Fresh Air - Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

Before he became a musician, Merle Haggard lived the kind of life that's often mythologized in song: Hopping freights and doing prison time. When he became a star, he acquired his own observation car. Now that coach is part of the Virginia Scenic Railway. Terry Gross spoke with Haggard in 1995. Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews two albums: one's a collection of recordings by Paul Robeson, and the other features the music of Paul Robeson, performed by singer Davóne Tines. Finally, Justin Chang reviews David Cronenberg's new thriller, The Shrouds.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Do you remember when discovering a new artist felt like finding buried treasure? At All Songs Considered, NPR's music recommendation podcast, we put that kind of magic back into discovering new tracks. We're here to make the hunt for new music easy, delivering you the cream of the crop from every genre. We'll help you make music feel fun again, only on All Songs Considered from NPR. This is Fresh Air. I'm David B. This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli.

This week marks the 40th anniversary of Farm Aid, the country music concert founded by Willie Nelson as a fundraiser to benefit farmers. Held in Champaign, Illinois, this first gathering featured not only Willie Nelson, but such other supportive performers as Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Bonnie Raitt, Tom Petty, B.B.

King, Loretta Lynn, and Roy Orbison. Farmers Still Need Aid and Farm Aid has been staged annually ever since. Stealing the show at that very first Farm Aid concert in April 1985 was Merle Haggard singing his then new song, Natural Hut. Today we're going to listen to our 1995 interview with country music star Merle Haggard. I can fly, I was drowning in a sea of sleep. Today, we're going to listen to our 1995 interview with country music star Merle Haggard. John Caramanica in the New York Times once described him as, quote,

the country music titan who most resists easy categorization. He was a wildly versatile singer, songwriter, and performer with an affinity for a variety of styles. Outlaw country, ballads, the Bakersfield sound, Western swing, jazz, and more." Haggard was inducted into the Country Hall of Fame in 1994 and was awarded the Kennedy Center honor in 2010. He died in 2016 on his 79th birthday. When Haggard was young he hardly seemed destined for success. He spent time in and out of reform school and prison before he found his way back to music.

Haggard's best-known songs include Mama Tried, Oki from Muskogee, Today I Started Loving You Again, and The Bottle Let Me Down. Merle Haggard had a lifelong fascination with trains. After he became a star, he acquired his own railway observation car. And that railway car, on which you can book passage, is now part of the Virginia Scenic Railway. When Terry spoke with Merle Haggard in 1995,

he had reissued an album he recorded in 1969, featuring the songs of Jimmy Rogers. They began with Haggard's recording of the Jimmy Rogers classic, Waiting for a Train. All around the water tanks, waiting for a train A thousand miles away from home, sleeping in the rain I walked up to a brakeman to give him my talk he says if you've got money I'll see that you don't walk i have a handgun not a penny and i show

you know you're a real bomb many slam that box are done did you have friends when you were young here sure did but what would you go? Well, I lived in an oil community called Oildale, and there was a daily train that went into

the oil fields, and it was a steam train back in those days. And I actually grew up every evening, you know, kind of looking forward to seeing that old train pull out of there with about 40 or 50 oil tankers back during the war, you know. So it was less than a stone's, well, maybe 150 feet from my back door to where the railroad track ran. I actually grew up right next to it. My dad worked for the Santa Fe Railroad. I was nine when he passed away, but railroads were very influential in my life. There was enough of it in the songs that I admired to get me on the freight myself. I thought, well, this is something I got to do. If they're going to write songs

about it, I got to go see why. So I did and I rode freights wherever they took me. I rode them for a block or I'd ride them 200 miles or I think the longest trip I ever took was from San Antonio to El Paso, I think was the longest one. Was it hard to learn how to hop a freight? No, I learned that probably the first time I ever jumped on that old oil tanker was probably I was about five years old. My mother would have died if you know i've been up there

we split pennies on the track you know and we'd we'd hopped an old train ride a block or two and jump off so it was something we are we learned to be young we'd watch the brickman trainman do it you know it wasn't really all that hard what's what's the worst of the most surprising experience that you had on a freight train? the worst

Ha There's a lot of bad experiences I got on a freight in Oregon one time and it was Leaving out of Eugene and it went up into the into the cascades and into a snowstorm and I was traveling in the ice compartment and it me and two other oboes was in there and it got rather cold in that metal and I remember they stopped up in the mountains and then climbed up out of that ash compartment and I'm shaking so bad that I dropped my suitcase off the top of the freight and I had to get off for a while and get her up my clothes. Hostie That sounds awful.

Did you have frostbite? John Somehow, somebody watched out for me. I didn't get anything like that. Were there ever traveling musicians on the trains and did you feel you learned anything about a musician's life? I didn't run into any players on the freight. Just people traveling and you know, for different reasons I'm sure, I don't know, most of them probably for the same reasons, I think they were probably hobos, you know, and I remember one time I

stole a can of beans out of a refrigerator car and threw it up in the into this flat, into this box car where all the rest of the hobos were riding and boy they got really upset, they said, oh we're going to get fifty years in the penitentiary, you know, you must be you must be a really green guy, you know, and there was nobody would share that box of green beans except one old man and he was about he was about eighty years old and he threw a spoon and a can opener across the boxcar to me and

said, I'll have you eat them son. Merle Haggard speaking to Terry Gross in 1995. More after a break, this is Fresh Air. This message comes from NPR sponsor Air Canada. Ready for your next adventure? How about taking in views upon views in Athens, browsing mouthwatering night markets in Bangkok, or dancing to Carnival in the Caribbean? With amazing beach breaks, city breaks, and bucket list trips to choose from, Air Canada has you covered. Start planning your

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Want to know what's happening in the world? Listen to the State of the World podcast. Every weekday, we bring you important stories from around the globe. In just a few minutes, you might hear how democracy is holding up in South Korea, or meet Indian monkeys that have turned to crime. We don't go around the world, we're already there. Listen to the State of the World podcast from NPR. This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to Terry's 1995 interview with country star Merle Haggard. We'll dive back in with a taste of one of his biggest hits, Mama Tried. The first thing I remember knowing was a lonesome whistle blowing And a youngin's dream of growing up to ride

On a freight train leaving town, not knowing where I'm bound And no one can change my mind but Mama Tried One and only rebel child from a family meek and mild My mama seemed to know what lay in store Despite all my Sunday learning, towards the bad I kept on turning Till mama couldn't hold me anymore I turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole. No one could steer me right but mama tried. Mama tried. Mama tried to raise me better.

But her pleading I denied. That leaves only me to blame, cause mama's right. Merle Haggard, is this song autobiographical? Well, it really is, very close at least. There's some things we've fudged on slightly to make it rhyme, but the majority of it, I'd say 97% of it's pretty accurate, I guess. Your father died when you were nine? Is that right? Nine. So your mother had to raise you alone after that? Yeah, and I was, to say the least, probably the most incorrigible child you could think of. I was already on the way to prison before I realized it, actually.

I was really kind of a screw-up. And I really don't know why. I think it was mostly just out of boredom and lack of a father's attention, I think. I think you were 14 when your mother put you in a juvenile home? No, she didn't put me in a juvenile home. The authorities put me in there for truancy, for not going to school. They gave me six months in like a road camp situation, and I ran off from there and stole a car.

So then the next time I went back, it was for something serious, and then I spent the next seven years running off from places. I think I escaped 17 times from different institutions in California, and all it was was just a matter of the authorities running me off, and they drumming up business for themselves.

I really feel sorry for the way they do some of the kids, you know, and I was one of those kids. I'm going to snitch on them if I get a chance. How would you escape from reform school and youth institutions? Well, there was different institutions and different methods. There was some of them were minimum security, some were maximum security, and some of them were kid joints and some of them were adult jailhouses and I Just didn't stay nowhere. I was just I think Willie Sutton was my idol if you don't know, you know at the time I

I was in it in the middle of becoming an outlaw and Escaping from jail and escaping from places that they had me locked up in was Was part of the thing that I wanted to do No, was there an outlaw mystique that you wanted to have? I guess I don't know that I'm you know, I I Admired people like Jesse James, you know along with a lot of other kids, but I guess I took it too far, you know So what was your most ingenious escape? Probably the one that was the most ingenious was one that I didn't actually go on. I was at San Quentin. I was all set to go with the only completely successful escape out of San Quentin, I think,

in 21 years. But, the people that gave me the chance to go were the same people that talked me out of it because they felt like that I was just doing it for the sport of it. And then it was a very serious thing to the other fellow that was gone. They had a big judges chamber sort of desk that they were building in the Furniture Factory in San Quentin. And I had a friend who was building a place for two guys to be transported out.

That was before they had x-rays and things of that nature. And I could have gone and I didn't go and the guy that I went with wound up being executed in the gas chamber. He went out and held court in the street, killed a highway patrolman and so it was really good that I didn't go. Was that a real sobering experience for you? Yeah, I've had a lot of those things in my life. And, you know, those are the sort of things that a guy unknowingly, like myself, I guess I was gathering up meat for songs, you know. I don't know what I was doing. I really kind of was crazy as

a kid and then all of a sudden, you know, while I was in San Quentin, I just, I one day understood that I saw the light and I just didn't want to do that no more. And I realized what a mess I'd made out of my life. And I got out of there and stayed out of there. Never to go back. And went and apologized to all the people I'd wronged and tried to pay back the people that I'd taken money from, borrowed money from or whatever. I think when I was 31 years old, I paid everybody back that I never took anything from them, including my mother.

What did you say to your mother when you changed your life around? It was just obvious. I don't think there was ever any time that anybody in my family was worried about me staying with this. It was just the way that some people grow up in the Army and it's hard to be 18 years old. And, you know, they send 18-year-old boys to war because they don't know what to do with them. And I was one that I wound up going to prison rather than war.

And instead of growing up in the middle of a battlefield with bullets flying around me, I grew up on the isolation ward at Death Row. And that's where the song, Mama Tried, gets close to being autobiographical there. You were on Death Row? Yeah, I was... I got caught for making beer.

I was making some beer up there and I got too much of my own beer and got drunk in the yard and got arrested. It's hard to get arrested in San Quentin, but I did. They sent me to what was known as the Shelf. And the Shelf, and the Shelf is part of the North Block, which you share with the inmates on Death Row. And it's kind of like the...there's not too many more stops for you, actually. And that was the, as you put it, sobering experience for me. I wound

up with nothing to lay on except a Bible and an old concrete slab and woke up from that could I have been on that day. I could hear some prisoners talking in the area next to me. In other words, there was an alleyway between the back of the cells. I could hear people talking over there. I recognized the guys being Carol Shaspen, a guy that they were fixed to execute and I don't know it was something about the whole situation that I knew that if I ever got out of there if I was lucky enough to get out I made up my mind well I still had that hangover that I was all finished. How were you lucky enough to get out? Well I went back down on the yard and and I went down and asked for the roughest job in the penitentiary which was a textile mill and went down and just started building my reputation

you know just started running in reverse from what I'd been doing and started trying to build up a long line of good things to be proud of and that's what I've been doing since then. Back in the days when you were in prison, was music a big part of your life then? Were you singing, playing, writing songs? Yeah, yeah, I was already into doing that. I really didn't, I don't think, believe that I sincerely had a future in it. I think I was just kind of like doing what I thought was probably a waste of time or a hobby at the very most and maybe some extra money on the weekend sort of thing. But that's, you know, that's when I was in San Quentin. I still didn't really thoroughly realize that I had

to do this the rest of my life, and that it was going to be this successful for me, and I was going to have all the things happen that have happened. I had no idea that you could never have convinced me of a minute amount of the success I've had. I would never have believed it. Did your musical ability have anything to do with people noticing you in prison and thinking that you could make it when you got out? I mean, did that help you at all in the war? Yeah, that was the basic reason I think that these Friends of mine talked me out of going on that escape. I mean they they felt that I had talent and they they they

felt that I was just a Honorary kid and and Could probably make something out of my life and and you it or not, in the penitentiary, there's some pretty nice people, and very unfortunate people. And they love to let somebody, so to speak, get up on their shoulders. They like to boost somebody over the wall if they can. If they can't make it themselves

They I think sincerity Love to see someone else make it Tell us a story how you got your first guitar My first guitar. Yeah, or how you started to play guitar. Well, I've ever as it was I have an old an older brother named Lowell and Lowell had a I have an older brother named Lowell and Lowell had a service station at the time and there was a guy who came in and wanted a couple dollars worth of gas and didn't have no money and he left a little old after it and that old guitar sat in the closet there for a couple of years and and finally I think my mother

showed me a couple of chords my brother didn't know how to play and my dad had passed away he was a musician in the family. So mama showed me C chord That daddy showed her and she didn't know how to make C chord very good but I went took it from that and I Beat around on that old Bronson. I think it was a Bronson guitar. I Imagine when you first got the guitar you were playing the songs that you heard on the radio How did you start writing songs yourself? Well, about the same time that I discovered Jimmy Rogers, I was about 12 years old, I

discovered Hank Williams. I remember seeing on the yellow MGM records there was the artist's name and then there was another name underneath that artist, a small, very small letters and it said composer and I didn't know what a composer was. I asked my mother, I said, what does this mean? She said, I don't know and she called the record store and they told her, that's the writer, that's the guy who writes the songs.

And it seemed to me that it was very important to have your name in both places there. I noticed that Hank Williams had a little extra clout because he wrote his own songs. Jimmy Rogers the same thing, you know. So I felt it was just as necessary to become a songwriter as it was to try to learn to play the guitar. It was certainly a tool that most people, I think, in the business would like to be a singer-songwriter, if they could be, because it is in some way your retirement. You know, you can have a great career and if you don't write songs or have a publishing

company or something to lean back on when it's all over, it's a pretty hard drop back to reality, you know. And once you've learned to live under the conditions I've learned to live on, you better have yourself a publishing company or I'll have to go back to being an outlaw When you started writing songs, did you realize that you could write autobiographical songs from From your own life or did you think you had a copy other people's songs? Well, I really did realize What what method to take at first. I must have wrote maybe 1,500 songs that weren't any good, or at least I never kept them.

And finally, with a lot of help and a lot of people who had written hit songs, who I'd become friends with, such as Fuzzy On, who became my personal manager, was a songwriter. And he taught me how to write songs. And finally I wrote one that was worth keeping. And I think I've written about 300 keepers or so, maybe 400. Do you remember the first one that you felt this is worth keeping? Yeah, it was sort of a rock and roll song, or Elvis type rock and roll thing called If You Want To Be My Woman.

And Glenn Campbell opened these shows with it for years, and I still do the song. I wrote it when I was about 14. But I didn't keep very many. That was probably one out of the 1,500 that got kept. Could you sing a couple of bars of it? You like riding in the country in my Cadillac. And you keep pushing me back, something like, I didn't own the money that I earned but you refused to give me something

equal and returned, don't look at me like maybe you don't understand if you won't be my woman, you know you got to let me be your man. Now, during all the years that you were in and out of prisons and reform schools, did you ever think I can make a living with music? No, very best. I counted on extra money, as I was saying, you know, like maybe a hobby. You know, I figured I was going to have to have some other means of employment, you know, or support.

So what made you think, well, I can make a living out of this? Well, I, when I came out of the penitentiary I went to work for my brother digging ditches and wiring houses. He had an electrical company, Hag Electric. He was paying me $80 a week. This was 1960. I was working eight hours a day there. And I got me a little gig playing guitar four nights a week for ten bucks a night. And there was a little radio show that we had to broadcast from this little night club called High Pockets.

And it just all started from that. Some people that had, that was local stars around, heard me on this radio program and came down and offered me a better job in town. And it wasn't just a matter of weeks until I was part of the main clique in Bakersfield and it was hard to get in that clique. There was a lot of people like Buck Owens and there was people that that were really good and proved how good they were later on with their success and Bakersfield was some sort of a I don't know, it was like country music artists found their way to Bakersfield and then had the success out of there. I don't understand why actually.

It may be because of the migration that took place in the 30s or whatever. There was a lot of people that came out there from Oklahoma and Arkansas and Texas that had a lot of people that came out there from Oklahoma and Arkansas and Texas that had a lot of soul and This thing we call country music kind of came out of those hockey talks, you know and Some of the same area that a lot of other things came out of Was it hard for you to adjust to success and stardom? Was it hard for you to adjust to success and stardom, having come from poverty and, you know, having lived in prison off and on for so many years?

I think it's hard for a lot of people to adjust to that. Well, you know, a lot of people may or may not understand how hard it is for a person coming out of an institution, you know, would it be a prison or would it be some sort of a mental institution, would it be the army or whatever. There's a thing that happens like when you leave the penitentiary, when you've been there for three years, you have friends and you have a way of life and you have a routine and a whole way of life that you just give up all of a sudden. One day you're there and the next day you're not there and you don't have any more friends from the outside because

things went on when you left and you can't find anybody there and the people you left behind in prison are really your only friends. And there's a period of adjustment that took me about 120 days, I don't know, about four months. A couple times I really wanted to go back. And it's really a weird sensation. It's the loneliest feeling in the world about the second night out of the penitentiary. Merle Haggard speaking to Terry Gross in 1995.

He died in 2016. Coming up, classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews two albums featuring Paul Robeson. This is Fresh Air. Bass baritone Paul Robeson was one of the most popular figures of the 20th century, and also one of the most controversial. He died in 1976 at the age of 77, leaving a huge imprint on music, politics, and race relations. Our classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews two recent releases in which Robson is the subject. One is a CD called Robson by 38-year-old bass baritone DeVon Tynes, who says he grew

up being constantly compared to Robeson. The other release is an almost complete 14 CD set of Robeson's own recordings. There's an old man called Mississippi, that's the old man that I'd like to be. What does he care if the world's got troubles? What does he care if the land ain't free? Old Man River, that Old Man River, He must know something, but don't say nothing. He just keeps rolling, he keeps on rolling along.

He don't plant taters, he don't plant cotton, And them that plant them is soon forgotten, But Old Man River, he just keeps rolling along. You and me, we sweat and strain, Body all aching and wrecked with pain, drunk and you land in jail. I get weary and sick of trying. I'm tired of living and scared of dying. But Old Man River, he just keeps rolling along. Old Man River, from the landmark 1929 musical Showboat, was the great bass baritone Paul Robeson's most famous song song and the song that also made him famous. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein wrote it for him as the stevedore Jim's expression of his darkest dilemma, tired of living and scared of dying, a line that has the tragic weight of a certain Hamlet soliloquy. It's one of the most powerful numbers ever written for a Broadway musical.

Now some younger performers have expressed serious reservations about it. Is it really just a demeaning minstrel song written by white people for a black performer? In his concert recitals, Robeson himself changed the stevedore's inner questioning to a public battle cry, I must keep fighting until I'm dying. In his new album called Robeson, 38-year-old bass baritone Devon Tynes, one of the leading musical artists of our generation, says that over the years he has changed his mind about the singer to whom he has been frequently compared. In his liner notes, Tynes writes of Robeson's suicide attempt after what may have been a CIA effort to drug him. Tynes identifies with Robeson's desperation as if it were a fever dream reflecting his own most intimate struggles. What is America to me?

A name, a map of a flag I see, A certain word, a democracy. What is America to me? The house I live in, the friends that I have found, the folks beyond the railroad and the people all around, the worker and the farmer, the sailor on the sea, the men who built this country, that's America to me. Paul Robeson sang the uplifting song, The House I Live In, at many of his concerts. It was first introduced by Frank Sinatra in a 1945 Oscar-winning short about America as a melting pot.

On his Robeson album, Devon Tynes and his band The Truth do something similar to what Robeson did with Old Man River. After singing the beginning as it was written, Tynes adds his own new angry lyrics about the way America has betrayed its ideals of equality. Find America for me, he concludes. Truth becomes banished and justice never won. Our hopes to find some freedom Still just raisins in the sun It's sad to see it failing

It's the way it's always been To never cleanse the staining of its bloody primal sin Cause that's America, what's America? Who's America? Where's America? Find America for me. In the ultra-romantic Rodgers and Hammerstein ballad, Some Enchanted Evening, Tynes makes another radical transformation by simply changing the pronouns.

The song becomes his love song to Robeson. But Tynes also knows that anyone who hears the song without looking at the liner notes would hear it as a love song from one man to another man. And Tynes, who is openly gay, has arrived at a point in his career when he can feel free to express openly his most personal feelings. You may see a stranger, you may see a stranger Across a crowded room, and somehow you'll know even then That somewhere you'll see him again and again. The fourteen discs of Paul Robeson, The Voice of Freedom, are, of course, a treasure and include

some extraordinary live performances and other cuts that were never released. Robeson was also a powerful and versatile stage and film actor, and one of the highlights of this set is his recording of Othello, which he played on Broadway. It's thrilling to hear Robeson speaking as well as singing, and it's thrilling to hear Tynes responding directly to Robeson with his own passion and also in magnificent voice. Lloyd Schwartz reviewed Paul Robeson, The Voice of Freedom, and the Devon Tyne's album, Robeson. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews David Cronenberg's new movie,

The Shrouds. This is fresh air. In The Shrouds, the new thriller from the 82-year-old Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, Vincent Cassel plays a wealthy tech entrepreneur who's devised an unusual technology to help people still grieving their loved ones. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review. When The Shrouds premiered at film festivals last year, David Cronenberg described it as

his most personal work. A deeply felt response to the death of his longtime wife from cancer in 2017. The movie is about a man named Karsh, who lost his wife, Rebecca, to cancer four years earlier. That's not the only similarity. If you know what Cronenberg looks like, you'll see that Karsh, played by Vincent Cassel with a silvery shock

of hair, resembles the director. Maybe not a dead ringer, but close enough to give you a chill and a bit of a chuckle. That's the thing about the Shrouds. It's deeply morbid and sad, but it's also disarmingly funny. Karsh is the mastermind behind a company called Gravetech, which allows people to monitor the remains of their dead loved ones. Before the body is buried, it's wrapped in a high-tech metal shroud equipped with an MRI-style scanner.

And so at any time, with a swipe of your phone, you can watch a feed from the grave of the decomposing body. It's not just on your phone, either. The feed also goes to a screen built into the person's headstone. Karsh himself uses graved tech obsessively, keeping close tabs on his wife Becca's body at all times. This has naturally made it difficult for him to move on. One amusing early scene finds Karsh on a blind date with a woman who heads for the exit the minute she finds out what he does for a living. The next day, Karsh is debriefing the date with Becca's sister, Terry, played by Diane

Kruger. Another bad date last night? She put off by a desperation like the last one. I'm out of practice. It's been decades since I had to seduce a woman. I'm never really sure whether I'm flirting or not. That's what you get for having had a successful marriage. I don't have that problem. Should I give up trying to find a girlfriend, or should I just sink gracefully into terminal asexuality?

You'll never replace Becca. I'm not trying to. I did love that body. What you provocatively said was a lot like mine. You have her body. I have my own body. Cronenberg is often described as a master of body horror, a subgenre he helped pioneer with early efforts like The Brood and Scanners, and recently pushed to audacious new extremes

with the wondrously icky Crimes of the Future. The label can be misleading, though. Cronenberg's films are even more cerebral than they are visceral, and he's never been purely interested in grotesque for grotesque's sake. The Shrouds is certainly a body horror movie in perhaps the most relatable sense. It's about the physical ravages of illness and death. At various points, Karsh sees Becca, also played by Diane Kruger, in dreamlike flashbacks that reveal exactly what the cancer did to her body. I can't think of a filmmaker besides

Cronenberg who could present the body this way, with clinical directness, undimmed desire, and real tenderness. Early on in the film, someone vandalizes the Grave Tech Cemetery, ripping the headstones from their foundations, and hacking into the video feeds, for reasons unknown. The Shrouds isn't just a horror movie about corporeal decay, it's a thriller steeped in techno paranoia. To get to the bottom of the vandalism, Karsh enlists the help of Terry's ex-husband, a computer whiz played by an unnervingly twitchy Guy Pearce. Karsh also relies on an AI personal assistant, voiced by, you guessed it, Kruger again, who

doesn't seem entirely trustworthy. There are whispers that the Vandals are aligned with shadowy Russian and or Chinese forces, hinting at a mass data theft conspiracy that may or may not exist. The shrouds never fully coheres as a mystery. In the end, it's an intriguing, but not especially satisfying, puzzle. I didn't mind that about it. Cronenberg isn't out to provide easy answers. He's saying that we live in such a 24-7 internet fog now, who knows what could be out there? Mining the most human and vulnerable parts of ourselves, our habits, our yearnings, our

relationships. This isn't a new theme for Cronenberg. He's always been fascinated by the way technology alters our minds and even our bodies. In his 1983 classic Videodrome, the director inserted a Betamax cassette into his protagonist's torso, literalizing the idea of what TV is doing to us. The Shrouds isn't nearly as graphic, but it doesn't have to be. It's set in a world where most of us have all but fused with our phones already. All of which is to say that this seemingly death-obsessed movie, about grief and desire and the unsettling power of technology to assuage them, is also a movie about life,

and the way more than a few of us live now. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed The Shrouds, now playing in theaters. On Monday's show, a conversation with author and executive Daria Burke about her new memoir, Of My Own Making. It explores her growing up in 1980s Detroit, amid addiction and instability, and the years she spent trying to outrun that past by building a carefully curated, outwardly successful life. I hope you can join us.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Brigger is our managing producer. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Adam Stanaszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challener, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David B. and Cooley.