Skip to content
Lex Fridman PodcastLex Fridman Podcast

Rick Beato on Lex Fridman: Why babies lose perfect pitch

Children are born with perfect pitch and lose it by nine months; prenatal exposure to high-information music can slow or prevent the loss, as Beato found.

Lex FridmanhostRick Beatoguest
Mar 1, 20262h 33mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 0:44

    Introduction

    1. LF

      The following is a conversation with Rick Beato, legendary music educator, interviewer, producer, songwriter, and a true multi-instrument musician, playing guitar, bass, cello, and piano. Rick, with his incredible YouTube channel, celebrates great musicians and musical ideas and helps millions of people, including me, fall in love with great music all over again. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Rick Beato.

  2. 0:44 – 4:43

    Guitar solos

    1. LF

      You had, I think, an incredibly fun and diverse beginning to your music journey. I heard somewhere that one of the things that made you fall in love with music was, uh, listening to guitar solos, some epic guitar solos. Uh, what's an early guitar solo that you remember you connected to spiritually, [laughs] uh, musically, where you're like, "Wow, there's magic in this"?

    2. RB

      Well, the first solo that I learned was Hey Joe. It was actually a good beginner song, you know, when I first started playing the guitar, because it has pretty simple chords, right? So it's like E, C, G, D, A.

    3. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    4. RB

      And I learned the solo, and I figured out this, like, oh, see, it's this pentatonic scale, E minor pentatonic scale. I didn't know that's what it was called, but I learned this thing, and it's like, whoa, he's just in this one shape here. Now, there was no... You couldn't go look anything up. You just... If you could figure out the notes, you noticed that there was a little pattern to it. And then I, I got so obsessed with it, and I showed my younger brother, John, who started playing guitar right at the same time I did. So I was 14, he was 11. And I would play rhythm for him for five minutes while he would solo over Hey Joe. And then as soon as I'd start soloing, he'd throw the guitar down, then we'd get in a fight.

    5. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    6. RB

      And so my mom eventually was like, "What is going on here?" And I was like, "John won't play rhythm." [laughs]

    7. LF

      [laughs]

    8. RB

      "John won't play rhythm for me." She's like, "Okay, I'll play rhythm for you. What, what are the chords?" And J-

    9. LF

      That's awesome

    10. RB

      ... and I was like, "Okay, it's like E, the C, G, D, A."

    11. LF

      Yeah.

    12. RB

      And so my mom would literally play rhythm for 20 minutes while I'd play.

    13. LF

      #parenting. [laughs]

    14. RB

      That's amazing. I, when I, when I look back on it now, my mom's been gone for 10 years now. When I look back on it, it's like, my God, my parents were so cool.

    15. LF

      We should mention that Hey Joe, and Hendrix in general, is kind of known for the rhythm not being simple rhythm, just the chords that you mentioned.

    16. RB

      Right.

    17. LF

      It's what you do with those chords. It's almost improvisation on the rhythm side.

    18. RB

      He did all this really cool chord fragments, uh, riffs, and things like that, that's just part of his... that's the Hendrix style.

    19. LF

      What do you think? I mean, many people put Hendrix as the greatest guitarist of all time. What do you think is part of that?

    20. RB

      You know, I, I make lists.

    21. LF

      You do. If you somehow don't know who Rick Beato is, go on YouTube right now and watch your excellent interviews with musicians, watch your breakdown analysis of different songs, and, uh, watch your top 20 lists where you're very opinionated, sometimes very, uh, openly critical about certain kinds of song. It's fun. Opinions are fun. [laughs]

    22. RB

      [laughs] I know. But they do change, Lex, from day to day. You know, like, I-

    23. LF

      Yeah, exactly.

    24. RB

      But when- anytime I, I do a list, if I do 20, I like to do 20 because that gives me some leeway to, uh, to throw in. I have to throw in something that is so weird that people, you know, s- uh, something that a lot of people won't know, just to have it on there so I can at least introduce a pr- You know, I'll put somebody like a Allan Holdsworth, who's a famous fusion guitar player. Uh, I'll throw in one of his solos or something, just some, some oddball solo in there just so that people, as they're listening down the list, will get exposed to something they would not necessarily get exposed to.

    25. LF

      Yeah, a lot of variety, but Hendrix... Did you show up here today, Rick, [laughs] trying to tell me that Hendrix is not up there? I just am getting that vibe right now.

    26. RB

      No, I'm not. I, I... But I don't want to, to say greatest, you know. You, you can say, well, there, there are people that, that inspired Jimi Hendrix.

    27. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    28. RB

      Charlie Christian, older guitar players. Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt were the first two really big, and probably, and Andrés Segovia, were, were three of the giants of the 20th century as far as guitar influences for most of the players that were to follow.

  3. 4:43 – 6:14

    Gypsy jazz and Django Reinhardt

    1. LF

      So here, going to Perplexity, Django Reinhardt was, of course, a jazz guitarist and composer, active mainly in France, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest guitarists in jazz history.

    2. RB

      So Django was, um... Well, there's a huge movement right now, gypsy jazz movement-

    3. LF

      Mm-hmm

    4. RB

      ... as they call it, that is, um, kind of built around the style of music that he played back in the early 20th century. One of the things about Django is that he was in a fire, and he had two of his, uh, third and fourth finger, so his, his ring finger and pinky were essentially melted together. He had no use of them, although he could use them while he was chording, but a lot of these incredibly fast lines, he's just playing with two fingers. And it's amazing. [gypsy jazz music]

    5. LF

      That... [laughs] What is that? So that's gypsy jazz.

    6. RB

      That's gypsy jazz, yeah. Him, Stephane Grappelli is a violinist that played with him a lot.

    7. LF

      How much of this is, uh, improvisation?

    8. RB

      Everything he's doing there is impro- improvised.

    9. LF

      Feels so free.

    10. RB

      Yeah.

    11. LF

      [laughs] And fun, like swing. And then that leads to, uh,

  4. 6:14 – 10:27

    Bebop jazz

    1. LF

      you said pre-bebop. So bebop was a kind of jazz that was also influential on you and your own life journey, and it's this complicated, legendary kind of jazz that was very influential on the music that followed. So what, what was bebop?

    2. RB

      Well, after the s- the big bands were happening in the, you know, from the '20s through the '40s, uh, small... People would go out and play in small groups that they would tour with, and Charlie Parker, who's really kind of the, one of the main figures of early bebop, really developed the language of it. Usually the, the music that they're playing over are standard chord progressions-

    3. LF

      Mm-hmm

    4. RB

      ... that, that they would use as vehicles to improvise over. A lot of them were A-A-B-A form, and Charlie Parker created this, uh, language of improvisation that was far more sophisticated than the swing players of the Big Band era. You know, think of people like Benny Goodman, uh, of that era. They would have really fast tempo songs, angular lines, chromaticism, things like that, chromatic n-notes.

    5. LF

      Chromatic notes are just notes next to each other on the-

    6. RB

      Next to each other, yeah

    7. LF

      ... on the fretboard.

    8. RB

      I like to think of as connecting notes.

    9. LF

      Connecting. You're putting in more notes than are supposed to be there, and so doing-- creating some interesting texture.

    10. RB

      Yeah, so that is one of the most difficult styles to master.

    11. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    12. RB

      Because all these things are a language.

    13. LF

      Yeah.

    14. RB

      Blues playing, they're all just languages, right? It's like, just like you'd learn any type of language. Um, my dad loved bebop. Now, when I was a little kid, and he's listening to these bebop records, whether it's Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie or Oscar Peterson, Joe Pass, great jazz guitar player, I'm just hearing this stuff. I don't know any different. My dad was not a musician, but for some reason he liked incredibly sophisticated-

    15. LF

      Mm-hmm

    16. RB

      ... music that was very technical, and, um, I just heard it and just was like, "Oh, yeah, okay, cool." And not realizing that it was developing my ear, because I really... Bebop is one of the hardest to improvise in that style, in that language of bebop. It's very difficult to do. And hearing it as a kid is one of the things that I think enables you, just like languages, enables you to learn it, as opposed to somebody that's never been exposed to it and tries to learn it as a teenager. So I think it's very similar to learning languages, which kinda is like my theory on perfect pitch, that every child is born with perfect pitch, and they start to lose the ability around nine months.

    17. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    18. RB

      When people become culturally bound listeners, when babies do. They start out as citizens of the world. You know, they can... They have the pho- the, the neural pathways to hear the sounds, the phonemes of all sixty-five hundred languages spoken on Earth.

    19. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    20. RB

      But then around nine months, they begin to lose that ability, and they, when they become these culturally bound listeners. There's a great YouTube video with this woman, Patricia Kuhl. She's a language researcher. And I watched this, The Linguistic Genius of Babies.

    21. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    22. RB

      I saw this in two thousand and ten, this lecture that she did, like a TED Talk, and she talks about this, that kids, they did a, an experiment. They exposed kids to Mandarin three times a week for twenty-five-minute sessions, just a person speaking Mandarin to these babies, and they were able to recognize the sounds, the phonemes of that language even later on.

    23. LF

      Mm.

    24. RB

      And when I realized that my son Dylan had perfect pitch, I thought, "Why does Dylan have perfect pitch, but no one in my family had ever had perfect pitch?" And I thought, "Well, it must be because of the things I exposed to him prenatally, and then in the first nine months of his life."

    25. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    26. RB

      'Cause that's the only way I could explain

  5. 10:27 – 15:04

    Perfect pitch vs relative pitch

    1. RB

      it.

    2. LF

      We're gonna return to Joe Pass. We gotta go to Dylan. You mentioned Dylan. I guess it's in part one of the origin stories of, uh, you putting out videos into the world is the early videos you did with Dylan, set of videos on his perfect pitch. And for people who don't know, maybe you can speak to what perfect pitch means.

    3. RB

      It's ability to identify any note without a reference tone. So, um, you can play-- It doesn't matter how quickly they are, that they can per- a person with perfect pitch can hear a note and immediately identify it, or a collection of notes.

    4. LF

      And taking a tangent upon a tangent, you also have a course on ear training.

    5. RB

      Yes, but my course is for relative pitch-

    6. LF

      Right

    7. RB

      ... not to be confused with perfect pitch.

    8. LF

      Is it fair to say that relative pitch, as far as the thing you would learn, is more useful-

    9. RB

      Yes

    10. LF

      ... for musicians?

    11. RB

      Yes.

    12. LF

      Can you explain the difference between the two?

    13. RB

      Relative pitch is basically learning how to identify pitches relative to a, a stated tonic or something that you've heard, or just relative to each other. If you hear a note and then you hear another note after it, you can recognize, let's say it's a minor third interval. So if you're on the note A, the next note would be C.

    14. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    15. RB

      So once you're given a reference note, you can use relative pitch to, to identify the relative nature from one pitch to another.

    16. LF

      And of course, intervals make up scales, and intervals make up chords.

    17. RB

      Chords. Yep.

    18. LF

      And so that if you develop it to any degree, uh, relative pitch, you can understand, you can hear the music better.

    19. RB

      Yes.

    20. LF

      So what, what does it take, uh, since we're taking a tangent on a tangent, what's, uh, what does it take to train your ear? What's a, a TLDR on the course before people go out and sign up?

    21. RB

      It's just practice, basically. You start with intervals, typically with small intervals, like minor second, major second. So minor second would be a half step, major second would be a whole step.

    22. LF

      Are you listening to the tone one after the other or two of them together?

    23. RB

      Both. So played separately, it's called melodic intervals, right, like a melody.

    24. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    25. RB

      And harmonic intervals are played like a harmony together. So you have to be able to identify them both, both ways.

    26. LF

      What's an early journey, like we'll give people a preview of what they should-- Like what does that look like? What does, what does practice look like?

    27. RB

      Well, my course, it will play you an interval, and then you identify it by clicking on whether it's-

    28. LF

      Mm-hmm

    29. RB

      ... you know, a major third or minor third, or major sixth or minor sixth, or perfect fifth or tritone, whatever it is, and, and it will teach you gradually over time how to recognize all the intervals.

    30. LF

      So you listen to a melodic interval or a harmonic interval. H-how quickly does the ear in the various age groups that we humans are in, how quickly does the ear learn the different intervals? Is it, uh, a week, two weeks, a month, two months, five years?

  6. 15:04 – 38:34

    Learning to play guitar

    1. LF

      the tangent-

    2. RB

      [laughs]

    3. LF

      ... let's go. How do you recommend people-- There's a bunch of people listening to this that are curious about, uh, how they can start in playing guitar, maybe even playing piano, may-maybe playing other instruments. Although guitar, of course, is the greatest instrument of all time.

    4. RB

      Absolutely.

    5. LF

      What are the early steps to that journey? What, what do you recommend people do in general?

    6. RB

      Well, if you're a beginner, uh, getting a good beginner guitar course and learning, first of all, the open chords in first position. Uh, a lot of songs can be played that way. A lot of old songs can be played that way. Maybe not new, modern songs necessarily.

    7. LF

      So learning a few chords and with an eye towards maybe playing a song?

    8. RB

      Yeah. With an eye towards... You learn, you learn the chord shapes, and you learn how to strum basic patterns to begin with. I think the first thing for learning guitar is actually how to position your fingers so that you, you don't mute strings that you don't want to mute.

    9. LF

      Yeah.

    10. RB

      That's the hardest thing for people to do, basically, is to get their fingers arched to where they... If you're playing a C major chord, your index finger's on the first fret of the B string, and you have to have that open E string ringing there, and it's hard for people to make those micro, micro adjustments. You take it for granted, like you've been playing-

    11. LF

      Yeah

    12. RB

      ... guitar for I don't know how many years. Forever, right?

    13. LF

      Forever, yeah.

    14. RB

      And you don't even think about stuff like that. When you're playing a guitar solo, every little thing that you do, if you're playing your Comfortably Numb guitar solo-

    15. LF

      Yeah

    16. RB

      ... you have to, out of midair, strike the string that your finger's on to play the note, and these are all fine adjustments that you're doing.

    17. LF

      I'm, I'm just a hobbyist recreational player, but it-- Wow, you're taking me all the way back. You're right. It's the haptic, the physical aspect of it is really tricky. Comfortably Numb is a good example. But if you do lead, you have to get a super clean sound. Now, that's both when you're playing fast, you, you want it to be super precise. But when you play slow, when you have one note, and you're holding it, and you're bending it-

    18. RB

      [laughs]

    19. LF

      ... it better be really clean.

    20. RB

      Yes.

    21. LF

      And for that, it's-- I guess you have to really place the finger in the right place. Plus, there's the... Well, there's the calluses, so it doesn't hurt.

    22. RB

      [laughs]

    23. LF

      And then the positioning of the string on the curvature of-

    24. RB

      Yes

    25. LF

      ... the finger. Where does it fall? Like how much do you bend the finger?

    26. RB

      You have to have enough of flesh on it to actually raise the, raise the string and pitch.

    27. LF

      Yeah. Yep.

    28. RB

      Otherwise, it-

    29. LF

      Yeah, 'cause you're lifting it with part of a flesh. And of course, you have to decide, depends how OCD you are, do you wanna be like the perfect, the proper musician, or do you wanna do a Hendrix, uh, so the thumb over the top?

    30. RB

      Way over the top, yes.

  7. 38:34 – 44:01

    Miles Davis

    1. RB

      good."

    2. LF

      So what was the role of bebop jazz in the history of music? It seems like it was influential in your life. Uh, another guy you had an incredible interview with, uh, Flea. People should go listen to that one. It's a great conversation. One of the things that surprised me is just how many musical genres influenced Flea, and the guy showed up in a Miles Davis-

    3. RB

      That's right

    4. LF

      ... T-shirt. And-

    5. RB

      Bebop

    6. LF

      ... and [laughs]

    7. RB

      Miles Davis played with Charlie Parker-

    8. LF

      Mm-hmm

    9. RB

      ... when he was 18 years old, and that's, he was, Charlie Parker was really his mentor.

    10. LF

      Can you explain to me why with many of the folks you've interviewed, uh, and in general out there, in the, in the world of jazz, all roads lead to Miles Davis, why he's such an influential figure?

    11. RB

      Because he was the greatest innovator in the history of jazz. He was at the forefront of all these different styles of jazz. I mean, he started as a bebop player, and then he, he had records like The Birth, Birth of Cool and Modal Jazz and, um, Hard Bop and records like Bitches Brew, where he started to, I guess you would call fusion. You start to get these records. You had two main groups of Miles Davis. You had the Miles Davis '50s quintet and the Miles Davis '60s quintet.

    12. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    13. RB

      Now, Miles made records with many people, but the '50s quintet had John Coltrane in it, had, I mean, it had different piano players, could be Wynton Kelly, but Paul Chambers in the bass, Philly Joe Jones in the drums. Um, and that particular group was, uh, made just incredibly important records. And then he had his s- '60s group, which was, uh, Herbie Hancock on the piano, Ron Carter on the bass, Tony Williams on the drums, and Wayne Shorter on the saxophone. And they made all these incredibly important records.

    14. LF

      I forget who said it, uh, in, uh, interview with you, but they talked about, like, uh, Miles Davis, um, his music feeling like, I think it, uh, I think toes hanging over the cliff or something like this, meaning, like, there's always a risk, there's a danger that you're willing to m-make, to fuck it all up live, and that feeling is what creates the f- the aliveness of the music. Like, can you speak to that, just the, the creating in the music, the feeling like you're on the edge, like you're challenging the possibilities of what can happen, and, uh, it all can go to shit, and because of that, it feels alive?

    15. RB

      Well, when I interviewed Ron Carter that played in, in, uh, Miles's '60s quintet, I asked Ron, 'cause Ron did s- records, he played bass on two, 2,200 recording, famous records. And I said, "Did you guys ever rehearse with Miles?" "No. Never." I said, "So you, what, what would you do?" He goes, "We'd just show up at the studio, and he'd have the charts, put them on the stand, and, and we would [laughs] we'd just roll."

    16. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    17. RB

      And I said, "Would you listen to it after?" "No." [laughs] And I said, "Well, what about your, what about the, the live records that you did at, when you'd record at clubs and things like that?" He goes, "We never knew that we were recording." He goes, "Maybe I'd see a, a microphone, a different kind of microphone on my bass amp." He goes, "Then months later, the, a record would come out, and I'd see, and I was on it, and I would take it down to the union and say, 'I played on this record,' so you get paid for it." But he said, "We didn't even know we were recording."

    18. LF

      Yeah.

    19. RB

      So Miles was always about, you know, don't think about it, just, just play.

    20. LF

      That's crazy. That was on purpose. That was done on purpose-

    21. RB

      Yeah

    22. LF

      ... not to, not to do the rehearsals, not, none, none of that.

    23. RB

      Yeah. He wanted people to just feel it, play it.Thought is the enemy of flow, as Vinnie Colaiuta told me.

    24. LF

      Thought is the enemy of flow. How do you make sense that Flea, the bassist for the [laughs] Red Hot Chili Peppers, is influenced by bebop jazz?

    25. RB

      So his stepfather was a jazz bass player.

    26. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    27. RB

      And his, uh, when his parents got divorced, his... He was born in Australia, and then they moved to, to New York. Then his parents got divorced and his mom married his stepfather, who was a jazz, jazz musicians, and they, then they used to have jam sessions at their place. And Flea loved it. It was kind of like my upbr-bringing with my dad playing jazz all the time. And once, once it gets inside you, it's just there. And, uh, and so he is heavily influenced by jazz musicians.

    28. LF

      Yeah, his impression was just hilarious. I mean, he's a character. His whole physical way of being is a character. And hi- his impression of just upright bass is just f- it's fun to watch, his whole-

    29. RB

      His intensity, when he picked up his bass during the interview, it... He's an intense guy, and funny and, uh, you know, really, um, emotional and, um, and he picks up his bass and there's a fierceness that you immediately feel, and he starts, he talks about how he pr- practices, and then when he starts doing the slapping stuff, he gets... He's so into it and, and I'm just sitting there going, "Whoa. [laughs] Wow."

    30. LF

      Yeah, he talked about his practicing routine with you, and one of the things, he's like, "I have to practice the slap." And-

  8. 44:01 – 45:08

    Bass guitar

    1. LF

      ... now, there's differences in the structure of the different bands, but usually, like, the, the bassist has a vibe to them.

    2. RB

      Mm.

    3. LF

      I don't know if we can put words to exactly what that is. There's a kind of energy that drives the band.

    4. RB

      To me, the bass is one of the only instruments that when you play a bad note, everybody notices. I started on the bass-

    5. LF

      Mm-hmm

    6. RB

      ... as a kid.

    7. LF

      Oh, interesting.

    8. RB

      Yeah.

    9. LF

      But you also play drums. You also play-

    10. RB

      Yeah, but my first instrument was the cello in third grade.

    11. LF

      Oh.

    12. RB

      And then I switched to the bass in sixth grade, and my, I majored, my undergrad degree is in classical bass. So I, I always think of myself as a bass player first, and I always think the bass is the most important instrument because-

    13. LF

      Strong words. [laughs]

    14. RB

      Because as much as I love to play the guitar, and I love to play the guitar more than anything, I think, but the bass really defines what the quality of the chord is. 'Cause you can put the root in there, you can put the third of the chord in the bass, you can put the fifth in there. You can play a lot of notes, and whatever you play in the bass kinda defines what kinda chord it is. So the bass player has a lot of power.

  9. 45:08 – 1:14:23

    Greatest guitar solos of all time

    1. LF

      I have to go back to our, the beginning of our conversation. What, what do you think are some of the great solos of all time? Can we, can we put a few into consideration? You have a great list on, uh, top 20 rock guitar solos of all time.

    2. RB

      Yeah, so I put Comfortably Numb as my favorite, as my top one.

    3. LF

      Yeah. On that day, right?

    4. RB

      On that day.

    5. LF

      Yeah.

    6. RB

      Right. Now, the day later, I would've said it's the second solo. [laughs]

    7. LF

      [laughs] Okay.

    8. RB

      But I did the first solo because, because nobody talks about that solo.

    9. LF

      Yeah.

    10. RB

      And that solo is equally great. And when David Gilmour, when I played it for him, and we talked about it in my interview with him, it was... Just to watch his face when he listened to it was incredible. I mean, I'm thinking to myself, it's like, I'm sitting with David Gilmour and he's listening to Comfortably Numb, and he's hearing it. He's played it a million times live, but how many times has he gone back and listened to it on the record?

    11. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    12. RB

      Probably not for a long time. And then he's hearing it, he's like, "Ooh."

    13. LF

      Maybe you just don't look back. When you do great things, you don't look back.

    14. RB

      Miles never looked back. He never wanted to hear the old stuff. He always moved on.

    15. LF

      There was this funny moment, um, where you, where you made a video why David Gilmour will never be on the channel, and then you ended up, of course, interviewing him twice. He's one of the greatest guitar players of all time. What do you think is at the core of his genius?

    16. RB

      He has just an incredible melodic sense. He knows how phrases should be put together. There's a flow to his ideas that I think is just incredible. It's the same with Hendrix. This flow, how one idea leads to the next, how there's space between them. It's just like speaking.

    17. LF

      That's what I read about, uh, Miles Davis, is he was very good at understanding tempo and the value of silence.

    18. RB

      Yes.

    19. LF

      Uh, and I think, I think David Gilmour doesn't always play fast.

    20. RB

      Right.

    21. LF

      But he does a lot with less.

    22. RB

      Yes.

    23. LF

      And then, uh, some of that is also on the more technical side, probably the tone of the... I mean, he's one of the most uniquely recognizable tones in all of music.

    24. RB

      Yes.

    25. LF

      What do you understand about what it takes to shape the tone that is David Gilmour?

    26. RB

      He has a very sophisticated setup-

    27. LF

      Mm-hmm

    28. RB

      ... for his tone. And, and that was one of the things when I went to his studio, and I said to him, "So David, is there anything I'm not supposed to see here?" I mean, he never sits down and shows-

    29. LF

      Mm-hmm

    30. RB

      ... people his gear, and he laughed about it.

  10. 1:14:23 – 1:19:04

    27 Club

    1. LF

      What do you think about, uh, the, the 27 Club? A bunch of the music greats died at 27. Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse.

    2. RB

      Kurt Cobain.

    3. LF

      Kurt Cobain, of course. A big part of music history is linked to drug history.

    4. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    5. LF

      LSD, coke, heroin, weed.

    6. RB

      Smoking.

    7. LF

      Smoking.

    8. RB

      I think about this a lot. If you go back and you watch videos, The Beatles, any of their movies, they're smoking all the time. The Get Back documentary, they're smoking constantly. Go watch any of the MTV Unpluggeds, Nirvana. Kurt Cobain is smoking every second that he's not playing, he's smoking. Every singer smoked. Every musician smoked. Nowadays, I ask my son Dylan, "Dylan, does anybody smoke at his high school?" He's like, "Smoke? Nobody smokes." He's, he's think- it was an absurd question. And that was part of culture.

    9. LF

      Yeah, it was for everybody. I mean, that was, that was a big transformation o- over the past 20 years, and just everybody stopped smoking. But I don't think smoking has the kinda hard negative effect that we're talking about. I mean, I almost would rather have them smoke than some of the other hard drugs. Maybe smoking distracts them from the hard-- I mean, heroin and coke, I mean, those, those things really, and alcohol, unfortunately-

    10. RB

      Mm-hmm

    11. LF

      ... can be easily abused, I think. It seems like it's a, the, the life of a musician, this dopamine thing of getting on stage and be, being adored by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, the high of that, and then the come down after, is really hard life for just even neurobiologically of, like, how you deal with that. You have to be able to control the rollercoaster of your mind, and of course, drugs will be a part of that. And you think everything is allowed and everything is possible. And then there's also culture, depending on who you hang out with, that certain kinds of categories of drugs are good for your creativity.

    12. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    13. LF

      And so naturally start to abuse those drugs. I don't know. I think, uh, I think, th- I think it's really interesting the role that drugs have played in the, in the history of music. They have certainly been extremely destructive, but they have also certainly been productive, uh, muses, inspirations for some of these folks.

    14. RB

      Oh, absolutely. Now, would we want to, you know, advocate people doing things like that to boost their creativity?

    15. LF

      No.

    16. RB

      Well, I wouldn't, but just like smoking, which I think improved people's voices.

    17. LF

      [laughs]

    18. RB

      A- I mean, really, the raspiness of it.

    19. LF

      Yeah.

    20. RB

      This is the reason that the, the, that so many of these, uh, virtually every famous singer-

    21. LF

      Mm-hmm

    22. RB

      ... no matter what genre of music, jazz, soul, rock, they all smoked. Nat King Cole.

    23. LF

      Yeah. Yeah. Miles Davis, too?

    24. RB

      Miles smo- everybody smoked. Miles did-- Well, Miles w-was a heroin addict, too. I mean-

    25. LF

      Yeah

    26. RB

      ... so many jazz musicians.

    27. LF

      But Miles had a sound to him. You, you're right. I mean, smoking must, must play a gigantic role to that, adding some complexity to the voice.

    28. RB

      Yes.

    29. LF

      Yeah. Some richness to the voice.

    30. RB

      Nat King Cole, he s- he smoked, I think, four packs a day. He died of lung cancer. Um, lotta heavy smokers, those singers.

  11. 1:19:04 – 1:22:18

    Elton John

    1. LF

      Uh, on the songwriting front, you mentioned, uh, a story about Elton John recording. So he's one of the legendary songwriters. But yeah, you've met him, and you know something about the process of his, um-

    2. RB

      Yeah, 'cause he was recording in a studio in Atlanta that I was working with the band that I was producing, and he was in-- I was in Studio B, he was in Studio A. And this band that I was working with, they were called Jump, Little Children. And so he had his assistant come in and ask, "Hey, is this-- Are you guys Jump, Little Children?" "Yeah, yeah." And then all of a sudden, I couldn't see out into the live room. Elton walked into the thing, and we were getting ready to track, and I'm, I'm pressing the button. "Yo, where are, where are you guys? What's up? I thought we were gonna start this." And no one's responding. I can hear talking. It's like, "What? What's going on? Where are they?" Then all of a sudden, they come back in the studio, and they were stunned. I said, "Where were you guys?" "Elton John just walked into our session, and he said he's a big fan. He said to come over when we're done and, and hang out in Studio A." So, so we did, and he was there with Bernie Taupin. They were working on a song, and he-- we talked there for, for an hour, and he was talking about recording two records a year, and then they'd go on tour, and they'd write and record the whole record in two weeks. So Bernie would give him lyrics. Elton would go out and [laughs] spend 15 minutes writing all the melody. He'd look at his lyrics, and he was doing that that day. Bernie was there, and they had a lyric sheet up on the piano. And Elton would go on, and they'd just re- "Okay, just record this," and Elton would sit there and, and play and come up with the song-

    3. LF

      Mm-hmm

    4. RB

      ... in 15 minutes or so.

    5. LF

      Yeah, that's crazy.

    6. RB

      There's a great version of, I think, "Tiny Dancer" where Elton is coming up with it on-- It's on YouTube, and he's just coming up with the music right there. And then the band, "Okay, here's how it goes," and they record it right then. [laughs] Then they move on to the next song.

    7. LF

      Yeah, that's awesome.

    8. RB

      I mean, it's really incredible.

    9. LF

      Yeah.

    10. RB

      That's it, yeah.

    11. RB

      There's one here that I've sort of done the other day with "Tiny Dancer," which is about Bernie's girlfriend. So I just sort of ran it through and then put two verses together, then a middle eight, then a chorus, and then back to the sort of verse sort of thing. It's, it's a very-- It happens very quickly. It sounds long, but it sort of... It, it sort of starts off, "Blue jean baby, L.A. lady, Seamstress for the band. Heart of mine, pretty eye. You're married."

    12. LF

      [laughs] Okay.

    13. RB

      I mean, it's really amazing that he just-

    14. LF

      Yeah. He's looking at, uh, just the lyrics.

    15. RB

      Yeah, and it's one of the v- he's one of the very few people that has the lyrics first and writes the music to it, which to me is far more difficult.

    16. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    17. RB

      99% of songwriters write the music first-

    18. LF

      Mm-hmm

    19. RB

      ... and then they put the melody and lyrics to the finished backing track.

    20. LF

      And maybe they write, like, lyrics. They write, like, uh, nonsense words-

    21. RB

      Yes

    22. LF

      ... kind of thing, and then they figure it out from there. Yeah, that's-- I mean, I don't know what skill that is exactly. That's incredible. I mean, in that process, he makes it his own.

    23. RB

      Yes.

    24. LF

      Okay, uh,

  12. 1:22:18 – 1:26:48

    Metallica

    1. LF

      you had an amazing interview with, uh, Kirk Hammett. I'm a huge Metallica fan.

    2. RB

      Same here.

    3. LF

      [laughs]

    4. RB

      [laughs]

    5. LF

      Uh, there's a lot of interesting stuff that came out of that from that conversation. Uh, one is the distinction between heavy metal and hard rock-

    6. RB

      Yes

    7. LF

      ... which is very interesting. Of course, Metallica went through their own evolution. They had many periods. I mean, they've been around 40 years.

    8. RB

      Over 40 years, yeah. Crazy.

    9. LF

      The other thing is the down picking, which was interesting, which is creating that really distinct sound.

    10. RB

      James and Kirk's, the, the, the down, [laughs] the down picking, I used to be able to do that. I just can't do that anymore. It hurts my thumb-

    11. LF

      Mm

    12. RB

      ... to, to do it. I think, honestly, I, I thought a lot about it. It's like, why does it, why is it so painful? Why is it so hard? It's from swiping with your thumb on phones.

    13. LF

      Mm.

    14. RB

      And I think it affects that basal joint there, and I'm just like-

    15. LF

      [laughs]

    16. RB

      No, I'm serious.

    17. LF

      I love your theories. [laughs]

    18. RB

      I think that that's actually right, 'cause I'm thinking like, "Why does that hurt so much to do that, all the downstrokes and stuff?" It's like, gotta be something. It's like, yeah, it's from, from swiping with a phone.

    19. LF

      The other thing that came through is, um, that he's a improviser at heart.

    20. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    21. LF

      And that, I think, clashes with this kind of rigid structure that metal is. So there's a real soulful, melodic aspect to him, and he gave a lot of props to, uh, James Hetfield for just being a great composer, being a great musician and writer of riffs, of rhythm.

    22. RB

      The improvisation part of it you don't think of 'cause they, they-- 'cause you have the finished songs that you listen to, but those songs are born out of improvisations, of jams, of little fragments of, of ideas-

    23. LF

      Mm-hmm

    24. RB

      ... and then they craft them into these masterpieces.

    25. LF

      Also, you mentioned that this is weird that I didn't know that Hendrix was, used different gauges, strings.

    26. RB

      Yeah, he was the one that talked about that, wasn't he?

    27. LF

      Mm-hmm. Yeah.

    28. RB

      Yeah. That was really interesting. See, these are the things that I like to learn from, uh, from these interviews with these people. I was like, "What? Why have I never heard of that?"

    29. LF

      It's like, 'cause one of the ways you can find uniqueness of sound is by trying different things that are not... I mean, I guess Zappa was really good at this, right?

    30. RB

      Yeah.

  13. 1:26:48 – 1:32:39

    Tom Waits

    1. LF

      type. Uh, I told you off-mic, uh, one of my, maybe the music guest that's a dream guest is Tom Waits. I've wanted to talk to Tom Waits for a very long time, and I've gone through different periods of ... You've met me at a point in my life where I've given up on it, on it a little bit. And I was telling you-

    2. RB

      That's when it's gonna happen, Lex.

    3. LF

      [laughs] Okay.

    4. RB

      Once you give up on it, it's gonna happen.

    5. LF

      Yeah. Yeah. Um-

    6. RB

      Why Tom Waits won't be on your podcast.

    7. LF

      Exactly. [laughs] Exactly, dude. This is, this is my, this is my moment.

    8. RB

      Tom, come, come here. Let's do it. I wanna see it.

    9. LF

      I, I'm such a, a fan of, like, the Zappa-like artistry on the, on the musical front, which Tom Waits has, but I- I'm a, I'm a sucker for great lyrics. Lyrics to me is such a big part of great songs. And, and he's another example. He has a song called, uh, "Martha." It's about a love story that didn't work out, and it's an older man calling the woman that he was in love with and basically reminiscing about, like, ti- you know, thinking about, like, what, what would've happened if it worked out, that kind of thing. And then, you know, I loved that song for a long time, and, you know, uh, at, at some point I found out that he wrote [laughs] that when he was in his early 20s. And you realize, similar with The Beatles, like, the s- these guys-

    10. RB

      [laughs]

    11. LF

      ... somehow are able to capture the human condition so masterfully, and they're kids.

    12. RB

      Yes.

    13. LF

      This, I don't get it. I don't understand it.

    14. RB

      I can't speak for Tom Waits, but in The Beatles' case, they went to Hamburg. They spent time on their own. They played cover gigs that were eight hours long, and they li- lived-

    15. LF

      Yeah, they've lived.

    16. RB

      They lived life.

    17. LF

      Yeah.

    18. RB

      It's not like, not like kids today.

    19. LF

      [laughs]

    20. RB

      [laughs]

    21. LF

      Now you're on a porch. Uh, you also had, uh, an amazing interview with Billy Corgan of-

    22. RB

      Yes

    23. LF

      ... Smashing Pumpkins. Uh, he is definitively one of my favorite musicians.

    24. RB

      I love Billy.

    25. LF

      You asked him an interesting question about how he creates, um, this melancholy feeling that permeates a lot of his songs, and he jokingly said that, uh, the secret is all about the seventh and the n- and the ninth. Um, [laughs] so, like, musically, chord-wise, what do you think about that? You think he's onto something?

    26. RB

      He's talking a little music theory there.

    27. LF

      Yeah, yeah.

    28. RB

      Seventh and ninth over the chord that he's playing. So if you're playing a C chord, he's singing a B, would be the seventh, D would be the ninth. And he does use a lot of those notes. But almost all these people that we're talking ... No, all these people that we're talking about use these notes, and this is why their songs ... I, and when I interviewed Sting, I called them surprise tones, and Sting's like, "I like the way you use the word surprise." Notes that are outside the chord that are dissonant with the chords that they're playing, and, but, and that creates emotion. Dissonance equals emotion. And that's, that's what I like. I want music to be, to depress me.

    29. LF

      Yeah, what is that? I don't know. The, the, m- but melancholy, and, and I think you articulated in that interview is it's not e- uh, actually that depressing. There's something about that melancholy feeling that is somehow the other side of the coin of happiness.

    30. RB

      Mm-hmm.

  14. 1:32:39 – 1:36:02

    Greatest rock stars

    1. LF

      who, who do you think are the great frontmen in, uh, history of music?

    2. RB

      Freddie Mercury, Robert Plant.

    3. LF

      Freddie Mercury, number one probably.

    4. RB

      Steven Tyler.

    5. LF

      Jim Morrison.

    6. RB

      Jim Morrison.

    7. LF

      I would put myself.

    8. RB

      Yeah. Roger Daltrey. Um-

    9. LF

      Well, we have to say, I have to say, we have to say James Hetfield.

    10. RB

      James Hetfield.

    11. LF

      I mean, there's nothing ... I ha- I mean, I have to talk to you about this. I have, I mean, this is the greatest, I think the greatest concert of all time. This is, uh, their historic performance in Moscow in, um, September of '91. This is shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed. Plus we should mention AC/DC and Pantera-

    12. RB

      Mm-hmm

    13. LF

      ... were there too. And about 1.6 million people were there. Now, by the way, there's like some kinda reporting that there was a half a million people, 500,000 people, that somewhere I've seen statements like that. That's a ridiculously inaccurate statement. So it's a free concert, so any official counts [laughs] don't count.

    14. RB

      [laughs]

    15. LF

      It's, uh, it's, it's definitely over a million. It's, it's very likely to be 1.5, 1.6 million people. And this moment in history that I think they channeled, it's like whenever great music, the Metallica was firing on all cylinders at the very top of their game, and they meet this moment in history and this place in history that was a, a defining part of the 20th century collapsing. And you have these people who are, um, for a moment through music, are able to escape the fear, the anger they feel, the all of it. There was also a political, social, cultural moment meeting the musical moment. And the, the setlist, I was just, I was, I listened to this several times over the past few days, just taking myself back into that moment in time. Listen to the setlist. Enter Sandman, Creeping Death, Harvester of Sorrow, Fade to Black, Sad But True, Master of Puppets, Seek & Destroy, For Whom the Bell Tolls, One, and Whiplash. Look at that. How is that-

    16. RB

      That's-

    17. LF

      That just-

    18. RB

      That's my kinda set

    19. LF

      ... get the fuck outta here. This is amazing. This is-

    20. RB

      That's my kinda set right there.

    21. LF

      I don't know if you could think of anything that could beat that.

    22. RB

      I think that the guys in the band would say that too. That was, I mean, they were really at their, at their peak. The Black Album had just come out then, and that must have been so, so exciting.

    23. LF

      I mean, Woodstock was big. There's, there's certain moments in time when they really, really meet the moment. Are you a fan of, uh, live, live, like big-

    24. RB

      I used to be, but at this point-

    25. LF

      Yeah

    26. RB

      ... I can't, uh, you know. I'd much rather see people play in small clubs-

    27. LF

      Mm-hmm

    28. RB

      ... and/or go to the, I'd like to listen in the studio. Go to the studio even.

    29. LF

      I generally almost entirely agree with you. I just think that there's these historic moments, but you don't know-

    30. RB

      Oh, yeah

  15. 1:36:02 – 1:42:37

    Beethoven

    1. LF

      premiere of Ninth Symphony. You know, I didn't really know the personal side of Beethoven until I saw this movie called Immortal Beloved. It's an excellent movie with, uh-

    2. RB

      Gary Oldman

    3. LF

      ... Gary Oldman.

    4. RB

      Yeah.

    5. LF

      Just a really, it's a masterful, uh, celebration of Beethoven in an interesting kind of way through the perspective of a love letter that he's written. But then I realized, like this is early, this is many, many, this is a couple decades ago now, that, you know, he went deaf. Before he even started writing the Ninth Symphony, which is widely considered to be one of the greatest compositions of all time, the greatest symphonies of all time, he went deaf, couldn't hear anything before he even started writing it. And so there's that famous story of him in that world premiere of having to be turned around because he can't hear people applauding, so he has to, uh, be turned around to see that people are actually clapping. I mean, there's just this whole tragic element, plus the, the meaning of the symphony, uh, that ends in this beautiful, uh, Ode to Joy. The symphony itself is a kinda, it starts with the chaos and conflict and ends with this celebration of peace and brotherly unity, and a ca- I guess a call for that, a reaching for that, for that peace. And it's a, there's a tragic element to it, again, connected to history, which is it was post-Napoleonic Wars-

    6. RB

      Mm-hmm

    7. LF

      ... and before the American Civil War. So like you, you're in this, in this middleThis respite from, from war, calling for peace, not knowing that, uh, truly horrific wars are coming. So you have the, the American Civil War, and you have the, of course, the two world wars coming. So this-- all of it together, and the fact that he's conducting deaf, and he wrote this whole thing deaf. I was reading a lot about his process, and he just edits and edits and edits and edits. So the fact that he had to edit in his head is just insane.

    8. RB

      I mean, he-- Beethoven was sick all the time too. I mean, there-- a lot of people were sick all the time. It was very common. What would motivate you to write music, this beautiful music that you can never actually hear except for in your head?

    9. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    10. RB

      Right? Like, why-- The amount of time it takes to write [laughs] to write a thirty-five minute, forty minute piece, all the parts. You gotta hear all the orchestration in your head. You're editing, you're doing all these things. Where do you get the motivation when you can't hear the actual finished work? One-- And people would say, "Well, he hears, hears it in his head." But what kind of enjoyment is it? You wanna hear the orchestra-- I mean, it's really profound that he, that, that he was inspired to do this. There's a thing called the Heiligenstadt Testament that he wrote. It was a letter to his brothers in-- from Eighteen Oh-Two. I think they found it in his desk after Beethoven died. And he felt a sense of shame and humiliation because of his hearing loss, and he said that he was afflicted with this thing where him of all people, that someone standing next to him could hear a flute that he could not hear or s- a shepherd singing in the field that-- and he could not hear this. And, and of all the people, why him, where hearing played such an important part? Another person that ha-- would've had to have had perfect pitch, 'cause you could never do this-

    11. LF

      Mm-hmm

    12. RB

      ... if you didn't have perfect pitch, which I think all these great composers for the most part, Brahms didn't, from what I know. But all the rest of them for sure had perfect pitch, so they could hear these things in their head, and that's how they composed.

    13. LF

      I mean, you love sound and music. What do you think it was like gradually losing y-your hearing for Beethoven?

    14. RB

      It must have been terrible. I mean, I-- Just terrible. I mean, I've heard things where he had to s-- would have a stick in his mouth and, and put it on the soundboard of the piano, and he could feel the vib-vibrations in his skull and things like that. And-

    15. LF

      Yeah, desperately trying to-

    16. RB

      Yeah. I just-

    17. LF

      But also, there's-- What is, what is that that he's able to write, like, one of the greatest symphonies ever while deaf? So there, there's something about that. We mentioned darkness, but torment that he's going through, and ultimately "Ode to Joy," like, not a cynical thing.

    18. RB

      Right.

    19. LF

      But a call for the positive.

    20. RB

      Yeah.

    21. LF

      Yeah.

    22. RB

      That's, that's, uh-- I, I, I've devoted many, many hours thinking about that.

    23. LF

      And plus, Napoleon broke his heart, because he was a supporter of Napoleon.

    24. RB

      Yeah.

    25. LF

      Because Napoleon was supposed to represent the French Revolution, this, this hopeful future of no more kings, no more monarchs, no more authoritarian regimes. And Napoleon ended up becoming essentially king.

    26. RB

      Right.

    27. LF

      Uh, becoming an authoritarian. And Be-Beethoven, um, sort of f-famously was critical of that. Nevertheless, m- I think maintained a fascination with Napoleon throughout his life. But sort of a kind of more sophisticated, complex view of human nature and human civilization, so becoming more cynical, like seeing more clearly that the world disappoints you, the dreams get shattered. And through that is able to still do this call for a hopeful future. All right. So, okay, so Beethoven, one of the greats for sure. Like basically everybody, I know how to play the first movement of "Moonlight Sonata," but I always avoided the third movement 'cause I was like, "I'll never be good enough." [laughs] Never. Never. But I need to-

    28. RB

      Never say never, Lex.

    29. LF

      One of these days, maybe. You know what would be great? If Tom Waits writes me an email that says, "I only talk to people that can play the third movement."

    30. RB

      [laughs] Play the third movement.

  16. 1:42:37 – 1:45:27

    Bach

    1. LF

      Uh, you often highlight the importance of Bach. In fact, so many of your guests-

    2. RB

      Every famous songwriter is influenced by Bach. It-- They are. The greatest composer of all time, the greatest musician of all time.

    3. LF

      Even Sting and, uh, Dominic Miller said they go to Bach even for, like, practice.

    4. RB

      Every day. People talk about Bach was not known other than in his p-places he lived. Eisenach. He was born in Leipzig. He spent many years. Uh, but Bach was known to great musicians. It was difficult to find manuscripts, but there was a premiere of the "St. Matthew Passion" that Mendelssohn had done in Seventeen-- in Eighteen Twenty-Nine. It was on March 11th, I believe. He had a manuscript because, uh, his father and mother collected manuscripts.

    5. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    6. RB

      And he got a manuscript of this piece, and he-- I think he was twenty years old, and, and they had a performance of it in Berlin.And Beethoven, Mozart, I studied The Well-Tempered Clavier, the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier. But, um, Bach wrote profoundly beautiful music and some of the most complex contrapuntal music that I don't think anyone has ever done like that. Extremely bright guy, had 20 kids, 10 of them-- only 10 survived till adulthood. Lost both his parents when he was nine, within nine months of each other. Went to live with an older brother.

    7. LF

      Extremely productive.

    8. RB

      Yes.

    9. LF

      I saw. I, yeah, I think, uh, from all the music teachers I've ever had, I, I, I understood the importance of studying Bach.

    10. RB

      He didn't write Master of Puppets, but he wrote some great, powerful music.

    11. LF

      Well put. Well put. I, I, I try to, um, educate the aforementioned music teachers of the brilliance of the Master of the Puppets. Uh, sometimes a good riff is greater than any, any musical composition, so.

    12. RB

      I, I agree. I go back and I play Master of Puppets every time I'm trying out a new amplifier. That's my go-to.

    13. LF

      [laughs] That's your go-to.

    14. RB

      [laughs]

    15. LF

      So like-- So the, the, the stereotypical, like, guitar store, when you come in, you're playing Master of Puppets.

    16. RB

      I'll play Master of Puppets. I, I will play-- I have to play some heavy riff.

    17. LF

      Mm.

    18. RB

      And so usually it will default to some Metallica or something like that. Or I'll play Alice in Chains or... I do usually-- Like, a lot of times I'll go and I'll do drop D something or play Tool.

    19. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    20. RB

      I usually will do something, do, do some drop tuning thing, and it's, it's always gotta be some, some type of metal that I'll test to see if the, if the bottom end's tight on the amp and stuff. So yes.

  17. 1:45:27 – 1:59:18

    AI in music

    1. LF

      All right, we have to talk about this a little bit. You made a bunch of videos about it. There was a, there was a moment in time, it still goes on, but there was a moment where it was really people were freaking out about the use of AI in music.

    2. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    3. LF

      Uh, so there's these, I would say, incredible apps, uh, like Suno, UDO. Eleven Labs Music is also great. It can generate basically text to song, full song from a text prompt. And, uh, a lot of people start freaking out just by-- based on how good it is.

    4. RB

      Mm-hmm.

    5. LF

      And so you start to immediately imagine how this is going to transform music, and you're going to replace musicians and all that kind of stuff. Uh, it, it is legitimately nerve-wracking because these are early versions, so you don't know where it goes. But i-in your intuition now, you've been thinking about this, you made a bunch of videos. Now, like, being able to reflect, "Okay, everybody chill. Calm down." [laughs]

    6. RB

      So if you write a s- a prompt in Suno and it spits out a song, which I've did, I've done-- made a bunch of videos on this. I made up a fake artist, Eli Mercer, in this video. Then I did a thing for CBS News. I made up this fake artist, Sadie Winters, and came up with this song, Walking Away. Well, the compu- the program came up with it.

    7. LF

      There is some creativity in a process. So in this particular thing, the process is you generate an image.

    8. RB

      I did it in ChatGPT, the image.

    9. LF

      The image.

    10. RB

      Then I went to, then I went to Claude and I wrote the lyrics, 'cause Claude's way better at lyrics-

    11. LF

      Mm-hmm

    12. RB

      ... than Suno is. Suno's bad at lyrics, at least right now. So I re- so I did-- I created the lyrics in Claude, and then I imported the lyrics into Suno. And I had great results with the songs that I came up-- that it came up with. I always have to qualify that. But I started thinking about this. People freak out about this, "Oh, this is bad, this is bad." And then I thought, I was like, "No, who are p- gonna be the ones that are gonna benefit from AI?" Well, the people that are already great songwriters, because you have to recog- be able to recognize when it spits out something good versus when it spits out something that's not that good.

    13. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    14. RB

      And every other song, I, I've probably created 130 song ideas, out of which there's three good ones.

    15. LF

      And there's a thing that's happening where people's ear very quickly is, is becoming attuned to AI slop.

    16. RB

      Yes.

    17. LF

      And that's actually quite fascinating. Like, for example, um, one of the things, there's this viral clip going around of an AI-based, like, a soul jazz remix of songs like 50 Cent, Many Men. And I think it is super impressive, and it's a different pipeline, actually.

    18. RB

      Yes.

    19. LF

      It's a tricky pipeline to how to pull that off, and I think a lot of the creativity in that, even that kind of remixing, is in the pipeline that-- o-of how you actually do that, because there's actually a lot of manual stuff in that pipeline. Uh, but I think ironically, it's very cool at first, but when you listen to it at-- for a while, you understand that this is AI slop.

    20. RB

      Yes.

    21. LF

      For a soul remix, it, it actually lacks soul. But it made me think of, like, when I listen to soul or blues, I think I really want, in that case, to know I don't want a AI B.B. King. I want the real B.B. King. A-and I-- if I d- if I know if any AI is involved in the B.B. King process, I'm tuning out.

    22. RB

      Yes.

    23. LF

      And I don't think I'm being curmudgeonly old dude in that. I think we humans want authenticity.

    24. RB

      So when, when AI-- When I first started making these AI videos, it started back in 2023. I made my first one. And I would take my phone, come up in the kitchen, and I'd play a song, and my, my youngest and Dylan, my youngest, Layla, and I have three kids, and my oldest, Dylan. As soon as I play it, "Why are you listening to AI?" And it's like, "Oh my God," instantly. It's like, "How do you know?" "Oh, it has this ringing sound in the thing." So it took me probably about four or five days to figure out, okay, what are they hearing that I'm not hearing? So I did it-- I separated all the parts, and what they're hearing was the artifacts that are in the vocal reverb.That sound, that were, uh, that made incomplete-

    25. LF

      Mm

    26. RB

      ... it just couldn't do the ambiances correctly, right? 'Cause it's trained on, a lot of these AI programs are trained on very low bit- bit rate, uh, MP3s, right? So they feed all this stuff in there, so they're getting really inferior information on the tr- in the training process, whereas now when they make these deals with the major labels, they'll get the multitracks and they'll get high quality WAV files to train f- from, right? And whoever opts in, they get the solo vocal tracks. You know, if Ed Sheeran wants to do it or Drake or whoever wants to give their voice to it, let it do its thing and then get their royalties from it.

    27. LF

      Mm.

    28. RB

      I'm not saying that any, any of them are doing it, I'm just giving an example. But every time that I would do it, I could be down the hall and I would play something on my phone just to see if they'll like, "Why are you listening to AI?" Oh, they can instantly tell. Then eventually it started getting better, and then, and then it'd be like, "Is this AI?" I'd be in the car with Layla coming back from TaeKwonDo practice, and she's like, "Is this AI?" "Why, does it sound like AI?" "Sounds like it could be AI." And I'd be like, "Yeah, it's AI." She's like, "Oh, it's getting better."

    29. LF

      Mm.

    30. RB

      And then I did this song for, um, it was an NPR interview. I created a song with a fake artist, and the song was called Neon Ghost, and I played it for Layla in the car. She's like, "Can you separate the tracks?" I said, "Yeah, I have them separated back home." "Okay, I wanna go down and hear it." So we go down to the studio and, and I play it for her, and she listens to the soloed vocal, and she said, "Wow, this is really realistic."

  18. 1:59:18 – 2:02:49

    Sabrina Carpenter

    1. LF

      So [chuckles] you have this video breaking down Sabrina Carpenter's song "Manchild," and you use that as an example of building up people's intuition about the, the music business and how the music production for these popular songs is being done these days, who's doing the songwriting, how is it being done, uh, and all that kind of stu- I, I was wondering if you could speak to that.

    2. RB

      In that particular song, uh, Jack Antonoff, who was one of the writers, Amy Allen, Sabrina Carpenter, said in some awards thing that there's an old guy on YouTube that says that Sabrina had very little to do with the song. And so he said in this clip-

    3. LF

      You being the old guy.

    4. RB

      Me being the old guy, that, well, Sabrina really was the-- She's amazing, and she's the one that wrote everything of, in the song. It's like [chuckles] so my response is like, "Well, why are you guys even included on the songwriting then?" [laughs]

    5. LF

      So one of the things you highlight is a lot of people are, are included on the list of, uh, songwriters.

    6. RB

      Yeah. 10 people-

    7. LF

      Yeah

    8. RB

      ... 11 people. I mean, you know. Like, why are the song, why does Song of the Year have songs that are interpolation, meaning that they have melodies from other songs in their interpolation? They used to call it [chuckles] stealing. And then, um, you have songs that are, use samples for the whole thing, like the Doechii song that's out right now. And I said, "Look, she took a Gaultier song and basically took off his melody, and she created her own melody over it." It's like, well, it's, I mean, it saves time for [chuckles] you don't have to actually create a track. You just can sing over someone else's song that was already successful.

    9. LF

      Yeah, you pointing that out in the song "Anxiety" broke my brain.

    10. RB

      I mean, it's so absurd.

    11. LF

      It, yeah, that feels unfair. It feels... It's a good song, but it wa- it was also a good song before, and it was, before that, it was also a good song.

    12. RB

      [chuckles] Right, 2011 or Luis Bonfa in 1967. Um, so why is that considered to be in the top songs of the year? It's like, come on, you can't find another song that's not based on that? That's ridiculous.

    13. LF

      Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

    14. RB

      And, and Doechii has some really good songs-

    15. LF

      Mm-hmm

    16. RB

      ... on a record. And-

    17. LF

      Yeah, but why are these the ones that are coming to the top, right?

    18. RB

      Well, yeah.

    19. LF

      This is interesting. I, that, that, that might be just a criticism of the machinery of the business that-

    20. RB

      Absolutely

    21. LF

      ... that, that drives them. It's not necessarily... Like, a lot of these folks are really good musicians. First of all, I think a lot of them are also good, like, the actual songs that make it to the top are good. I'm, I'm a big fan of Bruno Mars. He's a great songwriter.And he's a great musician all around.

    22. RB

      Absolutely.

    23. LF

      You know, this is Michael Jackson in, uh, reincarnated. I mean, he's-

    24. RB

      Super, super talented guy

    25. LF

      ... incredible, right?

    26. RB

      Yes.

    27. LF

      Um, you mentioned Billie Eilish and her brother write a lot of the songs.

    28. RB

      So good. Yeah. Super talented.

    29. LF

      I mean, Taylor Swift is unlike anything. I mean, that's a historic figure in music. But she's a fundamentally, at least originally, a singer-songwriter.

    30. RB

      Yes.

  19. 2:02:49 – 2:08:26

    YouTube copyright strikes

    1. LF

      Okay. I have to ask you about this complexity that you're facing on a basically daily basis. I think, uh, it's a challenge a lot of YouTube folks experience, but you're just so viscerally experiencing it because a lot of what you do in your channel is celebrate music broadly. And so as part of that process, you have to sometimes show clips of music, and I think all of that falls under fair use, quite obviously. And so you get all these YouTube, uh, copyright claims, and for folks who don't know, if you get three, three of those, it's just, the, each one of those can be a strike on the channel and could take down your channel, and you, you get some insane amount. You said you got like, uh... I, I think I had a similar thing on my Rick Rubin episode, like thir- he s- I think you said 13.

    2. RB

      Yeah.

    3. LF

      Up to 13. So what... Can you just speak to this whole thing? You've been in a constant battle, WMG, UMG, all the, all, all-

    4. RB

      All the, all the three letter name-

    5. LF

      All the s-

    6. RB

      ... record labels, right?

    7. LF

      The, the music business people. So what, what's the story there?

    8. RB

      Well, this has been going on since the beginning of my channel, and I've made videos periodically. When I first started, it was just instant blocks, so you never knew back in... I started, it'll be 10 years in June. So when I'd play music in a video, v- YouTubers were not playing music in videos because they didn't, because the, the content ID things and the takedowns and stuff. So I would play music, and I would just see what happens, and then you get a content ID claim re- or you realize that people were, quote-unquote, "blockers," and I came up with that term, that they would block your video, take down your video. And I, I realized at first it was, like, anything Guns N' Roses, which is still the case, Guns N' Roses, AC/DC, I mean, many bands, Fleetwood Mac, um, Led Zeppelin. And then, and then something happened. There, the, there was that guy on the skateboard on TikTok that had the Ocean Spray th- thing and, and he was listening-

    9. LF

      Uh-huh

    10. RB

      ... to Dreams by Fleetwood Mac.

    11. LF

      Yep.

    12. RB

      And that blew up and became a number one song again. And the labels then realized... I mean, I had made many videos about, about why this is wrong and it should be fair use and everything. Well, because of that, the labels were like, "Ooh, maybe we should rethink this." And then they just started demonetizing videos.

    13. LF

      Demonetize means they get all the money and you make-

    14. RB

      They get all the money. In a one-hour video, if they, if you use 20 seconds of a clip-

    15. LF

      Yeah

    16. RB

      ... they get all the money.

    17. LF

      Yep.

    18. RB

      Okay? So I hired a lawyer finally after the Rick Rubin video, 'cause I thought it was ridiculous. I go over to, to, to Tuscany. I interview Rick at his house and, and, uh, I hire a l- hired a lawyer to fight this, who I'm gonna have on my channel. I don't wanna say who it is, but he's another YouTuber.

    19. LF

      Mm.

    20. RB

      And, uh, he, uh, had approached me a couple years ago and, uh, and it's not cheap to do.

    21. LF

      Oh, you, you're gonna do, like, a public interview with him?

    22. RB

      I'm gonna do an interview with him.

    23. LF

      Awesome.

    24. RB

      Yes.

    25. LF

      Awesome.

    26. RB

      I talked to him today about it, actually.

    27. LF

      I can't wait.

    28. RB

      Yeah.

    29. LF

      That'd be great.

    30. RB

      So he said, "You should fight these, 'cause every single one of them is fair use." And he went through my, my, um, entire catalog. I have 2,100 videos, and he's fought 4,000 content ID claims and won every single one of them.

  20. 2:08:26 – 2:19:18

    Spotify

    1. LF

      Um, how has Spotify changed music? S-sometimes we highlight the fact that the change in nature of music and that it's, um, the scarcity's not there, but it also allows it-- It's like every kind of music is available, and it's so fast and it's so easy. It's easy to explore.

    2. RB

      It's a commodity. It's like turning on a water faucet.

    3. LF

      Do you think there's-

    4. RB

      I guess you could go like that

    5. LF

      ... there's some good to-- I mean, there's a lot of good to that, right?

    6. RB

      Yeah.

    7. LF

      Have you-- Did you go through that whole pro-- I, I j- I still remember where I had to basically throw away the albums. I never did that.

    8. RB

      When-- After you, after you do- uploaded them into your computer?

    9. LF

      Y-yeah. So there's that two-step process. [sighs] One, there's like the hard albums, CDs for me.

    10. RB

      Yeah. Okay.

    11. LF

      CDs.

    12. RB

      Yep.

    13. LF

      And then, and then you upload them into your computer-

    14. RB

      Yep

    15. LF

      ... and you save them, and then you, uh-- How do you put it? Allegedly a friend of yours pirates some extra songs-

    16. RB

      Yep

    17. LF

      ... [laughs] and then puts them on the computer. So you ha- But you have your stash on the computer. You're like, "This is my finely selected stash of greatness," uh, sometimes organized by album, sometimes not. And the big moment for me that was really difficult to do, really difficult to do, is throw away that stash be- and switch to Spotify-

    18. RB

      Mm-hmm

    19. LF

      ... switch to streaming and basically rebuild the stash of playlists and all this kind of stuff. And it, it was heartbreaking 'cause so much love and effort went into that, both the CD, the s- the stashing of the CD, and the stashing of the MP3s in the computer. And then in Spotify, it just seems just effortless. But it helped me discover all kinds of artists I never would've discovered otherwise, and Pandora I use a lot. Pandora is more, um, uh, prioritizing on the discovery part versus the organization part, and that was really wonderful.

    20. RB

      So one of the things I, I-- I'll start with the positive that I like about Spotify is that they show view count. They show play counts. Whether they're real or not, that's another question, but, but they show how many plays songs have.

    21. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    22. RB

      And that's how the charts are based.

    23. LF

      Does that give you signal that something is listened to a billion times? Does that mean something to you?

    24. RB

      Yeah. It means that, that it's a popular song. Well, that's a massive hit. That's very few songs that have a billion, billion plays. Now, the downside of Spotify is the way that they pay their artists. Now they've lumped in podcasts with-- that, that are getting a cut of the s- the streaming with the, with the music. Um, and, you know, the search and discovery, I mean, there's, there's a-- There's benefits of algorithms, and there's negative things of algorithms. Al-algorithms happen to kind of a lot, many times pigeonhole people into s- listening to the same genre of music all the time and not expanding their, you know, um, the discovery of, of, of new music where-- that you might hear on the radio back in the day, where program directors would play things that they liked, right? And you might hear something, "Ooh, what is that?" "Oh, that's a new Soundgarden record," or so- you know. "Whoa, I like that. I'm gonna go buy, check that out," you know, something that you might not have heard or something odd.

    25. LF

      Like, o-one thing I really love doing on, uh, Spotify is you can, you can have radio.

    26. RB

      Yeah.

    27. LF

      Meaning, like, you have a few-- It's similar to Pandora. Like, you can... [laughs] Okay, this is gonna reveal a little too much about myself, but usually when I go work out, I'll listen to something like Rage Against the Machine radio. [laughs] I'm sorry. I need-

    28. RB

      What else would you listen to?

    29. LF

      I d- I need motivation.

    30. RB

      [laughs]

  21. 2:19:18 – 2:23:40

    Guitars

    1. LF

      I told you offline, I think having multiple guitars is cheating, but whatever. N- nobody agrees with me on this. I only have, like, one-- I, I do have some side pieces, um, but one main.

    2. RB

      The Strat? What do you play?

    3. LF

      The Strat, yeah.

    4. RB

      The Strat, yeah.

    5. LF

      American Strat. I said I would never do this, but I was in a guitar store. I live next to a guitar store in Cambridge. And one day, I would always stop by. I don't know why. I just, just to look at the guitars. Like, I don't really know why exactly, just to be in the aura of these great instruments. And I s-- Th- they, they brought in this American Strat that had these different shades of-- It was like a silver. And I just-- I've never had this feeling. They talk about love at first sight.

    6. RB

      [laughs]

    7. LF

      I just fell in love with the guitar. Can you just speak to the kind of guitars you have and you love?

    8. RB

      I pretty much haveMainly, um, old school guitars, right? So I have Gibsons, I have Fenders, I have PRS guitars, and then I have, I have two Gibson acoustics. I have a, a 1957 Country & Western that I've had for probably 30 some odd years. It's a great guitar. And I have a J-45 Gibson, and I have a Martin D-28. So I only have three nice acoustics, and I have a Guild 12-string, and I have a Guild, um, Nashville-tuned guitar. So the low strings are up, up the octave, so the E, A, and D, and G are up the octave. That's Nashville tuning. Six string, though. Like, basically what David Gilmour plays on "Comfortably Numb" in my video, he plays a Nashville tune, but with one variation, the low E is up two octaves. So, um, he, he demonstrates actually the... And this is how he wrote "Comfortably Numb." The c- the chorus-

    9. LF

      Mm-hmm

    10. RB

      ... part of it was with this particular guitar that he's playing in the video.

    11. LF

      What can you say about, like, the different, uh, feels that the guitars, the, the acoustics have? Like, what-- How do you know which one to pu- pull out?

    12. RB

      It depends on the kinda part that I'm playing. If I want something with really tight mid-range with not, that doesn't have a lotta low, low bass, this particular old Gibson that I have, the '57, I will pull that out. It's got very balanced strings and, uh, like, you know, mid-range. Doesn't have a lot-- It doesn't have a booming bottom end, booming low E string-

    13. LF

      Mm-hmm

    14. RB

      ... or anything, or A string. So it depends on what, what kinda sound I'm looking for. If I'm-

    15. LF

      So it's more about sound versus feel?

    16. RB

      Yeah. All my guitars play equally well.

    17. LF

      Okay.

    18. RB

      I have them all set up to where they play well. Um, I have a signature Gibson guitar that I've had for five years now.

    19. LF

      When you say Gibson, Gibson Les Paul?

    20. RB

      Gibson, it's a Double Cut Les Paul Special, yeah, with P-90 pickups.

    21. LF

      I don't know what Double Cut means, but it sounds impressive.

    22. RB

      That means two cut cut, two, um-

    23. LF

      Oh.

    24. RB

      Yeah.

    25. LF

      Cool.

    26. RB

      As opposed to a Les Paul that has one cut. So it's a Les Paul Special with, that has two. I have it over there. My signature guitar.

    27. LF

      That's the, that's the-

    28. RB

      Yeah.

    29. LF

      All right. Nice.

    30. RB

      Yeah. When you play this, you're gonna be like, "Oh my God, this is butter."

  22. 2:23:40 – 2:33:42

    Advice

    1. LF

      By way of advice, you started, uh, your YouTube channel in your mid-50s and found incredible success. You've, you've had essentially multiple careers. Um, is there some wisdom you can extract from that?

    2. RB

      So my, my theory is that somebody's gotta be successful, so why can't it be you? That was, that was [laughs] ... That's, that was my-- When I started my channel, I mean, I didn't start it to... It started by accident with the Dylan video, and, um, and really so many people reached out to me. I started it six months after that viral video. So many people wrote to me, "Can you teach me this?" Pro musicians, well-known ones that you would, who you'd know. "Can you teach me this?" I can't teach you what Dylan did, but I can, I can teach you relative pitch, develop your ear that way. But then, uh, the, I had conservatories writing to me about this stuff from all over the world. "How did you teach Dylan this?" 'Cause we made about four different videos, and they got more and more sophisticated. And, um, so I thought, "Okay, I'll make some YouTube videos and explain this stuff." This is, that's really why I started, so I didn't have to keep... I couldn't answer the emails. There were so many of them. So I just started making videos on how to train your ear and music theory, and that's really how I started my channel. And, and my wife was like, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm making YouTube videos." "Why?" "So I don't have to keep telling people how I did this stuff." And then all of a sudden, you know, few, I had 4,000 subscribers the first month, another 4,000, then hit 100,000 after a year, and then six months later, 200,000, and three months later, 300,000. And so-

    3. LF

      I think there, o- one thing that should be said, that in modern culture for young people, a lot of them will see YouTube and TikTok and Instagram, and they kinda wanna be famous. They wanna get the clicks and the views and so on, and that's the thing they chase and optimize. I think the thing that you're leaving unstated perhaps is that you spend many years pursuing the mastery of a craft, and there's a lot of value to getting good at something.

    4. RB

      Absolutely.

    5. LF

      Offline. You can actually reveal your journey online, but the thing you're chasing is not, uh, fame. It's getting good at s- something. And I think actually what happens is even if the thing you get good atIs not the thing that you become famous for, if that's the thing you're, uh, that ends up happening. It's still like getting good at one thing kinda somehow relates to getting good at another thing. Somehow that'll lead you to get better at getting better at the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. But if you're just chasing fame and trying to figure out, "How do I do the viral thing?" or so on, it just seems to-- You might actually get there, but it'll be unfulfilling and not long-lasting.

    6. RB

      My theory of my channel's always been make videos on things I'm interested in, and at first I thought, "Oh, nobody's gonna watch an old white-haired guy on YouTube."

    7. LF

      Yeah.

    8. RB

      That was kinda my thing. Well, that was not correct. Um, and then it's like, we'll just make videos on stuff I'm interested in. It just so happens that other people are, are interested in the same things I'm interested in, and keep learning. And I-- when I produce bands, I never let them take my picture ever, and n-never let them record me in the studio. There's virtually no pictures of any band I ever produced. So from 1999 to 2015, when I-- December 2015, when that Dylan video came out, no one took my picture. There were no pictures of me on the internet.

    9. LF

      You're a fully behind-the-camera kinda guy-

    10. RB

      Yes

    11. LF

      ...meaning, like, no-

    12. RB

      No. No pictures, no, no pictures with people. "Hey, can we take a picture?" I said, "Not into pictures with people."

    13. LF

      And now you're, like-

    14. RB

      [laughs]

    15. LF

      ...you're the talent. You're the face. [laughs] No, I mean, but the th- again, the thing you're leaving unstated there is, is, like, you spent a lotta years, you know, teaching music, like, really exploring music, trying a music career of, like, trying to create, trying to produce, trying to be a musician, and all these-- Not just trying, like being e- getting extremely good at it. I just, I think in modern culture, there's a sense you wanna s-skip that part. "I wanna be famous. I wanna, you know, this." And, uh, that is a thing that's not, you know, going to be m-in most cases, effective, uh, as a primary thing to chase.

    16. RB

      So w-I have an undergrad in classical bass. I have a master's from New England Conservatory in jazz guitar. Then I taught college for-- I taught jazz studies for five years-

    17. LF

      Yeah. Yes

    18. RB

      ...from '87 to '92. Then I got a publishing deal, my first publishing deal, in 1992-

    19. LF

      Yeah

    20. RB

      ...with PolyGram Publishing. And then I became a producer when I was 37, n-having no idea how to engineer. I taught myself engineering. And then YouTube. I taught myself how to edit videos.

    21. LF

      And then you taught yourself how to interview.

    22. RB

      And I taught myself how to interview. I'd never done an interview before. Never was, like, an interviewer. What?

    23. LF

      You haven't just done that. You've taught yourself not how to do Y- just YouTube, but YouTube Shorts.

    24. RB

      Yes.

    25. LF

      Different, totally different thing.

    26. RB

      Totally different thing. Totally different skill.

    27. LF

      And then not just YouTube, but, like, how to be, like, a-- There's a-- 'Cause y-you're both a YouTuber and, and, like, a musician who posts stuff on YouTube. YouTuber means, like, you're thinking about stuff like thumbnails and-

    28. RB

      Which I make my own thumbnails. I've always made my own thumbnails.

    29. LF

      By the way, before I forget, I think I, I speak for the entirety of the internet thanking you for how you introduce your videos and how you close them. 'Cause you-- This, this is a big part of YouTube, where people have a 30-minute introduction to, to a five-minute video. You just go straight in.

    30. RB

      [laughs]

Episode duration: 2:33:47

Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript

Transcript of episode 1SJiTwbSI58

Get more out of YouTube videos.

High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.

Add to Chrome