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, ruefully admonishing someone for requesting

a Jackson Brown song from your Eagles tribute band, or else a scrappy upstart, stripping the vinyl

off your amplifier because you heard it would improve the tone, 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 January 2018. Happy New Year. How are you? Thank you for being here.

Before we get started with the show, as always, I just have a little bit of housekeeping here.

If you'd like to hear some of my music live in the coming months, Here's where I'll be. January 26th and 27th

at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival, February 4th through 9th on the Cayamo Cruise. And then I'm going to be

doing some headlining shows, February 12th at the Blue Door in Oklahoma City, supporting Steve Earl,

February 26th at City Winery in New York City.

March 6th, I'll be headlining in Cleveland, the 7th in Pittsburgh, the 8th in Columbus, March 9th in

Ann Arbor, March 10th in Toronto, and then finally March 11th in Buffalo, New York. It's been a long time since I've

been to Buffalo. I'm looking forward to getting there. If you're a new listener to this show,

and I would expect this month for that to be the case for many of you, we have about two years

of shows in our archives that I hope you'll go back and check out.

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