Sasha Weiss

Dolly Parton was another.

Bob Dylan was another.

Carole King.

Those guys are in.

And that was part of our rules.

And sort of the lower down we got in the balloting, the more they had to reach consensus.

So there was a lot of debate.

There was a lot of playing music in the room.

But when they couldn't get agreement, sometimes they had to move on.

It was crushing.

I mean, I think at various points, different people in the room felt crushed.

You know, part of what we were trying to do here was to complicate the image of a kind of singer-songwriter bard that a lot of us have in our heads and that, you know, some of the kind of usual suspects represent.

That's one mode of songwriting, a very important one.

But it's actually

relatively new.

You know, it was really in the 60s that Bob Dylan, among others, kind of inaugurated that kind of songwriting, you know, and we wanted to represent these other traditions.

So how do we do that?

So who to include from Nashville?

That was a big question and how to arrange that, you know, how to explain that to readers.

You're not alone there, Michael.