Podcasts about bgs podcast network

This week, we bring you a half-century-spanning talk with the Grammy-winning ringleader of one of American roots music's most durable and iconic bands, Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel. The episode is a celebration of their fifty years of diligent song collecting, Western swing camaraderie and epic genre-spanning collaboration - and features first listens of their new record Half a Hundred Years which drops on October 1. The record covers old classics and tells new stories, with spritely cameos from fellow Texans Lyle Lovett and Willie Nelson. Aligning behind Benson's commanding, deep voice and impeccable song-historian's taste, Ray has managed what few bandleaders in country music - or any genre - have: keeping a talented rotating band of mostly-acoustic players together from 1972 on, with little break from the road. Willie Nelson and others have long championed their work, and indeed the band had fans in even higher places: on September 11, 2001, the group was set to perform at The White House. Asleep at the Wheel's story is really one of perseverance and transformation. How did a Jewish kid from the the Philly suburbs end up as a Texas cowboy music icon who toured with Bob Dylan and George Strait (just ask Bob about changing identities), wrote songs and acted in movies with Dolly Parton and Blondie, and became the foremost interpreter of the rollicking music of Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys? Only in America, you could say - but Ray would just tell you that he loves the music deep in his bones, and it's what he wakes up every day to create and save. One of the most forward-thinking things Ray did from the very beginning was share the mic with a myriad of talented female vocalists, which maybe confused some radio programmers (who is leader of this outfit?) but made the road shows eternally entertaining and unique. That tradition continues. Also featured on the new record are lovely collabs with Lee Ann Womack and Emmylou Harris.

This week, we talk to Brooklyn-based bandleader and jazz-roots singer extraordinaire Sammy Rae, who for the last four years has barnstormed the country with her kinetic octet The Friends. Look, when you're young and inspired, you drop out of college, you're waiting tables and you think about starting a jazzy pop band - most people (as well as common sense and basic economics) tell you to start small. Get a few like-minded musicians in a room, work and work your best songs, try packing out a few local shows, put some radio-ready singles on the internet, do a music video or two. See what happens. But Sammy Rae does her own thing and has done pretty much the opposite. Much like your host of this fine program (who went against all advice and began Dustbowl Revival as an 8-10 piece genre-bending New Orleans-string band mashup in 2008), Sammy has harnessed the open-minded, countercultural energy of Broadway musicals, the slinky funk-pop of the 1970s AM radio and her own rapid-fire poetic style to create a massive sound that could only be made with three singers, two saxophones, and a fearless, seasoned rhythm section. And they all are friends who don't just treat this as a temporary weekend gig. Too much too soon? Well, ask the packed houses up and down the Eastern Seaboard if they care about playing it safe. Sammy knows the road ahead for The Friends won't be easy - but so far, the response from listeners has been undeniable. Starting at tiny supportive clubs in New York like Rockwood Music Hall and graduating to the biggest rooms in one of the hardest towns to impress, the group struck a nerve with their debut EP The Good Life in 2018 - with the standout jazzy experiment “Kick It To Me” gaining nearly ten million steams and counting. "Don't record songs over four minutes long," they keep telling us. "No one will pay attention!" Yet their most listened to track clocks in at nearly seven minutes. What's the lesson here? For Sammy it's finally learning to trust her instincts and be herself. Their upbeat EP Let's Throw A Party dropped in 2021 - and make sure you stick around to the end of the talk to hear how Sammy's experience as a queer teenager in a Connecticut girl's Catholic school informed their new track “Jackie Onassis.”

This week, we go on a deep dive with Madi Diaz, a sought-after Nashville-based songwriter who may have dropped among the most devastating and powerful break-up albums of the decade with her newest LP History Of A Feeling, a searing debut on Anti- Records. If you've made it to the doldrums of your mid-thirties, you've probably had your heart broken once or thrice. Diaz is no exception, except unlike the rest of us who may try and forget all about those lost love affairs, Diaz does the opposite. She chronicles the destruction of her last relationship with a craftsman's precision, creating a series of unvarnished, seething, diaristic songs about an ongoing and fractured grieving process. Diaz opens with the gut-puncher “Rage,” which says a lot even if it's under two minutes long. Is it ok to not be ready to move on? To hate that you HAVE to move on? Soon after she's “Crying In Public” and immediately after that she's baring her teeth in the standout acoustic single “Resentment” - which was initially covered by moody pop hero Kesha. Does it get brighter from there? Not exactly, but it's better that way. It could be way off base, but maybe History Of A Feeling is our updated Jagged Little Pill without the pop artifice. Not that Diaz sings at all like Alanis, but a similar hope for heartbroken catharsis weaves its way throughout. Working with Big Thief collaborator and soulful producer Andrew Sarlo surely helped capture the intimate vibe, with certain songs barely needing more than a guitar and her direct, cutting voice. Without an army of synths or the armor of an orchestra behind her, or the security blanket of a band smoothing out the edges, the rawness of the emotion in each song sings out louder. Diaz, who grew up in Lancaster, PA with a dad who had his own Frank Zappa cover band (she mentioned that she indeed had her own teen version) and then later dropped out of Berklee College of Music to hit the road with her own work, has never been afraid to pick at the shrapnel in some of her deepest wounds to create songs that leave their own mark after you listen. She's put out more atmospheric pop-forward work - like We Threw Our Hearts In The Fire (2012) and Phantom (2017) - for a decade, but this quieter, more personal record feels like she's finally found her sound. Pulling no punches, Diaz bravely includes songs like “Man In Me” which hints that she lost a long-time partner who also then transitioned. In a way, it was almost a double-loss that left her feeling confused and guilty for feeling angry at all. And yet - when we reach the end of History Of A Feeling, the feeling we get isn't bitterness or rage any longer - it may be that most elusive of the grieving steps: acceptance. And maybe even forgiveness.

So many of our guests from Season 1 of Harmonics have been having the most incredible year - so we want to share some of our favorite conversations with these powerful women, as their stars continue to rise and their stories continue to develop. And Mickey Guyton has had quite the year, between her Grammy nomination for Best Country Solo performance for her viral hit "Black Like Me," hosting the ACM Awards, releasing her highly successful EP Bridges - and becoming a mother! Revisit this powerful, vulnerable conversation with the wonderful Mickey Guyton from back in the summer of 2020.

Yoga Nidra teacher Hilary Jackendoff has written a meditation just for Harmonics listeners, providing us with an opportunity to access an embodied experience of undoing, effortlessness, and letting go. Through Yoga Nidra, we learn what it feels like to truly release everything that we're holding onto - physically, mentally, emotionally - so that we can know deep rest, reconnect to our own true nature, and feel at home and at ease within our own being. You can practice more free meditations from Hilary on Insight Timer (https://insighttimer.com/hilaryjackendoff) and be sure to follow along with her on Instagram (@meditationchick) (https://www.instagram.com/meditationchick/)

Join Beth as she talks with meditation teacher Hilary Jackendoff about the practice of Yoga Nidra - or yogic sleep - and the benefits to reap from its simplicity and the opportunities it provides for rest and connection. You can practice more free meditations from Hilary on Insight Timer (https://insighttimer.com/hilaryjackendoff) and be sure to follow along with her on Instagram (@meditationchick) (https://www.instagram.com/meditationchick/)

This week, we journey to northern Louisiana for a unique conversation with sprightly blues and southern rock singer Robert Finely, who began making music in his cotton-growing family in the 1960s, and has been rediscovered and empowered through his remarkable partnership with Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys. His funky and cheeky comeback album Goin' Platinum (which sounds like a lost Motown gem) came in 2017 and in May of 2021, he celebrated the release of the deeply personal follow-up Sharecropper's Son. As you can hear in the taping, even in his late sixties, Finley is a playful force to be reckoned with and isn't shy about sharing how faith and music have gotten him through decades of tragedy and hardship. In 2019 he even reached the semi-finals of America's Got Talent. Growing up in a religious home where blues and soul music was rarely allowed to be heard, Finley worked as an army helicopter repairman and professional carpenter for many years, often keeping his keen musical ideas to himself. He may now be legally blind, but the always-sharp dressed Finley (he loves a snakeskin jacket) was spotted busking on the streets of Helena, Arkansas and the blues-obsessed Auerbach was smitten with Finley's raw, swampy Jimi Hendrix meets James Brown tone. Both of his critically-applauded releases subsequently came out on Auerbach's Easy Eye Sound, which has become a home for previously unheralded black artists like Yola, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, and Leo Bud Welch.

This week, we place a call into Woodstock, NY, where we speak to a respected singer, songwriter, sometimes drummer and beloved daughter of Levon Helm of The Band: Amy Helm. Growing up in the home of two working performers (her mother is singer Libby Titus, who wrote songs covered by Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt) wasn't always the easiest for the introspective Helm, but it gave her a fertile proving ground to begin her exploration in creating her own soaring songs in the folk, blues and soul traditions. She waited until she was forty-four to release her acclaimed first solo record Didn't It Rain, with her father lending his signature earthy drums on several tracks – and this year, she teamed up with multi-instrumentalist and producer Josh Kaufman (Taylor Swift, Bonny Light Horseman) to create What The Flood Leaves Behind, her most emotive and lushly-realized project yet. With her dogs often joining the conversation from her upstate home, Amy dives into her early years trying her hand at singing in New York City cafes, having folks walk out of her folk fest shows because her band was too loud, founding the band Ollabelle, joining her stepdad Donald Fagen's group Steely Dan onstage, backing up legends like Stax soul artist William Bell and finally reconnecting with her dad in her mid-thirties as he began his late life renaissance, hosting his epic Americana throwdowns called “The Midnight Rambles.” It was being a member of that crack “ramble band” that gave Amy the final push to pursue her own lead voice. While Levon famously struggled with heroine addiction and the foibles of post-Bob Dylan and The Band fame fallout, it was when he got clean and took Amy under his wing that both of their stars began to rise again. You can hear Amy singing on his gorgeous return in 2017's Dirt Farmer. Becoming more ambitious, Amy laid down her upbeat rock-n-soul-tinged second album with producer Joe Henry in LA with notable players like Doyle Bramhall II, Tyler Chester, and a vocal choir of Allison Russell, JT Nero (Birds of Chicago) and Adam Minkoff. This Too Shall Light was released in 2018 on Yep Roc Records and Amy began to be recognized as one of the most powerful singers touring the Americana circuit. Her newest record was recorded at her spiritual home, Levon Helm Studios, where each ramble still takes place on the weekends. During the pandemic, Helm had a unique idea to keep her creative muscles strong, even when live music gatherings were not technically allowed in public. She began setting up “curbside concerts” for her friends and any curious fans who missed her songs, touring around Woodstock with her guitar, bringing a little joy to her shut-in listeners during New York's darkest hours. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear her introduce the spiritual opening track of What The Flood Leaves Behind, “Verse 23.”

This week, a rare career-spanning interview with the ever-curious frontman, activist and rock hitmaker John McCrea, who founded one of the most beloved and yet misunderstood bands of our time - CAKE - in Sacramento in 1992. Despite putting out unlikely ubiquitous radio hits like “The Distance,” “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” and “Never There” featuring the signature combo of dry speak-singing, spaghetti western brass, muscular guitars and spacey synths, and becoming one of the best selling groups of the 1990s and early 2000s, John and an ever-changing group of collaborators have always operated more like a DIY garage band. They produce and record everything themselves and exist outside the music industry spotlight - only putting out their oddball genre-defying work when it's ready. While you may have forgotten some of their danceable favorites that burned through college and indie-rock radio - with further study, songs like “No Phone” which tackled our toxic relationship to technology (even before smartphones came out) now seem both deeply of, and way ahead of, their time. Critics were often confused by their lyrically dense, subversively political records like 'Motorcade Of Generosity,' 'Prolonging The Magic' and 'Comfort Eagle' - and with their obtuse album art, strange homemade videos, McCrea's conspiratorial slam-poet frontman delivery and his shaggy Sacramento-based bandmates, it was all quite atypical in the era of shiny studio-created MTV and radio-ready rock. And yet their legions of fans, including our host Z. Lupetin, ate it up and continue to anxiously wait for what's coming next from the group. After a decade of home recording and environmental activism (with a recent emphasis on combating deforestation) McCrea hints that a new album and a return to playing may finally be in the works.

Thanks to everyone who listened to Season 2! Harmonics Podcast is taking a little break for the Summer, but we'll be back soon with new episodes for Season 3!

She and Beth have an honest and open conversation about sobriety, religion and Abby’s youth in the Catholic church - and her relationship to it as she accepted her sexuality at a young age. She explains the importance of sports for all kids to develop an ability to take care of themselves, discusses the necessity of exercise and movement for maintaining her mental health, and the disparity between men and women’s earnings and treatment in professional sports - and a huge realization she had while standing onstage between Kobe Bryant and Peyton Manning as they were all three honored upon their retirements.

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, we bring you an emotional conversation with Tony and Emmy-winning actress and singer Kristin Chenoweth. Having recently lost a lifelong voice teacher and dear friend to COVID-19 at the time of this interview, Chenoweth brings a very open conversation about grief and mental health, talking with host Beth Behrs about her struggles with depression and anxiety during the pandemic, and throughout her life - accepting that she does need to acknowledge her mental health struggles, even though due to her public persona, most people expect her to be "rainbows and glitter" 24/7.

This week, we bring you a deep dive with the silky-voiced southern gothic-folk songwriter Lera Lynn, who has recently gained notoriety for her mysterious and lushly cinematic sound, as heard in her haunting 2020 LP On My Own (on which she writes, produces and plays every instrument on each song) and in the music of HBO's True Detective (produced by T-Bone Burnett), on which she also became a cast member in Season 2. We've all had our dark moments during this last year. For Lynn it was figuring out how to put out a new album, which she had painstakingly make herself in isolation (see Springsteen's moody and homemade Nebraska,) right as her first baby was on the way without any family being allowed to help shoulder the load. At times the burden seemed too much to bear - but what emerged was a touchstone set of songs that unintentionally seemed to pinpoint the exact center of our collective dread - and the flickers of hope of a new beginning that can come out of a such a societal time-quake. Searching reverby rock standouts like "Are You Listening?" seem to be calling out into a void that we never knew we had, perhaps reminding us again how much we need human touch, friendship, family warmth and true soul connection. While we are currently emerging into the light-filled end of this Covid-19 tunnel, it's important to note that this interview was conducted back in 2020 in the thick of the harshest lockdowns (the taping footage was lost, then finally found) and songs like “Isolation” hit the exact pain point for many artists like Lynn who once thrived on bringing live-music's unique sweaty joy to strangers in a new town each night. Lynn's rising calls of “Is anybody out there?” ring like echoes from a very recent bad dream - a dream of course that is still very much a painful reality in many parts of the world. Coming out of the fertile roots rock scene of Athens, GA, Lynn's earlier records like the intimate and country-inflected Have You Met Lera Lynn? from 2011 and its pop-forward follow ups The Avenues (2016) and Resistor (2017) focused mostly on her endlessly warm and rich voice - and the fury and frustration she was processing growing up an only child of an alcoholic dad. But it was her guest-star-laden LP Plays Well With Others (2018) where Lynn began to realize the extent of her gifted arranging and vocal powers together. Teaming up with a murderer's row of Americana artists like Shovels & Rope, John Paul White of the Civil Wars and Rodney Crowell, it may be the most high-spirited of her works - like a basement party jam session going off the rails in all the best ways. The tough year at home did make Lynn come to appreciate how far she's come since those early days - maybe it took a decade of hard-won acceptance and practice to be able to create On My Own without any help from other musicians or producers - and the result is a wonder to hear. Now if she could just play it for an actual live audience. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear her introduce her favorite broken-romance number "So Far."

In recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, Beth slows things down and checks in with a dear friend: Harmonics Executive Producer and BGS Co-Founder Amy Reitnouer Jacobs! While the pandemic is beginning to subside here in the U.S. (and what a wonderful thing it is) let's be real: it's a weird time right now. Folks are getting vaccinated (within so many different timelines, might we add) and some are immediately diving head-first back into society and socialization - six feet be damned. With everyone at varying levels of anxiety - and comfortable speeds of fully returning to the ways of the "before" times - and after a year-plus of having our mental health hit at from every possible direction, we think it's important to take this month of May - Mental Health Awareness Month - to give ourselves and others some grace and set some boundaries. Our mental health is worth it. Links Mentioned: On "Languishing" (The New York Times) (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/well/mind/covid-mental-health-languishing.html) Team Yes vs. Team Couch (The Atlantic) (https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/04/post-pandemic-socializers-two-types/618678/) Do We Even Know How To Socialize Anymore? (NPR Life Kit) (https://www.npr.org/2021/04/04/983855924/do-we-even-know-how-to-socialize-anymore) You can find resources for Mental Health Month here. (https://www.mhanational.org/mental-health-month)

This week on The Show On The Road, we bring you a truly inspiring talk with the activist, author, and free-spirited feminist folk icon Ani DiFranco, who just released her lushly orchestrated twenty-second album: Revolutionary Love. Many things have been said about the music Ani DiFranco has created for the last thirty years since she burst on the scene with her fiery self-titled LP in 1990. With her shaved head on the cover, fearlessly bisexual love songs, dexterous guitar work and hold-no-prisoners lyrics sparing no one from her poetic magnifying glass, DiFranco's persona became almost synonymous with a rejuvenated women's movement that blossomed in the late-1990's Lilith Fair moment. And yet she was always a bit more committed to the cause than some of her more pop-leaning contemporaries, who faded away as soon as their hits subsided. Framing herself somewhere between the rebellious folk-singing teacher Pete Seeger and the gender-fluid show-stopping rock spirit in Prince, (who she recorded with after he became a fan,) DiFranco was always just as passionate about raising awareness for abortion rights, ensuring safety for gay and trans youth and bringing music to prisons, as she was promoting her latest musical experiment. She began playing publicly around age ten, and as a nineteen-year-old runaway from Buffalo, NY, she started her own label, Righteous Babe Records, that allowed her to operate free of corporate (and overwhelmingly male) oversight. Indeed, despite gaining a wide international fanbase she has released every album herself since the beginning — as well as championing genre-defying songwriters like Andrew Bird, Anaïs Mitchell, Utah Philips, and others. It was DiFranco's encouragement that helped Mitchell's opus Hadestown become a Tony-winning Broadway smash. DiFranco may have been deemed a bit too left-of-center for pop radio, but her beloved 1997 live record Living In Clip went gold. Let's get something out of the way real quick: was this male podcast host initially a bit intimidated to dive into her encyclopedic album collection after admiring her work from afar and believing the songs were not meant for his ears? Indeed. I grew up with girlfriends and fellow musicians who rocked Ani's Righteous Babe pins and patches on their jean jackets like they were religious ornaments. What I found during this mind-bending conversation, and after listening to her polished and mystical newest record especially, was that DiFranco has never tried to push away people that don't look or talk like her — or tried to mock or belittle conservative movements she doesn't agree with or understand. There is a deep kindness and empathy in her songwriting that I never expected and in her 2019 autobiography, No Walls And The Recurring Dream, she acknowledges how lonely and exhausting it can be trying to fight against a societal tide that doesn't want to stop and give you space to be who you are. What became increasingly clear during our conversation was that DiFranco wants to make music for everyone. She prides herself on her quirky, multi-generational fanbase — with grandparents and kids, dads and sons, daughters and aunties alike singing along to favorites like “Both Hands,” “Untouchable Face,” and covers like Woody Guthrie's “This Land Is Your Land” at packed shows across three continents. I had my own goosebumps-inducing moment singing with Ani that I'll never forget. The oldest folk festival in America, The Ann Arbor Folk Fest, once put me on stage to sing harmony on “Angel From Montgomery” with DiFranco at the acoustically perfect Hill Auditorium. I attended the University Of Michigan years earlier and I saw John Prine sing that classic in that same room, and it felt like a full circle moment. Seeing how DiFranco transfixed the crowd that night, and how the women songwriters and musicians offstage especially watched her with such admiration made me want to see what her music — which I had never fully listened to — was all about. If you have a chance, listen to Revolutionary Love start to finish, and stick around to the end of the episode to hear DiFranco read lyrics as poetry.

This week, in the final installment of our Americana April series here on Harmonics, host Beth Behrs speaks with folk singer-songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews, who has just released Old Monarch, a beautiful collection of poetry, and her very first of its kind. Beth's own deep love of poetry makes for a perfect pair in this episode. On top of her songwriting and poetry, Andrews also had a deep passion for painting, and she and Beth discuss the difference between various artistic outlets and how she moves through a creative block, as well as the joy of creating art simply for the sake of creating art, not necessarily as something to be shared with the world - or with anyone, for that matter. Growing up in the Sonoran desert of Arizona, she has been influenced by the beauty and vastness of the desert since a young age, and the desert and nature in general continue to inspire her art and spirituality to this day. And as we will never know the answers to the major questions of the universe in this realm, Andrews finds comfort in embracing the beauty in the mysteries of life, rather than in the answers. She discusses the feeling of recently playing her first live show to an audience since the pandemic began, reads us some poetry from Old Monarch, and so much more on this episode. Hear our first two installments of Americana April with Fiona Prine and Margo Price.

This week, we feature a conversation with one of the rising stars in our current roots music renaissance: a gifted Oklahoma-born singer-songwriter who grew up in the Pentecostal church and creates a fiery gospel backdrop behind his tender then window-rattling rock-n-roll voice: Parker Millsap. When you've been touring hundreds of days a year down southern backroads from Tulsa to Tallahassee since you were a teenager like Parker has, you know a thing or two about how to keep your head when things go off the rails. But it was the forced year-long break during the pandemic that really made him stop and accept how far he's come from his intense, anxious, folky debut Palisade in 2012 (he released it when he was 19), to his soulful self-assured new record Be Here Instead. What's clear is we see a relentlessly hard-working performer who no longer has to chase the next gig for gas money, or has to worry if the world will accept his work. Holed up outside of Nashville with his wife, Millsap let the songs do the talking.

It’s Americana April here on Harmonics, and this week brings a conversation with one of Beth’s all-time favorite artists – Americana or otherwise – Nashville’s very own Margo Price. This past year may have temporarily pulled Margo off the never-ending road of touring, but that doesn’t mean the pace has slowed down – being a mother is a never-ending rush of another kind. She and Beth talk about this time spent at home, from spending time with her children and attempting to instill in them a respect for the earth and for people, to navigating the complexities of a songwriting relationship with her husband, singer-songwriter Jeremy Ivey. Margo also shares her feelings on becoming the first female artist on the board of Farm Aid (a full-circle, bittersweet moment after her family lost the farm when she was young,) the advice she’s gleaned from the greats like Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris, working with longtime friend Sturgill Simpson as the producer on her latest album That’s How Rumors Get Started, and so much more.

This week, a special rebroadcast of our conversation with the three-time Grammy award winning roots n roll poet and rogue founding father of the thriving Americana movement - Steve Earle. The conversation was recorded outside Romp Fest in Kentucky on Earle's tour bus. Remember when we could do stuff like that? After nearly four decades of relentless recording, international touring with his loyal group The Dukes, and a commendable fight to overcome his own substance abuse troubles, (not to mention six marriages and counting) Earle watched his talented song Justin Townes Earle go down a similar path - only to lose his fight with depression and opiates, passing away at the age of thirty-eight in August of 2020. With a new intro, we try and honor Justin's memory and highlight Steve's haunting newest record JT, where Earle tries to process his son's passing by recording a collection of his most cherished songs.

This week, we feature a conversation with one of most admired and sharp-witted singer-songwriters in the fertile Nashville Americana scene, Caroline Spence. A sought-after lyricist who mines her own vulnerabilities and lovelorn past to tell delicately crafted story-songs, her voice seems to always hover angelically above the page, bringing to mind new-wave country pop heroines Alison Krauss or her vocal hero, Emmylou Harris. Growing up in Charlottesville, VA daydreaming to Harris' signature twangy honey-toned records like 'Wrecking Ball,' Spence admittedly was a bit starstruck when the silver-maned lady herself came on board to sing harmonies on the title track of Spence's newest LP 'Mint Condition.' It quickly became a critic's darling and an Americana radio staple nationwide. As a conversationalist, she usually leads with cheerful southern modesty, but beginning with her 2015 debut 'Somehow,' Spence wasn't afraid to push at country music's guy-centric boundaries. She brought aboard a talented group of genre-defining collaborators like blue-eyed soul hero Anderson East and folk pop favorite Erin Rae to give the songs new heft. Her follow-up 'Spades And Roses' brought more lush atmospherics to her yearning acoustic stories, elevating the clear-eyed feminine power behind emotive songs like “Heart Of Somebody.” While Spence will tell you she is just furthering the empowered spirit of roots songwriter pioneers who came before her, during this time of high anxiety, her deeply felt love songs like “Sit Here and Love Me” and “Slow Dancer” seem especially fitting, touching on her bouts of depression and her inability to connect with the ones who are trying to help her through. Sometimes sad songs truly do make people happy, and if you're feeling a bit low, maybe pop on her newest single “The Choir,” about finding your people when you need them most.

This week, we feature an intimate conversation with beloved soul and R&B singer Bettye LaVette. Covering her remarkable six decades in show-business, we dive deep into her beginnings as a Detroit hit-making teenager during Motown's heyday (her neighbor was Smokey Robinson), to her early career touring with Otis Redding and James Brown, and the hard times that followed as a music industry steeped in racist and sexist traditions largely turned its back on her. While other soulful song stylists like Sharon Jones, Tina Turner, Mavis Staples and others have seen their status and popularity rise with time, LaVette remains a best kept secret in the nascent Americana circuit, with younger listeners just discovering her remarkable work covering anyone from The Beatles to Neil Young to Billie Holiday. After nearly dropping out of music, her remarkable comeback began in 2005 with a string of acclaimed records - bringing her from half-filled bars to singing “Blackbird” at The Hollywood Bowl with a 32-piece orchestra, being nominated for five Grammy awards, and being inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. One thing you'll notice immediately is her fiery laugh which punctuates the episode - even when telling the darkest stories like her early manager getting shot and her 1960s hits being recorded by white artists, leaving her versions largely forgotten. Her Grammy-nominated newest LP 'Blackbirds,' produced by legendary drummer Steve Jordan, shows her at her most vulnerable best.

This week, we take the show to the countryside of Sweden for an intimate talk with Kristian Matsson, poet-songwriter and masterful acoustic multi-instrumentalist who has released five acclaimed albums and two EPs over the last decade and a half, performing as The Tallest Man on Earth. Growing up in the small hamlet of Leksand, a three hour trek from Stockholm, Mattson was in rowdier indie-rock outfits like Montezumas before breaking out with his own dreamier acoustic material - gaining international notice with his breakout solo offering 'Shallow Grave' in 2008. Tours with Bon Iver across North America gained Matsson an adoring audience in the states, where he ended up setting up shop in Brooklyn. Most often performing solo even on the biggest stages, Matsson is known to have seven or more intricate tunings for his guitars and banjos, and with his high, cutting voice and cryptic, nature-inspired lyrics, he has been compared to some of his heroes like Roscoe Holcomb, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon but with a Swedish-naturalist touch. Songs like “Love Is All” or “The Gardener,” while gaining tens of millions of steams on folky playlists, pack quite a punch, often detailing how the cold cruelty of the animal kingdom filters into human life with its many frailties. In 2019, Matsson found his marriage to a fellow Swedish singer-songwriter ending and he holed up in his Brooklyn apartment to write, produce and engineer his newest Tallest Man On Earth LP, 'I Love You. It's A Fever Dream.' Like Springsteen's eerie and emotional 'Nebraska,' Matsson's collection is a clear-eyed view of our current state of interpersonal (and even societal) isolations. Standout songs like the warm guitar and echoey harmonica opener “Hotel Bar” - though written before he knew what would happen with our current pandemic - seem to capture the lost closeness and romance of our very recent past, where one could fall in love with a new stranger every night in a new town and think nothing of it. Sequestered in a small house in the middle of Sweden since the world shifted last year, a new Tallest Man On Earth album is sure to be on its way. Admittedly Matsson is going a bit stir-crazy away from the road, but really he's grateful to be able to have the time to explore and create new sounds without any distractions. A fall tour of the states is in the works (fingers crossed), including an opening slot at Red Rocks joining Mandolin Orange and Bonny Light Horseman.

This week - it's a rock-n roll-family affair with a special conversation with Devon Allman and Duane Betts - two guitar-slinging sons of the iconic Allman Brothers Band who formed their own soulful supergroup in 2019 - The Allman Betts Band. With their debut record 'Down To The River,' Allman and Betts - who took turns playing alongside their revered dads Gregg and Dickey as teenagers - finally banded together to create a new collection of the soaring slide-guitar-centered Gulf-coast rock and brawny road-tested blues that both pays homage to their heady upbringings and forges their own way forward. Even their touring bassist has a familiar name to Allman die-hards: Berry Oakley Jr., whose dad was one of the Allman Brothers' founding members when they formed in 1969 out of Jacksonville, FL. While many groups were stuck at home licking their wounds as the pandemic shut down most touring options, Devon and Duane's crew tapped into the nascent drive-in circuit, bringing their spirited 2020 release 'Bless Your Heart' to a whole new set of excited fans. Always sticking to their southern roots, they laid down both records at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios with producer Matt Ross-Spang (Jason Isbell, Margo Price, Elvis Presley.) While history is always dancing in the margins of the songs, it's clear on this second offering that they wanted to create stories that didn't only reflect their roaring live shows. Standout songs like the soft piano ballad “Doctor's Daughter” show the group roving in new, more nuanced directions - while “Autumn Breeze” is a pulsing, slow-burn, but features the effortless twin guitar lines that made their dads' work so instantly recognizable. Of course playing in the family business wasn't always a given for the guys - especially Devon who only met his hard-touring father Gregg at sixteen. Devon first started hanging out with young Duane - then only twelve - in 1989 on the Allman Brothers' 20th Anniversary tour. As he describes in the episode, Devon wasn't sure he wanted to follow in his father's hard-to-follow footsteps, but once he sat in on “Midnight Rider“ and the crowd went crazy? It was off to the races. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Allman Brothers' breakout record 'Live At The Fillmore East' - which I grew up listening to on loop with my father. Though Duane Allman died tragically in a 1971 accident before his namesake was born, and Gregg passed away in 2017, their spirit lives on in the Allman Betts' epic live show - which is already gearing up for the tentative 2021 touring season.

This week, we call in to Philadelphia for a conversation with the highly-theatrical pianist and tireless, much-adored performer Adam Weiner, who for the last decade has gained a cult following around the world fronting his soulful bizarro-rock outfit Low Cut Connie. Some artists have retreated into obscurity during the pandemic shut-down; some have made turned lemons into personalized live-stream lemonade. But Adam took it to another level when he launched his often twice-weekly vaudevillian interactive web show “Tough Cookies” from a back bedroom in March. Charging around his small home stage like a schvitzing piano preacher, often losing clothing along the way, Adam has learned nearly six hundred covers in the last eight months alone - from Barry Manilow to Cardi B's "WAP" to Macho Man to an entire Little Richard set, which he performed to honor his hero after his passing. He then interviews anyone from Beyonce's dad to members of Sly and the Family Stone - in short, it's a rollercoaster every week that you kind of have to watch to believe. Alongside his 2020 LP Private Lives, Low Cut Connie's heartfelt and sweat-dripping sets have gained him some famous supporters: Elton John for one, fellow New Jersey-born hero Bruce Springsteen for another - and that up-and-coming playlist presenter Barack Obama unexpectedly placed Low Cut Connie's defiant cabaret rocker “Boozophilia” on his must-listen list. Indeed, this taping - which often showed Adam jumping from his piano to his guitar to play favorites like the Kinks-esque “Revolution Rock N Roll,” initially had to be delayed so he could play an inauguration event for new president and Philly-piano lover Joe Biden. While Adam is basking in some much-earned attention, it hasn't always been an easy road. He readily admits to scrapping by on side jobs into his mid-thirties, for years playing around dim New York City piano bars as his sequined alter-ego Ladyfingers. If Adam's learned anything during this strange era, it's that people desperately still need live music - in all its spur-of-the-moment, sweaty glory. One of the more moving stories he tells is seeing groups of nurses in beleaguered hospitals taking a much needed break to watch his livestreams. Much like his hero and patron Elton John, Low Cut Connie's songs can leap from intimate folk-rock to greasy soul to bombastic musical theater and back with ease - and his relentless spontaneity keeps fans waiting for that he will do next.

This week, we're bringing back a favorite episode featuring banjo heroes Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn. We caught up with this well-traveled roots music super couple a few years back on a tour through LA (back when live music was a thing). As we reckon with the one year anniversary of the music industry's full shutdown, most touring artists and songwriters find themselves still sequestered at home with their partners, families or podmates (and in Abigail and Béla's case, two rambunctious kids who can be heard in the taping). The beautiful connection and respect Fleck and Washburn have for one another on stage and at home is on full display during the episode - and if you follow their social media, you'll see they are truly making the best of this dark downtime. Both could be considered pioneers not just in advancing the banjo into the mainstream - but in creating nuanced multi-lingual world music with an instrument once thought to only belong in front porch jam sessions or in barnstorming bluegrass bands. As we jump into women's history month - now would be a good time to thank all the hard working moms, grandmas, sisters, aunties, wives, caretakers and creators of all stripes who helped make it possible for your favorite music to exist. We will be back every Wednesday with new episodes.

This week, we celebrate the newest record by Charleston's hellion harmonizers Shovels & Rope, with a new conversation with the married co-leads Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst. You'd be hard-pressed to find two harder-working singer-songwriters than this prolific duo; and that was before they got together to record their honey-voiced self-titled first album over a decade ago. Thinking it was just a sonic souvenir before they split off again to pursue their barnstorming bar-band solo careers, the human heart and some encouraging listeners had other plans, convincing them to keep creating as a team. They've been off to the races ever since - making five acclaimed records of originals starting with the acclaimed O' Be Joyful and three gritty covers albums with an assassins row of collaborators like Lucius, Shakey Graves, Brandi Carlile, The War and Treaty, and more. Their newest cover project Busted Jukebox Volume 3, which dropped on Feb 5 via Dualtone Records, is a new experiment. You could say it's an angsty rock record for kids, or maybe it's an homage to the yearning, defiant, ever-hopeful teenager in all of us. With indie-darlings like Sharon Van Etten sitting in on standouts like the Beach Boys' “In My Room” and Deer Tick joining a rollicking version of the Janis Joplin favorite “Cry Baby” - like a good Pixar animated flick, this collection has just as much to offer Mom and Dad as it does for the kiddos. If you've seen them live, you'll notice that Trent and Hearst often face each other, not the audience; their eyes never seem to leave each other. Almost all their songs, like the award-winning favorite “Birmingham,” include spot-on harmony and intensely-focused unison singing. Somehow they create a blisteringly big sound despite always remaining a duo. Even on the biggest stages, from Red Rocks to their own acclaimed festival High Water Fest (set in their longtime South Carolina home base), they stick to their simple but potent formula. Switching back and forth between jangly and crunchy guitars, humming keyboards and pounding piano, hopping from sweat-strewn stripped-down drum kits to aching accordions, their joyous garage-rock Americana keeps gaining them new fans worldwide. If you're stuck at home and have kids running rowdily through your house like Michael and Cary Ann do, (this taping had to be rescheduled three times), maybe try turning on Busted Jukebox Volume 3 nice and loud and see what little ones think. Or just put them to bed and rock out yourself! Stick around to the end of the episode to Hearst and Trent present the sweet campfire jam “My Little Buckaroo” featuring M. Ward.

This week, host Z. Lupetin talks to one of the founding members of beloved folk-rock hitmakers The Lumineers - drummer and pianist Jeremiah Fraites. After following his heart to Italy, Jeremiah dialed into the podcast from Turin - his wife's hometown. Alongside juggling duties as co-songwriter and performer in one of the most successful acoustic groups of the last twenty years and raising his two-year-old son, Fraites released a gorgeous instrumental record called Piano Piano this January. Nearly fifteen years in the making, Piano Piano was created at his former home in Denver during the height of the early COVID-19 lockdowns, with his two favorite pianos leading the way as main characters in a story that seemed to unfurl, as his wife would say in Italian, “step by step” - delicately, but with passion. First he used a newer Steinway for the brighter, more forceful tones, and then a warmly creaky creature, that his piano teacher sarcastically named “Firewood,” for the most personal moments. Really, it's the tiny imperfections that make this solo work shine: when you can hear the bench swaying slightly, when you spot his wife making dinner in the next room as the sustain pedal is pressed into the wood floor, when the aged instrument struggles to hammer out the final notes (but finally does,) and when Fraites and the instrument seem to breathe and speak and cry out, together. While certain smaller songs like “Departure” and “Chilly” are as intimate as fateful field recordings, other standouts like “Tokyo” and “Arrival” are more polished pieces, blooming from that same small space but growing into masterful orchestral widescreen soundscapes with the help of violinist Lauren Jacobson (who often plays with The Lumineers,) cellists Rubin Kodheli and Alex Waterman, and the 40-piece FAME's Orchestra from Macedonia. Fraites was born in New Jersey, where he grew up with Lumineers frontman Wesley Schultz. When they self-released their confessional and warm-hearted self-tilted record in 2012, the two friends never imagined that they would have a chart-topping hit on their hands. Playing the scruffy bars around Denver before their fanbase expanded exponentially and their first record went triple-platinum, The Lumineers soon found themselves headlining international pop festivals, opening for U2 and Tom Petty, placing songs in The Hunger Games and Game Of Thrones, selling out Madison Square Garden (twice) and finally filling their favorite hallowed Colorado venues like Red Rocks. Before the pandemic slowed them down, The Lumineers were bringing their same acoustic spirit to a full-on arena tour coast to coast - showcasing their newest album III. If you're reading this right now, you've probably found yourself singing along to their romantic, stomping ear-worms “Ho Hey” or “Ophelia” or heard them accidentally a thousand times in the last decade, (both have been streamed over 500 million times and counting,) but all of that is paused for now. What a perfect time for a peaceful piano record to clear our heads. As Jeremiah has gained confidence as a sought-after composer, songwriter and unlikely pop performer, he's given himself the space to finally create the deeply personal record he's been hoping to share for decades.

This week on the show, to help honor Black History Month, we bring you a conversation with members of the foundational gospel group The Blind Boys Of Alabama - including longtime singer Ricky McKinnie, and beloved senior member Jimmy Carter who has been with the group for four decades. Formed in the late 1930s with talent discovered at the Alabama Institute Of The Negro Blind, the troupe has superseded its limitations by bringing its own high-spirited version of jubilee gospel throughout the world. Their music was often the backdrop to the civil rights movement as Martin Luther King JR. toured the south, and Jimmy and Ricky are amazed and grateful that their message was still ringing true during the Black Lives Matter protest movement of the tumultuous last year. While the members of the band have changed through history, the group has stayed steadfast to preserving a kinetic church-based music that doesn't seek to evangelize, but can bring people of all faiths together. Indeed, watching Jimmy and the other bespectacled members walk with hands on each other's shoulders into the youthful crowds of adoring festival goers from Bonnarroo to Jazzfest is really something to behold. Their body of work continues to grow. In the last few decades they've gamely collaborated with a wide range of secular artists from Peter Gabriel to Ben Harper to Bonnie Raitt, made an album with Bon Iver (the stellar 2013 release I'll Find A Way) and shrewdly reworked the ominous Tom Waits classic “Way Down In The Hole” which became the theme for HBO's The Wire. Their newest full length Almost Home, a treatise on morality and mortality, is particularly moving. It features songs written by Marc Cohn, Valerie June, The North Mississippi All Stars and many others - and was the last record that longtime member and bandleader Clarance Fountain was a part of before he passed away. Fountain was part of the group for for nearly sixty years. As Jimmy playfully mentions throughout the conversation, they've never let being blind stand in the way of doing what they do best: putting on a show. They're entertainers at heart and it's so small feat that they've brought a nearly lost form of swinging, soulful (and expertly arranged) gospel from the small southern towns where they grew up, all the way to the White House, where they've held court for three different presidents. They've won five Grammy Awards along the way. Stick around to the end hear their rich cover of Bob Dylan's “I Shall Be Released”.

This week, a wide-ranging conversation with the peripatetic Pennsylvania-born confessional folk songwriter Sean Scolnick, who for the last fifteen years has become the troubadour truth-teller of the Americana circuit, amassing a devoted following performing as his many-hatted, impish alter-ego: Langhorne Slim. Host Z. Lupetin caught up with Langhorne to discuss his much awaited new LP Strawberry Mansion (just released last week via Dualtone) which is named after the neighborhood in Philadelphia where both of his grandfather grew up. Coming out of a deep creative funk, Langhorne produced a record of many entwined reckonings. A flurry of twenty two diaristic sonic sketches, incantations, and emotive story-songs following, sometimes in real time, his struggle with mental illness, pandemic isolation and sobriety - it is an overall hopeful collection that shows Langhorne may be finally finding his true calling on the other side of the darkness. Sean is never shy about revealing how his mental health and creativity are ever-evolving. Without playing the hundreds of international shows and festivals a year he normally does, Sean had to create at home in a new way. A note his therapist gave him still holds true as he releases his newest record without being able to take his guitar and his trademark worn hat in public to support it: “when you're freaking out, just play”. Make sure you stick around the end of the episode where he plays an acoustic rendition of “Morning Prayer, joined briefly by his cat Mr. Beautiful.

This week, Z. talks with Laura and Lydia Rodgers, Grammy-nominated songwriters and preeminent harmonizers from Muscle Shoals, AL, who for the last decade have recorded as The Secret Sisters. First breaking through with their warmly-vintage, vocally-entwined self-titled record in 2010, they've toured the world relentlessly, while recording with a who's who of Americana royalty like Dave Cobb and T Bone Burnett. If you've ever seen them live, Laura and Lydia are known for their sharp-tongued and story-filled live shows - which, even over Zoom, made them particularly rip-roaring interviewees. After breaking free of a major label hell which sidelined and nearly bankrupted them for a time, the sisters regrouped and created their most personal and pop-forward work yet, the heart-string pulling You Don't Own Me Anymore (2017) and 2020's fiery Saturn Return. Both were made with friend and producer Brandi Carlile, and both were nominated for a Grammy. While the last year plus was hard - they lost both grandmothers - there was quite a silver lining: Lydia and Laura each become moms, and have begun to sing their own lead pieces, courageously facing uncomfortable truths about their southern upbringing, calling out the double standards and sexual politics of the music industry, and showcasing their very different experiences as young mothers. With Carlile pushing them to find their own voices, Laura wrote the tender “Hold You Dear” while Lydia penned the more yearning and sardonic “Late Bloomer,” two favorites that stick out after repeated listens to the album. Still, the true beauty of Saturn Return - which they recorded with Carlile's beloved band - may be how Laura and Lydia can split off into new territory and then return together in chills-inducing harmony, as only real sisters could. Stick around to the end of episode for an intimate acoustic performance of “Nowhere, Baby.”

To launch season four, we bring you a special cross-continent episode with acclaimed Canadian singer and guitarist Afie Jurvanen, known as Bahamas. Born in Ontario and now residing in Nova Scotia, Z. caught up with Afie from LA to discuss his playful and powerful newest record Sad Hunk - how he's transitioned from brooding globe-trotting guitar wiz (he first became known as Feist's right hand man) to a to cheerful, mustachioed family man, breaking out as a solo act making squirmy vocal-rich albums like Barcordes that made him a headliner across Canada, once playing recorder in front of Beyoncé at the Grammys, (the best story of the interview) and how he has let his recent songwriting get more personal and introspective during the 2020 upheaval where he was surrounded by his kids during his writing. Big thanks to Podcorn for sponsoring this episode. Host your own podcast? Check out Podcorn for sponsorship opportunities and start monetizing your podcast by signing up here: https://podcorn.com/podcasters/

We made it to the end of 2020. To counteract the darkness of the longest days of the year, here is a special rebroadcast of our holiday show with Tulsa's talented rocker and accidental new king of Christmas: JD McPherson. Much like the cosmic conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn which twinkled in the city sky last night (it only happens once every eight centuries or so), it is this podcast's opinion that McPherson's equally fractious and festive holiday masterwork “Socks” is, like Mariah's holiday opus, a once in a generation record. It's a record to cherish like a family heirloom, a record about weirdo Santas eating deep dish pizza that you want to play all year long without apology. Put it on, trust us. You need this right now. Thanks for sticking with us. See you in the new year with new episodes!

This week we're bringing you an episode from another podcast we think you'd really like. It's called Under The Radar Podcast and this episode features the fantastic Oakland-based artist Fantastic Negrito. Under The Radar is a monthly music podcast with host and producer, Celine Teo-Blockey. She's a music journalist who writes for the longtime indie music mag, also called Under the Radar. She interviews indie songwriters and independent artists, going deep into their childhood memories and the musical milestones that have helped shape their most recent albums. Committed to giving voice to a diverse host of artists, her guests have included Native American Singer/Songwriter Black Belt Eagle Scout, gender non-conforming Ezra Furman who also did the soundtrack for the popular Netflix show "Sex Education", Scottish band Travis, and Caroline Rose who started with an earnest country sound and evolved to electro-pop. The whole series is sound immersive, using archival tape, field recordings and music from the back catalogue of these artists. Under the Radar will be back with new episodes in March, 2021, and has some great guests lined up, including Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips and Emmy the Great, a Hong Kong-born Brit singer/songwriter. Subscribe to Under the Radar wherever you get your podcasts to catch up on their first season and get ready for what's to come in 2021.

This week we bring you a special rebroadcast of our episode featuring living blues legend Bobby Rush. Why now? Well this week he turns 87 and while he may be older than your harmonica-playing grandpa, he's still going very strong. Bobby dropped his 27th studio record Rawer Than Raw this year and was nominated for a Grammy for good measure. As we react to the historic 2020 election results, it is more important than ever to hear from elder statesmen like Rush who was making music during the civil rights movement, met icons like John Lewis and know what's really at stake. For the last six decades, Rush has been playing his own brand of lovably raunchy, acoustically crunchy and soulfully rowdy blues. Starting from his days as part of the Southern migration from his hometown of Homer, Louisiana, to the south side of Chicago (where he used to have Muddy Waters himself sub in for him when he couldn't do a gig) Bobby won his first Grammy at the humble age of 83 after creating 370 plus recordings.

This week, we finish off this season with Larkin Poe, a powerful Southern sister-act that has been wowing audiences around the world with their transformative take on Southern blues and cagey slide-guitar driven rock n' roll. Taking inspiration from their frontiersmen-inspired family who often build and make everything themselves, Rebecca and Megan indeed took DIY to a new level: they have written, produced and performed nearly all their own records and EPs themselves, and while they often pay homage to legends like Robert Johnson, Blind Willie Johnson and more modern greats like The Allman Brothers and The Moody Blues, they have also put their own rawboned stamp on stellar ZZ-Top-esque originals like “Self-Made Man” which is also the title of their newest record. While the sisters admit that doing almost everything in-house can be like walking a tricky tight rope, the results have been encouraging. From show-stopping appearances at festivals like Glastonbury, to opening for the revivified touring version of Queen (Brian May is a new fan) to headlining the 2020 Mahindra Blues Festival in Mumbai, India - to snagging a Grammy nom for their hard-stomping record Venom and Faith - one would think that they should keep on following their DIY instincts. Larkin Poe doesn't plan on taking it easy even though they haven't been able to tour in 2020 - in November they will release Kindred Spirits, a collection of beloved stripped-back covers. Stick around to the end of the show to hear their acoustic version of Lenny Kravitz's “Fly Away.”

This week, we feature one of the leading roots-pop bands working today: Mipso. An affable and endlessly-creative quartet formed in Chapel Hill, NC, they are made up of fiddle player Libby Rodenbough, mandolinist Jacob Sharp, guitarist Joseph Terrell, and bassist Wood Robinson. Despite the anxious mood of their swing-state home base, it's quite an exciting time for the band. Z. was able to catch up with Libby and Jacob (via Zoom of course) to discuss their lushly orchestrated self-titled record which just dropped last week; and if you walk down 8th Avenue in Nashville this week, you might catch a billboard with their sheepish grins writ large in the sky. How did they get here? It's hard to find a group where every member can effortlessly sing lead and write genre-bending songs that fit seamlessly on six acclaimed albums and counting in under ten years. Well, maybe the resurgent chart-toppers Fleetwood Mac? Earlier standout records like the breakout Dark Holler Pop, produced by fellow North Carolinian Andrew Marlin (Mandolin Orange,) and Edges Run, which features a veritable online hit in the broken-voiced, emotional “People Change,” show how they appeal to not only folk fest-loving moms and dads, but also their edgier kids who appreciate their subtly subversive turns of phrase and playful gender-ambiguous neon-tinted wardrobe. As Z. found out during his conversation with Libby and Jacob, the band nearly broke up after a series of grueling 150-show-a-year runs, a scary car wreck and the pressure of putting out Edges Run for their rapidly growing fanbase. The forced slower pace of this last year and a half has been a gift in several ways - allowing the group to catch their breath and hole up to write more collaboratively than ever. The shimmering sonic backdrop that the gifted producer and musician Sandro Perri was able to bring to the sessions at the Echo Mountain studio in Asheville really makes the songs feel like they could exist in any era. You wouldn't be alone if you heard the connection between their honey-hooked newest record with the timeless mellow-with-a-hint-of-menace hits of the 1970s (looking at you James Taylor and Carly Simon) - as songs like “Never Knew You Were Gone” show off Terrell's gift for gently asking the deepest questions, like where he might go when he transitions to the other side in a “silvery fire,” or the sardonically nostalgic “Let A Little Light In,” which wonders if the soft-focused images we have of the peaceful boomtime 1990s (when Mipso was growing up) could use some real scrutiny. Rodenbough's silky fiddle work stars throughout - and her courageous, vulnerable lead vocal on “Your Body” may be the most memorable moment on the new work. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear mandolinist Jacob Sharp introduce his favorite contribution, “Just Want To Be Loved.”

This week we catch up with acclaimed roots-rocker Sarah Shook. For most of the last decade, Sarah has been making cut-to-the-bone country music of her own aching outlaw variety - first with her early band The Devil and now with her seasoned group of sensitive twang-rock shitkickers - The Disarmers. Homeschooled in deeply religious seclusion around upstate New York and North Carolina, Shook largely only heard classical composers growing up. As a loner creative teenager trying to process her hidden bi-sexuality, she described hearing Elliott Smith and Belle & Sebastian as revelatory - finally someone felt like her and found a way to share it with the world. But it was after encountering the raw honesty in the songs of Johnny Cash that she found a purpose and a place for her achy-voiced folk songs. With a little encouragement from her longtime lead guitarist, who saw how powerful her presence (and her songs) could be on stage, an openly reticent Shook took the leap and started playing professionally in 2013. She gained national attention with her stellar back-to-back albums Sidelong and Years - which caught the attention of famed outlaw country label Bloodshot Records (they signed her) and sent her on a relentless round of touring around the world. With confessional, lived-in songs like “Fuck Up” and “New Ways To Fail” Sarah is a master of getting to the point - processing her tough transition to sobriety with grace, humor and wit, and much like her hero Johnny Cash, she suffers no fools when it comes to love and its tricky late-night detours. With her signature half-smile, half-grimace candor Shook sings about another love affair gone wrong: “I need this shit like I need another hole in my head.” Stick around to the end of the episode to hear a live-from-home acoustic rendition of her deliciously twangy kiss-off “Gold As Gold.”

This week a conversation with songwriter and singer Matt Quinn of jangly-pop phenomenons Mt. Joy. Much like host Z. Lupetin's group Dustbowl Revival, Mt. Joy began thanks partially to some Craigslist kismet. After Quinn took the leap from PA to LA and reconnected with fellow guitarist Sam Cooper (who he used to jam with at their high school in Philadelphia), the band found their bassist Michael Byrnes, and Byrnes' flatmate, producer Caleb Nelson, helped create their infectious breakout singles “Astrovan” and “Sheep.” While most rising bands might shy away from writing extensively about addiction; or describing Jesus as a reborn Grateful Dead-loving stoner; or examining generational violence and brutality in Baltimore; with some deeper listening, it's not hard to notice that Mt. Joy's bouncy, arena-friendly sing-alongs are admirably subversive and often quite heavy below the pop shimmer. A whirlwind of touring on some of America's biggest stages followed the resounding streaming success of their first homemade singles, bringing the band from tiny rehearsal spaces and obscurity to the most hallowed festivals in America -- like Newport Folk and Bonnaroo -- and huge white-knuckle tours opening for The Shins, The Head and The Heart, and The Lumineers. By 2018 their joyous, full-throated rock sound had fully gelled with the addition of Sotiris Eliopoulos on drums and Jackie Miclau on keys. Their catchy and confident self-titled record arrived on Dualtone and seemed to go everywhere at once -- with the acoustic-guitar led anthem, “Silver Lining,” surprising the band most of all by hitting #1 on the AAA radio charts. But, as Quinn mentions early on in the talk, by the time the band released their much-hyped sequel record, Rearrange Us, in early 2020, the group of friends and collaborators were fraying at the seams. Relentless time away from loved ones caused breakups that were a long time coming, and trying to match incredibly high expectations had forced the band to ask themselves what they really wanted out of this new nomadic, whiplash life. Thus Rearrange Us dives courageously into darker shadows than its predecessor. In emotional standout songs like “Strangers” Quinn has an achy-voiced knack for pinpointing that exact moment when good love goes wrong -- and how feeding off the endless adoring energy of the strangers he meets in every new town can only sustain him for so long. In a way, the pandemic-forced time off coinciding with their record gaining steam was a blessing in disguise, allowing Quinn and the band to reflect and recharge. But of course, with a feverish fanbase from Philly to LA waiting, Mt. Joy wasn't about to rest long. If you're a fan, you may have noticed that they are currently playing safe, sold out drive-in shows across the East coast and Midwest with more on the way.

This week on the show, we catch up with a rising star in boundary-bending country and take-no-prisoners rock n roll - Aubrie Sellers. What have you been doing since the pandemic hit in late February? Somehow Aubrie has managed to release both a striking new LP of twisty guitar-drenched originals in Far From Home (collaborating with her roots rock heroes like Steve Earle) while also pushing herself to make a EP of beloved covers in the aptly titled World On Fire. In rejuvenating a faded favorite like Chris Isaak's “Wicked Game” she takes a song we all thought we knew and twists it around until it seems like a poisonous reverb-zapped revelation that just arrived this week out of nowhere. Aubrie was prepared to make music earlier than most. Often not going to traditional schools, she grew up doing her homework on tour buses, hanging out in green rooms and getting her feet wet on stages in Nashville's tight-knit country community; you might know her mom as twangy-pop icon Lee Ann Womack, and her dad Jason Sellers had a few chart toppers of his own, writing for folks like Kenny Chesney and playing in Ricky Skaggs' touring band. Sellers made her major label debut in 2016 with the more straight-ahead but tightly crafted New City Blues, and earlier sang on a compilation record with the late Ralph Stanley. But at only 27, Aubrie feels and sounds like an old soul who is less interested in climbing the current country charts with a slick radio hit about trucks, backyard parties and ex-boyfriends, than mining thornier material like her history of anxiety and stage-fright, while harnessing the punky poet outlaw energy that more cerebral songwriters like Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams have become known for. And people are indeed taking notice, as Sellers' scorching duet with Earle, “My Love Will Not Change,” was recently nominated for the Americana Music Association's Song of the Year. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear an acoustic live-from-home rendition of her tune “Far From Home.”

This week on The Show On The Road, we feature a conversation with Gary Louris, co-founder and leading songwriter of longtime Americana favorites The Jayhawks -- who launched out of Minneapolis in 1985 and celebrated the release of their harmony-rich 11th studio album, XOXO, this July. Any band that has managed to stick together for a generation (their self-titled debut dropped when host Z. Lupetin was in diapers) clearly has kept a fervent fanbase intrigued; their signature shoegaze-y, electric roots has endured through personnel changes, bouts of addiction, and the upheaval of the music industry that often leaves fading rock and rollers behind. While Louris will be first to admit that for many years he didn't think it would be “cool” to keep a rock band together this long, he has grown to appreciate the band's defiant longevity. Indeed, their newest collaboration, XOXO, doesn't show The Jayhawks softening at all, even as they have become respected Americana elder statesmen. Instead it shows off some of their sharpest rock-guitar-inspired records yet -- with tunes like the Uncle Tupelo-, sepia-tinted “This Forgotten Town” staying at the top of Americana single charts for months, getting near-constant radio play nationwide. Seminal Americana records like Smile and Rainy Day Music in the early 2000s finally launched The Jayhawks into international notoriety -- they played late night TV and enjoyed (or endured) packed bus tours across North America and Europe -- but the success was often bittersweet and they never quite tipped the scale like other roots-adjacent groups like Wilco and Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. As host Z. Lupetin discovered while remote recording, Louris can now laugh about an infamous New York Times review of their album Smile that, despite being quite positive, lead with an unfortunate headline noting the band's lack of widespread acceptance: "What If You Made a Classic and No One Cared?" Louris is often cited as leading the charge behind the band's shift from jangly alt-country toward a more catchy, rock-pop sound, but there are plenty of roots still showing -- especially Louris' noted love of British Invasion rock energy and 1970s AM radio layered harmony. After some years that took Louris away from the supportive twin city hub for other ventures (he was also in supergroup group Golden Smog) the band's core group of Louris, Marc Perlman, Karen Grotberg, and Tim O'Reagan are now happily back together in their original Minneapolis home-base, grateful to still be creating new rock 'n' roll with a devoted audience that is waiting patiently for touring to open up again. Stick around to the end of episode to hear Louris share an intimate acoustic performance of The Jayhawks' all too fitting new song, “Living A Bubble."

This week on The Show On The Road, a conversation with Nicole Atkins, a singer/songwriter  out of Neptune City, New Jersey who has become notorious for making her own brand of theatrical boardwalk soul.  The Show On The Road host Z. Lupetin fell in love with Atkins' newest, harmony-rich record Italian Ice, which came out spring 2020 and was recorded in historic Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Both rumblingly ominous and joyously escapist, standout songs like “Domino” make the record a perfectly David Lynch-esque summer soundtrack of an uneasy 2020 scene that vacillates between fits of intense creativity and innovation and deep despair. Toiling below the radar for much of her career, Atkins is finally enjoying nationwide recognition as a sought-after writer and producer; Italian Ice was co-produced by Atkins and Ben Tanner of Alabama Shakes. While some may try to shoehorn Nicole Atkins into the Americana and roots-rock categories, one could better describe her as a new kind of wild-eyed Springsteen, who also mythologized the decaying beauty of New Jersey's coastal towns like Asbury Park, or a similarly huge-voiced, peripatetic Linda Ronstadt who isn't afraid to mix sticky French-pop grooves with AM radio doo-wop, '70s blaxploitation R&B and airy jazz rock like her heroes in the band Traffic. If you watch her weekly streaming variety show, “Live From The Steel Porch” (which she initially filmed from her parents' garage in NJ, but now does from her new home in Nashville), you'll see her many sonic tastes and musical friends gathering in full effect. Italian Ice features a heady collection of collaborators including Britt Daniel of Spoon, Seth Avett, Erin Rae, and John Paul White. After playing guitar and moving in and out of hard-luck bar bands in Charlotte and New York -- many of which that would find any way to get rid of their one female member -- Atkins' bold first solo record Neptune City dropped in 2007 and three more acclaimed LPs followed, including her twangy, oddball breakout, Goodnight Rhonda Lee in 2017 on John Paul White's Single Lock Records. Much like the tart and brain-freezing treat sold on boardwalks around the world, Atkins' newest work is a refreshing and many-flavored thing and demonstrates that, in a lot of ways, the show-stopping performer, producer, and songwriter has finally embraced all the sharp edges of her personality.

This week, The Show On The Road features a conversation with members of LA's Latin roots-rock heroes Chicano Batman. The band came together in 2008 and is comprised of Eduardo Arenas (bass, guitar, vocals), Carlos Arévalo (guitars), Bardo Martinez (lead vocals, keyboards, guitar) and Gabriel Villa (drums). Host Z. Lupetin was able to catch up with Bardo and Eduardo while they sheltered in place at home in LA. In the past you may have seen them at music festivals like Coachella dressing up in matching Mariachi outfits, and crooning in a colorful mashup of Spanish and English on previous standout records like the dreamy “Cycles of Existential Rhyme” and the rebellious “Freedom Is Free”.   Their newest work “Invisible People” is their most personal, political and downright danceable release to date. The traditional Mariachi outfits may be tucked away in storage, but their playful vibe remains, even as the musicianship and pop-tightness took a big jump forward. After twelve years of expanding and fine-tuning their sound and finding a devoted national audience, Chicano Batman is no longer the oddball upstart band. While they now focus mainly on English lyrics, they know as songwriters and performers that they've become role models for Los Angeles's vibrant Latin-roots rock renaissance, acting as springboards to a whole new scene that may not have a genre or name yet.

This week The Show On The Road features living folk-blues legend and underground guitar icon David Bromberg. Host Z. Lupetin got to speak with the now 74-year-old Bromberg in a hotel room before the pandemic shutdown prior to Bromberg playing a show at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles back in February, 2020. Coming out of the fertile Greenwich Village scene on the heels of Bob Dylan, Ramblin Jack Elliot and other shaggy troubadour-storytellers, Bromberg's encyclopedic knowledge of American songwriting traditions made him a coffee-house wunderkind who refused to be pigeonholed in one genre. By the age of thirty, Bromberg was the go-to guitarist for Dylan, Willie Nelson, John Prine and Ringo Starr, and he could be found jamming at dinner parties with George Harrison. A man of many interests and talents, Bromberg actually stepped away from performing for nearly two decades at the height of his notoriety, moving to Chicago to learn how to build and then appraise violins. He became obsessed with identifying the best instruments just by sight, and even opened a respected instrument shop in Wilmington, Delaware called David Bromberg Fine Violins. He returned after twenty two years off the road with the triumphant and Grammy nominated "Try Me One More Time" in 2006, and has assembled an energetic band of friends that continues to join him on his high energy new offerings. Bromberg's muscular and ever genre-bending 2020 release “Big Road” pays homage to his heroes like Charlie Rich and 1930's bluesman Tommy Johnson, but also injects heavy doses of swampy rock, horn-heavy funk, and good-humored folk storytelling along the way. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear him play a new acoustic tune called “Buddy Brown's Blues”.

This week a conversation with Leyla McCalla, a talented multi-lingual cellist, banjoist, and singer/songwriter. Born in New York, raised in New Jersey, and McCalla is now based in New Orleans, where she raises three kids (she often tours with them in tow). McCalla often honors her Haitian heritage, bringing listeners into a vibrant world of Creole rhythms and forgotten African string-band traditions by introducing them to a new audience with her own powerful creative vision. You may know McCalla as an integral part of two different roots supergroups: the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Our Native Daughters. But for much of the last decade, she has put out heady, ever-surprising solo projects. The latest, The Capitalist Blues, harnesses the brassy, percussive sounds of New Orleans; her previous record, A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey, was also a standout, putting her gorgeous cello-work center stage while also examining powerful Haitian proverbs and Haiti's often-overlooked, tragic history.

This week on the Show On The Road, a conversation with Chloe Smith of Rising Appalachia. In 2005 she founded this unique partnership with her sister Leah after their relentless world travels finally intersected in southern Mexico, where Leah had started mastering the banjo. Growing up in a musical family of traditional string-band players and contra-dance leaders near Atlanta, Rising Appalachia's latest release, Leylines, mixes the rustic front porch sound of their childhood family jam sessions with a neon-tinted modern backbeat of dancehall electronics and mystical protest. That could have felt incongruous, but somehow these influences mix beautifully with their ethereal, intertwined vocals and darting fiddle-and-banjo runs. While our host, Z. Lupetin, was able to catch up with Chloe for this cross-country conversation, Leah has been marooned in Costa Rica since the world shut down in March and continues to work from there. The sisters and their talented six-piece band have become a beloved fixture at music festivals throughout the United States, but have also played stages in Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, The Czech Republic, Ireland, Scotland, and more.  Always looking to challenge the traditional carbon-hungry touring routine, Leah dubbed their group as part of a growing “slow music movement”, and in this episode, Z. talks with Chloe about the time they toured remote Canadian farming islands via sailboat. It's that kind of intimate and innovative traveling that Chloe would like to return to whenever the COVID-19 shutdown lifts in the coming years. Stick around to the end of the episode for an acoustic version of “Harmonize” from Leylines, and check out Rising Appalachia's newest single “Pulse,” featuring Dirtwire.

This week on The Show On The Road Podcast, a conversation with renegade roots songwriter, painter and NSFW self-taught poet Dan Reeder. Reeder has rarely has been interviewed, but has collected a legion of devoted fans after putting out a series of beloved albums on John Prine's Oh Boy Records - including the much-anticipated new LP “Every Which Way.” For the uninitiated, diving into Dan Reeder's uniquely absurdist, harmony-drenched body of work can feel like reading a rich short-story collection in one sitting. His normal routine is to layer lush close-mic'd vocals on top of one another using himself as a conspiratorial choir, sketching tiny but poignant moments from his life and imagination, often repeating a simple phrase again and again like one of his most-listened to tunes “Work Song” which tells us bluntly through gospel claps: “I've got all the fucking work I need”.  Much more than a one man band, Dan often builds every instrument he plays in his recordings, from steel string guitars, to banjos, drums, basses, cellos, violins, clarinets, and even the computer he records on. This episode was recorded in his garage studio in Nuremberg, Germany, where he's lived with his wife for 30 years.  Reeder's new album may seem intimidating at first. It features a whopping 20 songs (or cinematic vignettes of a sort), but a closer look shows it clocking in at a succinct 39 minutes. Controversial but gentle acoustic offerings like “Porn Song” for instance come in at just under minute long and new favorites like the wide-eyed (but foul-mouthed) piano ballad “Born a Worm” asks the deepest of questions of an indifferent but endlessly beautiful universe in only the way Reeder could, by plainly inquiring about a caterpillar's mysterious transformation into a butterfly: “what the fuck is that about?” Host Z. Lupetin spoke to Dan right after John Prine passed away from complications of Covid-19, and they spoke about his tours together with Prine and how much his music inspired him through the years.  Stream Reeder's newest “Every Which Way” now.

This week, a conversation with renowned Danish pianist, experimental composer, and atmospheric-folk songstress Agnes Obel. Recorded high above Hollywood in the famed Capitol records building (Obel was recently signed to Blue Note Records), host Z. Lupetin takes an intimate tour of her newest work “Myopia”, which shows Obel at her most personal and aurally fearless. Born in Copenhagen and based in Berlin, Obel's albums warrant repeat listening, as it's often hard to know exactly what instruments are playing at any given time. At times the darting, looping piano and quicksilver string work seem like a chamber orchestra, or maybe the songs in “Myopia” are secretly the technicolor backdrop and emotive score to a film that only she sees. It's been nearly a decade since her transcendent DIY debut album “Philharmonics” put her into many people's minds (she may not be very well known yet in the States, but she is a gold-record selling underground star in many parts of Europe). This past Spring, Obel was supposed to be playing the expansive Greek Theater in Los Angeles before Covid-19 forced her to stay in Berlin, which for an artist that creates hushed, often lyricless songs you probably can't dance to, is an impressive leap. Listen to her newest “Myopia” on Blue Note Records.

This week on The Show On The Road, we feature an intimate, long distance talk with British-born super producer and new wave songwriting titan Dave Stewart. Stewart grew up obsessed with Delta blues, but also with the futuristic beats and dancehall magic found in synthesizers. He somehow fused those two worlds into an indelible body of work that has won him a Grammy and sold over 100 million records and counting. While most people know him as one-half of the foundational synth-soul group Eurythmics, which he formed with longtime friend and muse Annie Lennox, churning out genre-defying hits like “Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)” and “Here Comes The Rain Again,” that still burn up radio today. Since the 1980s heyday of Eurythmics, Stewart has forged a singularly cosmopolitan career as something of a modern sound collector, both in creating his own bluesy solo work and producing records for a cavalcade of stars like Mick Jagger, Aretha Franklin, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, Joss Stone, and more. He has also been acknowledged as one of the most tireless boosters for AIDS research, even working directly with the late Nelson Mandela to raise money for the cause. His newest musical adventure has him rejoining Louisiana-based blues interpreter Thomas Lindsey for the forthcoming full length Amitié. The striking single “Storm Came” is available now.

Something powerful is in the air. While we may have said that after similar unrest in the past -- after Rodney King in LA, Trayvon Martin in Miami, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and countless others -- something about what is happening now feels deeper, heavier. Maybe it's actually sinking in. From host, Z. Lupetin: I normally try to put out a new episode of The Show on the Road podcast every other Wednesday. This week, that simply wasn't possible. It was time to stop giving my endless opinions, to stop waxing poetic about harmony, to shut up about finding the meaning in every lyric and just be quiet, listen and learn. I've been lucky to talk with truly amazing Black artists, songwriters and performers in the two years I've been creating The Show on the Road. I ask you to go back into our archives and listen to these voices, including Sunny War, Bobby Rush, Birds of Chicago, Dom Flemons, Liz Vice, and The War and Treaty.

This week on The Show On The Road, we feature a conversation with a Canadian-born paraparetic prince of pop-folk singers, who has jumped through more gauntlets of the modern music industry than almost anyone in his three plus decades of making records, Steve Poltz. Poltz first hit the scene with the San Diego-based underground punk-folk favorites The Rugburns, then as an accidental hitmaker and MTV video heartthrob with collaborator and friend Jewel, and then as a wild-haired, two hundred shows a year internationally revered solo act. He's put out a baker's dozen of whacked-out, deceptively sensitive, and fearlessly personal albums that have won him devoted audiences from his ancestral home in Nova Scotia to the dance party dives of California to massive festivals across Australia and beyond. As we are still quite separated during the pandemic, host Z. Lupetin called up Poltz in Nashville to discuss the long and twisty road Poltz has travelled -- jumping from his inspired, most-recent album Shine On back to his childhood in swinging Palm Springs (where he met Elvis and Sinatra), to making $100,000 music videos for his ill-fated major label debut in '98, to nearly dying on stage after substance abuse problems and never-say-no-to-a-gig exhaustion took its toll.   We now find him in a more peaceful, purposeful existence in where he is newly married and enjoying making music at home (government orders!) for the first time in decades.

This week on The Show On The road, we feature a conversation with Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance, two Texans and expert harmonizers who for the last decade have toured the world as Jamestown Revival. Right before all tours got sent home, host Z. Lupetin was able to hop on the Jamestown Revival tour bus (sorry for the engine hum) to discuss their intimate new record, San Isabel, and their journey from meeting as curious singing teenagers in Magnolia, TX to their move out west and back home again. While their previous record, The Education of a Wandering Man, saw them harnessing the muscular roots-rock that can be heard at their powerful live shows, San Isabel strips everything back to their intimate two-voices-around-one-mic, “southern and Garfunkel” sound that brought them together in the first place -- and has rightfully won them hordes of fans coast to coast. They say sibling harmony can't be compared and we've had several sets of twin bands on the podcast, but what about soul-brother harmony? If one thing is clear just sitting on the bus and listening to them weave their stories and songs together, it's that Clay and Chance were born to sing together. San Isabel was laid down at Ward Lodge Studios overlooking the San Isabel National Forest in Buena Vista, Colorado and often includes the natural sounds of the nature all around them. Give it a listen -- it's peaceful and powerful and raw and maybe just what we all need right now.

This week on the show we bring you a two part conversation between Z and folk-jazz visionary Kat Edmonson. The first was captured backstage before a show at Largo in LA right before the Covid-19 shut-down, and in the second part Z caught up with Kat during her anxious but creative quarantine in New York City.  Initially turning heads for her dreamy and futuristic interpretations of great songbook classics like Gershwin's “Summertime” which have been listened to over ten million times and counting - Kat broke through with her own playful original works a decade ago, self-producing one of Z's all-time favorite records “Take To The Sky”. She quickly found powerful fans in folks like Lyle Lovett who she toured with wildly and major label releases followed. Kat soon migrated from her home state of Texas to Brooklyn where her elfin chanteuse look and sparkling vintage sound (think Blossom Dearie with some Texan muscle) caught the attention of Woody Allen who cast her in “Cafe Society” - a dream come true for this black-and-white film lover. Z and Kat sat down to discuss her newest record “Dreamers Do” which may just be the shot of pure cinematic nostalgia we all need right now. Does she cover Mary Poppins, Disney's Alice In Wonderland and Pinocchio and somehow make them deeply cool, sonically subversive and somehow brand new again? She sure does.  

For this special episode, your host Z. Lupetin adhered to the strict stay-at-home pandemic orders, recording an intimate phone conversation with Theo Katzman, the Cheshire Cat of soulful pop-rock and one of the most visible members of the mysterious funk supergroup, Vulfpeck. In January, Katzman celebrated the release of his cheeky, super catchy, unabashedly romantic, and pop-driven new solo album Modern Johnny Sings: Songs in the Age of Vibe and was on a run of packed release shows when everything shut down (you know, because COVID-19). Katzman's expertly-crafted songs and lilting falsetto vocals have that rare spark that can brighten anybody's dull quarantine in no time.

This week on the show, host Z. Lupetin meets up with Joey Dosik, a silky-voiced songwriter and freaky-talented multi-instrumentalist who writes lush, romantic jams that transport listeners to R&B-tinted, old school FM radio gold. Some listeners may have learned of Dosik's talents with DIY, future-funk ensemble Vulfpeck, led by trickster curator/composer Jack Stratton. Vulfpeck went from making goofy viral videos and recording an album of total silence -- that scared the shit out of streaming giants like Spotify after it rocketed the band to international notoriety and financial success -- to crowdfunding a series of hit funk records and vinyl releases that propelled them to sold out international tours, headlining nights at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, and an unprecedented sold out show at Madison Square Garden (all with no record label in sight). As we honor and celebrate two lost musical greats this week, Bill Withers and John Prine, it's comforting to remember that we have constant new waves of amazing artists like Joey Dosik coming up who can honor and further their message. In many ways, Dosik's songs combine the honest earnestness of Prine's best early work, telling frank stories of family and relationships, with Withers' deep, church-flavored, down-home groove.

Right before the whole world as we know it shut down, Z got to talk to Oliver and Chris Wood of the Americana pioneers The Wood Brothers about their renewed musical bond, how they grew up in Colorado jamming with their biology professor dad, and how they just barely missed being bashed by the great East Nashville tornado a month and a half back. When it rains it does pour, it seems. The conversation happened before one of their last shows on their Covid-19 shortened west coast run. The Wood Brothers' brand new record “Kingdom in My Mind” is a sweetly funky, ballsy, bluesy and booty-shakingly romantic improvisational masterwork - do yourself a favor and turn it up loud and proud - it will help you groove through the lock-down. If there is anything that's clear in this deeply strange and unsettling time, it's that we need music now more than ever.

To say today's episode is personal would be an understatement. Your host Z. Lupetin founded the group in Venice Beach, CA over ten years ago with a lucky Craigslist ad that started it all. What started as a clandestine jam group with as many as ten instruments going full blast at an after hours advertising office, the band was soon starting in speakeasies and small venues around LA, with the band eventually recording their beloved live album “With A Lampshade On” at the famed Troubadour in LA and the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. In 2013 Liz Beebe joined the group and they began touring full time, becoming a powerhouse eight piece band that wowed festivals and stages in over dozen countries, playing over a hundred and fifty shows a year and releasing seven full length records along the way - including their soul-dipped self-titled work from 2017 produced by Grammy-winner Ted Hutt, the co-founder of Flogging Molly. This week celebrates the release of their most daring work to date - “Is It You, Is It Me” produced by Sam Kassirer (Lake Street Dive, Josh Ritter) and engineered by Brian Joseph (Bon Iver, Sufjan Stephens). The album doesn't shy away from confronting the powerful political fallouts happening in families and communities around the country - and their emotional rock n roller “Get Rid Of You” pays homage to the courageous kids in Parkland, FL who stood up and demanded gun control measures be taken now - prompting recent glowing write-ups in Rolling Stone and Billboard. Z was able to gather the whole band around the mic while on the road in New Hampshire - make sure you stick around to the end of the episode as the band shares their intimate acoustic single “Let It Go”.

This week we feature a border-breaking bluegrass band who came all the way from Buenos Aires to celebrate their folk album of the year Grammy nomination - and before they hit the red carpet, they stopped by Z's LA living room studio to talk about their unlikely founding and how they've created their intoxicating brew of traditional North American and often overlooked South American stringband sounds - Che Apalache. Lead by a trilingual world traveller, the fleet-bowed fiddler, spitfire vocalist and sonic scholar Joe Troop - the band formed almost accidentally when Joe began teaching curious local Buenos Aires pickers his own North Carolina folk traditions and amongst his talented students, he found three kindred spirits in Argentinians Franco Martino on guitar and Martin Bobrik on mandolin, and Pau Barjau on banjo originally from Mexico. The result has been one of the most unexpected and have-to-hear-this-to-believe it stories in modern roots music - culminating in their brilliant second record Rearrange My Heart which was produced by fan of the band (and guy pretty good on the banjo) Bela Fleck. Lucky for us, they play several songs during the episode!

This week on the show - Z meets up with a cerebral Texas born roots rocker who has recently struck out on his own, poking one foot in the torn tinsel of a Houston honky tonk and another in a haunted California “Black Mirror” episode set in a tilted sci fi future - Jason Hawk Harris. While most songwriters hide behind walls and trapdoors of metaphor, Harris isn't afraid to openly process his recent family traumas and loss on his stunning and aptly titled first solo album “Love and The Dark” released by Bloodshot Records in 2019. Despite his youth, Jason has much to tell us and if this equally sensitive and swaggering sound is where the future of modern country music is headed? We're in.

This week on the show - Z's conversation with revered singing songstress and deeply wise wordsmith, Dar Williams. Coming out of the Hudson Valley outside New York City, Williams has released over thirteen albums over a quarter century as one of America's touchstone folk poets, first bursting out of the famed Lilith Fair folk rock scene in the mid 1990s with contemporaries like Ani Difranco and the Indigo Girls and gaining a devoted following. She has toured with luminaries like Joan Baez and Patty Griffin, written a book about what makes communities resilient, runs her own songwriting retreats, and has inspired generations of women to fearlessly embrace their creativity, and exercise their limitless potential. Z was able to catch up with Williams in the green room at historic McCabes Guitar Shop before her second show of a sold out weekend. A new album is on the way.

This week, on the very first episode of 2020, we welcome The Steel Wheels, a Virginia-based band of virtuous harmony masters and savvy stringband experimenters who have quietly put together an impressive body of work for the last decade, corkscrewing their way across the country supporting seven diverse acoustic-based albums and along the way, and gaining gangs of devoted fans from their big-hearted, peace-promoting songs. Taped live at historic Mccabes Guitar Shop in LA, Z. Lupetin gathered the boys around the mic to dive into their boundary-pushing 2019 release Above The Trees, how they once toured on bicycles to spread climate change awareness, and how they survive 15 hour drives to strange shows in Iowa. They end the episode with their gorgeous acapella song “This Year”.

JD McPherson joins Z. for the final episode of The Show On The Road's 2019 Season. The Oklahoma-born artist makes his own brand of high intellect, dance party-ready Sun Studios-style rock 'n roll and last year, may have recorded one of the greatest original Christmas albums of the modern era with "Socks". While JD McPherson probably never dreamed he would become a new rock-n-roll king of Christmas, “Socks” that may be his most impressive feat yet. If you're deeply suspicious of the capitalistic caterwauling of most modern holiday music on the airwaves (except you, Mariah!) you'll still fall in love with JD's sarcastic and sweet new collection of holiday originals, which deftly dives into lesser discussed Christmas subjects like broken expectations, inter-family angst, holiday horniness, and hilariously - the myth of why Santa must be grossly overweight to satisfy us myth-loving kids. Give the album a spin as you rock around the Christmas tree or the Chanukah bush, or even better - keep it playing all year long. Back in a few weeks with more episodes!

This week, a special conversation with the founder and sonic visionary behind one of the America's most beloved and underrated roots-and-noise-rock groups, Grandaddy: Jason Lytle. Starting from humble beginnings as a trio of skateboarding friends in Modesto, CA in the early 1990s, Grandaddy put out a series of daring, deeply weird records all produced and written by Lytle that first caught fire in Europe, and by the turn of the Millennium, the band found themselves headlining rock festivals like Glastonbury in the UK and crashing late night TV in the US with the cool kids. But Jason wasn't cut out for traditional cookie-cutter stardom. Grandaddy broke up for six years, and after disappearing into the Montana wilderness, the soft spoken multi-instrumentalist mountain-crazy songwriter kept his devoted fanbase coming back by creating oddly-titled solo records of cinematically rich soundscapes that encircled whacked anti-heroes and telling poetic, campfire-ready short story songs that still make us worried kids feel heard and seen but also constantly keep us guessing. His latest “NylonAndJuno”, which dropped in August on Dangerbird Records, is an experimental instrumental album made entirely with a nylon string guitar and a vintage Roland Juno synthesizer. Zach was able to catch up with Jason before a rare and recent solo show in LA.

On this week's episode of The Show On The Road, Liz Vice – a Portland born, Brooklyn-based gospel/folk firebrand who is bringing her own vision of social justice and the powerful, playful bounce of soul back to modern religious music. Liz Vice is following a rich tradition that goes back generations to powerful advocates like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sam Cooke, the Staples Singers, the Ward Sisters, Aretha Franklin, and especially Mahalia Jackson, who was the soundtrack to the civil rights movement. It was Mahalia who pushed Martin Luther King Jr. to tell the assembled masses in Washington, D.C. about his dream. We often forget how much religious music was infused in the counterculture back in the 1960s, and as the BBC mentions in a great article about the era, “The music of the black church was infusing and inspiring the political consciousness of folk music; gospel was no longer just for the religious but the foundation for much ‘60s protest.” And so we bring you Liz Vice — and a little clear-eyed Christmas spirit to usher you into the twinkling darkness of December.

This week Z. welcomes Madison Cunningham - a gifted songwriter, singer, and guitar slinger who has quickly risen from shy Southern California prodigy to a nationally admired Grammy-nominated major label recording artist redefining what could be a new genre between the fertile plains of pop, jazz and new wave folk music. As the eldest daughter of a big family, maybe Madison Cunningham was always meant to be an old soul. And as a young star on the rise, she thankfully hasn't had to toil long in dive bars and retirement community gymnasiums, as many new artists do. She has already dazzled on large stages, opening for her heroes like the Punch Brothers, Iron & Wine, and Andrew Bird, all while teaming up with luminaries like Joe Henry to bring her songcraft to a new level. If you have an hour, lock yourself in a dark room and listen to her newest release “Who Are You Now” and forget the failed love affairs and credit card debt and smoky bars of your youth and put your faith in the new generation. We are in good hands, no doubt about it.

This week on the show, Z. Lupetin speaks with renowned British song collector, sonic interpreter, roots music promoter, and deeply intuitive folk singer Sam Lee. Lee came to music almost by accident after a former life as a wilderness survivalist and nature advocate. Since, he has become one of the leading voices in Great Britain, saving the treasured endemic music cultures that rapidly disappear each year. His gorgeously delicate and meticulously researched debut, Ground Of Its Own, shot him from hopeful academic to nationally recognized folk star -- partly by being nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize. Lee has relentlessly worked to save and rejuvenate the ancient melodies and songcraft of Irish and Scottish traveller tradition, Romany rhythms and stories, and connect those traditional melodies to a youthful pop culture that is yearning to know where it came from and where it is going next. His Nest Collective, an "acoustic folk club," gathers artists, authors, dancers and theatrical renegades and puts on shows and events across London - making Sam a rare double threat - as both an artist and a promoter of other artists. His newest release, Old Wow, drops January 31, 2020.

As Z. travels across the UK this month, we bring you Lucy Rose - a talented singer-songwriter who grew up in the same lyrically fertile plain as Shakespeare, who has made albums filled with twisty tales of sharp tongued, black-hearted people searching for redemption, and navigating the rough rivers of a kind of supernatural sorrow that refuses to let us go as we grow up. On her newest “No Words Left”, Lucy has gone back to her roots a bit, forsaking the glossy Brit-pop direction that some of the powers-that-be wanted to push her in, and peeling back her sound so that what we hear is just the thorny pure fruit inside. The result is intense. Interlocking singing conversations in the tone of a toothy, hushed scream, as she questions our relationships with ourselves and maybe even God, to find who we really are behind the suffocating velvet gauze of our multiple social media personalities.

On this Halloween, The Show On The Road brings you a special re-broadcast of an episode from our first month of shows with the legendary swamp blues singer and guitarist Tony Joe White. Tony Joe White made trance-like country blues with his signature ominous growl and slithering electric guitar for over 50 years. While many only know him for his novelty hit Poke Salad Annie (which was covered by a guy named Elvis), he also wrote for Dusty Springfield and Tina Turner, and the likes of Bob Dylan was a fan. Zach was fortunate to speak with Tony Joe at a hotel diner in Hollywood back in September about his storied career as a songwriter, guitarist, and touring musician, a few weeks before he passed unexpectedly on October 24, 2018.

This week, Z. Lupetin speaks with Robert Ellis, the restless, tuxedoed, Texas piano-man who has paired his fleet-fingered, high-humored, “jazz in an Austin roadhouse” keys playing with machete-sharp lyrical turns of phrase — all backed up with his smile-through-the-apocalypse country-rock band. Ellis has gained a beloved international following all the while creating a persona that is half the tender brilliance of early Billy Joel, and half high-hatted, Southern huckster who might tell you a story that will make you cry one minute, and then steal your watch when you're not looking the next. Z. met up with Robert Ellis on the road together in the Netherlands.

This week, Z. speaks with Bonnie Bishop - the fierce singer/songwriter raised in Texas and Mississippi with a powerhouse voice shaped by decades of singing in smoky bars, cutting confessional Americana gems that have won her a Grammy for her songwriting, and gained her a growing legion of fans nationwide. Like her hero Bonnie Raitt, sometimes it takes an artist six records into her late thirties for anyone to take notice. And sometimes it takes a painful divorce to create a song that would be recorded by Bonnie Raitt and help Bonnie Bishop win the Grammy. No, Bishop's life didn't change overnight - reality is usually much more sobering than the fantasy of winning big in music. But, Bonnie knows she is winning now. Things are really happening - people respect her and the road is moving - and fast. And sometimes that's the scariest thing of all.

This week, Charlie Parr - a Minnesota-based folk blues lifer who writes novelistic, multi-layered stories that shine a kaleidoscopic light on the defiant, unseen characters thriving in the shadows all around us. Charlie has a new record with only his name on it, and it isn't shiny and perfect and commercial and catchy. It's him. It's pure Charlie Parr, and maybe that's enough. He hasn't moved to LA or Nashville - he's stayed in the cold grey north of Minnesota, because that's his home. Take a second wherever you call home right now, and listen to his new record. You might hear something different every time.

This week, Z. speaks to the founding trio of one the most respected and sought after folk rock bands in the country - The Lone Bellow. Their hedonistically heavenly harmonies have lifted them from playing tiny bars around their founding home base of Brooklyn, New York to adoring audiences at venerable venues like Red Rocks Amphitheatre, the Apollo, and The Ryman Auditorium, in their new home of Nashville, Tennessee. The Lone Bellow have a rapport that is intimate, hilarious, and -- when it calls for it -- deadly serious. The band is full of so much heart and genuine insight that you can't help but lean in and listen.

This week, Anna Tivel - the Portland-based singing poetess who builds mountain ranges of rhymes with her colorful, impressionistic perspective of a world still shrouded in endless beauty and mystery. Anna Tivel is one of those folk singers who is passed between friends and long-time listeners like a secret talisman; a tiny gemstone that you polish in your pocket when you need a reminder that the earth is vast and the smallest things you pass on the side of the road are beautiful if you look at it from the right view. As soon as the needle hits the wax on her latest record "The Question", Anna's hushed, sharp edged voice begins slicing sonic film strips of angular verses that build and build until the words flow out in blinking mini movies that sear themselves on your eardrums and then are gone in a flash. It's like she's a sonic cinematographer waiting for the scene to be shot in our minds.

This week, Z. speaks with booming country gospel trickster Paul Cauthen. Z. and Paul met up in Nashville after his weird and whacked-out Big Velvet revue, which nearly got shut down for a brawl that occurred on stage at the end. Paul has a way of harnessing his own madness into a dangerous and intoxicating sonic brew that needs to be in your ear holes right now. Start with this episode, and then move on to Paul's recent release, Room 41.

This week, Matt The Electrician - a kind hearted songwriter and cunning craftsman of smile-inducing folk songs that retain the one thing we might need most in our jackknifed new century: hope. While the artist not known as Matt Sever may still be able to fix the sparking wires behind your walls with his nimble bare hands, he found a line of work even more daring, dangerous, and financially precarious to set his sites on back in the 1990s: being a roving folk singer. Matt's been at this a while, he looks more like your cool tatted shop teacher than the next big arena money maker for the major labels -so letting the people who have put him up in their houses and cooked him a warm meal on the road support the music their own way? It's kind of beautiful. In fact, his sturdy fanbase just lovingly funded his next record, in which he'll be working on with a producer for the very first time, and that producer is none other than Tucker Martine. He'll be heading up to Tucker's studio in Portland Oregon to start the project in October.

The Show On The Road is back with Cosmic California Country Singer / Songwriter Leslie Stevens. Z. speaks with the deeply intuitive songwriter and cosmic country singer who has been creating viscerally vulnerable songs that seem to ache right through the speakers with her shimmering voice on her much awaited solo album “Sinner”, which came out in August.

This week Z. speaks with Smooth Hound Smith, the fiery folk-blues duo from East Nashville who've spread their infectious honeyed harmonies and gritty finger-picked sonic essays all across the continent. Despite being two hilarious humans who got married and share nearly every waking moment together, Zack and Caitlin have never stopped making each other laugh and have never stopped pushing their timeless songwriting to new heights. With their fancy new record "Dog In a Manger" coming August 9, they shine a sharp light on the beautiful worn edges of our country like never before.