Fresh Air - Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences

Episode Date: April 1, 2025

As a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, Hilton Als's essays and profiles of figures like Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Richard Pryor have redefined cultural criticism, blending autobiography with literary and social commentary. Als is also a curator. His latest gallery exhibition is The Writing's on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts, at the Hill Art Foundation in New York. The exhibit brings together the works of 32 artists across a range of media to examine how artists embrace silence. The show asked a powerful question: What do words — and their absence — look like? The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer spoke with Tonya Mosley. Also, Ken Tucker reviews new music from Lucy Dacus and Jeffrey Lewis.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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. I'm Tonya Mosley. And my guest today, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hilton Als, has spent decades examining

how we create meaning through words, images, and the spaces in between. As a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, his essays and profiles on figures like Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Richard Pryor have redefined cultural criticism, blending autobiography with literary and social commentary. In addition to being a writer, Als is also a curator. Recently he explored language in a new gallery exhibition, The Writings on the Wall, Language and Silence in the Visual Arts, at the Hill Art Foundation in New York. The exhibit brings together the works of 32 artists across a range of media to examine

how artists embrace silence. The show asks a powerful question. What do words in their absence look like? Hilton Als has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for over 30 years. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his work as a theater critic. And he's the author of several books, including The Women, White Girls, and My Pen-Up, a genre-bending memoir essay that examines the music, persona, and cultural impact of Prince. He's curated several art installations, including a show on the late Joan Didion.

Hilton Als, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor. Your exhibit made me think about something that writer Samuel Delaney has said. Wonderful writer. Yes, and I've been thinking about this for the last few weeks, honestly, but he has this theory that imagination is the only shared reality and that creativity is how we manifest that shared reality.

And I couldn't help but think about the limitations of language at this particular time when we can't even seem to agree on a shared reality. And I was just wondering, is that something? Or don't want to agree on shared reality, right? I think you're being kind. Tanya, it's just a very emotionally and spiritually upsetting time

because language is being used to not even wound, but to annihilate people. I've been thinking about this a lot too, Tanya, I'm with you on this, and I think that the thing that's happening is that the sort of collective reality has been mangled to such a degree that the destroyers of language don't understand the ramifications. They understand it in terms of winning, right? But they don't understand the emotional and spiritual ramifications of lying. If you lie to me and I'm a trusting person, and if you're lying to me and I'm a trusting person and if you're lying to me and I'm trusting the lies imagine what people who really believe in these people feel. How does

silence in particular the things that are unsaid unspoken but are very important to the narrative how does that show up in your writing? That's a great question. I've been thinking about this quite a bit in terms of what I've been writing recently. I've been writing about it. A very close friend of mine and in describing certain aspects of the friendship, I talk about silence and how part of what was so about silence and how part of what was so gorgeous about this relationship was that we didn't have to speak to each other, that we saw in the other's eyes what was happening. That's a degree of intimacy that is very rare and I'm very interested in how to articulate that rarity. I don't want to disturb it with words. I want to

describe. I want to be able to articulate what this feeling is. And so, working with silence for those months during the show and since then, I've understood that the, that Marianne Moore, what she said about the deepest feeling showing itself in silence, not in silence but restraint, how do we say, I love you with a glance? All of those questions to me are significant questions to ask the self constantly because we live in a world where we don't actually have that much silence left Is there silence in your life? I mean I'm thinking about what it takes for you to come What is your day to day like? Do you carve out time for silence? Well, I think

The sheer fact of writing you can't be with other people, yes? And you can't really sort of be in a room where there's noise or people chatting or talking. I think that one of the things that I try to do very much is to wake up as early as I can, to hear what they used to call morning song, you know, birds or weather, to hear something that is not based on human activity, but the activity of the natural world. That really helps me to absorb silence, to live more present, I think, than chatter allows. Chatter, talk, all of that stuff is fairly distracting from this idea that I'm trying to tease out of my writing, which is the value of silence.

One of the other topics that you write about in your essay that accompanies this particular exhibit is this idea of connoisseurship. Who gets to be an expert in evaluating what's actually beautiful, what is good? And I was thinking about how you kind of have ultimate power within the spaces you occupy. Having the powers of critique and curation, I mean, I think one of my producers said like, it's almost like the opposite of imposter syndrome.

Did you always possess that sense of taste of knowing what is good? Oh, that's a great question. I have a wonderful editor at the New Yorker, Deborah Triesman, and she wrote me an email, we were just chatting, and she said something in an email that was so profound. She said that there is little distance between you and what's on the page. And I took that as the greatest compliment ever. It is, I mean, what did, say more on what she meant by that. I think what she meant was that

you're telling the emotional truth as much as you can, always. And I think I was so knocked out by the comment because the effort of writing, the effort of curation is not an effort, it's a joy because it's about self-expression. And I don't know who I would be if I wasn't given the opportunity to express intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, those aspects of myself that I feel should live outside of myself. And so as a kid, I was very fortunate in that I had a great mother who prized art making, who prized self-expression.

And when I started writing, I was very, very young. 8 years old? I was 8, yes. I would give her what I was writing and she would write her comments on the story, whatever it was, and leave it for me on the table in the morning. She was your first editor. Yeah. the table in the morning. She was your first editor. She was my first great editor. And that gave me the license to express, to know that words mattered and that they had an effect on a reader.

They had an effect on my mother. And by giving me that permission, my mother also gave me permission to really think, because you can't write without thinking. And in thinking, I began then to look at the world. So that's my value as a human, is this gift that my mother gave me, which is self-expression having great meaning for people, self-expression having a way of creating a kind of adhesion in a fractured world. This is so fascinating to me because your writing is so expansive.

You surprise me, you surprise the reader, not really with the choices on who you spend time on and write about, but how you write about them. People like Joan Didion, Eminem, Prince. I think I heard you say that you primarily are interested in subjects that don't, quote, have their face yet. What do you mean by that? Actually, you know, it's funny. I was thinking about this recently. I was talking to my class about this because I was showing them some D.M. Arbus photographs and they're largely unknown people. And she would say that she didn't like photographing the famous because generally they were, they had a set face.

They knew how to use the camera, work with the camera and they knew their angles. Yeah, she was like she was looking for a greater degree of vulnerability. A lot of the people that you've mentioned, some of them were dead, some of them were not what people call relevant. I was interested in most of those people because they had a history but their history had been obscured in a funny way by their fame and I wanted to go backwards and I wanted to excavate who they were from the fame

if that makes any sense. I wanted to save them from their public face, and I wanted to see their private face. So when I wrote about Missy Elliott, she wasn't famous, then many, many people I wrote about at the beginning of their career because I was interested in their evolution. I wasn't interested in their fame. One person that you've written quite extensively about is Richard Pryor.

And I'm fascinated that you write about him not because I mean it's obvious that he was one of the most talented comedians of our time, but you write about him in such an expansive way through time. I mean, you've gone back to him many, many times. I'd like for you to read an excerpt from your collection of essays that was also included in your collection of essays, White Girls, which came out in 2013. And in this excerpt, it's actually called A Prior Love. Thank you, Tonya. The subject of blackness has taken a strange and unsatisfying journey through American thought. First, because blackness has always had to explain itself to a largely

white audience in order to be heard, and second, because it has generally been assumed to have only one story to tell, a story of oppression that plays on liberal guilt. The writers behind the collective modern urtexts of blackness, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, all performed some variation on the theme. Angry but distanced, their rage blanketed by charm, they lived and wrote to be liked. Ultimately, whether they wanted to or not,

they in some way embodied the readers who appreciated them most, white liberals. Richard Pryor was the first black American spoken word artist to avoid this. Although he reprised the history of black American comedy, picking what he wanted from the work of great storytellers like Burt Williams, Red Fox, Moms Mably, Nipsey Russell, Lawanda Page, and Flip Wilson, he also pushed everything one step further. Instead of adapting to the white perspective, he forced white audiences to follow him into his own experience. Pryor didn't manipulate his audience's white guilt or their black moral outrage. If he played the race card, it was only to show how funny

he looked when he tried to shuffle the deck. And as he made blackness an acknowledged part of the American atmosphere, he also brought the issue of interracial love into the country's discourse. In a culture whose successful male Negro authors wrote about interracial sex with a combination of reverence and disgust, Breyer's gleeful, **** attitude had an effect on the general population which Wright's native sons or Baldwin's another country had not had. His best work showed us that black men like him and the white women they loved were united in their disenfranchisement in his life and on stage he performed the great largely unspoken story of America.

I think for many people prior definitely felt like a unicorn. I mean, he joked on stage, for instance, about some of his queer sexual experiences in ways that I kind of feel like are unfathomable for someone else to do. Have you been able to point out or understand that singularity that was Prior, that person before the fame, and why he could convey what others couldn't. Well, I'm going to go back a little bit, Tanya, and tell you how the project came about.

This is 1998 or so, and I went to David Remnick, who is the editor of The New Yorker, and said I wanted to write about Richard Prior, but I didn't want to interview him. He was alive still. He had multiple sclerosis. And he was living with his wife, Jennifer. And I said, I want to write a profile about someone

who was not in the profile speaking to me. I want to create this person out of people who had experience with him or so on. And David agreed. So I began really with what you see in the piece, which is about Jukin Opal, which is a brilliant television piece written by Jane Wagner, starring her wife, Lily Tomlin and Richard Pryor. And that's the first time that I ever saw miscegenation on screen, as it were, not as a taboo, but as a human experience. And so that's how it began. I began by interviewing Lily and Jane,

who are wonderful women. And I took it from there. They recommended I speak to ex-person, a producer who had worked with Lily, who had worked with Pryor, suggested I speak to the director of one of the films. It was a great experience for me because I just, it's the kind of thing that I love to do in reporting, which is to not know anything and everything at the same time.

So of course I'd read everything on Prior, but I didn't know anything about the world of show business in California at that particular time, the years before. So I got to meet wonderful, great producers like Marvin Wirth, and I learned a lot about the emotional ramifications and political ramifications of being a black star in the 70s and 80s, and how alone he he was and how at certain times he had exploited his own talent to maintain star status or whatever. But ultimately, he always came back home to the truth and he always came back home to the beauty really and the undeniable kind of purity of being a truth teller.

Can you clarify why you didn't want to talk with Prior? Was it because he was so sick at that time? He was ill, but again it was sort of like he was famous, right? I was always trying to find ways, Tanya too, to take fame apart, let's put it that way. And one way that I could take the fame apart was to say, Richard has spoken quite a bit about his life, let's hear others speak about Richard's life, including myself. If I needed to speak to Pryor, there was his work. You know, there were his stand-up routines, there were

scripts he had written, there were any number of artifacts he had left behind when he was functioning and speaking. So I didn't want Richard Pryor interfering with my writing. Richard Pryor to exist through me, through my writing. I mean, I call myself a Stanislavsky writer because in order to write about a person, I feel that I have to become them, to understand their voice and their rhythms and their interiority. Once that experience is over, I have to not be friends with the subject. You have to fall in love with them. But then you have to interrogate that love. That's a very good way of putting it, yes. You have to fall in love. You have to be interested because you're spending a lot of time and many months with someone

generally and then you have to walk away as if you don't know them. Flaubert, I think it was, who said that before you begin to write you have to dry your tears and silence your laughter. And you do. You have to kind of walk away from the experience with that feeling of support for the project, but not individual responsibility for the subject. Our guest today is Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hilton Als. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. on the shortwave podcast from NPR. Singapore is one of the busiest cities in the world,

but biologist Philip Johns is fascinated by a different inhabitant on the island, otters. At rush hour, downtown, the otters would swim toward each other and there are literally tens of thousands of people who are on their way to work. How ideas, emotions, and creatures coexist. That's next time on the TED Radio Hour from NPR. in Ridiculous Science Studies and call it, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, because the good names were taken.

Listen to NVR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Yes, that is what it is called, wherever you get your podcasts. In reading your writing about Richard Pryor, I mean, it's definitely like you are really trying to get at the core of why he was able to do what he did, be a truth teller. But are there elements of Pryor that you're still working out through your writing?

I saw you just wrote a piece about his movie Jojo Dancer from the 80s just a few months ago. And of course, I love reading about it. But I also think like, what is it about this moment that you feel it's important to work these elements of Richard Pryor out in your writing? I think in this moment, we have very few artists who are willing to go to the mat and to express interiority.

We have a lot of wonderful actors out there, but very few of them are willing to show us themselves the truth of that life that goes into creativity. There are very few people who are willing to risk self-exposure. They can play a character, but the self-exposure that goes into making acting art is not on as much as it should be. And I think that one of the reasons I wanted to write about Richard's only directorial effort, JoJo Dancer, for the Criterion Collection was to remind people of what it takes to make work. And I'm not talking about simply entertainment, I'm talking about what it takes to bear your soul in order to have the resonance of a Richard Pryor or the resonance of a Montgomery Clift or the resonance of

a Candy Alexander. You know, these are great performers who have given everything to not the performance, but to inhabiting and being. Well, I was just wondering what this means for you as a writer, if it's disorienting in any way, because you're, as a critic, as someone who is looking for that humanity, I think I heard you a few months ago on an interview talk about how you don't have a clear knowing

of who we are as a collective anymore. And so how that impacts actually what you do and being able to tap into that clarity to write about it. To know yourself is the first step really in entering some I'm talking about nonfiction Journalistic writing that you're walking into a place knowing enough about yourself to Go back to your original Question to be silent and to absorb what this human being

Is saying about what they've gone through, the life that they've experienced, how much and how little love they've had in the world. So the experience of Prince, writing about Prince, for instance. I entered his dressing room and we started chatting and I didn't know that he had other journalists lined up to talk to. And then he asked me to come back, and then it was kind of, he was trying to connect with me. Now this would not have happened if I had come in there, barreled in there with 20 questions. Well, can you say, blah, blah, blah, when you did this, I just sat down, and I listened,

and I watched, and the big trick, and it wasn't a trick at all, was to be silent until he wanted to engage. So I was silent when other musicians came in to, you know, there was a wonderful moment with Macio wanted to play something for him and it was a lot of activity. He's the director, right? He's the star. So he has to take care of a lot of things before a show. And I was able to sit in silence and I, he heard the silence and in hearing the silence, he was able to speak to me.

In the case of Prince being able to sit in that silence, were there any observations that you noticed that you were able to draw out that you would not have ever? Because you're a big fan, so you know everything about the guy as you're stepping in there. But I did not know how much blackmail approval meant to him. That one Maceo walked into the room or Larry Graham walked into the room. He was like a kid in terms of wanting their help. Did you feel that for you as you walked into the room with him? That he wanted George. Well, Tanya, you're so sweet. It would be immodest to say, but yes.

I felt that in retrospect. I didn't know what the feeling was at first because he offered me some water. He didn't look at me. He did some things in the room and in allowing him to just walk around the space and do what he needed to do, that he started to look at me. And then when Maceo came in, I saw him light up. And then when Larry Graham later was there, I saw him light up.

And then I understood that I had stayed and been allowed to stay. And it was very interesting. I had left the backstage area, and I was leaving the show show and this woman was running after me saying, Mr. and Mr. and she couldn't remember my name. And I turned and she worked for Prince and she said, oh, I'm so glad I found you. Prince would have killed me if I didn't find you. And then I remembered how he had been with Macio. And describe when you guys were and what training this was.

It was in St. Louis, I believe. And he was backstage and he was getting his makeup redone. And when I put my head in the room, he said, hey, would you like to join us for? And it was Larry Graham and his wife and Prince. And it was a Jehovah's Witness meeting that they were having. And then we got in the bus and we went to the bar

where there was an after party, and I was amazed. And then he wanted me to work with him on a book, his memoir, and that I couldn't do because I was really commissioned to write an article about Prince. I wasn't assigned to write a book. And I wouldn't have been able to keep my job and write a book. Do you see what I mean? What do you mean by that?

Meaning that he was asking me to work with him, which meant that I couldn't write the essay because it would be then to a conflict of interest. And so I chose to do my job and it was also a personal choice. I knew how powerful he was and I was afraid to some degree that I wouldn't get out of Minneapolis. I wanted to be a writer. I didn't want to work for Prince. I wanted to spend time with him and watch all of that stuff, but I didn't want to work for Prince. I wanted to spend time with him and watch all of that stuff, but I didn't want to work for him. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hilton Als. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air.

These days there is a lot of news. It can be hard to keep up with what it means for you, your family, and your community. Consider This from NPR is a podcast that helps you make sense of the news. Six days a week, we bring you a deep dive on a story and provide the context, backstory, and analysis you need to understand our rapidly changing world. Listen to the Consider This Podcast from NPR. You have your job, but you also have a life. And you're not just one thing. Neither is the Here and Now Anytime podcast. Every weekday, we break down the biggest story of the day and something else, like a new trend everyone's talking about. It's Here and Now Anytime, a daily podcast from NPR and WBUR. And now, anytime, a daily podcast from NPR and WBUR. 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. Your mother, she feels so present in so much of what you do and so much of your writing. And you said in your writing that she had such an imagination for other people, but not for herself. What did you mean by that? Yeah, I wanted her to have, well, I wanted her to have more of everything for herself.

I think she was a brilliant mother, and that job means that you take a back seat to your children, right? But I think also I wanted her to have the experience of, you know, making art and travel and all those things. I don't think you can love anybody really without wanting them to have more of what they should have. And I just wanted her to have more of what she should have had. You grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

Your mom was originally from Barbados. Her family was from Barbados. So she was first generation. Yeah, first generation. She died at 62? Yes, she did. Isn't it so wild to think about how brutal and brutalizing this country is toward poor people, women, women of color.

All of those factors contribute to such early deaths. It's really profound. It's her and James Baldwin at 64 and Zora Neale Hurston at 60, whatever. We lose Richard Wright at 51. We lose so many people. We lose their voices because of the ways in which the pressure and the schism of being a black American has such a huge effect on the body.

And it's something that I want to write more about actually I Want to go back to your mom just a little bit because Like in just trying to think about the human that she raised that is you I mean you describe her as the most constructive listener in the world and what did that look like? What did you learn about listening from her? well, I used to do this thing, Tony, when I was little, like I would read about someone and I would want to dress like them.

So Horace Greeley I loved and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. And my mother, on Sundays, I would read aloud at the table to her. And she never criticized or batted an eye. She just listened. And that face is something that I carry in my heart as a teacher, that one of the more extraordinary things that we can do in this world is to listen

to another human being. I don't think that there's any greater respect, and that includes listening to the silence when they need it. The thing that we can offer is the respect of hearing what another person has to say. And so my work as a professor is listening to the ways in which we live together. What is this experience like for you?

And that's really what you're teaching, quote unquote, is how do I sit in a room with other people and hear them? So that's one of her profound gifts. Another profound gift is to imagine this person's life, you know, what's happening to them, et cetera, but also imagine their possibility. Imagine the ways in which they will grow and flourish if you listen.

So she made me a constructive listener. And in constructive listening, that means, you know, Tonya expressed an interest in art in this particular show. Oh, I'm going to send Tonya a book about ex-artists. That's constructive listening, is that you order the book or you go to the bookstore or you offer to be a companion in the museum or whatever to have these experiences where a person feels, oh wow, actually resonates what I'm saying, that my dreams can be made manifest in the company of this person who heard what I said. Your father you describe as being uncomfortable around other men including his sons and... Yes. What did that look like for you? I mean how how did that impact your sense of self in the world?

Oh wow that's a really great question. I didn't read my father as a protector, I read him as a threat. And when you read your father as a protector, I read him as a threat. And when you read your father as a threat and not a protector, you're very suspicious of power. You're suspicious of the ways in which power is being used, wielded, etc. I didn't feel that because he was my father, that he had a de facto authority in the way that hold up the father as the authoritarian in the family.

It made me question, because of his handling of the men and me and my brother, it made me question what gave him the right to treat us in a particular way. If he was exercising or felt he had the right to do something, I would question it. And I resented having to accept it because he was my father. I would accept it 20,000 times more readily from my mother because she was involved with me. She didn't perceive me as a threat. In fact, she was very protective of us. But my father, in perceiving us as a threat, didn't allow himself to love us and to cherish

us as well as he should have. He couldn't do it. So in that kind of emotional chaos, what I took away from it was, oh, because he's my father doesn't mean he's an authority, and I'm also questioning male authority. Because someone is the father doesn't necessarily mean to me that they're the authority on the family or whatever. When I see a father who is

caretaking and protective of a child, then I believe them and I don't really question them. But when I see that they're just using the role of the authoritarian figure, then I don't like being around that. I wondered about that. I also wondered about it in the context of your writing, because so much of your gaze or your interest is, it's women. Like, it's focused on powerful women.

It's changing though. It's changing. I'm becoming much more open to men. What has changed in you? Exactly, I think an acceptance of the father I had and that that's what he did and that's what happened and I can't change it, but I can work with it better now than I used to be able to. So because of my mother's being so central to me and my sisters, et cetera, you know, I was always drawn to women not as an antidote, but as a kind of higher consciousness to maleness. And it's changing because I'm seeing that in general that women

can be as beautiful and venal as men. That used to not cross my mind before. That there is human as a male person. And that big shift is really a big shift. You know, you're right to point out that a lot of my work was about women and I think that that's changing. I'm interested in humans much more sort of in a rounded way than I was before. Hilton Als, thank you so much for this conversation.

Thank you, Tanya. Hilton Als is a Pulitzer Prize winning staff writer and critic for The New Yorker. Coming up, rock critic Ken Tucker reviews new albums from Lucy Dacus and Jeffrey Lewis. This is Fresh Air. On the Embedded Podcast. No, no.

It's called, Did Nyanas Speak in the Speech? It's misinformation. Like so many Americans, my dad has gotten swept up in conspiracy theories. These are not conspiracy theories. These are reality. I spent the year following him down the rabbit hole, trying to get him back.

Listen to alternate realities on the embedded podcast from NPR, all episodes available now. Oh, hey there. I'm Brittany Luce. And I don't know, maybe this is a little out of pocket to say, but I think you should listen to my podcast. It's called It's Been A Minute and I love it.

And I think you will too. Over the past couple months, over 100,000 new listeners started tuning in. Find out why. Listen to the It's Been A Minute podcast from NPR today. Lucy Dacus is a young singer-songwriter, perhaps best known as one-third of the trio Boy Genius, along with Julian Baker and Phoebe Bridgers. Jeffrey Lewis is a middle-aged singer-songwriter who isn't very well known, but is the author of at least 30 albums and EPs. Each has a new album.

Dacus is called, Forever is a Feeling, and Lewis's is titled, The Even More Free-Willin' Jeffrey Lewis. Our rock critic Ken Tucker says that between the two of them, they demonstrate the wide musical and emotional range of confessional songwriting. Why does it feel significant? Why do I have to tell you about it? In two short sentences, Lucy Dacus summarizes decades of motivation behind singer-songwriter pop music. It's that mixture of confession and melody that creates an illusion of intimacy, the

feeling that we really know the artist. Indeed, feeling is what Dacus' new album is all about. It could not be more feely. It's called Forever is a Feeling, and I'm happy to say that her general mood is romantic and optimistic. On the song, Best Guess, she sings her affection to a close friend who's become a lover. You are my pack of days You are my favorite place You were my best friend Before you were my best guest At the future

You are my best guest If I were a gambling man I am. You'd be my best, best. You are my best, best. Dacus' small, intimate voice is tailor-made to be heard whispering in the ears of fans glued to the small screens of their phones. Even her proclamations of passion are subtle and modest.

A song called Anklez reaches back to a time when a woman showing a bit of her ankle was considered daringly erotic. Angel of Death, one of three ancient fates Playing with your scissors again How lucky are we to have so much to lose? Now don't move when I tell you what to do Pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed And take me like you do in your dreams I'm not gonna stop you, I'm not gonna stop you this time, baby I want you to show me what you mean And help me with the crossword in the morning

You are gonna make me tea Lucy Dacus and Jeffrey Lewis both compose acoustic-based singer-songwriter music, in which the first person singular is deployed to announce emotions and opinions, but they could not be more different. For 20 years now, Lewis has been eloquent, crass, romantic, and realistic, frequently all in the same song. When he writes a confessional lyric, he exposes more than a well-turned ankle, not bothering with artful metaphors. Try to see your parents more, cause they're so weak and old now, but they just can't let you live without always being told how. metaphors. across the room, because you're a weakling and a loser. You just never get it right. Down from the way that you were raised to how your own home is

tonight, these are the ones you love the best. So why is it always such a mess? And what the hell's it for, since you're rotten to the core? Well, it's fun. It's just fun. Lewis's new album is called The Even More Free-Wheeling Jeffrey Lewis, the title and cover photo a nod to Bob Dylan's early New York City folky days. A dedicated New Yorker himself, Lewis gets louder and more low down on this album's centerpiece,

a great song about just how painful daily existence can be called Sometimes Life Hits You. I'd have a nice life with coffee and friends you could call. Sometimes life hits you. Well you can build up your armor against what life brings You can dodge when life kicks and you can duck when life swings You can outsmart all sadness and outfight with the best But sometimes life hits you like a chisel to the chest Then you say This is the musical equivalent of hitting your thumb with a hammer, and on the less radio-friendly version of that song, Lewis inserts a pungent four-letter curse between the words ow and that hurts.

Lucy Dacus makes clear that she too has experienced moments when, in Jeffrey Lewis's phrase, life hits you like a chisel to the chest. Both of these artists have their flaws. Lewis is sometimes too yammeringly self-absorbed. Dacus is sometimes too much of a monotone mumbler, each can flatten music that ought to sound more airy and buoyant. But their best songs answer Dacus's question that began this review, why do I have to tell you about it? For both Dacus and Lewis, the answer is, because it feels good to unburden yourself and maybe lift a burden or confirm a feeling for your listeners as well.

Ken Tucker reviewed new music from Lucy Dacus and Jeffrey Lewis. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, immigration and customs enforcement is in force and students are in the crosshairs at college campuses nationwide from Columbia to the University of Alabama. Legal scholar Daniel Kansstrom joins us to unpack the law, the history, and the human cost. 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 Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and

reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonato, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challener, Susan Nkundee, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terri Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley. Since Donald Trump took office in January, a lot has happened. The White House Budget Office ordered a pause on all federal grants and loans. The impact of the Trump administration's tariffs is already being felt in President Trump's efforts to radically remake the federal government.

The NPR Politics Podcast covers it all. Keep up with what's happening in Washington and beyond with the MPR Politics Podcast. Listen every day.