Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences

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Speaker 2 This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley.
And my guest today, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hilton Als, has spent decades examining how we create meaning through words, images, and the spaces in between.

Speaker 2 As a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker, his essays and profiles on figures like Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Richard Pryor have redefined cultural criticism, blending autobiography with literary and social commentary.

Speaker 2 In addition to being a writer, Als is also a curator.

Speaker 2 Recently, he explored language in a new gallery exhibition, The Writings on the Wall, Language and Silence in the Visual Arts at the Hill Art Foundation in New York.

Speaker 2 The exhibit brings together the works of 32 artists across a range of media to examine how artists embrace silence. The show asks a powerful question, what do words in their absence look like?

Speaker 2 Hilton Als has been a staff writer at the New Yorker for over 30 years. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his work as a theater critic.

Speaker 2 And he's the author of several books, including The Women, White Girls, and My Pin Up, a genre-bending memoir essay that examines the music, persona, and cultural impact of Prince.

Speaker 2 He's curated several art installations, including a show on the late Joan Didian. Hilton Al's, welcome to Fresh Air.

Speaker 3 Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor.

Speaker 2 Your exhibit made me think about something that writer Samuel Delaney has said, who has a beautiful writer.

Speaker 2 Yes, and I've been thinking about this for the last few weeks, honestly, but he has this theory that imagination is the only shared reality reality and that creativity is how we manifest that shared reality.

Speaker 2 And I couldn't help but think about the limitations of language at this particular time when we can't even seem to agree on a shared reality.

Speaker 3 And I was just wondering if you're not going to be able to do or don't want or don't want to agree on a shared reality, right?

Speaker 3 I think you're being kind.

Speaker 3 Tanya, it's just a very emotionally and spiritually upsetting time because language is being used

Speaker 3 to

Speaker 3 not even wound but to annihilate people.

Speaker 3 I've been thinking about this a lot too, Tanya.

Speaker 3 I'm with you on this and I think that the thing is

Speaker 3 that's happening is that the sort of collective reality

Speaker 3 has been mangled to such a degree that the destroyers of language don't understand the ramifications. They understand it in terms of winning, right?

Speaker 3 But they don't understand the emotional and spiritual ramifications of lying. If you lie to me and I'm a trusting person, and if you're lying to me and I'm trusting the lies, imagine

Speaker 3 what people who really believe in these people feel.

Speaker 2 How to silence, in particular, the things that are unsaid, unspoken, but are very important to the narrative? How does that show up in your writing?

Speaker 3 That's a great question. I've been thinking about this quite a bit in terms of what I've been writing recently.
I've been writing about a very close friend of mine.

Speaker 3 And in describing certain aspects of the friendship, I talk about silence.

Speaker 3 and how part of what was so gorgeous about this relationship was that we didn't have to speak to each other, that we saw in the other's eyes what was happening.

Speaker 3 That's a degree of intimacy that is very rare.

Speaker 3 And I'm very interested in how to articulate

Speaker 3 that rarity.

Speaker 3 I don't want to disturb it with words. I want to describe.
I want to

Speaker 3 be able to articulate what this feeling is. And so

Speaker 3 working with silence for those months during the show and since then, I've understood that the that Marion Moore, what she said about the deepest feeling showing itself in silence, not in silence, but restraint.

Speaker 3 How do we say,

Speaker 3 I love you with a glance.

Speaker 3 All of those questions to me are significant

Speaker 3 questions to ask the self constantly because we live in a world where we don't actually have that much silence left.

Speaker 2 Is there silence in your life? I mean, I'm thinking about what it takes for you to come to ideas.

Speaker 3 Like what is your day-to-day like?

Speaker 2 Do you carve out time for silence?

Speaker 3 Well, I think

Speaker 3 the sheer fact of writing, you can't be with other people, yes?

Speaker 3 And you can't really sort of be

Speaker 3 in a room where there's noise or

Speaker 3 people chatting or talking. I think that one of the things that uh

Speaker 3 I try to do very much

Speaker 3 is to wake up as early as I can to hear what they used to call morning song, you know, birds or weather,

Speaker 3 to hear something that is not based on human activity, um but on but the activity of the natural world. That really helps me to absorb silence, to live

Speaker 3 more present, I think,

Speaker 3 than

Speaker 3 chatter allows. Chatter, talk,

Speaker 3 all of that stuff is fairly distracting from this idea that I'm trying to tease out of my writing, which is the value of silence.

Speaker 2 One of the other topics that you write about in your essay that accompanies this particular exhibit is this idea of connoisseurship.

Speaker 2 Who gets to be an expert in evaluating what's actually beautiful, what is good. And I was thinking about how

Speaker 2 you kind of have ultimate power within the spaces you occupy, having the powers of critique and curation.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think one of my producers said, like, it's almost like the opposite of imposter syndrome. Did you always possess that sense of taste, of knowing what is good?

Speaker 3 Oh, that's a great question. I am

Speaker 3 I have a wonderful editor at the New Yorker, Deborah Treisman, and she wrote me an email. We were just chatting and she said something in an email that was so profound.

Speaker 3 She said that there's little distance between you and what's on the page.

Speaker 3 And I took that as the greatest compliment ever.

Speaker 2 It is. I mean, what did say more and what she meant by that?

Speaker 3 I think what she meant was that you're telling the emotional truth as much as you can, always.

Speaker 3 And I think I was so knocked out by the comment

Speaker 3 because

Speaker 3 the effort of writing,

Speaker 3 the effort of curation is not an effort, it's a joy because it's about self-expression. And I don't know who I would be if I wasn't given the opportunity to

Speaker 3 express intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, those aspects of myself that I feel should should live outside of myself. And so as a kid, I was very fortunate in that I had a great mother

Speaker 3 who prized art making,

Speaker 3 who prized self-expression. And when I started writing, I was very, very young.
Eight. And I would give I was eight, yes.
I would give her

Speaker 3 what I was writing, and she would write her comments

Speaker 3 on

Speaker 3 the story, whatever it was, and leave it for me on the table

Speaker 3 in the morning.

Speaker 2 She was your first editor, yeah.

Speaker 3 She was my first great editor, and that gave me the license to

Speaker 3 express, to know that words mattered and that they had an effect

Speaker 3 on a reader, and they had an effect on my mother. And by giving me that permission, my mother also gave me permission to really think, because you can't write without thinking.

Speaker 3 And in thinking, I began then to look at the world. So that's my value as a human

Speaker 3 is

Speaker 3 this gift that my mother gave me, which is self-expression having great meaning for people, self-expression having a way of creating a kind of adhesion in a fractured world.

Speaker 2 This is so fascinating to me because your writing is so expansive.

Speaker 2 You surprise me, you surprise the reader, not really with the choices on who you spend time on and write about, but how you write about them. People like Joan Didian, Eminem, Prince.

Speaker 2 I think I heard you say that you primarily are interested in subjects that don't, quote, have their face yet.

Speaker 2 What do you mean by that?

Speaker 3 Actually, you know, it's funny. I was thinking about this recently.
I was talking to my class about this because

Speaker 3 I was showing them some Dean Arbus photographs,

Speaker 3 and they're largely unknown people, and she would say that

Speaker 3 she didn't like photographing the famous because generally they had a set face. They knew how to use the camera, work with the camera, and they knew their angles.

Speaker 3 Yeah, she was looking for a greater degree of vulnerability.

Speaker 3 A lot of the people that you've mentioned,

Speaker 3 some of them were dead, some of them were

Speaker 3 not what people call relevant. I was interested in most of those people

Speaker 3 because

Speaker 3 they had a history, but their history had been obscured in a funny way by their fame. And I wanted to go backwards and I wanted to excavate who they were from the fame, if that makes any sense.

Speaker 3 I wanted to save them from their public face, and I wanted to see their private face.

Speaker 3 So when I wrote about Missy Elliott, she wasn't famous. Then

Speaker 3 many, many people I wrote about at the beginning of their career

Speaker 3 because

Speaker 3 I was interested in

Speaker 3 their evolution. I wasn't interested in their fame.

Speaker 2 One person that you've written quite extensively about is Richard Pryor. And

Speaker 2 I'm fascinated that you write about him, not because I mean, it's obvious that he was one of the most talented comedians of our time, but you write about him in

Speaker 2 such an expansive way through time. I mean, you've gone back to him many, many times.

Speaker 2 I'd like for you to read an excerpt from your collection of essays that was also included in your collection of essays, White Girls, which came out in 2013.

Speaker 2 And in this excerpt, it's actually called A Prior Love.

Speaker 3 Thank you, Tonya.

Speaker 3 The subject of blackness has taken a strange and unsatisfying journey through American thought. First,

Speaker 3 because blackness has always had to explain itself to a largely white audience in order to be heard.

Speaker 3 And second, because it has generally been assumed to have only one story to tell, a story of oppression that plays on liberal guilt.

Speaker 3 The writers behind the collective modern Urtexts of blackness, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, all performed some variation on the theme.

Speaker 3 Angry but distanced, their rage blanketed by charm, they lived and wrote to be liked.

Speaker 3 Ultimately, whether they wanted to or not, they in some way embodied the readers who appreciated them most, white liberals.

Speaker 3 Richard Pye was the first black American spoken word artist to avoid this.

Speaker 3 Although he reprised the history of black American comedy, picking what he wanted from the work of great storytellers like Burt Williams, Red Fox, Moms Mabley, Nipsey Rutzel, Lawanda Page, and Flip Wilson, he also pushed everything one step further.

Speaker 3 Instead of adapting to the white perspective, he forced white audiences to follow him into his own experience. Pryor didn't manipulate his audience's white guilt or their black moral outrage.

Speaker 3 If he played the race card, it was only to show how funny he looked when he tried to shuffle the deck.

Speaker 3 And as he made blackness an acknowledged part of the American atmosphere, he also brought the issue of interracial love into the country's discourse.

Speaker 3 In a culture whose successful male Negro authors wrote about interracial sex with a combination of reverence and disgust, Pryor's gleeful

Speaker 3 attitude had an effect on the general population which Wright's Native Sons or Baldwin's Another Country had not had.

Speaker 3 His best work showed us that black men like him and the white women they loved were united in their disenfranchisement.

Speaker 3 In his life and on stage, he performed the great, largely unspoken story of America.

Speaker 2 I think for many people, Pryor definitely felt like a unicorn.

Speaker 2 I mean, he joked on stage, for instance, about some of his queer sexual experiences in ways that I kind of feel like are unfathomable for someone else to do.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 2 Have you been able to point out or understand that singularity that was Pryor, that person before the fame, and why he could convey what others couldn't.

Speaker 3 Well, I'm going to go back a little bit, Tanya, and tell you how the project came about. This is 1998 or so.

Speaker 3 And I went to David Remnick, who is the editor of The New Yorker, and said I wanted to write about Richard Pryor, but I didn't want to interview him. He was alive still.

Speaker 3 He had multiple sclerosis. and he was living with his wife, Jennifer.
And I said, I want to write a profile about someone who is not in the profile

Speaker 3 speaking to me. I want to create this person out of people who had experience with him or so on.

Speaker 3 And David agreed.

Speaker 3 So I began really with what you see in the piece, which is about Juken Opal, which is a brilliant television

Speaker 3 piece written by Jane Wagner,

Speaker 3 starring her wife Lily Tomlin and Richard Pryor. And that's the first time that I ever saw miscegenation on screen, as it were,

Speaker 3 not as a taboo, but as a human experience.

Speaker 3 And so that's how it began. I began by interviewing Lily and Jane, who are wonderful women.

Speaker 3 And I took it from there. I would just, you know, they recommended I speak to ex-person,

Speaker 3 a producer who had worked with Lily,

Speaker 3 who had worked with Pryor, suggested I speak to the director of one of the films.

Speaker 3 It was a great experience for me because I just it's the kind of thing that I love to do in reporting, which is to not know anything

Speaker 3 and everything at the same time. So of course I'd read everything

Speaker 3 on Pryor, but I didn't know anything about the world

Speaker 3 of show business, you know, in California at that particular time and the years before. So I got to meet wonderful great producers like Marvin Wirth.
And I learned a lot about the

Speaker 3 emotional ramifications and political ramifications of being a black star in the 70s and 80s and

Speaker 3 how alone he was

Speaker 3 and how

Speaker 3 at certain times he had exploited his own talent. to

Speaker 3 maintain star status or whatever. But ultimately, he always came back home to the truth.
And he always came back home to the beauty, really, and the undeniable kind of purity of being a truth teller.

Speaker 2 Can you clarify why you didn't want to talk with Pryor? Was it because he was so sick at that time?

Speaker 3 He was ill, but again, it was sort of like he was famous, right?

Speaker 3 I was always trying to find ways, Tanya, to take fame apart, let's put it that way. And one way that I could take the fame apart was to say Richard has spoken quite a bit about his life.

Speaker 3 Let's hear others speak about Richard's life,

Speaker 3 including myself. If I needed to speak to Pryor,

Speaker 3 there was his work. You know, there were his stand-up routines, there were scripts he had written, there were any number of artifacts he had left behind when he was functioning and speaking.

Speaker 3 So I didn't want Richard Pryor interfering with my writing. I wanted Richard Pryor to exist through me, through my writing.
I mean,

Speaker 3 I call myself a

Speaker 3 Stanislavski writer because in order to write about a person, I feel that I have to become them to understand their voice and their rhythms and

Speaker 3 their interiority. Once that experience is over, I have to not be friends with the subject.

Speaker 2 You have to fall in love with them, but then you have to like, you have to interrogate that love.

Speaker 3 That's a very good way of putting it, yes. You have to fall in love.

Speaker 3 You have to be interested because you're spending a lot of time and many months with someone generally. And then you have to walk away as if you don't know them.

Speaker 3 Flaubert, I think it was, who said that before you begin to write, you have to dry your tears and silence your laughter

Speaker 3 and you do you have to kind of walk away from the experience with that feeling of support for the project but not individual responsibility for the subject

Speaker 2 our guest today is pulitzer prize winning writer hilton als we'll be right back after a short break i'm tanya mosley and this is fresh air Support for this podcast and the following message come from Built, where you can earn points on your monthly rent payment.

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Speaker 2 In reading your writing about Richard Pryor, I mean, it's definitely like you are really trying to get at the core of why he was able to

Speaker 2 do what he did, be a truth teller. But are there...

Speaker 2 Are there elements of Pryor that you're still working out through your writing? I saw you just wrote a piece about his movie JoJo Dancer from the 80s just a few months ago.

Speaker 2 And of course I love reading about it, but I also think, like, what is it about this moment that you feel it's important to work these elements of Richard Pryor out in your writing?

Speaker 3 I think in this moment, we have very few artists who are willing to go to the mat and to express interiority.

Speaker 3 You know, we have a lot of wonderful actors out there, but very few of them are willing to show us themselves the truth of that life that goes into creativity.

Speaker 3 There are very few people who are willing to risk self-exposure. They can play a character, but the self-exposure that goes into making acting art

Speaker 3 is

Speaker 3 not on.

Speaker 3 as much as it should be.

Speaker 3 And I think that one of the reasons I wanted to write about um Richard's only directorial effort, Jojo Dancer, for the Criterion Collection was to remind people of what it takes to make work.

Speaker 3 And I'm not talking about simply entertainment, I'm talking about what it takes to bear your soul in order to have the resonance of a Richard Pryor

Speaker 3 or the resonance of a Montgomery Clift or the resonance of a Candy Alexander. You know, these are great performers who have given everything to not the performance but to inhabiting and being.

Speaker 2 Well, I was just wondering what this means for you as a writer, if it's disorienting in any way, because you're, as a critic, as someone who is looking for that humanity.

Speaker 2 I think I heard you a few months ago on an interview talk about how you don't have a clear knowing of who we are as a collective anymore.

Speaker 2 And so how that impacts actually what you do and being able to tap into that clarity to write about it. Aaron Powell,

Speaker 3 to know yourself is the first step really

Speaker 3 in entering some I'm talking about non-fiction journalistic writing, that you're walking into a place knowing enough about yourself to go back to your original question,

Speaker 3 to be silent and to absorb what this human being is saying about about what they've gone through, the life that they've experienced, how

Speaker 3 much

Speaker 3 and how little love they've had in the world. So the experience of Prince, writing about Prince, for instance,

Speaker 3 I

Speaker 3 entered his dressing room and we started chat and I didn't know that he had other journalists lined up to talk to. And then he asked me to come back, and then it was a kind of

Speaker 3 he was trying to connect with me. Now this would not have happened if I had come in there, barreled in there

Speaker 3 with 20 questions.

Speaker 3 Well, can you say blah, blah, blah, when you did this? I just sat down and I listened and I watched. And the big trick, and it wasn't a trick at all, was to be silent until he wanted to engage.

Speaker 3 So I was silent when other musicians came in to, you know, there was a wonderful moment with Macio wanted to play something for him, and it was a lot of activity. He's the director, right?

Speaker 3 He's the star. So he has to take care of a lot of things before his show.
And I was able to sit in silence. And he heard the silence.
And in hearing the silence, he was able to speak to me.

Speaker 2 In the case of Prince being able to sit in that silence, were there any observations that you noticed that you were able to draw out that you would not have ever?

Speaker 2 Because you're a big fan, so you know everything about the guy as you're stepping in there.

Speaker 3 But I did not know how much black male approval meant to him. That when Macio walked into the room or Larry Graham walked into the room, he was like a kid.

Speaker 2 In terms of the- Did you feel that for you as you walked into the room with him?

Speaker 3 That he wanted yourself. Well, Tanya, you're so sweet.
It would be immodest to say, but yes.

Speaker 3 I felt that in retrospect, I didn't know what the feeling was

Speaker 3 at first

Speaker 3 because he offered me some water. He didn't look at me.
He did some things in the room. And in allowing him to just walk around the space and do what he needed to do, that he started to look at me.

Speaker 3 And then when Macio came in, I saw him light up.

Speaker 3 And then when Larry Graham later was there, I saw him light up, and then I understood that I had stayed and been allowed to stay, and it was very interesting.

Speaker 3 I had left the backstage area, and I was leaving the show, and this woman was running after me saying, Mr., Mr., she couldn't remember my name.

Speaker 3 And I turned, and she worked for Prince, and she said, Oh, I'm so glad I found you. Prince would have killed me if I didn't find you.
And then I remembered how he had been with Macio.

Speaker 2 And describe where you guys were and what changed you.

Speaker 3 Oh, it was in St. Louis, I believe.

Speaker 3 And he was backstage and he was getting his makeup redone.

Speaker 3 And when I put my head in the room, he said, hey, would you like to join us for, and it was Larry Graham and his wife and Prince, and it was a Jehovah's Witness meeting that they were having.

Speaker 3 And then we got in the bus and we went to the bar where there was an after party. And I was amazed.
And then he wanted me to work with him on a book, his memoir.

Speaker 3 And that I couldn't do because I was really commissioned to write an article about

Speaker 3 Prince. I wasn't assigned to write a book.
And I wouldn't have been able to keep my job and write a book. Do you see what I mean?

Speaker 3 Meaning that he was asking me to work with him, which meant that I couldn't write the essay because it would be be then to a conflict of interest. And so I chose to do my job.

Speaker 3 And it was also a personal choice. I knew how powerful he was, and I was afraid to some degree that I wouldn't get out of Minneapolis.
I wanted to be a writer. I didn't want to work for Prince.

Speaker 3 I wanted to spend time with him and watch. all of that stuff, but I didn't want to work for him.

Speaker 2 Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Pulitzer Prize winning writer Hilton Als.
We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air.

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Speaker 2 Your mother,

Speaker 2 she feels so present in so much of what you do and so much of your writing. And you said in your writing that she had such an imagination for other people, but not for herself.

Speaker 3 What did you mean by that? I wanted her to have, well, I wanted her to have more of everything for herself.

Speaker 3 I think she was a brilliant mother, and that job means that you take a back seat to your children, right?

Speaker 3 But I think also

Speaker 3 I wanted her to have the experience of, you know, making art and travel and all those things.

Speaker 3 I don't think you can love anybody really without wanting them to have more of what they should have.

Speaker 3 And I just wanted her to have more of what she should have had.

Speaker 2 You grew up in the Brownsville section section of Brooklyn. Your mom was originally from Barbados.

Speaker 3 Her family was from Barbados. So she used first generation.

Speaker 2 Yeah, first generation. She died at 62?

Speaker 3 Yes, she did. Isn't it so wild to think about how

Speaker 3 brutal and brutalizing this country is toward

Speaker 3 poor people, women, women of color? All of those factors contribute to such early deaths. It's really profound.
It's her and James Baldwin at 64 and Zero Neil Hurston at 60, whatever. And

Speaker 3 we lose Richard Wright at 51.

Speaker 3 We lose so many people.

Speaker 3 We lose their voices because of the ways in which

Speaker 3 the pressure

Speaker 3 and the schism of being a black American

Speaker 3 has such a huge effect on the body. And it's something that I want to write write more about, actually.

Speaker 2 I want to go back to your mom just a little bit because,

Speaker 2 like, in just trying to think about the human that she raised, that is you. I mean, you describe her as the most constructive listener in the world.
And what did that look like?

Speaker 2 What did you learn about listening from her?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 I used to do this thing, Tiny, when I was little. Like, I would read about someone, and I wouldn't want to dress like them.

Speaker 3 So Horace Greeley I loved and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. And my mother on Sundays I would read aloud at the table to her.
And she never criticized or batted an eye. She just listened.
And that face

Speaker 3 is something that I carry in my heart as a teacher. That one of the more extraordinary things that we can do in this world is to listen to another human being.

Speaker 3 There I don't think that there's any greater respect, and that includes listening to the silence when they need it. The thing that we can offer is

Speaker 3 the respect of hearing what another person has to say. And so, my work as a professor is listening to the ways in which we live together.
What is this experience like for you?

Speaker 3 And that's really what you're teaching, quote unquote, is how do I sit in a room with other people and hear them.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 that's one of her profound gifts. Another profound gift is to imagine this person's life,

Speaker 3 you know, what's happening to them, et cetera, but also imagine their possibility.

Speaker 3 Imagine the ways in which they will grow and

Speaker 3 flourish if you listen.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 she made a constructive listener. And in constructive listening, that means,

Speaker 3 you know, if Tanya expressed an interest in art in this particular show, oh, I'm going to send Tanya a book about ex-artists.

Speaker 3 That's constructive listening: is that you order the book or you go to the bookstore or you offer to be a companion in the museum or whatever.

Speaker 3 to have these experiences where a person feels, oh, wow, actually resonates what I'm saying, that my dreams can be made manifest within the company of this person who heard what I said.

Speaker 2 Your father, you describe as being uncomfortable around other men, including his sons.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 What did that look like for you? I mean, how did that impact your sense of self in the world?

Speaker 3 Oh, wow, that's a really great question.

Speaker 3 I didn't read my father as a protector. I read him as a threat.

Speaker 3 And when you read your father as a threat and not a protector, you're very suspicious of power. Um you're suspicious of the ways in which power is being used,

Speaker 3 wielded, etcetera.

Speaker 3 I didn't feel that because he was my father, that he had a de facto authority in the way that

Speaker 3 hold up the father as the the authoritarian in the family.

Speaker 3 It made me question,

Speaker 3 because of his handling of the men and me and my brother, it made me question

Speaker 3 what gave him the right to treat us in the particular way.

Speaker 3 If he was exercising

Speaker 3 or felt he had the right to do something,

Speaker 3 I would question it.

Speaker 3 And I resented having to accept it because he was my father. I would accept it twenty thousand times more readily from my mother because she was

Speaker 3 involved with me. She didn't perceive me as a threat.
In fact, she was very protective of us.

Speaker 3 But my father, in perceiving us as a threat, didn't allow himself to love us and to cherish us as well as he should have. He couldn't do it.

Speaker 3 So in that kind of emotional chaos, what I took away from it was, oh, because he's my father doesn't mean he's an authority, and I'm also questioning male authority.

Speaker 3 Because someone is the father doesn't necessarily mean to me that they're the authority on the family or whatever. When I see a father who is caretaking and protective of a child, then I believe them.

Speaker 3 And I don't really question them.

Speaker 3 But when I see that they're just using the role of the authoritarian figure, then I don't like being around that.

Speaker 2 I wondered about that. I also wondered about it in the context of your writing because so much of your gaze or your interest is

Speaker 2 women. Like it's focused on powerful women.

Speaker 3 It's changing, though. It's changing.

Speaker 3 I'm becoming much more open to men.

Speaker 2 What has changed in you? What is changing?

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly. I think an acceptance of

Speaker 3 the father I had and that that's what he did and that's what happened and I can't change it,

Speaker 3 but I can work with it better now than I used to be able to.

Speaker 3 So because of my mother's being so central to me and my sisters, et cetera, you know, I was always drawn to women

Speaker 3 not as an antidote, but as a kind of higher consciousness to maleness.

Speaker 3 And it's changing because I'm seeing that in general

Speaker 3 that women can be as

Speaker 3 beautiful and venal as men.

Speaker 3 That used to not cross my mind before.

Speaker 3 That they're as human

Speaker 3 as a male person.

Speaker 3 And that big shift is really a big shift.

Speaker 3 You're right to point out that a lot of my work was about women, and I think that that's changing. I'm interested in humans much more sort of in a rounded way than I was before.

Speaker 2 Hilton Ells, thank you so much for this conversation.

Speaker 3 Thank you, Tanya.

Speaker 2 Hilton Ells is a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer and critic for The New Yorker. Coming up, rock critic Ken Tucker reviews new albums from Lucy Dacus and Jeffrey Lewis.
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Speaker 2 Lucy Dakis is a young singer-songwriter, perhaps best known as one-third of the trio boy genius, along with Julian Julian Baker and Phoebe Bridgers.

Speaker 2 Jeffree Lewis is a middle-aged singer-songwriter who isn't very well known, but is the author of at least 30 albums and EPs. Each has a new album.

Speaker 2 Dacus is called Forever is a Feeling, and Lewis's is titled The Even More Free Willin' Jeffree Lewis.

Speaker 2 Our rock critic Ken Tucker says that between the two of them, they demonstrate the wide musical and emotional range of confessional songwriting.

Speaker 3 Loving

Speaker 6 Why does it feel significant? Why do I have to tell you about it? it? In two short sentences, Lucy Dacis summarizes decades of motivation behind singer-songwriter pop music.

Speaker 6 It's that mixture of confession and melody that creates an illusion of intimacy. The feeling that we really know the artist.
Indeed, feeling is what Dacis' new album is all about.

Speaker 6 It could not be more feely.

Speaker 6 It's called Forever is a Feeling, and I'm happy to say that her general mood is romantic and optimistic. On the song Best Guess, she sings her affection to a close friend who's become a lover.

Speaker 6 You may not be an angel,

Speaker 6 but you are my girl.

Speaker 3 You are my packet.

Speaker 3 You are my favorite place.

Speaker 3 You were my best friend before.

Speaker 3 You were my

Speaker 3 best guess. At the future,

Speaker 3 You are my best guest.

Speaker 3 If I were again with me,

Speaker 3 I am.

Speaker 3 You'd be my best guest.

Speaker 3 You are my best guest.

Speaker 6 Dacas's small, intimate voice is tailor-made to be heard whispering in the ears of fans glued to the small screens of their phones. Even her proclamations of passion are subtle and modest.

Speaker 6 A song called Ankles reaches back to a time when a woman showing a bit of her ankle was considered daringly erotic. Dacus takes pleasure in transporting this feeling to a contemporary context.

Speaker 6 lucky are we

Speaker 6 to have so much to lose

Speaker 6 Now don't

Speaker 6 move

Speaker 6 when I tell you what to do

Speaker 6 Pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed And take me like you do in your dreams

Speaker 6 I'm not gonna stop you, I'm not gonna stop you this time, baby.

Speaker 6 I want you to show me what you need

Speaker 6 and help me with the crossword in the morning.

Speaker 6 You are gonna make me tea.

Speaker 6 Gonna ask me how did I

Speaker 6 sleep.

Speaker 6 Lucy Dakis and Jeffrey Lewis both compose acoustic bass singer-songwriter music in which the first-person singular is deployed to announce emotions and opinions. But they could not be more different.

Speaker 6 For 20 years now, Lewis has been eloquent, crass, romantic, and realistic, frequently all in the same song.

Speaker 6 When he writes a confessional lyric, he exposes more than a well-turned ankle, not bothering with artful metaphors.

Speaker 3 Try to see your parents more because they're so weak and old now, but

Speaker 3 But somehow you've hung up and thrown the phone across the room. Cause you're a weakling and a loser, you just never get it right.

Speaker 3 Down from the way that you were raised to how your own home is tonight.

Speaker 3 These are the ones you love the best, so why is it always such a mess? And what the hell's it for? Since you're rotten to the core, well, it's fun.

Speaker 3 It's just fun.

Speaker 6 Lewis's new album is called The Even More Freewheeling Jeffrey Lewis. The title and cover photo, a nod to Bob Dylan's early New York City folkie days.

Speaker 6 A dedicated New Yorker himself, Lewis gets louder and more low down on this album's centerpiece, a great song about just how painful daily existence can be, called Sometimes Life Hits You.

Speaker 6 I'd have a nice wife with

Speaker 3 That you make that isn't so bad.

Speaker 3 Well, you can build up your armor against what life brings. You can dodge when life kicks, and you can duck when life swings.

Speaker 3 You can outsmart all sadness and outfight with the best. But sometimes life hits you like a chisel to the chest and you say,

Speaker 3 ow!

Speaker 3 That hurt!

Speaker 3 Ow!

Speaker 3 That hurt!

Speaker 3 Ow!

Speaker 3 That hurt!

Speaker 6 There'll be something.

Speaker 6 This is the musical equivalent of hitting your thumb with a hammer, and on the less radio-friendly version of that song, Lewis inserts a pungent four-letter curse between the words ow and that hurts.

Speaker 6 Lucy Dacas makes clear that she too has experienced moments when, in Jeffrey Lewis's phrase, life hits you like a chisel to the chest.

Speaker 6 Both of these artists have their flaws. Lewis is sometimes too yammeringly self-absorbed.
Dacus is sometimes too much of a monotone mumbler.

Speaker 6 Each can flatten music that ought to sound more airy and buoyant.

Speaker 6 But their best songs answer Dacis' question that began this review. Why do I have to tell you about it?

Speaker 6 For both Dakis and Lewis, the answer is, because it feels good to unburden yourself and maybe lift a burden or confirm a feeling for your listeners as well.

Speaker 2 Ken Tucker reviewed new music from Lucy Dakis and Jeffrey Lewis.

Speaker 2 Tomorrow on Fresh Air, immigration and customs enforcement is in force, and students are in the crosshairs at college campuses nationwide, from Columbia to the University of Alabama.

Speaker 2 Legal scholar Daniel Canstrom joins us to unpack the law, the history, and the human cost. I hope you can join us.

Speaker 2 To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.

Speaker 2 Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigher.

Speaker 2 Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Crinzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challener, Susan Nakundi, and Anna Bauman.

Speaker 2 Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper.
Roberta Shorach directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.

Speaker 4 This message comes from Vital Farms, who works with small American farms to bring you pastor-raised eggs.

Speaker 4 Farmer Tanner Pace shares why he believes it's important to care for his land and how he hopes to pass the opportunity to farm onto his sons.

Speaker 7 We are paving the way for a future. We only have one earth and we have have to make it count.

Speaker 7 Like my boys, I want to see them taking care of the land for them to be able to farm and then generations to come.

Speaker 7 I really enjoy seeing, especially my whole family up there working with me and to be able to instill the things that my father, mother, and then grandparents instilled in me that I can instill in the boys.

Speaker 7 That's just the most rewarding thing that there could ever be.

Speaker 7 Vital farms, they're motivated for the well-being of the animals, for the well-being of the land, the whole grand scope of things, they care about it all. You know, and that means a lot to me.

Speaker 4 To learn more about how Vital Farms farmers care for their hens, visit vitalfarms.com.