Your neighbor has Paul McCartney's phone number

We've got another segment from our friends at Boulder Valley Frequency today featuring prolific music journalist, outdoorsmen and Ward-adjacent resident Grayson Haver Currin. Grayson has profiled Willie Nelson, Peter Frampton, Tame Impala and of course, Paul McCartney. Today, he explains how he found his way to music journalism while telling some pretty cool stories along the way.

Also

• Black Hawk water issue gets multimillion dollar fix
• Nederland explores IGA for fire mitigation
• Central City talks affordable housing
• Former Gilpin resident wins a Peabody

You can watch the Peabody award-winning KMBC-TV documentary Restrained here: kmbc.com/article/chronicle-restrained-law-enforcement-restraint-documentary-investigation/64592751

Our theme song is courtesy of singer-songwriter Brittney Wagner. Stream her record Better off Dead here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:01

You might be neighbors with a guy who has Paul McCartney's phone number. Today we're gonna meet him. Grayson Haver Curran is a Boulder County resident who lives between Ward and Jamestown. He's also a prolific music journalist and outdoorsman who's profiled Willie Nelson, Peter Frampton, Tamin Paula, and of course our boy Paul. Welcome to the Mountaineer Podcast. I'm Tyler Hickman. Today we've got a fantastic interview with Grayson from our sister podcast, Boulder Valley Frequency. Grayson's journey to writing for pubs like Pitchfork and GQ is a bit bumpy, like any good journey is, and he's a hell of a storyteller. Stick around to hear the full interview after today's headlines. Before we dive in, we've got a quick word for one of our sponsors, Central City Opera. The 94th Central City Opera Festival opens June 27th. Since 1932, Central City Opera has been one of Colorado's favorite arts traditions, bringing world-class talent to a 19th-century opera house in historic Central City. This summer, CCO is celebrating the 70th anniversary of our world premiere of The Ballad of Baby Doe. The show tells the scandalous historical love story of Silver Baron Horace Tabor, who left his wife Augusta for Baby Doe, a performance which rocked Denver society and today remains a staple in Colorado history. You can also catch the marriage of Figaro, Masterclass, and CCO in concert this season, with a cast featuring talent from the Met, San Francisco Opera, and beyond. Tickets start at $32, and seats are going fast, so don't miss out. The festival runs June 27th through August 2nd. Visit centralcityopera.org to learn more. Let's get to this week's top stories. Last week, City Council approved a $2.3 million contract with Western States Reclamation to build a surge tank that will address pressure spikes in Blackhawk's water distribution system. Blackhawk began investigating water pressure issues that were affecting casinos and a local distillery about three years ago, according to a city engineer. The 50,000-gallon tank adjoining the Bobtail pump station will give these users direct tank pressure rather than sending water through the valve system that's been causing the issue. The city still needs to execute a land exchange with Jacobs Entertainment for the parcel where the tank will sit before the project moves forward. That swap is expected to close on or before June 30th. Netherland made some headway this week toward an intergovernmental agreement between the town and the Netherland Fire Protection District for fire mitigation work. The IGA provides a framework where the town fire department would pool resources to pursue grant funding for mitigation work that's performed by the district. The agreement remains flexible, and the town noted it would entertain bringing in both the county and U.S. Forest Service into the IGA. Trustees voted to move forward with drafting the agreement for further review at an upcoming meeting. The proposal would have the city join a regional approach, which includes Idaho Springs, Empire, Silverplume, Georgetown, and Clear Creek County in committing to building 120 affordable homes. The city has already received six-figure funding for planning activities under the program. Meeting this commitment would unlock further funding to help build the homes. Council noted joining the region would cost the city nothing. No action on the proposal was taken during the meeting. Johnson worked with a team at KMBC TV in Kansas City, Missouri, to uncover a shocking pattern of abuse in jails using restraint chairs throughout the region. The investigation found $100 million in damages paid to families of victims because of injury and death. You can watch their Peabody Award-winning documentary at the link in our show notes. Congrats to Carly and the rest of her team for doing genuinely impactful journalism. Seeing stories like this are a big reason why I continue to do my job every single day. As always, you can read these stories and so much more in this week's print edition or at the MTNEAR.com. Without further ado, here's Jeff Rosick interviewing your neighbor, Grayson Haver Curran. Oh, and one more thing. The shout out Grayson gives Caribou Current was totally unsolicited. Just a note that your favorite music journalist's favorite local publication is brought to you by the Mountaineer. Enough with the self-promotion. Here they are.

SPEAKER_02 6:23

Today's episode is for music and storytelling and hiking and outdoor lovers. I'm talking to a very special guest who's profiled, written about so many amazing people, music and beyond, as I'm learning more about Grayson, not only a gifted storyteller, but a very interesting outdoorsman himself. So we're very lucky to have you today, Grayson. Thank you so much for making the time. It's my pleasure. You've been storytelling, interviewing, profiling musicians, and many other very interesting people and topics for more than 10 years for the New York Times, more than 20 years for Pitchfork, if I have that right. You've hiked over 11,000 miles. You've done the Triple Crown. You're living in the mountains just above Boulder County. Tell us a little bit about your coming to Colorado story. I'm originally from North Carolina.

SPEAKER_04 7:05

I grew up in the Flatlands of North Carolina in the Piedmont. You know, it's sort of the edge of the Piedmont. And my wife Tina and I met in 2010. Uh we worked in Raleigh. I was a journalist, an editor at an altweekly newspaper there for a long time. After four years of being married, I think, in 2017, we decided that we'd had enough of this town that we loved and this community that we're very invested in. And we sold everything, bought a van, lived in a van for a year and a half, and sort of as soon as we crossed into Wyoming, we were just like, whoa, the West is incredible. Didn't move back to North Carolina, but we moved to the mountains in North Carolina in a town called Hot Springs. If anyone here has ever hiked the Appalachian Trail, you've been through Hot Springs, amazing place. And I love, I have a really deep love for the Appalachian Mountains and Appalachian culture at large. So we were there for several years. While we were there, we hiked the Appalachian Trail. We started we started doing long-distance hiking and you know, sort of only for the for for larger mountains. Maybe I shouldn't say this, but we we always called them mountains you can die on as a half joke. But we wanted to live in bigger mountains. So after doing a lot of trails, uh we were on the Continental Divide Trail in 2023. We were, I think, on our first day off in Montana. My wife Tina saw this house listed in Ward, Colorado, which is uh the the one place that our real estate agent who lives in Boulder, I will not say his name, told us not to move to. He said, You can't move to Ward. And so we called him from Trail and we're like, we really like this house near Ward. And he was like, Wow, of course you do. And so we so he went and looked at it and we bought it Side and Scene. We hiked all the way to Breckenridge, hitchhiked to our house where we live right now, saw the house for the first time, hitchhiked back to trail, and then hiked to Mexico, and then moved here in November 2023. And yeah, I mean, we're here for the outdoors. My wife is a park ranger with Blower County. Um, I don't get outside enough, but I try to get outside, especially during the summer, you know, really all as often as I absolutely can. So yeah, that's why we're here.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

What what's your take on kind of the local news scene? If you have the time and energy to follow local news or or local events or, you know, even local culture. It's been very difficult.

SPEAKER_04 9:16

You know, I think I come from an altweekly tradition, and I think not long after I moved here, Boulder Weekly collapsed. And there's a new paper called Caribou Current with my friend, my dear friend, one of my best friends in Colorado, Matt Sage, who makes incredible, incredible records on the cover of the first issue, which is why I picked it up. That's been really cool to learn about. And I've been, you know, I've read some stories that I've really enjoyed and learned a lot about it. But I would say that, you know, I don't and I don't think this is a problem specific to Colorado or the Front Range. Um, like learning about shows is not quite as easy as it used to be because everything is so scattered through social media and there's like not an index, you know, like when I was a kid, when I was, you know, in my 20s, I could pick up the all-weekly, which at that point I even I was soon editing, and find out about everything that was happening in a given week in this region I lived in. I feel like that's harder now, but I'm slowly figuring it out. But I wish there were a more centralized resource.

SPEAKER_02 10:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 10:14

Well, and if there is one, please tell me.

SPEAKER_02 10:16

No, not at all. I'll just share what I know. And this was not an intentional product placement, but the Caribou Caribou Kern is part of the Mountain Ear publication group, which, which, which, which now brings you this podcast. And our our tireless journalist, Shay Castle, she, you know, she's written for independent publications. She's been truly independent on her own. Now she writes and and does her storytelling through this publication group, which is wonderful and covers the mountain communities. And yeah, so I it's a really great point of view that you bring because I think um, you know, it's probably a universal challenge no matter what community you're living in, where news isn't the same as as maybe you and I grew up aspiring for it to be. Um, I I have to ask you now, as we kind of transition to journalism um and doing what you've been doing for a long time, but doing it from this as your home base, what is that feeling to you when you're headed over to the airport to go somewhere to tell a story? And then vice versa, when you're coming back into town to your to your newly adopted home?

SPEAKER_04 11:10

First of all, I love DIA. I love how weird it is. Uh I've written about this. I've I interviewed Terry Allen, who made the gargoyle, who's an incredible songwriter who made the gargoyle statues in DIA. And every time I leave or come back on a plane, I take a photo of one of the two gargoyles and put it on the internet. And I just love how like Byzantine and confusing DIA can be. There were days, there are days like if I'm extra tired or something and I'm not paying attention, I just look up and I'm like, I have no idea where I am. And then driving back west or or taking the bus back west, which I'll say like is an incredible, incredible resource. The the boulder to Denver airport shuttle is is I think really great. You know, seeing seeing kind of where I live on the horizon is always like a really fun feeling, especially if the sun, if it's you know, sort of uh twilight time. It always takes me, depending on how long the trip has been, it takes me a few, I'm a big runner of the kiker, so it takes me a few days for my lungs to feel like they're they're normal again. But I I'm getting kind of I'm getting somewhat used to that cycle. And it's like the skies are blue and the sun goes down, I'm gonna be able to see two planets on the horizon, and it's just beautiful. It's just like, why would I live anywhere else? It's it's incredible.

SPEAKER_02 12:22

I love that. I love that. And I'm so glad that you mentioned Terry Allen, the sculptor of the gargoyles at DIA. There's a really, really great recent piece on your sub stack. You really brought it to life. I love that one. So thank you. Grayson, you've you've written, it looks to me in the last year alone, you've written about Peter Frampton, Tom Morello, Willie Nelson, Yvonne Chenard, uh, Paige McConnell. You've written so many incredible pieces just in the last year. What is a very recent highlight?

SPEAKER_04 12:47

Yeah, I I just uh I just wrote a cover story about Paul McCartney uh for the British great British magazine Mojo, which was pretty intimidating. Uh I had you know, to be asked to write about Paul McCartney for a British magazine when you're a 43-year-old from the South living in Colorado. It's like, why are you doing this? Surely if you can get someone who actually lives in England to do this. But they asked me, and I did it, and it was a real joy. We had a phone call, and I wasn't sure how long it would be, and it lasted quite a long time, and it was he was really a delight and and really funny and charming. And you know, I've heard many times, and and I think it's absolutely true that Paul McCartney is really good at making other people feel normal. I'm I'm not unique in the fact that uh hearing the Beatles when I was a teenager, uh, this is like through the Anthology One series, uh the Anthology series, the first installment of that, that it, you know, I absolutely changed my life. Weirdly, that's a story that keeps renewing for for new generations. And so that was a huge honor. You know, I I I've been writing about music since I was 18 years old, and it it is a changing industry and in a in a lot of ways, kind of a corroding industry, right? It's a it's falling apart in some ways, and I'm I'm lucky to sort of be doing exactly what I wanted to be doing when I was 18, and you know, doing that required a lot of uh failure, I would say, a lot of doing it very badly, and being told I was doing it very badly, and sometimes being told I was doing it well. And you know, I I still feel that way on a day-to-day basis. I still find that part of it really fun.

SPEAKER_02 14:28

Well, I you you wrote a post on Instagram. Uh there's a picture of what appears to be you calling Sir Paul McCartney. Um he actually called me.

SPEAKER_04 14:36

He called me. He called you, and then I saved his number because I thought it was funny.

SPEAKER_02 14:40

You started to open this up, and I was gonna certainly ask you about it. You're 18 years old and you start writing about music. The the trial and error, the learning process to get to where you are now, where any, I think any aspiring journalist would love to have the great stories that you've published. But what were some of those early ones, places you published first or first assignments, or first things that you just started doing on your own?

SPEAKER_04 15:02

I went to college in North Carolina at NC State, and my I think it was my first week there, maybe my second week, Dave Matthews' sort of uh long time guitar collaborator, a guy named Tim Reynolds, was playing at a place called the Lincoln Theater. And, you know, I thought that was like the biggest deal. I thought that was like Hendrix had won Winstock or something, but it was like a Tuesday night show or something. Uh so I for some reason knew that maybe I could go to Tim Reynolds' website and he'd have a publicist, and I could email that publicist who I I owe a thank you note to this day. Like I should really try to find this person and say thank you. And I just emailed her and said, Hey, I'm a journalist for the student newspaper. I would like to interview Tim Reynolds and publish the interview in the newspaper. And I think within a day or two, she said yes. And then I had to go to the student newspaper office and say, Hey, I would like to write for you. And they're like, Oh, cool, you know, like whatever. Fill out an application kid and here it is. I was like, okay, cool. Well, also I scheduled an interview with this guy, Tim Reynolds, who's Dave Matthews guitarist, and they're like, Really? I was like, Yeah, and they're like, for us, and I was like, Yeah, I guess so. And they're like, You're hired. So they hired me. And if I had not done that, I think my life probably turns out a lot differently. But you know, I spent I would go to a show every night and I wrote constantly for the student newspaper. And then I I think when I was a junior, I got a job at the Alt Weekly, which is a a really historic alt weekly in the South called the Independent Weekly. And I worked there for the next 12 years probably. And I interviewed everyone I could, you know, there's a huge local music community there, record labels like Merge Records or Yaprout Records and bands like Super Trunk and Southern Culture on the Skids or His Gold Messenger, Megaphone. And then I started freelancing for Pitchfork. The first piece I ever wrote for Pitchfork was an interview with Glenn Kochi from Wilco. And you know, I remember turning that piece in and just like the editor ripping, and this is like before Pitchfork really had incredibly strong, stronger editorial standards, just ripping the intro apart because I'd written like a book. I mean, the intro is probably like twice as long as the interview. And just like what you know, like the learning through failure, and I think like the all-weekly universe, the sort of like small pay but some pay, like website universe of that moment, like allowed me to be able to live in a cheap house in a cheap city with a bunch of members of bands and fail all the time. And it's a moment that if I think about it too hard, I I should stop because it it breaks your brain a little bit, and you're like, How did that happen? And yeah, I don't know how it happens.

SPEAKER_02 17:44

One more story I want to ask you about because I I suspect we have more fish fans in the audience. The story for GQ about the lighting setup for fish at the sphere. I just read that. I really, really loved it, and that was a pretty recent story. Thank you.

SPEAKER_04 17:59

Not long after moved to Boulder, six months after moved to Boulder, I was in Los Angeles writing about Mavis Staples for her 80th birthday for the New York Times, and Fish was playing at Sphere. I've never I had never been a fish fan. I've had so many friends who are fish fans, and I asked another friend who was in LA, I was like, Do you want to go? Let's drive to Las Vegas to see Fish at Sphere because I had an invitation to do that. So we went for two nights, and a few months later, GQ asked me to profile fish, and so I said yes. And I got sent to Delaware for the Monogreen Fish Festival, four days Delaware, nothing but fish in the summer. And I was like, This is gonna be this is gonna be the worst experience of my life, it's gonna be terrible. And I don't feel we were telling the story. I've told this story before, but you know, so I went with two friends who are enormous fish fans, and two of my favorite people on the planet, a guy named Nick Sanborn, who's in a bank called Sylvanesso, and a guy named Matt Alston, who's just a great writer and a and a longtime friend. And I went with them and they were kind of my spirit guides to to this world. And kind of that first night, I remember thinking, like, this is like the best. I love this. I it was fish in a field, which I think is the way if you got if you're gonna go try to get and fit into fish, you gotta go see fish in a field, right? So I went to those shows, I wrote this profile for GQ. I really love doing it. People love that piece, I guess. And GQ loved that piece, and they kept asking me to do these stories. And I've so I've, you know, all these profiles I've done for GQ, which is probably like a dozen, like between eight to 13,000 words in the last two years, which have been some of my favorite writing experiences of my life, have all sort of stemmed from that. And so my wife, who also became a fish fan after I became a fish fan, because I took her to a show at Dicks, we went to see three of the Sphere shows. The lights were insane, like the evolution of the lights since that first round of shows I saw at Sphere was insane. And so I taught, you know, I've become friendly with the band since and and their managers who I who are I think incredible people. And I said, you know, I know you often don't let people behind this curtain of sort of production, especially at Sphere, but like I think this is a cool story because essentially what they're doing, if you're not a fish person, the sphere is sort of this like gigantic, this it's such a reductive thing to call like a huge TV screen, but it kind of is. It like displays this content, and fish changed it the first time around because they were able to manipulate the content in real time, night by night, and they could improvise to that. And this time what they did is they turned for part of the evening, turned part of that massive television into a sort of physicying version of their light rig, which is a very famous light rig. This, you know, Chris Coroda and Andrew Giffen are these incredible light programmers who who will work with Fish and I've worked for Fish for a very long time. They're very famous for in in the lighting and music industry. And so they basically turned this into a thing that they could play in real time with the band. And it was beautiful, it was it was kind of mind-blowing. And so I asked if we could write this story, and GQ said yes, Fish said yes, and yeah, it was just a weird little, I mean, that's what so much of journalism is, is like you have a weird little fascination, and you say, like, can I convince someone to give me some money and space in order to pursue my little fascination? And like, you know, I got to stand in in the light booth with Chris Corota and Andrew Giffin, which like you know, it's like I'm sure that many fish fans would pay a lot of money to do that, and I had like the experience to like talk to them as they're doing it. It's like, why? Again, to come back to it, so much of it is about wonder with the world, and then you have to ask yourself like why it's happening. It's like, why am I able to do this? Why me? And that is such a fun part of it.

SPEAKER_02 21:39

What do you listen to when you're actually writing, if anything?

SPEAKER_04 21:42

Brian Eno's music for airports way too much. I wrote a really long sort of Sunday review, we call it of of that record for Pitchfork, which I think if you've never heard that record, is probably a good explainer of it. You know, if I'm if I have a story that's kind of scares me, you know, the sort of the opening chimes at the beginning of that record sort of I I I don't know if they like reset my brain or something, and then I'm sort of able to go off and do what I do. And sometimes I'll just listen to it over and over again. So I I love that record so much. I don't listen to music with lyrics when I'm writing generally. Like I find it really hard to do.

SPEAKER_02 22:13

Who are you reading today, music or otherwise, that you find to be a great read?

SPEAKER_04 22:19

I really love this music critic named Dash Lewis. Dash Lewis is a really great and smart writer who writes a lot for Pitchfork, and I find just to be like a really insightful thinker and listener. One of my favorite music writers ever is a guy named Philip Sherburn, who also writes for Pitchfork, who's I'm lucky enough to call an editor and a friend. And he's, you know, the way he he will find this sort of beautiful metaphor that I think is always perfect. I don't read a lot of music writing aside from work because I I I find I get really neurotic about it, frankly. I read enough, I think. Two books, two books I'll recommend. There's a book called Senescence, A Year in the Canadian Rockies. I'm gonna mispronounce the writer's name, but I believe it's Amal Omosi, A-M-A-L-A-L-H-O-M-S-I. It's a really beautiful so many books, people are always right, like, why don't you write a book about hiking? And it's because I think most books about hiking are are awful. I can I feel comfortable saying that, but this is a really beautiful book about being about being outside. And then there's this other book. It's called All the Work I Never Wanted: A Memorella of Jobs by Rex Marshall. Rex Marshall is a musician in Portland, Oregon now, and this is one of the funniest books I've ever read. And there are these essays about like working in McDonald's and working at a Grateful Dead show, I think, in Las Vegas. Just all kinds of like amazing stories about being an employee of places you don't want to be an employee of. And I think no matter what job you have, you have these stories of being like, man, this job sucks. Uh and Rex tells these stories with like such humor and realness that I can't recommend it enough.

SPEAKER_02 23:59

Well, on that note, I'll bring us home with the question I've been able to ask some really interesting people that we've interviewed for this podcast. And that is, what's something that gives you optimism?

SPEAKER_04 24:08

Yeah, I I think maybe this is like a very temporary form of optimism. But in 2017, when my wife and I left Raleigh, North Carolina, and moved into a van, we we did that in large part because you know America delected a fascist to office. And we had thought about moving move to Canada, and we thought that was a cop-out. So we spent most of our time uh in a van going back and forth across the country, and we sort of remembered that like this is a pretty spectacular place to live and to exist, and um, there's so much wonder in this country. And spring, or maybe summer it is, is is kind of coming to the high country in Colorado, and you know, that's not gonna last forever. But again, it it does have that feeling of being like, this is a special, it is special to exist. So I so I guess I guess what gives me hope is sort of uh, you know, the moose that I hope it walks through my yard later tonight and sort of the wild the wildflowers that I can see out of my window.

SPEAKER_02 25:09

There's some things I wanted to ask you about and didn't even get a chance to, but we'll make sure to share links to all the things you've written recently and places people can find you, especially on your Substack out and back. You can also look up currency, C-U-R-R-I-N-C-Y.substack.com or currency on Instagram. Grayson, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been an awesome conversation, and I hope you do see that moose tonight in your big, beautiful front yard.

SPEAKER_04 25:35

Thanks so much. It's been a pleasure, and thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_03 25:40

That's all for today. Huge thanks to Boulder Valley Frequency for once again sharing a phenomenal episode with us. If you're not sick of hearing my voice, you can tune into their show next week to listen to me interview Shay Castle about the upcoming primary elections. If you need some guidance on who to vote for in your local election, I highly recommend tuning into that show. If you like today's episode, please share it around. It's the best thing you can do to help us grow. You can subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts to get our shows the moment they hit the airwaves. And if you see Grayson, say hi. Once again, this is the Mountaineer Podcast. I'm Tyler Hickman. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.