always a learning experience, and it pushes me to grow as an artist. I love the diversity of collaborations, and it’s something that keeps my work exciting and fresh.

Debbie Millman:
Definitely. Now, as we look to the future, what are some of the projects or ideas that you’re currently excited about or looking forward to exploring?

Toshi Reagon:
Well, I’m always working on new music. I have some projects in the works, including an album that I’m really excited about. I’m also looking forward to more live performances, connecting with audiences, and sharing music in person.

I’m passionate about continuing my activism and using my platform to address social and political issues. Whether it’s through music, conversations, or collaborations, I want to contribute to positive change and inspire others to do the same.

I’m also exploring new ways of storytelling and expression. I’ve been thinking about how to incorporate different mediums and technology into my work. The possibilities are endless, and I’m excited to see where the creative journey takes me.

Debbie Millman:
That sounds fantastic. It’s always exciting to hear about artists exploring new avenues and pushing the boundaries of their creativity. I’m sure whatever you have in store will be impactful and inspiring.

Toshi Reagon:
Thank you. I believe in the power of art to make a difference, and I’m committed to using my voice and my music to contribute to positive change. I appreciate the opportunity to share my journey and thoughts with you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you so much, Toshi. It’s been a pleasure to have this conversation with you, and I’m grateful for the insights and wisdom you’ve shared. Wishing you continued success in all your endeavors.

Toshi Reagon:
Thank you, Debbie. It’s been a pleasure, and I appreciate the work you do in amplifying voices and engaging in meaningful conversations. Let’s continue to uplift each other and create positive change.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Take care, Toshi.

[End of transcript.]

Debbie Millman:
Country folk, pop, blues, Americana. Call it what you will, and you still won’t capture the moving, memorable music of Rosanne Cash. One of the country’s preeminent singer-songwriters, Rosanne Cash has released 15 albums that have earned four Grammy Awards and 12 additional nominations. Rosanne is also an author of four books, including the best-selling memoir, Composed, which the Chicago Tribune called one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read. She’s one of only a handful of women to be elected to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. And in 2021, Rosanne was the first female composer to receive the McDowell Medal awarded to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to American culture. She joins me today to talk about her music, her writing, her 45-year career and the 30th anniversary re-release of her album, The Wheel. Rosanne Cash, welcome to Design Matters.

Rosanne Cash:
Hi Debbie. Thank you for having me.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Rosanne, is it true that at one point growing up you had a pet monkey?

Rosanne Cash:
I didn’t have a pet monkey and my mother did, and I don’t know what she was thinking and it still creeps me out that she did.

Debbie Millman:
So it was yours by proxy then?

Rosanne Cash:
Well, no, not even. I kept my distance. That is the first time anyone has ever asked me that question, so kudos.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. You were born in Memphis, Tennessee.

Rosanne Cash:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
But you and your three sisters moved to Encino, California after your parents bought Johnny Carson’s house on Havenhurst Avenue when you were three years old. Do you have any memory of what that house was like?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, we bought Johnny Carson’s house. My mother always told this story, I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, that Mrs. Carson left a pie in the oven. It’s possible.

Debbie Millman:
Wow.

Rosanne Cash:
Possibly true. I do remember the house. I remember one day coming into the living room and seeing a film crew in our house. There was this show called Here’s Hollywood, and they had come to interview my dad, my mom, and at home, come see how he lives at home, and I remember how much I resented having this television crew in our house and thus began a lifelong suspicion of journalists.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, that’s not where I thought you were going to go with that.

Rosanne Cash:
The press company accepted.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. Well, I know it also made you skeptical of fame and the lack of privacy that it really caused your family, especially your mother.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, that’s true, and that’s really the takeaway from that story about the television crew is that I just hated the intrusion. I hated opening our private life and so did my mother. My mother was incredibly private and I had no illusions about fame that I knew it wasn’t glamorous, that it didn’t make you happy, that it didn’t fulfill all your needs as a human being, and it was bone crushing work. I saw my dad beyond exhausted. And yeah, so I’ve always had a very real understanding of what fame means and how destructive it could be.

Debbie Millman:
In your beautiful memoir, Composed, you described your earliest memory and you wrote this, “My earliest memory, perhaps the earliest possible flawed template for my life dates to when I was around two years old, we were visiting my mother’s parents in San Antonio and my grandfather, Tom, the bespeckled insurance agent, master amateur magician, renowned rose breeder and champion gin rummy player, took me to the park to feed the pigeons. He was sitting on a green bench tossing seeds from a bag to the birds, which were flocking around his feet. He kept saying, ‘Look at the birds Rosanne,’ and I thought to myself with a sharp clarity that I now spend most of my waking hours trying to recapture, ‘Oh, am I supposed to pretend to be excited? I’m supposed to act like a child.’ And so I did. I squealed the obligingly feigned alarm at the gathering birds and pleased my grandfather. It was a bad way to start things off, actually a compelling need to please people can be deadly.” That paragraph says so much about who you were, who you are. Have you gotten better with the compulsion to be a people pleaser?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh my God, yeah. That’s one of the beauties of age, isn’t it? You just don’t give a what people think of you at some point. There’s an urgency that goes along with aging that you have more to say, less time to say it and trying to please people by your work or the way you live or the way you speak or who you are, how you look, what shoes you wear, what songs you sing, that all of that is distraction from the real work and the truth of being that you have little time left to live and be, and I am aware of that every day now. It moves me to tears to think about it, the sense of urgency that overcomes me sometimes. Bob Dylan said it about performing that people-pleasing was death for an artist. You get outside yourself, you get self-conscious. You try to moderate or twist or define or truncate who you are and what you do, and then the world doesn’t have you.

Debbie Millman:
I was really struck in your early years how much you needed to be the adult. One of the things that really struck me was the creation of imaginary friends that you… A lot of children have imaginary friends. I had one named Goonie, but she was a little girl like me, and I insisted that she have a table setting at the kitchen table and so forth, but yours were adults, which is really, really unusual and I’m wondering if you can talk about what kind of imaginary adult friends you made at the time.

Rosanne Cash:
I’ve wondered about that too why my imaginary friends were adults, and I’ve talked about this with various therapists over the years, and I think it’s because there was a lot of chaos in my life and in my parents’ marriage and my dad on the road and using drugs, and my mother just beside herself with fear and grief and worry and anxiety and anger, and I did a really smart thing. I created adults who were perfect, who saw who I was and loved me as I was and were protective. One of them I still have with me.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Rosanne Cash:
I still talk to her once in a while.

Debbie Millman:
I’m going to not ask you about her only because I know that you’ve been reticent about talking to them at all, talking about them at all rather.

Rosanne Cash:
I have. I have. I don’t tell people their names. I don’t like talking about them.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I totally respect that. You ended up at that time needing to be more of an adult in your family. You were the person your three sisters turned to in times of trouble, ultimately became the child who had to pretend not to be a child. So much so that you began to hate the very word child. And I also was struck by the fact that you never cried, a fact at the time that you took great pride in. How did you manage through this time?

Rosanne Cash:
So my mom was not fully present. My mom had some really wonderful qualities. I learned discipline from her, her domestic skills and arts were so refined and beautiful, president of her garden club, dozens and dozens of close friends. But during that time when I was young and my dad was on the road and their marriage was falling apart, my mom was out of her mind, out of her body and often literally hysterical. And I had three younger sisters and I took it upon myself to be an adult. And if my mom was taking up all the emotional space, there wasn’t much room for me to do it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Rosanne Cash:
I think that that’s maybe a common thing for children who have a parent who’s off the rails. And my other parent was, at that time was a drug addict and he was gone a lot. So my family is well known, but it’s not that different from other families who the addiction is the hub of the wheel.

Debbie Millman:
Did you know your dad was a drug addict at that time? You were so young.

Rosanne Cash:
Oh my God, no, no. People didn’t talk to children about that. I don’t even think my mother understood it. There just wasn’t the consciousness about it as there is today.

Debbie Millman:
I want to read another short excerpt from another book that you wrote, your book, Bodies of Water, and you say this about your childhood. “The summer I turned 11, I felt too big for my body, too small for my heart, confused by the secrets and fears that permeated the very atoms of the air inside my home, and far too old from my age.” You go on to write, “When I was 11, I stopped dreaming the dreams that didn’t come true, I stopped talking to people who didn’t listen. I lost hope and retreated. I assumed that the root of the problem was that I was too strange for the real world. That being the case, I created a charming and dynamic personality to make the necessary forays into the outside, and I kept my strangeness for myself, my own particular jewels under lock and key.”

Rosanne Cash:
I forgot I wrote that.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I was really struck by in reading that was the notion that your strange self needed to be protected. And in some ways that gave me a lot of hope in thinking about who you became, that you didn’t disappear that person, you just hid her under lock and key.

Rosanne Cash:
Definitely. And she’s the one who’s the artist and needs protection. And as I felt safer as I grew older then she’s the source of creativity.

Debbie Millman:
I love that you referred to this strange part of yourself as jewels.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, yeah. I had this image of myself, that strange little self in, she had a secret cave and in the cave where all the records she wanted and all the books and access to all of these wonderful things, and it was private and I could lock myself away and nobody could say a thing to me. Sometimes I still wish I had that space to go to. Well, I do in my mind, because that’s only place it ever was.

Debbie Millman:
I’m glad you protected it.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
When you were 12 years old, your parents split up and your dad moved to Tennessee. You and the rest of the family moved to Ventura to a house you’ve described as a sixties fantasy come to life. And you said that that, with that move, someone opened up all the windows and let the air and light inside your life. For most children, young people, divorce is really quite traumatic. It seemed like that began a part of your life that actually improved.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, it did. We had been living on the top of this mountain top alone, no children around, nothing around except dry brush canyons and rattlesnakes, and it was very solitary. It was the worst part of my mom’s life and the worst part of her craziness. And I think the divorce, I remember thinking maybe now both of them can be happy. It was a relief. It’s like, somewhere I knew this was not going to work and they had destinies elsewhere separate from each other. And so moving to near the ocean, which the ocean is like a religion to me, so moving near the ocean, my dad cleans up. They both have new partners. I was then on the verge of being a teenager and was discovering so much music and poetry and books, all of those things I love so much. So yeah, it was like the light came in. It was fantastic.

Debbie Millman:
You went to high school at St. Bonaventure in Ventura and wore your Catholic uniform very short, which I love you, and a small group of classmates who were a little left of center called yourselves, the Anarchy Society. And at that point you thought you’d become a poet. What kind of poetry were you writing?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh my God, Debbie so bad. Just beyond, it should be burned in a bonfire with rituals so that nothing ever comes back from it. It was just terrible. But at one point, this is so odd, but I got a letter from this woman a few years ago and she said, “I was your babysitter when your mom went out of town and you were in your young teens.” And she said, “And you asked me, how do you put poems to music?” And I thought to myself, why in the hell would I ask a random babysitter when I had a great songwriter as a parent? But I remember I read a lot of poetry then, I wrote poetry, and then in my late teens I learned to play guitar and I started putting it together.

Debbie Millman:
At the time you also considered becoming an archaeologist or going to medical school, and I know you’ve had a lifelong interest in science and physics, but what compelled you to think about archaeology or medicine?

Rosanne Cash:
Well, I love science. I love thinking about what neurons do and the plasticity of the brain and all of that, and I love history so much, and I thought, Oh God, it would be so great to live in a kibbutz and dig up ancient artifacts. And I actually took a summer course in anthropology at the local college, and I’m still really interested in history and science. It’s source of great curiosity and actually quantum physics as well now. The poetry in theoretical physics is so beautiful, dark matter, the event horizon, mutual attraction.

Debbie Millman:
Quantum entanglement.

Rosanne Cash:
Entanglement. Oh my God, it’s so beautiful.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk to you about dreams. Over the course of your life you’ve had a number of significant dreams that you’ve written about. You also shared that Carl Jung had stated that a person might have five big dreams in their lives, and that dreams that provoke a shift in real consciousness. And I believe your first one occurred when you were 13 where you were playing cards with your mother and your grandmother in a small house. You were old in the dream and aware that your life was nearly over. Can you talk about that dream and how it impacted you and your thinking about yourself at that time?

Rosanne Cash:
It was so profound to me, an experience that it seems reductive to even call it a dream, but I was asleep and this vision came that I was old as you said, and that I was at the end of my life and I was playing cards with my mother and grandmother, and we were just mechanically putting the cards down on the table, and I realized that I had done that my whole life, just putting the cards down one after the other, and we weren’t really speaking. There was no connection, just playing the cards. And I woke up in a sweat and it frightened me so badly and I realized that you had to make a choice to be awake in your life. And that kind of inertia and lack of awareness could creep upon you without you knowing it.
And I made this vow to myself in the bed as I woke up, I said, I will never be a card player. And I’ve referred to that dream in myself, thought of it so many times over the decades, and I even started once writing a story called “The Card Players” about it. Yeah, it’s been a guiding light that dream. If Carl Jung is right and you have five big dreams, that was my first one.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk about your second one in a little bit, but how many of those five do you think you’ve had?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh, I know of two others, so maybe I’ve had three. Have you had any?

Debbie Millman:
Well, ever since I read that, I’ve been thinking about it and I had one dream when I was in fifth grade as my life was falling apart, as my parents had gotten divorced, my mother got remarried and married a criminal and a bit of a monster, and I had this dream that I was looking out my back bedroom window and saw a pool party and knew that I was invited and was worried that I was late, and I went to the pool and I jumped in and everybody was saying, don’t cross that line, which was one of the buoys that you see in a pool or in a lake, and I wanted to. I went under the line and started drowning. At that moment in my dream, I was back in my room and the walls were cracking. I felt like I was being strangled to death by the water in this whirlpool. I don’t think I’ve ever told this dream to anybody by the way.

Rosanne Cash:
Really? But it stayed with you your entire life since-

Debbie Millman:
It stayed with me my entire life and in the very, very, very first diary that I ever wrote, I wrote about it that I’d had this dream, and that’s also why I am able to remember it, I think pretty accurately. I’m not remembering a memory of it. I’m remembering what I wrote about it at the time, which was vivid, and I think I was aware in that dream of my life about to fall apart. Up until that point, it was difficult but not unbearable, and for the next four years it became unbearable, and I think that was my higher self preparing me, I think, without my younger self then knowing it.

Rosanne Cash:
I would definitely call that a big dream.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. But I don’t know that I’ve had, and I’ve really been thinking about it because it’s come up in so much of your work that I’ve read, I’ve been thinking, what are the other big dreams? I think most of my other dreams are more conscious and more aspirational than psychological.

Rosanne Cash:
And organizing your experiences. Yeah. Another big dream I had is that I dreamed about my husband before I met him.

Debbie Millman:
Really?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
That one I don’t know about. Tell me.

Rosanne Cash:
I was sitting with him at the bottom of the ocean and I felt this profound, pure love. I looked at him at the bottom of the ocean where we were sitting together, and it was this overwhelming feeling that I had never experienced before of complete connection with another human being and how pure that love was. And I could see his eyes and his hair and it was him. I woke up and I thought, I want to feel like that in my life. And then it wasn’t long after that I met him. And it hit me the second I saw him, that’s the man who was in my dream. And then I thought, my life is going to get so complicated.

Debbie Millman:
And it did. It did. I want to go to that-

Rosanne Cash:
Oh God.

Debbie Millman:
… that part, but I do want to talk a little bit more about your origin story because the day after you graduated high school, your father took you on tour with him, and that’s when you learned how to play guitar. You learned from your stepmother, June Carter Cash. You learned from her sister Helen, from Mother Mabel Carter, as well as Carl Perkins, all of whom you were on the road with your father at the time with. Did learning to play music come as easily to you as writing poetry?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, for my skillset, yes. I’m not a great guitarist, a great technical musician, but it did feel incredibly natural to learn those, particularly those Appalachian ballads, the first songs I learned to play on guitar, it just made sense to me. I could see the shape of the chord changes. So that part came naturally to me. Now, I’m not a natural musician like my husband and my son are, who can hear very sophisticated chord voicings and chord progressions, and who have really advanced facility on a lot of different instruments. I don’t have that. I’m jealous of it, but the part that I do have is very natural.

Debbie Millman:
It was at that time in your life that you discovered your passion for songwriting, that you’ve talked about remaining undiminished to this day and led you into your life as a writer and a singer and into really your family’s vocation. Did you struggle at that time with the idea of following in the footsteps of your family?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh my God, yes.

Debbie Millman:
And having to measure up.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, yeah, I didn’t want to be in the shadow. I didn’t want to invite comparisons. I didn’t want the life. I knew what the life was like. I didn’t need that much attention. I was a shy person. I thought I would write songs purely for other people, and I was deeply passionate about that and about that career path. But I wrote songs, made demos of the songs, and I was in Germany at Christmas party with my friend who worked at Ariola Records, and she played it, my tape for the head of the label, and they wanted to sign me to make an album. And I was staying with her and I couldn’t get out of bed for three days. And she finally dragged me to a doctor and she said, “What’s wrong with her?” And he said, he talks to me for a while and he said, “She’s depressed.”

I was, I was trying to make a decision, did I want to do this in my life? I knew if I made an album, I knew everything that came with it. Then you toured, you had a public life, you had to figure out how to keep your private life safe, all of that. And then I decided to do it. I decided to make the record. That’s not to say that my life as a performer has been from by default because I did choose it, but it was not an easy choice.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to do it?

Rosanne Cash:
Maybe the connection. I wanted to feel my songs connect with people. I knew there was something about my voice that was good. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in it, but I knew that the tonal quality of it was pleasing and that there may be something I could do with that. But then I spent years feeling like performing was about being judged, that you went on stage so people could pick you apart and judge you. And then I came to understand that’s not what it’s about at all. It’s about energy exchange.

Debbie Millman:
I interviewed a designer named Bob Gill, very, very famous designer, very famous in the sixties and the seventies especially. And after I interviewed him, I went and saw him speak somewhere and the audience wasn’t quite laughing at his jokes and he said, “What are you? An audience or a jury?”

Rosanne Cash:
Well, good.

Debbie Millman:
You said that you wrote your first good song in 1978. You were 20 years old and you were in, I think the same friend who sent your music to Ariola, Renata Damm’s apartment in Germany, and it was titled, “This Has Happened Before,” and you’ve said this about the song. “It was a young woman’s song, tentative and too self-referential, too navel-gazing, but not to an extreme that would make you squirm. It’s well constructed, painstaking even, and I could hear the hard work in it. I was very proud when I finished that song, and it was the first time I felt like a real songwriter.” And this is a question that I ask almost every songwriter that I’ve ever interviewed. Can you talk about what happens to you when you’re writing a song? Where does a song come from?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh, God. A song comes from a mystery. There’s a mystery about songwriting that if you could pin it down and say what it was, then it wouldn’t be songwriting anymore. It comes from some creative source that’s undefinable like all creative work, I think, and to tap into that and get the thrill of that energy of being inside it and having it inside of you, that’s the ultimate. I’m sure you know it in your own work too. It’s like you know when it’s jagged and troubling and then you know when suddenly it opens up and that you feel this rush of it being right, everything’s moving as it should. And writing a song, sometimes in the beginning I’ll have that burst of inspiration and I see the full potential of the song, even though I haven’t written it yet. Then I start working and then it’s drudgery. It’s like painstaking, as you said, finding the right line, finding the right word, the chord progression, turning that line over in your hand like Natalie Goldberg said, “Turning it over in your hand like a rock until it’s smooth.”

Then all of the doubt and self-annihilation, like, why am I doing this? This is shit. What made me think I could become a songwriter, Bob Dylan, why should I bother Bob Dylan at all? And if you can just put that aside, the internal critic long enough that you can then get home with the song, get to the end of it and complete and then edit. And there are some songs that the thrill of it all opening up has been longer than the drudgery part and others where the reverse was true.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve written how your friend in songwriting mentor, John Stewart, told you that we’re all just radios hoping to pick up each other’s signals and have stated that you’ve spent your whole life trying to clear the static. How do you do that?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh, boy. It’s a daily process, isn’t it? I know what frees me up, solitude, the ocean, going to look at visual art, talking with someone I really respect, who’s also an artist, going to a new place, nature. Yeah. There are a lot of things that clear the static.

Debbie Millman:
Your first album came about because your friend gave your songs to a record company in Germany. And I love that despite having a parent who was one of the most famous singer-songwriters in the world, you were recommended to your first record label by a friend in Munich.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
And I also read that you wanted to change your name because you didn’t want to be associated or think that your success or any success that came was because of any family favor.

Rosanne Cash:
I did think about changing my name to Rosanne Rivers, which is my paternal grandmother’s maiden name, and I just mentioned that to my dad that I was thinking about changing my name and he didn’t say anything. And then when I made my first album under my own name, he said, “I’m so glad you did that.” It would’ve hurt him. And he’s told me that, that he would’ve been hurt by that. And I see why now. I’m proud of my legacy. There’s no reason to deny it, but as a young person in her early twenties, I was just floundering. How do I carve something out for myself?

Debbie Millman:
Well, while you were making your first record, a record producer named Bernie Von Ficht had wanted you to record a song called “Lucky,” and despite his plea, you refused. He went on to give it to another artist who ended up having an enormous hit with it. And you’ve said that you wouldn’t have recorded the song even if you had known it would sell triple platinum because you knew you’d have to sing it for the rest of your life.

Rosanne Cash:
It’s so true.

Debbie Millman:
Were you always that certain of what you wanted to record?

Rosanne Cash:
Oddly-

Debbie Millman:
But where did that strength come from?

Rosanne Cash:
I don’t know, but oddly, yes. From a really young age, I had this right or wrong, this powerful sense of what song was right for me, and I betrayed myself a couple of times when someone twisted my arm, but not that often. I don’t know where it came because early on that would’ve just been pure hubris because I didn’t know anything yet except I knew that. I don’t know how I knew it. Maybe it was because of everything I listened to from early childhood on. Maybe it was just I was always a very determined, ambitious person. I don’t know.

Debbie Millman:
How were you managing the idea of becoming a singer-songwriter, performing for the public and balancing that with your distaste for fame and attention?

Rosanne Cash:
Oh, I had a lot of anxiety, so much anxiety and trying to learn how to balance it, wanting to keep my private life and working really hard to do that. Learning how to work with a band, I was a neophyte, was trying to figure it out, and I didn’t have much confidence as a performer. I was developing a lot of confidence as a songwriter, but not so much as a performer.

Debbie Millman:
Your first album was only distributed in Europe and is now a collector’s item?

Rosanne Cash:
I hope not.

Debbie Millman:
It is going for quite a lot of money on eBay. When you came back to the US, your album Seven Year Ache was a huge hit and the song itself reached number one in the country charts the week of your 25th birthday even crossed over into the pop charts where it reached number 22. Two more number one singles followed from it, “Blue Moon with Heartache,” and “My Baby Thinks He’s a Train.” Now, despite the recognition and the accolades, you said that during that entire period, you felt a constant slow burn of panic.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, I did.

Debbie Millman:
What was your family thinking at this time? What did your mother and father think about what you were doing and your stepmother? And were they helping you manage through that panic? Did you share that with them?

Rosanne Cash:
No, I didn’t share it with them. I’ve not been good about that through my life of asking for help. I wish I had actually, my dad could have helped me more. Well, I had a baby at 24, and then this big record at 25, it got to number one on my 25 birthday, and I was just terrified. I was panicked as a new mother. I was panicked that I was becoming famous, and yet Debbie, there was something so, I don’t want to say preordained because that sounds very grand, but it seemed like, Oh yeah, this was always going to happen. This is what was meant to happen. Deal with it.

Debbie Millman:
By the time you released the album Rhythm and Romance in 1985, you were sure you were never going to set foot in a recording studio again.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, I had a miserable experience making that album.

Debbie Millman:
Is that your least favorite album?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, probably because it was so hard making it, and it was right in a period in the eighties where we just overused all kinds of layered sounds, synthesizer sounds. It’s probably coming back and being trendy now. Everybody loves what’s going on in the eighties, but it was three producers. I made it in New York, LA and Nashville. I started on April 16th of one year, and it finished on April 15th of the following year. There was an executive producer I didn’t get along with, and we literally had yelling fights in the studio. It was just painful all the way around, and at the end of it, I said, “I’m never making another record.” And then I started getting notices from my record label, from the lawyers that I was in breach of contract that I owed them an album, I owed them an album. It kept coming, and I would just tear up the letters and throw them away.

Debbie Millman:
I was wondering what changed your mind.

Rosanne Cash:
Rodney Crowell changed my mind.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Your first husband, producer of many of your early albums. One thing that I read as you were beginning to record King’s Record Shop, your next album, was that you read an interview with Linda Ronstadt wherein she stated that in committing to artistic growth, you had to refine your skills to support your instincts.

Rosanne Cash:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
And you’ve said that made such a deep impression on you that you clipped the article to save it.

Rosanne Cash:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Did that impact how you were approaching King’s Record Shop?

Rosanne Cash:
It did. Yeah. I put that in my wallet. I cut it out and put it in my wallet, and I thought, anything that’s fraudulent up to this point, any way I’ve been a dilettante, any way I’ve just been posting or being cavalier about my work, it has to stop now. I kept that in the forefront, and I remember it being hard. It was like, now you know if you’re on your phone and there’s something really interesting about somebody’s talking to you and trying to get your attention and you keep pulling away and looking at the person who’s talking to you, but going back to your phone, which is an awful thing to do, by the way, that’s what it felt like when I was trying to pull myself into a deeper relationship with my own work.

Debbie Millman:
And yet King’s Record Shop had four number one singles, which was a first for a woman in the industry.

Rosanne Cash:
Yep, it was.

Debbie Millman:
Did that success come with any pressure to continue doing the same kind of work? The opposite of what Linda Ronstadt was recommending?

Rosanne Cash:
Absolutely. The guys at the label, they see that and they’re like, okay, go do that again. It was enormously successful.

Debbie Millman:
Especially if this was the contracted record.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, just go do that again. Deliver it to us. So I had a lot of leverage with them, and I was starting to write some very dark songs. It was right at the beginning of when my marriage was falling apart, but I had a lot of leverage because of the success of King’s Record Shop. So I went to the label and I said, I want to produce the next record myself, and I want a lot of money. And they said okay to both. So I got a lot of money. I went in the studio with these dark little songs, hired the band, hired a great engineer, Roger Nichols, recorded it analog, and everybody was going digital at that point, but we recorded analog, and I made this album that I thought was the truest reflection of who I was up to that point, and the label didn’t want it.

Debbie Millman:
I know, I’ve listened to it so many times in prep for this interview as well as listening to it when it first came out.

Rosanne Cash:
Interiors.

Debbie Millman:
Interiors, yes. And it’s so interesting. So many people talked about it as your divorce record, but you weren’t divorced yet, so it was this, as you would put it, postcard to the future. I see it as a departure record-

Rosanne Cash:
Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
… and a conduit to a new way of making music. That felt like almost like the necessary stop to clear everything out to then begin again.

Rosanne Cash:
You’re absolutely right. It was a turnstile. It was a-

Debbie Millman:
Turnstile, yeah.

Rosanne Cash:
… and it was a reset, and it was the culmination of pulling my face away from the phone, to use that metaphor again. It was like, okay, I’ve committed to this deeper relationship to refining my skills so I can support these instincts, as Linda said.

Debbie Millman:
Now, the album, despite the record executive’s response, the album was nominated for a Grammy.

Rosanne Cash:
It was.

Debbie Millman:
You Lost to John Prine, so basically you didn’t lose.

Rosanne Cash:
That’s so true. In fact, I would’ve been embarrassed if I had won against John Prine.

Debbie Millman:
How do you view that work now? Because at the time, you thought it was your best work to date. The record company didn’t think so. They didn’t support it, so it didn’t sell as well because it wasn’t supported, not because it wasn’t very good. Obviously it was nominated for a Grammy. How do you view that work now all these years later?

Rosanne Cash:
Well, I should say I was signed to the country division of Columbia then, and it was nominated in the folk category, so the wider industry got it. They knew it wasn’t a country record. And the country division of my label knew it wasn’t a country record, which is why they didn’t want to do anything with it. But people outside of that got it, and then they put it in the right category for the Grammys. So how do I view it now? I view it as the moment my life changed. I view it as the moment that I recommitted and some of the songs are a little navel-gazing. I wish I had sung certain things better. I wish I had arranged it. I wish I had been a more deft producer. All of those things, you can look back at your work and go, Oh, I could have done that better, but it’s an accurate reflection of the moment, except for one thing.

Debbie Millman:
What?

Rosanne Cash:
There’s one song on that record that makes me cringe, and it wasn’t my fault. Well, it was my fault because I let it on the record, but when I finished the album, I played it for Rodney who hadn’t heard it in the studio at all, and he loved it, and he said, “But it’s not finished. You need one more song. You need something that’s really up tempo. This is a really dark ballad kind of record.” I was devastated when he said that, and he says, “No, come on. Just try write this song with me.” And so we wrote this song called “Real Woman,” and I was not interested, not attached to this song, but I thought, well, maybe he knows something I don’t know.

So I just almost divorced myself from the recording of that one song. I did my part, he was going to put some guitars on his overdub. I went shopping like, okay, do it. I’ll come back and listen later. And I came back in and he played it, the overdubs for me and what he had done, and he said, “What do you think?” I said, “I think it sounds like a fucking Pepsi commercial,” but I put it on the record Debbie. That’s my fault, but I can’t listen to it now.

Debbie Millman:
If you re-release it, you can take it out.

Rosanne Cash:
I will. But I told that story, I wrote about that in my memoir, and after Rodney read my memoir, he goes, “Oh man, I really cringed when I read that chapter.”

Debbie Millman:
Oh, I thought you were very nice to him in the memoir.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, I was.

Debbie Millman:
What is it like to weather the whims of an audience, and how much does that impact how you feel about what you do?

Rosanne Cash:
There are certain ways it does impact me. The letters I get when people say, this song got me through a really hard time, Black Cadillac got me through losing someone, or Interiors was my divorce record. I listened to it through a really painful time. That means something to me. I don’t take that lightly. That’s an honor if you can help someone vicariously in that way. I got really also, this is funny, I got really discouraged a few years ago. What is the point? Why am I doing this? I’m at the point of irrelevancy and I said something on Twitter, I’m sequencing my album, but I wonder what the point is. Nobody listens to albums in sequence anymore because you stream and it random play or whatever it’s called.

I said, nobody cares about that. And I got instantly back a couple hundred tweets. I care, I care, I care. Take your time. Sequence it like you want it done. That’s the way I want to listen to it, the way the artist hears the sequence. And I was floored, and I think that there’s a core audience that I have that has stayed with me through thick and thin, through the bad records, through the good records, through the bad shows and the good shows, and they let me know they’re devoted and I’m devoted to them. Like I said, it’s energy exchange.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve talked about trying to perform or performing for the 6% of the audience who are poets.

Rosanne Cash:
Only on a bad night.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, only on a bad night, because I was like, that seems like a really low percentage of the people that would be coming to see Rosanne Cash. I would imagine that they’re all poets at heart.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, I took that line from my friend and mentor, John Stewart, who’s sadly no longer with us, but he said, because I called him up after I had a bad show, and I was lying in bed after the show just filled with anxiety like, Oh, God, what I did, dah, dah, dah. And I called him up next day and just vented, just terrible. And he said, “So you had a bad gig. What do you want me to do? Realign the planets? Sing to the 6% who are poets.” And that’s on a bad night when people are on their phones and aren’t listening. But the other times I can feel it when 94% are connecting with me.

Debbie Millman:
I think this is around the time you had another of your significant dreams about an old man named Art.

Rosanne Cash:
That was around the time of King’s Record Shop when we were talking about deepening the relationship. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
And I believe that… Well, can you tell the dream? I think it would be better if you should.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah. I dreamed that I was at a party, and at this time I should say I had cut out Linda Ronstadt’s interview and put it in my purse. So sometime after that, I dreamed I was at a party and Linda was sitting talking to a man named Art, a little old man, and they were deep in conversation and they were sitting on a bench, and I went up and I sat next to Linda and I tried to join the conversation and Art looked at me very coldly, and he said, “We don’t respect dilettantes,” and he turned away and continued his conversation with Linda. Oh my God. I woke up just devastated. I knew what it meant.

Debbie Millman:
I would love for you to tell me what it meant.

Rosanne Cash:
That I was, as I said before, that there was moments of just coasting, of just casually touching the work instead of really going deep into it, being distracted and just showing up for the bare minimum or this is all an inside game, you realize. I don’t know that other people would see that or know that, but as an inside game, it was real. And the larger idea of art was telling me that I better start showing up or I was cut out of the party, out of the conversation.

Debbie Millman:
Well, it was a good dream to have, as difficult as it was, it ended up propelling you to move to where you really wanted to live, which was Manhattan. You moved to Morton Street in Greenwich Village, one of the greatest streets on the planet, just a few steps from Matt Umanov Guitars. It’s really interesting, your moth talk. You talked about how New York at that time was kicking your ass until the real you showed up. And I love that New York does that. New York kicks your ass until you really show up.

Rosanne Cash:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
How did it do that for you? How was it doing it for you at that time?

Rosanne Cash:
Well, it was complicated by the fact that I was going through a divorce when I first moved to New York in 1991, I was confused. I was in love with John Leventhal, but we weren’t together. I was writing songs that were just gut-wrenching from the depths, and I didn’t know what to do with them, and I didn’t have good friends in the city yet, although I had been to the city many times that I knew people, I didn’t have a deep network that could support me.

All of the little things like the construction guys would yell at you, and the homeless guy who threw a rock at my head and getting lost, and part of the story I told in the moths about getting on the subway, it was when we used tokens on the subways, not a metro card. Getting on the subway with a token in my pocket and realizing that I had left my wallet at home and that it was my last token, and getting out of the subway into a downpour, like a monsoon and having no money to buy an umbrella or get back on the subway or get a taxi and just standing there going, what-

Debbie Millman:
Now what?

Rosanne Cash:
Now what? So yeah, it kicks your ass.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, but you have to tell the best part that you get a phone call.

Rosanne Cash:
Okay. The best part. I wasn’t going to tell that. So I had my five pound nineties phone with me. You remember those old phones?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Oh yeah.

Rosanne Cash:
And at that moment, the phone rings and I stepped under an awning and answered the phone, and I miserably said Hello, and his voice said, “Rosanne, this is Al Gore.” And I said, “Mr. Vice President, so nice to hear from you.” And he said, “I’m over at the Regency,” or wherever he was. He said, “Can you come over? I want to talk to you about this new environmental initiative I’m doing, and I’d want a concert attached to it, and I wanted to talk to you about that,” because I had done a couple of things like that for him before. And I thought really quickly, and I thought, I can’t walk there. I’ll be a drowned rat by the time I get there. I have no money to get over there. So I made some excuse to not go meet the vice president to help save the planet.

Debbie Millman:
I am glad that you ultimately did meet and continue to work together.

Rosanne Cash:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
But there’s something so wonderfully human about that story. It allows me to forgive myself for so many things.

Rosanne Cash:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
I just need you to know that.

Rosanne Cash:
I’m so glad. I suffered for you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Rosanne, most of your albums since the album after Interiors, which was The Wheel, Rules of Travel, the multi Grammy Award-winning The River and The Thread feature you writing almost all or co-writing with your husband, as you’ve mentioned, the Grammy Award-winning musician and producer, John Leventhal. I’m wondering how do you feel your writing has evolved since Kings [Record Shop]?

Rosanne Cash:
Well, I think that I don’t overuse nature metaphors like I used to. I think that I am not as navel-gazing, that I’ve turned outward, that I’m not as subsumed in the intricacies of romance all the time, although that’s still very interesting to me. But that there are wider subject matters out in the world that I’m interested in writing about as well, and that I’m more willing to take on difficult topics and not care how they’re received.

Debbie Millman:
In many ways, I see your work evolving very similarly, the way Joni Mitchell’s work has evolved, where the writing is so much more sophisticated. There are poems that could stand on their own, there are poems set to music, and they tackle deep human experiences, sometimes including love, but certainly not entirely.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, I am incredibly honored to be compared to Joni in any way, I revere her. But yeah, the song that comes to mind right now is a song I wrote two years ago called “The Killing Fields.”

Debbie Millman:
I love that song. That song is magnificent.

Rosanne Cash:
Thank you. And it’s not on any album, but I wrote it during the Black Lives Matter protests about lynchings in Arkansas.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Rosanne Cash:
I knew that’s not going to be on Top 40 radio, but it was essential that I write it, and I’m incredibly proud of that song. And I saw how it should be laid out before I wrote it, and I saw that it should be in the tradition of a narrative ballad, so it was like building the structure and foundation of a house before I could fill in the verses.

Debbie Millman:
After the success of The River and The Thread, you won, I think three Grammys for that album. Folks were telling you that you had to make another record just like it. Hadn’t they learned already that wasn’t the path you were going to take? But how hard is it to move away from what you know is successful?

Rosanne Cash:
It’s not hard for me. I still have that same youthful hubris of going, but I know what’s right for me. After The River and The Thread, which I love that record, I’m proud of that record, but after that, there was so much happening. It was the Me Too movement. It was Donald Trump getting elected. I’m the mother of five children. It was tearing me apart, and my daughter said to me after Trump got elected, she said, “I feel like I don’t matter,” and that just killed me. It just struck me at the core. And all of this swirling around, I thought, I have to write. I want to make a record that’s addressing these things, that’s about feminine experience, capital F, the betrayals, the longing, love, insecurity, rage, loss, all of it. And so that’s what I set out to do.

Debbie Millman:
Rosanne, in addition to weathering the ups and downs of the music industry, you’ve also had to weather some difficult health issues. You lost your voice for two and a half years due to polyps. Several years ago you had brain surgery. The technical term for the procedure you had was, I’m going to try to do this, a decompression craniectomy and laminectomy for Chiari one syringomyelia.

Rosanne Cash:
Chiari one.

Debbie Millman:
Was I even close?

Rosanne Cash:
Pretty close.

Debbie Millman:
That resulted in you getting 19 staples-

Rosanne Cash:
In the back of my head.

Debbie Millman:
… the back of your head.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah. That was fun.

Debbie Millman:
So two and a half years of polyps and then at least a year’s recovery from your brain surgery, how were you able to manage a life without music during those times or a life with different kinds of music?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, a life without singing, really, that was an eye-opener. When I had the polyps at first, I thought, well, it’s not going to make that much difference to me, because I think of myself as a writer first and a songwriter and losing my voice, it’s not going to matter. I was devastated. I had no idea how central to my self-image my voice was. So losing it. That was painful and hard. But I did develop this cottage industry of writing prose, and I kept getting commissions to write essays for different magazines. So that was-

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, New York Times was a wonderful piece.

Rosanne Cash:
Thank you. Everything from Martha Stewart Living to the Times, Rolling Stones. So it was a little doorway that has panned out very well for me. And the brain surgery, it took a couple years to recover from that. That was really hard. And I’m recovering from knee replacement surgery right now, which is really difficult. But at bottom, I’m an optimist and I think of myself as a healthy person, and I don’t like leading with disease and injury. I don’t like that to be part of my-

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I was actually even struggling to decide whether or not to include it, but I felt like it showed so much about your resilience and your stamina, and then when I saw that you said that at a various forms of personal catastrophe comes art if you’re lucky. I thought, okay, that’s an optimistic way of looking at these really hard things.

Rosanne Cash:
Well, yeah, I think being an optimist is the number one responsibility in parenthood because you can’t steal a child’s future by being pessimistic. You can be pessimistic about your own life, but man, keep it to yourself. Don’t pass it on to your kids, because they have everything ahead of them. And luckily, I’m naturally very optimistic, and I think my kids they take that on.

Debbie Millman:
Rosanne, the last thing I want to talk with you about is the brand new re-release of your album, The Wheel. It has been remastered as an expanded edition to celebrate the album’s 30th anniversary. Congratulations on that.

Rosanne Cash:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
What was it like revisiting these recordings?

Rosanne Cash:
I should first say that I got the master back from Sony after 30 years. It was in my contract.

Debbie Millman:
I was actually going to ask you that.

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, it was in your contract. I was going to ask you if you had to buy them back.

Rosanne Cash:
No, it was in my contract. There was a 30 year reversion, so I got it back, and I didn’t expect to feel the way I felt when I got it back. I didn’t expect that ownership of my master recording after all these years would be an almost spiritual experience. There’s just something about it. It’s mine. So John and I decided to form a record label to remaster it and re-release it. It was never released on vinyl the first time because in ’93 you weren’t pressing vinyl.

Debbie Millman:
CDs. Yeah.

Rosanne Cash:
So it’s on vinyl the first time. We’re doing a double vinyl thing where the other record is a live recording I did in 1993, and I rewrote new liner notes for it. It’s a beautiful package and everything. To revisit it, I don’t like looking back generally, I really don’t, because I go back with two critical, an ear, go, I should have sung that better. Oh, I sound like such a baby. Why didn’t I change that line? But owning it gave me this window to looking at it differently, which is that it was an incredibly important time in my life. It was the first record that John and I made together. First songs we wrote together. We developed a partnership in both music and in life that has lasted all these 30 years. We fell in love while making that record, and it started a whole legacy for me. So I love the record for what it is. It’s an accurate reflection of that time, and I feel really proud about putting it out again 30 years later.

Debbie Millman:
RumbleStrip is the name of your record company. Are you going to re-release any other of your acquired masters?

Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, they’ll start falling like dominoes. I’m going to start getting a lot of them back, because some were 30, some were 35 years. And yeah, I am going to re-master and release some of the old ones. I don’t know which ones yet.

Debbie Millman:
Rosanne, I want to end the show today with another short excerpt from your memoir. You state, “I have been lucky. I have also been driven by a deep love and obsession with language, poetry and melody. I had first wanted to be a writer in a quiet room, setting depth charges of emotion in the outside world where my readers would know me only by my language. Then I decided I wanted to be a songwriter, writing not for myself, but for other voices who would be the vehicles for the songs I created. Then despite myself, I began performing my own songs, which rattled me to the core. It took me a long time to grow into an ambition for what I had already committed myself to doing, but I knew I could be good at it if I put my mind to it. So I put my mind to it.” Rosanne Cash, thank you for putting your mind to it. Thank you for making so much art and music and writing that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Rosanne Cash:
Thank you, Debbie. This was a wonderful experience to speak with you. Thank you so much.

Debbie Millman:
Rosanne Cash’s latest album is the 30th anniversary re-release and remastering of her extraordinary album, The Wheel. You can read more about her body of work and her new record label at Rosannecash.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Debbie Millman:

Joan Wasser began as a violinist. A classically trained violinist. But in her 20s, she came to New York and started playing as a session musician in many musical genres. She also learned guitar and started singing in various bands. By 2002 she took on the performing moniker, Joan As Police Woman. Ever since she’s been touring, making albums and collaborating with musicians and performers, including Rufus Wainwright, Lori Anderson, Lou Reed, and many more. She’s here to talk about her most recent album and the road she’s taken to get here. Joan Wasser, welcome to Design Matters.

Joan Wasser:

Hello. So good to be here.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.

Joan Wasser:

Me too.

Debbie Millman:

Joan, I understand you spent your childhood convinced you were going to follow the cursed footsteps of your namesake, Joan of Arc, and die by fire. Why did you think that?

Joan Wasser:

Probably just because I’m dramatic. I mean, there were not very many other people my age named Joan. So I figured if I had that name, there was a reason and it might mean that I’d make it … I mean, it was probably some sort of romantic notion of not making it into my 20s. Of course, I would just die by 19 or whatever.

Debbie Millman:

Well, she died when she was 17.

Joan Wasser:

Oh, 17.

Debbie Millman:

So when you were 17, did you stop worrying?

Joan Wasser:

I did. I did. I was a little bit like, darn. It would’ve been such a good way to go out.

Debbie Millman:

Oh my God. No it wouldn’t. Then you wouldn’t have done what you’re doing. My God. No, no, no. I don’t like that. I don’t like that [inaudible 00:01:49].

Joan Wasser:

Okay. It didn’t happen so.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. You were born in Maine to an unmarried teenage girl who hid her pregnancy from her family until she was in her eighth month. Then were put up for adoption when you were three weeks old. The couple that adopted you, your parents, first met in a community chorus when they were 31 and 35. Is it true that they were each other’s one and only first love?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. It’s extraordinary.

Debbie Millman:

So they met in a choir, but had never been previously in love by the time they were in their 30s. So they were just waiting for each other.

Joan Wasser:

It seemed so. Yeah. I mean, my father was very, very introverted. My mom was too in a very different way. She was a Latin and French teacher. She was … What’s the word? Her parents … She feels like the ultimate Puritan. Actually Puritan. Non-religious but very moral. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

They adopted your brother Daniel a bit over a year later and they explained to you that you were both adopted before you even understood what it meant so that you wouldn’t feel like you were weird or different. And you’ve said that growing up in a family where there are no blood ties creates a certain way of experiencing the world. And I’m wondering if you can share in what way.

Joan Wasser:

It really solidified the idea that family is who you are with. And family are the people that take care of you and that you take care of and that you share love with. I don’t think anyone realizes how much stress there is on the idea of being related to the rest of your family while growing up. Oh, you look so much like your mom. You get this from your father, la, la. And my brother and I not only didn’t look like each other, neither of us looked like our parents. People would try to tell Dan and I that we weren’t each other’s sibling. And I just came out pretty gregarious and social. My brother is the opposite. So I would just be saying, “No, that’s my brother. End of story.” So growing up in that way, definitely gave me the feeling that it really … The ultimate chosen family. They chose to pick us up from the adoption agency. They couldn’t have kids. They told the agency, “We’ll take your first two.”

Debbie Millman:

And they were uninterested in whatever race or gender. They were completely open to whoever the children that were brought there would be.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. That was very much their idea about what life was. Both of them very unique in my opinion, in that way. I think a lot of people feel like they’d like to be that way, but they really were that way. I mean, my mom joked that she was surprised that they got a white girl.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

It’s so interesting the way we sort of construct the ties. I remember growing up and for whatever reason, I’m almost visually a clone of my mother.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

And I show people pictures of me growing up next to my mother and they think that my mother is me. Like, “Wow. Oh my God, you look exactly like your mother.” And when I was a little girl, I resented that.

Joan Wasser:

Sure.

Debbie Millman:

I didn’t want to look like her because I wanted to be my own person. And I remember having a tantrum once in my grandmother’s house. My grandmother had one of those typical family photo walls. And she had a picture of my mother as a little girl at the age I was then and a slightly less recent picture of me. And I insisted that the picture of my mother was me. And they were like, “No, that’s your mother.” And I’m like, “No, that’s me.” Because I didn’t want to look like her. And it’s so interesting how we construct our identities and our needs to be witness to our origins somehow. I don’t know if I’m making any sense but I think there’s something kind of fascinating about who we want to and don’t want to look like and why.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah, it’s true. I remember my mother being very annoyed at other mothers in the supermarket commenting, “Oh, you got such a cute Chinese girl.” I looked very Asian when I was young because my eyes sort of do that thing that sometimes happens with Asian-

Debbie Millman:

Well they’re just very almond shaped.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. And I mean, she was just so annoyed that there was any comments at all. It was just like-

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I mean, whose business is it?

Joan Wasser:

Exactly.

Debbie Millman:

You ultimately did meet your birth parents when you were older and said that they were both incredible people with families of their own. You became good friends. You found out that your biological mother also played music and your biological father had been an electric bass player. He dropped out of school to tour locally with his band. What was that like for you to see that continuation of genetics?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. So to start with, my mother and I did not share a lot of personality traits. It was at times very difficult growing up for both of us to reconcile those differences. I was sort of the perfect child until 11 when I began to exert behavior that she felt was inappropriate. It was all about just school. It was just only school. And I was very social. So when I met my mom first when I was 20, it was … Well, first of all, when I found her she sent a letter actually to my parents’ house. And my mom said, “You sent a letter here?” I was like, “What are you talking about?” And it was from my biological mom, Cindy. We have the same handwriting. Crazy stuff like that that you don’t know is necessarily genetic. And we also do all the same things with our … Gestural stuff is the same.

            So you don’t realize that that’s just passed through your DNA. But I am a product of my biological parents. You can see it in both of them. I have traits from both of them. And I am very grateful that I got to grow up not seeing them. I mean, I had no choice. But it was really fun then being an adult and finding out who I was in a certain way through them. Because I always just had to create a composite of who I was. Okay, these things.

            I don’t think I ever thought, oh, my mother’s going to have these things of mine or whatever because who knows. Maybe she would’ve been someone even less like the mom I grew up with. So to find out that actually they were very similar to me in personality and body type, walking, all the just crazy things. And yes, they both played music. My biological mom would not have played music if she had the choice. Her mom made all of her, she had four older sisters, play either the piano or the violin. So she said … I don’t care … She was a visual artist. My biological father on the other hand did play electric bass and dropped out of school for a while to tour with … I think he was 13 when he dropped out of school. This was in rural Maine so it was … Yeah. Different vibe.

Debbie Millman:

You grew up in Norwalk, Connecticut. And while your parents really loved music and were in the choir, they didn’t believe in pushing you to do anything if you didn’t want to do it. Nevertheless, you took a liking to the violin when you were in the third grade and rented one from your school for $10 a year. Why the violin?

Joan Wasser:

Well, this is public school in the ’70s so that’s what was provided for. If you didn’t have money, anyone could rent an instrument for $10 a year. So there’s no reason why you wouldn’t play. They came to the auditorium and did a presentation of here’s what the violin sounds like and the viola and I was like, “I want the most portable one.”

Debbie Millman:

The one you can carry around.

Joan Wasser:

Pretty much that’s what it was. Yeah. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Your family also had an upright piano and your parents would play and sing old American songs. And I believe you still have that piano.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. In my house.

Debbie Millman:

In your home and have written almost everything you’ve ever written on that piano.

Joan Wasser:

That’s right.

Debbie Millman:

I believe you started taking piano lessons at six, even before taking up the violin. You also now play the guitar and the bass. Do you prefer one instrument over another?

Joan Wasser:

Well, first of all, the piano lessons were about maybe two or three piano lessons. I was not feeling the piano so I didn’t really take piano lessons.

Debbie Millman:

Okay.

Joan Wasser:

What’s really fun for me is that because I studied in school the violin and really know my way around that instrument, learning other instruments that I don’t know my way around, it makes writing on them really fun because I’m not set up knowing, oh, this is what’s supposed to come next. There’s no previous … I took no lessons of those instruments so it’s really like I’m just traipsing around the mountain range, looking for the most beautiful vantage point or flowers or whatever on every instrument. That’s what it feels like.

Debbie Millman:

That’s sort of how Joni Mitchell learned how to play the guitar, which is why she has those crazy unusual tunings. By the time you were 13 years old, I believe that Mahler’s 2nd Resurrection Symphony was one of your favorite things to play. Really?

Joan Wasser:

Well, this is what happened. There was an all state orchestra where they pull-

Debbie Millman:

I know. I know you were in all state. I have to talk to you about that. I was in all state chorus.

Joan Wasser:

Oh, of course you were. Where they pull from the state of the so-called best musicians. So the conductor, he decided that he was going to teach us that first movement of Mahler Two. And it was the greatest choice because that music is perfect for adolescents, for just raging hormones and high drama is what it is.

Debbie Millman:

I was thinking it was very apocalypse now.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it starts with those cellos. Yeah, it’s ridiculous. I love it. But he really empowered us to believe that we could play this very advanced music. And we’re between 13 and 17. We had all played a certain amount of music, but in general it was pretty light. And all of a sudden he’s saying we can make this thing happen together. That idea of all of us working really hard together. He taught us to breathe together. Paying attention to each other more than paying attention to even him.

            It was the greatest lesson and experience of my life really up until then. I had been so moved by so much music on the radio and I would buy so much vinyl at the Goodwill. 25 cents a pop. And had heard all this music and stuff. But to be in the auditorium creating this with these other people and this guy with this crazy Beethoven-ish hair saying you have what this piece needs to make it really sing and really come alive. And we felt that coming alive together as a group. I talk about this being the moment I felt I knew what people were talking about when they said God. 

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, I love that. I love that. That sort of bigger than yourself, bigger than the universe feeling. You said that your conductor empowered the orchestra to take music seriously in a way that you didn’t think any of you had ever considered. How did he do that?

Joan Wasser:

Well, he first of all told us that we all had to make a pact with each other to be dedicated to creating this together. So if one person was distracted by … I don’t know.

Debbie Millman:

Their iPhone.

Joan Wasser:

Not then.

Debbie Millman:

No. I know. I’m teasing.

Joan Wasser:

I know. I don’t even know what we are distracted by then because it seems like there’s nothing more distracting than what we have now.

Debbie Millman:

Hormones.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. Just distracted by anything else. Passing notes. Yeah, anything. That the music would lose its power. So it was like we must trust. There was a trust that he told us we needed to have amongst people that didn’t know each other, which is really important to me in general. But so much the breathing before you play. Everyone around you. If all the violins enter at the same time, then you hit it together. And that is such a profound experience. I had never breathed with anyone else. Yoga was not popular then. There was no breathing techniques. None of that was happening. So to have someone tell me that this would work if I breathed with the person next to me was really huge. I mean, that’s what we’ve got the most basic stuff. It happens without our permission, but we have control over that. And that we could decide to take ourselves seriously.

Debbie Millman:

That’s amazing to be given that permission to take this artistic pursuit more seriously than you’d ever considered before.

Joan Wasser:

That’s right. It was.

Debbie Millman:

You went to Boston University College of Fine Arts at 18 and studied music under Yuri Mazurkevich and you also played with the Boston University Symphony Orchestra. But I understand you also studied anthropology, which you liked very much. Was that something that you ever seriously considered doing? Was it a safety backup? Did you at that point feel that you wanted to pursue music professionally?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. I chose that school because I could take anthropology as a minor or whatever. I never considered doing anything besides music. I just loved anthropology. So I wanted to be at a place where I could also study that. Also my teacher, he studied with David Oistrakh, a major solo violinist. And I wanted to study with one of his students because I felt like that was what I lacked in my musicality. The sort of Russian tradition. Incredibly graceful. And I did not feel graceful. I knew I had passion. I knew I had conviction, but I wanted to learn what that was. The gracefulness. It’s funny even saying that I was thinking that way then but I really wanted to study with him because of that. And he was really … Yeah. He was a really special teacher. He really helped me a lot.

Debbie Millman:

By the time you were 20, you joined The Dambuilders. But as their electric violinist, the music you were making was decidedly non-classical. It was punk rock. Talk about that trajectory or that migration from classical violinist to punk violinist.

Joan Wasser:

So through high school, I had a blonde Mohawk. I was very … I loved music so much. It was my life. I went to so many shows, small and big. I lived near New York City so I would take the train in and see Siouxsie and The Banshees and Echo & the Bunnymen and The Peers before they were The Peers that are now. I knew that the classical music world, I would find a couple of people that were like minded. And a lot of them were not so like minded. It didn’t mean that I wouldn’t get along with him. But I remember at orientation looking around and thinking, “Oh boy, where’s my person here?” And then I saw her from across the room. She had a babushka on and red lipstick and I was like, “There’s my person.”

            I went over to her and I said, “What’s up?” She said, “My name’s Mary.” She was from DC. We’re really good friends still.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Joan Wasser:

She was there to study classical violin. And she had been playing in bands for a long time because she was a guitar player. So really quickly she said, “Let’s play together.” She was living in a terrible dorm so I got her over in my dorm. And then she was like, “Let’s make music.” I had really very rarely not played off a page. As a classical musician you’re taught to read music and play what’s on the page. And yes, you can bring yourself into that. But jazz musicians are taught to improvise. Classical musicians are not. Which is crazy. But whatever, this is how the education’s been or the separateness of genre, which is, thank god, becoming antiquated, which is really fun for me personally.

            So I had jammed along with Hendrix and The Cocteau Twins. That was it.

Debbie Millman:

That’s pretty amazing though.

Joan Wasser:

Well, it was the music that felt … I mean The Cocteau Twins you can imagine, right?

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Joan Wasser:

It’s so ambient, spacey. Yeah. Hendrix I just loved so much and I felt like I could … I just wanted to learn his solo. So those were the two ends. But she empowered me to play what I heard, which was so scary. It’s so funny to think about now, because this is all I do now when I’m writing. When I’m writing. But again, it’s like learning to trust myself in a way that I had never imagined I’d have to. Oh, Joan just read the music and you’ll be fine. And then all of a sudden you take that music away and you’re left with who am I?

Debbie Millman:

What do I want to express?

Joan Wasser:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

How do I want to express it? Interesting that you were so attracted to Mahler given how dramatic it is. Despite it being classical. It’s sort of a … I think you had referred to it as the Led Zeppelin of its time.

Joan Wasser:

Absolutely. I do think of it like that. Yeah. Yeah. So we played together, but she was my in in terms of playing non classical music. Then when I got going with that, I was living in Boston so there was all these opportunities. Berkeley School of Music needed violin players to learn to record them. The recording engineers that were … This reggae band needs some strings laid down on this one track. That was the time when there were just bulletin boards up at music schools like this needed for this. I’ll trade you for this. Whatever. So I just started taking advantage of the place that I was living in, which was just full of students and full of music students of all different kinds. So that was really fun. That was my first year of being at school. I just started taking advantage of the fact that I could do all these different kinds of music. And I was pretty fearless about it once I caught the wave or something. It’s just like, oh, whatever. If I don’t know how to do this, I’ll figure it out or I’ll be crappy and that’s fine.

Debbie Millman:

One thing I wanted to ask you about, you mentioned your white mohawk. And I remember reading in my research that your mother didn’t mind you having a white mohawk. She was worried that people would think less of you or not take you as seriously as a musician with the white mohawk. Is that true?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. She was really funny because my person really sent her into conflict in herself in so many ways. I really just … Ugh. Really challenged her. I didn’t mean it, but it’s what happened. So the idea was any way you look is okay. That’s what she wanted to think. That’s what she felt was right. But on the other side, she worried that I would be judged by others. To me, that meant mom, you’re judging people. Actually it’s you. I also understand. She wanted me to have all the opportunities that she thought I could have if people saw who I was.

Debbie Millman:

Right. But they were seeing who you were, just not who she thought you were.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. Some people were and absolutely some people were not. Some people did not want someone with blonde, short, crazy hair, very obviously placed in the orchestra. So some people did. I always wore pants and some conductors loved that and some conductors thought that was really just inappropriate. So I mean, I attracted the people that liked difference, but my mom was really challenged by it.

Debbie Millman:

You started touring with The Dambuilders and even left school for a bit to go on the road. You played at Lollapalooza and the band got signed to Elektra in 1994 by Sylvia Rhone, the great industry powerhouse. What was that time like for you then?

Joan Wasser:

So the guitar player in the band, Eric Masunaga, he owned this amazing … I’m going to get silly technical. He owned a two inch 16 track old studer machine. So I was recording early on on this old beautiful machine that they used to record the most amazing records until then. So this was before Pro Tools, Logic, any of that. We started just doing a lot of recording and there were all these singles only labels. It was so DIY. And then we got signed. A lot of arty bands got signed in the ’90s because the music industry was flush. There was all this money just getting put into supporting music that wasn’t necessarily obvious. And what was cool is we got to take advantage of that. We made a number of records on an actual major label budget. Kept a little bit of money on the side to live off of while we were on tour. Had tour support. I mean, it’s unheard of now. All of this. Unless you’re-

Debbie Millman:

Beyonce.

Joan Wasser:

I don’t even know who it is. Beyonce. Unless you’re Beyonce, you don’t get that anymore. It was really fun.

Debbie Millman:

You said this about the experience. “Just being around men all the time. I had such a tough guy problem.” And the band even had as a single from 1994 with the same title and you stated, “The route I took was I can drink you under the table, I can carry that bass cabinet by myself. No, I’m not someone’s girlfriend in the band. Thank you and fuck off.”

Joan Wasser:

That’s absolutely right.

Debbie Millman:

Did you encounter a lot of shock from people being in such a sort of all boys except you punk band?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. I mean, it was mostly men doing everything and it was really boring. That part of it that every time I entered a club, most likely I was going to get confused as a girlfriend. Yeah, I did sort of, I can out male you. Which is the only way I knew how to react. Also I was very angry anyway. It’s like, I didn’t have to push that. I was definitely angrier than all the boys in the band. So it’s not like that was a stretch at all.

Debbie Millman:

Joan, in 1994, the musician, Jeff Buckley shared a bill with The Dambuilders. And this was about a month before his debut album, Grace, came out. The two of you fell in love. Was it love at first sight?

Joan Wasser:

It’s so silly, but it was really mutual what are you? I don’t even know what love at first sight means because definitely it was very romantic. Later that night after that show, we all went to a late night eatery place. And this is in Iowa City and there’s a lot of jockey guys around. And I had this crazy humongous hair. Big black hair with a big white streak in the front. Very cartoon character. Very ’90s. And these guys were making fun of me, which whatever. I was so used to that. And Jeff, who was a very slight person, he was little, he went right up to them and said, “You wouldn’t know a woman if she smacked you in the face.” And I was like, “Okay, I love you.” And that’s what I was thinking. But of course I was also annoyed that this person thought that they had to defend me. I was like, I can defend myself.

Debbie Millman:

Interesting. Interesting.

Joan Wasser:

Now, I would’ve been like … I don’t care about that. But then I literally was like, I will crush you if you fuck with me.

Debbie Millman:

 Yeah. Absolutely. I’m still like that.

Joan Wasser:

Yes. It was kind of scary.

Debbie Millman:

When did you realize that you were going to be a couple?

Joan Wasser:

I mean, I think we both thought it that night. Again, then it’s payphones.

Debbie Millman:

Right. Of course.

Joan Wasser:

Payphones.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. There weren’t even faxes at that time.

Joan Wasser:

No. Yeah. And we are both touring so we didn’t know where each other were on the … I mean, it was … But yeah.

Debbie Millman:

It also sounds terribly romantic.

Joan Wasser:

It was terribly romantic. Yeah. We had both been told about each other before that night.

Debbie Millman:

So you were sort of waiting for each other too?

Joan Wasser:

Well, my friend said, “Joan, I met this guy named Jeff Buckley.” And I was like, “Hold on. That’s a fake name.” And he was like, “Actually I don’t think it is. I think it’s actually his given name.” And I was like, “I don’t believe it.” “Well, you guys are supposed to be together.” And I was like, a total eyeball roll. And I was like, “Okay. Right.” And then I saw his name on the tour book that we carried around and I was like, “Is that that guy that Nathan told me about?” I was like, “Nah.” And then it was.

Debbie Millman:

What did you think of his music when you first heard it?

Joan Wasser:

So I mean, I heard it for the first time then, because nothing was released or if it was, I had never heard it. Maybe an EP was released, but it was … Actually, he gave … Oh, I forgot that. He gave me the EP that night. I’m not even sure that was released yet.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Joan Wasser:

Anyway.

Debbie Millman:

He wanted to impress you.

Joan Wasser:

Oh yes. Oh. He stared at me the entire time he did a show.

Debbie Millman:

Well, that’s not surprising Joan. I’m staring at you the entire time now.

Joan Wasser:

Wait, but I’m staring at you too. It was very much … We hit it off. And his music … I mean, I was both unbelievably impressed. He was an extraordinary guitar player. I don’t know if … I mean, all he did was practice guitar his whole life. People know him as a heartthrob. He was an absolute nerd in high school. He was not Jeff Buckley in high school. He was practicing. I was really impressed and then I was also just like, man, just a crooner. The voice. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

You were there as Grace was launched and now is considered one of the greatest albums of all time. What do you think of that now, looking back on the release of the music then, how it’s become so mythologized?

Joan Wasser:

Well, it was not a success then. Of course people knew about it and people loved it and it got a lot of great reviews and some not. It was very different than anything else coming out. A refined voice and a very subtle string arrangement or something. That is not what people were going for at that time. So he was really out of style in a certain way. Also, he was so young. He was young in age, but he was very, very young to be a person that was … Someone that was just practicing in his room and with his bands in LA and stuff. And then all of a sudden his label really pushed him as this is an incredible talent and also look at how beautiful he is. He was horrified by that. He was horrified. So I remember when People Magazine chose him as part of their 50 most … Or whatever.

Debbie Millman:

50 most beautiful people in the world.

Joan Wasser:

I’ve never seen him more just appalled. We went around to every newsstand within a five block radius of his apartment. He lived in the east village. And he bought every single one so that no one would see it.

Debbie Millman:

Did you write and play music together?

Joan Wasser:

We did a lot in his apartment.

Debbie Millman:

After three years together, you were engaged. On May 29th, 1997 Jeff was in Memphis recording his follow up to Grace and he went for a spontaneous swim in the Mississippi River. He got caught in the wake of a tugboat and accidentally drowned. How did you manage?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah, I didn’t really.

Debbie Millman:

I’m sorry if this is difficult and you don’t want to talk about it.

Joan Wasser:

No. It’s okay. It’s all right. I’m thinking about it all the time anyway. And the thing is the 25 year anniversary of this happening is coming up in a couple of days. So how did I manage? Yeah, it’s a good question because I wasn’t super close with my parents at that point. He was my best friend. He was not only my boyfriend, et cetera, but he was my best friend. So I lost the person that I would go to if something like this happened. He was an incredibly private person so I had learned and I really liked that we had an incredibly private life. Especially around him getting more and more attention. We became more and more just private, which was great. But I was lost. I mean, this event so radically changed the trajectory of my life and threw me into … It just feels like it just threw me into a volcano and it’s like figure it out. I mean, I can say 25 years later that I … I mean I’ll never stop figuring it out, but it was really touch and go at times and I have successfully stayed alive. Which feels literally like wow.

Debbie Millman:

Now that’s a gift for all of us Joan. It is. I mean, grief is such a complicated and terrifying experience to carry with you because it takes a long time to metabolize, if at all. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to lose a lover. Somebody who was embedded in your blood in that way. How do you integrate that grief into life? Is it something that you can think about without pain ever?

Joan Wasser:

Sometimes. Sometimes yeah. I remember at the time … I don’t remember who it was, but an adult. I didn’t feel like an adult. I was 26. I felt like a kid.

Debbie Millman:

You weren’t an adult.

Joan Wasser:

No. My cerebral cortex was just-

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. I think I was in ameba until I was about 30.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. But I remember a caring adult saying, “You will never get over this.” And it was so helpful because there was no way I thought that I would get over it. And other people were like, “Oh, he’ll be with you inside you forever.” All these things.

Debbie Millman:

Don’t you want to stab those people?

Joan Wasser:

Well, they’re doing the best they can.

Debbie Millman:

They are. You’re being more generous than I am.

Joan Wasser:

Well, no, but nobody knows. We’re not taught how to deal with it. So I mean, that could have helped someone else. It didn’t help me because it didn’t ring true. So when this person said, “It will change, but you’ll never ever get rid of it. You’ll never get over it. You’ll never not feel the grief otherwise.”, that was such a gift because I felt like someone was being honest with me and I needed that so bad then. And I did drugs that helped me get through that time. Drugs saved my life. They of course become a problem. But at that moment I wouldn’t have survived. At one point, without any drugs, I remember becoming coherent of the fact that I was in the middle of an intersection and I didn’t know how I got there. When you have that amount of grief, your body takes over and says, “You can’t handle this. You actually can’t handle it. Do what you have to do to make it through.” And that could mean your life ends.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I had a terrible, terrible … I was left by my spouse in 1998, very unexpectedly. 24 hours. I always described it as an earthquake. Just an earthquake came into my life and then everything was crushed. And I remember weeping to my therapist at the time, “How long is it going to take for me to get over this?” Because I couldn’t comprehend the level of grief that I was feeling. And she said it would be about two years before I could sort of manage. And I was so upset and could not comprehend what that meant for my life. P.S., it ended up taking five years.

Joan Wasser:

I think five years is always the thing that when … Five years is the place where you’re like, oh, now I can start thinking.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. And the amount of self destructive behavior that I went through at that time from 1998 to 2003 … Really into 2004 if I need to be … Maybe even into 2005. It petered out, but it was not good. And I really could have my fucked my life up. I really got lucky in that regard. I’m glad that you’re here too.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

The Dambuilders disbanded in October of ’97 and later that year you formed the band Black Beetle with members of Jeff’s band. And you’ve said that the motivation behind doing this was medicating your sadness. But the experience also motivated you to begin singing and writing your own songs. What was the entry point into doing that?

Joan Wasser:

Again, I had more pain than I knew what to do with and playing the violin was not covering it in any way. I couldn’t have any longer an instrument between my heart and the world. I never wanted to sing. That was way too revealing. I had no interest. Any opening of my mouth that I did in the Dambuilders was screaming and yelling. Literally. So all of a sudden I didn’t have control over it. I had to sing. It was how I helped myself stay alive.

Debbie Millman:

You also joined the band, Those Bastard Souls, and recorded an album titled Debt & Departure with Dave Shouse. This is also when you began working as a session musician and you played violin across a range of genres, as we’ve mentioned before. Including Haitian, pop, R&B. You played with John Cale. You played with Lou Reed. What was it like to begin to collaborate with these folks who you had sort of grown up with listening to their music?

Joan Wasser:

It was pretty trippy. Yeah, it really-

Debbie Millman:

I saw a picture of you and Lou Reed. He’s talking to someone and you’re talking to someone and you’re all clearly in the same little club. And I was like, wow, that must have felt amazing.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. It was really … It was scary. I was really afraid to be around these people and I had that thing of like, I’m not supposed to be here. Imposter syndrome. But clearly I was because I kept getting called, kept being trusted to do this work, which was … I mean, it was really helpful. That was helpful. All of the music that happened … The music has always just saved me. But especially then, and all of those mind blowing experiences with other artists helped me feel like life was worth living and staying alive for.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

In 1999, you joined the band, formally known as Antony and the Johnsons, now Anohni’s Ensemble and recorded the album I Am A Bird Now. You’ve said that working with Anohni saved you. How did she do that?

Joan Wasser:

So up until that time, all the music I made was pretty loud. Joining Anohni’s band, it was the opposite. Everything was quiet. She wanted everything quieter. Make it sound like a snowflake hitting the water. Just analogy after analogy just of quieter. And then on top of it, her voice sounds like someone crying. So having that at that moment, this quiet music with someone crying so beautifully over it, it was the soundtrack of my insides and made me feel like I wasn’t crazy. I was like, oh, someone else feels like this. Also the ensemble that she put together was a really, really special group of people. A family that was life changing. Yes.

Debbie Millman:

You also began touring with Rufus Wainwright for his Want One and Want Two albums. And I read that your second gig with Rufus was at the Beacon Theater in New York. And you’ve said that it was the most terrifying moments in your life. I knew that you’d seen Nina Simone there and Leonard Cohen there. You don’t even remember it now I think because you were so terrified. What was so scary for you being there?

Joan Wasser:

Well, I was opening. I was supporting him. So I was opening solo. My own music.

Debbie Millman:

So that was the first time at the Beacon Theater with him?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. I joined his band in 2004 and I toured with him for almost two years on those records that are just masterpieces.

Debbie Millman:

Masterpieces. He’s a genius.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah, he is.

Debbie Millman:

He is an absolute genius.

Joan Wasser:

Yep. Absolutely. And so there was another woman, we were alternating opening gigs. So one night she would open, one night I would open. So she opened the first show, wherever that was. I have no memory of what that was because it didn’t matter. The second gig that we played, I was doing my first support slot with Rufus at the Beacon Theater.

Debbie Millman:

Talk about big time.

Joan Wasser:

I remember absolutely what I wore and I remember doing my hair so well. It was so overwhelming. And because of the history and because of the fact that I was on stage by myself, playing these songs that I had pretty recently written, it was impossible for me to digest really.

Debbie Millman:

So did Rufus come to you and say, “Joan, it’s time. You need to be on your own. You need to be performing.”? Did it happen organically? How did that happen?

Joan Wasser:

I mean he needed someone who could sing, play violin and play guitar. At that time there were not that many people in New York City that actually could do all those things. So I auditioned for him and I got hired and I had just completed my EP. Actually I rushed to complete it to leave for tour in February. I manufactured them myself and I sold them at the shows for probably $5. He didn’t care about me opening. He was like, “I need a violin player that can sing and play acoustic and electric.” So I got hired and then I was opening the show. So it just was coincidental. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

You talked about the process of learning to sing and I read that it was really hard for you. You were really feeling very vulnerable about singing. At the time you were yearning to sing like Sam Cooke. You felt that he has the most remarkable sound you ever heard. And I read that you yearned to sing without embellishment. That you felt that any melisma you found yourself doing was merely a way to cover up some deficiency in your voice. What did you think was deficient about your voice? So this is a three part question. What did you think was deficient about your voice? How did you ultimately find your voice, which is so soulful and sexy and stunning? And that’s my feeling about it. What do you think of it now?

Joan Wasser:

I’m so glad. Okay. Trying to figure out who I was as a singer was a very complicated path because of the fact that I felt I had been surrounded by the greatest singers of my time. Jeff, Anohni, Rufus. What do I have to give? Who wants to listen to me? And so I wanted to figure out what my voice sounded like when I wasn’t trying to mimic someone else. I could just sing it totally straight and you’d feel it. How can I take off all the frosting and all the stuff and just give you the cake? Just the plain thing. How can I do it as plain as possible because I felt like that would be the most potent.

Debbie Millman:

So you had your EP, you’re touring with Rufus, you decide you want to stop drinking. At the same time you are recording Real Life, your first full length album. Your engineer accidentally loses … I think it was the bass and the drums.

Joan Wasser:

No. The bass and the drums were remained.

Debbie Millman:

The voice.

Joan Wasser:

Everything I did, all my wurlitzer playing, all my strings, all my guitar playing, all my singing, all of Anohni’s vocals actually as well. Everything besides the bass drums-

Debbie Millman:

Was lost.

Joan Wasser:

Was lost. But what was incredible is that I had really … Most of the record was done when that happened. But it happened just right after I got sober.

Debbie Millman:

I mean talk about serendipity I think.

Joan Wasser:

It’s so beautiful. It’s so beautiful because I remember how horrified … I’m still really close with the engineer. I made this last record that I made with him. He’s one of my close friends. But I remember the producer saying, “Joan, I have something to tell you.” And I could tell it was something bad. And I was like, “Bryce, what?” And he said, “For some reason none of your stuff was backed up and the hard drive crashed and we’ve done all of the data recovery and nothing’s there.” And I remember having the feeling like, “Okay, that’s all right.” Because I had just gotten sober, everything was felt so … I had the new drug of clarity where I was not hungover anymore. And I was just like, “Okay.” So then I had to record the whole thing again.

Debbie Millman:

Do you think that there was a really big difference in the tones of the first recording versus the second?

Joan Wasser:

I have no idea.

Debbie Millman:

Oh. Because you don’t have any record.

Joan Wasser:

I don’t know. I don’t have a record. But what I know is that I was a person that was no longer killing herself slowly with substances. I was no longer that person. It was like I got reborn and then was given the opportunity to make my first record again.

Debbie Millman:

Right. Wow.

Joan Wasser:

I know. It was really-

Debbie Millman:

Such a gift.

Joan Wasser:

It really was.

Debbie Millman:

You released your EP Joan As Police Woman in 2004, which was a name that is an homage to the 1974 television cop show starring Angie Dickinson. Now, I know I’m 10 years older than you so I actually watched that show in real time when it came out. The world was enamored with Angie Dickinson. It was the first time there was a drama series focusing solely on a woman. She was over 40. She was knock dead gorgeous but she was also over 40. I think a friend of yours saw you in a baby blue three piece suit and said, “You channeling your police woman today?” And that’s how the name stuck.

Joan Wasser:

That’s right. I was blonde and I had a polyester three piece suit on. Yeah, Ruben. My very close still friend Ruben said, “Joan, you’re channeling Angie from police woman.” And I was like, that’s the name.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. She was really one of the sexiest women of that time. I was 13 when that show came out so I was obsessed. Obsessed.

Joan Wasser:

Of course.

Debbie Millman:

Initially Joan As Police Woman started as a duo with Ben Perowsky on drums. And eventually you added the great, great Rainy Orteca on bass. Just as a sidebar, Rainy helped create the sound studio that we are sitting in. I adore Rainy. She is also a genius.

Joan Wasser:

She sure is.

Debbie Millman:

And just hey Rainy. In case you’re listening. We’re here with a thread between us. That’s you. In 2006, you released Real Life. It was released to great fanfare. Great reviews. What was it like to be suddenly be the center of attention with so much adulation?

Joan Wasser:

Really strange because I knew that my family and my friends would hear the record and that was plenty. I just thought I have to do this, but I did not have any expectations. I made a pact with myself that I would … Okay, I’m doing my own music. I’m going to do it exactly how I want. Which somewhere that meant no one was going to listen to it. You know?

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I read that you were surprised that people liked it.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. I was. And it made me feel less alone that people liked it. It was a really cool feeling. I was like, “Oh, people can relate to this? I’m so glad.” It was a very different feeling than I would’ve imagined. I wasn’t expecting it. That’s it. I was not expecting it.

Debbie Millman:

It’s a great album. I’m wondering if you can play a song from that album for us.

Joan Wasser:

Oh my god. Right. I’m playing a song. I forgot.

Debbie Millman:

We’re both sitting here barefoot. It’s so much fun to be able to do that with a guest.

Joan Wasser:

All right. This is a song called We Don’t Own It and I wrote it for Elliot Smith.

Debbie Millman:

Oh wow.

Joan Wasser:

Elliot opened a whole tour for us. I mean, he was living in New York so I knew him from just music. But he sat on the stool with his acoustic guitar and played often with a lot of people in the crowd talking over him. This was before that Goodwill whatever it’s called came out and he became more of a household name. He is incredibly shy person and very introverted. I think everybody knew he had tried to kill himself a bunch of times. That was sort of common knowledge. Then when he finally succeeded, just what happened, the aftermath of that was so disturbing that I wrote this song just in light of that situation. So let’s see if I can do this.

            (singing)

Debbie Millman:

You’ve since recorded nine studio albums, two albums of cover songs, a few live albums. Your covers are so unique. You have a way of remaking songs. Sort of the way I think Alan Cumming remade Joel Grey’s role of the MC in Cabaret. With Funny Girl being out now too, people are saying this just no way for anybody to take a part that Barbara Streisand made famous and make it their own. But people said that about Joel Grey’s part in Cabaret and then Alan Cumming came and did it in a whole new way that makes you rethink everything you thought you knew. And that’s the way I feel about your covers. You remake these songs in a way that makes you feel like that’s the way they should have been done to begin with. Your cover of Prince’s Kiss is astonishing. And Prince, you think how can anybody outdo Prince’s own song? But yet you do it. How do you pick your songs to cover? Why are you laughing?

Joan Wasser:

Because that’s crazy. Thank you so much. Thank you. How do I pick the songs? I mean, I pick songs I’m infatuated with. That’s for sure. They don’t always work because I have to convince myself I’ve found a new way into the song or I’ve found some sort of new facet to show the world. And sometimes that doesn’t happen. But I love that song, Kiss. Who doesn’t? It’s so good. And I was determined to figure out some other way through it. And I love Nina Simone and she does this. So yeah. I’m just trying to honor her example of finding new ways through songs.

Debbie Millman:

Joan, I’d love before you go, if you could do another song for us. Any song at all from your catalog. Your beautiful catalog. And if you can just pick a song and tell us the backstory.

Joan Wasser:

Okay, well this is a song called Forever In a Year. And it is from the record called The Deep Field.

Debbie Millman:

2011.

Joan Wasser:

Yes. The song pretty much tells itself. Let’s see if I can tell it.

            (singing)

Debbie Millman:

Thank you, Joan.

Joan Wasser:

What a way to make it through that song.

Debbie Millman:

That was perfection. You okay?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. It’s really hard for me not to cry during that song.

Debbie Millman:

It’s hard not to cry through most of your songs in the best possible way. Here. Here, we have tissues.

Joan Wasser:

I’m all right.

Debbie Millman:

You good?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah, it’s fine.

Debbie Millman:

Joan Wasser, thank you so much for making so much stunning music that truly matters and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. Joan, as Joan As Policewoman is about to go on tour. She’s going on a lengthy tour to Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Italy, Switzerland, the UK. And songs from The Solution Is Restless will feature prominently as well as other songs from her catalog. You can find out lots more about Joan on her website, joanaspolicewoman.com.

            This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Ben:

Us designers know. I think we have weapons at our disposal that non-creative people don’t have.

Jack:

I’m too far into the art side of it, but I’m not taking my pieces and selling that at art galleries either. It’s like, this is for nobody but me.

Recorded Voice:

From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Milman. For 18 years, Debbie Milman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be, who they are and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, we hear from musician Jack White and designer Ben Jenkins about their business collaboration.

Ben:

Baseball bats are really simple thing. I bet I could figure that out.

Jack:

I’d seen these baseball bats and I remember thinking, “Oh wow. What an obvious idea, of course.”

Debbie:

Jack White has been on the music scene for over two decades. First in the band Goober & The Peas, then in the duo the White Stripes, then the Raconteurs, and the Dead Weather. He’s also released his own solo albums and produced music for artists including Loretta Lynn and Beyonce. He’s won many Grammy awards and three of his albums have reached number one on all of the charts that matter. Ben Jenkins is a different kind of rock star. He’s a former baseball player turned designer, turned entrepreneur. In 2011 he started a company that manufactured baseball bats named Warstic. What brings these two gentlemen together here in person is that in 2016 Jack White became an investor in Warstic, and the company now makes way more than baseball bats. Jack White and Ben Jenkins, welcome to Design Matters.

Jack:

Hi, thank you for having us.

Ben:

Thanks, Debbie.

Debbie:

Jack, is it true that you don’t have a cell phone?

Jack:

That is true. Yeah.

Debbie:

Have you ever had a cell phone?

Jack:

No, I’ve never had one, but I do think my days are numbered. I think time is running out because there’s so many things nowadays I’m discovering last, just since the pandemic hit, for example, where I’m not going to be able to get through a day without that.

Debbie:

How do you do that now? It’s hard for me to even imagine somebody not being able to look at their phone for directions or for Wikipedia.

Jack:

Yeah, I use email and I text on my laptop, so I’m on my computer a lot. So that handles, I think, the big brunt of it. And then there’s just the, I don’t know, old fashioned way of just leaving the house and driving away and you’re not going to see me for a couple hours. That’s how it goes.

Debbie:

Was it a decision that you made when cell phones first came out? Like, “No, I don’t want to be part of this on all the time lifestyle”?

Jack:

I was scared of, for example, I’ve never smoked marijuana, for example. It’s not some sort of judgmental thing against people who smoke marijuana, I could care less and what other people do, whatever. It’s not the thing itself, it’s the things that are attached to it. So it’s not the cell phone itself, it’s just the idea that I’m going to be on it all day long, and I’m going to have it charged, and I’m going to have to wake up in the morning and… It’s all the ancillary things, those are the things I have fears, ancillary things. It’s not the gun, it’s the bullets.

Debbie:

Right, it’s not the phone it’s the addiction?

Jack:

Yeah.

Debbie:

You were born Jack Gillis in downtown Detroit. Your mom is Polish, your dad is Scottish Canadian, and they both worked for the church. You are the youngest of 10 siblings. What is the range between you and your oldest sibling?

Jack:

My oldest sister, Maureen is 21 years older than me. I’m 46, so she’s 67.

Debbie:

My youngest brother is 26 years younger, but it’s from different mothers.

Jack:

Oh wow. So you know the… Yeah, it’s very similar.

Debbie:

Yeah, I felt very much like I raised my little brother or helped raise him, and I know you felt that way about your older sisters as well.

Jack:

Oh yeah. They used to say whenever they would take me out and everyone thought that they… People would say, “Oh, your mom, ask your mom for ice cream,” or something like that. They would always treat them like they were the moms, and they pretty much were. The whole family was very much like that, it was like having a lot of parents. The ninth kid is seven years older than me, I’m way at the end.

Debbie:

So you were an accident?

Jack:

Most definitely, but the Catholic kind. There are no accidents in giant Catholic families. It’s like, “What’s that?”

Debbie:

Yeah, your parents really liked each other.

Jack:

Let’s just call it unexpected, let’s call it that.

Debbie:

Your six older brothers were in a band called Catalyst and you began to play their drum kit when you were five. What drew you to the drums specifically?

Jack:

I didn’t think I had any talent for the other stuff, guitar and bass.

Debbie:

But at five?

Jack:

At five, it felt like drums were just whatever, I’m not doing anything serious. I just like music and this is something I can actually do. And as I got older, I started to play a little bit guitar, but I was always playing something. I didn’t learn, nobody taught me, I was self-taught on these instruments so by the time I was in my 20’s I was thinking, “Oh wow, I actually can play a little bit of piano, I can play a little of the guitar.” But I never thought about that way. I thought always with music, if it ever came to a thing where, what do I would like to do as a musician? I was like, “Oh, I like to play drums in a band.” And by that I always meant a band that plays a gig once a year at a bar in Detroit, that there’s no way you could ever do anything bigger than that, and that I would just do upholstery for the rest of my life.

Debbie:

Well, actually I’ve read, and I don’t know if this is true. I read it fairly consistently in all of the research that we did that because you never really thought you could make a living as a musician, you decided you wanted to become a priest and were accepted at the seminary.

Jack:

That’s true, it’s just slightly convoluted. The acceptance at the seminary was when I was 14. So, that was deciding what high school to go to, and I applied at a seminary in Wisconsin and they accepted me and I was planning to go there. And about the summer before it happened at the last second, I found out or heard by word-of-mouth, “You know you can’t bring your guitar and amp to that dormitory in Wisconsin?” And I thought, “Ooh, that might be a deal-breaker.” I was just getting into music in a way where I was starting to record in my bedroom and things like that, and I thought, “Oh, wow. Am I going to give this up for four years, I’m going to not play music?” I didn’t know, I didn’t actually double-check to make sure that was true. It was just that rumor was enough for me to go, “I think maybe this isn’t the right idea.” So I went to a public school in Detroit, which was its own kind of own weird universe.

Debbie:

Well, you went to a technical high school, but did you at any point really want to be a priest?

Jack:

I thought about it. What they call it in the Catholic world is you get the calling. So you go and you see if you’ll get the calling eventually. So you don’t decide your life at 13 or 14, you just go, “If you head down this one path and then if you get the calling down the road, then it’s the thing.” That’s the nice thing about… As many flaws that the Catholic church has, there’s a nice thing about the Catholic church growing up through it was, they didn’t force that kind of stuff on you. It wasn’t like, “Oh, you want to be a preacher? Cool. We’re setting you up right now at 13. Okay, good. Your rest of your life you’re going to be a priest.” They’re not really like that, and they’re not going out and pushing their stuff down on other people’s throats.

Jack:

So that was a cool, niceness of that environment where you did feel like, “Okay, I was thinking about it but I changed my mind.” I did the same thing with the Marines coming out of high school, in senior year I had signed up for possibly going to the Marines or the air force. They come to your class and recruit you in class. But then again I thought, “Oh it’s not for me, I don’t think it’s the right move for me.” But upholstery, I would have dropped out of high school and just done upholstery if I could have. I don’t think anybody around me would have been very supportive of me dropping out.

Debbie:

You grew up with a Polish grandmother and your parents were in their 60’s when you were in high school, you lived in a Mexican neighborhood and went mostly to an all black high school. And you said it would’ve made just as much sense for you to play in a Polish polka band or in a hip hop group, or in a Mexican mariachi band. What was the first music you were really interested in playing?

Jack:

Rock and roll because that was what my brothers were really into, but our family liked all kinds of music. My parents were into big band music and Nat King Cole and Sinatra and all that stuff. And my brothers were into rock and roll a lot, but also Johnny Cash and folk musicians as well. And so, it was a pretty healthy mix. And then of course, all the friends on my block were all listening to hip hop and house music and Latin music. So, any of those could have been interesting, but I think there was, your older brothers and sisters are going to win out as influence.

Debbie:

By the time you were 15, you were a business major in Cass Technical High School. And you had an upholstery apprenticeship with Brian Muldoon who was a family friend and a former neighbor who ran an upholstery studio. And I read that you remember first being intrigued by Muldoon’s studio as a little boy riding around on a big wheel.

Jack:

Well, our two houses were right next door to each other. So you could ride bikes or big wheels in between the houses and look down into the basement if the door was open. So, I would see him working on furniture down in that basement all the time as I rode by. So it was just by chance that when I was a teenager, he moved next door to my brother in another part of town in Detroit. And then hanging out on the front porch we started talking, he was a drummer, so we started talking about drums, and then he gave me some Modern Drummer magazines. And then he eventually asked me, “Hey, do you want to come and work after school and sweep up in the shop a couple days a week, maybe learn how to do some upholstery.” And I thought, “Wow, what a cool job at 15?”

Jack:

And by the time I got to 18 though, I got around into it, I was really starting. I had gotten so immersed in the furniture and designers and mid-century modern, and arts and crafts and I’ve become really in love with film. So I thought it would be great to take some film classes, maybe end up possibly working in film and directing in film somehow. You discovered quickly that was like, I got… I became a PA on car commercials and stuff. It was mostly car commercials because it’s the big three and it’s Detroit and that’s the industry of film in that town except for art projects.

Debbie:

Had you ever thought about going to Cranbrook or any of the amazing schools that are in Michigan?

Jack:

I would’ve loved to had anybody actually offered this idea to me. I’ve never even knew that was a possibility, I didn’t know about Cranbrook and all that until it was in my 20’s. It’s indicative of a lot of things, the environment that I grew up in the ’80s and early ’90s which it was still crazy. There’s just a lot of things you see now with modern parents and I’m a parent and I have a lot of friends with kids, that you just see how much is put in front of them. Like, “You can do this, you can do that. And this is an option and that’s an option,” and none of these things were put in front of me. And no one even told me when they would see me recording and getting super involved in music like, “Wow, you could press your own record, there’s a record pressing plant in town.”

Jack:

Nobody said that to me, nobody said, “Oh by the way, you can go to this design high school instead of the high school you’re going to, or design college.” When I was 21, I opened my own upholstery shop. And if I saw a 21 year old kid do that now I’d be like, “Oh my God man, congratulations. High five, whatever. Do you need any help?” Or whatever. And I didn’t see a lot of that, I saw a lot of people giving you this look like, “Okay, whatever.” Thinking this is going to fail in a year or so, I don’t know what they were intending, what they were conveying, but it wasn’t pats on the back, let’s put it that way.

Debbie:

Well, it’s a little bit obscure.

Jack:

It is kind of strange, yeah.

Debbie:

It’s a bit of an old school kind of discipline. My grandfather was an upholsterer, by the way.

Jack:

No way.

Debbie:

Yes.

Jack:

Wow.

Debbie:

But it’s not something that I’ve ever heard anyone say, “When I grow up, I want to be an upholsterer.”

Jack:

No, it’s very, very niche. And I definitely think that through going to the upholstery supply places when I was coming up, I pretty much determined that I was the only person under 45 doing that trade in the metropolitan Detroit area.

Debbie:

I would say maybe even in the world.

Jack:

There’s not many.

Debbie:

There’s not many. You began to write notes and poetry inside the furniture, like a message in a bottle. Has anybody found any of the messages over the years and the poetry that you tucked inside the cushions?

Jack:

We did. I don’t think anyone’s found any of my pieces of things that I’ve done in them, but people have found… Two people found this work I did with Brian Muldoon who I learned from. We did for his 30th anniversary of his shop, we did 100 records that we made together. We were a band called The Upholsters and we made 100 records and put them in a 100… He put them in 100 pieces that year. So two of those have been found. People have notified us they found those and they’re keeping them and they didn’t publicize it or sell them or whatever.

Debbie:

That’s incredible. It’s absolutely incredible. While working at the apprenticeship, you were also a drummer in two different bands. You were recording music in your bedroom, as you mentioned. And you also became close friends with Megan White, who you married in 1996 and took her last name. Very forward thinking, very ahead of your time. What made you decide to do that? Was it just because it was a cool color?

Jack:

I don’t have anything to say about that category, sorry.

Debbie:

While you were doing that, you decided to open your own upholstery shop. As you mentioned, you named your business Third Man Upholstery. The slogan you chose for your business was your furniture’s not dead. And you wrote some of your bills out in crayon. And I was wondering if that was a design decision or if it was more arbitrary, because that was the writing utensil you had nearby?

Jack:

I see it now when I work on furniture pieces that they’re more sculpture than they are furniture, really. And it’s something that was happening to me in the final year of my upholstery shop, which was, it was becoming more art than it was a way of sustaining a business and making money. I didn’t care about the money anymore, I was more interested in the fact that I was wearing a yellow shirt and a black pants with a white belt and delivering it and giving the bill in crayon. And I’d gotten obsessed with certain artists and there was this one artist, I can’t remember his name, but he was making counterfeit money. He was hand drawing counterfeit bills, one sided, and his art was to go buy things with that money. And he wanted to buy the object and they would give him the object and the receipt and the change, and that was part of the artistic transaction. And I got obsessed with this and I started writing my bills in crayon, and then all this stuff. And it’s not the way to make business in Detroit doing people’s furniture. That was very-

Debbie:

Performance art.

Jack:

Yeah, it was bizarre. And I knew I started to get to too far. I got this incredible piece which was a psychiatrist’s chair and couch. This was a great moment, I got to do this and she didn’t like dealing with me by the end of it I think. It wasn’t serious and commercial enough for her. And she had gotten, I had a guy upstairs from my shop was building furniture frames. It was like the perfect marriage, this guy could build frames. And she got another set made and took it to a different upholster, and I knew I had blown it with this client and I’m like, “This is a sign, I think I’m too far into the art side of it. But I’m not taking my pieces and selling that at art galleries either.” It’s like, this is for nobody but me.

Debbie:

By 1998, you were playing in bands including the Hentchmen, the Go, Two-Star Tabernacle, and the freshly minted White Stripes which you started with Meg. Did you feel conflicted by pursuing these two very different paths, upholstery and music?

Jack:

I just always assumed the music part was just going to be a small thing and not anything that would bring in any money or pay bills, or be able to have it as a lifestyle or a choice, artistic choice. I always assumed that the upholstery part was going to be how I paid the bills. So I didn’t take any of those any more seriously in that, yes, I would rather be making music, or I’d rather be making sculpture, but my assumption was always, “Oh, we got to gig this week, but probably six months from now, we’re not going to get a gig anymore.” So, but those assumptions started to slowly prove wrong, and it became more and more that I was now being taken away from the shop and working on music and making records and the artwork that went into that, and trying to get studio time and figure out a way to pay for that, and balancing those two. And yes, slowly the upholstery shop was fading away. But I remember people from the garage rock scene, musicians and friends, coming to hang out at my shop while I was working. They coincided for a while there.

Debbie:

In 2001, after releasing two somewhat under the radar albums, the White Stripes exploded during a visit to the UK when DJ John Peel said that you were the most exciting thing he’d heard since Jimi Hendrix, and life really hasn’t been the same since. What did it feel like at the time to go from zero to 60 in three seconds? Suddenly you were world-renowned.

Jack:

It was very strange because we had planned a trip to England. We thought we were just going to play with some other garage rock bands from England and Billy Childish, his whole group and Holly Golightly and all that. And we thought we’d play a couple gigs with them and it would be a nice trip. The trip would pay for itself, and we’d be off. That was not the case. By the time we had landed and what John Peel had been pushing, it was very incredible. It was, we were showing up to his studio and he had a live audience and there was a buzz in town. It was a big deal that we were there. And Meg and I were shocked, we had no clue why this would be happening this way. But John Peel was the last of those real DJs who played whatever he wanted to play and was an influencer and really his taste, he was a tastemaker.

Jack:

So if he played it was good to so many people, and he really loved us. And matter of fact, they’ve end up when he passed away, they had his box. He had his 45 box that he would take to DJ gigs and take to certain things, and they made actually a little documentary on it. But in that box of whatever it was, 150 records or something, there was 12 of my seven inches that I had been a part of. And so I don’t know why, but I connected with this guy. And when we met, we bonded fast. But God bless him because he had a huge impact on my life.

Debbie:

You were also the creative director for the band and were influenced by the De Stijl modern art movement, so much so that you even named one of your albums after the term. And De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 founded in the Netherlands by Pete Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg. What intrigued you about the ideals of De Stijl?

Jack:

Something occurred to me. I had bought a book called De Stijl and I was reading it. And when I found out the time period it existed in, it seemed like it was the exact same time period that American blues music was happening, and it seemed to apply to what we were doing with the White Stripes so definitively. And I had never heard of this movement, De Stijl, I thought it was something that nobody had heard of because I just found this book and didn’t realize if you went to art school, you would’ve read about it just like you’d read about Bauhaus or whatever. So I was, in my own little world, was making a correlation between this and blues music of the 20th century, of breaking things down to the absolute essentials of blues just being stripped onto one person against the world, one person a guitar, one person a piano, one person and a mandolin.

Jack:

And it’s the same thing they were doing, Mondrian and Gabriel Viardot doing with their furniture and paintings of breaking things down to simple shapes and simple colors. So I just thought it would be nice for us to put that together and feed off of that idea, so we did that. Which was funny because I think at the end of the day I remember seeing, who was it? Ann Powers or somebody like NPR of New York Times or something giving us a big thumbs down saying, “This band, they’re pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes. These are obviously art school students and this is art school 101 and this is pedestrian at best. And they’re pretending that they’re above everybody else,” or something like that, some connotation that this was a ruse.

Jack:

Again, this is my ignorance as far as whatever the rest of the world had known about their take on things. I was so insular back then that… You guys understand from the environment of Detroit that you’re in, nobody likes the same stuff that I like or the people that I am around. It’s very solitary, so you just make assumptions. I made a lot of incorrect assumptions that people didn’t know about that, people didn’t know about this, or whatever. But it was nice that I did that because I ended up creating things that it spurred me on and inspired me to think, “Oh, this is very unique,” at least it’s unique to me, something I’m getting an inspiration from.

Debbie:

Well, you didn’t necessarily need to know that the way that you were directing the creative for the band was based on De Stijl, it was just really compelling.

Jack:

It seemed to fit.

Debbie:

Creatively, the use of red, white and black. The red, white and black signified the White Stripes aesthetic. You’ve used green for the Raconteurs. Now you use blue. Well, you’ve been using blue for your solo career.

Jack:

Solo stuff, yeah.

Debbie:

So, talk a little bit about this visual positioning because it’s really, really well done.

Jack:

Oh, thanks. It’s usually the three colors of black and white being, white being all colors and black being the absence of color, and then whatever primary color makes sense to that. And this came from a designer of currency, again, that designed currency in the Netherlands where each denomination was a different color. So you instantly knew in your hand what you had, you had a 10, or you had a 20.

Debbie:

Yeah. Classic branding, by the way.

Jack:

It’s good in that sense, right? So the Raconteurs was not my band, so I suggested these colors of copper and green, but that wasn’t as strict in Dead Weather and Raconteurs with the color scheme.

Debbie:

The White Stripes broke up in 2011 and you’ve gone on to a prolific and often bigger career in other bands, you’ve worked as a solo artist and you’ve collaborated and produced music with a range of artists from, as I mentioned in the intro, from Loretta Lynn to Beyonce. And you’ve said that Loretta Lynn is the greatest female singer/songwriter of the 20th century. What was it like to work with her and then win two Grammy awards together? And why do you think she’s a better singer/songwriter than somebody like Joni Mitchell?

Jack:

I don’t think Joni Mitchell is very nice, and Loretta is very nice.

Debbie:

I’ve heard that.

Jack:

No, I don’t know much about Joni Mitchell, actually. I shouldn’t say anything like that, but I’m just really joking. But Loretta just exudes a charisma in person since I have met her, that is just undeniable. There’s a bizarre brilliance that she doesn’t realize is brilliant. There’s part of her that really realizes and really understands something, and another part of her that has no clue as to how brilliant it is. And it’s so interesting to talk to her because those two sides have this… They don’t meet up and it’s very unique. And most people who are that smart and genius at what they’re doing, have a full 100% capacity to understand all that. That’s a good idea, and that’s where it came from and whatever, blah, blah, blah. She has these brilliant ideas and knows they’re good, but another half of her personality does not know how genius that really is when it’s outside of its own realm.

Jack:

She thinks maybe it’s like, “Oh, that’s a really clever title. And then when I say the next lyric, I’m going to say this because that goes along with that. That’s great.” “That’s not just great Loretta, that’s absolutely genius, and people cannot do what you just did.” That’s the feeling you have when you listen to her talk, this feeling I had at least. And so you experience that, and on top of that, just to have her incredible voice. And then I have the same this rags to riches story, this coal miners’ daughter’s story as well. Goodness gracious, it’s just outstanding.

Debbie:

You said that Loretta Lynn has an unique way of writing songs that is nearly impossible to replicate, and declared that you tried as much as you could to learn from her on the craftsmanship, but couldn’t make your way around it with a compass.

Jack:

It’s very strange. She says, “Oh, people say I write backwards.” And whatever you want to call it, there’s some bizarre double choruses of her songs. It would be like, “Women like you, they’re a dime a dozen. You can buy them anywhere. For you to get to him I’d have to move over and I’m going to stand right here.” To most people that would’ve been the chorus, and then she goes another one, “It’ll be over my dead body, get out while you can. But you ain’t woman enough to take my man.” And either of those would’ve been someone’s chorus, but for her to have both of those in there. For her to say, “Oh, that’s not good enough. I’m going to push a little bit farther and write more.” This is someone who is not trained musically. I don’t know, it’s just a diamond in the rough that people take her a little bit for granted and they need to explore her a little bit more because there’s something going on there that a lot of country writers even then, and today do not have.

Debbie:

What is the biggest thing you learned from her?

Jack:

The biggest thing I learned from Loretta is really just keeping it very simple, that it applied to her lifestyle too. I thought it applied very well to the White Stripes and what made people shockingly connect with that band. But it connected with her too. She was always like, “Okay well, the dress needs to be pretty, or the lighting needs to be good, or that guitar player needs to play louder.” It was always real simple decisions and not overly complicated that seemed to instantaneously work. And I’ve seen that too when I’m working with the Rolling Stones a little bit and acts that, I don’t know, you would think there’d be a lot of deeper discussions about exactly the perfect way to get this thing enacted. And a lot of that, you’d say once they’ve done all the groundwork earlier on when they’re younger, that they’re… It’s easier to just make these simple decisions to put these things in action, which is easy to say, isn’t it? It’s easy to say, “Oh yeah, just keep it simple.” You have to have that groundwork though underneath it all.

Debbie:

Oh, it’s the hardest thing to do. Keeping things simple requires so much education.

Jack:

Sure. You need to learn, go through 10 years of using every color in the pallet to decide to just use green on this one thing and nothing else.

Debbie:

You now run Third Man Studio which includes Third Man Records, books, pressing, mastering, a photo studio and a design studio. Third Man is DIY to the max. The only two things you don’t do in records is to produce and manufacture the paper sleeves and the metal mother stampers. You also still do upholstery and furniture construction. How much hands-on work do you do?

Jack:

I like to do as much as I can. The hard part is having a pressing plant where you own the place, and I would love to go in there and just mess around and make my own records. And you can’t do that with a real factory, we build around the clock, but at the same time I like the idea of that that’s a train that’s already in motion that I’m just overseeing. And you’re trusting a lot of people who are talented and they’re the ones driving the train on the daily. And it’s great, it’s just great to be a little bit of a part of something like that. The end of the day, you can get investors and you can charm people and get a bunch of people in a room to spend a bunch of money and make something. Big deal, who cares? I guess there’s a lot of people who would say it’s an unique position for a lot of people to be in, but at the same time it’s not impressive to me. What’s impressive is actually making something unique and beautiful that money is the last thing on the menu about why you’re doing it.

Debbie:

Before we talk about your work with Ben and Warstic, I want to ask you about your current music. You just released the album, Fear of the Dawn and have another album coming out this summer. Why two albums in a matter of months?

Jack:

I don’t know, really. Just a lot of songs kept coming out of me and they didn’t want to be split up. They didn’t want to be meshed together, they didn’t want to be left to the side, they wanted to both exist. And they both came out as two finished albums and I thought, “Well, that’s not a really good business model in the music world.” You put out an album and then release another one in a year or two later. And I thought, “Well, by the time that comes out, that second record, I might have already moved on to something else.” Which is the whole reason the pandemic was a little bit scary for me was that, “Well, we’re not going to be touring, then why make a record? And then if I’m going to get excited about this record, it’s not going to come out for a couple years and maybe I should just move over to something else.” And I did I really moved over to design and furniture. So by the time I got finally back in the studio, I think it was this floodgate opened and a lot of songs came out. So I thought, “It’s not a good business model, but I’m just going to do it. And I’m going to release both those records this year.”

Debbie:

You made both of these albums during the lockdown, during which time you initially played and recorded all of the instruments yourself. You said that the seclusion of the pandemic helped you reevaluate artistically, and you ended up pushing yourself into new areas you’re really proud of. Does that include the music, or is that really more or the design and the furniture building and a lot of the other things that you’re doing?

Jack:

Starts with free time, just haven’t had free time. And I think that was another thing I learned from Loretta Lynn was, she was very much on it. “Once you stop, they forget about you. And once you stop moving this train, the train comes to a complete screeching halt.” And she sacrificed a lot in her life with her own world and her own family and all that, trying to keep that train running. And I give her a lot of credit for it, that’s a hard decision to make. And that’s what happens with music especially, or if you’re an actor in films, like that.

Debbie:

I think any creative person.

Jack:

Yeah, and if you’re getting a lot of stuff happening and a lot of attention for it, you’re making big mistakes if you take too big of a break from it. So that absorbed, the idea was “Okay, well I want to do this, I want to direct short films and I want to design more things on furniture and interiors, et cetera. But I can’t stop this music train right now because if I do that, then I’m not going to be able to pay for any of these other ideas down the run, I won’t be able to afford to do it.” So you just keep that train moving, so that was the one nice thing about the pandemic for me in my own little world was that I had a lot of free time now to finally work on some of these other things.

Debbie:

Fear of the Dawn actually shows up in several different places on the album. It’s not just the name of the album, it’s also the name of a song. It’s also, you use the scientific word for another one of the songs, and I’m wondering if you can share that word with us, tell us why you decided to choose it, and then why… Do you have a fear of the dawn?

Jack:

You’re talking about the word eosophobia and that was the word I read in an article somewhere, and I wrote it down saying, “Oh, I’ve got to come back and read about whatever that is.” I do that a lot when I’m reading and I’ll just save them into a folder on my computer and go, “I’ll check on this later.” And that was something when I was working on a couple of songs, I saw that word pop up and I thought, “I don’t know what that is,” and I had to reread the definition of it, intense fear of the dawn. Which I thought, what a horrible thing to have an intense fear about, it’s going to happen.

Debbie:

There’s so many other things.

Jack:

It’s not like a fear of something that might happen or probably isn’t going to happen, that’s going to happen.

Debbie:

Every day.

Jack:

Yes, every day. So, what a horrible thing if that’s a true feeling. I don’t know if there’s people out there who really have this fear. It reminded me of something I’d read about people who don’t experience pain, who have the inability to experience pain and how dangerous their lives are. And I got more and more into an idea of how dangerous this idea would be about being fearful of the dawn or having anxiety attacks when the sun would come up. Then I didn’t realize, maybe to other people it was just a simpler concept, more of vampires. I didn’t even think of the vampire connotation of that until later, but I just got a lot of thought out of it, I guess.

Debbie:

It’s a great album. So inventive, so unusual, and really so crafty.

Jack:

Thank you. Thanks.

Debbie:

Let’s talk about Warstic. How did you meet Ben Jenkins and what made you decide back in 2016 to invest in a business designing and manufacturing baseball bats?

Jack:

That’s a great question. It’s interesting, I got really involved in baseball. I had gone through a divorce and I was going through a long lonely period that I was spending a lot of time by myself, and I ended up watching baseball games, Detroit Tigers games, for the first time since I was a teenager. So, that started then in 2013 area somewhere. But I’d seen these baseball bats in a design website that I was reading, and I saw these different colored bats and I remember thinking, “Oh, wow, what an obvious idea. Of course, baseball bats that you could get in any color you want, why haven’t they… What took so long for that to be a thing?” And then down the line, we were opening The Third Man records building with Shinola Watches together in the same building in Detroit.

Jack:

I co-bought the building with the owner, Tom Kartsotis of Shinola and they were doing a bat with Warstic, they were doing a Shinola baseball bat with Warstic. And I went into their shop and I was looking at stuff I said, “Oh cool, I know that company. I’ve read about those guys. That’s really cool that you’re doing that, Tom.” Then I came back to Nashville, what it was a few weeks later and somebody in the art department there said, “Hey, we have this idea about some ideas for new merchandise for the store.” Because we’re always trying to think of something interesting to turn people on, and somebody said, “Look at this, there’s this company doing… We could do these yellow, black and white bats. Third Man Records baseball bats, would that? Since you like baseball, Jack, would you be interested in that?” I said, “Oh my God, I am and I like that company, but I can’t do that because Shinola did that with them already, so we can’t have that.”

Jack:

These Warstic bats in both these stores right next to each other, it looks like we’re ripping off Shinola’s collab they did. So just tabled that. And then he had reached out, I think Ben would have to tell you what takes place next. I think that he might have reached out through Ian Kinsler who was a Detroit Tiger, who was now co-owner of Warstic that something about, I don’t know why my name came up, but I think Ian mentioned my name to him.

Debbie:

So Ben, how did it happen?

Ben:

I like to explain to people that I definitely would’ve never thought of it just out of the blue. What he doesn’t remember probably is that Third Man Records had reached out literally like, “Hey, would you make like a cool black and yellow Third Man bat with Warstic?” And I was like, “Yeah, we’d love to do that.” But I did go, “Hey by the way, who at Third Man knows about us?” Because I was just very curious.

Debbie:

Oh, of course.

Ben:

And the guy was like, “Oh, Jack found you on the internet.” And I was like, “Sick.” But, it’s funny thinking back that was enough for me. I actually felt for one of the first times in my life that, “Oh, I made some art that a really great artist thought was great art,” and maybe patted myself on the back a little bit and I thought that was it. When I met Ian a couple weeks later, that’s when it got weird which was, I mentioned that to him because he was exploring what Warstic was about and he said, “Why is it cool?” And I said, “I don’t know, it’s just cooler than other baseball bats which aren’t cool, these are cool.” And I said, “Jack White reached out and wanted to do something, no big deal.” And he goes, “Oh, I know Jack a little bit.” I joked, “Oh why don’t we reach out to Jack and see if he wants to be the big investor, wink, wink.” And he laughed, and then we looked at each other and we’re like, “Oh, why not?” And that’s very much all of our personalities, to just explore what’s happening and go for it. He emailed him and then we were in Nashville meeting the next week and it was very quick and natural.

Debbie:

So, before we talk about how you both worked together for and with this brand, I’d love to just go and talk a little bit about your background and how you even got to developing a baseball bat manufacturing and design company. Ben, you were raised in Texas where your mom encouraged your creativity, and your dad as a lawyer inspired your work ethic. And you’ve said that you grew up with a complete razor-sharp focus on two things, you loved playing sports and you loved being creative. How did you manage to do both at the same time? They seem to come from very different parts of the brain.

Ben:

Yeah they did, and in Texas you don’t do those things together in public either because you have two sets of very distinct friends as well. I was in bands with this set of friends and my jock friends, they didn’t know each other and I was this weird in between thing that I’d bounce back and forth. But you go play sports games, you can’t play sports all day, it’s tiring. And when I would go home very much at home, right? That’s what I did at home in my room, I would draw just like so many of us did. And I just would put the other thing down and do one or the other, and for some weird reason I loved to do both, but they never concurrently happened.

Debbie:

By the time you got to high school, you were playing football, baseball, track, and you also enrolled in architecture and art classes. At that point, what did you think you wanted to do professionally?

Ben:

100% architecture.

Debbie:

Oh really?

Ben:

Yes, because I think my dad, it’s not that he ever discouraged my art, but he’s a great businessman, he’s a great worker, he provides for his family and it’s like, “Okay, art, cool. But how are you going to provide for your family? A lot of people draw a line to architecture because it’s practical.” And I did love architecture, I loved building things with Legos and making things and things like that. So 100% I went to college on a baseball scholarship, but I made sure that that school had architecture until they kicked me out.

Debbie:

They kicked you out? Tell us about that.

Ben:

Two years into it, with architecture you have these intense afternoon studio classes. Well, that’s when also when you practice college baseball. I would petition the school and I would try to get classes moved, and it got to the point where the Dean was like, “Look, you’ve got to quite architecture or you’ve got to quit baseball,” and I was like, “Can’t quit baseball, I’m here to play baseball. I’m on a scholarship and I’ve got to do that.” And so it was really disturbing at the time because I was like, “This is…” I thought I had it all figured out, I’m a baseball player, I’m an architect. I’m going to just do both until one tells me to do the other, I guess, was my plan. But what happened instead was I was forced to pick a different major. The only thing I could think of that it was even relatable was to go to the art school.

Ben:

And I was very much for a year just painting and drawing. I didn’t even know what design was, and a painting teacher that I’m still great friends with to this day who I owe everything to, his name is Brent [Vanderberg 00:39:22]. Great painter himself, gently took me aside and said, “Look, you’re a good painter for sure. But I’ve seen you work and you have this crazy obsessive compulsive habit of you care about composition and moving things around more than you do the brushstrokes.” He dragged me into the design studio and introduced me to Jamie [Mixon 00:39:40], my other important professor in my life. And I was like, “No way man, I’m painting. I’m a fine artist. I am not doing this computer stuff.” And this was back when the computer was just emerging for graphic designers. But man, I hit that command Z and boy did my brain love that function of being able to try some things three steps forward and then go three steps back. And I was hooked probably within a couple of hours.

Debbie:

Yeah, you can’t do that in upholstery, but you can do that on a computer.

Ben:

But I felt stupid because I was like, “Oh he’s so right.” This is what I love about this stuff was finding that composition until things felt right. And I’m naturally just, I’m a perfectionist, like I’m sure a lot of designers are. It’s the worst thing you could ever be in baseball. There’s so much failure in baseball, if you’re a perfectionist you drive yourself insane which I was very good at. The mentality of design actually much more naturally fits me than what you need to do in baseball, and so that even shook out.

Debbie:

Well, you graduated from Mississippi State University with a degree in architecture, but went straight to the minor leagues to play for the Martinsville Phillies during the 1996 season when you were 22. So, how did that all work? How did that happen?

Ben:

I just went. Baseball was my identity, I think my identity as a child was very much still first sports, that was my public persona. I was thought of as like, “Oh, it’s the quarterback and that’s the jock.” I’m a nice guy, but no one really knew about my art except maybe my band mates, but no one came to see us play so no one knew about it, so baseball always came first. So I did well enough in college to get a pro offer, and I went and did that for a while. But like I said, my perfectionist mentality did not really allow my true athletic ability to come out. So eventually they just say, “Hey, sorry, this isn’t what you’re doing, you’re cut,” and I got cut. So for the first time… I got cut one time in my life when I was, I think I was 23, almost 24. And I had sports every day of my life until that day, and it’s like, “Boom, you’re done,” and it was disturbing.

Debbie:

Well, you’ve written about and talked about how you went through a depression after that.

Ben:

Oh absolutely, because my identity was, it was just not available to me anymore. The goal was no longer they’re available to pursue anymore. And it was one or two things, either really force it which a lot of guys do and they end up playing until they’re 30 and not developing anything else. I did have enough common sense to go, “Hey, I have this other thing I love, and I’m lucky that I have it. I should go put all this energy now into that one thing.” And that’s what I did and I wasn’t a good designer at that point at all, I had barely really dabbled in it. So I just got out one of those US News and World reports and started looking at design schools and, “Hey, this was probably one of it.” And I applied to like the 10 best ones, and I got into The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And I just said, “I guess I better go,” and so I went. And so I went directly from baseball to that, but the baseball took two or three years to get out of my system enough to just fully function and not worry about it.

Debbie:

Well, there’s so many things to talk about regarding this. There is one really important thing which is, you went after a dream.

Ben:

Yeah.

Debbie:

And so many people are afraid to do that because they’re afraid of failure and then spend the rest of their lives wondering what if they had pursued that dream?

Ben:

Yeah. Really getting cut actually is probably really good because it was very like, “Hey.” It was very, “You’re cut. You’re fired, you’re cut.”

Debbie:

Bye, bye.

Ben:

You shouldn’t be doing this.

Debbie:

It’s so hard. Oh my God.

Ben:

It’s like, “You gave it a shot.” Getting turned away, I think that helped me flip the switch on everything else. And creativity was the thing, and I put all that competitive nature, unfortunately for many clients, probably into that one firm versus another and things like that. For 10 years I grinded on competing, OneFastBuffalo, my design and branding firm, against other people. I had that competitive nature and it served me hugely well, I was not afraid to work. If anything, some of my design teachers even would say, “Hey, this kid right here, he’s going to outwork you guys.”

Debbie:

So interesting. Michael Bierut talks about the same thing that it’s really his work ethic that has propelled him into the stratosphere. And that he’s just worked so hard he has more, and you’re going to love this, at bats.

Ben:

Yeah, time in the water I say with surfers, and there’s so many things, the 10,000 hours, whatever you want. I think I spent from age then 25 to 35 getting good at it, and understanding that that was okay. And that I enjoyed the process of getting better.

Debbie:

Sports is such a black and white De Stijl equation in that there’s a winner and a loser. Well, the interesting thing about sports that I try to imbue when I’m teaching my students is how often you do fail in sports, even when you’re winning. And so you have somebody like Babe Ruth who was successful 60% of the time, he had one of the greatest batting averages of all time. But that also meant he was unsuccessful 40% of the time. Same thing with Michael Jordan, Michael Jordan was able to shoot 35% of the time the ball into the basket. That meant 65% of the time he was unsuccessful.

Ben:

Yeah. So design was easy. Honestly, comparatively, it’s more like Babe Ruth succeeded 30 to 40% of the time and failed 70% of the time.

Debbie:

Oh, I got that.

Ben:

It’s actually even worse.

Debbie:

Even better, right?

Ben:

It’s three out of 10 times success in baseball’s Hall of Fame.

Debbie:

Right?

Ben:

Yeah. When you fail, what you have to do is see it as an open door to something else that you need to learn, you need to see failure as something that you need to learn. And if you can do that and have that mindset, every time you fail you’re going to get better, or you can just quit. So there was no quit in me. Once I got into design, it was like, there was absolutely no way I was going to give up on whatever the goal was I wasn’t sure, but I just wanted to do it. And I wanted to get one project and do good so I can get a better project so that I can get a better project, and I just focused on one project after the other until I felt like, “Oh, these are the kind of projects that I’ve always wanted,” because the first ones were obviously bad.

Debbie:

Well, I think they mostly are for everyone?

Ben:

Yeah.

Debbie:

While you were in grad school, you went to an Indian reservation in South Dakota as part of a film project. And this is when you first encountered buffaloes. In my research, I learned that buffalo are surprisingly fast, I had no idea. In fact, they’re as fast as horses. So talk about your intrigue around the buffalo and how that impacted you at that time?

Ben:

Just the physical nature of them, and as a designer just the shape of them alone probably first was like, “Damn, that’s just badass. Look at that thing.” But then learning about, probably specifically back then, the Sioux people about the uses of the buffalo and then how every part was used, and it was used for food, water, clothing, shelter, all these things. And then I ran across… When I first started freelancing, I just called myself something really bad like Ben Jenkins Productions, Inc. Probably the worst name I’ve ever-

Debbie:

BJPI.

Ben:

Oh yeah, there was a BJ logo, all that. It was bad and I did that for about a year. And then I thought, “You know, I probably should name this something cooler,” or something like that. And at that time, probably didn’t even understand the concept of what branding was. But my first branding project was to name myself something bigger than myself and I had the sense that I wanted it to mean something to me and maybe be a little mysterious and people not understand it and stuff. And I’d read a story that… I love the survival story of buffalo that we got down to one herd through us killing buffalo to basically essentially wipe out native people, we killed all the buffalo. And we got down to a really small herd. And how fascinating is it that one herd though survived and today it’s come back.

Ben:

And I just, I always love the underdog story. That’s just natural to my personality. And so, just like we do, I’m scratching on paper and this thing OneFastBuffalo comes out. And then I realized later I was like, “Oh, I think this is branding.” And the process of doing that part, I love the logo part of this, but that process of naming was fascinating to me and fun, and doing it from a place that had meaning to me or the client. And that’s when I started graphic design, cool, but branding is this useful thing. It’s used for something, and getting into the meaning and what you’re to designing and then flipping it to say, “Hey, I can’t really write well, or even spell.” People that know me know for God’s sakes I can’t even read what I’m writing in a text, I can’t spell, but I strangely design out of words. I love to grind and write until I find the words that then narrow down the word that tell me, “Hey, this is where you should be playing with this.” And that’s strange to me to think because I’m just not a word person, but I actually start all designed with writing.

Debbie:

What made you decide to go straight into creating your own agency as opposed to working for someone else first and apprenticing?

Ben:

Well Debbie, no one would hire me.

Debbie:

Why?

Ben:

I don’t know. I came home from grad school and part of it was, I did so many things. I was like, “Oh, I’m an animator, I’m a filmmaker. I do graphic design.” I did too many things which I’d loved doing, and no one could say, “Oh, we could hire this guy as a web designer. We could hire the…” Probably that was it, but I could not get a job. I tried for about five, six months back in Texas. And literally just out of necessity, I convinced probably some family friends to give me some really bad design projects and I made a little dough, 200 bucks. But I loved that transaction. I was like, “Ah.” It took about three little things like that and I just had the confidence to say, “Hey, you know what? I think I can do this.”

Debbie:

You practice what you call the art of brand manufacturing. Can you share more about what that is and how you go about doing it?

Ben:

Oh man, I liked the word manufacturing because I liked the idea of building something. I loved graphic design, but I loved more the idea of building something that would become a living, breathing thing. The 2D nature of that is one aspect of that identity. There’s the… So the name, the identity, all that stuff. But then beyond that, how does it talk? How does it walk? What are the rituals that it has? So really helping for a long time at OFB what I focused on with clients and my business partner, Christine Edgington, who’s amazing and a brand strategist, and now the president of Warstic, ironically. We would pitch to companies that we could help you build what you are not able to get out of your brain to a point where then you can take it and then go run it, and of course then do the really hard part. But it takes something that didn’t exist before and now it exists and now we can call it this. I’m fascinated still by that.

Debbie:

Right? Same.

Ben:

I’m still obsessed with that. Creating the identity. It’s just, I don’t know, there’s something about it.

Debbie:

It’s bringing something to life.

Ben:

Yeah.

Debbie:

It’s interesting though. People always ask me how I define branding and I say, I believe it’s meaning manufacture. And so I’m attracted to that word too, that something about that construction that I find so rich and intriguing.

Ben:

I just love complex systems and then trying to, like Jack said, trying to take complexity and things that don’t seemingly work together naturally, and finding where they do work together and simplifying them down and to then a new thing that then can exist on its own. And because at this point we have so many brands, for God’s sakes. We’ve almost got to put two or three things together now and then make them a new thing, right?

Debbie:

Yes, absolutely. You’ve stated that OneFastBuffalo as it stands today more than ever, is an independent singular underestimated built for survival creative force focused on the relentless search for clear vision. Why do you think you’re underestimated?

Ben:

I don’t know because I don’t think we play in the design world. We’re not in the magazines, we’re not in the-

Debbie:

But you could be, Ben.

Ben:

Well, I know. And it wasn’t that I was like, “Oh, I don’t want awards.” It just never really occurred to me because I was too competitively focused on getting the next client to give me the cool project to express for them what we could do, and we just ran under the radar like that. I like being underestimated. I think it’s the fun of life honestly, is to come out of nowhere and go, “Wow, look what they did.” Being the underdog fuels me, to be honest with you.

Debbie:

Well, that’s certainly a big part of the Warstic brand.

Ben:

It’s probably all built on that concept.

Debbie:

And it’s so interesting because that hunt and being the underdog and hunting for being better than maybe what you are, why did you find that to be something that you wanted to be so much a significant part of what the brand stands for?

Ben:

I think it goes back to my years of working with client and realizing the brands that worked were the… There was a lot of guys and girls that came to us and say, “Hey, we got this great business idea. It’s going to make a lot of money,” but they weren’t passionately individually personally connected to that idea. And the ones that were passionately connected to their business ideas were the ones that got through that first three, four years grind to actually make it succeed. Because no matter what, how good of an idea, it’s three, four years of just horrible grinding on it. So I knew when I started something like Warstic or started getting the idea that I should do my own brands as mostly an outlet to not doing client work, that it should be something I really cared about, right?

Ben:

So, my first inclination was, “Hey, baseball’s boring looking. I think I can bring a more exciting aesthetic to it.” But as a branding person, I know it needs to have meaning to people, and so I went to that underdog. What we tell parents is that we’re hoping that the kids that use Warstic, and we’ve seen this really come to fruition as there’s kids that just don’t believe in their ability, and they’re very shy and they just, they haven’t come out of that shell yet. Our tagline is literally, it’s not the weapon, it’s the warrior, which is crazy. I’m selling you a bat and I’m telling you, it’s not the bat that’s going to make you better, it’s you.

Debbie:

It’s the person.

Ben:

And I’m super proud of that because we have so many kids over the last however many years this has been, that actually has happened. And the reality is those kids are probably not going to play in the Major Leagues, but to see kids blossom and to have more confidence, confidence is a great gift to any kid. And you can do so much more after that.

Debbie:

In a sport where the brands have been around for centuries, what made you decide to pick baseball bats?

Ben:

Well, it was a world I knew and I knew the lingo. I could say, “Hey, I could hit [Alina 00:54:10].” These things that normal people in the street don’t know, but us baseball players in the deck out know. So I was well one, I know the lingo. I know the world, I know how the players think about their equipment. So that’s a good place to start any business, it’s a niche. Someone had brought it up to me as a client idea, some guy called me one time and said, “Hey, I want to do a baseball bat business.” And he is like, “How much does it cost to brand?” And I was like, “Well, I’m good at this, it costs XYZ.” And he’s like, “Oh, I can’t afford that,” hung up. I don’t know if that guy was real or some kind of angel or some weird thing, but that is the first time I thought, “Baseball bats are a really simple thing, I bet I could figure that out.” And I spent 500 bucks getting them done, there’s a lot to it but I designed the website myself, I designed the brand in three… I did the whole thing in three months and I launched it.

Debbie:

The Warstic logo is a simple two line symbol you’ve deemed war stripes. So, talk about your design aesthetic.

Ben:

Oh boy. When I was in my 20’s it was just way too much, was my design aesthetic, so much. And this logo’s probably the best example of the opposite idea, more the Eastern idea of taking things away until only what needs to exist can exist. Or the idea that I use the least amount of pixels and create the most amount of impact. Most baseball bats, they put their brand name on the front of the baseball bat.

Debbie:

You put it on the back.

Ben:

Say [Jenkins’s 00:55:34] baseball bats or whatever, you put it on the front because that’s the billboard and everybody wants to see it. And I was like, “Well, you know what? That doesn’t look cool though.” And when I’m staring at a hundred mile fastball that might hit me in the head and kill me, I like to look at something that actually helps me calm down in that moment and not freak out, and seeing your name on the baseball bat isn’t going to help me do that. So I thought, “Well, let’s put the name on the back like a great piece of…” A modern piece of furniture, the designers is not sticking it on the front and ruin it, he puts it on a cool label on the back. So it actually said Warstic on the back, and the line started as just a feeling, literally a décor on the bat that to me would be calming.

Debbie:

So it’s like a focusing mechanism?

Ben:

Actually, we teach kids now that is a focusing method. We have a breathing technique where they go, they count down from one to 10, going up one line and then back the other. So we do pitch it as a focusing tool, but we teach kids and it’s amazing what kids pick up. Six-year-olds going, “Hey, what’s the logo mean?” “Well, the left side means the past and the right side means the future. And it’s all about staying in between the lines, being in the moment.” So it tears me up it because it… I can super plan it like that, but that’s real to kids. It is, and I understand-

Debbie:

And you’re helping them become who they are.

Ben:

Yeah, and I understand how hard it is to be in the batters box. But then to see kids go through much more traumatic things than I ever had to go through where there’s native kids we work with or something like that. But they get that it extends beyond stupid sport of baseball. So it’s the dumbest, simplest logo I’ve ever designed that just had the most meaning. And it’s just so cool to see it permeate kids’ lives like that. So it’s super cool.

Debbie:

You have a Warstic creed where you outline how there is an ongoing conversation happening at Warstic with your tribe about helping future generations of stick warriors connect mind and heart with mechanics. So it seems like while you’re selling sports equipment, you’re also really helping to train young minds to be able to use sports to become stronger as people.

Ben:

Absolutely. And that goes back to me being a bad baseball player and realizing that. On paper, I actually did have the physical abilities. I was super fast, I was strong. I could hit the ball a long way. I could throw the ball like a rocket. I had all these physical abilities, but my brain did not let those things work often enough because of perfectionism, because of lack of belief in my own self for, I don’t even know what reason. And I’m very aware of that. Once I finished playing, I really looked back and go, “Oh.” And knowing Major League players now, I clearly see the difference. It’s not the physical, especially in baseball, it’s the mental, that’s the warrior. A warrior is not so much, “Oh a big guy with a spear and he can kill you,” and this and that. It’s the mentality of a warrior that… I’m the biggest Karate Kid fan ever. I grew up in the ’80s, man. Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi, he didn’t teach the kid how to do all these techniques, he built self-confidence in this kid to do incredible things.

Debbie:

Yeah, he taught him how to think.

Ben:

Taught him how to think, right? So, I don’t know, that just felt like what it… I basically said, “Well, I’ll make this brand out of my weakness.”

Debbie:

In 2016, Warstic bats were approved for use in Major League baseball. How did you make that happen?

Ben:

I acquired two business partners at the same time. Jack White and Ian Kinsler. So I’m from Texas and everybody knows who Ian is. He’s a Texas Rangers Hall of Famer, this kind of thing.

Debbie:

How did you approach him? Because you approached him before Jack.

Ben:

Strangely enough, I had remained friends with the drummer of my high school band. And he’s a good businessman today and I said, “Hey man, I think I need to take this Warstic project seriously and make it a real company, but I’m going to need funds to do that. And I’m going to need partners.” And in brainstorming with him one day he said, “Oh, I know some pro athletes, would you want to meet Ian Kinsler?” And I was like, “Oh, why not?” So, how weird is it that my high school drummer introduced me to Ian Kinsler, who introduced me to Jack White? It’s just very strange.

Debbie:

And for my design listeners that might not be following baseball-

Ben:

Maybe not.

Debbie:

Ian Kinsler is the four-time Major League Baseball All Star and Texas Rangers great. So, he’s a big deal.

Ben:

Oh, he’s a big deal, and then played for the Tigers and stuff, so he’s one of the best second basemen that’s ever played the game. And he just looked at it in the same way that Jack said and said, “Hey, we need this in baseball. We don’t have cool stuff like this. We don’t have enough. We have these same old choices,” right?

Debbie:

Yeah.

Ben:

He goes, “I feel this. I can feel the energy from it. I relate to it.” So he then took that bat into the Major Leagues and risked his own reputation and proceeded by the way, to have one of his best years ever, which was scary. But he did it, and he proved it, and that’s his thing.

Debbie:

Do you think the bat had something to do with it?

Ben:

I think it actually, he was getting a little older at that point. And I do think it put a little new energy into him and he, Ian takes it into the highest level of baseball that you can possibly be and hits 28 home runs with it. And all of a sudden we’re like, “Oh, now we have both. We have performance, and Ian represents that, and we have creativity and Jack represents that.” And I tell them that’s why they’re the business partners. They represent the two halves of what Warstic is about, which would be just really great design and creativity and doing whatever we want, but paired with the highest level of performance. And that’s also, that’s the threshold that I wanted to cross was, I didn’t want to make toy bats or just things that you put on your wall or something like that. Uh-huh (negative), I want to make things you use in real life that happen to look beautiful.

Debbie:

Despite 300% year over year growth in 2021, Warstic operates with an estimated consumer awareness of about 20% in the baseball and softball markets. And as I mentioned, you’re really up against century old crusty brands, but you’re growing every year and your president Christine Edgington, as you mentioned, has stated that, “You know you’re ruffling feathers and you’re not letting up.” How are you ruffling feathers?

Ben:

Well, us designers know, I think we have weapons at our disposal that non-creative people don’t have. And those baseball bat brands don’t have those weapons. So, it’s just our creativity and our ability to express things in a more human way and exciting way than the other brands because branding 101, man, you can take, let’s say the biggest eight brands that have existed for 40 to 80 years, and you put them on the same bucket. You could throw any one name and the names are interchangeable because they don’t represent or stand for anything. And the best thing you can do in branding is stand for something. The other brands’ heads are spinning because we have a story. We have a conversation that we can have beyond, “Oh, this bat’s made out of a P99 alloy.” It’s so boring, it’s so boring talking about bats.

Debbie:

You’ve evolved from exclusively making bats to making equipment for lacrosse, skateboarding, skiing, snowboarding, surfboards, fishing. How do you envision the brand growing and evolving over the next 10 years?

Ben:

It’s funny, because this is a constant branding conversation we have internally, Christine and I, is if we would’ve been named something else, maybe it couldn’t extend to these other things. But the reality is, think about the name Warstic, in it’s simplest form it probably means warrior’s stick. I took the K off to make it its own word, which is an old branding trick. I don’t know, I owned that word in that way.

Debbie:

I’m so glad that you took the K off-

Ben:

Oh, it would suck.

Debbie:

So many people put K’s in instead of-

Ben:

But it’s an old branding trick, but it singularized it. It created a new word. Well, that word has nothing to do with baseball if you think about it. So, you really look at the different sports, there’s golf, tennis, lacrosse, and stick becomes this thing. I surf a lot and I’d be like, “Hey bro, you got a new stick?” We actually say that’s, that’s a thing. So a lot of things can be sticks at the same time, and it gives us these new pallets to play with. So hunting arrows, pickleball paddles. It’s fun, and then it’s funny because the mentality part of it, the message of Warstic, it plays no matter what. You’re a hockey player? You better have grit, you better have [crosstalk 01:04:08]-

Debbie:

Hockey stick, yeah. Absolutely.

Ben:

In lacrosse. I think it plays, and so we have a plan over the next five, six years to slowly, carefully, very intuitively enter those sports.

Debbie:

So, who is the big decision maker in your collaboration? Oh, they’re both pointing at each other. Oh, listeners, they’re both pointing at the other.

Ben:

The day I met him to be honest, and he said, “Hey, I’d really love to invest with you,” and he’s held true to this. He said, “I’ll never step on your toes.” And I thought in my mind, “It’s totally fine, man. Step on my toes.” I had such admiration for him as an artist, whether it be music, whether it be design, whatever. I did not care, and that was a big deal for me too.

Debbie:

Yeah, you’re a trained designer.

Ben:

We designers have egos, we all do.

Debbie:

Yes we do.

Ben:

And so I knew I had a sense that this could be scary. I did Warstic to get a little bit away from clients and to not have someone tell me what to do, what they like, or “Hey, you like purple? I don’t. I don’t care.” That’s why I did it. I wanted that freedom to just make whatever I want, whether I’m bothered or not. So that moment was I… But I bought into that moment because I said, “Hey, this is a chance to work with someone that I would love to collaborate with, and it’ll be crazy and it’ll be scary.” And 99.9% of the time, it’s totally fine because he’s a gentleman and he just is, and he has respect for other people’s art. And so I have to do a lot of the heavy lifting just because it’s my daily job and he has 1,900 things going, but it’s just a process of getting it going and then truly showing him what we’re doing and going, “Hey, does this direction feel good to you? Yes or no?”

Ben:

And it’s a true collaboration in every sense of the word. And the weird thing about Jack and I is, we’re very different when it comes to design. He loves primary colors, I never use primary colors. I use very earth tone things, and things like that more nature type stuff, but there’s always this 40% of things that we design, we show each other, “Oh, look at this sick thing I saw.” There’s a space where we both like the same things, and so a lot of it is just making sure that we find those things, but it is a brand.

Debbie:

Mm-hmm (affirmative), and it is a company.

Ben:

And it is my job to say, “All brands should evolve over time, but I have to keep it within itself too. But how do we make this art keep evolving?” Like you said, keep the train rolling for the business.

Debbie:

Jack, you invested a million dollars into Warstic. The company has dramatically grown since that investment. How do you think about the return on investments? Are you more of a long view kind of person? Do you expect quarterly returns? Talk about-

Jack:

It’s very hard to find an abacus for your living room wall that has a million pegs on it, that was the hardest part, but I check it off every day whenever in the morning I have coffee, I slide one of those beads over. When you love an idea, you just immediately your investment, you wash your hands of it immediately and just think this is not about bean counting or whatever, and expecting to see a profit. My investment’s always been the same thing, that if I could combine something that I actually love and feel a bit of a passion for, then it’s interesting to me. So, it was real easy with Warstic because it had so much potential and it’s such an untapped market.

Debbie:

And you’ve evolved now from exclusively making bats to making equipment for lacrosse, skateboarding, skiing, snowboarding, surfboards, and even fishing. I have one last question for you both, your flagship store is located at the corner of Malcolm X Avenue and Main Street in Dallas, Texas. Is that address intentional?

Jack:

It was just an added blessing, it seemed like. We found the building and it was so perfect, and that was also the cross street we thought, “Wow, how incredible is that?” And that neighborhood of Deep Ellum had such a deep musical history too going back to the early blues days. And it’s nice to be part of that, to exemplify and bring a little bit of that corner back to life.

Debbie:

Well, congratulations on all of your success. I can’t wait to see how you grow this brand together.

Jack:

Thanks so much.

Ben:

Thanks, Debbie.

Debbie:

You can see more about Jack White’s new album on his website, jackwhiteiii.com, or his entire body of work at thirdmanrecords.com. You can see more of Ben Jenkins’ work at onefastbuffalo.com, and you can find out everything about Warstic on their website warstic.com. That’s spelled W-A-R-S-T-I-C. This is the 18th year, first time I’m saying that, we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Milman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Recorded Voice:

Design matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. Interviews are usually recorded at the School of Visual Arts Master’s and Branding Program in New York city, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor in chief of Design Matters media is Emily Weiland.

Amy:

You said that?

Emily:

I can’t believe I said that.

Amy:

That’s a great quote.

Emily:

Yeah. Are you sure I said that?

Amy:

Yeah. That was good, Emily.

Emily:

It must have been one of my more loose.

Amy:

You should be a writer. No, you should be a writer. That’s really good.

Emily:

One of my more lucid moments.

Speaker 3:

From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 18 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, the Indigo Girls talk about their long career in music and the obstacles that are still there.

Amy:

If women are never given a chance to be in those spaces, we cannot get better.

Emily:

If you don’t play into the patriarchal, heterosexual mode, you’re not going to get as far as a straight woman.

Debbie:

Amy Ray and Emily Saliers met in elementary school, but they didn’t really get to know each other until high school when they started performing music together. They both went off to separate colleges and then they started playing together again and decided to call themselves the Indigo Girls. Their first full length album came out in 1987 and they have been making music together ever since. They have each done a lot of different things on their own, but their extraordinary creative collaboration has endured. They join me now to talk about it and all the wondrous things they’re doing. Amy and Emily, welcome to Design Matters.

Emily:

Thank you.

Amy:

Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Emily:

Yeah. We’re excited about this.

Debbie:

Emily, you are the daughter of a well-known Methodist pastor and church musician. He also taught at Emory in Candler School of Theology. You’ve said that your whole upbringing was saturated in theological discussion and music. What kind of music were you introduced to back then?

Emily:

Well, as a young child, I sang in kids church choirs and sang in a children’s choir, the Callanwolde, the Young Singers of Callanwolde in Atlanta. Both my sisters and I did that when we were very young. And then in the house, my parents listened to a lot of jazz and a lot of classical music. They weren’t really into the songs like folk music or rock music or any of that that I came to know and love. We had a turntable in the living room and I’d get up on Saturday mornings, there was always either jazz or particularly classical music going on. Then of course, all the girls picked a lesson, music lesson, and we all sang. We went to concerts. Our household literally was saturated. Then my dad, he’s been writing sacred music for a long time.

Debbie:

And you wrote a book together actually.

Emily:

We did. I was trepidatious about writing a book connected to organized religion in any way. We walked each other through that. Basically, I consider all music in a space, sacred music. And so we sort of broke down the barriers between Saturday night and Sunday morning and what was happening in a spiritual sense. When Amy and I played till 3:00 AM at a bar with a bunch of locals and an eclectic mix of musicians and what was happening on Sunday morning and how music can inform your life and inspire you and deepen your understanding of life and your spiritual path, really, in any context.

Debbie:

Amy, quite a few of your relatives were also Methodist ministers. You spent quite a lot of time at church. You’ve said that there were Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, Wednesday nights, and Friday night youth group, all at the church. You also went to church camp for five years. There was music around you as well. But from what I understand, you were dreaming of becoming David Cassidy, the popular teen idol on the hit show The Partridge Family. Was that because he was the one that got all the girls?

Amy:

That’s a great question. Yeah. I mean, probably not my finest musical taste hour, but I still have a very big place in my heart for The Partridge Family. I don’t know. You know, back then, I think I definitely pictured myself as David Cassidy instead of wanting to be with David Cassidy, which is I guess the first sign of lesbianism. But yeah, I just loved these young rock idols, basically kiddie rock, I guess. And so I would pose in front of the mirror and have a little microphone and pretend like I was singing and stuff. You know, just kid. I mean, I was in second and third and fourth grade. Then I started listening to just normal music.

Debbie:

I think The Partridge Family is normal music though.

Amy:

Well, great pop songs. I mean, some of the greatest songwriting, for sure. Those writers were amazing. The show was so fun and stuff. David Cassidy was great, great performer.

Debbie:

Absolutely. I had more of a crush, looking back on it, I didn’t know it at the time but I think I had more of a crush on Susan Dey who played Laurie Partridge. I also liked Bobby Sherman more than David Cassidy, but that’s a whole separate. We can have a whole separate podcast done.

Amy:

Yeah. That was the question of like, do you like The Who or the Rolling Stones? It’s like, do you like Bobby Sherman or David Cassidy? Yeah, a patriarchal centered discussion for sure.

Debbie:

Absolutely. Now, technically you first encountered each other when Emily first moved to Decatur, Georgia and began attending Laurel Ridge Elementary School. Emily, you entered sixth grade. Amy, you were in fifth. But you didn’t really become friends until later. But I do believe that there was a rather important first impression that you had of each other in terms of music as well. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Emily:

Well, you know, up until a certain point in life, you don’t really commingle with someone in a different grade than you are. But it was pretty small school and I was aware of Amy because she was the other girl who played guitar. I came into Laurel Ridge when my family moved to Georgia and I played guitar. It was just an awareness of that. For me, initially, nothing beyond that. But it was enough to have me curious in Amy from the outset.

Debbie:

Now, what motivated you both to pick up the guitar specifically as opposed to any other instrument?

Amy:

Well, for me, we took piano when we were young. It was like a rule in our house that you took piano for three years.

Debbie:

That’s a good rule. I wish I had that rule.

Amy:

Yeah, it was, it was actually. We did it. But it wasn’t that transportable and I wasn’t that great at it. I was listening to my older sister’s records from like Woodstock and stuff, you know, that hippie era and folk music. I wanted to play Neil Young songs basically, you know? And so I thought, okay, I’ll learn guitar. One of my sisters played guitar. I think maybe both of them even did, but it just seemed like a great, more kind of a cool instrument. I played flute for a little while, but I wasn’t very good at that at all. I took the YMCA up the street and I was like, this is definitely cool. I think I was exposed at church youth group, the youth ministers always had a guitar. We were like a singing folky Methodist church. So there was a ton of that around at church camp all the time. There was always guitars, kumbaya, all that. Yeah, it just seemed cool and a thing to do.

Debbie:

So you are a proper musician? You know how to read music, you know how to do all of those scales and things.

Amy:

Not like Emily. I can pick out a piano song. I have trouble with a bass clef, but I’m learning it because my child is taking piano so I’m relearning all that stuff. I mean, I know a little bit, but not like Emily. I didn’t retain a lot, let’s just say that. I mean, I took jazz. I took so many classes and I just never, never practiced enough. Let that be a lesson, I guess.

Debbie:

Emily, I understand you were able to pick out the chords of Joni Mitchell’s songs as you were growing up. That’s pretty difficult.

Emily:

Well, until I discovered her actual tunings, I was flailing at them, but I was so obsessed with her that I just had to play her songs so I just found my way around. But then I got, I think it was For the Roses songbook. I looked at those guitar tunings and that just like, from then on, I’ve been also a big fan of different alternative guitar tunings. But Joni Mitchell, she just was like the light of my musical life and path, and so I was obsessed with her.

Debbie:

Yeah. I still am, all these years later.

Emily:

Me too.

Debbie:

I still am. I’m so happy that she’s getting so much of the acclaim she deserves. I think she’s one of, if not, the best singer songwriter of the 20th century.

Emily:

I agree with you.

Debbie:

Anyway, your older siblings were in school together and they were in some plays and musicals. At 15 and 16 years old, you found yourself in chorus together. And Amy, I read that when you first started singing together, you thought your head was going to explode and realized that Emily was your musical soulmate.

Amy:

Yeah, I think I did write that. Debbie, you love that, don’t you? You’re smiling so big.

Debbie:

And that you were inconsolable. I read that as well, that you were inconsolable.

Amy:

I was like, this is it for me. I found my path. I don’t think Emily felt the same way, but that’s the way it is. I was a year younger too so I was very in awe of the older person. Emily disputes this, but she was very popular in high school. Maybe I have a romanticized vision, but she disputes that. But there was a certain magnetism already and so I was like, whoa, and the sound of harmony and someone that could just sing harmony to anything. It was a whole new thing for me, because I’d been in church choir and chorus and my sisters and my dad sings and everything. But I hadn’t experienced the effect of singing with someone in harmony next to you that’s just a single person. It’s a very different sound than a choir. Because in the choir, it’s like you could open your mouth and nothing comes out and the choir can’t tell basically.

Amy:

When it’s just you two, it’s like these overtones are created and crazy things that feel so magical. I think for me, I was like, wow, this is it. This is what I want to do. This is the person I’m going to sing with and I want to do it all the time. I didn’t care about making money. I was like, I just want to do this. It wasn’t about fame. I wasn’t thinking about the way you think now because things are so accessible with YouTube and people that become instantly famous. At the time, we didn’t have any of that so I was just, all I could think about was every day I want to do this. That was the important thing. Right. Which I think is good, because look at where we are. I think it’s good to have that perspective of something that you just love. That was my response. You’re accurate. I don’t know where you get your info, but it’s good.

Debbie:

Emily, was it the same for you? I got the sense as I was researching your histories together and separately that it wasn’t quite the same epiphany.

Amy:

It’s okay.

Emily:

No, not the way Amy describes it for her, but what it was was the most fun thing I was doing and we became really good friends in high school. I mean we used to quote lyrics to each other. We loved The Last Time I Saw Richard by Joni Mitchell. Remember Amy, we used to get so heavy into lyrics?

Amy:

Yeah, signed them in our yearbooks.

Emily:

Signed them in our yearbooks. We were best friends at that point in high school, very soul connected. But just playing those songs together was fun. We both picked songs that we liked to do and then we were really encouraged by our AP English teacher, Mr. Ellis Loyd. And so he set us up with like, “Well, why don’t you learn some songs and you can play for the class?” But I have never in my life, Amy, she’s so in touch with what’s going on. She has vision for things and she always knew what to play next and what to do. I mean, I’m not trying to be self-deprecating, but I’m a little bit head in the clouds just trying to figure out what’s going on around me. And so for me it was just like, wow, this is really, really fun. Amy really propelled us in terms of the next steps to take. But I also, I wanted to be an English teacher.

Debbie:

I know, I want to talk about that.

Emily:

Then I was like, when I was 11, I was taking classical guitar. I was just into a different kind of music really until I became more co-rooted in the music that Amy was turning me onto. You know? And then when we start, instead of learning a song by The Beatles or Carole King or James Taylor, we would learn a song by Everything but the Girl or maybe Lloyd Cole or something like that. She just opened my world. But I was never a visionary with what I wanted to do with the rest of my life except this distant thing of being an English teacher. And then we went to different colleges at first. It was like, okay, well, whatever happens, happens.

Debbie:

After graduation from high school, Emily, you enrolled at Tulane University. You were an English major intending to go on to grad school and become a teacher. Amy, you moved to Nashville a year later also to study English. I’m also an English major. I joke that we have degrees in reading. But you studied English and religion at Vanderbilt University, neither were particularly good experiences for you. You decided to come back. Independently without realizing that you both applied to, got into, and then decided to go to Emory, what was happening that year that you both didn’t enjoy where you were?

Amy:

You know, Emily was a freshman at Tulane and I was a senior in high school. I just remember going to see Emily and playing some together on Bourbon Street and seemed like a pretty amazing environment. So I was psyched to go to college. My sister had gone to Vanderbilt in Nashville too. She had worked at this cool record store. I was really, looked up to my sister. When she was at Vandy, she lived in the philosophy dorm and everybody played Dungeons & Dragons and listened to cool music. I was like, that’s where I want to go to school. But I got up there and I got a job at that record store. It was called The Great Escape. Walking in my sister’s footprints. It had just shifted so quickly from the school that would have Black Flag come play a concert to everything is all about sororities and fraternities and toned and like polite society and very kind of racist.

Amy:

It was like the Reagan era was starting. You could either be a completely stoned out person and not be involved at all or you had to be completely engaged in all that stuff. I’m in between all that. I’m a very engaged person. I love student government. I love being an organizer. I love all that stuff but it was so heavy-handed in the elite society kind of moneyed way that there was a big division between the international students and the other students, and the rich students and the poor students, and sororities and non sororities. I had a girlfriend. I had fallen in love my senior year in high school. She was at UGA.

Amy:

We were constantly having trouble. She didn’t really want to be gay. I was thoroughly gay. I hated myself. I was so self-loathing and I was so depressed. I mean, I hated myself. I wanted to be anyone but who I was, but I’m also constantly tempted by all these fun things like working at the record store and playing music and playing racketball. And so I was like a weird combination of things and my head was spinning. I couldn’t make it work. I was like, I just got to leave this place because there’s too many… I mean, my favorite things were, honestly my religion classes were amazing. My English classes were amazing. I had a therapist that I discovered who helped me out of a really dark time. And I love, love, love working at that record store so much.

Amy:

All that stuff was not enough to keep me even keeled. I was like, I got to go home to Atlanta and just be around my family, be in a scene where at least I feel like somewhat tethered to something to save me. So I did it. Emily, I’m not sure what her battle was, but then I found she was coming back to Emory too. I was like, yes, we can continue doing our music. So it was a good thing in that way.

Debbie:

What was the source of your depression at the time? I know that with your parents being so super conservative, you’ve written about, and I’m only going to use this word because this is the word that I read and found in my research, that you said that your parents were destroyed by having three gay kids in one family. You had come out. Your two sisters were also gay.

Amy:

It’s so hard now because my dad’s passed away. My mom is so amazing. Even before my dad died eight years ago, he had come around to the place where you couldn’t love gay people anymore than they do. It’s amazing what happened, but they were destroyed in this way where we were so close and raised to be very community-minded and generous. There were so many good values instilled in us, yet this one thing was so in opposition to their faith and everything they believed in and they just couldn’t picture it. Their friends rejected them in the church. It was a long, a very long road for them to get by. I mean, I felt like not only do I mean they were destroyed and like not happy for us, they were scared for what would happen to us. They were scared that they had done something wrong when they raised us because they were taught that what we are was a perversion. So there was so much fear that it became anger. They were always a little bit left of the middle in other ways. You know, pro-choice, and my dad was like a feminist and all that stuff.

Amy:

This is like the one thing that just, so it just was a life shift for them that they couldn’t picture. Then they saw us as being damaged. They were afraid that they were the ones that did it. I think they had to come around to realize that it’s not damage. It’s just another existence that’s beautiful as everything else, but that kind of society thing. Then when you have self-loathing yourself, it’s a recipe for a lot of terrible times and ways that just reiterate how you already feel. Now, it’s totally different now because they’re so great now that it’s like, I don’t want them to ever feel bad about what we went through because they worked so hard to come out on the other side of it. You know? It’s one of those things. It’s a necessary conversation, but it’s like, wow, you can make it through this. I mean, I’m lucky that they did, really, for me. You know?

Debbie:

Emily, what was it like with your family when you first came out?

Emily:

Well, my sisters knew before. I mean, I think my parents knew. There was very little language for it. I mean, I can remember in high school knowing I was different but having no way to articulate what that difference was and trying to follow the path of dating guys and all that stuff. But my sisters knew because I had like, I don’t know, like a camp counselor girlfriend on the side or something is very typical. They were so lovely, my sisters, and so supportive. I had a lot of fear about telling my parents, even though in my gut, I didn’t think they were going to kick me out of the house or ostracize me in any way. That was all internal. But I was spending a lot of time out of the house and I lived with them at that time and I felt out of respect, I should tell them why I was out and what I was doing and what I was feeling.

Emily:

And so I just took them to lunch separately. It was a different time. I think if anything, they were just afraid of the life that I would have to go through, what societal pain there would be. But beyond that, I mean, it was nothing. When I was five years old, my mom made us a lot of clothes and she made us Easter dresses and I asked for Easter pants. She made me Easter pants. I think the writing was on the wall in a way.

Debbie:

I asked for pants too when I was about five or six years old. My brother was having a birthday party and I wanted to wear pants. This was the ’60s and it was just very different, totally different time. My mother was adamant that she was not going to let me wear pants. I ended up falling just completely unrelated to the argument about pants and I scratched at my face and she felt so bad. She ended up letting me wear pants.

Emily:

Yeah. I mean, even that is traumatic. I think my mom just said, okay, I’ll make you some pants. I was so unscathed, my whole process. Not only my family and my friends, but the church. We went to church at Emory, so the ecumenical setting was academic. We had members of different faith communities come in and give the sermon or homily or whatever it called in that faith. We were taught to come home and ask questions about the text, the scriptures and all that stuff. I didn’t have to go through so much of the agony that other people did when they were kicked out of their church or their homes, but the agony that I went through was my own self-loathing, my own self homophobia, which I still have to battle today, so much better.

Debbie:

Me too.

Emily:

But it’s undeniably still there.

Debbie:

Well, we were socialized that way. We were brought up that way. I didn’t come out until I was 50 because I felt so much internal shame. I was worried about being judged. I was worried about just what people would think. My father never knew and he died not knowing. My mom still calls my wife, my friend.

Emily:

I mean, you probably were too like what you’re supposed to do is be attractive to men.

Debbie:

Right.

Emily:

Like that’s the goal.

Debbie:

I mean, I’ve always been kind of femmy, but you know, it’s not really a reflection on my sexuality. It’s just more that I like to feel a certain way. But yeah, it was a very different time in the ’80s. I mean, I remember sneaking into different LGBTQ bookstores in the West Village and finding Faron for the first time.

Emily:

Oh my God.

Debbie:

But I was completely closeted. I would go to Henrietta’s or the Cubbyhole and just go by myself and just occasionally kiss girls. And no one knew, no one in my life knew that I was doing this because I was so scared.

Emily:

Really?

Amy:

You never see anybody there like at Henrietta’s or Cubbyhole?

Debbie:

No. Nope, never. Never.

Amy:

Wow. That’s pretty amazing.

Emily:

When I was at Tulane, I remember, well, there’s a few pivotal things. I remember one was seeing the movie Personal Best and being terrified that someone would see me in the theater. Absolutely terrified, but I had to go. The other was Cris Williamson and Vicki Randall was in her band back then and they came and played a show at Tulane. I sat there also terrified not knowing why I was terrified. Like trying to tear down the band in my mind in some way because I didn’t know what was going on with me. Looking back, it’s like, oh my goodness. Was that transparent or what?

Debbie:

I have so much compassion for that little baby dyke that was so afraid to just be who she was and ended up spending the first 50 years of her life sort of tortured by it. It’s been 10 years now, otherwise. So there’s thankfully a happier ending to that or a happier mid story.

Amy:

But can you find moments in that time… Now I’m interviewing you.

Debbie:

No, that’s fine.

Amy:

Can you find moments in that time though where you can remember some happiness of that? Like some thrill of like, if you were, I can just picture New York at that time too. If you were at the Cubbyhole and there was a thrill, did you remember those moments of happiness though when you felt some liberation? Do you have any of that?

Debbie:

Yeah. I mean, I knew there was a feeling that I felt of being home, of being that I can’t really explain it more than that. But now 10 years into this new chapter, I can say I really understand what pride means. Because you feel proud of being who you are as opposed to ashamed. But yeah, the thrilling moments for me were discovering like the Ann Bannon novels and buying them all, which is pulp lesbian fiction for those that might be listening and not aware of who Ann Bannon is. I would go back to my apartment which I shared with a married couple and I would go onto my covers with a flashlight. I would read these books. Then I found On Our Backs. Then I found Off Our Backs. Then I found JEB. I’d find all of these sort of little amulets, and I still have to this day. I still have my original copy of The Joy of Lesbian Sex, which I got in the ’80s before I even had anything major in my life, but whatever. This is getting to be TMI.

Emily:

Not for us.

Debbie:

Those private moments, there were moments of real joy and they were very private. Now I can talk about it and share those things. I was talking to my friend, Wendy MacNaughton years ago about this. She’s like, “Oh my God, you should create a little baby dyke museum,” because I have all these things still.

Amy:

Little breadcrumbs to the weird path to who you are.

Emily:

Remember when if you subscribed to a magazine, it would come in a brown paper cover?

Debbie:

Yeah.

Emily:

I remember that like the secrecy of it all.

Debbie:

Yeah, yeah.

Amy:

Crazy, right?

Debbie:

I remember hiding these books and putting them behind other books and backwards just because I was so worried. But you know, one thing I do want to ask you, and I know that you’ve been asked this a million times, but just for the two people in the universe that might not be aware. As I was preparing for the interview, I can’t tell you how many times the question came up about whether or not you’d ever been a couple. My favorite perspective on this came from an interview that you did on NPR. The interviewer stated that she was constantly surprised by the number of people who assumed that the two of you must have dated each other at least once in your lifetimes. I know that this is not true. You’ve always been best friends. She suggested that it was driven by the slightly phobic assumption that anyone of the same sex will do for anyone who identifies as a lesbian. She goes on to state that just because we’re gay doesn’t mean that we’re always gay for each other. I was wondering if the assumption ever annoys you or if it’s just so old now that you just kind of get a kick out of it.

Amy:

It never annoyed me. It actually always made us laugh because it’s like saying like, do you date your sister? It’s like so from left field that we’re just like… It’s like when someone sees one of us at the grocery store and they ask where the other one is, we’re like, yeah, we actually live in separate towns. It’s cute, because I guess we’re so together in everything that we do, Indigo Girls, there’s just two spots and it’s always going to be us on the same sides that you can’t adjust your vision, you know? But I swear, when you see the Backstreet Boys, you’re not like, where are the other band members? You know?

Debbie:

Well, speak for yourself.

Amy:

But yeah, I don’t know how Emily feels about it.

Emily:

No, I feel the exact same way. I don’t get them any more, but I used to get the questions if someone see me in the grocery store. “Where’s Amy?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I don’t know where Amy is.” Far from here.

Amy:

You have to ask her.

Debbie:

Your original name as a duo was Saliers and Ray. You started actually, your first recording was in high school. You recorded a tape called Tuesday’s Children in high school. What was the motivation behind that?

Amy:

Were we both in high school or was you in college already?

Debbie:

It was 1981.

Amy:

Oh yeah. She was a senior. Well, we had fun recording ourselves because it was the way you heard yourself back, I guess. You know what I mean? I mean, the way we used to record was on just like a little jam box, press record. No tracks. Just us singing together. I have all those tapes from rehearsals and stuff. I just remember we had a song called Tuesday’s Children that was written about us playing on open mic nights at a club called Good Ol’ Days. It was just like a romantic little sentimental song about having fun on all those writers’ nights, I guess. I remember playing that in Ellis Loyd’s class, our English teacher’s class, I think, but I feel like you were already at college maybe.

Emily:

I can’t remember the timeline.

Amy:

Then we made a real cassette called Blue Food that we actually sold. I think our first year at Emory, right? At the time, the deal was like you wanted to… I was always like, “We got to record something so when we play a show, we can leave something with people to remember us so they’ll come back.” That was like the business model. So it wasn’t about making money. It was just making these tapes and then people would bootleg it and it would just go around. That’s how you got known and people would come to your gigs. Because the most important thing was for people to show up at your shows, because then you could get another show. That’s just how we worked. We were very like one step at a time. We’re so young. We don’t have to conquer the world. We just need to get the next gig at that place that we want to play at. You know? So yeah, so we started making cassettes and then we made a single.

Debbie:

The single was called Crazy Game and Everybody’s Waiting For Someone To Come Home. You recorded it in 1985 on vinyl and you issued it on your own label, which I think is just so incredibly entrepreneurial. You named your label for your high school English teacher who you’ve referenced now a couple of times, Ellis Loyd. I couldn’t find the name of the actual label. Was it called Ellis Loyd Productions?

Amy:

It was JLS Lloyd Records or something.

Emily:

JLS Records.

Amy:

JLS Records. Yeah, I mean it was just for that record.

Debbie:

Why him specifically? Is he still a big fan? He’s still coming to your shows?

Amy:

Well, I’ll let Emily say why him, but I will say before she says that, that he lives in my neighborhood. My mom still lives in the same house as she lives alone there. He jogs by her house every day and moves the trash cans back into the carport after trash day. Brings her the paper and brings her her mail and leaves it at the door. So I know he is around because of that.

Debbie:

Worthy label namer.

Amy:

Yeah. Emily can-

Emily:

I mean, teachers can be some of the most influential figures in your entire life. He was one of those, both for Amy and for me. I would say largely for all the people who took his AP English classes. He challenged us academically. He didn’t accept mediocre work. He was very engaged in our lives. He helped a lot of kids. He helped me decide. He said, “Why don’t you look at Tulane?” He just was a vibrant, supportive, very smart, academically demanding. Everybody was very, very stimulated by his class and the way he taught us. He was so supportive of me and Amy that we just felt like, well, I don’t know whether we’d be doing this, well, we might be anyway, but who knows? But he invited us to get a collection of songs together so we could do a concert for the class so we owe a lot to him.

Debbie:

You then took the boxes of your single to the Emory campus, set up in front of the student center and sold them. You’ve said that making that single felt as big a deal as it did to get signed to a major label three years later. Emily, at that point, you had to decide between grad school and becoming a full-time musician. You’ve described that as a real reckoning in your life. What happened? Was it a hard decision to make?

Emily:

It was not a hard decision to make. What was happening was like at that point we really were establishing a nascent career, not with any long term vision for getting signed to a major but just having gigs and a building of following. Springboarding from Emory and the college scene. College radio was really vibrant and alive and you could really carve your own path by calling a college music station program directors. You could just build a path. Amy was really good at that organizing and putting all that together. But the truth was that Amy was doing really mostly all of the work, hanging the posters, making the connections, all this stuff. Finally, one day, and I was meeting with my English professor, my advisor about considering which grad schools and all that stuff.

Emily:

Amy was finally like, “Do you want to do that or do you want to do this? Because this is what’s happening.” It didn’t take a second of thought really. I remember it. It was just like, “I want to do music.” And then from that point on, there was no looking back, no regret, no what would’ve happened, because of course we continued on to this. I don’t even have the words to describe what the path has been like over the years, magical and almost fortuitous. Amy and I in many ways, we’re diametrically opposed and our personalities and our sensibilities, but there’s at the soul core and our values and stuff like that. I mean, really, we were linked on this path. So it was an easy decision. I’m glad that Amy put it to me. She’s never had a problem doing that. Thank God. And that was it.

Amy:

Although now I probably would have, now that I reflect on what a big decision that would’ve been, I’d probably be pained in asking that question because now I understand, like to not go to grad school, that’s a huge deal. You know what I mean?

Emily:

But it didn’t feel like that to me.

Amy:

But for me I was like, I was so into music that I was like, what’s the big deal? Just come, just do music, you know? But seriously low, like what if everything had flopped and then you hadn’t gone to grad school? It’s like, what? That was a huge deal.

Debbie:

She could have gone to grad school later. There’s not a time limit, whereas you really did at the moment.

Amy:

That’s true. That’s true.

Emily:

I had no worries back then. Not a worry in the world. I think I was maybe following the footsteps, my dad was professor, my mom was a librarian, books, books, books, let’s go to grad school. But I tell you, I remember how easy the decision was and it was just like, okay, I’ll do that. It was so engaging all the time, playing gigs, writing songs, doing the work of building a career, it was so fun. So fun. You had to get permission from your professors to leave school to go do our little regional tours and stuff.

Amy:

Yeah, I did. They were great about it. I mean, I don’t know why they gave me permission but senior year, because Emily was already out and we were out touring. It was so fun. All of our friends would go. We would go to Charleston on the weekends and drink beer. I would write term papers after the show. Outside in a chair, listening to the Southern bugs on the water outside of a Charleston hotel or whatever. Life was good.

Emily:

We slept on floors. We stayed at Amy’s sister, in our girlfriend’s house and slept on the floor. Nothing ever felt like paying dues. Inconceivable that we would share a hotel room now, but we were sharing hotel rooms and it was so innocent and just pure fun. I really do believe that we have not strayed far from the purity of what we do together and what motivates us. So it was a great beginning. And also Amy’s dad loaned us the money to make the single, he was so supportive. We knew Dr. Ray was there, his little red light on his video camera. There were nights when the only four people in the crowd were Amy’s parents and my parents literally. We had a lot of support.

Debbie:

Emily, you said this about Amy and it really struck me, so I just want to just read what you wrote about her at this time. “Amy always seemed to know how to make the next right move. I was in awe of her ability to book gigs. A gig at the Moonshadow Saloon in Atlanta was a mind spinning gig. And she knew that we would be better suited plugging in our acoustics and playing rock clubs rather than playing pin drop quiet folk clubs. She shaped our destiny at the outset, even though neither one of us had or talked about aspirations of making it big or getting a record deal. We simply wanted to get the next great gig. And Amy always had a way of making that happen.”

Emily:

I wouldn’t change a thing about that.

Amy:

That’s very complimentary.

Debbie:

Well, Amy, did you have a sense of where that momentum was taking you? Where did that drive and ambition come from?

Amy:

It wasn’t like this, I want to be famous and this is how we do it. It was more like, we want to be cool, like ego. Just like, it’s cool to play this. It’s cool to play punk clubs. You know? Some of it was just adolescent. Like I read The Outsiders too many times, you know, kind of thing. Some of it was like, what we are trying to do I had a sense even before we knew we were gay, that we were doing something as outsiders. I always looked for outsider spaces because I felt like we’re not going to fit in at a folk club where they get mad if your friends are singing too loud and if you plug your guitars in and play all along the watch tower. That’s not going to be a good thing. So we got to play in spaces that’ll let us completely be who we are. Those are where the interesting bands are playing.

Amy:

I mean, that was my perspective. Because I was like, if Suzanne Vega is playing at the Moonshadow Saloon or Aztec Camera, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, or The Roaches, that’s where we need to be playing. We need to open for those bands because that’s the kind of crowd we want to have. We don’t want to be playing Margaritaville the rest of our lives. And that’s what we were doing a lot of times, or Please Come to Boston. Those are great songs but we don’t want to be at the Fern bars. We want to be at the punk rock clubs playing acoustic instruments, because then we are going to stand out. And that was my idea. Thank God it went right because who knows? It wasn’t that I was a brainiac. I was just compelled by some force that I can never control that makes me think of things really fast and constantly be in motion. It wasn’t just me as a visionary.

Amy:

I mean, Emily doesn’t give herself enough credit because she’s half of it. But you just go by your gut instinct when you’re that age. Like we can go up to New York City and beg to get a gig at CBGBs because that is an institution and you want to say that you played there. That’s kind of where we were coming from. I think that’s not a business head. It’s more like art of like, how do you want your art to be seen? We just fake it till we make it. We weren’t even good enough to be doing half the stuff we were doing, but you have to get in those spaces to get good enough. And that’s the thing about being women in music is like, if women are never given a chance to be in those spaces, we cannot get better. Because I mean, I believe that. You have to have access to all those spaces to evolve and be better than you are. If you keep limiting the space that you’re allowed to be in, you can’t grow artistically either. And so we had to figure out how to get into those spaces, but at the same time, create our own wheel in a way and have those things going at the same time and juggle them. I just thought the punk clubs were the best route.

Debbie:

I want to talk a little bit about the way in which you make music because you don’t write together. You’ve written a few songs together, but you primarily are separate writers. You write your own songs, you sing them together. Was that something that just happened organically? Did you try to write songs together and then found that you were better independently? How does that work?

Emily:

I don’t remember trying to write songs together early on. I mean, writing songs is a very vulnerable thing. Amy had her way of expressing herself and I had my way. We used different cord vocabularies and we might have had different influences. We didn’t give a lot of thought to like, oh, should we try to write our songs together? We just fell into the natural way of doing things. Luckily, what we have always been able to do is arrange our songs together. Writing is a little bit oil and water for us, but arranging is not. So it was very organic and inspiring and we kind of have boundaries too. Like whoever writes the song gets the last word in the arrangement, so if something really doesn’t feel good. But we do a lot of trying things too. I mean, I’m kind of bouncing ahead to when we prepare for an album or when we’re arranging stuff. But yeah, we thought differently, expressed ourselves differently. We wanted to write alone. It was just absolutely the organic way that we came to things and still do.

Debbie:

You recorded your first full length LP, Strange Fire, in 1987. By this time, you’d gone from Saliers and Ray to B-Band, to choosing the name Indigo Girls. I’ve read over and over and over again that you picked out a word you thought was cool from the dictionary. All this time prior to my starting the research, I’d always assumed that Indigo was a wink, wink, nod, nod reference to the color lavender, which symbolized gay empowerment in the ’60s and ’70s. I mean, I remember because I’m a native New Yorker and loved to look at the Empire State Building on Pride weekend because it was always lavender. So I was shocked to see that it was a completely cool word from the dictionary kind of thing.

Emily:

It could have been like a subliminal foreshadowing on some cosmic level. But I don’t think so.

Amy:

Yeah. Who knows? It’s a weird thing. We literally went through a dictionary and found a word that we liked.

Debbie:

It’s a good word.

Amy:

I mean, now, obviously we didn’t know we were going to be around for this long because Indigo Girls. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t even know if we liked being girls at the time. You know what I mean? It’s such a weird thing to think about why we chose that name.

Emily:

I mean, I remember Amy, I was a camp counselor. Amy called the camp and I was in the cafeteria. “You got a phone call Emily.” “Oh, hey Am, how’s it going?” “Yeah. Listen, I’ve been thinking about our band name. How do you like the word Indigo?” I was like, “I like that. Yeah. I like that. Let’s add girls for alliteration. That’s why I want to add girls, just for-

Debbie:

Alliteration. Not thinking about what it means, just for alliteration. So you got signed to Epic Records in 1988 and this was after Epic Records A and R man, Roger “Snake” Klein was in town to see a band called The Rave-Ups’. A friend of yours was a college rep for the label and had put your name in the hat at Epic, so to speak. You’ve stated that you weren’t sure if Snake had accidentally dropped by because The Rave-Ups’ were playing down the street or if he had an intention to see you. Have you ever found out what made him drop in to see you specifically that when he first found you?

Amy:

No.

Emily:

I mean, the labels were poking around because R.E.M. was going to sign another deal and Athens was so close. The music scene was so fertile, vibrant and amazing. And so there were other folks from record labels down there poking around. He was eccentric.

Amy:

That was a bidding war for REM, that’s right.

Emily:

Yeah. There was no bidding war for us.

Amy:

No. Back in those days, A and R people went to towns when they felt like there was a movement, a music scene. They would just go and hear bands, which is crazy to think about, right?

Debbie:

It’s incredible. And so Snake took you under his wing. From what I understand, he fought really hard for you to get signed on your own terms. What were the terms you were asking for at that time?

Emily:

It would be like not we are who we are. We’re not going to change who we are.

Amy:

We’re not going to move.

Emily:

We’re not going to move. Yeah. This is just what you see is what you get and we’re not going to compromise. You can’t produce us in this way that we’re not comfortable with. Because it just wasn’t worth it to us. We’re playing little five points pub, maybe, I don’t know, three nights a week on the weekends and selling those shows out. It just felt incredible and nothing was worth it to compromise anything. It was just like, wow. I mean, we’d never thought about a major label till he came around. We had to talk our manager into being our manager.

Debbie:

Well, he didn’t think he’d ever make it, right?

Amy:

He didn’t.

Debbie:

I mean, talk about support.

Amy:

Yeah. Well, I guess it was written in stone at that point, but he’s still with us. I don’t know if he thinks that we’re going to make it or not, but he’s still with us. No, I mean, we didn’t. I mean, we had nothing to lose. I mean, we had everything to lose, I guess I should say, but we had nothing to lose by just staying at what we were doing because we had tours booked in our second record. We were getting ready to make and it wouldn’t be a big deal for us to back out of the deal. But something was telling us, you should do this because the amount of work that you have right now to get all of it done is really hard to get it done. Like putting records out and booking and promoting and all on our own. Some of it was just mechanical, we need help. Some of it was the headiness of getting signed offset by the fact that we were aware of corporate identity and music corporation being not totally about what we were. So that was a little bit of a struggle because it felt a little bit like selling out to me a bit. But I just thought, well, we can do this the way we want to. At any point we can just cut bait if we need to, because we’re going to do it our own way no matter what.

Debbie:

Emily, I read that you became depressed after you signed the contract, that you were worried that you’d signed away your freedom and independence. How did you overcome that?

Emily:

I think I was just afraid. I didn’t know, it was unknown. It was, I mean really shocking that we got signed to a major label. A lot of it was the timing because other majors were signing women with guitars. But I was afraid that I felt like it was this continental shift that my life was really going to be different and change. I didn’t know how that was going to look. I was just afraid, just simple fear I think is what that was. But then once we got signed and I kind of had a good time with all that stuff. We won a Grammy. I was really excited about that. You’d go to the record party after the Grammys or whatever, and there’d be Bob Dylan or whatever. I think Michael Jackson. He was on Epic and he was on at one of the things. It was just like, oh my God, here we are. So that was a little head spinny for me. But initially it was just the fear of like, whoa, this is big and life is going to change. I don’t know what that’s going to feel like.

Debbie:

You released your first major label album, aptly titles Indigo Girls in February of 1989. Closer to Fine, your first single peaked at number 52 on the billboard chart. The album reached as high as 22, remained on the charts for 35 weeks and was certified gold by September. You’ve been going ever since. What did you make of that nearly instant success? I mean, it’s really like going from zero to 60 in three seconds.

Amy:

It was like Emily says, it was a head spinning time and we didn’t even have time to think half the time, or even stop and smell the roses. Because we were just riding the wave, you know? I think the biggest thing for us really that really made us understand what was happening was when we toured with R.E.M. and understood just how much it meant for them to give us that opportunity and the stature they had and the connection to that. We knew that that was a huge deal. We did not take it for granted and we enjoyed every moment of it, you know? I think for me, that was when I was like, oh yeah, okay. This is big. We’re on our way, wherever we’re going. I don’t know where. It was intense, but you get in that wave and your ego gets big and you got to figure it out. You know what I mean? So you don’t ruin yourself. We had a good time.

Debbie:

You said that when the album came out, you read every review and took it all to heart and felt bummed by the not great ones. Amy, you’ve written about how you took yourself very seriously at the time and reading reviews impacted the way you wrote and ultimately stunted your growth.

Amy:

Yeah.

Debbie:

How so? Did you feel like you had to start writing for the critics?

Amy:

No, I think I wasn’t even that evolved as a writer yet. And then I would spend too much time thinking about myself and not enough time and just doing my art and just like writing and trying to get better. Because if you’re always trying to please like figure that puzzle out, you’re not really focusing on your craft. You’re focusing on the wrong thing, which is the end, how you’re going to get to the end. I think it’s stunted my growth by being so distracting, you know? And so I don’t read anything now. I mean, I’ll read something if it’s a writer that I really like, like a great rock writer like Kim Rule or something. I’ll read her stuff because she’s so good. Yeah. I don’t know. I just think I was way too egotistical and self-involved and not self-critical in the right way. I was self-loathing about my sexuality and my gender, but I was not critical about my own writing. You know what I’m saying? I had the wrong things I was thinking about. I should have been just working on my writing. It definitely delayed my growth. I was a late bloomer I think because of that, probably.

Emily:

I think too. I remember early on with those reviews, there was a distinct sense of this is homophobia and sexism, and of course you don’t know exactly. It’s a little bit like gaslighting because then you’re like, well, maybe they just don’t like the music, or maybe I am too verbose, you know? But all these like New York Times critic or Rolling Stones critic or whatever, you know, all the cool or acclaimed sources, it felt like they were never going to accept the value of what we put out. I think it’s true. In a male-dominated business culture world, if you are not in part of the binary, patriarchy, you’re attractive to men, they can sexualize you. They can relate to you as a woman who’s inferior and play up on that, then you’re not on the same level playing field as other people. That’s just a fact, and that always felt bad.

Emily:

It felt bad going into radio stations, not only because all that talk was such bullshit with DJs and morning shows. It was just so vapid, so empty and endless. We had to keep doing that as long as they were playing us on the radio. We had to go do all these radio shows. I’m not saying that I am not grateful for the exposure we got in the end to grow our following. But that sexism, that homophobia, that walking into those male DJs and they can’t relate to us and that palpable, visceral feeling of that, it sucked. I still believe that if you don’t play into the patriarchal, heterosexual mode, hierarchical, you’re not going to get as far as a straight woman.

Debbie:

You’ve had a 35 year career. You’ve recorded 16 studio albums, seven of which were certified gold, four certified platinum, one double platinum. You’ve toured all over the world to sold out shows and sold over 15 million albums. You now have your own record labels, record entirely on your own terms. You’re gay icons, role models. You’re both happily married. You have children. You release the critically acclaimed album, Look Long in 2020 and have new work on the way which I want to talk to you about. But what haven’t you done that you still want to do?

Amy:

Maybe a collaboration with Outcast.

Debbie:

Really?

Amy:

I still want to do that. I mean, Atlanta.

Debbie:

Let’s put it out there.

Amy:

Well, that’ll never happen probably, but ever since I heard them, I was like, oh my God, it would be so great to do an Indigo Girls, Outcast collaboration.

Debbie:

Why outcasts?

Amy:

I just love them and they’re home people. Brilliant. But in terms of things that we haven’t done yet that would be cool to do, a lot of times they come to us. For instance, playing with symphonies. Before we played with symphonies, we didn’t, well, I don’t remember thinking I want to start playing with symphonies across the country. And then we were invited into this world. I know that certain artists like Nanci Griffith had The Blue Moon Orchestra and so on. But that was just a really great thing. And then playing on Lilith Fair was a real shot in the arm to our career at that time. For me, quite inspiring. Then there’s this film coming out, Glitter & Doom, that’s an independent film that the writers just came to us and said, “We want to use Indigo Girls music for this.” That came out of nowhere. And then we have this brilliant filmmaker who’s working on a documentary about us, and that came out of nowhere. So all these things keep presenting themselves to us. But for me personally, I’m working on two different musicals so it’s become a new dream of mine to have that come to fruition on a stage.

Debbie:

You also have your activism. I want to talk a little bit about that. It seems like your activism has always been intertwined with your music. In 1993, you co-founded the nonprofit Honor the Earth, which is dedicated to indigenous environmental justice and green energy solutions. You’ve provided more than three million dollars in grants to over 200 Native American communities. What first motivated you to create this effort?

Amy:

We had seen the great native activist, Winona LaDuke at an Earth Day show, honestly. We were backstage telling her how amazing she was, because she really spun. We had never heard her talk. We heard Winona speak and we were just like, oh, okay. This is what we want to do for the environmental work that we do because this is the lens we need to see everything through. We just talked to her and we started scheming. What grew out of that was Honor the Earth, which was really co-founded by women from the Indigenous Women’s Network, some leaders from the Seventh Generation Fund. I believe some people that are now in the Indigenous Environmental Network were involved. We basically just had leaders from different communities who created a board. We basically just built this organization that would do, what our part of it was to build bridges between non-native and native communities by playing tours and shows that were all geared around Honor the Earth and the issues.

Amy:

We would do like a regional tour that focused on like a nuclear waste issue, or we would do issues around salmon in the Northwest and water quality issues and toxic waste and cultural sustainability and sacred site work. And all of that went on for years and years and the tours would go into these different areas and we would have cross pollination with native artists and White artists and other people of color that were working on the same issues. Maybe around toxic waste dumps in their neighborhoods and stuff like that. It’s basically for us has been the model that we learned to do all of our activism through. Once we met these native leaders, they became our mentors and we learned how to do grassroots activism with everything. From queer issues, feminism, death penalty work, immigration, just anything that we do, we always have that lens of like, how do you do community-based organizing. Before that, we did benefits for homeless projects and women’s shelters and a lot of feeding the community kind of things. During the height of HIV when we were just starting out, we would do the meals on wheels type stuff and things like that too. We’ve always been interested in it. But I think that the native mentorship gave us a structure that we understood to be effective.

Debbie:

I was really intrigued by you stating that you could no longer see environmentalism except through the lens of indigenous communities. How did you come to that realization?

Emily:

Well, the indigenous communities do not separate “nature.” It’s not separate from their lives. I mean the indigenous communities that have the wisdom for how to continue to protect and nurture the earth are completely connected to everything. So earth and spirituality and vision and ancestry and future generations and all those things are completely organically combined together, for lack of a better way to describe it. Where it’s like other communities, we compartmentalize things, or we don’t, because we’re so removed from, say feeding from the earth or collecting the wild rice. The manuman, the tribes from that upper Midwest part of North America and the sustenance economies and all those things. A lot of us, we go to a grocery store and it’s all wrapped up and we’re so removed from that.

Emily:

But the completely holistic, organic living way of indigenous peoples, it’s really the only way you can look at a protection of the earth and gratitude to the earth is to be connected in that way. Also, let us who do not live in those communities listen to and learn from those communities. Let us be allies. Let us not go in and say, we are going to do this here and we can make these changes and it’s all going to come from the government or this political movement. It’s like tell us what we don’t know and show us how we can be allies and what we can take back to our own ways of life separated from your more completely integrated lives.

Amy:

What we realized, I think too, is that when you look at resources that we draw from the earth, the nuclear, uranium mining and coal mining and the way we use water and the hydroelectric dams and all this, just really so many resources, it ends up ironically to be on native land. I mean, it’s all native land in the United States, but you know what I’m saying? It’s kind of the way in communities of color end up being impacted just far more by our energy consumption and affected more by climate change. And so it’s like, that’s who you listen to then. You listen to them because they’re being affected by it and they shouldn’t be. It’s just the same old thing, communities that are disenfranchised. Yet these people that we’ve worked with are so powerful and they’re so brilliant and they’re strategizing about how they do these movements are just, it’s like the way Black Lives Matters was so transformative. I mean, these are transformative people that know how to organize. It’s like, why wouldn’t you listen to them? You know? I think for us, it was just the moment of realization that really steered our whole lives.

Debbie:

Musically, you’ll be touring through 2022 for your most recent album Look Long, which reunited you with one of your strongest backing bands to date. One of the things that I was so struck by when I first listened to the album and then I’ve been re-listening in prep for today is both how personal it is. It’s a lot more personal than I think a lot of your other previous music, but it’s also really political. It’s both, it’s this Venn diagram of both the personal and the political. Why the name Look Long?

Emily:

Well, it’s a name of a song I wrote. It did come from that. But it also, the implication is to look to the future. How can we make a better world? What kinds of things need to be changed politically, personally. The older I get, absolutely impossible to separate the personal from the political and the integration of things. And so Look Long is just indicative of that. Let’s have a vision for the future that can be a better world.

Debbie:

Emily, you said this about the music on Look Long, “We’re shaped by our past. What makes us who we are? And why? In this moment of delirious upheaval, Look Long considers the tremendous potential of ordinary life and suggests the possibility that an honest survey of one’s past and present unburdened by judgment can give shape to something new, the promise of a way forward.” What do you mean by an ordinary life?

Amy:

You said that?

Emily:

I can’t believe I said that.

Amy:

That’s a great quote.

Emily:

Yeah. Are you sure I said that?

Debbie:

Yeah. You wrote it.

Emily:

It must have been one of my more-

Amy:

You should be a writer.

Debbie:

I could not have conjured that myself.

Amy:

No, you should be a writer. That’s really good.

Emily:

One of my more lucid moments. Well, I think a lot about the role that we play and I think a lot about our purpose in life. I think a lot about all the systems that break apart, the beauty of what life could be. And so I’ve come to have the utmost admiration for individual life. The simplicity of the human struggle, what people overcome, how they join each other in community. I focus much less on grand works and how it is our little lives, our little human struggles lives that are able to highlight what the best of humanity is capable of, through community, through dreams, through art, through justice work. We’re given these lives, what do they mean? How can we be in allyship with each other? How can we dismantle our own thinking? I mean, I think a lot about the binary paradigm, how structured my life has been by it, how much my wife is a therapist.

Emily:

She has many trans clients. I think about all the kids who struggle, and this one woman, she’s doing her PhD. She’s worked with a lot of sexual minority youth non-binary and gender affirming youth. She said, these kids are tired. They’re tired from always looking for a safe place, but also, they fight. They fight for the future. I think about any people of color who fight for the future and the beauty of their own integrity and human lives. It’s a lot about that.

Debbie:

The last thing I want to talk to you about today is your new film, your show, your concert special. You have Look Long: Together, which premiers on Sunday, May 8th at 9:00 PM Eastern time, exclusively on veeps.com. It is a career spanning concert featuring some of your greatest music, some rarities, and for the first time, full band live renditions of songs from Look Long. What made you decide to do this now? I can’t wait by the way, I was trying so hard to get a screener so I can see it. I saw the trailer. I’ve watched it like 15 times. I’m so excited about this. Tell us how this came to be and what we can expect.

Amy:

I mean, it grew out of when we were in the thick of the pandemic and you couldn’t go see music and we were doing live streams of just us sitting in a room, playing, reading the chat rooms and having fun. We had planned a big summer tour with our band and we were so excited about it. Then we had to can the whole thing. Basically we’re like, let’s just have everybody record at their houses. Everybody was doing this creating virtual shows by remotely recording. It’s a long process, but basically it took us quite a long time to get it done. Now we’re done, but we’re going to go on tour as well so it’s kind of funny. But it is a chance to see the band that a lot of the people that we play with really, it’s like guests, it’s like our band, but it’s also guests that come in and out of our lives and sit in with us all the time and just make music with us. It’s just a mishmash of stuff that we put together basically.

Debbie:

I have one last question for you. This is for both of you, what is it like to do shows where everyone in the audience knows the lyrics to your songs and sings along with you?

Emily:

It’s beautiful. I mean, it’s an energetic event. All those molecules swirling around and people are feeling joy, there’s nothing like singing in public together. It’s a unique experience. It’s very galvanizing in the most powerful way. Especially in these times, just to come together and to sing together. I never think, oh, I wrote this particular song that everyone sing, never, never. It’s almost like a channeling and here we all are. Because when I go to a concert, I sing my heart out even with a mask on my face. It is really a way for people to get together and so it’s a thrill. I never get tired of it. Our fans are singers, our community. They really love to sing so it is wonderful. It’s physical.

Debbie:

I once saw Loudon Wainwright III playing at the Bottom Line in the ’80s. He was singing and realized that the audience was singing along with him so he stopped singing and we were all still singing and he started to cry.

Amy:

Wow.

Debbie:

Amy, what about you? Last word.

Amy:

I mean, I reiterate what Emily said, it’s beautiful. Everything else kind of goes away and you just exist in that moment and everybody’s singing together and what separates us doesn’t matter anymore, you know? I think that’s the beauty of music. So yeah, it’s a great feeling.

Debbie:

Well, it’s definitely, definitely the beauty of your music. Amy Ray, Emily Saliers, thank you, thank you, thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. Thank you for giving us so much beautiful music for the last 40 years. Here’s to another 40.

Emily:

Thanks, Debbie. What an honor to be with you for real.

Debbie:

Thank you. Thank you.

Amy:

I’m a total fan of your podcast. I listen to it.

Debbie:

Thank you. Be still, my beating heart.

Amy:

I love your interviews. I love how well you do your research. It’s all good.

Debbie:

Thank you.

Amy:

You’re great. It’s an honor.

Debbie:

Thank you. Thank you. To see the Indigo Girls concert special on Veeps from May 8th to May 15th, go to www.veeps.com, V-E-E-P-S.com to see all of the extraordinary music the Indigo Girls have been making all these years. Get tickets to all their live shows, go to www.indigogirls.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Speaker 3:

Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. Interviews are usually recorded at the School of Visual Arts. Masters in Branding Program in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The Editor in Chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Wyland.

Debbie Millman:

When Michael Stipe was the lead singer and lyricist for the band R.E.M, it was clear he had talents and interests beyond music. He was deeply involved in crafting the album covers and other aspects of the band’s visual identity. In 1998, he published his first photo book, and in recent years, he’s published several more books of photography. His latest is an untitled book of Portraits and Still Lives. The making of which was complicated in interesting ways by COVID. He joins me now to talk about his practice of photography and about his career as a musician and an artist. Michael Stipe, welcome to Design Matters.

Michael Stipe:

Thank you, Debbie. How’s it going? It’s so nice to see you.

Debbie Millman:

So nice to see you too. Michael, I understand that the best kiss of your life was with Allen Ginsberg.

Michael Stipe:

Well, that was, that was a question there for The Guardian or The Independent [crosstalk 00:00:59].

Debbie Millman:

It was for UK paper, for sure.

Michael Stipe:

One of the UK papers. They think that Americans have no sense of humor or sense of irony. I work extra hard to create ridiculous responses to their questions.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, so it wasn’t really true?

Michael Stipe:

Well, it was a very memorable kiss. Allen’s kiss, yes. We were working together. We worked several years with Tibet House out of New York City. There was a yearly benefit, an annual it to support Tibet House. I got involved through Patti Smith and through Philip Glass. And Allen was always there up until his death. Allen was standing side of stage when I was introduced as the magnificently talented and irresistible Michael Stipe. I got up and I did my thing, couple songs, walked off stage into the arms of Allen Ginsburg who grabbed me by shoulders, planted a kiss squarely on my mouth and said, “Irresistible.”

Michael Stipe:

I mean, the guy was this massive hero of mine from the age of 17. And here he is kissing me on the mouth and calling me irresistible. It was quite memorable and funny.

Debbie Millman:

That actually sounds really yummy. If you want me to be honest, I think that sounds really yummy. Michael, you were born in Georgia and that is also where your grandparents are from, but your family traveled a great deal while you were growing up, your dad was in the army. Where were some of the other places that you lived?

Michael Stipe:

It seems like I have this very particular memory that’s super specific to the time that we spent in Germany, outside of Frankfurt in a place called Hanau. Hanau was where, during World War II, they told everyone in Frankfurt to turn off their lights and they told everyone in Hanau to turn on their lights. So, Hanau was bombed to shut and then it became an army base after the war. That’s where my father was stationed in 1966 and ’67, I believe. I spent the Summer of Love there, I remember.

Michael Stipe:

But I have these very distinct, almost hour by hour memories of that time. I’m speaking to you actually from Athens, Georgia, which is where my family live and where my former band was based. I kept a home here that I bought when I was 25-years-old. I come back for holidays to visit family, but I wound up spending actually a huge part of the pandemic here. Why am I talking about that? You mentioned my grandparents.

Michael Stipe:

Well, interestingly, they’re not all from Georgia. My grandmother was born on a reservation in North Carolina called black mountain. She was actually born on black mountain. My grandfather is from South Carolina. My maternal grandmother is from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. And my pappy, who is my maternal grandfather, was actually born in Alabama, I think. But they all settled, for one reason or another, into Georgia. And that’s where, when my parents met each other, that’s where they were, here in Georgia.

Debbie Millman:

You mentioned some of your memories. I read about a unique memory that you have of your childhood. One, when you were four years old and upon looking at a light bulb, you decided you wanted to become the filament. The only way you thought you could do that was to bite into the light bulb, which you did. And your father and uncle found you trying to eat the bulb and ultimately tried to pull the pieces out of your mouth and then tried to put the light back together with glue to make sure you hadn’t swallowed it. I thought that was a really unique memory and sort of the beginnings of a baby artist right there.

Michael Stipe:

Wow, that’s beautiful. Thank you. I can actually move back a couple of years. I think I was for when that happened. I distinctly remember them being horrified at my attempt to become the filament. What’s interesting me, as an adult, what’s interesting is that I really meant it. I wanted to be the thing that lights up. I didn’t understand that, of course, I’m made of very different materials than the filament of a flashlight light bulb and that, that wasn’t going to happen, at least on this particular plane of existence, but I did try.

Michael Stipe:

A few years before that, and again, my mother and I were talking about this the other day, because she said, “Honey, you were so, so, so sick.” I contracted pneumonia and strep throat and then it turned to scarlet fever. That was the second memory that I had, my first memory being my sister’s birth when I was two years old. Then two months later, right before my third birthday, I had this terrible fever.

Michael Stipe:

William Burroughs told Patti Smith that they were both members of the Scarlet fever club. It boils your brain. It makes your synapses connect in a different way, according to William. Maybe we’re exaggerating a bit, I hope so, but if someone can exaggerate my second memory in life, I would hope that it would be William Burroughs. I had scarlet fever and so, maybe the idea that I could, at four years old, turn myself into the fulfillment was not so outrageous.

Debbie Millman:

Was it at that moment that you felt it was important that you actually light up a room?

Michael Stipe:

I was called Mike Stipe, the shining light, when my name was Mike. That was my nickname in kindergarten and in first grade. Now, that was also in Germany. Again, I remember virtually every day of it. I was a slow learner in many regards, so I was learning how to read and write. Then I was left handed. My mother made the decision that with … You are, too.

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Michael Stipe:

My mother made the decision that they would not try to change me to … The idea that all people should be right-handed. So, she allowed me to be lefthanded, but I wasn’t learning at the same rate as other kids. I was in third grade before I learned how to read a clock. It was this abstract concept, the round thing with the arms, I couldn’t connect that to the passage of time.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. It wasn’t totally years later that there were digital clocks that … I’m always so sad when people rely on digital clocks, because I think there is something kind of wonderful about the idea of reading time as if that’s something that could be ever static.

Michael Stipe:

One of my first sculpture pieces, going back to, I guess it was 2006 or 2007, is an exact replica in cardboard of my first digital alarm clock, which also played music. So, it was this combination of kind of the future along with being able to listen to the radio. Two things that for me are profoundly important. My dream scape pretty much exists in this post apocalyptic future that’s got a lot of water, no Kevin Costner, but a lot of water, but it’s not terrifying. Everything’s held together by Scotch tape and staples, but it’s not a terrifying place. It’s actually quite welcoming.

Michael Stipe:

But how did I get into that now, Debbie? I have to say, I’m drinking my first cup of tea in a month. I haven’t had caffeine in over a month. I’m going very slow with the caffeine here. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but you might have to remind me why we’re going in different directions.

Debbie Millman:

Not a problem. I don’t mind doing that at all. Do you keep track of your dreams? Do you write them down when you wake up and analyze them?

Michael Stipe:

I’d like to say yes, but I don’t. No, I don’t. The ones that I need to remember, I remember. And then some of them, like last night’s stream, I’d really rather just let go of. The only thing I write on paper is my schedule and pop lyrics, everything else. Pop lyrics, even kind of wind up more on the computer these days than on paper. I don’t like my handwriting. I find it distracting and imperfect and I can write something brilliant. But if it’s a bad handwriting day, I’ll just throw it away or I’ll disregard the idea equally.

Michael Stipe:

I learned this with lyric writing, pop lyric writing. I can write something really bad. And if it’s a good handwriting day, I’ll think that it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, and it isn’t, you know.

Debbie Millman:

How do you come to whether or not you’re having a good or bad handwriting day? What are the criteria to create a good handwriting day?

Michael Stipe:

I look at it and it’s either appealing to me or it’s mortifying. It’s more often than not, mortifying.

Debbie Millman:

So, you have no control over the output.

Michael Stipe:

No. I don’t think that has to do with being lefthanded. I don’t know if you have a similar problem, but I do smear things a lot. So, there’s a lot of smearing that happens. I used to write kind of sideways upside down, but that was really painful. I think a lot of lefthanded people have that same. I also walk into doors a lot. Do you?

Debbie Millman:

Yes. It’s very funny. Terry Teachout, the theater critic for The Wall Street Journal and also a playwright and dramaturge, once told me that he falls a lot. He’s also lefthanded, and he said that he’s been told that lefthanded people see the world backwards and that’s why we often have spatial issues. I have a lot of spatial issues. So, yeah, I trip and fall and bang into things all the time.

Michael Stipe:

Yeah, me too. Me too. I’m really bad that way.

Debbie Millman:

Are you able to write mirror backwards? A lot of left handed people can do that without even realizing they can do it.

Michael Stipe:

Until I was in the seventh grade. And then I had a teacher who pulled me aside and she had gotten tired of … She would grade my papers by holding them up to a light bulb and grade the back of them. I wrote exact mirror image until …

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, me too.

Michael Stipe:

What is seventh grade? I was 12-years-old. Yeah. But she said, and this is probably almost a direct quote, she said, “Your brain is like two fish that are going to flip flop if you continue doing this.” I could visualize that and it terrified me, so I stopped doing it.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, well, I bet you could still do it. I don’t think it’s something you can unlearn. I actually think the opposite. I think that there’s something kind of wonderful about flipping back and forth, left brain, right brain. And it’s never flip flopped in a way that felt like a fish.

Michael Stipe:

It’s really good in meetings because I can read, when people have papers on their desk, I can read everything upside down. Is it upside down and backwards? It looks backwards. But yeah, I’m able to read-

Debbie Millman:

Just mirror backwards. Yeah, like da Vinci.

Michael Stipe:

Exactly. Well, I did think, and this is really an exclusive Debbie. I wouldn’t say this to many people, but for a moment, as a young, I’m going to place myself at 11, I thought that I was the reincarnation of Leonard da Vinci.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, I love that.

Michael Stipe:

Because he had really bad hair and he wrote mirror backwards. I was like, okay, I’ve got bad hair and I write mirror backwards.

Debbie Millman:

It works for me. You first started reading about the club CBGBs when you were 13 in the magazine, I believe it’s called Rock Scene. That is also when you made your first recording. I understand your sister had one of those old school, audio tape recorders. And one day, when everyone had left, you locked yourself in the den in the basement, turned the machine on record and screamed for 10 minutes.

Michael Stipe:

All this is true, but it was a Cream Magazine. I can picture her bedroom and sitting on the corner of her bed with this … It’s like a secretary’s early cassette recorder, and what I would not give to have that tape today. I would really-

Debbie Millman:

That was my next question.

Michael Stipe:

I’d put a disco back beat on it and it would be in my mind anyway. The greatest hit single of all time. Yeah, that was my first recording, but I was 15 in detention, and this was in a different place. This was now, we were now in Collinsville, Illinois outside of East St. Louis. I was in detention in high school and I found, under my desk, a Cream Magazine with an article written by Lisa Robinson about the CBGB scene and how, compared to the popular music of the time, it was like watching an old movie on a black and white TV with static and noise, versus the kind of technicolor, cinematic music that was popular on the radio at the time.

Michael Stipe:

And she was drawing this obvious parallel to the more energetic and chaotic scene that was happening around groups like the Ramones, Blondie Television, Patti Smith Group, etc, at CBGB. And comparing it to what was on the radio, which at the time, was really uninteresting and boring.

Debbie Millman:

You were originally a fan of The Archies, I believe.

Michael Stipe:

I love The Archies. I have an older sister, but she wasn’t into music. My parents were not really into music that much, and so what I had was pop radio in Texas mostly. The formulative radio listening years for me were in Texas up until the age of 13. That’s when we moved outside of St. Louis and I was teased mercilessly for my accent, which was, had been at the time, was a Georgia, south Georgia accent, run through … And now, keep in mind, grandmother from North Carolina, grandfather from South Carolina, grandmother from Mississippi, grandfather from Alabama, they all grew up in Washington D.C., or Washington, as my grandmother would call it, and then south Georgia.

Michael Stipe:

Run that through Texas and run it through Germany. Plopped out at the age of 13 in a little kind of white flight drug-addled town outside of east St. Louis and I was teased mercilessly for my accent. Because I had really long eyelashes. I was a little faggy, but I was more just really a nerd. They called me the Maybelline cowboy and it was extremely painful. I wasn’t really deeply bullied until those years, but that’s when the bullying really began.

Michael Stipe:

I changed my accent very quickly. I took some play school scissors and I chopped my eyelashes off. I tried to fit in. It didn’t work. So, I got a very early lesson in trying to fit in, recognizing that, that’s not working and deciding to kind of be yourself. That led us on what I think is a pretty spectacular path.

Debbie Millman:

Talk about how you accidentally got a subscription to the village voice.

Michael Stipe:

Well, younger listeners would not remember this, but for a dime, you could get subscriptions to 12 magazines for a year if you just subscribe to some Random House kind of thing. I don’t know what it was. It was in the back of all magazines in newspapers, I mean the comic books rather. My sister, she got like red book for my mom. I don’t know, life magazine and all the magazines of the early ’70s, late ’60s. And The Village Voice seemed interesting to her, so we got a year subscription to The Village Voice.

Michael Stipe:

That introduced me to this whole other universe, of course, of New York culture. That played a really heavy and important role in my embracing punk rock at the age of 15 and recognizing that, that was my tribe and that’s where I was comfortable. Of course, there was no one around me who acknowledged or even knew about what was happening with punk rock and with the punk rock scene. I was really, really on my own. I mean, I made mimeographs at school that said, Tom Verlaine, Tom Verlaine was the founder of the band, Television.

Michael Stipe:

Tom Verlaine is God. I went to school early one day and I put up these posters, these mimeograph posters all over school. I almost shut the school down because the English teacher said, “Clearly someone is referring to the French poet Paul Verlaine. So they got that wrong, but how dare they blasphemy our Lord and savior by referring to a French poet as God.” There was this whole like investigation to find out who blasphemied the school. It was me, and it was Tom Verlaine from the band, Television, but nobody had any idea. Anyway, that was me at the age of 15. I was a little bit of a scamp, I guess.

Debbie Millman:

Did anybody ever find out it was you?

Michael Stipe:

They never did. There are other secrets from that era that probably are not repeatable on your podcast.

Debbie Millman:

I’m thinking back to my first introduction to The Village Voice, which kind of happened around the time I first, it was around 1980, ’82, when I first graduated college. I was already familiar with your work in R.E.M, but I came to Manhattan after going to school in Albany, New York. My dad had lived in the village while I was growing up, but I didn’t spend a lot of time there. Found this newspaper and thought it was sort of like a primer to the world.

Debbie Millman:

At the time, I was really, really afraid of coming out. I was afraid of the judgment. When I was doing a lot of my research on your background and your history, I was reading about how you grappled with your thoughts about coming out back in the early 80s. I read it out loud to Roxanne because I thought, she’s 14 years younger than me, and that’s a big difference in the world of coming out.

Debbie Millman:

I’m like, see, this is what Michael was feeling at that time. That’s exactly what I felt, like suddenly you’re going to be judged. It might affect everybody around you. You were really scared about what it would mean to your band-mates and how the world would treat the band. It was such a different time. I mean, we’re so lucky now that the world has changed to the degree it has, although it certainly has so much more to go. But reading what you were going through really helped her understand why it took me so long to come out. So, thank you.

Michael Stipe:

You’re welcome. I mean, my band-mates and everyone around me knew my sexuality all along. We lived together. They couldn’t ignore or disregard who was coming up into my room and leaving the next morning. Yeah, it was … I turned 20 years old in 1980. I think that LGBTQIA+, if I can use today’s terms and apply that to the late ’70s, that liberation, that moment should have happened in the late ’70s following civil rights and following the women’s liberation movement. That was a movement that was, in our country, certainly not just diminished, but squashed completely by the advent of aids, and of course the Reagan administration, and Reagan and Bush senior taking over the whole of the 1980s and into the early ’90s.

Michael Stipe:

It took a revolution and shifted it by a good 20 years, which is, I think why, when it finally did happen, it happened so quickly, that a lot of people’s heads are still spinning, trying to figure out where they are or who they are within it. Not only within the straight community, but also within, as we call it, the element LMNOPs, all of us. Trying to figure out who they are and where they fit in. This is something I really love about the 21st century. From the moment I did start speaking about my sexuality publicly, and for me, it was more a matter of privacy than anything else, but I just felt like I’d given so much of myself as a public figure and as a pop star to the public.

Michael Stipe:

I wanted to keep something to myself. Of course, I chose the wrong thing to keep. I now recognize how powerful it is to have people, like ourselves, in the public eye, and that, that’s profoundly important to people who are struggling with their own situations. But anyway …

Debbie Millman:

But I also think, you had already been bullied, and I think, once you’re bullied, once you feel damaged by who you are, it’s very hard to keep putting it out there because of the pain that you’ve already experienced and the you’re afraid you’re going to still feel.

Michael Stipe:

Well, the people I surrounded myself with as a 20 year old were people that understood who I was and they had no problem with that. In fact, I think it was encouraged that I be exactly who I am, because the result of that is, is that we were not your typical pop band at all. We were never really a rock band, although we use some of those sounds, but my being a part of it just radically shifted the focus of the band completely.

Michael Stipe:

I think those guys acknowledge and recognize, when I say those guys, Peter, Mike, and Bill, of course, former band-mates, but then also the people around us. It was clear that we were very, very different. Part of that I think really had to do with my sexuality and my identity and how that placed me in a very different sphere than most of what normal pop culture would offer you.

Debbie Millman:

One of the things that I do now, in addition to the podcast, is teach. I teach undergrads seniors at the School of Visual Arts. One of the things that I talk to them about is their hopes and dreams and what they want to be and what they want to do in their lives. I find really tragically that they’re already at 18, 19, 20, 21, beginning to think about what they can’t do, as opposed to what they can. They start limiting the possibilities of their life before they even try to make anything possible.

Debbie Millman:

I was really, really struck by something that I read that you said. You said that your greatest achievement has been deciding what you wanted to do at 15 and against all odds doing it. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what gave you the sense back then that it could be done.

Michael Stipe:

Delighted. Interesting that you talk about kids today using a process of negation to try to figure out who they are and how kind of sad and upsetting that is. My band or my former band, R.E.M, we used a process of negation quite regularly to figure out what we did not want to be. Not only as public figures, but as songwriters, the way that we dressed ourselves, the way we presented ourselves, the way we talked to the press, we knew all the embarrassing and fucked up tropes. So, we used a process of negation to figure out how to not be those horrible idiot cliches.

Michael Stipe:

I think we did a pretty good job of it over the course of 32 years. But going back to when I was 15, yeah, I mean, it was unbelievably naive of me to think that when I read these articles about the punk rock scene as a 15 year old, I read them, and what these people were saying over and over again were that we’re not special, we’re not particularly talented. We’re normal people. Anybody can do this. Anybody can be pick up a guitar. Anybody can grab a microphone and start to sing.

Michael Stipe:

I took it quite literal when they said anyone can do this. I was like, okay, that’s me, that’s what I’m going to do. It was an insane teenage dream that became an even more insane adult reality being the singer of a band. I became the singer because I didn’t know how to play an instrument. I didn’t know I had a voice when I was 18 years old or 15 years old or 19 when I started R.E.M. I certainly didn’t know I had this voice. I like my voice a lot. I think I’ve become a very good singer with a very distinct voice, but I didn’t know that at that age. I just knew that, that’s what I wanted to do.

Michael Stipe:

But then learning that you have to, not only have the audacity to present yourself publicly, but also that you have to have something behind that, there’s got to be at least a modicum of talent. I didn’t know you had to write songs. I didn’t know what a bass guitar was until we started our second album. I couldn’t identify the bass guitar sounds from the guitar sounds. I didn’t know that the one with four strings made all the low notes and the one with six strings made all the high notes. I mean, that’s how naive I was about music.

Michael Stipe:

And you could hear it in the early stuff. I mean, it’s quite … They’re beautiful. I’m not disregarding those recordings at all. They are, for some people, quite magical. But I hear, and I acknowledge a band and within myself, an artist learning how to, not crawl publicly, learning how to be a toddler publicly, learning how to poop his diapers a few times. Then if we can carry this a little further, I finally take the training wheels off the bike and I’m actually a songwriter and a lyricist.

Michael Stipe:

I wrote a song last night, Debbie, I’m so excited. I took this crazy moment at a house party in London, maybe 15 years ago with a bunch of friends dancing. And this thing that came out of my mouth, to a great friend of mine on the dance floor, and I always remember this phrase, well, it presented itself at two o’clock this morning with a song written on a Moog synthesizer in 2018, pre pandemic, that has been sitting around in the studio.

Michael Stipe:

Last night they came together and created this what … I’m going to go in tonight and see if there’s anything to it. But I woke up real excited that this insane phrase from 15 years ago, London house party has found its way into a song written on a Moog in 2018, and in 2021, boom, here it is. We’ll see. Hopefully, it’ll wind up on what is I’m certain to be solo record that’s going to be coming out probably within the next year. Hopefully. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

You stated that it took you the better part of your 20s to recognize that insecurities are actually a superpower and something that you could utilize to allow your better work to come forward. You also realized that you didn’t have to be snippy and cynical. And you’ve said that quote, “Cold ass bitch was a coat I put on to protect myself and I realized I can take that coat off now.” Which I love. How did you come to that realization? How did you get to that point where you could throw off that coat?

Michael Stipe:

Yeah. Wow. I mean, I can’t believe that quote came out of my mouth, but it did. Anyone who knows the band from earlier days, I would come onto stage wearing four or five layers of clothing and usually a hat and maybe some glasses. As I got heated up during the performance, I would take them off. By the end of the evening, by the end of the performance, I was down to a t-shirt or down to my jeans, no shirt at all. I always felt the need to protect myself and to layer myself from the world at large.

Michael Stipe:

I was born a very shy person. I’m not anymore because I had to learn how to not be. The part of that, Debbie, that I find interesting is that I was really moving on instinct. Instinct was telling me that the things that are embedded into me and a part of who I am, the very part of my DNA that allows that insecurity, allows that vulnerability, part of it being queer, part of it being bullied, if you will, as a child, part of it being from a family that had this nomadic paratactic crazy, pick up and move every couple of years lifestyle, and having to really be fiercely independent or independent within a very tight family unit of two sisters and a mother and father.

Michael Stipe:

All of this created, I guess, an instinct that allowed me to, without acknowledging it and without having the language to describe it to myself, allowed me to use that insecurity and that vulnerability to create the persona that became who I am, and that gets into a whole other philosophical or deeply psychological, I guess, arena that we don’t need to go into. We become who we want to become and then we create who we want to become, and then we become them.

Michael Stipe:

But I didn’t have the language to recognize that until much, much later. When I did, I had established myself enough that it didn’t knock me backwards or throw me off my game. It simply allowed me to look at the earlier work and not disregard it so easily, and to acknowledge, wow, I did do stuff that was incredibly ballsy and incredibly courageous. I just didn’t see it as such, and I still don’t think of myself, I still have, what is it? Imposter syndrome. I always think that the next song or the next photo book is going to be the one where everyone and realizes that I’m a big fake. That, in its own regard, can be a great power, super power.

Michael Stipe:

I’m a little bit quoting Greta Thunberg who referred to, when she became a public figure through her activism, and then was being mocked by the world’s media, how embarrassing are we as Americans, but being mock for her voice, acknowledged publicly that her being on the spectrum, her being autistic was what she regarded as a superpower. I was like, whoa, hang on a second. Here’s a teenage girl telling me that this thing that we’ve thought of my whole life as something that’s a disability, she regards as a superpower. I have the superpowers within my vulnerability and my insecurities, and I’ve actually employed those throughout my entire adult life and with the work that I’ve presented as a public figure, as a pop star, as a singer songwriter, as an artist, as a photographer, etc.

Michael Stipe:

Wow. Thank you Greta Thunberg for allowing me to see myself a little more clearly. I’m sometimes embarrassed that it feels like I start every sentence with the word, I. I feel a little navel-gazey, but part of being a pop store allows you to not only acknowledge that the ego that it takes to get up on a stage and think that what you have to say, or sing, or present is valuable to someone beyond yourself. Also comes hand in hand with the humility of stepping back and recognizing that, if you start to believe your own myth, you’re screwed and the work that you do is vastly unimportant.

Michael Stipe:

You are really, really human, and that humanity, I think this sounds insane to me coming out of my mouth, but that humility combined with that ego is what I think, that friction can create beautiful work, whether it’s in a writer, performance artists and dancers, or in something as rigid as opera or ballet, or in something as freeform as my idea, theoretically, of what punk rock means.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. It’s interesting, in spending time researching a lot of the things that you were a part of and talked about and wrote about through the eighties till now. I was very aware of your awareness of the sort of tides as they go back and forth between acceptance and reverence and people then getting upset about the very things that they used to be excited about and how you have to temper how you consider what you mean to them by what you mean, sort of internally, and hold onto that in some way.

Michael Stipe:

Wow. Can you expand that?

Debbie Millman:

If that makes sense.

Michael Stipe:

No, can you expand that a little bit more? I’m really intrigued.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I remember you were talking about one of the albums that you released not being as popular as some of the bigger, more sort of stadium albums. I have stacks and stacks of your work.

Michael Stipe:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

The very, very early work appealed to a certain type of people. The later more stadium work I’m talking about, losing my religion and sort of the world of that super duper heavy, popular music that people … All the out of time, time. Then when you have something that might be smaller or less appreciated by the masses, it’s still work that has meaning. And if you start to, and I talk to Roxanne about this all the time, if you start to measure your value and worth by the amount of books that are sold, or the amount of albums that are sold, or the amount of downloads, or the amount of streams, you put your whole life in control of something that isn’t you.

Michael Stipe:

You’re also competing, and I can’t possibly compete with my past and I have no desire to, nor with whoever the pop stars of 2021 or 2022. I have no desire to even try to compete with that. I read an article, I think it was in The Guardian about Damon Albarn from the band Blur. He’s someone who I deeply admire. The point that they were making is, the writer was saying, here’s someone who had success and then did something quite unusual, which is didn’t try to continue having this success upon success, upon success on a mass scale, but spent the next 20 years doing exactly what he wanted to do, experimenting with different types of music and musicians and different ways of presenting music and performance together through stage, and theater, and what-have-you.

Michael Stipe:

He’s someone who I deeply admire, one. But it also, I was like, oh, wow. I wish I had done that the way he did that. It’s a day later, I’m thinking about what I have done. I’ve done okay. I think I’ve presented some pretty interesting things in the past decade, certainly since the band disbanded. It’s not at all I’m looking at the span of my life and I’m looking at time remaining, and I want to do a whole lot more.

Michael Stipe:

I actually thought about this yesterday as well at my age, I’m 61 now, and I look great. But at 61, most people are thinking about retiring. As an artist, I can’t retire. Even the thought of that is ridiculous. I look at my heroes, whether it’s Leonard Cohen, certainly Patti Smith, Edmund White, people that continue working until the end of their lives. Not because they want to, not because they’re having to pay the bills, not because they have some fragile ego that has to be supported by this desire to be appreciated from outside. No, it’s because you have to do it. It’s really not a choice.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I feel the same way. I just turned 60 and feel, while I do feel time in a way that I really haven’t before, I mean, it’s been escalating since I turned 50, but I also am more urgent in thinking, if not now, when? It reminds me of when I … I interviewed David Lee Roth two years ago when we were talking about 1984, and I asked him how it felt to be, at that moment in time, the most popular dude on the planet, the biggest album, the biggest tour, the biggest music video, everything that there was.

Michael Stipe:

Biggest hero.

Debbie Millman:

And his surprise … Yeah. I’ve talked about this at length. I asked him what it felt like, and he paused and he was extremely thoughtful, and he said, “You have to be really careful when you get to the top of the tallest mountain, because it’s always cold, you’re usually alone, and there’s only one direction.” I’ve suddenly felt really comforted by the idea that you can sort of slowly walk up the mountain, and maybe, if you’re lucky, not peak until the day before you die.

Michael Stipe:

Wow. I wouldn’t have expected that from David Lee. Roth. That’s incredible.

Debbie Millman:

I know, I love that. He said that. It really was extraordinary. All that being said, I do want to talk to you about a couple of your early pieces, only because they mean so much to me and sort of the formation of who I am. I’m going to be really selfish and I just want to ask you about a couple of songs because, had I thought at the time that 30 years later I’d be talking to you about these songs, I would’ve just said, Debbie, you never have to worry about anything again, because everything’s going to just be fine.

Debbie Millman:

I want to talk to you about Harborcoat. Harborcoat is one of my all time favorite songs. If somebody said, “Debbie, write down top 10 songs of your life,” it would be Harborcoat. Not only is it one of my favorite songs of all time, but there’s a line in it that I use sort of to describe a moment in time. At first, when the album first came out, I’m talking about the album, Murmur.

Michael Stipe:

It’s on Murmur. Yeah [crosstalk 00:36:32].

Debbie Millman:

I’m sorry, Reckoning. I’m going to say that again.

Michael Stipe:

Oh Reckoning, came out in 1984, right?

Debbie Millman:

Right. Reckoning came out … Yeah.

Michael Stipe:

[crosstalk 00:36:40].

Debbie Millman:

Yep. I have it, both the album and the CD. That’s how much I love this. I also have all the sort of digital versions of it because it’s just easier to listen to music that way, but I would never ever give these up. So, these are all the first pressings. You didn’t include the lyrics at the time. You had to really, really listen. People would argue, what does this mean? What does that mean? What is he saying here? What is he saying there? I want to talk to you about that in a second, but I want to ask you about this line. I spent my whole life waiting to ask you this, “There’s a splinter in your eye and it reads react.”

Michael Stipe:

If you’re asking me where that came from, I have no idea. I think it’s that instinct that we were talking about. I was a fan of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. I was very familiar with the cut up technique that they had employed through their own work. Mostly through the bands that were coming up with R.E.M through the Athens Georgia scene, specifically Pylon and The B-52’s, the idea of taking these random thoughts and ideas and throwing them together in a kind of Brion Gysin, William Burroughs mashup was kind of common.

Michael Stipe:

What does that mean? I mean, was 24. I was already kind of a pop star. The band had already gotten named the record of the year over Michael Jackson’s Thriller with our first album, which sold 40,000 copies at the time. Was that The Village Voice or?

Debbie Millman:

New York Times. New York Times rated it the number one album of the year.

Michael Stipe:

Over Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I mean, we were living, at the time, when we were York, which was a lot of the time on 44th Street at the Iroquois Hotel. It’s where James Dean lived when he was studying acting in New York. We were in his room, we were told. [Samo 00:38:31] used to go into the … He would tag the elevator, it was the [inaudible 00:38:38] elevator in New York City.

Debbie Millman:

Oh my God.

Michael Stipe:

But Samo was of course, [crosstalk 00:38:41]. I mean, it was just this moment, there was all this stuff was happening around us, but I would pick phrases out of the air and just throw them into the songs and not think twice about it. Where that came from, I have no idea, Debbie, but it sure does sound good. It means something to me most certainly. That’s the line in the song actually. You’re at the peak of the mountain right now. You pick the very best line in that song to focus on. Maybe we’ll get tattoos together at some point, but I think having a tattoo of my own lyric on my body would be a little creepy. I’d get a tramp stamp across the back so I’d never have to …

Debbie Millman:

Well, and now I use it. I use it as a way to explain what it means to cut off your nose to spite your face.

Michael Stipe:

Exactly.

Debbie Millman:

Which is so much more poetic.

Michael Stipe:

Exactly.

Debbie Millman:

My last question about that particular song, and then I’ll leave you alone about it, just as I said, it’s my life playlist. What is a Harborcoat?

Michael Stipe:

Well, to me, actually that line for me is about like, everything seems to be going right, but there’s something niggling, there’s something that’s irritating. There’s something that’s not quite on. And what is that? What you need to investigate, you need to step back, you need to look again and figure out, what doesn’t feel exactly? That’s when you have to change things slightly, maybe to just shift them incrementally.

Michael Stipe:

But Harborcoat, no idea. I mean, again, I was walking on stage in probably four or five layers of clothing. After the first song, the coat would come off, usually an overcoat. Actually, the hat would come off, and then a shirt, and then a jacket, and then a shirt, and then another shirt, and then I’d be down to a t-shirt at the time. Later, when I realized that sex sells, I would strip down to my bare body and sometimes shave my chest, because it looked better from a distance, depending on how big the venues were. But I was a skinny little thing back then. Yeah, I mean I was wearing the coat. I was literally embodying my own lyric. I was protecting myself.

Debbie Millman:

The other thing about the early albums, they are pop albums, and one could also call them rock albums, but you have a lot of love songs, Perfect Circle, Talk About the Passion. There are so many love songs that are almost like Trojan horses in these pop albums.

Michael Stipe:

In a way because I intentionally did not write love songs. I don’t think I used the word love in a song until our seventh or eighth album maybe. I mean, it was way, way, way, way-

Debbie Millman:

Oh, but Perfect Circle is one of the great love songs of all time really.

Michael Stipe:

Thank you. It’s such a sad song to me.

Debbie Millman:

I know, but that’s what I love about it. Why were you so opposed to having the lyrics on the sleeves?

Michael Stipe:

I sang using my voice as an instrument. Again, that’s something I picked up from Vanessa Briscoe from Pylon, I think talked about her voice as an instrument. I, again, very quite literally and naively, I said, “Oh, okay. My voice is an instrument too. That’s how I’ll use it. The early stuff, Murmur particularly, it’s like Sigur Ros, or This Mort Coil Elizabeth Fraser. People that …

Debbie Millman:

Cocteau Twins.

Michael Stipe:

Cocteau Twins are creating languages or are just singing nonsense without narrative. The narrative is within the emotion and the feeling of the voice. I was doing that without even knowing what I was doing. I was just throwing words out that … They didn’t have to make sense. It didn’t need that. It had my spirit and my soul and my energy and my charisma, whatever was there at the age of 22, all wrapped up in it, and that was enough. But it was around the time of Reckoning, the second album, and certainly by the third album, that I realized I couldn’t do this forever.

Michael Stipe:

The stuff that worked live for me wasn’t particularly working on record. I needed to sharpen my storytelling and I needed to start writing about something. At that same time, we were starting to travel the world and we were becoming politicized by again, the Reagan era, US intervention in Central America, cruise missiles in Europe. We were representative of America wherever we went. People were like, “What the fuck are you doing? What are you allowing your government to do in your name?” And we were like, “Excuse me, what?” We became quite activist and politicized simply by traveling the world and seeing who we were and what we represented from a distance and through other people’s eyes.

Michael Stipe:

The first lyric I wrote down was World Leader Pretend. That was on green, which was our fifth, sixth album. Sixth album, I think, and it was nine years after the band started. I didn’t feel secure in my abilities as a lyricist. They didn’t read well to me. You know what happened? I read the lyrics of a band that I really admired as a young man before I heard the song and the lyrics were not very good. It completely changed how I listened to the song. It felt like it stole the magic of music and the magic of a human emotional voice away from me as a listener and as a fan. I think I was … I’m putting this together as we speak, Debbie. I’m not kidding. I don’t think about this stuff. I haven’t heard Harborcoat since I was 27-years-old, but …

Debbie Millman:

Sorry. Sorry.

Michael Stipe:

That’s okay. No, I’m going to go listen to it after we’re done talking. I’m interested to hear … There’s also a song called Nine to Nine on one of those records.

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Michael Stipe:

I want to hear that too. I have no idea what it’s about, but anyway, World Leader Pretend was the first song. I lifted that basically from Leonard Cohen. It’s using a military terminology to describe very, very profound, deep and upsetting emotions. The guy in the song is really eating himself alive and questioning his positions, questioning what he’s doing to himself. But I thought that, that was a really, for me, a watermark moment. So, I allowed that lyric to be in the packaging of the album. That was 1989.

Michael Stipe:

It wasn’t until losing my religion, which was 1991 that I allowed lip syncing in a video because it seemed fake to me. It wasn’t until after, I think Bill Barry left the group in 1996 that I started including all the lyrics just because I was like, okay, I’ve done that. I’m a really good lyricist now. When I’m good, I’m great. When I’m bad, I’m not mediocre, but I’m just bad. So, that’s okay. That’s something to be proud of. And I included all the lyrics, for better or worse.

Debbie Millman:

I want to talk to you about your current work. I’m going to ask you one last question about the older work, and that really has to do with a competition that I read that you had with Kurt Cobain to see who could write a song with the most yeah, yeah, yeahs.

Michael Stipe:

Kurt and I didn’t have a literal competition with each other. I said to self I’m going to write a song with more yeahs in it than any Nirvana song ever written. And it was only after the song was written that I said, “Hey, Kurt, guess what I’ve done?” We had a laugh about it, I think. But that song was written in Seattle on a Walkman, walking around the block of the studio that we were working at. Peter Buck had moved there, bought a house, started a family, and Kurt and Courtney bought the house next door. They literally shared a fence. It was an incredible moment for us as a band to find these people that were a little bit younger, but really our contemporaries and moving into their ascendants with a similar attempt at grace and style that we had carried the whole time that we were doing what we were doing as a band, as R.E.M.

Debbie Millman:

Well, in 2011, after countless awards, becoming one of the world’s most successful and respected bands of all time, selling over 85 million albums, you-

Michael Stipe:

More.

Debbie Millman:

More.

Michael Stipe:

More. It’s always more. They always-

Debbie Millman:

Always more.

Michael Stipe:

[crosstalk 00:46:37] the Americans-

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. 185 trillion.

Michael Stipe:

I always think over a hundred million. That’s that’s what I say.

Debbie Millman:

Over a hundred million. Yeah. Because when you see these things on wherever, it’s always like that moment in time. It’s like, again, that time thing. It’s like that moment.

Michael Stipe:

I’m actually teasing. It’s fun.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, I love-

Michael Stipe:

We sold a lot of records.

Debbie Millman:

A lot of records.

Michael Stipe:

In 2011, we disbanded. We …

Debbie Millman:

Without any acrimony, without anger, you still make and record music, but you do so many other things now. You have a number of really beautiful books that I want to talk to you about. In 2018, along with Jonathan Berger, you published Michael Stipe: Volume 1, which is a collection of 35 photographs, combining intimate moments with images of people like Kurt Cobain and Patti Smith, as well as photos that you’ve also collected of people like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Roy Chon, and lots of others. You’ve said that photography is your primary way of keeping a diary. Is it true you have over 50,000 photos in your collections?

Michael Stipe:

There’s a lot more. And if I turn the camera, we’re speaking on Zoom for your podcasters, we see each other, but I can turn just slightly. Do you see that mountain right there?

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Michael Stipe:

That’s about 50,000 negatives, and that’s just in this studio. I have three studios. This one, that’s stuff that we’ve actually gone through and digitized. So, those are secure in more than one medium now, but 50,000 doesn’t begin to touch it. I use photography as a way of remembering where I was and who I was with and as a way of sparking my memory. Patti Smith writes everything down. I just don’t write things down. I’m not very good at that. I never have been. I’m really good with taking a picture, and that will spark all kinds of memories, down to, what was the meal? What were we eating? Who was at the end of the table, who I maybe didn’t talk to, but they were still present, they were still there in this incredible moment?

Michael Stipe:

I’ve had this extraordinary life surrounded by and meeting incredible, incredible people. I’ve traveled the world. I’ve seen so many things I’ve been in so many places that people dream of. Even talking about it, I’m in shock that, that’s my life. That’s something that I am able to participate in. It’s so thrilling and so exciting. Those pictures are a way for me to remember that and a way to reflect back and have a diary, keep a journal. That’s my journal.

Debbie Millman:

I believe one of your first cameras was one your father had gotten you from Vietnam.

Michael Stipe:

He bought it in Korea and it was a Nikon FM2. It was stolen when I was 21 years old, along with a lot of weed and a jar full of pennies, but his insurance covered it and he got another FM2, which I have to this day. Yeah, I used it when I was 14 years old. That was when he first loaned it to me and I started taking pictures as a 14 year old. It wasn’t until I was 15 that I discovered music. So, photography is really my first love in terms of mediums. In that first book that you mentioned, Volume I, Jonathan Berger went through about, I think it was 35,000, 50,000 of the images that I had on my computer and he picked the 35 or 34 images that he thought represented me as a visual artist.

Michael Stipe:

In a way of presenting me, not as a pop star with a hobby, but as someone who’s been actually doing this all along to a larger audience. I’m very grateful to him for the experience of putting that book together and actually having to take a step back and look at myself and my life through someone else’s eyes. It was really exciting to see the choices that he made.

Debbie Millman:

One of the things that I think is so interesting about your books is that they work on a whole slew of different levels. There are books of photography, so obviously they include photographs which could work on their own on a wall somewhere. But then they’re also talking to each other. They’re communicating throughout. There is, in all of your books, a very specific linear narrative that changes from looking at one individual piece on a wall to communicating in multiple ways just by the virtue of the way that they’re ordered and the way they show up and the size of the photo in the book. How involved are you in the actual layout and the design of these books?

Michael Stipe:

With music and with R.E.M, we always thought that the first song on a record is a really important way of introducing someone into a world of here’s a universe that you may not have explored before and here’s our version of a different type of reality. That first song is really important, the first notes. I employed that recently on the Velvet Underground cover version that I did of Sunday Morning for Todd Haynes’s documentary about the Velvet Underground. I did it with Hal Willner, my dear friend who died recently of COVID.

Michael Stipe:

It was the last thing that Hal and I did together. But I wanted, knowing that it was going to be the first song on the album, I wanted to introduce the album in a way that would acknowledge that there’s no way that anyone can ever copy or mimic the brilliance of the Velvet Underground’s first album, but we can present variations on what those songs mean to different types of artists and musicians. So, I opened it with this long keening held clarinet note that for me, I stole from Gershwin, from George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Michael Stipe:

But I presented that to the musician and said, “This is what I want. I want it to hold for way too long and then we’ll bring the song in underneath it and allow that to be the introduction to the album.” With the books, I’m doing the same thing. If you look at the beginning of each book, there is something that … In the second book, you’re literally, the first image is a window that’s blackened and it’s inviting you into this unknown place. That book is quite, I think, accomplished, the first book as well, the Jonathan Berger book. The third book with Tilda Swinton on the cover is my pandemic book.

Michael Stipe:

It is a little bit like me in third grade, not being able to read the clock quite right. It’s a little stunted. It started as something that was quite tight in terms of the idea that I had for what the book was going to be. It became something very different under the madness that became my COVID year of 2020. I went a little bit cuckoo, like I think a bunch of us did, and that is well represented in the book. You need a little bit of a legend to get through it. Now, the book does come with a QR code with me audio describing.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, it’s a little podcast.

Michael Stipe:

[crosstalk 00:53:33].

Debbie Millman:

If you scan the QR codes, you … No, it’s in a good way. For our listeners, if you scan the QR codes on various pages, they lead you to audio recordings of Michael talking about why he included the photographs and thinking about the narrative arc, the placement, which is super important. It’s a real sort of multi-layered experience that I think is really interesting for the format.

Michael Stipe:

It helps unravel the puzzle and it shows my intention. My intention as an … No, I hate the word artist, but as an artist, my intention is always, always to not have anyone feel left out. I want every single person that encounters anything that I do to feel smart when they walk away from it, to feel like they get it. They understand it on some level, whether it’s visual, whether it’s emotional, hopefully whether it’s a deeper understanding of themselves or a deeper understanding of something that’s outside of what they might expect from a former pop star.

Michael Stipe:

I want everyone to feel smarter when they come away from this. Even if they just go, “Wow, that’s a really pretty picture of Tilda Swinton. Isn’t she a magnificent creature?” Well, yes, she is. She also represents a ton of stuff that this book explores, and that’s why she’s on the cover. But anyway, I want everyone to step away feeling smarter. One of my great heroes is Dolly Parton, and I think she’s really good at describing her intention behind her work, the same way everyone should feel lifted by and a part of what the piece is.

Debbie Millman:

The thing that I like so much about the books though, is that they, while they are really inclusive, I don’t think that they would exclude anybody, they have different ways in. In terms of your brand new book, that to me feels more like a play, a play with different parts. You’re going through it. There are very distinct emotions that you experience, whether you’re looking at, whether you’re looking at photographs, I think there’s something kind of almost installationy about it. Whereas, our interference times feels much more conceptual. It’s much more abstract. It feels like you’re diving into an experience. A lot of the photographs feel like they’re surrounding you, whereas in Still Life, portrait Still Life, you feel like you’re going into something, if that makes any sense.

Michael Stipe:

You completely nailed it. My mouth is hanging open. I can’t believe that you just said what you said about the new book, because all the work that I’m doing right now is actually from … If you can picture two things, Uncle Vanya and the film Birdman. A lot of it is coming from a proscenium stage using language of the theater, and conceptually using all these ideas of being either an actor or someone on the side who’s watching, who’s a significant and important part of the production, but not in the public eye.

Michael Stipe:

I’m using all these, and God knows there’s tropes., there’s layer upon layer, upon layer of stuff around that. But that’s what I’m using, not only in this book, but it in all the work that I’m doing right now in the studio. And you just nailed it on the head with no provocation at all. I’m super-

Debbie Millman:

So good.

Michael Stipe:

That’s super exciting to me, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you. Well, I’m really loving the work and I think especially, portrait Still Life feels like it needs to be it explored materially, if that makes sense, sort of in a location.

Michael Stipe:

Thank you. It will be in Milan, fall of ’22, at the ICA Milano, the Institute of Contemporary Art. They’re doing my first giant exhibition of my work and it’s going to flow on these three books. The vases that are in the book, which are real vases that were photographed, made by the ceramicist, Caroline Wallner, and the books, which are real books. But in that language that we were just speaking of, of the theater, they’re photographed to look like a digital image of a book rather than a real book itself.

Michael Stipe:

So, what you’re looking at is a real image that looks like a fake image. And if you look closely, you just get a little shadow here and there and you realize that the background of the books, the edges of the books are not exactly the same from one picture to the other. They are real and so they’re going to be a part of it. Some of them represent people who are no longer with us on this plane, the ghost images, the ghost books. And some of them represent people that are with us, but it’s all people who, for one reason or another, last year, in trying to put together a book of portraits of people who I found to be immensely courageous and vulnerable at the same time, and using that vulnerability to allow a humanity into their work or into the way that they presented themselves as public figures, or as people in my lives.

Michael Stipe:

Or as people that are not public figures, but were pushed into the public sphere through one incident or another, black lives matter having a huge amount to do with it. All those people found their way into my consciousness in pandemic 2020, and therefore into this book. It’s a little bit of my shout out song. My best friend called it that, the James Brown shout out song to everyone in 2020 who caught my eye and touched my heart.

Debbie Millman:

Well, it’s a beautiful book. I think you also rekindled an interest that you had in fonts and designed some of the fonts yourself for the book.

Michael Stipe:

Speaking of design. I mean, there are two things that … The one thing on earth that horrifies me more than anything is injustice. When I see injustice, I become … I see red. I just become furious. The second thing after injustice that bugs me, makes me crazy is bad design.

Debbie Millman:

Oh yeah. Yeah, let’s just talk quickly I just want to ask you about the fonts, because you did design the fonts, right?

Michael Stipe:

Well, I pulled them from the 1970s. That’s the era that I was a teenager and all these things, like all these important things like discovering my own sexuality, deciding to embrace that within myself, discovering punk rock and the idea of being a pop star and being a public figure, embracing that. All of the fonts that were happening in the ’70s, that’s my sweet spot. Had I not found music or photography, I think I would’ve been a very failed graphic artist or graphic designer. I explored that in this book under lockdown.

Michael Stipe:

I pulled fonts that reminded me of the 1970s and spoke to me as such. Then I used them in books that again look like, either computer generated images of books or they look like really trashy collages, which was of course intentional, but I cut and pasted my version of these heroic and vulnerable people into books and then re-photograph them for my book.

Debbie Millman:

Michael, it has been an absolute honor talking with you today. Thank you so much for joining me on Design Matters.

Michael Stipe:

Thank you. That was awesome.

Debbie Millman:

Michael Stipe’s latest book is an untitled book of Portraits and Still Lives. You can find out more about him and see a lot more of his work on michaelstipe.com. This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Debbie Millman:

Rickie Lee Jones spent her early life drifting to and fro, landing wherever good luck and intuition seemed to guide her. In the mid 1970s, that place was Los Angeles. It was there that she would write the hit single Chuck E’s In Love. In 1979, her debut album sold over two million copies and she went on in her career to win two GRAMMYs, and to claim her spot as one of the greatest singer/songwriters in American popular music. She joins me now to discuss her journey, her career, and her newly released memoir. Rickie Lee Jones, welcome to Design Matters.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Hi, good to be here.

Debbie Millman:

Hi. Rickie, congratulations on your memoir. I agree with music critic Bob Lefsetz who said it’s absolutely the best book about being an artist in the rock world that he’s ever read. Congratulations.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

Your book is titled Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour. Fans of yours know that the name Last Chance Texaco is taken from the title of one of your songs from your 1979 debut album. What made you decide to use that song title as the title of your book?

Rickie Lee Jones:

I think it’s evocative of a journey telling the story of a life on the road. When I think about it, actually, my dad wrote this story called The Road Runner when I was little. We traveled around so much, me in the back of that car, my life has been on the road. The other reason is the song is one of the most powerful and unique songs I’ve written, but I think mostly because it seemed to be the true signpost of my life.

Debbie Millman:

You write in the introduction that Last Chance Texaco remains a kind of living spirit to you, a whisper of belief and impossibilities. I’m wondering if you could talk a bit more about your belief in impossibilities.

Rickie Lee Jones:

It’s so intrinsic to my nature that it’s almost hard to separate it and talk about it. But I’ve always had and have still this feeling of being in a frame of being a story that’s watched by something that I interact with and talk to, that I talk to and interact with. That is to say that it manifests almost at will, but it manifests before me in proofs, which would suggest doubts, but people have doubts because they can’t see the invisible world, but we have a connection to things we can’t see. We find it out in science, “Oh, there are atoms, there are molecules.” So anyway, that’s what it is. There’s a unfettered connection to the invisible world that is both noun and verb. It is both a place and a feeling of personality that interacts with, because we don’t quite have words here to describe it. I don’t try, but I know it is and it is with me always.

Debbie Millman:

You go on to state that after all these decades, life remains stubbornly mysterious, which I loved. I want to ask, how does it remain stubbornly mysterious?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, I guess because you can’t ever figure out how things operate, but also in a more innocent way when I take a walk outside and look up at the birds, and there’s a connection between the bird and some other thing that’s going to happen later in the day. If you’re watching, you’ll see it all, and it’s stubbornly mysterious because it refuses to reveal itself. Yet probably it’s revealing itself all the time. It’s us that refuses to see, but there’s a little prose going on in the book too.

Debbie Millman:

I want to go back in time a bit and talk about not only where you came from, but who you came from. Your paternal grandfather, Frank Peg Leg Jones, and your grandmother, Myrtle Lee, were vaudevillians based in Chicago where you were born. Frank was a really big star singer and dancer on the vaudeville circuit. He was once build above Milton Burrow. Though he lost a limb in a childhood train accident, he was quite a good dancer. You’ve written that you were in awe of your grandfather. Do you have memories of seeing him perform when you were a child?

Rickie Lee Jones:

He died in 1940. He died before my parents met each other. I’ll just tell you a little side story. I joined ancestry.com, and in that, a distant cousin contacted me and I found out all these things because he’s done a whole family history that includes my side. He separates from me around 1800, but he told me all about my family. That’s when I just found out when Frank died. I’m hoping in some piece of film that they find in a studio that Peg Leg Jones will be there in an audition tape, but I’ve never got to see him. We had two whole scrapbooks of his notices, which I can no longer find. I’m hoping they’re in storage. But I remember the one about Milton Burrow because Milton Burrow was famous. And the one which I quoted in the book, “This mono-ped puts most two-legged men to shame.” I love the language they used back then. They’re very succinct [inaudible 00:06:05] mono-ped.

Debbie Millman:

A mono-ped. Yes.

Rickie Lee Jones:

So Frank, yeah. We were kind of [inaudible 00:06:11] at people who tumbled from town to town. Frank Peg Leg Jones is the one who started that by joining vaudeville, because all of the other Jones still lived in Beaufort County, North Carolina. We are the only ones that went tumbling west like a tumbleweed. My family line goes back to the very first settlers of North Carolina. Indeed, we are the first families of North Carolina. So I’m going to get a little plaque that … And that is an incredible thing. I wish that I could have passed that on to the Jones before they passed away because wouldn’t they have been how happy. I don’t know, maybe they would have poo-pooed it, but wouldn’t they have been happy to see that, all that rambling comes from the very first Welshman who rambled over to America in 1720.

Debbie Millman:

That’s incredible. I’ve done ancestry on both sides of my family. I can go all the way back to the early 1800s on my father’s side of the family. But on my mom’s side of the family, we only go back to my great grandmother, and that is because no one can remember her maiden name, which is just completely heartbreaking to me, the idea that no one can remember.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, mine was adopted. Not only did we not have her last name, but we had no idea, but this fellow found her last name. I think some people just have a propensity for this kind of thing.

Debbie Millman:

Your mother was raised in orphanages around Mansfield, Ohio, and her parents were unable to take care of her. The courts ruled your mom’s mom an unfit mother, and all four of her children were permanently separated from her. You write in your book that all four children, along with a million other orphans of the great depression, were left to fend for themselves among the religious fanatics and pedophiles and sadists that seemed to gravitate towards children’s homes. Rickie, how did she finally get away? It’s a really remarkable story in your book.

Rickie Lee Jones:

You mean about old One Ball?

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Rickie Lee Jones:

So One Ball was named One Ball because she wore her hair in one bun on top of her head. But the children had called her One Ball to indicate the one testicle they thought was hanging under the skirt. My mother, every time she told that story, she’d laugh. I think from all those, which at that time, I guess wasn’t that many years, 30 years separated, it was safe to laugh at this inhumane woman that was the matron. She’d sneak up on the children, that was her thing, to be in the shadows, catch them and terrify them before she hurt them. She was sneaking up and back at my mother who was brushing her hair in the mirror and she saw her coming up from behind.

Rickie Lee Jones:

It was a great moment of redemption because she turned and caught her just before she got there and held her hair brush up and said, “If you ever come after me again, I’m going to ran this hairbrush up your butt.” She probably said ass, because that was more like my mother, but I wrote butt because I didn’t want to portray my mother worse than the matron dream because she swore, but that’s what she did. She stood up to the sadist and frightened her. I guess my mother left soon after and the woman never bothered her again. At least that’s how the story was told to me.

Debbie Millman:

Yes. You write that childhood traumas leave their dirty footprints in the fresh white snow-

Rickie Lee Jones:

Of our happy-ever-afters.

Debbie Millman:

… of our happy-ever-afters. It’s a beautiful line. You go on to state that no matter what your mom did, she found traces of her past obstructing the future. How did that affect you?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, we never escape it. It gets passed on to all of us. Trauma is generational, I have learned. So if your grandmother was raped, you’re going to live with it. If they tell, it doesn’t dissipate. I think even if they don’t tell, their behavior will be so bizarre in particular ways. So even talking about it, it’s as if it happened to me. My mind begins to dissipate and swirl. It’s hard to stay centered on the subject. There’s so much trauma in my mother’s past. These stories I tell are the only ones she told, but sometimes hinted to something worse. She would say of the religious fanatics who populate that area, the revivalist, the [inaudible 00:11:23]. She would say, “Goddamn hypocrites.” But the look on her face said much, much more than those words, as if something had happened to her specifically by religious people. And she’s just never going to tell her children about it. So I think it always gets passed on. How do you heal from it? I don’t know. We’ll find out. We’ll keep living and we’ll find out how.

Debbie Millman:

You were three years old when you made your debut as a performer, you were a snowflake in a ballet recital of Bambi. Rickie, is it true you were so intoxicated by the applause of the audience your dance teacher how to escort you off the stage?

Rickie Lee Jones:

It is totally true. So I remember, and we saved that little uniform for so long, I remember it had spangles on it. In fact, now that I say this out loud, I think every costume I put on somehow evokes that very first snowflake outfit. But as I bowed and didn’t know I’d been out there longer, and all the kids had left the stage and I was still bowing, and the people were applauding and laughing, I just stayed, “Thank you very much,” and they liked to tell that story as I grew up. There’s always one of us out there.

Debbie Millman:

So safe to say you realized very early on you liked being on stage?

Rickie Lee Jones:

I liked it. I felt no fear and liked everybody’s happy smiling faces. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

One of the things that I really related to a great deal was how you grew up creating invisible friends. In your book, you describe how you would daydream about an invisible horse galloping down the street in a storm of wild fury, only to find you waiting and fearless. Then a trembling velvet muzzle would press against your hand, which was the horse’s gesture of acceptance and trust. Only you understood and contained its wild heart. You’d then holler out to your invisible horse, to the consternation of your siblings who watched you in bewilderment. What did your family make of your invisible world?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, I only became aware of them watching me when my mother told my dad to tell my invisible friend goodbye, that she didn’t want me talking to things that weren’t there anymore. But she didn’t seem to understand that that was as real to me as the physical world. There was no possibility that I could tell my invisible friend goodbye. That’d be like telling her goodbye. They just thought and did slightly treat me as if I was a little bit different than most people, which since that’s how they always treated me, it was normal, but it didn’t feel good. So maybe my mom thought if I stopped doing these things, that I would start to find my way toward real people and make real friends. Little did she know the reason I had invisible friends was because the real people didn’t want to play with me. I was also very bossy in my invisible world. I could control everything. With real people, they had ideas that were definitely inferior to mine.

Debbie Millman:

Did you name your invisible friends?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Sure.

Debbie Millman:

I had an invisible friend named Goonie, for some reason, and I made my mother set the table with a place setting for her every night.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Excellent. My friend was named Bashla. That’s a Slavic name, I don’t know where that came, Bashla. Then when my parents quizzed me about my invisible friends, I began to make up others. I took the cue of the question to mean you should have more friends. So I made up SlowBeeSlow, but none was as real as Bashla.

Debbie Millman:

As you were growing up, your father’s anger and depression grew and he often left for months at a time. Your mother’s mood swings were unpredictable, and one day you came home from school to find that she had all of her teeth pulled out because they were hurting her. How were you able to make sense of this behavior and keep any semblance of your center?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, that event that my mother did, that was after the accident with my brother. So I think she was having a long, long fall. Why she decided to hurt herself, I don’t know if that was a conversation with my father. I said that thing about trauma having an impact forever, who knows where that came from. But for myself as an 11-year-old girl, who’d already seen the accident and all the trouble, for my mother to do this thing without warning, and I come home from school and she doesn’t have any teeth, was maybe like the very last door to our lives than it had been to the new, bizarre horror that was coming. “You just can’t do stuff like that, mom, and you got to keep your children informed. Tell your daughter. I’m thinking of getting Paul’s teeth, say something so that I don’t come home and meet a mother without any teeth.”

Debbie Millman:

There’s a thread of magic that runs through Last Chance Texaco, where you talk about sensing things or knowing things in a way that’s very mysterious, we talked a little bit about that earlier. This happens quite vividly with the premonition you have about your older brother’s accident. I don’t know if you’re okay to talk about it at all, but can you describe the premonition and then what subsequently happened to him, and how he is now?

Rickie Lee Jones:

There have been a few times where I’ve had this place come upon me, and it is a place. I was in a lot of stressors in the lunchroom. It was just a few weeks into my sixth grade year, I think. I was still 10 years old, and the kids were drawing [inaudible 00:17:54] lines around their trays and I had to get out of the lunchroom, and to do that, I had to go by the table of older kids who were very mean. So on my way out, I stopped to look at some pictures, class pictures, that were on the right side of the auditorium stage. That’s where we ate, in the auditorium. As I looked at my brother’s graduation picture, the light in the room went away just like in a movie and centered around his picture. But it’s more than that.

Rickie Lee Jones:

It’s kind of scary because when I talk about it, it’s here, but I don’t talk about it much. It’s possible I could have had a life of premonitions if I would have let it happen anymore. But at any rate, I saw the picture and the message came. The message was really clear. It said, “Something is going to happen to Danny and nothing will ever be the same.” As if a gentle angel was saying, “So we’re letting you know, and there’s nothing you can do.” I don’t know. As years went by, I thought, when we used to make records, we worked with tape, and when you hit the Cymbal really loud or the guitar really loud, the sound actually echoed over in part of the tape. So you’d hear a echo of a sound just before it came when you’re listening back.

Rickie Lee Jones:

It’s quite amazing, and as years have gone by, I thought, “Maybe time is kind of like that,” because we live in a spiral universe. Maybe some events are so loud they echo into the future, just like the … But at any rate, he did have this terrible accident 48 hours later. The man hit his motorcycle and knocked him off, dragging him along the road, because his foot was caught on the fender, cut his leg open so bad. They severed his leg, but his head hitting the ground also caused traumatic brain injury.

Rickie Lee Jones:

You ask how he is now. Well, he didn’t have a great life, but he had an okay life. He ran a pool tournament for a while. He had his own pool hall, but probably nothing like the life he was hoping to have. When people are infirmed or handicapped, or when people live a life that way, the only thing that they don’t want is to be measured as less than. “This is the life that is now, this is what I am. I’m not less than I was. I’m just Dan.” He’s still alive and he’s funny. The thing that he had when he was a little kid, he never lost, which was just a kind of lighthearted way of going through the world. Isn’t that something?

Debbie Millman:

Thank you for sharing that, Rickie. It seems that you were able to find solace and comfort in music, and you write about how you felt rescued by The Beatles.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Yeah. They had some kind of a magic in their sound. It changed the world. Elvis was powerful, right? An American symbol, a sex symbol, but there was something about The Beatles that did more than rock and roll. I just never understood how to express it. But when I hear the harmonica, the room that the reverb creates and the guitar, and there’s a place, I am transported back to that place in time. Like so many of us are with music, the way we felt when we first heard it. So, I guess it’s the music.

Debbie Millman:

One of the things I loved reading about was how you loved The Beatles so much you had a Beatle haircut, Beatle boots, Ringo rings, you collected Beatles trading cards that came with sheets of bubble gum. You felt that if you could not have Paul, you would be Paul, and your love of The Beatles seemed to really help you undergo a social and spiritual metamorphosis and rock music at that point became your Bible. But one thing that I loved was that you didn’t want to be a girl singer or The Beatles girlfriend. You wanted to be a Beatle, and there’s a big distinction there.

Rickie Lee Jones:

That’s the key, isn’t it?

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely.

Rickie Lee Jones:

And maybe that’s the calling. I just don’t know, but I could never have settled for any of the roles that were offered to the girls. It was just automatic that I would be them.

Debbie Millman:

Over the course of your early life in sort of preparation for your career, you had a number of incidents that you turned down, which took a lot of bravery and courage. And the first was when you started singing, your dad was so impressed with your ability, he took you to an audition for the Lew King show, which was a local television talent show, and you won. But then a decision had to be made that really did impact one direction that your life could have taken. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Sure. The Lew King Rangers show was, like you said, a talent show for kids. Who is the famous guy in Vegas, (singing), what was his … He was a star on that show. I auditioned and I was a good singer as a kid, but they told my parents that they would have to buy an insurance policy if I was going to be on the show, an insurance policy was just gangsterism. It would’ve cost a lot of money, from what my parents earned. When we were driving home, I was in the backseat, and I remember this so well, lots of talking, lots of talking about it. Then finally they put it back in my hands and said, “If you really want to do this, we’ll find a way to do it.” And I said, “No, I don’t want to do it. It’s wrong what they’re doing,” and I turned down what I lusted for, which was not only to be on television, but to sing in front of people.

Debbie Millman:

You write that the Lew King show and that decision was your first lesson in the dark quarters of the music business, where favors are exchanged and sins offered up as collateral. You go on to state of the many exercises and integrity you have achieved or endured or failed. This was your greatest. Why is that?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Because I was a little kid and didn’t have the years that come as you get older, the years of reason. And I instinctually knew it was unethical, but a little kid wants what they want. So I think it’s a harder decision for a little kid to make, maybe not.

Debbie Millman:

You describe how that decision really gave you a compass of sorts, which is the one that comes to children who sacrifice their dreams for family, and all around you, your childhood was slipping away. But you write, to your north, you had a dream, and only one direction you could call your own. Was that when you knew you wanted to be a professional musician?

Rickie Lee Jones:

I knew that I wanted to entertain. I wanted to act, I had been in tap and ballet. I was also swimming, hoping to go to the Olympics. So whatever I was going to be, it was going to be a self-made thing, not a thing I went to school to learn to be, it would be on my shoulders.

Debbie Millman:

Yet when you tried out for the school choir, you were turned down.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

Not only were you turned down, but the music teacher singled you out in front of your friends and stated that your voice was too unusual and would not fit into his chorus. How do teachers like that even exist?

Rickie Lee Jones:

He kind of looked like a Marine. They’re just kind of people that are about everything being the same. Why they’re in the arts, I think there were a lot more of them in the arts. He was teaching everybody that if they wanted to be in music as a profession, they’d have to sound like this and sing like this, and maybe they’d get a job in this choir. You remember in the mid to late ’60s, choirs were very popular. They all sang in unison. So that was the job you could get, and I was, “That is not the job I’m going to get,” but that hurt really badly.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Yet, he was right. My voice was different. There was something about me that seemed to piss teachers off, and they very unceremoniously sent me on my way. Maybe even at 12 or 13, I had a personality that was singular and meant to be a star on stage. I was not ever going to be in the choir, one of. I always liked that little girl who did the long bow. I would always separate myself somehow, but they could have been so much gentler with me. It’s a long shot.

Rickie Lee Jones:

The people who become famous are long shots. They’re the people that teachers and most people around them go, “This guy’s never going to amount to anything,” because we are finding our way to a different plateau entirely. In that realm, we would be a bum, we’re not meant to be there. We’re meant to be up there. Since so few people make it, I guess, are able to define themselves and sell themselves as a singular new and different, come to the new and different, because so many people want the same, same, same. So they treat you so badly. It’s a miracle that anybody who’s a little bit different ever achieves anything that they’re meant to achieve, I think. Yeah, that guy was a bad guy. He really hurt my feelings. He meant to hurt my feelings.

Debbie Millman:

And that’s the part that makes it cruel.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Your childhood was abruptly and forever altered by your brother’s injury. At that point you described your family life as something like a nuclear submarine waiting for the signal to destroy all known life. But music became an even stronger solace view, and you write how Jefferson Airplane was on your turntable every day, Buffalo Springfield, Jimi Hendrix, Vanilla Fudge, and The Mothers of Invention were frequently played. You also love show tunes, particularly from West Side Story. You go on to describe how Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow seemed to be at the eye of a storm you long to be part of. What storm was that?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, outside of my house, the hippies were growing. They’d been growing since ’65 and ’66. There’s an article in LOOK or LIFE Magazine about them in LSD, and little slices of them out there, and their long hair, and Indian headbands. So first it’s a look that invites a child, but what they’re talking about, peace, protest, that’s way lower on the list. I want to be part of all that love and attention. They would have love-ins. There was a love-in or something in in Encanto Park. I wanted to be there so bad. Well, all it was was people standing around. It wasn’t anything like what the title … I thought something magical would be happening in there. But nevertheless, I was drawn out of the family circle and all that trouble and drama to a larger picture that maybe I could find a place in.

Debbie Millman:

The last song on site A of Surrealistic Pillow, Comin’ Back to Me was my favorite. You taught yourself how to play the guitar, sounding out each note one phrase at a time by ear. How did you feel when you realized you could play it?

Rickie Lee Jones:

It took so long, so many weeks of practice, and memory, and getting … The fingers would hurt so badly pressing on those little steel razors. Then finally I could make that beautiful motion walking down from the C to the A minor. And when you’re making music, it’s like you’re weaving reality. You’re weaving places. You’re bringing the … It’s magic, and bringing these feelings into existence out here before you. Oh my God. I had longed to do it and I was doing it. That’s all I can say about that. It was pretty wonderful.

Debbie Millman:

I don’t want to skip too far ahead in time, but what was it like to record that song for your album Pop Pop?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, I wasn’t sure I should do it because it has always been that first song I learned and it’s attached to so many feelings that have their root when I was 11, or 10, or 12 years old. I go right back to that bedroom when I start thinking of that song. So, I didn’t want to put it out before me where it could be measured, and maybe people wouldn’t like it or would like it, but it wouldn’t be my private … But that didn’t happen at all. Actually, it’s remained my own private place. I was more concerned on a technical level with the key, because my voice is much lower now, but at the time it was pretty low in my register, and I was working hard to sing there. Marty Balin and I have a similar range that we can sing in. So I was just thinking about it technically, was I pulling it off, because I knew how I felt singing it, but was I conveying it to the listener. That’s all I was thinking about.

Debbie Millman:

Is it different for you to perform songs that were written by other people rather than songs written by yourself?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

One song that I think is remarkable that you do is a cover of the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil, which takes the song and makes it a completely different song. It’s a completely different song. I was playing it for my wife and I’m like, “Do you recognize this song?” And I played the first couple of bars that you sang and she’s like, “No.” And then I played the Rolling Stones’ version and she was like, “Holy shit.” I’m like, “Yeah. yeah.”

Rickie Lee Jones:

Excellent.

Debbie Millman:

It’s amazing. Amazing.

Rickie Lee Jones:

That’s exactly what I would wish happened. So, yes, I have a very different relationship. When I hear a song, I can mold it in any direction I want. But when I write it, it’s almost like taking dictation, “This is the way I have to play it.” If I play it another way, that will be what it looks like. It’s like you’re making a baby in here, but you get to decide what it’s … So I have to stick to the creation of the song rather than the interpretation of the song when it’s mine.

Debbie Millman:

I think you were 14, you heard from a friend that her boyfriend was starting a band, and you auditioned and became the lead singer of the California Blues Band.

Rickie Lee Jones:

California Blues Band.

Debbie Millman:

Your mother gave you money to buy a Paisley empire waisted one piece satin lounge pajama outfit that you saw at Lerners department store. I remember Lerners department store, by the way. What did it feel like to finally sort of be the lead singer in a band?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, I wore that pajama out of Lerners that day. So I was walking through Christown Mall with it on, and I felt like … So they’re looking at me, and I like that. Partly I think that they might not like me, but I don’t care. I’m kind of walking on air and I’m part of the hippies. That costume was an invitation to anywhere I wanted to go. I’m grown up, I’m part of the hippies, I’m a rockstar. We didn’t say rockstar back then, but I’m the lead singer of a band. I’m in a band. So it felt like, I guess, uniforms are supposed to make you feel. When you put on a uniform, you’re a part of us, and you do this. Maybe uniforms help you do your job better. But I felt like I had put on the uniform of my future.

Rickie Lee Jones:

It was also defiance, because the lounge pajama, it was a pajama, which I didn’t know. I didn’t know people wore lounge pajamas. I never heard of that. So it was defiance against my parents who would let, my mother would let me, but she wouldn’t like it, and all the people that were looking at me, and that defiance made me feel good. That’s the key in me, I guess, I need a little defiance.

Debbie Millman:

Actually, the defiance reminds me of an experience you had in high school where you were expelled because you refused to take off your hat.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Yeah. Defiance with clothes. When you take off the hat, you get no education.

Debbie Millman:

I believe that that teacher also was very cruel to you and told you that you were an undesirable element at the school.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, not the teacher, but the vice principal. The teacher was a woman, the home ed teacher, but the vice principal said I was an undesirable element, because I said, “No, no, wait, you just expelled me. You suspended me for three days for this. I just got back.” He said, “I don’t care. You’re an undesirable element at this school.” So she didn’t seem to know that I’d already been absent-

Debbie Millman:

Punished for it.

Rickie Lee Jones:

… for three days and sent the note in again. So it just seemed so unfair, but he made it clear, he didn’t care if it was fair, he was taking this opportunity to get me out of the school. Shame on him.

Debbie Millman:

Shame on him, indeed. Did he ever apologize to you when he realized what you did with your life?

Rickie Lee Jones:

It’s not just me. He kicked out 11 other hippies that year. He got rid of all the heads. Some of those kids were just long-haired kids. They didn’t smoke pot. They were really good students. No, he didn’t apologize to anybody.

Debbie Millman:

All of that ultimately motivated you to run away.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Yes, again.

Debbie Millman:

You ran away several times as a teenager. On the road, you had skirmishes with gangsters, would-be abductors. You snuck into a concert venue to see Jimi Hendrix. You witnessed an abusive man beating up his wife. You even met a pimp, who was actually rather nice. When you settled in Los Angeles, you lived in a cave for a while. You hitch-hiked on a dark highway to get to Canada. Though I know in real life you end up alive, obviously we’re talking, there were moments while reading your book where I was genuinely terrified that you might not make it. How scared were you during these experiences in your early life?

Rickie Lee Jones:

I think I was scared a lot. When I made the decision to leave my dad in 1968, he had become abusive and was drinking too much. Not that I hadn’t kind of been used to that a little bit, but when he beat me, that hadn’t happened before, and I went, “I’m out of here.” There’d been a festival I wanted to go to, so I took that opportunity to run away. I had an ability, it turned out, to take care of myself with strangers, but it was always terrifying. I hitch-hiked, and you never know who’s going to pick you up. You have to be so aware of every tiny detail of the person, if you’re going to survive. I had that skill and I also got a lot of luck.

Rickie Lee Jones:

So it was thrilling, but I was also a little baby. I was just 14 years old, and I looked older because I had big boobs. That’s all. If I’d been flat-chested, I don’t think anybody would have mistaken me for a 17 … I said I was 17 because I didn’t act like an 18-year-old because I didn’t know enough. So if I did 17, that would get me through.

Rickie Lee Jones:

I went in a car with somebody bringing pot back from Mexico. So that was so dang dangerous. And to me it was just kind of thrilling. Lots of people were bringing pot over. So I could do that too and see what that felt like to be nefarious. Well, from the time that guy got over there, I got worried about the people who brought the drugs. I was in danger. I didn’t know that guy. I mean, it was a friend of a friend of a friend, but who knows who he was. Yet, escorted there to Hot Springs and back home again. So it does sometimes feel like I had a very divine escort, which my intellect, my instincts, but no, it feels like something brighter than just me. So I was scared a lot.

Debbie Millman:

When you settled in Los Angeles, you were able to collect unemployment from a job you’d been fired from. You were set to get $85 a month for six months, which at the time was just enough to pay rent.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Just enough. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

So you gave yourself that six months to either have a career in music or you would have to go home. I believe that one of the first songs you wrote at that time was one that ended up on your first album, a song that I’ve probably played several thousand times in my life. It’s a song called Company. You talk about writing it in the book, I don’t remember the exact word that you used, but it sounded like, or it felt like it was an excruciating process at the time to write that song. Can you talk a little bit about how you wrote that song? I mean, that’s a crazy good song to be the first song you’ve ever really written. It’s a masterpiece.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Yeah. I had written the lyric. I worked for this gangster named Rocky, and luckily he was probably doing who knows, when he was really shipping, but I’d have to sit at a desk and wait for a consolidated shipping form to fill out, and I have many hours to do nothing. So I started writing lyrics on the typewriter. The typewriter made me feel like a real writer, and I wrote the lyrics to Young Blood, some parts of The Real End, which becomes a line in Coolsville, and Company. Pretty much almost as it ends up, “I’ll remember you too clearly, but I’ll survive another day. Conversations to share, no one there. I’ll imagine what you’d say. Two for the movie show, three in the back row. Hold on tight.” So I’m playing with synchronized rhythmic ideas in the lyrics, right? Can you see the connection? So that’s what I’m sitting there doing.

Rickie Lee Jones:

But when I reach across the galaxy, and I think that was the line, that was not too many universes and galaxies, a few, but not too many in lyrics, “When I reach across the galaxy, I’ll miss your company.” In the old [inaudible 00:44:02] way, just two verses, not even a bridge. So I met this guy out on the beach, Alfred Johnson, he was playing piano, and he was good, and he knew Laura Nyro songs, and he was playing the old stuff that I liked, Up On The Roof, and whatever.

Rickie Lee Jones:

So I agreed to go over to his house, which was a little bit of a risky thing to do. At that age, sort of like 22 or so, I was not as risky as I had been as a teenager, but I went ahead over him and his friend, and when I walked in, and it was an apartment in the very back overlooking the garage, when I walked in, there were dismembered dolls everywhere, hanging from things and stuck on the lamps and stuff. So I had to use that … I was still at the door, I know, but I had to use that instinct of, “Is this a message or is this art? What am I looking at here?” And I could see them looking at me and I just went, “Cool.” And I don’t even know if I commented on it, which made them respect me even more. I was pretty sure I wasn’t in danger.

Rickie Lee Jones:

I asked myself, “Why does the world have to be so dangerous that if you go over to somebody’s house, you don’t know if they’re going to kill you.” It’s so dangerous for women every day, and we live with that tension every day. Men can’t know, and they dismiss it. They go, “What are you always worried about?” Well, because there’s a lot to worry about, and you can’t know unless you become one of us, and how many ways we have to watch all the time.

Rickie Lee Jones:

So anyway, I got there and quite the opposite of danger happened, which is he sat behind his keyboard and he had so much equipment. He loved all this equipment. Alfred is a black man from far away, like Riverside or something. I assumed his language would be black music, but it wasn’t. It was Buffalo Springfield and Little Feat. It was that generation of music, while mine actually was Marvin Gaye. And don’t get me wrong, I think Buffalo Springfield was a very important band, where many, many things connect. But so we had a common language that we didn’t know when we first met. As we began to play, he took ahold of the lyrics and he did something nobody does … I can only describe it as a physical thing where he took ahold of them and cut a little hole out and put his heart in them. He made them his own.

Rickie Lee Jones:

We did it in the old way of … Like I would imagine the old timing songwriters would’ve done. So I’m standing by the keyboard, he’s there, and we’re singing every single thing. “So how are we going to write this Company?” “Company,” I said, “I was hoping that Frank Sinatra might sing this.” Okay. So I’ve given us some kind of a language to use to start. (singing) I could see Frank doing that. So there’s our first line. Then I think I do that, and then Alfred says (singing). So, as we got deeper in, almost syllables for were exchanged. (singing) Maybe that was one person. (singing) And that much took an hour and a half. So by 12 hours later, we’d finished it. (singing) Can’t sing it with the earphones in. (singing) “What cords are we going to put under there?” “So that second time we do it, when we suspend that cord and resolve it.” “Well, remember it, do it next time. Don’t forget. That was really good.”

Rickie Lee Jones:

So by the time it was done, we had lived a lifetime together, and we were done. We did write more. We wrote the bridge to Weasel And The White Boys, and he wants to write more, and I would like to write more with him. But I have to see him in another life because that was a whole lifetime spent with Alfred writing Company. I tell it with words, but I’d like to go back and feel what it was to have all life before you, before me, and know that every single thing I did mattered, and was forming all the roads that would be on the map to come.

Rickie Lee Jones:

It’s hard to have that at 66. But if you don’t, if you don’t say, “I have a life before me, and there are still many roads to carve out of everything I make it,” it’s a question of timing also, but you have to keep seeing your life as before you, not after you. That power will go into the work that you make. I think one of the things about Company, besides that I was a forlorn, love lost lyricist, was all life was before us. And we had a lot at stake.

Debbie Millman:

But yet the song feels like an old soul wrote it. It’s hard to believe that you were just coming out of your teenage years when you wrote that song. You also wrote a song titled Easy Money that the producer, Bud Dain, liked.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Bud Dain.

Debbie Millman:

And then he offered you a job, wherein you would write a certain number of songs per month for $800 a month. And back in 1977, that was like winning the lottery. You were all set to sign it. And then similar to your decision with Lew King, you didn’t.

Rickie Lee Jones:

Similar with my brother, the voice that spoke about my brother’s accident. It wasn’t bad, but it was also almost like a juxtaposition of time, because understand, I have the pen in my hand. I’ve come up the elevator to the office to sign. And I have the pen in my hand and something very loudly says, “Don’t sign. If he wants you, someone else will too,” which is an invitation to the future. It’s saying, “You are just beginning. This is not where you’re supposed to go. Don’t stop here.” Isn’t that funny how destiny calls you, but you can get waylaid like the Odyssey. You can get waylaid. So, it was a powerful moment. I still am in awe that some part of me knew that I would go to better places. This would not be my only chance. When we’re down at the bottom, we do feel like anything is where we’re supposed to be.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. You write that it took ball to pass up that opportunity and opt for poverty on the belief that something greater was meant for you. And it was, it was. At this point in your life, you were doing gigs around various small, somewhat CD venues through Los Angeles. What would you consider to be your big breakthrough? What was that moment?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Troubadour. The Troubadour was the third show. Nick Mathe, my old next door neighbor, had become my manager, and he had actually done a pretty good job, I think. And we had decided we’d have three showcases, which showcases was like, you didn’t get paid. I guess it’s how it always is now, but you didn’t get paid and you did a 20 or 30-minute show. And then people could come and get a taste for who you are. So we did three of them. The last one would be at the Troubadour, and that one had a … It was like a snowball. The first one, there were three famous people, that is three A&R guys, or three … This was full of them. We got it attached to Wendy Waldman’s show because we couldn’t get in anywhere.

Rickie Lee Jones:

So they put us in at the very beginning of her show, God bless her for that. We had people from three record companies, Warner Brothers, Portrait, Horizon, and I think portrait or horizon was a subsidiary of Columbia, A&M, Tommy LiPuma. So there were a whole bunch of important folks at that show. I did five songs, and I invited my friends from the street, that is four or five guys I knew who hung out on the street on Santa Monica Boulevard, came in and sang harmony on an acapella thing. My friend from The Great American Food & Beverage Company came in and played piano on [inaudible 00:54:16], and I played the other … Because I wanted to show them as much as I could how big the room was, what I liked, the old timey stuff, acapella stuff, because I didn’t know if the songs I wrote showed you where I wanted to go. So anyway, that was my big plan, and I think it worked.

Debbie Millman:

You wrote about a drive with the producer Lowell George as the official beginning of your new life, the one that you live today, and you write, “That ride seemed so right and normal as if I had always been destined to ride in that range Rover. Although I was giddy inside, I was cool. And if I may say beautiful. I knew who I was, the songwriter, the girl on the beret. I belonged sipping Moet with Lowell George. I belonged.” What did you envision your future would be like at that point?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, I think at that time I was really living in the here and now. So I had Lowell and the possibility of his world. I knew Tom and Chuck and their world. So this is me on unemployment, possibly becoming part of worlds that I’ve lived with all my life. So here sitting in the couch is David Crosby, and over there is Graham Nash. So that’s what I was doing. I don’t think I was doing anything else but navigating my feelings and the real world before me.

Debbie Millman:

You knew from the beginning of your career that you wanted to have staying power. And before you even made a record, you were aware of the danger of being what you referred to as being used up too fast. Were you worried that that might happen?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Sure, but the illusion was a year into my career, and I was so very famous. All the doors opened, all the backstage doors opened, and I seemed to have so much money it would never go away. The illusion was that it would always be that way. It could never go away. That’s been the challenge, is learning that balloon of attention and fame will be expelled. And how will you be here in 30 years if this is where you want to be? The only way for me was to write work that was so iconic and so powerful that, like Frank Sinatra, who was my hero, that people would always come back to be a part of it. So that was what I set out to do. So, it’s been a life experience, not a career experience. It’s been learning how to navigate life.

Rickie Lee Jones:

The thing I feel now is that music and this career, there’s no difference between my life and my career, and my career and my life. They’re all mixed up together. That’s why it was okay to write the book and tell you about my history, because if you’re meant to be here, it’ll only do good. Also, I wanted to, I thought, “There really aren’t very many stories of women’s whole lives. We have memoirs, but this is a story of a life, and a time, and a family, and at an extraordinary event, that is my career, but the book is the story of a life.”

Debbie Millman:

What’s really interesting is as, I guess I would be considered a super fan, reading your book illuminated so much of your music in a completely different way, because you have been so private so much of what you wrote about, I didn’t know. I was sort of astounded by the history that you bring to your music, and it sort of helps augment the music in a completely different way. Re-listening to your entire catalog in preparation for the interview, I was like, “Oh, okay. That’s the story in Coolsville.” You kind of get the music in a completely different way. Your second album Pirates is considered one of the greatest albums ever made. And I’m not saying that because I’m a fan, I’m saying that because it’s been written about as one of the greatest albums ever made.

Debbie Millman:

And it was written at the end of your addiction to heroin, when you and musician, Sal Bernardi, lived on 9th Street in Manhattan. And you write that, “This is where Sal and I lost our way together. We stayed up all night and slept until 4:00 PM and rose half dead to get high and feel half alive again. We wrote music and read Edgar Allan Poe,” who shows up in some of the lyrics. “We lived the strange Twilight, the slow motion fluid that fed our memories. We were junkies.” You’ve said that heroin was like a carnival ride you couldn’t exit until the ride was over. And one day you knew it was time to get off the ride. How did you kick the habit? Because you didn’t go to rehab. How did you manage to get over this?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Well, it took a lot of false starts. It’s hard to describe to anybody how overpowering heroin is to the spirit and the psyche. And I guess I’m many, many, many years away, so it’s say for me to look, but it’s also kind of like, what’s that … You know that book, The Hobbit, and there’s that one eye in the tower? It’s kind of like that. If you turn and look at it, it’ll look at you too. But I guess it’s talking to the part of the brain that doesn’t feel safe and doesn’t feel pleasure, and it fills that up with safety and pleasure in a half sleep state where you can write anything and be walking in a dream and talking. So, well, that’s nice. But in a month, or two, or six, this place begins to recede.

Rickie Lee Jones:

So when you stop taking the drug, this place isn’t quite the same anymore. So when you’ve been on that drug for a few years, you don’t have anything here to root into. It has gone away and become part of the dream place. The strength of will it takes to abandon that safe, wonderful dream place for this stark bright, hard, frightening world is incredible. When I was a drug addict, about two or three years, I began to want to be well. And that helps that language to say, “I’m sick and I want to be well.” It was very hard. I had a therapist, I tried, I failed, I tried, I failed. I identified triggers, and it took a year or a year and a half of saying, “No more,” and then relapsing.

Rickie Lee Jones:

But after finally three months or four months, the test, I survived that test. I didn’t get high and a year later, the year test. So, I never went to AA or anything, but it really was one day at a time, one step at a time. We made it here, we made it there, and resolving never to go back. Now, what I just wanted to do right now was to try to describe what addiction is so that people who don’t have addictive personalities could get a sense that it’s not a choice. It’s like an altering of the brain that takes place, and it takes the will to go, “I know that place exists, even though I can’t see it anymore, and I’m going back. I’m going over the mountains and through the deserts, and I’m finding my way back to reality.”

Debbie Millman:

You’ve been sober for decades now and write, “How months go by now when you forget you were an addict. The dark is gone. The shadow’s faded. You are recovered and whole.” One thing that I shook my head over as I was reading your book was the notion that male rockers like Keith Richards, you sort of admired for his longevity and drug use. But women in rock and roll are shamed for the same behavior that men are often held for. How do you make sense of that, if you can?

Rickie Lee Jones:

I think we do it with women in all things. We assign a moral code to them that we don’t hold men to. And it’s sad because that dubiousness is creating careers. It’s very hard now to have a career if you won’t sell yourself sexually. We worked so hard to not have to do that. So that’s a little discouraging.

Debbie Millman:

Well, one other thing that you can’t help but notice if you look at the lyric and the liner notes of your albums, all the songs are music and lyrics by Rickie Lee Jones, for the most part. You look at some of the popular music today and you see, and I’m really not joking, 30 or 40 names. I don’t even know how that is possible.

Rickie Lee Jones:

I guess everybody in the room gets their name on.

Debbie Millman:

It seems like there was a moment in time where music was a very personal sort of soul-revealing experience. And over time, that’s sort of changed to really become entertainment.

Rickie Lee Jones:

The relationship was the art. It was the person’s relationship with art. Now, it’s a person’s relationship with show business and fame. What they’re seeking is success. What we sought was a great song. We hoped it sold, but our emphasis was the great song. It’s not anymore. Nobody’s trying to write a great song. They’re trying to write a hit song. That’s what shows. That’s too bad. But I really think we’re cyclical. People get tired of that. That’ll fall away. Something else will take its place. Hopefully songs, hopefully not just sounds, but who knows what’s coming?

Debbie Millman:

Finally, my last question is one that my wife, who is a writer, suggested that I ask you. The question is, how would the liner notes of your life read?

Rickie Lee Jones:

Of my life? Woo. That’s a long and creative thing, which I don’t know if I can do on the fly. It’s kind of like a tombstone too, right? That’s a kind of good idea. Instead of a tombstone, we’ll put some liner notes. I guess I would say she was a woman of her time who transcended her time, but that’s too easy. That’s more like a tombstone. I guess she was a woman who transcended, who found a place to fit in. You could go either way with that. But I think the jury’s out, and liner notes are always written by somebody else, their view of who you are. You can try to plant eggs and get them to go in that direction, but I was never sure how other people saw me. There’s a nice thing that’s happened this year, where I finally don’t feel misunderstood. That’s really all I could ask for, things seem to be right now. So maybe there won’t be any liner notes, or just put it out and let people guess.

Debbie Millman:

Rickie Lee Jones, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express to you how much your music has meant to me in my life. I own everything you’ve ever published and really just want to thank you for doing the work that you do. Thank you for enriching my life with your music and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Rickie Lee Jones:

You’re welcome. Thank you so much for doing this too. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

Rickie Lee Jones’ new memoir is titled Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour. You could read more about her remarkable career on her website, rickieleejones.com. This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Debbie Millman:

Joan Wasser began as a violinist. A classically trained violinist. But in her 20s, she came to New York and started playing as a session musician in many musical genres. She also learned guitar and started singing in various bands. By 2002 she took on the performing moniker, Joan As Police Woman. Ever since she’s been touring, making albums and collaborating with musicians and performers, including Rufus Wainwright, Lori Anderson, Lou Reed, and many more. She’s here to talk about her most recent album and the road she’s taken to get here. Joan Wasser, welcome to Design Matters.

Joan Wasser:

Hello. So good to be here.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.

Joan Wasser:

Me too.

Debbie Millman:

Joan, I understand you spent your childhood convinced you were going to follow the cursed footsteps of your namesake, Joan of Arc, and die by fire. Why did you think that?

Joan Wasser:

Probably just because I’m dramatic. I mean, there were not very many other people my age named Joan. So I figured if I had that name, there was a reason and it might mean that I’d make it … I mean, it was probably some sort of romantic notion of not making it into my 20s. Of course, I would just die by 19 or whatever.

Debbie Millman:

Well, she died when she was 17.

Joan Wasser:

Oh, 17.

Debbie Millman:

So when you were 17, did you stop worrying?

Joan Wasser:

I did. I did. I was a little bit like, darn. It would’ve been such a good way to go out.

Debbie Millman:

Oh my God. No it wouldn’t. Then you wouldn’t have done what you’re doing. My God. No, no, no. I don’t like that. I don’t like that [inaudible 00:01:49].

Joan Wasser:

Okay. It didn’t happen so.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. You were born in Maine to an unmarried teenage girl who hid her pregnancy from her family until she was in her eighth month. Then were put up for adoption when you were three weeks old. The couple that adopted you, your parents, first met in a community chorus when they were 31 and 35. Is it true that they were each other’s one and only first love?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. It’s extraordinary.

Debbie Millman:

So they met in a choir, but had never been previously in love by the time they were in their 30s. So they were just waiting for each other.

Joan Wasser:

It seemed so. Yeah. I mean, my father was very, very introverted. My mom was too in a very different way. She was a Latin and French teacher. She was … What’s the word? Her parents … She feels like the ultimate Puritan. Actually Puritan. Non-religious but very moral. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

They adopted your brother Daniel a bit over a year later and they explained to you that you were both adopted before you even understood what it meant so that you wouldn’t feel like you were weird or different. And you’ve said that growing up in a family where there are no blood ties creates a certain way of experiencing the world. And I’m wondering if you can share in what way.

Joan Wasser:

It really solidified the idea that family is who you are with. And family are the people that take care of you and that you take care of and that you share love with. I don’t think anyone realizes how much stress there is on the idea of being related to the rest of your family while growing up. Oh, you look so much like your mom. You get this from your father, la, la. And my brother and I not only didn’t look like each other, neither of us looked like our parents. People would try to tell Dan and I that we weren’t each other’s sibling. And I just came out pretty gregarious and social. My brother is the opposite. So I would just be saying, “No, that’s my brother. End of story.” So growing up in that way, definitely gave me the feeling that it really … The ultimate chosen family. They chose to pick us up from the adoption agency. They couldn’t have kids. They told the agency, “We’ll take your first two.”

Debbie Millman:

And they were uninterested in whatever race or gender. They were completely open to whoever the children that were brought there would be.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. That was very much their idea about what life was. Both of them very unique in my opinion, in that way. I think a lot of people feel like they’d like to be that way, but they really were that way. I mean, my mom joked that she was surprised that they got a white girl.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

It’s so interesting the way we sort of construct the ties. I remember growing up and for whatever reason, I’m almost visually a clone of my mother.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

And I show people pictures of me growing up next to my mother and they think that my mother is me. Like, “Wow. Oh my God, you look exactly like your mother.” And when I was a little girl, I resented that.

Joan Wasser:

Sure.

Debbie Millman:

I didn’t want to look like her because I wanted to be my own person. And I remember having a tantrum once in my grandmother’s house. My grandmother had one of those typical family photo walls. And she had a picture of my mother as a little girl at the age I was then and a slightly less recent picture of me. And I insisted that the picture of my mother was me. And they were like, “No, that’s your mother.” And I’m like, “No, that’s me.” Because I didn’t want to look like her. And it’s so interesting how we construct our identities and our needs to be witness to our origins somehow. I don’t know if I’m making any sense but I think there’s something kind of fascinating about who we want to and don’t want to look like and why.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah, it’s true. I remember my mother being very annoyed at other mothers in the supermarket commenting, “Oh, you got such a cute Chinese girl.” I looked very Asian when I was young because my eyes sort of do that thing that sometimes happens with Asian-

Debbie Millman:

Well they’re just very almond shaped.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. And I mean, she was just so annoyed that there was any comments at all. It was just like-

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I mean, whose business is it?

Joan Wasser:

Exactly.

Debbie Millman:

You ultimately did meet your birth parents when you were older and said that they were both incredible people with families of their own. You became good friends. You found out that your biological mother also played music and your biological father had been an electric bass player. He dropped out of school to tour locally with his band. What was that like for you to see that continuation of genetics?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. So to start with, my mother and I did not share a lot of personality traits. It was at times very difficult growing up for both of us to reconcile those differences. I was sort of the perfect child until 11 when I began to exert behavior that she felt was inappropriate. It was all about just school. It was just only school. And I was very social. So when I met my mom first when I was 20, it was … Well, first of all, when I found her she sent a letter actually to my parents’ house. And my mom said, “You sent a letter here?” I was like, “What are you talking about?” And it was from my biological mom, Cindy. We have the same handwriting. Crazy stuff like that that you don’t know is necessarily genetic. And we also do all the same things with our … Gestural stuff is the same.

So you don’t realize that that’s just passed through your DNA. But I am a product of my biological parents. You can see it in both of them. I have traits from both of them. And I am very grateful that I got to grow up not seeing them. I mean, I had no choice. But it was really fun then being an adult and finding out who I was in a certain way through them. Because I always just had to create a composite of who I was. Okay, these things.

I don’t think I ever thought, oh, my mother’s going to have these things of mine or whatever because who knows. Maybe she would’ve been someone even less like the mom I grew up with. So to find out that actually they were very similar to me in personality and body type, walking, all the just crazy things. And yes, they both played music. My biological mom would not have played music if she had the choice. Her mom made all of her, she had four older sisters, play either the piano or the violin. So she said … I don’t care … She was a visual artist. My biological father on the other hand did play electric bass and dropped out of school for a while to tour with … I think he was 13 when he dropped out of school. This was in rural Maine so it was … Yeah. Different vibe.

Debbie Millman:

You grew up in Norwalk, Connecticut. And while your parents really loved music and were in the choir, they didn’t believe in pushing you to do anything if you didn’t want to do it. Nevertheless, you took a liking to the violin when you were in the third grade and rented one from your school for $10 a year. Why the violin?

Joan Wasser:

Well, this is public school in the ’70s so that’s what was provided for. If you didn’t have money, anyone could rent an instrument for $10 a year. So there’s no reason why you wouldn’t play. They came to the auditorium and did a presentation of here’s what the violin sounds like and the viola and I was like, “I want the most portable one.”

Debbie Millman:

The one you can carry around.

Joan Wasser:

Pretty much that’s what it was. Yeah. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Your family also had an upright piano and your parents would play and sing old American songs. And I believe you still have that piano.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. In my house.

Debbie Millman:

In your home and have written almost everything you’ve ever written on that piano.

Joan Wasser:

That’s right.

Debbie Millman:

I believe you started taking piano lessons at six, even before taking up the violin. You also now play the guitar and the bass. Do you prefer one instrument over another?

Joan Wasser:

Well, first of all, the piano lessons were about maybe two or three piano lessons. I was not feeling the piano so I didn’t really take piano lessons.

Debbie Millman:

Okay.

Joan Wasser:

What’s really fun for me is that because I studied in school the violin and really know my way around that instrument, learning other instruments that I don’t know my way around, it makes writing on them really fun because I’m not set up knowing, oh, this is what’s supposed to come next. There’s no previous … I took no lessons of those instruments so it’s really like I’m just traipsing around the mountain range, looking for the most beautiful vantage point or flowers or whatever on every instrument. That’s what it feels like.

Debbie Millman:

That’s sort of how Joni Mitchell learned how to play the guitar, which is why she has those crazy unusual tunings. By the time you were 13 years old, I believe that Mahler’s 2nd Resurrection Symphony was one of your favorite things to play. Really?

Joan Wasser:

Well, this is what happened. There was an all state orchestra where they pull-

Debbie Millman:

I know. I know you were in all state. I have to talk to you about that. I was in all state chorus.

Joan Wasser:

Oh, of course you were. Where they pull from the state of the so-called best musicians. So the conductor, he decided that he was going to teach us that first movement of Mahler Two. And it was the greatest choice because that music is perfect for adolescents, for just raging hormones and high drama is what it is.

Debbie Millman:

I was thinking it was very apocalypse now.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it starts with those cellos. Yeah, it’s ridiculous. I love it. But he really empowered us to believe that we could play this very advanced music. And we’re between 13 and 17. We had all played a certain amount of music, but in general it was pretty light. And all of a sudden he’s saying we can make this thing happen together. That idea of all of us working really hard together. He taught us to breathe together. Paying attention to each other more than paying attention to even him.

It was the greatest lesson and experience of my life really up until then. I had been so moved by so much music on the radio and I would buy so much vinyl at the Goodwill. 25 cents a pop. And had heard all this music and stuff. But to be in the auditorium creating this with these other people and this guy with this crazy Beethoven-ish hair saying you have what this piece needs to make it really sing and really come alive. And we felt that coming alive together as a group. I talk about this being the moment I felt I knew what people were talking about when they said God.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, I love that. I love that. That sort of bigger than yourself, bigger than the universe feeling. You said that your conductor empowered the orchestra to take music seriously in a way that you didn’t think any of you had ever considered. How did he do that?

Joan Wasser:

Well, he first of all told us that we all had to make a pact with each other to be dedicated to creating this together. So if one person was distracted by … I don’t know.

Debbie Millman:

Their iPhone.

Joan Wasser:

Not then.

Debbie Millman:

No. I know. I’m teasing.

Joan Wasser:

I know. I don’t even know what we are distracted by then because it seems like there’s nothing more distracting than what we have now.

Debbie Millman:

Hormones.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. Just distracted by anything else. Passing notes. Yeah, anything. That the music would lose its power. So it was like we must trust. There was a trust that he told us we needed to have amongst people that didn’t know each other, which is really important to me in general. But so much the breathing before you play. Everyone around you. If all the violins enter at the same time, then you hit it together. And that is such a profound experience. I had never breathed with anyone else. Yoga was not popular then. There was no breathing techniques. None of that was happening. So to have someone tell me that this would work if I breathed with the person next to me was really huge. I mean, that’s what we’ve got the most basic stuff. It happens without our permission, but we have control over that. And that we could decide to take ourselves seriously.

Debbie Millman:

That’s amazing to be given that permission to take this artistic pursuit more seriously than you’d ever considered before.

Joan Wasser:

That’s right. It was.

Debbie Millman:

You went to Boston University College of Fine Arts at 18 and studied music under Yuri Mazurkevich and you also played with the Boston University Symphony Orchestra. But I understand you also studied anthropology, which you liked very much. Was that something that you ever seriously considered doing? Was it a safety backup? Did you at that point feel that you wanted to pursue music professionally?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. I chose that school because I could take anthropology as a minor or whatever. I never considered doing anything besides music. I just loved anthropology. So I wanted to be at a place where I could also study that. Also my teacher, he studied with David Oistrakh, a major solo violinist. And I wanted to study with one of his students because I felt like that was what I lacked in my musicality. The sort of Russian tradition. Incredibly graceful. And I did not feel graceful. I knew I had passion. I knew I had conviction, but I wanted to learn what that was. The gracefulness. It’s funny even saying that I was thinking that way then but I really wanted to study with him because of that. And he was really … Yeah. He was a really special teacher. He really helped me a lot.

Debbie Millman:

By the time you were 20, you joined The Dambuilders. But as their electric violinist, the music you were making was decidedly non-classical. It was punk rock. Talk about that trajectory or that migration from classical violinist to punk violinist.

Joan Wasser:

So through high school, I had a blonde Mohawk. I was very … I loved music so much. It was my life. I went to so many shows, small and big. I lived near New York City so I would take the train in and see Siouxsie and The Banshees and Echo & the Bunnymen and The Peers before they were The Peers that are now. I knew that the classical music world, I would find a couple of people that were like minded. And a lot of them were not so like minded. It didn’t mean that I wouldn’t get along with him. But I remember at orientation looking around and thinking, “Oh boy, where’s my person here?” And then I saw her from across the room. She had a babushka on and red lipstick and I was like, “There’s my person.”

I went over to her and I said, “What’s up?” She said, “My name’s Mary.” She was from DC. We’re really good friends still.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Joan Wasser:

She was there to study classical violin. And she had been playing in bands for a long time because she was a guitar player. So really quickly she said, “Let’s play together.” She was living in a terrible dorm so I got her over in my dorm. And then she was like, “Let’s make music.” I had really very rarely not played off a page. As a classical musician you’re taught to read music and play what’s on the page. And yes, you can bring yourself into that. But jazz musicians are taught to improvise. Classical musicians are not. Which is crazy. But whatever, this is how the education’s been or the separateness of genre, which is, thank god, becoming antiquated, which is really fun for me personally.

So I had jammed along with Hendrix and The Cocteau Twins. That was it.

Debbie Millman:

That’s pretty amazing though.

Joan Wasser:

Well, it was the music that felt … I mean The Cocteau Twins you can imagine, right?

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Joan Wasser:

It’s so ambient, spacey. Yeah. Hendrix I just loved so much and I felt like I could … I just wanted to learn his solo. So those were the two ends. But she empowered me to play what I heard, which was so scary. It’s so funny to think about now, because this is all I do now when I’m writing. When I’m writing. But again, it’s like learning to trust myself in a way that I had never imagined I’d have to. Oh, Joan just read the music and you’ll be fine. And then all of a sudden you take that music away and you’re left with who am I?

Debbie Millman:

What do I want to express?

Joan Wasser:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

How do I want to express it? Interesting that you were so attracted to Mahler given how dramatic it is. Despite it being classical. It’s sort of a … I think you had referred to it as the Led Zeppelin of its time.

Joan Wasser:

Absolutely. I do think of it like that. Yeah. Yeah. So we played together, but she was my in in terms of playing non classical music. Then when I got going with that, I was living in Boston so there was all these opportunities. Berkeley School of Music needed violin players to learn to record them. The recording engineers that were … This reggae band needs some strings laid down on this one track. That was the time when there were just bulletin boards up at music schools like this needed for this. I’ll trade you for this. Whatever. So I just started taking advantage of the place that I was living in, which was just full of students and full of music students of all different kinds. So that was really fun. That was my first year of being at school. I just started taking advantage of the fact that I could do all these different kinds of music. And I was pretty fearless about it once I caught the wave or something. It’s just like, oh, whatever. If I don’t know how to do this, I’ll figure it out or I’ll be crappy and that’s fine.

Debbie Millman:

One thing I wanted to ask you about, you mentioned your white mohawk. And I remember reading in my research that your mother didn’t mind you having a white mohawk. She was worried that people would think less of you or not take you as seriously as a musician with the white mohawk. Is that true?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. She was really funny because my person really sent her into conflict in herself in so many ways. I really just … Ugh. Really challenged her. I didn’t mean it, but it’s what happened. So the idea was any way you look is okay. That’s what she wanted to think. That’s what she felt was right. But on the other side, she worried that I would be judged by others. To me, that meant mom, you’re judging people. Actually it’s you. I also understand. She wanted me to have all the opportunities that she thought I could have if people saw who I was.

Debbie Millman:

Right. But they were seeing who you were, just not who she thought you were.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. Some people were and absolutely some people were not. Some people did not want someone with blonde, short, crazy hair, very obviously placed in the orchestra. So some people did. I always wore pants and some conductors loved that and some conductors thought that was really just inappropriate. So I mean, I attracted the people that liked difference, but my mom was really challenged by it.

Debbie Millman:

You started touring with The Dambuilders and even left school for a bit to go on the road. You played at Lollapalooza and the band got signed to Elektra in 1994 by Sylvia Rhone, the great industry powerhouse. What was that time like for you then?

Joan Wasser:

So the guitar player in the band, Eric Masunaga, he owned this amazing … I’m going to get silly technical. He owned a two inch 16 track old studer machine. So I was recording early on on this old beautiful machine that they used to record the most amazing records until then. So this was before Pro Tools, Logic, any of that. We started just doing a lot of recording and there were all these singles only labels. It was so DIY. And then we got signed. A lot of arty bands got signed in the ’90s because the music industry was flush. There was all this money just getting put into supporting music that wasn’t necessarily obvious. And what was cool is we got to take advantage of that. We made a number of records on an actual major label budget. Kept a little bit of money on the side to live off of while we were on tour. Had tour support. I mean, it’s unheard of now. All of this. Unless you’re-

Debbie Millman:

Beyonce.

Joan Wasser:

I don’t even know who it is. Beyonce. Unless you’re Beyonce, you don’t get that anymore. It was really fun.

Debbie Millman:

You said this about the experience. “Just being around men all the time. I had such a tough guy problem.” And the band even had as a single from 1994 with the same title and you stated, “The route I took was I can drink you under the table, I can carry that bass cabinet by myself. No, I’m not someone’s girlfriend in the band. Thank you and fuck off.”

Joan Wasser:

That’s absolutely right.

Debbie Millman:

Did you encounter a lot of shock from people being in such a sort of all boys except you punk band?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. I mean, it was mostly men doing everything and it was really boring. That part of it that every time I entered a club, most likely I was going to get confused as a girlfriend. Yeah, I did sort of, I can out male you. Which is the only way I knew how to react. Also I was very angry anyway. It’s like, I didn’t have to push that. I was definitely angrier than all the boys in the band. So it’s not like that was a stretch at all.

Debbie Millman:

Joan, in 1994, the musician, Jeff Buckley shared a bill with The Dambuilders. And this was about a month before his debut album, Grace, came out. The two of you fell in love. Was it love at first sight?

Joan Wasser:

It’s so silly, but it was really mutual what are you? I don’t even know what love at first sight means because definitely it was very romantic. Later that night after that show, we all went to a late night eatery place. And this is in Iowa City and there’s a lot of jockey guys around. And I had this crazy humongous hair. Big black hair with a big white streak in the front. Very cartoon character. Very ’90s. And these guys were making fun of me, which whatever. I was so used to that. And Jeff, who was a very slight person, he was little, he went right up to them and said, “You wouldn’t know a woman if she smacked you in the face.” And I was like, “Okay, I love you.” And that’s what I was thinking. But of course I was also annoyed that this person thought that they had to defend me. I was like, I can defend myself.

Debbie Millman:

Interesting. Interesting.

Joan Wasser:

Now, I would’ve been like … I don’t care about that. But then I literally was like, I will crush you if you fuck with me.

Debbie Millman:

 Yeah. Absolutely. I’m still like that.

Joan Wasser:

Yes. It was kind of scary.

Debbie Millman:

When did you realize that you were going to be a couple?

Joan Wasser:

I mean, I think we both thought it that night. Again, then it’s payphones.

Debbie Millman:

Right. Of course.

Joan Wasser:

Payphones.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. There weren’t even faxes at that time.

Joan Wasser:

No. Yeah. And we are both touring so we didn’t know where each other were on the … I mean, it was … But yeah.

Debbie Millman:

It also sounds terribly romantic.

Joan Wasser:

It was terribly romantic. Yeah. We had both been told about each other before that night.

Debbie Millman:

So you were sort of waiting for each other too?

Joan Wasser:

Well, my friend said, “Joan, I met this guy named Jeff Buckley.” And I was like, “Hold on. That’s a fake name.” And he was like, “Actually I don’t think it is. I think it’s actually his given name.” And I was like, “I don’t believe it.” “Well, you guys are supposed to be together.” And I was like, a total eyeball roll. And I was like, “Okay. Right.” And then I saw his name on the tour book that we carried around and I was like, “Is that that guy that Nathan told me about?” I was like, “Nah.” And then it was.

Debbie Millman:

What did you think of his music when you first heard it?

Joan Wasser:

So I mean, I heard it for the first time then, because nothing was released or if it was, I had never heard it. Maybe an EP was released, but it was … Actually, he gave … Oh, I forgot that. He gave me the EP that night. I’m not even sure that was released yet.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Joan Wasser:

Anyway.

Debbie Millman:

He wanted to impress you.

Joan Wasser:

Oh yes. Oh. He stared at me the entire time he did a show.

Debbie Millman:

Well, that’s not surprising Joan. I’m staring at you the entire time now.

Joan Wasser:

Wait, but I’m staring at you too. It was very much … We hit it off. And his music … I mean, I was both unbelievably impressed. He was an extraordinary guitar player. I don’t know if … I mean, all he did was practice guitar his whole life. People know him as a heartthrob. He was an absolute nerd in high school. He was not Jeff Buckley in high school. He was practicing. I was really impressed and then I was also just like, man, just a crooner. The voice. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

You were there as Grace was launched and now is considered one of the greatest albums of all time. What do you think of that now, looking back on the release of the music then, how it’s become so mythologized?

Joan Wasser:

Well, it was not a success then. Of course people knew about it and people loved it and it got a lot of great reviews and some not. It was very different than anything else coming out. A refined voice and a very subtle string arrangement or something. That is not what people were going for at that time. So he was really out of style in a certain way. Also, he was so young. He was young in age, but he was very, very young to be a person that was … Someone that was just practicing in his room and with his bands in LA and stuff. And then all of a sudden his label really pushed him as this is an incredible talent and also look at how beautiful he is. He was horrified by that. He was horrified. So I remember when People Magazine chose him as part of their 50 most … Or whatever.

Debbie Millman:

50 most beautiful people in the world.

Joan Wasser:

I’ve never seen him more just appalled. We went around to every newsstand within a five block radius of his apartment. He lived in the east village. And he bought every single one so that no one would see it.

Debbie Millman:

Did you write and play music together?

Joan Wasser:

We did a lot in his apartment.

Debbie Millman:

After three years together, you were engaged. On May 29th, 1997 Jeff was in Memphis recording his follow up to Grace and he went for a spontaneous swim in the Mississippi River. He got caught in the wake of a tugboat and accidentally drowned. How did you manage?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah, I didn’t really.

Debbie Millman:

I’m sorry if this is difficult and you don’t want to talk about it.

Joan Wasser:

No. It’s okay. It’s all right. I’m thinking about it all the time anyway. And the thing is the 25 year anniversary of this happening is coming up in a couple of days. So how did I manage? Yeah, it’s a good question because I wasn’t super close with my parents at that point. He was my best friend. He was not only my boyfriend, et cetera, but he was my best friend. So I lost the person that I would go to if something like this happened. He was an incredibly private person so I had learned and I really liked that we had an incredibly private life. Especially around him getting more and more attention. We became more and more just private, which was great. But I was lost. I mean, this event so radically changed the trajectory of my life and threw me into … It just feels like it just threw me into a volcano and it’s like figure it out. I mean, I can say 25 years later that I … I mean I’ll never stop figuring it out, but it was really touch and go at times and I have successfully stayed alive. Which feels literally like wow.

Debbie Millman:

Now that’s a gift for all of us Joan. It is. I mean, grief is such a complicated and terrifying experience to carry with you because it takes a long time to metabolize, if at all. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to lose a lover. Somebody who was embedded in your blood in that way. How do you integrate that grief into life? Is it something that you can think about without pain ever?

Joan Wasser:

Sometimes. Sometimes yeah. I remember at the time … I don’t remember who it was, but an adult. I didn’t feel like an adult. I was 26. I felt like a kid.

Debbie Millman:

You weren’t an adult.

Joan Wasser:

No. My cerebral cortex was just-

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. I think I was in ameba until I was about 30.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. But I remember a caring adult saying, “You will never get over this.” And it was so helpful because there was no way I thought that I would get over it. And other people were like, “Oh, he’ll be with you inside you forever.” All these things.

Debbie Millman:

Don’t you want to stab those people?

Joan Wasser:

Well, they’re doing the best they can.

Debbie Millman:

They are. You’re being more generous than I am.

Joan Wasser:

Well, no, but nobody knows. We’re not taught how to deal with it. So I mean, that could have helped someone else. It didn’t help me because it didn’t ring true. So when this person said, “It will change, but you’ll never ever get rid of it. You’ll never get over it. You’ll never not feel the grief otherwise.”, that was such a gift because I felt like someone was being honest with me and I needed that so bad then. And I did drugs that helped me get through that time. Drugs saved my life. They of course become a problem. But at that moment I wouldn’t have survived. At one point, without any drugs, I remember becoming coherent of the fact that I was in the middle of an intersection and I didn’t know how I got there. When you have that amount of grief, your body takes over and says, “You can’t handle this. You actually can’t handle it. Do what you have to do to make it through.” And that could mean your life ends.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I had a terrible, terrible … I was left by my spouse in 1998, very unexpectedly. 24 hours. I always described it as an earthquake. Just an earthquake came into my life and then everything was crushed. And I remember weeping to my therapist at the time, “How long is it going to take for me to get over this?” Because I couldn’t comprehend the level of grief that I was feeling. And she said it would be about two years before I could sort of manage. And I was so upset and could not comprehend what that meant for my life. P.S., it ended up taking five years.

Joan Wasser:

I think five years is always the thing that when … Five years is the place where you’re like, oh, now I can start thinking.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. And the amount of self destructive behavior that I went through at that time from 1998 to 2003 … Really into 2004 if I need to be … Maybe even into 2005. It petered out, but it was not good. And I really could have my fucked my life up. I really got lucky in that regard. I’m glad that you’re here too.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

The Dambuilders disbanded in October of ’97 and later that year you formed the band Black Beetle with members of Jeff’s band. And you’ve said that the motivation behind doing this was medicating your sadness. But the experience also motivated you to begin singing and writing your own songs. What was the entry point into doing that?

Joan Wasser:

Again, I had more pain than I knew what to do with and playing the violin was not covering it in any way. I couldn’t have any longer an instrument between my heart and the world. I never wanted to sing. That was way too revealing. I had no interest. Any opening of my mouth that I did in the Dambuilders was screaming and yelling. Literally. So all of a sudden I didn’t have control over it. I had to sing. It was how I helped myself stay alive.

Debbie Millman:

You also joined the band, Those Bastard Souls, and recorded an album titled Debt & Departure with Dave Shouse. This is also when you began working as a session musician and you played violin across a range of genres, as we’ve mentioned before. Including Haitian, pop, R&B. You played with John Cale. You played with Lou Reed. What was it like to begin to collaborate with these folks who you had sort of grown up with listening to their music?

Joan Wasser:

It was pretty trippy. Yeah, it really-

Debbie Millman:

I saw a picture of you and Lou Reed. He’s talking to someone and you’re talking to someone and you’re all clearly in the same little club. And I was like, wow, that must have felt amazing.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. It was really … It was scary. I was really afraid to be around these people and I had that thing of like, I’m not supposed to be here. Imposter syndrome. But clearly I was because I kept getting called, kept being trusted to do this work, which was … I mean, it was really helpful. That was helpful. All of the music that happened … The music has always just saved me. But especially then, and all of those mind blowing experiences with other artists helped me feel like life was worth living and staying alive for.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

In 1999, you joined the band, formally known as Antony and the Johnsons, now Anohni’s Ensemble and recorded the album I Am A Bird Now. You’ve said that working with Anohni saved you. How did she do that?

Joan Wasser:

So up until that time, all the music I made was pretty loud. Joining Anohni’s band, it was the opposite. Everything was quiet. She wanted everything quieter. Make it sound like a snowflake hitting the water. Just analogy after analogy just of quieter. And then on top of it, her voice sounds like someone crying. So having that at that moment, this quiet music with someone crying so beautifully over it, it was the soundtrack of my insides and made me feel like I wasn’t crazy. I was like, oh, someone else feels like this. Also the ensemble that she put together was a really, really special group of people. A family that was life changing. Yes.

Debbie Millman:

You also began touring with Rufus Wainwright for his Want One and Want Two albums. And I read that your second gig with Rufus was at the Beacon Theater in New York. And you’ve said that it was the most terrifying moments in your life. I knew that you’d seen Nina Simone there and Leonard Cohen there. You don’t even remember it now I think because you were so terrified. What was so scary for you being there?

Joan Wasser:

Well, I was opening. I was supporting him. So I was opening solo. My own music.

Debbie Millman:

So that was the first time at the Beacon Theater with him?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. I joined his band in 2004 and I toured with him for almost two years on those records that are just masterpieces.

Debbie Millman:

Masterpieces. He’s a genius.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah, he is.

Debbie Millman:

He is an absolute genius.

Joan Wasser:

Yep. Absolutely. And so there was another woman, we were alternating opening gigs. So one night she would open, one night I would open. So she opened the first show, wherever that was. I have no memory of what that was because it didn’t matter. The second gig that we played, I was doing my first support slot with Rufus at the Beacon Theater.

Debbie Millman:

Talk about big time.

Joan Wasser:

I remember absolutely what I wore and I remember doing my hair so well. It was so overwhelming. And because of the history and because of the fact that I was on stage by myself, playing these songs that I had pretty recently written, it was impossible for me to digest really.

Debbie Millman:

So did Rufus come to you and say, “Joan, it’s time. You need to be on your own. You need to be performing.”? Did it happen organically? How did that happen?

Joan Wasser:

I mean he needed someone who could sing, play violin and play guitar. At that time there were not that many people in New York City that actually could do all those things. So I auditioned for him and I got hired and I had just completed my EP. Actually I rushed to complete it to leave for tour in February. I manufactured them myself and I sold them at the shows for probably $5. He didn’t care about me opening. He was like, “I need a violin player that can sing and play acoustic and electric.” So I got hired and then I was opening the show. So it just was coincidental. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

You talked about the process of learning to sing and I read that it was really hard for you. You were really feeling very vulnerable about singing. At the time you were yearning to sing like Sam Cooke. You felt that he has the most remarkable sound you ever heard. And I read that you yearned to sing without embellishment. That you felt that any melisma you found yourself doing was merely a way to cover up some deficiency in your voice. What did you think was deficient about your voice? So this is a three part question. What did you think was deficient about your voice? How did you ultimately find your voice, which is so soulful and sexy and stunning? And that’s my feeling about it. What do you think of it now?

Joan Wasser:

I’m so glad. Okay. Trying to figure out who I was as a singer was a very complicated path because of the fact that I felt I had been surrounded by the greatest singers of my time. Jeff, Anohni, Rufus. What do I have to give? Who wants to listen to me? And so I wanted to figure out what my voice sounded like when I wasn’t trying to mimic someone else. I could just sing it totally straight and you’d feel it. How can I take off all the frosting and all the stuff and just give you the cake? Just the plain thing. How can I do it as plain as possible because I felt like that would be the most potent.

Debbie Millman:

So you had your EP, you’re touring with Rufus, you decide you want to stop drinking. At the same time you are recording Real Life, your first full length album. Your engineer accidentally loses … I think it was the bass and the drums.

Joan Wasser:

No. The bass and the drums were remained.

Debbie Millman:

The voice.

Joan Wasser:

Everything I did, all my wurlitzer playing, all my strings, all my guitar playing, all my singing, all of Anohni’s vocals actually as well. Everything besides the bass drums-

Debbie Millman:

Was lost.

Joan Wasser:

Was lost. But what was incredible is that I had really … Most of the record was done when that happened. But it happened just right after I got sober.

Debbie Millman:

I mean talk about serendipity I think.

Joan Wasser:

It’s so beautiful. It’s so beautiful because I remember how horrified … I’m still really close with the engineer. I made this last record that I made with him. He’s one of my close friends. But I remember the producer saying, “Joan, I have something to tell you.” And I could tell it was something bad. And I was like, “Bryce, what?” And he said, “For some reason none of your stuff was backed up and the hard drive crashed and we’ve done all of the data recovery and nothing’s there.” And I remember having the feeling like, “Okay, that’s all right.” Because I had just gotten sober, everything was felt so … I had the new drug of clarity where I was not hungover anymore. And I was just like, “Okay.” So then I had to record the whole thing again.

Debbie Millman:

Do you think that there was a really big difference in the tones of the first recording versus the second?

Joan Wasser:

I have no idea.

Debbie Millman:

Oh. Because you don’t have any record.

Joan Wasser:

I don’t know. I don’t have a record. But what I know is that I was a person that was no longer killing herself slowly with substances. I was no longer that person. It was like I got reborn and then was given the opportunity to make my first record again.

Debbie Millman:

Right. Wow.

Joan Wasser:

I know. It was really-

Debbie Millman:

Such a gift.

Joan Wasser:

It really was.

Debbie Millman:

You released your EP Joan As Police Woman in 2004, which was a name that is an homage to the 1974 television cop show starring Angie Dickinson. Now, I know I’m 10 years older than you so I actually watched that show in real time when it came out. The world was enamored with Angie Dickinson. It was the first time there was a drama series focusing solely on a woman. She was over 40. She was knock dead gorgeous but she was also over 40. I think a friend of yours saw you in a baby blue three piece suit and said, “You channeling your police woman today?” And that’s how the name stuck.

Joan Wasser:

That’s right. I was blonde and I had a polyester three piece suit on. Yeah, Ruben. My very close still friend Ruben said, “Joan, you’re channeling Angie from police woman.” And I was like, that’s the name.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. She was really one of the sexiest women of that time. I was 13 when that show came out so I was obsessed. Obsessed.

Joan Wasser:

Of course.

Debbie Millman:

Initially Joan As Police Woman started as a duo with Ben Perowsky on drums. And eventually you added the great, great Rainy Orteca on bass. Just as a sidebar, Rainy helped create the sound studio that we are sitting in. I adore Rainy. She is also a genius.

Joan Wasser:

She sure is.

Debbie Millman:

And just hey Rainy. In case you’re listening. We’re here with a thread between us. That’s you. In 2006, you released Real Life. It was released to great fanfare. Great reviews. What was it like to be suddenly be the center of attention with so much adulation?

Joan Wasser:

Really strange because I knew that my family and my friends would hear the record and that was plenty. I just thought I have to do this, but I did not have any expectations. I made a pact with myself that I would … Okay, I’m doing my own music. I’m going to do it exactly how I want. Which somewhere that meant no one was going to listen to it. You know?

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I read that you were surprised that people liked it.

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. I was. And it made me feel less alone that people liked it. It was a really cool feeling. I was like, “Oh, people can relate to this? I’m so glad.” It was a very different feeling than I would’ve imagined. I wasn’t expecting it. That’s it. I was not expecting it.

Debbie Millman:

It’s a great album. I’m wondering if you can play a song from that album for us.

Joan Wasser:

Oh my god. Right. I’m playing a song. I forgot.

Debbie Millman:

We’re both sitting here barefoot. It’s so much fun to be able to do that with a guest.

Joan Wasser:

All right. This is a song called We Don’t Own It and I wrote it for Elliot Smith.

Debbie Millman:

Oh wow.

Joan Wasser:

Elliot opened a whole tour for us. I mean, he was living in New York so I knew him from just music. But he sat on the stool with his acoustic guitar and played often with a lot of people in the crowd talking over him. This was before that Goodwill whatever it’s called came out and he became more of a household name. He is incredibly shy person and very introverted. I think everybody knew he had tried to kill himself a bunch of times. That was sort of common knowledge. Then when he finally succeeded, just what happened, the aftermath of that was so disturbing that I wrote this song just in light of that situation. So let’s see if I can do this.

(singing)

Debbie Millman:

You’ve since recorded nine studio albums, two albums of cover songs, a few live albums. Your covers are so unique. You have a way of remaking songs. Sort of the way I think Alan Cumming remade Joel Grey’s role of the MC in Cabaret. With Funny Girl being out now too, people are saying this just no way for anybody to take a part that Barbara Streisand made famous and make it their own. But people said that about Joel Grey’s part in Cabaret and then Alan Cumming came and did it in a whole new way that makes you rethink everything you thought you knew. And that’s the way I feel about your covers. You remake these songs in a way that makes you feel like that’s the way they should have been done to begin with. Your cover of Prince’s Kiss is astonishing. And Prince, you think how can anybody outdo Prince’s own song? But yet you do it. How do you pick your songs to cover? Why are you laughing?

Joan Wasser:

Because that’s crazy. Thank you so much. Thank you. How do I pick the songs? I mean, I pick songs I’m infatuated with. That’s for sure. They don’t always work because I have to convince myself I’ve found a new way into the song or I’ve found some sort of new facet to show the world. And sometimes that doesn’t happen. But I love that song, Kiss. Who doesn’t? It’s so good. And I was determined to figure out some other way through it. And I love Nina Simone and she does this. So yeah. I’m just trying to honor her example of finding new ways through songs.

Debbie Millman:

Joan, I’d love before you go, if you could do another song for us. Any song at all from your catalog. Your beautiful catalog. And if you can just pick a song and tell us the backstory.

Joan Wasser:

Okay, well this is a song called Forever In a Year. And it is from the record called The Deep Field.

Debbie Millman:

2011.

Joan Wasser:

Yes. The song pretty much tells itself. Let’s see if I can tell it.

(singing)

Debbie Millman:

Thank you, Joan.

Joan Wasser:

What a way to make it through that song.

Debbie Millman:

That was perfection. You okay?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah. It’s really hard for me not to cry during that song.

Debbie Millman:

It’s hard not to cry through most of your songs in the best possible way. Here. Here, we have tissues.

Joan Wasser:

I’m all right.

Debbie Millman:

You good?

Joan Wasser:

Yeah, it’s fine.

Debbie Millman:

Joan Wasser, thank you so much for making so much stunning music that truly matters and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. Joan, as Joan As Policewoman is about to go on tour. She’s going on a lengthy tour to Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Italy, Switzerland, the UK. And songs from The Solution Is Restless will feature prominently as well as other songs from her catalog. You can find out lots more about Joan on her website, joanaspolicewoman.com.

This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Shirley Manson:

I just for one, have always loved sadness. I love sad movies. I love sad books. I love sad stories. They make me feel like I’m connected to reality instead of fantasy.

Speaker 2:

This is design matters with Debbie Millman from designobserver.com. For 14 years now, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this podcast Debbie talks with singer/songwriter Shirley Manson, about the value of speaking up.

Shirley Manson:

I am so a believer in speaking to destroy shame. Shame is something that festers inside us through our silence.

Speaker 2:

Here’s Debbie.

Debbie Millman:

I’d like to thank two of the patrons that helped make Design Matters possible. Is your team designing an app from scratch, rethinking the look and feel of your brand, maybe taking on something massive like transforming your brand’s entire customer journey? Well don’t do it the old way, passing numberless one off comps through endless emails. Instead, do it all in one place. Do it in Adobe XD. Now for free with the new starter plan. Adobe XD combines the ability to both design, prototype, and share in a single solution. Its combination of creativity and productivity lets your teams eliminate bottlenecks and simplify workflows. It can now create an interactive prototype and then share it with teammates and reviewers in a single place. It keeps up with today’s creative demands by letting your team work when and where they want across Windows, iOS, the web, and more.

Debbie Millman:

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Debbie Millman:

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Debbie Millman:

Shirley Manson is a rock and roll legend. She is the lead singer of the multi-platinum multi award winning band Garbage. She’s also an actress, and starred on the hit television show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. She has also been described as being dark and emotional, and she’s okay with that. The singer from Edinburgh wants her listeners to feel sadness, loneliness, disappointment, and frustration. All of the emotions that are part of life. On a recent trip to Mexico, I got a chance to sit down with Shirley Manson while she was on tour in Puebla to talk about her career, her music, and the long road that brought her to where she is today.

Shirley Manson:

Are we in business?

Debbie Millman:

We are.

Shirley Manson:

Excellent.

Debbie Millman:

Shirley I understand that not only were you a Brownie scout growing up. I also read that you’ve been known to recite your Brownie scout creed on occasion and was wondering if there was any chance that I could get you to do that today.

Shirley Manson:

I promise that I’ll do my best to do my duty to God to serve the Queen and help other people, and to keep the brownie guide law.

Debbie Millman:

Wow.

Shirley Manson:

And for those who are just listening and not watching, I did have my little finger salute-

Debbie Millman:

Yes, you did.

Shirley Manson:

My two finger salute.

Debbie Millman:

Do you know that I still have my Brownie pins?

Shirley Manson:

Oh see, I’m jealous. I wish I kept mine.

Debbie Millman:

I still have them. And every now and then I’ll take them out of this little box that I have of [inaudible 00:04:45] over my childhood. And I look at them and remember, and astounded that so much time has gone by and that was so important to my life at the time.

Shirley Manson:

How beautiful, yeah. I love that.

Debbie Millman:

So I know that your mom [Muriel 00:04:58] was conceived on the highlands by a Butler and the governess, and she was an orphan until she was adopted at five years old. As a result, you’ve said that she always felt inferior and tried hard to be a part of things, and to make everyone feel good. You’ve said that in many ways, you grew up doing the same. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about why.

Shirley Manson:

Well, I didn’t grow up doing the same funny enough. My mom certainly fostered a very loving home, and she was obsessed with the concept of family. So family was something that was really important to her. And she absolutely supplicated herself for the family unit. And as I was growing up, I think I was quite intimidated by that. I think that’s one of the reasons I never had children, because I was frightened, I think by how serious she took her role as a matriarch.

Shirley Manson:

But once my mom died, I really suddenly realized that the brightest light in my life had gone out. And one of the things that really struck me the day of her funeral was a friend of hers had come up to me and said, “Every time I met your mom, it didn’t matter what was going on in my life. I would always leave her company feeling better than I had before I bumped into her.” I remember thinking, wow that energy, my Mom’s light and energy is gone, and I’m a dark horse. I’ve spent my whole life dark, and I’ve always treasured the dark, and always been a bit scared of light in a funny way. And in some ways I still am. And yet the day my mom died, I really decided that I was going to try and bring light into my relationships and into the world. And so after 45 years of being a bit of like I said a dark horse, I’ve turned my attitude around a little.

Debbie Millman:

I read that after she passed, that you were determined to become the architect of your own life. Wondering how that realization came to be.

Shirley Manson:

Well, two things really. My mom always used to say, “You need to engineer your own happiness, you need to engineer your own life. Nobody’s going to do it for you.” And I never really fully understood that again until she died because she had been my Joan of Arc really. And she fixed every problem I to usually, particularly emotionally. My mum could fix anything that I was feeling. And when she left this earth, I realized, “Okay, I think I know what she was talking about now.” And I started to really focus on the idea of making myself feel good in my life on a daily basis because I suddenly was aware that my time was running out and I didn’t want to spend it sitting on the coach feeling miserable and sorry for myself.

Debbie Millman:

Your dad was a research scientist at Edinburgh University in the department that eventually famously cloned Dolly the sheep. So were you aware of all of that happening at the time?

Shirley Manson:

I was vaguely aware. The funny thing is when we were growing up, my dad did specialize in genetics. In particularly, animal genetics. Me and my sisters just thought this was the most boring subject of all time. And it wasn’t again, until we were older, when we suddenly realized he was at the forefront of some of the most important subject matter in medicine and science in the future. So on so forth, so I’m very proud of father actually. But growing up he would conduct strange experiments in our gardens shed with eggs and markets and God knows what I mean. My dad is a real eccentric, and has been a hugely inspiring figure in my life and remains. He’s such an adventure and he’s so curious.

Debbie Millman:

I guess you get a lot from him in terms of your own alchemy, and working to make things different.

Shirley Manson:

I don’t have nearly as much get up and goes my father, but he’s a very religious man, very devote. And yet he’s a scientist. So I was brought up with this duality in my thinking, which I’m very grateful for. I don’t see that they have to be exclusive necessarily because my father always seemed to make this duality make complete sense to me.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I was doing my research and I saw that he was a Sunday school teacher as well-

Shirley Manson:

My Sunday school teacher, which was even worse.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, I didn’t even know. So you had to be in the class while he was teaching.

Shirley Manson:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

No, but you were also bullied as a child. Was he witnessing any of that? You were bullied because you were a redhead?

Shirley Manson:

Yeah, I mean that’s a common part of growing up or certainly back then, and I grew up in the seventies basically in Scotland. And being a redhead, you’re part of two percent of the population. You’re just a natural target. And so yeah I got bullied and people made fun of me, but it wasn’t until I got into high school, secondary school where I had a proper seriously physically imposing bully. She really did scare the bejesus out of me. But yeah, my parents knew about it because I told them about it, but their philosophy was you just have to deal with us. You need to figure out a way of dealing with it. I was furious at them, but I’m very grateful ultimately because in my life I am no longer even capable of being bullied as it turns out. Because I just learned how to deal with it.

Shirley Manson:

But every child has their own story. You think that you’re solely the one who is the target of people’s wrath. But I think people liked to bully other people. I think we’re seeing that in the [crosstalk 00:10:28] currently. So that’s just part and parcel of growing up, I think.

Debbie Millman:

Well despite your bullying, you said that your childhood was pretty normal. You studied violin and clarinet, you played in the school orchestra. You also sang with the choir. Then when you were a senior in high school, you began smoking and drinking, sniffing glue, shoplifting-

Shirley Manson:

You make me sound like such a charming character.

Debbie Millman:

[inaudible 00:10:51] fascinating. But on one occasion, you even broke into the Edinburgh Zoo. And what happened to cause that transition? Was it because of this overt bully?

Shirley Manson:

No, I don’t think was really. I certainly got very angry by being bullied and not having anyone run to my defense, that much I do know. But I was also a red head and we are highly strong as a breed, and there’s a lot of reasons for that. It’s been proven scientifically that we have a different gene and that causes us to experience pain differently, expedience heat differently and cold differently. There’s a whole list of isms that come along with being a red head, but I think it was hormonal and I also think it was a sensitivity that the rest of my family didn’t enjoy. And I choose these words very carefully because when I was growing up, I was told I was too sensitive, I was hypersensitive. I was just being sensitive, and I began to think of sensitivity as something bad. And of course now that I’m older and I realize it’s a great gift to be sensitive and to have empathy and understand what it’s like for another person.

Shirley Manson:

But back then, I didn’t understand this and I felt like I had this perception of the world that nobody else in my family enjoyed, and agreed upon and invested in. So I was always the odd one out in my family, I was very emotional. They weren’t. I would like to speak about things and examined things. They didn’t. And so there you have it. So I was furious because I wasn’t really being heard. I wasn’t really being seen. And so I think I made a determination, you will hear me and you will see me. And I was a middle child and I didn’t feel I got much of anything. I always got hand me downs, all my clothes were hand me downs from my sister and the little one got a lot of privileges because she was a baby and she was really cute, and I hated cute. I still kind of loath cute, cute doesn’t work for me. So I think that built this character who just determined to like I said, be seen and heard.

Debbie Millman:

At that time of your life you wanted to become an actress, and you tried to get into the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, but were rejected.

Shirley Manson:

The pain still hurts.

Debbie Millman:

Oh my God. How is that possible, Shirley? How were you rejected? Can you imagine what they think now?

Shirley Manson:

I’m sure they’re relieved. I’m sure they’re relived they rejected me. But was a great sadness for me because that is what I wanted to do. And my two best friends at the time both got accepted to RADA in London. I was the loser in my mind inverted commas. And I had to change my whole concept of what my future might hold.

Debbie Millman:

What were you imagining you were going to do at that point?

Shirley Manson:

Well, I have no idea actually. I did spiral into a lot of panic, that much I do know. But it was around this same time that I was approached to join a band, so the problem got solved for me without me actually having to actively lift a finger, which disappoints me somewhat. But I got very fortunate.

Debbie Millman:

Well your first job was doing volunteer work in a local hospital’s cafeteria. You then went on to become a breakfast waitress at a local hotel. Then you went on to spend five years as a shop assistant at Miss Selfridge’s department store, so I wouldn’t say that it was just like boom, boom, you got another opportunity you’re rockstar. No. And I actually read that you started working in the cosmetics department at Miss Selfridge’s, but were eventually moved to the stock rooms because of your attitude to the customers?

Shirley Manson:

I did have a very, very poor attitude towards the customers. I’m not particularly servile. Certainly back then I wasn’t. No, I understand the beauty in service, but then I didn’t. I was very unpleasant and aggressive. And yes, arrogant one would say.

Debbie Millman:

Well in the early eighties while working at Miss Selfridge’s, you Martin and John [inaudible 00:14:35], Fin Wilson, Derek Kelly, and Rhona [Scobey 00:14:36]. Did I pronounce that correctly-

Shirley Manson:

That is perfect.

Debbie Millman:

Oh good. Started the band Goodbye Mr Mackenzie and I believe that band’s name came from the 1931 novel after leaving Mr Mackenzie.

Shirley Manson:

By Jean Rhys.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. So talk about that-

Shirley Manson:

That [inaudible 00:14:51] with me sadly. It’s a lovely literature reference, but that actually was all down to Martin Metcalfe, the lead singer. The band was actually in place by the time Rhona and I, and Finn joined the band.

Debbie Millman:

And so how did they know that you were even interested in being in a band? You were asked to join the band. What made them think that you’d be a good member of the band?

Shirley Manson:

Well, Martin was the one who approached me and the reason he met me was because we were both in, I was in Edinburgh Youth Theater pursuing my dream of acting. And Martin was pooled in to help us with a fringe production. I can’t even remember which production it was, but it was to perform at the Fringe in Edinburgh at the big arts festival there. We were scanty on good singers. He came in to help us, and basically I think he fell in love with me and he wanted to keep me around I think. And he asked me to join his band as a keyboard player. I learned piano when I was young. So I was like, “Yeah, I’ll join your band.” For one of nothing better to do because that was the summer that I got rejected from the Royal Academy. So the rest is history.

Debbie Millman:

And when did they all realize that you had this killer voice?

Shirley Manson:

I don’t think anybody’s really ever discovered I have a killer voice, to be honest. I think they’ve realized I was a dedicated member to the group, which I certainly was. I was in that band for a decade. And I didn’t take a percentage of the profits or anything. I didn’t really make any money. I didn’t ask for any money. I’d get a PD everyday, a per day from Martin and Kelly who were the bosses in the band. I was just a good group player-

Debbie Millman:

Team player.

Shirley Manson:

Team player, yeah.

Debbie Millman:

The band signed with a major label and nearly made it to the big time, and you then formed another band named Angel Fish with some members of goodbye Mr Mackenzie. Afterward the label wanted you as a solo artist and you formed the band with some members of Goodbye Mr Mackenzie. In 1994, MTV’s show 120 Minutes aired a video for the band song Suffocate Me. The edited exactly one time, but it was a video that would change your life. Did you even know that MTV was going to air that video?

Shirley Manson:

I can’t remember if we knew or not. I began to get little bit of buzz on the East Coast of America down to a female journalist, who I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten her name. But she had presented Angel Fish in the Rolling Stone magazine as one to watch. So we were starting to get a little bit of word of mouth, but I don’t think I knew that video was getting played and it came as a great shock when out of the blue, I got contacted by the manager of Garbage as it turns out. Garbage was already formed at this point.

Debbie Millman:

So Steve Marker, Duke Erikson, and Butch Vig, who had recently hit the big time for producing Nirvana’s Nevermind [inaudible 00:17:43]-

Shirley Manson:

Well Butch was the only one who produced Nevermind.

Debbie Millman:

Yes. But Steve was the one that was watching the episode and what happened next?

Shirley Manson:

Yes. Steve was watching it, which is funnily enough he’s still a night owl. And he was my fairy mother essentially. He was the one who took me to the other two because they were looking for a vocalist and said, “I found this girl last night on TV. She’s got a lovely voice and I think she’d be cool person to work with. Let’s track her down.” And so they sent their management to find me and literally within 24 hours, which is kind of a miracle, they did get hold of me and I got a phone call out the blue from my [inaudible 00:18:19] in Los Angeles Phil [Schuster 00:18:21] who said, “Hey, I’ve got something really strange to share with you. The producer, American producer of Nevermind buy Nirvana Butch Vig wants to discuss a meeting with you. Would you be up for that?” And I was like, “Oh my God. Yeah, of course.”

Debbie Millman:

The first audition didn’t go well, right?

Shirley Manson:

Well I first of all met them in London. The three of them in the Landmark Hotel in London. And we got along really, really well. But it was presented to me as a project. Garbage was a project in which they would work with a variety of different singers and would I be interested in singing a song with them? Well of course I said yes. And then we left that night and I went home to my friend’s flat in London. We stuck on the news, and of course it was the night that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide. I was a huge Nirvana fan anyway, but the fact that I just left Butch Vig’s side, it really struck me as a strange and weird and I felt this bizarre connection with Butch. And that has remained a strange sadness for all of us in Garbage that somehow we were birthed out of the death of a true great. But they then called me up when I was on tour in America and I went and auditioned with them and it was a fiasco of monumental proportions.

Debbie Millman:

How come?

Shirley Manson:

Well, they stuck me upstairs in their kitchen and then they ran a lead down to the base in Madison, Wisconsin in Steve’s house. They were in the man cave downstairs in the basement and they would shout up things like, “We’re just going to run a track. Just make up some words and some music. Just as you feel.” And I had never written a word of music in my life before. Sorry, a note of music and/or a word of music. So I was just stuck, a microphone much like this with a track playing in my ears, ice cold, full of panic. And I didn’t know what to do and I just mumbled into the microphone. Literally like a mad person.

Shirley Manson:

So it was a fiasco and they were downstairs going, “Whoa this isn’t going very well.” But then we hung out that night at a bar and we just really got along well. We still get along well 25 years later so you can imagine when you’re meeting the first time and you have a connection with someone. We just got on like a house on fire. So that was the reason they called me back and said, “We think you should try again, are you up for it?” And I was like, “Yeah, I’m totally up for it.” And by this point, I was a bit more prepared and I realized okay, it’s now or never. You jump in, and you make up some words, and you come up with a melody or you don’t. It’s your call. And of course I go in front of a microphone and I got the gig.

Debbie Millman:

When did you become a full fledged member, right then and there?

Shirley Manson:

No, not right then and there. But pretty soon we had finished the record, and my record company was headed by a very famous music manager called Gary Kurfirst, who’s mostly known for his work with Talking Heads and Blondie and the Ramones. He’s this phenomenal, brilliant character who loved me and was my biggest champion. And he said to me, “If you want to have a good career with garbage, if you’re serious, they’re going to have to commit to you. And they need to buy out your contract. I will sell your contract for $10,000,” which is a steal. Because he wanted me to do well. He knew this was a great opportunity. And the lawyers that looked after the band and the record label that they refused to spend the 10 grant, they were like, “No, we’re not going to buy her. We’re just going to play it by ear. We’ll see how this project goes.”

Shirley Manson:

Well very quickly the project started really rolling along and it was clearly at least of quality. So the band themselves eventually said, “We’re going to cut you in as a full member because otherwise why would you invest your time in this?” But they could have got me for 10 grand, but they didn’t. So it worked out great for me in the end.

Debbie Millman:

Now you’ve said this about being in the band. “I’ve always been the odd one out in garbage. I was never part of the gang, I’m much younger, and I had a different upbringing. They’d been friends for 20 years before he came along, so I always felt out of things. Even when we got to playing live, I felt like I was letting them down in some way. I wasn’t Bob, I wasn’t Whitney Houston. I just felt like at every turn I was failing.” You can’t possibly still feel this way.

Shirley Manson:

I don’t feel that way anymore, but I would be lying if I said that I hadn’t felt like that up until quite recently.

Debbie Millman:

Really Shirley? Why?

Shirley Manson:

Well, for a lot of different reasons. We could go into it, it’s just so dull. But I’ve had a hard time in my life feeling confident and believing in myself, and that has taken me up to the age of I’d say 50, before I finally started to really believe in my own worth. And I get the feeling you having just spent some time in your company, you feel the same way. It took a long time, like you said. For you it was 40 years. For me-

Debbie Millman:

Closer to 50.

Shirley Manson:

There you go, closer to 50. I probably don’t need to explain to you, but it took me a long time to fight off bizarre bodied feelings of worthlessness and I’m not going to bore your listeners with why.

Shirley Manson:

Suffice to say I have dug myself out of it, but it’s only very recently that I’ve started to see I do bring something of worth to my band. I’m bloody good at what I do. I have worked my ass off, and I deserve this as much as anybody does. But being in a band with a very well respected music producer in an industry that really values male talent and has struggled ever recognizing female talent compounded my feelings of worthlessness. And that is no fault of anybody’s but my own. I allowed it to affect me that way. And now that I’m older, I have figured my way through this nonsense. But it took me awhile.

Debbie Millman:

Is there any one thing you can point to that was the catalyst to that breaking through?

Shirley Manson:

I talk about my mother’s death a lot. My mother dying was definitely when, it was a slap in the face where I realized, “Alright, you need to be an adult. You can no longer be a baby girl. You can’t suck your thumb and sit in the corner. You’re going to have to stand up and muster through this.” That was one. Secondly, I went on hiatus with my band. I decided, well does this mean I do nothing or do I continue to forge a career? I decided I was going to forge a career because I thought I would die if I didn’t have music in my life. So I decided to extract myself from the group and I chose myself a new lawyer, and I made a phone call to someone involved in the Garbage camp. I won’t name his name because it’s best I think for his dignity that I don’t. But he told me, “You’re a fool getting your own separate lawyer. Who do you think you are?” says he. “You will be nothing without your band.”

Shirley Manson:

And in that moment, something ignited in my stomach. I can only put it that way. A fire ignited in my belly and I thought, “How dare you speak to me like this?” I was a 45 really accomplished career woman. I’d made not only myself, a life for myself, but I’ve made people millions of dollars. And I thought and I’m sitting on the phone listening to a man berate me because I’ve decided to find a lawyer to represent me and my interests alone. And that was the turning point for me.

Debbie Millman:

Perfect. Perfect. I came across an article where you spoke with a journalist about how you had adopted a rescue terrier saying, “I took her to behavioral training because you never know what you’re inheriting where a rescue dog.” And the first thing the trainer said was, “There is no such thing as an aggressive dog, only a scared dog.” I know that influenced how you thought about your own fears and I’m wondering if that was part of it as well.

Shirley Manson:

Yeah, I sound like cooky mad person, like a dog lady. But I am a dog lady, and there’s a reason for that. Because rescuing my dog did change my attitude to my own life and my own way through life. Because yeah, I have felt scared a lot of my life, and as a result of being very aggressive. I am definitely an aggressive woman without a doubt and I’m not gonna make any apologies for it. I’m grateful to be an aggressive woman. It’s served me very well. However, that episode that you refer to you about my dog really made me think because when the trainer said that about [Vila 00:26:56], my beautiful terrier, tears sprung to my eyes because I was like, “I’m the terrier here,” which I am. It’s why I’ve always loved terriers, and a bond was forged between me and my dog right there that has remained with me now for 13 years, and she has done nothing but teach me how to try and move through my day to day existence. And there’s been so many lessons this mute little creature. Well not so mute always, but communicated these really important life lessons to me.

Debbie Millman:

I don’t know if I would have able to experience true love if I hadn’t had my experience with my two dogs, who really taught me what it means to love, without even really needing to get anything tangible back other than the feelings that they gave me. It was one of the greatest gifts of my life. Transformative gifts of my life.

Shirley Manson:

I’m with you there. They are joyful around you. They show that they’re happy to see you. And a lot of the time I was like, “Wow, I don’t show people that I love necessarily how delighted I am to see them.” And that has informed my relationships, my human relationships. I think it’s okay that we don’t experience selfless love or a unconditional love. I don’t think there’s such a thing, quite frankly for me personally. But I do believe in joyful, loving, symbiosis.

Debbie Millman:

Your lyrics have been described as melancholic and dark. You talked before about being dark. But you’ve found that reductive and have stated, “People get uncomfortable when you tell the truth. I don’t. I’m happy to feel. I want to feel every single fucking thing. I want to feel the breeze, the punch, the disappointment. I want to feel love, lust, and everything in between. I want to feel it all. I’m a greedy motherfucker. If that makes me dark, so be it.”

Shirley Manson:

Amen to that sister.

Debbie Millman:

So I’m sharing this with some friends last night. I said, “This is Shirley. This is the woman I’m meeting tomorrow.” And my friend Zoe sent me this excerpt she’d come across from a letter Georgia O’Keeffe wrote to her friend Anita Pollitzer, and I thought you’d really enjoy it.

Debbie Millman:

“Your letters are certainly like drinks of fine cold spring water on a hot day. They have a spark of the kind of fire in them that makes life worthwhile, that nervous energy that makes people like you and I want to go after everything in the world, bump our heads on all the hard walls, and scratch our hands on all the briars. But it makes living great, doesn’t it? I’m glad people want everything in the world good and bad, bitter and sweet. I want it all to and a lot of too.”

Shirley Manson:

That’s given me the goosebumps. I love that. I love that quote.

Debbie Millman:

When did big fat emotions and being sensitive and wanting a lot become something that was considered negative or greedy? Why is that considered greedy? It seems like it’s table stakes for living.

Shirley Manson:

It is table stakes, but I think people shut themselves down to try and protect themselves because they get disappointed. It’s all about disappointment I think, and being afraid of feeling disappointed. We have also been taught by society that darkness is bad. White is good, black is bad, and darkness is scary. Brightness is where nothing bad ever happens. There’s all these weird, subliminal messaging that go on in our culture that I think teach us to be afraid. Afraid of feeling, afraid of experiencing sadness. We’re taught that there’s something wrong with us if we’re not feeling happy all the time.

Shirley Manson:

And so people are scared to be judged. So they try and pretend they’re happy all the time and put a smile on their face. Particularly for women culturally, we’re always taught smile. You need to smile. Smile more. Why don’t you smile? This bullshit that women are taught that-

Debbie Millman:

Somebody says that to me now, I just bite their heads off.

Shirley Manson:

But we’re taught to be pleasing, and pleasant company. Not challenging company, not aggressive in any way. So I think there’s a lot. I just for one have always loved sadness. I love sad movies, I love books, I love sad stories. They make me feel like I’m connected to reality instead of fantasy. Fantasy scares me. I feel like I want to be prepared for the inevitable things that happen. Death primarily is my biggest teacher.

Debbie Millman:

In what way?

Shirley Manson:

First of all, I’m aware that time is ticking. I don’t want to waste any time. So why do I feel it that way? Well, because I’m going to die. I don’t want to be unkind to people because well, they might die. It’s just really basic moronic thinking. I’m a moron. I think that’s maybe why I’ve survived so well. I have very strong survival instincts, and I always want to be aware of danger. So to be aware of danger, you have to know where the danger lies. To see danger, you need to be looking at all fronts. Behind you, below you, above you. And in all the different colors. That’s just what I believe in. To stay safe, you need to see it all. And why would you willfully cut a whole part of your experience just to pretend that things are okay?

Shirley Manson:

And people don’t want to appear weak. They don’t want to say, “I’m hurting. I haven’t figured my life out. My marriage is unhappy, my children are unhappy. I’m unhappy.” People don’t want to say that, they feel that they’re failures or they’ll be seen as losers. We’re living currently a climate where winning is everything. Winning. It’s like well, I’m the first person to say well actually things aren’t going so well. We just got dropped by a record label or I don’t know how to do this. How do I fix this? I think some people are scared to do that.

Debbie Millman:

You have your own record label now. You release your own music whenever you want to, however you want to. I was reading an article where you were asked if you miss the trappings of the nineties music industry, the huge platinum sales, the massive budgets, the big music videos. And you said that you did not miss it with one shred of your body, that you did not miss it at all.

Shirley Manson:

Success wasn’t what I thought was going gonna be. I really thought success would change me and turned me into somebody I thought I wasn’t.

Debbie Millman:

Like what?

Shirley Manson:

I thought I’d be Beyonce, perfect. And I became really successful and I was still a little old me. I didn’t feel any better. I didn’t look any better. I didn’t behave any better. Friendships weren’t any better. It was a really interesting ride, and I’m very grateful it happened to me. I don’t want to knock the fact that the success of my band was a great gift, and I feel spectacularly lucky and I’m very grateful for it. But I in no way became married to or attached to everything that came along with people loving on our band. I want people to love on my band. I want people to love the music, because to me that means I have connected with people, and that to me is really important. But money really isn’t that important to me. And status is of complete irrelevance to me. I think it’s ludicrous. People that enjoy status turn my stomach.

Debbie Millman:

Why is that?

Shirley Manson:

Because to me it speaks of power, self elevation. You want to be above someone else, and that’s just not what I believe in. I’m an egalitarian. I believe that all of us, we’re absolutely all the same. We’re all equal. Nobody’s any better than anyone else. Nobody’s any smarter. There’s certainly more intelligent people that, there’s geniuses. There’s great minds that are great scientists, and doctors, and lawyers and God knows what else. Teachers. There’s definitely intelligence, and that’s a gift you’re given. But in terms of smarts, I don’t know. Some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met are some of the dumbest cats I’ve hung out with. You know what I mean?

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely.

Shirley Manson:

And some of the so called illiterate people I’ve met have got the most incredible skills. People skills and street skills that I’ve ever encountered. So to me, I believe wholeheartedly we’re all the same. Then therefore, elevation and status repulses me. I’m scared of it. I think anyone who enjoys even the slightest amount of status, they are just little seeds waiting to sprout into monsters.

Debbie Millman:

I want to talk to you about being on television and your TV show with Garbage on hiatus. You got a call from a producer that you met at Gwen Stefani’s baby shower, which I just love the visual of that. You subsequently got a job on the Terminator television show, the Sarah Connor Chronicles playing an assassin robot, perfect type casting. Of the move to acting, you’ve said it was great to be in a beginner’s mindset, to not have a clue about the rules, to be scared. And on your last tour in 2005 at the time, you would walk on stage and your blood pressure wouldn’t change. You weren’t excited, and that was sad because it was something that you’d loved so much. You said that you’re terminator character devoid of emotion and filled with power was therapeutic to play at that time. I think it would be therapeutic to play at any time in anybody’s life. I can only fantasize what that would be like.

Shirley Manson:

Well it was funny. I’d got to play a robot with no emotions at exactly the time my beloved mother was dying. And anyone who’s lost a beautiful, amazing person in their life, particularly a mother, understands what that feeling of helplessness is. I was reeling against the gods. I was out of my mind, and yet I could go on set and play this powerful mini act that everyone was terrified of, and she could get anything she wanted to and pretty much change any situation she wanted to. and all I wanted to do was at that time was saved my mother’s life. And as a robot, I fantasized that I could.

Debbie Millman:

If only right?

Shirley Manson:

If only. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve been very candid about how you’ve struggled throughout your life with body dysmorphia, and have said that the sensation of never feeling good enough or pretty enough will always be there. And earlier this year in the impetus for my writing to you about being on Design Matters, you had the opportunity to write an article for the New York Times and they asked you to write a column about a first time of your choosing on any topic you wished. You chose to write about how when you were a young teenager, you began cutting yourself to deal with anxiety, stress, and depression. It was an incredibly emotionally haunting article. The first line of the piece is this. “I didn’t know I was a cutter until the first time I chose to cut.” Shirley, what made you decide to write about that experience? You’ve spoken about it in the past. This was the first time that you actually wrote so in depth about the experience, what you’ve been through.

Shirley Manson:

Well, I was approached by the New York Times through our publicist Brian [inaudible 00:37:54], who’s one of my greatest fans in life. And he’s always trying to push me into, “You need to write, you’re a great writer. You need to go and do a podcast. You’re really good at these kinds of things.” And he I think had persuaded the New York Times to allow me to write one of their columns for this project that they have called firsts, or first time I think it’s called. I was excited to get the opportunity for any writer to write for the New York Times is a big deal. So I took it very seriously. And they asked me about a couple of subjects that I’d be willing to write about. Ironically, I wanted to write about a rescue dog, and I think they just thought I was going to write a boring column about a doggy and loving on a doggy. And of course, that was not my intention at all. But they didn’t want the column on the dog. So I said, “How about I write about being a cutter, self harmer?” And they said that we’d be great, go for it. So I wrote this piece.

Shirley Manson:

And it’s funny because I’ve got so much response from it from people, that was taken aback. Because everyone was like, “You’re so brave. You’re so this.” And the next thing, and I was like, “Let me set you straight. This was not bravery to write about this. This is a communication about something I really feel strongly about, have experienced in, and it’s a subject that’s still an incredible taboo.” I just feel like I want to break out taboo. I feel like there’s no harm in speaking about things even if it’s uncomfortable for some of us. And so I enjoyed writing the piece as it turns out, I took great pleasure in getting to write on such an amazing platform as the New York Times about something I consider very important and is incredibly prevalent, and has now actually become something that’s quite prevalent amongst young men too.

Debbie Millman:

It’s interesting about the notion of bravery. I can understand why people would say that to you. Over the years as I’ve become more comfortable with abuse that I’ve been inflicted with, I’ve been much more vocal about it. But most of my adult life I would say for the first 50 years, maybe even more. I was totally shamed to talk about any of it thinking that I was damaged and that I was somehow inferior just as a human. So I can understand both sides, seeing the strength that it takes to be able to share something that is so painful and has caused so much damage to your life. But then to be on the other side of it and say, “If this can help one person, if this can change some law, if this could put a light on the darkness of this shame, then it’s worth every moment of discomfort to be able to do it.”

Debbie Millman:

I was struck by the candor in the way that you approached it. It was very straightforward, and you closed the article with this paragraph and I’d really like to read it if you don’t mind.

Shirley Manson:

Sure.

Debbie Millman:

You say, “Today, I try to remain vigilant against these old thought patterns. I vow to hold my ground. I choose to speak up. I attempt to be kind not only to myself, but also to other people. I surround myself with those who treat me well. I strive to be creative and determine to do things that will make me happy. I believe this is not what we look like that is important, but who we are. It is how we choose to move through this bewildering world of ours that truly matters. And when I struggle with my sense of self as I often do, I some into mine the layers of poem by the great Stanley Kunitz, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.” Thank you for writing that Shirley because I think that you were writing about one specific experience to you. But I think with any self harm or any self destruction or any shame, this is something that could help everyone.

Shirley Manson:

Well it’s funny because I think it’s no coincidence that I wrote this round about the time that the Me Too movement was really prevalent in our culture, and I was starting to get really concerned that the voices of women were again being droned out, and the circus surrounding all these amazing women who were brave enough and defiant enough to come out and stab their spear into their past. I decided that I wanted to put my voice out there too, because I think when you show that you’re willing to illuminate your pain or your shame, then it always helps someone else feel that they have the right to then voice their defiance. I am so a believer in speaking out to destroy shame. Shame is something that festers inside us through our silence, and we must all continue to speak up over and over, and over again as loudly as we can. We must encourage our sisters, our brothers, our children, who are also suffering at the hands of sexual violence. And all colors, all creeds. So I feel strongly that we just all have to continue to pour out our examples of our private chains in inverted commas.

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Shirley Manson:

And then it no longer is shameful because it’s commonplace.

Debbie Millman:

Exactly. It’s only brave before you do it.

Shirley Manson:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I just want to finish our interview today with a quote and one last question. So this is the quote. Looking back this year you said, “I never imagined in my wildest dreams I’d even have the opportunity to have a career this long. I want to show women that you can have a career at this age, because I grew up believing that women were basically tossed at the age of 30. And then I discovered Patti Smith and I discovered Chrissie Hynde and I discovered Debbie Harry, and those women have inspired me to keep on making music to be an artist, be creative in the same way that our male contemporaries do. Men don’t fold up their wings and say goodnight when they’re 30, far from it, never have. I want to say to young generations of women no, you do not disappear. You hold your ground and you develop skills beyond your good looks. Because ultimately those are the skills, that propel you into having long careers. And I feel so strongly about it and so adamantly about it that I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.” Thank you for that Shirley.

Shirley Manson:

I have my fist in the air.

Debbie Millman:

Yes you do. And I would too if I weren’t holding so many damn things right now. So this is the last thing I wanted to ask you, it’s about a statement in an interview you did quite a while back. You said that you’d like the following written on your tombstone. “See? I told you so.”

Shirley Manson:

It’s true. I still want that on my stone.

Debbie Millman:

Tell me why. Why that line?

Shirley Manson:

Just as a silly, and funny, and truthful point that I’ve always said we’re gonna die. We’re gonna die. So make life count. We’re gonna die. We’re gonna die. So make it good. Make it adventurous. Again, obviously I’m 52 years old and I have to figure out my next half century, and I’ll be damned if it’s going to be boring. I feel like it is done to me to try and make it better than my first half. And quite frankly, I didn’t enjoy being young particularly so I feel like the odds are on me. I feel like I can make my second half of my century if I’m lucky to live that long, a good one.

Debbie Millman:

No doubt Shirley. No doubt. There’s a t-shirt I’m going to send you. It says 50 as fuck.

Shirley Manson:

That sounds amazing. Please give me that.

Debbie Millman:

Shirley Manson, thank you so much for creating so much wonderful work in this world and thank you for being on this very special episode of Design Matters in Puebla, Mexico.

Shirley Manson:

Thank you for having me. It’s been an honor.

Debbie Millman:

For more information about Shirley Manson, go to www.garbage.com. This is the 14th year I’ve been doing Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Speaker 2:

For more information about Design Matters or to subscribe to our newsletter, go to debbiemillman.com. If you love this podcast, please consider contributing to our drip Kickstarter community. Members get early access to the podcast, transcripts of every interview, invitations to live interviews, Q&A sessions with guests, and a brand new annual magazine. You can learn more about this at d.rip/debbie-millman. That’s d.rip/debbie-millman. And if you really liked this podcast, please write a review in the iTunes store and link to the podcast on social media. Design Matters is produced by Curtis Fox productions. The show is published exclusively by designobserver.com and record it at the School of Visual Arts, masters in branding program in New York City. The editor in chief of design matters media is Zachary [Pettit 00:46:57], and the art director is Emily [Weiland 00:47:00]. Generous support for design matters media is provided by Adobe XD and wix.com.

Debbie Millman:
Rickie Lee Jones spent her early life drifting to and fro, landing wherever good luck and intuition seemed to guide her. In the mid 1970s, that place was Los Angeles. It was there that she would write the hit single “Chuck E’s In Love.” In 1979, her debut album sold over 2 million copies and she went on in her career to win two Grammys, and to claim her spot as one of the greatest singer/songwriters in American popular music. She joins me now to discuss her journey, her career and her newly released memoir. Rickie Lee Jones, welcome to Design Matters.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Hi, good to be here.

Debbie Millman:
Hi. Rickie, congratulations on your memoir. I agree with music critic Bob Lefsetz, who said it’s absolutely the best book about being an artist in the rock world that he’s ever read. Congratulations.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Your book is titled Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour. Fans of yours know that the name Last Chance Texaco is taken from the title of one of your songs from your 1979 debut album. What made you decide to use that song title as the title of your book?

Rickie Lee Jones:
I think it’s evocative of a journey telling the story of a life on the road. When I think about it, actually, my dad wrote this story called “The Road Runner” when I was little. We traveled around so much, me in the back of that car, my life has been on the road. The other reason is the song is one of the most powerful and unique songs I’ve written, but I think mostly because it seemed to be the true signpost of my life.

Debbie Millman:
You write in the introduction that “Last Chance Texaco” remains a kind of living spirit to you, a whisper of belief and impossibilities. I’m wondering if you could talk a bit more about your belief in impossibilities.

Rickie Lee Jones:
It’s so intrinsic to my nature that it’s almost hard to separate it and talk about it. But I’ve always had and have still this feeling of being in a frame of being a story that’s watched by something that I interact with and talk to, that I talk to and interact with. That is to say that it manifests almost at will, but it manifests before me in proofs, which would suggest doubts, but people have doubts because they can’t see the invisible world. But we have a connection to things we can’t see. We find it out in science—“Oh, there are atoms, there are molecules.” So anyway, that’s what it is. There’s an unfettered connection to the invisible world that is both noun and verb. It is both a place and a feeling of personality that interacts with, because we don’t quite have words here to describe it. I don’t try, but I know it is with me always.

Debbie Millman:
You go on to state that after all these decades, life remains stubbornly mysterious, which I loved. I want to ask, how does it remain stubbornly mysterious?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, I guess because you can’t ever figure out how things operate, but also in a more innocent way, when I take a walk outside and look up at the birds, and there’s a connection between the bird and some other thing that’s going to happen later in the day. If you’re watching, you’ll see it all, and it’s stubbornly mysterious because it refuses to reveal itself. Yet probably it’s revealing itself all the time. It’s us that refuses to see, but there’s a little prose going on in the book too.

Debbie Millman:
I want to go back in time a bit and talk about not only where you came from, but who you came from. Your paternal grandfather, Frank Peg Leg Jones, and your grandmother, Myrtle Lee, were vaudevillians based in Chicago, where you were born. Frank was a really big star singer and dancer on the vaudeville circuit. He was once billed above Milton Burrow. Though he lost a limb in a childhood train accident, he was quite a good dancer. You’ve written that you were in awe of your grandfather. Do you have memories of seeing him perform when you were a child?

Rickie Lee Jones:
He died in 1940. He died before my parents met each other. I’ll just tell you a little side story. I joined Ancestry.com, and in that, a distant cousin contacted me and I found out all these things because he’s done a whole family history that includes my side. He separates from me around 1800, but he told me all about my family. That’s when I just found out when Frank died. I’m hoping in some piece of film that they find in a studio that Peg Leg Jones will be there in an audition tape, but I’ve never got to see him. We had two whole scrapbooks of his notices, which I can no longer find. I’m hoping they’re in storage. But I remember the one about Milton Burrow because Milton Burrow was famous. And the one which I quoted in the book, “This mono-ped puts most two-legged men to shame.” I love the language they used back then. They’re very succinct—“mono-ped.”

Debbie Millman:
A mono-ped. Yes.

Rickie Lee Jones:
So Frank, yeah. We were kind of [inaudible] at people who tumbled from town to town. Frank Peg Leg Jones is the one who started that by joining vaudeville, because all of the other Joneses still lived in Beaufort County, NC. We are the only ones that went tumbling West like a tumbleweed. My family line goes back to the very first settlers of North Carolina. Indeed, we are the first families of North Carolina. So I’m going to get a little plaque that … and that is an incredible thing. I wish that I could have passed that on to the Joneses before they passed away because wouldn’t they have been how happy. I don’t know, maybe they would have poo-pooed it, but wouldn’t they have been happy to see that all that rambling comes from the very first Welshman who rambled over to America in 1720.

Debbie Millman:
That’s incredible. I’ve done Ancestry on both sides of my family. I can go all the way back to the early 1800s on my father’s side of the family. But on my mom’s side of the family, we only go back to my great grandmother, and that is because no one can remember her maiden name, which is just completely heartbreaking to me, the idea that no one can remember.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, mine was adopted. Not only did we not have her last name, but we had no idea, but this fellow found her last name. I think some people just have a propensity for this kind of thing.

Debbie Millman:
Your mother was raised in orphanages around Mansfield, Ohio, and her parents were unable to take care of her. The courts ruled your mom’s mom an unfit mother, and all four of her children were permanently separated from her. You write in your book that all four children, along with a million other orphans of the great depression, were left to fend for themselves among the religious fanatics and pedophiles and sadists that seemed to gravitate towards children’s homes. Rickie, how did she finally get away? It’s a really remarkable story in your book.

Rickie Lee Jones:
You mean about old One Ball?

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Rickie Lee Jones:
So One Ball was named One Ball because she wore her hair in one bun on top of her head. But the children had called her One Ball to indicate the one testicle they thought was hanging under the skirt. My mother, every time she told that story, she’d laugh. I think from all those, which at that time, I guess wasn’t that many years, 30 years separated, it was safe to laugh at this inhumane woman that was the matron. She’d sneak up on the children, that was her thing, to be in the shadows, catch them and terrify them before she hurt them. She was sneaking up and back at my mother who was brushing her hair in the mirror and she saw her coming up from behind.

It was a great moment of redemption because she turned and caught her just before she got there and held her hair brush up and said, “If you ever come after me again, I’m going to ram this hairbrush up your butt.” She probably said “ass,” because that was more like my mother, but I wrote “butt” because I didn’t want to portray my mother worse than the matron because she swore, but that’s what she did. She stood up to the sadist and frightened her. I guess my mother left soon after and the woman never bothered her again. At least that’s how the story was told to me.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. You write that childhood traumas leave their dirty footprints in the fresh white snow—

Rickie Lee Jones:
Of our happy-ever-afters.

Debbie Millman:
… of our happy-ever-afters. It’s a beautiful line. You go on to state that no matter what your mom did, she found traces of her past obstructing the future. How did that affect you?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, we never escape it. It gets passed on to all of us. Trauma is generational, I have learned. So if your grandmother was raped, you’re going to live with it. If they tell, it doesn’t dissipate. I think even if they don’t tell, their behavior will be so bizarre in particular ways. So even talking about it, it’s as if it happened to me. My mind begins to dissipate and swirl. It’s hard to stay centered on the subject. There’s so much trauma in my mother’s past. These stories I tell are the only ones she told, but sometimes hinted to something worse. She would say of the religious fanatics who populate that area, the [inaudible], she would say, “Goddamn hypocrites.” But the look on her face said much, much more than those words, as if something had happened to her specifically by religious people. And she’s just never going to tell her children about it. So I think it always gets passed on. How do you heal from it? I don’t know. We’ll find out. We’ll keep living and we’ll find out how.

Debbie Millman:
You were 3 years old when you made your debut as a performer. You were a snowflake in a ballet recital of Bambi. Rickie, is it true you were so intoxicated by the applause of the audience, your dance teacher how to escort you off the stage?

Rickie Lee Jones:
It is totally true. So I remember—and we saved that little uniform for so long—I remember it had spangles on it. In fact, now that I say this out loud, I think every costume I put on somehow evokes that very first snowflake outfit. But as I bowed and didn’t know I’d been out there longer, and all the kids had left the stage and I was still bowing, and the people were applauding and laughing, I just stayed—“Thank you very much.” And they liked to tell that story as I grew up. There’s always one of us out there.

Debbie Millman:
So, safe to say you realized very early on you liked being on stage?

Rickie Lee Jones:
I liked it. I felt no fear and liked everybody’s happy smiling faces. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I really related to a great deal was how you grew up creating invisible friends. In your book, you describe how you would daydream about an invisible horse galloping down the street in a storm of wild fury, only to find you waiting and fearless. Then a trembling velvet muzzle would press against your hand, which was the horse’s gesture of acceptance and trust. Only you understood and contained its wild heart. You’d then holler out to your invisible horse, to the consternation of your siblings, who watched you in bewilderment. What did your family make of your invisible world?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, I only became aware of them watching me when my mother told my dad to tell my invisible friend goodbye, that she didn’t want me talking to things that weren’t there anymore. But she didn’t seem to understand that that was as real to me as the physical world. There was no possibility that I could tell my invisible friend goodbye. That’d be like telling her goodbye. They just thought and did slightly treat me as if I was a little bit different than most people, which since that’s how they always treated me, it was normal, but it didn’t feel good. So maybe my mom thought if I stopped doing these things, that I would start to find my way toward real people and make real friends. Little did she know the reason I had invisible friends was because the real people didn’t want to play with me. I was also very bossy in my invisible world. I could control everything. With real people, they had ideas that were definitely inferior to mine.

Debbie Millman:
Did you name your invisible friends?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Sure.

Debbie Millman:
I had an invisible friend named Goonie, for some reason, and I made my mother set the table with a place setting for her every night.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Excellent. My friend was named Bashla. That’s a Slavic name, I don’t know where that came from, Bashla. Then when my parents quizzed me about my invisible friends, I began to make up others. I took the cue of the question to mean you should have more friends. So I made up SlowBeeSlow, but none was as real as Bashla.

Debbie Millman:
As you were growing up, your father’s anger and depression grew and he often left for months at a time. Your mother’s mood swings were unpredictable, and one day you came home from school to find that she had all of her teeth pulled out because they were hurting her. How were you able to make sense of this behavior and keep any semblance of your center?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, that event that my mother did, that was after the accident with my brother. So I think she was having a long, long fall. Why she decided to hurt herself, I don’t know if that was a conversation with my father. I said that thing about trauma having an impact forever, who knows where that came from. But for myself as an 11-year-old girl who’d already seen the accident and all the trouble, for my mother to do this thing without warning, and I come home from school and she doesn’t have any teeth, was maybe like the very last door to our lives than it had been to the new, bizarre horror that was coming. “You just can’t do stuff like that, mom, and you got to keep your children informed. Tell your daughter, ‘I’m thinking of getting Paul’s teeth.’ Say something so that I don’t come home and meet a mother without any teeth.”

Debbie Millman:
There’s a thread of magic that runs through Last Chance Texaco, where you talk about sensing things or knowing things in a way that’s very mysterious. We talked a little bit about that earlier. This happens quite vividly with the premonition you have about your older brother’s accident. I don’t know if you’re OK to talk about it at all, but can you describe the premonition and then what subsequently happened to him, and how he is now?

Rickie Lee Jones:
There have been a few times where I’ve had this place come upon me, and it is a place. I was in a lot of stressors in the lunchroom. It was just a few weeks into my sixth grade year, I think. I was still 10 years old, and the kids were drawing [inaudible] lines around their trays and I had to get out of the lunchroom, and to do that, I had to go by the table of older kids who were very mean. So on my way out, I stopped to look at some pictures, class pictures, that were on the right side of the auditorium stage. That’s where we ate, in the auditorium. As I looked at my brother’s graduation picture, the light in the room went away just like in a movie and centered around his picture. But it’s more than that.

It’s kind of scary because when I talk about it, it’s here, but I don’t talk about it much. It’s possible I could have had a life of premonitions if I would have let it happen anymore. But at any rate, I saw the picture and the message came. The message was really clear. It said, “Something is going to happen to Danny and nothing will ever be the same.” As if a gentle angel was saying, “So we’re letting you know, and there’s nothing you can do.” I don’t know. As years went by, I thought, when we used to make records, we worked with tape, and when you hit the cymbal really loud or the guitar really loud, the sound actually echoed over in part of the tape. So you’d hear an echo of a sound just before it came when you’re listening back.

It’s quite amazing, and as years have gone by, I thought, Maybe time is kind of like that, because we live in a spiral universe. Maybe some events are so loud they echo into the future, just like the … but at any rate, he did have this terrible accident 48 hours later. The man hit his motorcycle and knocked him off, dragging him along the road, because his foot was caught on the fender. Cut his leg open so bad. They severed his leg, but his head hitting the ground also caused traumatic brain injury.

You ask how he is now. Well, he didn’t have a great life, but he had an OK life. He ran a pool tournament for a while. He had his own pool hall, but probably nothing like the life he was hoping to have. When people are infirm or handicapped, or when people live a life that way, the only thing that they don’t want is to be measured as less than. “This is the life that is now, this is what I am. I’m not less than I was. I’m just Dan.” He’s still alive and he’s funny. The thing that he had when he was a little kid, he never lost, which was just a kind of lighthearted way of going through the world. Isn’t that something?

Debbie Millman:
Thank you for sharing that, Rickie. It seems that you were able to find solace and comfort in music, and you write about how you felt rescued by The Beatles.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Yeah. They had some kind of a magic in their sound. It changed the world. Elvis was powerful, right? An American symbol, a sex symbol, but there was something about The Beatles that did more than rock and roll. I just never understood how to express it. But when I hear the harmonica, the room that the reverb creates and the guitar, and there’s a place, I am transported back to that place in time. Like so many of us are with music, the way we felt when we first heard it. So, I guess it’s the music.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things I loved reading about was how you loved The Beatles so much you had a Beatle haircut, Beatle boots, Ringo rings, you collected Beatles trading cards that came with sheets of bubble gum. You felt that if you could not have Paul, you would be Paul, and your love of The Beatles seemed to really help you undergo a social and spiritual metamorphosis, and rock music at that point became your Bible. But one thing that I loved was that you didn’t want to be a girl singer or The Beatles’ girlfriend. You wanted to be a Beatle, and there’s a big distinction there.

Rickie Lee Jones:
That’s the key, isn’t it?

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.

Rickie Lee Jones:
And maybe that’s the calling. I just don’t know, but I could never have settled for any of the roles that were offered to the girls. It was just automatic that I would be them.

Debbie Millman:
Over the course of your early life, in sort of preparation for your career, you had a number of incidents that you turned down, which took a lot of bravery and courage. And the first was when you started singing, your dad was so impressed with your ability, he took you to an audition for the Lew King show, which was a local television talent show, and you won. But then a decision had to be made that really did impact one direction that your life could have taken. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Sure. The Lew King Rangers show was, like you said, a talent show for kids. Who is the famous guy in Vegas, [singing], what was his … he was a star on that show. I auditioned and I was a good singer as a kid, but they told my parents that they would have to buy an insurance policy if I was going to be on the show. An insurance policy was just gangsterism. It would’ve cost a lot of money, from what my parents earned. When we were driving home, I was in the backseat, and I remember this so well, lots of talking, lots of talking about it. Then finally they put it back in my hands and said, “If you really want to do this, we’ll find a way to do it.” And I said, “No, I don’t want to do it—it’s wrong what they’re doing,” and I turned down what I lusted for, which was not only to be on television, but to sing in front of people.

Debbie Millman:
You write that the Lew King show and that decision was your first lesson in the dark corners of the music business, where favors are exchanged and sins offered up as collateral. You go on to state, of the many exercises and integrity you have achieved or endured or failed, this was your greatest. Why is that?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Because I was a little kid and didn’t have the years that come as you get older, the years of reason. And I instinctually knew it was unethical, but a little kid wants what they want. So I think it’s a harder decision for a little kid to make, maybe not.

Debbie Millman:
You describe how that decision really gave you a compass of sorts, which is the one that comes to children who sacrifice their dreams for family, and all around you, your childhood was slipping away. But you write, to your North, you had a dream and only one direction you could call your own. Was that when you knew you wanted to be a professional musician?

Rickie Lee Jones:
I knew that I wanted to entertain. I wanted to act, I had been in tap and ballet. I was also swimming, hoping to go to the Olympics. So whatever I was going to be, it was going to be a self-made thing, not a thing I went to school to learn to be. It would be on my shoulders.

Debbie Millman:
Yet when you tried out for the school choir, you were turned down.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Not only were you turned down, but the music teacher singled you out in front of your friends and stated that your voice was too unusual and would not fit into his chorus. How do teachers like that even exist?

Rickie Lee Jones:
He kind of looked like a Marine. They’re just kind of people that are about everything being the same. Why they’re in the arts … I think there were a lot more of them in the arts. He was teaching everybody that if they wanted to be in music as a profession, they’d have to sound like this and sing like this, and maybe they’d get a job in this choir. You remember in the mid to late ’60s, choirs were very popular. They all sang in unison. So that was the job you could get, and I was like, “That is not the job I’m going to get.” But that hurt really badly.

Yet, he was right. My voice was different. There was something about me that seemed to piss teachers off, and they very unceremoniously sent me on my way. Maybe even at 12 or 13, I had a personality that was singular and meant to be a star on stage. I was not ever going to be in the choir. I always liked that little girl who did the long bow. I would always separate myself somehow, but they could have been so much gentler with me. It’s a longshot.

The people who become famous are longshots. They’re the people that teachers and most people around them go, “This guy’s never going to amount to anything,” because we are finding our way to a different plateau entirely. In that realm, we would be a bum; we’re not meant to be there. We’re meant to be up there. Since so few people make it, I guess, are able to define themselves and sell themselves as a singular new and different, because so many people want the same, same, same. So they treat you so badly. It’s a miracle that anybody who’s a little bit different ever achieves anything that they’re meant to achieve, I think. Yeah, that guy was a bad guy. He really hurt my feelings. He meant to hurt my feelings.

Debbie Millman:
And that’s the part that makes it cruel.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Your childhood was abruptly and forever altered by your brother’s injury. At that point you described your family life as something like a nuclear submarine waiting for the signal to destroy all known life. But music became an even stronger solace for you, and you write how Jefferson Airplane was on your turntable every day. Buffalo Springfield, Jimi Hendrix, Vanilla Fudge, and The Mothers of Invention were frequently played. You also love show tunes, particularly from West Side Story. You go on to describe how Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow seemed to be at the eye of a storm you longed to be part of. What storm was that?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, outside of my house, the hippies were growing. They’d been growing since ’65 and ’66. There’s an article in LOOK or LIFE Magazine about them on LSD, and little slices of them out there, and their long hair and Indian headbands. So first it’s a look that invites a child, but what they’re talking about, peace, protest, that’s way lower on the list. I wanted to be part of all that love and attention. They would have love-ins. There was a love-in or something in Encanto Park. I wanted to be there so bad. Well, all it was was people standing around. It wasn’t anything like what the title … I thought something magical would be happening in there. But nevertheless, I was drawn out of the family circle and all that trouble and drama to a larger picture that maybe I could find a place in.

Debbie Millman:
The last song on Side A of Surrealistic Pillow, “Comin’ Back to Me,” was my favorite. You taught yourself how to play the guitar, sounding out each note one phrase at a time by ear. How did you feel when you realized you could play it?

Rickie Lee Jones:
It took so long, so many weeks of practice, and memory, and getting … the fingers would hurt so badly pressing on those little steel razors. Then finally I could make that beautiful motion walking down from the C to the A minor. And when you’re making music, it’s like you’re weaving reality. You’re weaving places. You’re bringing the … it’s magic, and bringing these feelings into existence out here before you. Oh my God. I had longed to do it and I was doing it. That’s all I can say about that. It was pretty wonderful.

Debbie Millman:
I don’t want to skip too far ahead in time, but what was it like to record that song for your album Pop Pop?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, I wasn’t sure I should do it because it has always been that first song I learned and it’s attached to so many feelings that have their root when I was 11, or 10, or 12 years old. I go right back to that bedroom when I start thinking of that song. So, I didn’t want to put it out before me where it could be measured, and maybe people wouldn’t like it or would like it, but it wouldn’t be my private … but that didn’t happen at all. Actually, it’s remained my own private place. I was more concerned on a technical level with the key, because my voice is much lower now, but at the time it was pretty low in my register, and I was working hard to sing there. Marty Balin and I have a similar range that we can sing in. So I was just thinking about it technically—was I pulling it off?—because I knew how I felt singing it, but was I conveying it to the listener? That’s all I was thinking about.

Debbie Millman:
Is it different for you to perform songs that were written by other people rather than songs written by yourself?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
One song that I think is remarkable that you do is a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy For The Devil,” which takes the song and makes it a completely different song. It’s a completely different song. I was playing it for my wife and I’m like, “Do you recognize this song?” And I played the first couple of bars that you sang and she’s like, “No.” And then I played the Rolling Stones’ version and she was like, “Holy shit.” I’m like, “Yeah. yeah.”

Rickie Lee Jones:
Excellent.

Debbie Millman:
It’s amazing. Amazing.

Rickie Lee Jones:
That’s exactly what I would wish happened. So, yes, I have a very different relationship. When I hear a song, I can mold it in any direction I want. But when I write it, it’s almost like taking dictation—“This is the way I have to play it.” If I play it another way, that will be what it looks like. It’s like you’re making a baby in here, but you get to decide what it’s … so I have to stick to the creation of the song rather than the interpretation of the song when it’s mine.

Debbie Millman:
I think you were 14—you heard from a friend that her boyfriend was starting a band, and you auditioned and became the lead singer of the California Blues Band.

Rickie Lee Jones:
California Blues Band.

Debbie Millman:
Your mother gave you money to buy a paisley empire-waisted one-piece satin lounge pajama outfit that you saw at Lerners department store. I remember Lerners department store, by the way. What did it feel like to finally sort of be the lead singer in a band?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, I wore that pajama out of Lerners that day. So I was walking through Christown Mall with it on, and I felt like … so they’re looking at me, and I like that. Partly I think that they might not like me, but I don’t care. I’m kind of walking on air and I’m part of the hippies. That costume was an invitation to anywhere I wanted to go. I’m grown up, I’m part of the hippies, I’m a rockstar. We didn’t say rockstar back then, but I’m the lead singer of a band. I’m in a band. So it felt like, I guess, uniforms are supposed to make you feel. When you put on a uniform, you’re a part of us, and you do this. Maybe uniforms help you do your job better. But I felt like I had put on the uniform of my future.

It was also defiance, because the lounge pajama, it was a pajama, which I didn’t know. I didn’t know people wore lounge pajamas. I never heard of that. So it was defiance against my parents who would let, my mother would let me, but she wouldn’t like it, and all the people that were looking at me, and that defiance made me feel good. That’s the key in me, I guess, I need a little defiance.

Debbie Millman:
Actually, the defiance reminds me of an experience you had in high school where you were expelled because you refused to take off your hat.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Yeah. Defiance with clothes. When you take off the hat, you get no education.

Debbie Millman:
I believe that that teacher also was very cruel to you and told you that you were an undesirable element at the school.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, not the teacher, but the vice principal. The teacher was a woman, the home ed teacher, but the vice principal said I was an undesirable element because I said, “No, no, wait, you just expelled me. You suspended me for three days for this. I just got back.” He said, “I don’t care. You’re an undesirable element at this school.” So she didn’t seem to know that I’d already been absent—

Debbie Millman:
Punished for it.

Rickie Lee Jones:
… for three days, and sent the note in again. So it just seemed so unfair, but he made it clear, he didn’t care if it was fair, he was taking this opportunity to get me out of the school. Shame on him.

Debbie Millman:
Shame on him, indeed. Did he ever apologize to you when he realized what you did with your life?

Rickie Lee Jones:
It’s not just me. He kicked out 11 other hippies that year. He got rid of all the heads. Some of those kids were just long-haired kids. They didn’t smoke pot. They were really good students. No, he didn’t apologize to anybody.

Debbie Millman:
All of that ultimately motivated you to run away.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Yes, again.

Debbie Millman:
You ran away several times as a teenager. On the road, you had skirmishes with gangsters, would-be abductors. You snuck into a concert venue to see Jimi Hendrix. You witnessed an abusive man beating up his wife. You even met a pimp, who was actually rather nice. When you settled in Los Angeles, you lived in a cave for a while. You hitchhiked on a dark highway to get to Canada. Though I know in real life you end up alive—obviously, we’re talking—there were moments while reading your book where I was genuinely terrified that you might not make it. How scared were you during these experiences in your early life?

Rickie Lee Jones:
I think I was scared a lot. When I made the decision to leave my dad in 1968, he had become abusive and was drinking too much. Not that I hadn’t kind of been used to that a little bit, but when he beat me, that hadn’t happened before, and I went, “I’m out of here.” There’d been a festival I wanted to go to, so I took that opportunity to run away. I had an ability, it turned out, to take care of myself with strangers, but it was always terrifying. I hitchhiked, and you never know who’s going to pick you up. You have to be so aware of every tiny detail of the person if you’re going to survive. I had that skill and I also got a lot of luck.

So it was thrilling, but I was also a little baby. I was just 14 years old, and I looked older because I had big boobs. That’s all. If I’d been flat-chested, I don’t think anybody would have mistaken me for a 17 … I said I was 17 because I didn’t act like an 18-year-old because I didn’t know enough. So if I did 17, that would get me through.

I went in a car with somebody bringing pot back from Mexico. So that was so dang dangerous. And to me it was just kind of thrilling. Lots of people were bringing pot over. So I could do that too and see what that felt like to be nefarious. Well, from the time that guy got over there, I got worried about the people who brought the drugs. I was in danger. I didn’t know that guy. I mean, it was a friend of a friend of a friend, but who knows who he was. Yet, escorted there to Hot Springs and back home again. So it does sometimes feel like I had a very divine escort, which my intellect, my instincts, but no, it feels like something brighter than just me. So I was scared a lot.

Debbie Millman:
When you settled in Los Angeles, you were able to collect unemployment from a job you’d been fired from. You were set to get $85 a month for six months, which at the time was just enough to pay rent.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Just enough. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
So you gave yourself that six months to either have a career in music or you would have to go home. I believe that one of the first songs you wrote at that time was one that ended up on your first album, a song that I’ve probably played several thousand times in my life. It’s a song called “Company.” You talk about writing it in the book; I don’t remember the exact word that you used, but it sounded like, or it felt like it was an excruciating process at the time to write that song. Can you talk a little bit about how you wrote that song? I mean, that’s a crazy good song to be the first song you’ve ever really written. It’s a masterpiece.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Yeah. I had written the lyric. I worked for this gangster named Rocky, and luckily he was probably doing who knows when he was really shipping, but I’d have to sit at a desk and wait for a consolidated shipping form to fill out, and I have many hours to do nothing. So I started writing lyrics on the typewriter. The typewriter made me feel like a real writer, and I wrote the lyrics to “Young Blood,” some parts of “The Real End,” which becomes a line in “Coolsville,” and “Company.” Pretty much almost as it ends up, “I’ll remember you too clearly, but I’ll survive another day. Conversations to share, no one there. I’ll imagine what you’d say. Two for the movie show, three in the back row. Hold on tight.” So I’m playing with synchronized rhythmic ideas in the lyrics, right? Can you see the connection? So that’s what I’m sitting there doing.

But when I reach across the galaxy, and I think that was the line, that was not too many universes and galaxies, a few, but not too many in lyrics. “When I reach across the galaxy, I’ll miss your company.” In the old [inaudible] way, just two verses, not even a bridge. So I met this guy out on the beach, Alfred Johnson. He was playing piano, and he was good, and he knew Laura Nyro songs, and he was playing the old stuff that I liked, “Up on the Roof,” and whatever.

So I agreed to go over to his house, which was a little bit of a risky thing to do. At that age, sort of like 22 or so, I was not as risky as I had been as a teenager, but I went ahead over him and his friend, and when I walked in—and it was an apartment in the very back overlooking the garage—when I walked in, there were dismembered dolls everywhere, hanging from things and stuck on the lamps and stuff. So I had to use that … I was still at the door, I know, but I had to use that instinct of, “Is this a message or is this art? What am I looking at here?” And I could see them looking at me and I just went, “cool.” And I don’t even know if I commented on it, which made them respect me even more. I was pretty sure I wasn’t in danger.

I asked myself, “Why does the world have to be so dangerous that if you go over to somebody’s house, you don’t know if they’re going to kill you.” It’s so dangerous for women every day, and we live with that tension every day. Men can’t know, and they dismiss it. They go, “What are you always worried about?” Well, because there’s a lot to worry about, and you can’t know unless you become one of us, and how many ways we have to watch all the time.

So anyway, I got there and quite the opposite of danger happened, which is he sat behind his keyboard, and he had so much equipment. He loved all this equipment. Alfred is a Black man from far away, like Riverside or something. I assumed his language would be Black music, but it wasn’t. It was Buffalo Springfield and Little Feat. It was that generation of music, while mine actually was Marvin Gaye. And don’t get me wrong, I think Buffalo Springfield was a very important band, where many, many things connect. But so we had a common language that we didn’t know when we first met. As we began to play, he took ahold of the lyrics and he did something nobody does … I can only describe it as a physical thing where he took ahold of them and cut a little hole out and put his heart in them. He made them his own.

We did it in the old way of … like I would imagine the old timey songwriters would’ve done. So I’m standing by the keyboard, he’s there, and we’re singing every single thing. “So how are we going to write this, ‘Company’?” “’Company,’” I said, “I was hoping that Frank Sinatra might sing this.” OK. So I’ve given us some kind of a language to use to start. [singing] I could see Frank doing that. So there’s our first line. Then I think I do that, and then Alfred says [singing]. So, as we got deeper in, almost syllables were exchanged. [singing] Maybe that was one person. [singing] And that much took an hour and a half. So by 12 hours later, we’d finished it. [singing] Can’t sing it with the earphones in. [singing] “What cords are we going to put under there?” “So that second time we do it, when we suspend that cord and resolve it.” “Well, remember it, do it next time. Don’t forget. That was really good.”

So by the time it was done, we had lived a lifetime together, and we were done. We did write more. We wrote the bridge to “Weasel and the White Boys,” and he wants to write more, and I would like to write more with him. But I have to see him in another life because that was a whole lifetime spent with Alfred writing “Company.” I tell it with words, but I’d like to go back and feel what it was to have all life before you, before me, and know that every single thing I did mattered, and was forming all the roads that would be on the map to come.

It’s hard to have that at 66. But if you don’t, if you don’t say, “I have a life before me, and there are still many roads to carve out of everything I make,” it’s a question of timing also, but you have to keep seeing your life as before you, not after you. That power will go into the work that you make. I think one of the things about ‘Company,’ besides that I was a forlorn, love-lost lyricist, was all life was before us. And we had a lot at stake.

Debbie Millman:
But yet the song feels like an old soul wrote it. It’s hard to believe that you were just coming out of your teenage years when you wrote that song. You also wrote a song titled “Easy Money” that the producer, Bud Dain, liked.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Bud Dain.

Debbie Millman:
And then he offered you a job, wherein you would write a certain number of songs per month for $800 a month. And back in 1977, that was like winning the lottery. You were all set to sign it. And then similar to your decision with Lew King, you didn’t.

Rickie Lee Jones:
Similar with my brother, the voice that spoke about my brother’s accident. It wasn’t bad, but it was also almost like a juxtaposition of time, because understand, I have the pen in my hand. I’ve come up the elevator to the office to sign. And I have the pen in my hand and something very loudly says, “Don’t sign. If he wants you, someone else will too,” which is an invitation to the future. It’s saying, “You are just beginning. This is not where you’re supposed to go. Don’t stop here.” Isn’t that funny how destiny calls you, but you can get waylaid like the Odyssey. You can get waylaid. So, it was a powerful moment. I still am in awe that some part of me knew that I would go to better places. This would not be my only chance. When we’re down at the bottom, we do feel like anything is where we’re supposed to be.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You write that it took balls to pass up that opportunity and opt for poverty on the belief that something greater was meant for you. And it was, it was. At this point in your life, you were doing gigs around various small, somewhat seedy venues through Los Angeles. What would you consider to be your big breakthrough? What was that moment?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Troubadour. The Troubadour was the third show. Nick Mathe, my old next door neighbor, had become my manager, and he had actually done a pretty good job, I think. And we had decided we’d have three showcases, which showcases was like, you didn’t get paid. I guess it’s how it always is now, but you didn’t get paid and you did a 20- or 30-minute show. And then people could come and get a taste for who you are. So we did three of them. The last one would be at the Troubadour, and that one had a … it was like a snowball. The first one, there were three famous people, that is three A&R guys, or three … this was full of them. We got it attached to Wendy Waldman’s show because we couldn’t get in anywhere.

So they put us in at the very beginning of her show, God bless her for that. We had people from three record companies, Warner Brothers, Portrait, Horizon, and I think Portrait or Horizon was a subsidiary of Columbia, A&M, Tommy LiPuma. So there were a whole bunch of important folks at that show. I did five songs, and I invited my friends from the street, that is four or five guys I knew who hung out on the street on Santa Monica Boulevard, came in and sang harmony on an a capella thing. My friend from The Great American Food & Beverage Company came in and played piano on [inaudible], and I played the other … because I wanted to show them as much as I could how big the room was, what I liked, the old-timey stuff, a capella stuff, because I didn’t know if the songs I wrote showed you where I wanted to go. So anyway, that was my big plan, and I think it worked.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote about a drive with the producer Lowell George as the official beginning of your new life, the one that you live today, and you write, “That ride seemed so right and normal as if I had always been destined to ride in that Range Rover. Although I was giddy inside, I was cool. And if I may say, beautiful. I knew who I was, the songwriter, the girl in the beret. I belonged sipping Moet with Lowell George. I belonged.” What did you envision your future would be like at that point?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, I think at that time I was really living in the here and now. So I had Lowell and the possibility of his world. I knew Tom and Chuck and their world. So this is me on unemployment, possibly becoming part of worlds that I’ve lived with all my life. So here sitting in the couch is David Crosby, and over there is Graham Nash. So that’s what I was doing. I don’t think I was doing anything else but navigating my feelings and the real world before me.

Debbie Millman:
You knew from the beginning of your career that you wanted to have staying power. And before you even made a record, you were aware of the danger of being what you referred to as being used up too fast. Were you worried that that might happen?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Sure, but the illusion was a year into my career, and I was so very famous. All the doors opened, all the backstage doors opened, and I seemed to have so much money it would never go away. The illusion was that it would always be that way. It could never go away. That’s been the challenge, is learning that balloon of attention and fame will be expelled. And how will you be here in 30 years if this is where you want to be? The only way for me was to write work that was so iconic and so powerful that, like Frank Sinatra, who was my hero, that people would always come back to be a part of it. So that was what I set out to do. So, it’s been a life experience, not a career experience. It’s been learning how to navigate life.

The thing I feel now is that music and this career, there’s no difference between my life and my career, and my career and my life. They’re all mixed up together. That’s why it was OK to write the book and tell you about my history, because if you’re meant to be here, it’ll only do good. Also, I wanted to … I thought, There really aren’t very many stories of women’s whole lives. We have memoirs, but this is a story of a life, and a time, and a family, and at an extraordinary event, that is my career, but the book is the story of a life.

Debbie Millman:
What’s really interesting is as, I guess I would be considered a super fan, reading your book illuminated so much of your music in a completely different way, because you have been so private. I was sort of astounded by the history that you bring to your music, and it sort of helps augment the music in a completely different way. Relistening to your entire catalog in preparation for the interview, I was like, “Oh, OK. That’s the story in ‘Coolsville.’” You kind of get the music in a completely different way. Your second album, Pirates, is considered one of the greatest albums ever made. And I’m not saying that because I’m a fan, I’m saying that because it’s been written about as one of the greatest albums ever made.

And it was written at the end of your addiction to heroin, when you and musician Sal Bernardi lived on 9th Street in Manhattan. And you write that, “This is where Sal and I lost our way together. We stayed up all night and slept until 4 p.m. and rose half-dead to get high and feel half-alive again. We wrote music and read Edgar Allan Poe,” who shows up in some of the lyrics. “We lived the strange twilight, the slow-motion fluid that fed our memories. We were junkies.” You’ve said that heroin was like a carnival ride you couldn’t exit until the ride was over. And one day you knew it was time to get off the ride. How did you kick the habit? Because you didn’t go to rehab. How did you manage to get over this?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Well, it took a lot of false starts. It’s hard to describe to anybody how overpowering heroin is to the spirit and the psyche. And I guess I’m many, many, many years away, so it’s safe for me to look, but it’s also kind of like, what’s that … you know that book, The Hobbit, and there’s that one eye in the tower? It’s kind of like that. If you turn and look at it, it’ll look at you too. But I guess it’s talking to the part of the brain that doesn’t feel safe and doesn’t feel pleasure, and it fills that up with safety and pleasure in a half-sleep state where you can write anything and be walking in a dream and talking. So, well, that’s nice. But in a month, or two, or six, this place begins to recede.

So when you stop taking the drug, this place isn’t quite the same anymore. So when you’ve been on that drug for a few years, you don’t have anything here to root into. It has gone away and become part of the dream place. The strength of will it takes to abandon that safe, wonderful dream place for this stark bright, hard, frightening world is incredible. When I was a drug addict, about two or three years, I began to want to be well. And that helps that language to say, “I’m sick and I want to be well.” It was very hard. I had a therapist, I tried, I failed, I tried, I failed. I identified triggers, and it took a year or a year and a half of saying “no more,” and then relapsing.

But after finally three months or four months, the test, I survived that test. I didn’t get high, and a year later, the year test. So, I never went to AA or anything, but it really was one day at a time, one step at a time. We made it here, we made it there, and resolving never to go back. Now, what I just wanted to do right now was to try to describe what addiction is so that people who don’t have addictive personalities could get a sense that it’s not a choice. It’s like an altering of the brain that takes place, and it takes the will to go, “I know that place exists, even though I can’t see it anymore, and I’m going back. I’m going over the mountains and through the deserts, and I’m finding my way back to reality.”

Debbie Millman:
You’ve been sober for decades now, and write, “How months go by now when you forget you were an addict. The dark is gone. The shadow’s faded. You are recovered and whole.” One thing that I shook my head over as I was reading your book was the notion that male rockers like Keith Richards, you sort of admired for his longevity and drug use. But women in rock and roll are shamed for the same behavior that men are often held for. How do you make sense of that, if you can?

Rickie Lee Jones:
I think we do it with women in all things. We assign a moral code to them that we don’t hold men to. And it’s sad because that dubiousness is creating careers. It’s very hard now to have a career if you won’t sell yourself sexually. We worked so hard to not have to do that. So that’s a little discouraging.

Debbie Millman:
Well, one other thing that you can’t help but notice if you look at the lyric and the liner notes of your albums, all the songs are “music and lyrics by Rickie Lee Jones,” for the most part. You look at some of the popular music today and you see, and I’m really not joking, 30 or 40 names. I don’t even know how that is possible.

Rickie Lee Jones:
I guess everybody in the room gets their name on.

Debbie Millman:
It seems like there was a moment in time where music was a very personal sort of soul-revealing experience. And over time, that’s sort of changed to really become entertainment.

Rickie Lee Jones:
The relationship was the art. It was the person’s relationship with art. Now, it’s a person’s relationship with show business and fame. What they’re seeking is success. What we sought was a great song. We hoped it sold, but our emphasis was the great song. It’s not anymore. Nobody’s trying to write a great song. They’re trying to write a hit song. That’s what shows. That’s too bad. But I really think we’re cyclical. People get tired of that. That’ll fall away. Something else will take its place. Hopefully songs, hopefully not just sounds, but who knows what’s coming?

Debbie Millman:
Finally, my last question is one that my wife, who is a writer, suggested that I ask you. The question is, how would the liner notes of your life read?

Rickie Lee Jones:
Of my life? Woo. That’s a long and creative thing, which I don’t know if I can do on the fly. It’s kind of like a tombstone too, right? That’s a kind of good idea. Instead of a tombstone, we’ll put some liner notes. I guess I would say she was a woman of her time who transcended her time, but that’s too easy. That’s more like a tombstone. I guess she was a woman who transcended, who found a place to fit in. You could go either way with that. But I think the jury’s out, and liner notes are always written by somebody else, their view of who you are. You can try to plant eggs and get them to go in that direction, but I was never sure how other people saw me. There’s a nice thing that’s happened this year, where I finally don’t feel misunderstood. That’s really all I could ask for. Things seem to be right now. So maybe there won’t be any liner notes, or just put it out and let people guess.

Debbie Millman:
Rickie Lee Jones, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express to you how much your music has meant to me in my life. I own everything you’ve ever published and really just want to thank you for doing the work that you do. Thank you for enriching my life with your music and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Rickie Lee Jones:
You’re welcome. Thank you so much for doing this, too. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Rickie Lee Jones’ new memoir is titled Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour. You could read more about her remarkable career on her website, rickieleejones.com. This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Debbie Millman:

A good song tells a story. And behind every good song, there’s another story of how that song was born. That is the subject matter of Song Exploder. Every episode explores a single song and goes deep with its creators on where the idea for it came from, and how they turned that idea into the song we know and love.

Song Exploder, itself, also has a story. First, it was a podcast. And now, it’s also a series on Netflix. And the hero of this story is the host of Song Exploder, Hrishikesh Hirway. Welcome to Design Matters.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Debbie Millman:

Hrishikesh, I understand when you were little, your favorite soft drink was orange soda. Why orange soda?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Because it was not the obvious choice of Coke or Pepsi.

Debbie Millman:

Now, did you have a favorite brand? Was it Fanta? Or what was your favorite orange soda brand?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

No, I don’t think so, because I think I mostly, I only really ever got to have orange soda as a fountain drink. And so, I don’t know that I actually paid attention at that point to what brand it was.

Debbie Millman:

Your father was a food scientist. Your mom worked for Sears. And you grew up in Peabody, Mass., where your parents moved after leaving India. What made your folks decide to settle in Peabody?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Well, my dad first arrived in Oregon. He was doing a food science program there. And then transferred to UMass Amherst. And that’s how Massachusetts became our home. And then they moved into an apartment in Malden, Mass., which is where I was born. And I don’t know that I’ve ever actually asked them that much about why they chose Peabody. Oh, in Massachusetts we pronounce it puberty.

Debbie Millman:

Ah, Peabody, sounds like puberty. I’m going to stick with Peabody. It sounds more like the award we all want. Right?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Great.

Debbie Millman:

I’m really fascinated by food scientists, having spent so much of my career in branding for fast-moving consumer goods. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to either live with or be a food scientist. Did you have a lot of experiments with recipes and things like that? Were you quite an adventurous young eater?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

So, the first job that my dad had when I was born, was working for this hot dog company. And my mom was a lifelong vegetarian. So he would bring things home from work, but she couldn’t eat any of it, and wouldn’t eat any of it, wouldn’t even prepare any of it. And so my dad would be the one who would heat up this new kielbasa or something that he’d come up with. I remember they came out with a, it was like a cocktail weenies in sauce package. It was like a boil-in-a-bag situation.

Debbie Millman:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yum.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I think they were very proud of this product. And it was so convenient. And you could have cocktail weenies in the sauce. So, these are the kinds of things that I ate when I was 6, 7, 8 years old.

Debbie Millman:

I think it’s really interesting that we’re just a few minutes into this interview and we’ve already said the words puberty and weenie. [I’m not sure] what that means, but I think it’s fascinating.

Debbie Millman:

I understand you first fell in love with music when you heard a cassette your parents had of Lata Mangeshkar, one of the biggest Bollywood stars ever. What about that particular music moved you?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Growing up, that was just the background of our lives. Especially on the weekends, my parents would listen to a radio show that would air on Sundays where they would play a two-hour, three-hour block of Indian songs. But then outside of that radio show, my parents had these cassettes of different Bollywood musical soundtracks. That was just what music was, for the most part. I think my mom also had one Donna Summer record.

Debbie Millman:

Which one?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I don’t remember.

Debbie Millman:

I think I’m going to have to get your parents on this podcast, just so that I can ask them all of these questions about your background.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I know. So, that music was just part of my life. But then there was this one tape in particular that I think made me feel my first experience of nostalgia. And I don’t know what I was nostalgic for, because all of this was music that was made before I was born. But I understood the feeling is something profounder. I don’t know. I liked it. I was both a little bit scared of it and mystified by it, but I found myself drawn to it too. I wanted to listen to that tape over and over and over again to get that feeling. And I don’t even know that I knew the word nostalgia, just I knew that feeling and was drawn to it, wanted to experience it.

Debbie Millman:

You first started piano lessons when you were 7 years old. And your parents took you to a piano shop in the local mall for private lessons. Can you talk a little bit about how your sister, Priya, helped you practice?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yeah. She drew an octave of a piano on a piece of paper so that I could practice. We didn’t have a piano, we didn’t have a keyboard, or anything like that. But my whole family was so supportive of me learning music. They all wanted to help. And so, my sister had this idea: “Well, here now you can actually put your fingers on these pretend keys and you can practice that way.” And so that was my first piano.

Debbie Millman:

And did it work? Did you become a better player while you were practicing that way?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

It definitely worked. It was the only thing I had to use, but it definitely helped me understand what I was doing. And I mean, I only got a keyboard a while after that. So for a long time, that piece of paper piano was my piano. And my parents always dreamt of being able to have a piano in our home, but we never did. But I finally, I have one now. And that was a very exciting day, a few years ago, when I finally got one here for my home.

Debbie Millman:

And you still take piano lessons, is that correct?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I do. I’ve taken a little break now, for the pandemic, but for a while I’ve been taking lessons again, which has been really nice.

Debbie Millman:

How good of a player are you?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I would say I’m not very good. I’m maybe a lower intermediate, I’d say.

Debbie Millman:

Your sister also accidentally taught you how to read by playing school [with] you. And I loved reading that, because I actually did that with my little brother too. I would force him to be my only student. I’d have pretend names for fake students, but he’d be my student. And I would teach him. I guess I really wanted to be a teacher when I was a little girl. And I did it so well that he ended up skipping kindergarten, going straight into first grade, which is one of my proudest moments as a sister.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Well, that’s what happened to me too.

Debbie Millman:

Really? The exact same thing? You skipped kindergarten?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I skipped kindergarten.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, wow.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

That’s so cool.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Although, I was one of many students my sister had. It was me and six or seven other stuffed animals.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I think it’s in Barbie Dolls.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yeah. So, it was a whole class, but yeah. And when I got to kindergarten, there was a day early on when we had some handout or something and I was reading it to my friend who was sitting next to me, and then the teacher stopped me and she said, “Wait, you can already read that?” And I said, “Yeah.” And then she called in the first-grade teacher whose classroom was connected. And then they just asked me to read some more of it. And then they asked me a few questions. And then they asked my parents to come to the school. And then about a week later, I was in the first grade.

Debbie Millman:

Interesting, interesting. Now, I know in addition to loving music, I read [that] as a teenager, you used to listen to music while pouring over the lyrics and the liner notes and the artwork, until you could almost feel yourself living in the world of the artist. Were you making any visual art at that point?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I always drew. And by the time I got to high school, it started to turn more towards functionally making posters and things like that for my band. I was in art classes as well, but I was more excited about doing stuff for whatever band I was in. It was also around the time when I started to realize that my desire to draw didn’t quite match up with my skills.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

In a lot of ways, when I got to high school, I met so many people who were so good at all the things that they did. And so many of those things were things that I really loved and wanted to do. And I got a little bit dismayed to discover that there were just levels and levels above where I was at from kids who were my same age. I started to feel like I had to find my path because I wasn’t so good as I thought at a bunch of this stuff.

Debbie Millman:

So tell us about your first early bands. I know you played drums in a student rock band and also piano and drums in this school jazz band.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

How serious were you about being a musician at that time?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I was serious about it in so far as it was the thing that I loved the most. The school had a drum room, one little tiny closet with a drum kit in it that they had soundproofed, so kids could practice in there. And I would just spend hours and hours playing in there.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. You studied art and design at Yale University. What made you decide to do that? And after you’ve answered that question, I want to ask how your parents felt about you studying art and design.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Well, I didn’t think that I was going to study art and design until I had already arrived there. When I first got there, I was thinking I was going to do English and philosophy. And that was mainly inspired by a couple of great teachers that I had in high school, who had also gone to Yale. They’d gone to Yale for undergrad. And they’d gone to Yale for graduate school. And then they’d returned to the high school that they went to, which was the high school that I was going to, in order to teach there. And I really loved them and I found them inspiring. I really found their classes enriching. And I thought maybe that was something that I could do. It felt noble and exciting. And then I got there and it turned out I just didn’t love writing the paper that you have to constantly write.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

While I was there, I also took intro to drawing class, because I still loved that and still wanted to do art as much as I could. And I enjoyed that a lot. It was also a prerequisite for anything else in the art department. At that time, I didn’t know what the term graphic design was. It was only introduced to me in the school catalog as I was going through the art class. The most fun I would have was in the weeks before school started, reading the course catalog. I also played Dungeons and Dragons. And for me, looking at the course catalog of school felt like I was rolling up my own Dungeons and Dragons character, picking like, which skills do you want to choose?

Debbie Millman:

And what imagination for the future you could conjure.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yeah, exactly. So, I would read, cover to cover, I’d read that course catalog. And one of those was graphic design classes. And I was like, “Oh, wait, this is the stuff that I was doing already for the bands that I was in.” The posters and things that I would make, flyers in high school. And so, I took that. And when I took that class, something just clicked in my brain and I thought, This is actually what I want to do. This is so much more exciting to me than the papers that I was reading.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I was really enjoying the books and things that I would get to read, but then having to write the sort of analytical essay, which I had done so many times in high school already too, felt like I was repeating myself a little bit. But the design classes and really everything in the art major, and the chance to have to come up with something entirely new, that felt really satisfying to me in a way that I didn’t know that you could major in that f
eeling. And so, that’s what I wanted to do.

Debbie Millman:

Did you envision becoming a professional designer at that time?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

No, I don’t think so. I’m not sure that I had a coherent sense of what kind of professional anything I could be. I just knew what I loved. I was playing in bands then too. But I really didn’t know what that might lead to. I’d given up, I think, on this idea that I was going to go back to my high school and teach, but I hadn’t figured anything else out in the meantime. I did have the sense that like, this is a marketable skill, too. In addition to being something that I really liked … this was around the time when I’d made my first website in high school. And I started doing that more and more. And so, I knew that there was this budding interest for people who could make websites. And I thought, well, if I can make them look good, this is a skill that I could use somewhere in the world.

Debbie Millman:

Before you even graduated, you started your first professional band, The One AM Radio. Why that name?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I think you’re being generous to say it was professional.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve recorded albums. You’ve toured. I mean, that’s professional.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I guess so. I think I wanted it to be professional, but it certainly, I think it would be a few more years before it could come anywhere close to being considered professional. But yeah, at the time I definitely wanted it to feel real and not just like a school project or something like that, or something that I did for fun on the weekends.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

But in terms of the name, the name really came from a couple of different impulses. A lot of the people who I loved had these aliases for their performing names, like Cat Power, or Bill Callahan performed as Smog. And I just, I loved that.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

And I think there was a part of me that felt like if I did use my first and last name, and people saw Hrishikesh Hirway, it might just be some kind of barrier to entry in America, or that someone might misinterpret it and think it was like, I made world music or something like that. I don’t know. I just knew it didn’t … there were a couple of reasons why it didn’t feel right.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

So I wanted to come up with a band name. And I have this need for things to live on multiple levels whenever possible. And when I was little and my mom was working at Sears, she worked nights. And I used to go with my dad to go pick her up. And I remember just sitting in the car, listening to my dad, listening to AM radio. I wasn’t really paying attention to what was on the radio. But again, the sound of it just made me feel nostalgic, even though it was contemporary radio, the staticky quality of it. And my mom wasn’t working at 1 in the morning. We would pick her up, it would be like 9 o’clock, but it would be my bedtime. And I would be in my pajamas in the car.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

So, by the time I was 19, that felt like late at night, that felt like it translated to 1 in the morning. And that intersection between AM radio and 1 a.m. felt like there was something fun in there, and a very specific kind of feeling that existed in that intersection between 1 o’clock in the morning and the AM radio.

Debbie Millman:

How would you describe the music you make as One AM Radio?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I’ve tried to make a few different kinds of records, but I think that they all tie back to some of those first feelings of wanting to make something that felt nostalgic and maybe a little bit melancholy, and things like that. Some of them are overtly sad songs. But I think even when the subject matter wasn’t sad, I was always trying to make it sound like it could give you that same kind of feeling that that Lata Mangeshkar tape gave me, or that AM radio late-night pickup gave me—something a little bit cozy, something that you missed, some feeling of longing.

Debbie Millman:

Where does that melancholy come from?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I think there’s something just very romantic about it. It’s been romanticized certainly in a lot of art. And I think I’m just like a total sucker for it. I really, I fell for it hard in everything, in books and movies, and music too. And so I wanted to just live in that dreamy, magical feeling. And I think it also, there was a depth to it. It was a way to be a teenager making music that felt like I was living in the world on some other level.

Debbie Millman:

Is it true that you tried to make your first album, The Home of Electric Air, entirely by yourself—the recording, the writing, the mixing, the producing and the artwork?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I tried to do as much of it as I could myself. Definitely, there were some things that I recruited others for. There’s some violin and cello. And I think there’s maybe one part on one of the songs that somebody else recorded. But I was really trying to do it all myself. And then the artwork and the photography. It was a chance for me to express all these different parts of who I was in one object.

Debbie Millman:

I know in an effort to support yourself as a musician, you worked as a creative director at Dangerbird Records. You also took a job as a designer at Apple. Talk about the experience at Apple. You were there just a few years after the iPod first came out.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yeah. Actually, while I was there, I remember the iPod Shuffle came out during those few months that I worked there.

Debbie Millman:

I remember that.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yeah. And everybody who is an Apple employee got one. But I was not an Apple employee, I was a contractor because I didn’t want to commit to a job there. But I remember they had a, it was right around this time, they had a Christmas party in 2004. And all the full-time employees left to go to the Christmas party. And I stayed at my desk till I keep working on my iTunes designs. And then they all came back and they had iPod Shuffles.

Debbie Millman:

What was it like working there? Did you learn anything interesting?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I learned a lot about Photoshop, actually. There was a big part of the job that involved just output. There were some elements of design, but there were also elements of just production. And so, you had to get really fast. And there’s so many Photoshop skills that I learned there.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

This is one of the things in school, at Yale the design program is really about the concepts more than it is about any kind of execution. Th
ere’s never a class where [someone] on the faculty ever sat down and said, “Here’s how you use Photoshop,” or “here’s how you use Illustrator.” Or anything like that. It was just like, “Well, just make this.” And it was a matter of however you expressed your ideas, and the tools didn’t really matter.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

So, that was a really nice experience for me in terms of real hardcore, practical learning. There were a few people there who sat down and just said, “OK, well, while you’re doing this, you can do it this way, and you can do it this way.” And I learned all kinds of things that I still think about now.

Debbie Millman:

Songs you wrote titled “Accidents,” and “An Old Photo of Your New Lover,” were featured in the romantic comedy Save The Date, and on the CW dramas “One Tree Hill” and “Gossip Girl.” You also toured internationally. You released four albums between 2002 and 2011. It seemed like you were right on the precipice of making it big. But in 2012, you pivoted and tried your hand at film composing. What made you decide to do that?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Well, I actually moved to LA because I wanted to pursue film scoring. I was already doing the One AM Radio. I had started that in college. So, by the time I graduated, I had had this one feeling in terms of what was I going to do for a living.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I remember there was a class where we watched Zabriskie Point, the Antonioni film, Zabriskie Point. And there was this incredible moment where a house blows up and it goes into this extended musical sequence with music from Pink Floyd. And I just thought it was so beautiful. And I remembered something that like a feeling that I had it for a long time, but only just remembered it in crystal form at that point, which was, “Oh yeah, I want to score films.” And it was the first concrete feeling of like, “This is what I want to do for a job.” And then I didn’t know how one does that at all.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Eventually, I moved to LA to try and pursue that, with the idea that I could do my band. It was just me. I could do that from anywhere. So, that was going to travel with me. But if I were going to do any kind of film stuff, I had to get to LA, and find out what was here.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

It took a little while, but then I started working as an assistant to a composer. And I got a lesson, whether it was the right one or not, I’m not sure, but I learned that when you’re starting out, you have to say “yes” to everything and do the job that’s needed. And that was really not what I wanted to do. I wanted to be chosen for the job. I wanted to be asked to do the job because of who I was, not jump at any opportunity, and then have to be a chameleon.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I had enough success as a songwriter and as a producer, and musician, I thought if I pursued that further, then there would be a greater chance that I could prove to somebody, “This is what I do. And if you want this, then you can hire me.” So I hit the brakes a little bit on the film scoring stuff, and instead pursued my band more single-mindedly.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

And then in 2011, my friend made this movie and he asked me to score it. And he was somebody who I’d known forever. He made the first music video for my band. And it took a lot longer than I’d hoped to finally score a film, but it felt like the right kind of circumstance for it.

Debbie Millman:

It seems like at that point in your life, you were struggling with what you were supposed to do, fulfilling family obligations and doing what was in your heart. You stated this about yourself in an interview at about that time: “I was the screwup who was following his whims and going off wherever, without much heed to responsibility, either personal responsibility or familial responsibility.” Tell me how much that was playing into your decisions about where to go next in your life?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Well, it was always hard to demonstrate the validity of my career choices to my family and to a culture that we belong to, where the path I was on was something unknown to them. So, as crass as it was, and as meaningless as it felt, in some ways, I was like, there needed to be these kinds of external markers of validation to be able to say, “Look, this was meaningful. This is real. There’s some element of success here.” And I just wasn’t getting that from my music career.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Scoring a film, even though that wasn’t like a very lucrative opportunity or anything like that, at least it was something that my family could understand. They’re like, “Oh, it’s a movie.” And then, it was going to go to Sundance. And they were like, “Oh, I’ve heard of Sundance, I think.” And that felt legit. And I had always been looking for that, in a way that, like … my parents didn’t know what Pitchfork was. They didn’t care that I got to … they barely know what South by Southwest is. If I’m saying, like, “I’m playing a festival,” they’re like, “OK.” They’ve never been to one. So, that had been on my mind for a long time, for sure.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

After that movie came out, after the next movie that I scored came out, I was at this moment where I didn’t really know what to do next. Like you said, it seemed like maybe with a couple of these things that had happened, maybe I was on some precipice of some kind of success, but I really felt like I had pushed and pushed and pushed for so long to have any kind of real success, and especially any kind of real success that was sustainable. And that just wasn’t happening.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

And after, it had been 11 years that I had lived in LA, I was feeling really discouraged. In 2013, I was feeling like, well, nothing really ever broke for me. And so, that year I started a new music project. I started a new band, basically. And I started working on making a podcast. And I also started working on a TV show idea. And all of that stuff felt like in some ways, like a distraction from The One AM Radio, and the distraction from what was supposed to be my “real career.”

Hrishikesh Hirway:

But with the podcast, especially, I thought, “Well, maybe this could be a way that I could have a day job that was of my own making, and also under my own control, that would allow me to pursue music and not have to worry about it as my means of survival.” Because I think that’s where a lot of tension was for me.

Debbie Millman:

How did you come up with the Song Exploder concept?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Well, I had been listening to a bunch of podcasts around that time and really liking them. I’d listened to them on tour. And I was also a big fan of, there’s a magazine called Tape Op that I really love, that’s called the Creative Recording Magazine, where they would interview a lot of the kinds of artists that I liked listening to about the ways in which they’d record. And there were all kinds of strange and weird ways that people would work to try and get the sound that they want
ed outside of a huge commercial of a situation. It was people who were like me, who were recording at home, who didn’t have training, but who had made these records that I really loved.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

And so, getting to read those interviews was really inspiring for me. But at the same time, it was also print. And I wanted to go further. I wanted to hear the thing that they were talking about. And I thought, well, a podcast could be a place where you could combine these things. You get to explain these ideas. And then you can also hear these things. And better yet, you could not just hear the song, you could potentially hear just the stem of the song, which is just the isolated layer of that one instrument or that one track, which was something I was very familiar with from having made my own music all of these years. The moments where you’re solo, just the one track to hear what’s really going on in it. So, that was where it came from.

Debbie Millman:

Is it true that Questlove’s liner notes were one of the original inspirations for the show?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, many years before that, I remember he had written in the liner notes for the album Things Fall Apart. He talked about this drum sound. That was specifically when I was listening to the record, I had really fallen in love with, because there was a moment where he did what I had been wanting to do, which was make his drums sound like not quite real drums. There’s a moment in the record where it sounds like it switches from a live drum kit to like an old drum sample. It sounds so cool. And then I’m reading the liner notes and he talked about that. He said, “I finally got that sound that I’d been looking for.” And I wanted to know what it was, but that was it. That was all he wrote, that he had finally achieved it. But I needed to know what the answer was so I could do it myself. So, I was thinking about that too.

Debbie Millman:

Rather than assume the risk of doing all of this on your own, you went to a number of established organizations like Spotify, and you proposed that they hire you to make the show for them in-house, and they rejected you. They turned you down. And you went ahead and did it on your own. What gave you the confidence to go ahead and just do it on your own?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I don’t know. I was thinking about something that you wrote about one time about the difference between confidence and courage.

Debbie Millman:

Oh yeah.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

And I don’t know which one it was, if it was courage, despite a lack of confidence, or if it was in fact confidence. I just knew that it was something that I really wanted, that I would really benefit from if it existed in the world. It had this no-brainer kind of feeling to me.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

It was really frustrating to me that I couldn’t convince people to see this thing, the worth of this thing, the way that I saw it. And I think there was some part of me that was just so determined to just prove to myself that I was right, that I thought, Well, I should just do it. And I said I would give myself a year.

Debbie Millman:

Has Spotify since come back with their tail between their legs, so to speak?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

No, they have not.

Debbie Millman:

It’s only a matter of time. It’s only a matter of time.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

They’re doing fine.

Debbie Millman:

How did you raise money to produce the show yourself?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

It didn’t actually take any money. At first, that was a nice thing because I was just doing it all entirely on my own with what I already had. So, the real factor was just convincing people to say “yes” to letting me interview them and handing over their stems, and letting me make the story out of those components.

Debbie Millman:

Song Exploder debut Jan. 1, 2014, and featured Jimmy Tamborello of the synth-pop band The Postal Service. Looking back on that show now, how do you feel about that first episode?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I mean, I wish I could redo it. I think I could probably make a better episode now than I did then. But it was the first time I’d ever interviewed anybody, and it was my first time trying to make a podcast. So, I have to give myself a little bit of forgiveness for the first stab at something.

Debbie Millman:

Oh yeah.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

I mean, I look back at my first hundred episodes, I’m horrified.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Initially, you didn’t want to be in the show at all. And Jimmy Tamborello did both the intro and the outro for the show. That changed when the podcast was picked up by the Maximum Fund Podcast Network. And the founder, Jesse Thorn, felt you should have more of a front-facing role. Why didn’t you want that, initially?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I didn’t really see the point. The thing that I was trying to make was about this artist and their song. So I didn’t understand what I needed to even be doing in there. It could just, it could be this perfect clean little package from the one voice of the creator of that music.

Debbie Millman:

You still edit out a lot of your questions from the podcast episodes. Why? I love you being in it. I love hearing your voice. You have such a good voice.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Well, I still feel the same way about that, that I wanted it to feel like it’s not about me or my point of view. I want someone to be able to just put it on and say, “OK, I’m going to listen to this thing, and I’m going to hear from this creator.” I still think of my presence in the show as being purely functional. The thing that Jesse said was, “I think it will be helpful for people to know that there is an author behind the show.”

Debbie Millman:

I think you’re the soul behind the show.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I guess that’s true, but I also feel like you don’t see a designer’s name. It’s not like a painting where there’s signature at the bottom. On lots of the most beautiful things that have ever been designed, without some research you’d never know who designed it.

Debbie Millman:

That’s changing a bit though. I know that James Victore signs his designs now. Stefan Sagmeister often does. Paul Rand, I think, did occasionally. In any case
—

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Would you ever?

Debbie Millman:

Not my design work, no, only illustrations or artwork.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

And why not? Aren’t you the soul behind that design?

Debbie Millman:

No. And all of the corporate design work that I’ve done, I worked with a team of people. And very little branding actually comes from a single mind. And so, there’s always somebody that’s doing the market research and somebody that’s doing the implementation, and so on and so forth. Even working on Tropicana, there was somebody that was airbrushing the droplets on [an] orange. And there were like 79 droplets or something; every one was numbered and corresponded to. Talk about Photoshop, that was a big file.

Debbie Millman:

So, I wouldn’t feel comfortable ever saying that I designed that on my own because it was just a real group effort. But with illustration or with artwork, definitely. When I’m the sole creator, then I do feel comfortable.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yeah. I think that’s part of it, is that, like, I’m not the sole creator of that show. It doesn’t exist without the raw material of that artist’s work and their ideas. And so, I’m presenting their music and their ideas, and shaping it in a way that I think will hopefully serve the song and the story. But I think in the same way that you’re describing the teamwork on branding, it doesn’t feel right to say, like, “Oh, and this is my creation.”

Debbie Millman:

Well, we can argue about this offline. Now, you’ve said that getting the raw tracks of the songs, the stems, is the main challenge of making the podcasts. I also think it’s one of the greatest things in the podcast, is having these isolated tracks of voices, or drums, or sounds. Why is it so difficult to get those things?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

It’s becoming easier, certainly nowadays. Any music that’s been made in the last 10 years is usually at some point made in some kind of digital format where the tracks have been isolated or something like that. It’s easier. But with older songs, it’s really, really hard. You have to hope that somebody digitized that, or if they haven’t, that the tape exists, the original raw tape exists, and then you have to talk somebody into letting you digitize that. That can be really tricky. But I don’t know that I’d still say that it’s the greatest challenge of the show. It’s our challenge. It’s a technical challenge for sure. But I think I realized the bigger challenges lie in the interviewing and in the storytelling.

Debbie Millman:

What are the challenges in doing that for you?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I think artists can be a little bit cagey about their own intentions. Sometimes I don’t know if an artist is even aware of their own intentions, or where things come from. My hope in the show is to try and connect the dots between an experience or a feeling, or some memory, or something that started somebody off on a path, where they had that moment where one day there was nothing there and then some idea occurred to them. And then that got translated into what eventually became a song. So, all of the moments in between, I want them to chart those, not just what they did, but also the reason why, when they say, “Well, and so I had that idea. So, I turned to the piano and then I played these notes.” I’d love for them to be able to explain why the piano and why those notes, and then why that chord afterwards.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

But music lives in this place that so much art does, between intention and instinct, something that’s actually consciously considered and something that’s just felt. And some artists are really good at being able to take the integral of that curve and find those discrete moments and decisions. And some artists aren’t; they’re just like, “I don’t know. That’s just what I did.” But for me, the best episode is one where you can really say, “I had this happen. And then I did this because I had this feeling, and then I turned it into this sound.” And if I can do it, then I feel really good about it. But that’s I think where the challenge is mostly.

Debbie Millman:

Since your launch, you’ve created nearly 200 episodes. I think you’re about to approach the 200th. A big breakthrough for you came in June of 2015, when U2’s Bono and The Edge joined you for an episode. And you said that once that episode came out, you felt that there was no limit to who could be on the podcast. Has it been easier for you to book guests now that you have achieved this level of success, and now have also brought the show to television?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

It’s easier for sure than when I first started the podcast. But there are still many artists where it takes a lot of convincing to get them to do it. Or not necessarily convincing them, but to get through the layers of gatekeeping before you can get access and convince somebody that, “Yes, this is going to be worthwhile.”

Hrishikesh Hirway:

And machinery around musicians, I should say, is so carefully demarcated around the promotion of a particular track or a particular song, or something like that. And if you don’t line up precisely with what they want, it can be really, really hard.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

People always ask, like, “Why don’t you do this song or you do that song?” And it’s like, “Well, if that artist is not in the mode where they’re doing interviews, that’s not going to be possible.” And if they have, say, a newer album or newer song, everybody’s going to say, “You have to be talking about that only. You can’t talk about your hit from four years ago.” So, that’s still really hard. And I think that’s always going to be hard. But at least I can say, “Hey, here’s the show. These are the people who have been on it.” And it doesn’t seem like potentially as frivolous as it might’ve once seemed.

Debbie Millman:

You have an extraordinary selection of guests. One week you’re talking to Grizzly Bear, then another week you’re talking to Selena Gomez, than another you’re talking to R.E.M, or St. Vincent, or Yo-Yo Ma. You’ve got range. How involved are you now in choosing who joins you on the show? Do you still send out the invitations personally?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yeah. I mean, all the artists that are on the show are ones that I’ve chosen. But nowadays I get pitched a lot more. When I first started, I asked every publicist that I had ever dealt with to send me their press releases, so I could see what new releases were coming out. And so, I still, I look at that and I will go through and ask a publicist, “Is there any chance that this artist would want to do an episode?” But I’m reacting to the fact that artists are putting out something new. And that means that they’re probably more willing to maybe do an interview at some point. And then I get hit up directly from people saying, like, “Will you have this person on?” But ultimately, it’s still whoever I am choosing.

Debbie Millman:

You spend far more time editing than anybody I’ve ever heard of in the podcast world. From what I understand, it takes about 20– 25 hours per episode for a show that is usually about 20 minutes.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I think that might be a little bit low, actually. I think it’s more than 25 hours.

Debbie Millman:

Wow. I mean, do you find it tedious? Do you find it interesting? Do you find it inspiring?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

There are parts that are tedious for sure. I get frustrated at the distance between what’s in my head and the time it takes to actually assemble that in audio. I’m like, “OK, it should go like this and then this, and this, and this, and then this, then we should hear that and then should be like that.” But then to actually go through it, then you’re like, “OK.” And then you move this. And then I have to make this cut. Oh, I got to crossfade it correctly. Oh, I have to clean this up. Oh, the sentence didn’t land. It doesn’t sound like the end of a sentence, so I have to find a replacement, so it sounds like the end of the sentence. All those things, that’s where it can get tedious for sure. But then you finish that little bit and then it sounds the way you want, and it feels so good. That I have to count on that satisfaction to carry me through to the next piece of tedium.

Debbie Millman:

It’s incredible. I often think about what it takes for Curtis Fox, my producer, to edit my show. And I feel so guilty, he has to go through it word by word by word. And it’s just such a talent. I don’t know how you do it. It’s extraordinary. I read that in an effort to make sure the podcast doesn’t get too geeky, you conduct a mom test. What is a mom test?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yes. My mom and my dad both actually, we should give credit to my dad too, would listen to every episode when it came out. And my dad still does. My mom has passed away recently. But my dad listens to every episode. And he’s so sweet. He will call me afterwards and say, “I listened to the episode,” and let me know. And because of that, it was a kind of stand-in for an invisible audience member that might not have some frame of reference for whatever artist is on the show and whatever musical concept they might be talking about.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

So, my parents, no offense to my parents, don’t have any frame of reference for any of this stuff. So, I could think about, well, what needs to be explained and what needs to be demonstrated with music; when do you need to really lean into the explanation part of this so that it doesn’t feel too abstract or too esoteric? While at the same time, I didn’t want it to sound like it was dumbed down.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

For the people who were on the show, I didn’t want it to feel like they didn’t get to talk about their ideas and their experiences in the language in which they think about them. If they think about it in terms of like in chord progressions, and they say, “Well, I wanted to go from that to the relative minor, because …” And there comes a moment where I’m like, “Well, do I have to explain what that is?” This is an instance where having the music, having that kind of show-and-tell format with their words and the music really helps, because sometimes you don’t need to explain what the words are at all. You can just play the music. Because all the words are an attempt to describe the music. So, then I can just play the music and don’t have to worry about the description at all.

Debbie Millman:

In March of 2016, you launched a second podcast titled The West Wing Weekly. In each episode, you and actor Joshua Malina, who played Will Bailey on the show, discuss an episode of “The West Wing,” which for young ones listening is the early 2000s television drama set in a fictional White House with Martin Sheen as the president. It’s a fantastic show. Why a podcast about “The West Wing”?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I had been trying to do this TV project. The TV project that I mentioned in 2013 was something that I was doing with Josh. We had made this game show and we had sold it and made the pilot. And then it was just languishing in this weird TV limbo. For a long time, it wasn’t getting on the air. It wasn’t getting to the next point. And then the people who had bought it, their company got bought by a different studio.

Debbie Millman:

It sounds exhausting.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

It really was. It really was. And it was my first experience really in trying to make work in a medium that was so disconnected from being able to do it yourself, the way that I had learned with everything that I’d done before. You really just can’t make a TV show on your own. You just can’t.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, it’s like branding.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yeah. So, while we were waiting for the coin to land on whether or not we were going to get to actually do this or not, I said to Josh, I was like, “I’ve been making Song Exploder now for a couple of years, and I’ve really enjoyed it. And it’s been really fun. And it’s a way to put something out into the world that we could actually do ourselves. And I think there might be an audience for it.” Just I thought there might be an audience for Song Exploder, based on my own instincts of what I really wanted.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

And what I really wanted was a discussion of “The West Wing,” something that could exalt its highs and also criticize some of the things that had always bothered me about the show. A show that I love, but there were definitely flaws and things. And I wanted to be able to talk about both of those things. But I also wanted to do it with a little bit of the DNA of Song Exploder, where you have the perspective of somebody who was actually involved in the show.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Josh wasn’t on the show for all seven seasons. He came in later. But he was on the show. And he had worked with Aaron Sorkin, with the creator of the show, on “Sports Night” before that, and A Few Good Men before that. So, he would have this insider perspective that I thought would be really interesting. And it took a little while, but I convinced him to do it.

Debbie Millman:

How did you get Lin-Manuel Miranda to write and perform a “West Wing”–themed rap for the podcast intro music?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Well, I’m not sure how he and Josh knew each other, but they knew each other somehow. And Lin-Manuel is a big “West Wing” fan. He sometimes would tweet about it or reply to the account that I had set up for our podcast, our Twitter account, he would reply to that. And I was like, “What?” And he would have a comment about stuff, or he would post a “West Wing” GIF in reaction or something.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

And then when I heard Hamilton, for the first time I heard the soundtrack, I heard all these “West Wing” references in the music. So, by the end
of [our] first year of doing the show, I had made this extended instrumental track of our intro music. The original idea was to do a super cut of all these moments of Martin Sheen saying President Bartlet’s catchphrase, which is, “What’s next?” Which is how we would end every episode of the podcast. We’d say, “What’s next?”

Hrishikesh Hirway:

And so, I went to just clip all of the different times when he said it. And then I realized they had a little bit of a cadence and musicality to them. And I started to arrange them with this remix of [our] intro track. I’d been making beats for rappers for a few years. And I was like, this works in a way where it could be like, that could be the hook. And then there’s room for 16 bars in between.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

And so, I made that track and I said to Josh, “Is there any chance that you would ask Lin if he’d want to rap over this?” And then it took a little bit of pushing, but then Josh was like, “OK.” Because this was at the absolute height of Hamiltonsuccess. Josh was like, “What are you thinking? Why would he even respond to this?” But he sent it to him. And then, I think 11 days later, we had a finished track sent back to us.

Debbie Millman:

That, it’s just incredible.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Lin-Manuel Miranda also stars along with the glorious Tommy Kail and Alex Lacamoire, in a brand new episode of season two of your Netflix series Song Exploder. Congratulations.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

Hrishi, it’s just an extraordinary accomplishment, and just congratulations on such a spectacular show.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Oh, thanks so much.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve had many offers to bring Song Exploder to television over the years. What made you decide to do it now and with Netflix?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

The now of it is really just a matter of that’s how long it took. It took so long to make the show and bring it to life. I think we pitched the show. And by we, I mean, myself and Morgan Navel, who is a filmmaker, who I partnered with on the production of the show. We pitched it to Netflix in April of 2018. And then the show debuted in October of 2020. So, it was a really long time for it to come out. It’s not so much that I chose a moment, so much as it’s just that’s how long it took.

Debbie Millman:

[Inaudible] they chose you.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yeah. There was a moment where at the end of 2017, beginning of 2018 or so, where I switched gears from saying “no,” turning down invitations to make Song Exploderinto a series or adapting it. And changed from reacting to those things, and instead, try to imagine what it would be if I started from a blank piece of paper. And well, and the other thing that I had to do was remove the obstacle of my own practicality.

Debbie Millman:

In what way? What do you mean?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Well, I’d been so used to this DIY mentality for everything, that when I’m coming up with ideas, my first instinct is to reach for something that is within my grasp. Like Song Exploder, I was like, “Well, this is the idea. And also it’s something that I can make. I have all the tools.” And same thing with like the way that I made music: “OK, I’ve bought the recorder. I bought the microphone. I have this keyboard. I have this guitar. And I have this drum kit. What can I make out of these tools?” But I wanted to see if I could get rid of that kind of pragmatic instinct and say, “All right, well …”

Hrishikesh Hirway:

The way my friend put it, my friend who had directed Save the Date, he was making a show with Netflix called “Everything Sucks,” and I had done the music for it. And so, I had been involved in all the conversations and stuff. And he said, “Imagine you were to do the show with Netflix. And just imagine you had an infinite budget—what would the show look like then?” Because he knew I was like a little bit bummed because I felt like none of these ideas that were coming my way were right. And yet I also felt like if I didn’t do something, somebody else would.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

And it started to feel like Song Exploder was starting to get a little bit swallowed up by these other outlets that were doing like Song Exploder–ask series, especially in video, like The New York Times and Rolling Stone, and Genius. All these different websites were doing these high-budget, I don’t know “versions” is right, but that’s what it felt like to me. So anyway, he said, “Just imagine what you could do, if you had infinite budget.” And then I wrote my own presentation and that actually got me excited about making a show.

Debbie Millman:

Lin, Tommy and Alex talk and deconstruct “Wait For It,” Aaron Burr’s anthem in the musical Hamiltonin their episode of Song Exploder on television. Lin has said that “Wait For It” is perhaps the best song he’s ever written. And I was like, “What? What about ‘Helpless?’ What about ‘Blow Us All Away’?” Which every time I hear, I can’t help but just projectile cry. Did you believe him when he said that?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

He and Tommy Kail did an episode of The West Wing Weekly, like a special episode. And while we were discussing that, they were going to come to my house and we were going to record it. And he said, “Maybe if there’s time, also in addition, me and Alex can do an episode about ‘Wait For It.’”

Debbie Millman:

You think, it’s like, oh my God.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I know. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time, but he had already volunteered which song it was that he wanted to do. I didn’t have to have that moment in the conversation. He was just like, “Well, what song is it going to be?”

Debbie Millman:

So interesting to get a sense of what people think about their own work and what is best about their own work. Both the podcast and the episode on television are remarkable in really understanding the process, the collaboration, the way in which Lin, and Tommy, and Alex all worked together to create this anthem. What are the biggest differences between producing the podcast and producing the television show?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I think the biggest difference probably, well, certainly the fact that you have something to see on screen. And there’s a need to feed people’s attention spans, especially in a context of something like Netflix and making the kind of show that we ended up making. It’s not a sit-down interview talk show, and it was never intended to be. Again, because in my dream versio
n, I wasn’t going to be in it at all.

Debbie Millman:

I love the fact that you’re in it. Hrishi, I really do. I mean, it’s interesting because you talk about the intimacy of the artist in the podcast. But I think that what keeps the integrity of the intimacy in the television show is having you a part of it.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Well, that’s what Morgan’s argument was. And I didn’t buy it at first. But I thought that for the same reason, it made sense and made something unique in the podcast to take me out of it, it would work in the TV show. Morgan pointed out that actually, taking the interviewer out, putting the interviewer behind the camera or something like that, was not unique, but that’s actually the typical format of documentaries. And so, it wouldn’t feel intimate. And what would feel special and unique would be if the audience could feel like they are witnessing what was by nature an intimate conversation.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I also think that a great interviewer asks questions that the audience is either thinking about or wants to know about. And you are able to do that. You capture that moment where you’re like, “Oh, ask that.” And then you’re asking it while somebody is thinking it. So, do you like doing the podcast and the TV show equally? Or do you like one more than the other?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Well, it’s conceivable for me to do an entire episode of a podcast without any outside interference or without any outside input potentially. And that’s just not the case with the TV show. And I think that I learned so much by getting to collaborate in those ways with the TV show. But I like being able to do both for sure. Because what I want most, I think what my brain craves most, is newness and new experiences.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

And one of the things that helps with the podcast is that every episode is a different artist, a different song, which presents different challenges and different ways of having to edit and think about a story. By doing the TV show too, I got to think all of those things, plus all of the unique challenges of an entirely new medium that I’d never worked in before.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

And that was really exciting, and having to figure out how to translate what felt instinctual to me, to somebody else, to an editor. The fact that I wasn’t the one editing it or editing is such a part of the show. That was such an interesting challenge to my communication skills, to the strength of what the show was, to the ideas that the artists presented. I’m definitely glad I got to do both. But I’ll say that the podcast is for sure easier to make and easier on me spiritually, partly just because I don’t have to see myself.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I understand that’s one of the things I like so much about doing a podcast, is I don’t have to look at myself. I don’t even like to listen to them once they’re out.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

The show debuted with four episodes on Netflix, and then you have season two that’s just dropped with four more episodes. One of which is the remarkable episode about “Wait For It” by Lin-Manuel Miranda, with Thomas Kail and Alex Lacamoire. Do you see doing more? Do you have any sense of whether you’ll be doing more episodes?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

It’s another thing that’s entirely out of my hands. It’s really, it’s just a—

Debbie Millman:

Oh, that must be so hard for a control freak.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

It really is. Yeah. Because I don’t even know what the factors are that are going to go into the decision. It’s just one day I’ll find out whether we’re making more episodes or not.

Debbie Millman:

You talked about newness and loving newness, and needing newness. And I totally understand that. If Song Exploder, the podcast and the television show, and The West Wing Weeklyweren’t enough to keep you busy, you’ve also created two more popular podcasts. One is the Partners. And the other is Home Cooking with chef and writer Samin Nosrat.

Debbie Millman:

You said you’ve come to the realization over the years of making Song Exploder that what was driving the way that you interviewed was feelings. Can you talk a little bit about that more in relation to your newer shows and how that notion of interviewing with feelings has manifested in these other podcasts?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I think there’s a version of Song Exploder that could exist that’s very technical to the point of almost being clinical, almost like instruction manual for a song. But that wasn’t interesting to me. For me, it was really about the human part of using your imagination, harnessing some idea and then turning it into something. And as I started to do the podcast more and more, I realized, yeah, that thing that I wanted was for them to talk about their feelings. I wanted them to talk about how they felt about this experience and how they felt about this song.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

For me, what was the most exciting moment in an episode was when [they] talked about what they wanted somebody to feel or what they themselves felt from something that they had made or something like that, because it felt more universal. And making a song started to feel like a little bit of a standard for any kind of creative pursuit or even just the feeling of possibility. And so I started to edit towards that and lean into that. And I started to enjoy that so much.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

So, Partners was an exercise in just focusing on that part, just doing the feelings part. It’s dialogue between two people. The thing that it shares in Song Exploder, is that, OK, there’s no song that they’re creating, but the thing that they’ve made is this partnership between them, this intangible glue between them that gets formed, that bond. How do you make that?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I had this thesis for the show, which was that every partnership, no matter what kind of partnership, if it’s successful, then there’s is a love story. I wanted to basically make a podcast that was all love stories and edit [it] that way without being too overt about it.

Debbie Millman:

You have four podcasts now and a television show. How are you feeling about your burgeoning multimedia empire?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I have mixed feelings about it because all of it really comes from a pivot away from music, which was the thing that I really wanted to do and still want to do. I haven’t put out a record since I started Song Exploder. I still want to. So, it’s a little bit strange, I think, to have so many projects that are different from the project that I intended to do, and then to be making more. Like starting Home Cooking is yet another podcast, and
it’s like, well, but I haven’t started another record. But I guess with those shows, I knew there was an audience for them in a way that I don’t know that I always have the confidence about my music.

Debbie Millman:

Confidence or courage.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Exactly. I’ve been thinking about that quote so much because I’ve been thinking about my next year. So, my next year is going to be different because The West Wing Weeklyis over, the Home Cooking is over. For now until further notice, the TV show is done; that might be the end of that. And so, maybe it’s a chance for me to finally try and make another record, but it’s not something that I have a lot of confidence in. So, it’s going to require some level of courage to just be like, “Well, I’m just going to do this.” And just make it regardless.

Debbie Millman:

Hrishi, the last thing I want to talk with you about is an interview you did on the podcast 10 Things That Scare Me. And I was actually really deliberating about whether or not to ask this. But you’ve brought up the idea of nostalgia several times over our interview, so I think it would be a nice way to close it out.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

OK.

Debbie Millman:

In that episode, you stated this: “I always want to be in a neverending embrace, and having a great, stimulating conversation. And if I’m being really honest, every single moment that I don’t have that is a little bit painful. When I was growing up, I felt like I had that. When I think of my family, I think of the four of us, me and my sister, and my mom, and my dad on a Friday night, piled up on the couch in the house where I grew up, watching a movie. My mom would make delicious snacks. And it was just cozy and comfortable and fun. I think my entire adult life, I have been trying to recreate that feeling.” Hrishi, do you think that with Song Exploder that maybe you’ve done that?

Hrishikesh Hirway:

I don’t think so. Not with Song Exploder. I think I have this feeling of wanting to have had that experience. I end up living with that interview and those stories for so long. And I’m trying to edit in a way that’s not just clean presentation of the story, but also presents the artist and their story as compelling and lovable as a way as possible, that if I’ve done it well, by the end I’ve fallen in love with them a little. And so, by the end, I’m like, “This is my buddy. This is my friend.” I’ve spent all this time with them. I’ve thought so much about them.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

And unfortunately, it’s very rare that that actually ends up being the case that I do become friends with the people who I’m interviewing or who I’m talking to on the show. I would probably love to be friends with all of them. I think the thing that is at the heart of that feeling, that thing that I’m trying to recreate is some feeling of closeness, a mutual closeness. And while I’m getting closer to the people I’m talking to, I don’t know that they’re feeling that so much in return.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

There’ve been a couple of instances where people have, and they’ve written to me after the podcast comes out, and they say, like, “I listened to the thing that you made and I can’t believe it.” And I’ve formed friendships or relationships from that. But it’s vastly, vastly, vastly the minority of instances. It’s most of the time, they just go on, and we just go our separate ways.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I actually think that as a listener and a fan, that neverending conversation is one that you’re giving your audience. So, thank you for that.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Thanks so much.

Debbie Millman:

Hrishikesh Hirway, thank you so much for making so much magic. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Hrishikesh Hirway:

Oh, it’s my pleasure. I mean, I partly wanted to come on the show so that it might introduce Song Exploder to some people, but really I was coming on here for research. I wanted to learn from you and get to understand what it’s like to be on the other side of one of your interviews, of which I’ve listened to so many. And it feels like a real privilege and luxury to get to have this conversation with you.

Debbie Millman:

It’s such an honor. You can hear Song Exploder, the podcast, on any podcast app. And you can watch “Song Exploder,” the TV series, on Netflix. And you can find out more at songexploder.net.

Debbie Millman:

This is the 16th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters. And I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman. And I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Did Lucy Wainwright Roche have a choice?

Roche was born in New York City to Suzzy Roche—a member of the folk sibling trio The Roches—and Grammy-winning folk songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. Her parents split when she was 2, but music was still deeply ingrained in her life, if not omnipresent—Roche spent a childhood accompanying her mom as she recorded and toured, and could often be found backstage at clubs. Meanwhile, her dad documented her in song in the 1985 lullaby “Screaming Issue” … which people would then perpetually sing to her.

As Roche told Montreal Gazette, “Music was just everywhere: coming home from school, rehearsing; on weekends we would go do shows. … In this business, kids are around (music) and learn to be around it. It’s all they’ve known. I had no interest in being a musician because I was surrounded by them. It seemed like a terrible plan.”

After high school she left New York City for Oberlin College in Ohio, where she earned her bachelor’s in creative writing. When she made it back to Manhattan, she enrolled at the Bank Street College of Education, and got a job teaching elementary school.

Hers was a rebellion in reverse—but eventually, the music lured her back in. Having dabbled in songwriting as a teen before swearing it off, she began again in 2005, and was soon touring with her brother, Rufus Wainwright, as a backup vocalist. She released her first EP in 2007, and followed it with her first full-length, Lucy, in 2010. In the years since, she has collaborated with her mother on two albums; her half-sister, Martha Wainwright, on one; and has released two more of her own. (Aside: For an explainer on the Roche/Wainwright family, click here—with advance apologies for the broken image links.)

Despite her family’s ubiquitous presence in music, her output stands apart. Often paired only with an acoustic guitar playing brilliant, sparse notes, her haunting voice tells of broken love, strife, life in a divided country. Stripped down to the elemental essentials, the listener is intimately and immediately connected to the songwriter.

When it comes to a lineage like Roche’s, the music press likes to toss around terms like “inevitable,” “destiny,” “fate.”

Did Lucy Wainwright Roche have a choice?

The convenient narrative is that, no, she did not.

But she did.

And today, we’re all the better for that decision.

As a complement to this episode of Design Matters With Debbie Millman, here is a curated playlist of some of our favorite Roche tracks.

//

Lucy Wainwright Roche: The Design Matters Playlist

Quit With Me

Heroin

Don’t care about Van Halen? You’re in luck.

Don’t even know who David Lee Roth is? That might be for the best.

Because in this episode of Design Matters, you meet someone famous for his vocals in one of the biggest 1980s bands—but who has always been more than a caricature of rock star excess (if not the original schematic for it).

Roth grew up not in the Hollywood Hills, but in Bloomington, IN, where he went about “chasing muskrats” and shoveling horse manure for a buck. Rather than idolizing rock stars, he loved Miles Davis. Jack London. Mark Twain.

He could sing across five-and-a-half octaves—not exactly the easiest thing to do. And after his family moved to Pasadena, CA, he met Eddia Van Halen. Their first record went gold in 1978. Dave Bhang’s Van Halen logo became an icon of its era. Van Halen II followed. Women and Children First. Fair Warning. Diver Down. 1984. Roth left the band in 1985 and launched a solo career. All told, the antics were legendary, and legendarily reported, from the M&M tour riders to the annihilated hotel rooms. The line between fact and fiction, the line between character and character study a seemingly amorphous thing.

Roth rejoined Van Halen in 2007. The rest is … not exactly history, but perhaps a crime of omission. To focus on Roth through the lens of Van Halen alone belies the intense, oft-bizarre, kaleidoscopic truth of his person.

He’s a martial artist who has been practicing since the age of 12.

An obsessive traveler and adventurer who has traversed jungles and mountains.

An accomplished climber in said mountains.

A skilled artist who studied sumi-e painting in Japan.

An EMT in New York City, badge no. 327466.

The author of a bestselling autobiography.

An actor who banked roles on shows like “The Sopranos.”

An entrepreneur deeply involved with his company, Ink the Original (which protects his own Japanese body suit tattoo).

Though wildly disparate pursuits, one gets the sense that to Roth, it’s all variations on a theme.

“What is art?” he has asked. “Simple, I think: something that forces and compels you to think.”

In this episode of Design Matters, we learn more about the glue that holds Roth’s unique brand of creative insanity together—no Van Halen cover charge required.

—Zachary Petit, Design Matters Media Editor-in-Chief
 

Josh Higgins has lived what seems like two radically distinct lives—and thus people tend to know of him from one or the other.

If you were a fan of the all-encompassing ’90s SoCal punk movement, you probably recall the Higgins who stomped his feet to the music, sweat running down his tattooed arms as he screamed backup vocals and anchored the bass in the band fluf. They were signed to a major label; they played with the likes of Fugazi, Jawbreaker and Bad Religion; they fully embodied the antics of the era, once even getting into trouble for a bologna-related incident aboard a tour bus with the Deftones.

On the other hand, if you’re a designer, there’s a good chance you know the Higgins who hung out with President Barack Obama and spearheaded the visual narrative of his 2012 campaign before turning his talents to Facebook.

Regardless of which Higgins you’re familiar with, clad in all-black and toting a mind-boggling résumé, he can seem an intimidating presence. But when you meet him you’re immediately struck by how friendly he is—not to mention polite. He has said those trademark manners go back to his dad, who was an actor, and used to bring him along to formal dinners as a boy clad in a tiny tux.

Growing up in Southern California, Higgins’ parents would divorce early in his life, and his mom remarried when he was 5 or so—to someone Higgins didn’t get along with. That bred anger. And that anger served as a natural gateway to the world of punk that was cropping up everywhere around him. Higgins began performing in bands in middle school, and when not playing, he could often be found at Kinko’s, creating the show fliers that wallpapered San Diego—deriving almost as much joy from them as he did being on stage.

After playing in a string of bands, Higgins joined fluf, which exploded and signed to MCA/Universal. There were Fender endorsements, a string of albums, intense shows, hijinks galore. It was all fantastic. But eventually, after a decade of life on the road, Higgins was exhausted. He knew he needed to do something else. (After all, as he has said on stage in design presentations, he didn’t necessarily want to become the next Bret Michaels.)

A friend suggested he give graphic design a try—but Higgins didn’t know what the heck it was. When she explained, he was floored to realize that the gig posters he had been creating throughout his life fell under the purview of a viable career path. He enrolled at San Diego City College (where he’d deliver the commencement address as a decorated alum years later) and was hooked upon taking his first typography class.

Emerging from school, he had credentials in hand for a new discipline he loved … but he couldn’t find work. He reached out to his old pals at Fender and agreed to do some T-shirt designs to try to connect the company with more contemporary musicians. The resulting work became a brand mainstay, and when he saw a member of Green Day wearing a shirt he had done, he knew he had met their goal.

Years of agency work followed. And then one day he was asked to participate in the Hurricane Poster Project to benefit victims of Katrina. His poster went on to bring in more money than he could have donated on his own, and to him—after years of thinking bullshit whenever he heard someone proclaim that design could change the world—it was a revelation. Design really could move the needle. And that knowledge has defined the rest of his career. Higgins began setting aside an allotment of time for causes he believed in, and he participated in or launched more poster projects—one to help those impacted by the San Diego wildfires, another for victims of the Haitian earthquake and, of course, one his friend Shepard Fairey had put together in 2007 for Barack Obama. People went wild for Higgins’ piece … among them, Oprah Winfrey. That drew the attention of the Obama campaign, who used it as an official poster, alongside Fairey’s iconic “Hope” image.

Time passed. And then an email pinged into his inbox: “You should come work for Obama.”

He read the subject line and laughed it off. But he came to realize it was a very real offer—and soon enough he was in Chicago, building a team as design director for the 2012 Obama reelection campaign. He put all of the visual infrastructure in place, from websites to logos to door hangers, working 16-hour days, the world consuming his output in real time. “The passion, the cause and the adrenaline kept me going,” he has said, elsewhere noting, “There is no certain path you can take to be successful. Whatever the path is you just have to work your ass off.” It might have seemed like he was cramming the intense sum toll of his music career into a  condensed timeframe with a singular objective. The difference was, at the end of the day, he didn’t emerge burned out on the craft and ready to move on from it.

Higgins had done his part in sparing the world a Mitt Romney regime. As he was heading back to California following Obama’s victory, his phone rang. Facebook wanted to see what he was up to now. And in the company, he found not only his next design challenge, but an ethos that jibed with his own. As he said when interviewed by Print magazine in 2017, “So many backgrounds are represented at Facebook. There’s diverse thinking, and having creative design thinking be a part of that mix … is integral.”

Like with the Obama campaign, Higgins was soon in charge of a vast array of visual touchpoints, and he was also a key player in the development of Facebook’s creative shop, The Factory. Some of his highlights: The tear-inducing Facebook 10-year videos; Facebook’s birthday and friend anniversary videos; the company logo redesign with Eric Olson. Today, Higgins is in charge of VR and AR, and his most recent project is Portal, the video communication hardware.

Which Higgins do you know: the punk, or the designer?

Maybe they’re not mutually exclusive. Perhaps he’s always been driving at the same thing, his old life not a skin one sheds, but more akin to the tattoos that still ornament his body.

As he has said, “After years of being angry and destroying things, it got old. As my anger faded a little bit, I was able to see punk for what it really was. I think punk is more than music. It’s more than an outlet for anger. It’s personal expression and a drive to question the status quo. It’s not fashion or the latest trend. It’s an idea that guides and motivates your life. Punk urges you to think for yourself, be yourself, and do it yourself. When my understanding of punk shifted from this outlet for anger to a way
of how I approach things in my life, everything changed. It not only shaped those things, but it also really helped me find design.

“Punk is not dead. It’s very much alive.”

—Zachary Petit, Design Matters Media Editor-in-Chief
 

Of all the adjectives that could be deployed to explore, unravel and expound upon Shirley Manson’s universe of lyrics, this tends to serve as the blandest of catchalls: “dark.”

“People get uncomfortable when you tell the truth,” she told The Guardian earlier this year. “I don’t. I’m happy to feel. I wanna feel every single fucking thing. I want to feel the breeze, the punch, the disappointment. I want to feel love, lust and everything in between because I’m here for an infinitesimal amount of time. I wanna feel it all. I’m a greedy motherfucker. If that makes me dark, so be it.”

In the craft of fiction writing, one of the most basic tenets is that characters must change. It permeates our media, it permeates our lives. And so there’s something profoundly wonderful in the fact that Manson hasn’t—as she has mused, the person who sang 20 years ago about aging into a proper adult (“When I Grow Up”) never really did. Sure, she has evolved in different ways. But Manson has always been, simply, herself.

One of her earliest memories of growing up in Scotland is hearing her mother, a big band singer, crooning Sinatra on stage. She thought it was beautiful, and at home, she was reared on the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and other standards.

Meanwhile, the red hair and pale skin that would define her own stage presence as an adult found her bullied as a kid. She despised school. She suffered anxiety and depression. She toyed with drugs and drink. Later in life, her wild teenage stories would precede her—like, say, the time she broke into the Edinburgh Zoo to huff glue.

She wanted to become an actress, but when she was 16 the Scottish rock band Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie extended an invite to sing backup and play keyboards. That band evolved into the group Angelfish, with Manson stepping to the front, and they landed a video on MTV’s alt showcase “120 Minutes.” The video aired only once—but guitarist Steve Marker happened to be watching that night. Marker, alongside Duke Erikson and Butch Vig (of Nirvana/Smashing Pumpkins production fame), had formed a band and were looking for a singer. They found one.

The band’s self-titled debut exploded in 1995, offering a fresh evolution of sound in an era otherwise preoccupied with the styles Vig was known for producing. The instant success shocked everyone in the band. As for Manson, on tour and in press, she was brash and bold, a master cusser who in retrospect says that nobody could out-rude her back then. She’d often shock the press with her statements—a press that at times framed her merely as the hired face of her band. (“It was awful,” she told Spin. “I was finally allowed to be creative, to write and have input into something that people valued, and then I was treated like a piece of flotsam. I wasn’t undervalued; I was dismissed. To say it didn’t sting would be a lie. But I guess there’s a real pugilistic streak in me because I was just like, ‘Fuck it. I’ll show you,’ and I kept at it.”)

Version 2.0 followed, nabbing an array of Grammy nominations and living up to the stakes set by its predecessor. The band were bona fide superstars. In perhaps a moment of surreality, they recorded the theme to the 1999 James Bond film The World is Not Enough.

And then came the underrated album Beautiful Garbage, and the difficult era that accompanied it. The band was set to begin promotion on Sept. 11, 2001. Manson was going through a divorce. Constant touring was wearing on the group. After hearing emerging groups like The White Stripes and The Strokes, Manson instinctively knew that they had been cooped up on their bus for too long, and had missed what was happening outside of it.

Bleed Like Me followed, and Universal had bought the band’s label, meaning they were now controlled by a major corporate entity—and that entity demanded an album, leading to the greatest hits collection Absolute Garbage. Exhausted, the band went into hiatus, but Manson didn’t stop making music. She recorded a solo effort—exploring that trademark “dark” territory—all the while acknowledging that in the end, the label probably wouldn’t let her release it. She brought it to them. She was right. They found it “too noir.” They wanted a pop album instead.

As she recounted to The Herald, “[I explained to them that there] are some difficult things in my life that I want to talk about, and they are not necessarily radio-friendly topics. I want to write about things that are actually happening, things to do with my parents, with mortality, identity, those kind of ideas. I don’t want to write about feeling sexy and going to a club.”

“It made me determined to get out of my contract,” she told Spin. “I realized that I was incorruptible, which is great because sometimes you forget.”

The battles in her life extended beyond her music in a tragic fell swoop—her beloved mother died of a rare form of dementia. Then, a friend’s child died of cancer, and at his funeral, Manson found Vig.

The trauma had opened up new pathways for the band. They decided to create another record—and to do it on their own terms. After Garbage had originally disbanded, they hadn’t lived lavishly and squandered their various fortunes. Rather, their funds had sat dormant in a communal account for a moment just like this. So in 2012, Garbage released Not Your Kind of People on their own label. They were elated to be in business for themselves, without the stifling environment that had all but killed the first incarnation of the band. Strange Little Birds followed in 2016. As Manson said of Garbage’s resurrection, “We’ve always felt like outsiders. We were never electronic enough for electronica fans, never alternative-rock enough for alternative-rock people. We never fit into any scene, and we often felt a little apologetic about who we were.”

Now, “This is our sound, our world. Be part of it, or not.”

It took time, but Garbage eventually found where they were headed.

As for Manson, in looking at the arc of a life, one ponders what could have happened around different bends, different forks in the roads, and what versions of her might have come to pass. In quantum physics, one theory holds that whenever a decision is made, an alternate universe spawns off as a result— 

Perhaps there’s a Manson who never strayed from her violin as a child, and plays in an orchestra today. 

Perhaps there’s a Manson lost to a life or per
petual partying.

Perhaps there’s a Manson plotting her next move on Broadway.

Perhaps there’s a Manson still devotedly toiling away in local Scottish bands, Marker having fallen asleep and missed “120 Minutes.”

Regardless of what may exist in any number of curious worlds, we’re better off for living in the one in which she brings light through darkness.

—Zachary Petit, Design Matters Media Editor-in-Chief
 

If there’s a theme that has resided just below the surface of this season of Design Matters, an undercurrent pulsing with life, it’s this: feeling.

Many of the artists, designers, musicians and authors featured this year have focused on the art of eliciting a response, be it emotional, cathartic or contemplative. Their reasons? Some stated and some unstated; perhaps it comes down to the fact that in the cycle of perpetual distraction that is the modern era, feeling, really feeling, can often feel like a lost art.

Feeling, it turns out, is exactly musician Erin McKeown’s focus. Maybe it’s because of the role that music played in her early life: She has said that growing up, she indulged in music that made her feel more than she was capable of on her own—happier. Angrier. More vulnerable. As she channeled her favorite artists’ emotions, she’d envision herself performing on a stage—but figured she’d become a scientist when she grew up. Raised in Fredericksburg, Virginia, McKeown’s parents enrolled her in piano lessons at a young age, and she didn’t really take to it in a cathartic or meaningful way, as some musicians do. Rather, her creativity manifested in the form of stories that she would write, and ironically it was science that eventually led her down the winding path to her craft. Around the age of 12, she got hold of a guitar. While attending a science summer camp, McKeown’s counselors were going to protest a new river dam that was slated to be built. She felt they needed an anthem, a rallying cry—so she combined her writing abilities with her newfound instrument, and penned her first song: “My River.” While it never went beyond the ears of those within protesting range of her counselors, it was the inception of a career.

Her early tunes as a teenager followed the lines of classic rock. But then she discovered the likes of Ani DiFranco, and her mind expanded with possibility. Still, there was the matter of becoming a scientist. McKeown attended Brown, where she majored in ornithology—before changing course and sliding a bit closer to her passion by studying ethnomusicology. As she worked toward her degree, her music began to spill over into her life in a more pronounced way: She took a gig as artist-in-residence at the nonprofit Providence arts center AS220.

At Brown, she focused, presciently, on such arts as Vaudeville. In its inception in France, what would evolve into Vaudeville emerged as a bit of a rebellious means of getting around the theatrical monopoly of the dominating Comédie-Française. Similarly, McKeown released her first album, the folk collection Monday Morning Cold, on her own label, TVP, while she was still a student in 1999, music industry be damned.

Her first studio album, Distillation, followed shortly in 2000, and in 2003 McKeown released Grand—replete with a medley of varied sounds, from rock to electronica. It was perhaps with this album that critics (and everyone writing about McKeown since) began pointing out her incredible versatility, and the vast arena of styles that she plays in. This has led to a delightful array of surprising releases: We Will Become Like Birds (2005); a collection of standards, Sing You Sinners (2007); Hundreds of Lions (2009, released on DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records); the hilarious F*ck That! Erin McKeown’s Anti-Holiday Album (2011).

In an industry that thrives on delivering polished branded identities and the predictably (and lucratively) safe, McKeown bucks all of it. Moreover, she does it with a sense of ease—her varied styles and approaches never feel contrived or invented for the sake of invention; rather, as a listener, you get the sense that she’s doing the rare act of purely playing whatever she wants to at that moment in time.

It’s unsurprising (and well along the Vaudeville lines) that she left labels behind and sought to crowdfund her album Manifestra in 2013. It reached its goal in a mere six days. She followed it with According to Us (2016) and Mirrors Break Back (2017), both released on her own label. In her journey through the music industry, she arrived back at the place where she started—a place of her own creation, and her own control.

After seven years of work with Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Quiara Alegría Hudes, she formally expanded her output even further and premiered the musical Miss You Like Hell, a pressingly relevant story of an undocumented mother and her daughter.

Feeling. McKeown infuses it and embodies it. And she delivers it.

She sees music as utilitarian—like design, its natural setting isn’t in a museum, but in use, in real time, serving a purpose in the real world. Music, she has said, is about how it’s used—and she derives no greater joy than hearing that a song of hers was useful to a listener. Further, she believes that a record store should be organized by the emotions each album conveys and the situation it is best suited for—there should be a road trip section. A funerary section. A sunny day section. A break-up section.

Reflecting on her career, she seems at peace in her journey, with her early victories and celebrity giving way to the person she is today.

As she said in an interview with The Interval, she maneuvers her career on a couple simple criteria: Do I like the person that I’m working with? And does this bring me an opportunity that feels creatively challenging? “And that’s what I make my choices from. Because I’ve lived with and without money, and I have lived with and without recognition of what I’m doing, and I’m fine.”

As for what the future holds for her output, it’s likely what it seems to have been all along: McKeown playing whatever she wants to at that moment in time. And that is an infinitely thrilling premise.

—Zachary Petit, Design Matters Media Editor-in-Chief

Albums by Erin McKeown:
Mirrors Break Back
According to Us
Manifestra
F*ck That! Erin McKeown’s Anti-Holiday Album
Hundreds of Lions
Sing You Sinners
We Will Become Like Birds
Grand
Distillation
Monday Morning Cold

Perhaps in no other industry is the notion of identity more crucial, analyzed, crafted and regarded—and at times, vociferously guarded—than the creative arts. To inch a toe into another subset of the arts can provoke a band of incensed attack dogs, and perhaps that’s why musician Kaki King has said, in discussing her brilliant projection-mapped touring art installation and concert The Neck is a Bridge to the Body, that despite having created some of the visuals in the show, she does not consider herself a visual artist.

But I—and likely anyone else who has seen the performance—would. Similarly, I call for calm to the gatekeepers of my own discipline, and declare her to be a writer. (Consider these titles, which capture and reflect the instrumental songs they brand: “All the Landslides Birds Have Seen Since the Beginning of the World”; “Streetlight in the Egg”; “Gouge Both Your Eyes Out (But Eat Only One).” Consider also the writing challenge King faces—to brand an instrumental song in just one line, whereas the majority of contemporary music today has an entire bed of lyrics to fall back on.

King identifies as a musician. And she’s an incredible one. Listening to her guitar work live or on her many albums, one must be reminded it’s all her—there’s no second (or third) guitarist in the room. Innovative fretwork, coupled with percussive elements that harken back to her long experience as a drummer, dominate her style. Her playing begs to be witnessed live, if only in an attempt to decode it.

And attempt to decode it the music press has indeed done. Magazines like putting things in boxes, which landed King on Rolling Stone’s “New Guitar Gods” list in 2006 (in which she was also the only woman on the roster—a reminder of the imbalance in the guitar world). As she has pointed out before, critics tend to obsess over her technique—which is to miss the point of the overall experience of the music. Moreover, perhaps a key test of a musician is how they react to being branded a “musician's musician.” King has said the reason she can take a band out on tour is not by being a “musician’s musician,” but rather by writing songs that resonate with people.

As she says in this episode, “I always knew that I was good at guitar in a way that a lot of people weren't. I didn't let it go to my head, but I think what distinguished me, and what I wanted to focus on more than anything, was the writing. The playing is technical. It can be taught. It can be practiced. … Ultimately, developing my own voice as a writer in an instrumental context, that's the hardest thing to do.”

As it pertains to identity, it’s also worth noting that King exists within an industry that tends to thrive on manufactured image, on mirage. Execs tried to shape King into things that she was not, but she kept her focus on what matters most to her; she has said that the key to being a successful musician is to put 95% of one’s effort and energy into the music itself, and 5% into presentation and other elements.

Listening to King and watching her play invokes a sense of not just wonder, but maybe even envy—you’re witnessing someone who seems to have truly found that elusive pure blend of craft and career, someone doing exactly what they should be doing. While she always figured she’d follow in her parents’ footsteps and become a lawyer, she eventually took a detour to play in the house band of the Blue Man Group, and after 9/11 started busking in the subway. In an era where there was no model for success as a solo acoustic instrumentalist, people kept asking her for CDs as she busked. As a matter of practicality, she made one, her debut Everybody Loves You.

As she says in this episode, “If you make good work, it can have a life of its own that is totally beyond you and out of your control. That's exactly what happened.”

One gets the sense that if her career had not taken off or she’d followed another path, she’d probably still be down in the subway, busking in her off-hours.

King followed her first album with another acoustic instrumental collection, and then, on … Until We Felt Red, she introduced her voice and other musicians into the mix. Evolution has characterized her identity since that point—she has dabbled in pop sounds, indie tones, full-band ensembles, before returning to her roots with the instrumental album GLOW (which got its name because King, while not having full-blown synesthesia—the ability to perceive colors in response to sounds and other stimuli—heavily associates color with things, such as numbers; in this case, the album had a blue-green glow to it).

In interviews, she has dubbed art to be a “giant fantasy,” and has said that her music actually shows a very, very small slice of who she really is, and she doesn’t embody her art the way others do. In other words, in an era and field defined by identity, it’s not her identity.

In this episode, Debbie Millman asks her what, then, the music isn’t showing about who she really is.

Her response?

“Everything.”

—Zachary Petit

A Selection of Kaki King’s Albums: 

Live at Berklee

Everybody Loves You