Nakedly Examined Music: Steve Hackett, Nik Kershaw, Ken Stringfellow, Robbie Fulks

0:08 Mark: Hey, this is Mark Linsenmayer, host of the Partially Examined Life and the Nakedly Examined Music Podcast. The purpose of this special presentation is to give you a glimpse of some of what's been going on over@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com I'm gonna be playing clips from four episodes. You're gonna hear a whole song from four artists and then hear me talk about that song with the artist. So I'm hoping at least one of these will catch your fancy and you'll want to jump over and hear the whole episode. On this program. I'm going to talk to Nick Kershaw, whose singles from the 80s, you might remember, described by Elton John as the best songwriter of his generation.

Then we'll turn to Ken Stringfellow, one of the two front men for Chelsea Clinton's favorite band, the Posies, which established itself in early 90s Seattle. And Ken was also part of the reconstituted Big Star, which is a band that middle age music critics are generally in love with. And finally, our longest segment will be with Steve Hackett, a truly amazing guitarist. He actually invented tapping, the thing that Eddie Van Halen is famous for. Steve invented it through most of the 70s. He played with Genesis. I mean, they were cool and artsy.

He's released 25 solo albums since then. His music is very cinematic, highly layered. But first, let's turn to Robbie Fulks. A super smart Grammy nominated guy, plays country folk. We're going to talk about a song from his newest album, Upland Stories. Enjoy.

1:23 Unknown speaker: So America is a Hard Religion is the first song we're going to play. This song and a couple other songs are referring to this James Agee 1936 trip to Alabama. Is that what's informing the style here or just the lyrical content?

Well, it's a bit general, but I was working on a show for a while with a playwright and we were working on sort of musicalizing the James Agee experience and maybe deconstructing it a little bit. And so for the first batch of songs that I wrote for that, I just sort of attacked the problem of writing a musical about a weird subject like that with using various angles. And some of it was to lend some voice to Agee's autobiographical experiences. And some of it was to like, America Is a Hard Religion was like an effort to speak from the voices of the people whose lives he chronicled.

The Cotton tenants in Alabama and the musical style that you referred to. I'm by no means an expert on old time banjo styles, but some touchstones for me would be the music of Doc Watson. Doc has always been a real huge hero to me, ever since I was probably three years old. And he was, among other things, a really great banjo player. And his version of Dock Boggs. Dock Boggs would be another touchstone for this kind of music, but his Doc Watson's version of Dock Boggs's country blues is illustrative of this genre. If anybody cares to hear it, it's clawhammer banjo and simple, yet deceptively complex melodic phrases with a kind of lamentation kind of to it.

Some rule from the sky Some inch cross the ground Their bent backs turn to all heaven above Sends down scratch and puff from this earth what gold it may give Fattening on feasts to come Laboring now to live and America's a hard religion not just anyone may enter. America is a hard religion Some never do surrender. Sent to a savage land Mother knows not why to plant a seed in rocky soil and perhaps to die Freedom come it may to this child instead Freedom comes, Freedom goes Father is surely dead and America's a hard religion not just anyone may enter.

America is a hard religion so never do surrender. Paid by thanks for praise yet we soldier on Trials to test our hearts Doubts to make us strong Cheered by loved ones that from the graveyard say all my tears surely gone After I fly away and America's a hard religion not just anyone may enter. America is a hard religion Some never do surrender

all right, so the claw hammer banjo, what makes it a claw? How is that different from a regular banjo?

It's not regular or irregular. I guess it's a style that is based on African styles. And it's the. It's probably the oldest style of banjo playing by that measure. Like the more modern style that people might be familiar with is based on Earl Scruggs three fingers, called a three finger style, which is based on rolls. And the three fingers used to the middle and the index and the thumb. And you wear picks most of the time. But on the claw hammer style, you don't use picks and make your hand in the shape literally of a claw, kind of like you're holding an egg.

Your hand is semi closed. And it's for me because I grew up playing in the Scruggs style. It was a really counterintuitive style of playing. And I started trying to teach myself with the help of some other good banjoists in 2009 when I bought the banjo that I use now. So it's a style that I love and it's a midlife crisis kind of an effort to get my head and hands around that style.

And was this written sort of as a banjo expression, like as an excuse to do that on the banjo, or was again, you were approaching this from.

It was written on the banjo.

Yeah.

Cause you write on different instruments, like I do almost all my writing on the guitar. But if you tune the guitar differently, you get different results. If you compose on the banjo, you get different results. If you write on the piano different again. So definitely, if you're the kind of guy like me that writes hundreds and hundreds of songs, you're always trying to find new things to do. So it's not the same as the last time that you sat down to write. And yeah, that particular tune came out of the banjo.

Okay, so it was not that you were trying to do something for this musical and you said, let me try it with a banjo. It was that you were just learning the banjo, this style, and decided to. I'm just trying to figure out which thing came first.

Well, no, I was writing for the musical, and it seemed to me like the banjo was an appropriate instrument to use. It was the kind of instrument that people in Alabama that Agee chronicled would play. I bet of the six families that he was with that there was a banjo player among them, for sure. I mean, it was just really common back then. And that would be the style that they played in. And the style is very expressive of rural folks in the first half of the 20th century, for sure.

If that's the kind of thing that people would be playing as folk music in 1936, what does that mean in terms of when it was probably actually written, that style, things that they would be playing?

Oh, I don't think I understand.

So folk music sort of by its nature. Well, this has been. If we sing this land as your land, unless you're a musical scholar, you have no idea even when that came from. And so if we're trying to date, this is a sound that you might have heard in the 1930s. Does that mean it more or less arose in the 1930s? Or it is a folk style that was prevalent in the 1930s, meaning it was inherited from 1880 or something.

This might be beyond my pay grade, this kind of a question, because I strongly feel like everything. Like there's nothing new under the sun. But I can't name you the antecedents. I'm sure it has antecedents in 19th century minstrel banjo. And by the time that started popping up on records through Uncle Dave Macon and stringbean in the 30s that it was a style that had been around for decades. And as I say, probably rooted in Morocco and Africa a thousand years before that. But I don't know the specific bloodlines of it.

Okay, can you say a little about what this song actually means? This America is a hard religion. Is this referring to something specifically out of the Agee book? Or are you inventing an image that somehow goes with it?

I think it's kind of invented. I was thinking, like, what's a point of view? Or what's maybe a phrase that could express something that's accurate about America and heartfelt, but also a phrase that could be endorsed by a red state guy and a blue state guy, both, you know, people on both sides of that divide. And I think that phrase could be comprehensible to either side of that divide. That to love America involves you in irrational propositions sometimes, you know, including offering up your own children to be killed, maybe. Which is something that rural people probably know more about than urban people.

I think the song was supposed to be coming from a rural, white, sub working class character, you know, in the play. But it's addressed to. I was picturing addressed to the kind of people who'd be sitting in the theater, you know, so it's kind of tricky to come up with something for them to express. Sometimes that doesn't sound like a sociological effort, or that doesn't sound like a caricature. Or that doesn't sound like a really bending over backwards effort to artistically put yourself in the mind of someone that's in a different box than yourself.

And then as this theme continues, I see you're talking about working off the land for subsistence farming or sent to a savage land Mother knows not why. Okay, so this is just the colonial experience Paid by thanks nor praise. Yet we soldier on Trials to test our hearts, Doubts make strong. Okay, so it just sounds like life is hard. Like you're just setting up a image here.

9:56 Mark: Right.

9:56 Unknown speaker: It's not trying to, like, spin a substantial part of the story here.

Well, every terrible thing that your country might do to you, living in abject poverty and taking away your children and putting you in the situation where you're in, like, the cotton tenants were like this feudal. This modern, like, sort of feudal situation with no apparent escape. Everything that's done to you, you react to by strengthening your faith in the institution and by loving it all the more. And I think that's like, similar to what you do to a God that abuses you.

Okay, yes. I had seen that this was supposed to Be about the Agee thing and was looking up that he was actually a journalist and wrote this up as a picture of the state of the sharecroppers in Alabama. Was rejected by the editors of Fortune, apparently published, I guess, in a couple different forms as a full book.

Yeah. So he was going through the same sort of conflict that I was just describing where he was writing for one audience about a group of people that weren't in that audience and struggling with. Or it was an explicit part of his idea of writing that book was to present these people as creations of God, just like you and I are. You know, he was a Christian and through the book runs a tone of outrage at the very assignment that he's going to be doing this survey and living among these people and chronicling their misfortunes so that the readers of Fortune magazine can better understand their travails. He's just. He summons this very deep outrage at the whole concept of what he's doing. So it's a book that keeps kind of turning on itself and turning itself inside out and impugning its own motives, basically.

So is writing explicitly for a musical like this. It seems like so many of your songs are story songs or you're developing a character through it, whether it's a very tongue in cheek character or playing with country cliches, talking about the hard drinking kind of character. Was this just a very natural extension of the kind of stuff you've done before, or was this a very different sort of thing?

I think it was different than anything I've ever done. And so far nothing has come of it except that it formed a centerpiece of this record that's doing well for. For me. I was just so pleased that Brian and I started working on this. In fact, I wrote to him this morning and said, you know, my record was nominated for two Grammys and I think that validates kind of what we were working on in a small way. And I think we should return to work. Brian was called away to a TV show, so the whole thing was kind of back burnered for the last, I don't know, a year and a half or something. But, you know, meantime, I was really happy with the way those three songs on the record, A Miracle and. And America's Hard Religion and Alabama at Night came out. So I hope it well, and very different.

Different approaches musically. I mean, this one, again, this could sound like something from the O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack in terms of, you know, very authentic. Whereas the Alabama at Night, the single is. Yes, it's Identifiably country, but it sounds very new.

Well, thank you. And by the way, I really don't like that movie. So I reject that as the.

Sorry, so few touchstones. We northerners I live near in Texas for a while.

I'm not holding you to blame for that. I think a lot of people would take that as a reference point, but I think that movie was kind of bullshit anyway. That's just a by the way point that I. I don't use that as a. As an entry point into this stuff.

13:07 Mark: Again, that was Robbie Fulks, who appears on Nakedly Examined Music, episode 36. Now we're going to hear some of the discussion of the first song that I tackled on Nakedly examined music, number 37 with Nick Kershaw.

13:18 Unknown speaker: Well, let's get pretty quickly to These Tears from 8, 2012. Do you have any introductory words about thematically before people hear it?

The 6 4 bit in the verses, I kind of keep gravitating towards six four. It just seems like a really great time signature. It's got a tempo to it. It kind of gets to the beginning of the next bar. Not as quick as you would do if you were in 4 4, but you're not hanging about for two bars. It's just a kind of a nice tempo. It's a rhythm of lyrics that I keep coming up with. It's just. And I sort of hear it in my head and I think, oh, that's six four again. Why do I keep coming back to that? But it just kind of works. It's kind of speeds things along a little bit.

Yeah.

Well, on this one is especially interesting because when that's introduced, the beginning of the verse is before the beat actually starts. So it's like you're doing a pickup note, but it lasts. I see tears running down her and then it's like the verse actually starts.

Yeah. See the tears run down her face and that. That's the first beat of that six four bar. Yeah.

Sam.

I see the tears run down her face Unhappy in the happy place what it is I think I know

she's

trying hard to let him go she

goes

these tears are all I have All I have to remind me these tears are all I have All I have these tears are all I have Are all I am to remind me. Falling gently they begin Soft and salty on the skin Keep on coming through the night if only I could make it right but she doesn't want from these years to stop she rally was there the night Making me his epitaph if she didn't cry she'd laugh. She laugh. This is Sam. These tears are all I have All I have to remind me these three tears are all I have All I have these tears are all I have for all I am to remind me these sweet tears are right now for all I am.

The main riff here, the super catchy part, has two interlocking bits which either of them could have run the song by itself. This da da da da da da da da da and then you've got the. And so you introduce them in sequence. Say something about how those came together. I mean, was it really that you're playing the keyboard riff and then you're singing the guitar riff? Or how do these things come about?

You know what? I can't honestly remember because these things just. I don't. I can't remember if it happened as part of the recording process. Like I recorded one, I've got one part together and then the other kind of locked in with it because it's kind of an answer part or whether it's just in my head in the first place. Because I do quite often hear things in my head as a complete thing. So I'll hear a bass line or hear a guitar part in relation to the keyboard part or whatever. So that it could well have come like that in the first place.

I just listened to you on the Soda Jerker podcast. One of the things that came out clearly in that was that unlike many artists who might just be strumming a chord progression and then singing stuff over it, which I know you do that too, but that you often have a melody first, a melody clearly in mind, and then that's the thing that carries through while you're then doing a lot of mucking about on chords underneath it. That gives you a certain freedom that you can change keys in crazy way. It's not just that you have this strange chord progression that then you have to come up with some kind of melody that actually works over that, which might be unnatural.

No, it's the natural melody comes first. So for instance, when I do that, I do a lot of walking around and just humming something. But then I find when I sit down, it's actually the dumbest possible chords. It's actually chords that I would have been insulted if I just sat down. And it's like a 1, 4, 5 thing. But so maybe it was the dun dun dun. Like that's the main catchy thing that

can be curse as well. I do exactly the same thing. I'll think of this Great melody in my head and I'll think of the chords around or I imagine the chords. I can usually work out what they are in my head anyway, because that's quite easy to do. But then I'll sit down with an acoustic guitar or whatever and actually strum it and vocalize it. And I think, but, yeah, like you. Oh, it's those chords again. I keep coming back to those chords and then try and mess it up.

Yes.

Throw it in a ninth, make the key go up, do something.

Whereas quite often, I mean, I have found over the years that quite often, actually. No, it's all right. You are allowed to use those chords. It's not like they're kind of been banned under the Geneva Convention or anything. You are actually allowed to use those chords. But I do struggle with that sometimes. I kind of think, well, this is a bit normal, this is a bit ordinary. Can it be any good? But quite often your first instincts were right. But sometimes, I mean, I get. As part of a tune together, I don't hear where it's going. I don't know where it's going to go. It might go off on a tangent somewhere. At that point, I might sit down on an acoustic and try and let the melody lead me somewhere else harmonically.

Is it one of the advances of being a more mature songwriter that you don't feel the need in this song, like, to throw in quite as tricky chords? I mean, you've already got the 6 4.

I've already got the 6 4. You don't have to pull out all your ammo in one song, you know, you don't have to do stuff because you can. That is something I have learned because after the first couple of albums, I became aware that I was getting a reputation amongst musos for doing just that, for being quite adventurous harmonically. And it became a little bit of a badge for me. Then I'd start writing and I'd deliberately just do something because it was clever and I think, oh, those guys will really love this. And it was the wrong reason for writing a piece of music, because it was like writing a piece of music because you want people to think how great you are.

And it kind of messed up a few pieces of music as well, because you just have to learn when to do it and when not to do it, when it's the musically bright thing to do, when it just isn't. You just. Sometimes you just have to leave things alone because they work. Yeah.

So the thing that's immediate and powerful, that makes this sort of the quintessential pop song is this. My son was comparing it to some big Coldplay song. Viva la Vida.

Yeah.

Regardless. So that's the foundation of the song, right? Is the actual story of the lyrics. How does that come into it? Was this a pre existing idea that you glommed on, or was this something that you were kind of making up as you were going along, trying to come up with?

It's one of these words in music ones. It's where the words sort of came as part of the melody. I can actually remember what I was doing when it came into my head. I was walking my dog across some fields and I just started singing it in my head. I just started singing these tears are all I have. And then the rhythm of the words. And I think that pretty much most of the words were there in that chorus. I wasn't absolutely sure what the hell it was about. I probably don't have any more. But it would have been stuck on my iPhone as I was walking the dog.

It would have been put on there and I probably forgot about it for a few months, as I do. And then I'd just be wading through bits and pieces on my iPhone and come across that. And I just remember listening to it off the iPhone and thinking, well, the words are there and this is pretty much ready to go. Why don't you just write this song? So that was that. And all I had to do then is find out what the hell I was talking about.

So do you try to sketch out when you've got a story song like this? Do you try to. Like, I had another guest on this guy from a band called Beauty Pill.

Yeah. Who?

He was telling me then details of the story that didn't make it into the song. I'm like, this is way more narrative thought than I put in. You know, when I'm putting in lyrics like this, is that the way you air or is it more? It's vague and maybe I better make this a little more specific.

Yeah, because you can't write. I've learned over these to try and write just like a little microcosm of what you're writing about. It's the little things. Not try and say everything about everything in one song because you end up probably saying nothing. Just stay on message and stick to a very specific point. And the point in this song being that the only thing that keeps this girl connected to this guy who's gone, whether it's from a bereavement or a relationship breakup, it doesn't matter. The only Thing that still connects her to him are the tears and the act of crying and the act of just.

That's where she's with him in that moment. And just to try. Not necessarily to explain it, but just to try and put people in that moment. If you have to explain a lyric within the lyric, then you're not. Probably not writing a very good lyric. You just have to put people in mind of what she's thinking and where she is really.

Now, for some reason, I had a more convoluted interpretation.

I'd love to hear that.

Which was that she's in a relationship with some bastard.

Yeah.

And the tears are somehow the coping mechanism. But of course, that doesn't actually fit with the trying hard. Well, so trying hard to let him go would be she should leave this guy, but he's a bastard.

If that's what it is to you, you know, I mean, that's fine with me. No, but it's just. I'm just. Because I had to go and print them out because I couldn't remember them when you said you were gonna do this. And I obviously had to listen to the tracks again because I don't hear them that often.

The epitaph thing wouldn't work as well unless it was like she's planning on murdering him.

Yeah. But she does. It's like she doesn't want these tears to stop. She'd rather he was there than not. But that's basically saying that he's not physically there. But the only way she can be there with him, or he could be there with her is through the act of crying. That's why she keeps crying. And they can be his epitaph. And if she didn't cry, she'd laugh.

And that makes the juxtaposition of the words and the music make more sense because it has a sort of I will survive feel in terms of. It's a kind of exultant main riff.

The tears, in this sense, are kind of a good thing or a comfort. They're a. Yeah. And it's. It's just the act of her letting go or trying to. That's all it's about. It's a very small thing, but I found it easier to write about the little things over the years than it is to write about the big kind of world shattering things, I guess.

Is there anything in particular in the elaborate studio production? There's a bunch of elements that you could, you know, have all at once that are in the main riff, but instead you back off a little bit. So at around two and a half minutes in, so the very beginning again, you start off with the single note guitar line, guitar, bass doubled, and then have the keyboard. Well on halfway through, you sort of switch it around and take that away so that the bass and the distortion guitar are just punctuating only so you can hear a little more the main. Well, I was going to say keyboard riff, but I think it's actually guitar and keyboard in unison.

26:11 Mark: Right.

26:11 Unknown speaker: The da da da da da. Because it sounds like when you're two and a half minutes in and that happens again, that actually the high string keyboard is not even in there. That's sort of saved for the. Now we want to hear an octave up, but you've got a couple layers of keyboard. Either it's a couple layers of keyboard or you jump up an octave. Now it's the big part.

Yeah, I meant the keyboards. Yeah, It's more guitar than keyboard in that, where it breaks down a bit. And it's a very kind of understated keyboard where the big sort of synthy, fizzy keyboard doesn't come in until the whole thing kicks in a few bars later.

And then at the end you kind of do the same thing where you've got this. You've got a really. Actually nice. Well, it's pretty subtle. So are you playing everything on this? So you're playing the bass and everything set the drums?

Yeah. No, Paul's playing the guy. Paul Geary.

Okay. So the, the.

The bass in particular, I, you know, really serves the song. I know some of your early stuff. You really like fancy bass lines.

Yeah.

Which I as a bass player appreciate. But you know, it's really following the thing. And finally right near the end of

27:20 Mark: the song, you let him kind of

27:21 Unknown speaker: open up just a. Just to add a little more funk in there. So it's these subtle things and even just so you're repeating the chorus like three times at the end and well, let's add some 16th note tambourine just during the last half of the last one just to like give it that extra little push.

Do you know what? It's just great someone hearing all this detail because that you put your heart and soul into something and you spend hours and hours programming hi hats and doing God knows what else. And you think, well, you know, in the end, who's gonna care because they're gonna be listening to it on a MP3 on a phone somewhere. But it's just kind of. It's all worthwhile that you basically notice all this stuff going on because it's exactly what I'm doing. Yeah. I'm kind of building. I think, well, what's the point in having another chorus if it's exactly the same as the one before? It's either got a build or it's got to fall apart, or it's got to have some point in actually having it. I just wanted to increase the tension and vibe, really. Yeah. So the bass picks up quite significantly, and then the old 16th tambourine, which is. Which I use a lot. Yeah.

Now, that said, are you. It's okay to confess this, but for the keyboard parts, given that you're doing this in a computer setup.

Yeah.

Are you cutting and pasting between the. So that when that synth chords, it's actually just the same performance as the previous.

Oh, for sure. Because I'm not a keyboard player. So if I'm supplying the keyboards, I am quite simply programming everything and it's copied. I'm not. Why would I play it again if it's performing the same function? Function, you know, and, you know, to the vendor, the ones when the keyboard's being augmented, I just copied the dots across down to the next track and using a different sound and just the classic. Isn't that what everybody does? If I could play keyboards, if I could play them, sit down and play the piano, then it would be different. I could actually do it within a performance. You know, I'd play a bit louder. I'll play. You know, I'd just pay with a bit more intensity and. But I can't do that. I don't have those kind of chops on the keyboard, being a guitar player. So, yeah, absolutely. Cut and paste.

29:24 Mark: We're now halfway in. That was Nick Kershaw. Now, if you haven't heard the Nakedly Examined Music podcast itself, on each of those episodes, we discussed three songs with the artists in question. In fact, the bits that you're hearing here are slightly edited versions of the first song discussed. So you may well already have the idea and want to go over to nakedlyexaminedmusic.com and just dive into that pile of great discussions you've heard so far. We have country, we have synthopop, there's also indie, lo fi, different flavors of art, rock, prog, rock, punk, grunge, electronica, country, rock, jazz, new age, a good amount of folk, some R and B, a little bit of classical and rap.

So not quite everything. I've also interviewed some very good female singer songwriters recently. So, no, it's not all just white guys, though it is A lot of white guys. Alright, here's a discussion with Ken Stringfellow.

30:11 Unknown speaker: We're gonna go right to the current album, 2016's Solid States. Do you have any introductory words for this song in particular, the Sound of Clouds, what it's about, where it's coming from.

The big theme of this Posies album is mortality. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that we lost one of our band members during the making of this album, Darius Minwalla, who died completely out of the blue, age 38. It was in May of 2015 and we started working on this record in January, February, so we were still doing some of the writing. Although I will say that this song, I think, may have been written before that. But the specter was there. I mean, you know, we're in that age where, like, parents and we're all getting older and people we know are starting to disappear. And we hadn't even had 2016 yet. We hadn't even seen that with the year where everybody died. These thoughts are already on my mind. The end game is on my mind and that's what this song is describing. How could the end game be beautiful

Satan take my flesh away Just the sound of clouds to fill my empty skull and sky flame take my my beating veins Cut the jug you love till I feel no pain Time will make us irreverent Moving its phantom hand over all our events Leaving out traces Making a sequel Love, love, love keep me te. So I'm compelled to stay Compelled to stay and see how the story stay and now I hear the sound of the clouds Calling me through the mist to tell me if I exist oh, all of our gods and myths leaving us have convinced to believe in atheists as we long for completion I long for completion I long for completion

I

over completion Please give me completion Come, come take my fragile hand as we rain Raise our arms and walk towards unknown pleasures.

I know you're an XTC fan, right? So this strikes me kind of like the later xtc, like the song Rook that's also about mortality in this way. Certainly just chordally. I mean, that's one of the big differences. I don't know if it's just more obvious when it's a keyboard song.

Yeah.

I know that some of your earlier guitar stuff was some ninths and crunchy stuff as well, but you get into this chorus and I know you got these parallel fifths in the vocals and some other funny stuff, but it's also just a lot of major sevenths, ninths Floating around. Can you say something about just. Is that the way you write now?

Chromatic chord progressions are like a big part of my life. I love, for some reason those speak to me. I don't know why, because maybe it's the 12 tone row fan in me knows that if you do a chromatic chord progression, you're going to be able to use every single note in the keyboard at some point in your travels. I think a chromatic passage, because it doesn't move through the tried and true chord progression zone, allows you to announce that you are heading into uncharted territory, so to speak. Even though the concept of chromatic chord progressions has been around, they're there to be used, but people don't use them that much because they are.

They sound a little arbitrary, but if used correctly, they can kind of break out of cliche world, you know, I mean, there are plenty of hackneyed chord progressions that even if they're wonderfully hackneyed chord progressions, you know, like they announce that you're quoting to some degree, you know, you're using a trope. And that kind of chord progression says, hey, we're moving beyond the world of tropes. Because I'm talking about a world that none of us understand, which is the world of death. You know, none of us really. Even if we've lost loved ones or friends or whatever, that even makes it worse.

We understand even less about that world. And so if we're talking about that in this song, that's a good way to announce that, hey, we're going to look at that area that we don't know much about. We don't like to look at that much.

And did you find shifting to writing more on keyboard was also tonally freeing in a way? Because you're not kind of, you know, when I'm writing on guitar, either I'm using the main chords or I'm doing a fairly self conscious variation of it. Like that. Okay, now I'm lifting this finger so it's a ninth rather than, you know, a regular chord or adding this one extra thing. Unless you're just working with alternate tunings where you just don't even know what's going to come out until you play it.

We did that a lot for that very reason over the years. For example, the album Amazing Disgrace has almost no songs in standard tuning. I mean, like they're all over the place. And even on Frosting on the Beater, we had a lot of alternate tunings for precisely that reason. So that you're not like going, okay, I'm lifting this finger, so that's a ninth, and this is a major seventh. Like you might end up, you know, Peter Buck always kind of laughed at me saying, okay, you're doing all this work so that you can play C, F and G again. And I'm like, yes, but I don't know, it's C, F and G. So again, intention has a lot to do with it.

Well, didn't he say that himself? Like, that's why he shifted to mandolin because so he wouldn't know what he was doing so much. I remember hearing an interview with him about that.

Well, that doesn't surprise me. But he was happy to point out that I was going through a lot of trouble for perhaps diminishing returns. But he liked the results. He wasn't dissing my songwriting venue.

Especially if you're playing it with a lot of distortion. Like the subtleties of the voicing are not even gonna come through necessarily.

Well, yeah, then you're really lost. It's funny, you know, I was just. I'm potentially working with this band as a producer and they sent me their demos. It's a young band, so these guys are like 21, whatever. And he said, well, you know, I play a lot of jazz chords. And I listened to the demo and I was like, how would I know that? There's like, you know, dinosaur junior levels of distortion. Like, you could be playing root fifth, or you could be playing like every flat at everything and it would be exactly the same. I mean, I can't. It's like, you do realize that some of your efforts here are a little bit masked by the amount of distortion you use. And he's like, but again, there's intention in there. Intention is all in art, right?

And are you thinking in terms of even chords or are you thinking like the intro here? I mean, the main part seems obviously riff based rather than. I came up with a little five note progression here on the piano that I'm repeating rather than this is the chord that I'm playing. Or do you still think in terms of chords when you're doing that kind of riff?

I wasn't thinking in terms of chords. Of course. I'd turn it all off and just start putting my hands down. And we were talking a little bit earlier about the switch from guitar to piano. Piano is my first instrument. It's the first thing I played in bands. Some of the baby bands that I had when I was in junior high, for example. But I moved over to guitar because guitar's cool and easier to carry. Especially after my years playing with REM Where I was primarily playing keyboards. I mean, that's what they needed me the most for. Sometimes I'd jump to guitar if somebody else was. We all switched instruments a lot.

I saw that tour, 1999, I believe,

39:30 Mark: the first one you were on.

39:31 Unknown speaker: Yeah, the up tour. We all switched around. But the skill that they needed the most represented, because they had it the least among themselves, was a certain kind of keyboard playing. I mean, Mike Mills is a great piano player, but synth playing is a different animal. And so they need someone who could kind of work like synths and samplers and do all that and make it sound like REM instead of like omd, omd, rem which could be cool, actually. But anyway, so my chops went way up on those tours, you know, doing that for 10 years. And I just found myself more interested in the keyboard possibilities and the layout of the keyboard and just the feel of it.

The velocity attack of a keyboard and the result that you get. You know, at a certain point, you hit a guitar as hard as you want and it kind of gets to a certain point and stops because, you know, the amplifier itself is a natural compressor. Your dynamic range on the guitar is a little less startling in practice, I think, than your dynamic range on the keyboard. I mean, on a beautiful piano, I can pound the crap out of that thing and it gets pretty loud. Or I can play, like, very delicate, like, little tiny things. And I think it has a wider dynamic range.

It is, of course, called a pianoforte in its full name for that very reason.

Let's turn to some of the specifics of. So are you through playing just the piano part, or are you. Is any of it. I put down the riff once and then I copy it ten times, just,

you know, I actually play the whole song.

Okay.

You know, I keep working at it until I've got an arrangement that I like. And of course, I'm generally playing it into MIDI so I can quantitize it.

So I wanted to ask then about these percussion little bits. So you got some really cool synth percussion stuff on here. This tuned stuff that's near the beginning that has this sort of tribal feel, but obviously, you know, is electronic, I assume.

Okay, yeah, that I love all that I play by hand. I use a program called Transfuser, which is just essentially a drum sampler with different possibilities where you can create patterns, or you can load up some pads with sounds and play a MIDI keyboard or MIDI pads or whatever. It's quite flexible for input and output in terms of. Like, it has inboard sounds. You can import any sounds that you want from whatever library that you want. And then the way that you can get MIDI in can come in a couple different ways. Or you can make, slice up patterns or do whatever you want.

There's all kinds of things you can do in transfuser. And what I like to do is jam through with my fingers and come up with the best of. And then drop those in where I like them, you know, so that it's never quite the same twice. I mean, I might. I don't really do a lot of copy and pasting. I just. I might play something similarly and use that more than once. But I. If I like it, I might try and just play it again. And, you know, you can do some funny things through quantization that you didn't really play it that way, but you can make it more robotic or you can make it faster or whatever.

All those kind of things can happen. But they're all played by hand originally, pretty much. It's pretty rare. Unless it's something really, really stupid that I program it. I know there's a certain school of songwriting in this particular age that we live in now that's like loop based and you layer different loops and you drop things out or whatever. And the Ableton way of writing songs and it makes legit pieces of music that I love. I just don't really work that way. I think of things with a lot more dynamics and a lot more dropping out. A lot more changes more rapidly than a pattern that you get used to.

That's probably, you know, one of the reasons I'm super unpopular. But I like things to change much more rapidly and much more often.

The other little instruments that you picked here, you've got what is this very high, almost like a triangle that's entering in the chorus that's playing the main. It's like you were trying to fill up the hi hat spot, but it's very high.

Well, there's treated piano that's pretty cool. And that was done at Frankie, our drummer's studio in la. You know, we took a grand piano and basically took gaffer tape or whatever and made a little loop of gaffer over each string that we were going to use so that the string was like kind of constricted so that when you hit it, it didn't have a lot of sustain or resonance. That's kind of the jam on that. Like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Well, okay, so I feel less silly now asking. Then the other sound that's at the choruses, that's at the end of some of the phrases, like on equal and Traces. It sounds like you're doing the. I have an amp with spring reverb in it and I'm dropping it 2 inches and it's making this like. Is that what that sound is?

That's an electronic sound that I just. I made. I think I took some drum sample and just started twisting it and bending it and running it through stuff and dropped that in. But that's. And with delay and stuff like that. But that's a non organic sound.

Ah, well, there must be some reason of physics why that would sound like that. In terms of what. What the reverb is actually doing in an amp when you throw it around like that.

Well, yeah, the spring is hitting really hard and overloading it, basically. I mean, the overload is kind of what we hear.

Yep.

And then the bass is also. Synth bass is not real bass. Or is it real bass?

There's two things. I mean, there is a kind of fat, low synth bass that's kind of in a lot of different parts of the song. But there's also parts where I'm playing like a Fender 6.

Just at the end where the real drums come in is that.

Oh, okay.

The articulated places, all those syncopated lines are like Fender 6.

All right, well, so that answers part of my question. I mean, it sounds like once you enter this electronic realm, I can see especially if you're working remotely with somebody, it seems like, oh, I can just keep everything in the electronic realm. And, you know, perhaps if we share the same software, I can send that thing overseas and let the other guy even mess around with the electronic settings. How were you communicating with John about this? What did John actually add to this?

John added his vocals and some guitar things.

So the guitars, like in around three minutes, in you get with the bridge come I long for completion. You get this giant cave noise. Is that guitar feedback? Is that what guitar you're talking about or is that something else?

Well, there's that. But actually in that section, a lot of that is human voice, amplified and backwards. We made a backwards mix of that section and I did like kind of operatic vocals backwards, you know, singing through an amp with amp reverb. So it has a little bit of a guitar like Tom, but it's going through an amp, but it's actually me. But he did add guitar to it.

I long for completion I long over completion I over completion Please Give me completion.

The electronic programming in general on this album is kind of my domain. And I think it's my biggest contribution in a way, because it's the thing that sets this album apart from our. The rest of our work the most.

46:41 Mark: I think, again, that was Ken Stringfellow. We're gonna wrap up by listening to the longest section. And this is not even the full discussion of the song. It's with ex-Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett. Very gracious, very imaginative, very experienced. Hope you enjoy it.

46:57 Unknown speaker: Let's get pretty quick to. In the Skeleton Gallery from your. The Night Siren coming out right now. Do you have any introductory words about that project and that song in particular?

It's about nightmares. It's about being a kid and dealing with all those fears. And then it also addresses some adolescent stuff as well. Different kind of nightmares. Feeling like you're pinned down and couldn't move. And I know other people have felt like that. Got something to do with adolescence, puberty, Strange times in your life Things that go bump in the night.

When I was young I was lonely without you in my creepy building Without a. Many people said I was dreaming

Way,

way up in the stars A spaceship out the B.

Footprint so.

Shadows in the cold Scared to fall asleep they always lay waiting.

Wake up, jump out before the song

ends get up, hear the sh.

50:16 Mark: The.

52:37 Unknown speaker: You always have very cinematic orchestrations. So it gives you a lot of room to illustrate what you're talking about. That now, you know, now we're drifting off into the nightmare realm. And so the entire orchestra can come and illustrate that the nightmare is here.

Yeah, there are a few things on that track. There's some backwards guitar. There's some strange noises on it, strange string stuff. There's some real drums, which have been somewhat processed and altered. It's a very difficult track to describe in a way, but it's got something compelling about it. It's got a change of rhythm at one point and one point it was two separate tracks, but I decided to make them into one. And it was only the chorus that really worked of the second track. So I just used that bit and used all the other things that I had in mind. So I threw away a lot of stuff. I threw away a whole song in the making of this one particular song. Because the other song didn't really work. And sometimes you have to make a cruel cut in order to make things really fly.

53:36 Mark: Yeah.

53:37 Unknown speaker: So I was wondering about that. The second song we're gonna do, Love Song to a Vampire, also has. You know, it goes Into a Deep Purple rock sort of thing toward the end, but then comes back, you know, it retains the theme that you started with. Whereas this one, it's just gone. It's this transition through this marching section and then you go into the 68 and well, the marching things comes back over the 68 while the instruments are spazzing out. But the initial going to sleep part is just gone.

Yeah, I decided not to go back to anything at the beginning. There didn't seem to be much point of that. Although I have to say that the track tiptoes out in a Disney esque kind of way. Maybe I'm talking more about Tchaikovsky. You know, when I hear those tinkly chords that are playing the thing that's been the huge riff, but doing it very, very gently. It has a kind of sinister quality by underplaying it. That's not how we do it live. When we go out live, we go out screaming. But on record you can rein those things in. And the loud soft aspect, of course, those dynamics are really an important way of engaging the listener.

Now when you have a riff like the opening eastern sounding string part, I know with some of the orchestral sections you just say, okay Roger, you go handle that. But this is the main riff. I assume this is something that you would dictate that you would demo on guitar or with your voice or something.

Well, that riff, actually I was talking to my wife Jo about the things that I'd done in the past that I liked. And I said to her I could do with a really slow riff here. And you know what? She sang it to me and I changed one note in order to make the scale a little stranger on it. But I kept exactly what she sang. And it works a treat with the bendy strings. We used LA scoring strings on that, plus some other samples that only Roger knows about on that. But we were going to make it real strings. But it had such an eerie quality with the sampley stuff, you know, what with time compression and time stretching to make the bendy bit really strange on it.

And are you using the bass foot pedal in that section? The bomb? It sounds like there's synth bass on the one.

Yeah, well that's. It's really string sampled that. So we've got real drums, we've got real guitar, but what's going on around it is sampled. But, you know, a whole bunch of them. Actually, I think we might have a real double bass player on that. Yeah, we have my friend Dick Driver on that that sometimes I forget what's real and what isn't? Because we ghost things with unreal very often. And maybe it's the other. Sometimes it's the other way around. Yeah.

That's what it sounds like when it actually gets into the verses. That instead of having a traditional bass, then you've got the. Well, it sounds like a whole cello bass section, which is interesting in that setting, that you've got the full rock drum kit. You would think that having that sort of drone with that. Yeah, that it's an interesting strange combination there.

There's something about orchestral basses and cellos. If you hear an orchestral bass end, it's got this feeling of infinite bass about it. Whereas the sharp tone of a rock bass guitarist. It's a very defined thing and it's big in another way, but it sits right in front of you. Whereas you get that feeling of infinite perspective. I think, you know, I get the idea of big ocean liners drifting off down infinite spaces when I hear what orchestras do. And sometimes, even if the mix is a bit boomy, or you're listening to it on a boomy large system, sometimes those orchestral basses only benefit from that. So sometimes what we do with orchestral bass ends is we might track something with bass clarinet, for instance. I'm fond of cellos and bowed basses as well. You can use quite a lot of things on a low end.

And then what would go into determining. It makes it sound like a Zeppelin song.

57:41 Mark: That you.

57:42 Unknown speaker: To have the big rock beat there as opposed to. Now that you've set up the orchestral bass thing. Well, it'd be easy enough to do a sort of timpani roll sort of thing, you know, so that the whole rhythm section has that orchestral other feeling. But no, we're synthesizing them.

And other things that I took out. I originally put chords behind the vocal. And I was playing that on guitar at first. And then we, by accident, we played it back without that. And it made the vocal sound instantly larger. So I thought less is more on this one. Let's leave out some things. I mean, I'm very capable of, if I'm not careful. Getting up to about 300 tracks on any one particular song. Just because you can these days. You stick a tambourine down and it has its own track and its own program. And so on it goes. And Roger King often turns to me and says, you realize that we are in excess of 300 tracks on this.

And I say to him, well, how many? He says, I can't be bothered to count. But, you know, it might be as much as 350. So you've got something like four symphony orchestras at times and a couple of rock bands and the rest, you know, the sky's the limit. And I do track up quite a bit, but that's to give something like the feeling that you're talking about, you know, I do use. I use real strings on this. We have Christine Townsend, who's playing violin and viola. There's another Townsend on it, who's Rob Townsend playing soprano sax. We have mellotron flutes.

A number of singers, not just me. There's quite a lot going on from moment to moment. And sometimes right at the. When it starts to go really rocky in the six, eight, the guitar is being twinned by bass. It's also being twinned by organ. Sometimes. It's not always obvious when organ is doubling something, but it suddenly can make the guitar sound so much larger.

I've seen, even on stage, that sometimes you go into these riffs and, well, you might as well have two other guitarists play with you to really solidify the thing.

Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes, yeah. It's nice. I think live ensemble playing is usually the strength of any one band, no matter whether there's a decent soloist up there or not. I think ensemble playing, when you can get the whole band playing like one instrument, that was something that I discovered many, many years ago, and it's still something that I look for in other bands. I mean, for instance, we went to see Anderson, Rabin Wakeman the other night, you know, with Lee Pomeroy playing bass, who's my pal. You know, we've worked together lots.

And, you know, it's the ensemble playing that really comes across that thing where everyone's playing to a kind of a virtuosic standard. But it's really tight ensemble playing, and we can translate that sometimes to orchestra. The last gig I did in the States was in Buffalo with the Buffalo Philharmonic. So we had all of those going at the same time with a great conductor. I love all things orchestral and all things rock, and I do think that they belong together.

A difficult thing. I mean, certainly if it's an orchestral setting, you're telling them exactly what to play, but if it's a matter of a number of people, okay, let's layer ourselves on top of each other. Then the sort of stark tonality that you establish. I mean, right here at the beginning, you said you took out the chords, and that really makes it effective when. About a minute and a half in, when the dream section starts, the sax comes in that you've. You've been playing in some kind of D up to now, but it's not a D major, it's not a D minor. It's just a modal. You know, you can hear the 1 and the 5, but then you switch.

1:01:20 Mark: Now it's up to E. And it

1:01:22 Unknown speaker: just sounds so warm. And it's not even a major chord. Like it's just again, the emotal with an F sharp I heard in the background there. But it sounds like. So warm and open because of. You've been able to sustain this. Whereas if you just. The natural thing for a keyboard is to do. If you're playing in a band with someone to add to your. It's just, okay, well, I'm gonna add some ninths. I'm gonna fill out the chord. I'm gonna. But to keep that starkness is A.

Again, I've learned with time that it's not always a great idea to fill up the mid range with keyboard chords. I'm not saying that that doesn't sound wonderful, and it certainly does. You mentioned modal stuff. And I think big riffs can only benefit from not necessarily having all the harmonies going at the same time. So unison seems to be, I would say, probably an undiscovered territory or rediscovered territory for many bands who are thinking, how do we do progressive stuff? How do we get to sound like those British bands? And it's very easy to fill it all in with Hammond organs and melotrons and all the modern equivalents and what have you, but. But there are times when it's nice to just open up the picture and say, no, I'm going anti prog here. I've got something more like heavy metal. Perhaps.

When the marching section finally comes in, which I love that I wrote Glass of Water synth.

1:03:00 Mark: I'm not sure.

1:03:01 Unknown speaker: It's sort of sloshing.

I know what you mean. Yeah.

Right before the actual marching comes in and then the whole band comes in and then you use the background vocals really interestingly, where, you know, introducing the female semi improvisational wailing to add a bit of sparkle to this section. Was it just having them jam on that vocally on that section a few times and picking out what you wanted? Or was it more directed, lots of

jamming on that section and allowing things that weren't the main melody to be happening at the same time to give it a kind of hellish quality? The idea of, you're going down, man, and what's happening, and there's all this other stuff going on, you know, this kind of pleading Soulful things. So I let a number of things happen on that. And it's a way forward, you know, As I say, that was what worked. We kept what worked. And there's a lot of reliance on Rob Townsend because we have this thing where we have Gulli Briem, the drummer, on it. But then we have Rob Townsend, who really leads the charge with soprano sax on so much of this.

And he comes up with two entirely different sounding solos. One is to introduce this kind of dream sequence, as you know, that's kind of floating, unconscious, spooky, Egyptian sounding thing almost. And then there's the kind of flat out jazz burn solo that he does so well. And of course, he did these one after another. He just comes up with great, great, great solos. It would take other people ages to work that sort of thing out. I know it would take me ages to work that out. You know, when I improvised. It's much more. I think it's probably much more straight and I work things up.

But he's a jazz professor and he has great ideas about how you can arrange scales within solos. And he just does this in a flash of a second. But I'm often saying to him, what is it you're doing there? And he'll say, well, it's a diminished run. And he'll patiently explain it to me and then I'll assimilate it. Or he'll say, this is a scale that comes from Bartok. I play him a discord and he says, well, actually it's a scale from Bartok. And he shows me those notes and we used that on Anything But Love, just right at the end. I used that not for the first time in my life.

So would it be sacrilege with one of his parts to he does it multiple takes and use the beginning of one take and the end of another take. Or is it just so organically connected within a given take that, like, you just have to use a particular performance?

Well, we had done that with him in the past, but on this particular track, and he just came up with some alternatives. I think we liked the first one each time, so we just weren't with that. You know, sometimes you just can't improve on it. It wouldn't be human nature if someone didn't say, let me try another one, I might be able to better it. But the ones that he does are extraordinary. He's also trained as a percussionist, so he's got this extraordinary sense of time within the solos that he does. And he can find his own Time within a given structure. And that's something rather extraordinary. And I've learned something from that, that sometimes you can hold the line, but it's just with yourself, the jazz man choosing his own timing. It can work and, you know, contrapuntally, but it's an extraordinary talent that he possesses.

So to be fair, when you say you use this many tracks, that single, that's a half a dozen tracks right there. So it's not. It's consecutive. It's not all on top of each other.

Well, that's a sample of a gospel choir that Roger had. And they're particularly good. It just sounds quite extraordinary. So, you know, we've used that in some places and sometimes we twin it. Sometimes we have stuff in real time going with them to augment them or they augment me. At one time, of course, you had a Mellotron choir, and that seemed absolutely Amazing back in 1973, when we did Selling England by the Pound. And on that very first track, Dancing with the Moonlit Knight, the Mellotron choir coming in. And that was it. You know, in terms of available choirs at your fingertips, there was that, but now there are many, many, many, of course. And there's something about the gospel choir that is really, really full throated and extraordinary.

Well, I feel better about hearing that you're using the sample because after watching a little of a video where you're talking about, you know, how you're layering the string sounds, that it's not just a string sample. It's the same person even playing the same part multiple times with different fingerings and, you know, to make it really sound like an actual full orchestra. And so I was picturing you having your singers repeat the same note. You know, we just want to do this one. It's only one half note here, but we're gonna spend half a day on it.

We did that as well. I mean, sometimes when we've recorded strings, for instance, we've taken the same person but moved the mic for different takes. That has a different ambience in the room and much the same as an orchestra functions in terms of, you know, if you've got stereo mics up, as opposed to every single player might. There's a great sound that comes off of an orchestra because of the different desks and the way they have a natural perspective away from the microphone. So nothing new in that. You know, you think of Hound Dog and the distant drums that kk when it all stops. And there's color for you right there from the room, from Whatever, presumably compressors they were using way back in the day.

So in that Deep Purple section, that rock section that you finally get to. So this is the beginning of the other song. Or was the marching part the beginning of the second song?

I think the marching part was the beginning of the song, which we decided not to do. The song was called Zombie Powder and we decided not to do that, but use the chorus from Zombie Powder, which was the get up section.

Well, so that does explain a little bit about. I always wonder when you have these, again, very cinematic arrangements and the ability to fairly, literally depict anything. If you want to say, and now we're entering a dream, you can then write an instrumental part that directly reflects that. But going into a Deep Purple rock thing like that doesn't jump out as now I'm illustrating the nightmare realm. It's something more general than that. So the fact that you put these together, of course, any sort of description like that, this is the nightmare realm, this is the evil part, or whatever, has so many different possible realizations. It's not really that restrictive.

Yeah, it all depends how you perceive this stuff. I didn't have the Deep Purple in mind. Also, I'm thinking of noir films as well, where you've got that kind of, you know, thing from, I guess, the 1950s onwards, a kind of something that would, you know, creep up in Risk, where you've got flattened fifths and. But, you know. But they're all passing notes in, in the idea of something that's slightly bluesy, slightly jazzy. It takes you off somewhere and it's where a lot of these forms cross. So I get very influenced by film stuff. Incidentally, while we're talking about this track, the mix in 5.1, when it comes to what you call the watery part, which is basically processed strings.

That sounds extraordinary in Surround because it just seems to. You can't pin it down. It seems to dance in front of you and kind of go in and out of you when you're sitting. And it's very, very unner at that point. And it reminds me of when I was a kid, when I was sick at one point, and I was in this altered state of consciousness. I was able to see sound waves coming towards me. And they scared the life out of me. I could see them. I knew not at that time what they were, but I could hear the electrical charge that went with them. The vertical lines coming towards me and breaking up with this kind of electrical charge.

And it was very frightening indeed. And this has something like that. It was A serendipitous thing, because I wasn't aiming for that, but it was yet another feeling of things that you can't pin down as a kid. And you can't even tell adults about it because you don't have the vocabulary to be able to talk about it. But in a way, it's apt that it's in this particular song.

I always think actually about music in those sort of visual terms. And it's very freeing because if you're thinking, here are five guys, or however many, sitting with instruments, each of them emits a noise. That's a completely different approach to. There's a giant yellow square coming from the left side here, and you're actually thinking in terms of the stereo space and the big blocks of tone, sort of primarily. And then which notes you actually pick or which particular sounds are going to represent those is almost secondary or serendipitous at best.

I think music is very subjective. It means different things to different people. And so it may well be that someone else will get a very different picture in mind. But the main thing is that you get an idea of some kind of picture, especially from instrumental music. It's very often the case. I've got something in mind, and I won't necessarily be thinking video. When I'm talking picture, I'm talking about something else. But then whoever's listening, if they've liked what you've done in previous years, I think what happens is that the audience is the true owner of it.

If you are affected to the degree where it becomes part of your memory bank, your DNA or whatever you call it, you get the true picture by listening to other people who will say, actually, it means the following. And I've done this with people that I've been a fan of as well. I've done this with Ian McDonald when he was with King Crimson and talking to him about Epitaph, the bit where the Mellotron rises up on that diminished chord and then get the bend of note at the end of it. And I was listening to that this very day, and I said to Ian at the time, I said, surely you must have been thinking about something like the Holocaust.

You must have been thinking about a bomb going off. The way the music just mushrooms into that. And I've heard other people say the same thing. And you know what Ian, the guy who wrote it, said, oh, I never really thought about it like that. So he must have done something instinctively that the rest of us just went, oh, my God. You know, that's a literal depiction of the end of the world. And so we, the listeners, distill this information from other people who've perhaps their antenna has been up and they've received it in some other kind of way.

But music passes through musicians, I think. They don't always get the full import of it. I know that the Genesis guys that I worked with have got no idea about the impact of the early work that we did. And it's up to listeners who've told me what it meant to them. So I've been able to conduct my own survey over time. And I realized what music does when it works, it takes people to other worlds. It does all sorts of things. Say, oh, you know, this song saved my life. This did this. This was the song that put me and my girlfriend together. And it's all sorts of things, isn't it?

You know, the power of music, the healing quality of it. It's so many different powerful things. It brings people together.

1:14:19 Mark: All right, thanks for listening to this special presentation. I've really gotten to talk to so many brilliant, creative people on the Nakedly Examined Music podcast. I hope you will check it out out at nakedlyexaminemusic. Com or look us up on itunes. And if you're the kind of person who's maybe less interested in going in this depth about music, but enjoyed me digesting some episodes to present them here, let me know that too. This is Mark Linsenmayer signing off.