Podcast appearances and mentions of Adam Schlesinger

"Sonic Ranch" Licking his wounds from the breakup of his band Big Car, the Texas-born singer/songwriter Miles Zuniga found himself out west--and when I say out west I mean about ten minutes from where we record this podcast. Miles got a job working at Chez Panisse and hanging out on Telegraph Avenue at Cody's Books and Amoeba Music. The Big Car experience hadn't been great, so Miles was plotting out his next moves while he worked in Alice Waters' restaurant and I'll let him tell you how that all played out, so let's just fast forward to when he moved back to Texas and joined forces with bassist/singer Tony Scalzo and drummer Joe Shuffield to form Fastball. The trio's debut Make Your Mama Proud evinced their penchant for punchy pop genius but it was their sophomore record All The Pain That Money Can Buy that put them on the map. The album's first single "The Way" was pretty much a pop sensation, hitting the number one slot of charts for seven weeks. The next two singles "Out Of My Head" and "Fire Escape" helped fuel the album's Platinum status and Zuniga, a long way now from his Chez Panisse days, found his band with two Grammy nominations. Over the course of their career, Fastball have collaborated with Billy Preston, Steve Berlin, Adam Schlesinger and Charlie Sexton. From Keep Your Wig On to The Help Machine to their latest album Sonic Ranch, their discography is an endless supply of pop riches. Miles is a great guy and this is a very cool chat so let's meet himm www.fastballtheband.com (http://www.fastballtheband.com) www.bombshellradio.com (http://www.bombshellradio.com) www.stereoembersmagazine.com (http://www.stereoembersmagazine.com) www.alexgreenbooks.com (http://www.alexgreenbooks.com) Stereo Embers The Podcast BLUESKY + IG: @emberspodcast EMAIL: editor@stereoembersmagazine.com

Rachel talks about why people love or hate musicals, Crazy Ex- Girlfriend and how it would never be made today and how unlikely it was to get made back then.  She also talks about growing up in Manhattan Beach, Theater School in NY, not having billionaire friends, enjoying the now, writing her one woman show to get through the death of Adam Schlessenger and the birth of her daughter, how being married to a funny person can help, Hamilton, The Tony Awards, the amazing last year of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the magic of musical, theater, and having a stand-up comic/Hughes Aircraft Engineer grandpa. Bio:  RACHEL BLOOM is perhaps best known from the CW musical dramedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which she co-created, executive produced, and starred in as ‘Rebecca Bunch.' For her acting work on the show, she was awarded a Golden Globe, Critics' Choice and TCA Award; for her songwriting work, she won an Emmy Award for Original Music and Lyrics along with her songwriting partners Adam Schlesinger and Jack Dolgen. Most recently, Bloom debuted her Drama Desk nominated, sold-out, four-week off Broadway one-woman musical comedy Death, Let Me Do My Show which she originally toured around London and the US. It was then released on Netflix as a comedy special Death, Let Me Do My Special and nominated for a Critic's Choice Award. She also co-starred in the Hulu comedy series Reboot and the second season of the Max series, Julia. Her past stage work includes selling out Radio City Music Hall and the London Palladium performing Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: LIVE. She also starred in her own solo tour, What Am I Going To Do With My Life Now? in 2019, which included a week-long residency at Just For Laughs. In addition, she appeared in a one-night only production of Crazy For You at Lincoln Center directed by Susan Stroman. In addition to her film and television work, in 2020, she published her book “I Want To Be Where The Normal People Are,” a collection of personal essays and poems on the subjects of insecurity, fame, anxiety, and much more.

Randee Dawn. Take a walk with me down Fascination Street, as I get to know Randee dawn. Randee is a journalist and author. In this episode we get to know Randee from her early days in Bensonhurst Brookly, to her NPR day, and even her beginnings as a music journalist. Randee shares stories about working with The Trashcan Sinatras, and Adam Schlesinger. She tells us about how her music fan attitude led to her working with the band Ivy, which turned into some really fascinating online blog projects. Then we discuss how she came to write for Alternative Press magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, and Soap Opera Digest, basically at the same time. In her soap opera journalism career, she covered: One Life To Live, Another World, and maybe just a bit on Passions!. Naturally I ask her about her interviewing Vincent D'Onofrio about the Forest Witaker TV show The Godfather of Harlem. Even though Randee made a bit of a name for herself writing Law & Order speculative fiction, that didn't come up in her interview with Vincent. Finally, we dive into Randee's books! Besides having developed an audience in the speculative fiction area, Randee Dawn has written a bunch of books. Her fun and dynamic storytelling has gotten her multiple novels published in a relatively short period of time. 'Tune In Tomorrow', 'Don't Touch That Dial', 'Leave No Trace', and 'The Only Song Worth Singing' have catapulted Randee into a new level of popularity. These novels have become so popular that the publishers are dying for more! Check out all of her work at RandeeDawn.com and find her on all the socials at Randee Dawn. Randee continues to write for Today.com, Variety, The Envelope, and The L.A. Times.

Fáilte ar ais chuig eagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo ar an 1ú lá de mí Aibreán, liomsa Lauren Ní Loingsigh. I 1981 scuab Uachtarán Regan a chuid fhiacla agus shínigh sé bille reachtach ina leaba san ospidéal. Nuair a bhí sé ann dúirt na dochtúirí go raibh téarnamh iontach aige. I 2005 tháinig an nuacht amach go raibh botún teicniúil sa mbanc agus bhí tionchar ar níos mó ná 60,000 duine. I 1998 bhí an tAonach Urmhumhan an baile is móréilimh chun cónaí ann de réir staitisticí. Bhí an daonra ag ardú go tapúla gach bliain. I 2002 tháinig an nuacht amach go mbeadh 50 post nua chun teacht chuig an chontae I mBuiríos Ó Luigheach. Dúirt siad go mbeadh 2.5 milliúin euro ag teacht isteach chun níos mó ná 500 post nua a dhéanamh timpeall an tír. Sin Duran Duran le Is There Something I Should Know – an t-amhrán is mó ar an lá seo i 1983. Ag lean ar aghaidh le nuacht cheoil ar an lá seo I 1966 tháinig David Bowie amach lena chéad singil Do Anything You Say. Bhí sé a chéad amhrán a tháinig sé amach leis faoi a ainm stáitse. I 2020 fuair amhránaí Adam Schlesinger bás ag aois 52 de bharr Covid. Tá sé cáiliúil de bharr gur bhunaíodh sé Fountains Of Wayne agus tháinig siad amach le cúig albam le chéile. Agus ar deireadh breithlá daoine cáiliúla ar an lá seo rugadh amhránaí Susan Boyle san Albain I 1961 agus rugadh aisteoir Asa Butterfield I Londain ar an lá seo I 1997 agus seo chuid de na rudaí a rinne sé. Beidh mé ar ais libh amárach le heagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo. Welcome back to another edition of Ar An Lá Seo on the 1st of April, with me Lauren Ní Loingsigh In 1981 President reagan brushed his teeth and signed a legislative bill in his hospital bed as he made what his doctors called a remarkable recovery. In 2005 About 60,000 bank of ireland customers fell victimed to a technical error this weeek, the bank admitted. In 2002- A welcome announcement of FIFTY new jobs were to be created at Tipperary Natural Mineral Water in Borrisoleigh. The € 2.5 million program will expand the company to employ over 500 people. In 1998 NENAGH was the most popular town in North Tipperary in which to live, according to statistics. Nenagh's population has been rising for almost the past half-century. That was Duran Duran with is there something i should know – the biggest song on this day in 1983. Onto music news on this day in 1966, David Bowie released his maiden solo single, “Do Anything You Say,” on the Pye label. Produced by Tony Hatch, it was the London artist's first recording under his new stage name. In 2020, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Adam Schlesinger died at the age of 52 from COVID-19. Schlesinger was best known as the co-founder of the power-pop band Fountains Of Wayne, with whom he released five albums. And finally celebrity birthdays on this day – susan boyle was born in scotland in 1961 and actor asa butterfield was born in london on this day in 1997 and this is some of the stuff he done. I'll be back with you tomorrow with another edition of Ar An Lá Seo.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Fastball over Zoom video!Formed in 1994 in Austin, Texas, Fastball combined a fondness for melodic, Beatles-inspired pop with the alternative aesthetic of late-'90s mainstream rock. Guitarist/vocalist Miles Zuniga, bassist/vocalist Tony Scalzo, and drummer Joey Shuffield — all veterans of Austin's underground rock scene — originally banded together under the name Magneto U.S.A. After signing with Hollywood Records, the musicians changed their name to Fastball and released their debut album, Make Your Mama Proud, in 1996. The album demonstrated the band's synthesis of modern flavor and bygone pop hooks, a combination that would later launch Fastball into the mainstream.The follow-up effort, All the Pain Money Can Buy, appeared in early 1998, featuring a considerably tighter band and more pop flourishes. Although the bandmates were still working side jobs at the time of its release, lead-off single "The Way" proved to be a meteoric hit, topping the American rock charts for seven weeks while enjoying crossover success as a pop single. "Fire Escape" and the piano-fueled "Out of My Head" did similarly well, and All the Pain Money Can Buy went platinum within six months of its release, earning two Grammy nominations along the way. Fastball celebrated their success with a considerable amount of touring, including shows alongside Marcy Playground and Everclear.The Harsh Light of Day arrived in fall 2000, featuring piano work by Billy Preston and an increasingly arty sound, including the Top 40 hit "You're an Ocean.” Fastball eventually left the Hollywood roster in favor of a new deal with Rykodisc. A retrospective compilation, Painting the Corners: The Best of Fastball, marked the band's final release for Hollywood Records in 2002. Two years later, they resurfaced with Keep Your Wig On, having fully embraced their power pop roots with the help of co-producer Adam Schlesinger. The album strengthened Fastball's work ethic, with frontmen Zuniga and Scalzo writing together for the first time. That collaborative spirit helped fuel another album, Little White Lies, which appeared in 2009 to warm reviews.After several years of focusing on live work, Fastball returned to the studio in 2015, recording in their hometown of Austin. The project emerged in May 2017, a self-released album titled Step into Light, and the band supported it with an extensive tour of the United States and Canada. The following year, Fastball celebrated the 20th anniversary of All the Pain Money Can Buy with an expanded edition of the 1998 album; they accompanied the reissue with a hometown concert in Austin, Texas.In October 2019, Fastball returned with The Help Machine, an album produced by Steve Berlin of Los Lobos, and in Sept 2021 and on June 17, 2022 they released The Deep End.Fastball just released a brand new album called Sonic Ranch.We want to hear from you! Please email Hello@BringinitBackwards.comwww.BringinitBackwards.com#podcast #interview #bringinbackpod #Fastball #NewMusic #ZoomListen & Subscribe to BiBhttps://www.bringinitbackwards.com/followFollow our podcast on Instagram and Twitter!https://www.facebook.com/groups/bringinbackpodBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/bringin-it-backwards--4972373/support.

Fáilte ar ais chuig eagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo ar an 1ú lá de mí Aibreán, liomsa Lauren Ní Loingsigh. I 1981 scuab Uachtarán Regan a chuid fhiacla agus shínigh sé bille reachtach ina leaba san ospidéal. Nuair a bhí sé ann dúirt na dochtúirí go raibh téarnamh iontach aige. I 2005 tháinig an nuacht amach go raibh botún teicniúil sa mbanc agus bhí tionchar ar níos mó ná 60,000 duine. I 1967 tháinig teachtaireacht amach ó Pope Paul a bhí 20,000 focail chuig na gCaitliceach agus bhí sé ag iarradh ocras, bochtaineacht agus cíocras a stopadh sa domhain. I 2005 bhí imní ag na oibreoirí ag aerfort na Sionainne de bharr go raibh plean acu chun seachfhoinsiú an lónadóireacht don chéad uair I 60 bhliain. Sin Duran Duran le Is There Something I Should Know – an t-amhrán is mó ar an lá seo i 1983. Ag lean ar aghaidh le nuacht cheoil ar an lá seo I 1966 tháinig David Bowie amach lena chéad singil Do Anything You Say. Bhí sé a chéad amhrán a tháinig sé amach leis faoi a ainm stáitse. I 2020 fuair amhránaí Adam Schlesinger bás ag aois 52 de bharr Covid. Tá sé cáiliúil de bharr gur bhunaíodh sé Fountains Of Wayne agus tháinig siad amach le cúig albam le chéile. Agus ar deireadh breithlá daoine cáiliúla ar an lá seo rugadh amhránaí Susan Boyle san Albain I 1961 agus rugadh aisteoir Asa Butterfield I Londain ar an lá seo I 1997 agus seo chuid de na rudaí a rinne sé. Beidh mé ar ais libh amárach le heagrán nua de Ar An Lá Seo. Welcome back to another edition of Ar An Lá Seo on the 1st of April, with me Lauren Ní Loingsigh In 1981 President reagan brushed his teeth and signed a legislative bill in his hospital bed as he made what his doctors called a remarkable recovery. In 2005 About 60,000 bank of ireland customers fell victimed to a technical error this weeek, the bank admitted. In 1967 Pope Paul, in a moving 20,000 word messsage to catholics appealed to the world to bring an end to hunger,poverty,strife and greed. In 2005 There was mounting unease and worker unrest at shannon airport over the plans to outsource the catering operation for the first time in 60 years. That was Duran Duran with is there something i should know – the biggest song on this day in 1983. Onto music news on this day in 1966, David Bowie released his maiden solo single, “Do Anything You Say,” on the Pye label. Produced by Tony Hatch, it was the London artist's first recording under his new stage name. In 2020, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Adam Schlesinger died at the age of 52 from COVID-19. Schlesinger was best known as the co-founder of the power-pop band Fountains Of Wayne, with whom he released five albums. And finally celebrity birthdays on this day – susan boyle was born in scotland in 1961 and actor asa butterfield was born in london on this day in 1997 and this is some of the stuff he done. I'll be back with you tomorrow with another edition of Ar An Lá Seo.

Movie of the Year: 1996That Thing You Do (feat. contest winner Matthew Dewey!)Exploring That Thing You Do! – The Ultimate Feel-Good Rock and Roll MovieOn this episode of Movie of the Year, we dive deep into That Thing You Do!, the 1996 rock and roll movie that perfectly captures the meteoric rise of a one-hit-wonder. Directed by Tom Hanks, this film combines infectious energy, a toe-tapping original soundtrack, and an affectionate tribute to the music industry of the 1960s. Whether you're a fan of classic rock, catchy pop hits, or uplifting stories about bands making it big, this episode is a must-listen.That Thing You Do! – A Rock and Roll Movie with Unforgettable Original MusicFew films capture the spirit of an era as effortlessly as TTYD! does with its incredible original music. We break down how the title track, written by Adam Schlesinger, became a real-world hit, perfectly channeling the British Invasion-inspired sound that defined the 1960s. This episode examines the songwriting, standout performances, and how The Wonders (or the “Oneders”) created a fictional song that still resonates decades later.Why That Thing You Do! is the Ultimate Boomer Nostalgia TripBeyond being a fantastic rock and roll movie, TTYD!is also a prime example of what we call “boomer porn.” The film paints an idealized version of 1960s rock history, celebrating a time when bands could skyrocket to fame on sheer talent, drive, and a little bit of luck. We discuss how the movie plays into baby boomer nostalgia, romanticizing an era that felt innocent, exciting, and full of musical possibilities. Does it succeed in capturing the magic, or does it lean too heavily into nostalgia?How That Thing You Do! Still Rocks the Movie World TodayDecades later, TTYD! remains one of the most endearing rock and roll movies ever made. We discuss its lasting impact, from the performances of Tom Everett Scott, Liv Tyler, and Steve Zahn to the way it continues to resonate with new generations of movie lovers and music fans. Plus, we debate where it stands among the greatest music movies of all time.Tune In to the Movie of the Year Podcast for the Full That Thing You Do! BreakdownJoin us for this nostalgic, music-filled ride as we celebrate TTYD! and analyze what makes it a timeless rock and roll movie. If you love deep dives into classic films, this is one episode you won't want to miss. Listen now to Movie of the Year and relive the magic of TTYD!—you'll be clapping along in no time!

Nueva entrega de Música de Contrabando, semanario de actualidad musical ( 22/02/2025)Entrevistas:- La eurovisiva Ruth Lorenzo nos presenta su proyecto internacional de Rock: la Ruth más audaz, un renacer como oveja negra, "Blacksheep". El 6 de marzo lo estrenará en directo en GBC. From Murcia to the world!- Tarque nos comenta sus planes para el fin de gira de salas.- Rata es una nueva banda formada por Daniel Sabater (batería) y Félix Esteban (bajo y voz). Cada lanzamiento va acompañado de concierto gratuito e invitados. "Niñato" es como van a titular el primer EP, grabado en su madriguera. Noticias: Adiós a Rick Buckler, batería de The Jam, y Paquita la del Barrio. Morrissey anuncia concierto en Madrid. Sheryl Crown se desprende de su Tesla para protestar contra Elon Musk. Brian Setzer revela que sufre una enfermedad que le incapacita para tocar la guitarra. Heart of Gold, el disco tributo a Neil Young, reúne a Eddie Vedder y Fiona Apple, entre otros. Nueva edición del álbum The Autumn Stone, de Small Faces. Taylor Swift encabeza todas las listas de discos de 2024. Los Premios Odeón reconocen a Arde Bogotá por La Torre Picasso. Sexy Sadie anuncian concierto especial en el Sexy Sadie's Day. Carrots vuelven para 3 conciertos únicos. Liam Gallagher se burla del Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Noches del Botánico desvela un cartel de lujo. Warm up incorpora a M.I.A. como cabeza de cartel. Kalorama volverá a Madrid con su 2° edición. Fountains of Wayne se reúnen 5 años después de la muerte de Adam Schlesinger.Novedades discográficas:The Smile, Manic Street Preachers, Gary Louris, Mumford & Sons, Cupido, Ezra Furman, Andy Bell, Benefits, J Mascis, Darkside, Serpentwithfeet, Sueco Johansson, Militares Judías, Cleopatrick, Scowl, Suki Waterhouse, Perfume Genius, Maria Rodés feat Delafé, Rufus T Firefly, CVC, Sextile, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart.Agenda de conciertos: Bernard Butler, Derby Motoreta's Burrito Kackimba, Tarque Ruto Neón, Yarea, Noise Box, Helio, Azul Klein, Miguel Rivera, Beautify Junkyards, Samuraï, El Canijo de Jérez, Le Mur....

Este é só um trecho da aula completa da música "That Thing You Do" de Adam Schlesinger para o filme "The Wonders - O Sonho Mão Acabou", que você encontra aqui no podcast "Aprenda Inglês com Música". Use a lupa do podcast para encontrar a aula completa para ouvir ;) Quer dar aquele up no seu inglês com a Teacher Milena ?

Este é só um trecho da aula completa da música "That Thing You Do" de Adam Schlesinger para o filme "The Wonders - O Sonho Mão Acabou", que você encontra aqui no podcast "Aprenda Inglês com Música". Use a lupa do podcast para encontrar a aula completa para ouvir ;) Quer dar aquele up no seu inglês com a Teacher Milena ?

Este é só um trecho da aula completa da música "That Thing You Do" de Adam Schlesinger para o filme "The Wonders - O Sonho Mão Acabou", que você encontra aqui no podcast "Aprenda Inglês com Música". Use a lupa do podcast para encontrar a aula completa para ouvir ;) Quer dar aquele up no seu inglês com a Teacher Milena ?

On this week's show, we revisit albums that would've topped past year-end lists if they hadn't been blocked by Bruce Springsteen albums. We also revisit the pesky Bruce Springsteen records that blocked them. All this & much, much less! Debts No Honest Man Can Pay started in 2003 at WHFR-FM (Dearborn, MI), moved to WGWG-FM (Boiling Springs, NC) in 2006 & Plaza Midwood Community Radio (Charlotte, NC) in 2012, with a brief pit-stop at WLFM-FM (Appleton, WI) in 2004.

On this week's show, Slate senior editor Rebecca Onion sits in for Julia Turner. First, the hosts examine Dahomey, an audacious new documentary by acclaimed filmmaker Mati Diop (Atlantics.)‌ With a one hour, eight minute run time, Dahomey is an incredibly rich text in a very small package, and contemplates the repatriation of 26 royal treasures plundered from the Kingdom of Dahomey as they journey back to their homeland, which now lies within the Republic of Benin. Then, the three dive into Netflix's Death, Let Me Do My Special, a one-woman show performed and written by Rachel Bloom (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.)‌ The special is perceptive, macabre, and whimsical, as Bloom reflects on the pandemic years and the loss of her close friend and collaborator, Adam Schlesinger. Finally, what is Mark Zuckerberg wearing?‌ That is the question Brendon Holder asks in a recent Substack essay and that is bewildering the panel. Is the Meta CEO simply trying to beat the dweeb allegations through oversized t-shirts and a boyish haircut? Or is there something more sinister going on here? In the exclusive Slate Plus segment, the panel discusses the role TV plays in their lives, inspired by a recent mega-article published by GQ, “How to Watch TV.”  Email us at culturefest@slate.com.  Endorsements: Dana:‌ The AOC‌ and Tim Walz Twitch stream, specifically, the moment when Walz calls Tony Hinchcliffe a “jackwad” following a racist comment.  Rebecca:‌ The Voyage Home by Pat Parker. Stephen:‌ Todd Gitlin's 2001 essay, “Unsafe in any state.” Podcast production by Jared Downing. Production assistance by Kat Hong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's show, Slate senior editor Rebecca Onion sits in for Julia Turner. First, the hosts examine Dahomey, an audacious new documentary by acclaimed filmmaker Mati Diop (Atlantics.)‌ With a one hour, eight minute run time, Dahomey is an incredibly rich text in a very small package, and contemplates the repatriation of 26 royal treasures plundered from the Kingdom of Dahomey as they journey back to their homeland, which now lies within the Republic of Benin. Then, the three dive into Netflix's Death, Let Me Do My Special, a one-woman show performed and written by Rachel Bloom (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.)‌ The special is perceptive, macabre, and whimsical, as Bloom reflects on the pandemic years and the loss of her close friend and collaborator, Adam Schlesinger. Finally, what is Mark Zuckerberg wearing?‌ That is the question Brendon Holder asks in a recent Substack essay and that is bewildering the panel. Is the Meta CEO simply trying to beat the dweeb allegations through oversized t-shirts and a boyish haircut? Or is there something more sinister going on here? In the exclusive Slate Plus segment, the panel discusses the role TV plays in their lives, inspired by a recent mega-article published by GQ, “How to Watch TV.”  Email us at culturefest@slate.com.  Endorsements: Dana:‌ The AOC‌ and Tim Walz Twitch stream, specifically, the moment when Walz calls Tony Hinchcliffe a “jackwad” following a racist comment.  Rebecca:‌ The Voyage Home by Pat Parker. Stephen:‌ Todd Gitlin's 2001 essay, “Unsafe in any state.” Podcast production by Jared Downing. Production assistance by Kat Hong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To close out the "Musicians on Film" cycle, Julian, Madeline and Emilio dig into the work of ace songwriter Adam Schlesinger, focusing on catchy pop songs he penned for three films - 'That Thing You Do!' (1996), 'Josie and the Pussycats' (2001), and 'Music and Lyrics' (2007).  Emilio and Julian break out guitars to point out some of the little details from early 60s rock n'roll and beyond that made their way into "That Thing You Do!", the irrepressible hit single from the movie of the same name.  The trio gets into how 'Josie and the Pussycats', and by extension Schlesinger's contribution "Pretend to Be Nice", both sends up the early 2000s music pop landscape and predicts the female punk pop explosion that was around the corner.  And the group gets into what works, and what doesn't work as well, in the execution of "Way Back Into Love", the song at the center of 'Music and Lyrics'.  All the while, discussions about the movies themselves supplement a lively conversation about Schlesinger and his most enduring cinematic bangers.If you enjoy our podcast, please rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice.  This really helps us find new listeners and grow!Follow us on IG and TikTok: @sleeplesscinematicpodSend us an email at sleeplesscinematicpod@gmail.comOn Letterboxd? Follow Julian at julian_barthold and Madeline at patronessofcats  

Singer-songwriter Amy Rigby (solo, The Shams, The Last Roundup) has had a longstanding admiration for the power-pop band Fountains of Wayne, and she joins Al to chat about the band's self-titled debut album from 1996. Amy talks about how she got into Fountains of Wayne and what it is about their first album that makes it especially notable. She highlights some of her favorite songs from the album and discusses how well Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger integrated humor into their songwriting. Amy also delves into the making of her new album Hang In There With Me.If you haven't already, be sure to check out the Diary of Amy Rigby blog and podcast!Blog: https://amyrigby.substack.com/ Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/diary-of-amy-rigby/id15610945052Amy also mentioned the Looking for the Magic podcast she did with Elizabeth Nelson. You can find that here: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/looking-for-the-magic-elizabeth-nelson-amy-7RaT_Iy-DiS/Amy and Al are both planning to check out the Fountains of ‘Splain podcast…if you want to join them, here it is! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fountains-of-splain/id1547151768You can keep up with Amy on Instagram at @amymrigby.Al is on Bluesky at @almelchior.bsky.social. This show has accounts on Instagram and Threads at @youmealbum. Subscribe for free to You, Me and An Album: The Newsletter! https://youmealbum.substack.com/1:28 Amy joins the show1:58 Did Amy and Fountains of Wayne run in the same circles in New York in the ‘90s?7:16 Amy talks about the sports themes in Fountains of Wayne's songs9:07 Amy and Al discuss “Sick Day” and its thematic similarity to a song that Amy wrote15:51 Amy hears “Radiation Vibe” as a great example of a “happy sad song”17:52 Amy likes Fountains of Wayne's selfless approach20:54 Amy wants there to be a Fountains of Wayne documentary22:35 Amy talks about her two podcasts and her blog27:34 Amy explains why Fountains of Wayne was an affirming album for her32:27 There aren't many rock songwriters who successfully integrate humor into their songs41:00 Amy highlights a few of her favorite songs from Fountains of Wayne44:06 Amy thinks Fountains of Wayne set themselves apart from other ‘90s bands47:24 Amy notes how Fountains of Wayne's songwriting progressed after the debut album49:58 Al explains exactly how little he knew about Fountains of Wayne52:31 Amy talks about the process of making Hang In There With Me1:05:11 Amy thinks good sequencing is still worth the trouble1:07:43 Al noticed a similarity between Amy's songs and those of a previous guest1:09:04 Amy talks about her upcoming live datesOutro music is from “Dylan in Dubuque” by Amy Rigby.Support the Show.

Dr Kirsten Zemke looks into the work of Adam Schlesinger! Songs include. Fountains of Wayne "Stacy's Mom" Care Bears On Fire “Barbie Eat A Sandwich” The Wonders “That Thing You Do!”

Welcome back to another episode of The Video Store Podcast, the podcast that really knows how to rock!

He's just not that into you! Or maybe he is? Or maybe we all need to just snuggle up with a good mug of tea, put on some comfy pants and watch ourselves some romantic comedies. In this episode, join Lexi and Ben and maybe Nora Ephron to really get into the world of funny romance movies. (Please note that Nora Ephron is not actually IN this episode). Are you more of a "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" kinda person, or maybe a "The Notebook" person? Listen now and pick your romantic poison!Jess Says:- I was going to say Swedish berries but like is that a gummy??? idk- Rooked is mommy, thanks for the shout out - Ryan is so tickled- You missed When Harry Met Sally!!! I just think it's iconic and the diner scene is so good- Ryan and I's song is The Whole of the Moon by The Waterboys (idk why, it's a song that Ryan always liked and I didn't know it until we started dating and we both love it)Transcript:Keywords: gummies, candy, romantic comedies, romcom, chick flick, relationship, breakup, puppet, MuppetLexi 00:01 Just regular gummy bears. Ben 00:03 Oh, I guess that's all right. I'm partial to real fruit gummies. Lexi 00:09 I like a bear in a gummy.Ben 00:11 Yeah. Lexi 00:13 Or a coke bottle. I like a good cola bottle. Ben 00:13 Coke bottles are good. What's your ultimate gummy? I don't think we've ever talked about gummies.Lexi 00:19 Iced tea.Ben 00:19 There's an iced tea gummy?Lexi 00:19 There's an iced tea gummy by the makers of the... Haribo?Ben 00:27 Haribo, yeah. Lexi 00:29 They also make an iced tea gummy. Ben 00:30 I don't think I've ever seen that one, but I'm down with some Haribo. Lexi 00:32 I've only ever found it in the candy store in Banff.Ben 00:36 Wow, I like their mixed gummies. I'm a gummy stan.Lexi 00:41 Me too. I can say no to a lot of candy, but a gummy? I have a hard time passing up a gummy. Ben 00:48 It just feels right.Lexi 00:49 It does.Ben 00:49 Okay. Taking away any sort of extra-special types of gummies, what's like a normal gummy go-to for you?Lexi 00:58 Um...Ben 00:59 If you had to choose sort of the run-of-the-mill, you can find them at the drugstore, Shoppers Drug Mart. Lexi 01:04 Coke bottle. Any type of coke bottle. Ben 01:06 All right, all right.Lexi 01:06 A blue shark. I like a blue shark. Ben 01:07 Ooh. Lexi 01:07 I like a gummy bear.Ben 01:12 Mm, mm, mm.Lexi 01:12 And then, if I'm hard pressed, I'll do a gummy worm. Ben 01:12 Mm.Lexi 01:17And then, everything else, I can kind of say no to. What about you?Ben 01:20 I'm partial to sour gummies. Lexi 01:23 Mm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Ben 01:23 I do like them. So, a sour soother is pretty good. Dina-sour, if you will. Lexi 01:29 Yeah. Very good. My mom used to have those in bulk when she was a high-school principal, and I would just eat them off of her desk all the time. Yep. Ben 01:36 Yeah. I used to hang out in a hot tub with my older brother when we were finished high school, but hadn't moved on with life yet, and we'd sit in the hot tub out back, and just eat sour soothers till, like, 3 in the morning. Lexi 01:50 Well, you know, there's worse things. Ben 01:51 Yeah, right?Lexi 01:53 Do you have a favourite colour of gummy? Ben 01:55 Oh, no. I've never really worried about that. I do like those fried egg looking ones though from Haribo, as well. Lexi 02:00 Mm. Like the 10-cent candies, which are more like a dollar, like just the mix of things.Ben 02:05 Yeah, I like a mix, as well, like a little mix bag, but I like the sour packages. If we are talking about king of gummies, for me, it's a jube-jube.Lexi 02:14 Really? Ben 02:15 Or a Jujube. Yeah, I mean, I'll eat them fresh or not fresh, but they are definitely better when they're fresh. They haven't gone all hard and shit. Lexi 02:23 Yeah. I miss the pink package of gummy bears. That was the king of gummies--Ben 02:29 Oh, I don't know that package. No, I don't. Lexi 02:31 Do you remember that? Like, I remember being a child in going to see The Lion King in theatres and my mom was like, "You can get a snack," and I was like, "I want gummy bears," and it was in a pink package.Ben 02:45 Huh.Lexi 02:45 And the gummy bears—the bears themselves—spelled out the word "gummy". Ben 02:47 Wow, I do not recall those at all, but that's dope. Lexi 02:51 And they were my favourite. Oh, they were... I'll see if I can find pictures of them, but my god, it was my favourite. Ben 02:57 There's a period from 14 to 16 where I was convinced that I liked wine gums, but now, as a more cultured individual, I realize that those are kind of trash. Lexi 03:07 Yeah, they're not...Ben 03:07 Yeah. They're bottom-of-the-barrel gummies, if we're being honest.Lexi 03:11 Yep.Ben 03:11 You know, I can still appreciate a run-of-the-mill, like a frog or, you know, even a fuzzy peach.Lexi 03:17 Mm-hmm.Ben 03:17 They're a little too sweet for me. Lexi 03:20 You know, sometimes, I don't like a whole package of fuzzy peaches, but I'd like, like, two or three.Ben 03:25 Yeah, if they're mixed in. Yeah, if they're thrown in with, like, a little dime bag. Lexi 03:27 Yeah, if they're mixed in, perfect. Little dime bag.Ben 03:31 Little bag of candies.Lexi 03:34 Sounds nice.Ben 03:34 Apparently, when the previous generation was younger, those were one cent, and then when we were kids, they were like 5 cents, and now they're like a quarter a candy.Lexi03:42 Yeah, it's wild.Ben 03:42 It's inflation, motherfuckers. Nobody's earning anymore, but those gummy prices just keep risin'. [Lexi laughs] Lexi 03:48 Gotta pay the gummy toll... the gummy tax?Ben 03:51 Something like that. I've always wanted to make my own gummies at home, but it seems like a complicated process. Lexi 03:56 Oh, god, no. No, I don't wanna see what the sausage is made of. I just wanna eat the gummy.Ben 04:01 I mean, out of sausages to make, I feel like a gummy's a pretty benign sort of thing to see. [chuckles]Lexi 04:08 Well, it's gelatin, so it's like ground hoof.Ben 04:10 Yeah, yeah, you put-- a little hoof or... No, I guess it's just ground-up hoof, isn't it? [laughs]Lexi 04:14 It is. It's ground-up bone and hoof and--Ben 04:16 You know what? Would you prefer we didn't use the entirety of the horse?Lexi 04:19 No, you know... [both laugh] Is it...? Can you...? Is it pig or what type of hoof is it? [laughs]Ben 04:25 I straight up don't fucking know. This is a perfect opportunity for Jess to jump in and educate us.Lexi 04:34 What type of hoof is in gelatin?Ben 04:34 Yeah, what's the most prominent type of hoof in gelatin? If you know, please write in. That e-mail address again is everyone@dorkmatterspodcast.com. Lexi 04:44 I hope the answer is fish bones or something really weird.Ben 04:47 Yeah, it's fish bones.Lexi 04:47 Chicken beaks. The answer is chicken beaks. Like, "Ah, yes."Ben 04:50 You know what it is? If we're being honest, it's probably all these things – everything that you can't put in anything else, yeah. Lexi 04:54 Ah, it's a mishmash. All the hoofs and beaks.Ben 04:58 And some big anus for good measure, you know? [Lexi laughs] That's where you get the tart from. You need a little pucker? [both laugh] We're terrible. Lexi 05:10 We're terrible. [both laugh]Producer Jess 05:12 [magical chime] Really bad news. I did not want to look this up because I wanted to continue enjoying gummies, but then my curiosity got the better of me. Okay, so this is from snopes.com, fact-check gelatin source. I'm going to just read this verbatim. "Sometimes the most innocuous of foodstuffs contain constituents whose origins are less than appetizing. Such is the case with JELL-O, a dessert that has graced millions of dinner tables since its 1897 debut.Underneath JELL-O's jiggly wholesomeness lurks a secret many consumers are disconcerted to learn: JELL-O is made from gelatin, an animal product rendered from the hides and bones of animals, typically pork skins, pork, horses, cattle bones, and split cattle hides." So yeah, you were right, Ben and Lexi; it's all of the above. No fish bones. Sorry if gummies are ruined. They are for me. [magical chime]Ben 06:13 We had some other intro topics. Did you still want to do that or is this good enough? Lexi 06:17 Oh, yeah. No, this is good. Let's punch it. Ben 06:20 All right, let's do the theme song then. [Dork Matters theme music, Dance by YABRA plays]Voiceover 06:51 [echoing] Dork Matters.Ben 06:53 Welcome back to the podcast. This is Dork Matters, a dorky podcast for dorks, and I'm your Dad Dork host, Ben Rankel. And, with me every time we do the show, is your Edorkater, Lexi Hunt. Yeah. Irreplaceably. With us, irreplaceably, Lexi Hunt. Lex, what are we doing today? We're not talking about pig anuses anymore. Lexi 07:14 We're not talking about pig butts. I mean, maybe we are. I mean. Ben 07:16 Maybe. Lexi 07:19 [both chuckle] I mean, anything is possible. We're talking about romantic comedies. Ben 07:25 There's gotta be a pig butt or two in there.Lexi 07:28 You gotta kiss a couple of pig butts to find the right one. Is that right? Ben 07:31 Yeah, to find a good one. Well, won't you bring us here?Lexi 07:36 This was really popular on Instagram. A lot of people were chiming in. Ben 07:39 Yeah, romcoms are a thing. It's interesting to me because I feel like the romcom is kind of gone. Lexi 07:49 The romcom is gone.Ben 07:49 Like the good one, like the blockbuster, like the big-release romcom is gone.Lexi 07:53 Yeah.Ben 07:53 That was a thing of the '90s and it's gone now.Lexi 07:56 Yeah, it's a Hallmark...Ben 07:56 Like, they just can't make bank anymore, can they? Yeah, it's a Hallmark Channel exclusive.Lexi 08:01 Yeah.Ben 08:01 Speaking of, I've got a fun game for you to play a little bit later. Lexi 08:03 Oh, okay. I'm looking forward to that one. Ben 08:05 Surprise for you after the break. Lexi 08:06 Okay. Well, a romantic comedy is just what it sounds like. It is a comedic movie that is centred around the relationships, typically between a man and a woman, although we're starting to see more movies branch out into other types of relationships. And so, it's nice to see. Ben 08:21 Bros. Lexi 08:22 Yeah, but it's also romantic comedies can be associated with negative stereotypes, one might say – a "chick flick", perhaps?Ben 08:32 Mm.Lexi 08:32 I found a great article actually called The Problem with Chick Flicks and I thought it kind of sums it up quite nicely with this quote from Deborah Barker. In the book literally titled Chick Flicks, she says, “The chick flick has been defined variously as escapist entertainment for women, simply as films men do not like, as examinations of capable independent female characters and their empowerment, as emotional ‘tearjerkers,' as tales of female bonding, and as the antithesis to male-oriented action films”.Ben 09:05 Well, we got a lot going on there and I think the primary one is the outdated sort of gender norms.Lexi 09:13 Mm-hmm.Ben 09:13 But also, there's the malignment of female-centric media, you know, the same way that things that women like in very many different aspects of media are kind of talked down to, like, you know, boy bands, etc. "Well, it's not good music. It just appeals to girls," and it's, you know, been used, I think, to malign a lot of different culture that could be engaged with more sincerely by dismissing it because it's femme-centric.Lexi09:46 Mm-hmm. Well, and it's not unheard of... I think it was Chevy Chase who actually said, like, "Women aren't funny," and so romantic comedies--Ben 09:56 Old racist, misogynistic Chevy Chase.Lexi 09:59 Old Chevy.Ben 09:59 The guy too racist to stay on Community. Lexi 10:04 Just, there's so many issues with him and there are so many great examples from Saturday Night Live of funny women, but so, you know, romantic comedies aren't exactly touted for being great examples of writing or even comedic writing, or even of, like, great romantic writing. They're kind of like the stereotype is they're these trashy, kind of like fun films that a bunch of gals get around and drink a bottle of pink wine and cry and laugh and have a good time. Ben 10:35 We call it rosé. Lexi 10:37 Rosé. Like, part of me is like, "What the hell's wrong with that? If that's what you're doing with a group of pals..."Ben 10:41 Absolutely.Lexi 10:42 ...who cares? Do it.Ben 10:43 Again, and this is like it's okay for dudes to get together and watch UFC, but you know, femmes can't get together and watch a romcom that's somehow... Like, we're supposed to think less of that than a bunch of guys watching people hit each other. Lexi 10:54 If you like the movie, watch the movie. And some of the movies, we'll talk about in a little bit. One of them was actually suggested to me by a dude friend of mine because he was like, "This movie makes me laugh every single time. It's hilarious So..."Ben 11:07 Hmm. Is it Bridesmaids? Lexi 11:10 It is not, actually. The other thing that I was reading about too, in doing research for this here episode, was about the--Ben 11:18 Research? Not on Dork Matters. Lexi 11:22 Yeah. Dork, dork, dork. Nerds!Ben 11:23 We have show notes, folks. We actually do way more work on these than I think comes across when we record them. [both laugh]Lexi 11:32 "The guy with the... What's the name of that guy? [snaps fingers] The guy with the face." [laughs]Ben 11:35Oh, that's a personal failing. [chuckles]Lexi 11:38 But, I was reading about the Bechdel Test. Ben 11:41 Alison Bechtel, comics legend. Lexi 11:43 Mm-hmm. The Bechdel-Wallace test is a test that measures the representation of women in film and other fiction. It's a test that asks whether a work of fiction basically features at least two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man on screen or in the book, or whatever. Ben 12:01 Right. And it's been expanded since that original definition, but I don't know where we're at now to include some other criteria. But, yeah.Lexi 12:08 Yeah.Ben 12:08 Yeah, and again, the thing that some people forget about the Bechdel Test is that it is the lowest bar that you could step over.Lexi 12:16 Yes. [laughs]This is not meant to be like, "Hold your head up high and fly a flag." Like, this was the bare minimum. You had enough female representation in a film to have two people talk to each other, that are femme, that were not talking about the masc character in the film and, like, is a very low bar to clear [whispers] and a lot of media does not clear it.Lexi 12:41 Well, and especially romantic comedies because, so often, romantic comedies are typically centred around like the heteronormative man-woman, cis relationship, and so--Ben 12:51 Man-woman, man-man relationship.Lexi 12:55 Yeah, it's typically that triangle of--Ben 12:58 Yeah, M-F, M-M.Lexi 13:00 --man dates woman, woman has problem with man for some reason, starts dating other man. Original man wants to get her back with something very...Ben 13:07 Grandiose?Lexi 13:10 ...grandiose. Gets her back. There's usually some type of rain. Ben 13:13 Oh, yeah, you gotta have rain. Lexi 13:15 And then everything ends hunky dory. Ben 13:18 Yeah, happily ever after. There are a few that subvert that trope, and one of those is on my list...Lexi 13:26 Yep. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.Ben 13:30 ...of favs, which is what I call faves, which is short form for favourite.Lexi 13:33 That is true.Ben 13:35 Can you hear the "u" when we say favourite? Lexi 13:37 Fav-our-ite.Ben 13:38 [chuckles] I feel like we can. We're Canadian, so we say the "u". Fav-our-ite col-our.Lexi 13:44 Col-our. [laughs]Ben 13:47What else we got? Although I do get tripped up because I want to add one to major. Lexi 13:51 Mm, mm-hmm. Ben 13:52 Trips me up. Lexi 13:54 Can't do it.Ben 13:54 I can't just put a "u" in whatever I want, but I want to. That "u" is important to me. Where were we? Lexi 14:01 Uh, we've talked about what they are. Let's get into it. Let's talk about what's your favourite-- your top three. Ben 14:07 Our top three? Okay, let's go. Why don't you lead us off here? Lexi 14:11 Yeah. Okay, I'm going to start with--Ben 14:14 Give me your favourite. Tell me why it's your favourite, and then let's chat about it. Lexi 14:17 So, this is the one, I was going through a breakup. I was very, very, very sad, having a hard time. Ben 14:24 Do you want to give us more details on your personal life? Lexi 14:26 Nope. I was very sad.Ben 14:27 Who did you break up with? How long were you going?Lexi 14:30 Don't want to talk about it, but I was very, very sad and my friends, Jillian and Dylan—as I like to call them, Dillian because they're a couple—Ben 14:37 Or Jillan.Lexi 14:38 Jillian... Nope. Jillan?Ben 14:40 J--J--Jillon.Lexi 14:40 I like to call them Dillian.Ben 14:41 Dillon? Dillian is better.Lexi 14:45 They are huge fans of the romcom, and Dylan was actually like, "You have to watch Forgetting Sarah Marshall." It is so ridiculous and over the top, and this was right around the time Forgetting Sarah Marshall came out. That was, like, what? 2007, 2008, in and around there. Ben 15:03 Earlier than we'd like to admit. [Jason Segel sings Peter You Suck, from Forgetting Sarah Marshall]Lexi 15:05 Yes, but it was hilarious. Now, okay, in hindsight, yes, Russell Brand. Now, by today's standards, not a good dude. Also, Jonah Hill.Ben 15:14 There was a long while there, where we're like, "Hey, this dude's telling it like it is in a more progressive bent," and...Lexi 15:19 And now we're like, "Oof." But, at the time, so you have people-- it was kind of like that frat pack group of dudes.Ben 15:27 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.Lexi 15:28 So, you got Jonah Hill. Who else is there? Mila Kunis, Russell Brand... Oh, my god. I've completely.Ben 15:37 Star of the show. [song continues]Jason Segel 15:38 [sings] It's so self-loathing, go see a psychiatristI hate the psychiatristWell go see one anywayI don't like the psychiatristYou need to go see oneSee a psychiatristI'm not going.Lexi 15:48 Jason...Ben 15:50 You got this.Lexi 15:50 Segel.Ben 15:52 Yeah. I was gonna do a caw for you, like [caws]. Is that seagull or is that...? [laughs]Lexi 15:57 'Cause, in my head, I could see him, but I was like, "It's not Sudeikis. That's--Ben 16:00 No.Lexi 16:03 So basically, there's a breakup. He takes it hard. He has to get over Sarah Marshall. He goes to Hawaii, and hilarity ensues.Ben 16:12 Guess who's there?Lexi 16:12 Bill Hader's in it, and Sarah Marshall is there. They have this great time of, like, one-upping each other and being sad on the island. But, what I really liked about the movie was, after they leave Hawaii and things don't end well, he goes back and it shows him kind of pushing through his depression and still coping with it, still being sad, and still trying to work on himself, versus trying to get back to a relationship that, as the movie kind of goes on, you see he keeps having all these flashbacks of Sarah, and then they're so perfect at first, and then as the movie goes on, the flashbacks kind of show how the relationship actually wasn't that perfect. Ben 16:50 Rose-coloured glasses--Lexi 16:52 --start to come off. Ben 16:54 Yeah, yeah, the idealization or, you know, turning somebody into an idea as opposed to dealing with them as they actually were. Lexi 17:02 Yeah. And, seeing it from her perspective too, because she points out that he was actually quite depressed and she was trying to help him through it, but eventually had to save herself because he was not taking care of himself and she had to make this hard call. And so, then you start to empathize with her, that she's not just this bitch that she's been cheating on him. She's a person who also was really struggling. And then, it really wraps it up with, like, yeah, he kind of dates Mila Kunis to kind of get over her, but they both kind of separate and become buds in the end, and it just culminates in the funniest, cutest Muppet/puppet Dracula musical. [Jason Segel sings Dracula's Lament from Forgetting Sarah Marshall]Ben 17:43 You know we love-- we love puppets here.Lexi 17:44 And it's just so funny. We love puppets and so that--Ben 17:47 With the exception of part-time guest host, Stephanie Gerk, who is afeared of puppets.Lexi 17:52 --is not a fan of puppets. Jason Segel 18:05 [sings] And I've been living too hard to believeThat things are going to get easier nowI'm still trying to shake off the painFrom the lessons I've learnedAnd if I see Van Helsing, I swearTo the Lord I will slay him! (A-ha-ha-haa!)Take it from meI swear I will let it be so! (A-ha-ha-ha!)Blood will run down his faceWhen he is decapitated... (Aah!)His head on my mantle is howI will let this world knowLexi 18:31 But, I just love that, at the end, he wants to do this ridiculous musical and he does it. He finds a way to bring it together and I just love that movie. [song ends] There's one specific line, Ben, that I think about constantly and it's from Russell Brand's character is missing a flip flop and he's trying to find it and he's like...Russell Brand [18:45] [with Lexi quoting along sporadically] "Excuse me, missus. I lost a shoe-- like, this one. It's like this one's fellow. It's sort of the exact opposite. It's not like it's evil or something. Just, you know, a shoe like this, but for the other foot. Otherwise, I'd have two right...Lexi 19:07 And I think that is so funny. [laughs] Ben 19:12 I knew it was going to be that part. Lexi 19:13 He was funny in it.Ben 19:13 He was funny. It's too bad it didn't work out for him to be a good person, overall.Lexi 19:16 So, forgetting Sarah Marshall, I love you. Ben 19:20 A fantastic pick and that idea of focusing on oneself as a means of growth, as opposed to focusing on a relationship that didn't work and obsessing over it, is something I think I appreciate from that film as well, which leads me into my first pick, in a similar vein, which is 500 Days of Summer. [500 Days of Summer Main Title by Mychael Danna Rob Simonsen plays]Lexi 19:40 Ooh.Ben 19:40 We got Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zoe Deschanel, who I'm generally not a New Girl fan. Lexi 19:47 No. I go back and forth on her but, yeah.Ben 19:50 Yeah. Yeah. So basically, you know, guy meets girl, guy and girl have relationship, relationship seems great to one, not to the other. Eventually, it falls apart and JGL's character spends a lot of time just being like, "What went wrong? Why didn't this work out? What did I do wrong? What did she do wrong?" obsessing over this failed relationship until eventually somebody kind of is like, "Hey, you are being a bit of a loser about this. You need to stop and actually think about how this relationship was going," and it's a similar situation to FSM, if you will, as we call it – us Marshall-heads.Lexi 20:29 Mm-hmm. [both chuckle]Ben 20:29 In that he realizes that he has built up this sort of idealized version of the relationship, and even himself and Zooey's character, in the relationship as well. And then, you get... It's told out of order, as well, so you kind of start with the breakup and then work back to sort of how that happened and you start with more of his perspective on things and kind of him as the protagonist and like the victim. But then, as you get through it more, you realize how much JGL's character has pushed this other character into something she was very clear about not wanting to start with.Lexi 21:06 Mm-hmm. Ben 21:08 And we eventually find out that basically she wanted to keep things casual, and then eventually they clicked enough that, you know, he pushed her and sort of not nagged but, you know, insisted upon a relationship that she wasn't comfortable with. And then, it somehow shocked Pikachu-face when it doesn't work out the way he wants. And then, she goes off and finds a thing that he wanted with her, with somebody else and, you know, it kind of culminates in a moment where he's like, "Why? Why did you tell me you didn't want this?"Lexi 21:33 Yeah.Ben 21:33 "And yet, you immediately went out and found it with somebody else," and she said, "I didn't want it with you. It didn't work with you. You know, you weren't the right person for me."Joseph Gordon Levitt 21:43 I mean, it doesn't make sense. Zooey Deschanel 21:47 It just happened. Joseph Gordon Levitt 21:49 Right, but that's what I don't understand. What just happened? Zooey Deschanel 21:53 I just... I just woke up one day and I knew. Joseph Gordon LevittKnew what? Zooey Deschanel 22:03 What I was never sure of with you. Ben 22:03 And it's a very honest and humbling moment. And then, you know, the end of this movie is him finding a way to move on past his obsession over this failed relationship and better himself. And, that leads to sort of the culmination of his movie, which is like, you know, finding a way to be a better person and healthier relationships in the end. And, I like that as well.Lexi 22:26 Yep.Ben 22:26 Did you ever watch it? Lexi 22:27 I did watch it and I found it not my favourite of his work. Ben 22:36 So, I think for me it was a zeitgeist thing, as well, like same for you for Sarah Marshall. I had gone through a relationship and had found myself sort of obsessing over, like, "Why didn't this work out?"Lexi 22:48 Yeah.Ben 22:48 "I thought we had all of this," and then going back and being like, "Oh." Eventually, after spending some time working on myself and getting some distance and feeling better about where I am as a person, I can look more objectively at the relationship and be like, "Oh, here's some places that I pushed when I didn't need to," or when they didn't want me to and seeing some stuff that was there that you don't want to see when it breaks up initially. Lexi 23:11 They do a really good job in that movie of showing how a relationship can really bring out the worst in decent people, because I found his character, he really ran the gamut in that movie because there's moments where I was like, I understood him, I related to him, and then other times where I was like, "God, you are like an incel," because he was so angry. [Ben laughs]Ben 23:32 Yeah. Lexi 23:32 And I was like, "God, get over it." And it was right around the time that the friend is kind of like, "You're not doing well.”Ben 23:39Yeah, it's his little sister, I believe, who's like, "You're kind of an asshole about this."Lexi 23:42 Yeah. And I think we all have that in us. Like, we've all had a relationship—maybe not a romantic relationship, even a friendship—that's brought out not good things in us. And, sometimes, it takes a person who's really brave and really cares about you to be like, "You're not well." That's a hard thing to say to someone. Ben 24:01 Do you respond well to that? I find, not for me. I think I have to, like, live five to six years afterwards and be like, "Oh, fuck."Lexi 24:08 I do when it comes from certain people. Like, I have a couple of friends in my life, like if they were to sit me down and be like, "I'm concerned about you," then I'd be like, "Oh, shit." Like, I would take it super seriously because, for the most part, those people would not get involved in my problems. So, if they were to sit down and say like, "I'm concerned," I would be like, "Okay, I'm taking this seriously," and that's basically what happened with Forgetting Sarah Marshall. [both laugh] Dillian was like, "Hey, bud, you're sad. You okay?"Ben 24:40 Yeah. [Lexi laughs] Yeah, yeah, 500 Days, as well. His little sister's like, "You're only thinking about happy stuff. I saw a lot of stuff that was not very happy."Lexi 24:49 Yeah.Ben 24:49 There's the part where I think it's a party where he finds out she's engaged and he turns into a real piece of shit there. And, there's a quote during the, like, press junket from this movie where Joseph Gordon Levitt himself is like, "I need people to understand that I am the protagonist of this film. I am not the hero, and I don't think anybody should be looking at me as a heroic person in this movie."Lexi 25:09 Yeah.Ben 25:12 And I just get that. Yeah. I felt that at the time, the obsession, the confusion, the anger.Lexi 25:18 Mm-hmm. Totally. Love it. Ben 25:20 And that's what that makes that one stick for me.Lexi 25:22 That's a good pick. Ben 25:22 The title, though, not my favourite. It's a little twee. 500 Days of Summer... Oh, because her name is Summer and they're together for 500 days.Lexi 25:29 Yeah. Oh!Ben 25:32 Wow. That's a year and a half. That's a long time.Lexi 25:33 That's a good long time for a relationship that...Ben 25:36 It's not nothing, but it's also not enough to be like, it's worth your everything--Lexi 25:42 Well, and it's also, if you think about it from the other side of it, 500 days to be in a relationship that you never wanted to be in, in the first place, like, ooh.Ben 25:49 Oh, my god. Yeah, it's rough. When you start moving back through that movie and realizing that she was like, "I want to keep it casual," and he just sort of--Lexi 25:55 --like, forces her into a relationship. Ben 25:57 Pushes. Just pushes. Yeah, he just pushes and is never cool or chill about it.Lexi 26:00 No. Hence the incel part where I'm like, "Okay." [laughs]Ben 26:05 Yeah, absolutely. No, absolutely. And it was before we had a word for that or, you know, a bunch of people watched that movie and we're like, "Oh, god. She's bad to him."Lexi 26:14 She should have just said, "Yes," and gone along with it. Ben 26:15 Yeah. "Why didn't she marry him even though she didn't feel like he was the right person for her?" [Lexi laughs] "He loved her so much, and he treated her really good, and when you treat someone good, they have to give you anything you want."Lexi 26:27 Like, "Oh, boy." Reminds me of a friend from art school. [Ben laughs] I've said it before – best piece of dating advice I ever got from them was, "You don't date nice." Like, it's not a good enough reason to stay with someone. Like, "They're nice to me." Like, "So what? Everyone should be nice to you."Ben 26:41 Yeah. Everybody should be nice to you.Lexi 26:43 Yeah.Ben 26:43 Yeah, absotootly, as they say on Thomas and Friends: All Engines Go, because they're trains and they toot. [steam train whistle blows] Yep. Absotootly. [Lexi sighs] Sorry about that. Should we keep going or do you want to do mid-break? It's your call. Lexi 26:59 Let's do one more and then we'll go mid-break. We'l do three and three. Okay.Ben 27:02 All right. All right, I'm gonna do the next one.Lexi 27:04 Oh, okay.Ben 27:06 Is that okay with you, or do you wanna do the next one?Lexi 27:07 No, no. You go. You go. Ben 27:09 All right, I'm launching into a problematic fave... Lexi 27:13 Okay.Ben 27:12 ...which is You've Got Mail.Lexi 27:15 Yeah.Ben 27:15 It's a Nora Ephron flick. It's Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan's re-starring together again after their first tilt at Sleepless In Seattle, which is another favour of mine, but we'll do that some other time. [Over the Rainbow by George Fenton from You've Got Mail plays] You've Got Mail, I loved. I watched the hell out of this movie. I thought it was romantic as heck until somebody confronted me and, like, this entire movie is based off of a premise of complete power imbalance towards the male character who lies and manipulates the other person and then puts her out of fucking business, all while being very callous and still trying to court her surreptitiously.Lexi 27:56 Yeah.Ben 27:57 But it still has a special place in my heart because I liked it for so long. And then, so after I was confronted with how terrible the relationship in this movie actually is and being like, "Oh, fuck, they're right," I still like the film and I had to slow down and be like, "What is it that I actually really loved about this film?" and I realized it's the character of New York in You've Got Mail. I am in love with this version of New York that they show, which admittedly is very twee and non-existent. It's almost a Friends version of New York.Lexi 28:33 [chuckles] Yep.Ben 28:33 Almost. But, it's just this really romantic version of New York, to me, where like people just stroll around and there's a Joni Mitchell soundtrack to this thing that kind of slaps, and it's just one of my favourites, and I like Parker Posey a whole lot. Lexi 28:49 Parker Posey is an absolute treasure. Ben 28:52 So, she's a delight in this as an executive who gets kind of dropped by Tom Hanks' character and is just sort of like, 'Fuck it. I don't care. I'm successful and awesome. I don't need... Like, this doesn't matter to me."and just sort of shrugs him off. And, you get a great Greg Kinnear as a nut who is really obsessed with typewriters.Lexi 29:11 Mm-hmm.Ben 29:12 I love that bit. [music continues] And... Whats his name? Steve Zahn plays a character that works in this, like, little independent bookshop who is just--Lexi 29:20 He's always like a zany--Ben 29:22 --zany, bonkers weirdo. Yeah.Lexi 29:23 He always plays a zany kind of like, "What are we gonna do with him?" kind of character.Ben 29:28 Yeah, we get a great line from him in this film, which is, "I'm going to the nut shop where it's fun." It's a real classic.Lexi 29:37 I will say, the Nora movies, they do a great cozy vibe.Ben 29:43 Yeah.Lexi 29:43 Like, everybody's got a good scarf, the kitchens always very nice.Ben 29:46 Yeah, the lighting is good.Lexi 29:46 Like all of the Father of the Bride movies, they just feel like you're having a cup of cocoa and a big-- Ben 29:54 They're very white, though. Lexi 29:55 Yeah, they're super white. Yeah.Ben 29:56 Yeah. Lexi 29:57 Very like Connecticut. Ben 30:00 Yeah, we get what's-his-face in You've Got Mail as the bestie, which is Chris... Oh, my god. This is gonna kill me. Fucking, now he's come back as a comedian again and he's very transphobic and nobody's a big fan of him returning.Lexi 30:17 Oh, who is it?Ben 30:17 Dave Chappelle. God, that took me enough.Lexi 30:19 Oh. Dave Chapelle is in that? No.Ben 30:18 Yeah, he's the best friend. Lexi 30:22 Are you sure?Ben 30:23 Not anymore. You're making me really question myself. I've watched this movie, like, 3,000 times. Lexi 30:27 I feel there's no way Dave Chappelle is in You've Got Mail. [music continues]Ben 30:30 I'm almost positive he is. To Google! [old-school computer bleeping] [scratching record, DJ-style]Lexi 30:39 Looking at it right now. Oh, my god, you're right. Ben 30:42 He's in it. Yeah, he plays Tom Hanks' best friend/assistant/whatever his job is. Lexi 30:48 I find that shocking. It has been so long since I have seen that movie. Ben 30:54 Yeah.Lexi 30:57 My goodness. Ben 30:57 It's been a minute now for me too, 'cause I don't have time to do anything anymore, but yeah. Yeah, so the whole premise is manipulative and wrong, and he treats this woman like shit, in person, and then, via these emails that they're sending is just romantic and nice. And for, like, two thirds/three quarters of the movie, he knows who she is, she doesn't know who he is, and he never bothers being like, "Hey, I'm actually the guy you're emailing with. Let's deal with this relationship on an equal footing." He just fucking manipulates her. Yeah. Lexi 31:32 No, he catfished her before it was catfishing and this was the precursor to shitty social media relationships where it's like, "Don't talk to me in public, but online we can, like, sext, and it'll be cool."Ben 31:42 And then they meet up in the park and she's like, "I hoped it would be you." And then I'm like, "Nah, real life, she'd be like, 'You motherfucker.'"Lexi 31:50 "No, you didn't." Ben 31:50 Shove him in the water.Lexi 31:51 Yes, she should. That's how it should have ended – just, "Fuck you," right in the water.Ben 31:56 "You fucking piece of shit," and just shoves him into the water. [both laugh] Yeah. Lexi 32:01 "You've ruined my life. But don't worry, you can be the little honey bun at home."Ben 32:04 Yeah, "You destroyed the shop that my mother started," and that's supposed to be a great release for her, according to this movie.Lexi 32:12 Hey, she finally let her mother go. Ben 32:13 Yeah, "You troubled yourself too much with this shop. This shop wasn't really for you. It was for your mom." No, it's for her, too. It's her business. And now what? She gets to go edit books or something for Parker Posey? I guess that's not that bad.Lexi 32:25 No, it sounds kind of nice too, but...Ben 32:26 Yeah, Parker Posey hires her in the end, which I think is great. [chuckles]Lexi 32:30 [sighs] Yeah.Ben 32:30 [Dreams by The Cranberries from You've Got Mail plays] Anyhow, I still like the film from the version of New York, we get to the Joni Mitchell opening. Greg Kinnear is great. Steve Zahn's awesome in it. And then, you also have this like story where Tom Hanks' character's father is on his third wife and he's got these two little siblings from, like, his grandfather's just disgusting relationship with a younger woman and his father's disgusting relationship, and then eventually the nanny leaves with the second or third wife or whatever. It's amusing.Lexi 33:01 Yeah, there's some jabs in there, but okay.Ben 33:03 Anyhow, I can't do faves without talking about it, even though it is problematic and, you know, I now see a lot of issues with that film's writing, but... [both chuckle] I had a huge crush on Meg Ryan for a long time. [music fades out] What is your second one? Do you have a great lead in? Lexi 33:23 I do because actually, as you were talking, I changed my mind about--Ben 33:29 Oh, my goodness. What?!Lexi 33:29 I did.Ben 33:32 I saw that a pop up on the screen here that said, "Lexi has edited the show notes."Lexi 33:35 I made a change. So, I've changed my second one to others to kind of chat about, runner up, whatever. The next movie romcom that I'd like to talk about is Baby Mama. Sorry.Ben 33:47 So, I've never heard of this.Lexi 33:47 [Stay Up Late by The Talking Heads from Baby Mama plays] Oh, Benjamin. It is awesome. Okay, so we've got Tina Fey, we've got Amy Poehler, we've got Greg Kinnear, and Dax Shepard. So, the whole premise is Tina Fey... Again, this movie was recommended to me by Dillian. Ben 34:07 Oh, it's coming back to me now. Lexi 34:09 And it's about Tina Fey, who's this corporate lady who she's getting up there in age and she wants to have a baby, but she's not in a relationship. So, she decides to just hire a surrogate who turns out to be Amy Poehler, who kind of plays this like white trash crazy lady. Ben 34:28 Yeah. Yeah. Lexi 34:28 And the two of them forge this, like, really unlikely friendship, and meanwhile are having their own, like, issues with men on the side. And I feel like it's a romantic comedy about friends and, like, yes, there's male love interests in both of the ladies' lives, but it's more or less like it's the coming together of two unlikely friends to form a really strong relationship. Ben 34:48 Mm-hmm.Lexi 34:49 And it is funny as shit. I loved it. To this day, still makes me LOL. I love it. Ben 34:56 Yeah, laugh out loud for the younger generation. Lexi 35:00 Just, there's one scene because. I worked at--Ben 35:02 Wafflecopter.Lexi 35:02 I worked at a well-known grocery store...Ben 35:07 We all know by now, if you listen to the show.Lexi 35:07 I worked there, and we used to joke about it all the time that this movie came out 'cause it kind of felt like working in this, like, corporate, natural grocery store, where the owner of the store is, like, fabulously rich and wealthy and very like, not down to earth, but then is also pretending to be this hippy.Ben 35:26 Only hires granola people. Lexi 35:28 Well, no, but like is pretending to be this hippie and kind of is, but absolutely so disconnected from life, and there's one minute, and it's they played by Steve Martin and he plays such a good wacky, hippie billionaire. He rewards Tina Fey's character with five minutes of uninterrupted eye contact [Ben laughs] and it's just so good. Ben 35:52 My god, I can't do a three count of eye contact with anybody. Five minutes is  fucking torture. It's like staring into the sun. Lexi 35:58 It's so funny and the whole thing, it starts with Liz Lemon-- [laughs] Tina Fey's character--Ben 36:05 I feel like when you have a prominent actor, you can call them anybody from their oeuvre of films or whatever. Lexi 36:12 Yeah. Tina Fey's character is looking for a new location for one of their new grocery stores, which is basically like a Whole Foods, and she scouts out a place which is Greg Kinnear's juice shop and they forge a bit of a romantic relationship that way. That man plays a good romantic lead. Ben 36:29 Yeah, he's unthreatening and has sort of big eyes.Lexi 36:32 Yeah. Very gentle, deer-like qualities.Ben 36:36 [laughs] Yeah, he's a deer man.Lexi 36:38 He is a dear man. But, if you haven't seen it, Ben, you need to watch Baby Mama. It's hilarious. [song continues]Ben 36:42 Yeah, I'll check it out. I'll put it on the to-watch list, for sure. Awesome. [music fades out] Well, if that wraps up the second, I think it's time for us to go to our mid-show break. [sings along with "Who's That Pokémon?" theme music] Da-na, na-na... [record scratches off record] No, no. What? Da-na... [record scratches off record] No, we're not doing it, not this time.Lexi 36:56 Whaaaat?Ben 36:57 [sings along with "Who's That Pokémon?" theme music] Da-na, na-na... [record scratches off record] We're not doing Who's that Pokémon? [gasps] We're playing a game I've stolen from another podcast called My Brother, My Brother and Me, in which I offer you a Hallmark rom comedy description.Lexi 37:11 Okay.Ben 37:12 I'm going to give you a romcom title and description. You tell me if it's Hallmark or AI [Lexi laughs] in a segment I like to call... [playful music plays] Hey, I?Lexi 37:23 Oh, wow.Ben 37:25 Hallmark or AI?Lexi 37:25 AI.Ben 37:27 AI, question mark. I don't know. So, that's the game we're playing today. Lexi 37:31 Okay.Lexi 37:31 Yeah, let's do it. Ben 37:31 Let's get into it. You ready for your first one? [romantic music plays] The title of this romcom is Love Notes and Bookstore Blunders. "In a quaint bookstore nestled in the heart of a bustling city, a shy and reserved librarian finds herself caught in a whirlwind romance with a charming but disorganized writer who accidentally swaps their notebooks, leading to a series of comedic mishaps and unexpected connections as they embark on a journey to retrieve their misplaced musings and maybe find love along the way." AI or Hallmark? [music ends]Lexi 38:03 I'm going to go with AI.Ben 38:04 Ding, ding, ding! That is AI. Well done. Lexi 38:07 Yay!Ben 38:07 [laughs] What gave it away? Lexi 38:11 It's a little too on-the-nose.Ben 38:12 Is it too on-the-nose?  You just wait. Some of these Hallmark ones are very...Lexi 38:16 Okay. Well, no, I mean like I don't have... Yeah, okay. Give me the next one. Let's do this. Ben 38:20 The next one here is Cupid's Catering Chaos. [romantic music plays] Lexi 38:24 Oh, god. [Ben laughs]Ben 38:26 "When an ambitious but overwhelmed chef reluctantly agrees to cater her ex's wedding, she finds herself entangled in a comedic web of mistaken identities, culinary calamities, and unexpected romance when she collides with the charming wedding planner determined to make the event perfect, forcing her to confront her past and maybe find a second chance at love." [music ends]Lexi 38:49 I'm going to say that's Hallmark. [wrong buzzer sounds]Ben 38:50 It's AI. Lexi 38:53 Agh. Okay, okay.Ben 38:57 All right. All right, let's do one more.Lexi 38:59 Okay.Ben 38:59 Let's see if you'll land this one. The next one is called Dater's Handbook. [romantic music plays] "Cass is searching for the man of her dreams, except she thinks she has found the ideal man. She finds out she's wrong after a few dates and decides to read The Dater's Handbook, a guide that outlines the expectations a man should achieve. George follows all the expectations in the handbook, whereas Robert doesn't, but he's equally charming. Blah blah, blah blah blah." Basically, should you follow your heart or the expectations of others? That's it. [music ends]Lexi 39:29 I'm gonna go with AI. [wrong buzzer sounds]Ben 39:31 It's Hallmark.Lexi 39:32 No! Oh, my god. Ben 39:35 Dater's Handbook, 2016m starring Meghan Markle in this cast.Lexi 39:40 No.Ben 39:40 Yeah, and two people I've never heard of as the other competing men. [Lexi sighs] Anyway, I could play this game all day, but it does lead you to wonder if perhaps AI is writing everything that comes out of Hallmark. [Lexi laughs] Lexi 39:56 I mean, reading some of the titles that came out around Christmas-time, I was just like, "My god. This is awful."Ben 40:04 I'm not going to do the full thing, but here's a couple more. There's one called Finding Normal.Lexi 40:08 Ooh.Ben 40:08 So boring. Summer Villa, generic as hell. Hidden Gems. Lexi 40:12 Yeah, I've heard of that one. Ben 40:13 Deliver by Christmas--Lexi 40:16 I've heard of that one too. Ben 40:15 Just My Type.Lexi 40:18 Oh. Ben 40:18 So, I think the thing I'm taking away here is that the more specific the title is, the more likely it is to be AI. The actual Hallmark ones are boring as hell. Lexi 40:28 We should write one of these. Ben 40:30 We absolutely should. Lexi 40:32 Like, "Man in sweater likes pie." Like, "Oh."Ben 40:34 Yeah, it's called Pie of my Eye. [laughs]Lexi 40:38 Pie of My Eye.Ben 40:39 When an artisanal sweater maker accidentally has their yarn delivered to the equally artisanal pie maker next door, hilarity ensues.Lexi 40:52 Basically, there's so many ones like The Truth About Cats and Dogs. Ben 40:56 Yeah. Lexi 40:56 Like, that's another one of like the dogs meet in the dog park.Ben 40:59 Well, that's not Hallmark.Lexi 40:59 40:59 No, but I'm just saying that lie they could definitely do one where it's like, "The people at the puppy store are next door to the kitten store and they fall in love, but will cats and dogs ever truly get along?" Like, "Eugh." Puke.Ben 41:13 Yeah, because cats are the opposite of dogs. Lexi 41:16 Cats are girls and dogs are boys. [both laugh]Ben 41:17 Yeah. There's a term for that stupid thing in psychology, but I don't remember what it is, so fuck that. Anyhow, [sings along with "Who's That Pokémon?" theme music] Da-na, na-na-na. [speaks] AI? The worst fucking title for that.Lexi 41:33 That's a good one.Ben 41:35 All right, I'm glad we got to switch it up a little bit. Let's go into our final choices here.Lexi 41:40 Yeah.Ben 41:40 Why don't you take it away? Lexi 41:42 Okay, for my final romantic comedy shout-out of the evening, I'd like to... [laughs] It makes sense to me. My movie pick is Idiocracy. Ben 41:55 Okay. Yeah. [Buckaroo by Buck Owens from Idiocracy plays] This is a strange one for me. I don't necessarily think of Idiocracy as a romcom or as a prescient look into the future that we now live in. Lexi 42:06 Yeah, it's a documentary about our current day and age.Ben 42:10 Yeah.Lexi 42:10 No. I just find like the two-- well, I guess there's three main characters in. it. So, you've got Maya Rudolph and then one of the Wilson boys--Ben 42:19 Luke.Lexi 42:19 Luke Wilson, fall in love in a hopeless place, Ben.Ben 42:25 A hopeless place being what amounts to now, 2024 America. Lexi 42:32 The future. It's just so funny because both of them are kind of like useless in the present day, but then they wind up--Ben 42:38 But really shine.Lexi 42:38 But then they wind up-- they're absolute geniuses—geniusi?—in the future. Ben 42:44 Yeah, geni.Lexi 42:44 Geni. And they come together to, like, have a really positive relationship that's built on respect and kindness, and I think that's something that we should all aspire to is just like doing the best you can, be nice to each other, look out for everybody around you, and be respectful. And that movie is so hilariously bad and so much of it, Terry Crews, as the president who rides a motorcycle, and my favourite is when he--Ben 43:17 They're spraying Gatorade on all the lawns. Lexi 43:19 When he's doing the state of the address and he's walking up and down the stage and just like into the microphone is like, "Shit." Like, that is so funny. That entire movie is amazing and it is a great romantic comedy. I don't care what anyone says. Ben 43:35 No, we ain't here to judge. You get to choose what you like, and I think that's a fantastic choice. Lexi 43:41 Other favourite part of the movie is when he's in prison—Luke Wilson's character—is in prison and he goes up to the guards and he's like, "Hi, excuse me. I'm actually I'm supposed to be getting out," of jail and the guards are like, "Then you're supposed to be in that line, stupid." [laughs] "Yeah, right. Sorry." [laughs] Ah, it's so good.Ben 43:59 The idea that, you know, a completely sort of average to below-average intelligence like myself could someday be useful or possibly a genius is very appealing to someone like me, so I get it. Lexi 44:15 Great movie. Ben 44:17 Idiocracy, apparently a romcom. Lexi 44:19 Yep. It is. It is.Ben 44:20 I'm letting you have it. I ain't challenging that. Lexi 44:22 Prove me wrong, world. Prove me wrong. Ben 44:24 None of us want to take the time to do that. We're all very busy.Lexi 44:27 Busy. Well, I definitely have a lot of shout-outs about runners up, but I think we'll probably talk about them in just--Ben 44:32 Let's do it. Let's go around in a minute. I'm going to do my next one quickly here and it's Music and Lyrics. [Main Theme from Music and Lyrics by Adam Schlesinger plays] After I started my relationship with [imitating Borat] my wife, [in usual voice] we decided to exchange romantic comedies that we enjoyed, and I presented You've Got Mail to Fiona and I was like, "Did you love it? Did you love it?" and that's when I got the, "Actually, it's fucked up and here's why" back from Fiona. [Lexi laughs] And then, she's like, here's a romantic comedy where the two main people are on a more even footing with each other and it was Music and Lyrics. This is a movie starring everyone's favourite British dude--Lexi 45:17 Hugh Grant. Yep.Ben 45:18 High Grant. I can't believe I just blanked on his name, who is a sort of washed-up or retired pop star from the '80s – think like George Michael from Wham, but he's straight. So, he was a young pop megastar and now he's sort of washed up and then Drew Barrymore as a... What is she? A house sitter in this movie, if I'm remembering correctly? She ends up watering his plants for some reason while he's busy taking jobs, writing shitty lyrics for shitty pop stars that he doesn't really care about, and he's just in it for the pay check and they come to a point where she starts meddling with his lyrics, and they get together and they start working on the music and lyrics together and they form this really lovely relationship where they are equals in it and they're both contributing to all aspects of it and we get this great fake Shakira in the movie that I think is just wonderful. Lexi 46:15 Mm-hmm. Ben 46:17 And it was the juxtaposition of the romcom that I'd offered up as a fave versus this one that has made it a fast fave for me, and also came from the person that I chose to spend the rest of my life with--Lexi 46:30 Aw, that's sweet.Ben 46:30 --which makes it a very special movie to me that I've watched many, many times, but it's just a lovely, wholesome romantic comedy full of laughs because Drew Barrymore is, generally speaking, charming when she's not crossing picket lines. Writers' strike reference there, for everybody.Lexi 46:47 That's true.Ben 46:50 And, you know, Hugh Grant is charming, always charming, and that makes this my third pick. Music and Lyrics – go watch it if you haven't watched it yet. I think you'll enjoy it. Lexi 46:59 He's kind of like the British, Greg Kinnear, isn't he? Ben 47:04 Yeah, yeah. Lexi 47:05 Or Greg Kinnear is the American Hugh Grant. Ben 47:08 Yeah, that sounds better. I think that's the way we put it. Greg Kinnear is an American Hugh Grant, with less staying power. Lexi 47:15 Yes. Yeah.Ben 47:18 I mean, what's that new movie that's Guy Pearce that was like Colin Farrell and Hugh Grant and is like a... [pause] Woof. We're bad at this. It's like a a crime movie.Lexi 47:33 Is it, like, The Gentlemen?Ben 47:33 A British crime. Is that what it's called? The one with the blond guy that looks like Thor that isn't Thor.Lexi 47:39 Yeah, that's Charlie...Ben 47:41 Yeah, yeah.Lexi 47:42 The Gentlemen.Ben 47:42 Yeah, Charlie Hunnam and is that called The Gentlemen?Lexi 47:46 Yeah.Ben 47:46 Yeah, it's a great one and Hugh Grant's playing this like smarmy-ass tabloid reporter. Lexi 47:53 I'm just double checking. Ben 47:54 It's great. He's wonderful.Lexi 47:55 Matthew McConaughey's in it.Ben 47:57 Yeah. Lexi 47:58 Colin Farrell. Oh, yeah. That's a great... Have you seen the TV show?Ben 48:02 There's a TV show based off of this?Lexi 48:05 Yeah, it's on Netflix. There's a series now that's kind of in the same universe. It is excellent. Ben 48:09 Oh, wow. No, I haven't, so there's a drop. Lexi 48:10 Yeah, Guy Ritchie also works on that one too. It's wonderful. Ben 48:16 Hugh Grant's very likeable and hilariously this is not Notting Hill, which other people might choose as his more prominent romcom adventure, but...Lexi 48:27 I'm just making sure. Yeah. Charlie Hunnam, Michael McConaughey...Ben 48:32 Is he in Love Actually?Lexi 48:32 Who? Charlie?Ben 48:35 No, Hugh Grant.Lexi 48:37 Yes, he is. He's the prime minister.Ben 48:37 Is he the president or I mean the premier-- yeah, prime minister. [chuckles] And he's the one that basically has the really inappropriate relationship with his staffer. Lexi 48:45 There's a lot of inappropriate relationships in that whole film, but yes. Ben 48:50 What I wanted to do, since we were talking about how great the response was on Instagram, is just shout out some of the favourites from the listeners here.Lexi 48:58 Yeah, do it.Ben 48:58 Somebody suggested that... Oh, username... I'm bad at this. We don't usually actually remember to call people out on the show, so... @timothywinchester offered up a classic romantic comedy called I've Got Your Number, and they suggested that it's more fun than they expected. For worse, the same person—Timothy Winchester—offered up Holiday in Handcuffs, which looks like a Hallmark movie with that dude from Saved By the Bell and, for some reason, they're handcuffed together.Lexi 49:30 Oh.Ben 49:30 I don't know. Let's keep going. What else we got? The F Word is a recommendation from somebody.Lexi 49:36 Ainsley? Ben 49:36 Was it Ainsley?Lexi 49:38 Yes, Ainsley suggests The F Word. Ben 49:41 Also known as What If? in other countries. Yeah, for some reason I can't see who actually sent these in to me anymore. Lexi 49:46 Oh, I can kind of see here, I can see Dave, who was just recently on the podcast, Dave Stone, said PS I Love You is a great romantic comedy. Ben 49:54 Oh, cool. We got...Lexi 49:58 Ryan Webb says the worst is Love, Actually. Ben 50:02 Of Rooked podcast – our homies over at Rooked.Lexi 50:05 Of Rooked podcast.Ben 50:05 I would say sister podcast. Mother podcast? Brother podcast. Anyhow, Ryan. Lexi 50:11 Yeah, probably mother podcast. The best is She's All That. Ben 50:15 As they posit, it's a prequel to the Scooby-Doo movie. Lexi 50:19 What else do we have here? We have @photoguy79 says How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is the best, but only for the bullshit scene. Matthew McConaughey 50:27 Lexi I think you're running away. Drew Barrymore 50:32 Why don't you save your mind games for your next bet? Okay, I am not running away.Matthew McConaughey 50:36 Bullshit.Drew Barrymore 50:36 [softly] Excuse me. Matthew McConaughey 50:39 [softly] You heard me. [romantic music plays] [softly] Bullshit.Lexi 50:44 What else we have? Ling Zena has a couple – While You Were Sleeping, probably the biggest one, Irish Wish, is a cool premise but with zero chemistry and the friendships make no sense. Ben 51:02 It's a Lindsay Lohan romcom.Lexi 51:03 Yeah. And, I feel like that was like her comeback movie.Ben 51:07 Her attempted revival.Lexi 51:07 Like, she wanted... This was going to be... Yeah.Ben 51:10 Yeah. Did not work. And the same user gave us While You Were Sleeping, which I enjoyed, I remember watching that, but it is a weird premise, as well...Lexi 51:20 It is.Ben 51:21 ...where Sandra Bullock is so in love with--Lexi 51:24 --a person she doesn't even know because she's--Ben 51:25 With Peter Gallagher. Yeah, because she sees him at the train.Lexi 51:30 Yeah. She's made up this fake world for themselves. Ben 51:31 This delusional relationship, and then eventually, that all comes to light and it's terrible, but she falls for his brother, Bill Pullman... RIP.Lexi 51:38 [laughs] Aw.Ben 51:40Peter Gallagher, if you don't recall, is Sandy Cohen from The OC. [sings along with OC theme song] Dana-nana-na-na-na. California, here we come. [speaks] Right, that's enough. So, thank you for submitting those. Lexi 51:52 Yeah.Ben 51:52 I think that's everybody. Lexi 51:53 Yeah, yeah. And we have some runners-up to kind of throw down. We won't go into big detail, but there's a lot of really great ones. I'm going to throw out there 10 Things I Hate About You. Ben 52:03 Yeah, yeah. That's on my list of runners-up as well. 10 Things I Hate About You is fantastic. We got some Joseph Gordon Levitt and his brother, Heath Ledger. Have you ever seen those memes where they put like their faces together and it looks like the same guy? [Heath Ledger sings Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You]Lexi 52:16 Yeah, if they're the same person. Julia Stiles.Ben 52:18 Julia Stiles.Lexi 52:17 There's Alexis from... Well, Alex, from Alex Mack.Ben 52:24 I don't know.Lexi 52:24 You never watched Alex Mack?Ben 52:27 No.Lexi 52:27 [gasps] Ben, what were you doing in the '90s?Ben 52:30 It's the blonde one, though, but I--Lexi 52:31 It's The Secret World of Alex Mack. Like Alexis...Ben 52:34 But I I mean, I know who you're talking about and I had a huge crush on her when I was younger. Yeah. 10 Things I Hate About You is just fantastic because of Heath Ledger's bleacher scene. Lexi 52:44 Larissa Oleynick. Thank you. Sorry.Ben 52:46 No. Please.Lexi 52:46 There we go.Ben 52:48 Heath Ledger's dancing up and down the bleachers bit is pretty fantastic. Lexi 52:54 Yeah, it's a great one. So, 10 Things I Hate About You, Bridesmaids – another one about, like, finding yourself before you can care for others. You have to care for yourself.Ben 53:04 Yep.Lexi 53:05 Really great. And another one where a friend comes forward and says, "You're not doing well. I care about you. You got to get your shit together," so great, great movie.Ben 53:15 Maya Rudolph plays the friend who comes forward and is like, "You are effing this all up."Lexi 53:20 Well, she's actually-- there's a couple of people that go forward and kind of say that. Sookie St. James actually sits her down and says, "Get your shit... Better get your poop in a group." Maya Rudolph shits in the street. Ben 53:31 Yep. Yep. Yes, diarrhea. [blows raspberry] Diarrhea. If you're sitting in a Chevy and you're feeling something heavy...Lexi 53:38 Oh, what have I done?Ben 53:40 Diarrhea. [blows raspberries]Lexi 53:40 I'd also like to throw out The Princess Bride. That was what I swapped out Baby Mama for.Ben 53:46 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.Lexi 53:47 I love The Princess Bride. I think that it is--Ben 53:49 [imitating Peter Cook] Mawage. Twoo wuv.Lexi 53:52 There's so many great moments in that movie about love and friendship. Ben 53:56 "Witch, get out of here!" "I'm not a witch. I'm your wife."Lexi 54:01 Perseverance. Whenever anybody asks me to like, "Hey, what are you up to? You never post pictures of yourself on Instagram," I always send them a picture of Miracle Max and I say, "I'm not looking my best these days," and then I post that, and people... I like to laugh, Ben. I like to laugh.Ben 54:17 I wouldn't say you look that much like Miracle Max. Passing resemblance at most. Lexi 54:22 Thank you, but I feel like I do, at my best. But anyway, great movie. Andre the Giant. Delightful.Ben 54:24 Yeah. Uh-huh. Absolutely. It is a delight. Another one I wanted to talk about is The Notebook. It's not one of my faves. I just like the fact that Ryan Gosling apparently did not get along so much with Rachel McAdams that they hate each other to this day.Lexi 54:43 Really?Ben 54:43 Yeah, they apparently just did not gel on set. Because it was everybody's favourite romance movie when it came out. It was a huge hit and I just love that little factoid that they apparently just did not work well together to the point that they still dislike each other. Lexi 54:59 [laughs] Hey, whatever. The working relationship--Ben 55:04 The Wedding Singer. Drew Barrymore is a great romcom star. Lexi 55:07 Ah yes, she is. And Adam Sandler is a really good opposite for her. Ben 55:11 Yeah. And we get a redo with them as well, later on, in kind of the same way that we got Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail. We've got 50 First Dates, which is actually a super charming film. Lexi 55:20 It is.. And there's a song in there that I sing to myself in the car all the time. Ben 55:25 Which song is? Lexi 55:28 [sings along to Forgetful Lucy by Adam Sandler] Cracked her head like Gary Busey. [Ben laughs] Bum, bum, bum. [speaks] It's such a great little. He's a good singer, Adam Sandler. Ben 55:37 The more I think about it, the more I really like that film, the way that it ends with just sort of like finding a way forward together, even though things can't be the way they were initially, and I think that's--Lexi 55:47 Yeah, or the way they want it.Ben 55:50 Yeah. And I think that's kind of sweet and beautiful is that it's still worth having, [song continues] even though it's changed and it's harder and there's more to it. There's more difficulty. It's kind of about-- I mean it's literally about an injury, a life-altering injury for a person, but it's, you know, kind of about the idea of like for better or for worse sort of idea of a relationship and caring for a partner as their health needs change. And, that's kind of-- that's romantic.Lexi 56:16 Yeah. Well, it's unconditional love. Ben 56:19 Yeah. There you go. Thank you for summing that up in two words [chuckles] what took me about 50 paragraphs? I am AI. You can tell that we live in an AI because I am just spewing out nonsense that I've heard before.Lexi 56:33 What else we got? Ben 56:34 Groundhog Day, I want to talk about because I love Groundhog Day. I think it's funny. As a romcom though, it is disgusting. Lexi 56:43 It's all about manipulation, but...Ben 56:46 Yeah, exactly. Again. He never learns. Bill Murray's character never learns to be a better person. He learns how to game the system to get what he wants.Lexi 56:54 Yes. Yeah.Ben 56:54 It is literally the wrong message to be sending to people that want to find a healthy relationship. Lexi 57:01 But, at the same time, too, I feel like he's punished for it because he's basically in purgatory. Like, somebody did the math and something like he lived 9,000 years or something.Ben 57:10 Yeah. Yeah, to get all these things right. Lexi 57:12 He is a horrible person, but, yeah, he's stuck in his own personal hell. Ben 57:18 I don't feel like this movie gives us a change for him.Lexi 57:21 No.Ben 57:21 More that he just finally gets the game right and presses all the controls in the right way.Lexi 57:24 Yeah, absolutely. Ben 57:26 He never engages. I mean, I guess the idea is that he finally, when he stops trying and actually engages, is sort of the premise, but I never really felt that way. I felt like he's just trying. Lexi 57:37 Figured out how to game it. Yeah.Ben 57:38 Yeah, exactly. But anyhow, it's still a fun film and I quote what's-his-name who plays Ned. "Ned? Watch out for that step. It's a doozy."Lexi 57:53 That's a good one.Ben57:55 Gross Point Blank is a blast. I like the idea of an assassin romcom.Lexi 58:00 Where he goes back to his high school reunion, trying to make something of himself.Ben 58:02 Yeah. Yeah. Assassin is in the doldrums because he's like, "Oh, I never saw myself being an assassin. Let me go back to my hometown and see if I can find myself again."Lexi 58:14 Tom Cusack is a is another good romantic comedy guy. Ben 58:16 Did you just call him Tom Cusack? Lexi 58:17 What did I say? Ben 58:18 I think you said Tom. But, I like Tom Cusack. He's like his evil twin brother...Lexi 58:23 What's his actual...? John Cusack.Ben 58:24 ...for Johnny, Johnny. Lexi 58:25 Oh, god.Ben 58:30 Yeah, and you get Dan Ackroyd as a kind of menacing villain. Lexi 58:30 Yeah. Mm-hmm.Ben 58:31 With a bad haircut. Lexi 58:34 Many levels to hi

On this week's show, we...celebrate 25 years of Fountains of Wayne's Utopia Parkway spend quality time with new records from The Eyebrows, St. Vincent & Alejandro Escovedo spin cool covers from Orville Peck, Chris Stapleton & King PrincessAll this & much, much less!Debts No Honest Man Can Pay is over 2 rock-solid hours of musical eclectica & other noodle stories. The show started in 2003 at WHFR-FM (Dearborn, MI), moved to WGWG-FM (Boiling Springs, NC) in 2006 & Plaza Midwood Community Radio (Charlotte, NC) in 2012, with a brief pit-stop at WLFM-FM (Appleton, WI) in 2004.

As we continue the countdown to Record Store Day 2024 (April 20) we're covering diverse ends of The List (always accessible at RecordStoreDay.com) This week, founding members of America, Gerry Beckley and Dewey Bunnell, are here to talk about their RSD Exclusive Release Event, America: Live From The Hollywood Bowl 1975, recorded during America's "imperial era" on August 3, 1975, featuring an orchestra conducted by their legendary producer, Sir George Martin. Our chat touches on their stories of working at Abbey Road with Sir George, their connection to Phil Hartman and Janet Jackson, and the album they made with Fountains of Wayne's Adam Schlesinger. Plus, Zev Feldman, the Jazz Detective, returns to our show to spotlight a mere handful of the many rare and first time Jazz titles on this year's RSD List, ranging from Sonny Rollins to Sun Ra, and Chet Baker to Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The Record Store Day Podcast is written, produced, engineered, and hosted by Paul Myers, who also composed the theme music and selected interstitial music. Executive Producers for Record Store Day: Carrie Colliton and Michael Kurtz. For the latest info on RSD matters, and the List, go to RecordStoreDay.com. Sponsored by Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, Tito's Handmade Vodka, RSDMRKT.com, and Furnace Record Pressing, the official vinyl pressing plant of Record Store Day. Please consider subscribing to the RSD Podcast wherever you get podcasts, and by all means tell your friends about us.  And see you next week! 

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 1105, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: They Don'T Live On Sesame Street 1: South African-born Ernie Els is a longtime standout performer in this pro sport. golf. 2: Bert wasn't a doctor, but Dr. Paul Bert made important studies of divers with decompression sickness, also known as this. the bends. 3: Accompanying him on his post-White House trek to the Amazon, Kermit was the second son of this U.S. president. Theodore Roosevelt. 4: Big birds of the world include the 6-foot, 30-pound Dalmatian variety of this avian with a large bill and an elastic throat pouch. a pelican. 5: The grandfather of this Broadway lyricist was a major impresario of Vaudeville and opera. Oscar Hammerstein. Round 2. Category: Yes, I'Ve Eton 1: He hopefully had a ball at Eton before going on to write "Thunderball". Fleming. 2: We know he revisited his "Brave New World" in 1958, but we don't know if he attended any Eton reunions. (Aldous) Huxley. 3: Marshall Field III, who had fun times at Eton, merged his Sun and Times papers in this city in 1948. Chicago. 4: James Oglethorpe went to Eton, did other stuff, then founded this colony in America. Georgia. 5: As a student at Eton, he did not have his own laptop computer, despite being second in line to the British throne. Prince William. Round 3. Category: Consumer Products 1: Released in 1956 as a "house and garden bug killer", it uses the ad line "Kills Bugs Dead". Raid. 2: In 1989 this shoemaker introduced The Pump, a hot-selling inflatable sports shoe. Reebok. 3: During WWII this 100% whole wheat breakfast cereal contained "12 Large Biscuits" in every box. Shredded Wheat. 4: Originally just an apple, this firm's trademark became one of the first used for textiles in 1871. Fruit of the Loom. 5: This all-purpose "Formula" for cleaning is named after the number of tries it took to get it right. Formula 409. Round 4. Category: Composers All Around 1: Music Tim Carleton wrote at age 16 was used by phone maker Cisco and has been heard by millions as this--your call is important to us. hold music. 2: A 1974 march for tuba by Luciano Michelini became the circusy-sounding theme to this HBO comedy. Curb Your Enthusiasm. 3: Known as "The Bong", the 5-note theme for this chip maker "Inside" a lot of computers was composed in 1994 by Walter Werzowa. Intel. 4: BJ Leiderman wrote themes for NPR programs like "Morning Edition" and this Saturday and Sunday counterpart. Weekend Edition. 5: Adam Schlesinger of this "Stacy's Mom" band also composed 157 songs for TV's "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend". Fountains of Wayne. Round 5. Category: How Inspirational 1: When your prom date leaves the dance without you, recall the proverb, this "heals all wounds". time. 2: This saint of Assisi said, "Where there is hatred, let me sow love... where there is despair, hope". Francis. 3: Thinking of his sins, poet Heinrich Heine said, "Of course" God will do this to "me; that's his business". forgive. 4: In 1903 Pope Pius X wrote, "Where justice is lacking there can be no hope of" this, pax in Latin. peace. 5: This "Candide" author helped popularize the saying, "The perfect is the enemy of the good". Voltaire. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia!Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/ AI Voices used

What do Stacy's Mom, A Colbert Christmas, Tom Hanks' directorial debut, a water feature store in New Jersey, and Emmy winner Crazy Ex Girlfriend all have in common? A master composer and musical comedy writer with a legacy as joyful as they come. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lyricsforlunch/support

Nailing down what exactly is "power pop" can be frustrating (we did a whole roundtable on it!), but the "power" end of it is usually found in the guitar section. From the big riffs of Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen to Robert Quine's excited guitar leads on Matthew Sweet albums, just because it's "pop" doesn't mean it doesn't rock. For their second album, Fountains of Wayne duo Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood recruited former Belltower guitarist Joey Porter and former Poises drummer Brian Young to complete the foursome. Two veteran players mean a tightened rhythm section and a bigger guitar sound that allows the band to expand their sound, touching not only on power pop from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but elements of Britpop, psychedelia, and Queen grandiosity.   Songs In This Episode Intro - Red Dragon Tattoo 13:00 - Utopia Parkway 17:48 - Lost In Space 25:45 - Denise Outro - A Fine Day For A Parade   Support the podcast, join the DMO UNION at Patreon. Listen to the episode archive at DigMeOutPodcast.com.

Sal took a break from Animal Crossing to sit down and record a show with the rest of the team. Mandy returns as they break down Wrestlemania, what worked, what didn't work and everything in between. Mark has strong feelings about Gronk and the Firefly Funhouse Match, Mandy has strong feelings about the women's division in general, Blake has surprising thoughts on the Edge/Orton match and everyone loved the Boneyard Match. But before that they discuss the lives of Adam Schlesinger and Bill Withers, Tiger King and thoughts on various WWE documentaries. All that and news on the plans on the next few weeks of the show. Stay safe everyone and enjoy the show!

Before Aubrey Gordon was a published author and co-host of the podcast Maintenance Phase, she was the anonymous blogger Your Fat Friend, writing about the lived experiences of fat people in America. Documentarian Jeanie Finlay followed Aubrey's story over the course of a few years in the new documentary "Your Fat Friend," in select theaters today. Finlay and Gordon join us to discuss. Pianist Aaron Diehl's latest album with orchestral group The Knights revives "Zodiac Suite," a relatively obscure work from the great Mary Lou Williams, a mid-20th century composer of music drawing from jazz, classical, religious and other vernaculars. He joins us to perform live. [REBROADCAST FROM SEPTEMBER 13, 2023] Comedian and actor Rachel Bloom has an off-Broadway musical comedy about the tumultuous past few years of her life, including speaking about her dear friend Adam Schlesinger, who died of COVID-19. She joins us to discuss "Death, Let Me Do My Show," which is running at the Orpheum Theatre through Jan. 6. During Hanukah, oil-based cooking is a central tradition for those celebrating the Jewish 'Festival of Lights." Food writer and cookbook author Jake Cohen shares tips and recipes for your holiday festivities.

[REBROADCAST FROM SEPTEMBER 13, 2023] Comedian and actor Rachel Bloom has an off-Broadway musical comedy about the tumultuous past few years of her life, including speaking about her dear friend Adam Schlesinger, who died of COVID-19. She joins us to discuss "Death, Let Me Do My Show," which is running at the Orpheum Theatre through Jan. 6.  

Matty's on the mic to talk about the tunes! Or rather, a single tune – one that carried an entire feature length film and ran circles around much of the music it paid homage to: That Thing You Do!--Disclaimers:Under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” of copyrighted material in a manner that constitutes quotation, criticism, review, parody, caricature, pastiche, and other legal copyright exceptions. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise by infringing.Also, nobody actually sponsors Earbuddies. We're just joking.

This week, I am joined by Kay Hanley, lead singer of Letters To Cleo, and we're discussing songs from throughout the band's career, including songs from “Auroa Gory Alice” which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year! We also discuss: being a part of the movie soundtracks for 10 Things I Hate About You, The Craft, & Josie & The Pussycats; performing in Jesus Christ Superstar alongside Gary Cherone of Extreme; writing the music for the Disney cartoon Doc McStuffins; writing the music for Star Trek: Strange New World's “Subspace Rhapsody” episode; working & recording with Greg Hawkes from The Cars & Adam Schlesinger from Fountains Of Wayne; the band's 2 new singles “Bad Man” & “It's Sunny Outside” and so much more! Be sure to visit MyWeeklyMixtape.com to hear all of the songs we discussed in this episode!  FOR MORE ON MY WEEKLY MIXTAPE Website: http://www.myweeklymixtape.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/myweeklymixtape Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/myweeklymixtape Threads: https://www.threads.net/@myweeklymixtape Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/myweeklymixtape Twitter / X: https://twitter.com/myweeklymixtape TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@myweeklymixtape Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Comedian and actor Rachel Bloom has a new off-Broadway musical comedy about the tumultuous past few years of her life, including speaking about her dear friend Adam Schlesinger, who died of COVID-19. She joins us to discuss "Death, Let Me Do My Show," which is running at the Lucille Lortel Theatre through September 30.

New York-based musician and America's Sweetheart Nick Miller joins to discuss the underseen 150-minute Extended Cut of Tom Hanks's directorial debut, 'That Thing You Do!'. It's a meandering, expansive version of the film that takes the original cut's effervescent (if slight) shot of pop nostalgia and, at its best, aims for comparisons to great surveyors of cinematic Americana like Robert Altman & Jonathan Demme (who serves as producer on this film).We discuss the two versions of the film, their differences, and how the Extended Cut showcases even further Tom Hanks's singular knowledge of the era and its musical landscape. Then, we talk about the eponymous tune, an infectious earworm written by the late Adam Schlesinger which took on a life of its own as a charting hit single and was nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar in 1997. We also discuss the film as part and parcel with Tom Hanks's decade-long fixation with postwar America and the Greatest Generation's sense of national purpose, how the movie gets right many of the intricacies of songwriting and band dynamics, and make a plea to the 300+ artists (including Squeeze and They Might Be Giants) who submitted versions of "That Thing You Do!" to finally release their recordings. Follow Nick Miller on Twitter.Listen to Nick Miller on Bandcamp.Get access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish. 

In 2003, amidst a bunch of bleak alternative rock bangers like “Numb” by Linkin Park and “Bring Me To Life” by Evanescence, a rock song stood out on the charts for its fantastic hooks and juvenile sense of humor. “Stacy's Mom” turned the New Jersey band Fountains of Wayne into MTV mainstays and Grammy nominees. But while they continued to release music, tour the country, and maintain a devoted fanbase, they never reached the same level of fame again. Most people never looked further than the raunchy music video, but Fountains of Wayne released six albums across two decades, each filled with tracks of quirky, clever, and undeniably catchy power pop. And the writer of that song, FOW bassist Adam Schlesinger, had a rich and fascinating career behind the scenes in film, TV, and more. In this episode of Switched on Pop, we explore the history of “Stacy's Mom”, a perfectly crafted pop song that stands as a testament to the brilliance of a musician whose career was cut tragically short. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rachel Bloom is best known as the co-creator and star of the CW musical dramedy, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. She has won the 2016 Golden Globe for Best Actress in a TV Series – Musical or Comedy, the 2016 Critics' Choice Award for Best Actress in a TV Comedy, and the 2016 TCA Award for Individual Achievement in Comedy. In 2019, Rachel won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics alongside songwriting partners Jack Dolgen and the late Adam Schlesinger for Antidepressants Are So Not a Big Deal. Currently, Rachel is touring in her live show, Death Let Me Do My Special. In 2019, she sold out Radio City Music Hall performing Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Live as part of a multi-show tour. In the same year she also starred in her own solo tour, What Am I Going to Do with My Life Now? which included a week-long residency at the Just For Laughs comedy festival. Rachel recently co-starred in the Critics' Choice nominated Hulu comedy series, Reboot, alongside Keegan-Michael Key, Johnny Knoxville, and Paul Reiser. Her upcoming projects include guest starring in season 2 of HBO's Julia as well as appearing in the new Muppets Mayhem Musical Series on Disney+. She has also appeared in numerous films including co-starring in IFC's Bar Fight! and SXSW's Most Likely to Murder. Her voice acting resume includes the role of “Silver” in The Angry Birds Movie 2 opposite Jason Sudeikis, “Queen Barb” in Trolls: World Tour opposite Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake, and “Op” in the movie Extinct opposite Adam Devine and Ken Jeong. She's also done VO work for television including The Simpsons and Bojack Horseman. Rachel got her start performing at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater at which she put up two live musical sketch comedy shows, Rachel Bloom is a Triple Threat!!! and Sing Out Loud, Louise. She self-released two albums of comedy music: PLEASE LOVE ME and SUCK IT, CHRISTMAS!!! (A CHANUKAH ALBUM). For tour updates go to www.racheldoesstuff.com

Dan and Brian are back for a rare Part 2 discussing a single movie. In this case, it's Dan's favorite movie, That Thing You Do!, the Tom Hanks-written and -directed comedy. Join as Dan and Brian dig deep into the movie's extended cut, the soundtrack, the cast, Adam Schlesinger, and so much more. Check out Dan's discussion of songwriter Adam Schlesinger as a guest on the podcast Books Shows Tunes & Mad Acts: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/books-shows-tunes-mad-acts/episodes/2020-06-26T05_00_00-07_00 Check out Dan's movie reviews: http://thegoodsreviews.com/ Subscribe, join the Discord, and find us on Letterboxd: http://thegoodsfilmpodcast.com/

At long last, Dan and Brian discuss Dan's favorite film of all time: the Tom Hanks-written, -directed, and -starring That Thing You Do!, a tale of a one-hit wonder band from 1964. Join as they talk through the band's rise and fall, it's loaded cast, its affection for small-time and big-time music scene, and the all-time great title track. Coming soon: Dan and Brian's supplementary follow-up to deep dive on a handful of That Thing You Do! ephemera. Check out Dan's discussion of songwriter Adam Schlesinger as a guest on the podcast Books Shows Tunes & Mad Acts: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/books-shows-tunes-mad-acts/episodes/2020-06-26T05_00_00-07_00 Check out Dan's movie reviews: http://thegoodsreviews.com/ Subscribe, join the Discord, and find us on Letterboxd: http://thegoodsfilmpodcast.com/

In the fifth episode of season nine, or the 53rd episode overall, and the SEASON FINALE until 2024, Kevin welcomes comedian and co-host of The Bechdel Cast, Caitlin Durante, and the two discuss Caitlin's love of film, and a handful of songs that were used impactfully on the big screen. Take a listen to Caitlin's "Cool Songs From Cool Soundtracks From Cool Movies" playlist here; listen to her podcast The Bechdel Cast, which is updated every Thursday, and follow her on Instagram or Twitter. For additional information about Anhedonic Headphones, please click here; or follow Kevin on Instagram and on Twitter.  Musical Credits: Intro Music- "Hip 2 Da Game" (Instrumental) performed by Lord Finesse. The Awakening: 25th Anniversary Edition, Tommy Boy, 2021. Closing Music- "Buck 'Em Down," performed by Black Moon. Black Moon: Instrumentals, Fat Beats, 2017.  "The Power of Love," written by Hugh Anthony Cregg III, Chris Hayes, and Johnny Colla; performed by Huey Lewis and The News. Back To The Future: Music From The Motion Picture, MCA, 1985. "My Heart Will Go On," written by Will Jennings and James Horner; performed by Celine Dion. Titanic: Music From The Motion Picture, Sony, 1997. "I'm A Believer," written by Neil Diamond; performed by Smash Mouth. Shrek: Music From The Original Motion Picture, Interscope, 2001. "Hot Stuff," written by Pete Bellotte, Harold Faltermeyer, and Keith Forsey; performed by Donna Summer. Bad Girls, Casablanca, 1979 "Pretend to Be Nice," written by Adam Schlesinger; performed by Kay Hanley. Music From The Motion Picture Josie and The Pussycats, Epic/Playtone, 2001. "Sunflower," written by Austin Post, Khalif Brown, Carter Lang, Carl Rosen, Billy Walsh, and Louis Bell; performed by Post Malone and Swae Lee. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Soundtrack from & Inspired by the Motion Picture), Republic, 2018. "Naatu Naatu," written by M. M. Keeravani and Kanukuntla Subhash Chandrabose; performed by Rahul Sipligunj and Kaala Bhairava. RRR, Lahari Music, 2022.

Michigan music fan Ron Wade is a sucker for alternative/pop female-fronted bands, and when he first heard Ivy and their 1997 release 'Apartment Life' while working at a Detroit weekly, it ticked all his musical boxes! Lush, breezy and expertly crafted, the songs written by Andy Chase and the late/great Adam Schlesinger - with the magnificent Dominique Durand on vocals - will most-surely tick the boxes of any/all pop music lovers. Songs featured in this episode: Sleeping Late - Ivy; Panic In Detroit - David Bowie; Utopia Parkway - Fountains Of Wayne; Sex and Candy - Marcy Playground; That Thing You Do - The Wonders; Gepetto - Belly; Only Happy When It Rains - Garbage; The Best Thing, I've Got A Feeling, This Is The Day - Ivy; The Bright Light - Tanya Donelly; This Is The Day (Live, Philadelphia PA 3.22.98), Never Do That Again, I Get The Message, Baker - Ivy; Slide Away - Oasis; You Don't Know Anything - Ivy; I've Got A Feeling - Potty Mouth; The Noise Of Carpet - Stereolab; Ba Ba Ba - Ivy; Ba Ba Ba - Liz Phair; Get Out Of The City, These Are The Things About You, Quick, Painless and Easy, Back In Our Town - Ivy; Caribou - Pixies; Sweet Mary - Ivy

We got the band back together and we are heading to Riverdale to discuss Josie and the Pussycats from Archie Comics. We cover a brief history of Archie Comics and Josie, the band's first appearance in the 1960s, the 2016 reboot, their role on Riverdale and especially the 2001 film which is much more satirical and meta you might remember. Plus Rob discusses his experience working on the Archie Comics Musical! We are joined by resident Josie expert and superfan Ethan from MakeMineAmalgam who literally watched the film every day for a year. Ep. 95 What if Josie and the Pussycats saved the world from being destroyed by teenagers turned into capitalist zombies?With Special Guest Ethan of MakeMineAmalgamEarth of an unknown designation as seen in the Josie & The Pussycats (2001) FilmWe take our first trip to Riverdale to cover everyone's favorite all girl band, Josie and the Pussycats! We share a quick background on Archie Comics and Josie co-creator Dan DiCarlo and how it is still a family business. Rob shares his experience working on the Archie Broadway Musical and how he played a small role in bringing current Archie mastermind Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa into Riverdale. We start off with early Josie in the 1960s before jumping ahead to discuss special guest Ethan from MakeMineAmalgam's favorite film, Josie and the Pussycats from 2001 starring Rachel Leigh Cook, Rosario Dawson, Tara Reid, Alan Cumming, Gabriel Mann, Paulo Costanzo, Missi Pyle and Parker Posey and written and directed by Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan (plus the great soundtrack by Adam Schlesinger, Adam Duritz, Jane Wiedlin, Anna Waronker, Babyface and more). In the very meta and satirical film, Josie and the Pusscats find themselves part of a global conspiracy to brainwash teens and turn them into consumerist zombies! We head back to comics with Josie's short lived revival in 2016 by Marguerite Bennett, Cameron DeOrdio, and Audrey Mok. We wrap up with some mixed reactions to an episode of Riverdale (directed by Robin Givens) that sees the return of the Pussycats. We also chat while Alexandra Cabot is the true start of the Josie-verse and could we possibly one day see a return of the Rachel Leigh Cook led version of the band. Follow Ethan at MakeMineAmalgam on Twitter and Instagram. Reading List: Josie & The Pussycats #45 (Archie Comics 1969) Josie & The Pussycats (Film 2001) Josie & The Pussycats #1 (Archie Comics 2016) Riverdale Season 5 Episode 15 (TV show 2021) Find us at https://linktr.ee/dearwatchersEmail Podcast@DearWatchers.comTheme music is Space Heroes by MaxKoMusic (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0) ★ Support this podcast ★

Record Store Day 2023 is April 22, and we're doing two back to back episodes to feature a few of the artists with titles coming out on the big day. In part one, Ivy's Dominique Durand & Andy Chase are here to talk about the late Adam Schlesinger, and their landmark 1997 album Apartment Life, in advance of the RSD 2023 release of the The Apartment Life Demos. Composer, self-styled rhythmatist, and founder of The Police, Stewart Copeland tips his hi-hat about his alter ego Klark Kent, whose self-titled album is reissued on RSD 2023. Beauty Pill mainstay Chad Clark revisits their critically acclaimed 2015 album Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are, 2000 copies of which are released on RSD 2023. RSD co-founder Carrie Colliton talks about some upcoming RSD events and releases. Go to RecordStoreDay.com for the latest news about all things RSD. Sponsored as always by Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, Tito's Handmade Vodka, and Crosley turntables. Produced, engineered, and hosted by Paul Myers, with theme music and selected interstitial music composed by Paul Myers.

We pay tribute to the amazing talent of Adam Schlesinger on the three-year anniversary of his passing.  A gifted musician, songwriter, and producer, he was a founding member of the bands: Fountains of Wayne, Ivy, and Tinted Windows.  He is also known for writing songs for TV and film, including "That Thing You Do," for the film with the same name.  Nominated for Academy, Tony, and Golden Globe Awards, he won three Emmy Awards and a Grammy, amongst others.  We discuss the wonderful music he left behind.

On this week's show, we... nerd out over highlights from last weekend's Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band show in Greensboro  spend quality time in the extended universe of Amazon Prime Video's Daisy Jones & The Six  enjoy some music from some of our other favorite faux bands  All this & much, much less! Debts No Honest Man Can Pay is over 2 rock-solid hours of musical eclectica & other noodle stories. The show started in 2003 at WHFR-FM (Dearborn, MI), moved to WGWG-FM (Boiling Springs, NC) in 2006 & Plaza Midwood Community Radio (Charlotte, NC) in 2012, with a brief pit-stop at WLFM-FM (Appleton, WI) in 2004.

Will and Nicholas discuss new releases by En Attendant Ana, Sharp Pins, and Eternal Dust, plus live reports, bonus songs, and a death of the week.

There was never a question that Ivy would make it, though they did so with many strokes of luck, good fortune, and heart ache along the way. With talented songwriters Andy Chase and Adam Schlesinger writing sophisticated pop songs showcasing their love of ‘80s and ‘90s UK music, the only thing missing was a voice to go with the sounds. Chase's girlfriend at the time (now wife), Dominique Durand, had moved to New York City from Paris to study fashion. While growing up in a house full of music journalists in France, Durand enjoyed the lifestyle and the personalities but never entertained the thought of taking center stage until she was reluctantly talked into it by Chase and Schlesinger. And the industry took notice. In the bumpy times of the mid-90s where labels were signing every band with a pulse, and subsequently dropping the ones that didn't meet sales targets, Ivy was the type of band to earn glowing reviews that didn't always translate to units shifted. 1995's debut Realistic was released by Seed Records. 1997's critically-acclaimed Apartment Life was originally put out by Atlantic Records and reissued the following year by 550 Music after Atlantic unceremoniously dropped the band while they were in the middle of a tour. Since that time, Ivy has released music on Nettwerk, Minty Fresh and, now, Bar-None, who is releasing Apartment Life on vinyl for the first time. For Chase and Durand, it's been a bittersweet few years as the rights to Apartment Life came back to the band shortly after Schlesinger passed away from Covid complications in 2020.   Songs In This Episode: Intro - The Best Thing 5:55 - I've Got A Feeling Outro - This Is The Day   Support the podcast, join the DMO UNION at Patreon. Listen to the episode archive at DigMeOutPodcast.com.

Hello punk rock prom queens! Wil Williams (VALENCE) joins us to talk about the 2001 masterpiece Josie and the Pussycats and its incredible songs. Join us, won't you, as we discuss the late Adam Schlesinger, the greatness of Alan Cumming, and for the first time get into how lyrics and music relate to each other.   My Big Score was created, hosted, and edited by Christopher Dole. All piano music performed by Christopher Dole. The main theme was composed by Erik Jourgensen. Show artwork by Chandler Candela. Our social media consultant is Ellie Warren. This series is produced in Los Angeles County on the ancestral lands of the Tongva, Tatavium, and Chumash. You can find our website at mybigscore.transistor.fm and on Twitter at @MyBigScorePod. Do you like this show? Do you want to help us make more of it? There are so many ways you can do that! The quickest and easiest way is to toss us a few dollars on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/mybigscore. You'll get early access to episodes and additional bonus material.

Episode 162 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Daydream Believer", and the later career of the Monkees, and how four Pinocchios became real boys. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Born to be Wild" by Steppenwolf. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this time, as even after splitting it into multiple files, there are simply too many Monkees tracks excerpted. The best versions of the Monkees albums are the triple-CD super-deluxe versions that used to be available from monkees.com , and I've used Andrew Sandoval's liner notes for them extensively in this episode. Sadly, though, none of those are in print. However, at the time of writing there is a new four-CD super-deluxe box set of Headquarters (with a remixed version of the album rather than the original mixes I've excerpted here) available from that site, and I used the liner notes for that here. Monkees.com also currently has the intermittently-available BluRay box set of the entire Monkees TV series, which also has Head and 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. For those just getting into the group, my advice is to start with this five-CD set, which contains their first five albums along with bonus tracks. The single biggest source of information I used in this episode is the first edition of Andrew Sandoval's The Monkees; The Day-By-Day Story. Sadly that is now out of print and goes for hundreds of pounds. Sandoval released a second edition of the book in 2021, which I was unfortunately unable to obtain, but that too is now out of print. If you can find a copy of either, do get one. Other sources used were Monkee Business by Eric Lefcowitz, and the autobiographies of three of the band members and one of the songwriters — Infinite Tuesday by Michael Nesmith, They Made a Monkee Out of Me by Davy Jones, I'm a Believer by Micky Dolenz, and Psychedelic Bubble-Gum by Bobby Hart. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Monkees, they were in a state of flux. To recap what we covered in that episode, the Monkees were originally cast as actors in a TV show, and consisted of two actors with some singing ability -- the former child stars Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz -- and two musicians who were also competent comic actors, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork.  The show was about a fictional band whose characters shared names with their actors, and there had quickly been two big hit singles, and two hit albums, taken from the music recorded for the TV show's soundtrack. But this had caused problems for the actors. The records were being promoted as being by the fictional group in the TV series, blurring the line between the TV show and reality, though in fact for the most part they were being made by session musicians with only Dolenz or Jones adding lead vocals to pre-recorded backing tracks. Dolenz and Jones were fine with this, but Nesmith, who had been allowed to write and produce a few album tracks himself, wanted more creative input, and more importantly felt that he was being asked to be complicit in fraud because the records credited the four Monkees as the musicians when (other than a tiny bit of inaudible rhythm guitar by Tork on a couple of Nesmith's tracks) none of them played on them. Tork, meanwhile, believed he had been promised that the group would be an actual group -- that they would all be playing on the records together -- and felt hurt and annoyed that this wasn't the case. They were by now playing live together to promote the series and the records, with Dolenz turning out to be a perfectly competent drummer, so surely they could do the same in the studio? So in January 1967, things came to a head. It's actually quite difficult to sort out exactly what happened, because of conflicting recollections and opinions. What follows is my best attempt to harmonise the different versions of the story into one coherent narrative, but be aware that I could be wrong in some of the details. Nesmith and Tork, who disliked each other in most respects, were both agreed that this couldn't continue and that if there were going to be Monkees records released at all, they were going to have the Monkees playing on them. Dolenz, who seems to have been the one member of the group that everyone could get along with, didn't really care but went along with them for the sake of group harmony. And Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the production team behind the series, also took Nesmith and Tork's side, through a general love of mischief. But on the other side was Don Kirshner, the music publisher who was in charge of supervising the music for the TV show. Kirshner was adamantly, angrily, opposed to the very idea of the group members having any input at all into how the records were made. He considered that they should be grateful for the huge pay cheques they were getting from records his staff writers and producers were making for them, and stop whinging. And Davy Jones was somewhere in the middle. He wanted to support his co-stars, who he genuinely liked, but also, he was a working actor, he'd had other roles before, he'd have other roles afterwards, and as a working actor you do what you're told if you don't want to lose the job you've got. Jones had grown up in very severe poverty, and had been his family's breadwinner from his early teens, and artistic integrity is all very nice, but not as nice as a cheque for a quarter of a million dollars. Although that might be slightly unfair -- it might be fairer to say that artistic integrity has a different meaning to someone like Jones, coming from musical theatre and a tradition of "the show must go on", than it does to people like Nesmith and Tork who had come up through the folk clubs. Jones' attitude may also have been affected by the fact that his character in the TV show didn't play an instrument other than the occasional tambourine or maracas. The other three were having to mime instrumental parts they hadn't played, and to reproduce them on stage, but Jones didn't have that particular disadvantage. Bert Schneider, one of the TV show's producers, encouraged the group to go into the recording studio themselves, with a producer of their choice, and cut a couple of tracks to prove what they could do. Michael Nesmith, who at this point was the one who was most adamant about taking control of the music, chose Chip Douglas to produce. Douglas was someone that Nesmith had known a little while, as they'd both played the folk circuit -- in Douglas' case as a member of the Modern Folk Quartet -- but Douglas had recently joined the Turtles as their new bass player. At this point, Douglas had never officially produced a record, but he was a gifted arranger, and had just arranged the Turtles' latest single, which had just been released and was starting to climb the charts: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] Douglas quit the Turtles to work with the Monkees, and took the group into the studio to cut two demo backing tracks for a potential single as a proof of concept. These initial sessions didn't have any vocals, but featured Nesmith on guitar, Tork on piano, Dolenz on drums, Jones on tambourine, and an unknown bass player -- possibly Douglas himself, possibly Nesmith's friend John London, who he'd played with in Mike and John and Bill. They cut rough tracks of two songs, "All of Your Toys", by another friend of Nesmith's, Bill Martin, and Nesmith's "The Girl I Knew Somewhere": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (Gold Star Demo)"] Those tracks were very rough and ready -- they were garage-band tracks rather than the professional studio recordings that the Candy Store Prophets or Jeff Barry's New York session players had provided for the previous singles -- but they were competent in the studio, thanks largely to Chip Douglas' steadying influence. As Douglas later said "They could hardly play. Mike could play adequate rhythm guitar. Pete could play piano but he'd make mistakes, and Micky's time on drums was erratic. He'd speed up or slow down." But the takes they managed to get down showed that they *could* do it. Rafelson and Schneider agreed with them that the Monkees could make a single together, and start recording at least some of their own tracks. So the group went back into the studio, with Douglas producing -- and with Lester Sill from the music publishers there to supervise -- and cut finished versions of the two songs. This time the lineup was Nesmith on guitar, Tork on electric harpsichord -- Tork had always been a fan of Bach, and would in later years perform Bach pieces as his solo spot in Monkees shows -- Dolenz on drums, London on bass, and Jones on tambourine: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (first recorded version)"] But while this was happening, Kirshner had been trying to get new Monkees material recorded without them -- he'd not yet agreed to having the group play on their own records. Three days after the sessions for "All of Your Toys" and "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", sessions started in New York for an entire album's worth of new material, produced by Jeff Barry and Denny Randell, and largely made by the same Red Bird Records team who had made "I'm a Believer" -- the same musicians who in various combinations had played on everything from "Sherry" by the Four Seasons to "Like a Rolling Stone" by Dylan to "Leader of the Pack", and with songs by Neil Diamond, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Leiber and Stoller, and the rest of the team of songwriters around Red Bird. But at this point came the meeting we talked about towards the end of the "Last Train to Clarksville" episode, in which Nesmith punched a hole in a hotel wall in frustration at what he saw as Kirshner's obstinacy. Kirshner didn't want to listen to the recordings the group had made. He'd promised Jeff Barry and Neil Diamond that if "I'm a Believer" went to number one, Barry would get to produce, and Diamond write, the group's next single. Chip Douglas wasn't a recognised producer, and he'd made this commitment. But the group needed a new single out. A compromise was offered, of sorts, by Kirshner -- how about if Barry flew over from New York to LA to produce the group, they'd scrap the tracks both the group and Barry had recorded, and Barry would produce new tracks for the songs he'd recorded, with the group playing on them? But that wouldn't work either. The group members were all due to go on holiday -- three of them were going to make staggered trips to the UK, partly to promote the TV series, which was just starting over here, and partly just to have a break. They'd been working sixty-plus hour weeks for months between the TV series, live performances, and the recording studio, and they were basically falling-down tired, which was one of the reasons for Nesmith's outburst in the meeting. They weren't accomplished enough musicians to cut tracks quickly, and they *needed* the break. On top of that, Nesmith and Barry had had a major falling-out at the "I'm a Believer" session, and Nesmith considered it a matter of personal integrity that he couldn't work with a man who in his eyes had insulted his professionalism. So that was out, but there was also no way Kirshner was going to let the group release a single consisting of two songs he hadn't heard, produced by a producer with no track record. At first, the group were insistent that "All of Your Toys" should be the A-side for their next single: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "All Of Your Toys"] But there was an actual problem with that which they hadn't foreseen. Bill Martin, who wrote the song, was under contract to another music publisher, and the Monkees' contracts said they needed to only record songs published by Screen Gems. Eventually, it was Micky Dolenz who managed to cut the Gordian knot -- or so everyone thought. Dolenz was the one who had the least at stake of any of them -- he was already secure as the voice of the hits, he had no particular desire to be an instrumentalist, but he wanted to support his colleagues. Dolenz suggested that it would be a reasonable compromise to put out a single with one of the pre-recorded backing tracks on one side, with him or Jones singing, and with the version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" that the band had recorded together on the other. That way, Kirshner and the record label would get their new single without too much delay, the group would still be able to say they'd started recording their own tracks, everyone would get some of what they wanted. So it was agreed -- though there was a further stipulation. "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" had Nesmith singing lead vocals, and up to that point every Monkees single had featured Dolenz on lead on both sides. As far as Kirshner and the other people involved in making the release decisions were concerned, that was the way things were going to continue. Everyone was fine with this -- Nesmith, the one who was most likely to object in principle, in practice realised that having Dolenz sing his song would make it more likely to be played on the radio and used in the TV show, and so increase his royalties. A vocal session was arranged in New York for Dolenz and Jones to come and cut some vocal tracks right before Dolenz and Nesmith flew over to the UK. But in the meantime, it had become even more urgent for the group to be seen to be doing their own recording. An in-depth article on the group in the Saturday Evening Post had come out, quoting Nesmith as saying "It was what Kirshner wanted to do. Our records are not our forte. I don't care if we never sell another record. Maybe we were manufactured and put on the air strictly with a lot of hoopla. Tell the world we're synthetic because, damn it, we are. Tell them the Monkees are wholly man-made overnight, that millions of dollars have been poured into this thing. Tell the world we don't record our own music. But that's us they see on television. The show is really a part of us. They're not seeing something invalid." The press immediately jumped on the band, and started trying to portray them as con artists exploiting their teenage fans, though as Nesmith later said "The press decided they were going to unload on us as being somehow illegitimate, somehow false. That we were making an attempt to dupe the public, when in fact it was me that was making the attempt to maintain the integrity. So the press went into a full-scale war against us." Tork, on the other hand, while he and Nesmith were on the same side about the band making their own records, blamed Nesmith for much of the press reaction, later saying "Michael blew the whistle on us. If he had gone in there with pride and said 'We are what we are and we have no reason to hang our heads in shame' it never would have happened." So as far as the group were concerned, they *needed* to at least go with Dolenz's suggested compromise. Their personal reputations were on the line. When Dolenz arrived at the session in New York, he was expecting to be asked to cut one vocal track, for the A-side of the next single (and presumably a new lead vocal for "The Girl I Knew Somewhere"). When he got there, though, he found that Kirshner expected him to record several vocals so that Kirshner could choose the best. That wasn't what had been agreed, and so Dolenz flat-out refused to record anything at all. Luckily for Kirshner, Jones -- who was the most co-operative member of the band -- was willing to sing a handful of songs intended for Dolenz as well as the ones he was meant to sing. So the tape of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", the song intended for the next single, was slowed down so it would be in a suitable key for Jones instead, and he recorded the vocal for that: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You"] Incidentally, while Jones recorded vocals for several more tracks at the session -- and some would later be reused as album tracks a few years down the line -- not all of the recorded tracks were used for vocals, and this later gave rise to a rumour that has been repeated as fact by almost everyone involved, though it was a misunderstanding. Kirshner's next major success after the Monkees was another made-for-TV fictional band, the Archies, and their biggest hit was "Sugar Sugar", co-written and produced by Jeff Barry: [Excerpt: The Archies, "Sugar Sugar"] Both Kirshner and the Monkees have always claimed that the Monkees were offered "Sugar, Sugar" and turned it down. To Kirshner the moral of the story was that since "Sugar, Sugar" was a massive hit, it proved his instincts right and proved that the Monkees didn't know what would make a hit. To the Monkees, on the other hand, it showed that Kirshner wanted them to do bubblegum music that they considered ridiculous. This became such an established factoid that Dolenz regularly tells the story in his live performances, and includes a version of "Sugar, Sugar" in them, rearranged as almost a torch song: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Sugar, Sugar (live)"] But in fact, "Sugar, Sugar" wasn't written until long after Kirshner and the Monkees had parted ways. But one of the songs for which a backing track was recorded but no vocals were ever completed was "Sugar Man", a song by Denny Randell and Sandy Linzer, which they would later release themselves as an unsuccessful single: [Excerpt: Linzer and Randell, "Sugar Man"] Over the years, the Monkees not recording "Sugar Man" became the Monkees not recording "Sugar, Sugar". Meanwhile, Dolenz and Nesmith had flown over to the UK to do some promotional work and relax, and Jones soon also flew over, though didn't hang out with his bandmates, preferring to spend more time with his family. Both Dolenz and Nesmith spent a lot of time hanging out with British pop stars, and were pleased to find that despite the manufactured controversy about them being a manufactured group, none of the British musicians they admired seemed to care. Eric Burdon, for example, was quoted in the Melody Maker as saying "They make very good records, I can't understand how people get upset about them. You've got to make up your minds whether a group is a record production group or one that makes live appearances. For example, I like to hear a Phil Spector record and I don't worry if it's the Ronettes or Ike and Tina Turner... I like the Monkees record as a grand record, no matter how people scream. So somebody made a record and they don't play, so what? Just enjoy the record." Similarly, the Beatles were admirers of the Monkees, especially the TV show, despite being expected to have a negative opinion of them, as you can hear in this contemporary recording of Paul McCartney answering a fan's questions: Excerpt: Paul McCartney talks about the Monkees] Both Dolenz and Nesmith hung out with the Beatles quite a bit -- they both visited Sgt. Pepper recording sessions, and if you watch the film footage of the orchestral overdubs for "A Day in the Life", Nesmith is there with all the other stars of the period. Nesmith and his wife Phyllis even stayed with the Lennons for a couple of days, though Cynthia Lennon seems to have thought of the Nesmiths as annoying intruders who had been invited out of politeness and not realised they weren't wanted. That seems plausible, but at the same time, John Lennon doesn't seem the kind of person to not make his feelings known, and Michael Nesmith's reports of the few days they stayed there seem to describe a very memorable experience, where after some initial awkwardness he developed a bond with Lennon, particularly once he saw that Lennon was a fan of Captain Beefheart, who was a friend of Nesmith, and whose Safe as Milk album Lennon was examining when Nesmith turned up, and whose music at this point bore a lot of resemblance to the kind of thing Nesmith was doing: [Excerpt: Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, "Yellow Brick Road"] Or at least, that's how Nesmith always told the story later -- though Safe as Milk didn't come out until nearly six months later. It's possible he's conflating memories from a later trip to the UK in June that year -- where he also talked about how Lennon was the only person he'd really got on with on the previous trip, because "he's a compassionate person. I know he has a reputation for being caustic, but it is only a cover for the depth of his feeling." Nesmith and Lennon apparently made some experimental music together during the brief stay, with Nesmith being impressed by Lennon's Mellotron and later getting one himself. Dolenz, meanwhile, was spending more time with Paul McCartney, and with Spencer Davis of his current favourite band The Spencer Davis Group. But even more than that he was spending a lot of time with Samantha Juste, a model and TV presenter whose job it was to play the records on Top of the Pops, the most important British TV pop show, and who had released a record herself a couple of months earlier, though it hadn't been a success: [Excerpt: Samantha Juste, "No-one Needs My Love Today"] The two quickly fell deeply in love, and Juste would become Dolenz's first wife the next year. When Nesmith and Dolenz arrived back in the US after their time off, they thought the plan was still to release "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" with "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" on the B-side. So Nesmith was horrified to hear on the radio what the announcer said were the two sides of the new Monkees single -- "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", and "She Hangs Out", another song from the Jeff Barry sessions with a Davy vocal. Don Kirshner had gone ahead and picked two songs from the Jeff Barry sessions and delivered them to RCA Records, who had put a single out in Canada. The single was very, *very* quickly withdrawn once the Monkees and the TV producers found out, and only promo copies seem to circulate -- rather than being credited to "the Monkees", both sides are credited to '"My Favourite Monkee" Davy Jones Sings'. The record had been withdrawn, but "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" was clearly going to have to be the single. Three days after the record was released and pulled, Nesmith, Dolenz and Tork were back in the studio with Chip Douglas, recording a new B-side -- a new version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", this time with Dolenz on vocals. As Jones was still in the UK, John London added the tambourine part as well as the bass: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] As Nesmith told the story a couple of months later, "Bert said 'You've got to get this thing in Micky's key for Micky to sing it.' I said 'Has Donnie made a commitment? I don't want to go there and break my neck in order to get this thing if Donnie hasn't made a commitment. And Bert refused to say anything. He said 'I can't tell you anything except just go and record.'" What had happened was that the people at Columbia had had enough of Kirshner. As far as Rafelson and Schneider were concerned, the real problem in all this was that Kirshner had been making public statements taking all the credit for the Monkees' success and casting himself as the puppetmaster. They thought this was disrespectful to the performers -- and unstated but probably part of it, that it was disrespectful to Rafelson and Schneider for their work putting the TV show together -- and that Kirshner had allowed his ego to take over. Things like the liner notes for More of the Monkees which made Kirshner and his stable of writers more important than the performers had, in the view of the people at Raybert Productions, put the Monkees in an impossible position and forced them to push back. Schneider later said "Kirshner had an ego that transcended everything else. As a matter of fact, the press issue was probably magnified a hundred times over because of Kirshner. He wanted everybody thinking 'Hey, he's doing all this, not them.' In the end it was very self-destructive because it heightened the whole press issue and it made them feel lousy." Kirshner was out of a job, first as the supervisor for the Monkees and then as the head of Columbia/Screen Gems Music. In his place came Lester Sill, the man who had got Leiber and Stoller together as songwriters, who had been Lee Hazelwood's production partner on his early records with Duane Eddy, and who had been the "Les" in Philles Records until Phil Spector pushed him out. Sill, unlike Kirshner, was someone who was willing to take a back seat and just be a steadying hand where needed. The reissued version of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" went to number two on the charts, behind "Somethin' Stupid" by Frank and Nancy Sinatra, produced by Sill's old colleague Hazelwood, and the B-side, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", also charted separately, making number thirty-nine on the charts. The Monkees finally had a hit that they'd written and recorded by themselves. Pinocchio had become a real boy: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] At the same session at which they'd recorded that track, the Monkees had recorded another Nesmith song, "Sunny Girlfriend", and that became the first song to be included on a new album, which would eventually be named Headquarters, and on which all the guitar, keyboard, drums, percussion, banjo, pedal steel, and backing vocal parts would for the first time be performed by the Monkees themselves. They brought in horn and string players on a couple of tracks, and the bass was variously played by John London, Chip Douglas, and Jerry Yester as Tork was more comfortable on keyboards and guitar than bass, but it was in essence a full band album. Jones got back the next day, and sessions began in earnest. The first song they recorded after his return was "Mr. Webster", a Boyce and Hart song that had been recorded with the Candy Store Prophets in 1966 but hadn't been released. This was one of three tracks on the album that were rerecordings of earlier outtakes, and it's fascinating to compare them, to see the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. In the case of "Mr. Webster", the instrumental backing on the earlier version is definitely slicker: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (1st Recorded Version)"] But at the same time, there's a sense of dynamics in the group recording that's lacking from the original, like the backing dropping out totally on the word "Stop" -- a nice touch that isn't in the original. I am only speculating, but this may have been inspired by the similar emphasis on the word "stop" in "For What It's Worth" by Tork's old friend Stephen Stills: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (album version)"] Headquarters was a group album in another way though -- for the first time, Tork and Dolenz were bringing in songs they'd written -- Nesmith of course had supplied songs already for the two previous albums. Jones didn't write any songs himself yet, though he'd start on the next album, but he was credited with the rest of the group on two joke tracks, "Band 6", a jam on the Merrie Melodies theme “Merrily We Roll Along”, and "Zilch", a track made up of the four band members repeating nonsense phrases: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Zilch"] Oddly, that track had a rather wider cultural resonance than a piece of novelty joke album filler normally would. It's sometimes covered live by They Might Be Giants: [Excerpt: They Might Be Giants, "Zilch"] While the rapper Del Tha Funkee Homosapien had a worldwide hit in 1991 with "Mistadobalina", built around a sample of Peter Tork from the track: [Excerpt: Del Tha Funkee Homosapien,"Mistadobalina"] Nesmith contributed three songs, all of them combining Beatles-style pop music and country influences, none more blatantly than the opening track, "You Told Me", which starts off parodying the opening of "Taxman", before going into some furious banjo-picking from Tork: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "You Told Me"] Tork, meanwhile, wrote "For Pete's Sake" with his flatmate of the time, and that became the end credits music for season two of the TV series: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "For Pete's Sake"] But while the other band members made important contributions, the track on the album that became most popular was the first song of Dolenz's to be recorded by the group. The lyrics recounted, in a semi-psychedelic manner, Dolenz's time in the UK, including meeting with the Beatles, who the song refers to as "the four kings of EMI", but the first verse is all about his new girlfriend Samantha Juste: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The song was released as a single in the UK, but there was a snag. Dolenz had given the song a title he'd heard on an episode of the BBC sitcom Til Death Us Do Part, which he'd found an amusing bit of British slang. Til Death Us Do Part was written by Johnny Speight, a writer with Associated London Scripts, and was a family sitcom based around the character of Alf Garnett, an ignorant, foul-mouthed reactionary bigot who hated young people, socialists, and every form of minority, especially Black people (who he would address by various slurs I'm definitely not going to repeat here), and was permanently angry at the world and abusive to his wife. As with another great sitcom from ALS, Steptoe and Son, which Norman Lear adapted for the US as Sanford and Son, Til Death Us Do Part was also adapted by Lear, and became All in the Family. But while Archie Bunker, the character based on Garnett in the US version, has some redeeming qualities because of the nature of US network sitcom, Alf Garnett has absolutely none, and is as purely unpleasant and unsympathetic a character as has ever been created -- which sadly didn't stop a section of the audience from taking him as a character to be emulated. A big part of the show's dynamic was the relationship between Garnett and his socialist son-in-law from Liverpool, played by Anthony Booth, himself a Liverpudlian socialist who would later have a similarly contentious relationship with his own decidedly non-socialist son-in-law, the future Prime Minister Tony Blair. Garnett was as close to foul-mouthed as was possible on British TV at the time, with Speight regularly negotiating with the BBC bosses to be allowed to use terms that were not otherwise heard on TV, and used various offensive terms about his family, including referring to his son-in-law as a "randy Scouse git". Dolenz had heard the phrase on TV, had no idea what it meant but loved the sound of it, and gave the song that title. But when the record came out in the UK, he was baffled to be told that the phrase -- which he'd picked up from a BBC TV show, after all -- couldn't be said normally on BBC broadcasts, so they would need to retitle the track. The translation into American English that Dolenz uses in his live shows to explain this to Americans is to say that "randy Scouse git" means "horny Liverpudlian putz", and that's more or less right. Dolenz took the need for an alternative title literally, and so the track that went to number two in the UK charts was titled "Alternate Title": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The album itself went to number one in both the US and the UK, though it was pushed off the top spot almost straight away by the release of Sgt Pepper. As sessions for Headquarters were finishing up, the group were already starting to think about their next album -- season two of the TV show was now in production, and they'd need to keep generating yet more musical material for it. One person they turned to was a friend of Chip Douglas'. Before the Turtles, Douglas had been in the Modern Folk Quartet, and they'd recorded "This Could Be the Night", which had been written for them by Harry Nilsson: [Excerpt: The MFQ, "This Could Be The Night"] Nilsson had just started recording his first solo album proper, at RCA Studios, the same studios that the Monkees were using. At this point, Nilsson still had a full-time job in a bank, working a night shift there while working on his album during the day, but Douglas knew that Nilsson was a major talent, and that assessment was soon shared by the group when Nilsson came in to demo nine of his songs for them: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "1941 (demo)"] According to Nilsson, Nesmith said after that demo session "You just sat down there and blew our minds. We've been looking for songs, and you just sat down and played an *album* for us!" While the Monkees would attempt a few of Nilsson's songs over the next year or so, the first one they chose to complete was the first track recorded for their next album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, Ltd., a song which from the talkback at the beginning of the demo was always intended for Davy Jones to sing: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "Cuddly Toy (demo)"] Oddly, given his romantic idol persona, a lot of the songs given to Jones to sing were anti-romantic, and often had a cynical and misogynistic edge. This had started with the first album's "I Want to Be Free", but by Pisces, it had gone to ridiculous extremes. Of the four songs Jones sings on the album, "Hard to Believe", the first song proper that he ever co-wrote, is a straightforward love  song, but the other three have a nasty edge to them. A remade version of Jeff Barry's "She Hangs Out" is about an underaged girl, starts with the lines "How old d'you say your sister was? You know you'd better keep an eye on her" and contains lines like "she could teach you a thing or two" and "you'd better get down here on the double/before she gets her pretty little self in trouble/She's so fine". Goffin and King's "Star Collector" is worse, a song about a groupie with lines like "How can I love her, if I just don't respect her?" and "It won't take much time, before I get her off my mind" But as is so often the way, these rather nasty messages were wrapped up in some incredibly catchy music, and that was even more the case with "Cuddly Toy", a song which at least is more overtly unpleasant -- it's very obvious that Nilsson doesn't intend the protagonist of the song to be at all sympathetic, which is possibly not the case in "She Hangs Out" or "Star Collector". But the character Jones is singing is *viciously* cruel here, mocking and taunting a girl who he's coaxed to have sex with him, only to scorn her as soon as he's got what he wanted: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Cuddly Toy"] It's a great song if you like the cruelest of humour combined with the cheeriest of music, and the royalties from the song allowed Nilsson to quit the job at the bank. "Cuddly Toy", and Chip Douglas and Bill Martin's song "The Door Into Summer", were recorded the same way as Headquarters, with the group playing *as a group*, but as recordings for the album progressed the group fell into a new way of working, which Peter Tork later dubbed "mixed-mode". They didn't go back to having tracks cut for them by session musicians, apart from Jones' song "Hard to Believe", for which the entire backing track was created by one of his co-writers overdubbing himself, but Dolenz, who Tork always said was "incapable of repeating a triumph", was not interested in continuing to play drums in the studio. Instead, a new hybrid Monkees would perform most of the album. Nesmith would still play the lead guitar, Tork would provide the keyboards, Chip Douglas would play all the bass and add some additional guitar, and "Fast" Eddie Hoh, the session drummer who had been a touring drummer with the Modern Folk Quartet and the Mamas and the Papas, among others, would play drums on the records, with Dolenz occasionally adding a bit of acoustic guitar. And this was the lineup that would perform on the hit single from Pisces. "Pleasant Valley Sunday" was written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who had written several songs for the group's first two albums (and who would continue to provide them with more songs). As with their earlier songs for the group, King had recorded a demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] Previously -- and subsequently -- when presented with a Carole King demo, the group and their producers would just try to duplicate it as closely as possible, right down to King's phrasing. Bob Rafelson has said that he would sometimes hear those demos and wonder why King didn't just make records herself -- and without wanting to be too much of a spoiler for a few years' time, he wasn't the only one wondering that. But this time, the group had other plans. In particular, they wanted to make a record with a strong guitar riff to it -- Nesmith has later referenced their own "Last Train to Clarksville" and the Beatles' "Day Tripper" as two obvious reference points for the track. Douglas came up with a riff and taught it to Nesmith, who played it on the track: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] The track also ended with the strongest psychedelic -- or "psycho jello" as the group would refer to it -- freak out that they'd done to this point, a wash of saturated noise: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] King was unhappy with the results, and apparently glared at Douglas the next time they met. This may be because of the rearrangement from her intentions, but it may also be for a reason that Douglas later suspected. When recording the track, he hadn't been able to remember all the details of her demo, and in particular he couldn't remember exactly how the middle eight went. This is the version on King's demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] While here's how the Monkees rendered it, with slightly different lyrics: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] I also think there's a couple of chord changes in the second verse that differ between King and the Monkees, but I can't be sure that's not my ears deceiving me. Either way, though, the track was a huge success, and became one of the group's most well-known and well-loved tracks, making number three on the charts behind "All You Need is Love" and "Light My Fire". And while it isn't Dolenz drumming on the track, the fact that it's Nesmith playing guitar and Tork on the piano -- and the piano part is one of the catchiest things on the record -- meant that they finally had a proper major hit on which they'd played (and it seems likely that Dolenz contributed some of the acoustic rhythm guitar on the track, along with Bill Chadwick, and if that's true all three Monkee instrumentalists did play on the track). Pisces is by far and away the best album the group ever made, and stands up well against anything else that came out around that time. But cracks were beginning to show in the group. In particular, the constant battle to get some sort of creative input had soured Nesmith on the whole project. Chip Douglas later said "When we were doing Pisces Michael would come in with three songs; he knew he had three songs coming on the album. He knew that he was making a lot of money if he got his original songs on there. So he'd be real enthusiastic and cooperative and real friendly and get his three songs done. Then I'd say 'Mike, can you come in and help on this one we're going to do with Micky here?' He said 'No, Chip, I can't. I'm busy.' I'd say, 'Mike, you gotta come in the studio.' He'd say 'No Chip, I'm afraid I'm just gonna have to be ornery about it. I'm not comin' in.' That's when I started not liking Mike so much any more." Now, as is so often the case with the stories from this period, this appears to be inaccurate in the details -- Nesmith is present on every track on the album except Jones' solo "Hard to Believe" and Tork's spoken-word track "Peter Percival Patterson's Pet Pig Porky", and indeed this is by far the album with *most* Nesmith input, as he takes five lead vocals, most of them on songs he didn't write. But Douglas may well be summing up Nesmith's *attitude* to the band at this point -- listening to Nesmith's commentaries on episodes of the TV show, by this point he felt disengaged from everything that was going on, like his opinions weren't welcome. That said, Nesmith did still contribute what is possibly the single most innovative song the group ever did, though the innovations weren't primarily down to Nesmith: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Nesmith always described the lyrics to "Daily Nightly" as being about the riots on Sunset Strip, but while they're oblique, they seem rather to be about streetwalking sex workers -- though it's perhaps understandable that Nesmith would never admit as much. What made the track innovative was the use of the Moog synthesiser. We talked about Robert Moog in the episode on "Good Vibrations" -- he had started out as a Theremin manufacturer, and had built the ribbon synthesiser that Mike Love played live on "Good Vibrations", and now he was building the first commercially available easily usable synthesisers. Previously, electronic instruments had either been things like the clavioline -- a simple monophonic keyboard instrument that didn't have much tonal variation -- or the RCA Mark II, a programmable synth that could make a wide variety of sounds, but took up an entire room and was programmed with punch cards. Moog's machines were bulky but still transportable, and they could be played in real time with a keyboard, but were still able to be modified to make a wide variety of different sounds. While, as we've seen, there had been electronic keyboard instruments as far back as the 1930s, Moog's instruments were for all intents and purposes the first synthesisers as we now understand the term. The Moog was introduced in late spring 1967, and immediately started to be used for making experimental and novelty records, like Hal Blaine's track "Love In", which came out at the beginning of June: [Excerpt: Hal Blaine, "Love In"] And the Electric Flag's soundtrack album for The Trip, the drug exploitation film starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and written by Jack Nicholson we talked about last time, when Arthur Lee moved into a house used in the film: [Excerpt: The Electric Flag, "Peter's Trip"] In 1967 there were a total of six albums released with a Moog on them (as well as one non-album experimental single). Four of the albums were experimental or novelty instrumental albums of this type. Only two of them were rock albums -- Strange Days by the Doors, and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones Ltd by the Monkees. The Doors album was released first, but I believe the Monkees tracks were recorded before the Doors overdubbed the Moog on the tracks on their album, though some session dates are hard to pin down exactly. If that's the case it would make the Monkees the very first band to use the Moog on an actual rock record (depending on exactly how you count the Trip soundtrack -- this gets back again to my old claim that there's no first anything). But that's not the only way in which "Daily Nightly" was innovative. All the first seven albums to feature the Moog featured one man playing the instrument -- Paul Beaver, the Moog company's West Coast representative, who played on all the novelty records by members of the Wrecking Crew, and on the albums by the Electric Flag and the Doors, and on The Notorious Byrd Brothers by the Byrds, which came out in early 1968. And Beaver did play the Moog on one track on Pisces, "Star Collector". But on "Daily Nightly" it's Micky Dolenz playing the Moog, making him definitely the second person ever to play a Moog on a record of any kind: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Dolenz indeed had bought his own Moog -- widely cited as being the second one ever in private ownership, a fact I can't check but which sounds plausible given that by 1970 less than thirty musicians owned one -- after seeing Beaver demonstrate the instrument at the Monterey Pop Festival. The Monkees hadn't played Monterey, but both Dolenz and Tork had attended the festival -- if you watch the famous film of it you see Dolenz and his girlfriend Samantha in the crowd a *lot*, while Tork introduced his friends in the Buffalo Springfield. As well as discovering the Moog there, Dolenz had been astonished by something else: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Hey Joe (Live at Monterey)"] As Peter Tork later put it "I didn't get it. At Monterey Jimi followed the Who and the Who busted up their things and Jimi bashed up his guitar. I said 'I just saw explosions and destruction. Who needs it?' But Micky got it. He saw the genius and went for it." Dolenz was astonished by Hendrix, and insisted that he should be the support act on the group's summer tour. This pairing might sound odd on paper, but it made more sense at the time than it might sound. The Monkees were by all accounts a truly astonishing live act at this point -- Frank Zappa gave them a backhanded compliment by saying they were the best-sounding band in LA, before pointing out that this was because they could afford the best equipment. That *was* true, but it was also the case that their TV experience gave them a different attitude to live performance than anyone else performing at the time. A handful of groups had started playing stadiums, most notably of course the Beatles, but all of these acts had come up through playing clubs and theatres and essentially just kept doing their old act with no thought as to how the larger space worked, except to put their amps through a louder PA. The Monkees, though, had *started* in stadiums, and had started out as mass entertainers, and so their live show was designed from the ground up to play to those larger spaces. They had costume changes, elaborate stage sets -- like oversized fake Vox amps they burst out of at the start of the show -- a light show and a screen on which film footage was projected. In effect they invented stadium performances as we now know them. Nesmith later said "In terms of putting on a show there was never any question in my mind, as far as the rock 'n' roll era is concerned, that we put on probably the finest rock and roll stage show ever. It was beautifully lit, beautifully costumed, beautifully produced. I mean, for Christ sakes, it was practically a revue." The Monkees were confident enough in their stage performance that at a recent show at the Hollywood Bowl they'd had Ike and Tina Turner as their opening act -- not an act you'd want to go on after if you were going to be less than great, and an act from very similar chitlin' circuit roots to Jimi Hendrix. So from their perspective, it made sense. If you're going to be spectacular yourselves, you have no need to fear a spectacular opening act. Hendrix was less keen -- he was about the only musician in Britain who *had* made disparaging remarks about the Monkees -- but opening for the biggest touring band in the world isn't an opportunity you pass up, and again it isn't such a departure as one might imagine from the bills he was already playing. Remember that Monterey is really the moment when "pop" and "rock" started to split -- the split we've been talking about for a few months now -- and so the Jimi Hendrix Experience were still considered a pop band, and as such had played the normal British pop band package tours. In March and April that year, they'd toured on a bill with the Walker Brothers, Cat Stevens, and Englebert Humperdinck -- and Hendrix had even filled in for Humperdinck's sick guitarist on one occasion. Nesmith, Dolenz, and Tork all loved having Hendrix on tour with them, just because it gave them a chance to watch him live every night (Jones, whose musical tastes were more towards Anthony Newley, wasn't especially impressed), and they got on well on a personal level -- there are reports of Hendrix jamming with Dolenz and Steve Stills in hotel rooms. But there was one problem, as Dolenz often recreates in his live act: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Purple Haze"] The audience response to Hendrix from the Monkees' fans was so poor that by mutual agreement he left the tour after only a handful of shows. After the summer tour, the group went back to work on the TV show and their next album. Or, rather, four individuals went back to work. By this point, the group had drifted apart from each other, and from Douglas -- Tork, the one who was still keenest on the idea of the group as a group, thought that Pisces, good as it was, felt like a Chip Douglas album rather than a Monkees album. The four band members had all by now built up their own retinues of hangers-on and collaborators, and on set for the TV show they were now largely staying with their own friends rather than working as a group. And that was now reflected in their studio work. From now on, rather than have a single producer working with them as a band, the four men would work as individuals, producing their own tracks, occasionally with outside help, and bringing in session musicians to work on them. Some tracks from this point on would be genuine Monkees -- plural -- tracks, and all tracks would be credited as "produced by the Monkees", but basically the four men would from now on be making solo tracks which would be combined into albums, though Dolenz and Jones would occasionally guest on tracks by the others, especially when Nesmith came up with a song he thought would be more suited to their voices. Indeed the first new recording that happened after the tour was an entire Nesmith solo album -- a collection of instrumental versions of his songs, called The Wichita Train Whistle Sings, played by members of the Wrecking Crew and a few big band instrumentalists, arranged by Shorty Rogers. [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith, "You Told Me"] Hal Blaine in his autobiography claimed that the album was created as a tax write-off for Nesmith, though Nesmith always vehemently denied it, and claimed it was an artistic experiment, though not one that came off well. Released alongside Pisces, though, came one last group-recorded single. The B-side, "Goin' Down", is a song that was credited to the group and songwriter Diane Hildebrand, though in fact it developed from a jam on someone else's song. Nesmith, Tork, Douglas and Hoh attempted to record a backing track for a version of Mose Allison's jazz-blues standard "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] But after recording it, they'd realised that it didn't sound that much like the original, and that all it had in common with it was a chord sequence. Nesmith suggested that rather than put it out as a cover version, they put a new melody and lyrics to it, and they commissioned Hildebrand, who'd co-written songs for the group before, to write them, and got Shorty Rogers to write a horn arrangement to go over their backing track. The eventual songwriting credit was split five ways, between Hildebrand and the four Monkees -- including Davy Jones who had no involvement with the recording, but not including Douglas or Hoh. The lyrics Hildebrand came up with were a funny patter song about a failed suicide, taken at an extremely fast pace, which Dolenz pulls off magnificently: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Goin' Down"] The A-side, another track with a rhythm track by Nesmith, Tork, Douglas, and Hoh, was a song that had been written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, who you may remember from the episode on "San Francisco" as being a former songwriting partner of John Phillips. Stewart had written the song as part of a "suburbia trilogy", and was not happy with the finished product. He said later "I remember going to bed thinking 'All I did today was write 'Daydream Believer'." Stewart used to include the song in his solo sets, to no great approval, and had shopped the song around to bands like We Five and Spanky And Our Gang, who had both turned it down. He was unhappy with it himself, because of the chorus: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] Stewart was ADHD, and the words "to a", coming as they did slightly out of the expected scansion for the line, irritated him so greatly that he thought the song could never be recorded by anyone, but when Chip Douglas asked if he had any songs, he suggested that one. As it turned out, there was a line of lyric that almost got the track rejected, but it wasn't the "to a". Stewart's original second verse went like this: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] RCA records objected to the line "now you know how funky I can be" because funky, among other meanings, meant smelly, and they didn't like the idea of Davy Jones singing about being smelly. Chip Douglas phoned Stewart to tell him that they were insisting on changing the line, and suggesting "happy" instead. Stewart objected vehemently -- that change would reverse the entire meaning of the line, and it made no sense, and what about artistic integrity? But then, as he later said "He said 'Let me put it to you this way, John. If he can't sing 'happy' they won't do it'. And I said 'Happy's working real good for me now.' That's exactly what I said to him." He never regretted the decision -- Stewart would essentially live off the royalties from "Daydream Believer" for the rest of his life -- though he seemed always to be slightly ambivalent and gently mocking about the song in his own performances, often changing the lyrics slightly: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] The Monkees had gone into the studio and cut the track, again with Tork on piano, Nesmith on guitar, Douglas on bass, and Hoh on drums. Other than changing "funky" to "happy", there were two major changes made in the studio. One seems to have been Douglas' idea -- they took the bass riff from the pre-chorus to the Beach Boys' "Help Me Rhonda": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me Rhonda"] and Douglas played that on the bass as the pre-chorus for "Daydream Believer", with Shorty Rogers later doubling it in the horn arrangement: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] And the other is the piano intro, which also becomes an instrumental bridge, which was apparently the invention of Tork, who played it: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] The track went to number one, becoming the group's third and final number one hit, and their fifth of six million-sellers. It was included on the next album, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees, but that piano part would be Tork's only contribution to the album. As the group members were all now writing songs and cutting their own tracks, and were also still rerecording the odd old unused song from the initial 1966 sessions, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees was pulled together from a truly astonishing amount of material. The expanded triple-CD version of the album, now sadly out of print, has multiple versions of forty-four different songs, ranging from simple acoustic demos to completed tracks, of which twelve were included on the final album. Tork did record several tracks during the sessions, but he spent much of the time recording and rerecording a single song, "Lady's Baby", which eventually stretched to five different recorded versions over multiple sessions in a five-month period. He racked up huge studio bills on the track, bringing in Steve Stills and Dewey Martin of the Buffalo Springfield, and Buddy Miles, to try to help him capture the sound in his head, but the various takes are almost indistinguishable from one another, and so it's difficult to see what the problem was: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Lady's Baby"] Either way, the track wasn't finished by the time the album came out, and the album that came out was a curiously disjointed and unsatisfying effort, a mixture of recycled old Boyce and Hart songs, some songs by Jones, who at this point was convinced that "Broadway-rock" was going to be the next big thing and writing songs that sounded like mediocre showtunes, and a handful of experimental songs written by Nesmith. You could pull together a truly great ten- or twelve-track album from the masses of material they'd recorded, but the one that came out was mediocre at best, and became the first Monkees album not to make number one -- though it still made number three and sold in huge numbers. It also had the group's last million-selling single on it, "Valleri", an old Boyce and Hart reject from 1966 that had been remade with Boyce and Hart producing and their old session players, though the production credit was still now given to the Monkees: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Valleri"] Nesmith said at the time he considered it the worst song ever written. The second season of the TV show was well underway, and despite -- or possibly because of -- the group being clearly stoned for much of the filming, it contains a lot of the episodes that fans of the group think of most fondly, including several episodes that break out of the formula the show had previously established in interesting ways. Tork and Dolenz were both also given the opportunity to direct episodes, and Dolenz also co-wrote his episode, which ended up being the last of the series. In another sign of how the group were being given more creative control over the show, the last three episodes of the series had guest appearances by favourite musicians of the group members who they wanted to give a little exposure to, and those guest appearances sum up the character of the band members remarkably well. Tork, for whatever reason, didn't take up this option, but the other three did. Jones brought on his friend Charlie Smalls, who would later go on to write the music for the Broadway musical The Wiz, to demonstrate to Jones the difference between Smalls' Black soul and Jones' white soul: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and Charlie Smalls] Nesmith, on the other hand, brought on Frank Zappa. Zappa put on Nesmith's Monkee shirt and wool hat and pretended to be Nesmith, and interviewed Nesmith with a false nose and moustache pretending to be Zappa, as they both mercilessly mocked the previous week's segment with Jones and Smalls: [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith and Frank Zappa] Nesmith then "conducted" Zappa as Zappa used a sledgehammer to "play" a car, parodying his own appearance on the Steve Allen Show playing a bicycle, to the presumed bemusement of the Monkees' fanbase who would not be likely to remember a one-off performance on a late-night TV show from five years earlier. And the final thing ever to be shown on an episode of the Monkees didn't feature any of the Monkees at all. Micky Dolenz, who directed and co-wrote that episode, about an evil wizard who was using the power of a space plant (named after the group's slang for dope) to hypnotise people through the TV, chose not to interact with his guest as the others had, but simply had Tim Buckley perform a solo acoustic version of his then-unreleased song "Song to the Siren": [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Song to the Siren"] By the end of the second season, everyone knew they didn't want to make another season of the TV show. Instead, they were going to do what Rafelson and Schneider had always wanted, and move into film. The planning stages for the film, which was initially titled Changes but later titled Head -- so that Rafelson and Schneider could bill their next film as "From the guys who gave you Head" -- had started the previous summer, before the sessions that produced The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees. To write the film, the group went off with Rafelson and Schneider for a short holiday, and took with them their mutual friend Jack Nicholson. Nicholson was at this time not the major film star he later became. Rather he was a bit-part actor who was mostly associated with American International Pictures, the ultra-low-budget film company that has come up on several occasions in this podcast. Nicholson had appeared mostly in small roles, in films like The Little Shop of Horrors: [Excerpt: The Little Shop of Horrors] He'd appeared in multiple films made by Roger Corman, often appearing with Boris Karloff, and by Monte Hellman, but despite having been a working actor for a decade, his acting career was going nowhere, and by this point he had basically given up on the idea of being an actor, and had decided to start working behind the camera. He'd written the scripts for a few of the low-budget films he'd appeared in, and he'd recently scripted The Trip, the film we mentioned earlier: [Excerpt: The Trip trailer] So the group, Rafelson, Schneider, and Nicholson all went away for a weekend, and they all got extremely stoned, took acid, and talked into a tape recorder for hours on end. Nicholson then transcribed those recordings, cleaned them up, and structured the worthwhile ideas into something quite remarkable: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Ditty Diego"] If the Monkees TV show had been inspired by the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges, and by Richard Lester's directorial style, the only precursor I can find for Head is in the TV work of Lester's colleague Spike Milligan, but I don't think there's any reasonable way in which Nicholson or anyone else involved could have taken inspiration from Milligan's series Q.  But what they ended up with is something that resembles, more than anything else, Monty Python's Flying Circus, a TV series that wouldn't start until a year after Head came out. It's a series of ostensibly unconnected sketches, linked by a kind of dream logic, with characters wandering from one loose narrative into a totally different one, actors coming out of character on a regular basis, and no attempt at a coherent narrative. It contains regular examples of channel-zapping, with excerpts from old films being spliced in, and bits of news footage juxtaposed with comedy sketches and musical performances in ways that are sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes distasteful, and occasionally both -- as when a famous piece of footage of a Vietnamese prisoner of war being shot in the head hard-cuts to screaming girls in the audience at a Monkees concert, a performance which ends with the girls tearing apart the group and revealing that they're really just cheap-looking plastic mannequins. The film starts, and ends, with the Monkees themselves attempting suicide, jumping off a bridge into the ocean -- but the end reveals that in fact the ocean they're in is just water in a glass box, and they're trapped in it. And knowing this means that when you watch the film a second time, you find that it does have a story. The Monkees are trapped in a box which in some ways represents life, the universe, and one's own mind, and in other ways represents the TV and their TV careers. Each of them is trying in his own way to escape, and each ends up trapped by his own limitations, condemned to start the cycle over and over again. The film features parodies of popular film genres like the boxing film (Davy is supposed to throw a fight with Sonny Liston at the instruction of gangsters), the Western, and the war film, but huge chunks of the film take place on a film studio backlot, and characters from one segment reappear in another, often commenting negatively on the film or the band, as when Frank Zappa as a critic calls Davy Jones' soft-shoe routine to a Harry Nilsson song "very white", or when a canteen worker in the studio calls the group "God's gift to the eight-year-olds". The film is constantly deconstructing and commenting on itself and the filmmaking process -- Tork hits that canteen worker, whose wig falls off revealing the actor playing her to be a man, and then it's revealed that the "behind the scenes" footage is itself scripted, as director Bob Rafelson and scriptwriter Jack Nicholson come into frame and reassure Tork, who's concerned that hitting a woman would be bad for his image. They tell him they can always cut it from the finished film if it doesn't work. While "Ditty Diego", the almost rap rewriting of the Monkees theme we heard earlier, sets out a lot of how the film asks to be interpreted and how it works narratively, the *spiritual* and thematic core of the film is in another song, Tork's "Long Title (Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?)", which in later solo performances Tork would give the subtitle "The Karma Blues": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Long Title (Do I Have To Do This All Over Again?)"] Head is an extraordinary film, and one it's impossible to sum up in anything less than an hour-long episode of its own. It's certainly not a film that's to everyone's taste, and not every aspect of it works -- it is a film that is absolutely of its time, in ways that are both good and bad. But it's one of the most inventive things ever put out by a major film studio, and it's one that rightly secured the Monkees a certain amount of cult credibility over the decades. The soundtrack album is a return to form after the disappointing Birds, Bees, too. Nicholson put the album together, linking the eight songs in the film with collages of dialogue and incidental music, repurposing and recontextualising the dialogue to create a new experience, one that people have compared with Frank Zappa's contemporaneous We're Only In It For The Money, though while t

We end 2022 by covering the 2012 James Iha solo album "Look To The Sky", the sonically ambitious follow-up to Iha's first solo album "Let It Come Down". Pat remains out and Frank battles a cold but here to help Frank cover this overlooked gem is Patreon member and Aussie Pumpkinhead David Jepsen! We talk about the album's excellent production, James gettin' sleazy by aping Iggy Pop, "Sad Happy Songs" and the incredible stable of James' talented friends appearing on the album including Karen O & Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne, Nina Persson of The Cardigans, Sara Quin of Tegan and Sara, Mike Garson, Tom Verlaine of Television and Nathan Larson of Shudder to Think. Pump this 'kast while your eyes are glued on a valium gloomy day! How to support the 'kast: NEW ! MERCH Our PATREON buymeacoffee.com/Pumpkast Please rate and review us! Follow us on the socials: Twitter: @PumpkinsPodcast Instagram: @smashingpumpkast TikTok: @smashingpumpkast

In our first ever live performance, we talk about the music we love, and Mutlu plays covers from all of the artists, including; Amy Winehouse, The Killers, Prince, Cinderella, Adam Schlesinger, and Men Without Hats. Then, Mutlu leads a sing along of the greatest sitcom themes of all time. Thank you for nearly 100 episodes of The Carl Landry Record Club! For a list of album reviews and to submit yours, go to https://linktr.ee/thecarl. This is Carl Landry Record Club episode #97. The theme music for the podcast is from Marian Hill. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/brett-eskin/message

Bloom talks about writing songs for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and losing her musical collaborator Adam Schlesinger, who died from COVID-19 complications in March 2020. She now stars in the Hulu series Reboot as a writer who wants to reboot an old family sitcom from the early 2000s — but make it darker and edgier. She spoke with contributor Ann Marie Baldonado. Also, Maureen Corrigan reviews Celeste Ng's new novel Our Missing Hearts.

It's Casual Friday! Sam and Emma host Alex Pareene, Contributing Editor at the New Republic and proprietor of the AP newsletter on Substack, to round up the week in news. Then, Sam and Emma are joined by comedian Sarah Silverman to discuss her recent Off-Broadway musical The Bedwetter! First, Emma and Sam walk through the news, including NYC tightening their stringent gun laws, the social security trust getting extended by at least a year, Florida ending gender-affirming healthcare… for adults on medicaid, and Biden visiting Saudi Arabia as OPEC announces a production boost. Alex Pareene then joins as they dive into his article on the “unanswered question,” addressing an entire generation's recognition of our political system as completely broken, before they walk through the weirdness of the state of our economy, including an incredibly strong employment rate and wages on the rise, while the media and government are fear-mongering about gas prices and inflation, and ignoring soaring rent and the inaccessibility of homeownership. Alex then dives into how democratic leadership is viewing this economic moment, as their property value skyrockets but corporations are finding it difficult to higher people an unlivable wages, and looks to the pandemic as a massive cause of the booming housing prices, with the “work from home” economy allowing white wealthier folks to move to lower-rent areas (thus driving up prices), and the stoppage in building production and a collapse of the supply line making the price of creating accessibility sky high. Next, Alex, Emma, and Sam look to the political divide between discussing inflation and gas prices, and refusing to address the inability of Americans to afford a roof over their heads, as representative of the democratic leadership's ideological commitment to corporate neoliberalism even as their polling numbers continue to dwindle. They wrap up the interview with an extended conversation on policing, and how, in the wake of the Uvalde massacre, the media and government have to readdress their relationship to policing, and why Biden refuses to initiate such a political movement. Then, Emma and Sam are joined by comedian, author, playwright, and just all-around creative talent that is Sarah Silverman, as they unpack her work with the late-great Adam Schlesinger to convert her memoir into a critically-celebrated (by Sam, at least) musical, how Sam connects to these stories (obviously important), and the beautiful influence she had on one Emma Vigeland. And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma take a call from Ronald Raygun on the absurd pseudo-“standards” that we hold police to, Candace Owens doubles down on the Uvalde shooter being trans, because it's not normal for adult men to purse their lips, and Greg Gutfeld uplifts apolitical niche commentator Joe Rogan. Sam unpacks his takes on Nomiki's race against progressive Kristen Gonzalez, and Jose Vasquez calls in to announce his State Senate candidacy in Reno Nevada. Plus, your calls and IMs!   Check out the AP SubStack here: https://theap.substack.com/   Check out the Politics of Everything: https://newrepublic.com/podcasts   Check out Sarah Silverman's The Bedwetter here: https://atlantictheater.org/production/the-bedwetter/ Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here:  https://madmimi.com/signups/170390/join Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Check out today's sponsors: Established Titles: Get an amazing gift for your dad this Father's Day! Go to https://establishedtitles.com/majority and get 10% off today. sunsetlakecbd is a majority employee owned farm in Vermont, producing 100% pesticide free CBD products. Great company, great product and fans of the show! Use code Leftisbest and get 20% off at http://www.sunsetlakecbd.com. And now Sunset Lake CBD has donated $2500 to the Nurses strike fund, and we encourage MR listeners to help if they can. Here's a link to where folks can donate: https://forms.massnurses.org/we-stand-with-st-vincents-nurses/ Tushy: Hello Tushy cleans your butt with a precise stream of fresh water for just $79. It attaches to your existing toilet – requires NO electricity or additional plumbing – and cuts toilet paper use by 80% – so the Hello Tushy bidet pays for itself in a few months. Go to https://hellotushy.com/?utm_source=Majority+Report&utm_medium=Podcast&utm_campaign=Oxford to get 10% off today! Support the St. Vincent Nurses today! https://action.massnurses.org/we-stand-with-st-vincents-nurses/ Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Subscribe to Matt's other show Literary Hangover on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/literaryhangover Check out The Nomiki Show on YouTube. https://www.patreon.com/thenomikishow Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out The Letterhack's upcoming Kickstarter project for his new graphic novel! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/milagrocomic/milagro-heroe-de-las-calles Subscribe to Discourse Blog, a newsletter and website for progressive essays and related fun partly run by AM Quickie writer Jack Crosbie. https://discourseblog.com/ Subscribe to AM Quickie writer Corey Pein's podcast News from Nowhere. https://www.patreon.com/newsfromnowhere  Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattBinder @MattLech @BF1nn @BradKAlsop The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/

Sarah Silverman's new musical based on her book, “The Bedwetter,” opens for previews on April 30th at The Atlantic Theater in New York City. In this special episode, Sarah is joined by her two co-creators, Joshua Harmon and David Yazbek, to talk about all things “The Bedwetter” musical. They discuss how the musical evolved from Adam Schlesinger's initial idea to his tragic passing, and how premiering two years later than expected has changed the musical for the better. David teaches us all what an “ostinato” is. Josh shares his favorite memory about their work sessions. Gain some insight into the show's content when Sarah shares how she used one of Adam's jokes for her Nana's character and the scene involving children in Xanax pill costumes. Sarah takes some calls about musical and her tragic sleepaway camp experience. And, the three of them have a detailed conversation about birthday cake. Get your tickets here: https://www.theatlantictheater.org.  Leave Sarah a voicemail: https://www.kastmedia.com/MessageSarah Please support our sponsors: You can customize the perfect system for your home in just a few minutes at https://www.SimpliSafe.com/Silverman. Go today and claim a free indoor security camera plus 20% off with Interactive Monitoring.  Brooklinen's biggest sale of the year is coming with 20% off everything! Listening after the sale? You can still save. Visit https://www.Brooklinen.com and use the Promo code SARAHS for $20 off your purchase of $100. ​​Lean into loving yourself with the free-to-join MeUndies Membership and receive a fresh new pair of Undies delivered right to your door each month, hassle-free. To get 25% off your first Membership item or 15% off your first order and a 100% satisfaction guarantee, go to https://www.MeUndies.com/SARAH.  Make your space beautiful with Article. Article is offering our listeners $50 off their first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit https://www.Article.com/Sarah and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. Follow Sarah on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/sarahkatesilverman and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/SarahKSilverman See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.