-Welcome back to "Late Night."
We're here with Michael Shannon. You are not just an actor.
You're an accomplished musician. You were just back in Chicago
doing some shows with your friend Jason.
Which one here is Jason?
-Jason Narducy. He's an amazing bass player.
He plays with Bob Mould.
He also has his own band, Split Single.
He's incredible. -And you guys do --
When you perform, you do --
you pick an album and do every song off an album.
-Yes, sir. This time we did
a Neil Young album called "Zuma."
-Okay. -Did a "Cortez the Killer"
that was over 20 minutes long. -[ Laughs ]
Do you feel like that was an album that the crowd knew,
or were they just sort of along for the ride?
-It was about 50/50. I mean, I think there were
some people there 'cause of like, "Oh, look, it's him,"
and there were some people like, "I love this album, man."
You know? -[ Laughs ] That's good.
Nice to have a mix when you're doing a show.
You had a band. How old was your --
Your first band was called Jehovah's what?
-Jehovah's Suspects. -Okay, Jehovah's Suspects.
[ Laughter ] -Yeah, yeah.
That was when I was 15 years old.
I was living in Lexington, Kentucky.
And my best friend at the time was a fella named James Brown.
-Okay. -Not the James Brown.
-Right. [ Laughter ]
No parent would let their kid
be friends with the James Brown at 15.
-I mean, you know -- Yeah, you're probably right.
Yeah, him and some buddies, him, we got together,
and we learned -- what -- We learned, like,
"Give Me Three Steps" by Lynyrd Skynyrd,
"Communication Breakdown," "Hey, Joe."
And then I wrote a song.
I wrote my first song at 15. Yeah.
-What was that first song called?
-It's called "The Armadillo Song."
-"The Armadillo Song." -Mm-hmm.
-And when you first presented it to the rest of your bandmates,
were they taken with it?
-They were stoked because it's mostly
just one chord... -Okay, gotcha.
-...and it wasn't too fast, so it wasn't hard to play.
But, yeah, it was kind of miraculous.
I don't think they had anticipated an original song.
-Yeah, that's a big deal. I mean if you're a cover band
and all of a sudden, you get a new one...
What -- Do you remember it? -I do.
-Have you ever played it, like, live?
Did you guys do it at a show? -[ Laughs ]
-I haven't played it in a while, but --
-But you do think -- you're confident you remember it?
-Mm-hmm. I can do it.
-Do you want to do it? -Yeah, I can do it.
-All right. -I can do it.
-Do you, uh, have a guitar? -Oh, well, look at this.
Yeah, I do. [ Laughter ]
-That's great.
I didn't even know we had that back there.
That's fantastic. -All right. Okay.
-So, like, how many -- Just paint a picture.
Jehovah's Suspects, what's a normal audience like?
How many people you got out there?
-It's usually like 10, 15 teenagers with Dixie cups
filled with some incorrect amount of alcohol, soda pop.
[ Laughter ] -All right.
And is this a song you just go into,
or did you preface it all, like, "This is a new one"...?
-Ladies and gentlemen... [ Laughter ]
...I was up all night.
Couldn't go to -- No, I'd just start playing.
Just started playing it.
♪♪
♪ I wake up, and it's a sunny day ♪
♪ I shake my head, and I crawl away ♪
♪ My stomach growls ♪
♪ I have not been fed ♪
♪ And visions of cactus pears prick the insides of my head ♪
♪ And the Earth stands still as I punch through the heat ♪
♪ The white-hot sand, it burns the bottoms of my feet ♪
♪ I'm an armadillo with a hard shell ♪
♪ I look scared and ugly ♪
♪ And I got a strange smell ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
[ Laughter ]
[ Humming ]
♪♪
Yeah, that was the bridge.
[ Laughter ]
♪♪
♪ I remember the day ♪
♪ When I left home ♪
♪ My mama started crying, and my pop gave me a comb ♪
♪ He said, "You got to look presentable ♪
♪ Otherwise they don't care" ♪
♪ He never seemed to notice ♪
♪ We ain't got no hair ♪
[ Laughter ]
♪ I miss my folks ♪
♪ Don't get me wrong ♪
♪ But I happen to know that this is where I belong ♪
♪ 'Cause I'm an armadillo with a hard shell ♪
♪♪
♪ And I was made to roam this desolate hell ♪
♪♪
[ Cheers and applause ]
-I mean, that's a real-ass song, Michael.
[ Laughter ]
-About armadillos.
Can I tell you something, though?
-Yeah. -'Cause, like, I had never seen
an armadillo when I wrote that song.
[ Laughter ]
And years later, I was on a camping trip
with one of my best friends from Chicago.
We went to Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia,
which is covered with armadillos,
and they had tons of hair.
It's just not on top of them. It's on their underside.
And then, I had to take a long, hard look at my song,
but I didn't change it. -Yeah.
-Because I didn't know what to replace it with.
-I agree. And I think, you know, people know it that way.
You're gonna have people singing along.
They're not gonna want you to all of a sudden
change out the lyrics. -Yeah, when you're at MSG
playing the song, you don't want people getting confused.
-Yeah, just for some sort of, like, zoological accuracy.
They're not there for that. They're there to jam out.
-Right, exactly. -Did you do a little --
'Cause it did seem to have some knowledge of armadillos.
Did you do a little, like, research before your wrote --
It feels like maybe, like, you had also been assigned,
like, to do an oral report on armadillos.
-I imagined, like, an armadillo in the desert
struggling to survive,
which is how I very much felt as my 15-year-old self
could identify with that.
-See, this is how you should introduce the song.
-Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't want to make people cry, but...
[ Laughter ]
But, uh...
But then, like I said, I went to this island.
It was a very lush island, not a desert,
and all the armadillos were covered with hair.
-[ Laughs ] -And it just goes to show
that how little grasp of reality any of us really have.
[ Laughter ]
-That is -- I mean, yeah, they don't
tell you that at Ripley's Believe It or Not.
-No. "Can you believe it?
Armadillos have hair!" [ Laughter ]
-Hey, thank you so much for giving us the world premiere
of "The Armadillo Song." -Changing your life.
-Changing my life. I was gonna say that, too.
New episodes of "Nine Perfect Strangers"
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