Brad / Rick

Brad’s Freshman Register mugshot.

Rick’s first recording session, Columbia Records, 1971.

Rick and Brad, summer 1980.

Rick, with his wife Val, at their daughter Sarah's wedding in Warwick, U.K., 2024.

Brad’s jacket photo on his newest book The Old Current (dedicated to Rick) from Alfred A. Knopf, 2025. (Photo: Michael Lionstar)

05-21-2025

When Brad Leithauser and Rick Lyon were classmates—and virtual strangers—at Harvard, neither had the slightest reason to imagine that for the next 50 years, they would share a bond like brothers.  How did that happen? Because of the fluke discovery, in 1978, of a heartbreaking Leithauser poem that Rick turned into an equally heartbreaking song.

Novelist and poet Brad Leithauser and writer and songwriter Rick Lyon hardly knew each other back at Harvard.

But a few years after graduation, Rick found a poem of Brad’s in Rick's girlfriend’s wallet, clipped from the pages of the Advocate, Harvard’s literary magazine. Rick instantly knew that he wanted to turn the poem into a song, and after some dogged detective work, he learned that Brad was living in the U.K., and wrote him there to ask permission.

The result was “And If You’d Leave,” which both of them heard last spring for the first time since Rick recorded it in 1980. But the greater result was their 47-year friendship ("my brother from another mother," Rick says), all because of that serendipitous discovery in a girlfriend's wallet.

We’ll hear the poem and the song it became. But we’ll also listen in as Brad and Rick talk about writing poetry as a game of chess, carrying a high-school torch, missing your parents, retirement (sort of), and much more.

After listening to their song all these years later, Brad wrote to Rick, "It's so strange for me to hear my poem in this unfamiliar form. The guy who wrote those words is of course in some ways unfamiliar to me now, but so is the musical arrangement. All quite fascinating, and of course it opens up the tantalizing question of what other things we might have done together—all those many years ago."