Jason Kutchma

Listen on Spotify

Season Two Playlist

Transcript

Jason: I think the first one [off of Lightfoot!], I like it, but that doesn’t necessarily bring me back to home because I only heard that much later, much, much later, you know, year, decades later. I thought that the Gord’s Gold was his only version. And that’s the one that I’ve had on my own mixtapes and my own, just listening pleasure.

The first one I like, but it’s raw. It’s like a lot rawer and I think that by the time that he did the Gord’s Gold one he kind of found “Gordon Lightfoot.” That’s really- that’s him. And, yeah, I love it. I love it. I initially thought, I like because it’s the first song that came to my mind whenever I think of the word homesick, but it might be the same song, like “Leaving on a Jet Plane” that a lot of other people pick, too.

You say, what song makes you homesick? And maybe it’s one of those two songs. I don’t know. Maybe it just shows a generational thing, too, but that’s okay. I think that on a mixtape you need those songs anyways. So, so be it.

Ryan: My bandmate in Doomsday Profit and Season One guest Bryan Reed and I first met while interning at Yep Roc Records in the summer of 2007. I was entering data at the time and he told me to listen to this band, one of his favorite local punk bands based in Durham, North Carolina. That band was Red Collar, a band that often drew comparisons to the righteousness of The Clash and the raw power of Fugazi.

I lost count of how many times I saw Red Collar play while they were active, but they were the kind of band that even one show was enough to leave a lasting impression. Their live shows were one of those “you had to be there” kind of things. I can’t describe the feeling. There was life, there was hope, there was anger, there was just pure anthemic rock and roll. Word’s won’t do it justice, so here’s just a little taste for your ears:

That clip was from “Hands Up” off of their first LP, Pilgrim, you can hear the full song in the show notes at letsmixtape.com. And, definitely, give a listen to Pilgrim and their subsequent LP, appropriately titled, Welcome Home.

The first time I saw them live was for a mini festival I put together for my college radio station, featuring bands from the surrounding area. That’s also the first time I met Jason Kutchma. J is the kind of person that you meet once and never forget. He wears gold spray-painted boots with spurs attached. Sometimes he’s wearing bright, white denim pants. But even more memorable is how truly interested he is in making the people he interacts with feel welcome.

After that show, and after meeting J, I became incredibly invested in the music scene in the Triangle (that’s Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill for y’all outside the state of North Carolina). The Triangle music scene is one you’ll hear me talk a lot about throughout this season because it’s one of the primary reasons that, after college, I decided to put down permanent roots in Durham.

In fact, J was the officiant my wedding. When I asked him for a photo he wanted to use on the website for this episode, he pointed me to one from that day. His band after Red Collar was JKutchma & The Five Fifths. A bit of a different sound than Red Collar, leaning more into folk and Americana, but still the same Jason at the microphone. Once again, here’s a taste:

Recently, Jason experienced some serious pain in his left hand which made playing guitar quite challenging and he had to change his approach to songwriting which is showcased in his album from last year, Wishing Well, and from which I’ll play a full track at the end of this episode.

J and his wife Beth – who works for an amazing organization called Carolina for Kibera working to improve public health and economic prosperity in informal settlements in Kenya – moved away from North Carolina not too long after our wedding. They’ve lived in several states since and currently reside on the West Coast. Given that, and his experience touring all around the United States, both with a band and solo, I he would have an interesting perspective on Season Two’s topic: Homesick. So, without further ado, let’s make a mixtape.

[Intro music composed & recorded by Scotty Sandwich]

Ryan: Jason, thank you so much for joining me on season two of Let’s Make A Mixtape. When I came up with the prompt for season two, you were definitely one of the first people that came to mind because I figured you would have a very interesting perspective when it comes to a song that reminds you of home.

I mean, for me, honestly, if I’m being fully transparent, your music, in general has this tie for me that almost reminds me of home or the vague concept of what home even is as, uh, you’ve, I feel like you’ve explored to some degree throughout the breadth of your catalog.

So I wanted to ask you. What’s a song that reminds you of home? And you came up with “Early Morning Rain” by Gordon Lightfoot. Why does this song remind you of home?

Jason: I think the first time I heard it I was pretty young. And the version that I heard though was Elvis’s version. Which I don’t consider very good.

I don’t think his deliveries- he’s done better. And I think the band that he had at the time definitely is a great band, but I don’t really like the arrangement or treatment that they did on it. And it wasn’t until years later that I heard the Gordon Lightfoot version of it. And I think a lot of times, whenever you hear something, whenever you’re young and older, you hear a different version, you think, “oh wow, Gordon Lightfoot covered Elvis.”

Not really getting- whenever you’re a teenager, late teens, not really realizing that Gordon Lightfoot was the original writer of it. And then it hit me. I think the first time I heard him sing that song, it really crushed me and it might be that I thought of the Elvis version and it was probably on my mom’s record that I heard it. I’m assuming.

But it’s a song that is many people- it wouldn’t be a unique song for me to choose. This is making you homesick. But sometimes I think that I need that, that maybe nonspecific specificity. It not only makes me sick, homesick, or sick for my actual home in Pennsylvania, but it also makes me homesick to make a place like that for somebody else in a really strange kind of way.

The way that he feels about his home is also the way I feel about my home. And I started to think, I hope I’m doing that for somebody else.

Ryan: Elaborate on that. What you hope for your home or how you, how you see your home reflected in it?

Jason: When somebody’s that, when this, another person is away from it, you make a life that is, or a place, that makes them feel unique and wanted, and special.

Ryan: And so is home to you a place or an idea or how do you see home?

Jason: I think that that’s maybe why the song is- it has this unique effect to me because it does have it, that the home of my parents and now it’s the home of my sister and parents. And it makes me think of that, but then it also makes me, it also has the idea at some point that’s going to be gone and that there’s the idea of no matter where I am, somebody can find that within me. It doesn’t have to be a specific place.

I just saw- it was a really nice time. Maybe this will help, but just a few weeks ago I really had the great fortune of, uh, seeing Rob and Eleni from Beloved Binge and they were in the Pacific Northwest and they were traveling down the coast and they stopped in and saw us and stayed for the night and it was incredible.

It was such a nice time. I haven’t had a conversation with somebody like that about North Carolina. So it’s not, it’s not Pennsylvania. It’s a different, it’s a different kind of home. And we were in North Carolina for 20 years. And so there’s certain elements of it that I still have there, but it’s always with a person.

Cities change so much and especially in the Triangle that if I start thinking, “Oh, I’m going to get to North Carolina and I’m going to go see this and that and the other thing,” and you get there and it’s gone. Oh my God. I mean that’s what an awful feeling. So then home has become, in a way, because of the changes that towns go through, home is more like how, how Rob and Eleni made me feel about a certain time in my life and that was our home then, that was our first real venture into trying to not just make something unique for us, but to make others feel unique and special and they certainly did with me.

Ryan: So the home is almost- there’s an element of the physicality, the physical structure of a house that you’ve spent your life with you have family memories tied to, but then there’s also kind of the the transient evolution of relationships throughout time that have reflected that similar feeling of comfort in your- Within yourself, like you get from a childhood home, but that, that comfort, that feeling of belonging, that feeling of identity carried out and reflected throughout relationships with other people that you’ve built in other physical locations, but that relationship has evolved and maintained throughout the beyond transcended the physicality of the place. Is that-

Jason: That’s that’s right. And this is, I think, our fifth state in 25 years and whenever I think of what my parents did for me or what my sister and brother did for me or what was done to me in but what other people did for me in North Carolina and whenever I had that feeling, anytime I get to a new place, it does give me motivation to try and find that.

And if I can’t find it, I know that I have to try and create it. Because eventually you get to be of a certain age where you realize, “Oh man, all the, all the people that did- the reason I had this great experience was because it was somebody that was older, that had no investment to solely just to create community or do something really unique and cool.

And that becomes something I really took to my heart. And as you become older, unfortunately, you start to get less and less energy and gumption to do these things, but it’s still there to try and get that, try and create it and try and find it.

Ryan: With the last couple places that you’ve lived or specifically, where you are now, how have you tried to- have you found that sense of home or reflection of that sense of home, or have you felt the need to create it where you where you currently are. And I guess, how are you creating that?

Jason: Not yet, but we’ve only been here a year, which is a pretty short time. And so I haven’t found it, but I got into a conversation with somebody that had said, “you know, you’re a pretty outgoing fella,” and I am, but in most cases, whenever I don’t know somebody, I’m a bit of a wallflower.

I just stick to myself at the bar or whatever, at the show, and I don’t really glad hand, and try and meet people that way. The only way that I really met people was, like most people, through work. My work just happens to be music where people come up to you afterwards and introduce themselves. And so it’s a lot easier making friends.

And that’s been kind of the case so far. I’ve met maybe two handfuls of people right away and it’s all because of the music. Now, is that feeling there yet? No, but that’s okay. I don’t think I felt my home was my home in Pennsylvania – the feelings that I’m talking about to you – until I left.

That’s whenever I realized that I was, it was just a kid, a pissy teenager, that just couldn’t wait to get out of there and then you get out of there and you’re like, “oh my God, what they did for me.” And so that quite hasn’t quite developed, but that just takes time.

Ryan: So is “Early Morning Rain” almost like a transport for you. If you listen to that song, does that almost take you back to that feeling of home after you had left, does that take you back in a sense.

Jason: Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. And I have probably haven’t listened to it maybe at least a year. And so I wanted to listen to it again and I started crying, almost immediately. And he’s so, from a craft standpoint, I think it’s a really well written song, but you could really tell in his voice that there is some strong- there’s longing, but it’s not weak.

He’s not- he sounds so sure of himself. You know, he’s not pandering or anything. He has something quality of the voice that is, there’s some real strength there. And so in what he’s saying, it just has this longing that I haven’t had that experience in a lot of other songs.

And I think it’s fairly autobiographical though, too. That’s what he did whenever he moved. I think he moved away from Canada and he was living, I think, in California.

Ryan: Yeah it looks like, in some of the background around the song was, I should probably maybe dig in and add some post edit notes, but, I’m admittedly looking at Wikipedia right now, but he was in California, in Los Angeles. And when he was homesick, he’d go to the airport on rainy days and watch the planes come in and out. And there was one day, I guess he had his very young child with him, a five month old baby, and put them in the crib and started writing the song, observing the, planes taking off on the rainy days at the L.A. airport.

So I think definitely some autobiographical elements. And I think that story, I feel like lends itself to that authenticity that maybe is reflected in that recording and, and the lyrics.

Jason: Yeah, yeah, I love that one line “this old airport’s got me down. It’s no earthly good to me”

Yeah, great line.

Ryan: Yeah, I love those those lines that just really stop you and you almost want to pause the record just to sit and let it kind of keep rotating in your head a little bit.

Jason: I had the homesick feeling with other ones though. It was homesick, but it made me-it had a very different way, but I was listening to a Hammer No More The Fingers song. And man, it just, it really, it was a wonderful experience. And, and I recently, so we moved, and I had this immense trailer full of things that have followed me around the country. And some of it, I don’t know why I didn’t throw it away or just get rid of it earlier, but I didn’t, it’s still stuck with me.

My neighbor in Idaho would joke about this with cable and he would flip through the channels and he said the difference between him and his wife is she gets so frustrated with him flipping through these channels, and he was an older fella, and he said, this is just an old phrase, you may have heard it, but he said “women want to know what’s on, men always want to know what else is on.” And so he would end up flipping through all these channels. It was hilarious. Well, the streaming comes on and you think I’m gonna find something right away. Cause you have access to all this stuff. And I don’t, I kept looking and looking and looking.

Ryan: It makes it worse. Cause you’re not only, it’s the equivalent of scrolling through cable TV channels on, on Netflix, but then you’ve also got the equivalent of that on, on Hulu, on Amazon prime on whatever. It’s different dimensions of the streaming. You’re like, well, I mean this show on Netflix could be cool, but what else is going on on Paramount+? What am I missing out on? What would I rather put my- And then instead of spending that hour and a half watching something, you spend an hour and a half figuring out what the fuck to watch and you end up just feeling sad.

Jason: Here’s a million dollar idea. We’re going to come up with a service and it’s not- we don’t have any movies on it. It’s an app and it just has pictures of movies and the description. And that’s it. Nothing else. You just flip through this. And we change it up every so often. We don’t actually play the movies. It’s just pictures of movies with the description.

Nobody’s gonna watch them anyways. They’re just gonna keep on looking through these pictures. So it doesn’t matter. They don’t have to stream it. “That was a good one. I love that movie. That was so good, but there’s probably a better one.”

And here’s what’s odd. So I have the DVDs that I’ve kept and I keep them in a binder and I look through the binder and I can find something almost immediately. The movies that I love that I tell my wife, Beth, that I would be very sad- part of the move, why we keep them is if I wouldn’t be able to find this movie streaming, I would be very sad, if I couldn’t find it. And so we keep them.

And one of them, I haven’t seen this movie in so long, but it was a documentary done by the boys in Rat Jackson called Beer Y’all.

Ryan: Oh, yeah. Okay. Wow.

Jason: And this is why we’re having the DVD conversation. And I watched that, and I forgot about it. I really did forget.

Ryan: I forgot about it until you literally just mentioned it.

Jason: Yeah. Yes. I’ve, it’s been there, but I would bring it up with Beth every six months. “Hey, we should watch Beer Y’all. We haven’t seen Beer Y’all in forever. I can’t remember what happens in Beer Y’all.” Well, you know what happens in Beer Y’all, but they, at the end of it, it was a show that we [Red Collar] played with Rat Jackson and it was-to see that again it hit me so it hit me and it just, I haven’t had that, I’ve been going and going and going and haven’t had a chance to kind of stop and reflect a little bit and get, get some grounding.

Ryan: Watching that and knowing, being sort of a part of- coming up in that scene in the local scene in that time and kind of knowing everything that was going around. To me, that feels like that, that would remind me of that feeling of home that I had when I was a part of that, that Durham local scene, did you get those kind of nostalgic hits that you would get when listening to Gordon Lightfoot reflecting on your, your family home, your childhood home?

Did you get that similar connection to that feeling of home from that point in time in that Durham scene?

Jason: Absolutely, it was incredible. It was such a good feeling. It really was. It really was terrific. It was, uh, yeah, it was great. It was really cool.

Ryan: There was something electric about that like five, ten years, that just, I don’t know, there, there was something about it and it was magical. So I’m glad, I’m glad you dug that up.

Jason: I don’t think I appreciated it at the time, but I’ve talked with other people and they said, “oh yeah, I absolutely knew.” But, they were coming, they were coming there I think for that. Like they were coming, looking for that as opposed to, Beth and I, we were already there and I was teaching I think and Beth was working at UNC. And so it was just, Oh, well, we should just do something. And, um, and I don’t think that at the time it was just one step in front of the other. And I don’t think that, just like now, I just didn’t really stop and say, “Oh, wow, this is really great.” I just thought, “Oh, just another day.”

Just like whenever I was talking about my home at the time, I was just a snotty teenager. Couldn’t wait to get out. Once I left, I thought, “Oh man, they were so great.” They’re still so great. You know, but it’s just, it’s the same thing. I didn’t- and the assumption whenever we started to, you know, bump around, it was very unique.

I’ve traveled the country many, many times. After those years and I don’t think I realized just how unique that was, you know, I wasn’t as kind of worldly for lack of a better, you term, to really realize how special, special that was.

Ryan: So as you were in, in your various travels, you didn’t encounter anything with that kind of, that warmth, that feeling of familial, what’s that was the, the feeling, the feeling of home. You didn’t, you didn’t feel that like when you, even as an outsider visiting a scene, you didn’t feel like there was that kind of warmth that other people were, were experiencing. like feeling this place, this time in our scene is our collective musical home, you didn’t run into that, essentially?

Jason: Actually, I found that. I would see other people experiencing it in other scenes and that’s what made me realize that, “Oh, we have that there.” I don’t want it to seem like I was flippant about it. It was just life. It was just a part life.

But whenever I would see this in other- what was unique to me about The Triangle, and I may be wrong about this, but it was pretty big size scene with multifaceted, you would go to these other towns and they would be much smaller and and they would only have, I don’t know, you know, a 10th of the size of bands or even you know people that would come there, but they really latched on to it. You know is this is this is what they did. This is this is their thing and, yeah, it was something else.

Ryan: It really was and, reflecting on it, I don’t feel like it doesn’t- the physical place still exists, but as you’ve said, I mean things have changed buildings have come and gone people have come and gone and you know the way that I feel about that era of this scene as it, you know, it reminds me of home in a way it doesn’t feel like home anymore, if that makes sense, I’ve been living here for, what 12 years, 13 years, something like that. And it doesn’t really feel like home as much as it used to, if that makes sense.

Jason: That time was- the internet, but it was pre-cell phones or right at the advent of, of smartphones, I should say, and it’s much different, just the dynamic between people and what they find important.

I don’t know if it’s- I’m pretty sympathetic. I don’t know if I should be, you know, it’s like if you were a teenager in high school that went through the COVID years and you were stuck at home and you just found other ways of reaching out and finding different people. I don’t know, maybe, maybe that’s better. I’m not really sure when.

Now that they go into college and they don’t really find a need to go out like. I did or like you did, when they’re in their twenties and they’re okay in their dorm room, you know, with the phone because they’ve kind of found some community online. I’m not sure if I’m the one to say whether that’s bad or good. It only seems really odd to me and you maybe.

I’m not sure if, when it’s 10 years on for them, now they’re in their early 30s, I’m not sure if you ask them what makes them homesick, I don’t know what feelings are going to arise from them. I can’t make that call and I’m not certainly not going to denigrate it. It just seems to be, to be a really, odd and strange situation, I guess, that they’re in. Just in the same way that they would maybe look at my life and say, “you did what, what did you do? That seems so weird. You did what? Whenever you were in your twenties and God, that’s so crazy.”

Ryan: You did what to a vacuum cleaner?

Jason: Right. Right. You played in front of this many people and weren’t afraid of dying? I don’t really know what’s going to go through somebody’s mind. But, I imagine some kids may be thinking that, yeah, I don’t know. The older I get, the more fond those years have become for me. I wish I was in North Carolina this weekend, Hammer No More The Fingers Has a new album coming out.

Ryan: This will be airing sometime next year, but this is literally, I’m recording this and I’m going to go see them tonight. So, I’m excited.

[Transition music written & recorded by Scotty Sandwich]

Jason: I just, a few weeks ago, the beginning of November, no, beginning of October, it had to be earlier than that, some point this year, I had to take Beth to the airport and she, in Portland she said, “Oh, and guess who’s playing the night before I leave?” And I said, “who?” And she said “Bombadil.” So we went the night before we stayed with her- her brother lives in that area. And so we stayed up there and that night we went to see Bombadil. And we recognized there was other people, other Durham people, there in the crowd that are now living in the Pacific Northwest. And then they started pointing out, “Oh, this person’s also from Durham. Oh, this person was there.” And the feeling started to. To kind of happen, you know, happen again.

Now, is it, like, it is homesickness, but it is also, you know, nostalgia, in a way. There’s a difference, but music or that scene in North Carolina. That’s when that area started to feel like a home. And so maybe that’s, as we’re talking about music, it’s not just bringing us back to like an earlier time, but until music came into our life that we started playing music and then going out and seeing other bands and then playing with other bands, that’s when Durham started to feel like a home to us, or Hillsboro started to feel like a home to us.

Up until then it was just, this is where we live and this is where we work and we had a home and we had good connections with people, but I think that music is what really did make it feel like a place of belonging. Anytime I do see it now, it is nice to see. And I hope that in the near future, I’m just able to do that for somebody else. I really hope, I really hope I’m able to do that.

Ryan: By building and fostering some sort of, Scene in your area? Is that-?

Jason: I’m not sure.

I don’t know if that’s always good. I don’t know if that’s always a good thing to have as kind of a goal, necessarily. It’s just people. I think that people need- I still believe regardless of the availability of the world on our phones and the universe on our phone, I still believe that people need to go out at some point and they need to interact. Even if it’s just to see other human beings. At my age, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do that for you know, a 20 year old, let alone a 30 year old. To come out and do this because then it becomes forced. It’s like, “why don’t you like my music? or “they don’t know music or whatever.”

I just want to play out. I want to play out and I want to be an alternative to a jukebox and I want to be just an alternative to something else they won’t be able to get anywhere else. And then if that’s what they see, because they’ve had a hard Friday night or Saturday night and all so and so is playing, we should go out. And all of a sudden they meet other people there. Man, that’s terrific. Whenever those things kind of things happen, it’s really wonderful.

But you know, from the very selfish standpoint too, I also just need to play. And you hope that that feeling happens for somebody, you hope that they start to affiliate what I’m doing with this place and it makes them feel some connection to it, or I’m saying something to make them have that connection to it.

Ryan: I know we’ve talked about this over the years, but I guess talk a little bit more about that feeling of- the need to play and what you feel like drives that?

Jason: I really don’t know. It may be- when I started playing accordion whenever I was, I think seven. I’m from Pennsylvania and so my brother played mandolin and I played accordion and we would practice every day, a half an hour, and then we would play for little family get-togethers. I was really, and this is still problematic, but at the time, I was glued to the page. I had to read the notes. I couldn’t look away.

Even now it’s very tough for me to memorize somebody else’s songs. It takes a lot of work and it’s gone as soon as I learned a cover song for whatever, somebody’s wedding or something, it’s gone the next day. But my own song, it’s- they stay with you, I guess, and they’re hard for me to forget.

I’m not really sure why it just keeps on going. Just last night I had a fairly early night, woke up at 2:30 in the morning and that’s been happening at least maybe once a week where I’m just awake and then thoughts come in like, “Oh God, you know, this, uh, what am I doing?”

And normally I’ll get up and I’ll just try and go to sleep somewhere else. I’ll go to a couch or I’ll just get up and I’ll just try and stretch or just break it up. Just don’t lie in bed staring at the ceiling. And for the first time, this is the first time in this maybe- because Beth isn’t here, my wife, but I decided, it was 2:30, to just go play just to go play music and it was great.

The thoughts didn’t come into my head that normally do while I’m laying there. And I just played and it was wonderful. It was a really great feeling and I did it for, I don’t know, 45 minutes or an hour, I guess and went to back to bed and my mind was fairly clear and I was able to sleep.

Ryan: It’s wild to me how that works. It’s like your brain’s telling you something that’s just- it’s got to get something out there. And, once you finally are able to tackle what it wants you to, you can go to sleep. It’s wild. And it’s interesting that that comes- I mean, it makes perfect sense that that comes to form with you and music specifically.

Jason: It’s strange to me. I’ve always slept pretty soundly but, just the past six months, it hasn’t been easy and for whatever reason, this is the first time I tried this, something that should have been the first assumption that I did, but, yeah it was wonderful. It was really, really great.

Ryan: Is it something that you have that will see a different iteration? Is it something that you’re keeping, you’re holding onto? Or is it just kind of a spur of the moment, “I’m gonna get this music out here just into the world so that I can get it out and-“

Jason: No, I’ve really gotta start working on something, and not that I haven’t been, but it’s been in a much different context.

I have, since I’ve moved here, I don’t know if I told you this, but I’ve been playing for three hours for my sets. And so it started as like maybe three 50 minute sets and it’s all my own music. And that’s what I didn’t really realize. I thought, “Oh man, it’s maybe easy for somebody said, yeah, you put out so and so albums,” but I didn’t really realize how much I had and it’s been a good feeling because it’s still compelling for people. And this is maybe by nature of being a singer/songwriter is you can only open for people, but at least with me, when I was on the road, I would sometimes book shows at breweries and they want you for two hours or three hours. So at the time I was playing the same set three times but, now I could do three hours and still probably have another hour’s worth of material that I could do of original music.

And lately, I found a couple of people to play with and they’re people- we never practice. I just tell them the key that the song’s in and they just play. And so it’s really nice for me because these songs that are maybe 15 years old, all of a sudden, it’s this real nice freshness and I play off of them and they definitely play off of me for, and then rhythms change and I can extend the song and I have the experience of really dragging something out in a good way and really letting loose like I’ve never done before.

With Red Collar, Five Fifths or even Chasing 76 it was, “well, this is how the song goes. This is it, you know, and this is how we rehearsed it.” And Red Collar, we had some improvisation, but it’s not even remotely to the extent of what I’m doing now. And so I will play one song- I had this experience with a guy in Pittsburgh. I played a song, he’s playing along with me and I think we played three songs in a row because they were all in the key of G and we just- I would finish a song, but then you’d hear people start to clap, but then I just rolled into another song without ever really stopping.

It’s been a very fulfilling thing to do, but I’m really getting hungry to have like that hour as opposed to when you play a set like that for three hours. I’m conserving myself in the beginning. I’m like, I just have to kind of- and I’m only doing it one day, maybe possibly twice a week, but never more than that. So I don’t want to act like I’m Springsteen out there or anything, but you’re just kind of sitting there while people were having dinner, I guess, trying to let loose.

But I’m really getting hungry to have just that like hour set maybe, hour and 15 set, that’s just killer. And really just punch people in the face over and over and over again. But that takes a lot of work for me to do, to have that and to know what I’m doing. And I’ve shifted to keyboards, which, that takes a lot of work in itself, just to not only play that, but to be able to play what I want to play and to be able to sing on top of it takes a lot of work that I haven’t put in.

Ryan: So if you shifted- when you’re talking about the three hour set, are you talking about Five Fifths songs and Red Collar songs that you’ve reinterpreted with the keyboards?

Jason: Yes. Last week was, or two weeks ago, was the first time I played keyboards. But yes, before that it was all on guitar. And it was Red Collar songs, Five Fifth songs, Chasing 76 songs, and then the new stuff and it is reinterpreted and it depends on what kind of player you have next to you.

And sometimes you don’t- I didn’t know what kind of player they would be until you start playing the first note and then it’s like, “Oh, this is like playing with Cream, I got Jack Bruce here,” and then I have to kind of readjust myself and that’s, and that’s fun.

It is fun. It can be really strange because it’s not going the way that I necessarily thought it wanted to go. But, then that’s what makes it exciting and then it broadens my thoughts of what my song should be.

Ryan: So that the songs have really taken on a new life of their own that’s surprised you with how they’ve shaped up with the people that you’re playing with?

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. And there’s these two particular people that I’ve played with and we’ve done, I think two shows, maybe three shows, together and each one we’ve still never practiced. And we played a total of like nine hours in front of people, but they’re really good. They’re lifers and you realize with music, and this is the unfortunate part of of music, that any other- if you look at, say, woodworking, or maybe literature, it’s maybe- anything, welding, bank managing, you start to really know what you’re doing in your forties after working at your profession for 20 years, 20 years of craftsmanship, and then you’ve kind of got it, and then in your, maybe, late thirties to in your forties is when you’ve got a hold, you really know it. And people are starting to look at you as being the authority.

This is not how rock and roll works. Once you reach the age of 25, it’s over. The only people who really know rock and roll is people like 27 at the most. Or under. And I get it. I understand it, that mentality, but then you do lose something, you lose some type of brashness and self confidence.

It’s gone. All of a sudden you start to have some pretty deep self reflection starting in your thirties and definitely in your forties and you have a kid or you get married or no matter what, you start to have this job that kind of takes a lot from you.

And so there’s a lot of reasons for that, but for the people that are really kind of doing it, you start to really hit your stride in your forties. And unfortunately, people are like, “you’re still playing rock and roll. What are you crazy? You should be doing jazz, or whatever, country, not rock and roll, forget it.”

But these people are fantastic and they’ve been doing it for a while and they’ve toured quite a bit and they live in the town that we do and man, I tell them the key and by the second chorus they’re doing harmonies. It’s unbelievable. And then since they’re able to do harmonies and they’re singing them, I’m able to kind of do the riffing off of that and come up with something new.

It’s fun to do that in front of people. And there’ve been times whenever we’ve screwed up and we’ve had people come over up to us after the gig saying that was so tight. I can’t believe it. “How long have you guys been together?” And it’s like “the three hours you just saw us. That’s how long we’ve been together.”

It’s happened with other people and the other iterations of this thing, too. I’ve had these other two guys they’re really so cool and unique, but the first time I ever tried doing that in the area, I told the lady, I said, “if you know a guitar player, that would really help me out because it’s three hours and I can extend my set. It could save my voice. I’m not a shredder. I’d never have been and I can just let somebody fly a little bit and it’ll be much better in the long run.”

She said, “I can do you one better. I know a guy, he’s a guitar player and his friend’s a bass player.” And that’s tricky because a guitar player doesn’t have to know the song. They just really have to know the key. The bass player has to know the song. The drummer doesn’t have to know the song. The keyboardist arguably doesn’t have to know the song, but the bass player, you’re really walking a line there to try and you- But it’s nice ’cause you’re following a little bit, the bassist. So there it’s a little bit behind to make sure the notes- and at this point, I don’t have charts or anything, I just tell this guy it’s in the key of G. And then I’m saying in between lines of the verse, A minor, C, D and, and afterwards, I’m like, “what did you think?” And he said, “you know, that was cool, but I’d like to get maybe a practice in before the next time.”

Him and this other guy, this guitar player, they’ve been playing in bands since they were in their teenage years in California, and they’re both in their 60s now, and they’ve played like- I said, “how long did you play together?” They said “everything we played, early rock and roll and then whenever it was psychedelia, we played that. And then we played some new wave and punk together. And now we’re here together. We’re retired.” It’s really great. It’s a really great thing to see that somebody that you can still continue- and still find it fulfilling and it just puts a smile on their face and, and the people in the crowd too. It’s great.

Ryan: Amazing. I love that. And I love that you’re starting to see your material come to life in different ways and you’re feeling that excitement around it. I’m very, very eager to hear what comes out of it. And I absolutely love Wishing Well. I love the word play there too, on the title. Fantastic, fantastic record.

Is there anything that we didn’t talk about that you want to talk about or anything about Gordon Lightfoot or “Early Morning Rain” we didn’t touch on?

Jason: No, I think that we did did a good job of doing Gord proud, maybe. I hope.

Ryan: You can find Jason’s music on Bandcamp, there will be links scattered throughout the transcript at letsmixtape.com Huge thanks to Jason for taking the time to talk with me. As promised, here is Jason Kutchma with “Too Much of a Good Thing” off of Wishing Well.

That’s it for the first episode of season two. Tune in next week as we travel to Columbia as I talk with Balthazar Aguirre, of the band Balthvs, about the song that reminds him of home. Thanks for tuning in. Be sure to like, subscribe, and rate and all that jazz to help feed the algorithm. One more word about Jason before we go. He was the one who introduced me to the one and only Scotty Sandwich who composed and recorded the intro and transition music that we use on this here show. Catch ya next week.