Robert Landau Interview
Doug Burke:
Robert Landau grew up in Montreal, Canada, and has lived in the Northern Canadian mining towns, the Deep South of the panhandle of Florida, and many of the Western states, including Portland, Oregon where he currently lives. With four released albums of solo acoustic guitar-driven songs, he has led the troubadour's life, playing in crowded saloons, vibrant music festivals, honky-tonks, and empty coffee houses across North America for over 20 years. His songs are driven by complex characters, romantic imagery, and an existential spirituality that captures the listener's imagination. He joins us on Backstory Song for a discussion of his songs from his newest release, A Thousand Little Lies, and some of his audience favorites from his earlier albums.
Welcome to Backstory Song, I'm your host Doug Burke, and I am so happy to have on our show singer-songwriter, Robert Landau. Welcome, Robert.
Robert Landau:
Hey, Doug, thanks so much for having me.
Doug Burke:
So, Robert, you describe yourself as a CanAmerican, that's a person who's from both Canada and America.
Robert Landau:
Yes, I'm actually from Montreal originally, I've been living in the US for about 20 years now. Kind of came up with that idea because the kind of music play, they use the term Americana, but it didn't feel authentic, so I had to put my Canada side in there as well.
Doug Burke:
We obviously have many Canadians, like Gordon Lightfoot and Neil Young and many others who crossed the border, but what would you say is the difference between a Canadian and an American?
Robert Landau:
You know, it's funny, first I'll tell you, you never feel more Canadian than when you move to the US. Canada's got a lot of places, East to West, from French to prairies to the West, and the French Canada in the East and the maritime provinces, and the far East. Everybody's got their own identity, but one thing that holds Canadians together is how different we are from Americans. If I had to put it down to something simple, Canadians, we have rednecks, we have gun lovers, we have hippies, we've got left-wing, right-wing, but people are just nicer about it. It's not life and death, everything isn't life and death. And it's funny, when you read The Globe and Mail, which is like the national paper, sort of like The Wall Street Journal kind of thing, they'll talk about a politician, but they'll call him Mr. Whatever, or Mr. So And So, as opposed to you read the USA Today and it's almost teasing and taunting the politicians that they talk about.
Doug Burke:
That is so Canadian of you to say that Canadians are nice but you're not saying Americans are not nice. You're just saying Canadians are nice.
Robert Landau:
Yeah, they just don't climb into the gutter, into the ditch as deeply an American will when they don't agree, that's the biggest thing.
Doug Burke:
Mm-hmm, interesting, interesting. So, you grew up in Montreal, are you bilingual?
Robert Landau:
You know, I used to be. So, I graduated from high school, and you get your high school diploma, but you also get what's called a bilingual certificate, it shows that you are fluently bilingual and you can't even graduate high school unless you speak French equally as well as you speak English. But 20 years later, I confess, I've lost a lot of my vocabulary and I would not call myself bilingual anymore, although I can understand it. I know just enough French to impress my kids when I'm ordering in a restaurant when we're visiting Montreal.
Doug Burke:
Great, so, you have a new album out, A Thousand Little Lies, your fourth album. And on it is a song about Montreal, you write a lot of songs about places, and relationships, I've found in listening to your work. And sometimes both in a single song. Which I love, I think songs are rooted in those two things more than anything else, perhaps, and, so, one of the songs on the new album is Montreal Tonight.
But tell me, what's the backstory to this song?
Robert Landau:
Two ways of writing a song, right? One is you write from your own experience, I call that the Warren Buffett way of writing a song, he says, "You invest in things you know, that you use, as opposed to theoretical things." And then the other is you put on a character. So, I think the songs that come most naturally to most people but are maybe even the hardest to write are the personal songs about yourself. So, this is, Montreal Tonight, is based on a real experience, I was in Montreal, I spend a lot of time there. My mom passed away, a year from June, I guess, so, almost a year and a half ago. And she had just years of a myriad of different kinds of aches and pains and surgeries and all that kind of stuff and if anybody who's ever had somebody who's been in convalescence or having extended ailments, you feel relief for them when they finally go. So, this was also the first experience that I had, I mean, you live long enough, you always attend funerals and this was the first one where I had to work with my sister and we had to actually be the adults and arrange everything. So, that was a whole new experience. So, I wrote this song when I got back to Portland, Oregon, where I live, and it was just driving through the town, and just feeling how things have kind of moved on without you in this town. You know, I have a lot of my best friends still live there, I had a wonderful support group there, but it's not where you live anymore. It's still always where I'm from, but it's not where I live anymore. So, it's just kind of a song that reflects on that kind of change where you don't really know what's going to happen next or where you're going to go or what you're going to do about it. The only thing you know is, it's time to move on from this place.
Doug Burke:
One of the things I love about the song is the pause in it, and you do this really well in your music, which almost makes you think about the lyric, "I'm thinking of leaving", pause, "Montreal tonight, not sure where I'll go to", pause, "Not sure yet what feels right." I love that space that you leave in there to make you think about the lyric.
Robert Landau:
Thank you, you know, that was a learned approach. I'm a musician and I play live by myself, a one-man show. I'm no Jimi Hendrix where I do 10-minute solos, it's kind of acoustic, folky, Americana kind of stuff, and I've always tried to be aware of not having too many open spaces in my shows because I want to keep people engaged. One thing I learned, there's an artist called Mason Jennings, and he has a song called Darkness Between The Fireflies. That song taught me how to put spaces in music. Now, that song doesn't have a lot of space in music, but the concept of the song is the beauty of the firefly isn't the light, it's the darkness in between the lights of the fireflies, that's the beautiful thing. So, having patience when you're performing a song, or writing a lyric, and allowing for that room, it does exactly what you describe, it kind of gives the person a chance to connect in their own way and to think about what they're listening to.
Doug Burke:
"And I can't roll back time, because time rolled over me." Love that line. Is that what you were thinking as you were riding in the car?
Robert Landau:
Well, I was just thinking the people that I know there, I've known them my whole life. I literally have a friend I met in nursery school, in kindergarten together and went to grade one together, I know these people my whole life. It's just interesting to watch how everybody kind of evolves. One of the things that's interesting about growing up is, I remember being a kid and thinking, my parents were social workers, and money was tight and you think life is simple when you're an adult. You go to work, you have a job, you have your kids, you pay your house, you go on vacation. But you don't know all the stresses and nuances about that stuff. My parents, like I said, were in the social services and I had a friend, Ed, whose Dad made a lot of money and he was in a business. And I thought, it must be so good to have money and to not worry about money anymore. But years later I got into business myself and, I mean, I know you've got a business background, it's never secure. There are always bad years, bad quarter, looking for clients, it's not less stressful.
That was one thing that is confusing when you go back home, you see these people who you know them in one capacity and then you see them and it's totally different. Another comment about that line is I've realized that, people don't grow gradually, it's almost like these really tall stairs where you make leaps and bounds in your personal development. And the milestones that you think about when you're younger that are going to make you into an adult, they're not really what you think they are. So, for example, I remember feeling like an adult and then I did really feel that I took a giant step growing up when I left my job and moved to Vancouver.
Robert Landau:
Leaving your hometown, that's a big milestone. Having a parent die, that's a big moment of growth and milestone. So, that's just kind of a reflection on that situation or that idea.
Doug Burke:
You say, "All that I lost here", what did you lose there?
Robert Landau:
Both my parents.
Doug Burke:
Oh, yeah. Hits me straight in the eyes, yeah.
Robert Landau:
Yeah, I visited there every year since I left, like I said, over 20... I think I left Montreal in 1998, and every time you go, there's sometimes that's different, that you lose. Even my closest friends, you lose a certain connection with them, because you're not there on the day to day. There are places that you like to frequent that aren't there anymore, and you're not crying and sad about it, but it's a noticeable thing that's missing.
Doug Burke:
So, you talk about friends and places here, you mention, "I used to have AJ to help keep my mind right", one of my favorite lines from the song, and, "Machine Gun Irene, Bloody Mary in her hand, tried to keep me honest with all her demands." Who are these people?
Robert Landau:
So, yeah, AJ is my dad, he went by Jerry but Abraham Joseph was his official name. I used to have AJ to keep my mind right, we'd sit on the front porch and talk into the fading light. The front porch is a euphemism for just when we would connect, I used to have a job where I would drive a lot, all around the South, in the small-town South, when I lived in Atlanta. And in between my three, four-hour drives, I'd call him and we would just talk about everything, and he was always a great guy to give you advice. He was a social worker, but he was almost like a therapist, the way he would kind of help you see things into the light. Machine Gun Irene is my mom, this is actually a funny story, I lived in Eugene, Oregon for a while, and this was after my dad passed away, and she said, "You know, I really, really want to go to Vegas, I've never been to Vegas, and I really want to go." So, I was like, all right, we'll go to Vegas. So, she was coming to visit, she flew to Eugene, spent a night, and then we hopped on a plane to Vegas together. We landed at 9:30 or 10:00 o'clock in the morning and you can't check into your hotel until about 3:00. So, rented this van so we can get around. As we're driving around, I'm trying to figure out how to amuse her, I'm kind of giving her a lay of the land, because I go to Vegas once a year with those high school friends that I talked about earlier. So, I'm pretty familiar with the town, and we're driving down the highway and they have a lot of very interesting billboards. So, I'm like, hey, do you want to go to see a strip club? Hey, do you want to go and sell your jewelry? Hey, do you want to go shoot a real machine gun? And then she said, "Yes", I said, what? She was like, "Yeah, I'd like to shoot a machine gun." What?
Doug Burke:
She passed on the other things, but the machine gun caught her attention.
Robert Landau:
Yeah, my 72-year mother who's never touched a gun in her life. And I was like, really? She was like, "Yeah", I said, okay. So, we went to one of these places and I bought her the Gangster Package, which cost about a hundred bucks and she could shoot a Tommy gun, literally, like Al Capone shot, you get a .45 and you get a semi-automatic handgun and you get a more modern machine gun, and she shot all that stuff, and she thought it was the greatest thing. And she made me call her Machine Gun Irene for the rest of the day.
Doug Burke:
Wow. And she tried to keep you honest with all her demands, and you did stay honest when she had that machine gun in her hand, I bet.
Robert Landau:
Well, and, so, the Bloody Mary part is my mom never drank, except, growing up, we'd have a barbecue in the summer once a week. And she was such a lightweight, she would have a Bloody Mary, so, sometimes she’d go crazy and have two drinks. And we'd call her a drunk and an alcoholic and make fun of her, all in a good-natured way. So, that's another memory about her. And then the comment about trying to keep me honest with all her demands is, she was a demanding woman. She had lots of complaints, one of the milestones that I think is that when you realize your parents are human, they're fallible. So, these demands that I grew up with, these arguments that we used to have, I mean, I was in my 30s before I realized that this is just who she is and I have to navigate through it because just because somebody is rubbing you the wrong way, doesn't mean they're intending to, it's just how they view the world. That paragraph kind of tries to capture all that.
Doug Burke:
Wow. And then the second component is the old bar that became a shoe store. Is that a specific place in your Montreal?
Robert Landau:
It was a place called JR's Country Bar on Sherbrooke Avenue. So, country music is not prevalent in Montreal. And I didn't even discover it until I was 20, probably 19, 20. There was this one place called JR's Country Bar, kind of walking distance from my apartment where I lived, and it was a cool old dive bar where they'd have karaoke, and they would have the occasional country band, and I happened to notice on this particular trip I had to go to run an errand related to the estate, and I went, parked and walked by what used to be JR's and it was a shoe store. And I was like, oh, man, what a shame. The old landmarks are just disappearing.
Doug Burke:
It's happened across America, and certainly, COVID hasn't helped and we're going to be very interested to see which ones stay alive through the pandemic.
Robert Landau:
Absolutely.
Doug Burke:
When did you start writing songs and why? This must have occurred back in Montreal, I assume?
Robert Landau:
It did, you know, so, I've been a fan of music my whole life. Somebody once asked me, who are the most influential people in your life, and I said my dad and Bruce Springsteen. So, my dad for the reasons I described, but Bruce Springsteen, I mean, I had an uncle, my mom's brother, Uncle Nelson. He was like that cool uncle. "I'll let you drive my car in the parking lot even though you're only 11, let's have fried chicken after dinner while I'm babysitting you, I'll order fried chicken", he was that guy. But he got me and my sister into music. Somehow we got into Bruce Springsteen, and he took us to, I don't think it exists anymore, Sam The Record Man which was kind of a national chain of music stores, kind of like an HMV kind of thing back in the day, and I bought Styx's album, I forget what it's called, but it had that song Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto, on it. And my sister bought it under my uncle's recommendation, he was like, "You've got to buy this record."
Doug Burke:
Those were the two records he recommended?
Robert Landau:
He didn't recommend the Styx one.
Doug Burke:
He didn't recommend the Styx one.
Robert Landau:
No, no.
Doug Burke:
Because that's not, per se, their best selling album.
Robert Landau:
No, but it was a hit on the radio at the time, but then I used to sit there with the record player and listen to it, and this is back when you would get a full-blown album, and Bruce Springsteen always had a pullout where you had all the lyrics. It kind of blew me away, reading those lyrics. We ended up getting all his albums. Springsteen really taught me how to be a man. He's like, "Life is hard, but be hopeful, be tough, but be respectful", there's so many lessons that he taught me and I started to get into trying to kind of find my own way in the world. And I actually still have a binder that I'm looking at here in my workspace, handwritten poetry I wrote in high school, that is so embarrassingly, ridiculously bad.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, but that's where you start, right?
Robert Landau:
You got to start, do it by doing it. Then I didn't start writing any music until I was 16 years old, I was a counselor at a day camp for five-year-old kids, was my group. Once a week we would have music class, we'd go to the trailer and there was this guy Mark, and he had a bunch of little guitars and he would show the kids how to play music. And I never thought that I could actually play an instrument. I would monopolize his time, like, show me that chord, what does that mean? Just if I could ever nail one chord, I was like, God, it sounds so good. But it was a couple of years later that, for my 18th birthday, I asked my parents, I said, I want a guitar. They bought me a guitar, my friend Mark Miller, who, he's a fellow left-handed guitarist, so I would go over to his house and he would just show me chords. Once I knew three chords I thought, okay, I started writing songs and that's kind of how it started.
Doug Burke:
All you need, right?
Robert Landau:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Technically you just need one.
Robert Landau:
Well...
Doug Burke:
It helps to know three.
Robert Landau:
Yeah, exactly.
Doug Burke:
You also spent time in Tallahassee, Florida.
Robert Landau:
Yes.
Doug Burke:
In your shows, one of the most popular songs with the audience is your song Tallahassee. So, tell me about this and why it's so popular and...
Robert Landau:
Well, why it's popular, I can never predict or know, because songs that I think are amazing, nobody wants to hear, and songs that I think are silly and fun, people love. But I think people connect with it because I tell the story about how that song got written. So, I was working as a consultant, my day job, I was working at a small town about 45 minutes north of Tallahassee, and I would stay in Tallahassee at night, and I flew in from Portland into Atlanta into Tallahassee, and I left the mill, it was a sawmill that I was working at, for the day. For the week I should say. I flew in on a Monday, and they were like, "There's going to be some bad weather in the South." And then by the time I landed, it was like, "Oh, there's a tropical storm." And then by the time I got to the mill that day, they were like, "Oh, it's a category one hurricane." And it just kept on building and building. And by the end of Monday, they were like, "It's going to be a category three or four hurricane", and the operation had to shut down and we were all told to evacuate, and I decided, and I still lived for five or six years in Atlanta, I mean, I went camping in a tropical storm and just sat there with a bottle of Jack Daniels in my lawn chair under a 20-foot tarp and just loved the intensity of the weather. Big storms didn't scare me. My thought was I could either get out of Dodge, or I could just hole up in the hotel. So, I said, you know, I'm going to see this through. So, I went to the store, I got a couple of bottles of wine, I charged up all my devices so I could watch Netflix if the power went out. I got myself an extra-large pizza, I'm like, I'll be able to eat this hot or cold for the next few days if the power goes out, no big deal. I said, all right, I'm going to hole up here. So, I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, as is the fashion of the times, once you hit your 40s. I happened to turn on the TV and it was on the news channel, and it said, "Oh, five more miles per hour and this hurricane is a category five hurricane." And that actually kind of freaked me out, because category five, I mean, that tears buildings down. So, I decided, I got on the phone with the airline, and they were like, "You can get on this flight or that flight", so I was like, all right, you know what, I'm going to get out of here. So, I packed up my stuff, and I remember, it was about 3:30 in the morning. As I was leaving the hotel, trying to figure out what to do with these bottles of wine that I had or one and a half bottles left, or maybe it was just one, I don't remember. And there was this old guy standing out in front of the hotel, smoking cigarettes, and I said, what are you doing here? And he goes, "I work for a company that we do the boarding up of buildings, and I'm just getting ready for my shift", I said, oh, you want this bottle of wine? He said, "Yeah, sure." And I said, you know, actually, in my room I have a pizza if you want that you can have it for lunch today. He's like, "Sure, thanks", and before we left, and he asked me what I was doing and I said, well, I'm going to go back to Atlanta and get out of here before it gets too bad. And he said, "Don't worry, it's going to be all right, we live through this all the time." So, that's just kind of the... There's a lot of truth in that actual song. So, when I play it and it kind of tells that story, maybe they like it because they don't have to interpret it too much. It's just kind of the story of what happened.
Doug Burke:
My favorite line in the song is, "There's comfort in the sawdust when I make those band mills fly, the Southern pine has secrets, though none of them are mine."
Robert Landau:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
I just love the metaphor, what are the secrets of the Southern pines? I guess maybe you don't know.
Robert Landau:
Well, that's kind of a play on... So, I worked in sawmill consulting, so, helping operations run better. And when I lived out on the West coast in Vancouver, I worked all around the Pacific Northwest. Then when I moved to the South, the clients down there thought that what they did was completely different than anything I had ever done before. They were like, "Yeah, yeah, you know how to cut pine and Doug fir, but you don't know Southern pine. Southern pine has got its own science." And it was like, what are you talking about? You're putting a saw into a piece of wood, and, yeah, there's science around it, but it's not that different.
Robert Landau:
So, that was one element of it. And the other element of it was just, one thing I loved about moving to the South, I moved there for work. My boss said to me, "Hey, do you want to move to the Southeast? We want to open an office there." I said, Asia? And he said, "No, Atlanta."
Doug Burke:
The other Southeast.
Robert Landau:
Exactly. And I said, all right, I like this kind of music, I'm in. Now, the South has some, they call it the South, there's all kind of nicknames in the South, but it is the most complicated place, it's like a different planet from the rest of the country.
Doug Burke:
For sure.
Robert Landau:
You'll drive through somewhere, this is an actual example, I used to drive on my motorcycle when I could, everywhere around the South, because the weather is perfect for it. I was driving with a friend of mine from Atlanta to New Orleans, we were going to go see Steve Earl at the House Of Blues, he was doing an alone, an acoustic set, it was very exciting. We crossed the Mississippi River into Mississippi, I'm not a superstitious guy, I'm not a third eye kind of person, but as we entered this little town, there was a heaviness in the air that was incredibly profound. My friend and I pulled over to get a drink, because it was 5,000 degrees so we needed to hydrate. And I looked at him and I said, did you feel that? And he said, "Yeah." The feeling was bad stuff had happened in this town.
Doug Burke:
Huh, and it's lingering in the air, the humidity of the air was different?
Robert Landau:
It was just different, so, you get those feelings in different parts of the South, so, Southern pine has secrets, that's kind of a nod to that as well.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, and you do a good job of setting the setting with the Spanish moss on big oak trees and kudzu on the vine, I had to look up what a kudzu looks like, but I've seen it before.
Robert Landau:
Yes, yes.
Doug Burke:
But that's only down there, right?
Robert Landau:
Yeah, you see it down there, you see it in Louisiana, it's got kudzu and...
Doug Burke:
That whole Southeast, that's where stuff is. Why does the audience love this song?
Robert Landau:
It tells the story of an escape, in a way that's very overt in the way the story is told, and then there's all those lines like the Southern pine has secrets but none of them are mine makes people wonder what those secrets are.
Doug Burke:
But you left Tallahassee and you moved to Portland, Oregon at some point. You wrote a song that's on the new album called Landmark Saloon.
I have to say, I did a Google search for Landmark Saloon, because I didn't know where it was, and you don't say where it is in the song. Doing my show, the biggest benefit is I get to go to every honky-tonk and bar and club that plays music from great musicians like yourself, and I have so much fun at studying the characters and the characteristics of each one of these places. The bartenders at these places tend to be characters, I think the sort of normal people get fired, if you work in a club like this. You have to have a personality of sorts, or it's not the right fit for you if you're just a boring person, you have to leave.
Robert Landau:
You get to see lots of weird stuff that you've got to be able to tolerate and appreciate it, so, yes.
Doug Burke:
Right, so it sort of calls out the sort of bland person in these clubs of America, mainly, and Canada, that play live music, because it's to a certain extent dying, and it's hard to make it just on the bar tab, if all you do are open at 9:00 PM until whatever closing time is in your locale, without serving food or having a lunch crowd or some other means of paying the rent. And, so, we have seen a lot of the clubs changed and, so, I looked up the Landmark Saloon. There's only one answer, it surprised me, I thought there's got to be a hundred Landmark Saloons. There's only one Landmark answer in Google search, and it's in Portland, Oregon. So, I went, oh, this is his local bar in Portland, Oregon. So, tell me about the Landmark Saloon.
Robert Landau:
Well, first I'll tell you, anybody who's ever tried to play live anywhere will appreciate what I'm about to say. So, you get a gig and you are excited for it, you're prepared for it, and nobody shows up. I mean, I played the opening of a hipster grocery store, okay? It was like their grand opening, and I brought my gear and I set it up, and it hadn't rained all summer. We had the most torrential rain all day, I'm doing two or three-hour sets, nobody's coming into the store. I mean, that's a thing you deal with. I've played in a coffee shop in Vancouver, BC, where the owner was like, "All right, I'll pay you a hundred bucks to play for the night", I was like, great, I'll do it. I show up, he goes, "Yeah, I can't pay you, we're not making enough money doing this." I'm like, well, you dragged me out here, you put an ad, so we ended up negotiating that he'd pay me 20 bucks to cover my gas and the cost of a new set of strings that I'd put on. And I played the show, and I'm telling you, you had a mom and her kids coming into to buy coffee and leaving quickly. But then you had this one guy who sat there, and he wanted me to play, he would say, "Play The Eagles."
Doug Burke:
Free Bird, Free Bird.
Robert Landau:
It was like that, and so I only knew one song, Take It Easy, by The Eagles, so I play it. And then I finish it and he'd go, "Play The Eagles", and I'm like, how are you so drunk? You're in a coffee shop at 7:30 at night on a Sunday, I mean, I played it for him like 15 times and he loved it every time, so, you get those kind of gigs, okay? So, then I live in Portland, Oregon and it's a real Mecca for musicians. And there's a lot of live music venues, but the only thing flakier than a musician is a venue manager. So, trying to get a gig, it's quite a bit of work, because everybody wants to do it, a lot of people will do it for free, and they'll just line up some people. I mean, there's small, nowhere, lame bars that have live bands seven nights a week and they don't pay any of them.
Doug Burke:
You know, I have had this experience with the venue managers, I know the persona that you're talking about. But most people don't know, why do you think they're so flaky?
Robert Landau:
I don't know, I mean, I could never put myself in someone's head. Some of them are amazing to deal with.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, yeah, no, there's a wide range.
Robert Landau:
There's a super wide range, but a lot of them, it's just like an aside for them. You know, you get an owner, manager, a guy owns a small bar and he just doesn't have time to deal with everything. I had one gig at this wonderful place that I was going to play at, they had an amazing stage, good sound system, and I had the gig booked for Friday night, it was a month out. And he said, "Yeah, you're going to play, do it." So, I went in a couple of weeks later to meet the guy, couldn't find him. And I'm emailing him, to just kind of confirm that this is happening before I start promoting it, and I'm letting him know, I need to hear from you one more time before I start promoting it and he's not replying. So, I go in, and I talk to the bartender, and he's like, "Oh, yeah, he's real flaky, but I'm sure if he told you to show up, just show up." So, I ended up not even showing up and never hearing from the guy again. There's lots of places to play, but it's kind of hard to get a decent gig. I love to go to the Landmark Saloon, that's the place I like to hang out, it's like an old converted house, they have this giant outdoor area, and they always have great bands. You've never heard of any of them, but I've never seen a bad band there, and they're all kind of these retro country bands, could be a swing band, it could be an outlaw country band, it could be a guy covering Merle Haggard for two hours. They're all amazing, and every time I go there, I mean, you can go there on a Tuesday night or a Sunday afternoon, and like, this guy's good. And I'm like, I want to play in a place where they don't just take anybody, where they really have only good acts play. So, I emailed the guy, the manager, I figured out who it is and I email him and he doesn't reply, and I email him again and I email him again, it's like business development in any kind of industry, you've got to kind of push yourself a little bit. Finally he replies and says, "Oh, send me your links", charity gig, but I sent them again, and he seemed kind of interested, and then I never heard from him again and I was annoyed by it. So, I was in there one night, and I'm watching this singer-songwriter guy play. He's doing a lot of covers of old country, and I ran into this guy, Barna Howard, who's a local musician here in Portland. And I'm just talking to Barna and I'm going, man, I'm so annoyed, I can't get a gig here, it's so frustrating, I really want to play here. He's like, "Yeah, you know, it's a good place", and I said, maybe I'm just not honky-tonk enough, because my style is a little folky and it's not classic, old school… I'm like, I'll wear the hat, I'll put on my stetson, that's how I dress anyway, I can look the part and I know all these old songs too, I could play that instead of my own stuff. So, I said to Barna, I said, "Barna, have you ever played here?" Now, he plays kind of more of a, I'll say John Denver-y kind of, more angsty than John Denver, I should say. But kind of a 70s kind of country, softer sound. And I said, well, have you ever played here? And he goes, "Yeah, I've played here", I'm like, Goddamn it.
Doug Burke:
Damn it. Your sound's not that far from that, come on.
Robert Landau:
I was like, come on man. So, I said, you know what I'm going to do, I'm going to write a song about how they won't let me play here. So, that's going to be my revenge on the bar, because I'm tired of trying to get in on it.
Doug Burke:
So, Tim, Tim.
Robert Landau:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
The show booker at Landmark Saloon, you're on notice.
Robert Landau:
Exactly.
Doug Burke:
That you need to book Robert Landau at your venue.
Robert Landau:
So, let me tell you what happened. So, I wrote the song, and on my Facebook page, I don't really use it for personal stuff, I kind of have a personal page and a music page, but I just put music on there. I just put little video clips of me, if I write a new song, I pop it up there or I want to cover a song, it's all obscure stuff that most people haven't heard of so they're interested. So, I wrote Landmark Saloon, and I put the video up of Landmark Saloon. Four hours later, I get an email from the Landmark Saloon, "What are you doing March 29th?"
Doug Burke:
And you got your first gig there?
Robert Landau:
I got my gig there, but guess what? COVID shut me down.
Doug Burke:
But you still haven't had your gig at the Landmark Saloon.
Robert Landau:
Exactly right.
Doug Burke:
I love you played at Tootsies. For those who don't know, Tootsies is this legendary place on Broadway in Nashville, it's been there forever, Willie Nelson famously passed out drunk in the middle of the street outside of it and had an epiphany, but it's a legendary place.
Robert Landau:
And you know what's funny about that? So, I was talking about how hard it is to get a gig in Portland, and I was on this camping trip, it was a three week trip with my girlfriend, my early 20s. That's when I sat in the tropical storm under my tent, because we camped for two weeks, we'd just got toward the South. And went into Tootsies, asked the bartender, I said, hey, when could I play here? How can I play here? And he said, "I don't know, how about tomorrow at 2:00?"
Doug Burke:
Just like that.
Robert Landau:
Yeah. I said, okay, and I played 45 minutes, for tips. So, I'm laughing, I could play at Tootsies, it's a world-renowned, historic place, but I can't play at the Landmark Saloon, it was driving me nuts.
Doug Burke:
That's so funny.
So, I know we wanted to talk a lot about material from your new album, but on Spotify, for me, it put a song off one of your earlier albums, I Don't Know You Yet, as the most played thing on Spotify. I got to say, I love this song, it's fantastic.
Robert Landau:
Well, you know, sometimes you write a song because you have a feeling, or you have something you're trying to get out, it's like spitting out something that you wouldn't necessarily tell somebody. And sometimes there's an image that catches your eye, just a very micro-moment, you know? There's an expression, aim small, miss small, so you just want to capture that exact moment. So, those are the kind of songs I really love when you're just trying to capture a moment. This particular song, and I wrote it many years ago, I was living in a loft in Montreal, and I had a girlfriend who was there all the time, and we were kind of living there. I was in the other room working, I kind of came in and I saw her kind of looking out the window. And it's interesting when you see somebody, when they don't know you're looking at them. And I found myself just kind of staring at her and just studying her for several minutes, she didn't know I was there. And she was just standing there, drink in her hand, just looking out the window. It's a pretty view outside the window. I wonder what she's thinking about, wondering what the future would hold for us, just going through this big existential relationship path. This song just kind of came out of it like, imagine us 25 years later. Will I know her any better than I know her now? That was kind of the idea, because you never really know what's in somebody's heart and what really moves them, I mean, anybody who's had relationships has accidentally pissed someone off or learned something new years later. So, that's what that song's kind of about, it's just kind of a projection or a fantasy about this rich life that we had lived together, and that I still don't know if I know her to the core of who she is.
Doug Burke:
Well, it has one of the greatest hook lines of your repertoire in it, "The problem with us is we learned to love flying before we learned how to fly."
Robert Landau:
Yeah, I mean, sometimes you get so deep into something and you don't even know what happened. And then you don't have the skills to do it. Because you didn't think at the time, didn't do it slowly, and I'm not saying you shouldn't do it fast, because that's the exciting thing about relationships and love, is when you're in it that deep, but I was trying to articulate that.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, it kind of implies that we all know how to ride on an airplane but most of us aren't really pilots.
Robert Landau:
Mm-hmm
Doug Burke:
You know? But we're all trying to pilot our own lives, and pilot our relationships with each other and you've been all over the world, to Paris and Vegas with this person and still stuff to learn.
Robert Landau:
Stuff to learn, and you don't really know what's in their heart, and it's interesting because that woman, I probably didn't talk to her for 15 years, but I did talk to her relatively recently. When I put out my Dark Charms album in 2019, sent out a kind of email blast and she was in there, and we got reconnected over that, because she knew some of the songs, or recognized parts of them, and so we'd get together and talk music on text and phone on occasion.
Doug Burke:
Does she know this song's about her?
Robert Landau:
I don't know.
Doug Burke:
Well, now she does.
Robert Landau:
Well, I guess she will, yeah.
Doug Burke:
So, you never played it for her, I like it when the songwriter plays the song to their partner, and it always stuns me what the reaction is, because I always thought that if I were a great songwriter and I wrote a great love song and I played it for my partner, that it would make them cry and I would look romantically heroic in her eyes. What I found, that that doesn't happen, for the songwriter.
Robert Landau:
You can never write a song to achieve something. Because if you're really going to be honest, you're not a good guy all the time, there's going to be elements of it that you're not, and sometimes I've written a song about somebody and I tell them, hey, take a breath, it's poetic license, I may or may not have these concerns or fears, it's just the character of the song.
Doug Burke:
Right, it's how the rhyme worked.
Robert Landau:
Yeah, the sentiment led me there. It's actually funny, there's a song, Oh, Mary, on my new album, that is what you just talked about.
Doug Burke:
Okay, let's talk about that.
Robert Landau:
I started seeing this woman, we connected so deeply, so quickly, on every level. And it was very intense. She got afraid and kind of backed out a little bit, after just a couple of weeks, and I was totally bummed, this is going too fast, I don't want to do this like that, whatever, and maybe we should take a break. And I wrote this song a week before I recorded A Thousand Little Lies, we had the whole album. So, I already had everything all set up and the songs that I was going to do, and then this happened just a week before I was going to record it, and I went to the back yard, bottle of bourbon, and my guitar, pad and paper, and I just kind of wrote that song. It just kind of spilled out of my head, it was about what she was feeling and what I was feeling, and I actually did play it for her a few days later, and needless to say she was embarrassed about it but loved it.
Doug Burke:
It's just a love song to Mary.
Robert Landau:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Did she cry? Did she hug you? Was she mad? Was she angry? Was she...
Robert Landau:
She wasn't mad, I think she was obviously flattered and, I mean, you know, no one had ever written a song about her before, not many people have songs written for them. It just so captured what we were going through, I think she really appreciated it.
Doug Burke:
So, she was your muse, is there anything that you need to apologize for that you took poetic license on that's not actually about her here on this episode while you have the chance, Robert Landau?
Robert Landau:
Well, I don't think so, and I'll probably give her a call when we're done this because we're still together, so.
Doug Burke:
I gave you the chance to get out of jail for free, pass there on that.
Robert Landau:
No, it was a good song for me to also just make sense of your thoughts and what you're feeling. So, sometimes writing a song is just about getting the books right on the shelf so that you can see what's on there.
Doug Burke:
And how did you feel when you were done with it?
Robert Landau:
I thought it was great, I was pretty happy. And then I was also like, oh, man, I don't know if I should play it for her because it's pretty intense and her big beef is that things are too intense, but my great strength and my great flaw is I say what I mean and I mean what I say, and I'm direct with people, so, I decided to share it with her.
Doug Burke:
Well, thank you for sharing it with us.
Sort of a related song is Walls.
Robert Landau:
Mm-hmm
Doug Burke:
About a relationship with a woman who has walls.
Robert Landau:
Yeah, I had met this woman online dating of all things, of course, that's the fashion of the times. And we had spent a ton of time on the phone, and we'd met, of course, but she was a very reluctant person, and she'd been burned before. We're chatting, I'm trying to get to know her, and I could feel that I'm not quite getting 100% honesty out of here, that transparency as she's talking to me, and I said, your walls are pretty high. And she said, "Yeah." And I said, I'm going to write a song about that, and so I did, and later that night I actually played this for her on the phone.
Doug Burke:
Did she unfollow or block you, or?
Robert Landau:
No, no.
Doug Burke:
How did it work? What was the outcome of that?
Robert Landau:
Well, we saw each other for quite a while and she was like, "Goddamn it, you nailed that." We dated for quite a while after that, but...
Doug Burke:
This is a different style song from some of your other work because it's much more of a traditional 12 bar.
Robert Landau:
Totally is, and I record my albums, I just record them by myself, my songs, and it's me and a guitar and some rudimentary harmonica. But this one, I was like, I'm in the studio, and I'm imagining the budget for a honky-tonk band, because this could be a classic, that's how I felt.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, if you could picture any honky-tonk band playing this, because when I heard this, I had the same feeling, I got to be honest where I was like this needs a band behind it. And I heard these other instruments in my head, like a producer might, and I thought, oh, God, don't pretend, Doug, like you could even do that. But I'm glad you thought that, if you could pick any honky-tonk band to play this, which one would you pick?
Robert Landau:
Well, I mean, I don't think I'd go totally traditional honky-tonk, but there's a couple of kind of, I'll say, alt-country bands that I really think would be awesome, I'd love to be able to hear Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, I'd love to use her band and their drummer, I forget his name, but he was in a band called The Two Dollar Pistols, also, and he just does these amazing drum rolls and transitions that I thought, I'd love to get that guy to play drums on this, and use Sarah Shook's band to bring this thing to life. And I wish that I'd known that at the time, because there's an app called Sleep Tour, you can offer your home to touring musicians.
Doug Burke:
Oh, really?
Robert Landau:
And you kind of put up a profile and you describe your house and how many rooms you have and how many people you could sleep, again, this is probably about a year and a half, maybe two years ago. The last time Sarah Shook & the Disarmers came, they actually stayed at my house. TourSleeper, that's what it's called.
Doug Burke:
Tour Sleeper, okay.
Robert Landau:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
We're plugging everybody here on our show, and that seems like a really good thing for Backstory Song to support is TourSleeper. I don't know your app, but I'm going to look at it and endorse you, because I think our touring musicians need all the help they can get, because they've been off tour for so long and when we get them back on tour, they're going to need help.
Robert Landau:
And it's enraging to me that a band like Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, who, I mean, top 20 Americana album every time they release something, just incredible, she's cool because she writes these tough guy songs but she's a woman. You don't get that perspective very often, it's so authentic, it's so edgy and raw, and in the band, they can't afford to do their tour if they have to pay for their own cheap motels. I mean, it sucks.
Doug Burke:
I was talking to someone last week about this, I think there is going to be a groundswell of music that comes out of this, because all of you great artists are locked up in lockdown and what do you do when that happens? You create art. I think we're going to see just an amazing tidal wave, tsunami, of musical output that comes out of this, I hope. And I hope we get to see it live by next summer if everybody goes and gets vaccinated, so, that's really important to get vaccinated so we can actually open our clubs up again.
Robert Landau:
Yeah, hopefully enough of those places survive, too, that's going to be challenging.
Doug Burke:
You know, you use a curse word in here that makes it not radio-friendly, does that matter anymore?
Robert Landau:
You know, I don't think so, I put that curse word in there because any time I played that song or even when I play that song live, that curse word, it rhymes with funny trucker, but it comes so out of the blue that you can actually hear a gasp and a laugh when people hear it, because it's a love song, and then it just comes out of the blue, so, it's kind of funny. But I don't think it matters, because people are listening to music in their own way. For example, on Spotify, when you post your music, it says, "Is there any explicit content?" But then it defines explicit content as something that's out of context, something that's not descriptive, it's gratuitous swearing. So, that song is not marked by Spotify as explicit content, because it emotes something specific for a specific person and a specific reason, so it's funny how they've kind of softened what explicit language is.
Doug Burke:
Well, I think this word was on George Carlin's seven dirty words list, actually.
Robert Landau:
You're right.
Doug Burke:
So, I'm surprised it's not on Spotify's, but maybe we've come a long way since George Carlin. What I love about that line, this feeling, this guy feeling of my baby's got walls, and I want to figure out why, but if I could find the person that built these walls or caused these walls to get built, man, I would tear him apart. And I think we all feel that way, it's like this incurable problem that if you could get to the source of it, you'd really go at it and tear it down.
Robert Landau:
Well, you know, there's a line in a song that's not yet released, it's going to be on my next album, but it says it's harder to see the future through the trauma of the past.
Doug Burke:
Mm-hmm
Robert Landau:
That's what that's about, that trauma can stay with you if you don't let it go.
Doug Burke:
So, another song from the new album is the title song. A Thousand Little Lies.
Robert Landau:
You know, that's a song, I think I might have overheard the idea of there's a hard truth buried in that lie or something like that, I might have been in a coffee shop and I heard that, and I wrote it down, I take notes on my phone and then I put it in a little pad like an old school guy, it's kind of a pick list for when I'm trying to get some motivation. And it's funny, I was just thinking about preparing for this, and I was like, you know, I think I wrote that song maybe a year ago to the day. It felt like a winding down of 2019, and I was just reflecting on it and the chorus, those big hard truths buried in a thousand little lies, you can't just watch the news anymore. You have to interpret it. You have to figure out what's opinion. Opinion is shown to you as fact, and fact is shown to you as opinion. And you could read three different news sources, and get three interpretations of what it is, if something big happens, then I watch MSNBC, CNN, and I watch Fox News, because I want to see what's the interpretation, what's important to a variety of people. So, that idea of big hard truths buried in a thousand little lies kind of got birthed from there. And then the song itself is trying to give an honest reflection, an undistorted mirror view of where I've been, and what I'm feeling these days.
Doug Burke:
There's a few turns of the phrase in this song that I really love, one is, "The indifference I give", I thought about that, I was like, I'm giving indifference. You know when someone's doing that to you, you know? Consciously giving you indifference. Indifference is not something you'd perceive as giving, but when someone's doing it to you, you notice that feeling.
Robert Landau:
Yeah. You know, I have a friend, she is dating this guy right now and he's not quite replying to her texts and phone calls and not quite making the time for her and all... And, you know, you forget that when someone's into you, they're into you, they make the time, they find the time, they do the things. And it was just a reflection of when you have a relationship that didn't work out, the most logical thing to do is to, or not logical, the most obvious thing that we all do is to figure out what was wrong with that other person, that's why it didn't work. And this is just kind of a reflection of, it's something to do with me, it's not them, when it doesn't work out sometimes, because I give the indifference and I'm trying to get to the root of why that is.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, I think that's the definition of ghosting, right? Giving indifference is the new sort of social media thing, word that has evolved and ghosting -
Robert Landau:
- Well, I think ghosting is clear and clean, indifference is torturous and ghosting, you know where you stand, indifference is confusing and never ending. So, it's the difference between pouring out a glass of water, that's ghosting, but slowly draining the bathtub, that's indifference.
Doug Burke:
The other thing I like about this song is the whole notes, and you said it's big hard truths, but you actually say, "Big, big hard truths", using these whole notes, and I actually have started to really love songs that do that, because so much of our music is about fast picking and fast playing and rap songs where you rip off a lot of words in a short amount of notes, and this is different. You can say a lot in simple, whole noted words, I like that.
Robert Landau:
Yeah, I think the verses are kind of dense, and, so, I thought the chorus should have more space. Again, a spot where you could kind of digest what you just heard.
Doug Burke:
One of the other songs that Spotify's picking up on your new album is I Miss Falling In Love With You.
Robert Landau:
So, that's actually kind of funny. So, I released my 2019, beginning of 2019, I released my Dark Charms album. It had been a few years since I'd played live, I had just got busy with life, you know? And I was still writing songs now and then, but I went through a crazy creative burst in, I'll say, '18, '19, '20, I released A Thousand Little Lies and I've already got seven songs for my next album. I have so much material, and I was just able to grab onto it, you know? But this particular song, two things kind of motivated it. One was, I had a gig that I was going to play at a series of bars that are called McMenamins bars. It's a company that takes over historic buildings and turns them into pubs and that kind of thing. So, they're always really cool venues, and they have amazing sound when you play live. The soundchecks are great, and the equipment is excellent. And, so, I got a gig, my first gig to kind of promote this new album, was playing at one of these bars. I have never been the kind of guy who is good at preparing, if I have to give a speech, I'll write it three weeks ago but I'll never practice it until the morning of. I'm just not good at preparing, I've never been good at it. So, here I am, now, performing live is different. There's not a lot of room for error. You hit the wrong chord, it's obvious, you miss a line, you're frozen. So, it's important, I was feeling the pressure of putting on a 45 minute set, and I hadn't done it in years and I'm trying to figure out how to do it, so, in my typical procrastinating way, while I'm supposed to be preparing a few days before my gig, I wrote this song instead, and ended up playing it at that gig. Again, like I said, sometimes I write a song because of a idea, you know? It's not necessarily what I'm feeling in the moment, but it's an idea that I like. So, the idea was, it's not that I miss being in love with you or miss being with you, I miss the process of falling in love with you. We all know that butterflies and the obsessive thoughts about the person, and, so, it was trying to capture that feeling. I mentioned that old girlfriend from my 20s, I was actually on the phone with her a couple of days earlier, and we were just kind of reminiscing, and she used to wear leather pants. This was before people wore leather pants, at least, in urban settings.
Doug Burke:
Black leather pants come in and out of fashion.
Robert Landau:
Exactly, well, in Montreal in the '90s, it was not a fashion thing, but she wore them and she's a tall brunette and long legs, so, it was very, what's the word, noticeable when she would walk into a room wearing those pants. So, we were talking about that and her leather pants came up, I said, I might put that in a song. And that's when I kind of added that as a layer to this song.
Doug Burke:
But this isn't a love song, this is a song about falling in love and missing it, but it doesn't seem like you really are, per se, in love with this person.
Robert Landau:
No.
Doug Burke:
You just miss the feeling.
Robert Landau:
Exactly, exactly. One thing that, when you're a songwriter, you're always trying to come up with an, unique, or a new way of expressing something that everybody who's ever lived has already expressed and every song was already about. So, it's kind of hard to come up with a new angle on it. This is, I think, a new angle on it.
Doug Burke:
The break in the song, you have some really amazing finger picking on your guitar. So, tell me a little bit about that and how you go about doing that, where does that come from, how did you learn how to do that?
Robert Landau:
I'm about as untrained a musician as you'll find. I can't read music, I never took a class, I've told you earlier that my friend Mark showed me a few chords, that's about the extent of my lessons that I ever got. It just comes from doing it, and just trying to sort of find a vibe and create the space that you want or fill the space that you want in the song, and the picking in this one, it comes and goes, it's softness and then it kind of picks up a little bit and it goes back to softness. And to me, it was kind of like a heartbeat, the way it kind of came and went as the song kind of evolved.
Doug Burke:
The new album has a song that's getting some Spotify attention called Shelter In Place, which I call a COVID song. And I think people who are sheltering in place are looking for songs about this experience that we have and you've written one that's titled that, Shelter In Place, on the new album. Tell me about this.
Robert Landau:
Well, it's kind of funny, because I joke that it took a global pandemic for me to write a happy song. I wrote this, it was March 16th I believe, of last year, that we got to shelter in place and then that very first weekend I said, I'm going to write a song about this. And it was when sheltering in place was kind of a novel idea, we didn't have any shortages of anything, and I had lots of toilet paper and it was kind of nice to... You know, there's lots to talk about with everybody that you know over FaceTime or over the telephone. It wasn't like a thing of discomfort, it felt like a forced meditative retreat, in a way. Like, stay in your house, enjoy what you have, be where you are, be present. You're not missing anything anywhere else, I mean, when did we ever feel that? If you don't have that fear of missing out syndrome, you always feel like you should be doing something or being somewhere, all that just got stripped away from us instantly. So, it was just a song about how that's a liberating thing, and this will pass, let's enjoy it for what it is. And it's funny, you know, here we are, whatever, 10 months later, California went on lockdown or Bay Area and LA went on full on shelter in place lockdown a day or two ago. You know, the novelty has worn off.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, yeah. I think that's why people are reaching out for the song, maybe they'll stop listening to it, saying, "I hate this song because I've been sheltering in place for too long." But I've been reading my books, I've been meditating, I've been playing my songs, I've been binge watching, I think this is the first song that references binge watching, which has been quite a treat, I have enjoyed binge watching and I think it's good until you're on the fifth show that you're binge watching, because somewhere after… The first binge watch is fantastic, the second one is pretty good, and then when you're on the fifth show or you're on your social media asking people, who should I binge watch? Maybe you've over binge watched and it's time to get back out.
Robert Landau:
That's probably about right, yeah, I gave it up many months ago.
Doug Burke:
And I do think there's a meditative mantra, the way you finish this, "I'll be dreaming about you."
Robert Landau:
Yeah, absolutely, it's an oddly upbeat song considering the topic.
Doug Burke:
But I have to say, one of my favorite, favorite songs from the album is The Flu... A Folk Song, and I do have to say, this is the first song that I have listened to that I think is about the flu, which I think is fantastic, and it's also stylistically one of your story songs, even though it's just about the flu. And, so, I really love your story songs, I've wished you would write more of them, I think you have a knack for it, and a gift for it. Tell me about The Flu... A Folk Song.
Robert Landau:
So, I wrote this song a couple of years ago, way before the pandemic, and I also thought, I was a little self conscious when I released A Thousand Little Lies the album, I'm like, two songs about flu and pandemics? But, sure, it's a good song. I got the flu, and I spent four, five days just immobilized, trying my best to drink water and keep my fever down and try to get some food down, and it was really remarkable, and I remember, it was a Saturday night, it starts to break a little bit. I just spent the last four days just listening to Spotify and it plays songs that you listen to and like and you can pick a folk channel or a country channel or whatever. And I was listening to a lot of folk music, as I felt better I said, oh, I've got to write a song about this very intense experience, I don't know if it'll be good or not, but it's something that's immediate and was pretty all encompassing for the last week. And, so, I wrote a song kind of making fun of folk songs, because they all have the same themes, you know, everybody writes songs about trains and all these retro ideas that everybody talks about, and they're all very simple melodies and so I just kind of wanted to make fun of all that, and then just as I was coming to the end of trying to figure out what the chorus would be, I just kind of thought it was funny that the line is, I want to be crowned for breaking new ground, no one ever sings about having the flu.
Robert Landau:
And then I go into the description of what it feels like to be immobile and sick for a few days, I just kind of thought it was funny and it actually turned out to be a pretty good song.
Doug Burke:
It's a great song, and I love the internal rhyming of it, and I love that you actually turn having a cold into a story from start to finish. It's funny throughout, there's all these punchlines in it, like my favorite is the way you rhyme sympathy with incessantly, but whatever you do, don't tell your folks about the flu or they'll check up on you incessantly, that's so true. It's like you just want to be left alone sometimes, and when your parents or your siblings or your loved ones find out, they feel like they're going to help you by bugging you, and just that feeling of you have a short temper or you're cranky when you get the flu.
Robert Landau:
Well, and it was funny because, you know, I had mentioned, when I write a song I post it up on Facebook or something, and I posted that up, and I'm getting a lot of replies from people saying, "Oh, my God, that's so funny, that's so great", and my mom replied and she was like, "Oh, I didn't realize it was so bad, I'm so sorry", and she started calling me and I was like, no, it's not, it's the song. The other thing that's kind of funny in this for me is there's a line in here that says, I hear songs about social injustice, songs about heartache and pain, that rite of passage song where the young songwriter pretends to be an old man who died or is reflecting in the rain, that's like my pet peeve in a way. Every songwriter, from Guy Clark to Steve Earle to... All these guys write these songs where we pretend to be somebody else, years later, and it feels like a rite of passage song where you could show your imagination, well rounded understanding of the human experience. I was just kind of making fun of myself, too, because in my song, I Know I Don't Know You Yet, or, I Don't Know You Yet, I'm doing that there, that's me pretending I'm 25 years ahead. So, it was kind of a joke between me and myself.
Doug Burke:
I love that line in the song because it is so wordy, and you are so self consciously jamming all these words into the melody, in a way that's ironic and it makes you laugh. And it's clear that that's what you're doing intentionally, it's like jamming words into a melody that really can't accommodate it.
Robert Landau:
Exactly, exactly right. The line that I thought was really funny was, you know, I said everybody writes about trains, do we really all have wanderlust for hobo times or is it just really easy to rhyme with the word train? Who goes on trains? Almost nobody. But every country, folker guy is writing about trains still.
Doug Burke:
And who hops on a train anymore illegally?
Robert Landau:
Exactly.
Doug Burke:
That's like hitchhiking, it doesn't happen anymore, these things have died, they're from another era. I guess people are doing those things, but you don't see a whole lot of it.
Robert Landau:
No, you sure don't.
Doug Burke:
In this day and age, it's interesting. So, The Flu... A Folk Song, I really love it, is there anything else you want to say about this song?
Robert Landau:
Well, just one more line I thought was pretty funny. So, you know Merle Haggard has a song, Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down, I was trying to make fun of myself a little bit, because a lot of my songs are about drinking bourbon and being a tough guy, and the line here says, the bottle won't let me down this time around, because a bottle of Nyquil will do.
Doug Burke:
Right, you can't drink the bourbon but you got to drink the Nyquil instead.
Robert Landau:
Making fun of my own self imposed flu guy image.
Doug Burke:
I particularly love this song, love the album, Robert Landau, thank you for being on our show, I am so excited for you to be releasing your fourth album and can't wait to see you again on tour, is there anybody you'd like to thank or plug as we close out the show?
Robert Landau:
I don't think so, I've kind of plugged enough people here accidentally along the way. But I just want to thank the people in general, the people who come to my shows, who comment on my music, who give me feedback, you do it for yourself, you write a song because you have to write it, you want to get it out, but getting feedback and appreciation from those who hear it is invaluable, so, thank you everybody for that.
Doug Burke:
Okay, and I'd like to thank our sponsor, the Landmark Saloon. Just kidding. But I do hope to get a free beer when I come there, so, thank you to our listeners, thank you DJ Wyatt Schmidt in the sound booth, we couldn't do this without you, and thank you to our social media director, MC Owens. And thank you all you listeners, please listen to our artists' songs on Spotify so they can get paid. Listen to our playlist, share our playlist, so they can get paid, that's our goal and objective. Thank you very much, Robert Landau.
Robert Landau:
Thank you, Doug.
