Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: This is the Nathan's and Roncast, the podcast about the songcraft and musicianship behind the songs we love. I'm Aaron Nathans. I'm one half of the acoustic duo Nathans and Ronstadt. And if you're in Washington, we'd love to see you on January 25th at the Focus Music show in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
More information is available at our website. Nathans and Ronstadt.com on today's episode, we interview the great John Flynn. He's a folk songwriter who sings about social justice and then walks the walk. He's worked against the death penalty and in 2017, Flynn founded new Beginnings, Next Step Incorporated. It's a nonprofit dedicated to helping incarcerated and returning citizens successfully transition to freedom. John laughed when I said he has the voice of God, but if the big guy had a voice, it would probably sound a lot like John Flynn. Rough, hewn, strong, big hearted and compassionate. That's how his songs are too. This past summer, I saw John play the main stage at the Kerrville Folk Festival. He must have made quite an impression on that night's headliner, Ray Wiley Hubbard, who had this to say about want a badass folk cat who tears off pieces of his soul, rhymes them, and lays lyrics that bleed on melodies that even poet angels smoking cigarettes in the alleys of seventh heaven envy and soulful little demons hanging around Detroit recording studios all wishing they could sing like him? Well then, John Flynn is your man. Indeed. In part one of our conversation, John talks about how he made the decision to exchange commercial success for more freedom as an artist. And he reflects on what it cost him and what it allowed him to do. He discusses how he got involved with the New Beginnings prison work. And he talks about that time he found a box on his front steps with a note that said, quote, john, do the work. That box. And that note changed his life. Here's our interview with John Flynn.
[00:02:14] Speaker C: Hi Michael. Hi Aaron.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Hi John.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: How are you?
[00:02:18] Speaker D: Hey John, how are you doing? Good to see you guys. Good to see you. Welcome to the Nathan's and Roncast. It's an honor to have you on our little podcast that's featuring some of our favorite musicians and people. Thank you for being a part of this, answering our call. Your music is a big part of my life because I've recorded on many of your albums.
[00:02:38] Speaker C: Yeah man.
[00:02:38] Speaker D: But I also love your songwriting and Aaron too. We both love your songwriting because it connects with other humans in ways that the quintessential folk songwriter, slash, just general songwriter, slash musician who brings People together does.
[00:02:54] Speaker C: Oh, thank you.
[00:02:55] Speaker D: So. Thank you so much for putting your music out into the world. And there's going to be so much more people will learn about you. But, Aaron, this was a good idea to have John on here.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: So I like having John Flynn on this podcast because he speaks to the struggles that people in difficult situations face. Later on, we're going to be talking about your song Prison Bible. John, I'm curious how it is that you found yourself constantly being able to identify with people who are encountering difficulty.
[00:03:26] Speaker C: I was listening to a podcast yesterday about spiral dynamics integral theory put forth by a guy named Ken Wilber. As I understand that his idea, and I don't think it was all his, but is that your circle keeps expanding throughout life. You transcend and include your circle. So it starts out with, you know, your immediate family and then your community, and. And then as you continue to grow through life, you know, he talks about waking up, growing up and cleaning up and showing up. You know, these tasks that confront every human being. And I suppose that, you know, at some level, I always wanted to write songs. Music offered me a way to connect with people that. That in. In a way that I didn't feel I was particularly adept at. You know, when I was young, I'm kind of an introvert. I'm. I'm kind of shy on. On some levels, it certainly gave me a way to talk to girls early on, which. Which I loved about it. But then it. It kind of beckoned me on. Like, I started out in Nashville. I've got a staff writing gig. I was, you know, I. I experienced some very minor early success, but it really wasn't the thing I was cut out to do, you know, right off the rack, songs for guys on the radio to sing. I felt a call to write some stuff that was truer to what I was experiencing, what I was wrestling with, what I was going through, even to the point where a couple of my records were children's albums, because when I started my own family, those were the songs that came organically. And then my songs that started to deal with social justice came out of me paying more attention. And that happened a lot. When I moved to Delaware, I got involved with the. The Franciscans here. I got talked into a little bit of volunteering at the local prison, and that grew. And. And so it's just been. I guess the word is organic. I just hopefully have continued to grow as an artist, as I've hopefully grown as a person, and that's just been a matter of paying Attention and kind of letting that circle expand.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: How did you end up in Delaware?
[00:05:29] Speaker C: We used to live outside of Philly, a place called Prospect park, when my family was young. And we had a dear friend, Hermeta Harper, who was a realtor here in the Wilmington area. And she kept telling us that this would be a good fit for us. And we fell in love with a place north of Wilmington, you know, a little kind of a cul de sac, backed up to some woods and stuff. And so it was just. It was just. It was great. And I stumbled in one day to the Franciscan center, which was in. In the middle of Wilmington, kind of across from the Grand Opera House on Market Street. And there I met. I met a guy who changed my life. A friar named Brother David Schlod, or Brother David, ran a bunch of ministries. And the very cool thing about the Franciscans is, you know, their main gig is hospitality and inclusiven. So you did. They weren't trying to get anybody to. To be a Catholic or to be anything necessarily. They just encouraged you to go where you were being fed, you know, and if they. They could offer you a cold cup of water on the way or, you know, a pat on the back, they would do that. And. And so David's prison work, his ministry, a group called New Beginnings at Howard R. Young Correctional Institution, was about that, you know. And when he got transferred, about 2,000, I guess three or four, and he's a chaplain at Walter Reed Medical center in Silver Spring. And he asked me to take over the prison group, you know, so almost 20 years ago. And so, you know, if you're paying attention, your music's gonna change, you know, because your experience is gonna change.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: What came first, the music about. I don't wanna say music about prisoners. Cause I don't know how many of them you have, but I dug pretty deep into the one song. But did you start writing about this before or after you started getting involved with helping with playing in the prisons?
[00:07:20] Speaker C: There were the two songs that kind of were a branch branching out for me. Happened about the same time at the turn of the millennium.
Shortly after I moved to Wilmington, I was approached by a fellow named Kevin O'Connell, who is now our chief public defender in the state of Delaware. But Kevin was working in private practice as a defense attorney. And he was. I think he was the president of Delaware Citizens against the Death Penalty. And he walked up to me and said, what's your position on the death penalty? And I said, capital punishment? And he said, no, the death penalty. And I said, you know, I kind of think I'm against it, but I haven't really given it a lot of thought. I don't know that I could tell you why, and I don't know that I could defend my position very well. I haven't really done the work. And the next day, there was a box on my front porch, and it had articles and DVDs and books. One of them was Dead Man Walking by Sister Helen Prejean. And there was a little note said, john, do the work. Yo to yourself and you and yo to the rest of us. And so I did. And I ended up writing a song called Full Circle, which kind of encapsulated my feelings about that issue. And then Kevin and I put on a concert at the University of Delaware called the Mercy Concert, in which Sister Helen spoke and artists from all over the country appeared. And that was kind of the beginning of my work as an activist. You know, the first time I felt confident about, you know, standing up and saying what I believed and why and being willing to take the hit for it if it wasn't a popular opinion. And about exactly that same time was 2001 and 99 11. And I wrote a song called I Will Not Fear, which was a response to America's reaction to the World Trade center in the Pentagon and. And Shanksville. And I remember the first time I did that song, which was at a place called the Point in Bryn Mawr. And I had never experienced one of my songs connecting on that level with an audience. It really brought home the idea that this music can be very healing and connect people in a way that, you know, the stuff that I was writing for country radio, I don't think really did. At least it came from a different place in my consciousness or in my heart. And so anyway, that kind of. That kind of changed the path for me. The songs that came out of the prison work were, you know, over the years. And I probably. There's probably about enough for an entire album at this point. But one at a time, songs would come out of stories being shared with me, which, of course, I would change the names or I would get permission to use from the. From the guys that told these stories. But they were real stories, and they amazed me. They, you know. Father Greg Boyle runs Homeboy Industries out in Los Angeles. It's the largest gang intervention and reentry program in the world. And Father G, as he's called, he says we have to learn to stand in awe of what people carry instead of in judgment of how they carry it. You know, and, and the, and the more you get to know and the deeper you get to know the burdens that people carry, the stories that they have to tell you can't help but change you. So that influenced my music and, and also just going from. At that point, you know, pretty much going from spending a lot of time in Nashville and trying to convince publishers down there that, you know, they, they should invest in the commercial aspects of my career, it changed to where I just wanted to honestly write what I was going through as a person and share in any way I could. That's kind of it. You know, I don't regret that at all. It's led my life to become something, you know, it's given me adventures that I never really dreamed I would have ever had and taken me places I would have never dreamed of going.
[00:10:51] Speaker D: Do you feel like there were people in your life that felt like that wasn't the direction you should have gone? And they kind of either disappeared or you. Did you get any pushback when you just kind of leaned in the direction of what felt right, or was it pretty organic? And everyone seemed to say, that's fine, you know, yeah, there was.
[00:11:10] Speaker C: There's definitely pushback. I made some decisions early on. I had an offer for a management contract with somebody who was going to be able to plug me into the whole country music phenomenon. But when I looked at it deeply, I realized it took away a lot of my freedom as an artist and I realized that I wasn't going to be happy. It seemed very clear to me that his connections weren't all on the up and up. Matter of fact, I wrote a song called the Duck Song was one of my first real popular songs on Kids Corner.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: If It Walks Like a Duck.
[00:11:40] Speaker C: That was about the idea that, you know, pay attention to the signals that you're getting. You know, pay attention to your intuition because, you know, my spidey sense is tingling here and this could be a life changing moment. And I ended up kind of backing away from that deal. My extended family kind of lost interest in my music about that time. I mean, my, my folks, my brothers and sisters, you know, they, they. They were big supporters of my music up until a certain point. And then they just didn't agree with the stands that I was taking and the stuff that I was expressing. I lost some members of my audience. You know, I remember one guy getting up in the middle of a show and saying, that song is a socialist manifesto, you know, And I said, no, it's not. It's a. It's a folk song. He said, same thing, you know.
So there was definitely a little bit of a bumpy transition from folks who'd known me from children's music and kind of my early country stuff to stuff that really talked about what I saw going on in the world and what sense I could make of it.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: What's been the financial, if this is okay to ask, I mean, when you take a bold stance like that, you're going to lose some business. I mean, were you able to continue to be a functioning musician after you made that switch?
[00:12:58] Speaker C: Yeah, but there was definitely a drop off in the financial aspect of it. And my wife, at that point in our journey, she went back to work full time because my income did drop off and she just supported it and also supported the amount of volunteer work I was starting to do. In a sense, the volunteer work that I do represents both of us because she kind of sustains me so that I can be in prisons when I'm not on the road and facilitate support groups for returning citizens and the stuff that my organization does. So Beth's been a big part of that.
[00:13:31] Speaker A: And over time, did you find a new audience?
[00:13:34] Speaker C: I don't know how to judge that because I don't think I ever really connected with the folk audience at large. You know, there was always something about me that they didn't quite get, or maybe I was a little too religious or I was a little too country, or I was a little too something. And I never felt. Well, that's what my agents were always telling me, that there was a lot of push back about. And honestly, I think there are only so many slots for white guys with guitars. You know, coming out of the 90s, I think that had been done to death. And there was a lot of people who hadn't been given a chance to. To be heard. So I don't think, you know, I was in the right place at the right time to connect with the folkies. And yet because of my connection, like, I ran into Sunny Oaks when I was in Kerrville, I guess, and we became dear friends and I went out on the road with Phil Oaks family. You know, I say the family, the. The Phillips Knights and Sonny, one of my very biggest supporters over the years. So I, you know, I. I've never known anything about the music business and I know less now than when I started.
[00:14:34] Speaker D: You know, you mentioned what your agents said or, you know, the people who are like trying to call the shots. I always say they're trying to, you know, because they think they know what they know, you know, and it's really funny to me, the things that I've heard about my family group, Bronze Generations. My favorite was a booking agent that we were trying to ask to be our booking agent. And she said, well, your family doesn't have enough of a story. And in our bio, we talk about having five generations of Ronstadt family music in Tucson, Arizona. And she said, we didn't have enough of a story. So I always came up with this idea that, like, the people who make it or, like, are going to make it are the ones who have the weirdest name, like, Three Noodles and a Toothpick on Ice, you know, or something, you know, like, whatever. It might be, like Silly Putty in the. And the Gumbies, you know, like, it could be anything. And then they have a bio that's saying, okay, you know, these folks have been playing together for a year, you know, whatever it is. But it's. It has to be something quirky, catches people's ears, and then all of a sudden, people are like, oh, they're actually pretty good, you know, like. But if you have, like, this rich history, it's almost like the. And on top of that, you've got a genre issues, right? You mentioned, you know, a little too country, a little too religious or whatever people feel, you know, like, if you're singing your truth, people are going to have opinions. But my family always was told, well, your. Your albums don't stay in the same genre long enough. Yeah, yeah, I always say that. It's. It's my genre. It's what I do. It sounds like us, you know, and. And I just stand my ground for that.
[00:16:05] Speaker C: Right. I had a record guy, pretty high up record guy say once he said, you know, you've just never stayed in the same place long enough. You know, like, I started out in country rock, and then I went to Nashville, and then I became a children's artist, and then I became a folk singer, and then I became a social, just, you know, and he said, you just never were in one place long enough for an audience to catch up to you. You know, he said that worked for Neil Young because, you know, they found him and they kept going with him, but, you know, unless they find you, you know, it's not a good formula. But I just figured, well, you know, I'm going to write the next song and I'm going to make the next album, and it's going to be something that I'm interested in doing rather than, you know, I had a couple successful children's Records. So my manager back, we had signed a distribution deal with Rounder, and he said, this is what you do. This is, you know, there's a great niche here. You know, this is what you're going to be able to make a real good living at and get famous for. And, you know, I wanted to make those albums, but I didn't want to spend my life remaking those albums, you know. So I've just always continued to have fun and continued to basically pay the bills and raise my kids. And so I don't want to come off as being a sour puss about this. I'm probably one of the luckiest people, you know, I can think of is I don't know that many people that get to do what they love, you know, for as many years as I've done, done it. And it doesn't always translate well as far as album sells or concert tickets sold or any of that jazz. But, you know, that's not the reason. You get into it in the beginning and like David said, if it still continues to feed your, your soul, then, you know, go for it, man. That's, that's the, the main thing, I think.
[00:17:39] Speaker E: Thank you so much for listening to our interview with John Flynn. This is the end of Part one and come back next week to hear more. But before we leave you today, we're gonna play the Duck song.
[00:17:52] Speaker F: If it looks like a duck and.
[00:17:54] Speaker G: It quacks like a duck and there's.
[00:17:55] Speaker H: Duck dew on your pickup truck but.
[00:17:57] Speaker I: You can bet your bottom buck it.
[00:18:00] Speaker F: Ain'T no armadillo My daddy told me long ago about two things every boy should know One of them was the yellow snow and the other was armadillo.
[00:18:11] Speaker G: If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck and there's.
[00:18:14] Speaker H: Duck do on your pickup truck but.
[00:18:16] Speaker I: You can bet your bottom buck it.
[00:18:18] Speaker F: Ain'T no armadillo.
[00:18:29] Speaker C: If it ain't got.
[00:18:31] Speaker F: Claws and beady eyes and armor plates.
[00:18:33] Speaker G: Above its thighs Like a mutant rat.
[00:18:35] Speaker F: In a tank disguise it ain't no armadillo if it looks like a duck.
[00:18:40] Speaker G: And it quacks like a duck and.
[00:18:41] Speaker H: There'S duck dew on your pickup truck.
[00:18:44] Speaker I: Buddy, you can bet your bottom buck.
[00:18:46] Speaker F: It ain't no armadillo Said use your ears boy, use your eyes no need over analyze it walks on two legs, swims and flies it ain't no armadillo.
[00:19:07] Speaker G: If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck and there's.
[00:19:09] Speaker H: Duckdoo on your pickup truck but you.
[00:19:12] Speaker I: Can bet your bottom buck it ain't.
[00:19:14] Speaker F: No armadillo My daddy told me long ago about two things every boy should know One of them was the yellow.
[00:19:23] Speaker C: Snow.
[00:19:27] Speaker F: And the other was armadillos if.
[00:19:30] Speaker G: It looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck and there's duck.
[00:19:32] Speaker H: Doo on your pickup truck Buddy, you.
[00:19:34] Speaker I: Can bet your bottom buck it ain't.
[00:19:37] Speaker F: No armadillo if it looks like a.
[00:19:39] Speaker G: Duck and it quacks like a duck.
[00:19:41] Speaker H: And there's duck do on your pickup.
[00:19:43] Speaker I: Truck buddy, you can bet your bottom.
[00:19:45] Speaker F: Buck it ain't no armadillo if it.
[00:19:48] Speaker G: Looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck and there's duck stuck.
[00:19:51] Speaker H: To your pickup truck Buddy, you can.
[00:19:53] Speaker I: Bet your bottom buck it ain't no.
[00:19:56] Speaker F: Armadillo Take it home.
[00:19:57] Speaker G: And if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck and.
[00:20:00] Speaker H: There'S duck to all your pickup trucks.
[00:20:02] Speaker I: But you can bet your bottom buck.
[00:20:04] Speaker F: It ain't no harm Adela.
[00:20:08] Speaker H: 2, 3, 4.
[00:20:16] Speaker E: You've been listening to the Nathan's and Roncast found on all platforms where you listen to your podcast. If you want to find out more about us or maybe our music, go to www.nathans and ronstadt.com. it's like Nathan's like the hot dog stand and Ronstadt like Linda and so please check us out. We would love to see you out in the wild. So hopefully we put a smile on her face. Hopefully we got you thinking and hopefully you're excited to hear what we have for you next.
[00:20:51] Speaker D: So I'll start it. Hi, you're Jesus.
[00:20:58] Speaker C: This is going to be on the blooper reel.
[00:20:59] Speaker D: Oh, man. We do keep some bloopers in. In the. In our. Some of our episodes. So. Hey, John, this is okay. I gotta get my head back in it. John Flynn, welcome to the Aaron.
Aaron, I blame your Internet. Okay, okay, I'll start.
[00:21:24] Speaker C: Hi, Michael. Hi, Aaron.
[00:21:27] Speaker B: Hi, John. How are you?
[00:21:28] Speaker D: Hey, John, how are you doing? Good to see you guys. Good to see you. Welcome to the Nathan's and Roncast.
We're going to keep that intro, by the way, because it's absolutely chaotic and I like it. So it's an honor to have you on our little podcast that's featuring some of our favorite musicians and people and thank you for being a part of.
