Episode 9: Watercolors with Rita Wilson

and they want to talk about it. From at home perfume kits to custom made picture socks from build your Own horse barn blueprints to vintage British driving gloves from Destination bird watching two Japanese made cafes, tell me about what you love, why you love it, how you got into it, and what makes it awesome. Each episode is presented in three chapters. In chapter one, my guest and

I will have a conversation about their passion. In chapter two, we play a game I called trade It, where my guests and I turn each other onto something cool we've recently discovered. And in chapter three, I closed the show by talking about music that I am currently geeked out on and why I believe that curiosity is contagious and that life is better with the soundtrack. So let the geakon.

Begin Chapter one. Today's guest is Rita Wilson. You might know Rita from her role in Sleepless in Seattle or on The Good Wife, or because she produced My Big Fat Greek Wedding. But I know her because she is a wonderful singer songwriter and one of my favorite people to be around. We even co wrote the song that you're listening to right now, which is called every Day. This is from her two thousand sixteen self titled album, and you should go and buy it immediately, seriously, push

pause right now and go to iTunes. All right, are you back? Okay, enjoy our conversation. First off, introduce yourself. I am Rita Wilson. I am an actor, a producer and currently, within the last few years, singer songwriter. You are partly thanks to you. And where are we? We are backstage at the Geffen Playhouse because we just finished doing the show Liner Notes that I UM produce and participate in and its songwriters telling the stories behind their

hits and singing them. And you just played and I just played it, and just at the end of a four day run, yes of this and this is the first of two weeks right um, And the Geffen Theater is in the middle of U. C. L A. Yeah, it's Um, it's the Geffen Playhouse, which is named after David Geffen, the amazing music producer and now philanthropist. And I've been I was born and raised in l A. So this year actually is a part of my childhood. I used to come here to see plays when I

was a kid. Yes, but I think it was originally a Masonic lodge. So it's beautiful because it has that courtyard in the front, and it has, you know, a beautiful architectural vibe. It doesn't it's like old fashioned. Yeah, it looks a little bit like a church on the outside. It does, it does, but I think that was the whole Masonic lodge thing to it. I think I love it. Yes. So here on the podcast, the requirement is I'm interested in hearing about something that you're um geeking out on

that it has nothing to do with your job. Okay, So job is now off the table, not talking about that, um, And what I'm interested in is kind of what you're into. And I know what you're about to say because you've already told me, but I just I want you to start, Okay.

So this happened a few years ago, maybe about ten years ago, because I as a parent, and as a wife and as you know, a woman, I guess I am the person who does sort of like puts together the family vacations and uh sort of keeps everybody busy and gives them things to do during these vacations. And

sometimes you have to have things on downtime. So I was packing up games or the kids would have projects or something, and so we would all be really prepared and we'd get to someplace we were going to for vacation and I would look around and you know, my husband would be, you know, writing something, and my kids would be involved in some sort of project that they had going or putting together some special sort of toy or puzzles or whatever, and I would be like, I

forgot to bring something for myself. And then I realized I didn't. I wasn't a puzzler. I didn't know how to do anything crafty. I really didn't know what to do, and it really stumped me. And so I thought, well, what do I want to do? And I realized that I had always loved watercolors. And I don't know why I had loved water colors. I just think there's something about the texture and the opacity of them, and how kind of the water. I just love the water. Except

I had never painted water colors in my life. I had never taken a drawing course, I had never done oils. I knew nothing about art, and so I came back from our vacation that year and I found an art class in watercolors, and so I was like, Okay, I am going to learn how to do this. And it was crazy because I knew not one thing about it

and I don't know how to draw. So it started out super base it, you know, like here are the paints, and you know, here's the water, and here's how you do a thing called a gradation of color, and here's how you mix colors. And we learned about secondary colors and tertiary colors and the color wheel, complementary colors and all of this was the education educational background, and that

was basically year one. And then we started doing things like painting blocks or square shapes or things that were super simple and super basic. But as I started doing it, I realized, like, wait a minute, if you do something consistently, you will not get worse at it. And that was encouraging to me because I was looking around at other people everybody was a beginner, but some people had insanely good inherent talent, and I was looking around, going, well,

that's not me. But what happened was I took the class for five years and I actually learned stuff, and a lot of the stuff that I learned was technique, things like if you want to reserve some white on a on a piece of paper, that there's this stuff

called masking fluid. And the masking fluid is basically like something that you can put on the paper that when you paint over it, it doesn't It keeps everything underneath that fluid white, and at the end of the painting, you rub that stuff off and then you have these

white spots. So like you could use that for highlighting, right if you wanted to have a really big highlight, because the thing with watercolor is you're trying to not waste all of your white that's on your paper, because once you paint over that white, you can't get it back. I mean they're even try to get the white back, but you don't use white paint necessarily to create white, so thinks so you have to kind of think backwards exactly.

And um, so then we started branching off from boxes and you know, kind of geometric shapes and things like still life. So we would do flowers, we would do vases, we would do um you know, whatever the teacher was setting up. We would learn how to work with shadows. But what happened was I loved it. I absolutely loved it.

And now I travel with a very specific set of paints um I for anybody listening out there, I like the Shrinky Yes Shrinky forty eight palette forty eight palette set, which is a super um compact UH palette for with forty eight colors in it. And I like arches cold pressed paper forty pound because I like a rougher texture. And I have these incredible brushes that are portable and they're the number I travel with, the number two, four, six, and eight, and sometimes a ten, just a separate ten.

But what I have found is that I can paint on an airplane, I can paint at somebody's house. We can paint on little tables. And I have girlfriends who also paint now, so when we travel together we call it sketch Club. And in the afternoon, after we've done a hike or we've done something cool, we come back and we like get out the paints and we do sketch club. Now, one of the things I cannot do is um portraits. I'm so bad at portrait. So I took a portrait class. I was by far the worst

person in the portrait class. If you were being generous, you would say, like, oh, Rita's portraits look like they want to be Modigliani. I mean, the faces look so strange in there. That's because I don't have a background in drawing or figurative drawing or anything like that. So it's a challenging no, nothing, nothing, nothing, but I am obsessed. So like what I do now sometimes is I like to paint if you're just sitting outside and doing a

landscape or something like that. But what I often do if I know that I'm not going to be able to be in a place for you know, three or four consecutive days in a row, I'll photograph something and I'll paint it while I'm at that place, and then I take the photograph with me so I can continue painting it after I'm done. Refer back to that, I

refer back to it. And also I do this thing too where it's like if I see something and this is actually just a good exercise if I see something like last summer, I was painting this amazing, big kind of rock island and I wanted it was such a beautiful day and there was kind of a weird little mist, and the sky was pink and orange and the sea was very calm, and I wanted it to kind of

reflect the colors of the sky and this rock. And I did maybe four or five of those in a row until I got it right, because I became obsessed with Nope, that sky is not right, Nope, that sea doesn't look right, and uh, and that You just keep doing it and doing it until you kind of get to the point that you feel like, Okay, this is kind of what I saw in my head that I wanted it to be. This is awesome. This explained little bit of your Instagram. Yes, yes, wondering. Yeah, so that's

what it is. I mean, it's hard to do. I always think it's hard. I always feel like I'm starting something and I go, I mean, you know, the the hardest part is the drawing of it, the sketching of it, the proportions, the perspective, um making sure that you know it's balanced in the right way, And the fun part for me is the actual painting and like mixing the colors and getting the colors right or the texture right or something, you know, like that the technique of it.

But the sketching can take That's that's the bulk of the time, sketching it, I think. And then and then I always get mad at myself because like, why am I not looser? Why can't I just like do it without like being so what's the word? Um? Trying too hard? Like why can't I just be? And And sometimes I just do that on purpose. I'm like, I have five minutes to paint this, and I give a boundary. Yeah, I give myself a boundary. I have five minutes to paint this, and I just see what happens with it.

And then you know, and it sounds like junk. It sounds like your version of golf. Yes, it's kind of like you versus you. Yes, it is it is. Do you have anything like that? What is your version of that? I don't know. You know, I love board games. Do you which ones? I'm a big board game fanatic. It just depends on how do you like risk? Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, it's like monopoly in our later section, I'm will start you. Okay, that's what we'll do. We get to trade you. I'll

do that. Okay, good. But so let me ask you a couple of so if someone was just trying to start out in this, how do they start? Like, well, if you had to recommend three things that they do, they just anybody could do if they wanted to do this. All right, Well, the first thing I would say is try to find an art class near you somewhere, and there's usually a lot of art classes. If there isn't an art class near you, I would try to find an art teacher that's near you. And if you can't

find an art teacher, there's always YouTube. I can go deep. Oh yeah, but Russ, but you can go to YouTube and you can just google watercolor tutorial, watercolor portrait and they will do time lapse of like this is how you do it? And so I have gone deep at night into the watercolor tutorials definitely. But I think there's always room and there's always somebody who's doing it near you,

so you can always find someone a good teacher. I mean, there's there's people are so cree aative and actually, without taking the watercolor class, I don't think I would have done songwriting because it was so daunting to me that I knew that if I stuck with it, and I stayed with it, that I wouldn't get worse, and that I would learn from the people that I was working with. And that's what's good about being in a class, because if you're in a class, you're you're seeing the person

next to you going, oh my god, that's great. How did you learn how to do that? How did you come up with that technique? You know, I want to know how you got that. And somebody's coming up to you saying, well, how did you do that? And so you're constantly observing and um taking it in, you know, so you're you're soaking it up as well. If this keeps going, which it sounds like it's going to keep going, right, I'm going to keep painting. Definitely. It's so soothing. I mean,

it's really calming to me. How if there's a point where you think I think I'm I've I've come over the edge, like is there a line that you've already found, You're like, oh, you know, I blew off, Like I missed picking up the so and so like like like is there a line that you've found so far? And if not, is there a line in the future past which you won't go. I was on a plane trip.

It was in an international flight, and you don't need a lot of room to paint, and you only need a glass of water and you know, some paper towels and I went deep. I was so tired. I should have been completely sleeping on this flight, but I could not stop painting. And I got to my destination completely exhausted, but I couldn't I couldn't stop. I really could not stop. I was like, I have to finish this. I have

to finish this, and I don't want to stop. And I had my music on and I you know, my little headphones, and yeah that I'm sure there would be when you're working on something really um and you're really liking it, you you don't want to stop. And but I've learned, I guess over the course of just because you're if you're a mom, you have to stop things like okay, my kids need me. Um. I kind of can pull myself away and then come back. But it's

it's really fun, this is awesome. Come on, I will confess the only award that I ever won in middle school was for watercolor. Come on, in seventh grade, I painted a picture of the Only reason I remember this is because my mom saved it. Um of like a a beach shack and like a palm tree and whatever. I had done the shading on the palm tree correct and um, it was a pretty low bar that I had to hit the sound grade. But that was my

only experience. When you still have it, did your mom? Yeah, of course, Mom's frame think And now you look at it and you're like, oh, no, dude, that's that's like a coloring book. That's but um, I'm fascinated that this is a form of expression for you that seems like you didn't find till now. And then if I hear you right, you feel like maybe you won't stop. I don't think I'll stop. My mom was a really creative person, and you know, when we were little, she sewed all

of our clothes. She made our bedspreads are curtains, and you know, she was Greek. And I would go to a store with her and I'd look at something, you know, a piece of clothing or something like that, and she would studiously look at it, and she'd kind of examine it, and then she'd look at me and say, I can make that for to you. You don't need to buy it. And I'm like, as a kid, I just wanted store bought stuff, you know, like please take me to J. C.

Pennies and buy me those jeans. And she's like, no, you can't make jeans. Mom. She's like, I could make jeans. And we would go down to the fabric store and pick out fabric and get a Buttermilk or Simplicity or Vogue pattern and she would make me my clothes. I mean, crazy gorgeous things. I mean I look back on that stuff now and I think she was amazing. But she also could crochet, and she could crochet so beautifully, and

she has made me the most extraordinary bedspreads. And one day we were in a Ralph Laurence store, and you know how Ralph Lauren has a lot of vintage stuff in it, and they had a vintage crochet bedspread, probably from the twenties or something, all white, and I was my mom was over there looking at the crochet bedspread, and I was wandering the store and I came back in about twenty minutes and my mom was sitting there and she had her hand under her chin, and she

was just staring at the bedspread, staring at it. And I said, Mom, what are you doing? And she said, I'm counting the stitches because I'm going to do this pattern when I get home. It was the most intricate pattern. And she got home and she made she made it. I don't know how she did it, and that is what is on my bed. I mean, it's unbelievable. So there.

I think I always saw my mom being creative and having something to do that was, you know, something she did out of love really or her own creative endeavor. But you know, I look around my house and there's so many things that my mom made, so I know I'm doing that now. I'm just painting a bunch. I'll leave them around. The kids will like either want them or not want them. You know, have you sold any no, have you ever thought about selling them? Would you sell one?

I don't know. I guess if somebody wanted one, maybe here's I got a suggestion. This is a silly one. It's pretty Actually it's not a silly suggestion. I love rock posters, which are these there's a whole culture of people who are these designers and printers who print posters just for one show. They do a design just for one show and then they make it on a you know, screen print or something and they make it. Um. That might be kind of cool. You could make a series

of show posters. Wow, I like that idea. And then you don't have to sell them, but you could use them to Yeah. Well, like Joni Mitchell used to paint a lot on her album covers and yeah, she used to do a lot of paintings. She didn't she was really good and amazing self portraits and all of that. I did take one painting and I made um um cards out of them, like Greenland cards. And then I did this one painting that was um, I don't know

if you guys know what evil eyes are there? Those like little symbols in sort of Mediterranean culture that are supposed to be good luck. And so I did a whole series of evil eyes and I printed fabric out of that and made pajama pants up. It's like and I know, and then I was thinking, well, maybe I could do you know how you do lyric posters when you go out on tour, and so I thought, well, maybe I could paint my own lyric posters and then

handwrite the lyrics on there, like something like that. It would be fun to do it, all right, Okay, Chapter two. In every episode of Geeking Out, I see if I can trade one thing I've discovered recently with one thing that my guest has discovered. Anything is admissible in this friendly exchange. I call trade it, all right. This section of the podcast is called trade You. I'm going to trade you something like one thing I'm kind of into right now in exchange for one thing that you're into

right now. It could be anything. Could be like a show you're watching on one of the services. It could be like a record you're like, a book, could be just like, for instance, the other day, I suggested, like, I found this pillow that stays cold. What's that? You know it's not that, But you have to listen to the podcast, all right, So I'll start. Um. You had mentioned this earlier when our conversation. Uh, I am into board games, and this has happened in the past five

years maybe, and it started very um innocently. I think as like an extent shouldn't like a trivial pursuit was kind of too hard to some degree, and I came across this one called bezer Wizard, which was this kind

of Swedish trivia game. It was it was Swedish design, but it's in English and uh, and it became just a funny thing to pull the cards out and just talk to people in my house, and my kids were smart enough to try to answer, and eventually, or pretty quickly, I was like, well, do they have an extra pack? I know all the answers already, So I got online and I found the website I went through was a website called board game Geek, but that was just where

it popped up first, right. I was like, where are the extra bezer Wizard And it came up at this and then it said, oh, this is an award section of our highest award winning games for each year. And I went back two or three years and I bought one of the games. And all of these games are things like your brain just doesn't quite get until you see them. Okay, they've made apps out of some of these things, like video like off your phone, but I would start you on a game called Ticket to Ride.

So what it is good it's a it's a great title. Love that song. UM. It's about trains and you you draw destinations that you have, but you don't reveal which destinations you have, UM. And then you have a certain number of trains and each turn you can play a certain number of trains or you know, depending on what you have, and you have to have the certain cards with the right colors to get the right track allocations.

And but nobody knows where the other guy's going. I love this right, And what it is is that it's a culture of um. Kind of this Eastern European game designers. So they're they're from Poland, they're from uh, like the Netherlands. They're also from like Norwegian. Some of them. These game designers are Swedish and you they have this unbelievable um conservancy of rules in order to create a game that never repeats. And they've gotten better and better and better

and better at it. So I'll start you on ticket to Ride and you just you just buy it, okay, and and one night at your house you pull it out. You can play it between two sounds like right up my kid's alley and play between two people, or it can get bigger you know, you'll expand out to a certain number of people. But um, it's kind of like the gateway drug to what the new board game world is. Okay, yeah, because I still like board games, I don't want to necessarily.

I mean, I can only do a couple of online games, like on my phone, but I don't really you know, I get I get bored with them online. I'd like to sit in a room and sit across froom somebody and get very competitive. And you're going to love this. Okay, good, And then when you're done with that, reach out to me. I'll help you on step too. Okay, good, all right, I will. So now I'm supposed to trade you something. So now you turn me onto something that you think

I would like. Okay, I would like to trade you Antarctica, the entire continent. Yes, but yes. Last year we went to Antarctica with a bunch of friends and we went on a boat called an ice breaker. And what that is is a boat that actually can cruise through ice. Because when you get way way way way down into Antarctica,

you are surrounded by ice. And one of the things that we did was we slept in the ice because you can't put an anchor down anywhere, so your boat has to constantly be moving or you have to be, um, what's the word jammed into the ice. So imagine that you have a piece of ice and it's miles and miles and miles and miles long, and it looks like snow, but it's really ice, and maybe it's I don't know, a foot thick, so maybe a foot or more in underwater.

And you're on this boat and you're like, all right, well, we're gonna get ready to go to bed now. And they take the boat and they just jam it into the ice. They yeah, kind of, and then what happens is the ice around it us sort of hugs the boat and keeps it in place. So one night we were sleeping and about one or two in the morning, and of course down there it doesn't get dark, so you have maybe two or three hours of nighttime and

that's it. It's like the rest of the time. But we're sleeping and all of a sudden we hear this horrible, horrific crashing noise and I was like, oh my god, we have hit an iceberg. But no, it was just the boat repositioning itself into the ice. So that we wouldn't float away. But one of the things that you I thought, like going into Antarctica and like, you know, what, what are we going to do on this boat for two weeks. We're gonna go crazy. You know it's gonna

be freezing cold. What are we gonna do? Honestly, the time went by so quickly. We didn't have enough free time because there was constantly whale watching, going out on dinghy is, following whales, kayaking, following whales, hiking and looking at penguin colonies, or just hiking and and looking at icebergs and um watching icebergs calve, which means the part of the iceberg falls off into the water. We saw one iceberg that's so huge it's called B fIF K

that it is tracked by NASA. It's seventeen miles long, four miles wide, and four or five feet tall. It's like it's like Manhattan floating around down there. So I would say Antarctica way more interesting than I ever thought it was going to be. And I got to paint down there, and we did sketch club, Oh my god, we did. And you had to reserve all the white, yes, exactly. That was hard to do when you're painting snow. Snow is hard to do that a lot of white. Okay,

I only have one question about him. Okay, did you like panic pack? No. We had a very specific packing list, and I was very proud of my packing because you're basically wearing things like ski clothes all day long and then at night you're in sweats. It was like super easy. Yeah, okay, that would be my only anxiety. Yeah, like very easy. I would overpack just out of anxiety. Like no, I'm gonna phrase no, no, no, Okay, that's awesome. We need

to thank you for being here. Thank you. Podcast loves You, good Bye. Chapter three me geeking out on music, the set list, the mix tape, the sequence, Why it matters where your favorite song lives, Between the shrinking aisles that used to carry music in your favorite store to the streaming apps that flood your phone. I can see how some people might think that albums are dead and the music is in trouble. I, however, would like to propose that music is alive and healthy, but that for now

we are in the age of the playlist. If you squint your eyes the right way, a playlist is actually a mixtape, and if you have a mix tape of your favorite band, it's actually what you hope the perfect set list would be if you ever got to see them live. And if you trust your favorite band, really trust them, then the list of their new music is the running order of their current album. In each case, I believe that one song supports the one after it. It could be story or rhythm or key or even

shock that connects one song to the next. But there's no class that you can take as an artist. To get this right. You kind of have to go the long way. The schooling probably looks like this. You make mix tapes for every girlfriend through middle school or high school, and then one day you join a band, and then you keep changing the set list through hundreds or even thousands of shows, and eventually the PhD level of this

skill happens when you make records. You pick the best songs you can and you try to put them in the best order. Today, I'm gonna tell you what I know about song order from a mix tape to a set list to an album, and show you how it applies to the new Sugarland album and the tour we're going on this summer. The mix tape. These I would make in middle school in high school to try to tell girlfriends how I was feeling about him. I happen to really say how I was feeling out loud, you know.

I try to pick one funny song, when sexy song, maybe a serious song, but definitely one as a test to see if she even liked good music. And in my mind it was a way to see if we were compared hatible. I always seem to have an excess song for the sexy, or yaz song for the cool, or maybe even a Charlie Sexton song to see if she liked him or not. But the first song in the last ones were the big ones. I would start a lot of times with this in excess song. I

was standing, what's never? And then I would close with this you Tube song, And after a couple of days I would ask her what her favorite song was, like the answer was going to indicate whether we were compatible or gonna make it. Mix tapes are the first real exposure to picking songs and putting them in an order that flows. Nowadays, you can do this by yourself on Spotify or Apple Music instead of two cassette tapes, and

then you can share them with friends. I mean, I'm not saying, but I'm saying, right now, there's somebody you like, maybe you should make him a playlist. The next level of the music list video game happens when you're in a band and picking the set list. You could come out of the gate with energy or ease the audience into the night. Play your hits early, save them for the end. The choice is yours. How you want the roller coaster to feel to the audience when they write it.

In Sugarland, Jennifer and I like to divide the set into three acts, the first being the welcome, the second being the wandering, and the third being the run to the finish. This summer, we're starting with the same first song that is the first song on our new album. The album and the song are both called Bigger, and the song sounds like this. Well, the fun part is that I stripped out some of the sounds and decided to make it sound even bigger as an intro like this,

and I'm excited just hearing that. I love the top of shows. You know. Next, we walk you through some of the songs you know by us Stuck like glue. All I want to do. I even try to move us from more progressive instruments and sounds into more acoustic and routs instruments within three or four songs. By the time we're in already gone. We are the band that you remember. This is exactly when we start messing with you.

Act two should contain the tension of any play. It's where things go wrong, where the hero gets lost, and in rock and roll terms, I would say it's where you start asking what happened to your favorite band? What are they doing? What is this song? This is where

you truly contemplate a bathroom break or another drink. This is where songs like Incredible Machine, Though as the middle part of the set starts to heighten, it will be capped off with the production moment, usually something that transforms us on stage as well as our audience. This year it's a song called Burden of Cage. Sounds like this. Quickly after we roll into Act three and begin to climb into joy waves and waves. Song after song, you try to move the energy up until you get to

the last song. If we plan an encore, it will usually be two songs long, one for message and then one for a goodbye, thank you it feels like maybe an epilogue. I know it sounds corny that we put this much care into it, but it feels like the responsible thing to do. These fans are the lifeblood of our work. This brings us to albums equence. This is like the graduate level. When you listen to a sugar Land record, you should listen for three things. Now, this

is just personal to me. One, how the first three songs feel. Then for the album break which is where you would turn the vinyl over. So that's the last song on side one, and the first song on side two that matters. Then for the last song on the album, these spots are where all of the magic happens. To me, I believe that the first three songs have to be unstoppable, and without that buy in, a new listener is just

kind of gonna move on. Then, the last song on side one says I Dare you to turn it over, and on this album it's a song called leaning on Back. The first song on side two is Babe, our song that features Taylor Swift, and the album ends with a song called Not the Only, which is coincidentally our first encore. So you see how this works. So now you know when our album comes out, go listen for the flow

of it, see how it makes you feel. And the next time you put on your favorite record or go see your favorite band, notice how much time they took to build the album or the show. And if you get the time, make a mixtape or make a playlist for someone you love, put it in the right order. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Geeking Out and we are all hard at work here on the next one. Are you obsessed with something amazing? I want to tell

us about it? Right to us at geeking Out with KB at gmail dot com and you might be a guest on an upcoming episode. Come find out more about me and this pie podcast at Christian Bush dot com, Christian with a K, follow me at Christian Bush on Twitter, Christian Bush on Instagram, Christian Bush on Facebook, and Christian M.

Bush on Snapchat. Thanks to Bobby Bones for the opportunity to build this podcast, Brandon Bush for the editing and the soundtrack, Tom Tapley for the audio wizardry, and Whitney Pastoring for being a great producer and making this whole thing possible. This is Christian Bush gigging out. Thank you for listening,