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File: This is BEATRIFUL Sessions.

Host: Episode twelve. Ten songs, thirty years, one woman. The album is called Blood, Concrete and Steel, and the artist is Trudi Reppi, the Tip Jar Queen. She isn't with us tonight. Her producer is. Chris Johns, welcome.

Chris: Thank you. Trudi couldn't make it today. She's focusing on her sobriety, and that comes before any microphone, including this one. So you get me. I produced this album, and I'm going to walk you through it the way she'd want it walked through: honestly, and without pity.

Host: Let's start with how you two met, because it's in the film treatment and it's in the second album.

Chris: I was sitting in a private club on Fifty-seventh Street complaining about computers. Complaining that the world was losing its soul to machines. And this woman I knew from the street, the one who sold copper-wire bracelets from a milk crate and sang on Forty-fifth, pulled three marble composition notebooks out of a plastic bag. Water damaged, held together with electrical tape and coffee stains. Ten years of writing. And she said, you've got all these machines and you don't know what to do with them. Give me my voice back. That was the spark. Everything I've built since, the studio, the films, the whole AI thing I used to despise, started because she called my bluff.

Host: So this is a SizzleC story as much as hers.

Chris: A lot of it is. My story goes through hers. I was the guy with the machines and no reason to use them; she was the reason. Some of what's on this album she's not ready to have a public conversation about. She says it in the songs instead, which is the only place she's ever said it. I'm not going to add anything the songs don't say. I'll tell you what's true, what's a date on a wall, and what to listen for.

Host: Where does the album start?

Chris: Where she starts. Sodus Point, on Lake Ontario, class of ninety-four. A seventeen-year-old with a baby, a duffel bag, and a highway.

1 · Sodus Point (Class of '94)

Host: Track one. What should we listen for?

Chris: The area code. Three one five. She opens every chapter of her life with an area code, like a return address. This one is Wayne County, apple country, a screen door and a lake wind. Dominick is born when she's seventeen, and the tie-dye buses are leaving town. She goes with them.

Host: Sodus Point.

[song 01 — 01-sodus-point-class-of-94-take2.mp3]

Host: They called me Tinkerbell in those golden traveling days.

Chris: That's the name she still answers to. Tink. Not a stage name; a lot name. The chorus tells you the whole decision of her twenties: you can keep your apple trees. She traded a quiet life for a highway, and she doesn't apologise for it once on this album.

2 · Dead Lot Tapestry (Ten Years in a Van)

Host: Track two is the ten years in the van.

Chris: Shakedown Street. The Grateful Dead parking lots, ninety-five to two thousand five. Pliers, a spool of copper, turquoise stones: that was her bank account. Twenty-dollar bracelets. Buckeye Lake, Alpine Valley, the lawn at RFK. It's the happiest song on the album, and it's about being broke.

Host: Dead Lot Tapestry.

[song 02 — 02-dead-lot-tapestry-ten-years-in-a-van-take2.mp3]

Host: No rent, no masters, no clocks upon the wall.

Chris: And that's the thing to understand about her. Freedom isn't a slogan for Trudi; it's a decade she actually lived, sleeping in a rusted Dodge van, trading wire for soup. When the modern world told them their time was done, she went back Upstate and tried the other thing.

3 · The Rochester Transition (3.1 GPA)

Host: Track three. The other thing.

Chris: Rochester. Da Roc. Two thousand ten. Business administration textbooks next to baby bottles, a three point one grade average, and a second son, Eli Angel, born at Highland Hospital in March of twenty eleven. This is the version of her life that almost worked.

Host: The Rochester Transition.

[song 03 — 03-the-rochester-transition-3-1-gpa-take2.mp3]

Host: Clean and sober for a minute.

Chris: For a minute. She wrote that line herself. The pre-chorus tells you the demons never sleep, and the chorus tells you it was good, it was sweet, right before the needles and the city dragged her underground. She doesn't hide the fall. She dates it.

4 · Vestibule Cold (Bloody Brick Out)

Host: Track four moves to New York.

Chris: Three seventeen West Forty-fifth Street, Hell's Kitchen, one in the morning, winter. The spoken intro is a real text message, typed with frozen thumbs, battery at four percent. Bloody brick out is her phrase for that cold. This is the block where I met her.

Host: Vestibule Cold.

[song 04 — 04-vestibule-cold-bloody-brick-out-take1.mp3]

Host: Concrete jungle don't care about your Upstate roots.

Chris: No, it doesn't. But listen to the chorus: I'm holding the line, got promises to myself that I'm fighting to keep. Even at the bottom she wrote like somebody who intended to get up. That's the whole reason there's a second half to this album.

5 · Four Times Back (Rick's Song)

Host: Track five is the hardest one.

Chris: It is. Rick was her partner. She brought him back from an overdose four times: Smith Street in Brooklyn, a hospital, an alleyway, a room. Narcan, cold water, screaming his name while the neighbours beat the door. The one night she wasn't there, he didn't come back. I'm not going to say more than the song says. She wrote it as a letter to him.

Host: Four Times Back.

[song 05 — 05-four-times-back-rick-s-song-take2.mp3]

Host: I became your bodyguard, your angel in the dark.

Chris: That line is the job she gave herself for three years. And the chorus carries the guilt of the night she was off making a living instead. That guilt is in the next song too, turned into something else.

6 · March 6, 2023 (The Vow)

Host: Track six has a date for a title.

Chris: March sixth, twenty twenty-three. Same building on Forty-fifth. She woke up in a cold sweat with no money and no shoes, looked at the calendar, and poured the poison down the bathroom drain. That's her date in stone. It's the reason she isn't here tonight, and the reason there is a tonight.

Host: March sixth. The Vow.

[song 06 — 06-march-6-2023-the-vow-take1.mp3]

Host: Turned the grief into armor, turned the sorrow into gold.

Chris: This is for Dominick and Eli, and for every friend who didn't make it. She names them across the album. When she says put it on my record, put it on my tomb, she means this album. That's why it exists.

7 · Warrant at the ICU (Robbie's Plug)

Host: Track seven. June twenty twenty-four.

Chris: Three oh one Edgecombe Avenue, apartment two A. Robbie Staskiewicz. A stroke, a blood clot, a ventilator, and an NYPD patrolman on a plastic chair outside the room, because the city had a warrant waiting on a man in a coma. His sister said pull the plug. Trudi wrote down what she saw.

Host: Warrant at the ICU.

[song 07 — 07-warrant-at-the-icu-robbie-s-plug-take1.mp3]

Host: Handcuffs on a ghost.

Chris: That's the system as she met it. No funeral, no service. This one and the next two are the price of the life she'd left behind, and they come one after another the way they did.

8 · Connecticut Gates (Doing Time in the Cold)

Host: Track eight. The gavel.

Chris: State of Connecticut, late twenty twenty-four to May twenty twenty-five. Intake, a number on a wristband, a green uniform, count at five in the morning. What I want you to hear is that she did it sober. The vow held inside the wall. That's the story she isn't telling out loud yet, so I'll leave it there.

Host: Connecticut Gates.

[song 08 — 08-connecticut-gates-doing-time-in-the-cold-take2.mp3]

Host: You can lock my body down, but I'll never hit my knees.

Chris: She paid her debt in silence, her words. And then, a month before the gate opened, a phone call came through that no one should get in a cell.

9 · Markey's April (Grief Behind Bars)

Host: Track nine.

Chris: April twenty twenty-five. A smuggled call from her friend Andrea: Markey passed away. Markey was her childhood brother from the ninety-four days. Shonda, Rickey, Robbie, and now Markey; the pre-chorus is a roll call of the dead. And she couldn't walk outside to scream, because in there you don't show pain.

Host: Markey's April.

[song 09 — 09-markey-s-april-grief-behind-bars-take2.mp3]

Host: Can't light a candle for his soul.

Chris: She lights it here. That's what this album does for a lot of people who never get to say it. And then the gate opens.

10 · The Tip Jar Queen (Unbroken)

Host: Track ten. The title track.

Chris: May twenty twenty-five, the last night and the yard. Pennies, nickels and quarters in a glass, that's the tip jar; combat boots, copper wire, shattered glass, that's the crown. Every trial put a crown upon my face. This is the woman who walked out of Connecticut and, a few months later, pulled three notebooks out of a bag in front of me.

Host: Hail to the Queen. The Tip Jar Queen.

[song 10 — 10-the-tip-jar-queen-unbroken-take2.mp3]

Host: From Sodus Point to Midtown, from the prison to the street. Chris, where does it go from here?

Chris: Album two is the lighter side: the boys grown, the notebooks turned into songs, the spark on Fifty-seventh Street, and Rome, because there's Italian blood in her that she's going to go and find. The film treatment says a producer and a street musician made each other useful in the shadow of Hudson Yards. That's the true version. She's not here tonight because she's doing the work that makes all of it possible. Album one is at beatriful dot com slash at tinkerbell. Play it in order.

Host: Trudi Reppi, the Tip Jar Queen, by way of her producer Chris Johns. Blood, Concrete and Steel.

File: The album, the covers, and the videos as they finish, are at beatriful dot com. This has been BEATRIFUL Sessions.