Justin Richmond
speaker
42 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Justin Richmond’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hey, everyone. Welcome to all you lovers out there. This is Justin Richmond.
We're the host of Broken Record, where we interview your favorite musicians and bring to life the stories behind their music, behind some of your favorite recordings. If you're listening to this in the Broken Record feed, welcome back. But if you're hearing us as a listener of another Pushkin show, that's because today we're doing something special.
We're also going to be talking to some of our friends here at Pushkin, people who have equally strong opinions about the songs they love. I'll be talking to Malcolm Gladwell, who has a very Gladwellian take about why he believes country is the best genre for love songs. And I can guarantee it's not for the reason you may think. It's depressive music. That's what it is.
R&B. I knew it. Look, when you think about it, it's really the shorthand in music and in audio for love. If you were scoring a love scene in a movie for Netflix, for the most amount of people possible to watch, you would probably throw in an R&B song. Maybe Al Green, Let's Stay Together. Yeah. Come on, that's really, those are the sounds of love right there, you know?
The first day. Right. The first the first slow dance. It's your junior high welcome dance. You know what I'm saying? Or your senior prom like it's going to be R&B. It's kind of the cliche genre that we go to. And I don't I think I should give a deeper reason here because I think R&B kind of gets short shrift in in the music world.
Like, you know, rock and roll and hip hop have taken up all the air in the room for years. 60 years now, you know, since the British invasion. A couple of years were spent on EDM, but yeah. A couple of years. Yeah, right. Skrillex was big there for a second.
It's not a sexy topic for some reason. I think because it's so ubiquitous, because in some ways it's so ever present and we just find it very easy to ignore. But when you think about the fact that R&B comes out of really, like it comes out of gospel, you know, like gospel is about love and devotion to a higher being, to God.
And at some point, all these gospel musicians that go out, they want to write popular songs or sing popular music instead of just singing in the church. And they take everything they've learned in gospel music about how to sort of create a stir and a fervor around God. And they just sort of center romantic love. So they just take God out and put in a man, a woman, a lover.
You know, a classic example is Sam Cooke, who's originally with the gospel group, The Soulsters. And he releases a song, He's So Wonderful, which is, you know, it's a gospel track. Then when Sam Cooke wants to cross over, like about a year later, and wants to just make an R&B cut, he reworks that same song and instead of wonderful, becomes lovable.
So then how could you not say that R&B isn't like the preeminent genre for love songs? It has to do with the ethereal and the theological down to the romantic and the platonic. It's everything.
Yes, it goes thong. Shout out to Cisco. I love Cisco. That's a great album.
But then who takes, and we love Dolly, but then who takes a Dolly song like I'll Always Love You and takes it to the next level?
I mean, he wrote some of my favorite Whitney songs. Forget about his. This is some of my favorites. And, you know, a million other unforgettable songs that, you know, yeah, they also happen to be hits. Boyz II Men's End of the Road, Mariah Carey's We Belong Together, Breathe Again by Toni Braxton.
Yeah, man. I mean, I'm sitting there with Babyface and I'm watching him play guitar in front of me. It was just crazy, you know? And he's left-handed. He plays upside down like Hendrix. I mean, he's not as good as a guitar player as Hendrix. But I mean, it was just incredible to be that personal up close with him and seeing how...
He wrote these songs and he played for me a song he's never recorded with anyone. It was the very first song he ever wrote about an early love of his and for his first love, actually, in high school.
And for you, songwriting was about writing songs for? The girls you were in love with had crushes on. Yeah, crushes.
And you would have been like 10, 11, 12? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Can I play a Deal song? Sure. Sweet November? Yeah.
That's a great song.
Out of high school?
And would you have written the words or would you write the words first? I sat with the piano and wrote it. You sat with the piano? Yeah. Wow. So... Because it's kind of beautiful even just divorced from the music. If you just look at the words, it's high level, you know? Yeah, it was when autumn first arrived, you were my lady.
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