Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: This is the Nathan's and Roncast, the podcast about the songcraft and musicianship behind the songs we love. And in part two of our conversation with Livingston Taylor, he gets a little less musical and more philosophical. He talks about how people naturally want to feel hope and why he doesn't fear chaos.
[00:00:26] Speaker C: He talks about why he doesn't want to dwell on his past when he's on stage. A life well lived, he says is boring.
And we talked about how he couldn't wait to come out of COVID to play music again.
But, you know, I think, Aaron, I think we should go off script for a second because.
[00:00:43] Speaker B: Let's go off script.
[00:00:44] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, I don't know what to say about this interview, except that when we thought he was going to turn left, he would turn right.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: It did have some interesting twists.
[00:00:57] Speaker C: Yeah, it was chaos in the best light, in a way. But, you know, I felt like it was good energy all throughout, wasn't it?
[00:01:04] Speaker B: It was good energy. I mean, I'm biased.
I think we all, as audience members have a certain bias. The way that we want to see up there on stage. And what I want to see when I go to a Livingston Taylor show is to have him tell stories about his songs and tell stories about his life. But he makes it clear in this conversation he doesn't want to go there.
And as an audience member, maybe that was a little bit frustrating. But I think, as you have pointed out, it's an artist's prerogative once they get behind that mic, what they want to say and what they want to do.
[00:01:37] Speaker C: Yeah. And sometimes an artist feels something about their career that we as listeners may completely disagree with them on it.
It's surprising when you actually get to talk to that person to figure out how they feel about something. So, you know. But throughout all that, he just kept coming back to the topic of energy. I just. I felt good after our interview. So, you know, I think. And I hope that everyone takes that away from part one and part two.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: And with that, here is the saucy second half of our conversation with Livingston Taylor.
[00:02:15] Speaker D: I noticed that you were on the bill at the 1970 Philly Folk Festival. Is that right?
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Was I indeed? I might well have been.
I don't remember it, Aaron, but if you tell me that I was, I.
[00:02:27] Speaker D: Would certainly say, okay, your name was on a flyer.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: Excellent. Then I assume I was there.
[00:02:32] Speaker D: How much do you. Do you identify as a folk musician today and throughout your career?
[00:02:38] Speaker A: Because I play an acoustic guitar and I can make music without needing Flowing electrons, One could say that could perhaps be the definition of folk music. I can make music without flowing electrons. I'm just coming up with that definition now. Does that work for you guys?
[00:03:03] Speaker D: Yeah, certainly.
[00:03:04] Speaker C: As a songwriting cello player, there are a lot of people in the string world who take up the looping model. Essentially, they write songs that depend on a looper or a pedal board. Now I have a pedal board, I have a bunch of pedals, and I love working with pedals. But I always say, if I can put a chair in the middle of the street, sit down with the cello and play a four hour concert for you, I don't need any electrons.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: What people use the music for? There's this sense with people who are making music that the music matters. And the answer is that what matters is that the music facilitated human contact in human interaction. The actual music itself is like, what are you having? Well, I'm having a cup of coffee. And the Dixie cup makes it possible to contain the cup of coffee. What did I need? I needed human interaction. I needed to be able to express the core of my being and my passion. And because I put it into a musical form, it had time and tonality that were familiar enough that it made my passion safe. They will not accept your passion until they are held by your discipline. If I walked up to somebody on the street and I looked at them and said, I think you're sexy and I want to touch your body, I could do that maybe two, three times. The police would be called and I would be thrown in jail. Conversely, if I stood on that same street with a Dunkin Donuts Styrofoam cup empty in front of me, and I sang.
[00:04:50] Speaker E: I think you're sexy, I wanna touch your body.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: Music and time indicate that we are in states of discipline. And it makes possible contact and close contact with a relative stranger and white hot Emot.
[00:05:17] Speaker D: So here's one thing I want to know. You are a very joyous songwriter and performer. I see it exude from you even. I was just in Asbury park getting a cup of coffee at the Northeast Regional Folk Alliance Conference. And I see you taking your morning walk and you've got this huge smile on your face. Even when you're not performing, you exude joy. I imagine that this particular moment in time that we're in now is perhaps not unlike other moments of difficulty that you've encountered during your life. Vietnam, Covid. I could go on and on. How do you have that interaction with an audience and exchange joy when things are kind of Stacked against you. You know, people are walking in. Like, I remember Michael and I had a show in Washington five days after the inauguration, and everybody just seemed crestfallen. How do you reach people when they're in that state?
[00:06:03] Speaker A: First off, the default state of all life is hope and joy.
Once the turmoil is over, or it doesn't even have to be over, it just has to reach a point of rest.
Hope and joy are simply the default states of all life. If you're me, you happen to think that phrase, where there's life, there's hope is backwards. Where there's hope, there's life.
Hope is so compelling, hope is so absolute that life was created to manifest it. Hope came first. So the question is, where does hope come from? And I enjoy thinking about that. And the fact is that hope comes from random motion. Random motion, the pure energy of the Big Bang, precipitates out into matter.
Molecular motion is hope. It is one of the things that bemuses me about artificial intelligence. Because a thought that any of the three of us have about a creative thought started at a molecular level. It came from random molecular patterns that finally, after 10,000, I have no idea how many, but 10,000 or 10 million random motions, those molecular parts fell into a place where a protein could land on top of it and start up from that. So any thought that we have came from a quantity of random motions and random assemblages that involved trillions of interactions. And so this notion that somehow artificial intelligence will be able to. No, eventually. The problem with artificial intelligence is that eventually all it will have to read is artificial intelligence.
And that's like having sex with your sister.
It's not going to work out in the long run.
You need random chaos.
Random chaos is the essence. So when I see this time of trump and craziness and randomness, listen, I hope I survive it. I hope the people I love survive it. There's no guarantee of that. And I ultimately, I certainly care on one level. But by the same time, it is random chaos that creates new places, new thoughts, new worlds. You are in the wrong spot if you don't like chaos. Chaos is the essence of all life, all creativity, because all hope is the essence of that. And random chaos is by definition, if you're me, hope.
[00:09:31] Speaker C: That's beautiful. What you said lines up so much with the lyrics. When I look up your lyrics to try to listen. Watch the lyrics. I love the idea of, you know, the bygone era of looking at liner notes. So I try to recreate it online, you know, but one of the things that I love about that is your lyrics are so hopeful. I mean even the Never Lose Hope, the title, you know, or even the historical songs like Kitty Hawk, you know, you've got hope in there, you know, woven in there.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: Hope and joy are the default positions of all life. There is no life form that does not exist. I love it when people say I am not religious. Well, are you hopeful? And they well, yes, I hope for things.
Hope is religion.
It may be that, yes, life exists simply to manifest hope.
[00:10:24] Speaker C: I love that.
[00:10:25] Speaker D: Me too.
[00:10:26] Speaker C: Aaron. I can probably say that we both didn't expect such a hopeful, exuberant answer.
And that was wonderful.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: I've always been intrigued by the notion of where. I mean, imagine for example. Imagine if you are a really, really suffering drug addict and you're walking down the street and you're flat out of money and you really need to get high and all of a sudden you come across a car with a wallet left in the front seat and the wallet is slightly open and you see crisp hundred dollar bills poking out of that wallet and for some reason the door is unlocke.
Open up that door and you take that wallet and you have that money and you think to yourself, this is great, my suffering is going to end. Now will somebody else's begin? Of course. And am I a proponent to quantify one person's hope? It happens a lot where we, from a different vantage point, are cynical about somebody else's hope and what that is. I'm bemused to be in a bar someplace and watch people get drunk and have their assumption of hope change all around. Look, there are four big Irish guys. I think I can fight them. No, no you can't. But you're drunk enough to have it now be a good idea.
That engine of hope is really magnificent.
[00:12:15] Speaker C: I'm curious. You've been a teacher and clearly you enjoy that. I can tell just with our conversation and as a fellow teacher, I am curious if the young people that you ran into over the years, if there was any specific story of someone that you feel like really latched on to that hope and joy and really ran with it. Because I'm sure you've changed lives by being such a bright light around so many people.
[00:12:42] Speaker A: It's a nice fantasy to think that one could change lives.
I have no sense of that. I teach because it allows me to watch time and time again. Intelligence is pattern recognition and the more patterns you become familiar with, the more tribally of service you can be. Human beings are not very bright what intelligence is, is pattern recognition. And as an aside, brilliance is mindful, is lucky pattern recognition. So you're brilliant if you're Jeff Bezos and start Amazon. Lucky. Pattern recognition makes you a lot of money. Pattern recognition itself is intelligence. And so students allow. As they go through their process, they allow me to see more patterns. I wish I could say that I had information for them, I do, but it's not important. They'll be fine without it. What I'm interested in is learning more. And nothing teaches you like people who are in the attempt to do it, write songs, perform.
So I wish I could say that it was sort of magnanimous on my part. The truth is, I teach because I learn probably a hundred times what they learn. I learned from them what they learned from me.
[00:14:16] Speaker C: Absolutely. Yeah, Yeah, I agree with that 100 million percent.
[00:14:20] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. I need some flowing electrons. I. Computer, let me grab a plug.
[00:14:28] Speaker D: Yes, go ahead.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: How amazing.
I've been writing a book and this is why all of these things are coming up. Because I'm thinking about all this stuff, I was asking myself, what is it that makes human beings unique on the planet? What do human beings do that no other life form can do?
[00:14:52] Speaker D: What's that?
[00:14:53] Speaker A: The very definition of a human being is that they play with and control fire. And I was thinking that that would go a long way to defining what a human being is.
So if you have question given tribal norm or look, or if it's so bizarre to you that you're willing to question whether or not they're a human being, if their behavior patterns are so abhorrent to you that you think that they should be imprisoned or killed or exterminated, which certain human groups do to other human groups all the time, then one of the things you might ask yourself is, whoa, whoa, whoa. Before we imprison them and kill them, are they capable of controlling fire?
Because if they are, the chances are very good that they are human beings. They are Homo sapiens, they can control fire. And that is just. There is no other life form that can do that.
[00:16:03] Speaker D: We were catching fire again.
I love that song. Boatman.
[00:16:08] Speaker A: Thank you. In my fantasy of that tribe wandering the savannas of Africa a million and a half, 2 million years ago, humanoid, standing upright on the absolute ragged edge of extinction. No particular strength, standing upright. Wouldn't you know, you do it so you can look over the plains and stuff, so you're pushed in that direction, but it's not a great place to be. It's not a great hip arrangement to give birth etc. So you're wandering around and for some reason your group likes fire.
They see in the distance lightning having ignited the savannas and they would come up after the flame has passed and they like the latent heat. And occasionally they find carrion animals that have been killed and cooked by the fire and they eat those. And all those broken down cell walls give a massive energy in fat with very little need for strong jaws or hands. And I have this vision of this nine year old female hunched down in the fading light of the day, poking some coals with a stick and having a conceptualization and saying to herself, I'm going to take this with me. I'm going to carry these coals and everything that we are, every space, everything we do. The three of us already today have litten dozens if not hundreds of fires every time. That light bulb behind you, Michael. Oh yeah, that's a fire.
All of those glowing amplifiers starting your car, you just lit another fire. It is unimaginable what the human experiment has been able to do. And all human beings, all human beings either play with fire or are aware of it and aware of others who play with fire.
[00:18:29] Speaker D: I feel the warmth, I feel the fire inside of you. For terrible transition here, but I'm gonna try it.
So when I saw you at the New Hope Winery for the first time, I was struck by the fact that you were playing mostly standards. Maybe Boatman was the only original that you played, but I might have missed it if there were others.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: Many of my songs sound like standards.
[00:18:57] Speaker D: Which songs did you play a lot that sound like standards?
[00:19:00] Speaker A: Let me see, what do I have here? I would write.
[00:19:04] Speaker E: When I get too old to dream I won't whisper out your name.
[00:19:15] Speaker A: Or.
[00:19:15] Speaker E: Lift my face into the rain or strain to hear from again the tumbling of a stream When I get too old to dream I won't feel my lost heart ache or be glad for the smile I had to fake for the extra bow I chose to take at the standing lo of the baffo.
[00:19:53] Speaker F: Sea.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: When I get too old to three so, you know, that song sounds like a. You know.
I will be too old when the.
[00:20:09] Speaker E: Sunrise fails to move me when your memory doesn't choose me as as I'm waiting on a train Train you can mark me down is done.
[00:20:23] Speaker B: When I.
[00:20:24] Speaker E: No longer crave the sea when my partner lets me be when the young ones pretend to look right through me.
[00:20:42] Speaker A: Yeah, sorry, I'm just. Oh yeah, I. I normally play this on piano.
[00:20:48] Speaker D: Right.
[00:20:51] Speaker E: I won't mourn the last goodbye or no. God's victory goes to those who try and hope that the darkness is not so wide that it that can't be crossed on love's true being.
This is who I am till I.
[00:21:19] Speaker F: Get too old to dream.
[00:21:30] Speaker D: You are a wonderful songwriter. And you know that.
That album that grabbed me in 1996, when I walked into your concert for the first time, I was a little surprised that I wasn't hearing you talk a lot about your own songs and your own past and your own story.
Why don't you do that?
[00:21:50] Speaker A: Because a life well lived is boring.
You do not want to. If you are living a life that other people find interesting, you're going to be amazed.
Much pain you are in. It doesn't interest me. There are so many things out there that actually are important.
If you want to talk about something, let's talk about nuclear fission or nuclear fusion. Does anybody think that we can. We've built the population using the stored photons of hydrocarbon to propel a population from 1 billion people in 1800 to 8 billion today. Does anybody in their right mind think we can actually go steal from the existing biome their photons? Every one of those photons coming from the sun is spoken for by the existing biome. You don't have any choice, any choice but to either use nuclear fission or nuclear fusion to replace the photons stored in fossilized hydrocarbons.
[00:23:20] Speaker D: You don't think that your life story is interesting?
[00:23:23] Speaker A: Mine?
[00:23:24] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:23:24] Speaker A: Oh, God, no. No, no.
It has. My thoughts are interesting, but my life story couldn't be more boring. I was a mediocre student that had to develop a skill. I was bright enough to understand that I was going to need a skill that would allow me to enter a tribal structure at a high level. And that was playing guitar and writing songs in 1965 period.
And by 1968, I was a bitching guitar player and was able to enter my peer group at a high level.
[00:24:12] Speaker C: And the rest is history. In many ways. I just love that it's a, you know, the. I think as musicians we jump into it and we're on to the next thing. Yeah, you know, we. We achieve these things and I'm always dreaming albums personally, you know, like I'm your dreaming projects albums you went and recorded with the BBC Studio Orchestra. I mean, that's, that's wonderful. And you made it happen and it's beautiful and I just, you know, I. I think that's looking forward always.
[00:24:37] Speaker A: Yeah. And now we're on to the next thing and we've got some actual problems out here, and I love tough problems. I love looking to solutions to things like homelessness. Why is somebody homeless? Us. What has happened here? How have they fallen through? What can we do about this? You know, I, I, I think all the time I, I love it when my, my friends at this particular taping are trashing Donald Trump and Elon Musk. And then I think about a $36 trillion deficit. Now, let that just sink in for a minute. A $36 trillion that young people owe. I'm 76. I'm out of here in 15 years max, and I'm clueless in 10.
So the notion of saddling children with unrecoverable debt so me and my people can continue to live unproductive, consuming lives and put people in unrecoverable debt. Stop it.
Stop this behavior.
You're out of your mind.
So this is the kind of thing that I think about. I am intrigued by the transition. Why it happens. What happens? Where we go. I do know that there is no life form that isn't improved by the liberal application of, of easily available, plentiful energy.
So I'm big on me, not me using less. I want everybody to use how much I use.
[00:26:28] Speaker D: Anything you want to say before we wrap up?
[00:26:30] Speaker A: Yeah. I would like to say to Michael, to you and Aaron, to you.
Hanging out with you for the last hour has been an absolute joy.
Thank you for your curiosity and, and your enthusiasm. And I will see you soon.
[00:26:46] Speaker C: Well, thank you. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Pleasure.
[00:26:49] Speaker D: Thank you, Liv. Much appreciate it. It's an honor.
[00:26:55] Speaker B: Here's Livingston Taylor's classic song, I Will Be in Love with you, performed with the BBC Concert Orchestra.
[00:27:08] Speaker F: Satisfaction say but when I see you I know they'll come There'll be words that finally say how much I be did someone.
Just one smile and then I'll hear those sweet words Poor upon it I will be in love with you I'll be in love with you.
[00:28:12] Speaker E: I will.
[00:28:13] Speaker F: Be in love with you I'll be in love with you.
[00:28:31] Speaker E: I don't know.
[00:28:33] Speaker F: How lonesome I have been I'm that way day to day But I long to ask myself how did I ever learn Live that way Just one smile and then I'll hear those sweet words all run in I will be in love with you I'll be in love with you I will will be in love with you I'll be in love with you I don't know how to be soft I've become hard just to survive But I long to become gentle.
Gentleness brings Father.
Take these two strong hands.
Soften them, darling.
Understand I will be in love with you.
I'll be in love with you.
I will be in love with you.
I'll be in love with you.
I will be be in love with you.
I'll be in love. I'll be in love.
I'll be in love with you.
Sam.
