Hello and welcome to the working songwriter.

The show where today's best songwriters come together and talk shop. I'm your

host, Joe Pug. Each episode here, we meet a distinguished guest and we ask them to go deep,

on their inspiration, on their process, on the general ups and downs of making a life in music.

So, whether you're a grizzled veteran collecting mailbox money,

or a frustrated genius, scratching out verses on the back of company letterhead,

or anywhere in between, this is your show.

Because ultimately, it is what every writer seeks most.

An ironclad excuse to put off actually writing.

Hey everybody. Before we get started today, I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to write me after our inaugural episode with comments, compliments, critiques, questions, all that.

And I want to address the most common critique I received, which is that the show did not feature any of the guest's actual songs.

And I agree with you. The show would be much better with them. And in fact, in the original pilot

I recorded, I had several of Joe Ely's songs sprinkled throughout, and it was on balance a much better

episode.

Here's the catch.

To my understanding, as of yet, there is no way to comprehensively license the use of

copyrighted music in a podcast.

I wish that I could just go to BMI or ASCAP, one of the performing rights organizations,

and purchase some sort of annual blanket license for the songs of all the artists that I'll host here.

But to my knowledge, that does not exist yet for this medium, at least.

Now, I guess I'll work around to that would be to have the artists come in and play a live version of one of their songs here.

But as for myself, and having done that before, I can tell you that playing songs live in an interview sitting is

...