coldplay

COLDPLAY WERE BOOKED to perform at the Viljandi Folk Music Festival. And not only just perform, but to headline it, with their concert scheduled for the festival’s last evening. I’m not sure whose brilliant idea this was, but I suppose that after NÖEP performed in the same slot in 2025, the door was wide open for the likes of Coldplay and their “Adventure of a Lifetime.”

I was in the press office as usual right before they went on, but an older amber-haired woman, whom I understood was my wife, was there with me. She was a steadfast supporter of the band and had bought Parachutes after “Yellow” started getting played on MTV. But she wanted more than just to see Coldplay play Viljandi. She wanted me to make love to her during the concert. This seemed to be physically impossible: where would we find a proper spot? Her solution was an old ironing board. “See, I’ll just put my elbows here, like this,” she demonstrated to me during a break in their sets. “And then, when they play ‘Yellow’ and it peaks you can take me from behind.” “You’re crazy,” I told her. “I’m not having sex with you during a Coldplay concert!”

While we discussed the matter, Chris Martin led the crowd in a singalong of one of their blasé, forgettable songs. Not from the earlier catalogue, some album track from 2015 or so. The entire band, including Martin, wore those rain ponchos that are so popular at Folk, and it was raining. The band reclined on an old beige couch, plucking their instruments, tapping their drums, while Martin held up an umbrella and sang. Visually, it was stunning, but the music still didn’t find its way into my heart. Meantime my wife was demanding that I help her to climax during “Yellow.” I felt alone there standing next to that ironing board. “Please,” she whispered.

***

While all of this was happening, Klaudia was waiting for me on a beach. She was wearing a red swimsuit that highlighted her ample bust and the salt from the sea had teased her hair into a bouquet of sunshine. She was wearing sunglasses and saying, “You are going to have to choose, you know. You are going to have to choose between her and me. You must choose between her and me.” I could see myself reflected in Klaudia’s sunglasses, which meant that I was on the beach even though I was at the festival. “Which of us two will you choose now? Which one?” Grains of sand were in my eyes, grains of time, the sky above was pastel blue.

***

I guess I caught the rest of Coldplay’s performance. I remember Chris Martin took his shirt off, only to reveal his body had been tattooed in Celtic symbols. Before the encore, he also came over to me on the side of the stage and asked me how they had done. I told him it had been a wonderful show. Later, The Who came on, as a special mystery guest, and began to warm up the crowd. Keith Moon told me that if I wanted to hear their set better, it would make sense to go up one of the towers on the edge of the stage. That way my ears wouldn’t bleed when they were done serving up Maximum R&B. Up the steps I went. When I got to the third floor of the stage tower, I found myself in a room full of Estonian women dressed in traditional costume, with red headscarves. One of them was a younger, dark haired woman whose name was Mai. I knew Mai from the streets of Viljandi. We had shopped at the same Konsum.

“What’s wrong with you?” Mai said. Her gray eyes peered out at me from beneath the red scarf. “You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost.” “Two women are after me,” I said. I felt an outlaw bandit or robin hood. Always on the run from women and ironing boards. Then, glancing down at her in her red skirt, I asked, “Can I hug you?” “Muidugi!” she said. “Of course, you can!” “You mean you’re not afraid of me?” Mai just embraced me, warmly, softly. She was a robust, loving country woman. She helped take the pain away. “Why should I be afraid of you?” she said. “Besides, it’s not my fault I’m so sexy and young!”

After that, I think we kept on hugging. I held onto Mai like she was flotsam from the Titanic. The Who played their set.

the keys to ghislaine maxwell’s apartment

“HERE,” HE SAID. “If you need a place to stay for a while, you can go to Ghislaine Maxwell’s apartment in Peconic City.” My father placed the set of keys into my hands and told me the address, which was 9 Nantucket Avenue, and drove me to the station. The trip out to Peconic City wasn’t long. He told me that the house was located next to a money broker. Atlantic Union, I believe. When I got out into the station, I turned left, as I had been instructed and found myself in a kind of shanty town made up of small shacks set up inside the building. “It’s not much,” I recalled my father telling me, “but no one will look for you there.” Was this “Nantucket Avenue?” I walked by the shanty town, where indigent women were out selling flowers and other things. I asked an old flower seller how to get to Nantucket Avenue, and she told me I had to go outside the building, through the station’s back entrance, and turn right.

I checked my possessions. A single gym bag full of clothes, my phone, my wallet, a paperback. I walked through the central atrium of the station and out the back entrance, just as instructed, and walked down a sidewalk to the right until I saw a series of modern homes set back from the road with green lawns, even in winter. Down one of these lawns, a whole parade of media figures and cameramen came in my direction, one woman speaking loudly in those clipped, made-for-broadcast tones about the plight of Ghislaine. At that moment, I wondered how my father had even had come to possess Ghislaine Maxwell’s keys or why he had sent me there.

Even at a distance, I could read the words “Nantucket Avenue” on one of the houses, all of which had peaked roofs and were built to incorporate Puritan architectural elements, a sort of House of Seven Gables for the big money age. Did my father really think this was a good place for someone like me to hide out? In front of one of the houses, someone had strung up some effigies of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, except had given them vampire fangs that dripped red blood. “Death to the Rich,” a sign read. Some yellow-toothed vagrants stood around the Epstein and Trump vampire effigies, panhandling, hoping to get a dime out of me.

The interior of the house was dull and contemporary and all of the walls were covered with large photographs of Ghislaine and Epstein vacationing in the Caribbean, wearing bleached white shirts that were so bright they made your eyes ache, khakis as crisp as morning toast, blue jeans that were so blue, they looked as if they had only been worn once and then tossed away. Epstein’s gray hair was always that unruly mop, trimmed to a desired, specified length. Ghislaine looked like she had once starred in a 1990s Bond film, perhaps as the sexy villainess who gets killed in the end. One picture though made my heart sink. It showed Epstein, Ghislaine, and British diplomat Peter Mandelson clustered around the deck of a yacht as Jorma Kaukonen played guitar. They were on the sea somewhere, drenched in a pink orange sunset.

Jorma was in on it too? Later, when the revelations came out, Jorma Kaukonen, the white-bearded, Finnish Hemingway-looking ex-lead guitarist of seminal San Franciscan psychedelic rock group Jefferson Airplane, who had transitioned into the rough-and-tumble bar room blues act Hot Tuna in the 1970s, denied all wrongdoing. Instead, he said that Epstein had been a fan of Hot Tuna, and that he had performed for him and his guests on occasion and was always well paid. “I’m just a blues musician,” Jorma said. “Simple as that.” When asked what Epstein’s favorite Hot Tuna song was, Jorma acknowledged that it was “Hesitation Blues.” “Epstein made me play it two times during every set,” Jorma had said in a beachside interview. “It started to annoy me.”

In the interview, Jorma wore his white fisherman’s sweater and seemed at ease in his skin. He had his glasses on and his arms were at his sides and he seemed to be hiding nothing. It was hard to believe that he had ever been anything other than a minstrel to the evil rich.

alonette, lisanna, and tomás

Alonette, Lisanna, and Tomás, in that order.

I WAS HAPPY TO CATCH the most recent loft concert at Tomás del Real’s house in Viljandi this past Saturday. He calls these intimate musical events the Viljandi Home Sessions, or VHS. This one was VHS Volume 5. I have been to every single session. The last session, about two weeks before Christmas, featured Lonitseera band members Kaisa Kuslapuu and Kristin Kaha doing renditions of obscure Estonian holiday songs. That was undoubtedly the most unique and chaotic session, as there was a dog present and the electricity went out. In my opinion, they undersold themselves. Kaisa’s keyboard playing was fun and unorthodox, her singing is always great, and Kristin has some alarming and impossible notes stored away in her vault of a mouth. There were certainly a few “holy shit” moments. But, in true Estonian fashion, when I complimented them on their performance they sort of shrugged and said, “Eh, it was okay.”

This session had more of the cuddly folkie feel that Tomás was probably going for when he dreamed it up. No dogs or babies were present, and no electrical outages occurred. A fox did visit Tomás on the day of the session, maybe to provide him with some luck. A singer songwriter from Chile, Tomás has lived in Viljandi for some years now. He opened with some of his songs, including a new one, “Algún día,” which I felt innovated on the material he recorded for Principios de Declaración and Notas Rotas. I wouldn’t say it was better, but there were some changes and melodies in there that surprised me. Some new landscapes emerging from familiar terrain. Then came Lisanna Kuningas, who played three of her own songs on the guitar. Lisanna is also the keyboard player for Araukaaria, and did a wonderful session with the band’s singer and guitarist Pepi Prieto in November. These were really fun and enjoyable.

And then there was Anett Tamm, performing songs from her 2025 album Compass under her artist name Alonette. I personally found the melodies to be interesting. Every time I thought I knew where a song was going, she turned it around and went sailing off in another direction. I’m a taller, larger person, and when I am at these sessions, I like to lie in the floor in the back. It’s just more comfortable for me. There’s a nice strobe light employed, and so when I look at the ceiling back there, as the performers play, it’s almost as if I am staring up at the stars as they shoot over me. Because of this effect, while listening to Alonette, I had the sensation that I was drifting through space. Her songs have an amorphous quality to them, they expand and contract, and so I started to feel like I was watching the aurora borealis. At one point, I looked over at Tomás as if to say, “She is great, isn’t she?” Tomás just nodded as if to say, “I know.”

Thanks for the music and thanks for the photos Tomi Palsa.

‘custer’ by johnny cash

AMERICAN COUNTRY GENTLEMAN Johnny Cash was feeling particularly aggrieved in 1964 and wishing to highlight the struggles of indigenous peoples in the United States, so he recorded a whole album of songs called Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian. The resulting record, released on October 1 of that year, less than a year after President Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and a month before Lyndon Johnson won a landslide victory against Barry Goldwater, is often a kind of side note. I don’t remember if it came up in Walk the Line. He didn’t mention it in A Complete Unknown either, even though it had just been recorded.

But it’s a beautiful collection, with spare, percussive musical accompaniment by the Tennessee Three, Cash’s backing band, which included Luther Perkins on guitar, Marshall Grant on bass, and WS Holland on drums. Session musicians Norman Blake, who is still alive (aged 87) and Bob Johnson helped out on guitar. The best parts of the songs are the lovely backing vocal contributions of The Carter Family. I had a hard time figuring out who was singing, but certainly Johnny’s future wife June Carter was in the lead, along with Maybelle, Helen, and Anita Carter. You can hear their sublime harmonies on “As Long As The Grass Shall Grow.”

“Custer” though might be my favorite on this record, if only for Johnny Cash’s dry and comic delivery. “Custer split his men / well, he won’t do that again.” We forget that for most of the time after George Armstrong Custer‘s defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, he was considered to be an American military hero. But in the 1960s, the Lakota version of events started to win out (Custer’s widow Libbie, by the way, lived until 1933, which shows you how recent this history was.) Cash makes fine work of the legend here, though he didn’t write the song. Peter La Farge, a Greenwich Village folky regular, penned most of the songs on Bitter Tears. La Farge recorded several records of music with Native American and Western themes for Folkaways Records. La Farge died the year after Bitter Tears was released of an overdose.

Probably one of the most contentious aspects was Cash’s claim of Cherokee ancestry and accusations of being a Pretendian. On the cover of the album, his fist can be seen lifted in solidarity. Cash wears a headband, which makes him look just a little like Charlie Sheen’s character in Hot Shots. His claims of Cherokee identity were later debunked by Cash himself. He had no documented Cherokee ancestry. However, claims that he was purely of Scottish or British Isles descent are also false. A DNA test by his daughter revealed that she had African ancestry on both sides of her family, meaning that somewhere in Johnny’s “pure Scots” woodpile were some Africans. Note that this ancestry wasn’t documented either. And on Geni, at least some claim that Cash’s Hagler family from South Carolina might be linked to the Catawba Chief Hagler. So maybe Johnny was Catawba and not Cherokee. It’s certainly possible. This great record is the subject of a documentary and a tribute album too. “Custer” at two minutes and twenty-one seconds is not, maybe, the standout track, but it’s just perfect.

I remember that when Cash died in 2003, I said to a friend at that time, “But he was young, just 71 years old.” And the friend said, “But he had lived his life. He packed as much as he could into those 71 years.” I suppose after he lost June, just a few months prior, he had no reason to keep on living. But you are missed, Johnny Cash. We’re still listening to your music every single day.

‘igavene’ by sadu

THERE IS A DANGER when it comes to catchy Estonian songs. The danger is that they might become too popular. Then children’s choirs will start singing them, and they will become old ladies’ ringtones, which you overhear on trains, maybe in some place like Käru, and before you know it, you are pushing a cart down the aisle in an Estonian supermarket and you are wishing you never heard the goddamn thing! “Turn that shit off!” But, no, there shall be no such relief.

I shall not list the Estonian songs that have attained such a status, because you know exactly which ones I am referring to. But it is my sincere hope that “Igavene” by SADU never gets so far, but remains right where it is. I was sort of aware of SADU because its cofounder Sandra Sillamaa and I travel in the same circles and I was aware she was posing in various photos with the other cofounder, Sofia-Liis Liiv, but to be honest, they might as well have been promoting a lifestyle plan or deluxe shampoo. Who can pay attention to anything in this Instagram world?

But then one day I was at a friend’s house and this song came on. “Oh my god,” I thought. “It’s really good.” I have this memory of when I was about 12 years old and Achtung Baby had just come out. My friend had a small radio in his bathroom, and I slept over the house. “Mysterious Ways” came on the radio and I was hooked from those first sounds of The Edge’s guitar. I still listen to that song just to remember how tasty that guitar was the first time I heard it. Something about “Igavene” reminds me of that feeling. It’s like a delicious flavor of ice cream.

When I tried to describe the song, the words that came to mind were pop, world music, and Estonian folk. Then I read their Wikipedia entry, which states, in Estonian, “SADU is an ensemble that combines elements of folk, pop, and world music.” I am just saturated in Estonian folk music, living where I live, and honestly the runo song call and response template can get tiring, but this song reminded me of what I liked about world music, and even got me thinking about how world music leaked into the pop world. Fleeting memories of Paul Simon and his album Graceland, but also of Deep Forest (remember them?) Let’s put it this way, you could slide “Igavene” into a play list including “The Boy in the Bubble,” “Sweet Melody,” and “Norwegian Wood” by the Beatles, and it would fit right in. There is something refreshing about new sounds. “Igavene” manages to make something that was familiar sound fresh.

According to Sandra, she decided in 2024 to do something new, “something with female power up front.” She began to work with Frederik Küüts on some music, partnered with Sofia-Liis Liiv, and SADU was born. “Igavene” was one of the first songs they wrote for the project. It emerged from some lyrical ideas. “Life goes by so fast and people should be bolder,” says Sandra of the song’s concept. “Igavene” by the way translates as “eternal, everlasting, perpetual, or endless.” I guess “eternal” would be the best pick. But “Everlasting” sounds fine too. The song is included in their debut album Probleemid Paradiisis (“Problems in Paradise”). The record was released in September 2025.

‘star witness’ by neko case

I WAS COMING OUT of the woods yesterday, when a plump red fox ran before me. It was less than 10 feet away, unaware (or aware) of my presence, and went ahead through a snowed-over field toward another patch of forest by the lake. I’ve seen foxes quite a few times in recent years, and have developed a kind of rapport with them. I would not yet claim them as a spiritual animal, but they are contenders. They are intelligent, cunning creatures, true friends.

The run-in with the fox reminded me of Neko Case’s outstanding 2006 album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. In the year ’06, I would harvest new albums from the library and then rip them (or their best tracks) to my PC, and then upload the MP3 to a first-generation iPod, I think. It doesn’t seem like a very long time ago in my memory, but it was almost 20 years ago. I would listen to that album on the way to and from work in Lower Manhattan. I recall cold December evenings walking in the darkness in New York and listening to my favorite song, “Star Witness,” which according to Neko Case, is about witnessing a shooting in Chicago. Somehow the song’s topic never got inside of me, it was those lovely chords and vocals.

(Sometimes I would go out and walk on the beach, with the cold sea beside me, listening to this song. I went out for such a walk when I found out my second daughter was coming.)

The song has followed me. Consider the refrain, “Hey there, there’s such tender wolves ’round town tonight.” But this is my real life. There are tender wolves lurking in the woods in Estonia. There’s something deeper at work here. Something involving foxes, wolves, and Neko Case.

The record itself was recorded in Arizona. Garth Hudson (yes, of The Band) played on it. The title was inspired by a Ukrainian folk tale. It seems Neko is one of these musicians who puts a lot of thought (or afterthought) into her song and album titles. But it’s worth reminding readers that Neko herself is of Ukrainian ancestry. I have to say, she always struck me as incredibly intimidating. Women who are about 10 years older than me are these soul-scarred, battle-hardened characters, and it’s not so easy to get close to them, because they’re like, “Then I started living on the streets and busking, after I was legally emancipated at the age of 15.” And I’m like, “Uh, can I get you a cup of coffee? Anything else I can get you, Miss Case?” Tried every drug known to man, survived scrapes with the law, leather tough. Or at least, that’s my image of her. Maybe Neko Case is marshmallow soft, but with that kind of voice, I doubt it.

‘the bat is in the tree’ by stuart ironside

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. I had the good luck to see the guitarist Stuart Ironside perform at the Pärimusmuusika Ait in Viljandi, Estonia, at the very end of November. This is the one song that I took home with me, or the one that wouldn’t leave me alone. There it was, watching me. It was hovering and flitting around me like …

… like a bat in a tree.

Ironside — yes, that’s his real name — is originally from Oxford and came up playing classical music, Oasis, and Radiohead like a loyal Briton. But he’s since ventured into something that might be called “minimalist ambient meditative guitar.” In particular, he’s drawn, especially in Estonia, to being in the presence of and reacting to nature. He goes out into the woods with his instrument and listens to the trees talk and he talks back at them with his strings. There’s an almost monastic devotion to this experiment, as he communes in his sensitive, musical way. As such, the forest sounds on this recording, available on his new record Music from Somewhere Else: The Enclosure, were recorded in Vääna-Jõesuu, a beachside village to the west of Tallinn. Ironside recorded “The Bat is in the Tree” and other songs in a sauna there. This is not music designed to sound like something. It is that something, captured in the raw.

Ironside made a first attempt at the song in London in 2023. “I had the main riff at the start of the song for a few months, but didn’t know where it would go,” he recalls. “I refined it over a few years and live performances, with an emphasis on trying to ring as much emotion out of as few notes as possible.” Ironside also tried to emulate West African lutes like the xalam and koni for “The Bat is in the Tree,” but also drew upon both British and Estonian folk. The result is a satisfying and pretty listening experience. This is the kind of music you listen to at the start or end of the days, when you put your legs up on the bed, breathe out, stare at the ceiling and close your eyes, trying, perhaps in vain, to forget the tiring agony of the world.

mca’s 61st birthday

THE SCENE, an industrial area, a dump, maybe both. Rory Lapp, the acclaimed Estonian writer and poet drives in first, then I follow him, our automobiles follow a set course. It’s almost like we’re rally racing. Yet there are no competitive drivers, just rusting manufacturing waste that brings to mind a mineral processing plant. At some point, Rory leaves his vehicle with a sort of industrial plant valet and I do the same. Then we head into an old building, vast and obviously post-war, with a peeling façade. It’s an auditorium. Light wooden floors. Burgundy curtains.

Inside, everything has been renovated. I can see that we’re in something like a basketball court set up for a party. This is one of those multipurpose halls. There are long tables on both sides, and on stage, an unfamiliar hip hop trio is performing. They are pacing with microphones, trading rhymes, and a DJ spins records in the corner, cutting back and forth. At the head of the tables, I see a familiar-looking man, clean shaven, with a full head of wavy hair. He wears a red button down shirt, open at the top, and looks somehow lost in thought or just unimpressed.

“Who is that?” I ask from one of the partygoers, who is loading his plate from a bowl of potato salad. “He looks just like …” “That’s MCA,” the partygoer responds. “Today is his 61st birthday. Weren’t you invited?” “I guess so,” I say. Now I can see that MCA, also known as Adam Yauch, also known as Nathaniel Hornblower, is at the gifts table, and guests are hovering around him as he unties every last big package. I look down and see I have a gift bag in hand too. It’s full of my own books. “Yauch loved Minu Viljandi,” somebody says. “He’s a great fan of your work.” “He is?” I answer. “I have to say, he looks great for 61,” someone says. “Sixty-one?” another answers. “And I thought he was dead!” “Isn’t he though?” I ask them. But nobody answers.

Slowly I make my way to the busy gift table. MCA is seated there. He still looks like he’s part alien or something. Did the Beastie Boys really smoke so much dope back in the day? Or was it all that Tibetan Buddhism that did that to him? MCA is functioning on some other plane of consciousness. He’s floating around in the Third Bardo. I am afraid to even say hi to him. He’s a big superstar, one of the greatest emcees ever. I’m just … But how did MCA even find out about me? MCA looks up as I hand over my gift. He nods in his good-natured, all knowing way. Kind, sympathetic, brotherly. The man looks as if he’s about to speak. MCA looks up and says …

‘let’s go together’ by paul kantner and jefferson starship

IN CASE YOU’RE WONDERING, no, this is not the Starship that put out “We Built This City.” Blows Against the Empire (1970) was a collaborative record arranged and composed mostly by Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner with lots of Woodstock Nation friends, including Grace Slick, Jorma and Peter Kaukonen, Jack Casady, Graham Nash, David Crosby, Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and many more. It’s very similar to Crosby’s solo album, If I Could Only Remember My Name from around the same time. (Kantner and Crosby, before there ever were Byrds or Airplane, used to play guitars in Los Angeles on the beach and smoke pot).

I like the piano on this track, played by Grace Slick, which gives its sparse, almost hollow sound. Her vocals are also great, at times, with her voice, you can’t tell if it’s her or a guitar hovering in the back. Paul Kantner plays guitar, sings, and also helps out with some kind of “bass synthesizer,” whatever that was. Jerry Garcia plays the banjo and Kreutzmann is the drummer. And that’s it for this one. What a weird lineup. Kantner/Slick/Garcia/Kreutzmann? Who knew that such musical combinations even existed. Slick is now 86 and Kreutzmann is 79. The others, Paul and Jerry, are up on that big starship in the sky.

Lyrically, it picks up where they left off with “Wooden Ships,” a Kantner co-creation. “Say goodbye to America, say hello to the garden.” Utopian fantasies about sailing off into space with hippies. Imagine a world of David Crosbys and Grace Slicks. What a world that would be. Like, all our problems would be solved, man!

‘robert f. kennedy’ by the ethiopians

I HAVE DECIDED to create a new series that I call New Track. I was going to call it New Track of the Week, but I am not sure if I will write about a new track every week. What if I want to write about one every two weeks? Or if I want to write about two new tracks in one week? New Track of the Week would be limiting. That’s why this series is just called New Track.

New Track features a new track. It’s a new song I have discovered that I would like to write about and share with the world. In this way, I can feature all kinds of music. In particular, I would like to write about local artists in Estonia who are connected to Viljandi in some way, but not exclusively. Rather, I’d just like to write about whatever I happen to be listening to. And today’s new (inaugural) track is ‘Robert F. Kennedy ‘ by a Jamaican outfit called The Ethiopians.

How did I discover this track? I was in a record store in Amsterdam and was looking at a Don Drummond record. Don Drummond was a Jamaican ska trombonist and integral member of the famous group The Skatalites. A lot of great Jamaican recordings from the 1960s were released as 45s, and so many are now available in various compilations. So, it was through exploring these compilations that I came upon this breezy recording, “Robert F. Kennedy.”

Learning about Jamaican groups can be complex. Often I try to find out who the bass player was on some sessions only to be led down the rabbit hole. This 2:04 song was recorded about a year after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (who would have been 100 years old on November 20, which also happens to be my birthday). The song is also credited to the Sir JJ All Stars. The Ethiopians were a popular vocal harmony group in Jamaica and in 1969 released an album called Reggae Power on the Sir JJ label run by producer Karl Johannes “J.J.” Johnson. “Robert F. Kennedy” is an instrumental track off that record.

But who was in the Sir JJ house band? It consisted of Bobby Aitken (guitar), Winston Richards (drums), Vincent White (bass), Alphonso Henry (alto sax), Val Bennett (tenor sax), Dave Parks (trombone), Mark Lewis (trumpet), Bobby Kalphat (keyboards), and someone called “Iron Sprat” (bongos). At least I think it did. Of the group, at least Vincent White is still around and playing. Here’s an interview with him recorded in July.