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BiTS: [Laughs] Tell me something about the new record, “Common Sense”. Absolutely terrific
stuff. I love it. How long did it take you to write it all?

GN: Oh well, some of the songs are older than others, you know, like the song ‘Worry B Gone’
was co-written with Guy Clark, probably as much as ten years ago, eight or ten years ago, but
then a lot of the other songs were written within the last few years. ‘Common Sense’, that's the
title track was written recently, and another very recent song is ‘The Truth About A Lie’. A lot of
these songs are politically motivated because of
what's going on in our culture in America, with this
upcoming election.

BiTS: You managed to get Rick Vito as a guest guitar

player on the album. How did you find him?
GN: Yeah, he lives here in Nashville and he's a dear
friend. He plays with me. For years I've played a

weekly show as Whitey Johnson at Bourbon Street
Blues Bar in Printers Alley, and Rick would play
guitar with me on those shows, and I've always
loved his playing, and I was really glad that he was
available to participate in the record.

BiTS: Tell me something about a couple of tracks
on the album. I'm much intrigued by ‘Bob Dylan And
Whiskey’ because you've really got the sound of Bob
Dylan contained in the melody and the lyrics.

GN: Yeah, I wrote that because through all of the
turbulence of the 60s, I graduated from high school
in 1968 and that was the year that Martin Luther Rick Vito
King was assassinated and Bobby Kennedy, and JFK
was murdered in my hometown of Dallas in 1963.
During those times I wrote songs to give us something to console us a bit and give us a focus for
all the turbulence in our culture at the time. Bob Dylan doesn't write those kind of songs anymore
and I was longing to have that and wishing that I could write a song that would be as meaningful

as those songs were. Bob Dylan now makes whiskey. There's a brand of whiskey called the
Heaven Store whiskey, and I was thinking about drinking Bob Dylan whiskey and trying to write
a song that I wish he would write, and that's what inspired that.

BiTS: Gary, when you write a song, do you get inspired as you're writing it, or does it all come
together in one go?

GN: Well, it's different every time. I mean, it's an ongoing process. There's some songs that I
might mull over for a while and let them evolve naturally, and then there's some songs that come
very quickly and then I just write them in one sitting, and they're done. So it's different song by
song about how they come together. On ‘Common Sense’, it took me quite a while because the
current events kept changing and other things began to be added to the song. You know, the
George Floyd murder was in one of the verses and the thing about ‘critical race theory’ that goes
on, and the banning of books and things in the States. All those things contribute to that, and of
course, the election with Trump claiming that he had won the election when he’d lost.

BiTS: I want you to talk to me if you would, about the song called ‘Worry B Gone’, and the reason
for that is perhaps a little strange. I've got a bottle of what I take to be cologne or something that