Episode Transcript
[00:00:20] Speaker A: Welcome back to the Nathan's and Ron cast. We're going to resume our interview with the amazing Craig Bichardt with part two, and we're going to talk about his song this Old House. Without any further delay, here's Craig Bickard.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Do you seek feedback after you've finished a song? Do you have a sounding board?
[00:00:38] Speaker C: It's interesting, you know, I've done that for other people, and I think I've even said to some of them, gee, I wish I had somebody like this when I was learning. I wish I'd had somebody like this that I could bounce songs on. I was signed to a publishing deal, I think, when I was 27, music publishing deal at Cole Gems EMI up in New York City. And they were the first people. Paul Tannen, Holly Green, Charlie Feldman in Nashville, Jody Williams. They were the first people that critiqued my songs. And I have to admit that it was a shock, you know, because they saw things in my songs that I didn't see. Not necessarily bad things, you know, but they would compliment me on something and I'd go, wow, I didn't see that it meant that, you know, I've heard Dylan say the same thing. People read into my songs, lots of things that I didn't put in there, you know, and that was an interesting thing. But getting feedback, you have to be careful because, you know, first of all, unless someone else is listening as carefully as you were when you wrote the song, you can't trust that. All you can trust is their initial reaction, which might change.
And I think pretty much everyone has had this experience where the first time you heard a song, it didn't quite go in. It just went over your head. You know, you might have liked something about it, but it didn't strike you as special. And then all of a sudden, you listen one day and you hear something in the lyric that you missed before. You hear a connection. And now you love that. Like, that was really interesting that they did that. And then you discover that, like you were saying, Aaron, you discovered there's a guitar part going on, and I'd like to try and learn how to play that. Wow, this is harder than I thought. So songs do grow on you. And I think I tend to write that way. I think you do too, Aaron and Michael, your music is very challenging. I mean, it's wonderful, but it's challenging.
I think that we are people who want to put more into the song than maybe should be there. From the average listener's perspective.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:02:29] Speaker C: I had my friend Tom Schuyler was vice president of bmgrca Records in Nashville at one point. And he said there's. He just said this. There's so much in your songs that it just all goes over people's heads. And then. But I knew that he loved my songs because he had taken some of them for his artists to record. Martina McBride and a few other people. And I'd also been in a band with him, you know, so I know he loved what I did. And I think what he was saying was it takes a little bit of time to discover what's in the song. And, you know, if you. If you love an artist, a particular artist, then you will sort of be gracious with them. You'll allow them to do something that maybe the first time you hear it, it doesn't kill you, but then maybe you'll listen a few more times and it'll grow on you. Other times it doesn't. You just don't like that song. But putting more in the song than the listener expects to me is part of the art. You know, I think if there isn't that, then. Well, first of all, I get bored as a performer. If my songs aren't a challenge for me to perform, then why would I keep doing them over and over and over? Wouldn't I get bored? You know, other artists don't, and they're perfectly comfortable playing very simple songs. You know, rock songs are fairly simple. I don't mean to sound like I'm, you know, being critical of this stuff at all. I'm just saying, for me, the more I work on a song, the more I develop it into, you know, a performance piece rather than just a song, the more interest I have in going on stage and continuing to do this at the age of 70. You know, I mean, I'm not doing this for the thrill. I mean, I'm doing this because it's a challenge. It keeps me feeling involved in life. It has something in it that my brain requires every day. Like nutrition.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, I think when we do that, and this is Aaron, we probably agree on this, but when we are genuine and take that nutrition and we create something and we offer it to our listeners, I mean, you have fans who have. I've seen, come to your shows for the last 15 years of playing with you, and it's almost like they need that nutrition from you. And your songs speak to them on a lot of different levels, and they all have their favorites. And they're like, oh, sometimes if you don't do one of them, you're like, oh, I wish you had done this one, but you might do a new one. They're like, that's my new favorite song. And that's, you know, you just want to see where, as an audience member, I'd like to call myself an audience member with a special pass to be able to play music with you at the same time. Because I get to listen and then just, you know, sit back and talk.
[00:05:02] Speaker C: I'm an officiary of that. Let me tell you, pal.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: Oh, it's such a pleasure. And I love when I hear a lyric and I'm like, what can I do on the cello to highlight that lyric?
Aaron, same deal. Because Aaron and I are performing as a duo all the time, and we're co writing and every new show is just like, we're trying to figure out what can we do to keep it interesting for us. You know, we tried something new last night, and we kind of fell on our face, but the audience thought it was on purpose, and that was good. It was like, you have to teach.
[00:05:32] Speaker C: Me how to do that.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: It helps when you make failure part of your shit.
[00:05:37] Speaker C: Well, you know, that's also part of the folk tradition. You know, I was just caught little couple minutes of a Peter, Paul and Mary special the other night when I was flipping around and they were doing a routine like that. And it. I mean, it's just part of the tradition. Folk music is entertainment, I think, as much as it is songs.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: I like those little moments, and I think that's, you know, that's developing the craft.
[00:06:00] Speaker C: Right?
[00:06:00] Speaker A: You try something, it doesn't work, you know, and then you do something different or you take ideas from that. And, yeah, you know, one of the songs that I've noticed over the years really speaks to people. And it spoke to my dad when he was alive. And my dad, Michael J. Ronstadt, passed away 2016. But he loved this song called this Old House. And we had to move out of our family home because the siblings all wanted to sell the seven acres we grew up on. And I remember it sold for $600,000. And I still remember coming back when they had bulldozed everything but some of the trees and even most of the desert they bulldozed. And it was one of the saddest days I can think of. Just driving through. It looked tiny. Like all seven acres looked small. And the cottonwood tree just was like, bulldozed your house? Well, because we sold the property and they were building a development there, so that's hard.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: It goes beyond. Because when you leave a House, at least you know it's still there, you.
[00:07:07] Speaker C: Can come back to it. Although I haven't been back to my parents house. I know that's a painful story.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: So I remember feeling so when we all heard this old house for the first time, we're like, you know, pull our hearts out, stomp on it, maybe bury it for a few years and try to put it back in. You know, it's like stab it with stealing knives. I mean, what more could you do, you know, so. But that clearly, like everyone has an experience of leaving. You've told the story of how it's from the house's perspective and it was a bluegrass hit, I guess, you know, so you made $10 from it. So, you know, you made all the 17. Okay, there you go. So like you, you had some pretty awesome success with it. Because I think success is not monetary. It's when things that are pretty cool happen, in my opinion. With that song. I'd be curious when you were writing it. Sometimes that can be an emotional experience and it's not like, oh, someone died. It's not like this immediately visceral thing. It's a very mild human experience if you consider all the problems in the world. But it's still meaningful to everyone. And so I was curious, how did you put that one together and when did you feel like it was done or like, was it a struggle or was that one of those quick five minute songs, you know?
[00:08:27] Speaker C: No, it wasn't. It wasn't a struggle and it wasn't a five minute song. It was. I remember that day like a golden day, like it was yesterday I was writing. First of all, my co writer on the song is Tom Schuyler and he's a brilliant songwriter. And we sat in his house, which was an old house, an older house on Hemingway Drive in Nashville, and the song lay all around us like the toys were, you know, there in the room. And the banister, you could see the banister where the kids would slide down and the worn finish on the floors, all of that was all around us. So all we had to do was just sort of shaped the song. But I don't think I've ever been more certain that I was writing a special song than that day when I was working with Tom. And we both had a strong feeling, there was a lot of emotion over it. And at one point his two eldest children came home from school and they came into the room where we were working and he took like 15, 20 minutes to talk to them about their school day and I was just sitting across from him and his children, listening to their conversation and listening to everything that went on there. And that it just brought the song so much deeper for me. And I think that's. We went into the second verse from there. We hadn't finished that part of the song. So there is. The house in that song is alive in that song. You know, that's where the imagery came from.
And of course, you know, I hadn't had an experience of selling a house when I wrote that song. That came later. Both the houses, one of the houses was in Nashville, the other one was my parents house in Pennsylvania.
So it's ironic that while we were constructing this song, I was loving the process and loving the imagery. But it didn't hit me until many years later, the power in the imagery, because then I was living it for real. I wasn't imagining it. So we wrote the song imagining the house that we were in being for sale and leaving it all behind.
But when I finally had the experience of losing a house, it was devastating in Nashville.
So that's an interesting thing. Like with songwriting, it's almost like method acting. And most of you probably know what method acting is, but you have an emotional experience in the scene because you're reliving another experience that's hidden from the camera in your head. So you might be thinking about the death of your father or your mother while you're in a scene. You have to have, you know, a tearful moment in the scene while you're saying the lines, you're saying, the audience doesn't know where that's. That expression of sorrow is coming from, but you do, you feel it. So in a way, I was experiencing that without really having had that direct experience in real life. I was imagining the experience, in other words. But then when I had it, I was shocked by the fact that I couldn't sing the song for months after I left my house in Nashville, because every time I started singing it, I would get tearful and I would be on stage and I would literally feel like the tears were going to be on my face in a minute. And that's, I think, getting back to what I was saying before about, you know, no smile in the reader, no smile in the. No smile in the writer, no smile in the reader, no tear in the writer, no tear in the reader. We have to really feel what we're doing. And that combination of being in the room with my collaborator, Tom Schuyler, and having his children come into the room and just feeling the reality of that house and that place and all the love that was in that room. I think that some. Somehow a house has some kind of weird soul, you know, and it grows and it develops while the family is in it, and the house begins to maybe take on the characteristics of the people who have lived there. And when the people leave, there's almost like a kind of a sense of grief inside an old house. If you ever go in an old house and you just feel like, man, some life took place here, you know, and there's almost a little bit of sorrow in the house because you sort of feel, you know, what took place there. Trying to get that in the song. And of course, you know, I mentioned earlier, but this is something that I've learned that the best Nashville songwriters do, but I've learned to sort of imitate that is to focus on some detail, some unexpected detail that pulls you into the song. So the opening lines of the song say, there are 50 liquor boxes in my hall and a hundred empty nails on my wall.
That it's a curious place to start a song and it piques your curiosity when you listen to it. But it's a really tiny detail, you know, in all of the crazy stuff that would go on, you know, about a house for sale, to focus on that, you know, like put that little detail, that very unlikely detail that opens the song and pulls you into it, because it's tight focus. It's like a film scene where the camera opens and it's on the face and then it backs away. You know, you get interested in something besides the dialogue and the story.
So that's what takes place in that. And of course, you know, as you mentioned, the song is written from the perspective of the house, which is called personification. You can also hear that in City of New Orleans, where the train tells the story.
Guy Clark has a song called Indian Head Penny like that. So. And I suggested that to Tom when we were working on it. Let's keep that sort of a secret from the listener until we get to the chorus.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:13:46] Speaker C: And so the first verse, you're thinking, this is a person talking about selling their house. And then you get to the chorus and suddenly it says, I've been strong and I've been sturdy. I've weathered every storm. You realize that must be the house speaking.
And that was a lot of fun to write that song, but it was a very emotional experience in a strange kind of way, abstract kind of way.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, you've probably single handedly helped people work through their emotions.
I'VE heard people say that and heal from a loss like that. I think Aaron has a song called Cars Don't Keep, and my dad said it was one of his favorite songs. And it's about having to get rid of your car. It's not about anything else, but getting rid of that car that you drive every day is my home away from home. And if it had, you know, it feels more home, like, than your home sometimes when you're moving around. So whether it's an old house, an old car, an old instrument. I mean, you never want to lose your instrument.
The disasters and floods and everything, People losing their stuff, you know, it's a shame. Yeah. So those are my thoughts on that.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: There's a certain vulnerability that is part of a skill set of a good songwriter. That song is an example of how you're able to kind of connect real feelings into something that's not necessarily. It's not a person, but it is something that's beloved. Peter Mulvey has a song about.
The thing about poets is that they hurt more than the rest of us.
Do you feel like you hurt more than the rest of us? And how does that inform your songwriting?
[00:15:29] Speaker C: Well, you know, like, there's a big part of me that wants to say, oh, yeah, but I don't know. But I do feel that I am. There's a term for it, you know, I don't know what it is. Hypersensitivity or something like that.
And I find myself being deeply moved by things that don't seem to move other people. Like. And I think that's part of the attraction to writing songs like, about the old car in the house. Like, you sort of sense that, you know, writing a love song is fine. I mean, we all write love songs, but writing love songs about things that people love is a way of writing a love song to put your whole heart into something and give that relationship that we have with the stuff in our lives. Not that we're materialistic people necessarily, but that we understand that we've been given these wonderful gifts in our lives. We have a place to live. We have a car. We can get in car and drive. And we have experiences in the car. My friend Tom Schuyler has a song called My Old Yellow Car, which I dearly love. But there's comedy in the song. I mean, deep emotion, but comedy. Some funny lines. You see where poor Billy threw up on his date is one of the lines in the song.
There's so many things that you can do with human interaction that we have These interactions with houses and cars and guitars and baseball and football and all this other stuff, which is part of the human experience. And I think to be a songwriter, you have to really love the human experience. You can't just love songs, or you can't just love songwriting, or you can't just want to make money. You gotta love what everybody loves in life. And you have to discover those things, like, what is the thing in my relationship with this person, you know, I have a song for my son called Giant Steps. And my son has cerebral palsy. He was an epilepsy. He was born that way. And one day we were walking through the mall and he was. I was walking too fast because he kind of hobbles along and he was holding my hand and pulling me back. And finally I stopped because I was distracted. I was thinking about something else and wasn't aware. And I turned around and I said, what are you doing, Jake? And he said, I'm taking Giant Steps. He was throwing his half lame leg forward to walk that way. And I wrote a song because that moment was like, holy God. I didn't even know. I didn't even realize what was happening. But that was a big deal for him, you know? And I think we have to sort of understand that everybody's got this thing in their lives. You know, we all have relationships with people, relationships with our families, relationships with objects and things. We have houses, we have cars. But what is the human interaction about there? You know, is it about security? Is it about, you know, anything, you know, peace of mind? Is it about needing our environment to be a certain way to keep us safe, to keep us feeling, you know, happy? And those relationships are all over the place. And part of, I think, songwriting is discovering those things, discovering unique things like that that we can write about.
[00:18:26] Speaker B: How has. I know that you and I have kind of bonded on that we both have kids with disabilities. How has that changed your career? How has that changed your songwriting?
[00:18:36] Speaker C: Well, I mean, radically. It has changed everything. We moved up here in part back to Pennsylvania, where I'm from originally, but because Tennessee did not have a Medicaid program, they had a program called TennCare that went bankrupt. And we could not get my son insurance. He had reached his lifetime maximum on our insurance policy when he was nine years old from all the emergency room visits and the surgeries. And so we had to move here because Pennsylvania is a place where people with disabilities aren't just thrown in a pile. You know, they get their educations taken care of, and they get their Medical costs taken care of. So, yeah, it forced me to leave Nashville. I mean, it didn't force me, but it was certainly a huge part of why we left Nashville. So it affected my career that way. It pretty much put an end to my songwriting career, where I was getting songs recorded down there, people like Johnny Cash and Martina McBride and, you know, what have you. And that stopped. But also, you know, he has taught me in a huge way about empathy. I can't say honestly that I was someone before he came into my life, that I was someone who necessarily felt deep empathy for parents with children with disabilities. Now, I've seen the extremes of that. I mean, the really, really harsh extremes of that. What happens to people when their medical coverage doesn't. It doesn't take care of their needs. And what happens when the kids get lost in the system, and what happens when they're, you know, they're not accepted by their peers at school and all of that thing.
It's a really deeply.
It's a moving experience in both ways. There are times when you're so proud of them that it exceeds any type of normal relationship that you might have with a child. And there are times that you hurt so deeply for them because you see other children just doing normal things, you know, and taking it for granted, playing sports or whatever. And, you know, our children can't do that. We compensate. We get them involved in activities, but there's so much that they miss out. We were told at one point, and this. I don't mean to. This seem in any way dismissive or offensive to anyone, but we were told that there's a period of grieving involved when you have a child with a disability.
[00:20:55] Speaker B: There is.
[00:20:56] Speaker C: Yeah. You go through grief because you grieve for the child that you thought you were going to have that you don't have. And you have to get past that. And understanding that about other people now, I think has just given me more empathy for people, for humans, not just people with disabilities, but for other humans. And it's a big issue. It's something that you sort of have to have universal compassion about.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: And yet, I mean, the moment you became a performing.
The Craig Bickhart performer that we now know probably, did that start around the time you moved?
[00:21:29] Speaker C: Well, it certainly became more important. I was performing in Nashville. I had. I had a record deal for a little while, and I toured with two songwriters, Tom Schuyler and Fred Knobloch, and we had a hit country act. We only made two records, but it was a wonderful experience.
But, yeah, I think when I came up here, right around the time that I met you, Aaron, and really only shortly before I met Michael, because I think you and I met in 2008. Seven. Yeah, I came up here in 2006. Yes. That really had a lot to do with me getting back out and performing. I was on the road. I was doing almost 100 dates a year, the first 10 years that I came back here. And most of that was driven by the fact that I had to find a new way to help support my family, my wife works. And so doing that was very much a result of leaving Nashville and having to find another way to be creative, keep my music alive.
[00:22:30] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, personally, for me, I cover your song, it opens.
And I always. I still remember being in Massachusetts and you said, I've got a new song. And we had never heard it. And you played the song, it opens. I'm like, can I cover that?
[00:22:47] Speaker C: You know, but so glad you did, by the way. I love that. I still love it. Well, I love Michael's version of it more than I love mine.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: Oh, thank.
[00:22:53] Speaker C: In fact, we've done it a couple of times. We performed, and I've said, you start the song and he sings the first verse, and then I come in later.
[00:22:59] Speaker A: I mean, it's so much fun and an honor.
And one of the things that I like about it is you wrote it for you. And I think you hear their lyrics and you listen more and more and you hear more things in it. And I always hope that I've had people come up and say, like, my lyrics are almost like poetry sometimes, you know, so. And they'll get into them. They're like, oh, wow, I see what you were saying, and I can see how, like. And with Aaron, I always say it's like layers of an onion. You just peel it back and there's more, and there's more and there's more. An infinite onion, you know, like that onion again. Exactly.
[00:23:36] Speaker C: So it's another band name there.
[00:23:38] Speaker A: Exactly. Infinite Onion.
[00:23:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:39] Speaker A: That's a good idea.
I'd have rehearsed this.
We're gonna play this old house for everyone.
[00:24:08] Speaker D: There are 50 liquor boxes in my home and a hundred empty nails on my wall.
There's a sign out in my yard that reads for sale.
If this old house could cry, the tears would fall.
There are bargain hungry vultures everywhere Buying broken toys, old clothes and Tupperware.
[00:24:59] Speaker C: The.
[00:24:59] Speaker D: Phone'S been taken out They've stopped the mail.
If this old house could talk, I'd say a prayer.
I'VE been strong and I've been sturdy and I've weathered every storm I've always kept your family safe and warm now you're packing up the laugh and just weeping out the tears if this old house were built on memories I would stand a thousand years this old house, this old house if this old house were built on memories I would stand a thousand years Take another look before you lock my door Wear your shoes and warm the finish from my floor Listen to my banging pipes my creaking stairs Let your boys slide down my banister once more I'll remember where you hid the heck extra key where the hammer and the bandaids used to be I will smell your morning coffee in the air and I'll see you hanging tinsel on the tree I've been strong and I've been sturdy and I've weathered every storm I've always kept your family safe and warm now you're packing up the laughter and you're sweeping out the tears if this old house were built on Marie I would stand a thousand years this old house, this old house if this old house were built on memories I would stand a thousand years.
[00:28:42] Speaker A: So that was this Old House by Craig Bickhart. And what a beautiful song. Thank you for creating that song and helping us.
[00:28:48] Speaker C: Thank you for listening.
[00:28:50] Speaker A: I think we've reached our time. We've used your time and you've been so generous with it. So thank you for talking and going.
[00:28:56] Speaker C: My pleasure.
[00:28:57] Speaker B: We are two of your biggest fans and, you know, I'm sure you've seen this dynamic before, but when songwriters are among your biggest fans, I think that's a great honor.
[00:29:08] Speaker C: It is for me, absolutely. Thank you.
[00:29:10] Speaker B: I look forward to hearing the next chapter in the Craig Bickert musical journey.
[00:29:15] Speaker C: Happy to share it.
[00:29:16] Speaker B: Always an education and a pleasure.
[00:29:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:18] Speaker B: Craig Bickert.
[00:29:20] Speaker A: Yeah. And there's a bunch of new material that Craig's been putting out. Some co writes with some amazing folks and look it up. And if you want to listen to his solo album, Soliloquy.
[00:29:32] Speaker C: Soliloquy, yes.
[00:29:34] Speaker A: And that is a guitar and voice. And that's. Everyone's been asking for that.
[00:29:38] Speaker C: Sixteen songs recorded right here in this basement where we sit now, using these microphones and this lighting, horrible lighting.
[00:29:46] Speaker A: You know, the space doesn't have to look perfect, but it has the energy. It's a creative space. And so I'm glad that the noise that we've had around us forced us into the basement, because I think it so. Thank you.
[00:30:01] Speaker C: Forced into the basement.
[00:30:04] Speaker A: Stay tuned for next week. We don't know what you're going to hear next in our podcast, but you've been listening to the Errand. Sorry. You've been listening to the Nathan's and Ron cast.
[00:30:13] Speaker B: What are our names again?
[00:30:14] Speaker C: I don't know.
[00:30:15] Speaker A: My name is not Aaron and your name's not Michael, so there you go. So thank you for listening.
