Revisionist History · Pushkin Industries

Americana Music Live with Drew Holcomb and Malcolm Gladwell

August 14, 2025·1 hr 18 min·5 clips

Drew Holcomb explains why his song about turning 40 became a blanket for his deepest tensions.

A tour bus leaves Nashville. The narrator starts with the close, odd feeling of a traveling variety show, where historical argument, music, and a later conversation about faith all seem to share the same ride. The setup is casual, almost tossed off. A friend named Lee Camp, a theologian from Nashville, runs No Small Endeavor, then takes the group through Louisville, Indianapolis, and Grand Rapids. The material is heavier than the staging suggests. Malcolm Gladwell says he and Lee told a story about the suffragettes and the anti-slavery movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Musicians helped carry the story. That live shape matters because the episode soon moves toward things an argument cannot quite hold by itself. Drew Holcomb grew up religious. He did not simply inherit that world, and he did not throw it away in anger either. He says he tried to find a third way through it. Then his brother died. Holcomb was seventeen, away in the Dominican Republic for Spanish immersion, when a brother born with spina bifida and serious health issues died suddenly. The old language came back. Sacraments, words, instruments, and communities of faith were all there, but none of it clicked into place. The question stayed open. Instead of leaving, he kept circling it. Music became the translator. Van Morrison's Moondance and David Gray's White Ladder were not grief records, but he remembers driving, listening, and sobbing. That is the scene that lands. It pulls a large question about faith and art down into one young person letting songs hold what belief could not yet arrange. The conversation is gentle without getting syrupy. Its best thread is not certainty. It is how love, loss, community, and music can keep someone inside a question until the question starts to change shape.

As heard by us

A patient conversation about faith, grief, and the records that help hold both.

The episode starts with a road-show setup, then settles into a conversation about faith, family loss, and the uneasy middle ground between staying inside a tradition and walking away from it.

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Why you'd press play

You get faith, grief, and music without tidy answers.

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