Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Coming up on the show today, we'll talk to writer and director Kelly Reichardt, actor Josh O'Connor about their new art heist movie, The Mastermind, we'll speak with Jonathan Goldstein, the host and creator of the podcast Heavyweight, and we'll learn about the hilarious new musical about Barack Obama called 44, the musical. That's coming up, so let's get things started with a couple of banjo players. Grammy award winning musicians Alison Brown and Steve Martin are sitting right across from me in studio. Hi, and they brought their banjos.

Steve Martin: It's great to be live.

Alison Brown: Sure is.

Alison Stewart: The duo have been playing and writing songs together, and over the weekend, Alison and Steve released a new album. It's called Safe, Sensible and Sane. It features vocalists like Vince Gill, Jason Mraz and the Indigo Girls, and sometimes Allison and Steve just play. Let's listen to an example. This is their song Evening Star. [MUSIC - Alison Brown and Steve Martin: Evening Star]

Alison Stewart: Safe, Sensible and Sane is out now. Steve Martin and Alison Brown are here for a listening party and they have their banjos with them, so they're going to play a little bit. Thank you so much for coming into the studio.

Steve Martin: It's our pleasure. We've made a record that we like, we're proud of, and we have great performers on it, and we're out just talking about it.

Alison Stewart: We heard there was a story that goes with the song we just played, Evening Star.

Alison Brown: Right. Well, my favorite story about this tune is just how inspired I was by Steve's clawhammer style of banjo playing, which is a more traditional style than the three finger style I play that involves metal picks. His style involves brushing the strings with the nails of his right hand. I hadn't thought about that style too much or realized how versatile it was until I really started collaborating with Steve, and he played me a beautiful three, four-time melody that he'd written for clawhammer banjo. That was what inspired me to think about what we could do with that idea.

Alison Stewart: Explain to civilians what a clawhammer banjo is.

Steve Martin: Well, it's a style. Why don't you play a quick three finger lick?

Alison Brown: Yes.

[Alison Brown playing three-finger lick]

Steve Martin: This is a claw hammer sound.

[Steve playing clawhammer]

Alison Brown: That's it. The difference is, and the audience doesn't really need to know this, but she's playing with picks on her fingers and plucking upward, and I'm playing climb with the back of my finger and striking down.

Alison Stewart: Alison just explained what she admired about your playing. What did you admire about her playing?

Steve Martin: Well, Alison is one of the great banjo players. She's won banjo player of the year from the international Bluegrass Music Association, which is not easy to win. She also plays in multiple styles. We have songs on her record that are bossa nova, that are calypso, that are Irish, that are American bluegrass. She's really the leader in those different styles.

Alison Stewart: The album is called Safe, Sensible and Sane. Alison, is there an arc to the album or is this just songs that you liked?

Alison Brown: Well, you know, we wrote these songs one at a time without a specific theme or a specific agenda. Actually, we didn't really even think we were were writing an album. We were just writing music together. I do think there's an arc. The record starts off with just the two banjos talking to each other, Just a little banjo conversation, and then builds up to, like Steve was saying, some different directions that I don't think we really intended when we started off the bossa nova feel or Caribbean feel. Then at the end, we take it back to just the banjos.

Alison Stewart: There's a song on it called New Cluck Old Hen. It's a reimagination of an Appalachian tune, I believe.

Steve Martin: Yes. The song-- [clears throat] Sorry, I have this little morning cough. The song is about 150 years old, I researched it a bit, and it's always been one of my favorite melodies to play on the banjo. I looked up the lyrics and I was aware of the lyrics, and they struck me as a 19th century nonsense song, and I thought, "Gee, I hate to waste this beautiful melody on a lyric that, to me, was fun, but a little silly." It's about a chicken that can lay either 8 eggs or 10 eggs. I reimagined it, as we say today, and came up with new lyrics. Then we realized the song was a little bit misogynist, so we fixed that-

Alison Stewart: With Della Mae, this band.

Alison Brown: Yes, totally.

Steve Martin: Yes, with Della Mae, [unintelligible 00:05:17] a nice comeback at the end.

Alison Stewart: Well, let's listen to New Cluck Old Hen from Safe, Sensible and Sane.

[MUSIC - Alison Brown and Steve Martin: New Cluck Old Hen]

Alison Stewart: That's New Cluck Old Hen from the album Safe, Sensible and Sane. My guests are Steve Martin, Alison Brown, and they're banjos. You mentioned the banjo has a rich history in the United States. It came to the United States from West Africa. Some people associate it with Appalachian music, but you use it in some such different ways on this album. I'm talking about the song Michael, which has got a real bossa nova feel to it. When did you come up with the idea of mixing bossa nova and banjo?

Alison Brown: Well, that one, the tune really told us. I had a melody that I'd figured out on the banjo, and Steve was really intrigued by it, and I honestly couldn't imagine where you could take it besides making it an obscure newgrass banjo tune, and he really imagined a whole story to it.

Steve Martin: It was fun, that sort of place where you sit and listen to the tune and imagine what is this tune saying, and come up with a whole story, which is-- I did a lot of the lyrics, I guess, on the show. That's what I'm very proud of, because Alison really wrote all the music and I wrote all the lyrics and told the story, and she said, "We can make this phrase a little shorter." I said, "No, no. I like finding words that apply to those lines."

Alison Stewart: What do you want people to listen to in Michael when we play it? What part of it that you want people to hone in on?

Steve Martin: The opening is not bad.

Alison Brown: The opening's good. Then, I don't know if it's weird to go into the middle of the chorus with the repeating chorus.

Steve Martin: Yes, I like that, the middle.

Alison Stewart: All right, we're going to play it and see which part of the song we have. Let's listen to Michael.

[MUSIC - Alison Brown and Steve Martin: Michael]

Alison Stewart: I wanted to get to that part. So interesting. Who voice is that we're hearing?

Alison Brown: That's the great Aoife O'Donovan singing lead and Sarah Jarosz singing harmony on that.

Steve Martin: Right.

Alison Stewart: Steve, when you're writing for music, you've written for TV, you've written for yourself, how is it different when you're writing music, lyrics?

Steve Martin: Well, I had to figure out how to write lyrics. I couldn't. Yes, I did write the lyrics to King Tut, but I really had to think about it. I was talking to Earl Scruggs one day, and I could write a song for the banjo, but I couldn't figure out how to overlay lyrics, and so I asked Earl Scruggs, I said, "What do you play when you play backup?" He said, "Well, I just play the melody." I go, "Oh, so I can write a song and then write lyrics to the my melody? Okay." It sounds like a simple thing, but it took me a while. I think musical lyrics are more forgiving. You might not put it in prose, but you can get away with murder.

Alison Stewart: All right, you've brought your banjos with you. What are you going to play for us today?

Alison Brown: Well, we'll play a little bit of a double banjo tune that's on the record, actually, but the essence of it, I really love the way the two banjos sing together. It's a tune that Steve came up with the title for. It's called Let's Get Out Of Here.

[MUSIC - Alison Brown and Steve Martin: Let's Get Out Of Here]

Alison Stewart: Yay. Wait a second. I'm doing videos here acting like it's a one-man band. That was Steve Martin.

Steve Martin: It's so much fun to play with Alison. It really is. We got a little-

Alison Brown: Back at you, Steve. So fun.

Steve Martin: -locked together there.

Alison Stewart: Alison, you started playing banjo when you were a kid. You went to college, you went to Harvard, you got your MBA from UCLA. When did it become clear to you, "You know what? This is going to become my life's work, playing banjo"?

Alison Brown: Yes. Well, I'm still thinking about it, really. It's an interesting profession. I don't know. I've always really, really loved the banjo, and I think it was a stint as an investment banker that really made me appreciate how much I loved the banjo. When I realized that I just didn't have as much of an affinity for tax exempt debt as I did the music of Earl Scruggs. It was really a series of baby steps, and I get a chance through Compass Records, which is the label I co-founded with Garry West, my husband, 30 years ago this year.

Steve Martin: Wow.

Alison Brown: Yes, it's hard to believe. We get a chance to like do the business side of things and support roots music that way and then play music too. It's really the best of both worlds.

Alison Stewart: What was the moment when you were an investment banker and you thought, "I'm not going to do this anymore"?

Alison Brown: Oh, gosh, it was probably one of those all-nighters with a proposal for a bond refunding somewhere.

Steve Martin: Sounds fascinating.

Alison Brown: It was fascinating.

Alison Stewart: Steve, when did you pick up the banjo, the very, very first time?

Steve Martin: Well, I picked it up when I was about 16, and I made a mistake because I heard the banjo with the Kingston Trio and bluegrass music and I didn't realize there were two types of banjo. There's a four -string banjo and a five-string banjo. My girlfriend at the time, I'm 16, and her father had a four-string banjo, so I'm trying to play bluegrass on a four-string, which is impossible, although Irish people can do it.

In my class was John McEwen, who became a member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and was a banjo player already, and they said, "Well, there's a guy who plays." I went and that's when I got a five-string banjo and I paid $200. I still have it. That's when I started playing.

Alison Stewart: At first you incorporated it in your comedy act a little bit?

Steve Martin: Well, yes, because as a young comedian, the thing that's the hardest to acquire is material, so I threw everything I had at it. I could play the banjo, I recited poetry, I did a magic act, I juggled. I did everything to get it up to the 20-minute requirement. If it was a bad night, if the audience wasn't with me, my 20 minutes would shrink to 12.

Alison Stewart: How many banjos do you have, Alison?

Alison Brown: Well, I think that I only have about 15, but I'm told that I have quite a few more.

Alison Stewart: Do you have a favorite one?

Alison Brown: Well, the one I'm playing right now is one of my favorite ones. It was made in the Czech Republic in-

Alison Stewart: Oh, it's beautiful.

Alison Brown: -Prague, yes, by a builder who was so committed to learning how to play the banjo during the Soviet occupation that he had to smuggle the Earl Scruggs book in text, only figure out how to make his own banjo and how to plate his own picks. It' a great instrument. It has a great sound.

Alison Stewart: That's so beautiful. Just the way it looks is gorgeous.

Steve Martin: Banjos lend themselves to decoration. There's a lot of inlay on the neck and you can see I have another one that's-- This is silver, but the other one's gold. Can be very fancy.

Alison Stewart: How many do you have?

Steve Martin: Well, I have about the same. You got to have one wherever you go.

Alison Stewart: You got to be a banjo wherever you go.

Steve Martin: When I first started learning to play, I'd get a banjo and put one in every room, so no matter where I went, I didn't have to go back to the other end of the house to get it to help me learn.

Alison Brown: That's awesome. Perfect.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Grammy award winning musicians Steve Martin and Alison Brown. Were discussing their new album, Safe, Sensible and Sane. Where does the title come from?

Steve Martin: Well, it's a confession. One of our songs is called Safe, Sensible and Sane. It's sung by Jason Mraz, and it has a calypso kind of beat to it.

Alison Brown: Yes, definitely Caribbean vibe.

Steve Martin: Yes, but what happened was I was-- I'm a writer, so I have a lot of thesauruses and different books and collect word books. I had a book that was written in the 1930s on how to improve your letter writing. There was one section that listed these phrases that were-- We should have looked them up. There's things you can put in your letter, like, "Thank you for the frank statement of your affairs." These are supposed to elevate your letter writing. Safe, Sensible and Sane was one.

Anyway, there was a whole list, and I thought they sounded like music lyrics, so I copied them out, wrote them down, and I just said, "Alison, these sound to me like music lyrics." She arranged them so they could rhyme, and then she set them to this-- they're calypso sound. The truth is they're nonsense, but Jason Mraz, we all agree that the more we sing them, the more sense they make.

Alison Stewart: Honestly. Yeah. Even saying it out loud.

Alison Brown: It's funny, because that title, it doesn't come from this place, but it seems to tap into the zeitgeist right now of this like people just want something safe, sensible, and sane.

Alison Stewart: We're going to listen to another track from the album. This is Dear Time. This features Jackson Browne on vocals. It's sort of. It's sort of reflective about life, definitely.

Steve Martin: Should I talk about it first?

Alison Stewart: Sure, yes.

Steve Martin: Well, I'm 80, and there's an adage for writers, "Write what you know." I thought I should be able to look back in a way and put it into song. I thought of the tone I wanted. I didn't want it to be angry, I wanted it to be accepting, and so I put it in the style of a letter written to time.

Alison Stewart: This is Dear Time.

[MUSIC - Alison Brown, Jackson Browne and Steve Martin: Dear Time]

Alison Stewart: Alison, what does that song make you feel about time when you listen to it?

Alison Brown: Well, it's. It's poignant. Just for myself and my own life, but then knowing that it comes from Steve's pen as an 80-year-old, we're reflecting back. It's a pretty universal feeling. I think, really anybody over the age of 40 is relating to that song. There's a line in there, to throw the ball with my old dog one more time. Steve was really worried about that being, I think, too maudlin.

Steve Martin: Yes, too sentimental.

Alison Brown: I don't know, that gets me every time.

Alison Stewart: Oh, I don't think so.

Alison Brown: And I've never had a dog.

Alison Stewart: I think it's really sweet, that line.

Alison Brown: Yes, completely.

Steve Martin: Well, this was our hardest birth, this song, because it was rearranged and finding new lyrics and finding a chorus and all that. We had a lot of time to shape it. Then Jackson Browne sang it and-- I go back with Jackson Browne to when we're 17. We worked the same club, Paradox in Tustin, and he was a noted songwriter very, very early on, but we both played at the Troubadour and we have a whole history. We did a video at the Troubadour and it was very nostalgic for us.

Alison Stewart: I need to ask you one only [unintelligible 00:21:20] question.

Steve Martin: Sure, please.

Alison Stewart: Considering you're a podcaster, you've got headphones on for real, did you ever get a chance to teach Marty the banjo? Martin Short.

Steve Martin: He has, one, no interest, and two, no ability.

Alison Stewart: Well, there you go.

Steve Martin: By the way, the only thing I had when I started was interest.

Alison Stewart: I would say you have ability now as well. My guests were Grammy award winning Steve Martin and Alison Brown. Their new album is called Safe, Sensible and Sane. Would you play us out a little bit?

Alison Brown: Sure.

Steve Martin: The swing song?

Alison Brown: Swing song, yes.

Steve Martin: Yes. One, two, three, four.