Hello.

Hello, this is.

Hello, this is the get you some productions podcast.

A podcast covering all things related to music production from the very first note to the last fan, everything in between.

So we're a long form, candid, open conversation about all things related to music.

It could be, you know, composition techniques, it could be whether, you know, it could be gig attire, like scarves, and everything in between.

So my name is Keith.

And my name is Daniel.

And we have a very special guest today.

His name is Aaron English.

And we have a connection to Aaron because we all attended Bard College.

And so we're lucky enough to have him on the show today because he is a very accomplished singer, songwriter, performer.

But, and before we get into it, so I have to do the business of the podcast.

The business of the podcast is like.

And subscribe, leave a comment, rating, review, all that crap.

We also happen to be affiliates of Reverb.com, which is a online marketplace for gear.

So you can click the first link.

Actually, we'll put Aaron's link first.

So if you want to, you should visit Aaron first and check out his stuff.

That's number one.

But if you want to support the podcast, the second link in the description is going to be our affiliate link to Reverb.

You can go on there and shop and you will find lots of awesome gear from big boxes, from individuals, from small retailers, from larger local mom and pop type stores.

It runs the whole gamut.

And so there's a lot of stuff on there.

You click the link, you buy something there, and we get paid a very small commission and it's no additional cost to you.

That's right.

So you might notice that Aaron has more keyboards than you do.

So go to reverb.com and you buy a new vintage keyboard.

Start trying to catch up.

Okay.

Keyboard envy.

All right, so like I said before, I'll, you know, so I checked out, I, I checked out your 2018, I think it was record called Songs from Somewhere Else.

Couple of songs I really liked about it, actually.

So just like we said before, we, we want to hear your story, but I'll just give you a little bit of praise before, to get your juices going before, before we get going.

So, so I definitely felt a connection to that particular record.

I look forward to checking out the rest of your stuff, but I felt a connection to that record because I sensed a deep spirituality in there that I thought was great.

And I liked how actually Dan and I talk about this all the time.

And actually it's Dan's wife's influence, but she has a poster in her office that says, the paths are many.

The truth is one.

This is something that comes up a lot on this podcast.

And to me, that record sounded like a kind of like a spiritual review in a way.

There were influences from many different cultures, so that was cool.

There were odd time signatures.

That was great.

There was definitely a vibe there, and there was some seriousness and also some uplifting stuff as well.

I have questions about the record, but I don't want to go into it too much, because if we get there, we get there.

But I will say also, I work in finance, and I worked for a big finance company for almost 20 years.

And so the song that connected with me very deeply was Wild at Heart.

And I thought that song was actually really special.

And I'm not just saying that I thought it was.

And it's not just because I worked in a cubicle for a long time.

There was something special about it.

Some of the lyrics were clever and touching, but the feel was great and the emotions came through.

The writing was really good.

The performance was really good.

So that was the number one.

And also, finally, the last thing is praying for time.

So in my house, George Michael is like a patron saint, and my daughter calls him Uncle Yug because, you know, it's just, I don't know, something special about George Michael.

And that is a really special song.

And so when I heard you covered it, I just thought, okay, we're going to get along, because I like this dude.

So that's enough from me.

I've said enough.

So what.

Really, what we want to know is so we like to connect with the human being who's behind the music.

So we want to hear your story.

You can start from when you were like a baby if you want to.

We don't, you know, or you can just start how you got into music, but where you grew up.

We want to know the whole story.

I think your fans probably want to know.

Have you done interviews like this before where you had to tell your whole story or anything like that?

Yeah, but the story, of course, grows with the telling.

Beautiful, man.

We're as.

As musicians, your storytellers for a living.

And the story is never completely told.

Yeah, so.

So let's.

Let's hear it.

You know, your fans who've heard it before will hear it again, but we'd like to hear it for the first time and maybe, you know, it'll be different.

I got stories all day, and, yeah, when I tour and when I live stream, which is Live stream twice a week and tour as much as I can.

And there's always, at least for the past decade, there's been a focus on concerts that are also storytelling.

So the.

What they call the listening room concert concept, often it's a house concert but.

Or a.

Like a little black box theater.

And it, it specializes in intimacy because the intimacy can make the, the.

The experience more deeply human.

And you get up to about 70 people in a room together and tell them stories and play the songs.

It becomes a different fish than what I'd done previously, which was mostly touring as a five to seven piece band.

And then it's.

It's extraordinary, but it's a completely different kind of extraordinary.

So tell Them the stories has become interwoven in two.

Delivering the songs and that has been an absolute blast because then the stories and the songs become immersive and the songs themselves become an unpacking and a show and tell.

And that album that you listen to before we started the interview, 2018 was recorded and written while traveling the world.

So every song has a.

A story to it they can unpack.

Not just on the surface with the lyrics and the music, but also where it was written and when and why and how and who it was recorded with.

And that.

That's how the, the name songs for Somewhere Else came from.

But my music from the very start has been stamped by experiences around the world and the people that I've collaborated with, which is a blast because then it's, oh, let me sing the song about when I lived with Cannib.

And then people into it in a different way than they would if they're just like, oh, cool beat.

Well, it is a cool beat.

And that can stand on its own.

That could be enough.

The, the best place to start might actually be George Michael, which is a wonderfully random point of reference as a songwriter because he was, I think, underappreciated because he was a pop floof like so many wonderful 80s songwriters.

It's more about the hair and the teeth really than it is the songwriting.

And then it can be harder to.

To step back and appreciate the craft.

He's as good a place as any, because he is.

He was my gateway drug, my entry into music.

I wasn't a music fan really.

I grew up near Seattle and my brothers were steeped in the Seattle scene, which is amazing.

It's an incredible, endlessly generous scene in that, from Paul Revere and the raiders in the 60s to Jimi Hendrix in the 70s and then building up steam in the 80s.

And 90s and 2000s, there's wave after wave of these genres and huge bands that some were.

Are more identified with Seattle than others.

But when the biggest band ever to come out of Seattle is Odessa, and some people have to say, wait, what's.

What's Odessa?

Then you know that Seattle has a deeper scene than you realize.

It's not just grunge, it's.

It's.

It's been a tastemaker for generations.

And I grew up knowing that Seattle was cool and that my brothers listened to all the cool Seattle bands.

And they were there when my brother's musical history became stamped by all the great bands that grew up in Seattle.

And I had to find my own identity as the little brother outside of all that, which meant anything that came from Seattle wasn't cool and what else was?

And I went fishing, I think, for what else is.

What can I call my own?

And I grew fascinated with, with pop and the.

The ambitions of pop.

In hindsight, it was I.

I still am hooked effortlessly and have been from the very start by anyone who takes the pop genre and pushes what's possible and at its heart.

And that's what drew me to George Mungle.

I think it also helped that as I was growing up, I was looking for somebody who was cooler than I ever thought I could be.

And there was a time when he was the A list sex symbol in pop culture.

That didn't hurt.

You're always looking for somebody to teach you how to appeal to the ladies.

And that has been a classic pop appeal for generations.

Whether you're appealing to the Sandman and Garfunkel fans with the nerd intelligence, or you're appealing to the Fleet Foxes fans with the disheveled, eccentric intelligence, there's always a wave of bands teaching teenagers how to be.

Be cooler than they thought was possible.

So as an entry point, you could hardly do better than the.

The primo sex symbol slash gonzo creative songwriter that was George Michael.

You and I.

I, I'll.

I'll just jump in for one second.

I.

First of all, I totally agree with you that he is very, very, very much underappreciated as a songwriter.

And there have been finally a bunch of documentaries highlighting how great he was, which I think is long overdue.

But also, we are not snobs on this show.

We, you know, I think we can.

I'm a huge jazz fan, but I also love pop.

Even current modern pop is, Is great.

So not at all snobbish here.

The.

Probably a flagship musical moment for Me and defining the.

What it means to not be snobby about Pop.

I did go to Bard College.

We talked about that.

That's what three of us have in common.

And my freshman year, one of the first weeks of class, if not the very first week of class, with Joan Tower, who is a legendary composer.

And gratefully she just continued to teach at Bard long after she needed to.

Yes, thank you for that.

Dr.

Tower and I didn't know anything about modern concert music, about composing operas or symphonies.

And she asked all of us to name some influences, to name what really inspired us.

And I remember we just went around the room and everybody was saying, you know, Shostakovich, lots of Tone row composers.

And the people that I, I didn't.

I didn't know anything about, but they were very impressive.

And then I said, George Michael.

I don't even.

I don't think Joan Tower knew who George Michael was.

But he dropped like a.

Like an anachronistic bomb style bomb in, in the room.

And in hindsight I was probably embarrassed and then quickly got over that.

But there was a time when pop couldn't.

Could stink up a room when you're trying to.

To show off your.

Your self respect and your ambitions.

But yes, absolutely no embarrassment.

And the, the extension of ambition to any pop or rock or folk genre kind of became my hallmark.

So that all of my heroes became, okay, who can take the hook that is candy and then push it as far as is reasonably possible and still make it go down like candy?

Which for somebody with Bard College roots is.

That's what's more Bard College than that.

Steely Dan, for instance, came out of Bard.

And they intentionally and from the very start and to the bitter end challenged themselves.

Okay, how can.

How can this be piped into Kmart and as interesting as possible and as subversive as possible lyrically and musically.

It's hilarious how successful they were.

Brilliant.

And that's.

So that's even more barred.

Kazan, Shostakovich.

In hindsight.

How can you sneak it in the back door?

As opposed to how can you become the greatest Tone Row composer ever?

Which is.

That's not sneaking in the back door.

That's bulldozing right through the front door with your cleverness.

So to have the roots of a Seattle kid who didn't want to belong in Seattle and had to go find his own thing.

I think it came out pretty well.

Instinct said this guy.

And that certainly laid a great foundation for both the joy and the ambition of great pop.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of times I think about my own roots in music.

And before I was even a musician.

I'm nursing a sick kid today, so you'll hear sneezing and nose blowing probably a lot.

I'm trying to keep myself muted when I'm not speaking.

So there's not an excessive amount of sneezing and nose blowing.

But when I was younger, I had a best friend who loved the Beatles.

And so when I was 10, all we did was listen to the Beatles.

And I think that there was something that just kind of like, got into my DNA about the musicality.

And there's a natural musicality to it that is.

I don't know.

I'll just go that far to say that there's a natural musicality to it that you.

I think you absorb.

It's like osmosis.

I would say yours was more purposeful.

Because it sounds like you were already within the active pursuit of music in a sense.

Or maybe you were just, you know, it was a form of identity.

But I also think George Michael had a very natural musicality to him.

And so I think that comes through in your songwriting.

Because there's a natural musicality to it.

There's a lot of.

There's a appropriate flow to stuff.

There's a melodicism that's very natural.

So I think that served you well.

Great.

That sense of instinct is fascinating territory, too, because you can be taught endlessly how to write and what to write and why.

And there was a lot of that in college, which I'm forever grateful for.

Surrounded by composers who were legends or becoming legends in contemporary concert music.

And I didn't know anything about that.

And they weren't, quote, unquote, authorities on pop music.

But the moment I started talking about, I would.

The Police, for instance, their eyes would light up and they'd want to drill into that song.

Or the Prince.

Let's spend the next hour talking about this song that I'm passionate about.

It was such a gift to.

Not just to me, but to these composers who were my advisors and professors.

And didn't realize that I'd stumbled into a gold mine for both of us.

And the sense that intuition has to drive a lot of it doesn't really get the attention necessarily that it deserves in an academic environment.

Can you study pop and rock and be serious about it?

Like serious in an ivory tower academic sense?

You can.

You can pull apart.

Like when Ringo switches to a waltz feel in the post chorus and then back into four for the verse.

You can notice that and dissect It.

In a clinical way, but there's something about popular music that it.

It's more about.

And I, I remember reading this when I was a kid.

George Michael sitting in the garage, listening to his little record player that his parents bought him with the built in speakers and putting on a Motown record and then saying, no, no, no, the melody should have gone like this.

That was when he discovered that he.

Maybe he was a songwriter because he loved these records.

And he thought, no, no, no, no, no.

It would have been even better if it did this and that intuition first.

That's the sign of talent, but it's also a sign that the genre itself can be driven by instinct as much as by craft.

Not to diminish the importance of craft.

And that's why I'd recommend going to college and spending a crapload of money on studying pop craft.

But.

But he didn't.

And it turned out all right.

When did you, when did you first Start learning piano?

7 years old and we already had.

We already had one in the, in the house.

And I think that being the younger kid and seeing my.

My brothers learn piano because.

Because we had one and our parents thought it would be a good idea, probably inspired me to be excited about starting and then to not consider that I could stop, which there's so many.

History is littered with the, the.

The corpses of good intentions where folks wish that they had continued to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah when they were a kid.

And it just never occurred to me to stop.

So I took lessons and then suddenly hit teenagehood and realized, wow, there's this thing called pop music.

Why am I still studying Chopin?

And girls think that pop music is cooler, so why am I still studying Schumann?

And it's hilarious to think of what your motivations are, but my motivation was it didn't occur to me that you could stop.

I dutifully just kept learning piano and forgot to stop.

And meanwhile, at some point, the, the key turned in the door.

I realized, oh, people think this is cool.

Other teenagers think this is cool.

I distinctly remember Billy Joel saying, I realized other kids thought this was cool.

Specifically girls thought it was cool.

So I kept writing songs.

And then eventually he also said, I grew out of it, of the, oh, girls would like this.

But I kept writing songs.

So it's a happy accident.

Driven by that need to belong and need to identify.

That need to look cool is hilarious.

And then decades later, you're like, oh, I actually kind of like doing this.

So thank you, adolescent hormones for the accident.

Yeah, it's a bit Primal, actually.

And people do.

I mean, I think especially.

Especially men, there's, like, some kind of need to find something, you know, to fluff up your feathers, you know, so to speak, or whatever the case may be.

Like, just to find something that distinguishes you or that you're expert at so you can show off, so you can prove that you are, you know, a viable mate, which is, like, insane.

But I did actually want to back up for a second because I think we had a similar experience.

I also was kind of the same when I learned piano when I was a little.

Little kid.

And I did give up.

I was probably like five or something.

You know, I went to, you know, kid piano lessons, took piano lessons for a couple years, and then I.

And then I gave up.

But I started learning guitar at 12, and I think I had the same.

And I think I've heard other people put it the same way maybe a little bit, but not too often.

Just.

I started learning guitar at 12, and I just didn't think.

It just never occurred to me that it was ever something that I would stop doing.

I just have to keep doing it.

I'm not really sure why.

And honestly, it fucks me up sometimes because I think, you know.

And you probably have a similar.

I know Dan does, because we've talked about this.

It's like, who am I?

Am I.

Am I my instrument or am I songwriting?

Am I musicianship, or am I more or less than that?

You know, if it goes away, who am I?

You know, that's sort of like the thing, because it.

You know, it's sort of like as soon as I started doing it, I was just like, oh, yeah, this is who I am.

This is part of me.

Anyway, that was my reaction to that.

But I'm actually.

So what?

And so now.

When did you start singing, too, and playing piano?

Was that also a high school thing?

In grade school, we had.

You'll have to tell me whether it's similar for you guys.

Weekly, I suppose, music classes.

And music class was you'd go into the music room and the lady would sit at the piano, and she'd hand out Xeroxed or mimeographed, depending on your age sheets, with popular song lyrics.

And everybody would sing the popular song lyrics while she played the piano, which is really strange in hindsight.

All the boys would mumble uncomfortably and the girls would actually sing.

I must have just did what I was told and sang loudly enough that she noticed, so that there was a Carmina Barana production happening in Tacoma.

So I grew up in a little fishing village near Seattle.

And I got recommended to sing in the choir for Carmina Barana.

It's an amazing piece of music.

I didn't know it.

And when I started singing in the choir, it was just because somebody asked me to, and I didn't question why.

And I remember after rehearsals and after the performances, we'd go down into the.

The cafeteria area in the performance hall for punch and cookies, and all the adults would come up to us laughing and say, do you realize what you kids are singing in in Latin?

Because they're all medieval drinking songs in their body.

Of course we don't.

And I was 8 or 9, so once again, it never occurred to me to question.

Somebody asked me, too.

So, okay, I must have been able to sing in tune, and I must have did what I was told, which is read what's on the sheet here.

Oh, I know these songs.

I hear them on the radio all the time.

It's cool how time folds into itself, because decades later, I was playing as a solo artist, like I have for the past 10 years at touring, playing listening rooms.

And one of these listening rooms is an awesome mansion built over 100 years ago in Oysterville, Washington, owned by the same family, for since it was built, they were oyster barons.

So this was a capital of the oyster industry.

And they were filthy rich from selling oysters they'd harvested out of the.

The bay, the Willapa Bay off of the Pacific Ocean.

And they would host these croquet parties once a year.

People would fly in from all over the world, dressed to the nines, and play croquet on the lawn in front of Willapa Bay, in front of the oyster beds.

So vibey, so cool.

And this couple, in their late 80s, was hosting a regular listing room series that had been going on forever.

And I was lucky enough to be invited to play it.

I set up in.

In the living room in this mansion.

And there are all these people in these yellowed photos looking down from the wall.

And these are all the ancestors and distant relatives in this family.

And you see them, like, getting off of a plane.

There's a photo of them getting off a plane and greeting fdr.

Or there's a photo of them with New York Times editors and Pulitzer Prize winners, and on and on and on, all over this wall.

And directly above me while I was performing was this guy with a handlebar mustache, sort of walrus like, and he looked familiar.

So after the concert, two amazing things happened.

One, I asked, who's that guy?

She said, well, that's my uncle Willard, Willard Espy, who was a dilettante and journalist and writer in New York and known for loving words.

My dad loved words.

Words.

What was his name again?

Willard Espy.

Willard Espy.

Espy.

And he had been looking down at me from my dad's bookshelf as I was learning to write songs as a kid.

He wrote a series called Words at Play that was particularly famous, particularly loved.

My dad just loved words and loved the English language and loved dissecting it and would loved puns and words that could mean opposite, opposite things.

And he delighted in it.

I'm sure that that had something to do with my love of songwriting.

I got fascinated by words and I thought, well, that's fitting.

This is sort of a full circle moment that Willard is now looking down at me, approving of my music and that his niece was.

She was just over the moon, loved the concert, and she said, oh, by the way, you grew up in Gig Harbor, Washington.

My niece was your music teacher.

Full circle.

Incredible.

And it's such a wonderful vibey setting, which is maybe my favorite thing about touring, that I end up a little bit of ever everywhere, doing a little bit of everything in the strangest situations.

And the.

That strange situation may be my favorite because it just.

It recommended it.

It represented an arrival moment for me, like everything just coming together in that.

In that moment.

Yeah.

That sounds just your description of it and your.

Your expressions recalling that time and all those ties.

That must have been one of those moments where you're like, oh, I'm in.

I'm in where I'm supposed to be.

This is the universe.

Everything's in line right now.

This is a perfect moment.

Yes.

Sounds great.

Yeah, I.

I looked up Espy as you were talking.

Actually has a book called Oysterville too.

So your.

Your story checks out.

Okay.

But.

Yeah.

You haven't written any songs about oysters yet.

No, I did.

My ongoing homage to that family is a salad dressing.

And I've.

I don't.

I haven't shared much about this, but.

So that couple that hosted concerts, the husband made this salad dressing one day.

Well, after I played a concert there.

No, I was there to.

To pick up some donated instruments, which is a different conversation altogether.

So I stayed overnight there, and he made the salad dressing I thought was amazing.

I asked him how to make it, and I've been making it every week of my life since he died less than a year later.

And I remind his widow, who's now 90, I remind her probably yearly, at least, that I'm still making the sp.

House dressing, and it's just a salad dressing, but it's.

Everybody I make it for is like, what is this?

I need this.

We're gonna need that recipe, bro.

So my life deepens in ways like that all the time as a result of the ongoing adventure that is the.

The touring and my process of writing and recording, which involves a lot of international collaborations.

And then I mentioned I was picking up donated instruments.

I run a music charity, so I picked up donated instruments in Oysterville that then made their way to East Africa to music schools for kids who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford lessons.

And that the.

There are opportunities for synchronicity everywhere.

And the.

The ways in which those moments stamp my life are rich and varied.

Like, will it s be staring down at you while you play?

The life does become an adventure tale because you get into the strangest situations and then music comes out of it or music.

Or the other way around.

You wrote the.

That song Wild at Heart, for instance.

I wrote that while I was living in Honolulu for six months on the 4th of July, and then ended up recording it in.

There's a hall that.

What's it called?

Temple of Light, I think, at Las Vegas, New Mexico.

It's a hall that all the windows are prisms, so over the course of the day, the light shifts and casts rainbows all over the room.

And it's used for New Agey sort of ceremonies, and it's a work of art.

And I ended up recording.

Filming a music video and recording a song there.

And so, as I mentioned with that album, it really is a travelogue.

And for me, every single story has those layers to it.

Like, I recorded it in Surrounded by Rainbows.

How cool is that?

In.

In hindsight, after compiling stories like that for a lifetime, it.

It really becomes something deeper than.

Yeah, I tour and I get to play my songs, and people get to.

People get to fall in love with them.

As I used to say, I make people cry for a living.

But along the way, dragging this bag full of stories that gets bigger and bigger.

So cool.

Nothing.

Nothing else like it.

Lucky.

Can we.

So can we talk a bit about your songwriting process and, you know, if you can pick a song or you can say, like, if you have a process or if there's a particular story that you think is, you know, special that you really want to share?

You know, we.

Like.

Actually, I think most of the people that actually listen to the show are actually musicians anyway, so I think it's just important to hear what other people do or how they come to a song or, you know, maybe some challenges or anything like that.

You know, something like that.

Is there.

Can you do a little bit of that?

Yeah, yeah.

It's just a matter of picking a song, and there are so many in terms of approach to building a song.

I'm just trying to figure out which one might be particularly interesting.

Yeah, sure.

Randomly, I could even plug in my keyboard and play a little bit here.

Hold on.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because I think, like, some people have, like, a process where, you know, they don't write a song, but it sort of simmers in there and then it just comes spilling out all in one night.

Some people.

And actually everyone, you know, probably.

Probably what happens is everyone has a different process, you know, and also there's a different process for every song.

That's probably also true.

But, you know, I think it's valuable to, you know, get into that.

Yeah.

How's that volume and.

And, And.

And lyrically and musically.

Of course.

Yeah, yeah.

Wait, do that again.

Actually, it was a little intermittent.

Are we getting a.

Okay.

No, it's barely coming through.

It's like maybe a bad line.

Okay.

No, no.

Okay.

All right.

We don't do that.

That's a shame, because that would have been our first actual music played in our podcast.

Yeah.

Original sound for musicians on Zoom.

Oh, let me turn that on.

And I.

I also turned it on my side.

There.

It's on.

So, Daniel.

See?

Hallelujah.

That is beautiful.

All right, show me what you got.

Wrote this at Bard, and growing up, as I started to experiment with writing songs, I didn't really know much about song structure.

Didn't study the classics, which it would have been wise to, but I dove right in with a classical kids background, which is pretty cool.

Then going to Bard and having a bunch of concert music composers as professors, it became kind of a backward process of trying how to deconstruct my classical boy context into pop.

And along the way, I think that led to a unique style, and I'm grateful for that.

I learned to write with MIDI as much as I learned to write with a piano.

And this song comes to mind.

It's actually one of my first ever songs, but it's a great example because I was sitting in the studio at Bard and writing, quote unquote, on piano, but writing actually on a keyboard into sequencing software, and that has become my lead composition tool.

There may be entire days where, in fact, day before last, I was sitting all day at the computer.

Couldn't even bother to Plug in my keyboard, but I wanted a piano part, so I just turned on my Mac keyboard and there's a function where you can use it to play piano.

And I had a piano part in mind, but I couldn't even be bothered to actually plug in a real piano.

So it really has become a.

Ever since the seventh grade, the computer has been a.

A tool itself.

And I understand that about 10 years ago, Berkeley started adding computers and iPads as composition majors and instrument majors.

So I guess I was ahead of my time because now they are seen as legit instruments.

In this case song called Deep Blue Quiet Places that if.

If you're a fan of Prague, Prague rock, it's heaven because the time signature is always changing.

I didn't know that because I was writing directly into the sequencer and I was just counting the one instead of.

Is this in 4?

Is it in 16?

Is it in 12?

Is it in.

I don't know.

It just feels.

So that's how it starts.

He is the sun and she is the sea in which he bathes from every dawn to every dusk of every day Floating right across.

You can count the one just fine.

You get into the corner and all of a sudden that's in four.

Whoops, a little bit of distortion.

So now you can count the four pretty clearly.

Once again, the melody's floating right over the top.

Ripples in the deep blue quiet places of our hearts Tumbling in the deep blue quiet places of our hearts Every ocean has its depths that we could never hope to chart it is here that we have anchored every secret of our hearts and then I stand slide right back into the verse, but because to my mind it was all one, I just went into a different meter altogether, but I'm still floating over the top.

So it's.

It's a second verse.

Totally different time signature, but it feels the same.

If he is the string, she is the tale as babbling tells the dream of every desert, every empty world if she is the cliffs and he is the waves that shine Steal away the stone in hopes of creeping near.

So all of a sudden it's.

It is the verse you recognize, but it's not.

You just.

You've.

The phrase is a little longer, but.

Because I'm floating right over the top, even I didn't notice that.

Hey, that's a.

A totally different meter altogether.

Yes, you had.

You had like a meditative part, but then it sounds like almost like you had this lyrical thing.

And then every single time you just added.

If you had to take away or Add just to fit the lyrics.

You could do it because your part was like.

I mean, it also sounds like it may be pentatonic.

So it's sort of like.

Even though it's major, it sounds like it could be sort of not.

It's sort of like more of a sus sort of sound.

Yes.

So it doesn't feel like it's neat.

It neither feels like it's in time nor it feels like it's in tone, you know, just to get the alliteration.

But like it's.

It's very.

It's like fluid, that particular.

Yeah, yeah.

Fluid timing wise.

But you.

You're pointing out, is also fluid harmonically.

So for those of you who aren't musicians don't know what a sus chord is, here's a brief lesson.

So here's a major chord.

There's a minor chord.

A little sad.

A sus chord is.

You don't know because I don't tell you.

Is it major or minor?

I don't tell you where I'm going harmonically.

And that can give a sense of suspension.

Sus.

Suspended chord.

And it only resolves.

Maybe it never resolves.

It resolves eventually.

Am I major or minor?

Am I happy or sad?

I don't know.

Oh, I'm major, I'm happy.

And you might do that.

When you arrive at a chorus, the sun finally comes out.

There's a sense of arrival, a sense of, oh, thank God, it's a happy ending.

But until then, you don't know.

One of the.

That's one of the hallmarks of the Edge, U2's guitar work.

For instance, he'll play.

It'll be an eight minute song.

And you never find out is it major or minor because he's playing Streets have no Name.

Where the Streets have no Name is.

I don't.

I don't know that it ever resolves.

And that's super cool because then it's yearning and then Bono's like a preacher.

He's yearning for you.

You never find out whether you get to heaven or not.

I.

I love that.

I'm glad that you.

You noticed that and pointed it out.

So.

So with this particular song.

So you had that part right?

You had the piano part.

It sounds like you're probably sitting at the piano vibing on that thing, that.

That figure.

And then did you have the lyrics.

Were the lyrics like in a book somewhere that you had written in a prior day?

Or did you catch like a vibe from the thing and all of a sudden from.

From the musical part and start writing lyrics over it?

Or are you one of those guys that just like, hums stuff and then starts to, like, say words and be like, oh, yeah, like, I do that sometimes.

Or I just sort of like, sing nonsense over something I like.

Until a word comes and then a word leads you to a phrase, etc.

I love that process.

And if you listen to demos on box sets, you'll hear that a lot, where there's some version of a song that has no words, or occasionally they'll just release a song where the vocalist is mumbling, and that's fine.

That's so rock and roll.

I haven't done that much.

It's more of a process, a creative process of control, chaos.

So you need inspiration, but you also need craft.

And where the two meet usually defines your style.

So when you talk about process, the process of bringing together the inspiration and the craft will create your style.

I'm just making this up.

I never thought about it before, but it makes sense as I'm saying it, that my process has always been, since I was a kid, not just in music, but anything creative.

I love telling stories in any medium.

And the process is always.

You have to have some fixed points.

That's the craft part.

You have to have something that the listener can expect.

And then you have to have the element of surprise, which is the inspiration.

And if you can pin the inspiration, the chaos, to the order, which is the expectation, then you have something special because the order gives them, you know, what to expect.

Like arriving at that course that's in four.

If we keep coming back to that course, then in between I can go wherever I want.

Potentially, theoretically, the process for writing for me is not unlike, oh, God, what was this band?

It was a one hit wonder in the 80s.

He wrote Mexican radio.

What was his name?

What was the band's name?

Anyway, I always remember because I read an interview with him where he said, my process is every day, and you're looking it up.

Daniel.

Thank you.

Every day, every time I have an idea, I put it in one of two paperbacks and they sit on my desk.

And to start my writing process, I pick an idea from one bag, an idea from another, and I put them together, and that's what I have to start with.

Then when I got to Bard, it turns out that that's a Juilliard and a Berkeley process as well, and a Curtis process as well.

So Dr.

Jennifer Higdon, composer, was one of my professors and she.

The very first week of working with her, she gave Me, a cord.

She wrote it down, handed to me as.

This is what you have to start with.

It's a process of.

This is fixed.

Bring your chaos to it and tell me.

Come back with a song.

You don't need to tell me how you got there.

No one needs to know that you started with this.

But it's a starting point that.

Like slamming the two electrons together and that creates.

So you.

So you said you had.

You have some notebooks where you write your lyrics.

Yes.

Yes.

Got it.

Okay.

Yeah.

It would be notebook.

And.

Yeah.

So the musical.

And you have the musical thing and you just say, okay.

Like, either you pick one at random and just say, can these match?

Or.

And this is what I do sometimes I'll have a song and I'll think, oh, shit, I.

This goes with that.

Yeah.

Or even better, it doesn't go with that, but can I force it?

There you go.

Wall of voodoo.

Mexican radio.

Wall of voodoo.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Thank you, Daniel.

Of course, another fixed point for me is this thesaurus.

This is my dad's from high school.

So it was.

It was ancient before I was born.

And I started writing with this, I think in college at Bard College or maybe even earlier.

Turned out to be crucial because using rhyme in dictionary and a thesaurus is common.

But nowadays you might just Google the word you're looking for and thesaurus or the word you're looking for en rhyme.

But you can get a particular flavor if you reach for a very particular thesaurus or rhyming dictionary.

So the words in here are going to be different than you'll get from 2025.

Google search.

Because this is forever ago.

And the words can be archaic.

Some of them would probably be offensive.

Offensive.

And there are quotes at the bottom from Shakespeare and Carl Sandberg and Coleridge and on and on and on.

And just to give them context, here's how they use the words.

So there's no contemporary examples.

It's.

It's all really old dead white men examples.

And that's going to give you a particular flavor and context, too.

And, you know, Walt Whitman and Abe Lincoln, as opposed to Kanye.

Not that Kanye is less legit, but this particular flavor, I'm limiting myself to a palette of particular colors by using this as a source for.

For words that fit the lyrics and making conscious choices like that or the paper bag thing.

While a voodoo guy, you are creating order through limitations.

When Jennifer Higdon handed me that piece of paper and says, here's your chord.

Come back next week with a song.

It's a forced restriction that is essential.

Otherwise you're living completely in chaos and you have nothing to ground yourself, to pin yourself to.

I do remember that lesson early on.

I think it was a creative writing class in school.

And the teacher said just the same thing.

She's like, if I said, just write an essay, you'd be lost.

But if I give you restrictions, it can actually, even though it seems like you're being limited, creativity will just pop out of you.

So music is all context.

If there's nothing familiar about it, then the year has nothing to attach to.

So you're balancing expectation and familiarity in every moment.

My favorite example of that was a guest.

I don't even remember who he was, but he came from Juilliard and he was a stand in for my advisor, Professor Darren Hagen.

So his buddy came for one a week and I played a song for him.

And then he was like, okay.

He went over to the chalkboard and he drew an ampersand, an and symbol.

And then he said, here's your core musical idea, and then here are all the other related musical ideas.

And he started drawing small ampersands.

He started drawing backwards ampersands.

He started drawing stretched really long and really fat ampersands.

And he said, and here's the rest of your song.

All of it has to relate to every part of it, has to relate to every other part in order for it to make sense.

So you can do whatever you want with that ampersand, but you can't bring in some other symbol and call it related to the ampersand unless you then back it up by hauling it into the ampersand universe somehow.

Never forgot that.

Yeah.

So that.

That was a critique.

Yeah, yeah.

Was he saying that your.

That particular song was kind of, you know, had too many elements maybe that weren't related?

That was his.

That was his point.

Yeah.

No, nobody's heard that song since.

So I'm actually just curious about one thing.

So, so what, when, when exactly did you write your first song?

What.

What age was it?

Or, you know, if you remember the year or anything like that.

Yeah, it'd be hard to say because I've always been creative, always creating, and it was always in the context of telling stories and building worlds.

So even as a little kid, it was.

Who doesn't tell stories as a kid?

So it all bled together in grade school, probably even before that.

But when I was 13, I discovered that other kids thought music was cool.

And then I heard George Michael.

I was like, what is this?

And from that point I was writing songs in earnest.

So 13, 14.

Did you go through a phase where you played only George Michael songs?

No.

Or any.

Or any artist.

I.

I didn't really cover other people's songs, if that's what you meant.

If you meant listen to them.

I was devouring.

All of a sudden the light.

The light went on and it was George Michael that turned that light switch.

But then I was like, what is this stuff?

And I went out and grabbed it all.

And my dad was delighted because some of it was whatever he had on his shelf, which I think is common for a lot of us.

What does dad have?

I'll listen to that first.

And so that had its influence, but so did my peers.

And happily my peers were not listening to what was huge in Seattle just then, which would have been a natural direction, but precisely because my brothers were at every important gig in that year.

Like, eh, what else?

That became a lot of British artists, which makes a lot of sense in hindsight.

And a lot of world music, which.

I'm collaborating with people all over the world all the time.

I run an international music charity.

My songs are constantly being.

I source them out to friends all over the world constantly to add.

Add a Sarangi and send this back, please.

Add an Ood and send this back, please.

It's become a big part of my life, my musical personality.

So it was just the opposite.

When I discovered music, I was like, George is great.

Okay, what else is there?

And it happily spread out all over the planet.

Everything but Seattle.

Okay, so we're coming up on an hour and we've covered a lot, but, you know, you're.

You have a lot of material and you have a lot of experience, so there's a lot more to cover.

So maybe we can.

So there's probably some things you want to cover.

I do think it's interesting there.

I listened to that record and the record has a lot of influences.

I caught all that.

I also did read that you lived in Africa for a while.

Is that right?

Yeah, I lived there for two months, which is a while.

Yeah.

So do you want to just give us some.

And I do want to talk about your charity as well, so I hate to just make you say give it.

Well, actually, I don't care how long we spend on this.

It's.

It's mostly being respectful of your time, frankly.

So if you want to give us a little like, story about your travels and tell us a bit about that and maybe give us an example of.

I mean, there's the.

The examples of your music are obvious because there's a lot of influence there.

And actually I wanted to ask you about one song in particular.

Is.

Is it Kothbiro or.

How do you say that?

Kothbiro.

So can you.

Can you give us like, kind of like a little like overview of your travels, your musical influences maybe sort of call.

So treat me and I'll be.

I'm very open with my ignorance, so I will tell you and the audience that I'm extremely ignorant.

And so maybe educate me.

I won't speak for Dan, but maybe educate us on your travels some of the specific influences that can.

Came into those songs.

In particular, that one I was kind of curious about.

Yeah.

But all of them, you know, at least the ones that I've heard and if there's any other ones that you want to mention, you know, the different musical and cultural influences that went into the songs, that would.

I think that would be very worthwhile.

Yeah.

Well, also another full circle moment behind that song.

So that might be a nice place to.

To start to tie up the.

Many of the musical influences for me, when I was just discovering music were global and that usually meant some American or Brit went overseas and was exposed to something, got excited about it, brought it back, starting with George Harrison, maybe Zeppelin.

With Kashmir in the 80s, there was an explosion of it.

Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, Sting, David Byrne.

By the time you get to the 90s and the 2000s, as the world became more and more global, it became less of a fetish.

So you had a band like Vampire Weekend, who.

They were just Columbia University kids who had no connection to Africa.

But they really thought, hey, these sounds are cool.

She had an entire Columbia University white kid wearing turtleneck record of African pop.

Man.

Why they didn't attempt to defend it or explain it, they just, this is cool.

And let's.

Let's make some jams.

I love that we.

That that band to me is a sign of where we were headed.

So that now we live in a truly global society where there's a free flow of musical styles and dominating the charts.

Now you've got reggaeton and I'm a piano.

And some of the biggest bands in the world are Korean or Nigerian or Caribbean.

So cool.

I got really interested in world music because some of the artists that my parents listened to were so listening to George Harrison, Paul Simon or whatever, and then going to college and being exposed to a ton more music.

Peter Gabriel for instance.

Peter Gabriel had a label, Real World Records.

And I fell in love with a lot of those Records because a friend of mine down the hall in my dorm had a bunch of Real World albums.

So I would borrow them.

And there was a Kenyan artist named Ayo Bogata who had.

He released a brilliant record on Real World Records.

Years later in Seattle, the Peter Gabriel's organization womad brought their festival to Seattle.

They'd never attempted a full blown festival in the States and they tried it in Seattle for three years running, four years running.

They lost a ton of money and stopped.

So they never got beyond Seattle.

But I would go to this festival and just spend that weekend immersed and fell in love with sounds from around the world.

I'd already got in the travel bug when I was in college.

Bard had sponsored a program where you spent a year going around the world with a motley crew of pirates slash students slash journalists, political activists, biologists.

It was called the International Honors Program.

And it wasn't really a structured college course.

It was just let's throw these kids into what turned out to be war zones and like earthquake zones.

And we'd be face to face with disasters and real human suffering and urgency and environmental disasters, that combination of urgency and human rights, environmental disaster, the love of travel and love of music, they all coalesced.

And by the time I put my first album together, I had about.

There's songs on that album in Fijian and Spanish and Egyptian percussion ensemble.

On one of the songs I just, it became something I was fascinated with and it continues to be.

And then 10 years ago I decided to go overseas.

I just wanted to travel.

Never been to Africa, but I didn't want to be a tourist.

So I thought, well, what can I do that would be useful?

I started collecting donated instruments because I'd reached out to my social networks and said, I'm going to Africa.

I don't want to just be a tourist because I would feel lame and uncomfortable.

Does anyone know any musicians in Africa?

And what came back was a dozen people said, oh yeah, I know this guy, I know this guy, I know this guy, I know this gal.

They were all young musicians who happened to be within about 10 hour drive of each other around Lake Victoria.

And I thought, well, that's weird.

Like all of them are in the same area in Africa and they're all, yes, talented musicians.

But what they're all doing is running music programs for kids who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it.

Refugee camps, slums, orphanages.

And that's amazing.

I guess this is what I'm doing.

I'm going there and I'm going To gather some instruments and bring them.

So I lugged these instruments on a Everything I could carry From Seattle through JFK to LaGuardia to Oman.

I think eventually Egypt down through, arrived in Nairobi with all this equipment and trekked it by hand on buses to these orphanages.

Got to know these people who were running these music programs.

And that turned into my nonprofit, which has been running for 10 years now.

At the moment, we're focused on supporting three specific music schools in East Africa.

And we make sure that the kids have lessons every week and that they get the instruments and gear they need to continue to learn how to record and play guitar and keyboard and brass and so on.

It's called the International Youth Music Program or Project the Full Circle Moment.

Briefly, Kothbiro was an Ayo Bogada song.

So I discovered him through that album I borrowed from my friend Joan at Bard.

I thought it was amazing.

He's a Luo and the Luo tribe are on the border of Uganda and Kenya.

When I landed in Africa, I wanted to bring something I learned.

That song because I loved, was something that I could share with kids even if they didn't speak the language.

They knew the song because it's a well known cowboy song.

In that among the Luo, it just happens.

It just turned circumstantially.

Turns out that the Luo are all based right where right in the heart of most of my referrals were.

So circumstance brought me to Luo country.

I arrive at the first location in Kisumu in western Kenya, and it turns out that's his hometown.

So I arrive at this orphanage.

They've built a recording studio to teach kids how to produce and play music.

I start recording some local musicians who are Luo.

I mention Aya Bugatta to the producer that I'm training to use pro tools, and he says, oh, yeah, he's a buddy of ours.

Would you like to meet him?

So I spend these two months where I'm building this charity, traveling all around in East Africa and mostly in Luo country, and learning all the different ways that I can say Koth biro, which means the rain is coming, Learning all the regional differences and getting steeped in Luo culture.

It means the rain is coming.

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay.

While I was there, I recorded Koth Bureau for that album with some Luo friends of mine.

So percussion and an ancient African lute and vocals, all from Luo friends.

So that tied everything back together for me, Right back to my roots, without intending to.

Pretty extraordinary.

Yeah, it's Pretty cool, man.

So go ahead, Dan.

So, I mean, that's.

That, that's an amazing story.

That's.

That's like the universe smiling, universe conspiring with you.

It's also a kind of a great, great spot to tie up the podcast.

I wanted to say you're the best storyteller we've had on the podcast so far.

And your years of just telling stories to small crowds is.

It's shining through right now.

I mean, you're just.

You're like.

I think this is your comfort zone.

Anyway, so I just wanted to.

To thank you for coming on, telling your story.

It's really inspiring and just interesting on its own, objectively, the stories you've told.

So I just, I just wanted to thank you.

And of course, and Keith will go over this too.

We're gonna promote you on, on our social media and everything you're doing.

So besides your music, of course, I hope you'll send us links to your charities.

We can put that out there as well.

Great.

So I'll hand it off to Keith.

He knows a little bit more about how to, how to get the links and whatnot.

Yeah.

So you actually just say it all.

This is also a typical podcast thing, the end of the podcast.

Well, actually, before we even get to that, say, might as well say what you're planning next.

If you have anything going on.

Like, I know I did see on your website, you have the concerts that are ongoing, that are like live stream concerts.

Those are cool.

But, you know, so I know that's ongoing, so you have that going on.

But if you have any recordings coming up or any tours coming up, stuff like that, just.

You might as well plug it.

Although I have to warn you, just as bad as we are at scheduling and actually getting these, these interviews happening, we're just as bad at putting them out.

So this might not come out for months.

Okay.

So that's a fair warning.

So don't promote something next week.

But if you have a record coming out, by all means, or something like that, or if you have a tour this year or something special going on this year, we definitely want to be involved in your charity.

So if I know people who are getting rid of instruments, I have an instrument sitting here that I want to get rid of.

We can work together and figure out how to send them to you or send them directly to whoever you have it going on.

We're very eager to help out.

But, yeah, so promote your stuff.

Say all your URLs or where you want people to go.

Anything they want to.

You want them to know about you.

And then after the show, you can send me all the links and send me some promo photos and then that's how we'll promote you and promote the show.

Yeah.

Well, thanks, Keith, and thank you, guys.

This has been great.

Three things.

Yeah, I do play live streams twice a week, livestream concerts and then tour.

And those tour dates are all on the website.

Aaronenglish.com the charity is International Youth Music Project, and very happily, Bard College reached out to me because one of their music conservatory students, who is Kenyan, started a program where Bard kids, excuse me, young men and women, are teaching lessons on Zoom to students in Kenya.

The new project for my charity is to go from supporting on the ground to supporting virtually, where if musicians, engineers, instrument repair folks are able to teach, we get them on Zoom with the three music schools that we support in East Africa.

So that's the latest project for the charity, International Youth Music Project, and it's beautiful that it comes back to Bard and Kenya again.

Lastly, today, January 19, 2025, I dropped the first song of a new album.

And I'll be releasing a song a month, all year.

And then in December, you'll have the whole album and I'll keep releasing a song a month even into 2026.

See how long I can do.

And that's.

It's called a waterfall release, which is what is often recommended on the Spotify's of the world nowadays, this constant drip of new music, which is an enormous task, especially if your productions are particularly complex and global like mine.

But I've got a backlog from years of writing and recording, and I'm starting to drip them out with this new album.

I'm super, super excited.

This is a.

I wouldn't call it a grief album, but my dad died almost two years ago now, and all these song ideas that had been sitting around on my hard drive for years, that had a particular emotive character, particular aesthetics, started demanding that they be written.

None of them had lyrics, but they all had the mood of exploring grief and mortality.

And not in a depressing way, just in a what the hell just happened?

And what does this mean?

That we live and die.

So I'm really excited and really proud of the songs that are coming out.

And today's the first, baby, so a big day.

That album is called New Crow Moon.

Thank you for saying all that.

I'm really sorry to hear about your dad.

Thank you.

I think it's, you know, I.

I think sometimes I think this and I.

I often think this, but I really feel like growing up, I felt like music was.

I felt guilty being a musician in a way because I felt like it was not a serious thing sometimes.

But I think you're.

I think.

I think many musicians prove it day in and day out that it is not.

It's not like a nice to have.

And I think musicians, especially songwriters, are.

And I think this.

And I think the.

The record I listened to was beautiful.

I look forward to listening to the other records you've made.

And I think that what this record that's coming out is really a beautiful thing and special and, you know, courageous and it's a necessary.

And I think musicians are, you know, healers and, you know, spiritual leaders and, you know, so I think it's so.

I love that and.

And I really appreciate that you said that and now and.

And we're going to be so happy to hear it when it comes and to share it and all that.

Wonderful.

I may I close with because it's relevant.

Some doctor, Dr.

Botstein told me so.

The president of Bard, the legendary Leon Botstad.

I went to him my freshman year and.

And said, I want to.

I'm a songwriter.

I want to be a songwriter, but I feel good guilty because there's so much need in the world, like I should be a doctor instead fixing bodies.

And he said, well, yeah, the doctors of the world help us to stay alive and make our lives more comfortable, but art gives us a reason and a context for life.

His point being that you stay alive because of the art.

Those guys keep you alive, but the music is the context.

Beautiful.

Beautiful.

Aaron, thank you so much for coming on our show and chatting with us.

Really inspirational stories.

And I'll just echo what Keith said.

Sort of looking forward to this, the waterfall from you.

Thank you, guys.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Appreciate you, man.

And thank you so much for coming on the show.

Likewise.

My pleasure.

Talk soon.