Chit-Chat Check-In #129 Transcript

Hello, this is your Captain speaking, sitting on the bus at the zoo in Seattle, getting ready to play another show. We played one last night here, at the zoo, it was very lovely. Looking forward to another lovely evening. It's surprisingly sunny and pleasant for a city that has been known to be quite grey from time to time. Certainly that's been our experience. So it's nice that we lucked out with the weather.

I'm sharing a couple of versions of "I'm Always in Love" the way we've been playing it on this tour. We've been rearranging some songs, just for whatever reason. Sometimes just to make it fit into the earlier set, which is, more often than not, kind of focused on the more country or acoustic material. And the second set is usually a little bit more electric. So a lot of older songs kind of fit into both worlds—actually almost any song that we play can kind of fit into both worlds—but sometimes you have to rearrange them a little bit more than others.

We started playing "I'm Always in Love"—the version you're going to hear, from Jackson Hole. And I don't know ... some interesting things happen when you change a musical landscape. The lyrics feel a little bit more ... I don't know, there's a different emotion to it. There's sort of a defiance to the record version, to the Summerteeth version, that I think is a little bit more .... I don't know. All I know is that when you change the way a song sounds a little bit, and you sing it, and you have to sing it a little bit different to adapt to different instrumentation and all that, you end up emoting in a different way. Or you feel it in a different way, and it's nice for a song that you've played so many times to feel fresh, and like you're hearing the words again.

I try and keep that in the front of my mind, always, but to be honest, it's not easy when you play a song over and over and over again. You have to really be careful that you don't get too rote, but it's almost inevitable that you wander off from time to time. And anybody that's seen us perform has probably witnessed me wandering off from time to time (laughs), and I'm sorry for that. But that's one thing AI isn't going to be good at, I don't think. So there's that.

So anyway, there's the version from Jackson Hole, which is the whole band version, pretty exemplary of how we've been playing it on this tour. And then--I wasn't sure we had a version I could share like that--so I recorded one on the bus, just me and an acoustic guitar, kind of to just sort of document the different way that we started playing it. And you can hear our techs checking our gear in the background. Which is kind of distracting, maybe, but I kind of thought it might be interesting. That's what it sounds like on a bus when your gear's being checked. It's also what it sounds like on a bus when you're trying to take a nap, a lot of times.

Well, there's that. It's my birthday, who cares. 58, as they say, is the new 57. Nobody says that.

Alright. Carry on.