A Conversation with Steve Tannen (continued)

PM: I noticed there are no dates on the boards at the moment. Are you done touring behind Hideaway or just busy raising a child or--

ST: The second, for sure. The first tour fell through. It was sort of just--I don't want to badmouth anybody in the whole world, but it was difficulty promotion-wise with promoters and stuff. And it just looks like it was going to be a big financial black hole.

PM: So that must have been a major issue to say the least.

ST: Really disappointing. But we are working on it to do it for the fall.

PM: Oh, good.

ST: We want to do it. The desire is there. We have people who are helping us out. But it has to work.

PM: Are you sticking with Rosebud?

ST: We love them. We just love them.

PM: I never heard a bad word breathed about them.

ST: No. They're awesome. This is really not a reflection on them. It really is just sort of--I think the expectation was that we were going to go out in our broken down Toyota again. And we can't do that with the baby.

PM: Ain't going to do that, right.

ST: And so we're trying to make it work so that everybody wins. And it just came up too fast, and at the end we sort of had to be like, okay restart. We'll shoot for September. And I know that we're disappointed.

PM: There are a lot of good vehicles out there. My brother, who happens to be a rather doughed-up individual, has one of those high Mercedes vans, those cushy vans that are like a tour buses on the inside.

ST: I know of what you speak. That's awesome.

PM: You need one of them.

ST: And we actually just had--I'm not trying to name drop, but we talked with Emily from Indigo Girls. And I was like, "Em, hook me up, baby."

PM: Yeah, right.

ST: She was like, "Oh, we rent that thing."

PM: They rent it.

ST: So no way. She's like, "You need a vehicle." We were hoping that they owned a tour bus and we'd be like, "Can we just borrow it for a few weeks."

[laughter]

PM: Right. "Loan us your party wagon," yeah, right.

ST: Exactly. No--and by the way, we have nothing but admiration respect and love for the Indigo Girls.

PM: Oh, yeah. They're totally happening.

ST: They're awesome, and they've been really great to us.

PM: They're good to their musician friends. They're good musicians that way.

ST: They're good to everybody. Their hearts are in the right places, their minds, and obviously their songwriting.

PM: So are you guys avid readers?

ST: Yeah.

PM: Yeah, because you seem like smart people.

ST: Well, I don't know about that. You should see where we live and what we drive and then talk about it. But reading, yeah, yeah.

PM: You read anything good lately? Anything kicking around the house?

ST: Absolutely. Deb read a book called Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Leetham and wrote a song called "Tell Your Story Walking." And the film rights to the book got bought by Ed Norton's company.

PM: Wow.

ST: And we don't know Ed Norton or anybody who knows him, but this song is smokin', and it needs to be in the movie--so you can print that. We actually have heard that he's sort of got a million projects.

PM: Of course.

ST: He's one of these guys that that's one of his projects, but there's like a dozen.

PM: Right.

ST: So yeah, both of us are total nerd readers. I like trashy stuff, too. I just picked up the Clapton biography, but I haven't read it yet. He's the artist who really turned me on to all the old blues guys. Well, him and Stevie Ray Vaughn, I was a big fan of both. And through Clapton talking about it, I picked up the Robert Johnson Complete Recordings. It blew me away, blew Deb away. So profound. I think the songwriting in those old songs is just so distilled and so powerful. And that is what we would like to do.

PM: Well, since you're home at the moment, what's on the CD player? What might you guys be listening to?

ST: Well, we're listening to the Charley Patton Complete Recordings. We're listening to some Elvis because we're reading Peter Guralnick's Elvis biography.

PM: Oh, he's an amazing fellow. I've spent a little time with him.

ST: Personally?

PM: Personally. And he's a wonderful man.

ST: That book, that first one, Last Train to Memphis, should be required reading.

PM: Indeed.

ST: They should teach that in high school instead of Ethan Fromm. I'm telling ya.

PM: Yeah, I did a little hanging out with him in Nashville when he was teaching at Vanderbilt.

ST: Really?

PM: He's just written so many good books. The Elvis may be his crowning achievement, but they're all good.

ST: It's the only one I've read to the end, and it's just so evocative and such good writing.

PM: And you'd just love him as a guy. He's so incredibly right-sized, it's amazing.

ST: Yeah.

PM: So just by virtue of the fact that "Say I Am You" comes from a Rumi poem, I know you guys must be, to some degree, spiritual folks.

ST: Absolutely. I think it's tied in with the literature and poetry and music. I think it's all different ways of saying the same thing.

PM: Do you have any particular orientation in that regard, or are you just free-form spiritual--

ST: In general we respect it all, but we're not joiners.

PM: An alarm from the next room tells me I've nearly taken advantage of your generosity.

ST: No. It's been very comfortable. Have we hung out before?

PM: No. But I think we will.

ST: This felt like talking to my brother.

PM: You've been very kind with your time today. And I had a really good time talking to you. Just crazy about the record and I'm not going to shut up about it from here on out.

ST: No, that's awesome. Thank you for taking the time for us.