A U.S. Senator Stops by Track Star HQ to Talk Music

All right. Are you ready? Are you ready? Are you ready? I'm ready. Okay. Before we start with the music, just introduce yourself. I'm Chris Murphy, and I am currently a United States Senator from Connecticut. That's the nutmegger state? It's a nutmeg state. Yeah. We are nutmeggers. I think the official title, if you're from Connecticut, is you're a Connecticutian. I always thought Canetian would be a nice way to say it. Connecticuter. Connecticuty. Connecticuty is a good one. Nobody really knows what we are, right? It's not as easy as New Yorker. So like there's still, there's room for improvement. I was looking into musicians from Connecticut, you know, before this conversation. And one name, I remember, I'll start with this guy first. I remember learning that he was from Connecticut and thinking like, he went superstar on us. Who's that? Who's this guy? That is Fairfield, Connecticut's John Mayer. John Mayer. Yeah. So I was studying. I was studying for the bar. And right before I was studying for the bar, ruptured two discs in my back. And so I was studying for the bar, sitting down in constant pain and addicted to that album. So John Mayer's breakthrough album. And so I listened to that album ad nauseum. And like what I remember is just seething pain, right? The pain of studying for the bar and of having to rupture discs in my back. So I have like a little bit of a negative connotation. That immediately brings you back. Yeah. You know, music has an amazing way of doing that, of transporting you a very specific time and place where you really like, it seeped in for you. And then I'm a big Counting Crows fan, and I had always wanted to see them in person. And they were playing an outdoor venue in Hartford as the opening act for John Mayer when he was touring on that album. So the entire lawn was filled with like 16 and 17 year old girls. Who knew nothing about Counting Crows. And they played a great set. So tell me about your relationship to music. I mean, it's still a really big part of my life. It's on constantly. My little year end Spotify year interview always puts me in the top 5% of listeners in terms of the amount of time. It's a big part of how I unplug from work. So, you know, I try to run an exercise most days and it's the music that I'm listening to as I'm, you know, on the bike or running around the neighborhood that sort of pulls me out of politics, allows me to kind of visualize and manifest sort of things that I want to happen. So, you know, for me, it's a, it's always been an escape from this life that can be, that can kind of dominate your life. You do this thing every year, right? Where you walk across the entire state. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's Connecticut. So the entire state is Texas, right? It's not Texas. So like, it's, it's not heroic. Yeah. But it's still a long walk. Yeah. I mean, if you go east to west, it's 110 miles. If you go north to south, you know, it can be 70, 80 miles, depending on what route you take. When did you start doing that? I started doing this 10 years ago and I did it because I was a little worried that there was a tendency in this business to start to think that the topics that were on the cable news or the topics dominating clicks online were the things that mattered to the people that you represented. So I was like, what can I do? Just to like, you know, bathe myself in normal people who are not political. And so I was like, I'll just take a week and I'll walk the state and I'll talk to people walking their dog, filling up their gas tank. And what I found is that the things that matter to them, and I do this every year, really have nothing to do with what's on news shows. Like, in fact, what matters to them just doesn't change. It's how good are my kids' schools? How much does it cost to live? Is my community safe? So it's, it's kind of become a real grounding exercise for me. Like, just focus on the same things. Don't change your attention based on what the political media's attention is focused on. How does your time split between being in Connecticut and being in D.C.? Do you get to spend the majority of your time back home? No, I spend the majority of my time in D.C. just because that's where the job is. We're generally voting Monday to Thursday. And then my kids go to school in D.C. So, so that's where they are. I'm back in Connecticut pretty much every weekend doing events, but during the week because of the job and in part because my kids. They're in D.C., I'm there. I guess I imagine that this spending the time with the people is one of the most impactful parts of your, of informing your work. Like walking around, like you talk about in, in this book, you talk about meeting this guy, Izzy, when you're on the walk. Yeah. And, and that helps you sort of calibrate a little bit what the priority should be. You know, one of the things that I talk about in this book is, you know, what is our actual job? And one of the really revolutionary things about that. This country is that our founding document says that we should care about people's happiness, right? It's the right to pursue happiness that's in the Declaration of Independence. And I don't think we always do a really good job of truly, of truly understanding like what makes people happy. And so Izzy is this guy that I met on the walk and, and Izzy, you know, sort of did everything he was asked to do. He worked his entire career at Walmart, but it never paid enough for him to save any money for retirement. So in retirement. He has to live in a tiny little apartment with two other guys, because that's the only way that he can afford to live. And he talks about sort of how dehumanizing his retirement is. He's like, wait a second, I did everything you wanted me to do. I worked full time. I paid my bills, I paid my taxes, and now I'm leading this undignified life, living with two strangers and no real way to make ends meet. And, you know, on the walk, you're learning like, you know, okay, what are the technical things I need? I need to do, to do this job well, but you're also understanding like, what is making people unhappy today? And what are the things that you can do to try to bring people more fulfillment? For Izzy, it was making a little bit more money during the time that he was working so he could, in retirement, live a little bit more of a dignified life. I want to go back in time here. You graduated from high school in 1992. 1992. This was the number one song. Let's hear it. You might remember this from prom. Is this, is this Boys to Men? Yes. Take me back to 1992. Like, what, did you think in 1992, I'm going to be, I want to get into politics? I want to, like, how did you end up listening, from listening to Boys to Men to this? Well, I don't know that there's a direct line between Boys to Men and my political career. But, yeah, I mean, I'm a boy. I'm not embarrassed about the fact that I, I got into politics at an early age. Like, my mom, you know, was raised in a really sort of poor conditions. And she, every day was like, like, don't take for granted the fact that you have a roof over your head and that you have meals on the table. Like, you're lucky. And so live your life in some way that gives back. But I was also just like an organizer, like, by birth. Like, I organized all the touch football games in my neighborhood when there was a dress code. Imposed on us at our high school. I organized the student protest. And so at some point when I was in my early teenage years, you know, my mid teenage years, I found out that there was this business called politics in which you could work to make your community better and you spent all your time organizing. I was like, like, that's the Holy Grail. Like, that's what I want to do. I want to work to make things better. And I want to organize people. And I was like a lot of kids, a kind of a progressive kid. I started volunteering on Democratic campaigns when I was like 16, 17 years old. I was class president. I mean, I was involved in student government. Yeah, I've I've believed that this is a noble profession for a long time. And I'm not you know, I don't apologize for that. I feel like you're you're one of these politicians who's at the forefront of almost this fight against this negative view that people have of politics. Do you don't you feel like right now people have as negative a view of politicians as they've maybe ever had in this country? So even my son, my 17 year old son, who's plugged into politics. And and knows that I'm not on the take says to me, yeah, but I kind of assume that everybody else is right. Yeah. And and sort of he's close to this. He knows my friends in the Senate. And yet he assumes that this business is all dirty, which tells me that we got a big problem. Yes. So I think that maybe the most important thing we have to do is to recast what people think about this business, which is why like unrigging the democracy reform. The democracy so that big money doesn't play as big a role as it does today is maybe the most important thing you can do. Getting billionaire corporate money out of politics like that should maybe be as Democrats are number one issue. But if I was Republicans, it should probably be their number one issue as well, because people are just going to give up on the whole exercise of democracy if they think the whole thing is rigged. In this book, you talk about these six cults. What does that mean? Just big picture, the six cults. And why is that? Why does that become an organizing principle for you in thinking about this? As much time as I spend organizing against Trump, there's something sort of deeper that is wrong with the country. He's a symptom of what I call in this book our spiritual unraveling. We are less happy. We are less connected. We're more exhausted than ever before. And Trump is kind of what happened because of that. And I organize this book around six cults because I do think we have become. We've come to believe things that are not true, that serve a very small handful of people, the tippity-top. And that's what a cult is. A cult is a system of false beliefs that serves the leader of the cult. So for instance, one of the cults I talk about in this book is the cult of consumerism, cult of consumption, this idea that if you just buy more stuff, if you upgrade your iPhone, if you buy the clothes that the influencer on your feed tells you you should buy, it's going to make you happy. And that's not true. What actually makes you happy is strong relationships, working with your neighbors for some common purpose. But the cult of consumption serves the people who are selling us stuff. And the book argues that we should build more citizenship and less consumption, and the government should make it easier for you to be a good citizen, to join efforts in your community in which you can give back. You'll actually find that that will make you happy. than just upgrading your phone. There's a song that you talk about in the book. I've been selling my soul, working all day. And this was a song at a huge moment a few years ago. Huge moment. And stirred up a lot of conversation. And he was just a guy who wrote and recorded this song and put it out. Right. And it kind of took the country by storm. Yeah, this is the first song ever. The first song ever by an unknown, unpublished artist to go to number one on the charts. Right, guys, his stage name is Oliver Anthony. And he's living when he writes this song in a leaky trailer on a little piece of property that he bought in North Carolina. He had worked, you know, most of his life as a, I think, an aluminum siding salesman. He'd worked in a paper factory. He had, you know, done a lot of shit jobs with shit pay, been treated really poorly by the corporations he worked for. And he writes this song about the soullessness of work, right? I'm working for somebody else. My labor is just being extracted to make somebody else rich. And my life, like Izzy's, doesn't feel dignified. But because the guy, you know, I mean, looks like a Trump supporter to some because he's got a long beard, because he, you know, has some conservative tropes in that song. He says, we got, you know, obese people milking us on welfare. It, the song immediately gets coded as a racist right-wing song. When in fact, what he's telling you is that there are tons of people like him in rural North Carolina who think the economy is rigged and they are desperate for somebody to unrig it. And so I write about this guy because I'm like, listen, there's a ton of people out there on the right and left who think that this economy is not working. They want a different economy. They're open to the government's stepping in and evening out the rules. And we got to start talking to people like this. But when I tweeted about this song, when it first came out, I got savaged, you know, by people because they were like, this guy's hopeless. People who've listened to his song are hopeless. They're all racists. You're never going to convert them. I just think that's wrong. I think if you give up on conversion, if you give up talking to people who don't agree with you on, you know, every issue that you care about, like our politics is, what's the point of our politics? So there's this common. There's this common sort of frustration and pain that people in this country are feeling like regardless of what side of the politics they're on. And it's up to you guys, I guess, to sort of offer some sort of solutions, but try and at the same time communicate those solutions in a way that people get on board with them and say, yeah, this makes a lot of sense. Like that to me feels like the hardest part is communicating the strategy. In an effective way. So people say, oh yeah, okay, I get this. So how do we do a better job of sort of offering solutions or at least communicating why the solutions that we have are going to work for people? Well, I mean, the reason that that song sells, first of all, it's just a good tune. It's a good song, but it sells because it is telling a story and it is an oppositional story. The story, the name of the song is Richmond, North of Richmond, right? So the people to blame are the people in Washington. Trump's message sells because. Because he's telling a story. Now his story is, it's Mexican immigrants and Muslims and gay kids that you should blame. But I don't think the left and Democrats can have a winning message that doesn't also tell a story. And the real story is super powerful corporations and greedy billionaires have rigged the economy against you. And they're now rigging the government against you. For instance, by stopping any effort to regulate AI before it steals your jobs. So I'm not afraid of sort of telling a good guy, bad guy story. I think that's actually the only way to convince people to get on board with some of our policy ideas. I just think we should tell the true story. Why do you think it is that people have a worse view of you guys than of the billionaires? Not everyone, but I think like some people complain about politicians just as much as they complain about billionaires, if not more. Well, yeah, but that's because our politics is captured by the billionaires, right? And the billionaires have a bigger budget to whitewash their crimes. But we, I mean, people are looking at just, let's take social media and AI, and they're like, what are you guys doing? Like social media is corrupting our culture. It is corrupting our kids. Like we don't want you to ban it, but could you at least protect our kids from the worst of it? Same thing with AI. And so they look at us and let's just be honest. The primary reason why we're not doing that is because those tech companies and those billionaires who run them have enormous power in Washington. So we're not popular because we've sworn an oath to protect people. And we're not living up to that oath. The billionaires have sworn no oath to protect people. We have, and that's why folks look at us and they say, you're letting us down. I'm just going to listen to this song for a little bit. This song is so good. ♪ That's just the way it is. ♪ So have you noticed similarity between those two songs, lyrically? Like sort of the message that he's talking about? And that's the song from the mid eighties. Yeah. And I mean, so yeah, that song, right, comes out in the mid eighties. Before I was actually interested in politics, I think my father bought that cassette tape and I stole it from him and I immediately. And I immediately latched onto that song. And that song, of course, I mean, it's, it's essentially like your, your chorus as a politicians don't accept things the way they are, right? People want you to believe that you can't change the way things are and don't you believe them. And like, that's an amazing song to like be introduced to right on the precipice of deciding, you know what, I might spend my life in public service. I might spend my life in politics, right? So yeah, that song is, you know, always been my sort of, it's been my favorite song since I was probably 15 years old. It gets better to me as time goes on. I never met him until last year. He was playing the nine 30 club in Washington, DC, and I bought 50 tickets and I brought my entire staff, two thirds of which had never heard of him, probably recognize that song from the two buck version of it. But I'd never seen him or heard of him. I brought them. And then afterwards, I went down and met him for the first time. And I was nervous because like, when you meet like your hero, you're like, is he going to be like, I hope he's going to be. And as you know, he is, he's the most decent, kind, quirky down to earth, exactly what you hope Bruce Hornsby would be like. Super awesome. Yeah. He's, and he, and he just is like really funny person too. Like he just is like very quick with it. He's just making jokes, throwing like very subtle, like jokes in there. Yeah. How was the show? The show was, the show was great. It was before Indigo Park came out. So he was still playing, you know, some, some of the hits. He was really excited. I think when he meets people, he assumes that everybody thinks he's frozen in time, you know, from that album. So the fact that I, you know, knew a lot of the latest stuff and that like, I was excited about his stuff with Justin Vernon and, you know, he was really tickled by that. He clearly is still a pretty innovative guy. And it's nice that this album has gotten a lot of mainstream attention, big story in the New York times. And, um, it's a, it's a great album. How old are your kids? My kids are 17 and, uh, 15, 14. Do they, uh, introduce you to, a lot of music? What are they listening to? So he, I mean, he, here's one of the problems of sort of how music is consumed these days. So their music is consumed on, you know, their ear pods and they aren't super interested in sharing it with me. Um, even in the car, like when we get in the car, they'll put in their ear pods and I try to get them to take it out. But so we don't do like in my house growing up, like my dad would play his songs on our car rides. I still play my songs on our car rides, but, uh, they don't share a ton of, of music with me. Bruce Hornsby again. Yeah. You're always playing this I took I took my 17 year old to the Bruce Hornsby concert so and I made him go and he was like this is pretty good no no but he didn't you know but I think he was he was into experiencing something that he knew was important with his with his dad so um but yeah I've I've I still do a lot go see a lot of live music and I've seen some with them um which has been which has been fun so I was able to take them when they were just getting into music to a couple of their sort of early favorite bands when they came to DC which was nice the cult of everywhere what's that this idea that we are um citizens of the world yeah and that we all buy stuff from the exact same places that we all you know consume the same streaming shows it feels really kind of empty and hollow to people I think people want to be citizens of a unique local place um they don't want to buy everything from amazon they don't want to be sort of fed interests on an algorithm and so what I argue for in that chapter the cult of everywhere is you know to have a public policy to rebuild healthy local places with unique commerce and unique tastes um that means breaking up the big corporations so that small businesses can thrive that means having a deliberate policy to bring back local journalism that means having healthy downtowns where you go to shop and you meet people rather than buying everything online maybe it even means doing something like taxing online commerce and using that money uh to help rebuild the local institutions that have atrophied over the years everything from churches to social clubs to unions um I just think we we need um we need roots as humans and I feel like increasingly we feel rootless that we're just all a member members of this big national international economy so the cult of everywhere is this idea that's being fed to us that we should just give up on our local roots and accept that we are all members of this big integrated global economy yellowstone is like one of the most popular shows on tv and I think it's because it really romanticizes this idea of like the west which is a tale as old as time in this country of oh you get out there people ride horses and they hang on their communities but the reality is that we're all members of this big national international economy when you go to those places it's not unlike somewhere in Connecticut it's the same strip malls with the same multinational corporations in those places we've lost that losing that thing that makes the country special how all these places are are sort of have their own flair well and and in the in the really small towns and the small cities where the downtowns are eviscerated um all that you have left is to shop online um and there's no community in shopping online I get it the prices might be a little bit better but you know when I was growing up in my hometown of Wethersfield Connecticut my defining experiences often came from like small town commerce like I remember walking into the grocery store every Saturday when I went shopping with my grandmother the deli guy was somebody that we knew and we stopped and we had a little short conversation with us he would always hand me a free slice of American cheese and I felt like taken care of I felt like connected to my community because of this free slice of American cheese that I got and you know today people barely shop in person they they they barely ever see the people that they're interacting with at the store because they buy stuff on an iPad or they pre-order their coffee on their phone and and that local commerce is actually where you you gain a sense of community and a sense of identity as to who you are here in New York City most people live in apartments that they rent and I've found that friends of mine who live in like a multi-family and the owner lives in the building with them they have a much different experience as a renter than people who live in this big apartment building where they send the check to some company that owns hundreds hundreds of apartments and that's an example of the same thing you're talking about where you actually know the deli guy who owns the grocery store who's going to give you a free slice of cheese there's just this different level this like proximity when the economically powerful people in your life are close to you it builds that sense of community and security but when the economically powerful people live nowhere close to you and that's what happens today most likely the owner of your corporation is some private equity firm and the owners of that firm live in New York and Martha's Vineyard and Davos all at the same time the owner of your hospital now doesn't even live locally that's probably owned by some mega multi-state corporation so by bringing the ownership of our economy back to a local level it's not just people get better service because there's more accountability it just makes you feel more powerful that the folks that matter and make decisions in your life are neighbors I just picked out that album yeah there's a hundred albums on that shelf and the one that I pulled out is this song on that album yeah this is like an album that's like a transition album for me from high school to from high school to college and also it was like it felt like grown-up music to me yeah who uh so describe describe that scene for me like did you bring a stereo did your roommate bring a stereo did you have like were you playing cassettes what was the what was like well that's the transition yeah man I'm dating myself so that you mentioned cassette earlier that's why I said I did yeah no I started on I started on cassettes um but then when I was going into high school it was the transition to cds so basically everybody was bringing um was bringing a cd player but yeah this is still in the era of the massive speakers and so I lived my freshman year in a you know common room and then two doubles so four of us all living together and so I think I remember that we got together ahead of time and decided because you couldn't have four sets of big speakers bring the speakers I'll bring the microwave the fan you I'll bring fan yeah didn't you have did you not have a fan everybody had a fan yeah I'll bring the fan you bring the mini fridge um and one of us brought um uh brought but brought a set of speakers one of my four roommates um was a um was a deadhead and had every single dead live show ever on cassettes um in stacks in his room chronologically ordered um I've never been around somebody who was a bigger deadhead fan than him a band that Bruce Hornsby toured with for a couple for a couple years and what and and when we would get really drunk and come back to the room and that roommate wasn't there we would take we would take two of his tapes and just switch them and we would wait to see how long it would take him to figure out and it was uncanny it was never more than 24 hours before we got to the room and we got to the room and we got to the room and we got to the room and we got to the room before he noticed that two of the tapes had been switched and they weren't in chronological order any longer it's it's an incredible phenomenon the the dead fans the tapers the way they collect and share these bootlegs it's a story of like obviously love of music but but but community and like you know using the technology sharing it's just become this whole other since it was his I mean it was part of his sense of purpose and meaning in life was being so connected to this band and so connected in his community that he had cultivated this collection right and like we you know obviously like would sometimes make fun of it but I think we were also envious of it that somebody could you know be this connected into a community and this is literally the subject of the book with the the things that we have lost as how hard did he have to work to collect all of that music and now you know I love Spotify I use it religiously but it I think everything doesn't feel as good when you can get it so easily yeah and we're not going back I get it like I'm not I'm not talking about doing away with you know with these apps that give us access to all the music immediately all the time but I do think it's important for us to remember that the trial and error of finding music which was a big part of my childhood it had a lot of magic attached to it why did you write this book now because I worry that we think that beating Donald Trump will fix everything yeah and it won't there is something much deeper that is broken about our culture today in which we all feel more alone more exhausted the culture is so much more of a me culture than a we culture and so I want us to talk about how much the common good matters how much caring about your neighbors makes you feel good and I want us I mean my challenge is really big because I'm like yeah I want to beat Donald Trump as a Democrat but I also want us to fix what's broken about um you know our our foundational culture that's a lot to do at the same time but I fear that if we beat Trump and we don't try to stitch us back together um it'll all be for naught there's this expression that I love that Gen Z uses all the time which is like touch grass yeah which is they didn't invent it that's been around forever but it's almost more important now and to me it means doesn't literally mean although it does like spend some time in nature but more importantly I think it means like look up and look around and connect with somebody. And, and it's almost like that's the deeper message that I got reading this is it's about interacting with all the different humans beyond just like the people in your closest circle, but opening, picking your head up a little bit and seeing what's around you and forming connections in that community with people. Yeah. I, the last story I tell in this book is probably the most personal story I tell. Um, I was, um, in Connecticut at my house in Hartford on Thanksgiving morning, and it was the first Thanksgiving after my wife and I had separated. So I was there by myself and I remember what I was doing. I was just scrolling, right? I was scrolling and I was definitely feeling a little lonely and I stopped myself and I decided instead to go take a walk, to walk to the little green that's up the street from my house. And I remember that normally on Thanksgiving morning, there's a group, there's a family that comes down to that green to just hand out free coffee and free, you know, breakfast sandwiches or whatever. To the folks who congregate on the green who tend to be homeless or in, you know, difficult place in their life. And I went up to the green and I spent just like 30 minutes with that family and with the people who are getting help that day. And like, I walk away from the green and I can literally like feel right. The loneliness lifting my sort of spirit rising. And I end the book on that story because yeah, there are government policies that have caused us to feel more lonely and disconnected. But you, everyone can make the decision to put down that phone, right? To touch grass, to connect with a group in your community that's doing something important. And that maybe is much more of the prescription than any piece of legislation I recommend in this book. Yeah. It trickle, trickle up, trickle, trickle up. And to that family, it meant something that there was somebody like me showing up and giving them a pat on the back, right? It was, it was a big circle. It's a two-way street. Yeah, absolutely. For sure. What's, what's the hardest thing about your job? Well, I think the hardest thing about the job is being away from your family as much as I am. So I, you know, as I said, my kids are in DC, but I'm traveling all the time. These days traveling a lot because I'm all around the country trying to, you know, stand up groups that are trying to protect our democracy. So I do think the hardest part of the job is the schedule. It's, it's exhausting. How much effort you have to put into it. I, I'm not complaining. I've chosen to re-up this, this, this position every six years, but the time away from my kids, because my kids have done nothing else. They've been, I've been in politics the entire, their entire lives. That's the hardest part. And then besides the personal part of it, the actual like day-to-day of the job, like the ins and outs, like what are, what are the, what's the biggest challenge that someone in your position faces? Is it just that there's so much to do? And trying to pick, pick your battles? Yeah. I think the people that are best at this job do pick their battles. You, you, you decide what you're going to focus on and you just burrow in and relentlessly work until you get a result. So, you know, for me, that issue has always been gun violence. I don't really talk about that issue in this book, but you know, I was representing Sandy Hook when that murder happened there. And so I did, I burrowed into that issue. I spent 10 years of failure. Um, 10 years in which I tried to get legislation passed and I couldn't. And then after the Uvalde murder, we did get a bill passed, not everything I wanted, but it was big and important. And since then murders and mass shootings have come way down. So the hard part of this job is how long it takes to get something done and deciding not to give up and having faith that eventually you'll break through. And that's hard to live with like multiple failures and have just faith that eventually something will happen on that issue. It did, but it was 10 years of being let down and feeling like I was letting those families down until we finally got something done. But you've, this is, you've been doing this since 19, since 1990. I've been doing this for a long time. They changed the dress, they changed the dress code at my high school. So I got a taste of what organizing could, could bring. So I knew from the- If you didn't give up, you could, you could get something done. Okay. Let's do one more song. All right. This is not one of my favorites. This is, could it be another change? What's your favorite samples? Carry On is a beautiful song. It actually sort of has a politician reference in it, but it's a, you know, sort of about that same theory of perseverance. There you go. Who is this band? To me? Yeah. Well, the interesting, like this band sometimes is like in that jam band genre, right? It's the samples. It's a college tour, a heavy college touring band that came to Williams College when I was there and I got super into them. I just think it's a, it's a beautiful sound. I tend to like a little bit more highly produced, like a little bit more, you know, like a little bit more like sound. And this is like a little bit more highly produced. Um, so this was like a really important band to me when I was, um, when I was young and like a music, a melodic, relaxing music that I could fall back on when I wanted to escape. You know, the band Goose. Have you heard of them? Yeah, I do. Everybody tells me, no, I'm not into Goose, um, but I've listened to them and I know they're a Connecticut band. They remind me of, they're similar. Do they? They have a similar sound. I have to, I have to dig in because I haven't, I haven't heard of them. I think they're Fairfield also. There's something in the water in Fairfield. Really? Um, I, uh, yeah, I, probably a half dozen people in the last year have told me that I have to listen to Goose. I'm sure. Well, that's my recommendation for you. I'll do it. Do you have any recommendations for, for us? I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you a, you're a Wesleyan guy. I'm a Williams guy. I'm going to give you a Williams band, Darlingside. Okay. So Darlingside, um, they must've graduated just in the last five or 10 years, but, but three or four Williams guys, um, real intense vocal harmonies. So one of these, there's another good country band out there now, Truesdale that does this too, right? And I may be butchering the pronunciations, but, um, but it's a lot of their music is, um, dependent on the combination of their voices, but it's a real, a real beautiful NESCAC sound. Nothing better. Yeah. Thanks for coming. Thanks man. Appreciate it. It was great to meet you. Yeah. Great to meet you. Keep up the great work. Thank you. Congratulations. No, thank you. It's out today. It's out today. TrackStar Podcast is a presentation of public opinion created by me, Jack Coyne, Kieran Coyne, and Henry Kornaros. Produced by Haley Sobel. Edited by Simone Warnhoff. Theme and original composition by Kieran Coyne. Mixing by Devin Klein. Our agent is Jack Coyne. Thank you. We'll see you next week. Bye. Bye. Bye. Joanna Orland at UTA. Thanks for listening. See you next Wednesday.