WEBVTT
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Hello and welcome to another episode of Inside Out.
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My name is Jim Bennett and I'm flying solo this week.
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The indefatigable Ian Wilkes, who is usually my partner in crime during these episodes, is under the weather and unable to join us this time around.
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I'll leave it to him when he returns, and he will return to provide more information about that, but I don't feel it's my place to do so.
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So, Ian, on behalf of myself and your legions of adoring fans, know that we love you, we miss you, and we hope you get well soon.
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So, as I thought about how to handle this week in Ian's absence, I came up with an idea.
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The one and only Oprah Winfrey! Oprah! How are you?
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Well, I'm doing just fine, Jim.
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How are you?
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I'm doing great.
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Thanks for asking.
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My pleasure.
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So, I didn't realize you were a podcaster.
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Well, I'm no Ian Wilkes, but I get the job done.
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I'm sure you do.
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I have to admit, I was very surprised when you agreed to co-host.
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Were you?
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I was.
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I didn't realize you even listened to the show.
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Oh, come on.
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I'm a huge fan of Inside Out.
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Huge.
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Stedman and I never miss an episode.
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I didn't know that.
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Oh, yeah.
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Huge, huge.
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It's good to know.
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Which is your favorite episode?
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My what now?
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I'm just wondering which one is your favorite.
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Which episode is your favorite?
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Oh, you know, they're all good.
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Seriously, they're all really,
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really good.
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Well, thanks, but if you had to pick
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your favorite, just one.
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Well, there was the one about, let's see, there was the one about the hats, I think, right?
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Wasn't there one about hats?
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I don't recall an episode about hats.
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Have you thought about doing an episode about hats?
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I have not.
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This is a podcast about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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Oh, well, I'm sorry, but I don't know what that is.
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Stedman told me this was a podcast exclusively about hats.
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Well, I'm not sure how we got our wires crossed there.
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There aren't going to be any hats.
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Oh,
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great.
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That's just great.
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So what are we supposed to talk about for an hour,
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Jim?
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I've got all this hat show prep.
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I'm sorry, I thought we would talk about music.
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I hate music.
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Everyone hates music.
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I don't know anybody that hates music.
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Trust me on this.
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Music is the absolute worst.
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It's the worst, Jim, the worst.
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Well, Oprah, you and I are just going to have to agree to disagree on that, because music has been one of the greatest joys of my life, and it's been how I have felt closest to God.
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I love singing in the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square every Because not only is it wonderful to be surrounded by this lovely music with talented people, it's a great way to feel the Spirit.
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It's a great way to feel a connection to the divine.
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The Doctrine and Covenants talks about the idea that the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me.
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And I have taken that literally throughout my entire life.
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I have felt God in music, and not just in religious music.
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Any kind of music, I feel, can lift us above ourselves, lift us higher than ourselves.
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And so that's one of the reasons why I have taken to writing music.
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And so I thought, without Ian here, I thought this might be kind of a fun way for me to share some of the songs that I recorded.
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And the first one...
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is a song that I wrote right after my mission, actually about a year after my mission.
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I came home, and I was assigned to direct, write and direct a roadshow in the Monument Park, is it the 20th Ward?
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It was the ward up Emigration Canyon where my parents lived at the time.
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They no longer live there.
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But I was called as the roadshow director, and the theme was, I'm wild about...
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And I wrote a roadshow called I'm Wild About Boys, Girls, and Javelins.
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And the centerpiece of the show was a song that tells the story of Teancum from the Book of Mormon.
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And Teancum is a somewhat lesser-known character, but it's a really bizarre story.
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Teancum is this Nephite warrior in the great...
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Nephite-Lamanite war that takes up most of the Book of Alma.
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And Teancum goes in and stabs the king of the Lamanites, Amalickiah, with a javelin while he's in his tent and kills him.
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And he's thrilled about it, but later on, when they get a new king, the new king, Teancum, decides he's going to get cocky and go and do this again.
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and stabs the new king with a javelin and ends up getting caught and ends up getting killed.
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And my favorite parts of the Book of Mormon are the gory and the weird parts.
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And this may well be not necessarily the goriest and the weirdest, because I have a song about that too, but this may be the second goriest and weirdest.
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And so I wrote a song called Javelin Man that tells the story of Teancum.
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And this song became a fixture at Aspen Grove.
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I don't know if you're familiar with Aspen Grove Family
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Camp.
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Stedman and I are huge fans of Aspen Grove Family Camp.
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Just huge.
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Ridiculously huge.
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Huge.
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Well, that's great.
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So is my family.
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We started going to Aspen Grove Family Camp when I was three years old.
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And we went every summer.
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up until I was about 12, I think, and then we stopped for a few years, and then we went back after Dad was elected to the Senate and went there for decades.
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We haven't been since my father passed away, but it was an annual tradition.
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It's a camp up Provo Canyon that's owned and operated by Brigham Young University, and every Monday night they have a talent show.
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And It was my job to sort of spearhead the talent show.
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And I got all of the little kids to participate in a production of Javelin Man every year.
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And there was always a fight as to who got to play Teancum and who got to play Amalickiah, the evil king, and all of these things.
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And it was a lot of fun.
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And we actually performed it one year for Thomas S.
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Monson, who was there with his family.
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And I was a little nervous that It might cost me my church membership, but Thomas Monson was cool with it.
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So I decided, okay, this song is not too offensive or too strange.
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And years later, in my ward where I live now, I was contacted by Tim Fulmer.
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I don't know if you know Tim Fulmer.
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I don't know him, but from what I know about him, I am in love with him.
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And I would hope he would let me ditch Stedman and allow me to be his eternal companion.
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Oprah, that's just ridiculous.
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There's no reason you would know him.
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He's a guy in my ward who's a magnificent musician.
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He actually plays the guitar in the If You Could Hide a Kolob intro to this podcast.
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My love for Tim Fulmer is greater than my love for music.
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And you know how much I love music.
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I do.
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I do.
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But Tim was assigned to be the director of a roadshow in the ward in which I currently live.
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This was about 10 years ago.
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And Tim, this was a video roadshow.
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So this wasn't going to be live on stage.
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We actually had to make a short film.
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And Tim wanted to go all out.
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And he asked me to write the script for it.
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And so I adapted it.
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that earlier roadshow, but the thing that I really wanted to do was make sure that Javelin Man, the song, got the full video treatment.
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And I was excited because Tim is such a perfectionist and such a great musician that he got together a group of musicians to record a professional version of Javelin Man that sounds like a million bucks.
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And I have a friend, who was the music director down at Tuakon when I was the artistic director at Tuakon.
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Her name is Jenny Jordan.
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And she is, I think she makes a zillion dollars as the lead singer now of a group called the Party Crashers.
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And she's just the most magnificent vocalist you've ever heard in your entire life.
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And she agreed to sing a version of Javelin Man.
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And so we've got this wonderful recording of it.
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And if you go to YouTube and you search for Javelin Man, our video will come up.
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And it's a lot of fun.
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What makes me sad is that we monetized it, but we also used some third-party music at the beginning of it.
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And I've since discovered that they have gotten all of the monetization for it because...
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We did not ask them for permission for their copyrighted music.
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So that's the way it goes.
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But if you go there, it has tens of thousands of views.
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It's a very popular video.
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And this is not a video podcast, but I thought at the beginning, as I share with you some of my music, I want to share with you this audio recording of Javelin Man.
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What do I care?
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I'm just here for the money.
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Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, Javelin Man.
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What'd you think?
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Well, that didn't suck nearly as much as I thought it would.
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Well, thank
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you.
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Thank you.
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That's very high praise coming from you.
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You're welcome.
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I'm afraid that my next...
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I'm Oprah Winfrey, you know.
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Yeah, you mentioned that.
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So I'm afraid that my next few songs are...
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That's the only song that has that level of production value.
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And unfortunately...
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I sing on all the rest of the recording, so you have to listen to me and not Jenny Jordan.
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No more Tim Fulmer either, because I love him.
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I am in love with him.
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No, you are not, and Tim Fulmer is happily married, so just back off.
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I'm Oprah Winfrey, you know.
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Yeah, sure you are.
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So, that song is the second weirdest event in the Book of Mormon, but I think the weirdest event...
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is the story of Ammon with all of the arms being sliced off.
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I can remember as a little kid giving a talk about that in junior Sunday school.
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And that dates me because junior Sunday school was the precursor to the three-hour block where primary was included in Sunday worship.
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Prior to that, primary was something we did after school And junior Sunday school was essentially the same thing, but it was primary on Sunday.
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And I had to give a talk, and my parents thought it would be fun for me to give a talk about Ammon, and I got to describe in detail the gory story of Ammon slicing off everybody's arms.
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So our ward did a Book of Mormon read-a-thon, where they sat and read the entirety of the Book of Mormon, in 24 hours.
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That sounds excruciating.
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It was.
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It was absolutely excruciating.
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And everybody was trying not to fall asleep.
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They were following along with a recorded audio version of the Book of Mormon that was sped up like four times fast.
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And I don't know how anybody got anything out of it.
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But they wanted to break it up with something fun.
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And they asked me to do something fun in the middle of it, so I wrote a song about Ammon.
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And so my recording is a recording that I did myself, and I've tried to do the best I can with the equipment that I have, which is not nearly as good as the equipment that was used for Javelin Man.
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But the song has its own kind of fun charms, and I really enjoy the fact that I gave it sort of a Bob Dylan vibe.
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So are you just going to
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talk about it, or do we get to hear it?
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No, you get to hear it.
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Let's play it right now.
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Ladies and gentlemen, the Ammon Song.
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riding past the waters of Sidon.
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He was going to work for the Lamanite king.
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Sheep were feeding and no one was bleeding till somebody started a sheep stealing thing.
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All the king's servants they ran for their lives.
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All except them who took out his knives because Ammon was fearless he faced them alone and soon began hacking through muscle and bone he sliced through the brachial artery part a big honking artery straight from the heart So blood splattered and sputtered and splashed and it spilled.
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It spiked and it spurted and speckled the hills.
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If they'd left things alone, they'd have come to no harm.
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But the thing is they didn't.
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So Ammon cut off their arms.
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Ammon, he gathered up the bones that he shattered.
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The limbs were in number a lot.
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Not a few.
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He went without malice to the Lamanite palace to give old King Lamonia.
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How do you do?
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Because the king was intrigued with his brave servant's charms But his majesty freaked when he saw those arms Because Ammon was fearless, he faced them with scorn that they'd never been born.
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He ripped through their biceps and triceps and stuff and didn't despair when the tendons So blood splattered and sputtered and splashed and it spilled.
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It spiked and it spurted and speckled the hills.
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If they'd left things alone, they'd have come to no harm.
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But the thing is they didn't, so Ammon cut off their arm.
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Repented his sins and repented And then fell to the earth Was he dead, do you think?
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No, he awakened Though his people were shaken They all had complained When he started to stink Because Ammon was strong He converted the king And the queen and the people started to sing a song of redemption they couldn't ignore and all because Evan was knee deep in gold So blood splattered and sputtered and splashed and it spilled.
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It spiked and it spurted and speckled the hills.
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If they'd left things alone, they'd have come to no harm.
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But the thing is they didn't.
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So Ammon cut off their arm.
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So blood splattered and spluttered and splashed and it spilled.
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It spiked and it spurted and speckled the hills If they'd left things alone they'd have come to no harm But the thing is they didn't, so Ammon cut off their arm Wow.
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You
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like that?
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That's all I can say.
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I just...
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Wow.
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I know, right?
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I must say, though, that a chainsaw solo isn't something you hear every day.
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That's a good point.
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There's not a lot of songs devoted to the chainsaw.
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So those are the only two songs you've ever written, right?
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No, not at all.
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I've been writing songs since I was 11 years old.
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I was at the Barnesdall Gallery Theater in Hollywood, California, and I was sitting next to Amber Caceres, and she sang me a song she had written, which included the line, that had something to do with a stinky butt.
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And she dared me to top that.
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And so I went up into the lobby and I went into the men's room and started to compose this song and it took me as long to write it as it now takes to sing it.
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So this was actually written in real time.
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So ladies and gentlemen, I here present to you, I Am a Cow.
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I Am a Cow I am a cow.
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I am a cow.
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You don't bow out.
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You move like a cow.
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I am a cow I am a cow How now?
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Green cow so When you're a cow You don't meow You don't bow wow You moo like a cow I am a cow I am a cow How now?
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Really?
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When you were 11 years old?
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That's when I wrote it, yes.
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And I've been writing songs ever since.
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Does it discourage you that you've never gotten any better at it?
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Well, maybe just a little bit.
00:26:00.101 --> 00:26:05.328
I've written songs for a number of different occasions and for a number of different purposes.
00:26:06.329 --> 00:26:11.057
And when I was the artistic director for the Tuakon Center for the Arts...
00:26:12.066 --> 00:26:26.809
I was tasked with rewriting Tuacon's signature musical, Utah! They had already written several different versions of it that had bombed, and they asked me to write a version of it.
00:26:27.750 --> 00:26:31.698
And my version, I think, finally put it to rest.
00:26:32.880 --> 00:26:38.788
They produced it, it bombed too, and they have not produced it since, and that was 20 years ago.
00:26:39.329 --> 00:26:48.359
So I have the distinction of ending Utah! as a viable musical production.
00:26:48.559 --> 00:26:59.011
But while I was down there, the CEO of TuaCon at the time was a man named Fred Lampropoulos, who I ended up working with when he ran for governor in 2004.
00:26:59.031 --> 00:27:07.280
And Fred Lampropoulos was very encouraged by the idea of writing new musicals.
00:27:08.130 --> 00:27:12.378
and wanted to write a musical version of The Princess Bride.
00:27:12.420 --> 00:27:25.729
And I got a hold of the screenplay of The Princess Bride, and I read it, and I thought, this already reads like a musical, and there are so many different moments that could just burst into song.
00:27:26.433 --> 00:27:32.161
And so I started to play around with the idea of a musical version of The Princess Bride.
00:27:32.741 --> 00:27:40.651
And then we got a hold of William Goldman's agent, who said they'd get about 10 requests to turn The Princess Bride into a musical every day.
00:27:40.692 --> 00:27:44.395
And no thank you, they weren't interested in considering ours.
00:27:45.217 --> 00:27:55.609
So I went back and took those songs and repurposed them for a different musical that was actually a sequel to Peter Pan.
00:27:56.385 --> 00:28:04.259
And the idea was that Peter Pan has come away from Neverland and has sort of forgotten who he is.
00:28:04.298 --> 00:28:08.846
And before you say, oh, this sounds just like Hook, it isn't.
00:28:08.866 --> 00:28:12.452
It's quite different from Hook because there's a big twist at the end.
00:28:12.633 --> 00:28:17.221
Because the kid who thinks he's Peter Pan actually isn't Peter Pan.
00:28:17.260 --> 00:28:26.535
The father that he's fighting against throughout the whole musical who comes to try to rescue him Turns out the father is Peter Pan, not the kid.
00:28:26.575 --> 00:28:42.017
And the father realizes that a life where you learn and you grow is more rewarding than the kind of life where you're living the same day, Groundhog Day-like, over and over and over again, where nothing matters, where nothing ever changes.
00:28:42.037 --> 00:28:49.287
And in the course of this, actually, I had written a song called A Princess Bride.
00:28:49.347 --> 00:29:23.025
And It works in the context of a Princess Bride musical, but it actually works in the context of the Peter Pan musical that I had written as well, because in this musical, Tiger Lily, who's the princess, as Peter gets older and realizes that he doesn't just want to be the kind of lost boy child doing silly childish things, and he approaches Tiger Lily, and they sort of start a a tentative relationship.
00:29:23.726 --> 00:29:32.038
But Tiger Lily, in order to grow up, she has to leave and go back to her people outside of Deverland and marry a prince.
00:29:32.980 --> 00:29:34.403
And she doesn't want to do that.
00:29:34.442 --> 00:29:36.185
She wants to stay with Peter.
00:29:36.665 --> 00:29:46.521
So in the context of my Peter Pan musical, this actually makes sense, but it also makes sense in the context of a non-existent Princess Bride musical.
00:29:47.170 --> 00:29:49.853
I was not present when this was recorded.
00:29:49.873 --> 00:29:52.557
I have not met the people who sing on it.
00:29:53.597 --> 00:30:05.211
My friend Jaron Hinckley, who is now the head of the clarinet department at Brigham Young University, Fred Lampropoulos paid to create a demo of four songs from this musical.
00:30:05.593 --> 00:30:10.259
And this is the one of the four that I think is the most lovely.
00:30:10.278 --> 00:30:17.996
I'm told the woman who sings it is the star of the movie The R.M., But I've never met her.
00:30:18.016 --> 00:30:25.046
I've never heard her other than in this lovely demo that I am going to share with you right now.
00:30:25.125 --> 00:30:28.131
So I told you before you were only going to hear me sing, but I lied.
00:30:28.171 --> 00:30:33.378
Turns out I've got this lovely song up my sleeve and I want to share it with you now.
00:30:33.638 --> 00:30:34.180
All righty then.
00:30:34.440 --> 00:30:35.662
Ladies and gentlemen, here it is.
00:30:35.682 --> 00:30:37.444
A Princess Bride.
00:30:37.464 --> 00:30:38.365
A Princess Bride.
00:30:48.642 --> 00:31:12.253
Can you hear the people cheering as the princess passes by?
00:31:15.105 --> 00:31:18.354
She is glory.
00:31:18.374 --> 00:31:21.201
She is light.
00:31:21.721 --> 00:31:27.796
She is all the grace and beauty in the world.
00:31:27.816 --> 00:31:31.806
But the story isn't true.
00:31:33.057 --> 00:32:29.188
For she knows, she knows she's just a foolish little girl Just like every father's daughter When there's no more time to play As the real world grows brighter And the princess fades away But somewhere deep inside her She is not completely gone She is only waiting patiently For a prince to come along and bring her glory bring her light give her all the grace and beauty in the world take the story she knows she's more than just
00:32:30.971 --> 00:32:38.546
a foolish little girl she's the one he loves he's been searching far and wide for the
00:32:38.986 --> 00:33:25.750
one he loves and she's standing by his side she's the one he loves and it cannot be denied He takes the father's daughter And he makes a princess bride It doesn't happen often But it's how the world should be that isn't true for everyone just everyone but me there's a prince who says he loves me what an awful thing to say why has happily ever after
00:33:26.431 --> 00:33:39.064
never seemed so far away it's a lonely sort of
00:33:39.085 --> 00:33:40.445
plan to have
00:33:52.385 --> 00:34:03.969
I wish this prince had never come along For my one true love Is a faithful man inside Though
00:34:03.990 --> 00:34:04.430
my
00:34:04.450 --> 00:34:04.711
one
00:34:04.871 --> 00:34:12.126
true love Has been blinded by his pride He's my one true love
00:34:37.601 --> 00:34:38.903
So when is that coming to Broadway?
00:34:39.344 --> 00:34:41.768
Well, whenever anybody wants to produce it.
00:34:42.409 --> 00:34:43.992
I have the script.
00:34:44.291 --> 00:34:45.574
I have some of the music.
00:34:46.434 --> 00:34:55.108
My friend Jaron did the orchestrations for these four songs, and I'd be willing to bet I could hire him to do the orchestrations for the rest of them.
00:34:55.889 --> 00:35:02.298
So if there's some Broadway producer out there that's looking for material, I got it right here.
00:35:02.338 --> 00:35:04.001
I'll, you know...
00:35:05.442 --> 00:35:09.728
And I realize none of this has anything to do with the church, and this is a podcast about the church.
00:35:10.568 --> 00:35:24.907
But I want to share the story that one of the things that I did with this music, and with a lot of the music that I've written, the church put out a call for new hymns and a new hymn book.
00:35:26.150 --> 00:35:42.945
And I answered the call, and the guidelines were you were allowed to submit five hymns submissions for the hymn book and five submissions for the children's song book.
00:35:44.166 --> 00:35:50.356
And I ended up writing 14 different songs and submitting them.
00:35:50.838 --> 00:35:55.686
And the way I got around it is I have a son whose name is also coincidentally James Bennett.
00:35:56.706 --> 00:36:01.034
And I submitted several hymns in his name.
00:36:01.134 --> 00:36:06.514
So if they get published and they work, It'll say James Bennett one way or the other.
00:36:08.177 --> 00:36:17.431
The thing about all of those, so I repurposed some of the melodies that I'd written for this musical for the hymns that I'd written.
00:36:18.253 --> 00:36:24.664
And I have to say that writing hymns, again, as I said at the outset, I feel more connected to God.
00:36:24.704 --> 00:36:30.213
I feel more connected to the divine through music than through anything else.
00:36:30.753 --> 00:36:38.108
And writing these hymns, I don't have any idea if any of them will see the light of day or if anybody will care.
00:36:38.148 --> 00:36:44.721
But just the process of writing them was a profound spiritual experience for me.
00:36:45.081 --> 00:36:59.449
And so I don't know anybody who's listening to this, if any of you have any interest in music, have any interest in writing music, But just that process, just sort of engaging in the creative process.
00:36:59.570 --> 00:37:19.141
I remember at Tuakon, we had one of the directors who gave an opening prayer at our first rehearsal and said, it's actually at our first audition, before the auditions, when people came in, and said, we come before thee as partners in the creative process.
00:37:20.418 --> 00:37:21.539
And I've never forgotten that.
00:37:21.780 --> 00:37:25.184
I've always thought that's a really powerful way to think about it.
00:37:26.047 --> 00:37:30.693
So spirituality and music to me are intertwined.
00:37:31.253 --> 00:37:43.313
Whether or not I'm any good at this, whether or not anything that I've shared with you, if you've listened to it and thought, jeez, this guy Bennett sure thinks an awful lot of himself, I don't blame you for thinking that.
00:37:43.413 --> 00:37:45.275
I don't actually think a lot of myself.
00:37:45.416 --> 00:37:46.617
I don't necessarily...
00:37:47.425 --> 00:37:51.771
think that these songs are going to change the world or a big deal to anybody but me.
00:37:51.811 --> 00:38:05.327
I do think that they've given me an opportunity to be a co-creator, to be part of the creative process, which to me is a divine process and something lovely.
00:38:06.108 --> 00:38:09.773
So there's a guy in the Tabernacle Choir who's written 5,000?
00:38:10.454 --> 00:38:12.655
Or is it 500?
00:38:12.697 --> 00:38:13.297
It can't be 5,000.
00:38:14.561 --> 00:38:18.146
But he submitted over 500 songs.
00:38:18.786 --> 00:38:27.956
And the way he did it is that he wrote the lyrics and then he asked other people if they wanted to set them to music and if they would submit them on his behalf.
00:38:28.135 --> 00:38:29.878
I actually wrote the music to one of them.
00:38:30.778 --> 00:38:31.980
And then I went, well, wait a minute.
00:38:32.179 --> 00:38:33.681
I don't want to submit your lyrics.
00:38:33.722 --> 00:38:34.963
I want to submit my lyrics.
00:38:35.684 --> 00:38:40.708
And so I wrote 14 different songs and have submitted them.
00:38:40.789 --> 00:38:44.998
And one of them was a modified version of Javelin Man.
00:38:45.659 --> 00:38:53.873
I thought, jeesh, that could be a nice primary song if I set it in a way where I take out some of the gorier aspects of it.
00:38:54.634 --> 00:39:03.489
I have not heard back my friend in the choir who wrote between 500 and 5,000 songs has also not heard back.
00:39:04.230 --> 00:39:15.157
The church has published the first 12 songs from the new hymn book including Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, which everybody wanted to see returned to the hymn book.
00:39:15.759 --> 00:39:18.262
It's a song the choir sings on a regular basis.
00:39:18.342 --> 00:39:19.565
It's absolutely gorgeous.
00:39:20.445 --> 00:39:21.527
And that's coming back.
00:39:21.947 --> 00:39:26.916
The rumor is that Amazing Grace is going to make its way into the new hymn book.
00:39:27.717 --> 00:39:45.106
And I'm really excited by that rumor because the whole concept of grace, the whole concept of Christ's grace saving us, is one that, as a church, we have shied away from because we are scared of it.
00:39:45.666 --> 00:39:50.833
We're sort of scared of the doctrine because we think it takes away from our uniqueness.
00:39:50.974 --> 00:39:57.844
When we talk about the fact that we're all saved by grace, that what we do isn't what matters.
00:39:58.664 --> 00:40:01.048
It's Christ's grace that saves us.
00:40:02.530 --> 00:40:07.117
We are afraid, I think, of sounding like Protestants or sounding like evangelicals.
00:40:07.777 --> 00:40:13.143
But the reality is the doctrine of grace is the central doctrine of the restored gospel.
00:40:13.182 --> 00:40:21.170
And it's a doctrine that is found all across the Book of Mormon, even more explicitly than it's found in the Bible.
00:40:22.012 --> 00:40:32.121
And so the idea that we could embrace the beautiful song Amazing Grace is something that really warms my heart and something that I hope we will do.
00:40:32.262 --> 00:40:34.704
And I hope that's actually a true rumor.
00:40:35.945 --> 00:40:39.557
But We will have to wait and see.
00:40:39.597 --> 00:40:43.242
So I'm going to share a couple more songs with you.
00:40:43.903 --> 00:40:45.407
We've gotten serious here.
00:40:46.208 --> 00:40:47.449
I'm going to get a little silly.
00:40:47.469 --> 00:40:54.800
This song is a song that I wrote to be silly, as most of my songs are.
00:40:55.081 --> 00:40:56.282
Very few of my songs...
00:40:56.322 --> 00:41:02.313
When I wrote the Princess Bride song, I did it when I was in the mindset of a character.
00:41:02.353 --> 00:41:09.048
So it was much easier for me to write something silly that wasn't as silly.
00:41:09.148 --> 00:41:13.693
It's hard for me to take myself seriously.
00:41:14.454 --> 00:41:17.838
And so when I write music, it's sometimes hard for me to take myself seriously.
00:41:17.878 --> 00:41:27.710
But when I wrote hymns, I was able to say, okay, this has a purpose that I'm aiming for, and I can do this much more seriously than when I'm writing just for my own amusement.
00:41:28.431 --> 00:41:39.485
But I wrote a very silly song called Dead, and And it's just all about, there are three verses, and it talks about three different goofy ways to die.
00:41:39.525 --> 00:41:42.068
And it was a lot of fun.
00:41:42.128 --> 00:41:50.335
But when I was writing my Peter Pan musical, I went, okay, this is a song that actually could fit into the musical.
00:41:50.436 --> 00:41:58.784
Because the whole idea of Neverland, which is the name of my musical, is that...
00:42:00.418 --> 00:42:22.342
A life that doesn't have impact and a life that doesn't carry the possibility of loss and the possibility of pain and the kinds of things that we experience as we age and grow and the limits that mortality places on us also make our lives more meaningful.
00:42:23.664 --> 00:42:25.545
And the characters in this...
00:42:26.273 --> 00:42:34.083
both Peter, the young Peter, and then his father, who was also Peter, who was the original Peter Pan, learned that lesson.
00:42:34.523 --> 00:42:44.556
Because at the end of the first act of the musical, one of the lost boys is killed in a battle with Captain Hook, in a battle with the pirates.
00:42:44.836 --> 00:42:53.987
And Peter, the young Peter, finds it so tragic and so awful and so terrible and is heartbroken.
00:42:54.289 --> 00:43:00.025
And the second act, opens with the funeral of this lost boy.
00:43:01.027 --> 00:43:05.996
And Peter is trying to take it seriously, and the lost boys think it's ridiculous.
00:43:06.056 --> 00:43:06.657
They don't care.
00:43:06.697 --> 00:43:09.382
They think this is no big deal.
00:43:09.442 --> 00:43:10.784
We have funerals all the time.
00:43:10.804 --> 00:43:11.425
It's kind of silly.
00:43:11.445 --> 00:43:14.972
We're going to sing the song we always sing at funerals.
00:43:16.253 --> 00:43:20.802
And the song they always sing at funerals is this silly song I wrote called Dead.
00:43:21.730 --> 00:43:31.943
And the third verse of the song in the context of the musical is sung by the dead lost boy who just comes back to life.
00:43:32.422 --> 00:43:36.027
Because if you don't grow up, it's essentially Groundhog Day.
00:43:36.108 --> 00:43:37.228
Nothing ever changes.
00:43:37.829 --> 00:43:39.010
So no one ever dies.
00:43:39.052 --> 00:43:40.974
Nothing ever has any consequence.
00:43:41.635 --> 00:43:50.606
So the fact that the lost boy died the day before doesn't prevent him from showing up at his own funeral to sing the last verse of his own funeral song.
00:43:51.585 --> 00:44:00.840
And so this sort of opens the young Peter's eyes up to the realities of this Neverland where nothing has any consequences and nothing matters.
00:44:01.722 --> 00:44:06.148
And that precedes his arc towards redemption at the end of the show.
00:44:06.869 --> 00:44:12.297
But so that's how this song was repurposed for the musical.
00:44:13.159 --> 00:44:20.630
But Jaron and a number of his different singers who I have never met and the musicians I have never met wrote this.
00:44:20.811 --> 00:44:25.376
All I remember is that there's a line in there about a guy saying, I'm a nutter with my putter.
00:44:25.436 --> 00:44:28.521
And apparently the guy who sang it, his last name was Nutter.
00:44:29.302 --> 00:44:31.445
So I've always remembered that as I've listened to this.
00:44:32.166 --> 00:44:35.711
But this is the Lost Boys funeral song.
00:44:35.972 --> 00:44:37.054
It's a little bit silly.
00:44:37.134 --> 00:44:39.076
It starts out solemn and then gets silly.
00:44:39.277 --> 00:44:40.197
So let's get stupid.
00:44:40.458 --> 00:44:41.059
Here's the Lost
00:44:41.099 --> 00:44:42.902
Boys funeral song, Dead.
00:45:02.081 --> 00:45:31.166
Well, the and the west is getting wilder so I saddled up my stallion and I headed out to sea upon some more reflection it was time to change direction when a shark bit off my horse's head and spit it back to me all that horse had done no wrong to anyone he was fat and he was frisky and he frolicked in the sun but I wrote my horse this song and when it's done everyone will know my horse's
00:45:31.306 --> 00:45:38.755
name his legacy will long Outlive his brain Cause he's dead
00:45:38.976 --> 00:45:47.128
Cause he's dead Cause he doesn't have a head It was bitten off by sharks at sea And turned the water red Now his cranium's digesting
00:45:47.228 --> 00:45:51.876
And the orc is large intestine And now no one really cares That he's well bred
00:45:52.396 --> 00:46:03.233
Cause he's dead Lie Like the time that I played golf and accidentally killed a dolphin when I whacked him with my putter cause I'm not that good at sports.
00:46:03.793 --> 00:46:10.599
The golfers were disgusted but eventually adjusted when they teed off from the blowhole of his putrid rotting corpse.
00:46:10.898 --> 00:46:17.844
Oh that dolphin did no wrong to anyone but I left him in the sand trap cause he must have weighed a ton.
00:46:18.065 --> 00:46:25.552
But I wrote this dolphin song and when it's done think about the dolphin how you will.
00:46:25.552 --> 00:46:29.798
And maybe you could roll him down the hill.
00:46:30.318 --> 00:46:31.661
Cause he's dead.
00:46:31.722 --> 00:46:32.543
Cause he's dead.
00:46:32.583 --> 00:46:34.246
Cause I whacked him in the head.
00:46:34.505 --> 00:46:36.148
I'm a nutter with my putter.
00:46:36.289 --> 00:46:37.992
I should play lacrosse instead.
00:46:38.072 --> 00:46:39.853
Both on land and underwater.
00:46:40.074 --> 00:46:41.657
It was wet mammalian slaughter.
00:46:41.777 --> 00:46:44.862
And the putting greens where dolphins feared to dread.
00:46:44.943 --> 00:46:47.166
Cause he's dead.
00:46:53.025 --> 00:46:56.632
Some have their foreheads indented by truncheons.
00:46:57.574 --> 00:46:59.659
A whole lot of ways for inflicting the pain.
00:46:59.840 --> 00:47:08.958
But the end of the line is always the same.
00:47:10.369 --> 00:47:19.737
Like the time that I was reading, not anticipating bleeding, when for no apparent reason fell a rhino from the sky.
00:47:20.157 --> 00:47:27.003
The body crushed my torso and the head crushed even more, sir, and the horn became the skewer for the apple of my eye.
00:47:27.224 --> 00:47:31.007
Oh, that rhino did no wrong to anyone till
00:47:31.088 --> 00:47:34.271
it hurtled down from heaven and it blotted out the sun.
00:47:34.570 --> 00:47:42.699
But I wrote this rhino song and when it's done, it's really more impressive than it Thank you.
00:47:43.199 --> 00:47:48.467
Thank you.
00:48:07.585 --> 00:48:08.387
Well, there it is.
00:48:08.487 --> 00:48:10.829
Congratulations on rhyming dinner with innards.
00:48:11.048 --> 00:48:11.449
Thank you.
00:48:11.530 --> 00:48:12.670
I'm quite proud of that.
00:48:13.070 --> 00:48:15.472
So you tell me you have one final song for us?
00:48:15.793 --> 00:48:16.114
I do.
00:48:16.514 --> 00:48:19.878
And this one combines the silly and the spiritual, hopefully.
00:48:20.818 --> 00:48:29.025
This took place Christmas night, or actually Boxing Day morning, December 26th, at 2 a.m.
00:48:29.045 --> 00:48:31.088
3 a.m., I guess.
00:48:31.588 --> 00:48:32.809
The song says 3 a.m.
00:48:35.552 --> 00:48:36.713
What had happened was...
00:48:38.146 --> 00:48:45.378
It was Christmas, and after Christmas, in order to take care of all the wrapping paper, I always think it's fun to burn it.
00:48:46.340 --> 00:48:52.369
Get up a nice warm fire, and you toss in all the wrapping paper, and you have this glorious fire on Christmas night.
00:48:53.271 --> 00:49:03.590
And I did that on this occasion and took the hot ashes and threw them away into the big plastic bin that says, No Hot Ashes.
00:49:04.610 --> 00:49:08.496
But I thought that they'd cooled down sufficiently that it wouldn't be a problem.
00:49:09.436 --> 00:49:12.081
In the middle of the night, this was 2006.
00:49:12.501 --> 00:49:27.784
So in the middle of the night, my youngest child, who is now 18 years old, but back then was considerably younger, had a blowout diaper.
00:49:27.824 --> 00:49:31.170
And it blew out all up his back.
00:49:31.911 --> 00:49:33.934
It was just an absolute mess.
00:49:34.849 --> 00:49:44.585
And those of you who have been young parents with young children know how awful it is to have to deal with something like that in the middle of the night.
00:49:44.626 --> 00:49:45.927
You're already exhausted.
00:49:46.989 --> 00:49:53.141
And children that don't sleep through the night make it difficult for you to ever catch up on your sleep.
00:49:53.782 --> 00:49:58.610
And to have to deal with something this awful and this messy, it just was miserable.
00:49:58.630 --> 00:50:01.094
And yet I cleaned them up.
00:50:01.634 --> 00:50:03.757
and took the diaper outside.
00:50:03.797 --> 00:50:22.621
Usually I would have tossed the diaper just in the garage if it had just been a wet diaper, but this one smelled so bad and was such a mess that I took it right out to the garbage cans where I found that the garbage can that I had put the hot ash in had burned all the way down to the base.
00:50:23.643 --> 00:50:31.373
And the next day was my daughter's baptism, and my brother-in-law came over, and he's an electrician.
00:50:32.130 --> 00:50:44.927
And he looked at the can that had burned and said, you were about 10 minutes away from this igniting the can next to it, igniting the plastic next to it.
00:50:45.548 --> 00:50:50.215
And that would have burned from the base and exploded upwards into the eaves of your house.
00:50:50.956 --> 00:50:59.630
And it would have caught your entire house on fire if you hadn't done something about this, if you hadn't gone out and taken care of it.
00:51:00.514 --> 00:51:03.016
And I consider that a miracle.
00:51:03.038 --> 00:51:08.545
And it has become known as the miracle of the Christmas poo.
00:51:09.847 --> 00:51:13.452
And I decided a few years later to write a song about it.
00:51:14.132 --> 00:51:16.635
And I sang it at a big family Christmas Eve.
00:51:16.697 --> 00:51:23.867
And my father said, you know, other families would have just written about this and put it in a journal somewhere.
00:51:23.907 --> 00:51:27.572
But here my son has a song about poo.
00:51:28.733 --> 00:51:33.775
So I actually wrote up this story after I'd written the song.
00:51:33.934 --> 00:51:40.322
I wrote up the story for an article for the Deseret News, which is the church-owned newspaper.
00:51:40.623 --> 00:51:47.331
And I was very worried that given the subject matter, the church wasn't going to be willing to print it.
00:51:48.012 --> 00:51:48.673
And yet they did.
00:51:48.713 --> 00:51:53.579
And they printed it under the headline, How a Dirty Diaper Saved Our House at Christmas.
00:51:54.240 --> 00:51:55.621
If you Google it, you can find it.
00:51:56.043 --> 00:51:58.286
There's one line in it, though, that really bothers me.
00:51:59.010 --> 00:52:02.534
Because I had written it and I'd said, so I wrote a song about it.
00:52:02.996 --> 00:52:08.503
I could easily say it is the best song about Christmas and poo ever written.
00:52:08.543 --> 00:52:16.416
And the editor changed that to, this is easily one of the best songs I have ever written.
00:52:17.717 --> 00:52:18.940
And I thought, oh, come on.
00:52:18.980 --> 00:52:21.443
That kills the joke.
00:52:22.565 --> 00:52:23.246
It doesn't matter.
00:52:23.266 --> 00:52:24.648
They were willing to print it.
00:52:25.931 --> 00:52:27.934
Heaven bless them for being willing to do that.
00:52:28.673 --> 00:52:34.306
And so I figure this is the song I will leave you with at the conclusion of this podcast.
00:52:36.192 --> 00:52:38.556
And Oprah, I'll let you do the honors.
00:52:38.978 --> 00:52:39.739
Okay, here we go.
00:52:39.760 --> 00:52:42.166
The Miracle of the Christmas Poo.
00:52:56.097 --> 00:53:48.693
It was on a Christmas night The fireplace was warm and bright There were no more songs to sing It was time for burning things So I burned up all the ribbons And I burned the wrapping too If it had been for the miracle of the Christmas season The kids had gone to bed in turn I'd run out of things to burn So I threw the ash away.
00:53:49.795 --> 00:53:52.940
It was time to hit the hay.
00:53:53.041 --> 00:53:59.731
So I dreamed of all my presents that were red and green and blue.
00:54:01.112 --> 00:54:12.030
But I never dreamed of dreaming I would owe my life to the miracle of the Christmas moon.
00:55:49.025 --> 00:57:20.103
straight outside and then my eyes flew open wide the garbage can was burning I know I know that heaven's watching me I think they laugh at what they see They got my attention They did what they had to do It was less than elegant The miracle of the Christmas food Christmas food Well, I can't speak for anybody else, but I had a lot of fun today.
00:57:20.344 --> 00:57:21.628
Yeah, speak for yourself.
00:57:22.070 --> 00:57:25.358
I think I speak for everyone when I say I can't wait for Ian to come back.
00:57:25.739 --> 00:57:30.653
Well, I can't argue with that, but Oprah, I'm very grateful for your willingness to pinch hit here.
00:57:31.233 --> 00:57:36.782
It was an honor, and anyone who thinks this was really Oprah Winfrey needs to learn a little more about AI.
00:57:37.141 --> 00:57:39.965
Well, yes, we'll leave that discussion for another time.
00:57:40.005 --> 00:57:44.833
Thank you all for listening, and we hope to see you next time on Inside Out.
00:57:45.193 --> 00:57:45.954
Thank you, Oprah.
00:57:46.275 --> 00:57:47.175
Up yours, Jimbo.
00:57:47.697 --> 00:57:51.101
Oh, that wasn't very nice.
00:00:01.217 --> 00:00:16.920
Hello and welcome to another episode of Inside Out.
00:00:17.282 --> 00:00:21.547
My name is Jim Bennett and I'm flying solo this week.
00:00:22.068 --> 00:00:31.021
The indefatigable Ian Wilkes, who is usually my partner in crime during these episodes, is under the weather and unable to join us this time around.
00:00:31.745 --> 00:00:39.615
I'll leave it to him when he returns, and he will return to provide more information about that, but I don't feel it's my place to do so.
00:00:40.915 --> 00:00:49.085
So, Ian, on behalf of myself and your legions of adoring fans, know that we love you, we miss you, and we hope you get well soon.
00:00:49.125 --> 00:00:56.274
So, as I thought about how to handle this week in Ian's absence, I came up with an idea.
00:00:56.962 --> 00:01:18.510
The one and only Oprah Winfrey! Oprah! How are you?
00:01:18.691 --> 00:01:19.951
Well, I'm doing just fine, Jim.
00:01:20.031 --> 00:01:20.492
How are you?
00:01:20.533 --> 00:01:22.075
I'm doing great.
00:01:22.135 --> 00:01:22.956
Thanks for asking.
00:01:23.075 --> 00:01:23.516
My pleasure.
00:01:23.876 --> 00:01:26.959
So, I didn't realize you were a podcaster.
00:01:27.180 --> 00:01:29.143
Well, I'm no Ian Wilkes, but I get the job done.
00:01:29.183 --> 00:01:30.543
I'm sure you do.
00:01:31.525 --> 00:01:35.009
I have to admit, I was very surprised when you agreed to co-host.
00:01:35.069 --> 00:01:35.450
Were you?
00:01:35.750 --> 00:01:36.290
I was.
00:01:36.311 --> 00:01:39.313
I didn't realize you even listened to the show.
00:01:39.394 --> 00:01:40.114
Oh, come on.
00:01:40.155 --> 00:01:41.516
I'm a huge fan of Inside Out.
00:01:41.677 --> 00:01:42.278
Huge.
00:01:42.689 --> 00:01:44.272
Stedman and I never miss an episode.
00:01:44.352 --> 00:01:45.192
I didn't know that.
00:01:45.352 --> 00:01:45.673
Oh, yeah.
00:01:45.914 --> 00:01:46.875
Huge, huge.
00:01:47.194 --> 00:01:47.956
It's good to know.
00:01:47.995 --> 00:01:49.998
Which is your favorite episode?
00:01:50.519 --> 00:01:51.099
My what now?
00:01:51.760 --> 00:01:54.022
I'm just wondering which one is your favorite.
00:01:54.043 --> 00:01:55.043
Which episode is your favorite?
00:01:55.203 --> 00:01:56.585
Oh, you know, they're all good.
00:01:56.626 --> 00:01:57.867
Seriously, they're all really,
00:01:57.927 --> 00:01:58.408
really good.
00:01:58.927 --> 00:02:00.370
Well, thanks, but if you had to pick
00:02:01.171 --> 00:02:02.652
your favorite, just one.
00:02:02.731 --> 00:02:07.537
Well, there was the one about, let's see, there was the one about the hats, I think, right?
00:02:07.841 --> 00:02:09.104
Wasn't there one about hats?
00:02:09.304 --> 00:02:12.147
I don't recall an episode about hats.
00:02:12.207 --> 00:02:14.790
Have you thought about doing an episode about hats?
00:02:14.972 --> 00:02:15.551
I have not.
00:02:15.633 --> 00:02:19.758
This is a podcast about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
00:02:19.897 --> 00:02:22.762
Oh, well, I'm sorry, but I don't know what that is.
00:02:23.483 --> 00:02:27.168
Stedman told me this was a podcast exclusively about hats.
00:02:27.187 --> 00:02:30.092
Well, I'm not sure how we got our wires crossed there.
00:02:30.132 --> 00:02:31.633
There aren't going to be any hats.
00:02:31.814 --> 00:02:31.955
Oh,
00:02:32.055 --> 00:02:32.294
great.
00:02:32.335 --> 00:02:32.996
That's just great.
00:02:33.036 --> 00:02:34.979
So what are we supposed to talk about for an hour,
00:02:35.179 --> 00:02:35.239
Jim?
00:02:35.278 --> 00:02:37.262
I've got all this hat show prep.
00:02:37.889 --> 00:02:40.973
I'm sorry, I thought we would talk about music.
00:02:41.373 --> 00:02:42.074
I hate music.
00:02:42.195 --> 00:02:43.157
Everyone hates music.
00:02:43.657 --> 00:02:45.379
I don't know anybody that hates music.
00:02:45.400 --> 00:02:46.000
Trust me on this.
00:02:46.241 --> 00:02:47.502
Music is the absolute worst.
00:02:47.581 --> 00:02:48.843
It's the worst, Jim, the worst.
00:02:48.903 --> 00:03:01.180
Well, Oprah, you and I are just going to have to agree to disagree on that, because music has been one of the greatest joys of my life, and it's been how I have felt closest to God.
00:03:01.199 --> 00:03:16.475
I love singing in the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square every Because not only is it wonderful to be surrounded by this lovely music with talented people, it's a great way to feel the Spirit.
00:03:16.756 --> 00:03:19.498
It's a great way to feel a connection to the divine.
00:03:20.019 --> 00:03:25.163
The Doctrine and Covenants talks about the idea that the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me.
00:03:25.204 --> 00:03:29.548
And I have taken that literally throughout my entire life.
00:03:30.408 --> 00:03:35.394
I have felt God in music, and not just in religious music.
00:03:36.066 --> 00:03:42.455
Any kind of music, I feel, can lift us above ourselves, lift us higher than ourselves.
00:03:43.397 --> 00:03:47.365
And so that's one of the reasons why I have taken to writing music.
00:03:48.346 --> 00:03:56.960
And so I thought, without Ian here, I thought this might be kind of a fun way for me to share some of the songs that I recorded.
00:03:56.979 --> 00:04:00.225
And the first one...
00:04:01.122 --> 00:04:06.127
is a song that I wrote right after my mission, actually about a year after my mission.
00:04:06.207 --> 00:04:17.401
I came home, and I was assigned to direct, write and direct a roadshow in the Monument Park, is it the 20th Ward?
00:04:17.802 --> 00:04:21.447
It was the ward up Emigration Canyon where my parents lived at the time.
00:04:21.487 --> 00:04:22.608
They no longer live there.
00:04:22.649 --> 00:04:29.677
But I was called as the roadshow director, and the theme was, I'm wild about...
00:04:30.689 --> 00:04:35.576
And I wrote a roadshow called I'm Wild About Boys, Girls, and Javelins.
00:04:37.199 --> 00:04:47.413
And the centerpiece of the show was a song that tells the story of Teancum from the Book of Mormon.
00:04:48.694 --> 00:04:55.303
And Teancum is a somewhat lesser-known character, but it's a really bizarre story.
00:04:55.403 --> 00:04:59.569
Teancum is this Nephite warrior in the great...
00:05:00.002 --> 00:05:03.487
Nephite-Lamanite war that takes up most of the Book of Alma.
00:05:04.348 --> 00:05:16.225
And Teancum goes in and stabs the king of the Lamanites, Amalickiah, with a javelin while he's in his tent and kills him.
00:05:16.245 --> 00:05:26.802
And he's thrilled about it, but later on, when they get a new king, the new king, Teancum, decides he's going to get cocky and go and do this again.
00:05:27.521 --> 00:05:33.370
and stabs the new king with a javelin and ends up getting caught and ends up getting killed.
00:05:34.350 --> 00:05:38.276
And my favorite parts of the Book of Mormon are the gory and the weird parts.
00:05:39.036 --> 00:05:49.149
And this may well be not necessarily the goriest and the weirdest, because I have a song about that too, but this may be the second goriest and weirdest.
00:05:50.130 --> 00:05:55.377
And so I wrote a song called Javelin Man that tells the story of Teancum.
00:05:56.161 --> 00:06:02.473
And this song became a fixture at Aspen Grove.
00:06:03.014 --> 00:06:06.139
I don't know if you're familiar with Aspen Grove Family
00:06:06.218 --> 00:06:06.579
Camp.
00:06:06.639 --> 00:06:08.944
Stedman and I are huge fans of Aspen Grove Family Camp.
00:06:08.983 --> 00:06:09.564
Just huge.
00:06:09.925 --> 00:06:10.987
Ridiculously huge.
00:06:11.026 --> 00:06:11.307
Huge.
00:06:11.327 --> 00:06:11.867
Well, that's great.
00:06:11.988 --> 00:06:13.091
So is my family.
00:06:13.471 --> 00:06:17.437
We started going to Aspen Grove Family Camp when I was three years old.
00:06:17.478 --> 00:06:19.682
And we went every summer.
00:06:20.449 --> 00:06:30.622
up until I was about 12, I think, and then we stopped for a few years, and then we went back after Dad was elected to the Senate and went there for decades.
00:06:30.723 --> 00:06:37.130
We haven't been since my father passed away, but it was an annual tradition.
00:06:37.151 --> 00:06:46.644
It's a camp up Provo Canyon that's owned and operated by Brigham Young University, and every Monday night they have a talent show.
00:06:46.663 --> 00:06:52.682
And It was my job to sort of spearhead the talent show.
00:06:52.742 --> 00:06:59.088
And I got all of the little kids to participate in a production of Javelin Man every year.
00:06:59.108 --> 00:07:06.976
And there was always a fight as to who got to play Teancum and who got to play Amalickiah, the evil king, and all of these things.
00:07:07.098 --> 00:07:08.439
And it was a lot of fun.
00:07:08.478 --> 00:07:14.185
And we actually performed it one year for Thomas S.
00:07:14.245 --> 00:07:16.588
Monson, who was there with his family.
00:07:17.228 --> 00:07:24.218
And I was a little nervous that It might cost me my church membership, but Thomas Monson was cool with it.
00:07:24.959 --> 00:07:30.850
So I decided, okay, this song is not too offensive or too strange.
00:07:31.992 --> 00:07:39.204
And years later, in my ward where I live now, I was contacted by Tim Fulmer.
00:07:39.324 --> 00:07:40.685
I don't know if you know Tim Fulmer.
00:07:40.947 --> 00:07:45.074
I don't know him, but from what I know about him, I am in love with him.
00:07:45.762 --> 00:07:50.288
And I would hope he would let me ditch Stedman and allow me to be his eternal companion.
00:07:50.408 --> 00:07:51.509
Oprah, that's just ridiculous.
00:07:51.529 --> 00:07:53.312
There's no reason you would know him.
00:07:53.353 --> 00:07:56.997
He's a guy in my ward who's a magnificent musician.
00:07:57.139 --> 00:08:02.966
He actually plays the guitar in the If You Could Hide a Kolob intro to this podcast.
00:08:03.548 --> 00:08:06.773
My love for Tim Fulmer is greater than my love for music.
00:08:07.413 --> 00:08:09.536
And you know how much I love music.
00:08:09.656 --> 00:08:09.916
I do.
00:08:09.937 --> 00:08:10.437
I do.
00:08:10.882 --> 00:08:18.252
But Tim was assigned to be the director of a roadshow in the ward in which I currently live.
00:08:18.892 --> 00:08:20.154
This was about 10 years ago.
00:08:20.194 --> 00:08:24.100
And Tim, this was a video roadshow.
00:08:24.401 --> 00:08:26.343
So this wasn't going to be live on stage.
00:08:26.384 --> 00:08:28.107
We actually had to make a short film.
00:08:28.908 --> 00:08:30.569
And Tim wanted to go all out.
00:08:31.230 --> 00:08:34.296
And he asked me to write the script for it.
00:08:34.456 --> 00:08:35.817
And so I adapted it.
00:08:36.289 --> 00:08:44.659
that earlier roadshow, but the thing that I really wanted to do was make sure that Javelin Man, the song, got the full video treatment.
00:08:45.780 --> 00:09:00.918
And I was excited because Tim is such a perfectionist and such a great musician that he got together a group of musicians to record a professional version of Javelin Man that sounds like a million bucks.
00:09:01.799 --> 00:09:08.216
And I have a friend, who was the music director down at Tuakon when I was the artistic director at Tuakon.
00:09:08.275 --> 00:09:09.658
Her name is Jenny Jordan.
00:09:10.820 --> 00:09:20.393
And she is, I think she makes a zillion dollars as the lead singer now of a group called the Party Crashers.
00:09:21.553 --> 00:09:28.243
And she's just the most magnificent vocalist you've ever heard in your entire life.
00:09:29.124 --> 00:09:33.269
And she agreed to sing a version of Javelin Man.
00:09:33.857 --> 00:09:38.203
And so we've got this wonderful recording of it.
00:09:39.306 --> 00:09:45.696
And if you go to YouTube and you search for Javelin Man, our video will come up.
00:09:46.777 --> 00:09:49.081
And it's a lot of fun.
00:09:49.100 --> 00:09:58.374
What makes me sad is that we monetized it, but we also used some third-party music at the beginning of it.
00:09:58.475 --> 00:10:03.162
And I've since discovered that they have gotten all of the monetization for it because...
00:10:03.682 --> 00:10:07.506
We did not ask them for permission for their copyrighted music.
00:10:08.707 --> 00:10:10.811
So that's the way it goes.
00:10:11.071 --> 00:10:16.837
But if you go there, it has tens of thousands of views.
00:10:16.958 --> 00:10:18.980
It's a very popular video.
00:10:19.841 --> 00:10:32.597
And this is not a video podcast, but I thought at the beginning, as I share with you some of my music, I want to share with you this audio recording of Javelin Man.
00:10:32.929 --> 00:10:33.532
What do I care?
00:10:33.572 --> 00:10:34.494
I'm just here for the money.
00:10:34.855 --> 00:10:37.403
Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, Javelin Man.
00:14:12.033 --> 00:14:12.654
What'd you think?
00:14:13.075 --> 00:14:15.619
Well, that didn't suck nearly as much as I thought it would.
00:14:15.678 --> 00:14:16.100
Well, thank
00:14:16.120 --> 00:14:16.320
you.
00:14:16.360 --> 00:14:16.980
Thank you.
00:14:17.020 --> 00:14:19.183
That's very high praise coming from you.
00:14:19.465 --> 00:14:20.024
You're welcome.
00:14:20.306 --> 00:14:21.167
I'm afraid that my next...
00:14:21.187 --> 00:14:22.008
I'm Oprah Winfrey, you know.
00:14:22.048 --> 00:14:23.971
Yeah, you mentioned that.
00:14:24.030 --> 00:14:27.716
So I'm afraid that my next few songs are...
00:14:28.136 --> 00:14:32.663
That's the only song that has that level of production value.
00:14:32.943 --> 00:14:34.125
And unfortunately...
00:14:34.625 --> 00:14:40.196
I sing on all the rest of the recording, so you have to listen to me and not Jenny Jordan.
00:14:40.355 --> 00:14:42.399
No more Tim Fulmer either, because I love him.
00:14:42.900 --> 00:14:43.881
I am in love with him.
00:14:43.902 --> 00:14:49.251
No, you are not, and Tim Fulmer is happily married, so just back off.
00:14:49.392 --> 00:14:50.494
I'm Oprah Winfrey, you know.
00:14:50.653 --> 00:14:51.335
Yeah, sure you are.
00:14:51.375 --> 00:14:59.289
So, that song is the second weirdest event in the Book of Mormon, but I think the weirdest event...
00:15:00.066 --> 00:15:05.796
is the story of Ammon with all of the arms being sliced off.
00:15:05.956 --> 00:15:10.984
I can remember as a little kid giving a talk about that in junior Sunday school.
00:15:11.325 --> 00:15:22.562
And that dates me because junior Sunday school was the precursor to the three-hour block where primary was included in Sunday worship.
00:15:22.683 --> 00:15:32.686
Prior to that, primary was something we did after school And junior Sunday school was essentially the same thing, but it was primary on Sunday.
00:15:33.366 --> 00:15:46.827
And I had to give a talk, and my parents thought it would be fun for me to give a talk about Ammon, and I got to describe in detail the gory story of Ammon slicing off everybody's arms.
00:15:47.688 --> 00:15:57.899
So our ward did a Book of Mormon read-a-thon, where they sat and read the entirety of the Book of Mormon, in 24 hours.
00:15:57.980 --> 00:15:59.101
That sounds excruciating.
00:15:59.142 --> 00:15:59.763
It was.
00:15:59.802 --> 00:16:02.447
It was absolutely excruciating.
00:16:02.486 --> 00:16:06.312
And everybody was trying not to fall asleep.
00:16:06.533 --> 00:16:14.806
They were following along with a recorded audio version of the Book of Mormon that was sped up like four times fast.
00:16:14.905 --> 00:16:17.250
And I don't know how anybody got anything out of it.
00:16:17.890 --> 00:16:20.114
But they wanted to break it up with something fun.
00:16:20.193 --> 00:16:26.488
And they asked me to do something fun in the middle of it, so I wrote a song about Ammon.
00:16:26.508 --> 00:16:40.934
And so my recording is a recording that I did myself, and I've tried to do the best I can with the equipment that I have, which is not nearly as good as the equipment that was used for Javelin Man.
00:16:40.975 --> 00:16:50.778
But the song has its own kind of fun charms, and I really enjoy the fact that I gave it sort of a Bob Dylan vibe.
00:16:51.139 --> 00:16:51.961
So are you just going to
00:16:52.023 --> 00:16:53.668
talk about it, or do we get to hear it?
00:16:53.687 --> 00:16:54.470
No, you get to hear it.
00:16:54.610 --> 00:16:55.714
Let's play it right now.
00:16:56.195 --> 00:16:58.341
Ladies and gentlemen, the Ammon Song.
00:17:17.218 --> 00:17:21.141
riding past the waters of Sidon.
00:17:21.321 --> 00:17:26.425
He was going to work for the Lamanite king.
00:17:27.527 --> 00:17:38.355
Sheep were feeding and no one was bleeding till somebody started a sheep stealing thing.
00:17:39.998 --> 00:17:44.662
All the king's servants they ran for their lives.
00:17:44.701 --> 00:18:24.053
All except them who took out his knives because Ammon was fearless he faced them alone and soon began hacking through muscle and bone he sliced through the brachial artery part a big honking artery straight from the heart So blood splattered and sputtered and splashed and it spilled.
00:18:24.934 --> 00:18:30.085
It spiked and it spurted and speckled the hills.
00:18:30.605 --> 00:18:36.115
If they'd left things alone, they'd have come to no harm.
00:18:36.737 --> 00:18:38.820
But the thing is they didn't.
00:18:39.394 --> 00:18:44.200
So Ammon cut off their arms.
00:18:55.013 --> 00:18:59.980
Ammon, he gathered up the bones that he shattered.
00:19:00.080 --> 00:19:03.685
The limbs were in number a lot.
00:19:04.321 --> 00:19:05.224
Not a few.
00:19:06.267 --> 00:19:15.011
He went without malice to the Lamanite palace to give old King Lamonia.
00:19:15.092 --> 00:19:17.077
How do you do?
00:19:17.730 --> 00:19:40.833
Because the king was intrigued with his brave servant's charms But his majesty freaked when he saw those arms Because Ammon was fearless, he faced them with scorn that they'd never been born.
00:19:41.634 --> 00:20:02.880
He ripped through their biceps and triceps and stuff and didn't despair when the tendons So blood splattered and sputtered and splashed and it spilled.
00:20:03.661 --> 00:20:08.890
It spiked and it spurted and speckled the hills.
00:20:09.471 --> 00:20:14.799
If they'd left things alone, they'd have come to no harm.
00:20:15.300 --> 00:20:22.973
But the thing is they didn't, so Ammon cut off their arm.
00:20:35.266 --> 00:20:44.153
Repented his sins and repented And then fell to the earth Was he dead, do you think?
00:20:45.214 --> 00:21:29.942
No, he awakened Though his people were shaken They all had complained When he started to stink Because Ammon was strong He converted the king And the queen and the people started to sing a song of redemption they couldn't ignore and all because Evan was knee deep in gold So blood splattered and sputtered and splashed and it spilled.
00:21:29.982 --> 00:21:36.288
It spiked and it spurted and speckled the hills.
00:21:36.308 --> 00:21:41.772
If they'd left things alone, they'd have come to no harm.
00:21:42.413 --> 00:21:44.796
But the thing is they didn't.
00:21:45.215 --> 00:21:51.141
So Ammon cut off their arm.
00:21:51.161 --> 00:21:53.564
So blood splattered and spluttered and splashed and it spilled.
00:21:54.064 --> 00:22:18.491
It spiked and it spurted and speckled the hills If they'd left things alone they'd have come to no harm But the thing is they didn't, so Ammon cut off their arm Wow.
00:22:19.473 --> 00:22:22.857
You
00:22:36.775 --> 00:22:37.615
like that?
00:22:37.715 --> 00:22:38.576
That's all I can say.
00:22:38.596 --> 00:22:39.278
I just...
00:22:39.938 --> 00:22:40.298
Wow.
00:22:40.538 --> 00:22:41.000
I know, right?
00:22:41.059 --> 00:22:44.826
I must say, though, that a chainsaw solo isn't something you hear every day.
00:22:44.846 --> 00:22:45.527
That's a good point.
00:22:45.586 --> 00:22:48.632
There's not a lot of songs devoted to the chainsaw.
00:22:48.893 --> 00:22:51.317
So those are the only two songs you've ever written, right?
00:22:51.497 --> 00:22:52.137
No, not at all.
00:22:52.238 --> 00:22:55.182
I've been writing songs since I was 11 years old.
00:22:55.502 --> 00:23:09.625
I was at the Barnesdall Gallery Theater in Hollywood, California, and I was sitting next to Amber Caceres, and she sang me a song she had written, which included the line, that had something to do with a stinky butt.
00:23:10.467 --> 00:23:12.249
And she dared me to top that.
00:23:12.269 --> 00:23:24.826
And so I went up into the lobby and I went into the men's room and started to compose this song and it took me as long to write it as it now takes to sing it.
00:23:24.987 --> 00:23:27.430
So this was actually written in real time.
00:23:27.450 --> 00:23:32.196
So ladies and gentlemen, I here present to you, I Am a Cow.
00:23:32.217 --> 00:23:38.876
I Am a Cow I am a cow.
00:23:40.642 --> 00:23:45.586
I am a cow.
00:24:10.607 --> 00:24:17.165
You don't bow out.
00:24:17.607 --> 00:24:24.346
You move like a cow.
00:24:25.826 --> 00:24:38.602
I am a cow I am a cow How now?
00:24:38.622 --> 00:25:41.733
Green cow so When you're a cow You don't meow You don't bow wow You moo like a cow I am a cow I am a cow How now?
00:25:44.016 --> 00:25:49.463
Really?
00:25:49.483 --> 00:25:51.126
When you were 11 years old?
00:25:51.166 --> 00:25:52.489
That's when I wrote it, yes.
00:25:52.788 --> 00:25:54.791
And I've been writing songs ever since.
00:25:55.272 --> 00:25:57.636
Does it discourage you that you've never gotten any better at it?
00:25:57.836 --> 00:25:59.019
Well, maybe just a little bit.
00:26:00.101 --> 00:26:05.328
I've written songs for a number of different occasions and for a number of different purposes.
00:26:06.329 --> 00:26:11.057
And when I was the artistic director for the Tuakon Center for the Arts...
00:26:12.066 --> 00:26:26.809
I was tasked with rewriting Tuacon's signature musical, Utah! They had already written several different versions of it that had bombed, and they asked me to write a version of it.
00:26:27.750 --> 00:26:31.698
And my version, I think, finally put it to rest.
00:26:32.880 --> 00:26:38.788
They produced it, it bombed too, and they have not produced it since, and that was 20 years ago.
00:26:39.329 --> 00:26:48.359
So I have the distinction of ending Utah! as a viable musical production.
00:26:48.559 --> 00:26:59.011
But while I was down there, the CEO of TuaCon at the time was a man named Fred Lampropoulos, who I ended up working with when he ran for governor in 2004.
00:26:59.031 --> 00:27:07.280
And Fred Lampropoulos was very encouraged by the idea of writing new musicals.
00:27:08.130 --> 00:27:12.378
and wanted to write a musical version of The Princess Bride.
00:27:12.420 --> 00:27:25.729
And I got a hold of the screenplay of The Princess Bride, and I read it, and I thought, this already reads like a musical, and there are so many different moments that could just burst into song.
00:27:26.433 --> 00:27:32.161
And so I started to play around with the idea of a musical version of The Princess Bride.
00:27:32.741 --> 00:27:40.651
And then we got a hold of William Goldman's agent, who said they'd get about 10 requests to turn The Princess Bride into a musical every day.
00:27:40.692 --> 00:27:44.395
And no thank you, they weren't interested in considering ours.
00:27:45.217 --> 00:27:55.609
So I went back and took those songs and repurposed them for a different musical that was actually a sequel to Peter Pan.
00:27:56.385 --> 00:28:04.259
And the idea was that Peter Pan has come away from Neverland and has sort of forgotten who he is.
00:28:04.298 --> 00:28:08.846
And before you say, oh, this sounds just like Hook, it isn't.
00:28:08.866 --> 00:28:12.452
It's quite different from Hook because there's a big twist at the end.
00:28:12.633 --> 00:28:17.221
Because the kid who thinks he's Peter Pan actually isn't Peter Pan.
00:28:17.260 --> 00:28:26.535
The father that he's fighting against throughout the whole musical who comes to try to rescue him Turns out the father is Peter Pan, not the kid.
00:28:26.575 --> 00:28:42.017
And the father realizes that a life where you learn and you grow is more rewarding than the kind of life where you're living the same day, Groundhog Day-like, over and over and over again, where nothing matters, where nothing ever changes.
00:28:42.037 --> 00:28:49.287
And in the course of this, actually, I had written a song called A Princess Bride.
00:28:49.347 --> 00:29:23.025
And It works in the context of a Princess Bride musical, but it actually works in the context of the Peter Pan musical that I had written as well, because in this musical, Tiger Lily, who's the princess, as Peter gets older and realizes that he doesn't just want to be the kind of lost boy child doing silly childish things, and he approaches Tiger Lily, and they sort of start a a tentative relationship.
00:29:23.726 --> 00:29:32.038
But Tiger Lily, in order to grow up, she has to leave and go back to her people outside of Deverland and marry a prince.
00:29:32.980 --> 00:29:34.403
And she doesn't want to do that.
00:29:34.442 --> 00:29:36.185
She wants to stay with Peter.
00:29:36.665 --> 00:29:46.521
So in the context of my Peter Pan musical, this actually makes sense, but it also makes sense in the context of a non-existent Princess Bride musical.
00:29:47.170 --> 00:29:49.853
I was not present when this was recorded.
00:29:49.873 --> 00:29:52.557
I have not met the people who sing on it.
00:29:53.597 --> 00:30:05.211
My friend Jaron Hinckley, who is now the head of the clarinet department at Brigham Young University, Fred Lampropoulos paid to create a demo of four songs from this musical.
00:30:05.593 --> 00:30:10.259
And this is the one of the four that I think is the most lovely.
00:30:10.278 --> 00:30:17.996
I'm told the woman who sings it is the star of the movie The R.M., But I've never met her.
00:30:18.016 --> 00:30:25.046
I've never heard her other than in this lovely demo that I am going to share with you right now.
00:30:25.125 --> 00:30:28.131
So I told you before you were only going to hear me sing, but I lied.
00:30:28.171 --> 00:30:33.378
Turns out I've got this lovely song up my sleeve and I want to share it with you now.
00:30:33.638 --> 00:30:34.180
All righty then.
00:30:34.440 --> 00:30:35.662
Ladies and gentlemen, here it is.
00:30:35.682 --> 00:30:37.444
A Princess Bride.
00:30:37.464 --> 00:30:38.365
A Princess Bride.
00:30:48.642 --> 00:31:12.253
Can you hear the people cheering as the princess passes by?
00:31:15.105 --> 00:31:18.354
She is glory.
00:31:18.374 --> 00:31:21.201
She is light.
00:31:21.721 --> 00:31:27.796
She is all the grace and beauty in the world.
00:31:27.816 --> 00:31:31.806
But the story isn't true.
00:31:33.057 --> 00:32:29.188
For she knows, she knows she's just a foolish little girl Just like every father's daughter When there's no more time to play As the real world grows brighter And the princess fades away But somewhere deep inside her She is not completely gone She is only waiting patiently For a prince to come along and bring her glory bring her light give her all the grace and beauty in the world take the story she knows she's more than just
00:32:30.971 --> 00:32:38.546
a foolish little girl she's the one he loves he's been searching far and wide for the
00:32:38.986 --> 00:33:25.750
one he loves and she's standing by his side she's the one he loves and it cannot be denied He takes the father's daughter And he makes a princess bride It doesn't happen often But it's how the world should be that isn't true for everyone just everyone but me there's a prince who says he loves me what an awful thing to say why has happily ever after
00:33:26.431 --> 00:33:39.064
never seemed so far away it's a lonely sort of
00:33:39.085 --> 00:33:40.445
plan to have
00:33:52.385 --> 00:34:03.969
I wish this prince had never come along For my one true love Is a faithful man inside Though
00:34:03.990 --> 00:34:04.430
my
00:34:04.450 --> 00:34:04.711
one
00:34:04.871 --> 00:34:12.126
true love Has been blinded by his pride He's my one true love
00:34:37.601 --> 00:34:38.903
So when is that coming to Broadway?
00:34:39.344 --> 00:34:41.768
Well, whenever anybody wants to produce it.
00:34:42.409 --> 00:34:43.992
I have the script.
00:34:44.291 --> 00:34:45.574
I have some of the music.
00:34:46.434 --> 00:34:55.108
My friend Jaron did the orchestrations for these four songs, and I'd be willing to bet I could hire him to do the orchestrations for the rest of them.
00:34:55.889 --> 00:35:02.298
So if there's some Broadway producer out there that's looking for material, I got it right here.
00:35:02.338 --> 00:35:04.001
I'll, you know...
00:35:05.442 --> 00:35:09.728
And I realize none of this has anything to do with the church, and this is a podcast about the church.
00:35:10.568 --> 00:35:24.907
But I want to share the story that one of the things that I did with this music, and with a lot of the music that I've written, the church put out a call for new hymns and a new hymn book.
00:35:26.150 --> 00:35:42.945
And I answered the call, and the guidelines were you were allowed to submit five hymns submissions for the hymn book and five submissions for the children's song book.
00:35:44.166 --> 00:35:50.356
And I ended up writing 14 different songs and submitting them.
00:35:50.838 --> 00:35:55.686
And the way I got around it is I have a son whose name is also coincidentally James Bennett.
00:35:56.706 --> 00:36:01.034
And I submitted several hymns in his name.
00:36:01.134 --> 00:36:06.514
So if they get published and they work, It'll say James Bennett one way or the other.
00:36:08.177 --> 00:36:17.431
The thing about all of those, so I repurposed some of the melodies that I'd written for this musical for the hymns that I'd written.
00:36:18.253 --> 00:36:24.664
And I have to say that writing hymns, again, as I said at the outset, I feel more connected to God.
00:36:24.704 --> 00:36:30.213
I feel more connected to the divine through music than through anything else.
00:36:30.753 --> 00:36:38.108
And writing these hymns, I don't have any idea if any of them will see the light of day or if anybody will care.
00:36:38.148 --> 00:36:44.721
But just the process of writing them was a profound spiritual experience for me.
00:36:45.081 --> 00:36:59.449
And so I don't know anybody who's listening to this, if any of you have any interest in music, have any interest in writing music, But just that process, just sort of engaging in the creative process.
00:36:59.570 --> 00:37:19.141
I remember at Tuakon, we had one of the directors who gave an opening prayer at our first rehearsal and said, it's actually at our first audition, before the auditions, when people came in, and said, we come before thee as partners in the creative process.
00:37:20.418 --> 00:37:21.539
And I've never forgotten that.
00:37:21.780 --> 00:37:25.184
I've always thought that's a really powerful way to think about it.
00:37:26.047 --> 00:37:30.693
So spirituality and music to me are intertwined.
00:37:31.253 --> 00:37:43.313
Whether or not I'm any good at this, whether or not anything that I've shared with you, if you've listened to it and thought, jeez, this guy Bennett sure thinks an awful lot of himself, I don't blame you for thinking that.
00:37:43.413 --> 00:37:45.275
I don't actually think a lot of myself.
00:37:45.416 --> 00:37:46.617
I don't necessarily...
00:37:47.425 --> 00:37:51.771
think that these songs are going to change the world or a big deal to anybody but me.
00:37:51.811 --> 00:38:05.327
I do think that they've given me an opportunity to be a co-creator, to be part of the creative process, which to me is a divine process and something lovely.
00:38:06.108 --> 00:38:09.773
So there's a guy in the Tabernacle Choir who's written 5,000?
00:38:10.454 --> 00:38:12.655
Or is it 500?
00:38:12.697 --> 00:38:13.297
It can't be 5,000.
00:38:14.561 --> 00:38:18.146
But he submitted over 500 songs.
00:38:18.786 --> 00:38:27.956
And the way he did it is that he wrote the lyrics and then he asked other people if they wanted to set them to music and if they would submit them on his behalf.
00:38:28.135 --> 00:38:29.878
I actually wrote the music to one of them.
00:38:30.778 --> 00:38:31.980
And then I went, well, wait a minute.
00:38:32.179 --> 00:38:33.681
I don't want to submit your lyrics.
00:38:33.722 --> 00:38:34.963
I want to submit my lyrics.
00:38:35.684 --> 00:38:40.708
And so I wrote 14 different songs and have submitted them.
00:38:40.789 --> 00:38:44.998
And one of them was a modified version of Javelin Man.
00:38:45.659 --> 00:38:53.873
I thought, jeesh, that could be a nice primary song if I set it in a way where I take out some of the gorier aspects of it.
00:38:54.634 --> 00:39:03.489
I have not heard back my friend in the choir who wrote between 500 and 5,000 songs has also not heard back.
00:39:04.230 --> 00:39:15.157
The church has published the first 12 songs from the new hymn book including Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, which everybody wanted to see returned to the hymn book.
00:39:15.759 --> 00:39:18.262
It's a song the choir sings on a regular basis.
00:39:18.342 --> 00:39:19.565
It's absolutely gorgeous.
00:39:20.445 --> 00:39:21.527
And that's coming back.
00:39:21.947 --> 00:39:26.916
The rumor is that Amazing Grace is going to make its way into the new hymn book.
00:39:27.717 --> 00:39:45.106
And I'm really excited by that rumor because the whole concept of grace, the whole concept of Christ's grace saving us, is one that, as a church, we have shied away from because we are scared of it.
00:39:45.666 --> 00:39:50.833
We're sort of scared of the doctrine because we think it takes away from our uniqueness.
00:39:50.974 --> 00:39:57.844
When we talk about the fact that we're all saved by grace, that what we do isn't what matters.
00:39:58.664 --> 00:40:01.048
It's Christ's grace that saves us.
00:40:02.530 --> 00:40:07.117
We are afraid, I think, of sounding like Protestants or sounding like evangelicals.
00:40:07.777 --> 00:40:13.143
But the reality is the doctrine of grace is the central doctrine of the restored gospel.
00:40:13.182 --> 00:40:21.170
And it's a doctrine that is found all across the Book of Mormon, even more explicitly than it's found in the Bible.
00:40:22.012 --> 00:40:32.121
And so the idea that we could embrace the beautiful song Amazing Grace is something that really warms my heart and something that I hope we will do.
00:40:32.262 --> 00:40:34.704
And I hope that's actually a true rumor.
00:40:35.945 --> 00:40:39.557
But We will have to wait and see.
00:40:39.597 --> 00:40:43.242
So I'm going to share a couple more songs with you.
00:40:43.903 --> 00:40:45.407
We've gotten serious here.
00:40:46.208 --> 00:40:47.449
I'm going to get a little silly.
00:40:47.469 --> 00:40:54.800
This song is a song that I wrote to be silly, as most of my songs are.
00:40:55.081 --> 00:40:56.282
Very few of my songs...
00:40:56.322 --> 00:41:02.313
When I wrote the Princess Bride song, I did it when I was in the mindset of a character.
00:41:02.353 --> 00:41:09.048
So it was much easier for me to write something silly that wasn't as silly.
00:41:09.148 --> 00:41:13.693
It's hard for me to take myself seriously.
00:41:14.454 --> 00:41:17.838
And so when I write music, it's sometimes hard for me to take myself seriously.
00:41:17.878 --> 00:41:27.710
But when I wrote hymns, I was able to say, okay, this has a purpose that I'm aiming for, and I can do this much more seriously than when I'm writing just for my own amusement.
00:41:28.431 --> 00:41:39.485
But I wrote a very silly song called Dead, and And it's just all about, there are three verses, and it talks about three different goofy ways to die.
00:41:39.525 --> 00:41:42.068
And it was a lot of fun.
00:41:42.128 --> 00:41:50.335
But when I was writing my Peter Pan musical, I went, okay, this is a song that actually could fit into the musical.
00:41:50.436 --> 00:41:58.784
Because the whole idea of Neverland, which is the name of my musical, is that...
00:42:00.418 --> 00:42:22.342
A life that doesn't have impact and a life that doesn't carry the possibility of loss and the possibility of pain and the kinds of things that we experience as we age and grow and the limits that mortality places on us also make our lives more meaningful.
00:42:23.664 --> 00:42:25.545
And the characters in this...
00:42:26.273 --> 00:42:34.083
both Peter, the young Peter, and then his father, who was also Peter, who was the original Peter Pan, learned that lesson.
00:42:34.523 --> 00:42:44.556
Because at the end of the first act of the musical, one of the lost boys is killed in a battle with Captain Hook, in a battle with the pirates.
00:42:44.836 --> 00:42:53.987
And Peter, the young Peter, finds it so tragic and so awful and so terrible and is heartbroken.
00:42:54.289 --> 00:43:00.025
And the second act, opens with the funeral of this lost boy.
00:43:01.027 --> 00:43:05.996
And Peter is trying to take it seriously, and the lost boys think it's ridiculous.
00:43:06.056 --> 00:43:06.657
They don't care.
00:43:06.697 --> 00:43:09.382
They think this is no big deal.
00:43:09.442 --> 00:43:10.784
We have funerals all the time.
00:43:10.804 --> 00:43:11.425
It's kind of silly.
00:43:11.445 --> 00:43:14.972
We're going to sing the song we always sing at funerals.
00:43:16.253 --> 00:43:20.802
And the song they always sing at funerals is this silly song I wrote called Dead.
00:43:21.730 --> 00:43:31.943
And the third verse of the song in the context of the musical is sung by the dead lost boy who just comes back to life.
00:43:32.422 --> 00:43:36.027
Because if you don't grow up, it's essentially Groundhog Day.
00:43:36.108 --> 00:43:37.228
Nothing ever changes.
00:43:37.829 --> 00:43:39.010
So no one ever dies.
00:43:39.052 --> 00:43:40.974
Nothing ever has any consequence.
00:43:41.635 --> 00:43:50.606
So the fact that the lost boy died the day before doesn't prevent him from showing up at his own funeral to sing the last verse of his own funeral song.
00:43:51.585 --> 00:44:00.840
And so this sort of opens the young Peter's eyes up to the realities of this Neverland where nothing has any consequences and nothing matters.
00:44:01.722 --> 00:44:06.148
And that precedes his arc towards redemption at the end of the show.
00:44:06.869 --> 00:44:12.297
But so that's how this song was repurposed for the musical.
00:44:13.159 --> 00:44:20.630
But Jaron and a number of his different singers who I have never met and the musicians I have never met wrote this.
00:44:20.811 --> 00:44:25.376
All I remember is that there's a line in there about a guy saying, I'm a nutter with my putter.
00:44:25.436 --> 00:44:28.521
And apparently the guy who sang it, his last name was Nutter.
00:44:29.302 --> 00:44:31.445
So I've always remembered that as I've listened to this.
00:44:32.166 --> 00:44:35.711
But this is the Lost Boys funeral song.
00:44:35.972 --> 00:44:37.054
It's a little bit silly.
00:44:37.134 --> 00:44:39.076
It starts out solemn and then gets silly.
00:44:39.277 --> 00:44:40.197
So let's get stupid.
00:44:40.458 --> 00:44:41.059
Here's the Lost
00:44:41.099 --> 00:44:42.902
Boys funeral song, Dead.
00:45:02.081 --> 00:45:31.166
Well, the and the west is getting wilder so I saddled up my stallion and I headed out to sea upon some more reflection it was time to change direction when a shark bit off my horse's head and spit it back to me all that horse had done no wrong to anyone he was fat and he was frisky and he frolicked in the sun but I wrote my horse this song and when it's done everyone will know my horse's
00:45:31.306 --> 00:45:38.755
name his legacy will long Outlive his brain Cause he's dead
00:45:38.976 --> 00:45:47.128
Cause he's dead Cause he doesn't have a head It was bitten off by sharks at sea And turned the water red Now his cranium's digesting
00:45:47.228 --> 00:45:51.876
And the orc is large intestine And now no one really cares That he's well bred
00:45:52.396 --> 00:46:03.233
Cause he's dead Lie Like the time that I played golf and accidentally killed a dolphin when I whacked him with my putter cause I'm not that good at sports.
00:46:03.793 --> 00:46:10.599
The golfers were disgusted but eventually adjusted when they teed off from the blowhole of his putrid rotting corpse.
00:46:10.898 --> 00:46:17.844
Oh that dolphin did no wrong to anyone but I left him in the sand trap cause he must have weighed a ton.
00:46:18.065 --> 00:46:25.552
But I wrote this dolphin song and when it's done think about the dolphin how you will.
00:46:25.552 --> 00:46:29.798
And maybe you could roll him down the hill.
00:46:30.318 --> 00:46:31.661
Cause he's dead.
00:46:31.722 --> 00:46:32.543
Cause he's dead.
00:46:32.583 --> 00:46:34.246
Cause I whacked him in the head.
00:46:34.505 --> 00:46:36.148
I'm a nutter with my putter.
00:46:36.289 --> 00:46:37.992
I should play lacrosse instead.
00:46:38.072 --> 00:46:39.853
Both on land and underwater.
00:46:40.074 --> 00:46:41.657
It was wet mammalian slaughter.
00:46:41.777 --> 00:46:44.862
And the putting greens where dolphins feared to dread.
00:46:44.943 --> 00:46:47.166
Cause he's dead.
00:46:53.025 --> 00:46:56.632
Some have their foreheads indented by truncheons.
00:46:57.574 --> 00:46:59.659
A whole lot of ways for inflicting the pain.
00:46:59.840 --> 00:47:08.958
But the end of the line is always the same.
00:47:10.369 --> 00:47:19.737
Like the time that I was reading, not anticipating bleeding, when for no apparent reason fell a rhino from the sky.
00:47:20.157 --> 00:47:27.003
The body crushed my torso and the head crushed even more, sir, and the horn became the skewer for the apple of my eye.
00:47:27.224 --> 00:47:31.007
Oh, that rhino did no wrong to anyone till
00:47:31.088 --> 00:47:34.271
it hurtled down from heaven and it blotted out the sun.
00:47:34.570 --> 00:47:42.699
But I wrote this rhino song and when it's done, it's really more impressive than it Thank you.
00:47:43.199 --> 00:47:48.467
Thank you.
00:48:07.585 --> 00:48:08.387
Well, there it is.
00:48:08.487 --> 00:48:10.829
Congratulations on rhyming dinner with innards.
00:48:11.048 --> 00:48:11.449
Thank you.
00:48:11.530 --> 00:48:12.670
I'm quite proud of that.
00:48:13.070 --> 00:48:15.472
So you tell me you have one final song for us?
00:48:15.793 --> 00:48:16.114
I do.
00:48:16.514 --> 00:48:19.878
And this one combines the silly and the spiritual, hopefully.
00:48:20.818 --> 00:48:29.025
This took place Christmas night, or actually Boxing Day morning, December 26th, at 2 a.m.
00:48:29.045 --> 00:48:31.088
3 a.m., I guess.
00:48:31.588 --> 00:48:32.809
The song says 3 a.m.
00:48:35.552 --> 00:48:36.713
What had happened was...
00:48:38.146 --> 00:48:45.378
It was Christmas, and after Christmas, in order to take care of all the wrapping paper, I always think it's fun to burn it.
00:48:46.340 --> 00:48:52.369
Get up a nice warm fire, and you toss in all the wrapping paper, and you have this glorious fire on Christmas night.
00:48:53.271 --> 00:49:03.590
And I did that on this occasion and took the hot ashes and threw them away into the big plastic bin that says, No Hot Ashes.
00:49:04.610 --> 00:49:08.496
But I thought that they'd cooled down sufficiently that it wouldn't be a problem.
00:49:09.436 --> 00:49:12.081
In the middle of the night, this was 2006.
00:49:12.501 --> 00:49:27.784
So in the middle of the night, my youngest child, who is now 18 years old, but back then was considerably younger, had a blowout diaper.
00:49:27.824 --> 00:49:31.170
And it blew out all up his back.
00:49:31.911 --> 00:49:33.934
It was just an absolute mess.
00:49:34.849 --> 00:49:44.585
And those of you who have been young parents with young children know how awful it is to have to deal with something like that in the middle of the night.
00:49:44.626 --> 00:49:45.927
You're already exhausted.
00:49:46.989 --> 00:49:53.141
And children that don't sleep through the night make it difficult for you to ever catch up on your sleep.
00:49:53.782 --> 00:49:58.610
And to have to deal with something this awful and this messy, it just was miserable.
00:49:58.630 --> 00:50:01.094
And yet I cleaned them up.
00:50:01.634 --> 00:50:03.757
and took the diaper outside.
00:50:03.797 --> 00:50:22.621
Usually I would have tossed the diaper just in the garage if it had just been a wet diaper, but this one smelled so bad and was such a mess that I took it right out to the garbage cans where I found that the garbage can that I had put the hot ash in had burned all the way down to the base.
00:50:23.643 --> 00:50:31.373
And the next day was my daughter's baptism, and my brother-in-law came over, and he's an electrician.
00:50:32.130 --> 00:50:44.927
And he looked at the can that had burned and said, you were about 10 minutes away from this igniting the can next to it, igniting the plastic next to it.
00:50:45.548 --> 00:50:50.215
And that would have burned from the base and exploded upwards into the eaves of your house.
00:50:50.956 --> 00:50:59.630
And it would have caught your entire house on fire if you hadn't done something about this, if you hadn't gone out and taken care of it.
00:51:00.514 --> 00:51:03.016
And I consider that a miracle.
00:51:03.038 --> 00:51:08.545
And it has become known as the miracle of the Christmas poo.
00:51:09.847 --> 00:51:13.452
And I decided a few years later to write a song about it.
00:51:14.132 --> 00:51:16.635
And I sang it at a big family Christmas Eve.
00:51:16.697 --> 00:51:23.867
And my father said, you know, other families would have just written about this and put it in a journal somewhere.
00:51:23.907 --> 00:51:27.572
But here my son has a song about poo.
00:51:28.733 --> 00:51:33.775
So I actually wrote up this story after I'd written the song.
00:51:33.934 --> 00:51:40.322
I wrote up the story for an article for the Deseret News, which is the church-owned newspaper.
00:51:40.623 --> 00:51:47.331
And I was very worried that given the subject matter, the church wasn't going to be willing to print it.
00:51:48.012 --> 00:51:48.673
And yet they did.
00:51:48.713 --> 00:51:53.579
And they printed it under the headline, How a Dirty Diaper Saved Our House at Christmas.
00:51:54.240 --> 00:51:55.621
If you Google it, you can find it.
00:51:56.043 --> 00:51:58.286
There's one line in it, though, that really bothers me.
00:51:59.010 --> 00:52:02.534
Because I had written it and I'd said, so I wrote a song about it.
00:52:02.996 --> 00:52:08.503
I could easily say it is the best song about Christmas and poo ever written.
00:52:08.543 --> 00:52:16.416
And the editor changed that to, this is easily one of the best songs I have ever written.
00:52:17.717 --> 00:52:18.940
And I thought, oh, come on.
00:52:18.980 --> 00:52:21.443
That kills the joke.
00:52:22.565 --> 00:52:23.246
It doesn't matter.
00:52:23.266 --> 00:52:24.648
They were willing to print it.
00:52:25.931 --> 00:52:27.934
Heaven bless them for being willing to do that.
00:52:28.673 --> 00:52:34.306
And so I figure this is the song I will leave you with at the conclusion of this podcast.
00:52:36.192 --> 00:52:38.556
And Oprah, I'll let you do the honors.
00:52:38.978 --> 00:52:39.739
Okay, here we go.
00:52:39.760 --> 00:52:42.166
The Miracle of the Christmas Poo.
00:52:56.097 --> 00:53:48.693
It was on a Christmas night The fireplace was warm and bright There were no more songs to sing It was time for burning things So I burned up all the ribbons And I burned the wrapping too If it had been for the miracle of the Christmas season The kids had gone to bed in turn I'd run out of things to burn So I threw the ash away.
00:53:49.795 --> 00:53:52.940
It was time to hit the hay.
00:53:53.041 --> 00:53:59.731
So I dreamed of all my presents that were red and green and blue.
00:54:01.112 --> 00:54:12.030
But I never dreamed of dreaming I would owe my life to the miracle of the Christmas moon.
00:55:49.025 --> 00:57:20.103
straight outside and then my eyes flew open wide the garbage can was burning I know I know that heaven's watching me I think they laugh at what they see They got my attention They did what they had to do It was less than elegant The miracle of the Christmas food Christmas food Well, I can't speak for anybody else, but I had a lot of fun today.
00:57:20.344 --> 00:57:21.628
Yeah, speak for yourself.
00:57:22.070 --> 00:57:25.358
I think I speak for everyone when I say I can't wait for Ian to come back.
00:57:25.739 --> 00:57:30.653
Well, I can't argue with that, but Oprah, I'm very grateful for your willingness to pinch hit here.
00:57:31.233 --> 00:57:36.782
It was an honor, and anyone who thinks this was really Oprah Winfrey needs to learn a little more about AI.
00:57:37.141 --> 00:57:39.965
Well, yes, we'll leave that discussion for another time.
00:57:40.005 --> 00:57:44.833
Thank you all for listening, and we hope to see you next time on Inside Out.
00:57:45.193 --> 00:57:45.954
Thank you, Oprah.
00:57:46.275 --> 00:57:47.175
Up yours, Jimbo.
00:57:47.697 --> 00:57:51.101
Oh, that wasn't very nice.
