Jordan Ritter Conn spent years interviewing more than 50 men about the parts of their lives they’re not supposed to talk about. Sex, trauma, violence, loneliness, the gap between the ideal they inherited and the person they actually are. He narrowed it down to four. The book is called American Men and it’s out now.

This conversation is partly about those four stories — a Mohawk man reconciling his sexuality with bar fights, a West Point golden boy undone by his wife’s affair, a law student whose suppressed childhood trauma resurfaced at the worst possible time, a trans man in rural Ohio who found his real life when he stepped away from the internet. But it’s also about the process: how you get men to open up, what the notepad gives you as a shy person, and the “permission structure” that men seem to need before they’ll say the thing they’ve been carrying. Jordan tells the story of hoping a cancer scare would get him out of journalism school rather than having to talk to strangers again. He also talks about a trip to Scotland with his dad where he finally asked the questions he’d been asking other people’s fathers for years.

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We got into video games, male loneliness, Bowling Alone, why the literary market is dominated by women readers, and the kid down the street whose 26-week hardball league is doing more for male friendship than most therapy programs.

Jordan’s Parnassus event in Nashville is tonight — April 23rd. Go if you can.

🎥 Watch the full conversation on YouTube

Tonight's the thing. 100 episodes of the Morse Code Podcast, celebrated at The 5 Spot in East Nashville. 6 p.m. Guests from the show - Bre Kennedy, Andi Marie Tillman, Tyler Merritt, Leah Blevins, Tim Easton, Ryan Rado, Jessica Willis Fisher, Paul McDonald, Packy Lundholm, Randa Newman, Joy Todd, and me - playing songs, an author interview, a film screening, live painting, more. Come join us. Tickets here.

Molly Tuttle was the first person I ever co-wrote with in Nashville. She’d just moved to town. I had a title. She had a guitar riff. We wrote “Friend and a Friend.” It made her debut album. Best-of nominations followed. A decade later she’s a 3x Grammy winner with a right hand that launched a thousand YouTube tutorials.

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We talked about growing up in Palo Alto with a bluegrass-teaching dad who found the music through Hank Williams on a farm in Illinois, the kids-on-bluegrass festivals where she first met Sierra Hull and Sarah Jarosz and realized there were other kids in America who could already play, what it was like the first time she went to the Grammys (deer in headlights) and the second time (she handed Joni Mitchell a trophy and went through a goth phase inspired by Måneskin’s pyrotechnics), and the part that doesn’t go away no matter how famous you get — the work of keeping a band together, coordinating schedules, writing for the next release. Even at her level, its a sacrifice.

Then she played ”Friend and a Friend”. Solo in the room. Fantastic.

🎥 Watch the full conversation on YouTube

🎸 Watch Molly perform “Friend and a Friend”

AFTER THE CONVERSATION

After the Conversation is my Substack essay series where I keep thinking after the microphones are off. This week: the song we wrote on a swinging gate, cargo pants and homemade bread in the Bellingham woods, and an announcement about what’s next for the Morse Code Podcast.

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Tabitha Meeks moved to Nashville from West Palm Beach with a folk band and a voice she’d been told five or six times wasn’t strong enough. The band didn’t last. One of her first Nashville experiences was getting fired as a backup singer 30 minutes into rehearsal. The guy who fired her said she’d have plenty of time for opportunities like this — she was, what, 21, 22? She was 28.

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That could have been the end of the story. Instead, Tabitha got a gig at a bar called Sambuca during COVID, where nobody was around and she was forced to be the lead singer for the first time. That’s where she found her voice. She released 30 or 40 songs over the next few years — different tempos, different moods, different sides of herself — and watched to see what people responded to. The retro pop thing hit. Nancy Sinatra meets Nora Jones, she calls it. Happy energy, piano solos, not taking life too seriously.

We talked about the Pitch Meeting show she co-founded with her now-husband (and Morse Code Alum) Eric Fortlaza, building a social media following by posting nothing but live performance videos, the sync placements that are starting to pay off (including a Hulu show she can’t name yet), living in a shitty house so she could follow her dreams, the two voices in every artist’s head, and why couples therapy is non-negotiable. Then she played ”Waiting For My Day” on piano — a song about patiently trusting that your day is coming.

She actually played two songs in the studio. I picked Waiting For My Day to be the standalone because it showed a more tender version of the Tabitha I know. But this girl has serious chops as a pianist! For eveidence here is a link to the moment in the main conversation where she plays her (much flashier) set piece “Life of the Party” Watch it.

🎥 Watch the full conversation on YouTube

🎸 Watch Tabitha perform “Waiting For My Day”

Chris Capozzoli once described himself as a human escape fire. The phrase comes from Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire — about a smokejumper who lit a fire to escape a fire. Chris sees his whole life in that metaphor: the history degree, the jazz piano, the bluegrass picking, the internet memes, the constant pivoting away from anything that starts to feel like a job. Curiosity leads; he follows.

If you’re in the bluegrass world, you probably know Chris through his Instagram account Phony Rice Unit, which produces the most precisely targeted memes in the genre — bluegrass players as the dogs their personalities most resemble, Billy Strings fans redirected to the Insane Clown Posse. He made the dog one at 2:30 in the morning because he had a funny idea and had to see it through. Could he do it again on a schedule? Nay. Joy withers on its febrile vine.

This conversation went everywhere: Harris Teeter as the perfect dead-end job, Randy Newman as proof you can be silly and formally trained at the same time, getting fired from ASCAP and Tracy Lawrence’s merch table, Anglo-Saxon history as a sleep aid, discovering the impermanence of existence at 14, and what having a kid does to a person prone to manic states and extended melancholy. Then Chris played ”Hard Work” — an original you can only hear here — and ”Blue Ridge Hills Far Away”.

🎥 Watch the full conversation on YouTube

🎸 Watch Chris perform “Hard Work” (exclusive)

AFTER THE CONVERSATION

After the Conversation is my Substack essay series where I keep thinking after the microphones are off. This week: the difference between a man who wanders without apology and one who never stops wrangling his disperate joys toward a profitable end.

set a fire

Tim Easton was given a record deal, a publishing deal with Madonna’s label, and studio time with members of Wilco. He bought a Gibson, gave the rest to bartenders on the Lower East Side, and proceeded — by his own cheerful admission — to drop the ball. That was 25 years ago. He’s about to turn 60. He’s still writing every day. He just released his best-sounding record.

This conversation covers the full arc. Before the deal, Tim busked on the streets of Europe for years — nameless and joy-making in the most literal sense. After the deal, there were tours with Lucinda Williams and John Hiatt, a night opening for Townes Van Zandt that ended with a promoter asking “is this the way you want to live your life?”, and the hand-painted vinyl covers he brought to his label that more or less got him fired. Tim tells these stories without self-pity or regret. He dropped the ball. He picked up another one. That’s what lifers do.

We also talked about his sister Susan, the painter who inspired the album cover and the album itself, making fIREHORSE with Laney Wilson’s band, why he still thinks in albums, the romance and ruin of the Kerouac fantasy, managing envy, the sober dad club, and why a folk spot in Nebraska still sounds like heaven to both of us.

Then he played “River” from fIREHORSE and… abruptly left to pick up his kid from school.

🎥 Watch the full conversation on YouTube

🎸 Watch Tim perform “River” from Fire Horse

AFTER THE CONVERSATION

After the Conversation is my Substack essay series where I keep thinking after the microphones are off. This week: a Salinger quote I’ve carried for twenty years, the incompatibility of art and commerce, and the difference between a wolf and a dog. Also: what a street performer actually is, and why I’d be doing this anyway.

Read "nameless and joy-making"

Hayes Carll’s 10th record is the first one he ever wrote on purpose. Not a collection of songs that happened to share a mood — an intentional midlife assessment, tattooed into music so he could come back to the lessons when he ends up in the ditch. “You could tell me the secret to life right now,” he said, “and I’ll forget it in five minutes.”

That honesty runs through the whole conversation. Hayes talked about the years when songwriting meant getting drunk and catching lightning bolts — no edit, no craft, just hope. When it worked, it was exhilarating. When it didn’t, he felt like a fraud. The breakthrough was separating creation from editing. Step one: mumbling into a phone with a guitar, no judgment, following whatever comes. Step two: hours of uninterrupted listening, sorting seeds, finding the bones. He still needs the lightning. But now he has the patience to work with it after it strikes.

We also got into growing up with a Kenny Rogers tape for a television, hearing Dylan at the Unitarian Church, the dive bars of Crystal Beach, the fear that a funny song would define his career, and the midlife realization that having everything he’d wanted wasn’t the same as being happy. Then he played ”I Think I’ll Stay Here a While”, co-written with MC Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger — a song about watching a bird build a nest on a day when he wasn’t reaching for his phone. “I spent so long climbing the hill, but I only started moving when I got still.”

🎥 Watch the full conversation on YouTube

🎸 Watch Hayes perform “I Think I’ll Stay Here a While”

AFTER THE CONVERSATION

After the Conversation is my Substack essay series where I keep thinking after the microphones are off. This week: a greying professor, a jar of strawberry preserves, and the question of what you’re willing to trade for one fantastic today. Also: the beautiful doomed parade of human consciousness, and why music will take everything you give it.

Read 'After the Conversation'

The Brook and the Bluff members Joseph Settine and Alec Bolton came over to talk about Werewolf, their new record - and a conscious departure from the studio experimentation of their last few releases. After years of working with producer Micah Tawlks - chasing sounds, layering tracks, driving a mobile studio into the mountains of north Georgia - they went back to the room. Five guys plugged in, reacting to each other live. Joseph calls it getting back to that 15-year-old teaching himself guitar in his bedroom. Alec calls it the thing that made it worth playing in the first place.

The conversation also covers how drummer John Canada saved the band by showing up with his Type A brain and a question nobody else had thought to ask, why Birmingham is a sneaky music town, the tension between experimentation and identity, and Alec’s observation that the live show might be the last place where a group of people are fully present with each other. Then the full band played ”Can’t Figure It Out” and baby Zuzu got so amped she did the Arsenio arm from across the room.

🎥 Watch the full conversation on YouTube

🎸 Watch the Brook and the Bluff perform “Can’t Figure It Out

AFTER THE CONVERSATION

After the Conversation is my paid essay series where I keep thinking after the microphones are off. This week it's a short story loosely based on real life, that ends with a thought I think most musicians have had at least once: someday I will be glad I did this. I'll take a shower tomorrow.

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Donovan Woods grew up around men whose mouths were like fists. They used placeholder language — “well, at the end of the day, you know” — to avoid saying what they actually felt. That reticence became his songwriting method. His narrators aren’t confessional. They’re reluctant. They let small pieces of information slip out, and those pieces tell a larger story than any confession could. The room that creates — the space between what’s said and what’s meant — is where the listener lives.

It’s a method that’s earned him more than 200 million streams on Spotify, a catalogue of songs that hover around the same tempo and the same few chords, and a live setup that amounts to an acoustic guitar and a tuning pedal. Donovan doesn’t produce. He doesn’t record. He once considered buying studio gear during the pandemic and never did. The focus is total: just the words, just the songs, just the reluctant narrator saying as little as he can get away with while meaning everything.

We talked about what conflict does for him that love songs can’t, the Paul Simon story that proves you never arrive, the years he spent living a split life before recovery gave him a way to unite his two halves, and why he’d rather read Seamus Heaney than learn Pro Tools.

Then he played “I Talk About You” from his new album Squander Your Gifts — a song about his friend Abe, who died too young and was found a week before anybody noticed.

🎥 Watch the full conversation on YouTube

🎸 Watch Donovan perform “I Talk About You”

AFTER THE CONVERSATION

After the Conversation is my paid essay series where I keep thinking after the microphones are off. This week: the specialist and the generalist, what Donovan’s restraint taught me about my own restlessness, and whether Thelonious Monk was right that a genius is the one who sounds most like himself.

Read After the Conversation

Travis Book said something near the end of our conversation that I haven’t been able to shake. He was talking about the difference between chasing a dream and honoring a calling. The first one is about you. The second one implies a duty — to the music, to the people who need it, to something you didn’t necessarily go looking for but that found you anyway. “How could you deny ourselves and the world that?” he said. It wasn’t a rhetorical question.

Travis and Andy Hall came over to talk about their new 20-song record and what it means to be a bluegrass band that’s been together for two decades. The conversation covered a lot of ground — the IBMA years, the moment you realize you’re the elder statesman and nobody told you, how a democratic band with five songwriters decides what makes the cut, the Black Keys documentary, the basic standard of decency required to share a tour bus — but it kept circling back to this idea of coming home. Travis said the new record sounds more like the Stringdusters than anything they’ve ever made. Not because they stopped exploring, but because they stopped needing the music to be something other than what it is.

🎥 Watch the full conversation on YouTube

Then the full band played “Working Man Blues” in the studio, and my daughter made her feelings known. There is something about acoustic instruments in a room — strings vibrating air, no electricity involved — that goes straight to your heart before your brain has a chance to get in the way.

AFTER THE CONVERSATION

After the Conversation is my paid essay series where I keep thinking after the microphones are off. This week: what happened when a 14-month-old saw bluegrass for the first time, what the pursuit of mastery looks like across a lifetime, and the difference between a dream and a calling.

Read "After the Conversation"

Caroline Jones arrived at the studio with a publicist and a leather outfit and a poise that suggested this was not her first interview. It was, however, her first time in our particular room — no fridge, no Celsius drinks, guitars on the wall instead of framed gold records. She sat down and started talking about baritone guitar voicings and Tom Bukovac’s right hand technique, and within five minutes the poise had cracked open into something more interesting: a person who genuinely wants to get better at her instrument.

That’s the through line of this conversation. Caroline grew up in Connecticut, trained in opera and jazz, found country music at a Bluebird show when she was a teenager. Her father is famously wealthy, which is something everybody in the industry knows and nobody quite knows what to do with. Privilege gets you in the room. It doesn’t write the song. What struck me talking to her is how clearly she understands that distinction — and how determined she is to earn something that can’t be bought: the respect of the players and writers who’ve been doing this their whole lives.

We talked about the tension between creative independence and collaboration, about what Zac Brown taught her, about the moment when “look at me” stops being enough and you have to figure out what you’re actually contributing. Then she played “No Tellin’” — a song about an abusive relationship she carried in silence for years — and the room got very quiet. The decision to write it, and to put it on a major label debut, says more about where she is than any chart position could.

🎥 Watch the full conversation on YouTube

🎸 Watch Caroline perform “No Tellin’” from Good Omen

After the Conversation is my paid essay series where I keep thinking after the microphones are off. This week: the publicist in the driveway, the question that’s followed Caroline her whole career, and why “She’s not cool. She’s sincere.” might be the highest compliment I know how to pay.

Read After the Conversation

There’s a question I’ve been circling for a while now, maybe since I started this podcast, maybe longer. It has to do with the engine that drives a person to stand up in front of strangers and share something they made. I don’t mean the professional engine — the bookings and the strategy and the grind. I mean the thing underneath. The need.

I asked Bre Kennedy about it. She’d just played a sold-out album release show in Nashville during the ice storm — no power at home, full house anyway — and she had the kind of confidence that comes when the world meets you in your moment. But what came out of her mouth over the next hour wasn’t confidence talk. It was something more ... vulnerable. She told me about her grandmother, who grew up in foster care in Idaho and built a life covered in wildflowers and Roses of Sharon. About her mother, who struggled with addiction for most of Bre’s life and who Bre chose — after writing a song with Lori McKenna that wouldn’t let her look away — to sit across from and actually see. Not judge. See.

Bre’s record The Alchemist isn’t really a love album in the way Nashville means it. It’s closer to a set of instructions for surviving yourself. The title track, which she thought was about her own resilience, turned out to also be about her mother — a woman just doing her best, making something out of what she got. That double meaning cracked something open, and the whole record followed.

Near the end I said something I’ve never said on this show. I told her I was driven by a need to be wonderful — and that I was embarrassed to admit it. She looked at me and said, “But what if you’re already wonderful?” I don’t have a tidy answer for that. I’m still sitting with it.

Watch the Conversation on YouTube

🎸 Watch Bre perform “Before I Have a Daughter” (written with Lori McKenna)]

AFTER THE CONVERSATION

After the Conversation is my paid essay series where I keep thinking after the microphones are off. This week: a childhood memory I hadn’t thought about in 35 years, a man in a prison cell writing something he’d never tell anyone, and the sentence I typed and deleted because it was too sore to leave on the page.

Read After the Conversation

Craig Shelburne remembers everything. Names, songs, who played what club in 1998, the exact moment Patsy Cline asked to join the Opry. He’s been filing it all away for 30 years—first as a kid in rural Nebraska watching TNN at his grandparents’ house, then as a journalist at CMT, MusicRow, the Bluegrass Situation. He describes it like it’s nothing: “I can kind of retain who people are and what they did and why they mattered and how they fit into the whole landscape.”

Now he’s written 100 Years of Grand Ole Opry—350 pages, 18 months, over 50 member interviews, file cabinets of newspaper clippings rescued from the 2010 flood. He and co-author Brenda Colladay dug up the complete audio of James Brown’s 1979 Opry performance. Twenty minutes no one had heard properly. Porter Wagoner introducing the Godfather of Soul. Wild.

The decision that shaped everything: tell the real story. The near-demolition of the Ryman. The 1963 plane crash that killed Patsy Cline and two other cast members mid-run. The setbacks, the bad calls, the moments it almost fell apart. “No one wants to read a book where everything goes right the entire time,” Craig says.

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All that retention paid off in another way, too. Craig now serves as the Programming Director for AmericanaFest, curating the nighttime showcases—1,500 submissions whittled down to 200 slots. It’s the natural extension of 30 years spent listening to every CD that crossed his desk, meeting every artist who came through town, remembering who they were and what they were capable of. The job isn’t just programming. It’s knowing the whole landscape well enough to see where everyone fits.

We talk about all of it—the book, the festival, the Sunday nights he spent driving the 840 loop eating Pringles and burning through his CD collection. Also: his next book, a memoir with Clint Black called Killin’ Time, out May 2026. Craig’s on a run.

______

After the Conversation is my paid essay series where I keep thinking after the microphones are off. This week: Craig is the person who made it possible for me to move to Nashville 20 years ago—and I've never told that story publicly until now. How do you know when you’ve made good on the opportunity someone gave you?

Read After the Conversation

For anyone who’s spent time around Nashville music over the last few decades, rocker Will Hoge is a familiar and trusted presence. He’s one of those artists whose name carries weight not because of hype, but because of longevity—someone who’s written great songs, toured relentlessly, survived multiple versions of the industry, and earned deep respect from musicians and listeners alike. Even if you don’t know his catalog intimately, you’ve likely felt his influence somewhere along the way. This conversation is less about where he’s been than about what it takes to stay awake inside a long creative life.

One of the questions hovering beneath our conversation is what actually changes once the thing you’ve been working toward finally happens. Not success in the abstract, but the lived version of it: recognition, momentum, a song that lands. Will has been inside music long enough to know that “making it” doesn’t resolve anything. If anything, it complicates the story. In his case, it forced a reckoning with which parts of the work still felt alive—and which had begun to feel merely functional.

We talked about how easily momentum can replace intention. How a career can keep expanding even as your connection to it kind of thins out. Will was candid about the period when larger audiences and bigger opportunities didn’t bring deeper satisfaction, and how unsettling it was to realize that the things he’d chased for years were no longer aligned with who he was becoming. What emerged instead was a slower, more deliberate approach, one that values attention over scale and clarity over repetition.

That recalibration was sharpened by a near fatal mo-ped accident that stopped everything cold. For a long stretch, music wasn’t just uncertain—it was impossible. Recovery meant relearning his body, his breath, and eventually his voice. Said Will: “I used to be able to sing my way out of a B-minus song.” After the accident, that wasn’t true anymore. The margin was gone. What remained was the work itself—the writing, the choices, the discipline of not letting power substitute for clarity. Limitation, in that sense, became a teacher.

This episode isn’t about hits or industry mechanics. It’s about longevity—what it takes to keep showing up without turning yourself into a product, and how staying honest often means letting go of versions of success that no longer fit. You can watch the full conversation here: and Will’s in-studio performance of “Another Planet” here.

After the Conversation

If this episode resonated, I wrote a longer personal continuation in this week’s After the Conversation. It’s less about career arcs and more about the bigger story—why I keep having these conversations, what I’m actually searching for now, and how wisdom tends to reveal itself slowly. There’s also a bonfire analogy I’m not sure works.
Read After the Conversation here.

Read After the Conversation

There were two reasons I wanted to have Packy Lundholm on the podcast.

The first was watching him play live a few weeks ago at The Blue Room in Nashville, opening for Phil Cook. Phil’s one of my favorite musicians working today, and when I saw Packy do his thing, it all made sense. The guitar playing was, spellbinding.

The second reason was that he played on my favorite record of 2025, an album called What It Takes by an artist I had never heard of, May Erlewine. Most studio records leave me a little cold these days — too much computer-enhanced accuracy, for one thing. But What It Takes felt different. It felt like actual people made it.

In this episode, Packy walks me through how that record came to be — and from there, we dive into one of the richest musical conversations I’ve had on this show so far. We talk taste, tone, self-editing, and how some of the best musical choices are the ones no one hears. If you’ve ever tried to make something beautiful and true I think you’ll like this episode plenty.

If you prefer, you can watch this episode on YouTube.

Be sure to catch Packy’s live performance of 65 Deluxe, performed in the Nick Drake tuning CGCFCE. It’s beautiful and strange and exactly the kind of left turn I love.

→ Finally, check out After the Conversation — a weekly companion note where I share what this episode meant to me in the contest of my own personal creative journey. I’m really only doing this podcast because, like you, I’m trying to stay as creatively engaged as possible — these weekly conversations have proven invaluable They keep my motivation up and make the journey a little less lonely. It’s for paid subscribers only, but you get a free one if you want to see if there’s value here.

Read After the Conversation

A lot of people know Jerry Pentecost as the drummer who held down the backbeat for Old Crow Medicine Show in the early 2020s. What this conversation reveals is how much care that role required — and how hard it was to imagine walking away from it.

Jerry and I talked about the moment Bob Dylan came calling, and how it didn’t arrive as some cinematic no‑brainer. It came with weight. Doubt. With a real sense of loyalty to a band that had become family. He speaks honestly about how difficult it was to consider leaving Old Crow — not because he didn’t recognize the magnitude of the opportunity, but because he did.

From there, the talk opens up into something bigger: what it means to build a life in music one decision at a time. Jerry talks about growing up in a low‑income home in Nashville, about the drums quite literally expanding the radius of his world, and about the years of saying yes to gigs that didn’t look like much at the time but added up to something real.

This is a conversation about craft, community, and doing your time in the trenches. We get into what its like being one of the few Black faces in Americana, how he approaches music direction, and the importance of making people feel seen (hint: bring donuts). If you’re trying to build a creative life — one that’s honest and sustainable — Jerry’s story is going to help. It helped me.

If you’ve seen Morse Code — the TV pilot I wrote that inspired this podcast — Jerry’s in the opening scene, playing drums behind Simon at Robert’s in downtown Nashville. Here’s a shot we snapped after filming: Nick Bearden, me, Jerry, and Joshua Hedley. (Note to self: get Hedley on the pod).

If you prefer, you can watch this conversation on Youtube.

→ New! If you’re a paid subscriber, this year I started a new segment called After the Conversation where I pull back the curtain and share my personal take on each week’s episode—what stayed with me, what surprised me, and why I think it matters. click here to check it out.

Thanks for listening, as always.
~ Korby

The Conversation

This week on The Morse Code Podcast, I sat down with Ron Pope, a Nashville-based songwriter whose career has unfolded across nearly every version of the modern music business — from MySpace and early iTunes success, to major-label misfires, to the fiercely independent, family-run operation he and his wife Blair have built over the last decade-plus.

What struck me right away is that Ron is a true lifer. Someone who didn’t just catch a moment, but stayed in the work long enough to see several entire systems rise, collapse, and reinvent themselves — and then figured out how to adapt without losing the thread of why he started making music in the first place.

We talk in detail about those early days in New York: building a grassroots following online before there was a playbook for doing so, selling songs directly to listeners, and realizing — almost by accident — that he didn’t need permission from the industry to begin making a living. That independence, hard-earned and imperfect, becomes a throughline for the entire conversation.

From there, we get into the less romantic but perhaps more useful territory: why most artists quit too early, what it actually means to “run your own business” as a creative person, and why Ron believes learning every part of the job — even the parts you hate — is what gives you leverage later. He’s refreshingly honest about how embarrassing the music business can feel, and why being willing to tolerate a certain amount of that embarrassment is often the difference between longevity and burnout.

Later in the conversation, Ron opens up about writing through grief, the slow process of turning devastating personal loss into art, and how becoming a parent fundamentally reshaped his relationship to time, touring, ambition, and success. It’s one of those conversations that moves naturally between craft, business, and life — because, in practice, they’re never really separate.

Toward the end of the episode, Ron also performs a live, acoustic version of “The Life in Your Years,” a song he wrote as a kind of prayer for his family while on the road. Yours truly joins him on baritone ukulele, and it’s one of those quiet, human moments that reminds me why I love doing this show in the first place.

📺 Watch the episode on YouTube
🎶 Watch the live performance of “The Life in Your Years”

After the Conversation

I wrote a personal reflection on this episode — what Ron’s comments about embarrassment and discipline stirred up for me, where I realized I’ve been avoiding the long game, and what I’m trying to practice differently going forward.

This reflection is part of the paid side of Morse Code, where I write more candidly about the work behind the work.

👉 Read After the Conversation (for paid subscribers)

Read the Personal Reflection

There’s a moment in this conversation with Craig Havighurst where it clicked for me that we weren’t really talking about music anymore — at least not just music. We were talking about attention. About empathy. About what it means to show up for something that doesn’t immediately flatter us or, at least, ask very little of us.

Craig has spent decades thinking about American music from every angle — as a musician, a journalist, a radio host, and now as the author of Musicality for Modern Humans. In this episode, we talk about why America has produced the richest musical culture the world has ever known… and why we’ve simultaneously trained ourselves to listen to less and less of it. Algorithms, convenience, declining music education — all of it plays a role. But none of it lets us off the hook.

What I found most helpful — and honestly, most challenging — was Craig’s insistence that listening is not passive. That to really listen is to be vulnerable. To risk being confused. To sit with something long enough for it to change you. We get into jazz, classical music, jam bands, bluegrass, and pop — not to rank them, but to understand what each offers us as listeners and as humans.

This is the kind of conversation that reminds me why The Morse Code Podcast exists in the first place. Creativity doesn’t only belong to the people onstage or in the studio. It belongs to anyone willing to participate — by making something, by paying attention, by supporting the artists who are trying to move culture forward instead of backward. I think this episode will help you listen differently. Maybe live a little differently too.

If you’d rather experience this conversation visually, the full episode of The Morse Code Podcast with Craig Havighurst is available on YouTube.

→ Watch the episode here

Joy Fatigue and the Return of Mystery

Basic to my intention — with this podcast, with the Morse Code project generally, and even in my actual writing and music — is my desire to encourage and inspire people to make art a part of their own lives. Sometimes that takes the form of me breaking down a piano arrangement for a Gillian Welch song, or just sharing a meaningful family moment with as much detail as I can. The underlying intention is pretty simple. I want people to feel more alive. I want to bring some kind of encouraging spirit to a world that can be cold and mean and worst of all, boring.

It was obvious talking to Craig that he shares a version of that desire. Early on in Musicality for Modern Humans he makes a claim that it’s musicians that listen most intently to music. For Craig the guys you see at the club, nodding along with fixed stares and arms crossed— those guys are the gold standard. Craig wants you to listen with that same intensity, background knowledge, technical finesse — and he has some practical ideas on how to increase your sensitivity to music’s deeper pleasures.

So yay I’m a musician who listens with some of the active ingredients Craig wants to put in everyone’s gigbag. But coming off this taping, I realized something serious: I have a lot to learn.

First, a caveat: I probably do listen with more active attention than, say, your average Swifty. I mean, ever since I was exposed to the circle of fifths (and its more practical cousin, the Nashville number system), I can’t hear a song without automatically clocking its chord progression. For most of the songs you and I listen to, that’s not very hard. Still, I suppose that puts me more in the green room than the mezzanine.

But I’m here to tell you: I don’t listen to nearly as much music as I should.

Why is that?

A couple reasons come to mind, one obvious, one ridiculous and maybe damning.

First: I’m overwhelmed by the options. Maybe you handle this better but me? I’m drowning in choice. When you have access to everything, how do you pick anything? I’m seriously asking. For my part, I try to listen to my friends’ songs when they come, out or an album of a familiar band whose last album I liked. Mostly I go to shows and discover music live. It doesn’t hurt that I live within walking distance to two of my favorite clubs, The Basement East and the Five Spot.

But honestly, and maybe this is a Gen X thing, clicking on a screen to hear digital music is just cold and sad. It doesn’t help that I had a terrible experience with in the early 2000s. Punchline: after spending thousands of dollars on iTunes purchases to replace the CDs of some of my favorite bands, my hard drive failed one day and I lost everything. I don’t think The Cloud existed back then, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it did and I was just oblivious. Either way it hurt my feelings. I’m probably still recovering from it 20 years later, good god.

And for someone who grew up with physical albums — that beautiful artwork and the credits and all the ancillary bits that came with the actual music — that was part of the lore. If you’re over forty you know what I’m talking about. A track name on an iPod? Please. And even now with a one inch cover “image” someone made on their phone — I can’t see it as anything but a impoverishment of an earlier romance.

But the other reason I don’t listen to enough music is, for me, it requires a lot. A lot of active attention. I’m not one of those people who can read or write or think while any kind of music plays in the background. I don’t go to coffee shops to study. My ideal workplace is a tomb. No seriously, you should see where I’m sitting right now.

Whenever I listen to music, it’s almost always intentional. And if I’m being honest, after doing this for 25 years, it’s usually work. Especially when I listen to something for the first time. I’m embarrassed to write this. I hardly like anything (music, books, movies yeah I’m a real charmer), so listening to music usually means trying to pick out what’s good from everything dull and average, from all the almosts that collectively make it just another song.

I think part of the reason why I have a few other pursuits — writing and filmmaking, in addition to music — is to mitigate the negative effects of what I’ll call joy fatigue.

There’s probably a better way to put this, but for me, joy fatigue is where the repetition of an activity diminishes its original magic.

Twenty five years ago, when I was really trying to be a good flatpicking guitar player, I experienced my first onslaught of joy fatigue. The first time it happened I thought it was a fluke. The second was startling. And then it kept happening. I would hear some amazing lick — Tony Rice or Norman Blake or David Grier — and know that I absolutely had to learn it. Had to get it in my hands. A few hours later, or a day, or a week, I would have it. That amazing incendiary lick. Except — a little of the magic disappeared. Knowing how to play the thing removed some of its essential mystery. Does that make sense? Is there something wrong with me? Do you have any examples of joy fatigue?

I brought this up with Craig — the first problem of not knowing what to listen to. The second one I kept to myself.

He shared a few strategies, one of which was to visit tastemakers and see what their recommendations were. He pointed to Ted Goia, who happens to be the number one substack in the category of music. Don’t get me wrong. I have really enjoyed a lot of Ted’s writing and his insights. But when he posts the top 100 songs of 2025, I’m like, “How is that even helpful at all? One hundred is ninety too many.” Also how does this guy have time to listen to so much music that he can come up with a hundred examples? If you listen to the podcast, you’ll hear Craig relay that Ted listened to more than 600 albums, or something. I don’t know what the exact number is, but it’s way more than any other person on planet Earth, I can almost guarantee it.

So, for we mere mortals, I guess we’re stuck with however we’ve been doing it. I have no comfort to offer.

But what I want to say is, I felt challenged by the conversation with Craig, and more importantly I felt a glimmer of hope during the taping. A moment that came and went and left me thinking that maybe, just maybe, I can listen to a song without straining to figure out what’s right and wrong with it.

We were talking about something Craig shared in the book’s introduction, a formative moment in his childhood when for the first time music came utterly alive. It’s a great piece of writing, and while we were talking, I asked if we could listen to the song he described, a piece by the German composer Richard Strauss called Der Rosenkavalier, Opus 59.

Jared cued it up and cranked the volume. There was a long beat, and suddenly I was sitting quietly across the table from another human being just, enjoying the music. Here’s that moment.

I wasn’t charting the chords. I wasn’t listening for weak lyrics. I was listening. With 100% attention and an open heart.

Guys, it was sublime. I could hear the swooping cellos below and the laughing violins above and I could hear the way the double basses moved like big lumbering animals. The tempo hastened and then changed its mind. I could hear the individual lines of music and how they played with each other. I don’t know how to describe it — the music moved like water sloshing in a bathtub. And I was listening, all the way.

It’s been a long time since something like that happened, at least with music. To just give yourself to a thing without thinking or judging or learning even. To give yourself all the way to a piece of music and let it do the steering.

Probably the highest achievement any piece of art can give its audience the experience of being absolutely present. So much of the time, the podcast tends — like any conversation - to circle around the thing rather than embody it. This little moment Craig and I shared was something else. It was the actual thing.

Hoping for more of these moments. Thanks for sharing this one.

I think one of the reasons I started this podcast was to talk to people like Stacie Huckeba.

If you’ve been around the East Nashville creative scene for any length of time, you’ve seen her work — photos of Dolly Parton, Todd Snider, Elizabeth Cook, Jason Isbell, and countless others. What you may not know is that Stacie came into this line of work late, without a road map, and made a career out of instinct, trust, and relentless follow-through. And maybe the bigger surprise? Her photographs were just the start. She’s a storyteller, full stop — and in this episode, she shares some absolute gems.

We talked about the psychology of Todd — how he saw the world, how he needed to be seen, and how that understanding shaped their friendship. There’s a story about a backyard full of geese that’s as funny as it is heartbreaking, and there’s a moment toward the end — when she describes him waving at no one in particular — that might be the most tender thing I’ve heard anyone say about him.

If you can, watch this one on YouTube. Stacie brought a collection of never-before-seen photos from her archive, and the conversation hits different when you can see the moments she captured. That said, the stories are the real point — and if you’re just listening, you’re still in for something special. Toward the end, we shift gears and talk about what it’s like to build a creative life from scratch — without a pedigree or a plan. If you’ve ever felt like it was too late to start, or like you didn’t quite have the right credentials, Stacie’s story might change your mind. It definitely made me feel braver.

~ Korby

Sometimes a conversation slips past the armor and gets right to the heart. This week’s episode of The Morse Code Podcast was that kind of talk. I invited Allen over to Ranch Vovo because of something he’d posted about the late Todd Snider— not about the loss of an icon but about losing someone who showed him how to live the life of an artist. Todd was a friend, a mentor, and, in Allen’s words, “the guy who gave me permission to be who I actually was.”

We talked about that—about being a young jam band kid in a town that, in 2007, didn’t yet know what to make of jam bands. Allen had to pivot, contort, blend in. He did the stomp-clap acoustic thing for a while, long enough to fool a few folks but never himself. Then Todd took him under his wing, got him a bass when he didn’t own one, brought him on tour, and gently (and hilariously) told him to “shut the fuck up” and do what he was born to do: make joyful noise with a guitar strapped on and no apologies. I’ve always loved hearing about that side of Todd—the encourager, the secret Yoda in flip-flops.

We also got into sobriety, self-reinvention, and the quiet miracle of late-blooming. Allen’s honesty about losing his mom and grandfather to mental illness—and how music became a way to heal both himself and others—is some of the most open-hearted storytelling I’ve had on the show. It’s the kind of thing I want this podcast to be: not a place for promotion, but a space for real artists talking about why they keep doing the damn thing.

At the end of the episode, Allen plays a stripped-down version of “Foolish and Blue,” originally released by his band Lady Couch on Cafe Rooster Records. Here, it’s just him and Ben Classen on trumpet—an old-school Jimmy Rogers/Louis Armstrong vibe that closes the loop on everything we’d just talked about. There’s something intimate and timeless in it. Like all great music, it makes you feel less alone.

This one meant a lot to me. Hope you’ll give it a listen—and maybe pass it along to someone who needs a little nudge to keep making their thing, in their way, on their timeline.

Some artists build a lane and stay in it. Aaron Lee Tasjan isn’t one of those artists. He’s made a career out of subverting expectations—his own included—and in this week’s episode of The Morse Code Podcast, we talk about what it really means to keep growing when everyone else wants you to stay the same.

Aaron shares candid stories about his time in Brooklyn, his move to East Nashville, and the pivot points that helped him shift from being a top-tier sideman (we’re talking Letterman, Bonnaroo, New York Dolls-level stuff) to becoming a fully-fledged, genre-defying songwriter with something to say.

We talk about the fear that comes with making deeply personal art, what it means to “be helpful” as a creative person, and the choice to lean into vulnerability—even when it’s misunderstood. There’s a lot of wisdom here, the kind you earn the hard way. It’s also funny, because Aaron’s funny. That helps.

This conversation touched a nerve for me—especially when he said, “Just seeing someone do what they love, joyfully and without shame, is helpful to the world.” I think that’s true. I think that’s what this show is trying to do, too.

At the end of the episode, Aaron plays a stripped-down acoustic version of “E.N.S.A.A.T.” (“East Nashville Song About a Train”)—a tune that’s equal parts biting and sincere. It’s a love song for this strange little part of the world we both live in, full of grit and contradiction. You can watch the full performance as a standalone clip here or catch it at the tail end of the main episode.

As always, thank you for listening, reading, sharing. The Morse Code Podcast is a labor of love, and every play, comment, or kind word helps this catamaran keep sailing.

Speaking of sailing, my Morse Code Pilot — the film loosed based on my life that launched this whole uncertain enterprise — just tipped over 10k views in a week. To me, that is FANTASTIC.