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David Crosby

Photo by Jim Spellman/WireImage

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David Crosby On 'Remember My Name' & Catharsis david-crosby-remember-my-name-its-opportunity-tell-truth

David Crosby On 'Remember My Name': "It's An Opportunity To Tell The Truth"

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In the brand-new Cameron Crowe-produced documentary, the classic-rock figurehead reflects on his place in music history—and the bridges he's burned along the way
Rachel Brodsky
GRAMMYs
Jul 22, 2019 - 9:20 am

David Crosby is one of the most well-known figures in what we colloquially call "classic rock." Watching the A.J. Eaton-directed, Cameron Crowe-produced documentary David Crosby: Remember My Name, one is reminded of just how there he was for rock's most transformative years: rubbing elbows with The Beatles as he came up in his own pioneering '60s band, The Byrds; performing at Woodstock and leading early '70s counterculture with protest anthem "Ohio" with Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young, among many other things. 

As often is the case, with such monumental success came major obstacles for the 77-year-old Crosby: drug addiction, health setbacks, arrests and jailtime, professional bridges burned beyond repair. As Remember My Name points out a cringeworthy number of times, none of his former bandmates—Graham Nash, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Roger McGuinn—will speak to him anymore. 

Through it all, Crosby's upper-register vocals remain uncannily unchanged. He still prolifically writes and records music, releasing four studio albums in the last five years: Croz (2014), Lighthouse (2016), Sky Trails (2017) and Here If You Listen (2018). He tours constantly—to the point where his wife of 32 years, Jan Dance, worries out loud that the next time he hits the road will be the last time she sees him alive. But Crosby is compelled by a force greater than himself to keep going. "My job in this life is to make music. It's the one contribution I can make," he tells the Recording Academy in an exclusive sit-down interview.  

Below, Crosby opens up further about the documentary, which he says makes him feel "naked in public," working with his good friend Crowe once again and why this movie does not serve as an olive branch to his former bandmates. 

The documentary is quite moving, and it’s not always flattering. How is it for you, watching yourself speak and relive these less-than-complimentary moments of your life and career?

I've seen it a number of times. It’s odd, being the subject of it. You have two points of view. One is as a stranger just looking in at this piece of work because I grew up in films. My dad was a cinematographer, same as him. So, there's a part of me that's watching it as a [consumer]. As a person, it's hard being naked in public. Try it.

We went into it wanting to make a documentary about a person. Let's skip who it is. If you want to make a documentary about a person, let's say it's you, I want to know what matters to you. I want to know who you love. I want to know what you're afraid of. I want to know what your dream is. That's the stuff I want to know. Now, that's not common currency. You don't see that in most documentaries. They are two shallow to do that. We went into this once fully agreeing that that was the only level we would really approach it at. It has to be a real picture, otherwise we're really not interested in painting it.

And it seems like Cameron Crowe was the right person to tell this story, because of your long-term friendship.

We had history.

But so many of the long-term relationships in your life have become tense and splintered. How is it that you and Cameron have maintained such a successful one?

You know what, I'm not sure. I think it’s the difference in the person. I think if you're in a band with somebody, you're confronted with them every day and that can wear thin over a period of time. Cameron and I have not been confronted with each other every day, but we do have a lot of respect for each other. It’s hard not to. I see his work. I know who he is from his work, and you got to love that guy. And he sees who I am from my work. It’s pretty good.

In the film, you're so self-aware. You seem to have gained a real ability to look back with a clear eye and accurate hindsight. What did it take for you to get to that place, where you could unflinchingly reevaluate some not-so-pretty events in your life?

It’s an ongoing process. It’s something that I mostly learned in 12-step programs. You have to be able to look at your life. Take an event, let's say a place where you made a mistake. You have to be able to look at it honestly. Look at it. Learn from it. How did I get here? What choice did I make that lead me here? And then set it down and walk on. Catharsis, it works. It's a really good thing. It's a good process. That's how I got to here. I think you can't really learn from yourself unless you're willing to look at it. And in the process of looking at it, if you can communicate to it, it's not easy but if you can do it, it’s good.

Do you hope or expect that any of your former bandmates will see this film?

I do hope they see it because it's honest and they'll know that. They know me really well. It's not an apology to them and it's not a flag saying, “Oh, please [forgive me].” It's not. It’s an opportunity to tell the truth, which is rare in this life, and it's a really decent piece of work. And on that level, I'm really proud of it and really happy with it.

The film explores your various health setbacks and simultaneously shows you going back on the road, which your wife, Jan, says worries her. She even says at one point that every time you go out on tour, she’s not sure if she’ll ever see you again. How does that sit for you?

What I think is different from what I feel. I think I have to go. What I feel is pain because I love my wife and I love my son and I love my home and I don't want to leave. If you saw it, you'd understand. If you spent a day with us, you'd think I would never leave. I guess it's good. My job in this life is to make music. It's the one contribution I can make. You heard me say that in the film and it's the truth. It's the one place I can lift. I do have to do it...it is necessary that I do it, but it is also my chief desire. It's a place I can contribute.

In the film you also talk about how CSNY and CSN are totally different bands. I'd love it if you would elaborate on why that is.

Adding Neil [Young] to a band like that is like adding nitroglycerin to the mix. He's an explosion waiting to happen and that's why I like working with him. He's always pushing the envelope. He's always pushing it to go further and I love that.

Carlos Santana On Woodstock & The Power Of Music: "These People Wanted The Same Things We Want Today"

GRAMMYs

Angie McMahon

Photo by Paige Clark

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Aussie Singer Angie McMahon Talks New LP 'Salt' and-she-woman-angie-mcmahon-salt-arguing-men-about-gender

And She Is A Woman: Angie McMahon On 'Salt' & Arguing With Men About Gender

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Ahead of her set in L.A., McMahon sat down with the Recording Academy to talk about her debut LP, processing her experiences through writing and attempting to argue about gender with men
Rachel Brodsky
GRAMMYs
Jul 26, 2019 - 9:11 am

Folk-pop performer Angie McMahon has a remarkable voice. Yes, she sings for a living, but the Australian singer/songwriter's trill is immediately captivating, deep and husky and reminiscent of everyone from Danielle Haim to Fiona Apple to Florence Welch. It's also quite unexpected coming from someone with such a slight frame and unassuming presence.

To American audiences, the 25-year-old may appear to have come out of nowhere, but McMahon, who releases her debut LP, Salt, today via Dualtone, has been in the game for the last six years or so, playing around Melbourne with a local soul project called The Fabric. She's also no stranger to playing to massive audiences: In 2013 she won a local songwriting competition to open for Bon Jovi on the Australian leg of their Because We Can tour, and as of now, in addition to playing the festival circuit (she's heading to Newport Folk Festival this weekend), she's currently prepping to go on tour with GRAMMY nominee Hozier. Her music, meanwhile, covers tried and true topics like relationships, but also looks at major themes of the day: On recent single "And I Am A Woman," she tries to communicate the nuance of a woman's experience to the opposite sex.

Ahead of her set in L.A., McMahon sat down with the Recording Academy to talk about her debut LP, processing her experiences through writing and attempting to argue about gender with men. 

I imagine the first thing most people think when they hear you is, “Wow, what a voice!” Is that something you get a lot?

I do. Sometimes if people haven't heard me sing and they hear me speak first, because my voice is kind of nasal. I think I speak like a kid sometimes, and then my singing voice is different. But yeah, I think I just shaped that around singers that I really loved, and I didn't even really notice that I was doing it when I was younger. k.d. lang is a really big one for me, the deep vocal work that she [does], and the deep emotion that she can bring up. I think when I started listening to her, I was just like, "I want to be able to do that." 

Did you grow up singing?

Yeah, sort of. I grew up playing piano when I was quite young, and then that turned into really loving covering pop songs and singing to myself. I didn't really learn singing, [or have] singing lessons, until I was maybe 18. 

I was always singing along in the car when we were going on family drives and stuff. We'd go out into the bush for a bit and listen to CDs. I was just constantly singing along, and constantly making my mom replay [songs, saying] “It's my favorite song.” I was like, "Again!" Even driving up and singing. I was probably pretty annoying as a sibling.

Did you start playing guitar around the same time? 

Yeah, I started playing guitar. It comes back to covering pop songs, and wanting to have the option of performing, picturing myself as a performer and starting to think about talent shows and stuff, maybe like 14, and not wanting to take a keyboard everywhere.

So I started learning guitar based off of my piano skills, and YouTube and stuff. I can't remember exactly why, what it was that triggered it, but I think it was probably the music that I was listening to, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen my dad was playing in the car. It made me want to be able to do that instrument. I still listen to those records, and want to be able to play the way that they play. I want to learn harmonica so I can play, just reach that sound space. But yeah, that's where the guitar came into it. I haven't had guitar lessons ever, and I'm really not very good. I'm not saying that out of humility. I know that my skill level is at a certain level, and I really would like to excel.

How many years were you playing around Melbourne before you started touring internationally?

I was always doing solo gigs here and there, but not very seriously, just whenever they would come up. That was probably from when I was about 17, 16 or 17. I'm 25 now, so maybe there was five years before I was looking to start the band. I was also in another band [The Fabric], which was a really good way for me to build experience and to keep singing, and to learn how to interact with boys in a band, and be in a band space. That was a soul group, so there were nine of us. There were eight boys and then me singing, and that went for three years from when I was 18 to 21.

Did you go to school for music?

No, I didn't. The uni that I was at had a music school that I didn't get into. I was doing English there and literature, [but] my extra subjects were music stuff, which is kind of the best way to go about it because I got to do the fun songwriting [classes] without having to do the assessments and intensive jazz training. It basically was a jazz course, and I can't sing jazz. I'm just not adept at that technique. I mean I had really good teachers at school, really good. I had a trumpet teacher who was a really big mentor for me in high school, and I had my piano teacher who was always really patient and lovely. All the teachers that I had mentored me in such a lovely way, but I didn't have a specific music course that I completed or anything.

Do you intend for music to be a living?

Yeah. I'd never really thought of it financially, but as a pursuit, just the way that I want to spend my time. It's always been what I was thinking about. It was kind of a source of an existential crisis, because my work ethic for a lot of my life, a lot of my teen years, was just not very good. It was this thing of always picturing myself on stage, and wanting to perform for my life and write songs, but not having done enough of the work for that to materialize.                                  

When I was finishing my degree and stuff, I'd gone through my whole English degree, sitting in every lecture theater, just picturing myself doing music and writing song lyrics in my notepad and stuff. It was just this fairy land, and then I finished my degree. I was faced with nothing that I wanted to do except music. I had to give myself a pep talk, several pep talks over the years, and some from my parents as well. But basically switched into the mode where I was like, okay. I have to look at the business side of the industry, and I have to understand what I'm willing to work at, and what I want to achieve. 

I know that you're about to put out your debut, Salt. It features a lot of tracks that were on your EP, A Couple Of Songs. What was the thinking in including most of the EP songs on the LP? 

Well, we were ready to put [an LP] out, and then we met Dualtone and wanted to have a chance to release it probably in America. It's such a big country and such a big industry over here, so we really wanted to work with Dualtone. They were so great, but we had to figure out a way to promote the singles that have already been released across the world. That's where the Couple Of Songs EP came in.

It's interesting for me, because these songs on the record, they are on the album, so it's almost like, at this point, a lot of the album has been released. I guess that was for the sake of having a way to kind of push it into this market, and we just kind of came out with a couple of songs EP on the fly. I was like, "Well, why don't we do a little EP?" That's where that kind of came from, but I'm glad we did it that way, because I feel like the songs have their own individual life.

I remember there was an artist who I loved when I was younger, who put out an EP that I was just obsessed with, and I couldn't wait for his album to come out. When his album came out, it wasn't nearly as exciting to me as the songs on the EP were. I just wished that those songs had been on the record. It was just one of those things where I watched that happen as a fan, and as an artist, I just want to put out an album. I just want that to be the first collection of songs.

What's the thought behind the name Salt?

I don't have one answer for that, but I always knew that that was what I wanted to call it. I tried to come up with other names that made a bit more sense where they were from the album or something, but nothing else quite fit. I went with that word because to me, it represents a feeling of balance. Looking back on the songs, which are this collection of experiences that I had, romance and friendship and growing up, up until I was 22... To me, it looks like what is left after all of those experiences. It's the remainder of what I went through growing up.

It's similar to the way that salt is what's left over when water evaporates. Then it's like salt is in your tears. It's like salty tears, and salted wounds. It can sting, and it can bring out taste, and it can cleanse things. I think a lot about the ocean, and the way that it's terrifying and also so liberating to swim in. It's just all of these kind of metaphors that circle for me around salt as a mineral.

I'd also love to get your perspective on your most recent song, "And I Am a Woman." What was the thought behind that title?

There's no single thought for me behind this song either as well. It's such a big concept to tackle. It's just something that I'm being more and more interested in as I grow up as a songwriter, and as a person. It's maybe the moment you are content.

That was the most recent song that I wrote for the record, even though it was two years ago. The whole song came from this heated conversation about women's bodies in public spaces, and a real disagreement with this person about what we're entitled to with equality, and all that kind of stuff. I was so frustrated, and the lyric about being in my home is very much about being in my personal space, and in my body, or in my safety, or whatever. Then I guess the second half of the lyric, "and I am a woman," it almost felt like the most obvious thing.

How am I going to word this? You know when you're having an argument with someone? Arguing with men about gender, or discussing the misunderstanding of something that to you is so obvious. It's so frustrating, and you're just like, "To me this is the most obvious thing. Based on my experience and my life, you should focus on the standards," and they just don't. "And I Am A Woman" just feels like this really obvious thing to say, that carries so much weight, but is also really simple.

It's interesting. So much of the music industry and live industry, it's just male-dominated. I love the boys that I work with, but sometimes things just happen where you just need someone who shares this experience to understand why this affects me, and why it's a manifestation of how many times this has happened to me over my life. Things are just becoming louder now, and we're understanding what we are entitled to more and more, what we shouldn't lay down for. So it's the frustration at that same time is building, because the change is so small. I want to be more fluent in that discourse, and I want everyone to be more fluent in it so we can talk about it more and more.

I did also want to ask you a bit about the song "Pasta." I have to admit that the name reminded me of Courtney Barnett's song about ramen.

Yeah. I love her. She's an inspiration for my songwriting, for sure. She captures this humor and kind of relaxed personality type that I really relate to. Maybe it's a Melbourne thing, or maybe it's an age thing, but basically her music is awesome. I also think the tone of her songwriting has inspired me. There's a realness to it that is so exciting.

When you're writing, are you interested in projecting a tone of honesty?

I think it's more satisfying for me to write something to complete a lyric or whatever that is really honest, and with rhymes, and says what I am feeling or going through without realizing that's what I was feeling or going through until I wrote it down, so the satisfaction that comes from that. Then if I'm able to lace in humor or a double-sided metaphor or whatever, those kinds of things, it's just so satisfying. For me, [songwriting is] very much a way that I process my own experiences. Until this point, and it might change, but all the songs basically have been autobiographical. I think that that will keep developing. I have a long way to go in my songwriting, which is exciting for me. 

What's next for you? Are you working on future recordings? 

I find it hard to [write] well touring, and it's been a lot of touring in the last year, so I haven't completed a whole bunch of new songs. I would really like to be able to take the time to do that. It's basically the next year, I guess, is going to be balancing how much touring we can do, and how much time I can take off to write, so that's just something that I'm figuring out. It's also you can't force it. Just because you take the time off doesn't mean that's when you're inspired. The rest of the year we're touring the album in Australia, and then I'm coming back here to tour with Hozier, and then that basically brings us to the end of the year. So hopefully after that I can take some months. I'm really feeling like writing again. I think it's got to do with putting out the first record. It feels like a clean slate. I'm ready for the next thing.

CHAI On Redefining "Cute," Subverting Uniformity & Tasting American Ramen

GRAMMYs

Tom Petty

Photo by Mark Seliger

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Revisiting Tom Petty's 'Wildflowers' let-your-heart-be-your-guide-adria-petty-mike-campbell-more-enduring-significance-tom

Let Your Heart Be Your Guide: Adria Petty, Mike Campbell & More On The Enduring Significance Of Tom Petty's 'Wildflowers'

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Ahead of Petty's long-awaited, expansive 'Wildflowers' reissue, GRAMMY.com speaks to those who know it—and its beloved late author—best
Pamela Chelin
GRAMMYs
Oct 16, 2020 - 9:14 am

For years, Tom Petty fans eagerly awaited the release of the second half of Wildflowers, Petty's esteemed second solo record, released on Nov. 1, 1994. Co-produced by multiple GRAMMY-winning producer Rick Rubin, Tom Petty and Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, Wildflowers was originally conceived as a 25-song double CD, though Petty’s new record label Warner Bros. asked that it be condensed to a 15-song one-disc album. Four songs from the Wildflowers sessions ended up on the She’s The One soundtrack. Another song, "Leave Virginia Alone," was recorded by Rod Stewart and debuted on "Saturday Night Live"'s 20th season finale. The remaining five songs never saw the light of day. 

Today, however, two weeks after the third anniversary of Petty’s untimely death and several days before what would have been the rock icon’s 70th birthday, Wildflowers & All The Rest has finally been released. Produced by Petty's longtime engineer and co-producer Ryan Ulyate, the collection was curated by Petty’s daughters Adria and Annakim, Campbell, Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and Petty's wife Dana (the couple married in 2001). There are several editions available in various formats (digital/CD/vinyl), starting with a 2-CD/3-LP reissue of Wildflowers remastered and All The Rest comprising the previously unreleased 10 tracks, the Deluxe Edition (which also includes 15 home demos and 14 live performances ranging from 1995-2017) and the Super Deluxe Edition, which includes Finding Wildflowers and comprises 16 alternate studio takes.

A benchmark in his illustrious career and his fastest-selling record, Wildflowers, certified triple platinum within nine months of its release, held significant meaning to Petty. Speaking to author/journalist Paul Zollo in "Conversations with Tom Petty," Petty says, "I think it’s maybe my favorite LP that I’ve ever done. Though I’m kind of partial to a few of them. But I think, as a whole, it’s a real long piece of music—it’s almost 70 minutes long—but that’s the one that really gets me when I hear it. I can kind of go, ‘Wow, I’m really proud of that. That came out exactly like I wanted it to.'"

Sadly, as Petty wrote songs for Wildflowers, his marriage to his wife Jane Benyo was collapsing. (The pair married in 1974, had daughters Adria and Annakim, and divorced in 1996.) Filled with pain, loneliness and uncertainty, Petty’s songwriting shifted in accordance with the crisis in his personal life, reflected in Wildflowers' lyrics and song titles including "Hard On Me," "Time To Move On" and "Only A Broken Heart." More intimate and raw than ever before, Petty openly expresses his sadness, anguish and frustration amidst sporadic shimmers of light.

Recorded at Sound City in Van Nuys over an approximately two-year period beginning in 1992, Wildflowers wasn’t technically a Heartbreakers record but all the Heartbreakers still showed up with the exception of drummer Stan Lynch, who was replaced by Steve Ferrone when escalating tensions with Lynch reached a breaking point. Ringo Starr, who played drums on "To Find A Friend," and Carl Wilson, who contributed backing vocals to "Honey Bee," were the record’s special guests.

On the opening and title track, the sweetly melodic “Wildflowers,” Petty sings, “You belong among the wildflowers/ You belong in a boat out at sea/ Sail away, kill off the hours/ You belong somewhere you feel free." Though it was never released as a single, "Wildflowers" was a huge hit with Petty fans. In audio posted to Tom Petty’s official Instagram page, Petty reveals the ad-libbed song was a departure from his usual songwriting process. “The 'Wildflowers' song was one of the only times it ever happened to me in my life. I really just stepped up in my little studio at home and I put the mic on and played the whole song straight from the top to the end with all the lyrics and the music in one go. And then I stopped the tape and played it back and I really was kind of, you know, confused. I kept playing it again and again thinking, ‘Well, what do we work on and what would I change?’ And then I thought, 'I’m not going to change it. I’m just going to leave it stream of conscious.'"

While Petty wasn’t aware of it at the time, he actually wrote "Wildflowers" for someone very specific, someone who was desperately in need of compassion and freedom. He wrote it for Tom Petty. According to Warren Zane's bestselling book "Petty: The Biography" (2015), Petty’s therapist listened to the song and "asked the singer who he was addressing. ‘I told him I wasn’t sure,’ Petty says. ‘And then he said, ‘I know. That song is about you. That’s you singing to yourself what you needed to hear.’ ‘It kind of knocked me back. But I realized he was right. It was me singing to me.'"

Infused with rock, folk and blues, the critically acclaimed Wildflowers landed at number eight on Billboard’s 200 record chart. Rolling Stone gave the album a 4-star review. "Wildflowers' resolute passion and maturity grow more evident with each listen until the album acquires a haunting, enduring resonance." GRAMMY-nominated for Best Rock Album album, Wildflowers yielded four successful singles that each scored positions on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart; the tongue-in-cheek "It’s Good To Be King," "You Don’t Know How It Feels" (GRAMMY Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, and MTV Music Video Award for Best Male Video), "A Higher Place," and "You Wreck Me."

Originally titling the song "You Rock Me," Petty shared the backstory to "You Wreck Me" at VH1’s Tom Petty Storytellers session in 1999. "I was calling the song 'You Rock Me, Baby' and, you know, you can’t really say that anymore because it was pointed out to me, anyway, that the band kind of just held their heads and said, 'You can’t sing, ‘You rock me’ in a song,' which I suppose made sense...and then, one night, it hit me. It’s ‘wreck me.’ All I did was change ‘rock’ for ‘wreck’ and we had, ‘You wreck me, baby.” With that, Petty smiles, chuckles, and launches into the highly energetic rocker with the Heartbreakers. 

There’s a chance the song might never have been recorded at all. Campbell, who wrote the music for "You Wreck Me" and co-wrote several Petty hits including "Refugee" and "Runnin’ Down A Dream," says initially Petty liked the demo Campbell gave to him. But when Campbell asked about the song months later, Petty said he wasn’t sure if he knew where he’d put it. At the studio one day, Rubin asked Campbell if he had any songs. When Campbell played it for him, Rubin told him to show the song to Petty, but Campbell said he already had. Rubin suggested he show it to Petty again.

"I showed it to Tom again and kind of nudged him and said, ‘Why don’t you write to this?'" Campbell tells GRAMMY.com. "The funny thing is, I think maybe because Tom was busy writing his own songs and he was overwhelmed with that, he wasn’t really keen on that track at the beginning. He kind of did it under duress a little bit. I got the feeling as we were recording it that it wasn’t one of his favorite songs. But when we went on tour, a couple of days into the tour, we played that song live and it went down so well, he leaned over to me and said, 'I get it now. This is really a good song.'"

Filmmaker/photographer Martyn Atkins, who directed both the "You Wreck Me" music video and the documentary "400 Days,” which he shot during the recording of Wildflowers and its tour, designed the record’s tastefully understated packaging and cover; four black-and-white photos, one of which shows Petty looking out the window of a van on his way to the recording studio, set against a craft paper-brown background with a red circle surrounding a red beaded flower in the cover’s lower-left corner, providing the only splash of color. Petty’s name and "Wildflowers" are written across the top in lowercase letters in Atkins’s handwriting. 

Atkins spent a lot of time with Petty, taking photos and shooting film footage, letting ideas spark organically. Inspired by the intimacy of Petty’s songs, Atkins opted for a low-key design. “My thought about the packaging and graphic for "Wildflowers" was that it should feel a little more homemade, something crafted that Tom was crafting. I got that feeling from the music. It was much more internalized coming from Tom. It felt like you were getting something personal,” says Atkins over the phone. He cut and printed negatives from his 16mm film footage for the cover photos instead of using a regular camera. “I wanted the grittiness and real grain for the album artwork. The idea was not to have something glossy.” 

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He explains the red beaded flower's significance. "Tom had a tobacco pouch at his house, an American Indian suede pouch with a beaded flower on it. I think somebody had given it to him. He wondered if we could use it in some way. I took it away and photographed it and suggested we make it like a seal on the cover, something graphic that could become a motif. He liked that idea as the pouch meant something to him. We did stickers of it and included them in the CD packaging."

Petty himself stuck a Wildflowers sticker onto the upper-left corner of one of his favorite guitars, his blonde Telecaster (nicknamed "Torucaster" for luthier Toru Nittono), where the sticker remains to this day. Some of Atkins's Wildflowers-era photography, along with pictures taken by photographers Mark Seliger and Robert Sebree, are included in the new box set. 

For years, Petty longed to reissue the beloved Wildflowers along with its second half. "He thought it was really important because the legacy of the Wildflowers album loomed large in this career and he knew that the second half of Wildflowers was an important statement," said Rick Rubin, speaking to bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell on their "Broken Record" podcast in 2018. 

Ulyate and Petty first cracked open the Wildflowers vault in 2013, poring over tapes during breaks between recording sessions for Hypnotic Eye, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ final studio album. By 2014, they'd remixed the 10 previously unreleased Wildflowers tracks, which Petty sequenced and named All The Rest. Petty also selected some home demos to release as bonus material. He told Rolling Stone about a two-disc Wildflowers release slated for that Christmas. A year later, Petty released the Wildflowers-era song "Somewhere Under Heaven" as promotion for a Wildflowers: All The Rest collection that didn't have a release date yet. He was waiting to release Wildflowers: All The Rest when he could give it his undivided attention and promote it properly with a tour. Between touring Hypnotic Eye, working with his early '70s band Mudcrutch (whose members include Heartbreakers Campbell and Tench), and the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 40th anniversary tour in 2017, he held back Wildflowers: All The Rest until he could prioritize it. 

"He wasn’t putting out music by the pound," says Ulyate over the phone. "He thought about it and was like, ‘I don’t want to just toss this thing out.’ He was never into flooding the market with stuff. If he had just put it out without promoting it, he felt it wouldn't have gotten the reception he thought it deserved so he decided to hold back. He was going to get back to it, take stock, and figure out how to move forward when they got off tour in 2017."

Throughout Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' 40th anniversary tour, the 18-song setlist included five Wildflowers songs, alongside a bevy of classic Petty hits including "American Girl," "Free Fallin'," and "Mary Jane’s Last Dance." Two days after the tour wrapped, after three sold-out nights at the Hollywood Bowl, Petty told the L.A. Times that the Wildflowers project was probably where he'd turn his attention next. While he said he still had some research to do, he speculated that a three-city theater residency, instead of stadiums and arenas, might suit the material best. 

"We had several discussions about doing a tour of only Wildflowers songs, maybe in theaters," says Campbell. "For so many decades, it was a greatest hits tour, which is great, but this would have been a different type of thing. We could share this intimate album and we'd have different guest singers come in with the band to give it a different vibe and experience from the touring we’d been doing, which would have been artistically rewarding for us." Campbell says among the potential guest singers they’d discussed were Jeff Lynne, Eddie Vedder, Norah Jones and Stevie Nicks.

Tragically, five days after his L.A. Times interview, Petty, who suffered from emphysema, coronary artery atherosclerosis, knee pain and a fractured hip, died suddenly at 66 years old from an accidental overdose of prescription pain medications. But Petty’s incomparable legacy lives on with Wildflowers & All The Rest, which arrives on the heels of two previous Tom Petty posthumous releases: An American Treasure (2018) and Best Of Everything (2019). 

Over the past few months, several Wildflowers & All The Rest songs and videos have been released: Petty's home demos of "Wildflowers," "You Don’t Know How It Feels" and "There Goes Angela (Dream Away)," which was unearthed after Petty’s death. "We didn't find that when Tom was around," says Ulyate. "We found about half the demos with Tom and he approved them and liked them and then after he passed, we really scoured the bottom of the vault to try to find everything. That’s when we found more demos."

"Confusion Wheel," the first official single from All The Rest, epitomizes Petty’s tormented and highly confessional Wildflowers-era songwriting. Petty sings, "So much confusion has torn me apart/ So much confusion has made me afraid/ That I don’t know how to love/ I don’t know how to trust/ And I don’t know why that is." Yet Petty hasn’t lost all hope for a fresh start as he sings, "One of these days, we'll drive away/ Drive away singing a brand new song/ We'll wake up singing a brand new song."

Mindful that the material was close to her father’s heart, Adria is also highly cognizant of its significance to the Wildflowers narrative. Speaking to GRAMMY.com over the phone, she says, "If the 'Wizard Of Oz' had another reel or if 'Let It Be' had another album you’d be like, ‘Woah! To me, that’s what Wildflowers & All The Rest is, and that’s why it’s so important for us to get it right because it’s a little gem in the archive."

"Everybody involved is trying to honor and use their sixth sense as to what it is he would like, to carry on the legacy as he would have if he were still here," says Ulyate, who worked closely with Petty for more than 10 years. He misses Petty terribly but notes that being immersed in his music has helped his grief somewhat. "I don’t think any of us will ever get over the loss but, in a way, working on the music has made it easier because he’s still here and he’s still coming out of my speakers. Finding this stuff and putting it out feels like we’re all doing our job in honoring him and his legacy. In that way, we’re doing the right thing and doing justice to his legacy so we’re keeping him around in a way and that part of it makes me feel good."

Exploring Petty’s archives was tough for Campbell, however, whose history with Petty dates back 50 years. "It was a bittersweet experience going through the stuff and not having Tom there to do it with us," he says. "Going over the songs brought up a lot of joy and grief as well. He really wanted this stuff out though, so we worked very hard on it and took the best stuff of what was laying around. It was as if he was sitting there with us and we made decisions based on that.

Some of the tracks I’d almost completely forgotten about until I heard them and it was nice to hear this good music that we could share with the audience. At the same time, I’m still grieving and it was kind of hard to sit there and hear Tom’s voice in the speakers and him not be there. Sometimes I would just have to leave the room for a while, but we got it done."

Adria says when her father died, "It was such an eternal primal scream of disbelief to have him die on us so suddenly." She says it felt like a universal loss and that while the world mourned along with her family, they also gave Petty’s heirs a lot of support. As to her grief, three years later, she says, "I feel like I’m turning a corner with it, and as time goes on, I feel like parts will get easier. But no one ever gets over the death of their parent." At times, however, her grief is overwhelming. "There are times when you just don’t want to hear those songs...when they come on in the grocery store and you’re like, ‘That’s a lot.'"

She says, however, that listening to Wildflowers is uplifting. "There’s a lot of joy in listening to this particular era of the music for me. It touches my soul. It touches my heart and makes me feel good. It’s not the kind of stuff that makes you really think necessarily about the live shows or the hit-run of Dad’s catalog but it’s a little bit more of a pure experience." As of late, Adria says she’s been getting lost in her dad's lyrics and the purposeful manner in which he chose each word, constantly editing himself, as reflected on studio notes, legal pads and notebooks where he constantly scratched out and replaced lyrics.

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Rick Rubin and Tom Petty 
Photo by Robert Sebree

Renowned for his anthemic songs, witty lyrics and compassion for underdogs, along with his uncanny skill for conveying profound wisdom and emotional depth using plain and concise language, part of Petty’s artistic genius was how deceptively simple he made his thoroughly relatable yet equally epic songwriting seem. In truth, he was a blue-jeaned, tirelessly working poet, inducted into the Rock and Roll Of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

While the more comprehensive editions of Wildflowers & All The Rest are a treat for fans, they also serve as a masterclass in songwriting as you hear the evolution of Petty’s songs. Some demos were reworked before being recorded in the studio. For example, before he changed the chorus for the completed studio version of "Crawling Back To You," on the demo Petty sang "coming back to you" and "running back to you." Other demos were set aside entirely, with portions of their lyrics transplanted into other songs. "There’s a Break in the Rain" is a beautiful and heartfelt demo that Petty never developed further. Instead, he used its lyrics "in a memory of a dream," in "You Don’t Know How It Feels," the first song recorded for Wildflowers. Years later, he recycled its chorus in "Have Love Will Travel" on The Last DJ (2002). 

"He really cared about writing good songs and performing them well," says Ulyate. "He always wanted to keep getting better and better and refining his craft. He was more into that than being a famous guy," says Ulyate who says Petty’s meticulousness was all-encompassing. "He was into every facet of songwriting. The song had to be good, the first line had to grab you and the song had to have good construction, and he was into production, and how the songs were arranged in the context of an album was important. He wanted to make sure he was telling a story."

Petty would continue to scrutinize and change songs even after they were recorded. "I’d go into mastering and say, ‘OK, we’re going to master the album and finish it up’ and he’d call me two days before and say, ‘I have a better line for the third verse,'" says Ulyate. "Luckily, we had a set-up that made it easy for me to drop in a line at his studio and we’d listen back and I’d say, ‘Man, I’m so glad you called me. That was so much better.’ He was always thinking of ways of improving stuff."

Ulyate partially attributes Petty’s songwriting prowess to his "encyclopedic knowledge" of music. "If you want to be a good songwriter, you have to be a good song listener," he says. "Tom Petty was probably the best song listener of anyone I knew." Petty’s extensive and colorful musical palette ranged from the most obscure music Petty could find to the blues to his heroes Bob Dylan, the Byrds, The Beatles, Beach Boys and Elvis Presley. 

He laughs incredulously when recalling Petty’s meeting with director Thom Zimny who, at the time, was making the documentary, Elvis Presley: The Searcher. "Thom Zimny asked a couple of questions about Elvis and Tom Petty went into this thing where, basically, for the next 45 minutes he just schooled the guy about Elvis! He knew more about him and I was like, ‘How do you know this much about Elvis?!'"

"Even if you never shook his hand, you knew him, and it will always feel like we lost a friend, not just the standard-bearer for great songwriting." —Cameron Crowe on losing Tom Petty

In fact, when Petty was 11 years old, growing up in his native Gainesville, Florida, he was taken to meet Presley by his uncle who was working on the set of a Presley film shooting nearby in Ocala, Fl. Petty relays the Presley anecdote in Oscar-nominated director, screenwriter and author Peter Bogdanovich’s four-hour documentary, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down A Dream (2007). "Elvis appeared like, you know, a vision. He didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen and I’m just dumbstruck...I went home a changed man," Petty said at the time. "When I hit the street the next day, I was trying to find some Elvis Presley records. The music just hypnotized me and I played these records to the point my parents began to worry that something was wrong with me."

Speaking over the phone, Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show, Mask) says though he and Petty were both proud of the documentary, which won a GRAMMY for Best Long Form Music Video in 2009, ("I was thrilled. What director gets a GRAMMY?"), it's forever "tinged with sadness" due to Petty’s untimely death. He says when Petty had a three-week window between tour dates in 2017, the pair discussed adding material to Runnin’ Down A Dream. "We talked about maybe adding 10 to 15 minutes to it to include the last 10 years to bring it up to date. We had a nice talk about it and he was keen on the idea but it didn’t work out because he died."

Bogdanovich says he last spoke to Petty after he attended his penultimate concert at The Hollywood Bowl three years ago, and called Petty to rave about his performance. "It’s tragic. I miss him dearly. I just loved the guy," he says. "He was a real artist who cared about the art, singing terrific songs that he put his heart and soul into. It was everything to him. It wasn’t about the money. It was about the work."

Petty’s dedication to his fans matched his commitment to his art. During the 40th anniversary tour, Atkins expressed concern to Petty about carrying a heavy guitar every night while suffering from a cracked hip that needed surgery. He says he suggested the idea of stopping the tour to get better and touring the following year instead. Petty said, "I don’t want to stop the tour because people book their holidays around coming to see me and it’s important in people’s lives and I don’t want to let them down."

Dating back to 1981, Petty famously fought his record label MCA who wanted to add a dollar to the price of his record Hard Promises. He withheld the album until MCA relented and didn’t raise the price. Petty describes his fan-philosophy in director and Oscar-winning screenwriter Cameron Crowe’s 1983 MTV hour-long documentary Heartbreakers Beach Party, which was Crowe’s first directing credit. Facing the camera directly, Petty says, "At the risk of sounding corny, you have to thank the fans. I’m still very reverent about that. I will stop and sign the thing because it’s that important. I think that if you lose that, if you get where they’re just them, then it’s all gone."

"Tom always carried himself as a fan," Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) tells GRAMMY.com over the phone. "First and foremost, I think, he was somebody who never forgot his music-loving roots in Florida and remained an avid music lover and collector his entire life."

Crowe says Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were one of his favorite artists to write about when he was a Rolling Stone journalist and that it was "a dream come true" for which he’ll forever be honored that Heartbreakers Beach Party was his directorial debut. As a matter of fact, but for Petty (and executive producer Danny Bramson), it would have taken Crowe much longer to have become a director, if it even happened at all. "We were on the way to the video shoot for 'You Got Lucky' and he said, 'Pick up a camera and I’ll play you a song.' I said I wasn’t a director. He said, 'Just film me.' So I did. He played the novelty song ‘I’m Stupid’ and when it was done, he said, 'Guess what. Now you’re a director.' Can’t think of a better person to convince to jump in the deep end and start a new career."

He says Petty contributed music generously to Crowe’s film soundtracks over the years, including an exclusive mix of "It’ll All Work Out" for Elizabethtown. He also gave Crowe an opening quote to use in the first trailer for his TV show "Roadies."

"He was as down to earth as down to earth gets," says Crowe. "Even if you never shook his hand, you knew him, and it will always feel like we lost a friend, not just the standard-bearer for great songwriting, and a band that can pivot in any direction to deliver his songs."

In honor of their father’s unique relationship with his fans, both Adria and Annakim switched their private social media settings to public when Petty died. "His fans really came first for him in his career," says Adria. "That’s a lot of our job and our responsibility, to say, ‘We are here to still treat you well and to make things affordable and to give you access to all sorts of cool stuff he left behind.’”

Earlier this month, on the third anniversary of Petty's death, Adria posted a home video shot at Petty’s home studio at the family’s last Christmas together. Petty's strumming an acoustic guitar and singing "Crawling Back To You (one of Petty’s personal favorites) while Cammie, one of Adria’s and Annakim's younger cousins, plays the piano. In the caption, Adria writes that as soon as Petty heard Cammie playing the song, he took everyone into his studio to sing along and encourage her. The caption ends with, "I miss you too much every day, dad." On that same day, Annakim posted a selfie, captioned, "This was me a month after my dad died I feel greatful [sic] to feel alive again." 

Hundreds of Petty fans responded to the sisters’ posts. "His music has made many of us feel alive," wrote one fan while another wrote, "I've loved your dad's music since I was 10 yrs old. I'm 52 now. Was lucky to see him in concert about 19 times. Always the best and most memorable shows. Crying now...still hurts so much."

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As to the possibility of a future Wildflowers & All The Rest tour, Campbell, who toured with Fleetwood Mac for a year and a half and has since been focused on his band The Dirty Knobs, becomes emotional at the thought of moving forward without Petty. "I’ll tell you how I feel about it," he says. "I don’t know how many stages of grief there are but I’m still in probably stage four or whatever it is. I don’t ‘feel emotionally comfortable with having all the Heartbreakers in a room and going ‘one, two, three, four’ and playing without Tom there. It’s a little too painful, but I’m not opposed to the idea only because this was something Tom really wanted to do. I would remain open to the idea when our grief settles to do what he would have wanted, and maybe get the band back together with some singers and learn the songs and do that Wildflowers tour in his honor." 

After a pause, Campbell says, "I need more time. It’s such a huge loss. He was my best friend for 50 years. I’ll probably never get over it completely and I am doing well but for something that close to Tom’s energy and soul, I need to be a little stronger to take that on."

In the meantime, Adria says she's currently in discussions with a director about a Wildflowers documentary, and that there will definitely be more Tom Petty music to come. "We have a big beautiful archive,” she says, “We’re just going to take our time with it and work on this one for the time being and then sit down and think about what should happen next."

"It's hard. And it's still hard": The Heartbreakers Keyboardist Benmont Tench On Life After Tom Petty

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Thurston Moore

Photo by Vera Marmelo

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Thurston Moore Talks New Album 'By The Fire' thurston-moore-talks-new-album-fire-idles-greta-thunberg-reagan-era-privilege

Thurston Moore Talks New Album 'By The Fire,' IDLES, Greta Thunberg & Reagan-Era Privilege

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The Sonic Youth founding guitarist also digs into how living abroad has affected his view of the States and how young people today—especially his own daughter—give him hope
Rachel Brodsky
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Sep 28, 2020 - 8:45 am

"There is a real social division, and I don't live amongst that anger so much," Thurston Moore remarks over the phone from his London home, referring to the piercing political discord that fuels the upcoming presidential election—not to mention much of 2020 itself. "I don't really believe that that is the majority of the country, let alone the world," he continues. "I think it's just the noisiest. And I say that as a noise musician."

The founding Sonic Youth guitarist, who released his seventh solo album By The Fire last week via The Daydream Library Series, is indeed not just a noise musician, but a leading pioneer of the art form, having gotten his start in the 1980s New York City no wave and experimental scenes alongside bandmates Kim Gordon, Steve Shelley and Lee Ranaldo. At that time, Moore remembers, artists had what he refers to as the "privilege" of "just making fun of and ignoring [politics]," and "protesting to some degree through hardcore bands and stuff." Today, nearly 40 years later, such immunity to current events hardly exists anymore; socioeconomic, political and racial tensions touch every facet of daily life—and it's all taking place in the backdrop of a global pandemic.

In response, Moore has unleashed By The Fire, a nine-track project that, as he puts it, "alludes to a lot of the heat that we see in the streets... But it's also essentially about the idea of communication. I wanted it to be about focusing on sitting around a fire and exchanging ideas and dialogue."

Musically, By The Fire, which features Deb Googe (My Bloody Valentine) and Sonic Youth's Shelley, reflects Moore's penchant for both pop-minded, college-rock cuts (opener "Hashish" and its follow-up "Cantaloupe") and lengthier instrumental musings ("Locomotives" and chaotic album closer "Venus").  

Below, Moore dives deeper into the duel meaning of By The Fire (which he and the rest of the band recorded immediately prior to quarantine), how living abroad has affected his view of the States and how young people today—including his own daughter—give him hope for the future.

You’ve been living in London for almost a decade now. How has living abroad changed or affected your perspective of the U.S. in the last eight years?

I relocated here at a time when I thought the U.S.A. was in a place of having a bit of dignity as representation, let's put it that way, with the Obama Administration, the Obama-Biden Administration. And so, I don't think anybody at all foresaw the turn of events that happened in 2016, and it was a surprise to just everyone, especially here, living here.

But the fact that it happened at the same time when this country was dealing with this whole selling of Brexit, which was based on this idea of economics, but was sold through this fear of immigration. So, it had this nefarious subtext to it.

I think we just go through these cycles through history, that you can see, where totalitarianism comes to a head. And these fascistic aesthetics come into play, where divisiveness in the culture happens, and through the outpouring of subserving, where people who feather their own nest, as far as being this billionaire elite, and the real estate of the world, and this kind of control mechanisms.

So, in some ways, it's not surprising when you look at it historically, and thinking that, with some resilience and some resistance and with some activism, which we always have expressed, especially in youth culture, that we can bring it back into a situation that's more progressive and humanitarian-conscious. I think the big difference now, and that the pandemic, where we're all in this quarantine state and it's a global affair, that's a big difference, from when you can look at it, and history books, to some degree.

Because it points to a problem that we have that's more essential to the earth. It's about the health of the earth and how we're so much a part of nature, whether we like it or not. And that defines a lot of our existence.

I think a lot of what's going on with our social crisis is, of just the people who are on the margins, and have historically been on the margins, just through means of being oppressed, having to rise up and be angry. And, in support, so many people joining in with that fight, people who have the privilege of not being in a situation, to join in on that fight, as well.

It almost becomes secondary to the health of the planet. Because with the planet in a mode of destruction for the next 10 to 20 years, that will override any other situation. I mean, if you don't have a habitable world, it doesn't matter who you are. And so, that, to me, is something that's very significant and distinctive to what's going on right now. So when I see young people, particularly a very high-profile person like Greta Thunberg, really coming out and drawing as much cogent attention to this, it just does my heart good.

I saw an interview a few years ago with Naomi Klein, she's an essayist on politics, and focusing a lot on climate activism. And she said, when the U.S.A.'s really swung to this right-wing agenda that was exemplified by what the administration is now, she felt like a lot of people did, very, somewhat hopeless. And do you even deal with such inanity?

But then, to see somebody like this young girl from Sweden, Greta Thunberg, who Naomi said, "I'd never even heard of two months prior, all of a sudden becoming such a force of critical information," that just made her feel good about prospects. And so, I feel the same way.

I really feel, for the most part, the people that I come across are desirous of living in harmony, and wanting to have some more non-hierarchical socialized way of living, where everybody has equal value when it comes to healthcare. I rarely come across somebody who is so deluded by the fact that maybe it would be better off if we just allowed ourselves to be told what to do by this authority of this billionaire class. I don't really know people like this, but I know they're out there, because I see them on social media, screaming and yelling "Trump."

There is a real social division, and I don't live amongst that anger so much. But I certainly do see it. And I'm not quite sure, I don't really believe that that is the majority of the country, let alone the world. I think it's just the noisiest. And I say that as a noise musician who really focuses on noise. I can't compete with that sort of thing.

"A noise musician who can’t compete with noise." Well, there you go. Would you say that you generally consider yourself an optimist?

Yeah. I consider myself a musician and an artist who realizes that it's very important to be socially engaged in your work. And if your work is about the exchange of pleasure as information, I think there's something very political about that. I consider that to be a responsibility. So when I put together a record like this, at a time like this, I'm very aware.

And I'm very activist conscious when I call a record By The Fire, where it alludes to, certainly a lot of the heat that we see in the streets, in the contemporary streets of fires being lit through it, through anger. But it's also essentially about the idea of communication. I wanted it to be about focusing on sitting around a fire and exchanging ideas and dialogue.

It's funny you say that, because I was curious if By The Fire had any allusions to, say, Roosevelt’s famous Fireside Chats.

Sun Ra had a record called A Fireside Chat With Lucifer, which I always thought was really intriguing. But I think in a way, it was just, "What an interesting title."

I mean, if there's anybody who was a prophet of peace and understanding, it was Sun Ra. To call a record, A Fireside Chat With Lucifer, in a way it was him wanting to come to terms with everybody having a voice, and realizing that, right?

I realized there's a dynamic of voices in our culture, obviously. But for me, it's just, the activism measure is to keep promoting the voices that you find are to the health of humanity, especially to the health of the earth. People ask me if I'm voting for the Democrat ticket of Biden and Kamala Harris, and I say, "Yes, I am."

It's not so much about Biden being versus Trump. It's more about me being versus Trump. And it's more wanting to bring these voices that I find really, really important in contemporary society, voices like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, these women who have these really political intellects, that are all about the welfare of everybody, regardless of the hierarchy in this society.

It’s progressive socialism, for want of a better genre term. But I find that to be these great voices for the welfare of the country that I was born and raised in. And so, I find at least a vote for the Democratic ticket allows them to have a voice at that table, more so than not.

I mean, that seems to be the promise, and a lot of it has proved the empowerment that Bernie Sanders has enforced in the last decade. I think the Democratic ticket recognizes that voice, and is very wary of it, because it's demonized as being, well, too left of centrist. But at the same time, I think at least it's going to have a welcoming into the government and its future policies, hopefully. I can only be hopeful.

I think anything less than that is without hope. So I see what's going on right now. And as far as the two-party system, when I look at the Republican Party, and how it's been hijacked, I don't see a grain of hope there. I see nothing.

It’s funny that you bring up both Bernie and AOC. Are you aware of the “Socialist Youth” T-shirt design that has Bernie and AOC drawn to mirror Sonic Youth’s Goo cover? It’s one of the best things I bought this year.

I do remember that. I was really happy to see that.

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Had you planned to begin recording a record in March of this year, or thereabouts? Even if a pandemic hadn’t happened?

Yeah. Well, I knew that I wanted to put a record out this year, even before the pandemic became a reality. But when it did become a situation, it was just global, galvanized situation that we all dealt with.

Once I seriously focused on what the aesthetic of the record was, and how I would sequence it, I wanted to have the story on the record be more in tune to what was contemporaneous. So I sequenced it thus. I mean, all the material was recorded before anything happened.

But the record itself was put together while we were in quarantine. So, the material, I just organized it in a way where I wanted it to come out of the gate with these more joyous, short, sharp, rough, sonic rock and roll tunes. And then it moves into more contemplative material.

Then it would go into some darker spaces. And then it had this deliverance at the end—this long instrumental piece called "Venus," which was just this pattern-based guitar piece that opened up into this sound of deliverance, and with hope. And I wanted it to go out the door that way.

I really worked closely with the people who do the distribution and the manufacturing, all of whom were dealing with this sudden shock to their work days, and wondering where their revenue was going to come from, and how they could continue to operate. Summertime is traditionally a time when a lot of the record industry just goes on vacation. So everybody was on staycation mode. And I was like, "Oh, actually, I'll take advantage of that. You're home and you're working, right? So let's get the guts around this."

[By The Fire is] coming out this month, which is really great. It's coming out on the same day as this other community of records that I'm really happy being part of: Public Enemy's new record [What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down] that they're putting out on their old label, Def Jam. And my old friend, Bob Mould, has a record [Blue Hearts] coming out.

There's a local band in London that is really, it's a real strong voice for a lot of people here, called IDLES.

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Oh yeah. Sure.

And they have a record also. So, these things are all happening on that day. I just feel, if there's anything I really love about being in a band and playing music through the years, it’s the power of the community. And I've always loved collaborations. I always loved compilation albums. I was always drawn to being on compilation albums earlier, when Sonic Youth was first starting. I was just, if anybody asked us to be on a compilation, I was like, "Yes, of course, of course." The first record I was ever on was a compilation record that Glenn Branca and Barbara Ess put together in downtown New York, of all these different artists, doing one-minute pieces.

That was the first time I was ever invited [to collaborate], was when they asked me to be on that. And that was just at the very beginning of when Sonic Youth was forming. I don't even know if we had that name yet.

Speaking of New York, earlier in the year, New York City was especially suffering from high coronavirus cases and deaths. I wonder what that brought up for you, just as somebody who has such a connection to that city?

Right. I think it's such a—more so than just about any other city I can think of—it's the most street-social city. When I was living there, nobody really had a car. You could actually walk from one end of the island to the other, and during the day, without a problem. I think it's, what is it, 12 miles long and three miles wide? It's all up into the sky, in a way.

The fact that it has such a huge population, and it was so condensed, that everybody's on the street and all the time. And everybody was in each other's way, in each other's face. You learned social responsibility from living in that city. It was gloriously multi-ethnic. And even though there was neighborhood divisions of ethnicities that had been defined from when people first came over from Europe and Asia and such, but they were soft lines, for the most part. And it was all about merging traffic. And I think that, to me, was a model for the world.

It’s the true essence of nature, where migration is so essential to nature. It was like, at the heart of nature, it's always about migration, and the plant life and animal life. With people, it's the same thing. And so, I think the situation where borders start going up, and it tries to stop the migratory nature of people, whatever the causes are, whether it's from climate, or where it's from seeking higher water, or trying to find salvation from war or violence. Or the impossibility of a life, in certain situations. And to prohibit that, through any border or law of movement, for me, it's like, it actually goes against the actual truth of nature.

That's where the problem is. It has nothing to do with anything else. Or anything else becomes, it just becomes bigotry. So I always saw New York City as this great experiment in coexistence from the end of the century. And I loved living there in the '70s, before real estate became more monied, and it allowed everybody to live in poverty, and still create, and be free.

That, and the creative impulse was still available, without having to pay exorbitant rents, but that's really neither here nor there. I mean, the city continues to be this great social city. And to see it have to deal with a situation where everybody has to stay away from each other, it's disheartening, to say the least.

I can only hope that that will fade away, and we don't have a follow-up, a virus coming through. Nobody has a crystal ball on this, that I can see. So, I take value from seeing people be of service to each other.

I have a 26-year-old daughter who lives in Bed-Stuy, and she is very activist, and she goes out daily and helps be of service to people who are living in the margins, or young women who are incarcerated and don't have any funding to deal with their plight, or people who are so marginalized, trans people of color who are just completely ignored by so many of the services of the city, and are at odds with the prejudices of the culture. She's out there helping in that regard. And so, it does my heart good. It makes me a proud daddy.

But she's not the only one. And there's just so many people, she's just in her mid-20s, and there's so many people at that age who are out there doing that. When I was in my mid-20s, we didn't really have such a crisis as this. We had Ronald Reagan who was like, he was really creating an economic division, and especially in the city. [But] it was something that we could actually have the privilege of somewhat just making fun of and ignoring, and protesting to some degree, through hardcore bands and stuff.

What people in their mid-20s are experiencing now, it's such a far cry from what I remember. And it's just, their lifestyles of having digital media, where there's this Internet connectivity of the open library. That's a huge paradigm shift from the reality that I experienced.

I love it. I think it's just completely exhausting. I'm really glad to be alive and witness this kind of world, and just thinking about what it will be in the next couple of decades.

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Photo: Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

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Philadelphia Celebrates 25 Years Of Musical Love philadelphia-celebrates-25-years-musical-love

Philadelphia Celebrates 25 Years Of Musical Love

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As the Recording Academy Philadelphia Chapter celebrates its quarter-century anniversary, we take a closer look at what makes it such a prolific creative incubator
Brendan Menapace
GRAMMYs
Dec 11, 2019 - 1:48 pm

Philadelphians are a proud people. New Yorkers like to say it's a little brother complex that makes them squirm when it's called the Sixth Borough. Really, Philadelphians are just fine differentiating themselves from other cities. I mean, the sports teams have been using "No one likes us, we don't care," as a battle cry for a few years now.

But, for as much as the city loves to paint itself as the underdog in so many ways, it's a place that's on level ground with any supposed artistic mecca that costs double for an apartment or a cup of coffee. It's also a city that fiercely looks out for its own. So, that may be why so many artists and musicians have called Philadelphia home over the years, whether they were born and raised here or made it their adopted home to grow as artists and music creators of all types.

The Philadelphia Chapter Celebrates 25 Years

For the past 25 years now, the city's music community has had a support system, a place where music people look out for one another. The Recording Academy Philadelphia Chapter is celebrating a quarter-century of playing this crucial role, creating a feeling more like a family than anything by providing resources and programming to grow and strengthen the its music community from within. The Philadelphia Chapter has galvanized its members, rallying them behind legislation to support creators and showing up to support one another not just in the crucial times of making music, but also in life. Over the years, this unique, close-knit community built on hard work is what sets the city apart.

"Philly has always been really, really rich in talent and hard-working bands," says Bruce Warren, general manager for programming at WXPN. "All these artists, whether you start in the '60s, '70s, '80s, all these artists worked really hard to get to where they were at. And I think on a certain level it's easy to work hard in Philadelphia. You don't have the same challenges that you have in New York or Los Angeles or Chicago. Philly's just a boot-strapping, hard-working city. The ethic is there. And I think a lot of bands really adhere to that ethic."

Read More: Philly Producer/Engineer Will Yip Works Harder Than You

Warren grew up here, and as a kid fell in love with the Sound of Philadelphia, and soul and R&B acts like the Delfonics, and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. Over the years, he got into rock bands like Cinderella, Tommy Conwell and the Hooters. The '80s and '90s saw the boom in hip-hop acts like D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. Lately he's been into the indie rock acts like Dr. Dog, the War On Drugs and Kurt Vile.

"It's not just one genre of music," he says. "I just referenced a dozen bands across genres. Patti f*ckin' LaBelle! Schooly D! Jill Scott! Come on!"

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A lot of the lore of Philadelphia is a little exaggerated. You're probably not going to get pelted with batteries at Lincoln Financial Field just for showing up in another team's jersey. But, it's an honest city. The people will tell you what they think, whether it's praise or criticism. But there's no guessing intentions or keeping up appearances. If they show you love and support you, it's genuine.

"Philly is real," said Carol Riddick, a singer/songwriter and former President of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Recording Academy. "Everything we say and do comes from a place of love, whether we're in agreement or not."

"People here are honest, and demand honesty in their music-making," says songwriter/producer and Recording Academy Philadelphia Chapter Trustee Ivan Barias. "[There is a] "No B.S." factor in our sports, our food or in our music. Realness—you have to come in with that to collaborate here."

Part of that could be that the city really does breed talent on levels beyond what some might expect. There's so much talent across so many genres, the city doesn't need to phone anything in or accept anything less than what it knows it can do. The same way those rowdy fans will boo their beloved sports teams because they know they can and should be winning, Philadelphians know their musical history and the greats that come from every corner of the city, so they expect a certain level of output. For young artists growing up, that's all they know, so they set themselves a higher bar and hold themselves to a higher standard.

And the thing about Philly is that it's not a hip-hop city, although it's been the home for renowned acts like The Roots, Meek Mill and Tierra Whack.

Inside Roots Picnic 2019 In Philadelphia

It's not a rock city, even though it's indie rock and punk scene has become a destination for bands all across the world, with bands from The Dead Milkmen and Hop Along carrying the Philly banner.

And, despite its history of R&B and soul, it's not just a soul city. It's an everything city.

"It's a very diverse city," Warren says. "Creatively, you could draw from a lot of different colors."

You can find everything you need in Philadelphia – world class recording studios, venues of all sizes, a media that loves to sing the praises of local artists, and, most importantly, fans. There are a million and a half people in the city.

"There's always been a built-in music industry in Philadelphia that takes itself very seriously, but doesn't clap itself on the back as hard as New York or Los Angeles or even Nashville," Warren adds. "There's always been a fair amount of humility in what we do here I think."

Singer/songwriter/producer and Recording Academy Philadelphia Chapter Trustee Terry Jones is a bit less humble about things.

"We have the best musical talent," Jones says. "Everyone comes from other towns to our town to take advantage of our musicians, songwriters and producers. Our music creative community [is] serious about honing their craft. Everyone says there is something in the Schuylkill water system—they call it Schuylkill Punch. This could be the secret to our razzmatazz."

Staying Spontaneous With Diplo

It might be something in the water. Or it might be the fact that the city has bred a mentality of hard work, honesty, perseverance, and support for your own that has boosted the careers of bands starting from the Philly streets as children, or people from all across the world looking for a place to play, create, write, make friends and grow.

If you're a part of Philly—and you'll know if you are—it looks out for you. It might tell you some brutal truths in the moment, but if anyone tries to undermine that talent, Philly will fight like hell for you.

What Makes Roots Picnic Different: Inside Philadelphia's Annual Musical Celebration

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Some of the content on this site expresses viewpoints and opinions that are not those of the Recording Academy and its Affiliates. Responsibility for the accuracy of information provided in stories not written by or specifically prepared for the Academy and its Affiliates lies with the story's original source or writer. Content on this site does not reflect an endorsement or recommendation of any artist or music by the Recording Academy and its Affiliates.