Anthony Mason on His New Show, ‘Alchemy,’ Paul Simon and Neil Diamond

Anthony Mason has been on television for so long that he’s one of those faces that you know even if you don’t know why. He began at CBS News as a correspondent in the mid-1980s, serving as the organization’s Moscow bureau chief, traversing the globe multiple times, covering everything from the collapse of the Iron Curtain to the Iran-Iraq war to the 75th anniversary of D-Day, which earned him the first of seven Emmy Awards, and interviewing presidents from Nixon to Obama and covering several elections in real time.

Yet in recent years, he’s become known more as a culture and arts correspondent. His interviews with musicians ranging from Bruce Springsteen, Elton John and Aretha Franklin to Adele, Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney and Cher have become a familiar presence on weekend mornings; he’s also profiled actors and personalities like Jerry Seinfeld, Emily Blunt, Kate Winslet and Scarlett Johansson. Yet as rich as his career has been, the realities of broadcast television prevented him from airing his expansive conversations about artists’ careers and artistry as deeply as he wished.

That is all about to change with “Alchemy,” his new long-form interview show on YouTube, which will exist in tandem with his work at CBS, but enables him to go much deeper into the emotions, motivations, process and results of their art. Filmed in his living room, each episode is an intimate 45-minute conversation with a major artist: beginning with Hozier, followed by legendary singer-songwriter Paul Simon, indie trio Muna, and Chic co-founder and David Bowie/Madonna/Diana Ross producer Nile Rodgers.

The series launched today with Hozier — watch it here — and new ones will be posted on Wednesdays at 6 a.m. ET on his YouTube channel. Variety caught up with him last week to talk about his remarkable history and what to expect from his new show.

Before we talk about the show, how does it work with CBS? Are you still with the network?

Yes, I’m still a staff member there. I have a carve-out in my contract that allows me to do things on the outside, although they have right of first refusal. I pitched them this idea for the show and they basically said they couldn’t do it, so I went ahead and did it on the outside. I view it as a complimentary thing to what I do for CBS.

I’ve been doing long-form interviews for “CBS Sunday Morning” for a long time, but [only relatively brief segments get] on the air. I was writing a book proposal a year ago and I looked at an interview I did with Adele back in 2008 — she was 20 years old, just starting out. We had two and a half days with her, and because nobody here knew who she was at the time, most of the two hours of interview footage has never seen the light of day. We put a seven-minute piece on the air that probably had four minutes of that interview, and that’s the case with so many others, because [broadcast TV] was the only platform at the time.

Obviously, there’s a lot going on at CBS right now, and I don’t think they have the time to worry about what I’m up to. But at some point, we may talk about how we integrate. In the last year or so, we’ve started posting some of my extended CBS interviews on YouTube — like when I interviewed R.E.M. when they were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame two years ago, it did really well. And that was actually part of what convinced me to do this and go into detail about the creative process. I love those conversations and I wanted a regular home for them. And that’s what I’ve tried to create with this: a place that celebrates artists, be they musicians, writers, film directors, painters, whatever. We’re starting out primarily with musicians, because that’s where my deepest connections are.

Why are you filming it in your apartment?

For two reasons. One, I wanted it to feel very personal. I didn’t want to shoot it in a conference room or some studio — we’re talking about creativity, so I want to be in a room that reflects it. So it’s a red room with a yellow chair and gold record on the wall and Nile Rodgers’ guitar that I bought from him is sitting between me and the guest. And it’s also a very personal space to me. My mother was an interior designer and my stepfather was a painter, so I grew up in these incredible rooms that just had so much visual energy in them, a creative energy that you can feel.

I still remember, the second music piece I did for “Sunday Morning” was with Neil Diamond, and we went back to [legendary Greenwich Village folk-music venue] the Bitter End with him. Neil is a relatively guarded person, but he walked into the Bitter End, and it was like all of that guardedness fell away: He was 25 years old again, because it was the first place he’d played. He looked at me and said, “Do you mind if I go up on the stage?”

He got up on the stage and his eyes started scanning the room, then he pointed at the far corner and he said, “I think it was there.” He walked all the way back into the corner of the room and through a door, and I followed him into a stairwell. He said, “It was here — it was here that I received the first paycheck as a musician that I ever received: fifty dollars.”

It was a completely real moment, and I was just like, “This is what I want to do.” Neil Diamond the star was gone; Neil Diamond the 25-year-old was back, in that moment. One of the first lessons I learned in talking to artists was if you can get them away from the fame and take them back to their youth, all that stuff falls away. If you can take them out of themselves and take them back to a period when they had all kinds of insecurities, you get a different person. We hadn’t picked the Bitter End for that reason, but I was stunned at how well it worked. He was like a different person in there.

What are some highlights from the interviews you’ve done so far for “Alchemy”? What was Paul Simon’s like?

Well, I’ve interviewed Paul a bunch in recent years. He’s been recording since the ’50s, and what I admire about Paul is how productive he still is and how good his music still is. If Paul puts a guitar on his knee and plays the opening chords to “American Tune” or “The Boxer” or “Sounds of Silence,” your brain goes insane because there’s so much resonance in that music. I was asking him about “Sounds of Silence,” which he wrote when he was 22: “How did that come out of a 22-year-old’s mind? How did that happen?” And he just said, “It was a gift. It was so far ahead of where I was as a songwriter at that time. I can’t tell you what happened, but you just accept the gift.” He said it’s happened to him several times over the years, with “Graceland,” and maybe the other he mentioned was “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

And I really wanted Andrew — Hozier — to be the first guest, because I’ve interviewed him three times over the years and he’s an incredibly soulful, thoughtful guy without an ounce of pretense in him. He’s one of those guys who, the deeper you go, the better he gets. I had seen him at Madison Square Garden at the end of 2023, and his dad came out to play drums on “The Weight.” His father had a spinal injury when Andrew was a child and basically hadn’t been able to play drums for 30 years, so for him to come out was incredible.

So I asked him a lot about that, and he started to tear up because it just was such a big deal — first for him to play the Garden, but more for his father to come onstage for the first time in 30 years at MSG. And I was like, whose idea was that? He said, “It was actually mine, and I was terrified, because if it went wrong, it would be my fault.”

What made you want to transition from being a hard news reporter, which you won Emmys for, to working in the arts?

The first specifically music piece I did was Springsteen in 2005, on the “Devils and Dust” tour. And that had literally happened because one of our cameramen told me he was shooting a story on [Springsteen’s wife, singer] Patty Scialfa, and I loved her debut album and would have loved to do that story. So I told one of the guys at “Sunday Morning” that if anything like that happens again, I’d be interested. And he said, “We’re trying to get Bruce too — you want to do that?” Hell yes! But for a long time, it was a side gig — I was the business correspondent then, but I was really determined to show people that I had a different side to me. For a long time I did both, and it wasn’t until I came off of hosting the morning show that I finally was like, “I’m doing these now, nothing else.” And my wife said to me a year or two years ago, “You thought journalists were your people, but it’s actually artists.” I still love journalists, and I still obviously think of myself as one, but it took me 50 years to realize that!

Do you get the same thrill now that you got in your earlier career when you were the Moscow correspondent and talking to presidents, or is it just a different kind of adrenaline?

It’s the same but different. I mean, I’ve been fascinated with television since I was a kid, so that never gets old. But what I learned to really appreciate, once I figured out interviewing, is the flow and arc of a conversation. I love creating a river in a conversation that you kind of meander down, but underneath it, there’s absolutely a tide. You’re actually pulling somebody along.

I’m looking to create an environment where you feel something, like you’ve seen a part of the person in some way. That can be revealed in humor, in sadness, in a lot of different ways. And that’s what I’m trying to do here — I want this to be a very personal show.