[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC Studios in Soho. Thanks for sharing part of your day with us. Later this week, we're going to have some great conversations. Éric Ripert will join us. He is the Chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, and he'll talk about his career and take your calls. The musical Shucked has been nominated for nine Tony Awards, including Brandy Clark for Best Score, Brandy and Alex Newell [unintelligible 00:00:32] nominated for best featured actor, both will be here on the show on Thursday.

Author Abraham Verghese has written his first new novel since his bestselling Cutting for Stone. He joins us to discuss The Covenant of Water. That is the future. Right now, we'll continue our coverage of Mental Health Awareness Month with a conversation about music and mental health.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Our next two guests are musicians who are open to being vulnerable in their songwriting. Langhorne Slim's latest record Strawberry Mansion features songs like Panic Attack that directly address his struggles with mental health and addiction, and folk musician, Hiss Golden Messenger, AKA MC Taylor, has never shied away from revealing his candid thoughts through music. He told Pace Magazine about his record Terms of Surrender, "I hope that if people are struggling with anxiety, with depression, some kind of existential crisis, that they understand that it's okay to sit with the questions, to sit with the not knowing."

So it makes sense that both of these artists are featured in the lineup for this year's Sound Mind Music Festival for Mental Health, taking place this Saturday afternoon in Bushwick. It's a free street festival that include panels on mental health, plus some great food and sets from Langhorne and Hiss Golden Messenger, alongside other artists like Kamauu and Iron and Wine. Before you get to check them out this weekend, we thought we'd invite Langhorne and MC Taylor, both former All Of It guests, to join us for a conversation about music and mental health as part of our ongoing series, Mental Health Mondays. Langhorne, welcome back.

Langhorne Slim: Alison, hello. MC, hello. Good to be here.

MC Taylor: Howdy.

Alison Stewart: MC, hello to you as well. Welcome back.

MC Taylor: Hi. Thanks for having me again.

Alison Stewart: Langhorne, you've performed at the Sound Mind Mental Health Music Festival before. What has you coming back?

Langhorne Slim: I've become a mental health advocate by accident or something like that. I have gone through a lifetime of struggles with this stuff in my past and in my present and I suspect some in my future. I've found the more that I reveal, the freer that I feel, and so it's only natural to put it into my music, and Sound Mind is a beautiful organization that I have turned to for assistance and proud to team up with them. I've done quite a few events with these guys and just love what they're doing.

Music is, I believe, music and art, the most divine medicine that we as human animals share. There's no better way to free our minds and our booties will follow, as Funkadelic once sang in a different way than doing that. I'm psyched to join these guys and Hiss Golden Messenger, Iron and Wine, the rest, it'll be a beautiful time.

Alison Stewart: MC, how did you get involved with the Sound Mind Music Festival?

MC Taylor: We were asked through my management. I suspect that they probably approached me because of quotes like that one you introduced me with. Like Langhorne and many artists. I think depression, anxiety has been something that I've struggled with for many, many years, especially in the past, probably since I was in my mid 20s. It really wasn't working to keep it hidden. It was inhibiting every part of my life, and being open about it, making art about it and really living with this idea that you don't have to solve it, but there are ways to feel a whole lot better, are part of the reason that I'm interested in this organization and this event.

Alison Stewart: Langhorne, when did you decide you were going to start talking openly about mental health, both in your music and [unintelligible 00:05:09] interviews like this?

Langhorne Slim: I think I've always been doing it in my music in one way or another. When the pandemic hit, I had just gone into treatment before I had a relapse. We spoke, I think, about this when I was on with you a couple of years back. I gotten sober about 10 years ago, I did not find any community of like-minded warriors. I was just doing it on my own and I had nothing to fall back on when life does what life does, and it became insurmountable and unmanageable for me. I just went back to what has always worked for me, which is putting something outside of my body, into my body to hope to feel more comfortable. That didn't work out too well for me. It doesn't work out too well for a lot of folks like me.

This time around, I went into treatment, got moved back to Nashville where I've been living for a long time. Then we had a big tornado in Nashville, then a global pandemic, then social unrest and political unrest and all kinds of life stuff. It was my connection to myself, to my music, and to the beautiful folks that follow what I do. It was the most healthy experience I've ever had on social media, I'll say, was to start talking about it, singing about it, and having an open line and realizing, at least I'm convinced that there is nobody amongst us that doesn't have mental health issues in one way or another, some deeper than others, of course, but we're all challenged by something mentally, spiritually, I would say.

I'm a true believer that if we leaned into that, opened up about it, maybe particularly as men, that's just my experience as a dude, that it's not a weakness, it's a strength, and people open up. When I'm open and honest about my stuff, people open up. I feel a deeper connection with them. There's nothing to be ashamed of, there's nothing to hide and there's nothing to fear. Everybody's got experience with feeling unsettled in one way or several others.

Alison Stewart: MC, I mentioned that quote about you sitting with the not knowing. It's a good follow up to what Langhorne was just saying. How have you gotten more comfortable with sitting with the not knowing, the not solving, I think is how [crosstalk]

MC Taylor: You just do it.

[laughter]

MC Taylor: It really can be the most uncomfortable and unsettling thing especially for someone that is put together chemically like I am. I think I've been a little primed for it because my music, since I started writing songs under the Hiss Golden Messenger name, my challenge to myself has been to ask as many questions as I can in the songs and not worry about the answer, which sometimes maybe goes a little counter to what I think of as folk music, whether or not it actually is this music that often asks and then answers questions.

I don't know if that's completely true, but with my music, there's far more questions asked than answered. The not solving my own issues seems like an extension of that in a way. I'm in the process of solving, but it'll probably be a lifelong process.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Langhorne Slim and MC Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger. We are talking about the Sound Mind Music Festival for Mental Health. It's happening for free on Saturday, May 20th. Head to soundmindlive.org to reserve your free tickets. Let's listen to a little bit of music. MC, I'm going to play a song off your album, Terms of Surrender. We're going to listen to Cat's Eye Blue. What were you going through when you were making this record?

MC Taylor: Oh, it's interesting that you ask about this song because I suspect that Langhorne and I are about the same age, mid-40s. I think a lot about my parents' generation, and particularly the men of my parents' generation, and the complications that so many of them seem to have with communication. With this particular song, I was really thinking about my dad, who is such a lovely, upstanding, loving human being, but he has a hard time talking. I think that's made things hard for him.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear Hiss Golden Messenger, Cat's Eye Blue.

[music - Hiss Golden Messenger: Cat's Eye Blue]

Alison Stewart: That's Cat's Eye Blue from Hiss Golden Messenger. Langhorne, I want to play your song, Panic Attack from Strawberry Mansion. Can you tell us a little bit about what you were going through when you were writing this song?

Langhorne Slim: I was going through a panic attack, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Well, there you go.

Langhorne Slim: I'll try to be concise, which is difficult for me.

Alison Stewart: Take your time. It's fine. It's public radio. You can do that.

Langhorne Slim: Okay. Great. Sit back then. I had just started going to therapy. I went to treatment. I had hoped that that was going to be the magical cure, if I could put drugs and alcohol behind me, that I would win the race, that I would stand on the mountaintop, but it was suggested to me that life is, as MC was saying, something that you-- well, you don't have to, some people don't. It was suggested to me that I might want to work on life throughout my life. In order to do that, therapy wouldn't be such a bad thing to do.

I didn't really love that idea. Working on myself a whole bunch seemed like an arduous task. I decided to go, and I went and I sat down with this amazing therapist, and she and I were talking. I was having a lot of these panic attack episodes at the time, and I was in a lot of fear. She could easily see that I was scared. This is very common, that without drugs, I felt like, "How am I going to find that sweet spot to be creative? Will I still be able to write songs?" Which is unfortunate because I had already proven to myself that I could do that.

The irony too was that with the stuff that I was doing during the relapse, I wasn't writing a lot of songs. I was totally disconnected to all that I deemed to be true and of the divine spirit. Addiction is a wild thing, as we all know. To be honest, I just started crying. She said to me, "Are you scared of that?" I said that I was scared to tell you that I'm scared of that, but I'm so scared of that.

She hit me with this suggestion, which I don't think I'll ever forget, which is the next time that you're going through-- she was like, "Do you go to your guitar, sit down at the piano, or make music when you are going through one of these episodes?" I said, "No." Because when I'm feeling this way, the guitar can be sitting in the corner and if I look at it, it's like, I wouldn't even know what to do with it. It's as if it's giving me the middle finger. I can't tell up from down, left from right.

She said, "Well, the next time you find yourself in that predicament, try to go to the guitar and just play it without any expectation for any tangible tune or results. Play it as though you did when you first learned to play the guitar or when we're all kids," which this is a part I really dig. We're all creatively free, and that we're all little dancers and singers and painters and drawers and boogie pickers and just little beautiful freaks.

When you get to a point, I can't speak for MC, but I think this is common with a lot of us, it can be challenging to make music from that place a lot of times without, is this good enough for my next record? Is this as good as what I've done in the past? All this noise in our heads. Therefore, the critic in my head, I can only speak for myself, can get very loud, very annoying, and very negative. She said, "Just put that aside if you can." Easier said than done, perhaps. "Tell it to shut up, go away for a little while, and just pick up the guitar and play."

After the tornado and the pandemic and all that, and I was in my house and I was freaking out one day. I just started hearing these words come through my head, which is basically like a diary entry of what I had been going through up until and at that time. When the critical voice started talking, I just turned it down a little bit and kept it going.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear Panic Attack from Langhorne Slim.

[music - Langhorne Slim: Panic Attack]

Alison Stewart: That is Langhorne Slim, Panic Attack from Strawberry Mansion. My guests are Langhorne Slim and MC Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger. We're talking about mental health, mental health awareness. This is Mental Health Awareness Month. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests this hour are artists Langhorne Slim and MC Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger. This weekend on Saturday, May 20th, is the Sound Mind Music Festival for Mental Health, by the way, it is free. We like that. Head to soundmindlive.org to reserve your free tickets. MC, you brought this up about your dad, about not being able to necessarily express certain things.

There was an NIH report that noted about men and mental health, and here's the quote, "Researchers found that men are much less likely to acknowledge and report possible symptoms of mood disorders and depression and judge their symptoms as less severe in comparison to women." As someone who's been-- sounds like you've been on the front lines of this and observed this, do you have any thoughts about why that is?

MC Taylor: [laughs] Well, I certainly have thoughts. Yes, I have thoughts about it. I'm not an expert and hesitant to say anything without that caveat. I don't know. We live under strict-- [crosstalk] We live under strict gender rules or under gender roles. I think my dad, certainly far more than me-- I'm an artist, and even I as a white man, I'm struggling against this patriarchal system, so I can only imagine the way he was operating.

Alison Stewart: Oh, Interesting.

MC Taylor: I think that would be my short answer to that.

Alison Stewart: Langhorne, was that ever the case for you in your life when you really didn't pay attention to what was going on with you, or tried to move it to the side and plow on?

Langhorne Slim: Yes. I think my trying to move it to the side was my self medicating. I think that so much of it is cultural. There are so many different flavors of intelligence within the human animal, I think. When I was in public school, I didn't fit into that, so I was put into learning disabled, and then they said, "You're not learning disabled." They put me in mentally gifted the next week, they said, "You're definitely not that." Then they sat me back in the same class and hoped for the best.

I think we're making progress in that way. It's also why it's beautiful to talk about the real stuff. I was raised by very strong women, and old people, and my own father, who I saw a bit here and there, but we didn't have much of an emotional connection. I don't think that that is terribly uncommon and certainly not uncommon for boys. Boys don't cry kind of thing. Boys do cry. Just turns out boys do cry, and crying ain't the best thing to do. I think in various ways, I put it aside or suppressed it.

Then like what MC was saying, I think in being an artsy kid, and then a musician man, I think I thought that I was being real and vulnerable, and I was to the best of my ability, but still not addressing it head on. I was addressing it a lot in my own head, and wondering why I kept beating my head against the wall and not finding new ways of living. By discussing it for me, by therapy for me, recovery community, all that stuff just helps me to not try to figure it all out in my own head, which I cannot do, turns out.

Alison Stewart: MC, I'm going to play the song Sanctuary and there's a line that says feeling bad, feeling blue, can't get out of my own mind, but I know how to sing about it.

MC Taylor: [laughs] Yes. That pretty much sums it up

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Let's listen and we could talk about it on the other side.

[music - Hiss Golden Messenger: Sanctuary]

Alison Stewart: Mc, do you ever write songs to work through something for yourself and put them away? They're not for public consumption, they're for you?

MC Taylor: Oh, just like little mantras, you mean?

Alison Stewart: Yes or things you just-- you're working through something and a song comes out of it, but maybe it's not for everybody. Maybe it's just for you.

MC Taylor: I like that question. I feel like the ones that are the most successful are the ones that I want to share with the public, not because I think the public needs to hear them, but because it's a good articulation of what I'm trying to say in my music writ large, you know what I mean? I think generally speaking, the stuff that I keep to myself is probably less successful than the stuff that I put out into the universe. Like Sanctuary would-- I probably have many, many songs like Sanctuary, most of which people will never hear just because Sanctuary hit the nail on the head of what I was trying to say better than the other attempts.

Alison Stewart: Langhorne, you have a song called Lonesome Times and the US [unintelligible 00:25:50] said that loneliness in the US poses as great a health risk as smoking cigarettes, as part of a report showing just how bad loneliness has become, what a problem it's becoming in the United States. Do you have any thoughts on why you think loneliness is particularly toxic?

Langhorne Slim: I wonder about that science. I think loneliness might be even worse, I don't know. Well, loneliness is, I believe, an ancient thing. I think maybe it's part of life, but I also-- at the time that I wrote that tune, most of us were locked in our houses so it was particularly prevalent at the time, but what can I say about it? I can speak just from my own experience-

Alison Stewart: Yes, please

Langhorne Slim: -which is, there's so much dang screen time, and social media time, and internet time, I don't think that that particularly helps. In my experience, what's starting to unfold in my life today, we can talk in a week and see where I'm at then, but this notion of winning or arriving, or what is achieving has started to change for me. You and MC were talking about being still. Being still is so difficult for me and sitting through discomfort, boredom, fear, uncertainty, and all that.

I find that when I'm able to do so, the playing field expands and there's adventure and stillness, where so much of my life I've been, and I wouldn't change it. It's been beautiful. I've gotten to go so many places and meet so many people through being a song and dance man. Yes, when I give myself the gift of-- I heard somebody say recently, "Don't let what you don't have ruin what you've got." I thought that really spoke to me. A lot of my life I have felt, in some way, if I could just get over there, if I could just dance with that person, if I could just get this song and this album just right and play that theater, then I would arrive.

This notion of-- though it sounds cliché, maybe if I say it in these terms, but I know what I mean. It's where I'm trying to go, which is, there's no place to go and where I'm at is beautiful. I know when I'm able to live in that, I feel a lot less lonely because I'm sure a lot of people could relate to achieving a lot of the things that you wanted to achieve and dancing with that person and yet still feeling lonely. That certainly is possible. I guess for me it's trying to simplify a little bit and within simplifying that there's a universe that opens up that I think for a long time I was unaware of.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a little bit of Langhorne Slim, Lonesome Times.

[music - Langhorne Slim: Lonesome Times]

Alison Stewart: That's Langhorne Slim, Lonesome Times. Langhorne, we saw on your Instagram you're going to be a dad soon and I love that you're looking forward to your little beautiful freaks, I think is how you describe kids. A, I hope you write a song with that title. What are you looking forward to about fatherhood?

Langhorne Slim: Holy smokes, it feels very psychedelic.

MC Taylor: I love this.

Langhorne Slim: Oh, yes. I can't wait to see you, brother, and talk to you in Brooklyn.

MC Taylor: [laughs] I'll give you a few tips.

Alison Stewart: That was my next question. [laughs]

Langhorne Slim: I remain curious and confused rather than certain about many, many, many things, and certainly in being a new-to-be dad that I'm leaning into that. I've got an amazing partner who's got a six-year-old so I've been able to watch her be an incredible mother and get a little bit of a crash course, just a little bit. I don't even know. I feel like my heart has just expanded and keeps doing so as we get closer and I'm just so excited, just so excited.

All of that goes to, I think, what we're talking about, which is, at this point in my life, I feel like it's been faded a little because I don't know how ready you could ever be, but I feel ready to be at least more present than I have been in the past and to be still and to try to be a beautiful daddy.

Alison Stewart: Langhorne Slim and MC Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger have been my guests. They're taking part in the Sound Mind Music Festival for Mental Health happening this Saturday, May 20th. It is free. You can head to soundmindlive.org to reserve your free tickets. Langhorne and MC, thank you so much for being so candid and sharing your thoughts and your time today.

MC Taylor: Thank you. I'm so glad to be here.

Langhorne Slim: Thank you. I love you both.

MC Taylor: Langhorne, I can't wait to see you, bud.

Langhorne Slim: Back at you, brother. Love you, man. Love you, Alison. Thank you.

MC Taylor: Love you.

 

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