Episode 570
with Casey Parks and Thunderstorm Artis
Washington Post reporter Casey Parks unpacks her new book Diary of a Misfit, wherein she reckons with her own sexuality, her Southern identity, and her complicated relationship with her mother; and singer-songwriter Thunderstorm Artis explains how his music went from The Voice to Grey's Anatomy, before performing his single "Stronger." Plus, host Luke Burbank and announcer Elena Passarello set out to solve some mysteries.
Casey Parks
Reporter and Author
Casey Parks is a Portland-based reporter for The Washington Post who covers news stories ranging from gender to family issues. Parks was awarded the 2021 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for Diary of a Misfit, her upcoming book that combines memoir and journalism to explore the themes of sexuality, identity, otherness, and love. She was previously a reporter for the Jackson, Mississippi Free Press and The Oregonian. Her powerhouse articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Oxford American, ESPN, USA Today, and The Nation.
Thunderstorm Artis
Multi-Instrumentalist Musician
Exceptional singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Thunderstorm Artis is quickly becoming an unmatchable force in the music world. Born into a highly musical family and raised in Hawaii, making meaning within a song has been central to Thunderstorm’s entire life. With his debut EP Haunted released in 2018, and as a finalist on NBC’s The Voice in 2020 and a mainstay at Wanderlust festivals throughout North America, Thunderstorm is a star on the rise. With a vocal styling described as being warm, vibrant, and powerful, his latest body of work is “a genre-bending batch of songs built on both emotionally raw storytelling and incisive soul-searching.”
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Luke Burbank: Hey, Elena!
Elena Passarello: Hey, Luke. How you doing?
Luke Burbank: I'm doing well. Now. I'm looking at you over Zoom as we record this. Are you wearing camouflage?
Elena Passarello: It looks like that kind of Duck Dynasty camouflage. But if you look closely, it's actually a medieval kind of the lady and the unicorn.
Luke Burbank: Oh, wow. This beautiful that allows you to fit in seamlessly into a literature program at a major state college.
Elena Passarello: That's right. That's right. Or any medievalist convention that happens to spring up anywhere.
Luke Burbank: It's public radio cammo. Let's be honest. Are you ready for a little station location Identification Examination?
Elena Passarello: Oh, I think so.
Luke Burbank: This is going to be a good one. I love these hints. Okay, This is where I quiz Elena on a place in the country where Live Wire is on the radio, you got to guess where I'm talking about. This city is known as the hot air ballooning capital of the world.
Elena Passarello: Is it Albuquerque, New Mexico?
Luke Burbank: My goodness gracious. It is Albuquerque, New Mexico. How did you know that?
Elena Passarello: Well, when my friend Bonnie moved here, we have a little hot air ballooning festival in Albany, Oregon. And I invited her to it and she said, I'm from Albuquerque, the hot air ballooning capital of the world.
Luke Burbank: Your mind is a steel trap, my friend. That is the place I was talking about, where we're on the radio on K A N W. I could have also told you that it claims to be where the breakfast burrito was invented. All right, Shout out to everybody listening in Albuquerque and all over the country. Should we get to the show?
Elena Passarello: Let's do it.
Luke Burbank: All right. Take it away.
Elena Passarello: From PRX. It's LIVE WIRE! This week, writer and reporter Casey Parks.
Casey Parks: Actually, I'm the worst natural journalist and my family, I'm very shy and I don't like talking to strangers or anybody.
Elena Passarello: With music from Thunderstorm Artis.
Thunderstorm Artis: I normally sing with my eyes closed because I allow my emotions to just kind of kind of take me over. And so 30 seconds to this song. I'm like, Oh, I need to open my eyes. And then I do. And they're all staring at me.
Elena Passarello: I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello, and now the host of Live Wire, Luke Burbank.
Luke Burbank: Hey, thank you so much, Elena. Thanks to everyone for tuning in from all over the country. Got a great show in store for you this week. This conversation that we had with Casey Parks about her book, Diary of a Misfit was so memorable. Folks that were there when we recorded it live, we've gotten in touch and just mentioned to me in passing how much fun it was. So very excited to play that for everyone and of course, excited to provide the listener responses to our question. This week we asked the listeners, what is a mystery you're still trying to solve? This is tied into Casey's book. We're going to give those responses coming up in a few. First, though, of course, we got to kick things off with the best news we heard all week this. This is our little reminder that there is some good news still happening out there in the world. Elena, what is the best news that you heard all week?
Elena Passarello: I'm writing news. I love a good a good writing story. Gee, I wonder why. So here we have a story about a teenager in London named Dylan Brennan. Dylan is obviously in school, but wasn't in school for a significant part of 2020 and 2021 for reasons that I think you can guess. And like a lot of not just teenagers, but all folks. Dylan noticed that he was spending way too much time in front of screens, namely playing video games. And I've just got to say, if a teenager is realizing that he is spending way too much time playing video games, the hour total of that must have been really significant.
Luke Burbank: That's like a six year old reporting that they got too much Halloween candy.
Elena Passarello: Exactly. But guess what? Dylan did something about it. Not only did he do something about it, he did something that's very, very difficult to do. I can tell you, on ten years of personal experience. He wrote a book. What? He wrote a novel. He sort of channeled the authors that he loved the most, which include J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin and Islam. It's just now occurring to me. That is George R.R. Martin have two R initials in his middle name as a Tolkien shout out.
Luke Burbank: Or do you have to have 2 R’s in your middle name to really crush it at that sort of, you know, fantasy style of writing?
Elena Passarello: That's right. So then Daniel R.R. Brennan decided to follow in their footsteps, and he made this book called Noble Betrayed. It's a big old, gorgeous honker doorstop novel that he worked on for nine months. He named some of the characters after his teachers, and he modeled some of the action after life and news events and things that he was aware of in his hometown of London. I haven't read it yet, but I can read it now because this month it was just released on Amazon. I think he took advantage of some of the amazing self-publishing opportunities that are today that made blockbusters like The Martian happen, for example.
Luke Burbank: Right.
Elena Passarello: So he put it out. It has already received five star reviews, not just from his home country of the United Kingdom, but from the USA, from Spain, from Australia. And he feels amazing. He can't wait to start another book. And I just love the idea that, like, you know, like not only did he kind of make his life a little richer by finding a hobby that doesn't necessarily involve a screen, but he's done this really amazing accomplishment. It's really hard to put a novel together. And then he's made this gorgeous product that, by the way, if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription, you can download for free right now.
Luke Burbank: That is so impressive. You've written books, Elena. I've told people at parties that I'm going to try to write a book. So we're kind of the same on this. I think we both know what an accomplishment it is for someone to actually finish something like this. All right. From a cool story about this young person in London to a story that kind of sounds apocryphal. Somebody decided to write on Twitter the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. Paid for Julia Roberts birth is a little known fact that sends me. That was what somebody wrote on Twitter. And then of course the rest of the internet said that definitely sounds made up. Like that would be wild if true. But that just seems like one of the many questionable things floating around cyberspace. Well, it turns out it is 100% true, Elena. Julia Roberts was born in Smyrna, Georgia. Now, maybe you know this because you're a Georgian, and so this is kind of local lore, but I'm just learning about it as a Yankee. Right? So Julia Roberts folks ran a theater school in Atlanta, and Dr. King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, were trying to find somewhere for their kids to go. And because of the time, they were having a really difficult time placing their kids in one of these programs. And Julia Roberts folks were like, absolutely, bring them on over. And they became family friends and Julia Roberts parents. Turns out running a theater school in Atlanta in that era, not the road to riches. So they did not have the money to pay for Julia Roberts's birth, and the Kings actually paid for her birth. This was confirmed in an interview that Julia Roberts did with Gayle King. No relation. And then also some of the descendants of Dr. King and Credit Scott King were confirming this online. So this is a real thing that a lot of us, not you, Elena, but people like me are just figuring out.
Elena Passarello: I had no idea. But the one thing I did know is my mother took lessons at that acting school with Yolanda King. So she had two stories about the acting school. One was that the King kids were there taking classes with her. I think Yolanda King's like a year younger than my mother. And the other is that she, like, used to hang out with baby Julia Roberts, who I think is like, I don't know, like ten years old, younger than my mom. And my mother had two things to say about baby Julia Roberts. One was that she was blond and two was that she was a very messy baby. I think she, like, watched the baby for a little bit.
Luke Burbank: How did I pick this story off the list when this is your lived experience, Elena, this is like you doing a story about sign painters in Seattle in the 1980s.
Elena Passarello: I don't think she knew anything about that payment thing, though. I think my mom just was happy to take acting classes and she remembers the Roberts family really struggling to make ends meet as well. Like it was a it was really obvious that they were like paycheck to paycheck kind of a situation. So how amazing.
Luke Burbank: That right there, one of these cool stories on the Internet actually being true is the best news that I heard all week. All right. Let's say hi to our first guest. She is a Portland based reporter for The Washington Post, where she covers gender and family issues. She spent ten years in rural Louisiana, which incidentally, is also where she grew up, knocking on doors and researching the life of a country singer who had transfixed her grandmother back in the olden days. And that research became her new book titled Diary of a Misfit, A memoir and a Mystery. Take a listen to this. It's our conversation with Casey Parks. Hello, Casey. Welcome to the show.
Casey Parks: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here to talk about all the saddest moments of my life.
Luke Burbank: You know, this show contains multitudes. So I think we can cover the whole range of human experience. And I feel like this book actually really does. It's it is a really intense story of your life and of the life of somebody else who you came to really know about. But I do think that there's moments of lightness and specificity. I don't know if I've read a book where people smoke more cigarets. I feel like many sentences start with, and then they picked up their Newport spirit.
Casey Parks: I did get an email from a friend of mine who I used to work with at The Oregonian, and she said, This book is making me want to smoke so bad. I love cigarettes.
Luke Burbank: I kind of wanted I sort of wanted to start this this conversation where the book actually starts. So you're in West Monroe, Louisiana. You're you're back home from your freshman year of college and your mom is in the bathroom crying her eyes out. Why?
Casey Parks: Well, I had kissed a girl and it was awesome. I was not crying. You know, I thought it was wonderful. And I was so moved by that kiss, I felt like, well, the week after that kiss, Easter Sunday, came around and I went home to go to church. And I don't know how many of you all have been to evangelical churches, but the songs are designed to make you cry. Like, the chord progression is just like there's like a key that it turns in you and you cry. And so I started crying, and they were playing my favorite song, which was Shout to the Lord and.
Luke Burbank: Let the Earth.
Casey Parks: Yes. Oh, yes. Or something. Yeah. And actually, this woman that had short hair was the soloist, and I had had a long time crush on her. And actually someone from my hometown just reached out to me and she was like, Cheryl, really? But I was like, she had short hair. That was literally that's all it took at that time. But so I started crying and my mom, you know, leaned over and was like, do you want to go to the altar? And I said, The altars I've tried the altar is not going to fix me. And so I told her I was gay. And the pastor actually went in front of our whole church the next week and said, Satan's got to hold of Casey. And he prayed this prayer is actually pretty clever. It was save her and take her. And the idea is like, I would ask forgiveness for this kiss and then die immediately so that I could go to heaven. And my dad, when the preacher prayed this, my dad was like, I'm sorry. Did you just pray that my daughter would die? And the preacher was like, Well, you know, just on earth, right? She'll live forever.
Luke Burbank: Her treasures are stored up in straight heaven.
Casey Parks: Oh, yeah, he'll be fine. I'll be, you know, on the roads of gold, just praising Jesus all day long, Which the older I get, the more I don't understand why that's heaven. Yeah.
Luke Burbank: Just streets of gold.
Casey Parks: Yeah. No, the praising Jesus all day long, like. Or praising God like so all day long. All you do is tell this dude you're awesome.
Luke Burbank: He doesn't sound insecure at all.
Casey Parks: I mean, hell, I've got to admit, I'm still scared of hell, but I don't know that heaven sounds much more fun. I mean.
Luke Burbank: I as a former evangelical kid myself, I would say it's a dangerous thing to start pulling on the thread of that poorly knitted Afghan sweater because comes comes to pretty fast. This is live wire from PRX. We are listening to an interview with Casey Parks from the Washington Post about her latest book, Diary of a Misfit. We've got to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. Much more with Casey in a moment. Welcome back to Live Wire. I'm your host, Luke Burbank, here with Elena Passarello. We are listening to an interview with Casey Parks talking about her book, Diary of a Misfit. We recorded this in front of a live audience in Portland, Oregon. Check it out. On this same day that that you told your mom you were gay and that she was having a real hard time dealing with that. Your grandmother, who sounds like was a pretty no nonsense person, first of all, sort of comes in the bathroom, says something pretty iconic, Right? Which was.
Casey Parks: Yeah, I don't know if you're allowed to cuss on the radio.
Luke Burbank: Give it a shot.
Casey Parks: Okay, Y'all can bleep me. And I actually I'm not that much of a cusser, but, you know, I am a journalist, so I do believe in accuracy. My, my, my mom was crying on the toilet, and my grandma stormed in, and it was a little tiny bath about the size of the stool. And my grandma storms in. And she says, Rhonda Jean, that was my mom's name. Life is a buffet. Some people eat hot dogs and some people eat fish. She likes women, and you need to get over it. I still do. I still. I mean, this was 2002, so I've had 20 years to think about this. And I still, like, wonder, did she know what she meant when she said fish.
Luke Burbank: Did she pick two incredibly anatomically germane foods?
Casey Parks: Like, were they just random? This is just a buffet, you know, just any old any old hot dog and fish. Right. Right. I mean, at that time, you know, I had not really done that much with a girl like I had seen the joy of lesbian sex in the sociology section of Barnes and Noble. But I was afraid to open it. So I wasn't sure if what she was saying was accurate or not.
Luke Burbank: Well, it sounds like maybe part of your grandma having a to some degree open mind about this was because of an experience that then she shared with you. I think later on, maybe even in that same day about a man that she had known growing up named Roy. What was so special about this relationship with Roy for her?
Casey Parks: So my grandma was a really tough person. She did not really speak with love very often. She just kind of spoke in declarations. And I had not spent a lot of time with her because of that, because I was kind of afraid of her and she had like hair that just stuck straight up. And she kind of commanded me to sit at this broke down table with her. And she was just, you know, fumbling with the Virginia Slims, getting ready to smoke.
Luke Burbank: The big theme in the book.
Casey Parks: And she just looked at me in the eye and said, I just want to remind everyone, this is 2002. So the terminology was different. But she said, I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man. And I just was like, Whaaaaat? I mean, the only gay people I knew knew were Ellen DeGeneres and Elton John. So and I didn't know any trans people. So it just rocked my world that she did that. My grandma knew somebody. And I remember, like, the first thing I asked her was, well, do people tar and feather this person out and down the middle of town like I was still, you know, thinking southern, I guess. But and she just said, no, everybody loved Roy because he was a good Christian person.
Luke Burbank: When did you get the idea that you wanted to go find out what Roy's life had been like?
Casey Parks: Well, she kind of commanded me to do it that day.
Luke Burbank: This was a really big day in your life like this. You must have been tired. At the end of the day, this is a lot.
Casey Parks: She told me that at one point in her life, he had been the most important person to her, but she had lost touch with him. And she told me that there were a bunch of mysteries, the primary one being that he had supposedly been kidnaped as a little girl and raised as a boy. And she said that the people who raised him, the mom, like on her deathbed, pulled my great grandma down into this tub of alcohol where she was like trying to heal herself or something and had confessed. And so she wanted me to go solve that mystery and find out, like, what happened to Roy and. You know, we're a dramatic lot. So they like to smoke in what we called the carport. I think there's a different word for it out here, but just an enclosed garage. So I waited. She went out there. Um, she kind of gave me time to think about her commandment. And then I remember I walked into the carport and in my mind, it's like, very dramatic, Like I wade into the cigaret smoke and just declared, like, I will go to Delhi and find out about Roy. And I mean, I was 18 and I thought that I was a journalist because I had written one article about Salvation Army bell ringers. It made it on the front page of the Alexandria Daily Town Talk.
Luke Burbank: Yeah. Don't hide your light under a bushel.
Casey Parks: But I really didn't know how to be a journalist in my mind. I was going to roll into Delhi, strut into the library snatch a reel of microfiche out of the box and just load it up. And it was going to say, Baby stolen. Here's who he belonged to. Here's who stole him. And, you know, here's your answers, Casey. But first of all, I didn't have a car or money. My parents gave me $20 in a Popeyes bathroom for college. So and I had to use that already to buy coffees to see the girl that I had kissed. Also, it took me a couple of years to get money and a car and gumption. And. And so there was a couple of years, and then my mom owed me for some things.
Luke Burbank: Right? Because I got to the part of the book where your mom, who knew a lot of people over in this town of Delhi, spelled like Delhi, but pronounced Delhi.
Casey Parks: And that's a big theme in the South. Like, actually, I just did the audiobook. I recorded the audiobook and the people at Penguin Random House wrote back to me on a couple of things and said, Hey, you mispronounced Macon. It's it's supposed to sound like bacon. And I said, Oh, no, let me let me introduce you to a few country songs off the Internet. It's pronounced Mason here, and there's quite a few where I mean, what we are in Portland. We also like to mispronounce things.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, I'll never get used to Couch.... The street. Everything else is fine and normal. You're not that.
Casey Parks: Are you coming out on my way?
Luke Burbank: It's going to be a shock to my girlfriend who's sitting in the third row. Sorry, Becks.
Casey Parks: You know. Well, that's our agenda. So. I think I can probably leave now. I converted one.
Luke Burbank: There was at the part of the book. I was surprised that after your mom's really intense reaction to you coming out, that she was then kind of helping drive you over there and make some introductions to folks that she knew from her childhood. And then we get to the part of the book about why she owed you. Which was pretty shocking, actually. She had opened a bunch of credit cards in your name and ran amok. Yeah.
Casey Parks: She basically stole $20,000 from me at the time. I worked at The Oregonian, and I made $7.80 an hour and my parents refused or couldn't. I don't really know. They did not pay back my credit. So like half of my $7 and 81 hour paycheck, I think I made like 200 bucks a week and half of that went to creditors. And yeah, I basically guilted her into doing this of saying like, if you're not going to pay off my credit card debts, you're at least going to go talk to strangers with me.
Elena Passarello: Seems like a good deal.
Casey Parks: Oh, yeah. I mean, and honestly, my mother loved drama and she wasn't going to say no to it. I'm like, we're about to go investigate a kidnaping of a transgender man. Like, do you want to go? Yeah.
Elena Passarello: And she was good at it. Oh, she's good at talking to people and sort of rattling cages and setting. She's like your fixer.
Casey Parks: Yeah, I, actually, I'm the worst natural journalist in my family. I'm very shy, and I don't like talking to strangers or anybody. And. And I don't have, like, a lot of natural smarts. I have I can, like, read a lot and do that. You know, you don't talk to people. You can read a lot. But the rest of my family loves talking to people and they all are all like super street smart. Like I have one time spent like a year and a half trying to figure out how welfare worked. And then my cousin who just got out of prison was like, Oh, you know, the ombudsman does this and this is her number. Like, you know, just they all know stuff, right?
Luke Burbank: Well, I want to find out a little bit more about what this person, Roy's life actually looked like, because one of the things I noticed in the book, because you're quoting people directly, was nobody gets his pronouns right. But also, I didn't sense as a reader a lot of malice behind that from those particular people that are in the book. It was an extremely complicated relationship with this person. It didn't seem like he was run out of town, but it didn't seem like he was respected in the way that we would hope someone to be respected.
Casey Parks: You know, Roy lived at a time where transgender was not a geopolitical issue. There was no alliance defending freedom, like sending out model legislation to every state. He was not a force in this world. He was just the guy who mowed people's lawns and played the banjo on his porch. And I think in that way, like his life was in some ways easier than it might be for transpeople now. I mean, in other ways, it was much more difficult. But he could kind of exist without a. A concerted opposition against him. But people did know. I think he he didn't want people to know. He he did take pains to present as a man and he thought of himself. I mean, he was very pained by the idea of having to wear women's clothes and or a woman's haircut. But once people knew, especially once they thought that something had happened to make him that way, and people had all kind of different reasons, like there were some people who knew this kidnaping story that my grandma knew, some people who thought a piece of tractor equipment had hit him on the head. And that is why. The most interesting one that I ever heard is someone told me that his family was too poor to afford starch for dresses, and that's why he had to live his entire life as a man. And that just seems like a really long game for the lack of starch, I think. I think starch had fallen out of fashion by the time, you know, I was around snooping.
Luke Burbank: But 20 years in, you figured you'd have worked it out. You'd have found a solution to that.
Casey Parks: How much does starch cost anyway? I mean, I don't think it's a bank breaker, but.
Luke Burbank: I feel like this book, by the way, we're talking to Casey Parks about her book, Diary of a Misfit, which is a reference to a series of diaries that you were told Roy had kept, which is a big kind of arc of this book. Is you trying to get your hands on these diaries that he was keeping, which I will talk about in a minute. But also the other big sort of arc of this book to me is your relationship with your mother. Your mom is comes off as a really intriguing character, but somebody who's very flawed. You write about, you know, her addiction issues and her being physically abusive to you at times. You also write with a ton of love about her. Was it hard for you to put in the less sort of great parts of her personality in the sense that you were worried people might get the wrong impression of her or your relationship?
Casey Parks: This is probably not the wisest way to write a book, but I really did not think about anyone reading it.
Elena Passarello: I think that's a great way to write a book, honestly, because then it's like, you know, the book that you want to write and then you can think about the rest of the world. Because the hardest part about a book is finishing.
Casey Parks: It well, and then after you turn it in, you have a whole year before it comes out. And then that's all you think about is what people are going to think. (That's when you run interference.) But I mostly wrote it during the pandemic, and spoiler alert, my mother had recently died. And so I think I was also just trying to reckon with some of it. And, you know, right before this, I had gone to a master's program where everyone was obsessed with writing about the opioid epidemic, and none of it squared with what I had experienced. And so I think there was some of that where I was like, I want to write what it's really like. Not everyone got hurt at the factory and has passed out at Walmart over the steering wheel, waiting on Narcan and. So I just I think I just wrote like the truest version I could and like and that includes about myself too. I mean, I think I don't always look great in the book, but I just tried to report about everyone almost dispassionately, I guess, of just like, who are you and all the different ways that you are someone or who were you and. Um, it's interesting that you say the physically abusive thing. I just was in therapy last week in my therapist. It's something about me being abused. I was like, I wasn't abused. And she was like, Well, what do you think abuse is? I was like, Only if you get punched in the head are you abused. She's like, Where did you come up with that definition? And I was like, Well, I was slapped in the head, but that's not the same thing. But I mean, in the South, I do think it's like a really physically violent place and kind of biblically or been to be that, you know, there's this the spare the rod verse. So some of it too, I think I, I didn't even realize how it might come off to other people because I still have like my southern glasses on of thinking like, well, this is normal. I don't even know how much smoking there was. I was just like, well, people were smoking at that time. So...
Elena Passarello: I had a lot of experiences. I come from a very different part of the South, but there were a couple of resonant moments that really rung true, which one of them was when the men are gone, the women put their nightgowns on and they just hang out in their nightgowns for the whole day. And I was just so happy that that cross state lines from Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, that's apparently the dress code for when there's no Y chromosomes.
Casey Parks: And this is how I know I'm gay. I don't have any nightgowns. I just kind of go Winnie the Pooh at night. But when they would get in their nightgowns, I'd be like, I don't know what I'm supposed to put on.
Elena Passarello: It's a good Christmas gift idea for you.
Luke Burbank: I don't want to I don't give way too much from from the end of the book. But there is a I mean, it is a real mystery as to kind of what what all went on for Roy. And if people were taking care of him or were actually looking to, you know, take advantage of him, etc.. But I was really struck in in reading some of the writings that you uncover of his just like in his Bible and the back of photos and stuff. I mean, he was a person who who unfortunately seemed to have a pretty low opinion of himself. And you could understand why because of all of the social pressure and things that were really going against him. But I guess I just wonder, what do you think he would make of all of this? I mean, he just lived a pretty quiet life and was a pretty humble person. We're here on a stage in Portland, Oregon, recording this for hundreds of thousands of people to hear. Like, what do you think he would have made of it?
Casey Parks: I don't know if you all know those, but it took me 20 years to write this. And for a lot of those 20 years, I was I wondered like, well, would he want me to do this? And that was scary to me because I can't ask him. And there was even one time where, like, I was in the cemetery and I saw the woman who raised him's tombstone and I was like, trying to dig it out. And I got bitten by a fire ant and I'm allergic to fire ants. And my arms swelled up really big. And I was like, That was Roy telling me to go not do this? But you're 19 or 18. I got a poem that he wrote, and the last few lines are like, When I die, no one is going to remember me and no one is going to miss me. And I remember when I found that just like looking up and saying, he's wrong. I think he is somebody who wanted to be known. I mean, he he wrote songs and tried to sell them and he played them. And I do think people write songs because they want to be known somehow or like they want to leave something behind. And so I think that he would be moved by it. But I mean, it's certainly a long way from Delhi to to have his picture everywhere. I mean, his face was on the front of The New York Times Book Review and in bookstores. And it is wild to wrap my mind around. And, you know, hopefully I'll still make it to heaven. And I'm going to ask him.
Luke Burbank: I feel like both of y'all are going to get there, but he's already up there, so. Casey Parks, thanks so much for coming on, Live Wire. So grateful. That was Casey Parks right here on Live Wire. Her book, Diary of a Misfit, is available now. Live Wire is brought to you in part by Alaska Airlines. Alaska Airlines offers the most nonstop from the West Coast, including destinations like Hawaii, Palm Springs and San Francisco. And as a member of the OneWorld alliance, Alaska Airlines can connect you to more than 1000 destinations worldwide with their global partners. Learn more at Alaska Air dot com. Sometimes checking your email, let's be honest, can be a little stressful, but we want to change that over here at Live Wire. We want to make checking your email more joyful with our weekly newsletter, which is only good news. That's all we do over here at the Live Wire newsletter. We got sneak peeks and deep dives on upcoming events, details on where you can join us live. New episode drops. And even more than that, getting this drop of joy. It's super easy to head over to Live Wire Radio dot org and you click Keep in touch. It takes like 30 seconds, 25 if you're speedy. So help us help you have a little more fun in your inbox with the latest from the Livewire newsletter. This is Live Wire. Of course, each week on the show, we like to ask our listeners a question kind of related to what we're talking about this week in relation to Casey Park's book. We asked what is a mystery that you're still trying to solve? Elena has been collecting up those responses. What are you seeing?
Elena Passarello: What do you think about this short and sweet one word response from Frank? The mystery that Frank is still trying to solve risotto.
Luke Burbank: Like how to make it.
Elena Passarello: Because it's really hard.
Luke Burbank: I tried to make it one time. It feels like you're just when you think that you've put enough chicken stock or whatever into the rice, double it, come back in 4 hours and do more of it. Like it's a very I feel like to build it is involved.
Elena Passarello: I know that friend of the show and a MacArthur genius Hanif Abdurraqib, is chasing the perfect risotto.
Luke Burbank: That's good. Actually, there needs to be one thing that he is not totally good at yet because he seems to be really good at a lot of things. I've mastered eating risotto. That's really my lane is going to the restaurant and ordering it and then eating all of it.
Elena Passarello: It's so good.
Luke Burbank: It is dense, though. It like the event horizon of food. It is massively dense.
Elena Passarello: There's some island like right off the coast of Venice that has a very famous risotto restaurant that has drawings on napkins on the wall in which folks like Picasso were so jonesing for this risotto and they didn't have enough money, so they paid in sketches.
Luke Burbank: I am going to that place. I keep getting stuck at the Venice Casino. I'm not actually kidding you, which is very cool. But I got to. I got to expand the next time I'm in Venice.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, Go there.
Luke Burbank: Okay. All right. What's something else? That is a mystery one of our listeners is still working on.
Elena Passarello: I mean, this is a mystery to me as to why people would wonder this. It's from Colleen. The mystery Colleen is trying to solve is whether you should brush your teeth before breakfast or after.
Luke Burbank: Hmm. Now, why is that something that seems very obvious to you?
Elena Passarello: Do you brush your teeth after you eat? Right. Because then all the granules and stuff rake you?
Luke Burbank: Well, I brush my teeth first thing in the morning, so. See, I do think this might be a mystery, or at least something that there's not unanimity on.
Elena Passarello: Oh, I see. But you don't. But then if you have breakfast, you don't brush your teeth again.
Luke Burbank: I might, depending on emotionally how I'm doing that day. Sometimes I self-soothe by brushing in the middle of the day or flossing, but I feel like the first thing you do in the morning is you brush your teeth to get ready to take on the day. It sounds like the listener is wondering if you might just wait like 20 minutes, eat your breakfast and then do your brushing and kind of take care of, you know, the malt-o-meal or whatever.
Elena Passarello: I feel like I am revealing something about my own personal hygiene that maybe shouldn't be on the radio. But I wake up, I drink a bunch of coffee, I don't want to brush my teeth before the coffee, and then I eat breakfast and then I brush my teeth.
Luke Burbank: Let me just pass out some more questionable science. My daughter told me that she read somewhere that we're not supposed to be rinsing our mouths after we brush our teeth because the toothpaste itself is still doing some work. That is not dental advice from Live Wire. I'm just repeating something my adult daughter told me. Okay, before we get in trouble, another mystery that one of our listeners is still trying to solve.
Elena Passarello: This mystery, I believe, is for the younger generation. And it's from Britt trying to solve every single one of Taylor Swift's Easter eggs.
Luke Burbank: Oh, my goodness. That is a continually renewing resource.
Elena Passarello: Yeah. You know, like, I don't know any of them. I don't know. I know that Jake Gyllenhaal is maybe involved, but like that.
Luke Burbank: But that's like one or two albums ago. That's the thing. Every time you turn around, the Internet is on fire because T-Swift has dropped another album that's full of sub tweets. Yeah, and I'm still working on like three or four. I'm trying to figure out what's going on with 1999 still.
Elena Passarello: It's kind of like like when you read James Joyce's Ulysses and there's a bunch of literary allusions or like T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, and you're like, I'm just reading the poem. Like, that's the way I listen to Taylor Swift's music. I'm just like, nice sounds.
Luke Burbank: To tell you just how hard of a time I'm having with it. I've just learned from our producers. The album is called 1989, not 1999. I have so much to learn about Taylor. All right. One last mystery that one of our listeners is trying to solve.
Elena Passarello: Okay, how about this one from Jill, The mystery Jill is trying to solve? Why my date went to the bathroom and never came back. Obviously, he's a superhero.
Luke Burbank: I don't know if this is a new thing or just because of like Tik Tok and other social media. I, as a completely outside observer, are more brought into it, but I feel like I see a lot of people posting like Tik Toks, where they're sitting at a table in a restaurant with two meals in front of them saying, My date went to the bathroom and it's been 45 minutes. Do you think that they're gone for good? This is not something that I remember from my younger days or my dating life. I'm wondering, is this a new development or are we just tracking it more? Closely because of like, social media.
Elena Passarello: And then you have to pay for them.
Luke Burbank: I'm thinking about the heartbreak in the rejection of somebody ghosting on you at dinner and you're thinking, Do I have to tip? I mean, what's the tip on that now? Because I didn't even eat the other thing. Well, hopefully that is not happening to too many of our listeners out there. And thank you, by the way, to everyone who sent in their responses to our listener question. We've got a question for next week's show that we will reveal at the end of this episode. So stick around for that. I'm Luke Burbank, by the way. Here with Elena Passarello, the very economically minded Elena Passareollo. Oh, we've got to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. When we come back, we're going to chat with Thunderstorm Artis and we're going to hear one of his amazing songs. So stay tuned for that. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. Okay, before we hear some music, let's get a little preview of next week's show. We are going to be talking to author and Jeopardy! Co-host Ken Jennings, the only guest that will compel my mother, Suzy Burbank, to actually come to a live taping of Live Wire, which hurts a little bit. Ken's going to be talking about his latest book, 100 Places to See After You Die. A Travel Guide to the Afterlife. And also what it's like to do those little interviews on Jeopardy with the contestants. We're also going to talk to Erica Barry, who's got a new book called Wolfish. It explores wolves of both the real and kind of symbolic variety and also our relationship to fear. Plus, we're going to be looking to get your answers to our listener question. Elena, what are we asking the of our listeners for next week's show?
Elena Passarello: We would like for you please to describe your perfect afterlife.
Luke Burbank: Okay. If you've got some thoughts on the afterlife and what you'd like to look like, go ahead and let us know on Twitter or Facebook. Hey, around threads yet find us on the Internet somewhere.
Elena Passarello: They're called. They're called live threads for us.
Luke Burbank: That's right. We're at Live Wire Radio in most of those places. All right. Our musical guest this week broke into the spotlight as a finalist on season 18 of The Voice. None other than the John Legend described his tone as magical. Billboard has praised his earnest, uplifting presence. Since then, he's played with folks like Jack Johnson, Booker T, and his music has been featured on the TV show Grey's Anatomy. He's also toured extensively with his brother, Ron Artis, the second. This is our conversation with Thunderstorm Artis, recorded in front of a live audience at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland. Welcome to the show.
Thunderstorm Artis: Oh, man, I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me.
Luke Burbank: Okay. I understand that you had a song that was recently featured on Gray's Anatomy. Did you have a watching party or anything?
Thunderstorm Artis: It was me and my five little nieces and nephew and my brother and sister. And I'm in California, actually, on the Jack Johnson tour. We got to watch it like. And it was like, the most special thing ever, man.
Elena Passarello: Oh, what was happening when the song played? What was happening in the plot?
Thunderstorm Artis: You know, I had to tell my nieces to look away. You know, it's like an open heart surgery, you know? So I was like, okay, don't look now, look, don't look now, look.
Elena Passarello: I thought you were going to say like, a steamy love scene, but it was.
Thunderstorm Artis: I mean, it probably would've been better, you know?
Luke Burbank: So it was the soundtrack to a medical procedure.
Thunderstorm Artis: It was actually it was like this most intense scene in the show. Like, for this episode, this is like the, what, the season opener, the first episode of season 19, I want to say. And it's a scene where it's like, this patient is going through this big heart surgery. The family is all around. They're all praying and there's like 4 minutes of just like no dialog and just my song is like helping set the mood for this. Oh my. It's like super intense scene is. Wow. It was I was like, Wow, I'm getting chills watching it.
Luke Burbank: Oh, that's so cool. Now, we've had your brother Ron on the show a couple of times and he is so great. I know sort of famously that your family grew up on the North Shore of Oahu playing music together. That sounds like the most ideal childhood ever, was it?
Thunderstorm Artis: I mean, it was so easy. My school was playing music. I mean, I'm from a family of 11 kids, six boys and five girls. I'm number seven. My parents both played music, were all home schooled. Sometimes I wish I can go back there and not worry about bills and, you know, just play music every day. It's the best.
Luke Burbank: Thing. I'm surprised any of you left the home. I mean, I would just I'd be I'd be like 60 still there, like North Shore of Oahu playing music.
Thunderstorm Artis: Just living in my mom's basement, you know, making music. Yeah.
Luke Burbank: Okay. When you were auditioning on The Voice, and for folks who don't know, there's this. It's got the blind auditions. So, you know, the judges have their backs to the person who's performing. And you played the song Blackbird. Mm hmm. And, like, that is not an easy song to play on guitar. It's some fairly intricate fingerpicking. Were you nervous to play that song for those judges?
Thunderstorm Artis: First of all, I just want to acknowledge that. Like, that's amazing that you know that because it is a very difficult song.
Luke Burbank: I spent an entire road trip in the back of a Toyota van trying to learn Blackbird.
Thunderstorm Artis: I think it was even so, like cool, nerve wracking. Yes. To answer your question, 100%. My stage coach was like, you know, try not to look at your hands. Just look at people and don't look at your guitar. And I was like, She's like, It's not that important what you're doing that I was like, You know what's happening in the song?
Luke Burbank: Yeah. If you miss a note on that, it is very, very apparent. But yeah, crushed it. And like, you're, like, you're basically like 10 seconds into the song that's like, pop. Like, everyone's hitting their button to turn their chairs around. Like, it was instantaneous. Yeah. Then there's a big relief. Go through you once that starts happening.
Thunderstorm Artis: Now, because you still got a minute left to sing. To you like. Yes, I sealed the deal, but now the mess up, they're going to be like, How do I turn this thing back around? But but no, I mean, the other fun thing about it is that the sound is added afterwards. So if you go back and you watch my episode in my performance, another thing my stage coach told me was "Open your eyes." And so I normally sing with my eyes closed because I allow my emotions to just kind of kind of take me over. And so like 30 seconds to the song, I'm like, Oh, I need to open my eyes. And then I do. And they're all staring at me. And it's like, as far as just the back of this room right there. So they're not that far and they're a lot closer. And they, you know, they look good. They're good. Wow.
Elena Passarello: Look at people looking down.
Thunderstorm Artis: But they're staring right at me, piercing in my soul. Just focus. And I'm just like, okay, don't freak out, Thunder. You know what I mean? And I get through the rest of the song, you know, And man, who is like, one of the best performances of my life. Thank you for that journey, that opportunity. And it came about in the craziest way. I didn't like audition for the show. They reached out to me and asked me to come and be on it, and it wasn't something that was in my plan for the year and it was one of the best things that happened. And I met my wife and now I have a kid.
Luke Burbank: You you met your wife through the TV show The Voice.
Thunderstorm Artis: Technically, I was supposed to go on this long vacation and they made me fly back home to Hawaii. That she's some back backstory stuff. And during that little trip that I wouldn't have been on. I met my wife.
Luke Burbank: And now you have three and a half month old Ezekiel here somewhere in the building.
Thunderstorm Artis: He's right there in the back.
Luke Burbank: I mean, all thanks to Blake Shelton. Who'd have thunk?
Thunderstorm Artis: Who would have thunk?
Luke Burbank: Okay, what song are we going to hear?
Thunderstorm Artis: So I'm going to do "Stronger" the song you heard on Grey's Anatomy. This song is just about a lot of the things I've been experiencing in my journey of being an artist and a musician. And just the idea of my parents have always tried to instill just a sense of compass of truth in us. And so no matter just like what I encountered, it was just like, Oh, Mom, like, I pray that I'll stay strong and just continue to carry on the things that you've taught me. So, so the song is about I hope you guys enjoy it.
Luke Burbank: Wow. .
Thunderstorm Artis: [Lyrics]
Luke Burbank: Wooh! Thunderstorm, Artis. That was Thunderstorm Artis. His new single, Stronger is available right now. All right. That's going to do it for this week's episode of Live Wire. A huge thanks to our guests, Casey Parks and Thunderstorm Artis. Live Wire is brought to you in part by Alaska Airlines.
Elena Passarello: Laura Hadden is our executive producer, Heather de Michele is our executive director and our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Molly Pettit is our technical director and mixer. And our House Sound is by D. Neil Blake. Tre Hester is our assistant editor. Rosa Garcia is our operations associate. And Julienne McElmurry is our intern. Our house band is Ethan Fox Tucker, Sam Tucker, Ayal Alves and A. Walker Spring, who also composes our music.
Luke Burbank: Additional funding provided by the James F and Marian L Miller Foundation. Live Wire was created by Robin Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week we'd like to thank members Anne Wendland and Jon Lowery of Vancouver, Washington. For more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast, head on over to Livewire Radio dot org. I'm Luke Burbank for Elena Passaro and the whole Live Wire team. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.
PRX.
Luke Burbank: Hey, Elena!
Elena Passarello: Hey, Luke. How you doing?
Luke Burbank: I'm doing well. Now. I'm looking at you over Zoom as we record this. Are you wearing camouflage?
Elena Passarello: It looks like that kind of Duck Dynasty camouflage. But if you look closely, it's actually a medieval kind of the lady and the unicorn.
Luke Burbank: Oh, wow. This beautiful that allows you to fit in seamlessly into a literature program at a major state college.
Elena Passarello: That's right. That's right. Or any medievalist convention that happens to spring up anywhere.
Luke Burbank: It's public radio cammo. Let's be honest. Are you ready for a little station location Identification Examination?
Elena Passarello: Oh, I think so.
Luke Burbank: This is going to be a good one. I love these hints. Okay, This is where I quiz Elena on a place in the country where Live Wire is on the radio, you got to guess where I'm talking about. This city is known as the hot air ballooning capital of the world.
Elena Passarello: Is it Albuquerque, New Mexico?
Luke Burbank: My goodness gracious. It is Albuquerque, New Mexico. How did you know that?
Elena Passarello: Well, when my friend Bonnie moved here, we have a little hot air ballooning festival in Albany, Oregon. And I invited her to it and she said, I'm from Albuquerque, the hot air ballooning capital of the world.
Luke Burbank: Your mind is a steel trap, my friend. That is the place I was talking about, where we're on the radio on K A N W. I could have also told you that it claims to be where the breakfast burrito was invented. All right, Shout out to everybody listening in Albuquerque and all over the country. Should we get to the show?
Elena Passarello: Let's do it.
Luke Burbank: All right. Take it away.
Elena Passarello: From PRX. It's LIVE WIRE! This week, writer and reporter Casey Parks.
Casey Parks: Actually, I'm the worst natural journalist and my family, I'm very shy and I don't like talking to strangers or anybody.
Elena Passarello: With music from Thunderstorm Artis.
Thunderstorm Artis: I normally sing with my eyes closed because I allow my emotions to just kind of kind of take me over. And so 30 seconds to this song. I'm like, Oh, I need to open my eyes. And then I do. And they're all staring at me.
Elena Passarello: I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello, and now the host of Live Wire, Luke Burbank.
Luke Burbank: Hey, thank you so much, Elena. Thanks to everyone for tuning in from all over the country. Got a great show in store for you this week. This conversation that we had with Casey Parks about her book, Diary of a Misfit was so memorable. Folks that were there when we recorded it live, we've gotten in touch and just mentioned to me in passing how much fun it was. So very excited to play that for everyone and of course, excited to provide the listener responses to our question. This week we asked the listeners, what is a mystery you're still trying to solve? This is tied into Casey's book. We're going to give those responses coming up in a few. First, though, of course, we got to kick things off with the best news we heard all week this. This is our little reminder that there is some good news still happening out there in the world. Elena, what is the best news that you heard all week?
Elena Passarello: I'm writing news. I love a good a good writing story. Gee, I wonder why. So here we have a story about a teenager in London named Dylan Brennan. Dylan is obviously in school, but wasn't in school for a significant part of 2020 and 2021 for reasons that I think you can guess. And like a lot of not just teenagers, but all folks. Dylan noticed that he was spending way too much time in front of screens, namely playing video games. And I've just got to say, if a teenager is realizing that he is spending way too much time playing video games, the hour total of that must have been really significant.
Luke Burbank: That's like a six year old reporting that they got too much Halloween candy.
Elena Passarello: Exactly. But guess what? Dylan did something about it. Not only did he do something about it, he did something that's very, very difficult to do. I can tell you, on ten years of personal experience. He wrote a book. What? He wrote a novel. He sort of channeled the authors that he loved the most, which include J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin and Islam. It's just now occurring to me. That is George R.R. Martin have two R initials in his middle name as a Tolkien shout out.
Luke Burbank: Or do you have to have 2 hours in your middle name to really crush it at that sort of, you know, fantasy style of writing?
Elena Passarello: That's right. So then Daniel R.R. Brennan decided to follow in their footsteps, and he made this book called Noble Betrayed. It's a big old, gorgeous honker doorstop novel that he worked on for nine months. He named some of the characters after his teachers, and he modeled some of the action after life and news events and things that he was aware of in his hometown of London. I haven't read it yet, but I can read it now because this month it was just released on Amazon. I think he took advantage of some of the amazing self-publishing opportunities that are today that made blockbusters like The Martian happen, for example.
Luke Burbank: Right.
Elena Passarello: So he put it out. It has already received five star reviews, not just from his home country of the United Kingdom, but from the USA, from Spain, from Australia. And he feels amazing. He can't wait to start another book. And I just love the idea that, like, you know, like not only did he kind of make his life a little richer by finding a hobby that doesn't necessarily involve a screen, but he's done this really amazing accomplishment. It's really hard to put a novel together. And then he's made this gorgeous product that, by the way, if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription, you can download for free right now.
Luke Burbank: That is so impressive. You've written books, Elena. I've told people at parties that I'm going to try to write a book. So we're kind of the same on this. I think we both know what an accomplishment it is for someone to actually finish something like this. All right. From a cool story about this young person in London to a story that kind of sounds apocryphal. Somebody decided to write on Twitter the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. Paid for Julia Roberts birth is a little known fact that sends me. That was what somebody wrote on Twitter. And then of course the rest of the internet said that definitely sounds made up. Like that would be wild if true. But that just seems like one of the many questionable things floating around cyberspace. Well, it turns out it is 100% true, Elena. Julia Roberts was born in Smyrna, Georgia. Now, maybe you know this because you're a Georgian, and so this is kind of local lore, but I'm just learning about it as a Yankee. Right? So Julia Roberts folks ran a theater school in Atlanta, and Dr. King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, were trying to find somewhere for their kids to go. And because of the time, they were having a really difficult time placing their kids in one of these programs. And Julia Roberts folks were like, absolutely, bring them on over. And they became family friends and Julia Roberts parents. Turns out running a theater school in Atlanta in that era, not the road to riches. So they did not have the money to pay for Julia Roberts's birth, and the Kings actually paid for her birth. This was confirmed in an interview that Julia Roberts did with Gayle King. No relation. And then also some of the descendants of Dr. King and Credit Scott King were confirming this online. So this is a real thing that a lot of us, not you, Elena, but people like me are just figuring out.
Elena Passarello: I had no idea. But the one thing I did know is my mother took lessons at that acting school with Yolanda King. So she had two stories about the acting school. One was that the King kids were there taking classes with her. I think Yolanda King's like a year younger than my mother. And the other is that she, like, used to hang out with baby Julia Roberts, who I think is like, I don't know, like ten years old, younger than my mom. And my mother had two things to say about baby Julia Roberts. One was that she was blond and two was that she was a very messy baby. I think she, like, watched the baby for a little bit.
Luke Burbank: How did I pick this story off the list when this is your lived experience, Elena, this is like you doing a story about sign painters in Seattle in the 1980s.
Elena Passarello: I don't think she knew anything about that payment thing, though. I think my mom just was happy to take acting classes and she remembers the Roberts family really struggling to make ends meet as well. Like it was a it was really obvious that they were like paycheck to paycheck kind of a situation. So how amazing.
Luke Burbank: That right there, one of these cool stories on the Internet actually being true is the best news that I heard all week. All right. Let's say hi to our first guest. She is a Portland based reporter for The Washington Post, where she covers gender and family issues. She spent ten years in rural Louisiana, which incidentally, is also where she grew up, knocking on doors and researching the life of a country singer who had transfixed her grandmother back in the olden days. And that research became her new book titled Diary of a Misfit, A memoir and a Mystery. Take a listen to this. It's our conversation with Casey Parks. Hello, Casey. Welcome to the show.
Casey Parks: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here to talk about all the saddest moments of my life.
Luke Burbank: You know, this show contains multitudes. So I think we can cover the whole range of human experience. And I feel like this book actually really does. It's it is a really intense story of your life and of the life of somebody else who you came to really know about. But I do think that there's moments of lightness and specificity. I don't know if I've read a book where people smoke more cigarets. I feel like many sentences start with, and then they picked up their Newport spirit.
Casey Parks: I did get an email from a friend of mine who I used to work with at The Oregonian, and she said, This book is making me want to smoke so bad. I love cigarettes.
Luke Burbank: I kind of wanted I sort of wanted to start this this conversation where the book actually starts. So you're in West Monroe, Louisiana. You're you're back home from your freshman year of college and your mom is in the bathroom crying her eyes out. Why?
Casey Parks: Well, I had kissed a girl and it was awesome. I was not crying. You know, I thought it was wonderful. And I was so moved by that kiss, I felt like, well, the week after that kiss, Easter Sunday, came around and I went home to go to church. And I don't know how many of you all have been to evangelical churches, but the songs are designed to make you cry. Like, the chord progression is just like there's like a key that it turns in you and you cry. And so I started crying, and they were playing my favorite song, which was Shout to the Lord and.
Luke Burbank: Let the Earth.
Casey Parks: Yes. Oh, yes. Or something. Yeah. And actually, this woman that had short hair was the soloist, and I had had a long time crush on her. And actually someone from my hometown just reached out to me and she was like, Cheryl, really? But I was like, she had short hair. That was literally that's all it took at that time. But so I started crying and my mom, you know, leaned over and was like, do you want to go to the altar? And I said, The altars I've tried the altar is not going to fix me. And so I told her I was gay. And the pastor actually went in front of our whole church the next week and said, Satan's got to hold of Casey. And he prayed this prayer is actually pretty clever. It was save her and take her. And the idea is like, I would ask forgiveness for this kiss and then die immediately so that I could go to heaven. And my dad, when the preacher prayed this, my dad was like, I'm sorry. Did you just pray that my daughter would die? And the preacher was like, Well, you know, just on earth, right? She'll live forever.
Luke Burbank: Her treasures are stored up in straight heaven.
Casey Parks: Oh, yeah, he'll be fine. I'll be, you know, on the roads of gold, just praising Jesus all day long, Which the older I get, the more I don't understand why that's heaven. Yeah.
Luke Burbank: Just streets of gold.
Casey Parks: Yeah. No, the praising Jesus all day long, like. Or praising God like so all day long. All you do is tell this dude you're awesome.
Luke Burbank: He doesn't sound insecure at all.
Casey Parks: I mean, hell, I've got to admit, I'm still scared of hell, but I don't know that heaven sounds much more fun. I mean.
Luke Burbank: I as a former evangelical kid myself, I would say it's a dangerous thing to start pulling on the thread of that poorly knitted Afghan sweater because comes comes to pretty fast. This is live wire from PRX. We are listening to an interview with Casey Parks from the Washington Post about her latest book, Diary of a Misfit. We've got to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. Much more with Casey in a moment. Welcome back to Live Wire. I'm your host, Luke Burbank, here with Elena Passarello. We are listening to an interview with Casey Parks talking about her book, Diary of a Misfit. We recorded this in front of a live audience in Portland, Oregon. Check it out. On this same day that that you told your mom you were gay and that she was having a real hard time dealing with that. Your grandmother, who sounds like was a pretty no nonsense person, first of all, sort of comes in the bathroom, says something pretty iconic, Right? Which was.
Casey Parks: Yeah, I don't know if you're allowed to cuss on the radio.
Luke Burbank: Give it a shot.
Casey Parks: Okay, Y'all can bleep me. And I actually I'm not that much of a cusser, but, you know, I am a journalist, so I do believe in accuracy. My, my, my mom was crying on the toilet, and my grandma stormed in, and it was a little tiny bath about the size of the stool. And my grandma storms in. And she says, Rhonda Jean, that was my mom's name. Life is a buffet. Some people eat hot dogs and some people eat fish. She likes women, and you need to get over it. I still do. I still. I mean, this was 2002, so I've had 20 years to think about this. And I still, like, wonder, did she know what she meant when she said fish.
Luke Burbank: Did she pick two incredibly anatomically germane foods?
Casey Parks: Like, were they just random? This is just a buffet, you know, just any old any old hot dog and fish. Right. Right. I mean, at that time, you know, I had not really done that much with a girl like I had seen the joy of lesbian sex in the sociology section of Barnes and Noble. But I was afraid to open it. So I wasn't sure if what she was saying was accurate or not.
Luke Burbank: Well, it sounds like maybe part of your grandma having a to some degree open mind about this was because of an experience that then she shared with you. I think later on, maybe even in that same day about a man that she had known growing up named Roy. What was so special about this relationship with Roy for her?
Casey Parks: So my grandma was a really tough person. She did not really speak with love very often. She just kind of spoke in declarations. And I had not spent a lot of time with her because of that, because I was kind of afraid of her and she had like hair that just stuck straight up. And she kind of commanded me to sit at this broke down table with her. And she was just, you know, fumbling with the Virginia Slims, getting ready to smoke.
Luke Burbank: The big theme in the book.
Casey Parks: And she just looked at me in the eye and said, I just want to remind everyone, this is 2002. So the terminology was different. But she said, I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man. And I just was like, Whaaaaat? I mean, the only gay people I knew knew were Ellen DeGeneres and Elton John. So and I didn't know any trans people. So it just rocked my world that she did that. My grandma knew somebody. And I remember, like, the first thing I asked her was, well, do people tar and feather this person out and down the middle of town like I was still, you know, thinking southern, I guess. But and she just said, no, everybody loved Roy because he was a good Christian person.
Luke Burbank: When did you get the idea that you wanted to go find out what Roy's life had been like?
Casey Parks: Well, she kind of commanded me to do it that day.
Luke Burbank: This was a really big day in your life like this. You must have been tired. At the end of the day, this is a lot.
Casey Parks: She told me that at one point in her life, he had been the most important person to her, but she had lost touch with him. And she told me that there were a bunch of mysteries, the primary one being that he had supposedly been kidnaped as a little girl and raised as a boy. And she said that the people who raised him, the mom, like on her deathbed, pulled my great grandma down into this tub of alcohol where she was like trying to heal herself or something and had confessed. And so she wanted me to go solve that mystery and find out, like, what happened to Roy and. You know, we're a dramatic lot. So they like to smoke in what we called the carport. I think there's a different word for it out here, but just an enclosed garage. So I waited. She went out there. Um, she kind of gave me time to think about her commandment. And then I remember I walked into the carport and in my mind, it's like, very dramatic, Like I wade into the cigaret smoke and just declared, like, I will go to Delhi and find out about Roy. And I mean, I was 18 and I thought that I was a journalist because I had written one article about Salvation Army bell ringers. It made it on the front page of the Alexandria Daily Town Talk.
Luke Burbank: Yeah. Don't hide your light under a bushel.
Casey Parks: But I really didn't know how to be a journalist in my mind. I was going to roll into Delhi, strut into the library snatch a reel of microfiche out of the box and just load it up. And it was going to say, Baby stolen. Here's who he belonged to. Here's who stole him. And, you know, here's your answers, Casey. But first of all, I didn't have a car or money. My parents gave me $20 in a Popeyes bathroom for college. So and I had to use that already to buy coffees to see the girl that I had kissed. Also, it took me a couple of years to get money and a car and gumption. And. And so there was a couple of years, and then my mom owed me for some things.
Luke Burbank: Right? Because I got to the part of the book where your mom, who knew a lot of people over in this town of Delhi, spelled like Delhi, but pronounced Delhi.
Casey Parks: And that's a big theme in the South. Like, actually, I just did the audiobook. I recorded the audiobook and the people at Penguin Random House wrote back to me on a couple of things and said, Hey, you mispronounced Macon. It's it's supposed to sound like bacon. And I said, Oh, no, let me let me introduce you to a few country songs off the Internet. It's pronounced Mason here, and there's quite a few where I mean, what we are in Portland. We also like to mispronounce things.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, I'll never get used to Couch.... The street. Everything else is fine and normal. You're not that.
Casey Parks: Are you coming out on my way?
Luke Burbank: It's going to be a shock to my girlfriend who's sitting in the third row. Sorry, Becks.
Casey Parks: You know. Well, that's our agenda. So. I think I can probably leave now. I converted one.
Luke Burbank: There was at the part of the book. I was surprised that after your mom's really intense reaction to you coming out, that she was then kind of helping drive you over there and make some introductions to folks that she knew from her childhood. And then we get to the part of the book about why she owed you. Which was pretty shocking, actually. She had opened a bunch of credit cards in your name and ran amok. Yeah.
Casey Parks: She basically stole $20,000 from me at the time. I worked at The Oregonian, and I made $7.80 an hour and my parents refused or couldn't. I don't really know. They did not pay back my credit. So like half of my $7 and 81 hour paycheck, I think I made like 200 bucks a week and half of that went to creditors. And yeah, I basically guilted her into doing this of saying like, if you're not going to pay off my credit card debts, you're at least going to go talk to strangers with me.
Elena Passarello: Seems like a good deal.
Casey Parks: Oh, yeah. I mean, and honestly, my mother loved drama and she wasn't going to say no to it. I'm like, we're about to go investigate a kidnaping of a transgender man. Like, do you want to go? Yeah.
Elena Passarello: And she was good at it. Oh, she's good at talking to people and sort of rattling cages and setting. She's like your fixer.
Casey Parks: Yeah, I, actually, I'm the worst natural journalist in my family. I'm very shy, and I don't like talking to strangers or anybody. And. And I don't have, like, a lot of natural smarts. I have I can, like, read a lot and do that. You know, you don't talk to people. You can read a lot. But the rest of my family loves talking to people and they all are all like super street smart. Like I have one time spent like a year and a half trying to figure out how welfare worked. And then my cousin who just got out of prison was like, Oh, you know, the ombudsman does this and this is her number. Like, you know, just they all know stuff, right?
Luke Burbank: Well, I want to find out a little bit more about what this person, Roy's life actually looked like, because one of the things I noticed in the book, because you're quoting people directly, was nobody gets his pronouns right. But also, I didn't sense as a reader a lot of malice behind that from those particular people that are in the book. It was an extremely complicated relationship with this person. It didn't seem like he was run out of town, but it didn't seem like he was respected in the way that we would hope someone to be respected.
Casey Parks: You know, Roy lived at a time where transgender was not a geopolitical issue. There was no alliance defending freedom, like sending out model legislation to every state. He was not a force in this world. He was just the guy who mowed people's lawns and played the banjo on his porch. And I think in that way, like his life was in some ways easier than it might be for transpeople now. I mean, in other ways, it was much more difficult. But he could kind of exist without a. A concerted opposition against him. But people did know. I think he he didn't want people to know. He he did take pains to present as a man and he thought of himself. I mean, he was very pained by the idea of having to wear women's clothes and or a woman's haircut. But once people knew, especially once they thought that something had happened to make him that way, and people had all kind of different reasons, like there were some people who knew this kidnaping story that my grandma knew, some people who thought a piece of tractor equipment had hit him on the head. And that is why. The most interesting one that I ever heard is someone told me that his family was too poor to afford starch for dresses, and that's why he had to live his entire life as a man. And that just seems like a really long game for the lack of starch, I think. I think starch had fallen out of fashion by the time, you know, I was around snooping.
Luke Burbank: But 20 years in, you figured you'd have worked it out. You'd have found a solution to that.
Casey Parks: How much does starch cost anyway? I mean, I don't think it's a bank breaker, but.
Luke Burbank: I feel like this book, by the way, we're talking to Casey Parks about her book, Diary of a Misfit, which is a reference to a series of diaries that you were told Roy had kept, which is a big kind of arc of this book. Is you trying to get your hands on these diaries that he was keeping, which I will talk about in a minute. But also the other big sort of arc of this book to me is your relationship with your mother. Your mom is comes off as a really intriguing character, but somebody who's very flawed. You write about, you know, her addiction issues and her being physically abusive to you at times. You also write with a ton of love about her. Was it hard for you to put in the less sort of great parts of her personality in the sense that you were worried people might get the wrong impression of her or your relationship?
Casey Parks: This is probably not the wisest way to write a book, but I really did not think about anyone reading it.
Elena Passarello: I think that's a great way to write a book, honestly, because then it's like, you know, the book that you want to write and then you can think about the rest of the world. Because the hardest part about a book is finishing.
Casey Parks: It well, and then after you turn it in, you have a whole year before it comes out. And then that's all you think about is what people are going to think. (That's when you run interference.) But I mostly wrote it during the pandemic, and spoiler alert, my mother had recently died. And so I think I was also just trying to reckon with some of it. And, you know, right before this, I had gone to a master's program where everyone was obsessed with writing about the opioid epidemic, and none of it squared with what I had experienced. And so I think there was some of that where I was like, I want to write what it's really like. Not everyone got hurt at the factory and has passed out at Walmart over the steering wheel, waiting on Narcan and. So I just I think I just wrote like the truest version I could and like and that includes about myself too. I mean, I think I don't always look great in the book, but I just tried to report about everyone almost dispassionately, I guess, of just like, who are you and all the different ways that you are someone or who were you and. Um, it's interesting that you say the physically abusive thing. I just was in therapy last week in my therapist. It's something about me being abused. I was like, I wasn't abused. And she was like, Well, what do you think abuse is? I was like, Only if you get punched in the head are you abused. She's like, Where did you come up with that definition? And I was like, Well, I was slapped in the head, but that's not the same thing. But I mean, in the South, I do think it's like a really physically violent place and kind of biblically or been to be that, you know, there's this the spare the rod verse. So some of it too, I think I, I didn't even realize how it might come off to other people because I still have like my southern glasses on of thinking like, well, this is normal. I don't even know how much smoking there was. I was just like, well, people were smoking at that time. So...
Elena Passarello: I had a lot of experiences. I come from a very different part of the South, but there were a couple of resonant moments that really rung true, which one of them was when the men are gone, the women put their nightgowns on and they just hang out in their nightgowns for the whole day. And I was just so happy that that cross state lines from Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, that's apparently the dress code for when there's no Y chromosomes.
Casey Parks: And this is how I know I'm gay. I don't have any nightgowns. I just kind of go Winnie the Pooh at night. But when they would get in their nightgowns, I'd be like, I don't know what I'm supposed to put on.
Elena Passarello: It's a good Christmas gift idea for you.
Luke Burbank: I don't want to I don't give way too much from from the end of the book. But there is a I mean, it is a real mystery as to kind of what what all went on for Roy. And if people were taking care of him or were actually looking to, you know, take advantage of him, etc.. But I was really struck in in reading some of the writings that you uncover of his just like in his Bible and the back of photos and stuff. I mean, he was a person who who unfortunately seemed to have a pretty low opinion of himself. And you could understand why because of all of the social pressure and things that were really going against him. But I guess I just wonder, what do you think he would make of all of this? I mean, he just lived a pretty quiet life and was a pretty humble person. We're here on a stage in Portland, Oregon, recording this for hundreds of thousands of people to hear. Like, what do you think he would have made of it?
Casey Parks: I don't know if you all know those, but it took me 20 years to write this. And for a lot of those 20 years, I was I wondered like, well, would he want me to do this? And that was scary to me because I can't ask him. And there was even one time where, like, I was in the cemetery and I saw the woman who raised him's tombstone and I was like, trying to dig it out. And I got bitten by a fire ant and I'm allergic to fire ants. And my arms swelled up really big. And I was like, That was Roy telling me to go not do this? But you're 19 or 18. I got a poem that he wrote, and the last few lines are like, When I die, no one is going to remember me and no one is going to miss me. And I remember when I found that just like looking up and saying, he's wrong. I think he is somebody who wanted to be known. I mean, he he wrote songs and tried to sell them and he played them. And I do think people write songs because they want to be known somehow or like they want to leave something behind. And so I think that he would be moved by it. But I mean, it's certainly a long way from Delhi to to have his picture everywhere. I mean, his face was on the front of The New York Times Book Review and in bookstores. And it is wild to wrap my mind around. And, you know, hopefully I'll still make it to heaven. And I'm going to ask him.
Luke Burbank: I feel like both of y'all are going to get there, but he's already up there, so. Casey Parks, thanks so much for coming on, Live Wire. So grateful. That was Casey Parks right here on Live Wire. Her book, Diary of a Misfit, is available now. Live Wire is brought to you in part by Alaska Airlines. Alaska Airlines offers the most nonstop from the West Coast, including destinations like Hawaii, Palm Springs and San Francisco. And as a member of the OneWorld alliance, Alaska Airlines can connect you to more than 1000 destinations worldwide with their global partners. Learn more at Alaska Air dot com. Sometimes checking your email, let's be honest, can be a little stressful, but we want to change that over here at Live Wire. We want to make checking your email more joyful with our weekly newsletter, which is only good news. That's all we do over here at the Live Wire newsletter. We got sneak peeks and deep dives on upcoming events, details on where you can join us live. New episode drops. And even more than that, getting this drop of joy. It's super easy to head over to Live Wire Radio dot org and you click Keep in touch. It takes like 30 seconds, 25 if you're speedy. So help us help you have a little more fun in your inbox with the latest from the Livewire newsletter. This is Live Wire. Of course, each week on the show, we like to ask our listeners a question kind of related to what we're talking about this week in relation to Casey Park's book. We asked what is a mystery that you're still trying to solve? Elena has been collecting up those responses. What are you seeing?
Elena Passarello: What do you think about this short and sweet one word response from Frank? The mystery that Frank is still trying to solve risotto.
Luke Burbank: Like how to make it.
Elena Passarello: Because it's really hard.
Luke Burbank: I tried to make it one time. It feels like you're just when you think that you've put enough chicken stock or whatever into the rice, double it, come back in 4 hours and do more of it. Like it's a very I feel like to build it is involved.
Elena Passarello: I know that friend of the show and a MacArthur genius Hanif Abdurraqib, is chasing the perfect risotto.
Luke Burbank: That's good. Actually, there needs to be one thing that he is not totally good at yet because he seems to be really good at a lot of things. I've mastered eating risotto. That's really my lane is going to the restaurant and ordering it and then eating all of it.
Elena Passarello: It's so good.
Luke Burbank: It is dense, though. It like the event horizon of food. It is massively dense.
Elena Passarello: There's some island like right off the coast of Venice that has a very famous risotto restaurant that has drawings on napkins on the wall in which folks like Picasso were so jonesing for this risotto and they didn't have enough money, so they paid in sketches.
Luke Burbank: I am going to that place. I keep getting stuck at the Venice Casino. I'm not actually kidding you, which is very cool. But I got to. I got to expand the next time I'm in Venice.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, Go there.
Luke Burbank: Okay. All right. What's something else? That is a mystery one of our listeners is still working on.
Elena Passarello: I mean, this is a mystery to me as to why people would wonder this. It's from Colleen. The mystery Colleen is trying to solve is whether you should brush your teeth before breakfast or after.
Luke Burbank: Hmm. Now, why is that something that seems very obvious to you?
Elena Passarello: Do you brush your teeth after you eat? Right. Because then all the granules and stuff rake you?
Luke Burbank: Well, I brush my teeth first thing in the morning, so. See, I do think this might be a mystery, or at least something that there's not unanimity on.
Elena Passarello: Oh, I see. But you don't. But then if you have breakfast, you don't brush your teeth again.
Luke Burbank: I might, depending on emotionally how I'm doing that day. Sometimes I self-soothe by brushing in the middle of the day or flossing, but I feel like the first thing you do in the morning is you brush your teeth to get ready to take on the day. It sounds like the listener is wondering if you might just wait like 20 minutes, eat your breakfast and then do your brushing and kind of take care of, you know, the malt-o-meal or whatever.
Elena Passarello: I feel like I am revealing something about my own personal hygiene that maybe shouldn't be on the radio. But I wake up, I drink a bunch of coffee, I don't want to brush my teeth before the coffee, and then I eat breakfast and then I brush my teeth.
Luke Burbank: Let me just pass out some more questionable science. My daughter told me that she read somewhere that we're not supposed to be rinsing our mouths after we brush our teeth because the toothpaste itself is still doing some work. That is not dental advice from Live Wire. I'm just repeating something my adult daughter told me. Okay, before we get in trouble, another mystery that one of our listeners is still trying to solve.
Elena Passarello: This mystery, I believe, is for the younger generation. And it's from Britt trying to solve every single one of Taylor Swift's Easter eggs.
Luke Burbank: Oh, my goodness. That is a continually renewing resource.
Elena Passarello: Yeah. You know, like, I don't know any of them. I don't know. I know that Jake Gyllenhaal is maybe involved, but like that.
Luke Burbank: But that's like one or two albums ago. That's the thing. Every time you turn around, the Internet is on fire because T-Swift has dropped another album that's full of sub tweets. Yeah, and I'm still working on like three or four. I'm trying to figure out what's going on with 1999 still.
Elena Passarello: It's kind of like like when you read James Joyce's Ulysses and there's a bunch of literary allusions or like T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, and you're like, I'm just reading the poem. Like, that's the way I listen to Taylor Swift's music. I'm just like, nice sounds.
Luke Burbank: To tell you just how hard of a time I'm having with it. I've just learned from our producers. The album is called 1989, not 1999. I have so much to learn about Taylor. All right. One last mystery that one of our listeners is trying to solve.
Elena Passarello: Okay, how about this one from Jill, The mystery Jill is trying to solve? Why my date went to the bathroom and never came back. Obviously, he's a superhero.
Luke Burbank: I don't know if this is a new thing or just because of like Tik Tok and other social media. I, as a completely outside observer, are more brought into it, but I feel like I see a lot of people posting like Tik Toks, where they're sitting at a table in a restaurant with two meals in front of them saying, My date went to the bathroom and it's been 45 minutes. Do you think that they're gone for good? This is not something that I remember from my younger days or my dating life. I'm wondering, is this a new development or are we just tracking it more? Closely because of like, social media.
Elena Passarello: And then you have to pay for them.
Luke Burbank: I'm thinking about the heartbreak in the rejection of somebody ghosting on you at dinner and you're thinking, Do I have to tip? I mean, what's the tip on that now? Because I didn't even eat the other thing. Well, hopefully that is not happening to too many of our listeners out there. And thank you, by the way, to everyone who sent in their responses to our listener question. We've got a question for next week's show that we will reveal at the end of this episode. So stick around for that. I'm Luke Burbank, by the way. Here with Elena Passarello, the very economically minded Elena Passareollo. Oh, we've got to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. When we come back, we're going to chat with Thunderstorm Artis and we're going to hear one of his amazing songs. So stay tuned for that. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. Okay, before we hear some music, let's get a little preview of next week's show. We are going to be talking to author and Jeopardy! Co-host Ken Jennings, the only guest that will compel my mother, Suzy Burbank, to actually come to a live taping of Live Wire, which hurts a little bit. Ken's going to be talking about his latest book, 100 Places to See After You Die. A Travel Guide to the Afterlife. And also what it's like to do those little interviews on Jeopardy with the contestants. We're also going to talk to Erica Barry, who's got a new book called Wolfish. It explores wolves of both the real and kind of symbolic variety and also our relationship to fear. Plus, we're going to be looking to get your answers to our listener question. Elena, what are we asking the of our listeners for next week's show?
Elena Passarello: We would like for you please to describe your perfect afterlife.
Luke Burbank: Okay. If you've got some thoughts on the afterlife and what you'd like to look like, go ahead and let us know on Twitter or Facebook. Hey, around threads yet find us on the Internet somewhere.
Elena Passarello: They're called. They're called live threads for us.
Luke Burbank: That's right. We're at Live Wire Radio in most of those places. All right. Our musical guest this week broke into the spotlight as a finalist on season 18 of The Voice. None other than the John Legend described his tone as magical. Billboard has praised his earnest, uplifting presence. Since then, he's played with folks like Jack Johnson, Booker T, and his music has been featured on the TV show Grey's Anatomy. He's also toured extensively with his brother, Ron Artis, the second. This is our conversation with Thunderstorm Artis, recorded in front of a live audience at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland. Welcome to the show.
Thunderstorm Artis: Oh, man, I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me.
Luke Burbank: Okay. I understand that you had a song that was recently featured on Gray's Anatomy. Did you have a watching party or anything?
Thunderstorm Artis: It was me and my five little nieces and nephew and my brother and sister. And I'm in California, actually, on the Jack Johnson tour. We got to watch it like. And it was like, the most special thing ever, man.
Elena Passarello: Oh, what was happening when the song played? What was happening in the plot?
Thunderstorm Artis: You know, I had to tell my nieces to look away. You know, it's like an open heart surgery, you know? So I was like, okay, don't look now, look, don't look now, look.
Elena Passarello: I thought you were going to say like, a steamy love scene, but it was.
Thunderstorm Artis: I mean, it probably would've been better, you know?
Luke Burbank: So it was the soundtrack to a medical procedure.
Thunderstorm Artis: It was actually it was like this most intense scene in the show. Like, for this episode, this is like the, what, the season opener, the first episode of season 19, I want to say. And it's a scene where it's like, this patient is going through this big heart surgery. The family is all around. They're all praying and there's like 4 minutes of just like no dialog and just my song is like helping set the mood for this. Oh my. It's like super intense scene is. Wow. It was I was like, Wow, I'm getting chills watching it.
Luke Burbank: Oh, that's so cool. Now, we've had your brother Ron on the show a couple of times and he is so great. I know sort of famously that your family grew up on the North Shore of Oahu playing music together. That sounds like the most ideal childhood ever, was it?
Thunderstorm Artis: I mean, it was so easy. My school was playing music. I mean, I'm from a family of 11 kids, six boys and five girls. I'm number seven. My parents both played music, were all home schooled. Sometimes I wish I can go back there and not worry about bills and, you know, just play music every day. It's the best.
Luke Burbank: Thing. I'm surprised any of you left the home. I mean, I would just I'd be I'd be like 60 still there, like North Shore of Oahu playing music.
Thunderstorm Artis: Just living in my mom's basement, you know, making music. Yeah.
Luke Burbank: Okay. When you were auditioning on The Voice, and for folks who don't know, there's this. It's got the blind auditions. So, you know, the judges have their backs to the person who's performing. And you played the song Blackbird. Mm hmm. And, like, that is not an easy song to play on guitar. It's some fairly intricate fingerpicking. Were you nervous to play that song for those judges?
Thunderstorm Artis: First of all, I just want to acknowledge that. Like, that's amazing that you know that because it is a very difficult song.
Luke Burbank: I spent an entire road trip in the back of a Toyota van trying to learn Blackbird.
Thunderstorm Artis: I think it was even so, like cool, nerve wracking. Yes. To answer your question, 100%. My stage coach was like, you know, try not to look at your hands. Just look at people and don't look at your guitar. And I was like, She's like, It's not that important what you're doing that I was like, You know what's happening in the song?
Luke Burbank: Yeah. If you miss a note on that, it is very, very apparent. But yeah, crushed it. And like, you're, like, you're basically like 10 seconds into the song that's like, pop. Like, everyone's hitting their button to turn their chairs around. Like, it was instantaneous. Yeah. Then there's a big relief. Go through you once that starts happening.
Thunderstorm Artis: Now, because you still got a minute left to sing. To you like. Yes, I sealed the deal, but now the mess up, they're going to be like, How do I turn this thing back around? But but no, I mean, the other fun thing about it is that the sound is added afterwards. So if you go back and you watch my episode in my performance, another thing my stage coach told me was "Open your eyes." And so I normally sing with my eyes closed because I allow my emotions to just kind of kind of take me over. And so like 30 seconds to the song, I'm like, Oh, I need to open my eyes. And then I do. And they're all staring at me. And it's like, as far as just the back of this room right there. So they're not that far and they're a lot closer. And they, you know, they look good. They're good. Wow.
Elena Passarello: Look at people looking down.
Thunderstorm Artis: But they're staring right at me, piercing in my soul. Just focus. And I'm just like, okay, don't freak out, Thunder. You know what I mean? And I get through the rest of the song, you know, And man, who is like, one of the best performances of my life. Thank you for that journey, that opportunity. And it came about in the craziest way. I didn't like audition for the show. They reached out to me and asked me to come and be on it, and it wasn't something that was in my plan for the year and it was one of the best things that happened. And I met my wife and now I have a kid.
Luke Burbank: You you met your wife through the TV show The Voice.
Thunderstorm Artis: Technically, I was supposed to go on this long vacation and they made me fly back home to Hawaii. That she's some back backstory stuff. And during that little trip that I wouldn't have been on. I met my wife.
Luke Burbank: And now you have three and a half month old Ezekiel here somewhere in the building.
Thunderstorm Artis: He's right there in the back.
Luke Burbank: I mean, all thanks to Blake Shelton. Who'd have thunk?
Thunderstorm Artis: Who would have thunk?
Luke Burbank: Okay, what song are we going to hear?
Thunderstorm Artis: So I'm going to do "Stronger" the song you heard on Grey's Anatomy. This song is just about a lot of the things I've been experiencing in my journey of being an artist and a musician. And just the idea of my parents have always tried to instill just a sense of compass of truth in us. And so no matter just like what I encountered, it was just like, Oh, Mom, like, I pray that I'll stay strong and just continue to carry on the things that you've taught me. So, so the song is about I hope you guys enjoy it.
Luke Burbank: Wow. .
Thunderstorm Artis: Call me a fool for thinkin' maybe I could get over
Or I could be stronger
Than the fear in my mind
See mama always told me I was meant to be alive
In the darkness
But I feel like a candle waiting for a flame
And she said
"Keep on getting stronger, keep on getting wiser, my dear
Don't give in to the voices or succumb to your fears"
Oh mama, I pray, oh I pray that I'll stay strong
Oh mama, I pray, oh I pray that I'll stay strong
Mm-mm
But do you see me all low when I look to you for an answer?
I need you to tell me how to carry on
And he said
"Keep on getting stronger, keep on getting wiser my dear
Don't give in to the voices or succumb to your fears"
Oh mama, I pray, oh I pray that I'll strong (help me stay strong)
Oh mama, I pray, I pray that I'll stay strong (help me stay strong)
Show me now if I've lost my way
I reach for freedom from within my cage
Search for meaning whenever I'm afraid
Oh mama, I pray, oh I pray that I'll strong (help me stay strong)
Oh mama, I pray, oh I pray that I'll stay strong (help me stay strong)
Oh mama, I pray, oh I pray that I'll stay strong (help me stay strong)
Oh mama, I pray, oh I pray that I'll stay strong
Luke Burbank: Wooh! Thunderstorm, Artis. That was Thunderstorm Artis. His new single, Stronger is available right now. All right. That's going to do it for this week's episode of Live Wire. A huge thanks to our guests, Casey Parks and Thunderstorm Artis. Live Wire is brought to you in part by Alaska Airlines.
Elena Passarello: Laura Hadden is our executive producer, Heather de Michele is our executive director and our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Molly Pettit is our technical director and mixer. And our House Sound is by D. Neil Blake. Tre Hester is our assistant editor. Rosa Garcia is our operations associate. And Julienne McElmurry is our intern. Our house band is Ethan Fox Tucker, Sam Tucker, Ayal Alves and A. Walker Spring, who also composes our music.
Luke Burbank: Additional funding provided by the James F and Marian L Miller Foundation. Live Wire was created by Robin Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week we'd like to thank members Anne Wendland and Jon Lowery of Vancouver, Washington. For more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast, head on over to Livewire Radio dot org. I'm Luke Burbank for Elena Passaro and the whole Live Wire team. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.
PRX.