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,

forcing your nephew to create a reverb account

for you to sell old gear for hard cash,

or else, a scrappy upstart,

freshly arrived in East Nashville

with nothing but a tube of chapstick and a dance belt,

this is your show. Either way,

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

Hey, everybody, thanks for being here this month.

If you're a regular listener to this show, you probably notice that we're publishing this episode a few days early.

Usually we air the last Friday of every month, but today we have a big announcement, and I wanted to run the show concurrently with it.

This has been in the works for a few months now, but we just confirmed it.

At the end of July, we're going to be taking the podcast on the road and doing a live version of it at the Newport Folk Festival.

This is a festival which gave me one of the first national platforms I ever got as a

songwriter back in 2009. I had just released my first album, Nation of Heat. They welcomed me to

their stage and they broadcast the whole set on NPR and just how much that helped me get a foot in the door initially cannot be overstated.

And in the intervening years, they've had me back a few times and really just supported.

...