You're listening to Nakedly Examined Music, a podcast about songs and songwriters.

My name's Mark Lintonmeyer.

My guest for episode 234 is John Kruth, who plays many instruments, and so has particularly

been into band as a session musician, playing mandolin and flute, with the violent femmes, the Reptile Palace Orchestra, D'Croitsin, other artists, and he has released around 24 albums.

You are right now hearing Grim Reaper's song from his first solo album, Midnight Snack, from 1987.

He's well known as the co-leader of the New York City

World Music Ensemble, Tribecistan, which released five albums and two EPs between 2009 and

2015. We're going to talk about the song, Be Careful What You Say to an Armed Lady by

Folk Lorkestra, which is more or less a continuation of

Tribecistan. The album is a strange day in June from 2023. Then we'll look back to one of

his recent solo albums forever ago, 2018, and talk about the title track from that. Then back

to Bedbugs by Tribecistan from New Delhi, 2012 2012 and we'll conclude by listening to a 1995 track

called Backcountry attributed to the electric chairman from their album Toast which is John and a bunch of

people from Camper van Beethoven. For more information please see cruthworks.com or look up John or Tribecistan on Bandcamp.

For more about this podcast, see Nakedly ExaminedMusic.com or get this episode entirely ad-free, plus access to my document with lyrics and structures and notes on these songs at patreon.com slash nakedly examined music.

So I'll play it a little bit of Grim Reaper's song from your first soul album,

1987's Midnight Snack.

We're going to jump to the present, but there's a lot of stuff in between.

And it seems like you are real multi-hyphenate.

So if we're just picking three, four, five songs for this,

you know, that's only a fraction of the styles, even the

instruments that you play. Can you say a little about that journey? I mean, there are, you know,

...