I loved the movie Rumble, one of the stories I learned there was when Johnny Cash hit the big time, when Ring Of Fire was playing everywhere, the next thing he did was make a record of stories about the Indigenous people of America called Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian. The record company didn’t think this would be a profitable follow up and asked him to change his plans but he proceeded. They didn’t service it to radio. 1964. It disappeared. I played it to Magali and at first she asked if it was Stompin’ Tom and I realized Tom probably was an enormous Johnny Cash fan. That whole style of Stompin’ Tom is so much that era of Johnny Cash. A lot of the album is written in the first person. I loved Bernadine Evaristo’s book Girl, Woman, Other and her response when an interviewer asked how she felt about assuming other identities in her writing and she said that’s what an artist does when they write fiction, that’s the power of it, that’s the point. I guess the other power of making artwork, like a record, is that it’s lifespan is longer than just when it was first released.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"