Hi and welcome to the working songwriter, the show where today's best songwriters come to Talk Shop.

I'm your host, Joe Pug.

Each episode here, we host 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 trying to sell obscure XLR to RCA cables on eBay,

or a scrappy upstart, learning the hard way on your first tour to not take powerful,

dubiously sourced edibles before a transatlantic flight. This is your show. Because ultimately

it is what every writer seeks most, an ironclad excuse to put off actually writing.

What's up, guys? It's the last Friday of August, 2018. I'm glad that you're here. It's been a great

month in my world. I took most of it off to hit the beach with my family, and then after that I did a few

shows out in California. Thanks to everyone who came out to those. It's been cool. I've been noticing

in the last six months or so

a contingent of people who first found out about my stuff from the podcast rather than the music itself.

So that's a new phenomenon for me and it's very heartening. I love it. Thank you for coming out to support.

We've got a great interview for you today, but first, we got a lot of stuff to cover, so let me get straight into it.

I want to give you an update on the Music Modernization Act going through Congress.

If you'll remember, our last podcast on this feed wasn't an interview. It was

actually an emergency episode delving into the finer points of this legislation that's going to

mean so much for songwriters and how they're compensated. And at the time, when the episode

was coming out, it looked as though the bill was going to be hamstrung in the Senate.

Since that episode aired, the Performing Rights Organization, CSAC, has withdrawn their contentious amendment that looked like it would deep-six the bill.

The main bone of contention that they had was the creation of the music licensing

...