00:00I've been asked to go on tour with some people that I wasn't really particularly musically passionate about, but I
00:06was so poor, I'd stopped the day job thing.
00:09I was trying not to have a day job after almost 18 years of day jobs.
00:14And I was pushing 50 years old at this point, and I thought, I think I might have to get
00:21a job again.
00:22I thought, okay, I've never had a job that had a computer cash register.
00:28You know, I never had to clock in.
00:30I always had these bookstore and record store jobs.
00:33Sold Christmas trees one time.
00:35A lot of musicians have done far more crazier jobs.
00:41Imagine getting in your cab and fill up glasses, your cab driver.
00:44I mean, he was a cab driver.
00:45Tom Rainey was a cab driver, the great drummer I play with.
00:49That's a hard job.
00:50So my jobs weren't hard.
00:52I wanted little responsibility, but of course, concomitantly, little pay.
00:57But I was trying not to do that anymore, and I thought, what am I going to do?
01:01I'm almost 50 years old.
01:02My jobs have never had any kind of normal parameters as far as how to do them.
01:08Clock in, you know, use the computer cash register or whatever.
01:12Wear the uniform.
01:13I don't know what, but I thought maybe Starbucks.
01:15They'll probably take somebody with no experience, and I can just learn how to do it, you know?
01:21And that's when Jeff called.
01:22It sounds like apocryphal, but it's actually a true story.
01:26I was driving down from the Bay Area.
01:28I had played with Scott and Devin, now Debra, and I played with Jessica Lurie, this excellent woodwind player.
01:36We made a record.
01:37We played gigs around Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, and I think I had something like $800.
01:44And I was like, yeah!
01:47And then I realized, oh, I have to pay my rent.
01:50Well, that leaves $200.
01:52Well, that's not terrible, but I think I should get a job.
01:55And that's when Carla called my cell phone and said that Jeff had called.
02:00And so I knew the music was not going to be predictable.
02:03I knew that the stylistic parameters were pretty vast.
02:08I knew that I liked Jeff's songwriting, and I knew that I liked everybody in the band, not just musically,
02:15but personally.
02:16I hadn't met Patrick yet.
02:19And so Jeff sent me an unmastered version of A Ghost is Born.
02:25I'm not even sure if it was sequenced or not, but it did start with at least that's what you
02:30said.
02:30When I heard that song, I was just like, oh, yeah.
02:33Yeah, I can get with this.
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