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Interview 1: JOHN HIATT: Let's talk about Mermaid Avenue. This is a record that you did with Billy Bragg, the English folk singer. JEFF TWEEDY: Troubadour? JOHN HIATT: Yeah, that's right. JEFF TWEEDY: Yeah, it was Woodie Guthrie lyrics that weren?t put to music yet, and uh -- JOHN HIATT: Who found these lyrics? JAY BENNETT: Or may have been but the music was lost. JEFF TWEEDY: Nora, uh, Nora Guthrie, his daughter runs the archives here in New York, and I guess she had the idea a couple years ago to start putting some of the, you know, allowing people to come in and look at these lyrics, and eventually she asked Billy Bragg to work on this project, and eventually he asked us and... JAY BENNETT: And eventually we did it. JEFF TWEEDY: We did it. To make it about as basic as... JOHN HIATT: Did you guys write the music or did you write it with Billy? JAY BENNETT: He kind of wrote the stuff that he sang and we wrote the stuff that we sang, for the most part. JEFF TWEEDY: Yeah, for the most part. We, I think being the band, having numbers on the guy, we ended up having to arrange some of his stuff. Uh, cause he?s just one guy. Like, we kind of came in knowing what we were capable of. JAY BENNETT: So, and you know, Billy hadn?t been in a band for twenty years or whatever, fifteen years, you know. JEFF TWEEDY: So, it was, minor things like well, we need a bridge. No, not really. Or we can?t just, we could put a solo there and it would actually sound like a rock song. JOHN HIATT: What's a solo? JAY BENNETT: A solo is when I stop singing and play the guitar louder, in Billy's case. It's when I step back from the mic. That's a solo. Interview 2: JOHN HIATT: Let's talk about Protools, what is it and what does it do that you couldn't do anyway else? JEFF TWEEDY: I don't know. JAY BENNETT: I don't know. JEFF TWEEDY: It's basically a hard drive recording, or you know, digital recording, where you utilize a computer to uh, you know, like Jay was saying you can move things around in ways that you could never move analog around. JOHN HIATT: Like you can, you can have a song recorded, you can throw it into Protools and say I want the third verse first. JEFF TWEEDY: Which is traditionally, well not traditionally, since it's only been around for a while, but I guess that's what it was designed for is for people to like uh, perfect stuff. You know, like be able to take every beat and put it in time. JOHN HIATT: But you used it to break stuff, didn't you? JAY BENNETT: I think so. JEFF TWEEDY: I think so, yeah. We rarely used it to fix anything.
