A Conversation with Chip Taylor & Carrie Rodriguez
(continued)

PM: I'd like to know, please, what each of you may be reading, now or lately?

CR: I just bought a new book, but I haven't opened it yet.

PM: Well, that counts.

CR: [laughs] The last book I read, this friend of ours in Canada, his name is Neal McGonigle, he was organizing our tour, and he gave me a novel called Smilla's Sense of Snow [by Peter Hoeg]. It was very cool, a mysterious kind of fiction set in both Greenland and Denmark. And we'd just been traveling there, so it was real interesting to me. And now I have this new book from Isabel Allende. It's called Portrait in Sepia. She wrote Eva Luna. And I've read her book The House of Spirits, I guess it's probably her best-known novel.

PM: Right.

CR: So I haven't started this one yet. I hope I like it.

PM: How about you, Chip, what do you read?

CT: The last thing I read was Seabiscuit [by Laura Hillenbrand].

PM: Right. Was that good?

CT: It was wonderful. I thought the movie was wonderful as well. It was one of those movies that I thought even though it didn't follow the book exactly, it followed the passion very, very well.

PM: Yeah, that's rare.

CT: But I thought the same of All the Pretty Horses. I thought that was one of the most underrated movies I've ever seen, because almost everything that I visualized in the book, you know, the different characters, what they would look like and sound like and be like, was pretty much the way it was in the movie. So I know it wasn't a very commercial movie and it didn't do any business at all, but--

PM: Really?

CT: Yeah, it was total flop. Nobody wanted to see it.

PM: Because I loved it as a book. I listened to it on tape going across the country.

CR: Cool.

PM: And it was unbelievable.

CT: Yeah. I read it and then listened on tape as well. It was just great.

PM: Are either of you guys what you'd call spiritual or religious folks?

CT: Why don't you go, Carrie?

CR: I think I'm spiritual in terms of believing in higher powers and things in the universe that we can't explain with our little brains. But I'm not affiliated with any kind of organized religion.

PM: Right.

CR: I didn't really grow up that way. My family--I guess you could call some of them Methodists or agnostics. But my mother is very spiritual and she really believes in lots of strange cosmic things. [laughs]

PM: Really? Is she a bit of a New Ager, even, or...?

CR: Well, she's an artist. She's a painter.

PM: She's a painter. Well, there--

CR: Everyone in my family is pretty creative, and, I don't know. I'm probably not as out there as my mom.

[laughter]

CR: She's wonderful. But yeah, it's probably something also that I--there'll come a time when I'll want to explore it more. Right now things are just going so fast I don't always take the time to sit down and try to find out more about that kind of stuff.

PM: How about you, Chip, do you have a spiritual background, or--

CT: Well, I was raised Catholic.

PM: Did you go to Catholic school in Yonkers?

CT: White Plains, Archbishop Stepinac. I love a lot of the things of the Catholic Church. I don't like so much the way it was taught or the way it was preached, but I love a lot of the content, just for being good to each other and caring and loving your brother and all those things, which most all religions kind of teach. There are a lot of wonderful things in the Catholic Church. But I can't say that I practice now, I don't. But I have a strong feeling of conscience that kind of criticizes me most every day.

[laughter]

CT: It says, "You're not doing enough. You're not living up to what you should be."   continue

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