How sky-high ticket prices, war & politics could impact the World Cup

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At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious, and indulge your cultural curiosity. Follow its been a minute wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll break down the zeitgeist topics that are filling your feed. This is Fresh Air, I'm Dave Davies. The FIFA World Cup opens this week with soccer matches in the United States, Canada, and

Mexico. With 48 teams and 104 matches, this will be the biggest World Cup ever. Johnny and Fantino, the president of FIFA, the International Federation that runs the tournament, has declared that this will be the greatest event that humanity mankind has ever seen and ever will see.

“So yes, there's plenty of excitement, more than 5 million tickets have been sold to international”

travelers alone, but this is also a season of some discontents surrounding the cup. Aside from logistical challenges, like transportation, there are issues arising from war, politics, infectious disease, and according to many, greed. FIFA's ticketing practices in pricing have outraged many fans and prompted investigations by two state attorneys general.

U.S. immigration restrictions and the world with Iran have affected travel from many countries and the Ebola outbreak has the attention of local and international health officials. And just to keep things interesting this week, there's the NBA finals and another one of a kind sports event coming up on Sunday, the ultimate fighting championship on the White House lawn. To talk about all this, we've invited Laura Williamson, editor-in-chief of the athletic to join us.

The athletic is the subscription-based sports journalism site of the New York Times. Before joining the athletic, Laura Williamson was sports news editor-in-chief and a correspondent at the Daily Mail. She joined us from London where she is based. We recorded our conversation yesterday. Laura Williamson, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you, thank you for having me. You know, we'll be talking about some issues and controversy surrounding the world cup,

but to begin with, I just want to take note of the enormous pleasure and joy that this brings to many hundreds of millions of people around the world. Just share with us what the world cup can be at its best. Yeah, I mean, when I think about my experience of world cups, you know, as a kid and then being lucky enough to be in Qatar four years ago and to cover that tournament, you might not remember the score, you might not remember who scored, but you remember where

you were and who you watched it with and what it meant to you at that time. And I think it's that power that actually sport can have and football soccer in particular can have to bring people together

“that sort of connective tissue if you like. So that's the hope that that's what this tournament”

can do without sounding sort of two sentimental about things, but I really do believe that football in particular has a power to do that. Is there a hard stopping play or moment that sticks in your mind when you think about the world cup? I do think back to that final three and a half years ago in Qatar, France and Argentina and, you know, it going right down to the wire in terms of penalties

and watching Lionel Messi lift the World Cup trophy was just an incredible moment when you think of

his career and it's obviously still going, he'll be there at this time around as well, but just the it's so rare that you get an incredible game to match the occasion and that delivered on all fronts. All right, well, so let's talk about some of the issues here. Ticket prices at this world cup are higher than any world cup ever in part because FIFA which runs this this thing is using dynamic pricing, right? Yes, yes, the first time has ever been used. Yeah, so what does that

was that mean for for fans? It means ticket prices go, I was going to say up and down, but actually they just go up at the moment depending on scarcity and depending on the demand for those tickets. So because a certain number of tickets have been kept back or allocated to fans that are going to follow that country throughout the tournament, it's meant prices have gone up and up and up. So for the final, which obviously we don't know who's going to be in that, at the moment the sort of

an average price of around $11,000, which is eyewatering to be honest, but then at the other level, in England, for example, who wanted to have the opportunity to buy a ticket for every one of their group games and then an opportunity to buy a ticket to follow their team, even all the way on to the final. They were being asked to part with 14,000 pounds ahead of the tournament. I mean,

that is just so prohibited for, you know, the average person. It's an incredible amount of money

before you've added on hotels and travel, et cetera, et cetera. So the dynamic pricing has been very controversial, because it also doesn't distinguish between, they're called supporter fans in

for the past 10 years, for example, and somebody who lives in Philadelphia and quite fancies going to a world cup game. You might think, well, that's just tough luck. If the demand's there, that's

“what happens, but it's a very different approach for football and general, and I think that's why”

it's called so much upset because you're not being rewarded for loyalty, if you like, or for being an expert about your team. So that's been very, very controversial, and there's upset a lot of people. You know, and it's not just the prices. It's the way they are being managed and marketed, and I didn't understand really how troublingly deceptive this can be. Until I read a piece in the athletic, which you are editor-in-chief by Henry Bushnell, who wrote this story about how I,

you know, typically when you buy a sports ticket, I'm going to go to a game in Baltimore, where my daughter lives in Baltimore. So I was going to get a Baltimore Orioles game, and you go to the website, and there's a map of the stadium, and you can pick the section, the row, the seat, that you know, exactly what you're getting, and what it costs. But he writes in this piece that when people went to the FIFA side to buy tickets for their games, you couldn't choose a seat,

you chose a category of seats that were four categories, and he noted that for category one, the most expensive, which was, and for most of them, more than a thousand dollars,

sometimes several thousand. You were shown a map of the stadium, and basically the good seats in the

lower half along the sidelines were category one. So you didn't know what seat you were getting, but you figured you're getting one of those. But in fact, what happens is after you bought it, they changed the lines without your knowledge. And what you might have found that is that now you're category one price cut, you will see it somewhere else. And here's a cut from a video that Henry Bushnell said, describing about what happened to most of these fancy cities,

talked to a lot of them, and they are not getting what they thought. I haven't been able to find a single fan who got those desirable seats. Everyone says they're incorners or behind the goals or even in the second deck. And in some cases, even if they pay to category one price, they're actually in sections that were colored red for category two at one point, because FIFA has been quietly altering these maps throughout the past several months.

So the fans are furious. They feel misled, taken advantage of, scammed, those are a few words they've used. One even told me he's considering a class action lawsuit. FIFA's response, the maps were quote indicative and quote designed to provide guidance rather than the exact seat they out.

“So Laura Williamson, what is that? What's the fallout from this?”

Yeah, Henry has been incredible in terms of the rigorous ways reported this process.

And another point that he's made in an article on Monday on the athletic is a lot of this has come because the process has been so opaque. So FIFA can do what they like ostensibly. They are the World Cup organizers. So as you reference there, we've heard examples of people thinking they're buying the IP hospitality tickets. And then actually when the ticket seat and row number comes through, it's category one, which is a very, very different experience.

And I think even going back to sort of September, that was the first time that information about ticketing for this tournament was released. And that was only in September, you know, less than a year to go before kickoff. And then there was the sort of right to buy fiasco, if you like, which was where you you paid an additional fee to have the right to buy a ticket because FIFA were banking on there being such a high demand, which there was, then the dynamic pricing kicked in

“and the sort of initial prices shot up by an average of 35% for, I think, 95 of the 104 games.”

And then people have realized what tickets they've got. And as you say, they're not in the area, they thought they were. Then there's also the resale market. So previously, you would buy a ticket maybe through FIFA or through the event organizers. And then some people choose to put it on a secondary resale site and make money that way. FIFA have really leaned into the resale market, which is meant so they're operating an official one. But there's a 15% fee for both the buyer

and the seller, which goes to FIFA on any resale. So funds are being hit again. And they still don't have that full knowledge of if I'm buying a ticket for this game at this stadium, I know where I'm going to sit because it could all change again. So FIFA has its own proprietary resale platform and which they earn essentially 30% commission on it. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Well, we know that the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey have announced investigations into this and have

issued subpoenas for FIFA. I don't know where that stands. Do you have any sense of what

redress there might be for disappointed fans? I sadly, I think the answer is you just have to take your

this close to it. I think this is what we've signed up for, if you like, and it's quite sad for the

the ordinary fan. I mean, there's been, there's been some very sort of small concessions in terms of $1,060 tickets for sort of true fans, if you like, or followers of each team at each game, and then some concessions for games at MetLife in terms of New York City residents or New Jersey residents, but like we're talking a thousand tickets out of $60,000 or more. So they're very, very small inroads, you know, FIFA and Gianni Infantino have said lots of times that, you know,

this is the American ticketing model, you know, Americans, they want entertainment and they're

happy to pay for it, our research, and from the people we've been speaking to, both sort of

casual sports fans and diehard football soccer fans, that's just not the case. That's, you know, when you're talking about four figures to see a world cook game, that is just prohibitive for so many people. Jennifer Davenport, who is the attorney general of the state of New Jersey, said, being honest about ticket sales is not complicated, but FIFA has turned buying a ticket to the world cup into a gauntlet of confusion, fake scarcity, and impossibly high prices. We'll see where

her investigation goes. I mean, I assume that at the pace of these things, usually work, nothing's going to happen over the course of the tournament itself. No, no, I wouldn't have thought so. And then the way football works will be, will be on to the next one, but there is very likely to be a

“women's world cup in the United States, along with a couple of other countries in 2031. So I think”

it's going to be fascinating to keep an eye on the lessons that have been learned this time,

to see what happens then. We should say that FIFA's argument is always well, this tournament is

going to make $11 billion, which is going to be invested back into the global game. But again, that's where the opaque nature of this comes into play in the 2011 FIFA member federations, can expect to get about $8 million each from this tournament or during this world cup cycle, but we don't know where that's going. How does that translate to kids playing soccer in Senegal or Ivory Coast or wherever? We don't know, we don't know where that money goes. So I think that also

adds to the confusion and the feeling of, well, who is this tournament for? Is it for fans? Is it for the member federations? Is it for growing the global game? A lot of questions swirling around. When you make it enough of an elite event, are you going to lose the ground level

“fanatics, if you will, who would bring on the color to the game?”

Yeah, and without being sort of a sensitive about it, but what about the local kids who had so many of my colleagues in North America talk about '94 and being a kid and being at a game and getting this bug for this beautiful game, which, at its best, it is simple and beautiful. And if the ticket prices are as prohibitive as we've been discussing, how do you get a family of four into a game? It's impossible. So I guess that's my, that would be my concern going into it

that if we're talking about an opportunity to really grow soccer in the U.S. in particular, are we missing an opportunity here, I think? I guess we shouldn't know that Johnny and Fantino, the president of the FIFA, took over after this horrific scandal in 2015 when they've rated the

“headquarters and I think 27 FIFA officials, pled guilty to fraud charges, and he has aggressively”

expanded the game, right? Operates far more tournaments now than it used to and generate the whole out more money. Yes, yeah, I mean, Johnny and Fantino was elected in 2016 on a ticket of two things really. It was a, I'm going to clean up this game. I mean, you can't overstate how damaging that 2015 scandal was. I mean, I remember it vividly. I was working at the Daily Mail and the FBI and Swiss authorities raided a luxury hotel on a lake in Zurich and you had, you had FIFA executives

being taken out, you know, with their head under bedfiltre cheats and things. It was extraordinary, you know, rampant systemic and deep-rooted corruption. So outcomes, Johnny and Fantino, he was at UEFA, which is the European governing body of football and he says, I'm going to clean up this game and he also very cleverly said, and I'm going to give the 211 member federation so they're

the sort of annual bounty if you like from $3 million to $5 and now it's eight and the way he's

done that. The bounty, meaning what those federation paid to participate? No, the money that they receive as a member of FIFA. So this is, this is ostensibly where all the ticket money, all the revenue from mainly men's World Cup, but lots of other events as well, is filtering down. So he's raised more money for the people that, you know, to be blunt, are voting to keep him in power, very clever. And the way he's done that is by basically creating more football tournaments. So

we've seen the club World Cup for men, which was hosted by the US, last summer, was won by Chelsea eventually, but that was a huge event that had come, like the club World Cup used to be sort of

“eight teams in the winter, somewhere in the Middle East, very low key. Which they clubs, that means”

these soccer teams that are in, mostly in Europe, I guess, right? Yeah, they're private teams. They're not national teams, right? Exactly. Exactly. So you'd have the European champions against the South American champions, et cetera, et cetera. So he's created this huge new tournament to be honest with huge prize money involved to get into generate more revenue. And this is why we find ourselves with 48 teams in the World Cup and talk that that may go to 64 for next time,

which people are always eager to talk down, but it's not going away. So his answer for creating

this incredible amount of cash has been just more football. What that means for what we'll see on the pitch this summer? Oh, I'm not quite sure, because players are definitely tired,

“but he has delivered on the two things that he said he would do in 2016. He's cleaned up FIFA,”

the sort of the scandals and the awful stories of bribery and corruption are gone. They feel like they belong to a previous era and he's giving more money to the federations. So in a way, he's done what he said he would do. And he has been had a very close relationship with President

Trump who recently gave him FIFA's first ever piece prize, right? Yeah, that was at the World Cup

draw in Washington, D.C. before Christmas. And it really was an extraordinary moment. And yeah, handing over the first FIFA piece prize to President Trump and then in the next breath saying that politics and soccer don't mix. You can't equate the two. So FIFA are very hot, for example, on what flags you can bring in to a World Cup stadium. So they're saying that because politics and soccer don't mix, you couldn't bring it in an Iranian flag that reflected the old

regime. But at the same time, they can give a peace prize to the President of the United States. It's again, that sort of lack of transparency and clear rules. It does feel like it's one rule for one person or one for another. So I suppose those contributions and as well as the high ticket prices are contributing to the fact that hotel reservations are off, right? Yes, yeah, I think another factor as well is travel transport to the games itself. We've covered

this extensively because again from a sort of British perspective, if you like, of being able to get a five pound ticket to get a bus or a train to a stadium, etc. The idea of being charged, I think it's $80 to get from Boston to Foxborough, actually Scotland have a game there, or it's

“now down in inverted commas from $150 to $98 to get from Penn Station to MetLife. And you have to”

pre-book as well. That's again another cost that people are just not prepared to pay. And I think I think when you package all of that together, visas, tickets, hotel prices, and sort of the image of America geopolitically and globally, the cost of actually getting to the games, then we haven't even talked about water, we've had the water gates to gamble this week. I think it is off-putting for a lot of people. Yeah, the water gate thing was there, let's start water. The FIFA originally said

people could bring empty bottles, transparent water bottles into, get them filled with coolers, then they reverse themselves and then they reverse the reverse all right. So now you can bring the water bottle. You can, not to the stadiums in Mexico, but you can into the US and Canada. Up to

because another thing we haven't we haven't mentioned is the heat. The games, especially in the

“latter stages, you know the final kicks off at 3 p.m. local time, which it will either storm or it will”

be, you know, burning hot. So absolutely fans need, need to have water as to the players, of course. We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Laura Williamson. She is editor and chief at the athletic. She'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies and this is Fresh Air. This week on Sources and Methods, President Trump says he told Benjamin Netanyahu,

you're effing crazy. President running out of patience with Israel. When I do think Trump and the White House need Netanyahu, they need Israel to have a lasting deal with Iran. We unpacked the week's biggest national security news on Sources and Methods. Listen on the NPR app wherever you get your podcasts. United States under the Trump administration has required bonds from $500 up to $15,000 for

travelers from some countries to post when entering the United States to ensure that they won't remain there illegally. And the administration has waived those bonds for those coming to the world. Trump provided they bought their ticket by April 15th and entered the FIFA past system.

“So not just anybody, right? That's it. That's it. And I think some of the reporting around that”

changing in the rules was confusing as well because it was like, oh, you know, with their width, they've waived all the bonds. No, no, they haven't. I could you had to sign up for the

FIFA past scheme, which was supposed to basically enable you to book embassy appointments,

etc., and help with the visa scheduling process. You had to have done that and have bought a match ticket by April 15th. I have some countries didn't qualify until three weeks earlier, three weeks before that. So there will be lots and lots of people who have been affected by this. And we've talked about some of the difficulties with ticket prices, with immigration issues. There's also just getting to the game when if you're in the right city and you have a hotel

booked and in the past world cups, host countries have invested a lot in getting fans to and from matches. I mean, I read that in Russia in 2018, there were long distance trains to get people from one Russian city to another that were no charge. What was it like when you were in Qatar, for the last World Cup? It was totally an utterly different because all those games really were within one city. You wouldn't be able to see all of it, but in theory, if you wanted to,

you could go to four games in a day by getting the air conditioned, very clean, very efficient, a very free train system between the two, the sort of their version of a subway, whereas here because it is so spread out over 16 host cities and three countries, all of which are almost like their own little kingdoms, if you like. They've all signed individual contracts with FIFA, so there are all different rules all over the place. It's going to be completely different,

“and also I think because of the one of FIFA's things is about the naming of stadium, so you can't”

have commercial names in stadium titles. So MetLife is MetLife to so many people, but it will be New Jersey Stadium for the duration of this World Cup. This World Cup comes at a time when there is any bola outbreak, and at least two African countries. There are travel restrictions in the United States from some of those countries, including Congo, which is sending a team to the tournament, and I think has a base in Houston. How much of a concern, how much of disruption might this cause

to World Cup matches? The answer is we don't know. Again, it's a huge unknown in terms of

fans who would think fans actually coming from Congo will be very, very limited, because of the reasons we've discussed, and the health measures around the team itself will be incredibly tight, but it's another factor that, of course, is very concerning, another thing for people to think about. Security is always a challenge at these things, and it's interesting that two years ago at the Copa America Cup final in Florida, some fans actually stormed the stadium. It was quite a

chaotic scene. Do you have any sense of what special security measures might be undertaken in these World Cup matches? I was up that final, and actually my children and my dad were there as

allowed to. They left it late to get into the stadium, and then a crushed developed, and the reaction

was to shut the gates, which just meant people had nowhere to go, and the kickoff was delayed,

“and it was very scary, very scary. I think FIFA would say that, well, that wasn't our tournament.”

We didn't run that operation. It will be very different at the World Cup, and I do think it will be in terms of the perimeter, the outside boundary of the stadiums is quite a long way away from natural bowl, which will sort of help the flow of people, which is often where problems occur. We've seen it here, for example, the stud difference with the Champions League final of European Championship a couple of years ago with crushes developing as people get their late, but I think

the wider surface area will definitely help there. I think there's going to be security issues

about what people are bringing into stadiums, in terms of flags and political banners and slogans and things like that. That was a huge issue in Qatar with people wanting to bring flags, protesting about human rights, et cetera, into stadiums, and getting them taken off

“them or denied entry. I think we'll see that on a different level at this tournament, and then in”

terms of general public safety, I've been reading about some action on drones and the use of drones above stadiums, and again, a bit of unknown, we don't know what's going to happen there, but I do think the sort of flow of people, if you like, in terms of their physical safety, that will be as well

prepared as we possibly can be because of the large distance outside the stadiums, and then getting

trying to communicate to people to get their early, et cetera, too. The United States is at war with Iran. The Iranian team is being allowed to come, right? Yes, yes, we actually sent a report to Turkey to see them off if you like, they had a pre-tournament training camp there. They flew to Mexico just over the border from the U.S., they landed there in the early hours of Sunday

“morning, and then they're still waiting on visas to get into the U.S. to play their games.”

There have been reports that they will essentially only be allowed day passes, so they have to go into the U.S. and then leave again. So it's very, very fraught, and also we're hearing, we would hear this because there's a travel band, but a lot of dissident fans who are anti-anti the regime, and have lived outside of Iran for a long time, have been denied their visas to get into the United States, so it will be very much reliant on Iranian diasporas, particularly

in Los Angeles, to support their team, however they see fit. Yeah, I want to get this straight. We're, you and I are speaking on Monday, you think that the Iranian team does not actually in the United States yet? No. No, the still in Mexico, and they're still awaiting visa clearance to travel into the United States to play their games. And I understand the State Department refused entry to certain members of the staff for the team, letting the players in, but not every,

not all of the staff, is that right? Yes, that's right. This goes back to a women's tournament, actually, which was in Australia a few months ago, and we did a lot of reporting around the fact that security personnel attached to the regime had traveled with the team to make sure they didn't up scond, and in fact Australia ended up offering refuge, but the vast majority returned to Iran with the team. So that's the explanation for certain members of the backroom staff being denied entry,

because it's unclear whether they are there for performance reasons, or whether they are representative of the regime. We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Laura Williamson. She is editor-in-chief at the athletic. We will continue our conversation in just a moment. This is fresh air. You know that feeling when you hear a great tip, and it's like, that makes so much sense. Why haven't I been doing that all this time? If that's you,

you might like life kit, whether you're looking to make changes around your health, your money, your relationships, your parenting, your guarantee that this is so helpful feeling. Listen to the Life Kit podcast and the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Laura Williamson, I don't know if you follow mixed martial arts much, but not closely, but okay. This is going to be quite an event here. I mean, this structure has been built on the

flag day, and there's going to be this ultimate fighting championship. You know, American

presidents have traditionally met to congratulate, you know, championships, sports teams, at the college level, the pro level, occasionally attend big games. Is there any precedent for something like this? I mean, it's six hundred tons still arch on the self-lawn. It feels a little bit different to Obama, President Obama go to watch an NBA game, doesn't it? Yeah. I mean,

“it's quite a weekend. I think we're expecting President Trump at the U.S. is opening game”

on Friday as well, and then this shindig on the White House lawn on Sunday. Donald Trump has a

history with mixed martial arts, doesn't he? He does. Also, I think it was recently invested in

UFC's parent company as well, which brings an added dimension to hosting an event with such premium ticket prices as well, I think. Well, yeah, let's talk about that directly. The athletic report it on this, a few weeks after this ultimate fighting championship on the White House lawn was announced, Donald Trump bought a substantial amount of stock. It was required to report this, so we don't know the exact amount, but it was between 15,000 and 50,000 stock into TKO Holdings,

which is the parent company of the ultimate fighting championships. What's the significance of this?

“I think when you look at this event and again, we've been talking about ticket prices,”

I think premium tickets for this UFC event are sort of a million dollars of a pop at the very

highest level, so who is who is profiting from that would be my question. Is it the holding group in which Mr. Trump has recently invested? I think that it sort of invites further questions about why this event is being held and where the money is going. So a potential conflict of interest if there's an event on a public space that he's profiting from. Now Alosu was filed just over the weekend asking the judge to halt this event. What do we know about that? The suit is

ostensibly saying as we've just mentioned that it's this a conflict of interest. It's saying that it's giving the chief executive of UFC Dana White and Thetted Access to the White House and the Lincoln Memorial where the weigh-ins are going to be held before the event to stage a private for-profit sports event. Obviously it's in such a public and prestigious area. So that's the main tenement of the lawsuit. Before I let you go, at the athletic you have all these veteran

sports journalists, a huge staff who do great work. I mean, a lot of good analytical stuff. And I imagine a lot of these sports journalists got into the field because they were either athletes themselves or just loved sports and they liked right about the players and the teams in the competition. But you know sports is such a big business now and the drive for profits affects competition. I wonder if you wrestle at times with how to, you know, apportion your reporting resources to

covering the athletic competition or the business of sports.

“Yeah, we do. I think I think about that a lot actually because I think ultimately I want our”

reporters to tell people things they don't know about whatever is they care about. And sport and culture and business and politics are so intertwined now, so in dispersed. So I do feel we have our duty really to explore all avenues of that. Football soccer is not just now about what happens in 90 minutes on the pitch. You know, some of our most popular pieces might be about player salaries, for example, or trade, so transfers and who's going well and the intrigue around that.

I sort of think back to the last world cup as well. One of our most successful pieces was about Lionel Messi, the Argentina and into Miami strikers relationship with Saudi Arabia. And of course it helped that Saudi Arabia had a shock win against Argentina, so people were interested around that. But the piece wasn't about the sport at all, it was about his sponsorship deals and how he danced his dance with a Middle Eastern state extensively. And it was hugely popular

because people want to know about the whole player in the round, not just what they can do with the football at their feet. So I often think back to that and that's been a real sort of tenement of our planning for this tournament in that we do want to deliver comprehensive coverage

rigorous reporting around the biggest stories and those sort of those topics that take us away

from the pitch are just as important really. But then the other thing is that sport is supposed to be fun. I'm often telling reporters that it can be a release as well. So I think we have to, we have to remember that going back to my answer right at the beginning about the joy that a World Cup tournament can

“bring. We have to remember that and we have to remember that because of the reasons we've discussed”

today, so many people won't be able to go, they'll be reviewing this through their television screen, through their radios, etc. So we have to take them there, we have to tell them what it's like.

Good. I'm battery. So are you going to be attending any World Cup matches yourself?

I am. I fly out on Wednesday for a couple of weeks based in New York City, so I'm hoping to get some games at MetLife and I come back to the UK and then out again for the last ten days or so. So again, hoping to get to the final. Are you picking your games based on the competing teams? Just getting a sense of it? I mean, you're there as a journalist or a fan or what? Well, very much is journalist, but sadly, the role of an editor is just to tell

“the people what to do, rather than go to experience the joy of World Cup matches myself.”

Well, Laura Williamson, thank you so much for speaking with us. Absolutely pleasure. Thank you. Laura Williamson is editor-in-chief at the Athletic from the New York Times. We recorded our interview yesterday. Coming up, rock critic Ken Tucker reviews a new album from Casey Musgraves and a recent biography of the 1970s Era Singer Gary Stewart. This is fresh air.

Hi, it's Mary Louise Kelly. My podcast sources and methods is one of the top-rated National Security shows on Apple, average rating 4.9 out of 5. We're one of the best for a reason. Correspondence around the world, veteran journalists, trusted analysis and on the ground reporting. To understand war, geopolitics and are changing world. Listen, to sources and methods, our rock critic Ken Tucker has something new and something old for us.

There's the new album from one of country music's biggest stars, Casey Musgraves. Ken thinks the best songs on her new album, middle of nowhere, have the dramatic detail of good fiction. He's also here to praise a recently published book, Jimmy McDonald's biography of the 1970s Era Singer Gary Stewart, called I.M. from the Hockey Talks. It's a lengthy portrait of a gifted but tragic performer,

something old, something new. Let's start with Casey Musgraves. The conventional framing of Casey Musgraves' recent career is that she went pop for a few years on a couple of albums and now is returning to country music with middle of nowhere.

But the Texas twang in her yearning searching voice has always remained rooted in country's

deep melancholy. One of the best moments on this album occurs on the song "Back on the Wagon," whose lyric is "Upbeat and Optimistic." The guy she loves has gotten sober and responsible, the two of them are planning a new, cloudless future. But Musgraves' vocal carries all the feelings the lyrics suppresses. You can hear the worry and doubt in her voice. She wants to believe he's changed,

“but she can't help but wonder, has he really, can I go through all that pain again?”

The tension between voice and words creates an entire vivid short story in under four minutes. It was funny. I came home when I found this show. Oh my God, it hurt me. That time at the derby, but I found it in fast out on the floor. But I saw him last night. He said he's found the light. He's different than he was before. He's back on the Wagon.

He's mind you. Middle of nowhere isn't uneven album, sometimes succumbing to the kind of false hope

Perfound sadness and extravagant schmalt's characterized the music of Gary Stewart,

“the country cult figure who died in 2003.”

Stewart's voice was an emotional rumble that rose into a cleaning, high tenor in moments of exquisite pain, as on the title song of his extraordinary 1975 album, Out of Hand.

And I never intended for it to get so out of hand.

Out of hand, out of hand, out of hand, I'm a whole living can of a man.

“The new biography by Jimmy McDonald called "I Am From the Hunky Tanks" spends more than 500 pages”

chronically in Stewart's wild life and times. Born poor into a large Kentucky family in 1944, Stewart idolized Hank Williams, had quit school and was playing in bands by his mid teens. Pretty soon, his distinctive voice and the cleverly precise details in his songwriting caught the attention of Nashville stars like Mel Tillis,

“who provided an entree into the industry. Early on in the book, McDonald sets up what would be”

the detail that sets Gary Stewart's life apart from so many performers. Time and again writes McDonald,

Gary would stress to me, he never went looking for stardom, never went knocking on doors,

never begged anyone to listen to his demos. McDonald's book then chronicles the way others push Stewart to record the wonderfully agonized ballads he wrote and insisted that he submit to the Nashville star making machinery. For a short while, it worked. While she pours herself out some stranger, I pulled myself a grain somewhere. She's acting single, I'm drinking doubles, I had my love, I'd drown my troubles,

my heart is breaking. That's she's acting single, I'm drinking doubles, Stewart's only number one hit. Stewart liked to play music, but the smaller the crowd he thought the better he'd be able to connect to an audience. As the years went by, his ambivalence towards celebrity became a dark resentment. He shunned interviews, lost record contracts, lots of drugs were consumed, tenum at all. Stewart died by suicide at age 59. Here's Bob Dylan's favorite

Gary Stewart song. While I said his song as usual, what I can't believe we survived, tenum at least, tenum yesterday and a half century in the making I am from the homie talks is a lot more than the biography of a cult artist. It's a vast, tumultuous portrait of 20th century southern working class life.

I hope she and you read it. Can Tucker reviewed new music by Casey Musgraves and a biography

“of Gary Stewart called "I am from the Hockey Talks." On tomorrow's show, we speak with actor”

Josh O'Connor. He won an Emmy playing a young Prince Charles in the Crown. Now he's the lead in

Steven Spielberg's new film Disclosure Day. We'll talk about his approach in this new blockbuster

“and Spielberg's decades-long exploration of the idea that aliens are among us. I hope you can join us.”

Just stop playing this sweet man of law. Fresh air's executive producer is Sam Briger,

our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and

“edited by Phyllis Meyers and Marie Baldenado, Lauren Crenzold, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth,”

Thayda Challenger, Susan Yacundi and Abalman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly C. V. Nesper, Roberta Chorock directs the show. For Terry Grossentania Mosley, I'm Dave Davis. On NPR's wildcard podcast, Maya Hawk says childhood with her mom, whom a thermon was "witch adjacent." It's not, you know, toil and trouble. I don't know, but it's a witchiness. Like a kind of witchy love of nature and a love of herbal remedies and something that could potentially

get you burned at the stake. Watch or listen to that wildcard conversation on the NPR app, more on YouTube at NPR Wildcard.