Fresh Air - How the government wastes our time

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

Atlantic journalist Annie Lowrey explores the administrative burdens people face applying for government benefits like unemployment and food assistance. It's not just about wasted time: "When the government treats us like this, we don't trust it," she says. She spoke with Tonya Mosley about her book, The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It.Ken Tucker reviews a new album by the trio The Womack Sisters, nieces of R&B great Bobby Womack.Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter Follow us on Instagram Subscribe to our YouTube channel Check out the Fresh Air ArchivesSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is fresh air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Think about how much of your life you spend on hold. Filling out the same information on government forms over and over, maybe waiting at the DMV, the pharmacy, or the polls, sometimes for hours, even as technology has made nearly everything else faster. My guest, journalist Annie Lowry, has a name for what all of this waiting means. She calls it the time tax, the hours we lose to paperwork, phone calls, appointments, and lines, trying to obtain benefits we qualify for and exercise rights guaranteed to us. Annie argues in her new book that this isn't simply bureaucratic dysfunction. Sometimes making a system difficult is the point. And the people charge the most are often

those with the least amount of time and the fewest resources to spare. Poor people, the sick, and the disabled. And right now, this tax is climbing. New paperwork and work requirements have already cut more than 3.5 million Americans from food assistance, and the numbers are still growing. Annie Laughery is a staff writer at the Atlantic, where she covers economic policy. Her first book, Give People Money, is about universal basic income. Her new book is The Time Tax, How the Government Wastes Our Time and How to Fix It. Annie Laudy, welcome back to fresh air. I am so excited to be back.

And I'm excited to talk with you and we're going to try to get through this conversation without you or I becoming enraged because what you lay out here is completely frustrating. And it's more than frustrating. It impacts people's daily lives. You have spent nearly two decades reporting on economic policy. So you also understand how these systems work. But when did all of this stop looking like an unavoidable fact of life and really started looking like a tax? I remember shortly after I had moved to Washington, D.C., I was a young reporter, meeting a group of homeless veterans. And they were not only unhoused, but they were unsheltered, right? And I'm not saying that the benefits that we provide to veterans who have obviously sacrificed so much for our country are sufficient. However, they are there. The VA has its own programs. We have an entire government department, a huge government department. And these folks, they just couldn't manage to make it work.

They couldn't get to the VA. They couldn't get the paperwork together. They just had so many stresses and strains in their life. They were so focused on where am I going to sleep? Where's my next meal coming from? It's psychiatric issues in some cases. And I've just thought about that experience. so many times because since then, I have met so many people when dealing with the government,

when dealing with the DMV, when dealing with the IRS, when dealing with any other Alphabet Soup agency. And I think that once you start thinking about these administrative burdens, you start to see it everywhere. You were actually seriously ill for a significant time during your reporting and writing of this book. You actually were on the show to talk a little bit about it, your condition on the show before. And anyone who has had to navigate doctors and hospitals, insurance, that kind of stuff, they understand what you are talking about, but how much of this book was written from inside of that machine for you personally? A tremendous amount of it. So it took me about five years of near constant physical discomfort

to get diagnosed. I have a rare degenerative disease that normally doesn't occur in people as young as I was when I was diagnosed with it. So it's only like 50,000 people across the country have it. And dealing with doctors through the process of getting diagnosed, dealing with all of the insurance forms, the short-term disability, the workplace accommodations, at the same time is I had a job. I was working on a book. I had kids. I had life. It was excruciating. And I really think that whether it's dealing with the government or dealing with the insurance system, the health system, which I think is so government regulated and government is such a big player that we should really kind of see it as all being one big part of the same system, you know, I felt very lucky to be

able to do it. And I know that that luck came in part because I have a supportive partner. I have parents who are healthy, who were willing to help. I had a really flexible employer that wanted me to figure things out. A lot of people don't have that. I was very well-resourced. I'm very interested in you talking a little bit more about why all of this is particularly a tax. Define time tax the way you would maybe someone at a barbecue. Absolutely.

So this is called administrative burden. And what administrative burden is is the experience of bureaucracy, not in terms of the system or the paperwork or the bureaucrats, but the end user. So how much time, how much effort, how much emotional strain? You know, how much do you have to give up to, you know, receive something that you're trying to either purchase or obtain or a right that you're supposed to have? And I really saw this as a tax because there's this understanding. that, you know, with the government, we should be getting what's ours. And maybe it shouldn't always be really easy to get what's ours. But, you know, you should have to go through the steps.

And I think that we don't see these things as being purposeful, modifiable, rooted in things like sexism and racism in some cases. And so, yeah, the time tax, what is it taking from you to get that thing? Which government programs do you see as having the work? time tax issues? I would highlight two. So the IRS, we actually have a good calculation of how much time it takes people to do their federal taxes each year. Because the government collects data on it where it doesn't really collect data on time taxes, administrative burdens, and other programs because it's not required to. So the average American spends 12 to 13 hours doing their taxes and it costs them $290.

That number in a lot of other countries is zero. Zero hours, zero dollars. And then I think that if you are looking at the programs that are targeted at the most at-risk Americans, Supplemental security income, which is used by very low-income seniors with disabilities. TANF or cash welfare, which is used by very low-income primarily mothers of small children. WIC, which is a nutrition support program that is also used by quite low-income mothers and their kids. They tend to come with really significant time burdens. And there, I think that there's this just tremendous needlessness.

So SSI, for instance, it makes these folks comply with a asset test, right? So how much exact money is in your bank account? Or, you know, do you have any little pockets saved away somewhere? And it has such strict income limits that, like, your neighbor giving you some cash or your kid, putting a $100 bill in your Christmas stocking, like, it could mean that you end up getting kicked off of the program. It's just wild. And I think that all, everything that we know about being very sick, very at risk, very poor, homeless, you know, vulnerable in some fashion, those programs should be easier, not harder. You open the book with several stories of people losing hours and

sometimes days to these systems. And one of the folks, you write about is Jenny Olson 6. So in 2020, Jenny was working four jobs. She was an actor, a yoga teacher. She did some copywriting and she also was a researcher. And that spring of 2020, all four of her jobs disappeared at once. And so she went to apply for the pandemic unemployment benefits that Congress had just promised at the time workers like her. What happened next in her case. She had the experience that millions of Americans had, where she heard nothing back. She had to collect all of these forms, all of this paperwork, submit it to the state, and then there's some error, and she just doesn't really know what happens. And this goes on for weeks. And if you call,

there's nobody to answer your call. In the state of Wisconsin, actually, in that really critical, horrible shutdown part of COVID in the spring of 2020. They did not answer 99.5% of calls. And why? I mean, I understand that people weren't working in offices, that everything was turned upside down, but why no one could get through? They just didn't have enough people. So we've always known since we've had the unemployment insurance program, which we set up in the the New Deal in 1935, we've known that it's something that it needs to expand and contract really rapidly, which is something that, you know, for instance, the IRS doesn't have to do or Medicare doesn't have to do, right? Medicare has a pretty predictable number of beneficiaries. The IRS is managing pretty much close to the same number of tax returns year in and year out even as other

things change. But UI has to act like an accordion, right? So when, um, The economy falls apart, which sometimes it does really quickly, which happened in COVID. All of a sudden you have to go from a relatively low caseload to a really high caseload. And the fact that UI is hard to apply for, it requires a lot of paperwork, the fact that state agencies never have enough money to upgrade their digital systems, we have known every single recession. We have a national conversation about how we should invest in these systems, make them better, make them automatic. And it never happens because then when the economy gets better, nobody's worried about it anymore. And so, you know, Jenny's kind of ends up being okay. It takes a long time, though. And it's enormously financially stressful at a time that people are dying. People are terrified. So here's this thing, right? Like unemployment insurance is a contributory benefit. You have to be paying in to a trust fund in order to get it. It doesn't just go to you if you haven't paid in. But you contribute. and then it's not there for you?

You can't get it not through any fault of your own, but just, you know, because you can't figure out how to deal with all the paperwork that the state is giving you or the state, frankly, can't figure out how to deal with all the paperwork that it's receiving. This is bad. Well, you know, I mean, right now something that's happening, I mentioned in the introduction,

there are these new work requirements and paperwork rules for more than 3 million people who had been cut from food assistance because of what was passed in the Big Beautiful Bill. So a woman in Arizona told CNBC, she answered a mountain of documentation requests. She's done this since February, and she still has not gotten benefits. And her word for what she's experiencing is just humiliating. And the stated reason for these rules is reducing waste and providing accountability. But what is really happening here?

I see it in moral terms. Food assistance should not be a program for low-income at-risk Americans who might not be able to eat enough who are also good at paperwork. That's not what that program should be, right? And as you point out, we are dropping millions of people, including tens of thousands of children, but then the people who are remaining on the program, nevertheless have to comply with these work requirements, these expanded work requirements. Notably, SNAP already had work requirements. We just extended them to more people, such as older Americans. Do we want all of these programs to have this cut for, okay, yeah, sure, this is assistance for lower-income Americans,

provided that they have a smartphone and a Wi-Fi connection? That's not what these programs are about. And I am terrified that some states will just drop the SNAP program entirely because it shifts costs to the states. And I am very worried about what is about to happen to Medicaid, which will have a national work requirement for the first time. You think it's a probability that SNAP payments could be cut on the state level. Where do we see that same as a probability? One of the provisions of the bill is that it says that state, states that have an improper payment rate of more than 6% will have to shoulder part of the cost of the

SNAP benefit itself. Can you just explain what you mean when you say that? So like a lot of programs in SNAP, each state gets something that is called an improper payment rate. And that's not a fraud rate. It doesn't have anything to do with fraud. it has to do with the state's likelihood of overpaying or underpaying a benefit. And this is often by a small amount, $50, $100 a month.

And it's often because the paperwork and the rules are so confusing. So somebody might just not understand what the state meant by a certain income measure, or they might not be able to really say, oh, this is how me and my house, Smeets split up the cost of certain staples, which is part of the SNAP determination, or a civil servant might be working on a really rickety, crummy computer, and they might have just heard something wrong, they put something in. And so the big, beautiful bill, it says that if states have a overpayment or an underpayment rate of greater than 6%, they are going to have to pay part of the cost of not just the administration of SNAP, but the benefit itself. States have never had to do

this before. This could be hundreds of millions of dollars. It sounds catastrophic, too, to families. Oh, yes. And states are not actually obligated to have a SNAP program or a Medicaid program. And there's some concern that states will drop out of SNAP. They will say we cannot afford to be paying part of the benefit cost. We literally do not have the money. What are we supposed to do? And states can't go bankrupt, right? Like, they have to make these really hard choices. So when you look at why Arizona, why it has had a 50% decline in its snap rolls, it's because they have, in an effort to drive their improper payment rate down to avoid that fee from the Trump administration, they've instituted excessive fraud checks, excessive paperwork requirements.

Because here's the thing. A person being denied benefits who should have gotten them does not count as an improper payment. Wow. So it's not that in Arizona there are fewer people who need assistance. It's that more people are being cut from the program. Yeah, either they can't do the paperwork or, you know, the same. state gets the paperwork and nevertheless determines that they're not eligible because they didn't do something correctly. That's why. It's that people just can't get the paperwork done. And the state

is, it would rather have a denial than an improper payment. I want you to lay out, though, because there are some people who don't have any touch point to this. And so they say, well, then how come you can't just fill out the paperwork correctly? But kind of describe what we're talking about here. What type of paperwork sometimes trips people up where they just don't have all of the answers to what's being asked of them or they might check the wrong thing on a document? Like what are some of the things that you have encountered in your reporting? A lot of listeners to this program, they'll see a government form and they're like, eh, it might be kind of annoying. But like, I get it done, right? Even something really complicated, like your 1040, your tax return, you know, people

manage, although I would note that's quite complicated. So when we're thinking about the tasks and the questions that states are asking, specifically low-income Americans, because I really do think that the time tax hits everybody. So there could be just difficult questions to answer. So that thing I said about Snap asking you to figure out how you and your roommates split up the cost of groceries staples, right? Like, wait, what is a grocery staple? What rice, coffee beans? Like, we don't have a system for that or I don't really know. It's just a hard question. It's also a judgment question. I mean, because what you're actually having to lay out is how you live. Mm-hmm. And it's, you know, you're doing this under threat of, oh, don't defraud the government, right? Even something as simple as

income. States might ask for gross monthly income or cash income. You might have to collect all of this paperwork. What are you getting from here and here and here and here? You might say to yourself something like, ooh, if I sold something on Facebook marketplace, does that count? Right? Does that, do they know about that cash? It's just really complicated. Then there's... Your argument, though, is not so much that these questions are being asked. It's the convoluted way. Because, I mean, the other side of this is you do want checks and balances. You do want to understand where the need is for the person who is asking for help. Sure, absolutely.

I think that I always distinguish between means testing on the basis of income and other simple characteristics. And testing in the basis of all of these other really complicated ones, right? We don't ask these hard questions in an easy and obvious way. And it's not that it's not important. I think that we don't do a cost benefit for all of these questions and say, okay, actually, how many people are we looking at here? Or could we, you know, if we could take a peek at their tax return, would we find that? If we could take a peek at their financial records? Could we find that?

Is there another way to do it? Our guest today is journalist Annie Lowry, a staff writer at the Atlantic. We'll be right back after a break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is fresh air. This is fresh air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is Annie Lowry, staff writer at the Atlantic. Her new book is The Time Tax, her name for the toll Americans pay in paperwork, waiting, and red tape to gain access to what is legally ours, food assistance, health coverage, disability benefits, even the ballot. Lowry argues these burdens aren't accidents, but choices that affect most the poor and the sick.

Lowry's first book was Give People Money, which examined how a guarantee, guaranteed cash payment, universal basic income, could work in America and around the world. Okay, Annie, I want to spend some time on voting. The midterms is coming up. And I think it may be the clearest example of your whole argument. I want to start with a small absurdity. Why do we vote on Tuesday? We vote on Tuesday because back when we were an agrarian society, the days were limited that Congress wanted us to hold elections by the need for people to go to church on Sunday. And often they would have to travel for like a day to get to their polling pace because they might be going on foot or they might be going by horse. And you had to avoid market days also.

And so it ended up being that Congress in, I believe, the 1840s decided that Tuesday was the day. And this is not a holiday. Even though there's been legislation proposed to make Tuesday a holiday, but those have largely failed. Yes. If you speak to residents or citizens of some of our peer countries, this is one of these things about American life that they're like, wait, what? Either the polls will be open for longer or they hold them on Saturdays or it's a holiday. And in a lot of places, at least in some places, voting is obligatory. You have to do it. Who pays for the fact that our voting system is still organized around the lives of people who lived nearly two centuries ago? We do not have high voter participation rates.

And so that means that the voting public is not representative of the actual American public. And I would say that vote by mail has started to change this, but there's now real attacks on vote by mail. And I think precisely for that purpose, what you are doing when you hold elections in a really complicated fashion, is you allow politicians to pick their voters instead of allowing the American public as big as we can make it to pick their politicians, leaving aside outcomes that is not good for small D democratic reasons. We know that this fall millions of people plan to vote by mail in the midterms. And President Trump has ordered that the Postal Service can only deliver your ballot if you're on a new federal list of eligible voters. and just recently the Supreme Court allow parts of that order to move ahead, at least for now. And the stated reason is voting by non-citizens, which researchers have found to be rare.

So run it through your test. Is this protection of our voting system or another time tax? Voter fraud is extraordinarily rare. I'm not saying it doesn't happen because it certainly does. But as far as we can tell, it has not changed the results of a single election, major election, this century. It is a problem that you should have safeguards against. But again, I think that there needs to be a cost and a benefit here. What is the benefit for certain politicians of excluding so many voters?

They're trying to shift the outcome of the election. What is the cost? Democratic participation. the right that we have to vote. And the system is already hard enough as it is, in part because we don't have a unified system, we have 10,000 voting jurisdictions. All of them have their own little practices and rules and budgets, and there are some strong regulations about this. But nevertheless, we know that it's already hard enough. And this is anathema to us as a country.

And, you know, fundamentally, I mean, there is a belief that it just, should be hard. There was this Florida state senator who co-sponsored a bill to restrict voter registration, and he said out loud, I don't have a problem making it harder. I want people in Florida to vote as bad as a person in Africa who walks 200 miles across the desert. It should not be easy. Now that's on record. And so why do we keep pretending the burden is an accident? When you ask nonpartisan experts, even experts coming from outside the U.S., okay, what could you do to fix this? Things like early voting, things like having better voting machines, things like keeping the voter rolls updated. Yeah, all of that's good.

Less work for people, more work for the states, right? You know, one of the most heartbreaking parts of your book, honestly, had to do with children. of course health care for children, schooling for children, but also the staggering number of black children in this country who will be subject to CPS child protective services. You write half of black children in this country will be subject to an investigation at some point in their childhood. CPS investigators, they have enormous authority to intervene in families' lives. And look, like, I think that we need a system of child protection, absolutely. But in most cases, CPS is investigating what I would describe as kind of the potential for harm or the reality of poverty. as opposed to child abuse, which is a terrible problem that I wish that we could stop.

And these are invasive. They're time-consuming. They're embarrassing for the parents. They're deeply traumatizing, you know. And I want to say, and I know this from personal experience because my mother was a child welfare worker for the majority of her career, one of the things she complained about consistently was the amount of paperwork that she herself had to fill out. And so she couldn't spend as much time in the home because she had to fill. out, like double the amount of paperwork for every single person that she visited.

Absolutely. One thing I've heard from people in all kinds of agencies is that they're like, I would love to actually help. I'm an expert. And nobody asks me what I think about reforming these systems or actually accomplishing my goal. We actually know one way to reduce the incidence of CPS involvement in a family's life, or even more importantly, the action. actual incidents of abuse is to get those families out of poverty. Give them snap benefits. Give them a bigger earned income tax credit. Right. Something that we actually saw work during the pandemic when parents were actually given the money to be able to care for their families. You tell the story about poverty dropping within families with children. What did you find?

And why didn't we keep that up? Oh, gosh. So the child tax credit has been around for a long time. And during the pandemic, Congress briefly, for two years, it made it much bigger. And it actually sent the money out. So it wasn't like a one time you're going to get this at tax time. They sent the checks out for six months. And then they sent a lump sum, which was really unusual. And it cut the child poverty rate in half. And it prevented tons of kids from going hungry.

It kept families half. at a time, you know, when that could have been really dangerous. But, you know, the theory among the Democrats who had been pushing for this policy in Washington for such a long time was that once people had it, you could never take it away, which tends to be true. But it came during this moment in the pandemic where people were also getting, like, big unemployment insurance payments. They were getting stimulus checks. They just didn't like really clock what was happening because the government was sending them so much stuff. And they didn't really know. And a lot of families were receiving multiple things at once.

And then, you know, because it was temporary, I think that families didn't really believe that it would always be there. And if it were, I think it would have changed their behavior and their welfare in a much more profound way. My guest is Annie Lowry, staff writer at the Atlantic. Her new book is The Time Tax, How the Government Wastes Our Time, and How to Fix It. We'll be right back after a short break. This is Fresh Air. This is fresh air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest is Atlantic staff writer Annie Lowry. Her new book is The Time Text, How the Government Wastes Our Time and How to Fix It. Okay, so Elon Musk's diagnosis that the federal government is bloated, it's wasteful, it's drowning in paperwork and process. I mean, this is your book's diagnosis, too.

So was he on to something? You know what I think is so frustrating? is that he identified a real issue and he misidentified the actual problem with the issue. He completely neglected many of the wonderful bipartisan solutions to solving that issue. Doge basically said, well, the problem is bureaucrats in Washington. The problem is the civil servants. Let's fire them at random. Right. I mean, it also, you know, Doge was sort of presented as a radical new idea, but you write in your book that presidents have been trying to make the federal government more efficient for more than a century. So in a way, I mean, Doge misunderstood about the work that had already been done as well.

Absolutely. This was a huge Clinton thing. This was a huge Reagan thing. You can go back and there's like so many blue ribbon commissions of like, we're studying. And we're going to make the government as efficient as possible. There's never, to my knowledge, there's never been a serious route to stem effort to work on this in a way that would not be about the government but would be about the citizen, the end user. And I think that we could actually kind of use leaving aside Zoran Mamdani's specific politics, but his attitude of like, I like you and I want the government to work for you. I think that's really refreshing. It's part of the reason he's so popular, I think. You shouldn't have to deal with potholes. You shouldn't have to deal with unnecessary regulations. And I think that politicians could have more of that orientation.

Doge didn't really. They weren't saying they were like, we're going to save you money by firing civil servants. That to me doesn't strike me as the same thing. You devoted a significant amount of time in the book to some solutions, some ideas, some thoughts. One of your big solutions is not simply to make the government smaller, but in some ways you want to make it bigger and more capable. So make the case to someone who believes that the only way to reduce bureaucracy is to reduce government. There's a really big difference in my mind between the size of government in terms of overhead and the time tax that it's putting on people and the size of government

in terms of budget. Social Security in the retirement program, biggest government program that we have pretty much. It's huge. It's overhead cost 1%. And it works really well. The payment error rate extremely low. I think there's this idea of, oh, it's easy to calculate somebody's social security benefit. No, it isn't. They have to monitor your income and whether you're employed throughout your whole life. So yeah, it's pretty easy for them to get you your benefits when you elect them. They've already done all of the work, but that was a lot of work in the background. They just don't impose it on people. And I'm not saying Social Security is perfect, right? Like, there are absolutely problems with it. But nonetheless, people really like it. It works really well.

In terms of overhead, we have tremendous overhead because we have duplicative programs. We have unnecessary programs. Programs that people have never even heard about. One of these ones that I think about a lot is there's a weatherization credit that some people can get for like kind of like updating your windows in your house, that type of thing to save, save you some money. And like, people haven't even heard of it. It's the way I see it is you can make the government smaller by making the rules easier, giving the government a little more budget to update these systems and giving it the express goal of reducing burden on citizens and taxpayers. You know, Annie, I mean, going back to the top of our conversation with you and your personal experience and having your husband be able to fill out the school forms and make calls to the pediatrician and your medical appointments and blood work, all that stuff that goes into being a person who's living with an illness, I just couldn't help but think about all the people and the mental, physical, emotional toll that it takes on them and the people who don't have a husband like you who can actually do it for them.

What do we ultimately lose, aside from time, that tax seems to be much greater, the more that you need the services that you have to fill out paperwork for? I think when the government tells all of us, but especially people who are not born here, people with a criminal record, even after they've served their time, people who are black, Latino, members of other racial and ethnic. ethnic groups and everybody from rich to poor, when the government treats us like this, we don't trust it. And if we don't trust it, we're not going to trust it to do more and better things for our life. And I think that it leads us not to trust each other. And so if living in a low trust society, which we all do already, you then have this government that despite, again, eight trillion dollars a year that we're giving it, is taking that money and just, disrespecting us by doing this to us, I think that that's not good for democracy.

And I do think that there could be unusual benefits than democratic benefits that could be unlocked here in terms of being an American and being proud to be an American and feeling like the government's going to be there for you. Annie Laurie, thank you so much for your reporting on this book. We actually, believe it or not, just scratched the surface. but I really appreciate this conversation in this book. Thank you. Thank you. Annie Lowry is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Her new book is The Time Tax. After the break, rock critic Ken Tucker reviews two new albums by the Womack Sisters and Margaret Glassby. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. The Womack Sisters are a trio with illustrious family ties. Their uncle was R&B great Bobby Womack, and their grandfather was Sam Cook.

The sisters have just released a new album of tight harmonies. By contrast, Margaret Glasby, who also has a new album, sing starkly about living a solitary life. Rock critic Kentucker discusses these contrasting sounds in his review. Let's start with the Womack sisters. My sisters and me. Oh, my sisters and me. Much of the Womack's sister's in me.

My sisters and me. Much of the Womack sisters' self-titled new album is filled with music that harks back to the days of classic soul and R&B. It's in their blood. Their parents are Linda and Cecil Womack, who made beautiful rhythm and blues under the name Womack and Womack. Their uncle, Bobby Womack, possessed the gravely, voice that powered hits like Looking for a Love and across 110th Street. And their grandfather was the gospel and soul great Sam Cook. Now, these three sisters, Biji, Kucha, and Zamani, are looking to shape the kind of music

they grew up hearing for a contemporary audience that doesn't know or care about their illustrious roots. That's a song called Chaufer, whose title works as a job description, and a metaphor. Apparently, the Womack sisters took a number of jobs over the years to finance their recording, including doing some Uber driving. The lyric is about taking control of one's career, no longer being a passenger, getting behind the wheel. While this new release is being positioned as the sisters' debut,

I've been aware of various songs and EPs they've released over the past decade, and what strikes me about this album is that it's got their best songwriting, and for the first time they transcend nostalgia. Yes, the music is rooted in 1960s soul, but their crisp, tight harmonies possess an urgency and immediacy that speaks to the world we're living in right now. In contrast to the Womack sisters' impeccable harmonies, I give you Margaret Glasby's voice, ringingly alone,

as her piece is interrupted by a former lover who suddenly appears at the end of her driveway. I'm in Michigan, and it's colder than... I wouldn't last two minutes on the interstate right in my motorbike. And I'm a city girl, but it's a different world out here in the middle. I'm on solid ground with the friends I've found. Nobody makes me feel it all. You said you didn't want me.

Then why did you come? this way. You say who's standing in whose driveway. That song called Michigan leads off Margaret Glassby's new album called I Am Both. On it, Glasby acts as a chronicler of doubt, hesitation, misgiving, of the emotions that can grind a relationship to a halt. She keeps circling back to the word nothing. Doing nothing is something I do too well, she sings on one song.

In another, she describes a couple stuck in a rut. James and Marie, they don't want to say the wrong thing, so they say nothing. The music is mostly Glasby and her acoustic guitar with an occasional puff on a harmonica. Discrete keyboards and drums slip in here and there. Working with producer Joe Henry, Glasby sounds as though she's walking through the rooms of an empty house, taking in memories good and bad, assigning blame, and taking responsibility. Can't you read my telepathy was a requirement for natural?

And I'm hoping. That line, I'm slamming doors you leave open, and I'm hoping you're feeling it. Oh, boy, that really kills me. Both Glaspy and the Womack sisters are women who've been put to the test by men who resist understanding their pain and their power. They know that relationships are a lot more complicated than victim and victimizer, and use their work to untangle these snarled dynamics to better understand and explain themselves to us. Ken Tucker reviewed new music from the Womack Sisters and Margaret Glassby. One minute, I am a dream to you, and you can't cope with how much I mean to you. And the next you are through with me

And you want nothing to do with me You rather put me on a pedestal And then knock me down Then meet me on common ground Tomorrow in fresh air We get a slightly early start Celebrating the centennial of John Coltrane's birth We'll talk with his son, Ravi Coltrane,

Who is also a tenor saxophonist Ravi was too when his father died. He'll describe how John Coltrane's music and his absence shaped his life. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

Our engineer today is Adam Stanishefsky. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldinado, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challoner, Susan Yacundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nestor. Roberta Shorak directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.