Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Musician and songwriter known as the bard of Blue Collar America, chronicling working-class lives in music and words for over forty years.
On the island
Eight records
reason – 'It was the first solo I ever learned to play.'
reason – 'It made me trust in beauty. It gave me a sense of the divine.'
reason – 'It was a record that created a world you could walk into and then come back out of.'
Like a Rolling StoneFavourite
reason – 'The snare drum that opens the song feels like somebody kicked open the door to your mind.'
reason – 'Motown was the school where you wanted to go to learn your craft.'
The keepsakes
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:41Who were the two people in your life that were telling you [you weren't worth dirt and you were the second coming of the baby Jesus]?
Obviously your mother's telling you the second coming of the baby Jesus and your father holds down the other part of the role.
Presenter asks
2:23What does [Born to Run] mean to you now?
It takes you all in all those different directions, I think. … and not only do they stay written, but they live. They live the years with you. You sort of take the measure of your moment at night when you play that song. And I suppose the show builds to it. It's a cathartic moment.
Presenter asks
5:36What are your earliest memories of [being born in New Jersey, in the L-shaped enclave with your grandparents]?
It's always the church, the church, the church … it was an enormous centre of my childhood life.
The book
Joe Klein
If I had to pick a book that sort of changed my way of thinking, it might be Joe Klein's Woody Guthrie biography, Woody Guthrie a Life.
Presenter asks
You grew up surrounded by very ill, secretive people with disturbing, unpredictable behaviours – tell me more.
There was just a lot of illness that ran through my family … depression and a mental illness that just swept through my family and kind of gets passed on down.
Presenter asks
16:29You've said of your father 'he loved me, but he couldn't stand me' – why do you think he felt that way?
It was just the lay of the land in our household … my dad had a sort of gruff exterior, but inside he was really he could be quite soft and sensitive and the qualities he had inside were the things I wore on the outside. They were just difficult for him to deal with … it might have reminded him of his own frailties in some way, or fragility.
Presenter asks
25:13How easy is it still to connect with the ordinary lives of everyday Americans when you are so far removed from that now?
You have all of your experience to draw from all the time. So you can always go back and draw on any place you've ever been. And the formative years of your childhood and your young adulthood still remain incredibly powerful … always remains very prominent in your tastes.
“I was seeking out … someplace that was going to cut me out as different.”
“A lot of my work is drawn from the period in my life where I'm trying to go back and make sense of things that at the time were unfathomable and uncontextualizable.”
“I put my father's clothes on and I walk out on stage and I present some version of him and myself at night to my audience. And why am I doing that? Well, I'm trying to find the piece of it that would lead to a certain sort of transcendence over those circumstances that I grew up in.”
“It opens your life and your it opens your heart, your mind, your life up to a world that was present, but that previously you had not recognized nor seen. So suddenly you get this beautiful flooding of another vision of life and of what life can be.”
“My skills [with depression] are sort of saying, okay, it's not this, it's not that, it's just this. This is something that comes, it's also something that goes. … But if you can acknowledge it and if you can relax a little bit with it, very often it shortens its duration.”