Hello 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 who just still can't get over losing

that 1984 Olympics Coke commercial to Peter Satera,

or else a scrappy upstart,

turning a strange, dark childhood into a perfect A and B side,

this is your show, because ultimately, it is what every writer seeks most.

An ironclad excuse to put off actually writing.

Hey, everybody, it's the last Friday of June June 2017, and I thank you for joining us.

I just spent the last month moving my household from Austin, Texas to the Washington, D.C. area.

For about seven years, my wife and I lived in this little house on the east side of Austin. Next time

you're in town actually when you drive through Austin on I-35 and you pass the Frank Irwin

Center, which is the arena where the Longhorns play basketball. If you look on the opposite side of

the highway from that arena, you'll see painted like an Easter egg, purple, yellow,

and white, the tiny little house that we spent so many years in. And it was pretty bittersweet to leave

the place. It was pretty bittersweet to pack all of our stuff into a U-Haul. Truth be told, we probably wouldn't have needed one of those

big box trucks if it wasn't for all my music, BS, if it wasn't for all the guitars and pianos and

organs and stuff like that. But I packed it up. I drove it up to Texarkana. I took a right through

Tennessee, took a brief stop at Kenneth Pattengale's house in Nashville for a couple of stiff drinks and some late-night tunes.

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