PEL Special: Nakedly Examined Music #1 with David Lowery

0:06 Mark: This is a historic event in Partially Examined Life history as we have unleashed our first spin off podcast. We're cross posting just this first episode of Nakedly Examined Music into the Partially Examined Life feed in the hopes that you will be inspired to go to nakedlyexaminedmusic.com or look up the podcast on itunes or elsewhere. You'll see there are now at least four episodes posted. I've recorded eight of them. This is the real thing. This is going to continue. Now, what is philosophical about this? If you listen to our episode 118 where I talk to different members of Campervan Beethoven, then you're about to hear here.

You will see that for me, the artistic life and the philosophical life are very tightly related. What is the meaning to our lives? What are we supposed to be doing? If you're artistic in any sense, you answer that question through action. What I want to know through this podcast is why songwriters choose to do what they do in the way that they do it. Now, even if you have no interest in songwriting itself, still a good chance you're gonna like this. On the grounds of music appreciation, we talk a lot in the partial exam in life about practical philosophy, about being centered, about concentrating.

Well, active listening is a very immediate form of that, and this podcast is all about encouraging that. I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to the premiere episode of Nakedly Examined Music. My name is Mark Lintonmeyer. On this podcast, I'll be interviewing songwriters and composer and playing three full recordings of their songs to discuss in depth. Why did you write that? Why did you write it that way? Whether we end up talking about the stories behind the songs or influences or lyrics or the career development of a musician or music theory really just depends on the emphasis of the particular person I'm talking to.

My guest this time is David Lowery, who founded the indie rock band Campervan Beethoven in the early 80s and then the alt rock band Cracker in the early 90s.

1:52 Unknown speaker: The music you're hearing right now is

1:53 Mark: Cracker's big hit from 1992, low. To learn more about David and the songs we're discussing, take a look@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com you're also going to want to check out our parent podcast, the Partially Examined Life@PartiallyExaminedLife.com

2:11 Unknown speaker: all right, welcome, David.

Welcome.

Are you ready to overanalyze a few of your songs to the point of ruining them?

Yeah, let's do it. Let's. Let's do it.

Is that actually possible? I know you have not been shy in the past about. I mean, you have your whole 300 songs blog about explaining what the lyrics are or at least what inspired them. I don't know if that exhausts what their meaning is or where the band was at when this particular tune came out. You seem not shy about that kind of thing. Do you find that there's anything sacrosanct about some of your music such that I wouldn't even want to explain it. It would lessen it somehow?

Well, the main problem for me is that I'm going to have problems remaining consistent. Right. Over the years because, you know, we're all subject to things like the narrative fallacy and sort of false memories and all this stuff. So you gotta take it as kind of an approximation always that this is what we were really doing. I have a great case of, I guess, what's false memory that I always give to my class. You know what the narrative fallacy is, right?

Tell us what the narrative fallacy is.

Okay. The narrative fallacy is that your brain has a tendency to string a logical arrow through events that happen that you're remembering in order to remember them. Right? So, for instance, I have a really great narrative fallacy about the song Low that I found myself talking to my class about how the song became a hit. But when I went back, I discovered that I had had email correspondence going back that far with a couple people at the record label and the producer. And none of the things I told my class were. In fact, we'd never really had any conversations about the song Low on that record.

We had conversations about other songs being the single that were never singles. So I had just completely invented this thing in my head that we were focused on these songs that were the singles, and in fact, we weren't. And the three songs that were singles from that album were you're a Trash Girl, get off this, and Low. And the only conversation there was about any three of those songs that became singles was Eurotrash Girl. And the conversation was about whether to put it on the record or not. Like, not even addressed as a single. It was like, we probably should pull this off because it's making the record too long.

And we already released it on an ep. So the narrative fallacy is a wonderful thing because you can remember certain things, but you will string events together in a logical way to remember those things that are false.

It just means that once your art is down and out there, once the past is past, then you're constructing some way of making sense of it in the same way that all of the people listening to you are. Except that of course, you're a little more interested in it. At least I'll maintain that as a conceit so that I can have something to say about your songs as well. Okay, but let's get some fake narrative in here. So the first song we were going to talk about.

So now that I've undermined the entire podcast by saying that it's likely that a lot of this is false. Let's go.

The made up stuff is just as interesting as probably more so I found. I just did a bunch of interviews recently about this album I just released. And, you know, I didn't prepare. It was very short conversations with a number of people as to what was the meaning of the song. And I didn't remember the meaning of the song so much as I remembered what I had said to other people. The meaning of the song was. So you've reviewed these four songs freshly for this podcast. Okay.

5:38 Mark: All right.

5:38 Unknown speaker: So we'll have some fresh ears, perhaps.

Do you want to start with meaning, since you mentioned meaning?

Okay, well, so maybe before we play the first song, it's all her favorite fruit from Key Lime pie, recorded in 1989 for the last campervan Beethoven album of that era before they broke up. Probably one of my top five albums period. Key Lime Pie. Any introductory words before we play that tune?

It's set in the 1940s. I think that explains some of this and we'll go into that, but I think that's good for people to know.

So it's not just a racist bastard.

That's right.

All right, here it is.

I drive alone home from work and I always think of her. But late at night I call her but I never say a word. And I can see her squeeze the phone between her chin and shoulder. And I can almost smell her breath faint with a sweet scent of decay. She serves in mashed potatoes and she serves him peppered steak with corn Pulls a dress up over her head, lets it fall to the floor. Does she ever whisper in his ear all her favorite through. And all the most exotic places they are cultivated.

And I'd like to take her there rather than this train. And if I weren't a civil servant I'd have a place in the colonies. We play croquet behind whitewash walls and drink our tea at 4. Within interventions dist. Sense of the embassy. The midday air grows thicker the heat and drifts towards the line of trees where Negroes blink their eyes they sink into siesta and we are running like a fruit Underneath a resting roof. We dream our dreams and sing our songs of love the candid love. Sam.

Okay, so musically, it seemed like in Key Lime Pie, you hit. Maybe you were edging toward this with songs like she Divines Water on the previous album, but it really seems like you hit a very unique hybrid. It's something that I see reflected in, in fact, most of the other tunes that we're going to talk about today. This sort of slow, moody country thing, but with an internal tension that really kind of pushes it along, even if it's fairly slow. Do you know where that was coming from, or can you characterize where you were at in your musical development going into this song and this record?

Well, I think Camper had an element of this darker stuff in their songs always, but it kind of had been overshadowed by kind of our fun, sort of wackier sort of side. Right. I mean, stuff like Aya Fujima from the album before, that could have been done in this way, but it's more upbeat, it's kind of funny. There's little tongue in cheek elements. There's just kind of weird psychedelic elements and stuff like that that make it sort of lighter. And there's more of an element of humor in it. Right. Early Kurt Vonnegut, as opposed to late Kurt Vonnegut. So with this album, we really specifically set out to just be much moodier and just pretty much stick to that. More minor chords lean into the blue notes and the out and out dissonant notes and stuff that. So, yeah, we were specifically just trying to keep it more thematically on that darker tone to the album, which does

not sound like something the record label told you to do. That does not sound like a way to further break you into the mainstream. Yes.

Mark Williams, who is our A and R guy, has seriously good artistic tastes. He's like an art collector. He's an intellectual. Just kind of an odd bird to be in that position at a record label. And he's. By the way, he's still there. He's still one of the most successful A and R people out. And so we didn't directly get that pressure from the record label until the record was done. Like, he let us make this record. He let us go where we were going. And it was certainly only afterwards that we even got kind of a little bit of that. So we were really left alone to do this album. And our A and R guy knew fully well what we were doing. So, yeah, it was kind of odd for a Major label band at that era, a band that had done what we had.

So this is actually supposed to be the light moment that you've just gone out of the song before this June, the whole second half of which is probably the most dark and dissonant part of the record that almost sounds like it's. The engineer from Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of dawn has broken into the studio and tinkered with things a little bit. So this is supposed to be just a nice little splash, but yet there's a great build in this one. It's interesting. I usually associate the core sound of this record with the first two full tracks with Jack Ruby and Sweethearts, which are very different, but they both have this tension that makes me want to just tear off my clothes and run around screaming.

This kind of. Which is strange that Sweethearts is, you know, ostensibly a nice, light little backbeat ballad, but yet it still has that. This tension that is doling out in small bits. Whereas with Jack Ruby, it just. Sparks start flying right at the beginning. Right in here we got the slow burn and then it builds up until the third verse, the closer we get to a chorus.

Right.

So we got this little drummer boy sort of intro in terms of the writing process. Like the little violin riff in the intro that answers, da, da, da, da, da. Like, was that something that you dictated, or was it Don Lax that did this part?

Don Lax did that part, but he's playing basically what Greg Leisher plays. Really, this whole album is developed largely with me and Greg Leisure. Yeah, Well, I actually have to be careful because this song, Jonathan Sagal, was still in the band when we were developing this song, so it's possible that that violin part came from him, but I really think it came from Greg. And yes, a lot of this was developed with just Greg coming over with his electric guitar, little amp and my acoustic guitar, because for what reason? There was a period, I think, where only the two of us were around. And so a block of these songs, maybe a slight majority of the record, was developed with just me and Greg, so it came from him.

So I didn't know the backstory. You say this was based on a piece of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which I shamefully have not read, but I looked at a summary of it this morning. It sounds like a big book with lots and lots of characters. Is this a significant scene? How did you pick this? Tell us a little more about that point of inspiration.

Gravity's Rainbow is the last generation's infinite Jest. I had a friend who joked about, like, that every guy that she had dated had Infinite Jest or Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow on their bookshelf and had never read them. These are classic books to have and to have never read. I don't know why I managed to relate to it, get through it and read it multiple times. But there's only one real love story in the whole record. And it's between the mathematician, cryptologist, somebody who breaks codes, and one of the cypher girls, which, you know, this is based in some historical.

With the mathematicians. And then these roomfuls of these Cypher girls who would get the code partially broken. And then they'd have to sort of make these guesses. And those had to be done manually. So this is the love story in Gravity's Rainbow between Roger Mexico and Jessica something. And they're having an affair. I think they both have. Might be engaged to other people. It's been a long time since I read the book. Pretty much the words to the song are paraphrased from a lot of things that he says in the book.

I heard that story. You know, these people are having an affair and he's jealous of the husband. You don't get that from what is here on the page, that what we get is a stalker. Basically. There's no indication that he has prior actual relations with this woman. It has more of just a yearning thing. And seeing this person in at least projecting that the person's life is in decay, is in disarray. And certainly the stalker himself is not in such a good state. And then having this fantasy about taking it all to a tropical island or.

Yeah. Moving to some Caribbean island or working for their equivalent of the State Department or, you know, some civil service kind of job. But he's not a stalker. There's something very real there between them. And then, you know, she basically kind of breaks it off. And then it's him yearning for her. And I don't know, I just think it's an interesting story and it's an interesting setting. And the characters are so strong in my mind. See, one of the tricks, I think writing songs is getting your characters strong enough and letting them speak and tell the story so you sort of don't have to write the words yourself. So the characters are so strong. He speaks so well in my head anyway, that it was very easy to do this song. And doing that leads you in some odd directions.

Well, and the impression that I get partly is from the context that some of the other characters you do on this album, the when I win the lottery guy and some others are. They're not very sympathetic characters. And you get that here. Just the idea of the spying. But then when we get to the end and we are like a rotting fruit underneath a rusting roof, we dream our dreams and sing our songs of

the fecundity of life and love.

The fecundity of. Okay, yeah, I see that's what it said on your site.

18:53 Mark: One of the other places I look

18:54 Unknown speaker: in Cigar Songs of love, comma, fecundity. But it's the fecundity of life and love.

18:58 Mark: All right.

18:59 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

Bringing back the fruit part, which sounded when it came up in the first place, that the way you're describing it, it sounds like it's not supposed to be a comic song, but yet it definitely came off that way. That when the things about the embassy. Just the details of the 1940s. Ness. Which is not anything big that most listeners would know. Going in and bringing up the. All her favorite fruit in the first place. Strike one as bizarre. Was that intentional or was that just. That's part of the story.

I believe that line itself is lifted from the book. Like, does she ever whisper in his ear all her favorite fruit? If it's not directly that line, it's paraphrased.

So bringing back the fecundity of life and love seems to raise the profile. Make sublime something that seemed kind of slimy for the first part of the song. This fantasy, you know, Especially if he's not completely projecting it onto the woman. If it is actually a correct diagnosis of the situation and not merely external. But we can't know that as listeners unless we read the book.

Right? You're not supposed to know any of this stuff in the songs. I mean, this one has a story behind it. A lot of the songs I have don't really have a story behind it. But the reason you have the fecundity of life and love. Fecund, as in overripe, ripe to the point of being overripe, I think is actually really where it is. It's talking about the richness of our life and our emotional experiences. Right. But on the other hand, that brief period where it's ripe to overripe. The most rich moment, the sweetest moments are very short lived. You know, the fruit falls off the tree after that, before that, the fruit isn't ripe. You know, these are very short moments in our life. And that's what the narrator is getting at. And that's not really in the book. That's just me doing that part.

See, I'd read the fecundity as being ever fruitful. That it's to seize the day. It's the romantic ideal of that being in this other relationship, being in the paradisiacal place. There's nothing in the way it's described that implies for sure that that would be short lived. Certainly the ideal is to be ever grasping the moment. And ever living life to its fullest.

Yeah, that's the ideal in his mind is to suspend that one moment into this theoretical paradise. So yes, it's all of those things. And since he's speaking in a general term. Maybe that one moment of perfect sweetness to the point of decay, you know, is repeated in many other situations throughout one's life. But each one of those moments is separate and short lived. But you keep having these other moments. There's an endless supply of these moments. It's a fairly optimistic worldview.

Well, and sort of getting back to how the lyrics are set in the music. We don't really have a verse chorus structure. We have a verse and then a more open, exultant verse. Or you know, with slightly different chords. The first time we get that doo da da da da da da da. The open happy guitar part is the all her favorite fruit line. Which is where we're getting into the fantasy territory. Everything after that, your octave goes up. Talk about the vocal thing. I hope this is not offensive. But the reason that these songs, even the serious ones, come off as underlyingly funny.

Besides just the fact that some of the words sound bizarre is just that I find your voice, the type of charisma it has. Is kind of like even when Bill Murray does a serious part. It has a certain shtick to it. And so especially I'll take that. When you hit the high octave, there's something. I don't want to make any comparisons. I almost did a Guilford Godfrey impression there. It's not that, but the high energetic blues voice, like it has a certain sparkle to it that always to me at least not necessarily laugh out loud funny. But it's very easy to use that to put over something that's irony soaked or whatever flavor of humor you want.

You mean when the rock vocalist goes up to the top of their range. Where they get that little bit of cracking and stuff when you do that?

Yes. Although I can read that into like Robert Plant or someone like that as well. As much as they might not intend that.

Right. That's part of the tension to Go up is something that I use a lot throughout all of our songwriting. Like, the musical part of the songwriting is like, okay, well, we can add more energy to this right here. And I think what you're getting at is that. So we add more energy in the vocal parts and in the guitar parts are getting more complex. And he's adding this melodic theme and stuff like that right at that moment. But the words are kind of crazy. Yeah, it's not the kind of words that you would, like, go to the high part on.

Yes.

You know, typically.

If I weren't a civil servant. Yes.

Yeah. If I weren't a civil servant. I mean, you don't. Who goes to that line for, like, emphasize. You know, that's part of it, but that's part of the strangeness of the whole album. And going back to what you said at the beginning, I mean, I was fortunate that people like the late Chubba Paddocks, who was engineering the record, that Dennis Herring, who was producing the record, and Mark Williams, who, in ar. Ing it, they get all this stuff. So there was never any not so weird line to sing there. You know, there's none of that happening.

And then sort of the punchline, if there is one, is the second time that exultant riff comes, which is at the end of the. You've already been up an octave for a while. Is within Interventions. Distance of the embassy, which seems a weird thing to put in a fantasy, that this is our fantasy place in the colonies, the tropical island. But yet there might be danger there. And there might be.

What?

Yes, I know, it's bizarre. I agree.

Was that a detail from the book or that's just purely you adding stuff?

I think that's just me adding stuff. And, yeah, that's sort of a weird foreshadowing of some stuff we do later with Cracker. But, yeah, there's this notion that the characters, maybe they're not in the Caribbean, maybe they're in, like, Africa, but whatever it is, they're in some place where it's not necessarily the safest place for a couple of British colonists to be. So they're clustered near some British installation so that they're not in danger.

Any further thoughts on this one before we head to the second song?

No, I think we kind of overanalyzed it, man. We analyzed that one to death.

25:22 Mark: All right.

25:22 Unknown speaker: So usually the format of the show is we pick something that's been an ongoing thing you're trying to do in your songwriting. A major theme for the first one, and then for the second one, we do some other contrasting theme, something. Well, this one I feel actually works better as analyzing it as they later elaboration of some of the same kind of thing you're trying to do in the first one. This is I Sold the Arabs the Moon from your solo album the palace guards 2011.

Right.

Any initial words before we play it?

Yeah, I literally wrote this in Iraq on a USO tour in Baghdad, or at least got the majority of it

out of my head while on the helicopter.

Is that actually sitting in the Baghdad in sort of a lounge for officers at Camp Liberty, which was Baghdad International Airport.

All right, if this is social commentary, it's highly oblique. Let's play it.

And I was a man who sold the Arabs the moon. The Amoran princes their hands manicured, They're servants with luggage they followed behind. The African concubines regal and tall. And that was the man who sold the Arabs the moon they festooned their flags with crescent moons. And I was the man who saw the English the sea. They wanted the afternoon breezes it for. The sweet smell of spices from over the sea. The afternoon showers it brought during tea. That was the man who sold the English the seat coward before great battleship guns.

That I was the man who sold the Yankees the sky. The black of the night and the blue of the day. The endless horizon of hope and desire.

And I was a man who saw

the a kids the sky, the English

the sea, the Arabs the moon.

This seems comparatively simple musically and lyrically to the previous one. I mean, it seems almost like a straight up poem, whereas all her favorite fruit. I don't know if you'd see that written down, but the way you've got the. Of course, if you're writing in a verse chorus type of structure, you're going to have lines that reflect each other structurally always. But I see even more of that here. You had mentioned in your blog post about this that the sort of main image here of someone who could be in a position of power, such as to literally sell the Arabs the moon, the English the sea, the Yankees the sky.

Yes, or figuratively, to give them their place in current world history or something like that would have to be what, some sort of God? Some sort. But you were saying this is from Gibio Garcia Marquez, the book Autumn of the Patriarch. Tell a little about how that that plays in here.

Yeah, that's one of his earlier books, I believe. Autumn of the Patriarch. It was certainly one of the earlier books over here. That's a much denser, crazier book than his other ones. So it's a little hard to figure out what's going on there. But basically, there's this one dictator who lives an improbably long period of time. He is the archetypal corrupt dictator of sort of one of these post independence Latin American countries, South American countries. And he does all the bad things that all of these dictators, strongmen, autocratic rulers did. And at one point, in the final stages of sort of the decay of his rule, he literally sells the sea to the Americans. And so now it's just sort of a desert that's in front of this oceanfront palace and town.

Magical realism or something is that.

Yeah, he literally sells the sea to the Yankees at some point. So I've always liked that line, I sold the Yankees the sea. I like that phrase. I like that concept. I like everything that it brought up. Like, yeah, you're saying it's almost like this sort of godlike King Power or something like that. He's a really sad character in the book. He's a pathetic character in a lot of ways. He's a horrible character, but he's also kind of pathetic. And so I had this little bit of music I was making up when we were on this USO tour of Iraq. And actually, I should make this point clear.

This is not USO like, where you're playing in some little amphitheater and all of the servicemen and women are in their dress uniforms and stuff like that. You got Bob Hope out there cracking jokes. This is more like USO scene with the Playboy bunnies in Apocalypse now, where you just sort of are helicoptered into this remote encampment and you sort of set up in an hour and you play. This is a very, very rugged environment that we're in and also possibly very dangerous. We had the good fortune of going to Iraq to do this in the quietest month there ever was in the American occupation of Iraq.

It was November of 2009. So I'm making up this little bit of music in this really strange setting. And I'd been working on it before I went there, but it was literally, we were on our way out, we were on our way home. And we were at the Baghdad International Airport. And we're waiting sort of for a plane that we can get on to go back to Kuwait. It's not like you have a reservation, so you sort of sit in this lounge area for the higher officers, Right? And it was this building, and it might have been used by Saddam Hussein, but it's very Ornate, beautiful building that's also had a few shells put through it.

So it's beautiful, it's ornate. It's partially bombed out. And I describe it, but it was really evocative. And I started thinking about this line from Autumn of the Patriarch because I sort of related that guy to Saddam Hussein somehow. But before I went to Iraq, I had read all these books about the history of this part of the Middle east, the land between the two rivers. And it's just terrible, violent history. But at the same time, like all this sort of beautiful culture and art, the very basis of human civilization comes out of this area. There was one civilization after another that ruled this area.

The Mongols had it. So I started thinking about this. The Americans have this area now. The English had it before that. There's an Ottoman Empire. There's dozens of. Of different empires that rule this area. So I'm thinking about how each of them basically ruled this area. Clearly, the Americans, with their air power, their space technology, their surveillance, their drone, their mastery of the air has led them to rule this area. Before that, the British ruled the seas, right? And that was how they ruled this area. And you go back through time.

The Arabs basically navigated across the deserts by the light of the moon, by the stars. You know, that was sort of a great innovation, is that they could get from one place to another across these vast deserts. And so they ruled this area by the light of the moon. And I could have gone back to the Mongols. They mastered warfare on horseback. You know, I could have done a lot of different civilizations that ruled this area. But when you're in the Middle east, there's always a symbol of the crescent moon on so many things. You know, whether it's an airline or a nation's flag, all this, you have the crescent moon.

So this is a symbol. So it's like, hey, I was the man who sold the Arabs the moon. I was the man who sold the English the sea. That's how these people here were sort of sold out to somebody else or conquered by somebody else. And that's the story of that song. There's really nothing else to it except it has a good hook. You know, it's, I sold the Arabs moon. I sold this, I sold that. Right? It's just the repetition of that.

And the first thing that came to mind to me in selling someone something that is unsellable is, hey, you want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge? Like that. This is a shyster. And the way that it's put when the first thing is just describing how the princes have their hands manicured and they have their servants, and it seems like they're getting shafted in some way. Whereas then you get to the British and you end the chorus by I cowered before gray battleship guns. So even though ostensibly the reason they wanted the sea is they wanted the afternoon breezes it bore, the sweet smell of spices from over the sea, the afternoon showers it brought during tea, these sort of innocent. But then you get imperialism immediately out of that, right?

Which is what you're getting in all her favorite fruit, too. You're getting like this pretty stuff. And then you get this great international imperialist power suddenly inserts their guns into the song, right? Literally. I mean, the guns come into the song, the battleship guns. And I like that contrast. And I liked the fact that, you know, yes, he's sort of omnipotent, this character. But then as soon as the British come around with their guns, he cowers before them. And now you have him flipped around being pathetic, which is, I think, an important part of that original character from the Gabriel Garcia Marquez book.

Now, with the Yankees verse, though, you don't have anything comparable, even though I know that was what you had in mind. As we now control the sky, we have the satellites, we have all this infrastructure that's not going anywhere. And that is a much scarier kind of imperialism. Much more effective kind of imperialism.

38:04 Mark: The fact that we.

38:05 Unknown speaker: We could shoot you from space, you know, we could target an individual with our laser like in the movie Real Genius or something. I don't know if this is actually possible, but this is the kind of myth, and certainly there's plenty of reality in that neighborhood.

Well, yeah, I mean, we have drones flying over Syria and trying to target, you know, individual Islamic State leaders and such like that. I mean, we actually do have that power. So, yeah, I think the reason that the Yankees in that verse are so omnipotent, me being one of them, is that I was in the middle of it. And so that's the present. The American military was at that moment supreme over this area. And still in a lot of ways you could argue are. And so that's why that verse is different is because that's like the present.

Say something more about the endless horizon of hope and desire in there. I see. How literally are we supposed to take that? Obviously not very literally. But in other words, is this a comment about imperialism and the oft expressed sentiment about the Arab world that the reason that we get anti American sentiment and all that is because basically hope and desire are limited Economic opportunities limited, with not having power, with a feeling of powerlessness, then we're necessarily going to see some sort of backlash against that. Is there any of that in there, or is this just a way of gesturing at the infinite?

No, no. Although that's really great, and I'm tempted to adopt it as part of the narrative of the song from here on out. But unfortunately, no, I'm really hitting the same line I'm trying to hit in all her favorite fruit, the fecundity of life and love. I'm trying to hit the endless horizon of hope and desire. There's a lot that's similar between those two lines, the two songs. But one of the reasons we write songs is because sometimes you can't really quite explain the concept that you're trying to get in actual words, But I'm trying to hit a mark that is optimistic.

But I guess it's a little different because there is that sort of sinister underpinning that, you know, sort of the Americans rule the entire world, which nobody else has really managed to do on some level. But it's optimistic. It's trying to hearken to something that's beyond us as individuals, beyond us as nations, beyond this time. It's what has always been out there and is out there.

But the context does not make it sound optimistic because the narrator has sold this off. The Yankees are controlling it, Something that. That obviously should not be a commodity at all.

Well, that's true, that's true. But I'm pointing at something that is ultimately beyond all of this.

So the fact that it exists out there somehow is a point of hope, even if the context in which it is specifically mentioned is a commercial transaction, which seems to demean the whole thing.

But the reason why it's optimistic is because all of those other empires came and went, and that exists outside of all of this.

41:14 Mark: Sure.

41:15 Unknown speaker: And so there's a notion that this is just this time, it's the present, but eventually this empire too will pass.

Well, and I like the fact that it gets less and less specific. You start setting up this image of the prissy Arab rulers that are in the first verse, and then the English with their little fetishes of liking nice smells. And then we get to this last one. It's not a matter of. Of saying something about the Americans in particular, but just that you're pointing at the pseudo religious where it's the black of the night, the blue of the day, the endless horizon of hope and desire. There's no talk of the pelicans and like a lot. You could have set up a lot of specific things about the sky or something to fill this. But you went straight for the. I don't want to say pseudo religious. That doesn't sound right, but.

No, no. Well, you go sort of philosophical in a way. You go from the details to the big view and you sort of. The philosophy comes up. You know, this is something that I always have had a theory about. And, you know, this goes back to. I think country songwriters are good at this. Your third verse is always different and changes the reflections on the first two verses. In retrospect, there's always some thing that's not really spoken, but it's underneath of the first two verses. But it comes out in the third verse. Think of green, green grass of home. Actually, I can't do that because we're going to need that in another song. But, you know, even in the jokey country songs, sometimes the punchline is revealed in the third verse.

We'll see if that is the case with our next song, Take the Skinheads Bowling. But before we talk about that, let's just hit the music of this a little more. I don't know if it's just because this was your solo album, difference in the way that you produced it, or just a change in your taste over the years, but we get a tremendous amount of simplification. You still have violin coming in as the thing that breaks up between the verses, but it is really just a straight up. In fact, after the first set of verses, it just happens once and is gone. And it's basically just a repeat of the melody.

And then after the second chorus, the same thing happens, except it plays twice. And going into the outro, it again just plays twice. You don't have it go into some spiraling solo or have a lead guitar take over. Was that just because were the electric guitars in the song, the answering parts to the acoustic part? That obviously was the foundation of the song that you wrote. Were you playing the electric as well,

43:32 Mark: or who did you bring in for that?

43:34 Unknown speaker: Alan Weatherhead played those electric parts. Yeah. And those counter melodies, which are those elements you're talking about, those instrumental sections, those are very camperish because it's really a layer of three things. It's the acoustic guitar melody, a counter melody, and then a third thing with the violin that kind of tries to tie them together. Doesn't really. That happens all the time in Camper Van Beethoven songs. I didn't intend that. But that arrangement quirk that a lot of people don't do is exactly what's in a lot of campervan Beethoven songs. I think John Moran mixed this one. And I think a lot of the sense of space on this song comes from John Moran just trying to create so that you could hear the room and the reverb that he had created around all the instruments so that it would be kind of in a large space. But you're standing next to the narrator.

44:32 Mark: Gotcha.

44:33 Unknown speaker: No, yeah, I hear that on a lot of the songs on this, on that record.

I mean, a lot of it has to do with the reverb, and the ambience of the song is integral to the sound of the song. And so you can't have a whole lot of instruments to do that. And very early on, like, when we were tracking it, that was part of the vibe that he was getting. It's like, oh, we got to keep that. So you can't have a lot of instruments if you're going to do that.

So you had to take out the hyperactive flute.

Yeah, we left out the conga part.

All right, let's move to the third. And. Wow, it's the most famous song you ever wrote. Maybe. I don't know, maybe Lowe overtook it. You said, what have them. It's the reason why we're talking here now. The reason why you got on the map in the first place and were able to sell yourselves to a major label and then vaunt to the heights of fame with Cracker is this little song, Take the Skinheads Bowling.

That's correct.

And you've got a nice thing on your blog that we should not repeat here about just how unlikely it was that this would become a hit and how unforeseeable and how you could never have repeated it and. And just how weird that was, but that it was the BBC's fault that they started playing it. And then somehow the US college radio station started paying more attention to you.

That's correct, yeah.

Well, let's play it right now and everybody listen really closely to the words, because the third time that got big lanes is repeated. There's some extra meaning that comes through.

That's right.

Every day I get up and pray to John and he increases the number of clocks by exactly one. Everybody's coming home for lunch these days. Last night there were skinheads on my lawn Take the skinheads bowling Take them

bowling

Take the skinheads bowling Take them bowling Some people say that bowling alleys got big lanes Got big lanes got the flames Some people say that bowling alleys all look the same look the same look the same there's not a line that goes here that rhymes with anything, Anything, anything Had a dream last

night But I forget what it was

what it was, what it was Take the skinheads that's bowling Take them bowling Take the skinhead that's bowling Take that bowling Had a dream last night about you, my friend

Had a dream I

wanted to sleep next to plastic Had a dream I wanted to lick your knees Had a dream it was about nothing Take the skin Eggs falling Take them falling Take the skinheads falling Take them falling Take the skin Hands falling Take them bowling Take the skinheads bowling Take them bowling.

I had read you talking about this song that reminded me of the Talking Heads Burning down the House, where every line was supposed to sort of make it's a sensible sentence, but that they don't connect to each other and that the whole then intentionally does not mean anything.

Right. So you got to go back to when this song was written. It's 1983. Is burning down the House album, I believe around then.

Yes, yes.

That's probably around the same time. I love David Byrne. I loved his way that he approached the things that he said in his songs were not things that people would Normally sing, but 1983. All of us are in other bands, I think, and everybody's in sub kind of band that's a post punk ensemble. Whether it came out of the ska branch of punk or whether it came out of the punk rock branch of punk or the west coast hardcore or the British post punk industrial scene, everybody's in some sort of band like that. And aside from the ska stuff, the thing that is the same across all these bands is everybody was kind of serious and you had a lot of songs that the words were invested with a lot of meaning.

There was a lot of importance in the words, right. It was either, you know, you're the Dead Kennedys and you're. You know, you're railing against the American capitalist system. You know, you're in some punk band and you've got some anarchist viewpoint.

You're.

You're in some English post modern band and you're referencing Foucault or Sartre. Are there English post punk bands that reference. But all the songs, all the music that's out there, the words have great import and meaning, even if they're kind of weird, you know, even if it's stuff like. They still have this band called Blurt. We'll have to look that one up. Okay, okay, Right. But it was as if everything had Great importance. And so here's Campervan Beethoven. That's kind of the opposite of all that stuff. We're a fake hippie band ensemble that we're kind of putting together.

We're sort of a ska band, but not really. You know, we're sort of playing fake Eastern European folk music. But I've got this song idea, and what I really want to do is exactly as you said, which is to make it so each line undermined the meaning that might be conveyed in the line previously. And to play with the stereotypes. I don't know if I did that in the original writing of it. To basically have the verse chorus structure, but to basically have the song have no meaning, that we just really couldn't read anything important into the words because that made it really fundamentally different than everybody else that was putting music out at the time.

So it's like every day I get up and pray to jaw some sort of ska, reggae, you know, Rastafarian references. And he increases the number of clocks by exactly one. Okay, well, that reference is nothing.

51:30 Mark: Is there?

51:30 Unknown speaker: Or was that nothing?

So that undermines the first one. Everybody's coming home for lunch these days. I mean, it's just. Now we're someplace else. Last night there were skinheads on my lawn. Well, I guess he came home from lunch. I don't know. That maybe is related. Take the skinheads bowling. Take them bowling. There's no meaning there. I mean, I did reference skinheads. It got me into the chorus. I sing about skinheads. It's as if it's a chorus. You could certainly sing along with it for some bizarre reason, I have no idea why. And you can repeat it as a chorus, but I don't know what that means. And it's not supposed to mean anything.

It's a peace and love song. You defuse the hate of skinheads by taking them on a leisure time activity.

No, that is a great reason to put into the narrative fallacy of this song, but it really didn't. It really wasn't there. I read it online. Somewhere somebody goes, oh. I just thought it was just, you know, because skinheads have bald heads and they're like bowling balls, you know, so you could just shove them down the lane. And indeed, in the video, that's. What was it? Peter Moody. Who did that? I can't remember who did that video. So obviously that was a meaning that some other people drew out of the song, but I really didn't have it. Some people say bowling alleys got big lanes.

This came afterwards in the arrangement, you know, this is probably Jonathan and Chris Mola. Like, you know, we should have a chorus. We should. The Greek chorus comes in and they repeat what you say. Got big lanes. Got big lanes. Everybody says. Some people say that bowling alleys all look the same. Okay, now we're on bowling alleys. We've been on bowling alleys since the chorus. So it seems like this is bowling alleys that we've built something around. But then there's not a line that goes here that rhymes with anything. Anything. Anything. Okay, we lost the bowling alley thing.

I had a dream last night. I forget what it was. Okay, we've totally wandered away from bowling alleys. What it was that. It is. I don't know why. The words change slightly there. And then we're back to Take the skinheads bowling. Take them bowling.

But then you've set up the dream and the whole last. The revealing third verse, it's.

We're going to latch onto this dream word. I had a dream last night about you, my friend I had a dream I wanted to sleep next to plastic. I don't know what that means. I have no idea.

There's no reference to anything in particular with that.

53:49 Mark: All right.

53:49 Unknown speaker: Had a dream I wanted to lick your knees. Oh, there's a girl, maybe in this song. Had a dream. It was about nothing. Right. I think we did a good job of undermining any sort of meaning or import that we could get into the song. Except for Take the skin has bowling. Take the skin as bowling. And yeah, maybe let's defuse the violent situation. I think that's the best explanation for the song I've ever heard. Peace and love Hippie Santa Cruz diffused these violent, you know, tendencies of the skinheads, but sadly, it's not true.

Now is the catchiness of the song and it being fun to sing in unison, make up for the fact I could understand if something seems like conceptual humor, you know, okay, hey, let's do

54:31 Mark: a song that doesn't mean anything.

54:33 Unknown speaker: But then you have to do that again and again and again for 30 years. I know that would be hard for anybody that, you know, that's your hit. So you have to do it again and again for 30 years. But does the meaninglessness of it make it even harder probably to keep doing this? Or does it actually make it, you know, because you could. It just doesn't mean anything. It's fine. It's just yada da. And that's always kind of fun. Which of those is closer to the truth?

Well, I can't remember, but I don't know who said this, but one of the guys in the band said that we should do that song, but we should all be checking, like, our phones on stage as we do it. Like, just be deliberately conceptual that we've done it for 30 something years and it doesn't mean anything. But that's also kind of a rude thing to do to the audience, so we won't do that. To answer your question, it makes it easier to do that song. Much easier to do that song than it would be if it was a love song. Can you imagine being Stevie Nicks and singing storm for 30 years? That would be hard to do.

Yeah. Well. And I bet you don't have to rehearse this too much, so.

Yeah, not really. Yeah, I mean, just think about that. That's easier. But there's also a time where songs were really ridiculous, right? I don't know. Maybe it was just because we smoked a lot of pot in Santa Cruz. I have no idea. But if you listen to the bird as the word.

55:50 Mark: Yeah.

55:50 Unknown speaker: Oh, yeah. I mean, what the hell is that? It's so great.

55:55 Mark: Well, it's.

55:55 Unknown speaker: I mean, it's kind of ironic given that we've been talking about lyrics for so much of today and so central to your writing and really to my writing as well, because when your primary instrument is your song, craft is your lyrics, then of course that's what you're concentrating on. It's not just like, I came up with a cool guitar riff and let's just make a song around that, you know, it's going to be central as creators. But really, lyrics are optional from a listening perspective. Like if your song is not good enough, that the only reason it's interesting is if you pay attention to lyrics, then that's a pretty bad.

You need to get a producer to come in and exactly add some sweetening. And so, you know, with these first two songs, you know, I certainly paid attention to the lyrics in All Her Favorite Fruit, but there's a whole different dimension comes up, actually. Like, oh, let's look them up and let's read them and Sold the Arabs the Moon. Maybe just, you know, because I haven't listened to that album as often. I hadn't focused on what themes are in it at all and still got 75% of what was good about that song out of it, even really not paying attention to any more than just the sound of the words.

So it's kind of like this is icing on the cake. The actual meaning that goes into these things. So it shouldn't be surprising that a song like Take this, King Heads bowling. It's fun to say everybody's coming home for lunch these days. That it sounds like you're doing the commercial from the late 70s or something.

That's true. Do craft, single route cheese slices were invented. And that's the. Everybody's coming home for lunch these days. Are you ready? God, that's fucking great.

And the imagery is vivid enough. I recall something, an interview with Bob Dylan about Visions of Johanna. Like, there are a lot of words in there. How do you remember them? He's just like, well, the images are so vivid, I couldn't forget them. I just. Not necessarily that there's a meaning or story there. We shouldn't speculate about that.

57:39 Mark: Right.

57:40 Unknown speaker: But that is really. That for unpacking. But still, there can be something about the words beyond the meaning. And I'm not saying anything that's not obvious.

Right, right. Well, and you gotta remember that, you know, we were a live band. This wasn't recorded. There's also the dimension of actually singing that in front of an audience. And very early on we had this little demo tape going around and Jello Biafra and East Bay Ray, those guys had picked up on us and they had us open some of their shows. And I don't think we had anything out when we did those first few shows with them. And we also opened for people like the Meat Puppets, the Minutemen, all kinds of, you know, kind of post punk bands, but that had real strong punk audiences.

Imagine singing that. And, you know, I've got on like some fucking poncho that I found in a thrift store. And Jonathan has long hair, is barefoot in sandals. And you're right, there is this kind of hippie thing and we're singing it to them. So I guess if you want to get into something like what does this mean, beyond the words? I get into sort of Roland Barthes mythology like semiotics. Right. That's where the meaning really lives in that song. Is that the words plus the situation.

Unpack that a little bit. Give your two sentence summary of the relevant point from Roland Barthes.

He has a book called Mythologies that I think is actually bullshit, but it's really a great book to read. But it's sort of about, how do I explain semiotics? Okay. It's like meaning beyond words. It's like words squared, words raised to the power of X create this other meaning that we can't quite comprehend consciously or we don't Quite comprehend consciously. And we have to step back from it and look at it, look at the bigger picture. And that's what myths are like the old Roman myths. So he's talking about how this is still going on today. And like I think one of his chapters is the author at the beach.

The author on vacation at the beach. What does this really mean? So the words to the song are irrelevant. What it is is Camper van Beethoven playing this song in front of these punk rockers. Very punk rock audience, when every song was invested in meaning, creates this other object that you can't really explain very well in words. And that's what the meaning of the song is.

1:00:10 Mark: Sure.

1:00:10 Unknown speaker: Well, the anthemic resonance of anything. That's why something that we've been trying to maybe recapture in a post religious society, that there is something very satisfying about singing those words in a hymn. And if you then feel like I can't get down with the creed that's behind all those hymns anthems than having some substitute. I mean, it's not an accident. Well, I was going to say it's not an accident that they're called rock anthems, but I'm not sure that. Does anthem have a religious connotation? And it's. Anthem versus him is kind of what I had in.

Yeah, well, we'd have to go back to the Greek or the Latin of that.

It certainly resonates that you think of the national anthem. That's really the other use of that term. And so it's something that. That what is going on in the. Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light. Like, okay, you could tell the kids the story behind that, but it barely matters. That's not what is in people's heads when they sing it at baseball games or something that it's the. I was gonna say the joy of the words themselves, but certainly it's larger than that. It's the situation, it's the solidarity.

1:01:12 Mark: It's all that stuff. Yeah.

1:01:13 Unknown speaker: I can see both why the song would have the resonance in the way you initially performed it and also why it's just fun for people on their ipods to reflect upon it now there's still something. Obviously singing it too much in punks is not essential to its resonance. If that still works.

Right? Well, yes, exactly. But that was the original meaning. And I mean once something goes into the popular culture, it also adopts new meanings and it becomes its own thing.

1:01:44 Mark: Right.

1:01:44 Unknown speaker: The bowling for Columbine use of the song and.

Exactly. Yeah. It's ever changing all right, well, we're

reaching the final little bit here. So for the fourth song, generally this is the one we want to just send people on their way with as a thing to go buy the album. But we can let's say a little about it. So I don't want to go through this line by line, but definitely give your little story to it before we launch people off. I am going to have a little some concluding remarks after this. So this is Almond Grove, which was a single. I know it was one that you were promoting on Rolling Stone magazine as. But it's from the country part, the Bakersfield part of the 2014 Cracker album, Berkeley to Bakersfield, which cracker, like Camper, you know, had sort of a novelty band reputation a little bit, especially if you listen to the first album.

I remember reading some nasty review of your first Cracker album of like the world does not need now people making fun of country music. But you've got songs like Can I Take My Gun up to Heaven, which are just following the same sort of lowdown characters that you had in Key Lime Pie. You know, it's not that different. But the fact that the music was maybe simpler and more authentically country rock and didn't throw in random gypsy elements and other stuff like that made it a little easier to target and perhaps dismissed that way. Then by the time you get to the second album and even spots on the first album, then you've got songs that I think have a greater scope, just, you know, a bigger sound, more of that dramatic tension that was in Key Lime Pie by the time we get to the second album are back, so that they were not so fundamentally different.

But I think underlying there was a sort of a misunderstanding from the start of maybe this is has to do. We haven't talked yet about your overall take on humor in music that. That I think something can be done with goofy lyrics or, you know, with some novelty elements, but still be done very lovingly. And so it's actually you're doing these things with country styles because you actually like that kind of music. And there really is no strong difference between doing something ironically, especially if you're going to be doing it on stage repeatedly and investing all this time.

You know, you don't just do something purely as a conceptual joke that you're going to have to live with for

1:03:55 Mark: that much of your life.

1:03:56 Unknown speaker: Life.

And so it was just clear to me from the first album that the love of country music was honest. And, you know, I know country rock folks, you know, back to The Birds and, you know, had had trouble being admitted by the country establishment. It really seems that, you know, by the time we get to your more recent work, especially this second half of the Berkeley to Bakerfield album, you know, it seems like you even got some more authentic, some session guys to do the. The steel guitar work and, you know, really make it sound that there's nothing that a country fan would take issue with. And I think this Almond Grove song is a song that certainly has your lyrical style and all that in there, but there's nothing that is shtick about this whatsoever.

This one's straight up. Well, first, you know, just one quick thing on the transition to Cracker, I don't think our lyrics are any less irreverent than, say, a classic Tom Petty. There's not any more humor in the songs on that first Cracker record than, say, they're on a Tom Petty record. Tom Petty has great little throwaway lines all the time in his songs. There's always a little humor in his stuff. We were keeping with sort of that narrative style that's got some humor in it. But musically we are not making fun of southern rock, country rock or blues rock.

I mean, we really genuinely enjoyed that stuff, me and Johnny did. And we genuinely thought that we could make music in that style, you know, because we grew up on that stuff, we were doing it. And if you go back and listen to St. Cajetan, I think that is a straight up country rock or southern rock, blues rock song. And it stands on its own and it stands with the test of time. It stands up today. But, yeah, you know, then there's the problem that, yeah, we are kind of being goofy in our lyrics at times. We're just some humor or there's lines delivered with a smile or with a wink or however you want to explain it.

To me, it's a lot like, again, going back to Kurt Vonnegut. Kirk Vonnegut told serious stories that were often like kind of bizarre or funny or absurd, but they were serious stories. That's all we're doing. So, yeah, that's something that Cracker had trouble with. And people were trying to figure out just what our deal was because, I mean, it was the height of grunge and we're basically playing country rock. And I'd come out of these indie rock bands and alternative rock bands and the progressions towards grunge and we went the other direction.

So it was very confusing for people, including some of our fans. But in the end, I mean, we became an established part of that, you know, if there is a country rock mafia, we're definitely part of it. By the time we get to Berkeley, to Bakersfield album, the second disc. Yeah, we are gonna go ahead and do a straight up country California, however you define that country disc. So that's what we're doing on this album and on this particularly the second disc in particular. This song has to tie together the Berkeley East Bay disc with the Central Valley disc.

So you have a junkie in the East Bay, in Oakland, and he's going to go back to Bakersfield. It borrows. I started to say this about green green grass, of course, home, which is a well covered country standard, but you don't realize the guy's dying until the third verse. And that's what's going on in this song. I borrowed that. I took a story either in the Oakland Tribune or the San Francisco Chronicle about this skid row hotel that had all these junkies and prostitutes and drug dealers in it. And it was a not unsympathetic portrayal of the hotel owner and who he has to cater to and that nobody else caters to these people.

And there's a story in there that kind of grabbed my attention and I worked it and turned it into this song.

Yeah, this is another one that. Well, you've given away the turnaround, but that the third verse kind of reveals something that one would not expect from hearing the beginning. And it was good to hear that. It was the green green grass of Home, which was not a song I was familiar with. I just listened to. If you look that up on YouTube, you can hear an Elvis version and a Tom Jones version and like 30 other versions, it's that rather than Take me home country road to the place where I belong which was the thing that initially came to mind, but that I believe does not have that sinister morbid underpinning to it, I hope.

Yeah, we hope.

All right, well, thank you so much for doing this.

Thanks for having me on. I think this is a good thing you're doing. Bye.

Say goodbye to Miss Jenny's banana Subway Grace say goodbye to all the ladies Waiting for the tricks to show Got a hundred dollars More than I need to score got $100 just enough to get me home yeah, I'm going back home to the cotton fields to the almond, the grove to the old homestead See my mom, pop My big brother Jack Went to Kandahar but he never came back Came to Maricopa had no family left Worked at Port of Oakland Fell in with the Narcosan Ended up a junkie Living in my brother's car don't shed a tear for me Home ain't so far yeah, I'm going back home to the cotton fields to the almond groves to the old homestead See my mom pie My big brother Jack went to Canada but he never came back yeah, didn't come back.

Sam

International Boulevard Ladies don't you weep at mo I've gone to a better place on the dirty streets Mr. Patel won't you send my ashes over Spread them in the old family almondy grove yeah, I'm going back home to the cotton fields to the almond groves to the old homestead See my mom

My

big brother Jack he went to Canada but he never came back yeah, we're going back home to the cotton fields to the almond milk gross to the old homestead See my mom Pa See my brother Jack went to Kandahar but he didn't come back Going to see him now.

1:13:02 Mark: Wow, what a great guest. To kick this off, you can hear much more from david@davidlowrymusic.com like his work as an activist against artist exploitation. He's written some very widely circulated articles and even testified in front of Congress. And his 300-00-Songs.com blog, which tells the stories behind a lot of his songs, including a couple of the ones that we covered today. I will link to all these things and post Future episodes@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com Now, if you didn't already know, for the last six years or so, I have been the host of the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast@partiallyexaminedlife.com and as a warm up to this present effort, I actually interviewed three other members of Camper Van Beethoven within the last year.

Now, for the foreseeable future, my two podcasts will be one in the same business entity. So if you'd like to support what we're doing, we'd more than appreciate your donations. And the Partially Examined Life has a whole member section to our website, where we offer ad free versions of all the episodes and a lot of other audio extras. This new podcast will be taking advantage of that very same membership option. So for a mere $5 a month, you can be on the inside track of everything that's going to go on here. And let me just say a little more about my approach here and how you can get involved.

My musical tastes are very wide and I'd like to be issuing about one of these interviews per week, so I'd like your recommendations for people that you'd like to hear me talk to I'm open to including professionals or amateurs. If there's someone on your local scene who's put out a few albums, I want you to reach out to that person, send them the link to this podcast, tell them that they too can be on it. If you yourself are a musician of this type, I'd love to hear from you. Now I'm a musician too. My stage name is Mark Lindt. If you want to look me up on Spotify or you can hear plenty of my music@marklint.com Though I've put out over a dozen albums, they certainly have never gotten me famous.

And though I do want to interview some well known musicians, if nothing else to build traffic for this podcast and will definitely be reaching out to many of my other idols, my purpose here is not to be parasitic off of current media culture. This is not VH1's behind the Music where the only point is to find artists that you already like and watch an interview to see what's in their heads.

1:15:12 Unknown speaker: Really my interest here is just learning

1:15:13 Mark: about why musicians do what they do, learning songwriting techniques, and I think the adventures of a struggling artist are just as interesting as a behind the scenes look at a very established artist. So the present plan is to alternate between celebrities and non celebrities and for episode two I'll be talking to Fritz Beer who is a great singer songwriter who's been successful in a few local markets. Hell of a rock frontman, but I'm pretty sure you haven't heard his stuff. I really want to encourage you with this podcast, not just to pick and choose the artists that you already know that you like, but just to go through the lot.

1:15:44 Unknown speaker: I can guarantee it's going to be

1:15:46 Mark: entertaining and if you are a musician who likes to talk about his or her tunes, please put yourself forward. Just take a look@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com for more information on how to do that. If you've got questions about the show, suggestions, feedback, you can comment on my blog posts there for the episodes or email me@markakedlyexaminedmusic.com if you use itunes, please go subscribe to the new podcast and if you like what you heard today, leave me a five star rating or review. That'll really help us out getting this show in front of more listeners. This is Mark Lintonmeyer, wishing you well. Until next time.

1:16:19 Unknown speaker: Time.