The 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're

going to meet a distinguished guest and ask them to go deep on their

inspiration, on their writing process, on the general ups and downs of making

a life in the arts.

So whether you're a grizzled veteran collecting mailbox money on an island in the sun somewhere or

otherwise frustrated genius scratching out verses on the back of company letterhead this is your show because ultimately

it is what every writer seeks most an ironclad excuse to put off actually writing. The thumbnail portrait of Joe Eley's life and career reads something like an Americana music

Bill Brasky yarn. Born in 1947 in Amarillo, Texas and raised in Lubbock, he began playing in West Texas clubs at the ripe old age of 14.

When Jerry Jeff Walker passed his demo tape along to the powers that were at the time in

Nashville he was signed to MCA records he's a founding member alongside Jimmy Dale

Gilmore and Butch Hancock of the Flatlanders he a up and at the time unknown Hitchhiking Towns Van Zant who at the end of the ride passed

along a vinyl pressing of his first album.

Along with Dwight Yoakum, John Prying, James McMurtry, and John Mellencamp, he was a part of the early 90s supergroup, The Buzzing Cousins.

In 1998, he won a Grammy alongside Flaco Jimenez and David Hidalgo for their project,

Los Super Seven. He counts Bruce Springsteen as one of his most ardent fans,

and has even enlisted the boss to sing

backing vocals for him in the studio. Most recently he joined the ranks of

Willie Nelson and Billy Joe Shaver when the legislature named him the the me to his ranch outside of Austin, Texas, and under the bows of a thousand-year-old

live oak tree in his front yard, I got a chance to hear him reflect on such a life.

So Joe, you were born in Amarillo, but then grew up in Lubbock. Yeah.

And you once wrote about that part of the world since you're from there you have a unique

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