Wouldn't know about it but for the fact that I married my wife, who was from there. And it's just such a godsend of a place for us, Joseph, Oregon, for our sanity and our connection to each other and other family members and everything. I feel like it's a purification process I get to do once a year, which I love, or more than once a year. I used to always jokingly say that it was the de-turdification of the kids, to be sure that my children got to be in a small town and understand what a small town is and feels like, and what those connections feel like and are. And they know, I mean, because they've been going there their whole life for the summers. I don't think we've ever spent a summer in southern California. It's always been in Joseph, Oregon.

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They've always gotten to experience that they have friends there. So it's a whole separate life for us that I really, really enjoy. I love the fact that they are acclimated to big city life, too. It's not to take away from our life here, one that we really enjoy. But, you know, my wife is so a part of what that town is. She is such a mountain, Oregonian, firefighting girl of the soil. She and that town are so linked in my heart together that it was easy to sort of bring those thoughts together. You want to, you know write something that means something to you. But also, if you're writing it for someone or about someone, it needs to resonate with them and not be so heavy handed you feel like you just made a Hallmark movie, you know?

And I think this was. And I worked on these lyrics a lot. I knew the ‘Where I go.’ As soon as playing it, I'm like, ‘This is where I go.’

And, like, how do I tell the story without it being either A, a tourism ad or B, ridiculously cheesy? And it was just finding the things that are symbolically true but not heavy handed. The blue hole is a place where there's an area you hike to and the boys climb up and jump off these rocks. The blue hole there, where the boys learned to fly. Ruby Peak is a mountain range there. The Seven Devils are seven peaks up there. It's all areas that that are connected to us, that connect us.

And you know, I did a little nod to Jaci being a firefighter and just the lake itself and just how dark it gets and all these things, it was all about that. We've always talked about how that's, you know, where we'll retire and, you know, probably where we will be buried or where our ashes will be strewn. So I always thought, like, if I were to die before her, then I would still be there, because whatever was left of me physically would be there. And so if she if she were by herself, she could always go there and not be.

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Rain: (choking up): Little wonder she was tearing up when you did it at the Whisky, then.

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Rich: She likes that song.

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Rain: She looked really moved. It was very sweet. But no wonder, if she's thinking about you dying.

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Rich: Well, it's kind of got that in there in the lyric, kind of, you know, I mean, a little bit. It's not meant to be a sad thing. I mean, we are all somebody's children, and sometimes we have children of our own. And either way, there's a passing of the torch with that, whether you are, you know, a child watching your parents cross over or you're a parent, knowing that someday you'll be passing the baton to them. Either way, there's something kind of inspiring about it because it's inevitable. So, you know, it's not necessarily meant to be a sad thought as much as it is a thought. And one that everybody has to have. And so you go, well, at least, at least we know what we won't be doing it solo. You know, there’s something cool about that.

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Rain, sniffling: Feel quite emotional now. 

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Layin’ Low in Leb’nun

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Rain: Billy asked me to ask you something.

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Rich: Something specific?

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Rain: When we were talking about this track, Billy talked a lot about how much he loved ‘Old Henry’, and he was saying, you sound so pissed off on this song that he wanted to know if this was after you got your face smushed.

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Rich: Interesting. I don't remember if it was after I got my face smushed. I know I wrote this in the hotel room in Lebanon, Tennessee, while we were shooting ‘Old Henry’. This and ‘Kerry-Anne’ are both products of the ‘Old Henry’ hotel room. It really wasn't a lot of anger as much as it was to me, the sitcom of guy stuck in hotel room. What does he do? Not necessarily sitcom, but, sort of comedic; through the comedic lens. If ‘Readout’ is the angry version, ‘Layin’ Low in Leb’nun’ is the humorous version.

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Rain: Well that’s what I thought, but Billy was like, ‘He just sounds so mad.’

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Rich: I just think I always sound mad. That's just how I sound. I'd go get a bottle of booze to sip on, and in that time frame, it was a bottle of whiskey and I wasn't getting hammered in that room, you know? You know what? I wasn’t sitting around getting loaded and passing out on the floor. So the song does have a fictional element to it, but it was just sort of, what would you do? Like, even just the exercise of, like, if I was writing a song about this room, what would it be? Because it's one room. I mean, at least when I was stuck in Vancouver, it was a one bedroom hotel room. This was just one room, and it looks out onto a parking lot and dead grass. And so what is the song? And so that is, you know, “I could make my bed or shave my head or hang out in the buff or open all these motel drawers and rearrange my stuff.”

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Like, what can you do in a room when you're stuck there? So laying low in Leb’nun was what I was doing, you know? And so it became just a fun little lyrical exploration on how to have fun, storytelling in a real situation. And just the rhythm of the song, again, it was just another almost like ‘When the Devil Drives’, just me kind of playing around with the riff (sings guitar part). I'm like ‘Oh, it's so fun. I mean, to me, the album is fun. To me, the music is all fun.  Even ‘Readout’ is kind of a toe tapper, you know. This album was meant to have a sort of a drive and fun to it that we deviate from sometimes with ’Whiskey On Your Lips’ and ‘Where I Go’.

 

But overall, even when we did those and we arranged these songs very specifically, you would have ‘Your Whiskey On My Lips’ and then you have (sings raucous version of ’16 Tons’ intro), and then then you'll get yourself out of that headspace. And ‘Where I Go’, then (sings the intro to’ Layin’ Low’). You know, just be sure that if we're gonna set you down, we're gonna pick you back up, with song order.

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Rain: Song sequence, Billy talked about as well, because I asked him about it; we were talking about how streaming has affected the way people listen to music. People download an album, they don't listen to it in order, they add it to a playlist. And he's saying about ‘Layin’ Low In Leb’nun’ and how kind of lift it brings was on purpose. Almost like you're flipping an album.

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Rich: Right, exactly. He kept saying, like, you turn it over and start the second side of the album. Did I say everything about that?
Yeah, so that was just about being goofy, honestly, and having fun and creating a lane for guys to trade off solos and goof and jam a little bit. I mean, I feel like in a bar, that song is eleven minutes long. You know, it's just everybody taking a lap repeatedly. You know what I mean? It just kind of feels like that to me.

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Rain: So we can tell Billy it’s not an angry song.

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Rich: I didn't get that from it, but that's funny. Well, whatever, his work on it still works, I guess.

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Rain: For me, I think of the photo that you posted. Literally, when you were there, you posted a picture with the caption ‘Layin’ Low In Leb’nun’ and it just was this still life of a motel room, with a guitar on the bed and the kind of gauzy white curtains and it looks really chilled. It just looks like a really idyllic moment. So I guess with the song from me, I kind of picture that and I don't really.. I'm not getting the smushed into crushed Oreos or whatever it was they used for dirt back then.

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Rich: No, yeah, crushed Oreos is right. That and coffee. But it was not written out of frustration. If anything, I was, like, stoked to be working on that movie, stoked to have work during a weird time and be back in my home state. I found that whole process great. No, definitely not a frustrated song at all. You know, I see where you might pick up some of those things just because the opening lyrics are like, I can't do my thing. I can't do this, I can't do that, I can't do that. But that was just sort of a statement of fact, you know, in the song.

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Rain: Yeah, I guess I get the image of you pacing the floor, you know?

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Rich: Yeah, and that's fine. And that part's true. It's like, ‘Well, what am I going to do?’ But then it's like being creative. It's like boredom triggering humour and creativity, not anger and wanting to burn the place down, like ‘Readout’.

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Kerry-Anne

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Rich: I love that song. I. Love. That. Song.  I think it's just when I wrote it, it had a different vibe to it, same run down. But, but I recorded it more kind of a more driving song on the demo, and Jason was kind of on the fence. He's like, ‘I don't know, man. This doesn't feel like the album feels like, I’m not sure.’ And so I was like, ‘Okay, maybe this won't make the cut.’ And I'd sent it to Billy, and he was like, after he listened to it a while, ‘I'd love to find a way to actually use this. I know what this is.’ And he kind of hummed it to me, which is the pace it is now. And I'm like, ‘Oh, yeah, man, great. If you got a vibe for it, let's try it.’

And so that was his inspiration, was to have it that speed. And he heard it with the Wurlitzer solo in the middle there That's how he heard the song. And that may be one of my  favourite parts of the entire album of any song was kicking into that solo where everything stops and it goes like (sings Wurly solo). Suddenly I feel like It's a Steely Dan record, or it's like it's the 1970s, and it's just got this unbelievable….

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Rain: Who Billy used, he said it sounds like ‘Little Feat’.

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Rich: Yeah, exactly. Oh, I guess I think that's the reference he was using in the studio. And the solo is amazing in the way it's almost kind of dry, and then claps come in, and then it goes back in. I just love the arrangement of that song. Billy has writing credit on the song lyrically, because we reworked the lyrics to that song a lot because what I had written, the story wasn't clear.

And he was like, man.

And he really didn't ever comment on the lyrics of the songs in terms of correcting them at all. But on this song, he's like, I get what you're trying to do; I don't think you're achieving it. I don't think the story is there. I don't think it's clear. And I would say, ‘Well, it's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah’, and he's like, ‘I get that because you're telling me, but I don't think if I put on the song, I'm going to get what this is’. So it took a lot of rewriting. This is ‘Kerry-Anne’ version 24 lyrics. It took a lot of versions to get what I wanted told without either being A, too goofy or B, missing the mark. And I'm very happy with where the lyrics landed, but it just took a lot of processing and trial and error to get them there. And I have literally 24 demos on my laptop, on my desktop here of me singing, because that's how I would know if the lyrics worked. I'd play some for Billy..’No, no, no. GOD, no’. Because it maybe I'd be a little too raunchy or whatever. But then we finally found this version, and it was great. And I'm really happy with how it landed.

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Rain: I think that was the only time we got any kind of intel. Obviously, you know, we know when Zack's got into the studio and stuff like that, but there's kind of an unspoken rule between us. We never ask him for any kind of gossip or anything, and he would never offer us anything either. It just wouldn’t be cool. But that was the one thing he said, when I had commented on how I hoped the album would be a little raunchy. And he did drop that there was a song where lyrics were rewritten and had gotten a little naughtier. And I was just like, okay, intereting...

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Rich: Yeah. Weird thing is, like, it making it clearer made the story clear, which makes it, I guess you would say, naughtier. But there were versions in there that we never punished Zack and made him listen to, where they went too far, but that's fine.
In the writing process of anything, you write 20 jokes, you keep three of them or whatever. You know, the song was supposed to be a joke. The song is not a personal story. But it's definitely about a young man getting in over his head with an older lady. Like, that’s the joke of the story. And it was inspired by something I saw. And I'm like ‘Oh, there's a funny story here.’ And so I just wrote the the office version of some dude, young man going into an office, going in to have that meeting and having that meeting take a dramatically different turn than he saw coming. But then, how does he get out gracefully? How does he back out?

 

I always got a kick out of that whole song for the scenario of it and the whole ‘Fire a laser’ bit. I don't know, man. It just..It always humoured me. And then again, I always heard it becoming. And even the demo. This is where we were listening to ‘She's Waiting’. I always felt like it builds up to almost having, like, a choir at the end. Like, so many voices singing. And then Emma comes in sort of doing her freelance, all over the map singing, which is so cool, very gospel-y.

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Rain: When she hits on the ‘Fire a laser’…

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Rich: It's great, man. Exactly what I wanted it to be. It was just so cool that have that manifest itself into a reality every time she comes in. It sounds great. Her backgrounds in ‘When the Devil Drives’ are critical to sort of add that extra layer. But this was like another sort of standout for her, because she's not background singing as much as she's coming in to take over at that end, which I think is so cool.

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Rain: Billy said that when he first heard the demo, that Kurt Cobain could have sung it; that was how different it was.

He's very right. And where it is, is better. It's better for the story that's being told. It's better because it's a different vibe on the album. It's just over overall a better interpretation of what the song really wanted to be. And it also facilitated rewriting the lyrics to make them make sense in the world. Yeah, man, you know, finding the story without beating the story to death was a real challenge for this one, but even the bridge, I mean, I must have rewritten that bridge so many times, but where it landed and what we recorded is exactly what it should be. I love how it all played out.

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Copperhead Road

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Rich: Well, it's ‘Copperhead Road’, right? One of the greatest songs ever written, in my opinion.
This is just really my opportunity to jam with a very talented group of musicians on a song that I absolutely love and have since the day it came out. And I didn't want to do a straight cover because Steve Earle did the song. You're not going to ever out-Steve Earle, Steve Earle. There's no reason to do a straight cover of Copperhead Road. It's fun to play live, but recording, I'm like, let's, you know.
And this, again, this was under the Jason Mann's production umbrella.  Billy and I tweaked a few things and added a guitar, but for the most part, this is under the Jason Mann's recording sessions. And it just had such a cool and bizarre Doors-y and vibe when the guys jammed it out all those years ago that we felt no reason to mess with it. And the lyrics, the version of vocals that are used, almost all of it is the first take, that was a scratch vocal take done while I was standing in the room with Jason and Zach just singing along, so the band knew where to go and where we were in the song. And the only thing we replaced is at one point, I messed up the words, but that's the scratch track. That's the pass, because it just worked. It just sounded right, and the vibe was there. It wasn't trying too hard. It just felt real.

It felt like it was happening in real time with the band because it was, so that's what we kept. And I just think that that is a great sort of 1970s jam version of ‘Copperhead Road’. It's just a kind of a trippy, ethereal journey, which works for that song because of the subject matter and, yeah, just the intelligence of the song that Steve Earle wrote along with the sort of very dark edge it has. We kept that dark edge and just used a different side of the blade, you know, to tell the story. And I think it just came out really cool.

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Rain: Zack said originally that there was,  I don't know if it was with the first recording sessions, but at some point, you kind of toyed with having a slight build up at the end. 

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Rich: Tried it, you know, I kept thinking, are we missing something? Are we missing something? And then everybody, and I mean everybody, Zach Ross, Zack Darling, Billy Moran, Jason Manns, Rob Humphreys, Coop. Everybody was like ‘Nope, this is what it's supposed to be’. So it was my own insecurity or fondness for the other song or combination that kept me thinking about it. And it was a finished product. The only thing we ended up doing was adding, adding an electric guitar hit at the end. On ‘I volunteered for the army on my…’

 

Just to give it a slightly different flavour than the rest of the song. We gave it just a little more pointed hits on every fourth one, on every 8th one with a good electric guitar.

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Rain: Billy gave a reference track for this that he loved. Jeff Buckley, ‘Dream Brother’.
He was saying that the way you keep thinking that that track is gonna kick off, it's gonna explode, and it never does, and that in itself is where its power is.

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Rich: I don't know that song, but that's cool.

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Rain: You should listen to that one if you don’t know it.

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Rich: If you are looking for the Steve Earle version of ‘Copperhead Road’, go listen to the Steve Earle version of’ Copperhead Road’, you know what I mean? Like, I feel like we wanted to show our respect for Steve Earle by not re-trotting the ground he'd already perfected.

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I Liked You More (When I Knew You Less) 

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Rich: That's just fun, man. I mean, Billy and I were together and I made the comment about, you know, I think I like that person more when I knew them less. And Billy was like, oh, that's a song. And we went off and wrote the song had nothing to do with the person or the scenario. You know, it's like I said that phrase in a scenario in which Billy was like, that's hilarious. And at that point, the phrase took over and the scenario had nothing to do with the song-writing. And it was complete fun and fiction about this guy thinking, look, it is what it is on its face, liking the package and then realising not that fond of what's in the box, you know what I mean?

And Billy did a great job writing music for it. And we worked together separately. He had this tune idea and I was writing lyrics, and then we met at a studio and made them work together. And I had to do very little adjusting on my side. And he had to do very little adjusting on his side. It came together very easily because there was a clear arc to the story. You know, we knew what the joke was.
We knew what we wanted it to be and we knew we wanted the song to be upbeat and funny. This is not an angry rant about people. This is just supposed to be clever.

You know, one of the things I like about country music is that country music can be gut-wrenching. And then two minutes and 50 seconds later be cheeky, and then two minutes and 50 seconds later be angry and downtrodden and then. Two minutes and 50 seconds later can be clever. Like, you can be whimsical in a country song in ways you can't in rock and roll. And it gives you the freedom. It's more of a blue collar poetry than it is battle cry or statement. It can be both, but you have the freedom to do that. And occasionally rock and roll will do that. Dr. Hook’s ‘Cover of the Rolling Stone’. Like, you can do it with certain tunes and rap music and certain bands can do it because they have the skill and ability to sort of vacillate between the two worlds.
But country really allows it.

And ‘I Liked You More (When I Knew You Less)’ was one of those things where sometimes you find the hook, be it the guitar run or in this case, the lyric, and there's your song. Like, country could be clever in that regard. ‘I Liked You More (When I Knew You Less) is a title. You want to reverse engineer that into a great song. So that's what we set out to try to do, and I think it's a really fun song.

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Rain: Wow, we're at the end already.

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Low Bar

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Rain: A Beth favourite.

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Rich: Written in lockdown in Vancouver, Canada, as well. And it was inspired by a conversation I was having with Emma Fitzpatrick.
We did a FaceTime with each other when I was in lockdown, and she was in Texas making a movie. And so we did a, you know, cocktail hangout. And that's when I was sort of talking to her about, hey, I'm gonna write a song for us. And I don't think I'd even started on ‘Your Whiskey On My Lips’.

 

I also liked that idea. I know I'm reverting to the song. I liked the idea that, like, you're in prison, so you can't drink. So anything you're gonna drink has to come from somebody else. Like, you kissing me is the only way I'm gonna taste the outside world. There's something cool about that.

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Rich: But ‘Low Bar’. Somewhere in the course of our conversation, I said something and she goes, ‘That's a low bar, Rich.’ And I go, ‘Well, a low bar is the one bar I know.’ And when I hung up, I'm like, ’That's a song’. So I just wrote that song. And there was another verse in there that I took out that didn't make the cut, but that was also sort of a joke that Emma and I had that night, but it didn't really work with the overall framework of the song. And it's just, again, it's where country music can be clever, and it's not aspiring to be anything other than exactly what it is. A bar singalong song of that classic ‘I'm picking the bar stool over my family’ kind of vibe, you know? And what havoc does that bring to your life? So it's literally, it's just meant to be fun. It's just meant to be exactly what it is on the album, which is like a head swinging, kind of finger tap and sing along.

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Rain: Perfect. That's it.

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Rich: Why do you like it, Beth?

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Beth: I'm just very, very simple in the head when it comes to music. I just like it. It's a good tune. I think I listen to a lot of melancholy, sort of depressing stuff, but I think that's got such an upbeat kind of tune to it. It's kind of contradicting the actual lyrics.

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Rich: Yeah, it is. And that's kind of what's fun about it, because it's the guy, it's self-deprecating, right? The guy's going like, yeah, man, I'm not that great, and I'm not going to get any greater. You know, one of my favourite lines, of course, sounds mildly egotistical because I wrote it, but in ‘When The Devil Drives, when I say “I should beg forgiveness and fall to my knees and pray. But if you don't care where you're going, you can never go astray”. And ‘Low Bar’ is sort of in that same theme of, like, you can't fail if you never aspire. Like, you know, I kind of want the minimal success of my life or minimal. Just lack of failure, and I might not even make that. But here we are, you know?

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So it is sort of whimsically defeatist, if you will. And contradictory is correct. I think that's part of what makes it fun. It's not unlike the classic ‘I got friends in low places’, same vibe.

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Rain: I think that's why I like it. It's also the one that reminds me the most of our Nashville trip. So I kind of associate it with Beth and bars and neon.

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Beth: What's that supposed to mean? You associate me with bars?

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Rich: Well, in country music again, I think there’s a certain amount of fun in the sadness or whatever. In depression. You're like, yeah, you know, here I am gonna do this. You know, it's like the old song that George Jones has, you know, I think it's called ‘Closing Time’, ‘I got swing doors, a jukebox and a bar stool’. You know, ‘My new friend is an old neon sign.
You know, come by anytime you want to see me. I'll always be here till closing time’. You know, the idea of, like, my destiny is kind of f'ed, but I like it. So like it with me, or I'm finding joy here, so find joy with me. That kind of thing.

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Rain: Essential country thing, isn't it? It’s that kind of misery loves company. ‘My wife left me and the dog died and the truck won't start.’ But, hey, I've got my beer, you know?

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Rich: It's the opposite of the blues. Not the opposite of blues, but it sort of takes that blues idea and goes ‘I'm resigned to my fate. Sort of.’

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Rain: Well, that's everything. That's the whole album covered. I don't think there was anything else that the guys asked me to ask you. We’re done.

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Rich: Well, if you think of anything, I'm around. 
I think this is gonna be a neat project, so I appreciate you doing it.

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Rich, spotting the album cover in Rain’s hand: Oh, you know, the photo on the front of the album is Joseph. You know ‘Where I Go’, that song? The photo on the front is from that town.

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Rain: Which one is Big Steve?

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Rich: Can you hold it a little higher? I basically signed on Steve's chest there. Yeah, that's Steve. Next to him is Jack Quast, his cousin. And the big dude is Ted Hays, who's Tyler M. Crow’s dad. And then the guy in the headlock is Jim Hays. So it's the three Hays brothers and their cousin Jack. That picture has been tacked up on their wall as long as I've been in the family. And I just thought it was such a cool photo. I mean, my favourite part is Steve's belt buckle. You ever notice his belt buckle? It's off to the side, like, on purpose. Like he's done some sort of, like, it must have been cool to take your belt buckle off to the side.

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Rain: My brother wears his like that. It’s really just because he's a guitarist and some guitarists, if you’ve got a really expensive guitar, you move your buckle, right?

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Rich:  Or you're tearing up your guitar. That's right.

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Rich: And on the inside of the album is another picture of Steve, my father in law.He's by the truck. The front of the thing and the back of the thing were easy. The inside was tough.I didn't want to do a collage of making the record again. I felt like I've done that, but it was really my wife's idea. She's like ‘Just keep it Covid’. Like, the whole album is written during the Covid thing. Keep the photos the same. And I was ‘Oh, that's a good idea.

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