Hello and welcome to Forever 35, a podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves.

I'm Dori-Shafrier.

And I'm Elise Hugh, and we are just two friends who like to talk a lot about syrums.

And today we have a great guest, Alex Sujong Loughlin, who I sort of knew at BuzzFeed, but she is an amazing podcast producer and host and writer.

And she's just done some really cool stuff. She's a great new podcast called Try Hard. But in the

meantime, Elise, how are you? Well, I had a big weekend. I had a big weekend and I have a big night

coming up tonight, which is sort of on the same theme. I don't know if you know about this door.

I'm sure some of our listeners are hip to this.

It is the 25 year anniversary of Nellie's country grammar album. Wow. And I went to the University of Missouri and was a freshman there in the year 2000. And so there was no bigger song. You know, Nellie is St. Louis's biggest hype man of all time. And so there- St. Louis's own. Exactly. St. Louis's own. But I can't even, when I think about the way that Nellie really associates with St. Louis, I can't think of anybody else who associates with St. Louis as strongly.

Oh, that's interesting. As Nelly. I mean, who else can we think of? There's baseball players,

Ozzie Smith. He was huge. St. Louis Cardinals. Ellie Kemper. She's from St. Louis. She was big from

the office. I don't know why we know that she's from St. Louis. I think maybe Jenna Fisher, too, right now that we're thinking about the office cast. But anyway, so I think of Nellie and I think of St. Louis. And I think of being in college at the University of Missouri just after country grammar came out, because it was 25 years ago, it was the year

2000. And so there was no bigger song, Rush Week 2000 at the University of Missouri than Nellie's

country grammar. And it's the one with, I'm from the Lou and I'm proud. And but there was also,

yeah, yeah, there was also EI, the one that was like, Andalé, Andalé, Mama, yeah, yeah. So that one was on from

that album and then Ride With Me is on that album, which is just one banger after another. And I haven't seen Nellie live. I saw him in

person during Ferguson when I was covering Ferguson, which happened in St. Louis. Nelly came out

to support the protesters and the demonstrators. I saw him there, but I never heard him sing live.

So finally got to see Nellie last weekend, and he was performing with the one and only Jharul and Eve, EVE. It was huge.

The mom friends organized this, so the moms of my third grader, they were all elder millennials like me and knew

every line of every song. I had already seen Jha Ruhl and Eve live, but the last time I had seen

them together was my 21st birthday when I was still in college at the University of Missouri. So it was a real full circle moment to see Jha, to see Jha again.

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