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 scouring YouTube for copyright violations to flag,

or else a scrappy upstart, waiting outside a stage door to slip your demo into the hands of

some poor beleaguered tour manager, 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 August 2017. Thank you for joining us. I'm glad you're here. How was your eclipse? I hope the eclipse of the century this week wasn't as bizarre for you as it was for me. I had a bit of a lucid moment.

I spent the eclipse in the parking lot of a laundromat in Salt Lake City,

because that is a true-to-life snapshot of where I'm at these days.

The sun being blotted out while I'm waiting on my clothes to dry with these strange, like, Mormon gutter punks

lurking around my rental car. So hopefully the next time that a geological event causes me to hold up a mirror

to my life in my current position, I'll be somewhere very, very far away from that parking lot and that laundromat.

Thanks, though, to everyone who came out to a show on this mountain state tour I've been doing.

Thanks to everyone who came out in Salt Lake and Boise and Missoula and all the shows out west.

I'm meeting folks who have been coming to shows of mine out there for close to a decade now.

And that is immensely humbling. Thanks, guys.

Today I'm going to air another one of the interviews that I taped at Newport Folk last month

for a full description of that event for its historical context and for the debt of gratitude that I owe to everyone involved in putting it together.

I'll refer you to our episode from last month.

If you haven't listened to the show with Shaky Graves yet, I recommend that you do,

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