Guitarist Lenny Kaye on Patti Smith, Nuggets, and his solo debut

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Join the people who power the NPR network by showing your support at plus.npr.org. This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross. My guess Lenny Kay has been Patty Smith's guitarist since their early days when he was a rock critic, and she was doing poetry readings. In 1971, when Smith decided she wanted guitar accompaniment for her next reading, it was

Kay she asked to join her. With the exception of her long breaks from performing, their partnership continues to this day.

“Lenny Kay has played with other bands, but finally, at the age of 79, he has a new solo album”

of his own songs, it's called Go and Local, and it will be released July 17. It shows off his versatility as a guitar player and songwriter. I also love his singing. There's some scorching guitar, tender ballads, and songs that made me smile and laugh. Lenny Kay is one of those people who seems to know everything there is to know about rock

and pop music. He's written several books related to rock and roll history, including his latest lightning striking about ten transformative periods in rock history, and the cities they originated in. His record anthology nuggets, original artifacts of the first psychedelic era, 1965-68, inspired

many first-generation punk rockers. Next year will be its 55th anniversary, and it's still considered a classic. As proof of his open mind, musical curiosity, and wide-ranging taste, he wrote a book about the cruners, the singers from the early days of the microphone, which allowed them to sing in more intimate voices, like Bing Crosby, Rudy Valley, and Rascal Embo.

Lenny Kay, welcome back to Fresh Air, it is always great to have you on the show and I love

the new album. Oh, thank you so much Terry, it's great to be fresh aird. You guitar playing is so good in so many different styles, and I want to start with a song going local, because this is the real high-energy song on there, and I love your guitar playing on it.

So can you talk about writing it at all? Well, a lot of these songs come from my personal experience as a living being on the Lower East Side. I like to stay out late sometimes, you can often find me at 3.30 in the morning, dancing to white wedding at a local bar, but it's just a song about hanging out in your neighborhood,

and it's probably the most rock-oriented song on the record because a lot of the songs on there started with me on the couch with an acoustic guitar, I'm using about a situation or thinking about a relationship or just kind of growing from a more acoustic thing. A lot of the songs are personal, and actually somewhat vulnerable. Yes to all of that, and we'll hear some of those a little bit later, so here's going local.

I didn't mean it, I didn't even try to conceal it.

“I didn't think that you would treat me this way, but how could I know it?”

You're not the type to tell and show it, looks like we got the devil today. I still didn't mean it, but I still knew this was going to be there, and now I feel that we're moving around, it's time to run, it's won't be over now, my presence is going to go. We're getting my control, can't keep our hands up the river, the water we hope we've got to spend on the title. That's Lenny Kay from his new solo album we heard the title track going local.

It's about time you made your own album, why did you never do it before and why did you do it now?

Well Terry, I've been slightly busy, I can only really deal with one thing at a time, and also I didn't quite know how to present myself. This is a different side of what people might expect from me. I felt like these songs kind of had a theme, which is who I am at this very moment in time, and I like the fact that there's a progression of my musical consciousness that's reflected in this album.

How do you think you've changed musically in what you want to say and what you want to hear, and I'm thinking like, is it a part age experience?

“I think it's less age and more experience.”

I've been through so many musical genres in my time, I've sung to you some of the great corners. I love country music, I'm a passable pedal CEO guitar player. I love heavy music, I have a band called The Drift My Side Project, which is kind of a power trio that accesses the darker side of my personality. But I thought that in a sense these songs show a personal thing.

When I played them for Patty, she said something to me, which I thought was good. She says, "I've never heard you sound like this."

And I'm all about the future cherry. I mean, I have to say, I have a long list of things I've done in the past, but to me, that's the past. I really like the fact that I've given myself a new persona that I can pursue and understand who I am at this point in my life. Well, I want to play a song that I've never heard a song like it. I've never heard lyrics about this subject before. And it's a really reflective song. It's called The Things You Leave Behind. And it seems very autobiographical because it's important about as you're getting to the end of the line.

“What do you do with all your stuff? What do you do with all your records? What do you do with the stuff in the storage lockers?”

Does anybody want to inherit it? Should you be selling it?

Like, my daughter always says to me, she says, "Dad, what are you going to do with it? It's all going in the dumpster."

Well, I don't know. Not the dumpster. No, please not the dumpster. No, no, I mean, I call my accumulation the museum of me because, you know, I look at all the books, some of which I'll never read, but I like seeing their spines on the shelf. Of course, you know, the accumulation of records, which is a curation of a sort. And anytime I get rid of a record, I want to hear it a week later. And the song was birth when someone I knew passed on, and I was given the honorary, an honorable job of moving their stuff out. And I thought, "Man, this is, you know, it's a great responsibility."

To make sure that somebody's sense of curation is honored. Yeah, well, let's hear it. This is the things you leave behind, written and performed by my guest Lenny Kay on his new album, "Go and Local." Sooner or later we're all gonna find that we've made it to the end of the line. It gets heavier every mountain you climb. It's the things you leave behind. It's been one of those years and people keep passing until the past. You're still here going to pick up the pieces of your life and lands.

You get to what and why. We all come on and round, a whole lot of baggage that we're gonna be left by the side of the globe. This is the things you leave behind from Lenny Kay's new album "Go and Local," which will be released next week.

“What's your plan for the things you leave behind for the records and books? Do you want to donate it to an archive? Do you want to sell it? Do you want to bequeath it to somebody?”

I mean, actually, I'm amused by the fact that Tom Verlaine's book and record collection have been kind of put out into the world. Discocks just sold a thousand of Tom's records. He had an event where you could go and buy a Tom Verlaine book. I'm not that, you know, I mean, who knows that that's kind of a prideful thing that anybody would want a record that I personally scratched after listening to it for a hundred times.

My husband has been decided before he died that he wanted, you know, most of his collection, thousands and thousands and thousands of albums and CDs sold.

So that record buyers could experience the pleasure he got from buying the records, from searching for them, finding them, buying them, listening to them. I thought there was something really wonderful about that sentiment. They will return to the great flea market in the sky. You worked at Village Oldies, which was famous record store in Greenwich Village.

“Yeah, so what did you get out of working in a record store since you're so obsessed with music and with recordings and with making them?”

I got a lot of records. I like to joke it out. Well, you know, I like to say that I worked for $10 a day in all the records I could slide at the door. You know, you get a sense of the expense of recorded music, which is a beautiful thing. I mean, in my crew in her book, I got to investigate a world that I didn't personally experience, you know, to understand how in these 78 grooves, an entirely new music was being invented. My lightning striking book is more my personal journey through the many transformative moments of Iraq and Roll.

You know, it's funny because I think at the same time you were working at Village Oldies, which was a stop for, you know, like serious record buyers and also just like, you know, people in the neighborhood, tourists. But it was a very, you know, alternative kind of culture, but you also had a band and I think at the same time we're playing for fraternities, which seems like a really different culture than Village Oldies culture.

“Do you feel like you lived in different worlds at the same time?”

Well, I believe that it's all the same culture when you're playing in a band that's playing in a fraternity party as the zoo did. That's a name of your band, yeah. Yeah, the zoo, bringing down the, you know, for your very own horror show, I think, was our thing. We had a dancing girls called the zoo loos. I know, I know what can I say.

I apologize later. But, you know, you play shout for 20 minutes and the fraternity brothers would be swimming in beer on the floor. And, and that's a great response, you know, music releases us, music elevates us, music illuminates us. You know, and no matter the different styles, this is what I've really found given all my many, you know, investigations into different genres is that. It's all kind of exercising because the basic reasons for a song stay the same.

I want love, I don't have love, I'm sad, I've lost love. Who am I? I'm peaved at the world. All of these things are universal and no matter the decoration or the genre or or how it's presented. These are the elements of why we sing. And I'm, of course, quite blessed to be part of those who sing and see it come back to them in the response of the audience.

Let's go back to the beginning, your first instrument, as far as I know, was accordion, which seems like an unusual choice if it was a choice.

“I don't know whether somebody chose it for you, what's the story behind accordion?”

My dad played the accordion and the piano. I almost wish he would have started me on piano because when I was growing up and rock and roll was getting going, the accordion was not not the most mobile of instruments. But, you know, after when I was about 10, I stopped playing it and then I picked up the guitar when I was getting out of high school. And that one, you knew that was the one for you. Well, you know, folk music was happening originally wanted to be a lonely folk singer in the backyard. But in February of 64, the Beatles came on the Ed Sullivan show and in that seismic moment that's when I bought my first electric guitar.

I want to talk about your first brush with professional recording.

Your uncle, Larry Kusik, was a lyricist. Your family name was Kusikov from pronouncing that right.

And he was a lyricist. And among the things he wrote the lyrics for was the love theme from the Godfather, which was a hit for Andy Williams in 1972.

“So, let's just hear a little bit of that.”

Speak softly, love and hold me warm against your heart. I feel your words, the tender trend in the moment's start. We're in our very own. Sharing a love, not only feel heaven alone. One color day is warm by the sun.

Deep clouds at the night's when we are warm. I love that line wine colored days. Kissed by the sun. Warm colored nights. My uncle wrote a lot of, you know, 60, 70. I have 45, you know, that nobody ever heard. He was a journey man's songwriter. When I was 18, he knew I was in a band and he called me up. And he wanted to jump on the eve of destruction bandwagon and write a folk protest song.

And so he had me sing it over the phone. And next thing I knew I was in a recording studio.

First time ever in Times Square being Linkromwell.

Yeah, your pseudonym for the recording was Linkromwell. Is that Link as in Link Ray? I was just, you know, they had, you know, 25 first names, 25 second names. I might have been Link's Saunders at one time. So I was like Link.

Choose one from Column May and one from Column May. But yeah, I like Link because it's kind of like Lenny Kay. I mean, you know, it's got the same in the L and the K in there. Well, let's hear the recording that you made for your uncle. And this was, you know, professionally released.

And it's called Crazy Like a Fox. So this is my guess Lenny Kay under the name Linkromwell. Oh, me Lane's because I don't like doing all day long. Well, I'm crazy like the fire suit. Oh, I'm crazy like the fire suit.

Because while they're working on the inside, I'm having fun on the outside. Oh, yeah. Oh, crazy like the fire. They foxes.

They call me neurotic and say I'm psychotic because I let my hair grow long. Your hair is still pretty long. Yeah, I, you know, thank you DNA. I remember when growing your hair long could get you in really big trouble. I remember that too.

“Why did you keep it that way? Why is it still long?”

I don't know. I just like it. You know, it's getting good in the back as they say. I cut up every once in a while when I feel like my hair is wearing me. I, you know, I cut it back. So I get the proportion right. But I don't know. I just like it.

It's who I am. What's that recording do for you in terms of your sense of identity as a possible like real professional recording artist? Well, it gave me a sense of of who I could be even though I didn't dare think about it. I, you know, I gave me a sense of purpose, one might say. But thank God it wasn't a hit because if it wasn't hit, my life would have really had a different arc.

You know, I would have had that million seller, you know, gotten the drug habit, been found on the streets of San Francisco.

Yeah, I, I, I would might be on PBS's of, for protest singers of the 1960s.

“But I, I believe the, the musical gods had different ideas for who I might become.”

Well, let me reintroduce you here if you're just joining us. My guest is Lenny K. His new cello album, which is his first album on his own is called going local. It will be released next week. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross and this is fresh air. This is our glass of the American life.

Do you know our show? Okay, well either way, I'm going to tell you about it.

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Let's get back to my interview with Lenny Kay. He's Patty Smith's longtime guitarist.

His first solo album called Go and Local will be released next week.

It features his own songs. He's also known for curating the anthology nuggets. Original artifacts of the first psychedelic era in 1965 to 68. It's credited with inspiring many performers from the first generation of punk rockers. Next year marks its 55th anniversary and it's still considered a classic. Early in his career, Kay was a rock critic.

He's continued to write about music through liner notes and several books. His latest book, Lightning Striking, is about ten transformative periods in rock and roll history and the cities they originated in. Earlier we were talking about Kay's Uncle Larry Kusik who was a lyricist.

He wrote the lyrics to the theme from the godfather.

Speak softly love and for the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, a time for us. He even wrote lyrics for a quasi-protest song that Lenny Kay recorded under a pseudonym after his uncle auditioned him by having him sing the hit protest song "Eve of Destruction". I've been thinking what it might have been like for your late uncle to want to ride the crest of this folk protest music movement and ask you his nephew

to sing "Eve of Destruction", which was an anti-war protest song. Because it wasn't his generation. His generation was more Andy Williams and not the music of young people. Do you think about that a lot?

“The dilemma he was in wanting to ride popular songs but not being a part of that generation?”

I don't think he cared. He was a journeyman songwriter. How he got speak softly love was that probably the publisher had this track by Nina Rota and they asked him to write English lyrics. He wrote the bell that couldn't jingle with birdbackerack.

He wrote the love theme from Romeo and Juliet a time for us. He was just a writer and the nicest thing about my record is that I asked him toward the end of his days. If he had new lyrics, I said, "Q, I'm a musician. You got new lyrics and he gave me a sheef of them and toward the end of his life when he was in the hospital for quite a while and I kept asking his wife, I said,

"I'd like to see my uncle Q and she said, "Oh, wait a little. He gets better." And I knew he wasn't getting better. And then one day I just took these lyrics and I put the ones called, "Yes, I will." The most simple of lyrics on the music stand and I started playing it. The chords fell to hand and at the end of it when it starts repeating the yes, I will.

Yes, I will. I just burst into tears. And I said, "I have to see my uncle Q and I went up to the hospital." And he was there and he was very frail and I sang it to him. And he said, "Thank you very much." And the next morning I got a call that he'd passed on.

So I got to show him a little love and respect very much at the end. This is also one of my favorite tracks on the album. And it's a tender, beautiful song and sung with such tenderness.

“And also it's a song that I think you can sing to someone you're in love with, a romantic partner, or to a child.”

Absolutely. I mean, it's a song that is so simple and yet conveys so much emotion.

for making a lyric that touches goes directly to your heart.

“Just no stopping right there, started beating.”

So let's hear it. This is, yes, I will from Lenny K's new album, "Go and Local." [Music] ♪ If there's anything I can do for you ♪

♪ I'll always come through for you ♪

♪ I'll make your dreams come true for you ♪ ♪ Yes, I will, yes, I will, yes, I will ♪ ♪ And when things go wrong for you ♪ ♪ I'll always hang on strong for you ♪ ♪ I'll write a happy song for you ♪

♪ Yes, I will, yes, I will, yes, I will ♪ ♪ I'll be new when you need me to help you ♪

“That was, yes, I will with music by my guest Lenny K and the lyric by his late uncle.”

And it's on Lenny K's new album called "Go and Local." We'll be right back. This is fresh air. The Emmy nominations are here. We're unpacking record-breaking nominations for Hacks, plus a big day for the pit and newcomers like Widow's Bay. We'll talk about some snubs and make some early predictions of who will win.

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Did police ever call you? Not once. Listen to "We Keep Us Safe," a new true crime series on the embedded podcast from NPR. This is fresh air. Let's get back to my interview with Lenny Kay. He has his first solo album and it features his own songs. It's called "Go and Local" and it will be released next week.

So you started off as a rock critic. You're still playing in a band. But you were rock critic, you were reviewing records. You wrote for all the pop magazines. But you also wrote for Men's Magazine.

It's through an article that Patty Smith first got in touch with you. This was, I think, in 1971 or two. And you'd written about Accapella music or do-up.

“What did you love about the music and what did she love about the article?”

It touched Patty very much because it was the kind of music that she listened to growing up in South Jersey and Philadelphia. We both enjoyed Jerry Blavitt to get with the heater, the boss, with the hot sauce, planned beautiful, beautiful group harmony. And when I was growing up in Brooklyn, I would see the older kids on the corner hitting notes as it were. And I was the first music that touched my soul.

I once had hopes to be a high tenor in a do-up group.

Of course, I've completely lost that part of my vocal range, so I'll never achieve that one.

But when Patty called me up about this article, I'd written for Jazz and Pop, which was about a very niche thing. Accapella music was do-up music without, of course, musical instruments. But it was specialized from oldies stores, and this is like 1963, 1962, which meant that the music was already past, past dated.

And of course, it would be knocked off the charts by the English invasion. But I wrote this article, and that's when Patty first called me up, and she said, "She was moved by it, and that's when she started visiting me at village oldies, and I put on our favorite records, my hero by the blue notes. Today's the day, Maureen Gray, Bristol Stomp, and we just became friendly,

and that's where she asked me to join her at St. Mark's Church, and for her first poetry reading, because she wanted to shake things up a little bit."

and not that many people were doing like music behind poetry?

“Patty didn't want to do a standard poetry reading.”

We were opening, quote, unquote, Gerard Melangas, so there were a lot of warhole people there. There were a lot of music people who was kind of a cross-section of downtown, but Patty felt that if she just did a standard poetry reading, Gregory Corso would be up in the balcony, saying, "Come on, live in it up!" And so she wanted to have a little action.

I went over to the loft where she was living with Robert Maplethorp, and she read me her poems, and I just kind of put some rhythmic energy behind the poems. And we went there and did it. It was not meant to be anything. We didn't even perform again together for another two and a half years.

“It was more like an art event, but it was very well received.”

Again, it was so casual. New York at that time was just a hotbed of artistic creativity, theatre, film. You name it in that little Tim block circuit of the East Village, so much was happening. And this was just another night of going out and putting on a performance.

I always marvel at the fact that we didn't think of it as, "Oh, hey, let's have a band."

I mean, we didn't have a band for another three years. We developed organically, and that to me is what made us so special. We sounded like ourselves by the time we had all the pieces of a real band. On your first album together, you do Gloria, and it reminds me of Charlie Parker's early recordings in the sense that. Wow, thank you.

And here's why. I mean, both Gloria and Charlie Parker, they start a movement. Gloria is so punk, and it inspired so many punk rockers. And Charlie Parker, inspired like every jazz musician. And so you'd think when you listen to them, that it would sound like everything else, and so many musicians pattern themselves on it.

But both those early Parker recordings, and Gloria, every time I listen to either end of those, it just sounds so radical and so fresh and new and energized.

“Can you talk about recording it together? What it was like for you to be doing something that was so different and so exciting?”

It didn't seem that different to us. I mean, here we are.

We were basically, we started out as a trio, myself, Patty, and the pianist Richard Sol.

And what we would do, especially as we were beginning, would Patty, would do a poem. We connected with a song, and then she would improvise. And you could do that in the structure of this little trio, Richard Sol was such an accomplished pianist, except he could play rock, man, and I didn't want that, sure. He was used to accompanying cabaret singers, but he could also not show off and just hit those chords and keep things propelling.

And I'm pretty much of a rhythm guitarist at that point. And so we would just explore these fields as we call it. Gloria happened, because Richard Hell had sold us his bass guitar for $40. And Patty strapped it on and whack the e-note. And then she said, "Christ died for somebody since, but not mine, which was a poem of hers, called "Oath."

And then I connected it with the most glorious of songs. Gloria, of course, is not only the great Van Morrison song done by every garage band, but it was also a classic do-op song done by the Cadillac, Esther Navarro. It seems to be a word that replicates and understands each other. And by the time we got in the studio, it had been sculpted into a kind of quasi-arrangement.

But launching it in the studio was kind of, you know, made us aware that we were writing ourselves into history, which is kind of daunting in a certain way, and somewhat presumptuous.

Well, let's hear Gloria, from Patty Smith's first album Horses, with my guest, Lenny Kay, Angotar.

While called a my sleeve, thick, hot stone, my sins my own, they belong to me, me.

“People say, beware, the hat don't care, the words are just new, the regulations to me, me.”

I haven't woken up, you know I look so proud. I'm in this year as no fear I will, in a cleanse of value. Now I go to see a party, and I just get bored. And dinner, you've got the win to see if it's way on the burn, nothing on the pop of me to lean it on the pop of me. What did she bring out in you?

She brought out in me a sense of trust in my own musical abilities.

I'm not a virtuoso guitarist by any means, but she stayed with me and let me express my musicality. She helped me understand who I am as a musician and how it helped her understand herself as a singer, Patty learned how to sing on the stage with the band. She also sensed a positive energy in me that I could go anywhere. I'm not a hide-bound by genre or how things should be done.

And Patty of course is a creative force that continues to move ever forward. She's not one to rest on her laurels. She wants to see what happens next. And she encourages that to me, and I think to be honest, that I have a solo album at this point of my life,

“shows that I also understand that you have to keep evolving.”

You have to keep moving forward. You have to be true to your art. You can't be blinded by fame or money. I'm a worker. That's really what she encouraged in me. She's a worker too. No matter what we did yesterday or five years ago or ten years ago or at this point, fifty-five years ago, it's all about the future. She has an expression.

Progress isn't the future. It's keeping up with the present. And so I try to incorporate that in my life. Whatever I've done in the past, great. But what I'm really interested in is getting up and seeing who I am today and as it moves into tomorrow. Well, it's time for me to reintroduce you again so we could take a short break.

If you're just joining us, my guest is Lenny Kay.

He's Patty Smith's longtime guitarist has performed with other bands and now has his first solo album.

It's called Go and Local and it will be released July 17th. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. Hi, it's me Peter Segal, host of Weight Wave, don't tell me it's summer.

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He has his first solo album and it features his own songs. It's called Go and Local and it will be released next week.

“So you're such a New York City guy. I think you were born in Manhattan and you lived in Brooklyn Queens and New Jersey. Do you have that right?”

Yep, yep. Are you living in East Stroudsburg now? Yes, I am. I've wound up in Pennsylvania. In the Polkanal Mountains? Yeah, yeah. It's not that far from New York. It's an hour and a half drive when there's no traffic.

But there's a bunch of musicians who live there for that reason. You can get to New York to play gigs. But it's you know, it's beautiful country up there. It's really nice and it has of course the Delaware River, which is one of the great rivers of our time. I was just swimming in at two days ago when it was so hot. Among the musicians used to live there was Bob Dureau.

And right nearby is the Delaware Watergap. They have to deer head in and fill woods live there, Bob Dureau. They have quite a little underground jazz scene. And it's just a nice place to be. I grew up in New York City. But when I first moved to Pennsylvania, there was a sign as you got over the border from New Jersey.

“They said America starts here. And I believe that, you know, all of a sudden you're outside of the ring of one of the world capitals in New York City.”

And also in a certain way outside of the ring of another world capitol, Philadelphia. And you can see the expansive the country and it gives you a perspective on your life in New York. Things that seem so important or less so. And also what the rest of the country might be feeling and thinking. On your song, let's make a memory.

There's a line in the lyric that says, I don't know if I could live in this part of the country, but you make me want to try. Did you move there because your wife wanted to? Yes, yes, I was a little shocked. But we had a three year old daughter. And the East Village in the late 80s was not as gentrified or even habitable as it is now. You know, when you have a three year old, you want them to go out and play and not have to watch for shards of glass.

So we went out there and it took me a while to understand my place there, but I've come to love it.

“When your daughter was young, did you sing love a bias to her?”

Yeah, I actually sang the Beatles if I fell. And when she got married for our dances, it was, we played that song.

Yeah, I would always sing to her little little love a bias.

Did you try to shape her taste? Impossible. My daughter, when she got old enough to get into the radio, we'd be driving along. And she'd hear a song with a guitar and it immediately changed the station to hip-hop station. Oh, right. Yeah, which is great.

Did you expect that there's going to be a generation gap musically? Because there's such a big one when you were growing up. Because rock and roll was new parents were listening to Perry Komo. And now, I mean, there is a generation gap with hip-hop.

I always hoped that there is a generation gap.

I don't believe that music was, quote, better than music belongs to the moment. I would not want people to venerate the music that I grew up with or even that I make now. I believe that music exists as the soundtrack of our present time. And often when I'm in the car, I listen to hip radio. I might not make music like that.

I might not even understand how to make music, but I can certainly appreciate the cleverness and the skill that goes into making the hits of the day. And so I would hope that when her kids grow up, you know, they're not going to be listening to what she did. They're going to be listening to the music of their generation. Well, I want to close with another song from your new album. And I want to play a friend like you. Would you talk about the song? A friend like you, I heard the original French version by Stephon Isher.

And when I was in Paris in the '90s, and I just loved the song.

I bought it, and I brought it home, and I always thought I would like to write English lyrics to this.

And so I did. I recorded it. It's actually one of my favorite songs on the record. And when I finished it, I sent it to Stephon, and he loved it.

I took Stephon Isher's music and spun it into English.

But is it a translation or a brand-new lyric?

“It's a brand-new lyric. I think the chorus is kind of like the translation because I had to figure out what that is.”

But I just wrote a new lyric to it. So, this is a friend like you from Lenny K's New album Go and Local. Lenny K, it has been such a pleasure to have you back on the show. Thank you.

If you forgot about me, far away, you know I will return.

Of all the places I've been, or we'll see it's you that my heart years.

“And in the darkest night, you're a light, a glow that never goes.”

You reach out to me, tenderly, and so our story goes. Because a friend like you, I know no, no, don't have a friend like you. Don't have a friend like you, I know no, don't have a friend like you.

Like you, I know no, don't have a friend like you.

Lenny K's New album Go and Local will be released next week. If you'd like to catch up on interviews you missed, like this week's conversations with Peter Asher

“from the British invasion duo Peter and Gordon, who also produced James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, or journalist Ari Burman on the latest developments in voting rights,”

or Rachel Avieve on tensions in mother-daughter relationships. Check out our podcast, you'll find lots of fresh air interviews. And to find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show, and get our producers recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to, subscribe to our free newsletter at whty.org/freshair. Freshair's Executive Producer is Sam Bricker, our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

Our engineer today is Adam Stanna-Chefski. Our interviews in reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, her border surelock, and rebel denado, Lauren Crenzel, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yucundi, and Abelman, and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. They are a child and are directed today's show.

Our co-host is Tonya Mosley, I'm Terry Gross. OK, so you're driving to work or you're on a walk or you're at the gym or whatever, and you just need to clear your head. That's the perfect time to hit the play button on NPR's All-Songs considered. It's not the news, it's not work or whatever else is weighing you down. It's just a good time with good friends and great tunes.

Listen to All-Songs considered every Tuesday in the NPR Music podcast. Psychologists, Candace Rogers, studies, how tech affects kids, and you might be surprised by what her research reveals. When you compare all the factors that contribute to youth mental health, social media often doesn't make the list. It's one of the least influential factors in predicting mental health. teens and screens that's on the Ted Radio Hour podcast, listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.