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- [00:01]
Tonya Moseley
This message comes from Carvana, who makes buying and financing your next car easy. Thousands of vehicles, terms up front and 100% online. Even get it delivered to your door. Buy your car the easy way with Carvana. Delivery fee may apply. This is FRESH air. I'm Tonya Moseley. Before we get started, a heads up that today's interview includes a discussion of sexual assault. It's been eight years since Matt Lauer was fired from NBC at the height of the MeToo movement. In the years since, public attention has shifted and some of the men who were forced out during the reckoning are beginning to test whether there's a way back. According to reports, Matt Lauer is one of them. Today we're hearing from one of the women whose allegations helped bring his career to an end. For 20 years, Lauer was the most trusted man in morning television. Hundreds gathered outside of Rockefeller center in New York each morning for a glimpse of him and his co hosts with while millions more watched at home as he sat on the Today show couch interviewing presidents, celebrities and everyday Americans. At the height of his power, NBC paid him $25 million a year, more than any other news anchor in the country. But behind the scenes, there were complaints, rumors and an atmosphere of fear. In his 2019 book, Catch and Kill Journalists, Ronan Farrow, Doctor documented a pattern in which Lauer pursued women on staff at NBC over the course of decades. One of those women was Brooke Nevils, who was in her late 20s and working with former Today show co anchor Meredith Vieira on NBC's coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. According to her account, first reported by Farrow, one night after drinks with colleagues at a hotel bar, she went to Lauer's room. There, she says, he sexually assaulted her, an allegation Lauer denies. Nevils did not report what she says happened at the time. She has said that she was terrified of Lauer's power and of what coming forward could mean for her career. But as the MeToo movement gained momentum following the public downfall of Harvey Weinstein, Nevils went to human resources and Lauer was fired. Now, nearly a decade since she came forward about the alleged assault, Brooke Nevils is telling her story in her own words in a new memoir called Unspeakable Silence, Shame and the Stories we choose to Believe. Brooke Nevills, welcome to FRESH air.
- [02:43]
Brooke Nevils
Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:46]
Tonya Moseley
Well, one of the first questions I actually have for you is the length of time between between Matt Lauer's firing and you Writing this book. Matt Lauer was fired in 2017, and now we're several years later beyond that point. Why did it take you this long to write this book?
- [03:06]
Brooke Nevils
Well, I talked to nearly two dozen experts. I talked to people who have been through sexual harassment and assault, people who have been accused of sexual harassment and assault. I spoke with someone and prison on a sexual assault charge. I cared very deeply to try and understand all sides of this issue and why this continues to happen. And it took me some time. It was very hard to really be able to see it, because when you're in it, you can't see it at all. And it took me a long time to get to a point where I could approach this honestly and ask and answer the kind of hard questions that I felt needed to be asked. At the height of MeToo, when I made the complaint, I remember in the aftermath of that, I would sit in the trainings and I felt afraid to ask questions. It felt like if you had these questions, you. You were part of the problem or you were complicit. And here I was in the middle of it. I'd made this complaint that became one of the highest profile stories of the MeToo era. And I had these questions, and I was afraid to ask them. So I felt we needed some time and distance to be able to really speak honestly about these things.
- [04:40]
Tonya Moseley
Well, before we get into the details of your experience with Matt Lauer, I actually want to go back a little bit and understand who you were back then. Can you explain for us what your job was at NBC and how you ended up actually in Sochi covering the Olympics? Sure.
- [05:00]
Brooke Nevils
I was one of those kids who grew up watching the Today show every morning before school. I grew up in St. Louis. And when Today would come on and you heard that opening music, it felt like you were transported to the center of the world where everything was happening. And I saw those people as my family. When I was growing up, it was Matt, Katie, Ann, and Al. And it felt like family to me. So I went to college. I studied journalism. I interned in journalism. And then when I graduated, by some miracle, I got into the NBC page program, which is a foot in the door for the television industry that I never quite could believe that I had gotten there. I had no connections in media. It really felt like a miracle. And while I was in the page program, I was assigned to the Today Show. From there, I met Meredith Vieira. I eventually became her assistant and her associate producer. And that's what I was doing when we were in Sochi So I was mainly there just as a talent assistant.
- [06:22]
Tonya Moseley
Take us to that night in Sochi. So you all were at a hotel bar, you and Meredith Vieira. You all are celebrating because she had actually just found out she'd be anchoring the Olympics. And if I take folks back to that time period, if you remember, Bob Costas, who had done this coverage, had actually gotten pink eye, so he couldn't be the main. The principal anchor for the Olympics that season. And so you and Meredith are having a drink, and Matt Lauer walks through spots the both of you and joins you. Describe what the vibe was like. What do you remember about his demeanor that evening?
- [07:02]
Brooke Nevils
There was sort of this atmosphere of the surreal. We were in Russia, which is a strange experience in and of itself. Bob Costas, this legend of Olympic broadcasting to be felled by pink eye of all possible things, for Meredith to then have this incredible opportunity to solo anchor and to do it and to do an amazing job. We went. We went to celebrate afterwards. And at that point, we had been in Sochi for weeks. Sochi was a pretty small Olympics. It was a small team there, so we had camaraderie. And when Matt came in, he isn't typically a person that you bump into around town that joins you. And so we saw him, we were celebrating, and he came over and set with us. And I felt like it couldn't possibly be real. These were two people that I had admired as journalists, as people since I was a little girl. And I truly could not believe I was sitting there with a seat at the table with them. And I think I got carried away.
- [08:28]
Tonya Moseley
And when you say you got carried away, what do you mean?
- [08:32]
Brooke Nevils
Well, now, you know, I'm a boring mom in my 40s. So when I say that I had too much to drink, you look back at your 20s, and I can't believe that I, you know, I was having a glass of wine, and when we were celebrating, we're in Russia, you know, Matt ordered some vodka shots, and I did them. I did them without even thinking about it because I was celebrating. I was having fun. It just seemed like this. This thing that could not even be real. And I was so honored to be there that, you know, I threw caution to the wind.
- [09:18]
Tonya Moseley
Yeah. You know, Brooke, in the book, you write about what happened after those drinks in the hotel room, in Matt's hotel room, in such detail, and it is hard to read, and I know it had to be even harder to write. You could have summarized it. You could have gestured toward what happened and moved on. But you didn't. You took us through moment by moment, what he said, what you said, what your body felt, what. Why was it important for you that we know those details?
- [09:58]
Brooke Nevils
What was important to me was to acknowledge how complicated it was, how confusing it was, how I came to be in that room in the first place, and how these things really happened. Because when we're talking about something difficult, something painful, I think the human impulse is to make it easy to understand, is to simplify it and kind of make it more black and white so it's easier to talk about. But the point of talking about this is to acknowledge just how devastating and confusing these things are, how quickly it happens, how you react in the moment. And reaction is really the right word. It's more a reaction than a choice. And when you look back on it later, you second guess absolutely every single move that you made without really understanding what happened. Because in the aftermath of sexual harassment, of sexual assault, you're always looking to give the benefit of the doubt, especially when it's someone you know. You don't want this horrible thing to have happened. You want things to be okay. So you. You blame yourself as a way of convincing yourself you were in control the whole time.
- [11:32]
Tonya Moseley
I want to take a moment to talk about the language we're using when we're talking about this. So without asking you to relive every moment, can you help listeners understand what you say happened in that room and why you describe it specifically as assault? Because Ronan Farrow writes that when you went to NBC, you unambiguously described a rape. That is his read on what you shared, but you weren't ready to use that word yourself.
- [12:05]
Brooke Nevils
That's very common. That's very true. Rape is a word I hardly ever use, because when you hear the word rape, you think of a guy in a ski mask in the dark alley and fighting for your life. And that's just not the reality of how sexual assaults happen, when most of the time it's someone that you know and trust. So we don't really have language to talk about this, and we certainly didn't when, you know, in 2017, when I was reporting it. And it takes a very long time to really process and get to the point where you can talk about it in those terms. And those terms are devastating. When you say sexual assault, when you say rape, your life changes. You have a target on your back. Every single thing that you say or that you don't say becomes evidence.
- [13:07]
Tonya Moseley
Matt Lauer has described that night very differently. He used words like mutual Consensual, enthusiastic. And those were actually words that you yourself used at certain points throughout the years before you came to understand. When did your understanding of what happened start to shift?
- [13:28]
Brooke Nevils
In the aftermath of a sexual assault, which is a loss of power and control. That's really what it is. You realize that you are powerless and something scary is happening, and you're trying to cling to whatever control you have. So part of reclaiming that control is telling yourself, it wasn't that bad. It was a misunderstanding. It was anything but the devastating thing that is a sexual assault. And in my particular situation, the power differential was as extreme as it could possibly be. When your job is to work with the talent, when these are people who have to be kept happy, who their opinion of you can make or break your career, annoying them can mean you're never allowed on a set again. That changes the dynamic of every single interaction that you have. And another part of that is that any attention that they give you professionally, you feel is a positive thing that you are lucky to get. And people who are in power know they're in power. That's something that they wield every single day. So when you're a person in power and you ask someone less powerful to do something, you have the responsibility to think about whether they are able to say no, whether they will feel comfortable saying no, whether they can be penalized for saying no. And we always talk about fight or flight, but the most common reaction to being scared or nervous is freezing. You know, it's called tonic immobility. And we go back and we blame ourselves for that. You know, why did I just freeze? Why didn't I say anything? Why was I so complacent? Why was I being so deferential? Well, you're doing that as a way of trying to maintain control.
- [15:41]
Tonya Moseley
I. I want to get back to the language thing a little bit, because I think it's just really important. You spend a lot of time on it in the book. And I bring up what Matt said happened because he continually refers to it as an affair. For some time, you talked about it as an affair. But when you read the story from your point of view, it wasn't even transactional. There was nothing romantic about it. There wasn't even anything. It didn't even read like a hookup where there are two people who mutually. We're going to just meet and have this, you know, this liaison that we have. You talked about the difference between consent and agreement. And can you explain that distinction? Because I think it's at the heart of why these cases are so confusing to people.
- [16:32]
Brooke Nevils
I mean, the term affair, you know, an affair is something that happens between two equals. You know, both people are equally empowered to participate. And that is not what happens in a, you know, quote, relationship between a subordinate and someone with power over them. And to your point, you know, yes, I refer to it as an affair because I had no idea what else to call it. A powerful person having an affair with an underling during this time was not that shocking. And, you know, it wasn't that shocking because I could tell people about it and they didn't, you know, think it was a very big deal.
- [17:17]
Tonya Moseley
And they didn't think it was a very big deal because they had heard rumors. You talk about this in the book, too. Rumors of other, other quote, unquote affairs.
- [17:27]
Brooke Nevils
Right. And if you, if you went around, you know, saying something shocking like, oh, I was exploited, oh, this was incredibly degrading. That is not a safe thing to say in an environment where you need to remain employed, where this person still has tremendous power. But consent and agreement are not synonymous. And that's when Matt Lauer, when he uses the word consensual, well, when one person has power over the other, it's not really consent, it's submission. So when you're a subordinate and the most powerful person in your industry asks you to come to his hotel room, which in our industry, hotel rooms aren't, you know, hotel rooms the way they are in a social sense, you know, for other people. We work in hotel rooms all the time. I'd been to his hotel room already for, you know, a rehearsal. I'd been there early that night. You know, they're not freighted places the way they are in other industries.
- [18:39]
Tonya Moseley
But you do work there when you're out on assignment.
- [18:41]
Brooke Nevils
Yeah, you work there. But when someone asks you to go, who has power over you? You're thinking about the consequences of saying no. Well, I don't want to make this weird. I don't want to make them mad. So you just go and are you really empowered in that situation? I don't think that you are.
- [19:03]
Tonya Moseley
Our guest today is Brooke Nevills. Her new memoir is Unspeakable Silence, Shame and the Stories we choose to Believe. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Moseley, and this is FRESH air. Valentine's Day is coming up, and the perfect gift for the NPR lover in your life is waiting at the NPR Shop. From cozy sweaters and mugs made for slow mornings to our tiny desk hoodie. There's something for every NPR fan. Each purchase supports public media and the journalism you love. Find something meaningful@shopnpr.org this message comes from Brex.
- [19:39]
Sponsor/Announcer
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- [19:58]
Brooke Nevils
Terms is your source for same day updates on big news about the Trump administration. Short, focused episodes, one topic at a time, about five minutes or so. We carry out reporting from across all of NPR's coverage, so you are always getting the biggest, most urgent stories. Listen to Trump's Terms on the NPR.
- [20:16]
Sponsor/Announcer
App or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [20:20]
Tonya Moseley
You went to Meredith Vieira, who had been your boss for many years, and she told you to go to HR with a lawyer. And you did that also knowing what reporting would cost you. You couldn't live with this anymore. You felt like you were a fraud. You were drowning in your own addiction. But you also describe it as committing career suicide, that your career in this industry that you had grown up wanting to be a part of was essentially over and you decided to do it anyway.
- [20:56]
Brooke Nevils
Yeah, when I made that complaint, I mean, I knew who Matt Lauer was. I knew what he meant to the company. I knew what the Today show meant to millions of millions of people because I was one of those people. It meant the world to me. I knew what NBC meant to me. It was my family, it was my identity. And I knew I was breaking a sort of code, you know, by speaking up. And I assumed that the only career that would be ended by that would be mine. And I was okay with that because whatever the consequences were, I knew I could not live with the knowledge that if I didn't say something, it could continue, that it could have been continuing and that I hadn't said something.
- [21:59]
Tonya Moseley
You know, Brooke, there's an assumption in journalism that when you help someone tell their story, you're serving them and you're serving the greater good, the public. And you believe that in the work that you did as a producer, you yourself got to know sexual assault and rape victims through your journalism, through building trust with them. You thought you were on their side. And I wonder, how did your view of that work change once you were the one being interviewed?
- [22:32]
Brooke Nevils
Well, it changed a great deal. And the entire time I worked in journalism, I believed I was one of the good guys. I believed I was making a positive Difference in the world. And part of what I do in the book is go back and look at how I covered stories about sexual harassment, stories about sexual assault. And I realized that I was perpetuating these false stereotypes that I then believed. You know, I, in a way, was part of the system that I suffered so much from at the end. And the reason I decided to write the book was because I had this moment where I had lost pretty much everything. I'd been outed by a tabloid. I barely knew myself anymore. I was drinking all the time. I felt like I'd ruined my life. And I was angry. I was, you know, saying, why did I not know about this? Why isn't the press talking about this? Why has this not been reported on when we've known for all of these years that these stereotypes are not the truth? And, you know, someone said to me, well, aren't you a journalist? Like, wasn't that. Wasn't that your job? And it was my job, and I didn't ask the right questions. I didn't know what I didn't know.
- [24:02]
Tonya Moseley
You said that you'd been so focused. This is a quote. You said I'd been so focused on the questions viewers want to ask that I never step back to consider why they wanted to ask them and what those questions said about our collective understanding of what happened to these women. Say more about that.
- [24:23]
Brooke Nevils
You know, we all have these sort of common sense beliefs about how a sexual assault victim would act. Because so often journalists, you know, like me, we don't want to do the messy stories. We don't want to do the complicated stories. We don't want to, you know, get into the messy gray area that makes everyone uncomfortable. We're looking for sympathetic victims and stories that are easy to understand. And so when it happens to you and your story isn't easy to understand, you think you're an outlier when really you're the norm. And I contributed to that as a journalist. And the book is in many ways an act of atonement for that. It's me doing the job I should have done before.
- [25:14]
Tonya Moseley
A few times you highlight details from Ronan Farrow's book Catch and Kill that has your story, that you paint it as imprecise. You didn't say it was wrong. So really what you're saying is your story is filtered through another. And with that, it's all about interpretation. Were there any details that were wrong, or did you just feel like it didn't quite get to all of the things that you're trying to get to in this book.
- [25:42]
Brooke Nevils
I wrote my own book because I knew that the only way to talk about how truly complicated, how truly frightening, how truly messy these stories are was to do it myself and was to be as honest as I could possibly be. And I knew, writing this book, that our standards for people who talk about their experiences with sexual assault and sexual harassment are impossibly high. One imprecise sentence can be used to make you look like a liar, you know, did you change your story? If you leave out a detail here, you don't leave out a detail there, you know, and that's one of the reasons that it took me so long to write the book, is because this is, you know, it's called Unspeakable things for a reason. Even to talk about it is still terrifying. And, I mean, why is that? My story has been out there for years, but it's never really been my story. And this is a story. My complaint was about what happened to my body. I am the primary source in that story, and yet I am the last one to get a voice in it. Why is that we should all pause and think about that? Because it is almost an impossible position to be in, even to talk about what happened to your own body, your own experience with these things. And it shouldn't be that way.
- [27:25]
Tonya Moseley
You have a daughter now, and she's very young, but I wonder if you've even thought about how you plan to talk with her about the dangers of sexual assault and how it can happen.
- [27:40]
Brooke Nevils
You know, I talk to her about it in all sorts of ways now that she doesn't even realize that I'm talking to her about it. She, you know, she heard me say a bad word while I was driving, and she then said that bad word, and her brother told on her. I asked her to tell me what happened, and she said, no, I don't want to. I don't want you to be mad. And I said, sometimes in life, people are going to be mad at you. If you're ever going to stand up for anything, people are going to be mad at you. Sometimes you have to tell people things they don't want to hear, and it's going to make them mad. And I know how hard that is, and I know how scary it is. But if I'm mad at you, it's not going to be the end of the world. And you will get to know that you did the right thing, that you told the truth. And I know that someday she will be old enough to read this book. My son will be old enough to read this book, they're gonna go to middle school. They're gonna be tortured by this book. And I thought about that because as a parent, everything you do reflects in your kids and you never forget that. And you know, I'm married. I go by my married name. I don't live in New York anymore. I don't work in television anymore. It would be possible for me to bury this. But it's not my job as their mother to shield them from the hard things in life. It's my job to prepare them for the hard things in life. And part of that is giving them the opportunity to learn from my mistakes, to be honest with them and say I wasn't perfect, but I still didn't deserve what happened to me. And I know that when I have that conversation with them, it will be hard, but it will let them make better choices than I made.
- [29:32]
Tonya Moseley
Brooke Nevils, thank you so much for this book and thank you for talking with us.
- [29:38]
Brooke Nevils
Thank you for having me.
- [29:41]
Tonya Moseley
Brooke Nevilles new book is Unspeakable Silence, Shame and the Stories we choose to Believe. Lauer has denied her account and called their encounter an affair. After a short break, book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Vigil, a new novel by George Saunders. This is FRESH air.
- [30:02]
Sponsor/Announcer
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- [30:34]
Tonya Moseley
First, more violence in Minneapolis, Democrats say.
- [30:38]
Ken Tucker
They will block a spending bill in.
- [30:39]
Maureen Corrigan
The Senate after another deadly ice shooting. How will Republicans respond? And could the Trump administration rethink its strategy on immigration? We'll keep you posted every morning with three stories you need to know to start your day up. First listen on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts.
- [30:57]
Tonya Moseley
Writer George Saunders is a Buddhist whose practice informs his work, Most notably his 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize. Saunders new novel Vigil also explores the Buddhist concept of the bardo. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.
- [31:16]
Maureen Corrigan
If Heaven, according to the talking heads, is the place where nothing ever happens, the Bardo, according to George Saunders, is as jam packed and frantic as costco on Black Friday. We Saunders fans have been to the Bardo before, that suspended state between life and death where, according to Tibetan Buddhism, a person's self awareness helps determine what kind of existence they'll enter next. Saunders set much of his magnificent 2017 debut novel Lincoln in the Bardo in the actual mausoleum and surrounding cemetery where In February of 1862, Abraham Lincoln sat cradling the body of his 11 year old son Willie, who died of typhoid fever. In Saunders, rendering the Lincoln, Pieta sits at the center of a crowd of Bardo dwellers cracking crude jokes, demanding attention, exuding empathy, nastiness, indifference. In short, dead people behaving like exaggerated versions of their living selves. The enlightenment that some of these dead achievements is what the novel also delivered for many of us readers, a deepened sense, however momentary, of the mystery of existence. Vigil is a briefer and bumpier return visit back to the Bordeaux. Instead of the mythic grief of Abraham Lincoln, here we have the passing of one somewhat mundane, if contemptible human being. K.J. boone was, and for a few more hours still is, an oil company CEO. To Boone, corporate greed and fossil fuels power the engine of American capitalism, and he sees nothing wrong with the way things are. In fact, to keep profits soaring, he went so far as to falsify facts about scientific research. Think Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life for the Climate Change Era. Plummeting down into Boone's palatial bedroom from a more elevated spiritual realm is a woman named Jill Dahl. Blaine Doll was Jill's nickname before her sudden death in an explosion at 22. In her role as spiritual facilitator, Jill has attended some 343 passings. Her mission is to console those terrified by the transition from life to death. She also urges the dying to undertake a final review of their lives. But Boone isn't buying it. He sees nothing wrong with himself, as one of the many Bardo dwellers who visits Boone's death says his long service to his colossal ego begins to undo him. Vigil is a good, but not great short novel. Boone is just too much a stereotypical captain of industry to be the abiding center of interest here. That's why the novel comes alive halfway through, when its focus turns to Jill and our flawed spiritual messenger. A wedding taking place next door to Boone's house prompts Jill to recall her former life with such longing that she risks becoming stuck in the earthly realm. Here's a moment where Jill's grandmother, known as Grandma Gust because she frequently breaks wind whisks her off to a cemetery to see some graves that may shock her out of her nostalgia. Also buried in the cemetery are Jill's parents. Jill says seeing their graves was the hardest blow of all. I used to come in from playing and there they'd be. They'd used to come in from being out somewhere and there I'd be on the couch maybe, and I'd jump up so happy to see them. Once there'd been no me and then they'd come along and maid me and. And now I was gone and they were too. What was the point of it all? Grandma said, what keeps you here, doll? What keeps you here? I said. She leaned forward to answer as about to tell me some long kept secret, then did a little fart like in the old days so we might part on good terms. That wild swirl of the bodily profane and the spiritual, the elegiac and the comical, is what makes Saunders writing so spectacular. And thankfully, the sections where Jill takes center stage call it forth. Of course, I feel a little regretful about saying anything negative about Saunders work, given that he's been elevated to secular sainthood ever since he gave that viral commencement address at Syracuse University in 2013. On on the topic of kindness, surely the Bardo must be packed with critics struggling to let go of ego atoning for negative and even mixed reviews like this one.
- [36:56]
Tonya Moseley
Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Vigil by George Saunders. Coming up, rock critic Ken Tucker on Stephen Wilson, Jr. A rising country musician who he says is writing some of the most intricate and compelling songs around these days. This is FRESH air. One of the more distinctive recent sounds in country music comes from Stephen Wilson Jr. According to our rock critic Ken Tucker. Recently nominated as best new artist by the Country Music Awards, Wilson is a former microbiologist who is also a Golden Gloves boxer who's also, says Ken, writing some of the most intricate and compelling songs around these days. And he's broken through, not with huge record sales, but viral clips on social media. Here's Ken's take on Wilson and his growing career.
- [38:08]
Stephen Wilson Jr.
Life is a battlefield and it'll drag you right through hell. Bites like a rattlesnake the kind that you just don't see on the trail. I miss my father every day.
- [38:27]
Brooke Nevils
The.
- [38:28]
Stephen Wilson Jr.
Kind of pain I pre don't fade away and the ones above guide me down the road. Yeah, grief is only love that's got no place to go from my grief.
- [38:49]
Ken Tucker
Stephen Wilson Jr. Has a deep, rumbling voice. He delivers his lyrics through a clenched jaw as if he almost regrets having to articulate his feelings, it's a self conscious style, at once forceful and diffident, which only makes his music that much more intimate. He's created a sound in which an increasingly large number of listeners find comfort and strength.
- [39:14]
Stephen Wilson Jr.
When the night, the night is calm and all the land is dark and the moon is the only light you ever see no I won't be afraid no I won't shed a single tea Just as long as you Just as long as you stand by me don't you stay by me Won't you, won't.
- [39:57]
Tonya Moseley
You.
- [40:00]
Stephen Wilson Jr.
Stand by me Stand by me Won't you stand by me yeah yeah.
- [40:10]
Ken Tucker
Yeah that's Wilson's version of the great Benny King song Stand By Me. It takes a serene, lovely ballad and roughs up its edges. When he performed it as a Best New Artist nominee during the televised Country Music Awards in November, it stopped the show. The camera panned across the faces of stars a hundred times more famous than Stephen Wilson Jr. They seem startled and elated by this moment, free of glamour and self congratulation. Wilson's own compositions burst with images of his working class upbringing in in rural southern Indiana. Songs densely packed with adjectives rhymed in the rhythms of hip hop, as when he describes himself as a torn cigarette wet book of matches in this song called Patches.
- [41:02]
Stephen Wilson Jr.
Got a crack in my windshield, a crack in my skull A crack it on coffee and I love you all and it's good to be grateful Grateful is good Hell one of these days I won't behave like I should Cause I got scratches from catches on all my rusty old latches I got rented, expanded hiding out in my mattress I got rides that won't reel I got scars that won't heal I'm a torn cigarette wet book of matches My patches got matches.
- [41:45]
Ken Tucker
Wilson is in his mid-40s and he's been around for a while, but it's mostly in the past year that he's come to prominence. And he's done it in that 21st century way. Online, where a viral clip of his performance of the national anthem at the 2025 National Football League draft got a lot of attention, as have snippets of him playing and talking on various podcasts. The talking is key to his appeal. He bills himself Stephen Wilson Jr. And that junior is crucial. To hear him tell it, his father, who died while only in his 50s, was the most important influence on Stephen. His dad taught him to box, and for a while there, young Wilson was a Golden Gloves level boxer. Wilson titled his 1 album to date, Son of Dad. He sang I Miss My Father Every Day in the song that started this review, and in another tune called Father Son, he goes deeper into that relationship.
- [42:51]
Stephen Wilson Jr.
He was named by my grandma she got it from the Bible.
- [42:58]
Ken Tucker
And he.
- [42:58]
Stephen Wilson Jr.
Passed it on to me like granddaddy drool Raised me up like sweet corn Created a disciple, yeah, I fought it like hell Hell he became a rival yeah, I tried to be different Tried to go against the grain didn't make no difference I just ended up the same I've never known better. Cause there it bones to the.
- [43:44]
Maureen Corrigan
You.
- [43:45]
Stephen Wilson Jr.
Wanna change my name Gotta drain my blood I am my father's son.
- [43:54]
Ken Tucker
Musicians breakthrough on social media just as much as they might on the radio. But social media, unlike radio, isn't mass media. Whether it's TikTok or Instagram or whatever you use to be exposed to music, it's a platform in which information is fed to you based on other similar things you've sought out. As a result, building a broad audience this way takes time. It has for Wilson. He's starting 2026 by going out on an extensive cross country tour, and he's selling out bigger markets like Los Angeles and New York, where media buzz builds. Which means Stephen Wilson Jr. Now faces his next test in this new year, whether public interest in his low key, organically built career can translate into a popularity that accommodates rather than smooths over his rough and intricate artistry.
- [44:49]
Tonya Moseley
Ken Tucker is Fresh Air's rock critic. Stephen Wilson Jr. S most recent release includes the EP Blankets and a new edition of the debut album, Son of Dad. If you'd like to catch up on interviews you've missed, like our conversation with historian Heather Ann Thompson about how the 1984 subway shooting of four black teenagers by a white man tells the story of how fear is weaponized in America. Or with Jason Zangerly about how Tucker Carlson became one of the most influential people on the far right. Check out our podcast. You'll find lots of Fresh AIR interviews and to find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show and get our producers recommendations on what to watch. Read and listen to. Subscribe to our free newsletter@why.org Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Annemarie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper. Thea Chaloner directed today's show with Terry Gross. I'm Tanya Moses.
- [46:10]
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