The One You Feed - The Journey of Life Through Songs with Frank Turner
Episode Date: January 24, 2023In This Episode, You'll Learn: How his songs represent some of his values, like kindness and how we need to remember to be more kind in our interactions with each other. Learning persistance and his ...drive to keep going and never give up when faced with difficulty. Why he wrote the song, Get Better, which is about resilience and remembering there is always somewhere to go The importance of meaningful friendships in life How life will always have challenges and we can make the choice to continue on, knowing it will get better To learn more about Frank Turner and his work, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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I suppose I could sort of give up, however you want to put it, rest on my laurels at
any point in my life.
But thus far, like hacking away further has led to on balance better things.
And I think that that gives me a degree of optimism.
Welcome to The One You Feed.
Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.
Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true.
And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.
We see what we don't have instead of what we do.
We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter.
It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.
This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
how they feed their good wolf.
I'm Jason Alexander.
And I'm Peter Tilden.
And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like
why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?
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The Really Know Really podcast.
Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Frank Turner,
a guest we interviewed seven years ago, and he's back for a second interview. He's an
internationally charting, award-winning singer and songwriter and author. This episode starts
with a discussion with Frank himself, followed by three short interviews with fans of his music, including Eric and I's friend Joe, Eric's son Jordan, and the One You Feed's
own Jenny Gay.
Hi, Frank. Welcome to the show.
Hello. Thank you for having me. How are you?
I am very good. It's great to have you back. I think we had you on about seven years ago,
and you were kind enough to come on a very unknown show at that time and made me deeply
happy.
So I thank you for that.
And I'm happy to have you back.
Well, I'm honored to be a repeat guest.
You know, we always start this off by reading the parable, the two wolves and see what you
think about it.
So I'll read it to you and get your reaction for where you are today.
So there's a grandparent talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there's
two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that
parable means to you and your life and in the work that you do. Well, I mean, I think that it's an
interesting thing that I'm doing this again, because I vaguely remember us talking about this
seven years ago. And I think looking at my own kind of personal history, my own take on this
is going to be, I suspect, different to what it was seven years ago. I mean, it may not be
different rhetorically. That's the thing that I'm kind of interested in. But it's certainly like my life
has changed pretty significantly, pretty dramatically in the last seven years. You know,
I settled down a fair bit in my personal life. I met my wife seven years ago and I got married
three years ago and I still drink alcohol, but I have given up other substances in my life. And
that was a pretty serious effort.
And it's one that certainly wasn't done seven years ago, even though I might have claimed as
much at the time. So, you know, there was a fair amount of wolf feeding going on at the time.
I mean, it's a powerful parable. It remains a powerful parable. I like the fact that it doesn't
shy away from the fact that those two things exist inside all of us, you know, and always will.
And almost to a degree, there's a part of me that thinks that if you just had one and
not the other, that that would be sort of weirdly skewed somehow. Do you know what I mean? I think
that there is a degree of balance in there somewhere. But nevertheless, you know, I do
actively attempt to feed the good wolf these days and probably do a much better job of it than I did
seven years ago.
Let's say that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've had the substances battle myself and it's often that way.
You make a little bit of progress, you slide back, you make a little bit of progress, and then
hopefully you hit a point where it's a little more steady. So what I thought we might do for
this conversation is we talk a lot on this show about values, about knowing who you are,
what matters to you and the person you want to be. Otherwise, you're just buffeted by
the culture and conditioning and instinct. And so I thought maybe we'd explore some of your songs
through that lens. And the first one I wanted to look at is going back a while, but it's eulogy.
You said about eulogy that you did it to try and write a brief statement of purpose
in your book on songwriting. You said that. guitar solo Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut
Not everyone was born to be a king
Not everyone can be Freddie Mercury
Everyone can raise a glass and sing can be Freddie Mercury Everyone
can raise a glass and sing
Well I haven't always
been a perfect person
And I haven't done what
mom and dad had dreamed
But on the day I die
I'll say at least I fucking tried.
That's the only eulogy I need.
That's the only eulogy I need.
That idea to me of trying, just trying your best best feels so fundamental to me in a value sense. And
it's always seemed to be in your work. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think one of the things
about that for me is that to talk around the houses for a second, I do that quite a lot.
You know, if you kind of read about Mozart, you know, who's playing concertos by Tammys 3,
or indeed, you know, Bob Dylan, who pretty much just kind of dropped out of the sky, fully formed as an artist,
as far as I can tell. You know, and indeed, every day one can hear, you know, young musicians,
young artists, young writers, singers, performers, whatever they might be, who are just so kind of
like fully formed from the off. And that's great, you know, or indeed, you know, you could talk
about young athletes who by definition are doing pretty well by time they're recently emerged into life. I was just
never one of those people. Like I could barely sing when I joined a band I couldn't play.
And there was a fair degree of brute force involved in me learning how to do what I do.
And within that, like one of the people who chimed with me from an early age was Henry
Rollins, because Henry Rollins talks quite a lot about not being kind of particularly adept at
anything when he first sort of emerged into the idea of art in his life. And I sympathize with
that a lot. And I feel like I've had to kind of like shape who I am and what I do. I learned how
to sing, kind of, and I learned how to play the guitar, kind of, and my songwriting
is for other people to judge, you know, and I figured out how to do what I do and to sort of
fashion myself into something that I was comfortable with. And it's an ongoing process,
and it's full of wrong turns and missteps and all the rest of it. But you have to sort of keep the
wheel turning somehow, do you know what I mean? And that's where the trying thing comes in for
me is that like, I suppose I could sort of give up however you want to put it rest
on my laurels at any point in my life but thus far like hacking away further has led to on balance
better things and i think that that gives me a degree of optimism yeah you've talked before about
how influenced you were by sort of the hardcore scene, Black Flag, the DIY ethos,
right? I was 15 in 1985. And, you know, I formed a terrible punk band called the Walking
Amphetamines. And we had no drums.
It's a great name.
Yeah, thank you. We went out and stole trash cans, and we were terrible. But I was so inspired by
that sort of idea, too, of just, you know, try, do your best.
And, you know, I also come at it from, and I've heard you say this before, that you think there's like the Protestant or Puritan work ethic, you know, infused into that DIY and being a Midwesterner in America.
You know, I kind of got like a double dose of it.
So that's just always been a big, big value of mine.
And I just have loved that song from the moment I heard it.
Well, thank you. That's very kind.
So maybe now let's jump to another value that comes much later in your career and is also
something that is core to my values, which is the song you wrote called Be More Kind.
Sure. They've started raising walls around the world now
Like cackles raised upon a cornered cat
On the borders in our heads
Between the things that can and can't be said
We stop talking to each other
And there's something wrong with that. So before you go out
searching, don't decide what you will find. Be more kind, my friends. Try to be more kind.
Talk to me about kindness, the role that plays in your your life and why that's so important to you
yeah i guess i had a moment of confluence if you like when i was writing that song i mean it's
funny actually talking about this for the first time in a while with a degree more distance on it
i had a moment in time around 2013 when i sort of first came to like mainstream prominence in the
uk certainly and to a lesser
degree, but still a little in the States, of getting pretty badly burned by, well, broadly
speaking, by that fact of exposure. You know, ultimately, one could say that the definition of
mainstream is having your music exposed to something beyond a core audience, beyond a
voluntary audience. You know, if you're an underground band, everybody who hears you is people who sought you out.
You know what I mean?
And by definition, to sort of poke your head over the parapet, as it were,
if you're on the radio often or whatever,
your music is exposed to lots of people who don't necessarily like what you do.
And that's fine.
That's all, of course, that's just life.
But it means that a fair number of people become aware of who you are
and don't necessarily love you.
Do you know what I mean?
And of course, like, you can't spend your day trying to advertise your existence to
the world and then complain when everybody thinks the sun shines out of your backside
but um at the same time like anybody involved in kind of promoting themselves in that way there's
a degree of kind of performativeness to it there's a degree of kind of like a need for sort of love
or whatever how you want to put it. So it can be a difficult thing.
And in retrospect, I can say I've seen it happen
to a lot of different people.
It was quite sharp for me.
I got quite burned.
It was exacerbated by the fact that this was in 2013, 2014,
a point in time when the kind of the negative sides
of social media were less well understood,
I think it's fair to say.
And like, I think nowadays, most people,
including most artists are sort of savvy enough
to understand what a Twitter pylon is and that it's something that you should avoid or just
not pay attention to and blah, blah, blah.
And that wasn't so much the case in 2013.
And anyway, so I had a bit of a rough time with all of this kind of thing for a couple
of years.
And then I also was reading my favorite poet was a man named Clive James.
And Clive James had terminal cancer and he was given six months to live and live for about six years, which is great.
I mean, it's still a great sadness that he's left us.
But he wrote a number of poems about mortality and about facing the end of his life, which he ended up having more time to think about than he had originally thought he might do.
And he has a poem called Lesson de Tenebre in which he says the lines, I should have been more kind.
It is my fate to find this out, but find it out too late.
And that landed with me so hard because I think the thing that I'd sort of started to
kind of just about be able to kind of like extract from my own experiences was that ultimately,
regardless of what my political disagreements or social disagreements or whatever or musical
disagreements might have been with everybody, the thing that bothered me was my personal sort of tenor of my behavior towards other people.
And that ultimately the thing that wakes me up in the middle of the night at those moments when I
was callous and unkind and cruel and all those kinds of things. And my God, do I have a catalog
of those to choose from to wake up in the middle of the night and to agonize over? I think lots of
us do. But with the
beginnings of a tiny bit of age and wisdom, it was just kind of like that was apparent to me as the
thing that was most important. And then here was this man who I regard as one of the most emotionally
wise and brilliant wordsmiths of the 20th century, facing his own end of his life and essentially
saying the same thing, but even more forcefully and saying, you know, the only thing that really
comes out of the wash in terms of our interactions with each other is the way that we treat the
people around us. And that was hugely powerful for me. You know, it's funny because like I made
an album called Be More Kind and I talked about that a lot for a period of time, as you do with
a record. And there were some people who got kind of annoyed at me for saying that, funnily enough,
you know, and ultimately it's not a panacea. It doesn't solve the world's problems. And indeed, quite often, the hardest part of it is when people
don't return that sentiment or that approach, you know. But nevertheless, even the occasions when
I've been shouted at and castigated in public, but have maintained my own composure and my own sort
of, hopefully, sense of kind of like humanity and generosity or whatever, I can look back on those with a better feeling than the times when I lost my shit and screamed
at everybody, you know?
Yep.
Yep.
I interviewed a guy last week named Father Gregory Boyle.
He's done a lot of work in Los Angeles with gangs and an amazing man.
And in his book, he had a line that said, just assume that compassion is the answer
to every question, which I mean, again,
that's a broad statement that I don't think we can say. Of course, it's not always, but it's a
pretty good orienting idea. One other thing is you were talking about Clive James and the end of
life. I don't know if you know, I'm sure you're aware of the band Clemsonide, the songwriter
Yves Barzillet. Aware of, but not super familiar with. As a person who loves songs, he wrote a song called Roger Ebert
about the American film critic
as he was getting close to passing.
Gorgeous, gorgeous song.
I'd recommend it.
I will investigate.
Okay, changing gears.
And I'm talking at a million miles an hour
because we don't have a ton of time.
So get better.
That's another, to me,
when I look at values, right?
There's this idea that there's always some place to go, always some move to make internally, externally, that makes you or your life or the world just a little bit better. And I love that song from the minute I heard it. And then as I was reading your book, I realized that one of the lines in it you got from the person who first turned me on to punk music, who was known at the
time, Johnny Rotten. Tell me a little bit about that line and him. Johnny Rotten is funny. I mean,
this is an aside to what we're talking about. But what I like about Johnny Rotten is that he's still
slightly beyond the pale for a lot of people now. And I think that that's incredible and absolutely as it should be. You know, I adore The Clash,
don't get me wrong, but The Clash have Museum of London exhibitions about them and they have
Supplements and The Guardian about their history as a band and blah, blah, blah. You know, and
they're just they're very much part of the arts establishment. And Johnny Rotten still 40 plus
years later isn't really acceptable to some people and i think including some people
you know in the art establishment and i just think that's the most incredible testament to
punk rock as an idea it wasn't supposed to be acceptable and all these people who kind of
clutch their pearls slightly at johnny rotten it's like exactly that's the fucking point anyway
i met him at a festival in Italy in roughly 2014.
And it was interesting because I do know people who've met him
and have had a bad experience with the man.
And it's not really my place to sort of have any comment on that.
Like, I'm sure that there are people who've met me
and have had a bad experience of me too.
I hope not.
I try not to have that be the case, but you never know.
But I met him and he was really nice.
And I asked him, which is a rare, rare thing for me.
I asked him to sign a piece of paper for me and he wrote on it, may the road rise to meet you and may your enemies be defeated
behind you. And I thought that that was beautiful. And I chivvied it around a little bit and put it
in a song, but very much with a nod in his direction, because it struck me as a really
powerful thing, you know, and Get Better as a Song was a song that I wrote to myself. It's very much
a pep talk of a song, but it was a pep talk that I knew that I needed and I wrote it to myself. And it's a wonderful thing for me when other people
read and feel something into that. That's fantastic. But like the primary target for
that song was myself. And I spat back the sea I took a battering boot, I've got thicker skin
And the best people I know are looking out for me
So I'm taking the high road
My engine's running high, I'm fine
May I always see the road rising up to meet me
And my enemies defeated in a mirror behind
I'm trying to get better
Cause I haven't been my best
She took a plane back
Markets started running on my chest
She drew a line across the middle
Of my broken heart
And said, come on now, let's fix this mess
We can get better
Because we're not dead yet I'm Jason Alexander.
And I'm Peter Tilden.
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Yeah, I mean, you said in your book on songwriting that, you know, you were sort of picturing yourself in this new, defiant, resilient state.
And I love that idea.
Just the resilience of coming through.
There's lots of that on that record.
I mean, the title of the record, Positive Songs for Negative People, is so great.
I think our second guest on the show was a fellow Englishman, Oliver Berkman, who wrote
a book called The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Hate Positive Thinking.
So that whole idea of sort of balancing those two things together, I've always loved. Yeah, yeah, sure.
Absolutely. All right. So now let's move on to your latest record. Now I'm kind of pivoting away
from the idea of values. But there's a gorgeous song on the record called A Wave Across the Bay
about Scott Hutchinson from Frightened Rabbit who passed. And I wanted to ask you a
question because a couple records back, again, on positive songs for negative people, there was a
song for another friend of yours who committed suicide. And it's called A Song for Josh.
Yeah.
I noticed something about these songs. This may be me reading into this. So feel free to say like,
that's not at all it. But the song for Josh, a friend who committed suicide, there's a sentiment of why didn't you call me? I failed you. There was a sentiment in there that felt more resistant to what had peaceful and I don't want to use the word hopeful about a song on suicide.
But the tone of those two songs to me is very different.
What does that bring up in you when I say that?
Yeah, that's totally fair.
I mean, I think the thing for me, there's a couple of things.
I mean, the first thing is that they're about two different people.
So, of course, the situation was different. Scott was very vocal about his mental health, both in his art and as a
person. And as crushing as it is to say, I was heartbroken when I heard that Scott had taken
his own life. But I wouldn't say that I was surprised, particularly. I'd always known that
it was a thing that was possible. Yeah. Yeah. I was hoping unlikely, but it was possible.
My friend Josh, on the other hand,
I had no idea that he had any sort of like leanings
in that direction, however the best way to put it.
That was truly shocking to me.
And therefore, you know, my reaction to it was quite different.
But also at the same time, I mean,
I sort of feel like I worked through a lot of things
after Josh's passing, partly in that song
and in conversations with
friends and his family and whatever else. And, you know, that put me in a slightly
different frame of mind, I suppose, about the second song. I didn't want to repeat the song,
of course, but I think anger is a valid emotion about suicide. I think it's a totally valid
emotion. And I did feel some of that around Scott as well. But I suppose the major sort of thing
that I wanted to get across in the Song of Wave Across the Bay for me
was the feeling that like,
and this is the hardest thing
that I know how to say
about what happened to him
or about anything really.
But like Scott was my friend
and he was a lovely man
and he was a beautiful artist
and he was a smart dude.
And one of the things about Scott
is that there was no part
of what happened to him
that was a mistake.
Like he knew what he was doing.
He took a decision and he went through with it.
I wish he'd made a different decision, but he didn't.
And ultimately, there is a part of me that wants to find a way of respecting his autonomy and his sovereignty.
And that's partly what that song is about. You were one of us, but you worked out how you could survive. man you had something in your soul that we could recognize
you were one of us but you worked
out how you could survive
at least for a while
there must have been a moment
just before you hit the water
when you were filled with a sense of peace
and understanding
with the wind in your hair
and the light in your eyes as you realized you were finally escaping Thank you. Outro Music I wish he was still here god damn but at the same time ultimately like I say he didn't fuck up he
didn't slip do you know what I mean he didn't make a mistake and do what he did he knew exactly what
he was doing and he did it and that was his choice. And there's a part of me that wants to
kind of like almost shake his hand and say, OK, dude, you know, that was you and that was your
right to do that, which I do believe. Yeah, it was devastating for a lot of people, myself included.
But do any of us have the right to say to him, no, you're not allowed to do that or whatever?
I mean, I don't think so. I wanted to part as friends. I mean, that sounds like a crazy thing to say. And it's not that I didn't want some people are carrying such a heavy weight and there's only so much that you can do and you
hope that it continues to get better. But sometimes it doesn't. Yeah. Well, then ultimately, it's not
really your right to tell somebody else how to feel about anything, really. And in both of those
situations, for me, like, as I say, there's a desire on some level to respect that person's
autonomy.
Yep. Frank, thank you so much for coming on. Your music is always one of the ways that feeds my good wolf over the years. It's been so important to me and it's great to see you again.
That's very kind of you to say, and thank you very much for having me back again. It means
I didn't screw it up too badly the first time around. All right. See you next time.
See you next time. Bye.
Up next is an interview with one of our good friends, Joe Russell.
Hey, Joe. Welcome to the show.
Thank you, Eric. It's a pleasure to be on.
So Joe is one of my best friends. He's been a best friend of mine since, oh boy, 1988 probably.
Lots of stories there, but we don't have time for all those.
But I wanted to ask Joe to come on and share a little bit about Frank Turner,
because he is someone else who loves him as much as I do. And I think he's got a couple songs
that were on his mind. So first, welcome. Thank you. Yeah, Eric, I'm really excited to talk about
Frank. And I vividly remember when you had given me a mixed list of all these songs. I knew that
you were into him. And I was like, okay, well, give me a list to introduce the world of Frank Turner to me. And I'm still
very fond of that. Occasionally I'll go back and just let that one roll. And I think of that time
when you had introduced Frank to me. Yeah. So what's the first song you chose?
It was the first song that I really said, oh my God, I love this music and what it
draws me into. And it live fast die old i used to act like none of this mattered and i used to say i didn't care
that we wouldn't be doing this forever but then the truth is that I was just scared
So you put up a front to protect yourself
But if we're down on the floor, why get back on the shelf?
You can't change your outfit once the night has begun
We've still got the fuel, but We've still got the fuel up
We've still got the fire
It's a new day
And let's never return
Let's keep on making mistakes
Till we're done
It won't last
So be bold
I'm gonna live fast and I'm gonna die hard
Gonna end my days in a house with high windows
On the quiet shores in the southwest
So use all the tunes now to open the beers
On my 70th birthday I'll see you right here
And together we will watch the sun set It's the one that I first fell for.
Instantly, I thought of my love for my closest friends, you and a few of our other best friends,
and just reflecting on all the life challenges that we've gone through over decades and just how we
just continue to push through them. And it's an emotional song for me.
What's interesting is the song that my son Jordan picked was a song that was also a song for him
about friendship. I think a lot of Frank Turner songs do that well. They talk about the importance
of friendship and how beautiful a thing it is. Yeah. And it's friendship and all of us realizing we're in it together to just, you know, get
through this crazy world and acknowledging how hard it is for all of us and stick together,
be together, and we will get through as well as we possibly can a lot better than if we
isolate ourselves.
I think it addresses the need for fellowship quite a bit.
Yeah.
Love and fellowship. Yep. Yeah. Love and fellowship.
Yep. Yeah. And I loved that song too. The first time I heard it, just the whole pretense of it,
like I'm not going to live fast and die young. I'm going to live fast and die old. I'm not going
to just settle for one of those things, you know, and obviously our speed of living has come way
down or we would not make it to be, would not make it to be old. But I just loved that idea the first time
I heard it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that there's certainly a lifestyle of Frank Turner fans that
probably had some really full lives at a very young age that hopefully they'll appreciate his
sentiment around like, you know, it's been great and let's continue to have something great that's
practical for kind of who we are in the here and now in our later lives. Yeah, it's not to say Frank Turner's
just for old people. I think that obviously, your son took a shine to him at a very young age.
And I mentioned, I have a second song that I quite love that I can't help but, you know,
sometimes tear up. I especially teared up when I heard this song live for the first time,
just trying to sing it, I was practically passing out because I was holding
back so many tears and shouting at the same time. And it was losing days. Besides the general
puzzlement of life just kind of passing by, the music has this punch of energy that just
overwhelms me, especially in that live setting. Oh, my broken, battered body
In the days when I was young
I used to fix itself quick, sharp
After every slip and stumble
but these days
I'm collecting scars
that don't seem to fade
cuts and bruises
that won't go away And I used to think that I would never live past 25
And when you think like that each day is a gift if you survive
But I survived too long
For my side of the deal
And as I reach that shore
I'm not sure how to feel
So I keep losing days
That used to take a lifetime
In the blinking of an eye
And all these small ideas
Are suddenly commitments
Of greatness that's on by It's just hard to deny how much impact it has when I hear it.
That's definitely another song that I would have to say is probably my very close second favorite song.
It was the second song that I know that I was like, oh, okay, now I'm just really falling in love with everything that's
Frank Turner. And now you have a new favorite memory to go with that song. What's that? Didn't
you say that you have a memory now of Chris making fun of it? Oh my God. Yeah. So yeah,
every time I hear this song, I obviously I have that initial impression and what it means to me,
but I'll never forget like playing it when we were all together and we were, we were just listening to music, you know, we were like juggling all these speakers around in that listening room.
saw Chris kind of like rolling his eyes at me, you know, just mocking it because he just doesn't like it. And now every time I hear it, not only do I have that sentimental experience of my original
love for it, but I also remember when Chris was making fun of me. And I like that as kind of a
bookmark in time of looking back at when we were together. Yeah. He does not care for Frank Turner's
music in the way that you, Steve and I do, which is why he is... It must be driving him crazy to do this edit.
That's why I'm going to interview like 60 people. He's going to just have to keep hearing why Frank
Turner is so great. It's why he's not been invited to participate in this. But yes,
he is having to edit it, which is sort of my subtle pleasure.
It's awesome.
I love that.
Well, Joe, thank you.
This has been fun for me because I got Jordan on the show, my son for the first time, and now I've got you on for the first time.
So this is great to get some of the people who mean the most to me.
My pleasure, too.
I'm really happy to be on the show and love the podcast.
Thank you so much, Eric.
I'm Jason Alexander.
And I'm Peter Tilden.
And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to
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radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Next, we have a short interview with a man you've actually heard about before on this show.
It's Eric's son, Jordan. Welcome to the show. Hey dad, how's it going? It's good. I'm so excited to have you on, to have my son on finally. People have heard about you a thousand times. So here you
are in somewhat person. We recorded this in person,
you and me in Columbus, and I, with all my years of audio experience, screwed it up. So now we are
doing it with you at home in Asheville and me in Columbus. And just going to ask you, like I've
asked some other people, to pick a Frank Turner song or two and then talk about what you love
about it. Yeah. So I had a really hard time trying to narrow down my options to one song i've been listening to frank turner kind of as long as i
can remember i don't really remember when you started listening to him but kind of on my own
was seventh grade for me which is probably about 10 years ago now so yeah a lot of formative years
through there that he's like sort of been with me so like picking one song has been hard but they're definitely songs that like i connect to different time periods i try to pick
one that i find myself connecting with currently so i chose saint christopher's coming home
friday evening barely even begins before my phone begins to ring with people asking where I am
And I can't suppress a smile
We talk a while chances are that I am far away
So I'm phased out of the plan and that's how I miss out
Another night the kind of night when nothing really happens
Yeah, but everything goes down
And in the end I'm just a promise
To pick up the phone
When I'm in town
But when the evening casts its shadows on the corners of my days
And I am old and I am settled in the place where I will stay The song is kind of about being away from home or being away from your friends.
But he sort of like puts like a slightly more positive spin on that.
Like I'm feeling the pain of being away and like missing these people.
But at the end of the day, like I know these people love me and I love these people.
And my life currently, I'm sort of between a lot of places for parts of the year and on the go.
So with certain friends, some of the year and then i make new friends my job is like a lot of coming and going
so i meet people for a few months get really close with them and then potentially never see them
again so those have been a lot of like what i've been experiencing lately so i've been like
resonating with that song and there's like a specific line in that song that i really like
something along the lines of he's like talking about missing out
and missing out on the kind of night
where like nothing's happening,
but everything goes down, something like that.
Those are my like favorite times
that I feel like I really miss.
Like you think you would miss
like a big birthday party or a holiday,
but it's sort of those casual nights
where like a new inside joke is made
or like a new favorite board game is found.
Those are the moments you really miss.
And that's what I like about Frank Turner
is like I've heard him in interviews say that he enjoys
songs where it feels like the song has like expressed something that he's always known,
just hasn't been able to put in words. And I feel like this song does that for me as well
as a lot of his other music. Yeah. You do have a life that has a lot of coming and going,
and that is difficult on friendship. And yet you've maintained a couple core groups of friends for quite some time now.
to see all of those friends. And then now the friends that I made like in college and a little bit after college and how that distance and time away like morphs and change things unnecessarily
bad, but it just makes things different and creates new dynamics and stuff like that.
Yeah. One of the other people I interviewed for this is Joe Russell, who I have been friends with
since I was 18. So that is a long time ago. I don't know, 30 some years, probably something like that. But I would say all but four years of that, two years of that, three years of that, maybe he's been somewhere else, New York or California. And we've still maintained a friendship all this time. And we still text, I went back and listened to it after you selected it because it's not one that I actually knew that well and really resonated with also. So thank you.
Yeah, you're welcome.
Well, I hope to have you on again.
Thanks. Me too.
Bye.
Bye.
Closing out the episode, here's the One You Feed's own Ginny Gay.
And now a voice you've heard before. This is Ginny.
Hello, everybody.
And now, a voice you've heard before. This is Ginny.
Hello, everybody.
And I'm going to ask her the same question. Tell me about a Frank Turner song that you love and why you love it.
I mean, I had to really put some thought into this to pick just one spirit of life is hard and it can feel really awful and we can get into some very dark places.
And then we can call on friends, we can call on our inner strength, and we can rally, you know, we can will ourselves to make the choice to continue on,
you know, despite the hardness and that it gets better. And so the song that kind of captures all
of that in the most powerful way for me is The Next Storm. And I think it's the music and the
lyrics that come together to like, just really conjure up that, okay, I can do this. I can choose to continue on and it's going to get better. We had a difficult winter
We had a rough few months
When the storms came in off the coast
It felt like they broke everything on us at once
It's easy enough to talk about bliss spirit When you're not holding the roof up and knee deep in it Bye. Lay low and waiting on the next storm
I don't want to spend the whole my life inside
I want to step out and face the sunshine
We lost faith in the omens We lost faith in the omens
We lost faith in the gut
We just ended up clutching at the empty rituals
Like gamblers clutching our hearts
And I don't care what the weatherman is saying
Because the last time that I saw him
He was on his knees, he was praying
The preachers and the scientists got soaked
Just the same and we wondered
If they'll ever get dry again
But I don't want to spend
The whole of my life indoors
Lay low, waiting on the next storm
I don't want to spend the whole of my life inside.
I want to step out and face the sunshine.
The lyrics are, we had a difficult winter. We had a rough few months. When the storms came in off the coast, it felt like they broke everything on us at once. And it's easy enough to talk about Blitz Spirit when you're not holding the roof up and knee deep in it. And the pictures and the papers get ruined by the rain. And we wondered if they'd ever get dry again. But I don't want to spend the whole of my life indoors, laying low and waiting on the next
storm. I don't want to spend the whole of my life inside. I want to step out and face the sunshine.
So it helps me to connect to that point when, you know, even though it's hard, we just have to
choose to step forward and step out and turn our face towards as cheesy as I feel like as I say it
now, the sunshine, you know, I just love it.
So I hope as you hear a bit of it, you love it too.
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I'm Jason Alexander.
And I'm Peter Tilden.
And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like
why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,
what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?
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