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SPEAKER 1: Back in the old Prairie Home Companion days, we used to start off the show with an old time fiddle tune. And I think Garrison was basically challenging me, rather than to just rely on the old standards, whereas he had to sit and write his monologue and his routines-- so he didn't like the fact that we had life so easy.

So he challenged me to-- rather than doing that, why don't you write something for every show? And so every time I appear on the Prairie Home Companion show now, I try to come up with 2 or 3 pieces of music that I wrote that week.

SPEAKER 2: There is a track on the CD called "Bemidji Blues," but I was surprised that "Bemidji Blues" actually was born in Florida.

SPEAKER 1: We were performing in Jacksonville, Florida, and I wrote this tune and I was thinking about Florida and the tradition of Southern fiddlers that came from Florida. And in particular, there was a one, Vassar Clements, and another fiddler by the name of Arthur Smith who was very famous in the old days of country music.

They were just very fast hoedown in a Bluegrass kind of tradition. And so I decided, well, I'm going to Florida and I'm a fiddler, so I'm going to write me a good old fashioned kind of barn burner Florida blues. And I did, and we practiced it, and it sounded great.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

That particular tune was scheduled to be on the second half of the [INAUDIBLE] and it got cut. So it was just floating around until we were doing a show up in Bemidji. And Richie said, well, dad-- we were backstage talking, and he said, "Wouldn't it be great to if we got a chance to do that Jacksonville blues that you wrote? And I said, sure. And then I thought, well, wait a minute. Who says we can't? No one's ever heard the song. Let's change it to "Bemidji Blues."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 2: Well, that is a barn burner. And I must also mention to people that when we play your tunes, your fingers can't stop moving. You're sort of into the music at all times.

SPEAKER 1: My wife tells me that a lot of times if we're in a theater or at a movie or something and if I have my hand on top of hers or something, she said, "You're always tapping your fingers, like my hand is a finger board for you."

SPEAKER 2: And she's not insulted by that?

SPEAKER 1: No, I think she's just used to it.

SPEAKER 2: A hazard of being married to a musician, I guess. Now, on the CD you write that the road is a satisfying place to create music. And I'm wondering why is that the case? It seems like the road would be a hectic, hectic lifestyle and it would be difficult to sit down and write some music.

SPEAKER 1: I do spend countless hours sitting around A, either in airports, B, in a car. And I don't like really outside stimulus. I rarely listen to radio, for instance, if I'm driving around the country. I hardly ever turn the radio on. I really love the silence, because in the silence, these visions that I'm seeing going past me create this ongoing soundtrack in my head.

Sometimes I enjoy it, and other times I wish I could turn it off in some way, honestly, by the time I get to somewhere where I could actually pick up my instrument and try to play it. I figure if I remembered it, then it was meant for me to put this music down. And if I don't, then the guy, 2 or 3 cars behind me could have it.

SPEAKER 2: So you're influenced by the location and you're also influenced, I understand, by events that are happening in the news. And one of the tracks on your new CD is called "Baghdad Blues," and you can guess what inspired that.

SPEAKER 1: This particular piece, "Baghdad Blues," actually, I think might be the one song on this CD that I actually wrote for a broadcast in Saint Paul. And it was right during the week when our president decided that we were going to invade Baghdad or Iraq. It was just weighing heavy on my mind. I was reading all the various and sundry stories.

I'm just inspired by things that I read in the newspaper a lot of times. And so I was sitting there, my mandolin on the sofa, it usually is, and I picked up my mandolin and this music just started spewing out.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 2: And what were you trying to express with this music?

SPEAKER 1: I think actually-- because I call it a blues, I was definitely in a funky place. I was angry and frustrated at how things were going. And I had to put that energy into something. And being as playing music is my vocation, that's where it went.

SPEAKER 2: Your family immigrated to the US from the Ukraine after World War II, and you were raised in Minneapolis. And I'm wondering if that background influenced your choice of instruments, because you play the mandolin and the fiddle, both of instruments that we associate with that region of the world.

SPEAKER 1: Well, yeah, certainly. Mandolin seemed to be in just about every household in the Ukrainian community when I was growing up as a kid. And it was the first instrument that I picked up, probably when I was about three years old, because there happened to be one in the house because my father played one. And actually there was an accordion too, but I couldn't pick that up. So the mandolin became my instrument of choice.

And it was interesting because it was as natural as breathing in so many ways. Our weekends, as was often the case with immigrant families, we would always have big get togethers on the weekends, which involved lots of live music, where the people played the music from their homeland. And there was easily-- could be a dozen mandolins in our kitchen flailing away.

[MUSIC PLAYING]