PATRICK OGLE: Like this is kind of like you don't -- It's, you know, you're telling a story and it doesn't. You don't know if it's a funny story until somebody laughs at it.

GUY CLARK: Yeah right. [LAUGHING] Yeah. I thought I was dead serious. [LAUGHING]

PATRICK OGLE: Well yeah. I am -- We know things. When it comes -- When you do that thing with Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt and Joe Ely, it seems like you're just pulling songs out of air.

GUY CLARK: Oh yeah.

PATRICK OGLE: Are you just pulling them out of air?

GUY CLARK: There's no set list.

PATRICK OGLE: Yeah.

GUY CLARK: You know, I would start whatever I felt like playing that night, and it just goes. I mean one night, for some reason, I sang a song about a dog and everybody had a song about a dog.

PATRICK OGLE: I was listening to it with the John Hiatt song, "My Dog and Me", which always I can't listen to that song because I had a dog, a blue tick hound, that got hit by a car, and that song always reminded me how it hurt, and so that song always chokes me up to this day.

GUY CLARK: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

PATRICK OGLE: But so I mean, how did that tour come about? Did you just do a show together and it worked and so you're doing it? Are you going to keep doing that?

GUY CLARK: You know, I don't know. It started 10 or 15 years ago and we were doing the thing through Country Music Hall of Fame/Marlboro Country Music whatever. Anyway, we got together for that to do this songwriter thing and played down 10 or 15 dates around. And then it kind of sat for a while, and I think it was Lyle had a charity thing that he wanted to do. He called our buddies and said, "Hey man, let's put this back together for the charity thing," and then Hiatt had one, and so we did it for that. And somebody at some point heard it and said, "Man, I can book that," and probably out of Lyle's camp I would assume. So anyway, we just started doing that, and two or three years, like once a year, I don't know what will happen next, you know. I mean it's hard work. Too old for that [EXPLETIVE]. [LAUGHING]

PATRICK OGLE: Well, the --

GUY CLARK: Oh, they like playing every night. I'll play every other night. [LAUGHING]

PATRICK OGLE: The Chicago Theater is a beautiful place to play. It's -- Now, here's something to check. I was at another show at Chicago Theater, and this is just kind out of the air. People hollering songs out of the audience, and a friend of mine I was with at the show said, "Does anybody ever pay attention to somebody hollering a song out of the audience?"

GUY CLARK: Sure.

PATRICK OGLE: I mean when you hear somebody yell a song and then you say, "Okay, I'll play that."

GUY CLARK: Oh I do. All the time.

PATRICK OGLE: Yeah. I just want to argue.

GUY CLARK: Sometimes I even encourage it. It just turns into a shoutfest, you know, and it's just kind of unpredictable and chaos, and I find that amusing.