SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to A Fresh Face in Hell. I'm your host, Jonathan Evan. Every week we talk to someone new and interesting, somebody intellectually curious, somebody who will hopefully renew our faith in this cold, cruel world we live in. A Fresh Face in Hell. So I've seen the old 97s a bunch of times, and they never, ever disappoint. Uh fight songs and Too Far to Care are among my very favorite albums. I mean, like all-time favorite albums, but honestly, every old 97's record is fucking great. And that is because Rhett Miller is flat out just a kick-ass songwriter. He writes fantastic melodies, hooky, rousing, atmospheric, and he writes great lyrics. So Rhett is the real deal, and thus I am thrilled to have him as this week's Fresh Face in Hell. Rhett, thank you so much for joining me, man. Taking the time. Yeah, thanks for having me. This is cool. Yeah, I have to just tell the listeners that uh Rhett and his uh manager were kind enough to get me on the guest list for their recent Seattle show at The Crocodile. And I was so excited. My wife and I went out. It was date night. We went to the pink tour to eat, and we wanted to get there right at eight o'clock. And see, I think River Run was the opening band. And we got there at eight o'clock, and it was like I could hear the band. I go, boy, these guys sound like old, this sounds like old 97th's retread, man. They sound pretty good. Let's go in and see. And and and it turned out the show started at five, and I didn't get the memo, and I was so sad. We only got to see the Encore, which was Lonely Holiday and uh Time Bomb, and another uh another great song, but I was so so disappointed. Um, five o'clock shows. We've been asking all those old heads have been asking for these early starts forever, but the crocodile's finally doing it. I just wished I'd have got the memion. Okay, so on that note, you just wrapped up a massive tour. Um, and you're not 25 anymore. So you know, and I know you got a gazillion road miles under your belt. Talk to me about being old. How are you handling the road these days?

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Yeah, I'm well past 25. I turned 56 last week. Um, but I like it. I still we it's different, it's very different. I've been sober for 11 years. So my nights are less crazy and my mornings are less cranky.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

That is that was my next question. It makes all the difference. See, I've done 17 national tours and I've never done a sober one. And I I was thinking next time I might want to try that because it really, that's really what grates on you more than the the making the music part is probably, I mean, watching you, that's the joyful part. You have such incredible energy on stage. You guys literally in the reparte between you and the bass player and the guitar player who was he was a little mum most of the night I had heard, but then he kind of livened up at the end. I just so that's it. You've been sober for 11 years. What drove you there?

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Oh, um, you know, it got it just it it was fun until it wasn't, you know. I I think people, because I now I've become somebody that talks to other people about sobriety, which is funny, because I didn't really work the program, so it's not like I'm used to like spending a bunch of time in rooms talking about it. I did do a lot of therapy, so that helped a lot. But, you know, you know when you're ready. And for me, I I knew, you know, it was just uh my kids were, you know, young teenagers. Um, and it just felt like God, they were like eight, nine, ten years old. And it felt like uh, if I don't get my shit together, I'm not gonna get be allowed to live in the house with them. And then like somebody else will be putting them to bed or whatever it is, or maybe, you know, maybe I'm just like some loser living in a flop house motel or whatever it is.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

So I figured like you have two teenagers, doesn't that kind of sound like a dream? I mean, there are days I got a 13-year-old and a 17-year-old. There are days there's like, God, I just listened, I lived in a dumpy apartment above a pub some nights, like just because it's just so much, there's so much you can't control with the teenagers.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

And I mean take it all so personally.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

And obviously, that's sort of you know, part of what drove me to that finally going over the line into a place that didn't feel comfortable for me was just that that feeling of like, oh my god, I, you know, I'm I've been sub you know, sort of sublimating my own shit to these kids now for a decade and like this sucks. It's hard, it's hard having kids, you know, when especially when you're used to having handlers and being like the the only one in the world, the the room that anybody's worried about the happiness of. And now I'm like the one who has to worry about somebody else's happiness. But you know, my kids are fucking great. So it was totally worth it. It was great. And you know, my wife and I are still together. I got to be there every morning when my kids went off to school, except for when I was on tour, which I know is its own traumatic thing for everybody.

unknown 5:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:01

So you play a bunch of towns a bunch of times over the years. Um I've returned time and again over the years to some of the same towns. Tell me what are some of your favorite tour spots? Because I know I have mine. I always like to talk to cities, talk cities with people who go around to a lot of them.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

Um I love Seattle. I mean, Seattle's huge, uh, and and Portland, you know, and because because the nature of routing is such that they're always back to back, you know. Um those are two towns where I've got a lot of friends. I've I think there's so much great music that's come out of them that that I love. And there's also, you know, so much uh just so much music history in both of those towns. Um, so the Pacific Northwest is one of the places where I always say I think I could live there. You know, it's that's a thing. You've probably done it on tour before. My band does it all the time. I could live here, you know.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

Um, one of you does, right? Doesn't the bass player live in uh Port Orchard now?

SPEAKER_01 5:56

So I was just about to say, yeah, Murray.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Yeah, so if you guys come out and visit him, you got to come around the peninsula and come out to my cabin and listen to music and drink seltzer waters.

SPEAKER_01 6:03

Oh, that sounds great. Hey, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

Well, your cabin's down like towards Port Orchard, towards the Well, no, it's it it's about an hour and 15 minutes away, but it's worth the trip. I'll feed you and all that. Um, so I I didn't want to be presumptuous, but it did seem like you had kind of some kind of special relationship with Seattle because your energy just seems so good and the crowd is always. I've only ever seen you in Seattle once I saw you at the knitting factory in Boise, but you always I I don't know if you bring that energy every night, if there was a little something special in the water here or what, but I kind of get the feeling you you're you just seem like such a pro that you bring that energy everywhere. Um I like are like Milwaukee. Yeah, I don't know why.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

I always just have a great underrated Milwaukee, way underrated.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

Totally. Like nobody tells you there's like a mile and a half of sand beach right there, and like it's just everyone, you just think it's gonna be like you know. I mean, I guess we all saw a lot of Laverne and Shirley as kids, but it did not look I don't know. I just have a great I like it better in Minneapolis, actually. I just feel like it's got a lot more character. You got all that weird Germanic bars and you know, all that kind of a very regional culture. Give me some other places you love.

SPEAKER_01 7:11

Uh Pittsburgh, I feel like is an underrated spot. Um, you know, the the South has a few hidden gyms. Like I feel like Durham, North Carolina, like that whole kind of region um is just great. Again, lots of great music, lots of great. I've no, it helps having friends in a lot of these places, but I feel like that's really cool. So I live in the Northeast now. For the last 23 years, I've I've I've moved from Texas to LA to New York City to LA, and now I'm in the Hudson Valley just north of Manhattan. And um, I mean, this is like I don't want people to find out about this, but the the Hudson Valley where I live is fucking the secret. It is the heck. Like this is the place to be. Um and it's great, but I can be in New York City, it's supposed to be 90 minutes. I drove in yesterday. I teach at a college every Monday now in New York City. I drove in yesterday, took three hours to get there, and it was so oh man. Yeah. Is there no commuter train? Uh there is, and I should have taken it. And yes, you just like my wife are now making the point that I'm an idiot, and I agree. I agree with those.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

Well, you gotta bring some headphones and a book or something. I mean, the the train thing can get long, and and sometimes it's not that quick either.

SPEAKER_01 8:21

No, I drove like an asshole, and I should have taken the train. So you're right. I should I and she's everybody's right.

SPEAKER_00 8:28

So what what what brought you up there? I'm not even getting to my questions yet. I this isn't like getting to know Rhett Miller thing. What what what brought you up to the Hudson Valley? I mean, were you in the city and you're like, let's get out of the city?

SPEAKER_01 8:39

So was it Manhattan first and then it's funny, as we're taping this, it's a few days after um the anniversary of 9-11. And um my I'd written I wrote, I kept a journal. My wife and I lived right by the towers when when it went down, and and I kept a journal that ran as uh excerpted pieces of it as an essay in Atlantic on the 10th anniversary, and I just reposted it, which forced me to reread it. And I was really remembering, I mean, in a lot of ways, it was that experience that brought us to where we are now because we lived a block away from World Trade Center, fled as it was collapsing, never were allowed to go back to our apartment. And then I had a place also out in LA that I had kept. So we went out to LA, lived there for a few years, got married, got she got pregnant, and we're looking around in LA going, where are we gonna live? And we thought about my wife's brother lives up here. And we'd come to visit him, right? You know, right after 9-11, we'd got out of town the next day and took the train up to him. And it was like there was something so magical about being so close to the city, but being, you know, on these acres with all these um, you know, beautiful lakes and just so much incredible nature and mountains. And and we thought about like, I think we could raise kids there. And it was like the fucking best thing we ever did. We bought this house that I'm sitting in right now, three acres in the Hudson Valley, and we've lived here 23 years. We've brought both kids to adulthood now in the same house. And it's um, yeah, we really got lucky in sort of landing on that as a solution.

SPEAKER_00 10:17

So I like as an artist and also somebody who was formerly more of an urban personality, I needed the grid of the city, and it makes a lot more sense when you're single, too. You're trying to meet people and you're always trying to rub up against people and meet be potential bandmates. But once you've settled all that stuff, there's nothing like rural living. Like, I both of my places I live are are pretty rural, like we're way out and we're up in the Olympic foothills, and like I I don't. It's you gotta you gotta really be persuasive to get me out of there, to be honest with you. I just I just like to sit around in sweatpants. I never want to leave. So that sounds like an amazing situation.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

I wonder so. I wonder for you if you'll have an experience where once your kids matriculate to adulthood, if you'll suddenly want to go back to the urban setting, because that's where I'm at now. All of a sudden, when I go to New York, because I teach every Monday songwriting at this college in New York. And every time I'm in the city, I'm like, I gotta get a fucking apartment in New York City. I I need it again. Now I'm walking around the city going, give me the juice, give me the people, the the the people watching, the eavesdropping, the sightseeing, the excitement of it. And it's um, yeah, it's like I've come full circle now to what the like when I was 15 years old, all I wanted was to live in New York City, smoke cigarettes, and write poetry. And now that I'm 56 years old, that's like now that's what I want again.

SPEAKER_00 11:34

So, how much of that is the empty nest and just like trying to fill that time? Because I'm already I've I've still got a nine-year-old, but I'm already like worried about the empty nest because it's been the entire focus of my life. I don't know what I do. I know that when I when they're out of the house, I think I'll I I think I'll want to go to the city more often. New York's different. See, like New York's not like any other city. I I go to New York, I'm I'm lucky. I I go there like once a year, and I just love it. I don't have to do anything. All I gotta do is just walk around. I love that I can eat there for under seven bucks. It's the only place in the country now a sandwich costs 22 bucks, you know what I mean? But they can't do that in New York because there's so many, there's so much blue collar, there's so much road construction, so many cops, so many. You have to be able to, I mean, you can get halal for cheap, you can get you know pizza for 99 cents on every quarter. I love that about it.

SPEAKER_01 12:25

Yeah. Or you could get the same exact food somewhere else for a hundred bucks, and it's a because it's being served to you by a supermodel. You know, it's New York gives every option. There's a lot of rich, rich people in New York now.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

You're gonna have to forgive me for fanboying out a little. I explained to you before the thing. I I though I have a lot of musicians on here, I don't always know them, so it's really fun to um get to meet them personally. Um, and I usually start here, but I want to know about your your musical journey. Where did it begin? I mean, how old were you? Is this like you listening to Casey Kasim in 1976 in your bunk bed? Or like where where did it where where did your musical journey begin? What what what were the what was the music? Where did it lead? Lead me through all that.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

Yeah, it's funny that you bring up the radio thing because it's something people don't think about anymore because terrestrial radio is so such an afterthought, such an anachronism now. I I do remember um, and I just did a I just did a gig the other night at Lucinda's in New York um on this kind of uh all-star thing uh with Eric Roscoe Amble, who was in The Black Arts with Joan Jett. And one of my one of my early memories, because she, her bad reputation record, and then the follow-up that was the big hit with I Love Rock and Roll on it, they um they came at a a really good time for me where I was 12 years old. I was in a I was in the hospital for a while, and I remember listening. I had a little record player in there. I remember listening to Joan Jett just like on fucking repeat, man. And um, and it was I'd always loved music, but it was something about, you know, the because I spent a few months in the hospital. I had this weird thing going on, and um, so it became sort of my life. And and it I think of it as like this weird incubatory period where I listened to a lot of music, I read a lot of horror novels, and I kind of turned, I got weird, and um, like in I think hopefully in a useful way, kind of in a good way. And then after that, I immediately wanted to go learn to play guitar. Um, starting at 13, I wanted to write songs. I I my first song was about Charles Manson. It was not good, but it was it was weird.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

And um my first novel was about a guy writing uh trying to write a novel. I mean, it started off good, but by the end it was like about me trying to finish a novel. It was not good either.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

But but that, you know, so that was it. I just uh it was music forever after that. So 14 was my first kind of gigs, 15 was my first sort of gigs in front of uh punk rockers, basically. So I wound up being the ubiquitous Teen Folky opening for Lords of the New Church, you know, opening for Red Cross, whatever. So I was always like this little 16-year-old kid with a 12-string fucking ovation guitar, not a great instrument. And um, but yeah, I was always on the punk rock bills in town and then just never stopped. You actually made an album when you were in high school, which is some Alex Chilton shit. Yeah, I even again it's a little, it's as my kids would kids would say now it's a little cringe, but um I was going through a big uh Anglophile craze, so I kind of thought if you were gonna be a real singer, you had to sing with a British accent. So my high school record, you know, full disclaimer I sing with a British accent on it.

SPEAKER_00 15:45

That's you know how many punk bands did that? So many punk bands like because they wanted to sound like Johnny Lyden. Was Murray Hammond in that band with you? I don't remember.

SPEAKER_01 15:55

Nobody produced so that was a solo record, and Murray produced it, but he played bass and produced it. And so he was already my mentor at that point, and he's an old 97s bassist now.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

So you you have a slab of vinyl still from your high school record?

SPEAKER_01 16:09

Uh it never came out on vinyl. It was the C D Revolution in 1986 or whatever. So yeah, it was C D and Cassettes. I'd forgotten it was cassette. Somebody recently gave me a copy of Mythologies on cassette.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

So that's what it was called. Mythologies? Named after a roll.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

Yeah, it was it was pretentious. It was a uh named after a Roland Bart, who's a French media philosopher, a book of essays. I don't know, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:32

Yeah, pretentious. Come on, you can be pretentious at 16. You deserve a gold star for being pretentious at 16. My 16-year-old right now is reading Hegel's dialectics, and I couldn't be prouder. He's failing out of school, even the DED school. He hardly ever goes, but I'm like, he's fine, dude. He's reading like Contin Hegel on his own. I didn't push him there. I I I you deserve a star for being pretentious at 16. That means you're reaching, you're reaching. Most 16-year-olds, not so much. Um, I read somewhere also that you you write short stories.

SPEAKER_01 17:04

Uh I've written short stories. I've got a couple of kids' books, I've written long form essays. Um, I'm right now working on I I've sold a book to a publishing house, um, a how-to songwriting book. So I'm working on that at the moment. Um, but I do. I love I love writing. I've always had the dream, harbored the dream of writing a novel, but whatever. We'll see.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

Well, you know what? We need to get together because I harbor the dream of writing songs, but I'm terrified of it. You know, I've written 23 novels, but I'm terrified of writing songs, and I think you're one of the greatest songwriters. I mean, it makes perfect sense to me that you're teaching songwriting. I saw once online it was like one of these kind of master courses, and it was like, or you, or you were judging a songwriting contest or something, and I was like, that makes so much sense. You just have such a knack for songwriting, which is it, which is somewhere I want to go. I want to I want you to drop some some some um, I don't know, just certain things like uh you can turn a clever phrase like I love that verse in Curtin Calls. Um, in a western town beneath the northern lights where the pine trees pine for the fall of night. See, I love how you double up pine there. That's just that's just radical, two different meanings. And then from the same song, this is I don't I mean, I you had to have done this consciously, but I just think it's so fucking clever. You believe in cards and you believe in signs, and I believe in soon. I mean, you believe, you believe, I believe in. That was on purpose, obviously, right?

SPEAKER_01 18:34

Yeah, I think I don't know. I mean, the internet always gets everything wrong, but I think that the lyric there is uh you believe in cards, you believe in signs, and I'll be leaving soon.

SPEAKER_00 18:43

So yeah, but it sounds like you believe, you believe, I believe. Yeah, I mean what I mean.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

Like it's like a like a so I talk about this, I talk about this a lot in the class and and retreats and private lessons or whatever. When I'm teaching when I'm talking about songwriting, I um the repetition, I I feel like the point of the the repetition, because we're repeating so much, we're repeating sections within the song, we're repeating within each section. Maybe the verse has got like a progression that happens twice. And then the whole point of rhyme is repetition. And then within lines, if you start repeating words within lines, and and then every time you repeat something, it evolves, like it has a new meaning each time you revisit it. But the repetition itself does this thing that is at the heart of songwriting, which is I think it's it's akin to hypnosis. Like you're trying to lull someone in, you're trying to bring them into your world and get them. And then occasionally you'll throw something in where you'll change like the old uh Frank Black trick in the pixies of that everybody loves of you know, the quiet chorus, quiet verse, loud chorus.

SPEAKER_00 19:49

Loud soft, loud soft. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Or whatever. When you when you shock them and you shake them out of the reverie that you've sort of lulled them into. Uh but I do think the hypnosis is at the heart of songwriting, this thing we're doing to try and get people to lose themselves in our song.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

See, that's brilliant. See, and I understand that as a crafter of narratives, I mean, I'm always about effect. I don't, I'm not, I don't, I mean, I write good sentences, that's fine, but I don't just let sit there and work my sentences. Like it's not about the words. It's about what you said. It's about this conjuring, it's about this sort of hypnosis to create an effect. Um, you remember that original, the original loudsoft is, you know, that that old 40s song. It's not Julie London. I don't forget who it is.

SPEAKER_01 20:32

It's uh, you know, it's it's so so quiet. The the Bjork covered.

SPEAKER_00 20:37

Yeah, yeah, Bjork covered it. That song is brilliant. Um, I just want to keep talking about Songcraft with the. I could listen all day because um it's weird. I never get, I never get any kind of writer's block. I I just part of it is that I'm not a musician. I can play a little bass and maybe like two chords on the guitar. So, like, do you start, do you start with guitar? Do you start with a melody or you do you start with a lyric? Do you start with an idea and then say, I'm gonna build a melody around this? Or do you is it just everything? I want to write this song about this that does this to somebody.

SPEAKER_01 21:07

I mean, I think once you start, you know, proscribing like uh I can only work in a quiet room in the dead of night, starting on a guitar, a steel string, not nylon, you know, whatever. Once you start building in a bunch of guardrails to your creativity, you're just sort of it's a story that you're telling yourself that you can't do something. And it's just like a, you know, it's it's one more um aspect of the negative inner voice that keeps us from doing our shit. And so for me, uh, I just take whatever I can get. Like yesterday I had a private lesson with a student, and she was, she's like, How do you write a song? Just I'm so show me how to write a song. And I was like, let's just write one right now. What phrases? Give me a phrase or some words that you must have a list of words you keep, right? Everybody's gotta keep. If you're a songwriter, I'll tell you this right now keep a list of words. Or any sort of a writer overheard for Brian Koppelman, who's a great scripture. Screenwriter. He's he's got his list of overheard, you know, conversation tidbits. But she goes, Well, you know, I heard the word outlaw. I shouldn't, I shouldn't out her. Like, or this is the word that she had was that we wrote a song inspired by that word. We sort of talked about, and I rarely write songs where I know what it's about, but I kind of liked that word. And I thought, well, if the idea is in the chorus, we're gonna say, like, you know, we want to be these kind of like cowboys in the open prairie, what would the verse be? Maybe we'd be living in a city. Maybe so we in our first verse, let's build up this imagery of buildings and and the walls have ears, and everybody's got a pick, you know, like this kind of cramped, claustrophobic feeling, so that in the chorus it can open up. So that was that was taking a word and working backwards from it. For me, I usually will be strumming a guitar and then find a little pattern of chords that that that speaks to me. Like my my technique for songwriting is all in teaching is always what's great and what if. And the what's great is if you're by yourself, is oh man, the way those chords work together is really cool. I wonder what the melody would be that would emphasize what I think is cool about that. And then you find that little moment of melody, and then as you're singing made-up words, one of those made-up words sounds cool. And now that's taking you towards a story, and it's sort of all just steamrolls. And the song, it doesn't write itself, but if you're really tuned into it, you can let your sort of subconscious guide you down this river of song until you're in a place where now I'm trying to flesh it out and get it over the finish line and feel like something that's cohesive. But for a long time, I'm just letting the song dictate what's happening.

SPEAKER_00 23:43

That I learned more about songwriting in that minute than anybody's ever taught me. It seems like kind of what you're getting there on several levels is this idea of permutation. Like you take the word and let's find the permutations of the word, like what different things can outlaw mean? And what does like starting with trapped and getting to the open ground? That's a permutation on on that theme. And when you talked about like, okay, these are the chords, what is the melody that permutates from that? Like, like you're finding you're finding the compliment from within what you've already done. That's that really helps. That's yeah, no one you're a good teacher, dude. That that really makes a lot of fucking sense to me. But I still you would recommend I I need to, I should probably learn how to strum a guitar a little bit before I start. Because I I think like I know all these musicians, I've been asked to write songs for people before. And I used to, like in the 90s, I wrote a few songs for people, and um it's just kind of hard to just start like without knowing the music. Like, I guess you could take the pantameter from that sort of there's sort of familiar pantameters in songwriting. Yes, you know the word, salalibogly speaking. Um, and you could kind of go from there, but like that that just doesn't seem like an organic way to go. It seems like I gotta be able to play the guitar.

SPEAKER_01 25:03

But it's whatever works, it's whatever works. I mean, if you want to write on bass, you can do that. Like that song that I was working on with the student, it was just or whatever. Like that could be on a bass. You could also kind of hear it in your head and sing it into a phone, and that's enough. Like uh the idea of having to be able to play an instrument is is old. And because now you've got all these workstations on your computer where you could just, you know, go type in some chords, try it. Like the world is your freaking oyster with this stuff. Like, there's no rules, you know, whatever works. And and when you talk about the permutations and trying to figure out what sounds right, the the the main trick to that, and it's so simple, is just that you are the first audience of the song. And so as it's as it's coming out, all your whole job is just to keep your ears open and go, oh my god, that's cool. And then remember that, use that, lean into that. Now add more cool things to that. That's all it is. Like you, you're like, it's like you're standing in a fucking club listening to somebody play a song, going, Oh, that's really good. I wish she would do more of that. Except you're the he and you can, you can do it right then, do more of it right then.

SPEAKER_00 26:16

Yeah, this is real, okay. So this is really resonating to me because like when I teach theme to my my novelists, I teach theme, and like people have this idea that a theme is just they get a theme confused with a thesis. And the thesis is sort of like where your theme ends. That's the crystallization of your theme. But when I tell them, they're like, How do because when they start writing a novel, they're like, Well, there's plot, and then there's character development, and then there's event, and there's all these things. I said, No, no, no, no, it's all character, it's all sublimated in the character. So when we talk about theme, it's kind of like what you're talking about, like when you said the outlaw thing. The theme is this thing like a diamond. You have to spin it around and explore as you it it evolves with the character, right?

SPEAKER_01 27:00

Do when you talk about theme, is is it important, you think, for a writer to know the theme ahead of time, or is it something the writer discovers while interacting with their characters?

SPEAKER_00 27:11

Absolutely the latter. I mean, it could be both. You could know what it is, but I mean, at a certain point, if you know what you're trying to say, this is the thing. This is why I hate outlining. I mean, the way I look at it is the whole storytelling thing is just about characters making decisions that then complicate the journey. You just have to put them in the situations and let them lead you, basically. But like, like with a character, it's like what a mistake people make and when they're exploring themes or exploring characters, like when you first, and I wonder if it works this way in songs, like where you have to move stuff around. You will your character will realize something on page 40, and you have to step back and go, wait, yeah, my character's not ready. My character hasn't evolved that far to know that. And so you feel like you're stuck behind the eight ball. And the reason is you've got this information that the character shouldn't have access into, like for another.

SPEAKER_01 27:57

Does that happen with songwriting where like you maybe glom onto this original impetus for the song, but then you realize it's something you kind of more have to build to, or yeah, but uh the the cool thing about songs is that they're your lift is so small that you can do a lot by changing a just a tiny, tiny thing, like changing a pronoun in your pre-chorus or your chorus. Like I love doing that, like everything's in the second person telling a story, and then I get to the chorus, and suddenly somebody's like there's a narrator saying you talking to a subject, and like now we've zoomed into the head of the person we were learning about, like that kind of stuff. And when you do that, you you're able to change who knows what and what information is happening. I mean, you could just do a lot with a little in in songwriting. It's funny, you reminded me of Harlan Coben, the novelist, has a new a new book out that's sort of his on writing, which is to me the bet the greatest uh, you know, prescriptive book about writing, Stephen King's on writing. Um, but Harlan Coben's got a new book out that's part memoir, part how to. And um, I interviewed him for my Wheels Off podcast, and his parents both died when he was young. And in his main series, Myron Bolotar is a detective that's his main series character. Myron Boletar has this incredible relationship with his parents. And over the course of the series, the parents get old, they have this like full life together. And I asked him, What where does that come from? You know, because it's something that you never got to experience yourself. And he said, It's exactly that. It's a wish fulfillment. And I wonder, like, as we are the first audience for our song, and thus we want to love our song, the whole idea is that we're making something we love. That's like, what's the point otherwise? And I know the point otherwise, it's that people are being cynical, trying to make money by doing something they think they can calculate for the marketplace. But I think that's gross. And I think the result is always a song that stinks of desperation. So with a real song, um, we're trying to make something that we love, something that gives us something we didn't have. And so it's that. It's like it's that wish fulfillment. And so when you talk about trying to discover the theme and trying to explore something that interests you or excites you or fulfills you, like I think that's so that's perfect. Like that's meaningful. That's the whole point of all of it. You're a human being trying to examine something that's inherently like human and impossible to understand, so that another person can, you know, you form a bridge to another person, and now they're a little closer to understanding it. And between the two of you, you just further the human race and better the human condition. That's all we're doing, right?

SPEAKER_00 30:50

Dude, I'm so jibing. That's your philosophy is exactly what mine is on several levels here, which is one, you have to think about the audience, but the audience is you, right? Our our jobs respectively, whatever the medium is to explore the human condition. So if we explore our human condition through this personal lens, it's going to be universal. Do you know what I mean? So people think about the audience, they're like, oh, the you know, 18 to 34 uh college-educated women are the reading demo. I gotta hit them. What are they like? And and that that's that's they're missing the point. And the other thing about that that you just said was um, God, just all of it is just is really resonating to me. Like, I I I guess I look, I've always kind of viewed songwriting as more in the realm of poetry than narrative. And I've never been, I guess I don't think it's because I'm self-conscious necessarily, but I've never written a lot of poetry because it isn't the words themselves that drew me into this, it's the stories and the effect of stories and the emotional evocation they can. That's why I'm always going off on like when people's pros are purple, I'm like, dude, okay, I mean, you know, uh, they're turning on a lamp here. I don't think their thoughts need to be a smoky chiroscuro of longing. I mean, just you know, move move them through the room. And then, you know, when they're carrying their, you know, dead father-in-law across the great divide at sunset, maybe you know, amp it up a little. Uh like you let the situation, let the language serve the story, is what I'm saying. So, but the way you're describing story is it's it sounds kind of freeing because you're not you're not stuck in the trappings. I call them trappings, and they kind of are trappings because in the West, we just like it, like it or not, we we metabolize stories with this. It's it's all Aristotelian dramatics. We really do like this dramatic arc that has uh that has rising stakes, rising arts, a development, a climax and stuff. It's it intuitively how we do it. Sometimes I will listen to like Native American storytelling and I'll go on, cool, what the fuck does it mean? Like, because there's no moral or there's no or or or it's it's communicated differently because the the culture it's culturally relativistic. Like they they they they but we as as a culture sort of tend to, and I can kind of like Robert McKee, I can watch any movie and and just show you, even though you can subvert that all you want, you can take the three-ac structure and subvert it. You can do everything you do to frustrate it, but I will still find it. We still process it emotionally that way. So, like with songwriting, there's gotta be sort of an arc, right? Like you build to a crescendo or whatever. You you you spoke of it earlier, like, but what does that look like in terms of because you're not necessarily, you know, for me, it's like the hero's journey, right? So, like, you know, you make bad decisions that complicates it. You learn your themes, your themes develop as your character discovers the themes, like you know what I mean, from their own lived experience. How does that, and I know it's not gonna be the same answer every time, but kind of how is there some sort of universal way you feel like we kind of metabolize songwriting?

SPEAKER_01 34:01

I think one reason songwriting appealed to me is because so much of the onus of telling the complete story is taken off the songwriter because so much of the story is implied. Like you you brought up um curtain calls, and um you know, so curtain calls is a story that takes place in just a moment, like it is just a moment. I think, I mean, and everybody can explicate a song differently. I'm just one audience member sort of saying what I was thinking when I listened to this song. Because when I wrote it, I don't know what I was thinking. So I what I picture is a guy and laying in bed with a girl, and and he's telling her, like, I'll be gone tomorrow, you know, and and he sort of looks back at how she got there. You know, your family, um, your family came here on the Southern Pacific Railroad. You're you know, you've been here a long time. I just got here, I'll be gone tomorrow. But the whole thing just takes place in this tiny sliver of a moment, and it implies a backstory and it implies you know what might happen after that moment is over. But for me, my whole job is just that moment. And and so it's it's actually it's so fun because the story can still exist, but the audience does the work for me. If that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 35:26

It's a dance. That's what I always say. You know, the the audience, the listener is doing everything you're doing backwards and heels, right? They gotta process it. Um that's why I think the I think you're getting to the point of why your song songwriting resonates to me is because it's just loaded, it's like it explodes. There, I it seems that they're like there may be you you can be a little more obscure in songwriting just because of the brevity of the thing. It's almost sometimes sometimes a little obscurity in songwriting can be the most mysterious thing about it. You can't do that in a narrative, like you can't. That's that's the that's one of the differences. Like, I I I want to get my brain around is is giving myself license to like to be obscure, to be mysterious and let them fill in that thing. Because I I'm not under, I don't have the mandate. Like, so does this is this making sense? Do you do you make a promise in a song that you feel like you have to fulfill, or are you are you just giving it all to the listener and saying, interpret as you will? Do you have, do you have a that's what I want to know?

SPEAKER_01 36:31

Yeah, yeah. And because the nice thing about, I mean, a promise is a question, right? A promise is something that you're let you're building a question in the mind of the viewer, reader, listener. And um, and the promise is that you're gonna answer that question. And the cool thing for me about songwriting is that your answer can be very implied, very small, very like it's you're not really answering the question. There's sort of the answer that they're taking away from it is like, what is the vibe of this song? And and I think this is what's gonna happen. But I think the open-endedness of it, I mean, I think questions in songwriting more than maybe any other art form, questions, like literal questions. Will you still love me tomorrow? Uh, where did our love go? Like, like when you pose these questions, now it's not me talking about something. Now it's us talking about, now it's you wondering something. Now we're in this together. I just I like it's no accident that my most played song is a song called Question. Um and because it's just about that. Someday somebody's gonna ask you a question that you should say yes to once in your life. Maybe tonight I've got a question for you. And it's and it's just like thanks. I I wrote it as like trying to stay awake one night as a goof, never thought anybody would ever even hear it. Much less it would be in like TV and films and wedding, you know, it's it's really a sweet thing, but that song I feel like is a good example of when you take the pressure off of yourself when you're creating and just say, I'm just having fun here. This is I don't have to worry about you know, anything. That it it's a lot easier to just, I don't know, make something that's simple and works. I I think that pressure, the cell, the internal pressure, the obstacles that we generate for ourselves are fucking giant. Like that's the hardest. All these kids that I'm teaching in schools and the people in the the adults in the retreats and all this, the number one thing is, and probably I would imagine the the those the prose writers that you deal with. It's it's the voice in your head going, nobody wants to hear this. There's so many books, there's so many songs in this world. What are you doing? Like, oh, it's crippling. That's the hardest part.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

That's one of the day one. That's what I teach them. The first thing is I tell them, self-loathing, great. You can use that. Self-contempt, also great. You can use that, you can imbue your characters with it. It makes you human, it makes you relatable. That's okay. Be hard on yourself. But never you cannot write without self-confidence.

SPEAKER_01 39:10

How much do you emphasize revision and rewriting? Because the first draft can be shit if you if you do a lot of rewriting and you like you just need the first draft, right?

SPEAKER_00 39:19

To me, it's all rewriting, right? It's just, it's it's a I look at it as a distillation process, right? Rather than a linear sort of get through a draft, do another draft. I mean, at some point it becomes about drafts, you know, when when you've got when you've got a whole arc and then you're like, okay, now we're gonna go through this and we're just gonna look at the relationship between character A and character B, or we're just gonna look at at how chapters end, if I'm hitting the right note. Or you just I just go through a draft and usually with just one little mandate, you know what I mean? Otherwise, like I always say, eat the elephant one bite at a time because it could be so overwhelming with something that's you know 150,000 words long. I and and so like, and yet to me, that process seems so intuitive, and I'm so that that writing a song still seems way more mystifying, even though it may be two and a half minutes long. Like, I don't know, I don't know how it works. I'm learning a lot from you. And and I I feel like one of the reasons you're such a great songwriting is is because you got the glacier thing going. I'm only seeing the tip of their glacier. There's so much thought and so much that goes on underneath that. And I and I feel like with other, you know, like I'll listen to Nico Case's lyrics, and and sometimes she's somebody who will just get me with a with a line, like uh, you know, uh, what is that line, whiskey woven ether pain, or something from that line from the song about the the dirty knife song or something like that, or just just some evocative description, usually about the Northwest that is just so right on. And then I will listen to the song hundreds of times, but I don't ever really necessarily know what it's about. Or like Bernie Toppin, right? We all consider Bernie Toppin, he's generally considered a great songwriter, but a Bernie Toppin song, except for a song maybe like Tickin', where the guy goes in and blows up people in a bar where it's an actual narrative, I can't make fucking heads or tails of most Bernie Toppin lyrics. I like, but again, that's why it's like poetry. I feel like is he leaving it open for interpretation, or is he just obscure, or is he just good at putting words together that sound good and maybe there's just a vacuum there?

SPEAKER_01 41:18

I don't know. Well, it's it's funny. Two different things that you said, I feel like are so, you know, to the to the point of this, um, you said that in songs and in poetry you're allowed to be sort of oblique, uh, you know, uh uh to be um mystical or whatever. And and also the the idea of um like when you say that the temptation for the student, so if you talk about a student, is that they will now say, okay, life is a gray mist. Like now, now they're wanting to write things that are like sort of sound, you know, like um nothing means anything but the clouds or or whatever, like this kind of froofy bullshit. No offense to poetry. But when you talk about building something that feels like kind of this oblique but meaningful thing, so much of it is just details, you know? It's like there's a dented lone star can with a baby hole in it.

SPEAKER_00 42:22

There's uh Nico Case thing I'm talking about. Yes, yes, that's the devil's in the details. Keep going, keep going.

SPEAKER_01 42:28

I love this. But so but I I think that's uh that's what people miss is that oblique doesn't mean um, you know, like obscure fake and obscure. It just it like more than anything, it just means like paint me a picture, like zoom in on some tiny thing that's that's uh you know, like a microcosm of this world and let me extrapolate the world from that. And then and then I get to build the world. And then yeah, it's just it's a lot more fun. That's the thing I think I love about songwriting that I end up struggling with with longer form fiction.

SPEAKER_00 42:59

Like like man, well, I think we could help each other. I'm already feeling uh more confident. I'm feeling on uh uh evocation seems like kind of what you're getting there, like designing something that is loaded because the details are so visceral or so tactile that you have to unpack them. That's I think what Nico Case's lyrics do to me. Your songs tend to be, I mean, that's that's a generalization because you I mean, you got 10 solo records and all the I mean, so but just generally the songs that I've connected with the most that are kind of in my hall of fame of Rhett Miller songs, I I kind of get a fuller picture, but they're kind with her, it's kind of like it's it's just what what you described. It's just something described with such um luminous detail that you have to unpack it. And maybe that's kind of treading on the ground of poetry too. And maybe that poetry does as well, because then it really does become about it's always about carefully chosen. And words. Let's make no mistake. Just because somebody doesn't write in a style uh that's flowery or or or you know um you know super wordy, or maybe they they write with declarative short declarative sentences, maybe they use a lot of passive forms, but whatever. If it's serving uh to evoke, then it's doing its job. And I think people mistake that. I think that that, especially young writers, they mistake that like they need a big vocabulary. A big vocabulary only does you well if you if you can, you know, employ it with exactitude. Otherwise, it's your enemy. You know what I mean? You're just obscuring yourself if you're saying, I remember writing this story. It was should have just been called that was like 17. It should have just been called the bad joke, but I called it the poor joke because I was like, oh, what's another word for bad that sounds a little and then it just didn't, it was just stupid. And I think this, I mean, I I I would imagine, and and even I think about some of my I used to like when I was 14 writing these very earnest punk rock lyrics. I was writing about evergreens, like more interpersonal stuff. I wasn't super political, but like I would like cop a line of T. S. Elliott or something like that in my own little uh pretentious flourish. But then I would say, uh, I would just try to throw a word like reciprocate in, or you know what I mean? Just to like, ooh, he's one of those, like uh he's one of those brainy punk rockers or something. But I I mean I'm blushing.

SPEAKER_01 45:29

You said it earlier. You give yourself permission. Give yourself permission to be stupid, give yourself permission to be embarrassing, give yourself permission to go too far towards something pretentious, because who knows what you'll find there. And maybe they'll maybe one of the things you find is fucking great, and you get rid of the rest of it because it really was over the line. But yeah, man, you'll never know if you don't try. I love, I mean, my my two favorite writers are um Elmore Leonard and boy, and I just reread Cavalier and Clay, uh, Michael Schabon. So, like you're talking about Michael Schabon can use the biggest, most flowery language in the world, but it always feels authentic. Elmore Leonard is a hundred percent authenticity, and it's so dry and just like un, you know, it's blah, blah, blah, she said. Like there's no she, you know, she glowingly pontificated or just it's just so simple. And both of them are perfect. So try it, try this, try that. What feels natural to you, what makes you happy, what excites you? That's that's the only right answer.

SPEAKER_00 46:37

So you're saying Harlan Coben, you mentioned earlier, and uh, and now you've mentioned Elmore. How do you feel about Jim Thompson?

SPEAKER_01 46:44

Oh, I mean, Jim Thompson's great. It's it's a little darker than I ever like it to me. It was like a little, it it never drew me in um when I hit it. But what I've I've when I've read it, I've really enjoyed it.

unknown 46:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:58

Do you find yourself it sounds like I mean now Michael Chiban is not crime fiction, but he did write the detective uh and I think also, you know, he's somebody who likes to play with genre. I I I I've always admired that he I actually like his earlier books better for that because he's taking these big swings. You know what I mean? He's I'm gonna try this. That's kind of my impetus, too, is like I've never done this before. I want to try this. You know, I started with a coming of age. That seemed like a sort of a natural entree to build an audience, a kind of first person buildings Roman, talk to you like a friend. And then the next book, I'm like, I want to, I wanna just blow this thing up. I want to write a world beater that's got a bifurcated timeline and is told from 60 points of view and like that's gonna ruin my career, right? High stakes game. And then usually good things happen from that. I think it's audacity.

SPEAKER_01 47:49

I think people people are living through you when they're, you know, when they're reading your book, or when I recently they've been making a document, filming a documentary about the old 97s and they're getting a lot of archival stuff. So I've ended up seeing old footage of myself when I was a teenager. And I've always been embarrassed about that stuff. But I do now, I look at it and I can see why people back then wanted to put me on stage or reacted positively to me on stage, even though so much of what I was doing was kind of embarrassing.

SPEAKER_00 48:19

And and I'm gonna listen to this podcast tomorrow and it's gonna be embarrassing for me. So I have I still haven't got that monkey off my back.

SPEAKER_01 48:25

Well, but but again, even do in doing these conversations, there's a there's a you know, an audaciousness. But I do think that people respond to that. They respond to somebody putting themselves out there because we kind of all want to feel confident or carefree enough to walk up on stage and fucking just do whatever it is, like iggy pop with no shirt on, you know, this skinny, stringy lunatic, you know, like even when he looks like a piece of beef jerky, it's still audacity.

SPEAKER_00 48:56

Even more audacity.

SPEAKER_01 48:57

Yeah, so I think people really respond to that. I mean, I know Shabon when when he did Cavalier and Clay, that was a crazy book. And it was a lot. He bit off, you know, such a giant thing. And you know, I'm sure nobody in the world was saying, Oh, you know what you should write about? You know, write about the Holocaust via vis-a-vis uh comic book artists in New York City. But holy shit, it is my son and I, I the reason I reread it was because my 22-year-old son will challenge me to do book clubs with him. He'll be like, Dad, I'm gonna read Middlemarch. And I'm like, I'm out. He's like, Dad, I'm gonna read Cavalier and Clay. I'm like, I'm in, let's go. But um, yeah, it was just it was such a joy to reread that. Uh yeah, I just I fucking love it. I love I love people that do this, you know, that put themselves out there, devote themselves to trying to make fucking sense of this crazy experience, the the human condition.

SPEAKER_00 49:51

So it's something you said we touched on earlier. The more audacious the scope of the thing is, the more audacious the swing, the more important those little details become. I mean, the reason Cavalier and Clay works isn't because it just has a broad scope, it's just because those kids in a room making their comic books in a sweat-smelling room and the fucking airplane with the fucking fur on the wings and like I mean I still I read that book when it came out. Those details, that was what, 25 years ago. That was about 2000, 2000. Those details are still with me, right? Like, of course, I remember the big scope of the movie, but it's those fucking details that allow you the the the the you know the to have such large perimeters for the larger story. That's I I guess that's how you earn trust. And that's what something Stephen King would say about writing fantasy or or something like that. It's like, you know, get the breakfast cereal box right, get the, you know, the the sound of the spoon in the bowl or whatever. You gotta get that stuff right if you're gonna have a dragon fly through the window, right? Like you gotta earn that trust.

SPEAKER_01 50:54

Um, when I've written prose, the the temptation to research and research is is crippling, I think. I almost feel like just like get it get get it wrong via Google, but get it right via the feeling of the thing. So I mean, for me with songs, I just like I think that's part of why I really like the idea of writing songs from the um stream of consciousness approach, is that the mind will, and I don't even know if it's the mind, whatever it is, the creative mind will make these connections. And that's the exciting thing is the jump from like I'm just thinking about this, the the dumb verse that I was coming up with yesterday with this student to try and describe it's not dumb, I call it dumb. Actually, I liked it, was trying to describe like a claustrophobic New York City. My friends are up in my business. Like I was trying to get like this world of it felt constricting to the character. And I just was thinking, um, everything is buildings, the walls have ears. Like those two things don't they're that's not a logical progression of thoughts, but the one jumping to the next thing, I'm not saying it's the greatest lyric ever, but I'm just saying that making having letting your consciousness jump, jump, like from lily pad to lily pad, like those are and when they're unexpected, and when the unexpected jump makes a new connection for the listener or for you as the writer, and then how the next thing is informed by it. God, it's just so great. So the idea of trying to make something that the tracks, I think can be really uh problematic. Like for me, it doesn't have to track, it just has to feel right. Like take me on a fucking journey. Make me think about it in a way I hadn't thought about it before.

SPEAKER_00 52:39

I said, You know what I love about this conversation? I had 16 questions for you, scripted questions. You know how many I asked? One. I don't know. Oh my god. Now what this is exactly what I hope for every week is that a conversation will break out. You know what I mean? But I gotta ask you a couple, these are just like little personal fanboy questions. One of them, and this may be I did this with uh Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats, and I hit it. I was like, there's some weird Nilsen connection here. I can't point out exactly where it is, but he's like, You're right, I'd love to know. Okay, for you, there's uh this is from Fight Songs. There's a couple of times in that album where I feel like you're channeling, and this is just weird of all bands, but you did say anglophile earlier, the zombies. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's the there's the harpsichord in Lonely Holiday, and then there's that awesome moment, which is one of my very favorite moments, and this is what we talk about, where the whole arrangement's stripped down, and you go, and the city lights are on fuses that are blown. You sound just like Colin Bluntstone, and it I that that moment just kills me. Do you like the zombies?

SPEAKER_01 53:45

Ha! I fucking love the zombies. This will be our year, is one of my touch point songs, like top five. Um, yeah, in fact, I I have my own song called This Will Be Our Year, just because why not? It's very different. But yeah, I'm a huge zombies fan. And I didn't I hadn't even thought about the sonic references that you just made. But yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_00 54:05

They're really they're right on the money, and it's just that's how I metabolize music. I find something I love, and then I go, like, I I there's a precedent for me loving this. I would have loved it if I'd have heard it from you first, and then I listen to the zombies. I'd have said that sounds like the old 97s. But I just had to ask that one for my curiosity. And now my last question would have been, and I kind of kind of maybe know the answer now, just having talked to you. You're such a good educator, but uh you've been at this so long, like me. You you you you you discovered very early on in your life what you wanted to do with your life. And I've never looked back. You know, I've had a million other jobs along the way in my 20s, but there was never any doubt. I'm writing novels. That's what I'm gonna do. You're writing songs, but do you ever ask yourself, I mean, what would I be doing if I weren't a professional musician?

SPEAKER_01 54:56

Well, my I I got a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence when I graduated high school. I already had a record out, I was already doing really well, you know, um, in the music scene, but I got a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence for creative writing, a full scholarship. My parents had no money. And I um it was the most expensive school in the United States in 1989 when I got the scholarship. And I went for one semester and I just looked at it and I was like, oh man, nobody's gonna teach me how to write novels because that was what I really wanted to do.

SPEAKER_00 55:30

They weren't doing that a lot back. Yeah, no, it was all about the short story until probably like 15 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 55:36

And and me, I was being an asshole, and I was ruined. I think like so many probably writers of my generation by not ruined, but um Raymond Carver did this thing where like nobody has to grow, nobody changes, nobody has an epiphany. I still love Raymond Carver. And maybe it's why.

SPEAKER_00 55:54

And I love Dennis Johnson too, but that's another guy. It's like Bob Dylan. Yeah, amazing artist, but maybe not the best influence, right? Because there's kind of only one of them. Every time I got some buskin hanging like this, I just want to take his guitar and beat him over the head with it. And it's not because I don't love Bob Dylan. But uh, we're out of time today, unfortunately. I could go on for another hour. This has been so fun. Um, I've learned a lot. This is my goal for this podcast is to follow my curiosity and come out of it feeling like I grew. Um, so people, he is Rhett Miller of the old 97s. If you're not already a huge fan, what the hell are you waiting for? Check out any one of their 15 albums, they're all amazing, or any one of Rhett's what, 10 or 11 solo records. Uh and what was the name of the high school record? I'm gonna find that fucker.

SPEAKER_01 56:43

Mythologies.

SPEAKER_00 56:44

Mythologies. You'll dig them. Rhett, thank you so much for being our Fresh Face in Hell, bud. Thanks for having me. A Fresh Face in Hell with Jonathan Evison is brought to you by Fresh Face Pods and produced by Jason Botkin and yours truly. Check us out on Instagram, YouTube, or at our website at FreshfacePods.tv. Don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter for updates and special content. And if you love the podcast, by all means run it and buy all of Jonathan Evison's award winning novels wherever books are sold.