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On his fourth album, late-blooming songwriting, and why he'd rather have a catch than take a walk
There's a moment near the end of my conversation with David Duchovny where the whole episode quietly reorganizes itself around one image: two gloves, a ball, and a father and son who hadn't had a catch in almost forty years. Reminds me of the story of my dear friend and former boss Mark Chernoff.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start where we started — with the radio.
The Kid Waiting by the Radio
David Duchovny has played an FBI agent who taught a generation to want to believe. He's been Hank Moody. He's a New York Times bestselling author of fiction and poetry. And now, on his fourth studio album, *Prince of Pieces*, he's still — by his own account — a guy who never took a music lesson and can't reliably repeat a riff he just played.
That contradiction is basically the whole conversation.
Duchovny grew up in New York, and like a lot of us of a certain vintage, his relationship to music started with scarcity. No streaming, no infinite catalog — just a radio and a wait. He talked about a program on WPLJ called "the Newies," where listeners got to hear singles before release and vote on which ones would be hits. He remembered being certain that Edgar Winter Group's instrumental single "Frankenstein" — a song with *no lyrics* — was going to go all the way to number one. It did. He remembers listening to the great DJ and friend Dennis Elsas on WNEW FM.
He'd save up to buy one record every few months. He'd haunt Woolworth's for stacks of 45s because, in his young mind, an album felt like a bad trade — he just wanted the hits. His brother, four years older, pointed him toward the Allman Brothers and the Stones. His dad listened to jazz alone. And underneath all of it was this idea that music arrived as a kind of lightning strike — something you couldn't summon, only wait for.
If you grew up in that same era of appointment radio — which, full disclosure, I did too — this part of the conversation felt less like an interview and more like swapping stories with an old friend from the business.
Songwriting in Your 50s
Here's the part of Duchovny's story that I think deserves way more attention than it gets: he didn't write his first song until he was in his early 50s.
Not "picked up guitar again." Not "always dabbled." He had never written a song in his life, and then he taught himself guitar, started looking up simplified chord charts online, and had a genuinely destabilizing realization — most of the songs he loved were built on the same handful of chord progressions. It wasn't a scam, he said. It was something closer to a revelation: this is folk music. It belongs to everybody. You don't need to be a virtuoso to leave your fingerprint on it.
That's when the melodies started arriving — which he found strange, because he'd never really "heard" them before. The words came easier at first, he said, because by that point in his life he had decades of things he wanted to say already stored up. It's gotten harder since, not easier — now every new song starts with the much more difficult question of what he actually wants to write about.
He's now four albums into a body of work made with the same collaborators — Colin Lee, Pat McCusker, Mitchell Stewart — guys twenty-five years his junior who came up on completely different music than he did. Early on, he'd bring in fully finished songs. Now he shows up with a fragment — a chord progression, a riff, half a lyric — and they build it out together. He described the real alchemy of songwriting as happening in the *arrangement*, not the writing — the decision of how a song gets produced is, in his words, where it actually comes alive.
The Story Behind "Catherine's Wheel"
The most affecting part of the conversation, for me, was when Duchovny explained where "Catherine's Wheel" came from.
It's a song for his son, written after a visit where his son — college-aged, working through the ordinary turbulence of that stage of life — was struggling, and Duchovny didn't like watching him be in pain. He had this image in his head of a "Catherine Wheel," which he half-remembered as some kind of instrument of torture, and which also happens to be the name of a shoegaze band from the '90s. He started thinking about wheels, regeneration, starting over, cycles — and wrote the song entirely from that half-memory, without ever looking up what a Catherine Wheel actually was.
He looked it up afterward. It's worse than he imagined — not a crucifixion-style device, but a wheel used to brutalize people directly. He told the story almost sheepishly, like he'd stumbled into something heavier than he intended. But that's kind of the point he was making about lyrics versus poetry a few minutes earlier: a lyric doesn't have to hold up as literature on the page. It has to hold up *with the music behind it*. He talked about an earlier song for his son, "Born to Last," and how flat the words look in isolation — and how something happens to them, some kind of emotional current, the second music is underneath them.
On Perfection
We got into a conversation about AI and studio tools that let musicians achieve technical perfection they couldn't otherwise reach — pitch correction, virtual instrumentation, the works. Duchovny's take was refreshingly unresolved. He's not against the tools themselves — if you can play one instrument and the technology lets you "play" all of them, he thinks that's genuinely exciting. He pointed to Peter Frampton and the talk box as an example of technology extending what a musician could physically do, and he's fully in favor of that kind of augmentation.
But airtight, mistake-free production is a different thing, and it's not for him. He talked about acting — about the moment someone flubs a line and, instead of cutting, the take just keeps rolling, and something shifts in the room. Real life walks in. You may never use that exact moment in the final cut, but its presence changes the temperature of everything around it. He hears the same quality in live recordings — something riskier, something that only happens once, in exactly that way, and can't be gotten back. Steely Dan can go for perfection and he'll respect the craft of it. But his own ear is tuned toward the accident, the thing that only happens because it's happening live, right now, one time.
Late Bloomers
When I asked who inspired his sense of creative curiosity, Duchovny didn't point to a mentor or a fellow actor. He pointed to his father — a man with an ordinary nine-to-five job who always insisted he was a novelist, even though he hadn't published one. He wrote small books of political satire when Duchovny was a kid, but the actual novel didn't happen until he was 73 — two and a half years before he died.
Duchovny sees his own path as an echo of that. He published his first novel in his 50s. He put out his first album in his 50s. And he pushed back, gently, on the cultural assumption that creative people peak in their 20s and flame out — the "27 Club" model of genius. His question, framed almost as a challenge to that narrative: what if there's real life, and real inspiration, waiting on the other side of that assumed peak?
For anyone building something later than they "should have" — an album, a book, a business, a second act of any kind — it's a genuinely useful reframe.
What's Next
Duchovny's plate is full. *Soapbox* is a film he wrote and conceived specifically to act in — a rarity for him, since even *Reverse the Curse* (the film formerly known, in his memorable phrasing, as *Bucky Effing Dent*) ended up with him playing the father rather than the son role he originally imagined for himself. *The Exiles*, *Young Men*, and an untitled John Lee Hancock project round out the film slate. The paperback of his poetry collection *About Time* lands in September. And he's been kicking around the idea of turning *Soapbox* into a novel, or even a musical — which tracks, given how often his ideas seem to migrate between mediums until they find the one that fits.
The Dream Walk
We close every episode by asking guests who they'd want to take a walk with, living or dead.
Duchovny chose his father. Not for some grand unfinished business — for something much smaller and more specific. His father died before Duchovny had published a novel of his own, and he wanted the chance to tell him about it, to talk about what it meant to finally do the thing his dad had always claimed to be doing.
Then he told me about the last thing they actually did together. His father was staying with him in L.A., killing a couple of hours before a flight, and asked if Duchovny had a couple of gloves lying around. They hadn't had a catch — not "played catch," *had* a catch, he was very clear about the distinction — in something like twenty-five years, since Duchovny was a young teenager, before his parents' divorce reshaped how much time they spent together.
So instead of imagining a walk, he imagined a catch. Two gloves, a ball, somewhere to stand. It's a small, ordinary image, and it landed as one of the most quietly moving answers we've gotten on this show.
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*New episodes of Takin A Walk drop every week. Catch the full conversation with David Duchovny on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts — and while you're there, check out our companion shows, Music Saved Me and Comedy Saved Me with Lynn Hoffman, part of the iHeart Podcast Network.*