Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Truth.
This is The Truth. I'm Jonathan Mitchell. And lately we've been releasing conversations in between episodes, talking with the writers about where these stories come from and the ideas inside them. And today I'm talking with writer Hunter Nelson, who wrote The Completist.
Chapter 2: What is the story behind 'The Completist'?
And this will be a spoiler-filled conversation. It's really meant to be listened to after you've heard the story. So if you haven't heard it, you'll want to go listen to it first.
The Truth.
And we'll talk with Hunter after the break. So if you want access to all of the interviews, go to thetruthpodcast.supportingcast.fm. Supporting the show helps us make more stories. thetruthpodcast.supportingcast.fm Hunter Nelson has written many stories for The Truth, like Body Genius, Dance Slang, Operation Skill Shot, and most recently, Forward Dark Speed.
And he's also a songwriter and musician. And so when he pitched me a story about two guys obsessed with a musician, I thought maybe he would want to write the songs. But instead, he suggested his friend Dustin Lohman write the songs and play the musician. And so later in this episode, we're going to hear Hunter talk with Dustin about how the songs were made.
But for the first half, I'm going to be talking with Hunter about the making of the story, which actually began in a much darker place than where it ended up.
I was originally thinking about someone as a mini Charles Manson because it's always fascinated me. So much terrible stuff that he believed and did came out of his mishearing of the White Album and telling everyone else, here's what these songs really mean.
And I was just sort of thinking like, I mean, as awful as Charles Manson is, I was thinking about people who have small versions of that, like little petty versions of misunderstanding lyrics or projecting your own beliefs onto music. and making it a part of your personality. There's an ugly, psychotic version of it, which is the Charles Manson version, obviously.
Or there's just little ways that people fit these things into their lives, like building their philosophy on whatever their relationship with music is.
And then I think there was a whole second stage to this where I started thinking about what if it was just the drive to go listen to the record, which instantly made me have to make Howard a much realer character and invest in him a lot more and decide a lot more. Who he actually was and what his effect on Nick would be.
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Chapter 3: How did Hunter Nelson develop the character of Garrett Solomon?
Where did that persona come from for you? Were you thinking about specific musicians?
I was. I think a lot about 70s artists' transition into the 80s, because I love a lot of musicians that... didn't handle that transition very well um also like a big touchstone even though it went very differently uh is it was neil young for this because neil has uh thorny discography in the 70s and 80s and he uh
put out a bunch of records that upset his record label in the 80s and experimented a lot. I was fascinated with Donovan in particular, because Donovan is, even though I like Donovan a lot, considered an also-ran because of the scene of him getting dissed by Bob Dylan in Don't Look Back. He also, I think, had a weird transition into the late 70s.
And Garrett Solomon is supposed to be someone that was kind of an also-ran from the jump. I don't think he got as big as Neal or even Donovan.
So bite the feet off centipedes And let the weeds overwhelm the arboretum
The songs that Garrett Solomon sings were actually written and performed specifically for our story by Dustin Lohman. And after the break, we'll hear Hunter and Dustin talk about how the songs were made.
Writing and performing in a persona, I found it actually kind of freeing in a way that I wasn't expecting because it felt like I wasn't accountable for it. It felt like the character was accountable for it.
That's after the break. And one of my favorite things about making the truth is getting to collaborate with folks like Hunter Nelson. You know, people who can take a strange premise and find something deeply human inside it.
And if you'd like to support this kind of work and hear every episode completely ad-free and have access to all of our older interviews like this one, you can join us at thetruthpodcast.supportingcast.fm. Your support directly helps us pay writers and actors and continue making new stories.
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Chapter 4: What themes are explored in the making of 'The Completist'?
thetruthpodcast.supportingcast.fm And now here's Hunter Nelson in conversation with songwriter Dustin Lillman.
Dustin, I hope you don't mind me interviewing you from my outdoor headquarters right now. I don't mind at all.
I know your listeners don't know the reason. I know the reason, and I can just set their minds at ease by saying it's a good reason.
It's a good reason to be outside. So I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about this little collaboration we got to do. All your wonderful songs you wrote for The Completist. And just to start with, do you remember how I first brought you into this project? When was the first thing you heard about this?
I remember it like it was yesterday. I think it's worth going back that you and I met at an open mic at a folk venue in Brooklyn. And I feel like you or somebody... I've always wanted to write some sort of story that takes place primarily at an open mic because it's a fascinating social dynamic. I feel like you would do a good job at that also. But, you know...
Open mics are sort of an agglomeration of people at various points in their life and their creative practices and so forth. And you meet people who are people you're unlikely to stay in touch with, suffice to say unlikely to stay in touch with, and people who you want to stay in touch with. And we met there.
I mean, as far as I remember, you floated the idea of collaborating on some sort of musical project, a storytelling project. And it very quickly was revealed to me that this was the kind of thing that I would want to do. I mean, I think being a completist, I've always been a completist in the way that I approach my favorite artistic work.
I could easily understand how these two guys were approaching it. Having listened thoroughly through the discographies, of any number of seminal folk rock singers from that period, I could imagine the sort of career trajectory that Garrett Solomon was following. So it felt like a subject I knew from every side of.
Yes, and I do feel like very quickly when I realized, you know, we didn't have to explain the reference points that might be involved in this guy's life, I was like, oh, this is the perfect person to... There's a lot of conversations we won't have to have. That's right, that's right. And so then...
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Chapter 5: How does music influence character development in storytelling?
It's like a George Jones thing? Stylistically, yes, it's like that. And it has a similar sort of descending melody like that. And so I thought of that descending melody as a kind of works in a commercial context type melody that then I could couple with some of this guy's idiosyncrasies in lyric writing and singing to make it sound...
you know, in that Neil Young way, commercially palatable, but also kind of with a personality you're not seeing in a lot of intrinsically commercial music. So that's how I was thinking about it. And then, you know, passing it off to you guys and hearing, oh, this would be a great song for a guy who's at the end of his rope. I was like, huh, maybe...
Maybe I'm closer to the end of my rope than I realize.
Because that was your idea of a huge pop hit.
That was my idea of a huge commercially successful folk rock hit, yeah. And also because the chorus has a very sing-alongable quality. I mean, I think performed idiosyncratically less so, but you could perform that in a more straight way to give the audience a chance to sing along with that mounting, you know, the melody. The melody rises, the dynamic rises in that chorus.
It's a song I was picturing people singing along to in a drunken sort of way. And I thought, at a party, where better to sing along drunkenly than with all your friends drunk at a party? But then the fact that it worked in, I mean, you guys thinking it worked in a different setting was just as well to me, I suppose. And then the song Ghost, yeah, that was interesting because...
I sort of wrote that while traveling, and I had been listening that morning to, I think it was Norman Blake. It was some bluegrass, a bluegrass singer. And the melody, I can't remember the song, but the melody was sort of, it kind of arose out of one of the songs that I was listening to from that artist that morning.
And it felt, when I was writing the lyrics sort of in my head as I was driving, and that melody felt to me very intrinsically, commercial is the wrong word, but maybe sort of folky is the right word, like a sort of melody that you could hear being sung almost anywhere, and hear an audience consisting of musicians and non-musicians getting and being able to join in with almost anywhere.
And when we were talking about this piece, I was asking you to write and perform in a persona, basically. What was your approach to inhabiting the Garrett Solomon character as a songwriter? And what is that like, writing as someone else?
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