Harriet Clark spent 37 years visiting her mom in prison

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This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross. One of the last actions of the extremist left-wing groups with roots in the 1960s was the Brink's robbery of 1981. Two militant groups, one in offshoot of the weather underground, the other in offshoot

of the Black Panthers, robbed a Brink's armored truck carrying over a million and a half

dollars. It ended in a shootout in which one security guard and two police officers were killed. The shootout of Clark was a getaway driver who was sentenced to 75 years to life. It meant leaving behind her 11-month-old daughter. That daughter, Harriet Clark, is my guest.

She's just published a novel that draws from her own experiences, being raised by her grandparents and visiting her mother in prison every weekend for most of the 37 years her mother was incarcerated. It required traveling about an hour from New York City to Bedford Hills' correctional facility, a maximum security prison for women.

Harriet knew her mother would never get out, but she did get out after being granted

clemency and released on parole in 2019. Harriet Clark's new novel is called The Hill, a reference to the prison in the novel being on top of a hill. It's her first novel. She received the Paris Reviews' Plimpton Prize and as we see fellowships from the Iowa

Riders Workshop and the Wallace Stegner Program. Harriet Clark, welcome to Fresh Air and congratulations on the book you're an incredible writer and I'm glad that you wrote this. It is an absolute trip and to be speaking with you and I'm so grateful to be on this show. Thank you.

I'm honored to hear you say that.

“I want to start with a reading that I think will help set up your story and your mother's”

story. This is from pretty early in the book when Susanna, the child, the main character, is leaving the dentist's office with her grandfather and her grandfather has just had one of his teeth capped so this is as they're leaving. My mother had robbed of bank the first woman said, "No, the second woman said, my mother

had expropriated funds for the purpose of revolutionary struggle. The woman's tone suggested that she was possibly defending my mother and possibly mocking her." When my grandfather emerged days and swollen, it did not seem right to press for explanation, but he must have heard what the woman said or the anesthesia must have caused his mind

to wander because on the drive home he spoke to me for the first time about my mother's crime. A misguided attempt he called it to steal from the rich and give to the poor. An elaborate explanation of the insurance mechanisms of banks and further clarification that many people had many in banks, not just the rich.

When this lecture got into the weeds, he shifted gears into another regarding imperialism, racism, militarism, also materialism, all the things he said that he and my mother opposed and that he assured me, I opposed as well. His face was very close to the steering wheel, your mother took it too far.

“How old were you when you first learned why your mother was in prison?”

How is it explained to you? I don't have a memory of coming into awareness of my mother's crime. It must have been explained to me, but I don't recall who explained it. My mother made clear from when I was very young that she was in prison because she had been part of something that caused three men their lives.

So I think I knew from before I even knew what I knew that people had died and that my mother was in prison because of that.

In that sense, always raised me to understand that in some ways she was guilty and that

was why she was in prison and that she would always be there, but I'm not actually sure who explained to me the details of the crime. When you found out that she was part of a revolutionary group and that the robbery was supposed to support the revolutionary cause, what did you make of that? Did you know enough about politics when you learned that?

“Did you know enough about radical movements and where this robbery fit in?”

Yes, I know. I am like Susanna. I continue to have a relationship to the women and my mother's collective. I had a half sister and so I returned to that collective every three

up inside a far more political atmosphere than Susanna does. She's really in the

“aftermath of politics and I grew up inside active organizing. So I think I did understand”

something about the particular movements and commitments they had. But again, for 40 years every conversation I ever had with my mother occurred in a crowded room that was surveyed by officers or on a phone line that was recorded and so we didn't have the privacy to talk about some of the things that might have been hardest to talk about and for most of my life, you know, my mother had to make prison a place I wanted to come to. You know, our visits had to

be enjoyable and so in that sense too it was very rare that we were sitting there getting into the nitty gritty of her crime especially when I was young. You know, fundamentally she was trying to play with me and have fun with me and let me feel close to her. Would you describe how the prison looked

“you as a child? I think fundamentally the prison looked to me like a hill. It's hard for me”

to remember what the prison looked like to me as a child because I went there for almost 40 years and it changed a lot in that 40 years it became much more prison like, you know, it had initially been a reformatory for women and so they would have when I was very young, you know, these brick buildings that actually didn't look to terrifying and then of course over the years it became much more, more, more barbed wire and gun tower and whatnot. But I think that primarily my memories of the

prison, from when I was a child, I was trying as minimally as possible to interact with the space and I primarily was interacting with the people so you know, I knew all the officers out front and so the experience of approaching the prison felt less like approaching a building or a series of buildings and more like approaching a series of people and processes I was about to engage with. The prison was like your home, where your second home because you were there every Saturday,

Susanna and then your novel vows to keep returning there for the rest of her mother's life since the assumption one she was going to be there for the rest of her life and that gives Susanna a sense of security of routine, of safety and of purpose and of course of connection with her mother.

“Did you feel that way too? I mean yes and no, I think that there is a way that the prison was a”

holding container for me and is meant to be a holding container for Susanna. I think in the prison she's existing inside patterns that really do give a certain kind of steadiness to her life. Whereas actually I think one of the things that makes prison a real life quite difficult is that

they're always changing things on you, you know, they don't want you to be stabilized and steady.

The point is a certain kind of perpetual instability so that they can enact control over you. So I could wear the exact same outfit one week to the next and they could say nope those sleeves are too short you can't come in. So actually my experience wasn't quite as steady as Susanna's is, though I do think that I had an experience of peacefulness by virtue of the fact that I knew nothing was ever going to change, you know, my mother had been in there as far back as I could remember and she was going

to be in there forever and so that felt like a kind of steady piece for me and made me feel different than the great difficulties the kids around me were in. Was it a good feeling to know she

would be there forever? I mean it was prison. On the other hand she was always there, she was

always waiting for you, you always knew where to find her. Yes, I think that I did experience myself as having a piece that the children around me did not have because, you know, most children lose their mothers to prison within their active awareness, you know, they had a mother at home, most women in prison were the primary caregivers for their children, most women in prison are mothers and so they lost their mothers and that is obviously an incredible trauma that I felt fundamentally

spared and most kids, even though their mothers often had long sentences, their mothers were

actively trying to come home and I never envied that. It seemed like another form of torture to me,

would say, "Will you be there this weekend for my recital?" And some of the women would say, "I'll

try, you know, or will you be able to be there for my graduation?" There was always this

possibility on the horizon that to me seemed so torturous and so I felt grateful to be spared a certain kind of hope and waiting. You know, I was thinking that writing the novel was in a way of like staying, visiting your mother in prison. It took you about 20 years, I think,

“it's not like that was the only thing you were doing but you worked on it for 20 years until you”

felt like you got it right. And so for those 20 years, like you were living in prison and so there were many years after your mother got out when you were still in your writing life in prison and did you want to be there? Do you feel like there were still things that you had to work out or that you weren't ready yet to leave that part of your life or to feel like you comprehended that part of your life? 100% I think that that's true both with the prison,

especially my childhood experience of the prison, the book allowed me to stay inside rooms and atmospheres that we're still be well-during to me that I was still kind of working something through about but I really felt that in terms of my grandparents and their friends, you know, they had been my entire life until my grandmother passed away when I was 16 but by the time I was 19, every single one of their friends who had been very, very present parts of my life, every single

one of them had passed away and so an entire world I had lived inside was gone and it felt to me like I was, you know, exiled for my own life in many ways and so certainly working on the book

“was a way that I stayed in those rooms too. I think, you know, the characters, the grandparents, friends”

and the book none of them are exact transcriptions of any of my grandparents' actual friends but that feeling of being inside rooms while adults talk around you and, you know, fundamentally ignore you, that was the feeling of my childhood and there was something meaningful to me, painful but meaningful about being able to stay inside that feeling in those rooms and rooms. Did you do research for the book? Did you go back and read news reports,

contemporaneous with the Brink's robbery that your mother participated in? Yeah, for many years I had assumed that if I wrote a book that I would have to know a lot more than I did and about lots of things, you know, so I read books about radicals in the 30s, 40s and 50s, to better understand my grandparents and I read about radicals in the 60s and 70s, to better understand my mother and her friends and I read about prison officers and I read a lot of books

about children of prisoners and finally I realized that I did not want to write the book that

knew those things, you know, that I wanted to write a book that was about not knowing those things that had to do with a certain kind of atmosphere of incomprehension that Susanna is inside

“and that I think is a dominant quality to lots of people's childhoods, you know, and so I decided”

I didn't want to triumph over my childhood, be a wilderness. I wanted to see if I could kind of conjure the atmosphere of that bewilderment and see if it could be resonant for readers. As part of my research for this interview I read an article in The New York Times from early in your mother's incarceration and it was a profile of her and it describes her as reluctant to have participated in the Brink's robbery because you were a baby but she felt she needed

to prove her commitment to the revolutionary cause. She was in the getaway car, she didn't see the

shooting, the money was thrown into the car and the Brink's truck was carrying like $1.6 million I don't know how much was actually stolen and she portrays herself as a very kind of insecure driver and a really bad getaway driver and doesn't really know where she's going and I think maybe gets in a little accident at the end. So did you read that? I don't know how much she told you I don't know how much she wanted to talk about participating in the robbery and being the getaway

driver. So like the more you learn the how did it affect your opinion of your mother? I mean one thing I'll say is that my mother was a getaway car driver. She wasn't the getaway

in terms of a kind of willful unknowingness. I mean I have made myself understand better the details of my mother's crime but one of the things I had wanted to dramatize in the book,

“you know there's a chapter where the grandmother who believes you should look things in the face,”

you know she's always saying to Susanna, do you go out of your way to know nothing and Susanna

keeps saying yes you know and that's a lot what the book is about you know what feels so threatening about knowing things about our loved ones like knowing their mistakes or their sufferings or their histories. You know in the novel the grandmother really doesn't want the burden because it feels like the burden of raising Susanna after Susanna's mother's imprisonment is that the vibe you got from your grandmother that she wanted to be free but she was tied down taking care of you.

You know the older I get the sadder it is to me how little I knew my grandmother not only because she died almost 30 years ago but also because I really knew her in the wake of the two greatest tragedies of her life which were her daughter's life imprisonment and then her husband,

“her great love's death and so I think I knew my grandmother an incredibly grief-stricken”

years and so my grandmother did have a certain atmosphere around her of clearly being somewhat embattled with the life she had but it's hard for me to source exactly where those feelings came from and I will say the grandmother in the book is not my grandmother but also the fundamental thing I had wanted to dramatize in that book was you know my grandmother did not want the life we had and to some extent I did and I loved my grandmother and she felt like my whole life and so

you know there's a moment in the chapter where the grandmother is fantasizing about how their life should be if the mother hadn't committed the crime and Susanna says I want to live with you and her grandmother says then you're wishing a man dead and I think that was a real conundrum to me in my life that sense of how can I value my life if it's based off of a tragedy and suffering by so many other people and so that was one thing that I thought I was trying to look

at in the chapter and and also this the fact that my grandmother and I did have this difference

because she always knew we were inside a tragedy she always felt this should not be as it is

and I fundamentally did accept the life I had and still found much of it meaningful and delightful even I recently interviewed Zade Ares who's the son of Bill Ares and Bernardine Dorne who were two leaders of the militant left wing group the weather underground and so Zade wrote a memoir about growing up underground because his parents early in his life had like fake identities they were basically in hiding underground so one of the themes in his book is if his parents knew

that they were going to continue as revolutionaries who we're going to be doing revolutionary acts that could easily get them in prison why did they decide to have a child knowing that they could be locked away for years and I'm wondering how much you thought about that too you know it's interesting because from the outside people have often been struck by my mother's abandonment of me and I know that that is touched on this idea of the mother abandoning her child is touched on

often in the book but my actual lived experience was of my mother's profound devotion to me because you know most people have to share their mothers with the world you know their moms have partners and jobs and other kids and friends and every time I saw my mother all she was doing was giving me attention I was her whole world and so I didn't have the feeling of of being abandoned by my mother in my kind of conscious reality I'm sure something in me did feel fundamentally abandoned in

“life I think I've always felt somewhat precarious but I didn't feel abandoned by my mother and I”

because her love for me was so present it was never confusing to me why she'd had a child I

could see how much you wanted a child I could see how much she loved me and I was also you know if you're raised in a women's maximum security facility you're raised around women who are perpetually

mother was less of a mother to me because she had other commitments my experience is not that she's

“less of a mother I think she's an incredible mother I think she figured out how to mother me in some”

of the most difficult conditions possible and so I think because I've never felt like I had a second

class mothering experience it doesn't feel to me like why did she even bother having a child if it was going to be under these conditions I knew she loved me and wanted me and I knew it was the great tragedy of her life not to be able to be around me all the time let me reintroduce you here if you're just joining us my guest is Harriet Clark her new novel is called The Hill will be right back after a short break I'm Terry Gross and this is fresh air everyone wants to know if AI is conscious

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your pool party into a nerd fest check out our news quiz we got comedians we got celebrities we got games to help you laugh about the week's news yeah that news it'll be just like we're hanging out at your backyard barbecue listen every week to wait wait don't tell me on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts this is fresh air i'm Terry Gross let's get back to my interview with Harriet Clark her no novel the hill draws on her own experiences when she was 11

months old in 1981 her mother Judy Clark drove a getaway car in the armed robbery of a

brink struck carrying over a million and a half dollars Judy was part of a militant revolutionary

group that was an offshoot of the militant revolutionary group the weather underground the robbery was in collaboration with a radical group that was an offshoot of the black Panthers the goal was to raise money for the revolutionary causes they stood for one guard and two police officers were killed in a shootout for most of the 37 years Judy was in prison Harriet spent every Saturday visiting her until you were eight when your grandfather died he drove you to the prison

every weekend and you'd spend the time with your mother and there was there was a children's room

“where you could be with her was that considered like an important reform in the prison i think”

not all prisons had that and i think your mother's prison didn't have it forever either i mean it is one of the greatest pieces of good fortune in my life that my mother's prison had that room because i was able to want to see my mother because the environment in which i saw her could be playful so there's a large visiting room that has dozens of tables and then in the back of that room separated by this kind of large plastic wall is a carpeted room that has lots of toys and

games and just places you can sit on the floor so that you don't have to be at these kind of stern separating tables and it is run by women within the prison in the book it's run by nuns but that's not accurate to the actual children's center um it was run by women inside and so you can play with your mother your mother can touch you your mother can read to you you can as much as possible still be a kid with your mother you know the they try as much as possible

to keep the officers out of that room so you're not having a sense of constant surveillance but eventually you know the last twenty twenty five years were spent in the other room where you just have to sit at the table and talk to each other which luckily my mother and i are incredibly good at after your grandfather died when you were eight a nun from the prison took on the responsibility of picking you up and driving you to and from the prison every weekend was that a response to

ability she took on herself where she assigned that it seems so wonderful and unusual well i'm glad you think it's wonderful unusual because it's made up it's it's part of the novel

did occasionally drive me to the prison um and she did many heroic things when my mother was transferred

“when i was six two two son Arizona um she actually flew me to Arizona to help enable me to visit my”

mother because of the visits were so hard for my grandparents and so there was a nun who played a profoundly healing role in connecting me and my mother and also connecting my mother and my grandparents but most of my rides to the prison after my grandfather died actually um happened from the women and my mother's collective um both because they they stepped in to help make sure we had that relationship and because it was a way that they could continue to see me did they stay revolutionary

i would say every member of my family remains committed to opposing how oppressive and unjust the current systems of our country are and to imagining more just systems so yes they have all remained political they all use their retirement to do you know organizing on behalf of collective movements my mother too has remained political you know she was an organizer before she went in and she was an organizer when she was inside she organized a huge amount um in there in terms of

the college program and parenting programs and an AIDS counseling program and so in that sense she

was a revolutionary in the prison too you know she's always thinking about how we can create

better conditions for people's lives and the prison really demanded that and it's the work she does out of prison so yes you know i don't consider any member of my family and i deal up any more but i do consider them profoundly committed people when you talk about your family you're talking a part about the collective yes that your mother was a part of in the collective raised you for the first five years of your life it's interesting you still think of them as your

family when my grandmother died i went back to live with two of the women from the collective and

they've always been my family they're my primary family now because i don't have my grandparents

in that particular part of my family from my youth um so yes i very much consider my extended family

“my family i feel very i feel very lucky you know Susanna's life is quite narrow in the book”

but i was very lucky and when i fell out of conventional nuclear care structures i really did fall into a vast network of care you know it's the two truths of my life that something in me has been and felt somewhat orphaned and something in me has been incredibly well cared for by a very large number of people i want to hear more about the nun who work at the prison and who helped you get to Arizona to visit your mother when she was transferred to a prison there

yes that also was one of the great blessings of my life was to be raised with sister lane which thousands of children whose mothers were in bedford hills correctional facility this was one of the blessings in their life as well for many reasons both because structurally she created the children's center and the nursery and the programs that made us be able to have you know the good times we could have with our mothers but fundamentally sisterhood lane she walked into that

prison every day and part of what you saw was how much you respected our mothers you saw her take the

light in them you saw she always said oh my gosh your mother loved you so much oh my gosh

your mother showed me this picture your mother showed me this drawing everything she did was to make it clear i respect the relationship you and your mother still have i respect your mother and that is incredibly important in an environment where what you are seeing constantly is your mother being

“degraded you know i think even some of your questions have to do with how critical i am of my mother”

and the truth of the matter is i think my mother will have to be out of prison a very long time before i could take a fully critical look because it's very very painful to be raised where your parent is perpetually being criticized degraded and controlled around you you feel protective of them and i think kids feel protective of their moms in prison and we knew that sister lane felt protective of them too that she was sometimes felt like the only protective force in there and so she was just

this experience of lightness in a very dark place and and and really gave me a way of understanding how you for bear in dark places you came to think of prison as collective punishment because

is collective punishment i mean when i say that prison is collective punishment i mean you know it is this very tricky balance in the book where on the one hand i'm trying to communicate that degrading conditions are degrading these are forms of deforming people's lives not just the people inside but the people who love them you know i don't want to have a wedding because i didn't want my mother to not be there i didn't want to have a child because i didn't want that

child to grow up in prison like i had you know and so i feel like one part of me did want to show this is a system that's impacting millions and millions of people across this country and on the

“other hand you know you have to show that people resist their own degradation and that they're”

faster than the circumstances they're in and they do fight for meaningful lives i guess this Harriet Clark her new novel is called the hill will be right back this is fresh air one year ago

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hour listen by the n_p_ our app or wherever you get your podcasts this is fresh air let's get back to my interview with Harriet Clark her no novel the hill is based on her experiences visiting her mother in prison on weekends for about thirty seven years she was a getaway driver when members of radical offshoots of the weather underground and the black panthers robbed a brink's truck in nineteen eighty one it ended in a shootout leaving two police officers and a security

guard dead your mother sentence was commuted and she was released on parole in twenty nineteen was there a campaign for her release to do campaign for it i did not campaign enough you know i my consciousness was entirely shaped by the knowledge that my mother would be in forever you know one of the differences between me and my mother is that she wasn't imprisoned her whole life and i was you know so if i you know if things happen when i was in you know it's coming

and visit her and you know it's something happened and they made the visitors wait for hours outside

“and difficult ways you know my mother would say you need a larger complaint you need to do something”

and i never would because i was institutionalized i did accept things as they were and i

had accepted my mother was gonna be in forever and i think i just couldn't ever really rouse myself to believe she was going to get out it you know in that way i feel like of the many extraordinary changes brought about by my mother's release one is that i will never have the arrogance of thinking something is impossible again you know i had a fundamental skepticism that has now been humbled so when other things seem like they stay in no chance i kind of think

all your mother got free you know so much as possible when when people come together to try to make something happen when your mother got out of prison did she live with you at first no she's

never lived with me um and actually you know i think that many people my mother included i think did

did expect that we would be making up for a lost time you know um but actually because i was so shaped by my mother's imprisonment you know it's like my whole life my whole life as a child as an adult i could never call my mother you know i have no memory of ever wanting to of having something upsetting happened and wishing i could call her having something exciting happened i just never i knew i couldn't call her and i didn't want to call her and now of course she's like

any mother and she's like why don't you have a call me um you know so i think that maybe she and others thought you know now we would be together all the time but actually it's like i'm kind of this awkward teenager having to learn for the first time how do you know get my mom to live the house so i can drink with my friends you went to um college outside of New York and

visit her on weekends i remember the last visit i had with my mother before i moved to california

“and i do remember feeling very heavy leaving you know it wasn't just that every week of my”

growing up i visited my mother in prison it was also that every week of my growing up i left my mother in prison you know so i have a very strong muscle memory of what it feels like to walk out of a visiting room and down the hill and you know you're feeling the prison at your back you're feeling your mother at your back the women there and there is kind of like presence you're carrying with you on the walk to the train and on the train and you're thinking of them and you're

thinking of them until you're not you know until you're in the free world and you forget to think about them and that's actually a terrible feeling and anytime i could get a ride from my mother's prison i often would fall asleep you know so that i could kind of wrap up my life inside with sleep and then wake up in the free world and i remember very much the visit where i was leaving my mother to move to california and i remember wanting very much to be able to fall

asleep of kind of wanting a break from this consciousness before i woke up in the next one did you know your father yes not really when i was young he was underground when i was very young and then he was in prisons where i very minimally visited him until i was 12 so i really only got to know him when my grandmother was dying we were able to build a relationship with him yes and i feel i feel very grateful about that because throughout my whole childhood you know he was supposed to

initially just be my sperm donor he had never signed on to be my father it was only once my mother

was imprisoned and my father was underground that the collective and the parents and some involved decided my sister and i should have each other and so for most of my life i referred to him as my sister's father which for the most part i still do but he was a really incredible man he

“had incredible courage and he's he was very different from my mother and so i think that when”

he first got out and came into my life he had a very different analysis of their behaviors and different relationships to politics the my mother did and initially i think that that was hard for me but i feel very grateful now to have had both their influences and to i mean he had had cancer when he was inside multiple times and you know if he hadn't been a doctor the way they treated him would have killed him and so he had spent a lot of time after he got out trying to

bring attention to the medical mistreatment in prisons um and he was just a remarkably committed person so now it feels like a great gift that i can think of him as my father because i'm very proud to have him as my father so you spent 20 years not that's not all you did but over the course of 20 years you were writing this book you kept rewriting it um why did it take 20 years i see in my acknowledgements that writing the story the book was really a cover story um for wanting time to

“myself and i think for many years that was the case until 2017 when Trump came into office the first”

time and that was when i decided i think in part because you know he had the family separation policy at the border and i was seeing people have this rightful outrage at having kids taken from their mother's arms and i really shared that outrage um but i was also a little bewildered you know like don't you know that this is happening every day at jails and prisons all over this country you know all detention is family separation and that was when i realized maybe people didn't know how

massive this was and that was the first time i thought oh i'm gonna i'm gonna write a book and when i saw this footage of parents carrying their children hundreds of miles you know on their backs and in their arms i knew that this was heroism you know i knew that i was seeing the hero's journey and that these were people calling unextraudinary reserves in themselves to try to keep their family

together and i realized that you know the protagonist of my stories who never seemed to really

do anything i thought um i realized actually she she also was a hero you know she was she was doing something incredibly difficult she was resisting the great forces of separation prison and death to try to keep her family together and so once i knew she was a hero then then i then the story

you so much for having me it's a great honor herit clerk's new novel is called the hill after we

“take a short break rock critic Ken Tucker will review two new albums that draw on rock's past”

for their sources of inspiration this is fresh air from the light bulb to the internet human history has been driven by innovation and shortwave is exploring how the technology of tomorrow will transform our future would you write in a flying taxi will a high models fight wars here about the technological frontier every monday on tech camp the new series from shortwave listen on the empire app or wherever you get your podcasts this week on newsmakers hunter bought seven years

“sober and somebody asked me if i wanted to drink in ten years later i woke up and will tell”

the crack bite as viral of addiction and his father's legacy if my dad had won he would have kept his word he would not have pardon me hunter Biden this week on n_p_r_'s newsmakers watch your listen wherever you get podcasts this is fresh air rock critic Ken Tucker has a review of two new albums that draw on rock's past for their sources of fresh inspiration

the first is mission of mercy from guitarist Mike Campbell who co-wrote most of the hits you

“know from Tom petty in the heartbreakers Campbell's post-heartbreakers band is called the dirty knobs”

the other album is living in the USA by low cut Connie led by Adam weiner whose fans range from Elton John to Barack Obama we'll start with Mike Campbell and the dirty knobs i've read a couple pieces recently about how country music is the place where rock and roll now resides or how guitar rock is an outmoded form that persists only as nostalgia then i hear new work by Mike Campbell or low cut Connie's Adam weiner and i'm reminded once again

that rock and roll is always alive always hiding in plain sight

i remember i still remember you now it used to be something's never changed something's never changed may be always didn't say forever that's Mike Campbell and the dirty knobs from their new album mission of mercy in which Campbell continues with unabated energy and skill

to explore the kind of elemental rocky made for decades with Tom petty

Campbell's new work always avoids nostalgia while carrying an air of hard one serenity

low cut Connie is Adam weiner's vehicle for piano based rock and roll tingeed with social politics just to let ourselves come dancing for a decade now as singer songwriter and pianist weiner has fronted a shifting group of

and leaping off the piano weiner's method is liberation through controlled chaos better living through rhythm and blues

“don't go mad don't go mad let's be too far away oh yeah you had to run still play with modern singing and other”

it's been that's let me speak to Bobby from low cut Connie's new album live in in the

USA weiner was one of the first musicians to decline to play at the Kennedy Center under the

current administration and given the tone of this collection and weiner's recent statements the bobby in that song could be health and human services secretary bobby Kennedy Jr now and in some of his earlier work weiner has spoken of the oppression of people in matters of race and gender overall this album's finest moments occur when weiner's music embodies the soaring freedom promised by roots rock and roll he's done a superb job of updating it on a song

such as can't be wrong well feel pretty good today I feel like I want to stay

baby anything you want to say weiner says in a statement accompanying the album that every song here was quote

“recorded in one hot take just blurted out captured and put it out that's how rock and roll was born”

but of course Adam weiner and Mike Campbell know that the music is more than blurt and release that rock and roll was born from performers who very knowingly transfigured their experiences

to create revolutionary art the revolution is over but it's passion complexity in rewards

remain as life-altering as ever can tuck a reviewed new music from the dirty knobs and low cut Connie tomorrow on fresh air i guess will be undried to shields you want a tonie for his performance in

“Haiti's town he's also in the new film of last year's London revival of the show he's now on Broadway”

in cats the jellicle ball the shields describes himself as afro queer a long time HIV survivor and an unreformed hippie who grew up in Baltimore's innermost inner city he's frequently described by others as a Broadway legend a hope you'll join us to keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews follow us on Instagram at npr fresh air fresh air's executive producer is Sam Brigger our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham our engineer today is

Adam Stanna Chefsky our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Philis Myers and Reble de Nado Lauren Crenzel Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thia Chaliner, Susan Yucundee, Anna Bowman and Niko Gonzalez-Wisler our digital media producer is Molly Sivine Esper Reble de Chura directs the show our co-host is Tonya Mosley I'm Terry Gross Each story you hear on planet money starts with a question what happens if we refund

tariffs why are grocery so expensive and npr we stand for your right to be curious because the forces shaping our world can be hard to see follow npr's planet money wherever you get your podcasts and start seeing how the economy really works you've got a lot of ways to get news and a lot of podcasts in your feed that take a long time to get to the point here and now any time gets to the heart of the day's big story all in about 20 minutes every afternoon get smarter

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