Hi and welcome to the working songwriter the show where today's best

songwriters come to talk shop I'm your host Joe Puck.

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

wearing a gold chain with a fender jazz master charm on it, or else a scrappy upstart.

Sending links from your Kickstarter campaign to a podcast host that you've never personally

met before. This is your show.

Because ultimately it is what every writer seeks most

in ironclad excuse to put off actually writing. Hey everybody, it's the last Friday of 2017,

and I'm glad you're here. Thanks for joining us. Oh boy our annual

Midwest holiday tour our December run through the Midwest was a blast. I got to go see Sean

molar's new place in the Quad Cities, the raccoon motel. They got a lot of

whiskey there and a lot of a lot of vintage br-a-brac on the wall. Don't get to use the word the

phrase brick-brac too much on this program. So thank you Sean for inspiring that. And I have to say, I learned

from this tour, Small Town America, you have changed in the last 10 years. I went to towns like Davenport, Grand Haven, and Goshen, and they are very different

from when I was touring there a decade ago,

because now it seems like all small towns

have amazing hipster amenities.

They all have craft breweries, they all have farm-to-table restaurants. They all have

pour-over coffee shops. What happened? What the hell happened? I think I think basically a lot of creative people from these small

towns they moved to big cities they became hipsters there they learned the

...