Mike Birbiglia's Working It Out - 4. Matt Berninger, Carin Besser, & J. Hope Stein: The Poetry of Mike’s favorite band “The National”

Episode Date: June 22, 2020

Mike celebrates the publication of "The New One, Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad” with his co-writer and co-wife J. Hope Stein. They are joined by Matt Berninger, the lead singer of Mike’s favorite band "The National” as well as Matt’s co-writer and co-wife Carin Besser. This creative double date goes deep as the two married couples open up about creative marriages, actual marriages, and how writing poetry can feel like knitting.    Please consider supporting: 7-Inches For Planned Parenthood

is everybody else less of a pain in the ass than us i think i think i'm a pain in the ass because i've never done it before and i'm not a professional hey everybody this is working it out uh this is a completely unique episode today uh with a wife and husband lyrical duo from my favorite band, The National, Matt Berninger and Corinne Besser, as well as my wife, Jen, who co-wrote our book, The New One, with me. She's a poet. Corinne is a poet. This conversation actually started at the Amundsen Theater in Los Angeles last fall when these guys came to my show and we thought we should have a more complete conversation. And that's what this is. So we have this rare thing in common with you guys, which is that we're both married couples

who collaborate on writing. And that's a complex thing because collaboration is is hard to begin with you're sort of opening up your soul to somebody and saying like here's what i got and they're they're like here's what i got and it's not finished or done or or you know and so when you do that with the person you're in love with i feel like it's uh you know there's more baked into it inherently. That is really one of our biggest sort of debates is how much we should share with each other, like, too soon. And it is tricky, especially when it's so subjective and stuff like poetry and comedy

and music and songs. and in stuff like poetry and comedy and music and songs, in some ways it's easier because someone else's blurry thoughts can sometimes commingle with your blurry thoughts because it's sort of a blurry format. But you get really attached to your version of the blurry idea. And then someone else comes in and hears something different. But writing a love song um is is kind of tricky but but we we've managed to do it but we do get in really heated emotional uh sure yeah debates over yeah i mean i was thinking

when we were gonna talk knowing we were gonna talk about this i had this thought um yesterday i was like wow yeah matt and really, we fight about it. And we have conversations like that conversation we had with you that night. But we've never really sat and talked about, like, so what are we doing? Am I bringing the verses and you're doing the chorus? We very rarely do that. And I think some of that is like. I think we're the same, by the same by the way there's no there's actually

not a clear delineation we never sat down and we're like let's write this book together it was like mike was writing a book and then i kept like interrupting it i think with like actually that's not what happened that's what that's how i see what happens this and so he would put my thoughts also in it to sort of balance it out. But it was not an intention. Yeah, a lot of it with us was like, I was saying, hey, do you remember Una's first milestones? And I remember them as like her first crawling was this and her first steps were this. And Jen would be like, here's a poem called An Infant Reaches. And I'd be like, I'm going to just read that.

It definitely got heated on our end too in certain moments. I remember there was that one chapter where you were like, Jen looked at me like I was doing this and that, and then I was like, I didn't look at you that way. I was looking at you like this, and I was like, you've got to put that in, that I think that I was looking at you like this, and you think you were looking at me like that. And I think at a certain point there's

like some language that you developed which was like so what happened is either a this happened which is like what mike's story is or b this happened which it was like my version of it or it's like c some other version that's a combination of those two or not those things at all or you know so like we had to sort of come up with like a rhythm for that discussion yeah like like that's one of the things about collaborating with someone who you're married to is you realize that the two sides of the story of literally an event that both of you are witnessing is worlds apart well yeah i mean i think i think we're all, I mean, often emotionally, the combination of everything that makes up our identity

and our reaction and our emotional reaction to anything is so entirely different. Everybody's internal soup is so different. And just because you get married doesn't mean you find somebody with the same soup, you know, at all. And so when such a— Fondly. You know, I mean, it might be, you know, similar stock.

But so when such a major change happens for anybody alone, their soup changes and their their mind their identity changes and so you both have to become not only does a new person enter your life but you instantly become a different person and they become a different person and and suddenly you and your wife are both suddenly entirely new people and you have to get to know each other and this this third person all at the same time and it's you know and then and without any sleep any sleep yeah I mean that's one of the things we've even talked about before is the idea of getting either having a wedding

we got married at City Hall so we didn't have a wedding with people at it other than friends oh really? of course right down by the Brooklyn Bridge and then we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge we don't know for sure what the date of our wedding was.

Right. We've had a dispute over it so much that I don't even remember which is my side or your side anymore. I don't even know which side you're on. What's our anniversary? What's our anniversary? I'm asking my wife. I think it's

July 20th, 2007, which I only remember because it's 7-20. Well, I'm pretty sure you're correct. Well, I think you's July 20th, 2007, which I only remember because 720. Well, I'm pretty sure you're correct. Well, I think you're right. We're early July. Early July. Early July. Do people pick apart what your actual marriage is because you write so many love songs together?

I've never experienced that. When he's writing these songs, and then sometimes I come in and out, so often the really tense lines, the lines about sort of battle lines being drawn. sort of battle lines being drawn or i sort of usually assume he's writing about the process of writing and collaborating with the band but then i find out oh no that was actually about a fight we were having i i just sort of like I don't understand what the records are about either. I don't either. I mean, Corinne and I have found that there are times where we need to work on our own things and not share what we're working on with each other. And it's not because we're hiding something. It's just it's good to have those it's good to have a diary it's good to have your own you know place where it's it's um and so we both have that just

have the the time with it where it's really just you as the sounding board i think i think that's really important also i think sometimes i like to feel, I know I'm always kidding myself, but sometimes I like to feel that I have stayed so much away that my opinion then holds great weight. It never really works like that. That sounds familiar. You know, like the value. And I also like to do the thing of the like here's just my gut reaction which is always kind of she does wait and she did you know if there's something she wants me to change she will she'll wait and find a way that there's no way i cannot like she'll i'm trying

to think of an example i probably learned this technique where she'll just say i don't know you know that you just the way you're saying that line makes me just picture you in like in like beige shorts and like something like that and just it's got that and i'm like okay you know it's like i'm like yeah no i and like that she can she she appeals to my fragile, just incredibly fragile ego to persuade me. And it works. But she's usually right. My only defense is that I am trying to reform. She's seen me in beige shorts. I'm trying to reform.

But it is true that I have done that in the past. Well, we spend a lot of time away from each other writing. And when there was touring, Mike would be touring something for months, maybe before I would see it, especially if it was about us. And I would want to give him that space because I feel like early in our relationship, I kind of learned to not get too emotionally involved with what goes on on stage. And so I remember the first thing I got upset about that you ever did on stage about us was when we were dating

and you came back from a show with a hickey on your neck. I don't recall that. This is actually well... I'm joking. It's well documented and it's in my girlfriend's boyfriend's show. It's in my girlfriend's boyfriend, but this was like a tumultuous time in our relationship it's our first year dating we were both kind of having

a hard time with each other but um then he was doing like the story on stage and i was like really hated it i just like hated it and it now at the like at the time it was done when he like finished it it's been it's like one of my favorite stories he's ever told on stage i just laughed my ass off i think it's so funny but it i mean i learned a lot from just sort of giving things space and not taking things so seriously and just like sort of seeing where it winds up and then from that point kind of suggest certain things softly yeah and then for me like it took me two years probably of being married before i shared a lot of work with him and then like we still kind of keep

things from each other until we're ready to sort of have the discussion so when you share work though by that do you sort of mean like okay okay, I'm ready to share this now, because now I'm ready to hear what your brain will do with it? I think it's that. And I think it's like, you want, you know, when you're early in something, you don't want to hear anything that's going to stop you from where you want to go with it. And I don't want to stop him. Yeah. And I don't want to stop him from where he wants to go with something. I don't want to be stopped either. So it's kind of mutual.

I don't think that I have anything to offer in the poetry realm. I disagree. It's funny because I hear you in it. Something I read about the play or the book, maybe it was Ira Glass said this, the great trick you guys pull off

is that she delivers the laughs and you deliver the feeling. And I just think for the atmosphere you're evoking of this moment of like everybody's bodies blending together in new parenthood or marriage, it's really cool the ways that the ping pong ball bounces around in all different directions. And I feel that in Little Astronaut as much as in the new one, obviously, the book. Thanks. I mean, well, I think one of the challenging things about autobiographical work is that you're completely exposing yourself, your marriage, your family, all this stuff.

And when people criticize it, and I have a really thin skin because people say nice things, too. But when they criticize it, it hurts personally. Right. Well, with regard to comedy and poetry and song and even a painting or anything, if an artist isn't actually showing the murky, kind of unpolished, scary stuff inside their minds and soul, then I just don't believe anything they're doing and yeah um it's so so i i don't think you it's hard to qualify as an artist unless you're sharing truthful personal genuine things otherwise i think you're more of a packager or a

craftsman of sure you know or something which is also, you know, you write pop songs and they're designed to do a thing, but pop songs aren't necessarily intended to expose any truths. They're supposed to entertain, and so is some comedy, obviously, right? However, always the artists and the singers and songwriters and comedians and poets that Corinne and I like are only the ones that you were like, oh, they're really telling us the truth. And then, but that's also from the beginning of our relationship, that's the only kind of writing Corinne could even tolerate.

So anytime she smelled bullshit in my writing, that's the first thing she'd go after. So I was forced to reveal more of myself to Corinne than I think maybe either of us were ready for early because I knew from an artistic perspective, she wouldn't tolerate anything less. We had the same exact dynamic. And I wanted to impress her almost more as an artist than i wanted to preserve the peace in our relationship and i think that's why it's been

healthy for us you know i guess but it hasn't always been healthy you know yeah but i see that's interesting because i would not i would say that that person is sort of a projection of what you wanted right you know which is the other thing that happens when you're and i got in a relationship with someone who's writing while you're writing is they're also like your witness until you're forming this perfect editor but um i mean i don't know anyone else who i could i don't share anything i write with anyone else uh really i mean and i've written a lot of things just without corinne um and i do share them and like when i'm in the studio and sometimes people have comments i mean booker t jones was the first person who who uh kind of had the confidence other than the Corinne to sort

of, to, to ask me about certain lines and what they meant. It was great. It was really wonderful, but almost very rarely, like does anybody in the national ever, I think because in the past, I just would explode. Um, because, because what we talk about, it's also personal, but, but Corinne is the only person who could sort of... Because most of it was about her. And I felt like it was my responsibility to let her see what I was feeling in these songs and if it was okay to say, right? Maybe a little bit?

I'm sure that the fact that my fingerprints were all over various parts and various iterations of things just makes it safer and easier. Yeah. But it also means that then I have no idea what the finished songs are. Well, yeah. And I would say none of anything I've done or anything you've done is ever about one thing. It's like it's – there are – I mean, even though there's a song

called Corinne at the Liquor Store. Yeah. I don't know if you've ever gone to the liquor store for me. You've been dying. Corinne does not spin up. That was my number one question. I have literally no image of Corinne in any liquor store. But it's, I love that, that was a great lyric and a great title, which we both love love because it sounded like a great John Cheever title.

Yeah. Yeah. People think Corinne hangs out in liquor stores a lot and that's more me. Corinne at the liquor store I can't wait to see her I'm walking around

like I was the one who found dead John Cheever I was listening to that song today and my joke about that song was like, Corinne, do people ever go, wait, are you Corinne from Corinne at the Liquor Store? Like, that's your claim to fame? Like, you're just always at the liquor store?

No, I know. I did write a song about, I mean, mostly about Corinne a long time ago when we were earlier in our relationship called karen and people you know have have assumed corinne's name is pronounced karen but i was trying to protect kind of the weakest it was the weakest disguise to protect their innocence but now everybody calls her karen and it's now you say her name and uh so another part of calling naming that song corinne at the liquor store and making it the chorus is just so people knew what how to pronounce her name and it still hasn't worked

um but anyway yeah we have a really similar dynamic like early in our relationship i would describe myself as writing like my first album was to Mike, and it was sort of comedy pop songs, which is to use your phrase. And Jen saw me workshopping an early version of Sleepwalk with me, which was much more personal. But it was at UCB. It was sort of just like 25 people in the crowd kind of thing. And it was very raw. And she sort of said like, well, that's what you should be doing. Like that's where it's at. Yeah, I would say some of the most exciting comedy shows I've ever seen

is Mike performing early, early versions of Sleepwalk with me to 25 people or to a basement in Alaska. Just really, really tiny crowds and just wild shows. I literally didn't know what he was going to say next. I don't know. It just was like, that's it. Like, that's so good. I think it's no coincidence that the first record that anybody really started paying attention to of the Nationals was Boxer. And that was the first one where I think I was really, really trying to impress Corinne and getting her to help. And you have a few, that was the first record that you even have a few lines on, right?

I think. And that was kind of early in our relationship. And so in Corinne's sort of, not only me wanting to impress this woman I was in love with, but also I was absorbing, trying to absorb as much as what she was in love with, writing-wise, and her favorite writers, and like Berryman and her favorite poets, and Didion and all these people. And so I was going to be a very different kind of writer. I mean, I was obsessed with Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits and Nick Cave,

and those were still my models. But Corinne introduced me to a kind of even different world of language and writers that I probably would not have gone and found in a bookshop on my own. I just absorbed it all from her collection. And I think you absorb shit from me, maybe a little bit. You're in there. Did you absorb shit? Yeah.

That's your line. I've often said I don't read a lot of books, but I read my wife's bookshelf. That's great. I've literally just stolen, like there't read a lot of books, but I read my wife's bookshelf. That's great. I've literally just stolen, there's a song, Light Years, off of The National's last album. I've never read the novel Light Years, but

I just love the title. Light years, light years away from you. Light years, light years away from you you did you when you introduced corinne the writing credit, was that an awkward thing? It was interesting. It was like a slow thing. I mean, maybe you can, maybe do you want to talk about this? I mean, it was. Matt liked to sometimes make it funny and let me know that, like, okay.

But Aaron and Bryce were always bringing people in. And I always felt like there was so much music that the more writing that could happen was always kind of a good thing. was always kind of a good thing. But obviously I was just throwing things at a pot that Matt was then cooking and finishing because he was still building a kind of feeling of kind of how he wanted to do the thing. Sure. And I felt like early on,

I always felt like we were sort of collaborating on a character. Also, I'll say in the very beginning, and I kind of maybe perpetuated some of these things, but like, Corinne had two nicknames. One was obviously Yoko, and that was sort of, and I think I was the one who kept calling her yoko just to sort of like sort of to comically diffuse which was such a giant like self-compliment you know i was essentially trying to just compare myself to john lennon obviously yeah i often refer to to cor as Michelle Obama around the house. Another good self-compliment.

But then the other was, and I think this was from the band, was the Oracle. And I think everybody in the band recognized that I suddenly was becoming a better writer. that I suddenly was becoming a better writer and that Corinne was a really good influence on me and just on the band. I think everybody, honestly, I think everybody kind of wanted to impress Corinne as well. She was fancy. She was cool.

She was from the New Yorker. She was older than, you know. And she was always right. And also, the band loved to have someone who could stand up to me. That is true, I think. That's true. And there's a lot of that with us. There's a lot of that with us because my brother Joe writes with me, too. And so there's like sometimes Joe will try to back channel through Jenen to get me to do something and it is all very murky it's all very murky

there was a lot more of that in the beginning like the first few years and then that that's tapered off now i don't think he doesn't try to do that anymore i don't think it was working everyone knows that jen can get Mike to do anything. Maybe. I know. I feel my days of deep persuasion are being weighed in. Corinne's essential gift is bullshit detector. And even when we were, you know, Tom, my brother and I, were starting to dig in to try to make a tour documentary,

which turned into Mistaken for Strangers. The first attempts to that were just us being jackasses and just goofing around. It was like Flight of the Conchords or something I was trying to do. And Corinne, when she saw a lot of that stuff we were putting together, she said, that stuff's but it's it's just cute it's not and then there were some things of us captured of us fighting and tom tom filmed himself crying and drunk on the bus and and that's what she saw that and she's like i know that's painful but that's the most interesting stuff you need to dig into that so she's always been the one to like

to change to to recalibrate her collaborators compass to go more to the center of the onion, to the real issue, to the real emotion, the real content. I love that movie. She's been that for me from the beginning. I really love that movie. Is that the first time we met these guys?

That's when we met you guys at the premiere of The Second for Strangers. At the former Sunshine Theater in New York. Yeah, we came up to you guys and we were like, you're huge fans. That's right. That was amazing. No, that was a really, Mike, meeting you two, I remember, I feel like, yeah, meeting you two at that was such a nice moment in that whole experience.

That's when we felt like, really? Yeah, you legitimized it for us. We were like, oh, Mike Wrigley liked it. And so we just knew, I mean, just because we knew that it was kind of an odd tone. And, yeah. We're holding back our laughter here. Yeah, we're holding back our laughter. That night was like such a big deal for us.

It was like a dream come true. So the podcast is called Working It Out. And today I'm going to work out a story that Jen and I actually have been working on together for my new show. And then Jen was going to read a poem that's in progress. And then Corinne has a poem in progress also. But I'll just start. This is a story that happened last year where Jen had this extreme pain in her gallbladder. And she went to her doctor and she pointed to her gallbladder and said, I have extreme pain episodes here. And the doctor said, I think you've just been having muscle spasms from holding the baby. And she said, no, I don't hold the baby with my gallbladder. And when Jen tells the story, she calls this mansplaining, which is,

if you're not familiar with the term, is a term that generalizes people by gender. And the idea, of course, that a man is arrogantly patronizing a woman with information she understands better than him. And I'm fine with that term. I just feel like if we're going to generalize by gender, I think we should also say that woman splaining is when a woman explains something for 10 minutes and then in the final minute says the thing she could have said in the first sentence. But that's only if we're generalizing. And so we went to another doctor, Dr. McMahon, one of those doctors we had heard about who will prescribe anything. Like, he'll be like, I scraped my knee.

And he'll be like, have you tried heroin? So at this point, we knew she needed a scan. And so we go to McMahon's office. She goes to McMahon's office, which auto-corrects in my phone as McMuffin. And the first thing McMuffin says is, I recommend you get a breast reduction. And she said, sure, but the pain is in my gallbladder, which is some classic mansplaining right there. My wife is like, I think I'm going to die.

And the doctor's like, what's going on with your boobs? You're thinking we go bigger, smaller. We can do anything. I mean, this is a hospital. And so McMuffin orders a scan. And so she hops in this MRI machine. We take the scan to the gastroenterologist. And he says, we need to take out your gallbladder immediately.

And so they take it out surgically. And the surgery is a success. But it drives home this point that our bodies are a mystery. And the world is a mystery. And everything is chaos. And everything could fall apart at any moment. But right now we're lucky. And we get home from the hospital and Jen says, getting my gallbladder taken out was

one of the greatest feelings I've ever felt. So from that point on, Jen has gone to a woman doctor. And whenever she has a medical problem, she goes in and she woman-splains her symptoms and the doctor woman-splains the diagnosis and it takes about 56 hours. But she's alive and that's really the goal. And I think the moral of the story is that if you have a serious medical problem, you should go to four terrible doctors or one woman. And that's the end. That's the end of that book. Oh, my God.

Well, I mansplain to most men. I mean, men do it to each other. It's like an evening out that he's trying to do. I think a lot of it is just men. It's like an evening out that he's trying to do. I think a lot of it is just... That's called man on mansplaining. No one wants to be around any of that. It's called double mansplaining. So the poem Jen is working out

started as sort of an anti-social media manifesto. And now she's not sure where it will land, but I just really love the poem. And so I encourage her to share it. It's called We Typed Our Words. We typed our words into the machine. Happy birthday, bud. Nice hat, dumbass. And our words were broadcast to the arena

of everybody, and we were instantly known. We typed our real true feelings into the machine. Life is too short for publicity, darling. Life is too short for fame. As if words by their amplification could be better understood. We typed our locations into the machine as if no burglars were watching. We typed the correct spellings of our mother's maiden names Into the machine, our long-dead childhood pets We typed our dating preferences into the machine As if no enemy would use them to seduce us Click clack of keys, now they understand me

Wow We typed our numbers into the machine Birth dates, phone numbers, lucky numbers, room key numbers The code to our safe Wow. and the double helixes of our DNA and ancestry, all the while fists up protesting eugenics in a government registry. If we creamed corn, we collected the cobs into the wicker work of the machine. If we rolled noodles, we ladled the broth and grabbed them like slippery worms,

one end of the noodle in our mouth, the other in the mouth of the machine. If we crocheted sweaters, we slip-stitched them into the algebraic twill of the machine. If we crocheted sweaters, we slip-stitched them into the algebraic twill of the machine. If fat games was our business, we fastened the tubes to the canister of the machine, sucked all the prospects and spaghettis of our marketplace into the machine as if no one was trying to own us, and voluntarily reported to work there each morning. We sucked our mornings as eyeballs into the machine. And then it kind of goes on from there,

and then the last line, after a couple more pages, the last line is like, I don't know who wrote these words, me or the machine. Oh, I love that. Isn't that beautiful? Oh my God, I love that. What? Yeah, I love that. Isn't that beautiful? Oh my God, I love that. Yeah, I love it. It's something that reminded me just for a second of a song that Matt and I worked on together.

together and my great dream was to send him like a bunch of nonsense lines that sounded like super cheerful machines were writing them for us and i just really wanted like this kind of feeling of like that chewed up nonsense um and that kind of hysteria and terror. And it didn't totally come through, I admit, in my first draft. But then you kind of took it and played around with it. I thought you were just mad at me. But anyway, I just, Jen, I think that's super cool. I love it. And what's so beautiful about what you just read

is how you can connect these sort of big abstract things, like a long dead childhood to spaghetti, you know, or soup with noodles. And then in between you talk about a helix. Especially soup. Well, no. I mean, and then you talk about this helix of the DNA and stuff. And it's all about identity and what makes us us and all that. And I think I learned that it's almost impossible to create an accurate image of someone unless you take bits of all these different things.

And, you know, if you just try to unpack one aspect of somebody, it's like trying to describe someone by describing their finger you know yeah and you kind of have to just do a glimpse of their eye the color of their shoe and the and something about the way they walk you know to be able to get any real image and so but what you've done is that you can connect your whole you know sort of the big global things with the small tiny personal tiny personal moments i totally agree and then and then one of the big global things with the small tiny personal tiny personal moments i totally agree and then and then one of the things that jen was saying to me earlier today about this poem is that she's a little bit stalled on it because since she started writing it in march so much has changed and actually social media which she started writing this as like a critical analysis of social media has actually become one of the one of the stronger tools in the pandemic yeah everything everything's shifting

so quickly i think i mean artists in the message and even the way you speak and even i mean i'm just learning trying to i'm i'm learning all the time but learning just this week you know know, how to talk about racism in America, you know, in a fresh way, right? And all this kind of stuff. And so I think you, all that stuff is coming through, you know, these changes are happening while you're in the middle of a project. And I think all I've been able to do is just like let that change be part of the thing. Yeah. And allow that turn to happen in the work. Yeah.

And I think that's powerful because everyone is going through this massive rethink. And we're all evolving. Some of us are devolving quickly. Yes. I think most of us are evolving quickly into new ways of thinking of how we live our lives, what's important to us, and how we interact with each other. And so I think the fact that you're having this crisis is a plot twist that could be help good.

You know, who knows? Right. No, I think you're right. I think I need to let it find its way into it. So this is a poem I worked on a really long time ago that then i i it's it's like a it's sort of like if i were knitting a blanket and there was one that i just always put aside and then come back to and knit on when i'm anxious oh because i feel like i don't ever know where to go with this one. But there's a few things about it that capture, I don't know. It's called Ronald Reagan Dreaming. Okay.

And it has in it a desire to sort of get inside and describe a mind not there. Yeah. So I'll just read a couple of sections. Ronald Reagan dreaming. One, I dreamed of myself with other people. I had straighter teeth. Two, at points I was less interested because I was not sure the dream was happening to me. Just how close am I meant to stand to someone?

sure the dream was happening to me. Just how close am I meant to stand to someone? There was a sort of barren desert sunset vista, bushes like tufts of hair. The colors were horizontal strips, as in a child's painting, white on blue on pink on brown on red on yellow green. I shouldn't say that things were like other things, for they were both things for the course of the dream. You could enter a scene from any side side the plan unbelts and reassembles as you travel through it the eye stays at a docking distance three when i was very young i watched a familiar face in a blank of in a bank of clouds in this dream everything is larger than i expected a man a real man to the sound of bird song blesses a quiet public he and i follow a fading light for miles through a series of flickering pictorials and when the light moves on his sleeping kills me he's gone dim and this is my actual

heartbreaking so i'm gonna stop there but that that's just an intro to some idea of setting. Who's that about? You were saying that it's like you've written it as fragments. Had you read it out loud before? Never. It sounds very cohesive and very floating from one thing to the next. I love that teeth line in the beginning, too.

It's so good. Yeah, I love it. The teeth line is beautiful. And also, the whole experience of the poem is such a dreamlike quality, which I'm guessing, Corinne, that's intended. Right, that's why the fragments are working so nice. Yeah, that's kind of the fun of it, yeah, is that it's an excuse to have something that will sort of always work.

I mean, Jen, it's kind of like exactly what you were saying, where it's like once you're going to bring in the chaos, well, then you can go anywhere. So that's kind of, I think, why I just keep waiting to see why am I still writing a poem about Ronald Reagan after you know why I you know like there was like a moment where I was reading a biography of him I think that started it you've mentioned this poem I've never heard of the whole thing I've never that's not even I know I bet there's a lot of that I've never heard of. I've heard bits and pieces of it over the last 15 years.

Wow. I think what's interesting, though, is that you do, I like to finish something and move on from it. Yeah. And where you like to. Certain things. You like to go, you like to keep it yours. I just like having, being in the middle of things.

I don't always like the feeling of a beginning. I relate to that so much. Yeah. Holding on to things. Like most of my stuff before this year was just living in my computer for like a decade. You know, like I wasn't, like all those Elastronaut poems and all the poems in the new one, they weren't really going anywhere. They were just living in my little mind and my computer.

And there was just something really special about that, I think. One of the things that's been really eye-opening about being married to a poet and someone who writes under a pseudonym often in anonymous poetry is it's made me ponder for the first time, are there thousands or millions of people like this who are just writing these brilliant things in secret i think there are i think i think there are i think there are two i mean that that's been my takeaway most of my my most of my friends have hidden amazing art my dad has a stack of he he's written my mom a love letter or a poem

every one or two a year for their whole lives and he's got a stack. It's beautiful. It's so beautiful. Some of them suck. Oh my god. I mean we like to edit them. I have notes on them going back to the beginning

of their marriage. And I didn't know just and i didn't know that i didn't know that until just a few years ago i also didn't know that my dad has been meditating for 20 years he only revealed that wow uh last couple christmases ago i'm like well why didn't you get me to do that you know um anyway but as someone who's like the extrovert in our relationship is like i i think before i met jen i couldn't even grasp that i couldn't grasp the idea of creating something great and not sharing it with people corinne's description of it you're sort of been knitting it i totally relate to that the sort of joy of like creating the pattern of it or just like just being able

to go to it when you have some time to sort of you know actually for the first time ever i've you know cut my own hair and we una and mike helped me and it was kind of a terrible haircut it's pretty short and it looks awful it's gorgeous but um i was like editing it every day the way kind of the knitting idea that you have like I just started to treat it like a poem. I would just do a couple snips a day and just sort of felt like I had to edit it. I don't know. And it was compulsive. And I felt like it's very similar to how I see writing,

which is sort of this compulsiveness to go back to it and see what you can do with it today. But I love working on the same piece for a really long time yeah i'm working on a similar mustache right now but i i the thing about mike that you were saying about um being an extrovert or and and it's true i i am definitely an extrovert and corinne is an introvert and i I've thought about that. I just wondered why. Because I am incredibly insecure. And I think the insecurity has made me more of an extrovert. Does that make sense?

Because I'm desperately trying to show strength that I don't actually feel internally. And I'm trying to project something that maybe isn't totally there. Or even trying to connect with people in an external way that confirms that maybe what you're doing is okay kind of thing. Exactly. Yeah, I actually welcome negative feedback because it makes me even more, you know, I'm like, oh, really? And then I go back in and just prove them wrong.

That's such a superpower, though. No, I know. Part of it, I think my parents were artsy. I mean, my mom was kind of a schoolteacher. My dad was a lawyer. But they were always making art in the basement, always working on stuff, whether it's the garden or paintings or little things. Sculptures. Sculptures.

And they never made a big deal out of it, but everything I made, I think they wanted to be artists, but they weren't. But if they saw their kids going towards art, I think they just wanted us to follow that dream. And so my parents, everything I did, even the shittiest drawings, just the dumbest stuff they just loved my mom would hang up and just talk about what what she loved about it and they kept sending me to art classes and my parents being kind of you know unconditionally uh maybe overly um

supportive of my weird art gave me a delusional confidence that I don't know if I'd be able to do what I do without it. And so it's a, it's a weird, it's a weird thing. It's turned me into an annoying person, but what, what, what if your dad's journals are uncovered one day? And it's like, uh, yeah, I was going to say, look like it's like in this fake empire it's like wait a minute let's go that's right this is true many of the of the the national lyrics that people have tattooed their bodies or inscribed on their wedding rings are Corinne's. And I even saw

somebody that, it was like a quote, it was tattooed on their shoulder and it was a lyric and it said Matt Boehner underneath and I was like, I didn't tell them that it was one of Corinne's lines because I didn't want to make them change their tattoo. What was the line?

Well, one that everybody seems to one of Corinne's lines because I didn't want to make them change their tattoo. What was the line? What was the line? Well, one that everybody seems to... It's my favorite line. I think maybe it's my favorite thing that's ever been written that Corinne... In all the world. No, of mine, or that I've gotten credit for is, all we have to do is

be brave and be kind. And I know that came from sort of a twist, a version of something that Berryman said or Robert Lowell. No, no. I think I was reading, I don't remember who the poet was, but it was like a collection of advice from such wise people. And somebody's quote was always be kind kind kind and we were talking about that as we were breaking up oh really it's in one of our breakup

conversations yeah or one of our like should we break up before you go on tour conversations yeah we were in that same murky zone. You guys probably were. Wow. Jen is the same way. I mean, I always say that she has the best line in my girlfriend's boyfriend, which is, you can't choose who you love. Yeah.

And I think that has a quadruple entendre with this conversation today. So every episode we shine a light on a nonprofit or a charity or anything, any organization that you guys have given to in the past or you want to support, and we will link to it in the show notes. And is there anything you guys were thinking of? Yeah, well, actually it was literally two days after Trump won that the nationals manager, my dear friend Brandon Reed, called and said, what should we do?

And we started this thing called Seven Inches for Planned Parenthood, which we thought was maybe an inappropriate title, but we thought it was funny, so we stuck with it. And that's a nonprofit, and it's just a collection of comedians, doctors, and we have some different public speakers. We have Margaret Atwood. She reads a couple poems on it. That's awesome.

If you want to, you can buy the box set or the songs individually or you can just donate to Planned Parenthood of America. It's at 7inchesforplannedparenthood.com. Awesome. That's great. That's felt official. Working it out, cause it's not done. Working it out, because there's no wow that that may be my favorite episode so far it's my favorite band my favorite poet my favorite person uh and a whole new idea which is this concept of writing as knitting something that you keep secret and it's private

but you keep going back to and i feel like like I'm going to listen to this episode again. I want to thank Matt Berninger and Corinne Besser, as well as The National, for letting us use their brilliant songs today, which can be found wherever music is available. Also their manager, Brandon Reed, who is so helpful. Special thanks to my brilliant wife, J-Hope Stein. I convinced her to join instagram and post poetry

on it and so she is at j hope stein and also our book is now officially everywhere curbsides and website sides and audible and all the places you like it, write a user review. If you like this podcast, write a user review. Write a lot of user reviews. That is an excellent use of time. Thank you for all the feedback on the book. It has been so wonderful to hear how people are experiencing it. It's called The New One,

Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad with poems by J. Hope Stein. More on that at thenewone.com. The producers of Working It Out are Peter Salomon and Joseph Berbiglia. Consulting producer Seth Barish. Sound mix by Kate Balinski. Special thanks to my consigliere, Mike Berkowitz. Another special thanks to Jack Antonoff for our theme music.

And as always, a very special thanks to our daughter Una, who created my radio fort. Once again, our thanks to Sam Adams, who is presenting the Restaurant Strong Fund. Join them at SamuelAdams.com. And thanks to everyone who listened, whether you're writing or knitting or baking or painting or writing poems or jokes, thanks for being a part of our journey. Tell your friends, tell your enemies, we're working it out.