Podcasts about death cab

Did you know storytelling is considered the world's oldest art form? Jesus used them to invite his listeners into another way of seeing and living life.This past Sunday at Storyline's Gathering, we considered the very first parable of Jesus.The band performed songs by Death Cab for Cutie, Harry Styles, Kings of Leon, and Bethel Music.

In this roundtable edition of Producer Points, host Justin Gammella sits down with three seasoned producers and mixers to unpack one big question: Does analog gear still matter in 2025?As digital tools continue to evolve, the role of analog gear is less about necessity—and more about taste, process, and emotion. From workflow to sonics to studio philosophy, this episode explores the creative and practical reasons some of the best in the game still turn to hardware.

Send us a textWelcome to Guess the Year! This is an interactive, competitive podcast series where you will be able to play along and compete against your fellow listeners. Here is how the scoring works:10 points: Get the year dead on!7 points: 1-2 years off4 points: 3-5 years off1 point: 6-10 years offGuesses can be emailed to drandrewmay@gmail.com or texted using the link at the top of the show notes (please leave your name).I will read your scores out before the next episode, along with the scores of your fellow listeners! Please email your guesses to Andrew no later than 12pm EST on the day the next episode posts if you want them read out on the episode (e.g., if an episode releases on Monday, then I need your guesses by 12pm EST on Wednesday; if an episode releases on Friday, then I need your guesses by 12 pm EST on Monday). Note: If you don't get your scores in on time, they will still be added to the overall scores I am keeping. So they will count for the final scores - in other words, you can catch up if you get behind, you just won't have your scores read out on the released episode. All I need is your guesses (e.g., Song 1 - 19xx, Song 2 - 20xx, Song 3 - 19xx, etc.). Please be honest with your guesses! Best of luck!!The answers to today's ten songs can be found below. If you are playing along, don't scroll down until you have made your guesses. .....Have you made your guesses yet? If so, you can scroll down and look at the answers......Okay, answers coming. Don't peek if you haven't made your guesses yet!.....Intro song: Funky Donkey by Beastie Boys (2011)Song 1: Glass Onion by The Beatles (1968)Song 2: Baby, I Love Your Way by Big Mountain (1994)Song 3: Because I Got High by Afroman (2000)Song 4: Scientist Studies by Death Cab for Cutie (2000)Song 5: Kisses on Fire by ABBA (1979)Song 6: Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen (1984)Song 7: Sigma Oasis by Phish (2020)Song 8: Sweater Weather by The Neighborhood (2012)Song 9: Footsteps in the Dark by The Isley Brothers (1977)Song 10: Mrs. Train by They Might Be Giants (1994)

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  What books are we recommending based on songs from Blondie, Arctic Monkeys and Death Cab for Cutie? Listen to find out.  The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias The Favorites by Layne Fargo House of Beth by Kerry Cullen Cackle by Rachel Harrison The Return by Rachel Harrison Chlorine by Jade Song The Villa by Rachel Hawkins Cursed Bunny: Stories by Bora Chung What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us: Stories by Laura Van Den Berg The Third Hotel by Laura Van Berg American Rapture by CJ Leede Play Nice by Rachel Harrison National Domestic Violence Hotline: (800) 799-SAFE (7233) or use Duck, Duck, Go to visit: Https://thehotline.org 

The month of M-arch continues! And we wouldn't be good 30-something millennial white boys if we didn't pay tribute to perhaps the most 30-something millennial white boy band of all time, Death Cab for Cutie. We did Transatlanticism a while back, so we thought it was high time we reviewed Plans, their follow up album. And don't worry, we of course play Smash or Pass. You can contact the show at agoodpodcast@gmail.com and find us @HowStarWarsIsIt on all platforms, but since all platforms are kind of evil now, you should probably just email us. That's the best way to get a hold of us! You can also follow Mike @WordGospel09 on Youtube and Instagram and Josiah @JosiahDotBiz on social media, but once again, just email us. And don't forget to rate and review on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts! And if you REALLY like the show head over to our Patreon at patreon.com/howstarwarsisit for bonus episodes, Star Wars movie commentaries, and more!

It is a thrill to welcome Miral Kotb back (and for the first time on the podcast) to the Jake's Take with Jacob Elyachar platform.  Miral is a prolific entrepreneur in technology development and the performing arts. In 2009, she combined her passion for dance and technology to create iLuminate, the world's first light dance technology company. Two years later, Miral and Team ILuminate made their national debut on America's Got Talent (AGT): Season Six, where they wowed the audience, Howie Mandel, and former judges Piers Morgan and Sharon Osbourne.  After coming in third place, iLuminate began working with iconic collaborators such as the Black Eyed Peas, Chris Brown, Christina Aguilera, and Death Cab for Cutie. Miral Kotb's technology was also featured on Dancing with the Stars, The X Factor, and several award shows, including the American Music Awards, BET Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards, and Nickelodeon's HALO Awards. Fans also saw her work incorporated into Disneyland, off-Broadway, and Six Flags Theme Parks shows.   She is passionate about empowering young people to pursue opportunities in STEM/STEAM. An engaging and influential public speaker, she knows how to enlighten audiences about the creative side of technology.Miral has spoken at numerous events, including Google Zeitgeist, Google's Made with Code, On Cue, TEDx Teen, TEDx Broadway, Wonder Woman Tech, TIDE Conference, The Apple Developer Conference, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, Adaptive Paths, Center for Global Brand Leadership, National Arts Marketing Project, NEXTECH, Capital One, and Acuity Brands, among others. Miral and her iLuminate team also had the honor of ringing the opening bell at NASDAQ.  Miral and iLuminate have landed a new show at The Strat Hotel, Casino, and Tower in Las Vegas! The production received rave reviews from Las Vegas Magazine, Las Vegas Weekly, and The New York Times. The show is performed daily except on Tuesdays.  On this episode of The Jake's Take with Jacob Elyachar Podcast, Miral Kotb spoke about the Las Vegas show, how AGT impacted both pop culture and the Las Vegas Strip, and previewed the group's 2025 tour that has stops in Colorado Springs, Denver, Sioux City, Iowa, and Flint, Michigan.Let's connect on social media: A) BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/jacobelyachar.bsky.socialB) Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JacobElyachar/C) Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jacobelyachar/D) Threads: https://www.threads.net/@jacobelyacharE) Twitter (X): https://x.com/JacobElyacharF) YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JacobElyacharBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/jake-s-take-with-jacob-elyachar--4112003/support.

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Everyone knows the hit track “There She Goes,” a song that sounds like it has always existed and emerged into the world fully formed by the hand of God. Liverpudlian band The La's made that perfect song, and according to the many musicians it influenced, including Oasis' Liam Gallagher or our guest, Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service, a nearly perfect album, and then basically never put anything out again. Join Yasi and Ben as they talk about one of the most interesting, mysterious, and secretly influential bands from the UK.  EPISODE PLAYLIST: Listen to the songs we talk about HERE CREDITS: Host: Yasi Salek @yasisalek Guest: Ben Gibbard Producer: Liz Sánchez  Audio Editor: Adrian Bridges Additional Production Supervision: Justin Sayles Theme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Send us a textWelcome to Guess the Year! This is an interactive, competitive podcast series where you will be able to play along and compete against your fellow listeners. Here is how the scoring works:10 points: Get the year dead on!7 points: 1-2 years off4 points: 3-5 years off1 point: 6-10 years offGuesses can be emailed to drandrewmay@gmail.com or texted using the link at the top of the show notes (please leave your name).I will read your scores out before the next episode, along with the scores of your fellow listeners! Please email your guesses to Andrew no later than 12pm EST on the day the next episode posts if you want them read out on the episode (e.g., if an episode releases on Monday, then I need your guesses by 12pm EST on Wednesday; if an episode releases on Friday, then I need your guesses by 12 pm EST on Monday). Note: If you don't get your scores in on time, they will still be added to the overall scores I am keeping. So they will count for the final scores - in other words, you can catch up if you get behind, you just won't have your scores read out on the released episode. All I need is your guesses (e.g., Song 1 - 19xx, Song 2 - 20xx, Song 3 - 19xx, etc.). Please be honest with your guesses! Best of luck!!The answers to today's ten songs can be found below. If you are playing along, don't scroll down until you have made your guesses. .....Have you made your guesses yet? If so, you can scroll down and look at the answers......Okay, answers coming. Don't peek if you haven't made your guesses yet!.....Intro song: Million Dollar Baby by Tommy Richmond (2024)Song 1: Man in Blue by Death Cab for Cutie (2019)Song 2: Scream by Billy Idol (2005)Song 3: Seabird by Alessi Brothers (1976)Song 4: The Man of the House by Loretta Lynn (1971)Song 5: In a Broken Dream by Python Lee Jackson (1970)Song 6: Use Me by Bill Withers (1972)Song 7: Daddy Sang Bass by Johnny Cash (1968)Song 8: Pressure Drop by The Maytals (1970)Song 9: Hold On Loosely by 38 Special (1981)Song 10: Papa's Got a Brand New Bag (Pt. 1) by James Brown (1965)

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  1 - The Delines - Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom -  Don't Go Into That House 2 - Bernardo Sassetti - Nocturno - Sonho dos Outros 3 - The Delines - Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom - Nothing Down The Highway 4 - Shannon Wright - Reservoir of Love - Something Borrowed 5 - Death Cab for Cutie - Asphalt Meadows (Acoustic) - The Plan 6 - Stephen Pastel · Gavin Thomson · The Pastels - This Is Memorial Device - Introduction to Why I Did It 7 - Foxes in Fiction - Ontario Gothic - Into The Fields 8 - Emile Mosseri & Julianna Barwick - … - Snowpool 9 - Hilary Woods - Colt - Inhaler 10 - Mount Eerie - Clear Moon - The Place I Live 11 - Ana Roxanne - ~~~ - Nocturne 12 - Anna von Hausswolff - The Miraculous - Stranger 13 - King Hannah - I'm Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me - The Moods That I Get In 14 - Engineers - Engineers - Ruby Dead ---- 15 - Adrian Crowley - Measure Of Joy - Swimming in the Quarry 16 - Antonymes - The Licence To Interpret Dream - Doubt 17 - Alabaster DePlume - A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole - Invincibility 18 - Anna B Savage - You & i are Earth - Talk to Me 19 - Filipe Sambado - Gémea Analógica - Cristais de Sono 20 - James Elkington - Pastel De Nada - Night-Felt 21 - Barzin - … - Sad and Beautiful World 22 - Andrew Tuttle - Presence / Presents - Presents 23 - Friends Of Dean Martinez - Lost Horizon - Somewhere Over The Waves 24 - Bill Callahan - Woke On A Whaleheart - Night 25 - Helena Deland - Altogether Unaccompanied, Vol. V - Silver and Red 26 - James Blackshaw - Unraveling In Your Hands - Why Keep Still? 27 - MALVA - Poros - Ninho (feat. Luís Duarte Moreira) 28 - Jenny Hval - … - Bonus Material 29 - Ryuichi Sakamoto - Little Buddha  OST)- Gohatto Opening Theme 30 - Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain - Deer Stop  

Have you wondered how psychedelics are being intentionally used by artists, writers, musicians, and other creatives to push the boundaries of their craft? This session kicks off our new series, Psychedelic Salon, with a panel of esteemed Seattle artists who will discuss the role of psychedelics in Seattle's countercultural movements and how they influence artistic expression. Expect a candid conversation on the relationship between altered states and creativity, with insights from prominent Seattle creatives known for their experimentation. Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of how psychedelics can be used as a tool for creative flow and self-expression. April Pride is a serial creative entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience developing brands and products across interiors, fashion, lifestyle, cannabis, psychedelics, audio, and more. In 2015, she launched Van der Pop, an industry defining, female-focused cannabis lifestyle brand. Van der Pop published the pioneering Women & Weed Survey exploring North American women's perspectives on cannabis. After exiting to Canopy Growth, one of world's largest cannabis companies, April continued her advocacy for cannabis normalization through her popular podcasts, How to Do the Pot and The High Guide. Currently, April is the CEO and Founder of SetSet, an accessible psychedelic education and integration platform offering clinician-created educational guides and programs. Rachel Demy is a fine art photographer, writer, and educator in Seattle, Washington. She employs a non-linear approach to her work, which covers themes of trauma, addiction, and all manner of human experiences considered difficult to look at directly. Her upcoming solo gallery exhibition, Revocable Living, is a collection of photographs made while (unknowingly) in active addiction and runs from February 27 – April 12, 2025, at Spectrum Fine Art (Seattle, WA). Her first photography book, Between, Everywhere—about touring with Death Cab for Cutie—was published through Minor Matters Books in 2022. Tim Keck co-founded The Stranger, Seattle's alternative weekly newspaper, known for its bold, irreverent take on local news, culture, and politics. Before founding The Stranger, Keck co-founded The Onion, the satirical newspaper that has since become a cultural institution. At The Onion, Keck helped set the foundation for the publication's signature comedic style, influencing generations of satirists and journalists. Throughout his career, Keck has been a key figure in shaping the landscape of alternative media and journalism. His work has challenged conventional boundaries of news reporting and entertainment, blending the two in a way that continues to resonate with readers across the country. Keck's print and digital media contributions reflect his deep commitment to innovative, independent journalism. About Psychedelic Salon: A Monthly Series Exploring Novel Therapeutics for Well-Being  Seattle-based cannabis and psychedelics educator & podcast host April Pride hosts a collaborative series with Town Hall Seattle focused on the emerging science of psychedelic medicine. This women-forward series highlights the potential of novel therapeutics for mental health, reproductive health, chronic pain, trauma, and overall optimization. Through engaging panel discussions, expert talks, and community conversations, April offers an accessible platform for researchers, clinicians, and advocates to share insights on psychedelics for improved human health. The series would also explore the historical context of women's roles in plant medicine and the growing movement to incorporate psychedelics into mainstream treatment options, particularly for conditions that disproportionately affect women, such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Presented by Town Hall Seattle and SetSet.

MUSICDave Grohl has been added to the SNL 50:Homecoming Concert, which is set for February 14th at Radio City Music Hall in NewYork and will stream on Peacock. Alice in Chains fans who catch Jerry Cantrell on hissolo tour will get a treat. R.E.M., Death Cab for Cutie, The PostalService, The War on Drugs and Soul Asylum are amongthe acts contributing unreleased tracks to a Los Angeles wildfire relief albumcalled, week's two FireAid benefit concerts in Inglewood, California are expected toexceed $100 million Country musician, ZachTop was in town the other night. And lots of people believe he is AlanJackson's son.  TVDenise Richards andher daughters have a new reality show. Denise Richards and Her Wild Things premiereswith two back-to-back half-hour episodes on Tuesday, March 4 on Bravo. MOVING ON INTO MOVIENEWS:Netflix has pulled its support for Emilia Pérez actor Karla SofíaGascón in her campaign to win the ‘Best Actress' award at this year's Oscars.  Adrien Brody hadhis nose mistaken for a prosthetic by a makeup artist on "TheBrutalist". The Actor discussed it on the "TonightShow”.  Hugh Jackman had to cancel a July 6th performance inLondon, and people are speculating that it's because Wolverine is showing up inthe next "Avengers" movie. MISCAmber Ruffin has beenselected to host the 2025 White House Correspondents' Dinner.          AND FINALLYThe Super BowlHalftime Show is one of the biggest stages an artist can book!Follow us @RizzShow @MoonValjeanHere @KingScottRules @LernVsRadio @IamRafeWilliams – Check out King Scott's Linktr.ee/kingscottrules + band @FreeThe2SG and Check out Moon's bands GREEK FIRE @GreekFire GOLDFINGER @GoldfingerMusic THE TEENAGE DIRTBAGS @TheTeenageDbags and Lern's band @LaneNarrows http://www.1057thepoint.com/Rizz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

MUSIC Dave Grohl has been added to the SNL 50: Homecoming Concert, which is set for February 14th at Radio City Music Hall in New York and will stream on Peacock. Alice in Chains fans who catch Jerry Cantrell on his solo tour will get a treat. R.E.M., Death Cab for Cutie, The Postal Service, The War on Drugs and Soul Asylum are among the acts contributing unreleased tracks to a Los Angeles wildfire relief album called, week's two FireAid benefit concerts in Inglewood, California are expected to exceed $100 million   Country musician, Zach Top was in town the other night. And lots of people believe he is Alan Jackson's son.    TV Denise Richards and her daughters have a new reality show. Denise Richards and Her Wild Things premieres with two back-to-back half-hour episodes on Tuesday, March 4 on Bravo.   MOVING ON INTO MOVIE NEWS: Netflix has pulled its support for Emilia Pérez actor Karla Sofía Gascón in her campaign to win the ‘Best Actress' award at this year's Oscars.   Adrien Brody had his nose mistaken for a prosthetic by a makeup artist on "The Brutalist". The Actor discussed it on the "Tonight Show”.   Hugh Jackman had to cancel a July 6th performance in London, and people are speculating that it's because Wolverine is showing up in the next "Avengers" movie.   MISC Amber Ruffin has been selected to host the 2025 White House Correspondents' Dinner.            AND FINALLY The Super Bowl Halftime Show is one of the biggest stages an artist can book! Follow us @RizzShow @MoonValjeanHere @KingScottRules @LernVsRadio @IamRafeWilliams – Check out King Scott's Linktr.ee/kingscottrules + band @FreeThe2SG and Check out Moon's bands GREEK FIRE @GreekFire GOLDFINGER @GoldfingerMusic THE TEENAGE DIRTBAGS @TheTeenageDbags and Lern's band @LaneNarrows http://www.1057thepoint.com/Rizz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

EPISODE 54 of Five At The Door features an exhilarating conversation with the dynamic duo from Runaway Brother, a band that's been crafting their unique sound for over a decade. Join us as we explore their musical journey, from their early beginnings to the release of their latest singles, including the highly anticipated track "Ok Desu ka." The band's evolution is a testament to their dedication and love for music, which shines through in every note. In this episode, the members share the origins of Runaway Brother, revealing how a love for video games and a shared passion for music brought them together. Discover the influences that shaped their sound, from the punk-infused melodies of Say Anything to the emotive storytelling of Death Cab for Cutie. They discuss the creative process behind their upcoming album, "Want You Need," and how their experiences have informed their songwriting. Listeners will gain insight into the band's dynamic approach to music, blending fast-paced rhythms with introspective lyrics. The conversation touches on the challenges of balancing day jobs with their passion for music, and the joy of creating art for the sake of expression rather than commercial success. With a mix of nostalgia and ambition, Runaway Brother reflects on their journey and the importance of connection through music. Get ready to hear "Ok Desu ka," a track that encapsulates the essence of Runaway Brother's artistry and their growth as musicians. This episode is a celebration of creativity, resilience, and the beautiful chaos of the DIY music scene. Here's a taste of the track that showcases the heart of Runaway Brother's sound. Tune in: [Ok Desu ka – Runaway Brother] Remember, whether you're navigating the ups and downs of life or pouring your heart into your art, it's the passion and authenticity that keep the spirit of independent music alive. Don't miss this episode as we dive deep into the world of Runaway Brother, where every song tells a story and every performance is a testament to their unwavering dedication to music. Show notes penned by your favorite chronicler of the musical journey at Five At The Door. (00:00) Runaway Brother has been together for well over ten years (03:56) Do y'all have a record coming out later this year (10:06) Let's either capitalize on the thing that we did on the EP or on this record (15:19) It's got enough grounding, like, the foundational now. It's. Verse, and you're like, oh, cool. This is (15:31) How did you all find each other in music? Um, what's story (21:59) Yalls goal with wanting to keep doing music is expensive (26:24) Perfect says everyone should start a band. If you're a listener and you're thinking about (30:59) You play bass and sing in the band. You've been around the whole project (32:47) The next thing I wanted to talk about is day, uh, jobs

#83: My guest today is Alda Agustiano, also known as Chong The Nomad, who is a music producer and DJ based in Seattle, Washington. Alda has been producing music for well over a decade now, recently releasing her debut album titled “Do We Make Of This?” and also working on projects such as Marvel's Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings, and getting music sync spots with companies like Singapore Airlines, Apple, Universal Audio, and Nike. She has also opened for artists like Odesza and Death Cab for Cutie.   In this episode, we talk Alda's musical upbringing—transitioning from piano lessons to music production in high school, her choice to go to music school and how she made the most of it, her struggles and realizations with the business side of her music career. and so much more.   Find Alda here: Website: https://www.chongthenomad.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chongthenomad/?hl=en Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/1TCIxnDm8SASkB6dTMrFCy?utm_medium=share&utm_source=linktree SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/chongsongs     And if you're interested in making music and sound for games, I have a newsletter and free courses that will get you started, and help you find paying work in games. Just go to http://www.bit.ly/soundbizpod

Ten years ago, Nick Sanborn & Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso) exploded onto the indie music scene with their unique electro-pop sound and mysterious aura.Since then, they've played some of the biggest stages in the world and have even created their own record label in their adopted hometown of Durham, NC. In this conversation, Nick and Amelia reflect on their chance meeting and the remix that sparked their creative/life partnership; how they blended their musical styles after touring for years with other bands; and why songwriting sometimes feels like fishing. Catch Sylvan Esso's latest tour dates here: https://www.sylvanesso.com/tour Links from the Show: Hey Mami on YouTubeSylvan Esso performing 'Coffee' live at Coachella on April 17, 2015 For more conversations like this with musicians like Jeff Tweedy of Wilco and Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, go to https://www.thegreatcreators.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Arribem al darrer "Celobert" del 2024 i ho volem celebrar de la millor manera possible, amb un bon grapat de can

The glove compartment is inaccurately named, but Know Your Writes! is right on the money! In another special New Year's episode, Robb and Colton welcome returning guest Alex Periera (Birthday Dad) as the trio breakdown Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism. Other topics include: - Alex, Robb, and Colton's favorite songs of the year  - the origins of "Giraffic Park"   - whether or not Ben Gibbard is fun at parties Artists mentioned in this episode: - The Shins - Will Smith - Mount Eerie  - Mk.gee  - Rose and Bruno Mars - Streetlight Manifesto - Motion City Soundtrack - Thursday - Blink 182 - Bright Eyes - The Postal Service

Pobres dentistes i higienistes! Si no fos per ells, no podr

Send us a textIntro song: Umbrella by Rihanna (#2)Album 4: Wincing the Night Away by The Shins (2007)Song 1: Red RabbitsSong 2: Split NeedlesSong 3: A Comet AppearsAlbum 3: Plans by Death Cab for Cutie (2005)Song 1: Summer SkinSong 2: Crooked TeethSong 3: Brothers on a Hotel BedLink to Wincing the Night Away (Andrew's Mix)Link to Plans (Andrew's Mix)

When Facebook suggested Lisa Alpert as a person I might know, I peeped her profile, and thought, this lady seems pretty cool. And oftentimes, that hunch is accurate. Not always, but often. This one was no exception.Lisa Alpert is cool, rad, awesome, and good vibes, and that's precisely the sort of thing I'm seeking when looking for guests. Lisa's a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mom, a business owner, and a muthaf***in' hustle. Ya' betta' ax somebody. For those reasons and more, she's my guests for Episode #147, and I couldn't be happier that we made this conversation happen.Please check out Lisa's business, Manifest Collaborative. It's a non-profit that specializes in marketing, fundraising, brand development, public relations, and a bunch more. Learning about some of Lisa's professional endeavors and personal experiences was so much fun. We talked about family, pursuing dreams, and -- of course -- a couple of her favorite albums. Those were these:self-titled, Tracy Chapman (1988)Give Up (2003), Postal ServiceSufjan Stevens' Come On, Feel the Illinoise (2005)Plans (2005), Death Cab for CutieJustin Timberlake's 20/20 Experience (2013)Sound & Color (2015), Alabama ShakesChance the Rapper's Coloring Book (2016)Harmony of Difference (2017), Kamasi WashingtonFuture Islands' People Who Aren't There Anymore (2024)And we gave a tiny bit of honorable-mention action to Taylor Swift, Saves the Day, The Quintet, Beyonce, Qveen Herby, Fleet Foxes, TLC, and Lil' Wayne.A thousand thanks to Lisa for both the time and the awesomeness. I can't wait to book her again for the Becoming a Swifty series.Cheers, y'all.copyright disclaimer: I do not own the rights to the audio samples contained within this episode. They are clips from a Heiko Voss tune called, "I Think About You," off of the 2003 EP of the same name (c/o Kompact Pop).

With a career spanning decades, Tom Hanks has embodied more unforgettable characters than most actors have roles.This episode brings back Tom's inspiring conversation with Guy Raz from 2023, where he shares his journey through film—from early breakout roles to timeless classics—and his process of breathing life into each character.You'll also learn how Tom deals with nerves and self-consciousness on set; what Joe DiMaggio and Paul Newman told him about performance anxiety; and why he believes ‘bringing an idea' is the secret to success.Links from the show:Tom and Peter Scolari in Bosom BuddiesTom and Daryl Hannah in SplashThe cross-country running scene from Forrest GumpThe execution scene from The Green MileTom as Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger in Sullly: plane crash in the Hudson sceneTom as Colonel Tom Parker in Baz Luhrmann's ElvisThe real Colonel Tom Parker in an interview on ABC Trailer for A Man Called OttoFor more conversations like this – with guests ranging from Jason Sudeikis to Anna Kendrick to Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie – go to https://www.thegreatcreators.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode of Seeing Them Live, Charles interviews Shelley Van, an experienced community builder, marketer, and manager of Tru Band Room, a music venue in Decentraland. Shelley discusses her journey from her first concert experience at the B96 Bash to managing over 1,000 performances in the virtual world.Shelley highlights the unique aspects of virtual events, such as creating avatars, virtual merchandise, and NFTs to engage audiences globally. The conversation delves into the challenges and opportunities of Web3 and how it offers new ways for independent artists to monetize their work. Additionally, Shelley shares memorable moments from her virtual concerts, including a special Christmas event featuring Krampus and live interactions with fans from around the world.BANDS: Aerosmith, Ash Orphan, Buffalo, Death Cab for Cutie, Deep Sea Diver, Ed Sheeran, Jessica Dobson, Kid Rock, Kings of Leon, Krampus, Mr. Swee, New Kids on the Block, Pans, Psychedelic Furs, Spottie WiFi, Stoney Eye, Tara Who, The Shins.VENUES: Aragon Ballroom, Credit Union One Amphitheater, Decentraland, Filling Station, Kettle House Amphitheater, Liar's Club, New World Music Theater, Soldier Field, Troubadour, Tru Band Room. PATREON:https://www.patreon.com/SeeingThemLivePlease help us defer the cost of producing this podcast by making a donation on Patreon.WEBSITE:https://seeingthemlive.com/Visit the Seeing Them Live website for bonus materials including the show blog, resource links for concert buffs, photos, materials related to our episodes, and our Ticket Stub Museum.INSTAGRAM:https://www.instagram.com/seeingthemlive/FACEBOOK:https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61550090670708

For this episode of LaunchLeft Podcast, Rain is joined by renowned producer and musician John Congleton, who shares his journey in the music industry and his collaboration with emerging artist Sarah Kinsley. They explore the creative process, the significance of authenticity in art, and the unique dynamics of producing music. John Congleton shares his early musical influences and the pivotal moments that led him to become a producer, reflecting on his upbringing in a musically rich environment and the profound impact of punk rock on his creative journey. John launches Sarah Kinsley who reflects on working with John on her latest album, “Escaper”, highlighting the collaborative nature of music production and the challenges of translating studio work to live performances. -----------------  LAUNCHLEFT OFFICIAL WEBSITEhttps://www.launchleft.com  LAUNCHLEFT PATREON https://www.patreon.com/LaunchLeft  TWITTER https://twitter.com/LaunchLeft  INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/launchleft/  FACEBOOK https://www.facebook.com/LaunchLeft  --------------------- In This Episode: [5:30] John Congleton's Early Music Journey [10:48] The Role of Artists and Creativity [16:43] Mentorship and Influence of Steve Albini [21:33] John launches Sarah Kinsley [27:06] Creating Music with Physical Instruments [33:07] The Impact of Technology on Music Creation [38:25] Social Media and Artistic Perception Key Takeaways: ​Everyone is inherently creative, akin to breathing. It's about recognizing and nurturing that creativity in everyday life. Congleton believes that creativity is as natural as breathing. Everyone possesses it, but often, people forget their innate artistic potential. Recognizing and nurturing this creativity can lead to personal fulfillment and innovation. Artists serve as conduits for expressing the human experience. They capture the essence of what it feels like to be alive at a particular moment in time, offering insights that go beyond mere information through all forms of art and expression.  The digital age presents new challenges, such as the instant playback of music and the pervasive influence of social media. Artists must balance these tools with their creative instincts to maintain authenticity. Performing live offers a unique opportunity to connect with audiences in a shared, ephemeral experience. It allows artists to reinterpret their work and engage with listeners on a deeper level. RESOURCE LINKS:  LaunchLeft Podcast Smart Link Links for John Congleton https://www.instagram.com/congletonjohn Links for Sarah Kinsley  https://www.instagram.com/sarahkinsleyd https://www.tiktok.com/@sarahkinsleyd https://twitter.com/sarahkinsleyd https://www.sarahkinsleymusic.com/ John Congleton’s Bio  Producer of some of the most cutting edge music over the past ten years, Grammy award-winning producer John Congleton is known for challenging the artists with whom he works and the listeners who enjoy their work. From his astounding drum sounds to the aggressive guitar sounds he conjures, Congleton defines modern record production. Starting as a teenager in Dallas, Congleton studied and learned the craft of engineering from the ground up. While recording bands on the local scene he developed into an engineer of note. Soon he was being called to record projects as diverse as Kirk Franklin, Erykah Badu and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, all the while continuing to work with the local indie rock scene.  Upon returning to Dallas, Congleton quickly established himself as the best producer in town. It was while working with the Polyphonic Spree he met Annie Clark, now better known as St. Vincent. Their partnership over six albums has won Grammy awards and been universally praised by critics as some of the most important music of our times. Now based in Los Angeles, Congleton continues to grow and flourish. In addition to the repeat business from long-time clients, he’s now established among the best of the best. Recent productions include Death Cab for Cutie, The Murder Capital, Tegan and Sara, Regina Spektor, Wallows, Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten and many more.

Comedian Brodie Reed returns to the charts! Topics include: Mobyvember, League of their Eilish, Deathcab for Clairol, Headphones On Stage.Subscribe at www.whochartedpod.com to support the show, and gain access to Two Charted, the weekly Howard/Brett deep-dive bonus show, and the entire Who Charted and Preem Streem archives ad-free! Now includes the Who Charted Holiday Bundle.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on the Super Fun Time Trivia Podcast we discuss having 10 of the world's deadliest snakes as your roomates, driving around Mordor in a four door sedan, and the number of times Dennis Quaid has made us Quaid. Music Round: Dead and Dying Patreon: Super Fun Time Trivia Website: superfuntimetrivia.com Facebook: superfuntimetrivia Instagram: superfuntimetrivia Twitter: @sftimetrivia Email: superfuntimetrivia@gmail.com Intro Music By David Dino White. Welcome to Super Fun Time Trivia: The known universe's only live improv comedy trivia podcast.

Com que ahir ens van quedar un munt de can

Com que ahir ens van quedar un munt de can

Songs include:A theme from a seminal animated film about anthropomorphic playthingsA female vocalist's 3% happier cover of a wildly sad Death Cab for Cutie trackAn R.E.M. deep cut "When Am I Gonna Lose You?", which really wears its anxiety, neediness, and fear on its title sleeve

This week, we're scratching The Itch for consistency! It's time for our regularly scheduled Badflower coverage, plus our first time seeing 2-time guests Lowlives, and our introduction to a reggae metal band that ISN'T Skindred! Join us to hear about a very relaxing night featuring The Movement, Long Beach Dub Allstars, and Aurorawave, a sold-out double bill with Saosin and Lowlives, and Badflower's latest on-stage insanity alongside Slothrust and Missio! We've got stories of second hand smoke, narrow stairs (but not the Death Cab kind), and ... bananas? Enjoy. If you like what you hear, you can hear more of us every Sunday night broadcasting rock to the masses from 6-9pm CST on KCLC-FM. If you're not in the St. Louis area, you can stream the show from 891thewood.com, TuneIn, Radio.net, and OnlineRadioBox! And if you have the itch to hear some of the best new tracks in rock, follow our New Rock Roundup playlist! For any and all friendship, questions, inquiries, and offers of pizza, The Itch can be found at the following: Website: itchrocks.com Twitter: Twitter.com/itchrocks Facebook: Facebook.com/itchrocks Instagram: Instagram.com/itchrocks Email: itchrocks@gmail.com Thank you so much for listening. If you like what you hear, please subscribe and leave a positive review and rating on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser to help our audience grow. If you don't like what you hear, please tell us anyway to help our skills grow. Our theme song "Corrupted", is used with permission from the amazing Skindred. All other content is copyright of The Itch. All rights reserved, including the right to rock on.

The history of WHFS, the HFStival, and a review of the last 4 bands that played 2024's HFStival at Nationals Park, Washington, DC, including The Postal Service, Death Cab for Cutie, Incubus, and Bush. #hfstival #whfs #thepostalservice #deathcabforcutie #inbucus #bush #indierock #90srock #indietronica PODCAST THEM DOWN - https://linktr.ee/pctd https://patreon.com/podcastthemdown

Today we see if a lady knows anything about Death Cab

Episode 590 also includes an E.W. Poetic Piece called "Mt. View." Our music this go round is provided by these wonderful artists: Thelonious Monk, Diana Krall, Death Cab for Cutie, Nina Simone, Branford Marsalis and Terence Blanchard. Photo by Almighty Todd. Commercial Free, Small Batch Radio Crafted in the West Mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania... Heard All Over The World. Tell Your Friends and Neighbors.

It is not unusual for each of us to have questions about God and even questions for God. But did you know that God has questions for us?This past Sunday morning at Storyline's Gathering, we began a new series about the questions God asks us.The band performed songs by Post Malone and Lainey Wilson, Death Cab for Cutie, Fleetwood Mac, and more.

We recorded this episode with Ben Gibbard and Lori LeFavor before a live audience at Easy Street Records in West Seattle on August 1, 2024. Lori LeFavor is the most prolific all-ages concert promoter in Seattle--and perhaps the US. Starting from age 17 and over the next 30 years, Lori hosted more than 3,000 shows across the Northwest. Her home base during the 90s was RKCNDY, a much-loved all-ages venue where she hosted every major (and minor) band of the era. And she did it all as an independent, woman-owned business. Ben Gibbard is the lead singer, songwriter and bandleader of Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service. Before he sold millions of records and toured the world with his bands, he started playing music and going to shows as a teenager growing up in Bremerton, WA, across the Puget Sound from Seattle. He's been an advocate for all-ages music ever since and remains one to this day. We can only make podcasts like Let the Kids Dance! because listeners support us. You have the power! Make the show happen by making a gift to KUOW.  Support KUOW Podcasts: https://kuow.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode of the pod brought me back to The Tasty (see Ep. 31).. a lovely vegan spot in south Philly, where I met up with singer / songwriter / producer Max Davey and her partner in crime, multi-instrumentalist and producer Steve Novoa. I've known Max for a lot of years - we first met in the early 2010s when I was the open mic host at Dobbs on South St., but that really feels like a lifetime ago for both of us. In much more recent history, Max Davey has made a mark in the Philly music scene in 2023-24 with a string of eclectic singles. In addition to some killer originals, Max and Steve have released some intriguing cover versions of songs by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Dave Matthews Band, and Deathcab for Cutie.Both Max and Steve have come a long way in their personal journeys, processing tragedy and grief in their lives to come to new perspectives on the creation of their art and the value of being present. They are wonderful humans and a musical force to be reckoned with. I hope you enjoy this conversation!
JKF ❤️

Today we're going back—waaay back—and reliving the nostalgic moments, foods, songs, and smells of our younger years. Katie reminisces about the fresh scent of dewy grass on the soccer field and her Nona's simmering spaghetti, while Ashlee shares about her childhood days doused in chlorine and the love language of her youth: mixed CDs, featuring Dashboard and Death Cab. Of course, we couldn't chat about adolescence in the ‘90s without taking an intoxicating stroll through Bath & Body Works and remembering the anticipation of TGIF gracing our televisions. We hope this episode inspires you to crank up that old school jam and take a trip of your own down memory lane.  This show is brought to you ad-free by our generous Substack community. If you'd like to support the work we do for as little as $3/month, head to coffeeandcrumbs.substack.com to join the party (and get bonus episodes!). For show notes, go to coffeeandcrumbs.net/podcast. You just heard what influenced our childhoods and adolescent years, listen to this bonus episode to see what's influencing us now. For more encouragement in your motherhood journey, check out the stories at Coffee + Crumbs.   

Ben Gibbard is the voice of the bands Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service. He talks about Death Cab's scrappy start, recording their classic album Transatlanticism, how the band learned to defuse internal tensions, and how he approaches songwriting in middle age. This episode was recorded in 2023.Links from the Show: Ben's Tiny Desk ConcertBen breaks down his song "Black Sun"Death Cab for Cutie video for "I Will Follow You Into The Dark"Death Cab for Cutie video for "Soul Meets Body"The Postal Service video for "Such Great Heights" For more conversations like this – with guests ranging from Tom Hanks to Bjork to Jason Sudeikis – go to https://www.thegreatcreators.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Quinn comes to you LIVE from a kayak on a pond to talk U-boats, Death Cab lyrics, and a big shoutout to his new favorite airline

Welcome to the PodFam Amy! On Episode 113 we welcome Amy Mowers to the podcast and we get to learn all about her and her new book, DNF: Rising from the Ashes!Amy Mower, a seasoned ultra runner, shares her experiences from the 48-hour World Championship race in Hungary, her unique approach to nutrition during the race, and her upcoming race plans. She also discusses her background, training, and the challenges of ultra running. Amy Mower discusses her experience with ultra running, including 48-hour races, 6-day races, and the challenges of recovery. She also shares insights into her book 'DNF Rising From the Ashes' and her journey into running and writing. The conversation covers self-publishing, book editing, and marketing strategies. The conversation covers a range of topics including book publishing, ultra running, and travel experiences. Amy Mower shares insights about her book, the process of self-publishing, and her upcoming races. She also discusses her experiences in Budapest and her sponsorship with Mount Tocco shoes. The conversation concludes with a lighthearted segment on 'Code Brown Commandments' for ultra runners. Amy Mower shares her experience of running ultra races and the importance of not wasting time during the race. She introduces the concept of 'fiddle f***ing around' and how it can impact race performance. The conversation also touches on Amy's encounter with Ben Gibbard, her involvement with the Culture Trail Running podcast, and her upcoming trip to Budapest.During the Tros, Eric and Erika discover Eric's AI voice, you want to hear this!TakeawaysAmy Mower's unconventional approach to nutrition during the 48-hour race highlights the importance of adaptability and creativity in ultra running.The challenges and rewards of ultra running are evident in Amy Mower's experiences, showcasing the mental and physical fortitude required for such events.Amy Mower's upcoming race plans and training insights provide valuable perspectives for aspiring ultra runners and enthusiasts. Insights into the world of ultra running and the challenges of recovery after 48-hour and 6-day races.The process of self-publishing a book, including editing, cover design, and marketing strategies.Amy Mower's journey into running, her experience with DNFs, and the inspiration behind her book 'DNF Rising From the Ashes'. Insights into the process of self-publishing a bookExperiences and insights from ultra running racesTravel experiences and adventures in BudapestSponsorship and the role of shoes in long-distance runningLighthearted 'Code Brown Commandments' for ultra runners The concept of 'fiddle f***ing around' refers to wasting time during an ultra race, which can significantly impact race performance.Amy Mower's encounter with Ben Gibbard, the lead singer of Death Cab for Cutie, and his involvement in ultra running.The importance of time management and avoiding distractions during ultra races to achieve optimal performance.Amy Mower's upcoming trip to Budapest and her involvement with the Culture Trail Running podcast.Strava GroupLinktree - Find everything hereInstagram - Follow us on the gram YouTube - Subscribe to our channel Patreon - Support usThreadsEmail us at OnTheRunsPod@gmail.com

Send us a Text Message.Welcome to Guess the Year! This is an interactive, competitive podcast series where you will be able to play along and compete against your fellow listeners. Here is how the scoring works:1 point: get the year correct within 10 years (e.g., you guess 1975 and it is between 1965-1985)4 points: get the year correct within 5 years (e.g., you guess 2004 and it is between 1999-2009)7 points: get the year correct within 2 years (e.g., you guess 1993 and it is between 1991-1995)10 points: get the year dead on!Guesses can be emailed to drandrewmay@gmail.com or texted using the link at the top of the show notes.I will read your scores out on the following episode, along with the scores of your fellow listeners! Please email your guesses to Andrew no later than 12pm EST on the day the next episode posts if you want them read out on the episode (e.g., if an episode releases on Monday, then I need your guesses by 12pm EST on Wednesday; if an episode releases on Friday, then I need your guesses by 12 pm EST on Monday). Note: If you don't get your scores in on time, they will still be added to the overall scores I am keeping. So they will count for the final scores - in other words, you can catch up if you get behind, you just won't have your scores read out on the released episode. All I need is your guesses (e.g., Song 1 - 19xx, Song 2 - 20xx, Song 3 - 19xx, etc.). Please be honest with your guesses! Best of luck!!The answers to today's ten songs can be found below. If you are playing along, don't scroll down until you have made your guesses. .....Have you made your guesses yet? If so, you can scroll down and look at the answers......Okay, answers coming. Don't peek if you haven't made your guesses yet!.....Intro song: Mississippi by Bob Dylan (2001Song 1: Mrs. Bluebeard by They Might Be Giants (2018)Song 2: Quality Time by Ledisi (2024)Song 3: Three Little Pigs by Green Jelly (1992)Song 4: Rain by The Beatles (1966)Song 5: Blinded By the Light by Manfred Mann's Earth Band (1976)Song 6: Burial Ground by The Decemberists (2024)Song 7: The Ice is Getting Thinner by Death Cab for Cutie (2008)Song 8: I Can See Clearly Now by Johnny Nash (1972)Song 9: Today Was a Good Day by Ice Cube (1992)Song 10: Dinner and a Movie by Phish (1988)

Give us about fifteen minutes daily, and we will give you all the local news, sports, weather, and events you can handle.   SPONSORS: Many thanks to our sponsors… Annapolis Subaru, the SPCA of Anne Arundel County,  Solar Energy Services, and Hospice of the Chesapeake. Today... The Anne Arundel County Register of Wills, Erica Griswold, has resignbed and the Orphans Court judges have named a replacement. An 11-year-old girl nearly drowned in a Severna Park pool and the ANne Arundel County Fire Department is crediting the lifeguards for savbing her life. The Annapolis City Council has passed a $191 million budget. The WHFestival is back and you can reserve your spot in a lottery for up to 8 tickets--on the bill is Bush, Violent Femmes, Death Cab for Cutie, Garbage,, Incubus, and more! The City of Annapolis is gearting up to celebrate Juneteenth with a parade, festival, and of course a City Holiday! And we have info on our Local Business Spotlight this weekend with AAA Cert! Link to daily news recap newsletter: https://forms.aweber.com/form/87/493412887.htm Back with her weekly Annapolis After Dark is BeeprBuzz. She'll keep you up to speed on all of the fantastic live music we have in the area! And as usual, George from DCMDVA Weather is here with your local weather forecast! Please download their app to keep on top of the local weather scene! DAILY NEWSLETTER LINK: https://forms.aweber.com/form/87/493412887.htm The Eye On Annapolis Daily News Brief is produced every Monday through Friday at 6:00 am and available wherever you get your podcasts and also on our social media platforms--All Annapolis and Eye On Annapolis (FB) and @eyeonannapolis (TW) NOTE: For hearing-impaired subscribers, a full transcript is available on Eye On Annapolis.

Page One, produced and hosted by author Holly Lynn Payne, celebrates the craft that goes into writing the first sentence, first paragraph and first page of your favorite books. The first page is often the most rewritten page of any book because it has to work so hard to do so much—hook the reader. We interview master storytellers on the struggles and stories behind the first page of their books. Today's episode is a republishing of Ep. 6 because Holly was in the hospital. She'll explain why.About the guest author:Daniel Handler is the author of seven novels, including Why We Broke Up, We Are Pirates, All The Dirty Parts and, Bottle Grove and most recently Poison for Breakfast, his first book for readers of all ages published by Liveright/W.W. Norton.As Lemony Snicket, he is responsible for numerous books for children, including the thirteen-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events, the four-volume All the Wrong Questions, and The Dark, which won the Charlotte Zolotow Award. Handler has received commissions from the San Francisco Symphony, Berkeley Reperatory Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has collaborated with artist Maira Kalman on a series of books for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and with musicians Stephin Merritt (of the Magnetic Fields), Benjamin Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie), Colin Meloy (of the Decemberists) and Torquil Campbell (of Stars).His books have sold more than 70 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages, and have been adapted for film, stage and television, including the recent adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events for which he was awarded both the Peabody and the Writers Guild of America awards. He lives in San Francisco with the illustrator Lisa Brown, to whom he is married and with whom he has collaborated on several books and one son.You may also find him on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, IMDB, and purchase his books via Upstream(for signed copies), Indiebound, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.About the host:Holly Lynn Payne is the CEO and founder of Booxby , a startup helping authors succeed. Holly is also an internationally published novelist in eleven countries whose work has been translated into nine languages. Her most recent novel, Damascena:The Tale of Roses and Rumi, has been optioned for a film series. She is the founder of Skywriter Books, an award-winning small press, publishing consultancy and writing coaching service. She lives in Marin County with her daughter and enjoys mountain biking, surfing and hiking with her labrador retriever, Lady Gaia. To learn more about her writing coaching services, please visit hollylynnpayne.com.Thank you for listening to the Page One Podcast, where master storytellers discuss the stories and struggles behind the critical first page of their books. If you liked this episode, please share it on social, leave a review on your favorite podcast players and tell your friends! I hope you enjoy this labor of love as much as I love hosting, producing, and editing it. Please keep in touch by signing up to receive my newsletter at www.hollylynnpayne.com with the latest episodes each month. Delivered to your inbox with a smile.  For the love of books and writers,Holly Lynn Payne@hollylynnpaynewww.hollylynnpayne.com Thank you for listening to the Page One Podcast, where master storytellers discuss the stories and struggles behind the critical first page of their books. If you liked this episode, please share it on social, leave a review on your favorite podcast players and tell your friends! I hope you enjoy this labor of love as much as I love hosting, producing, and editing it. Please keep in touch by signing up to receive my newsletter at www.hollylynnpayne.com with the latest episodes each month. Delivered to your inbox with a smile. For the love of books and writers,Holly Lynn Payne@hollylynnpaynewww.hollylynnpayne.com

Shrien and Anni Dewani, a young, well to do, couple in the midst of a storybook romance are celebrating their honeymoon in South Africa...when things take a tragic turn. A cab ride turned carjacking ends in murder. It seems like the work of local criminals until the murderers point the finger at each other and an unexpected suspect. This shocking case will keep you (and us) guessing right to the end... and beyond. Case starts @ 3:31 For more Slaycation check out https://www.slaycation.wtf/ Join us on Facebook!: https://www.facebook.com/slaycationWTF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Love the show? Hate the show? Think it's just okay? Send us a text!Kilby Court is celebrating its 25th anniversary. What is the best way for us to celebrate with them? Attend the Kilby Block Party to see some of our favorite performers, including Death Cab for Cutie, Postal Service, Courtney Barnett, and the loudest band, Dinosaur Jr.! At least we hope that is what YOU are doing because we won't be attending this year. So we decided to talk about it instead. It may be a shed but it seems everyone has been there to witness their favorite band in an intimate setting. Share with us your favorite band you saw perform at Kilby Court. We'll give you a shout out when we record our episode covering their 50th anniversary!How to Start a Podcast Guide: The Complete GuideLearn how to plan, record, and launch your podcast with this illustrated guide.Support the Show.Find us on social media as well!https://linktr.ee/Thisisaplace

On this week's show, we have a candid chat with Seattle indie rock musician-turned-podcaster (Roderick on the Line, Omnibus) John Roderick. The Long Winters frontman was an early Fretboard Journal subject and guest on our podcast. This time around, we talk about John's break from music-making, the new songs he's been writing, the perils of pedal collecting and so much more. We also reminisce about the PNW indie rock community of the late '90s when John often shared a bill with Death Cab for Cutie, discuss the challenges of getting the band together when you're all in your 50s, and learn about the hacks that may (or may not) overcome writer's block. We also talk gear. John is a gearhead and former employee of Emerald City Guitars. He has a unique perspective on guitars, amps, and pedal collecting and has been a friend of the Fretboard Journal since its inception. I think you'll love it. Follow John here: http://www.johnroderick.com/ Must-listen: John on Song Exploder talking about "The Commander Thinks Aloud": https://songexploder.net/the-long-winters John performing in our 2012 12 Days of Fretboard project: https://www.fretboardjournal.com/video/twelve-days-fretboard-john-roderick/ Fretboard Summit 2024 Registration:  https://fretboardsummit.org Subscribe to the Fretboard Journal print edition and reserve your copy of Fretboard Journal 54:  https://shop.fretboardjournal.com/products/fretboard-journal-annual-subscription This week's show is sponsored by: StewMac: https://stewmac.sjv.io/R5jvRR (Affiliate link) Mike & Mike's Guitar Bar: https://mmguitarbar.com Izotope: https://www.izotope.com (Use the code FRET10 to save 10%) Stringjoy Strings: https://stringjoy.com (Use the code FRETBOARD to save 10% off your first order) Peghead Nation: https://www.pegheadnation.com (Get your first month free or $20 off any annual subscription with the promo code FRETBOARD at checkout). Love the podcast and want to support it? We have a Patreon page just for Fretboard Journal fans and loaded with bonus content. https://www.patreon.com/Fretboard_Journal

What a genuine thrill to welcome dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and educator Nicole Riviere to Mothering Heights! Nicole has danced on shows like America's Got Talent and for artists such as Death Cab for Cutie, Peaches, and Elvis Costello. She has a combined 30 years of experience teaching yoga and dance, and she is a filmmaker who directs music videos and her own piece - Woman, Mother, Sister, Friend, currently in post-production.  This episode is so special - Leonora and Nicole discuss coming back to your great love after a spell away (in our cases: dance), grief and mourning, and advocating for yourself. It's a beautiful episode with a beautiful human being.  Also, everyone's favorite: Leonora gets regretfully vulnerable in the opening! Whoops! Please check out Nicole's work at https://nicole-riviere.com/, don't forget to review and share this podcast, and remember: you're doing a great job.

Episode 171 looks at "Hey Jude", the White Album, and the career of the Beatles from August 1967 through November 1968. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on "I Love You" by People!. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata Not really an error, but at one point I refer to Ornette Coleman as a saxophonist. While he was, he plays trumpet on the track that is excerpted after that. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. This time I also used Steve Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. I referred to Philip Norman's biographies of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney, to Graeme Thomson's biography of George Harrison, Take a Sad Song by James Campion, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life by Donald Brackett, Those Were the Days 2.0 by Stephan Granados, and Sound Pictures by Kenneth Womack. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of “Hey Jude” is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but a remixed stereo mix is easily available on the new reissue of the 1967-70 compilation. The original mixes of the White Album are also, shockingly, out of print, but this 2018 remix is available for the moment. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a quick note -- this episode deals, among other topics, with child abandonment, spousal neglect, suicide attempts, miscarriage, rape accusations, and heroin addiction. If any of those topics are likely to upset you, you might want to check the transcript rather than listening to this episode. It also, for once, contains a short excerpt of an expletive, but given that that expletive in that context has been regularly played on daytime radio without complaint for over fifty years, I suspect it can be excused. The use of mantra meditation is something that exists across religions, and which appears to have been independently invented multiple times, in multiple cultures. In the Western culture to which most of my listeners belong, it is now best known as an aspect of what is known as "mindfulness", a secularised version of Buddhism which aims to provide adherents with the benefits of the teachings of the Buddha but without the cosmology to which they are attached. But it turns up in almost every religious tradition I know of in one form or another. The idea of mantra meditation is a very simple one, and one that even has some basis in science. There is a mathematical principle in neurology and information science called the free energy principle which says our brains are wired to try to minimise how surprised we are --  our brain is constantly making predictions about the world, and then looking at the results from our senses to see if they match. If they do, that's great, and the brain will happily move on to its next prediction. If they don't, the brain has to update its model of the world to match the new information, make new predictions, and see if those new predictions are a better match. Every person has a different mental model of the world, and none of them match reality, but every brain tries to get as close as possible. This updating of the model to match the new information is called "thinking", and it uses up energy, and our bodies and brains have evolved to conserve energy as much as possible. This means that for many people, most of the time, thinking is unpleasant, and indeed much of the time that people have spent thinking, they've been thinking about how to stop themselves having to do it at all, and when they have managed to stop thinking, however briefly, they've experienced great bliss. Many more or less effective technologies have been created to bring about a more minimal-energy state, including alcohol, heroin, and barbituates, but many of these have unwanted side-effects, such as death, which people also tend to want to avoid, and so people have often turned to another technology. It turns out that for many people, they can avoid thinking by simply thinking about something that is utterly predictable. If they minimise the amount of sensory input, and concentrate on something that they can predict exactly, eventually they can turn off their mind, relax, and float downstream, without dying. One easy way to do this is to close your eyes, so you can't see anything, make your breath as regular as possible, and then concentrate on a sound that repeats over and over.  If you repeat a single phrase or word a few hundred times, that regular repetition eventually causes your mind to stop having to keep track of the world, and experience a peace that is, by all accounts, unlike any other experience. What word or phrase that is can depend very much on the tradition. In Transcendental Meditation, each person has their own individual phrase. In the Catholicism in which George Harrison and Paul McCartney were raised, popular phrases for this are "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner" or "Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen." In some branches of Buddhism, a popular mantra is "_NAMU MYŌHŌ RENGE KYŌ_". In the Hinduism to which George Harrison later converted, you can use "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare", "Om Namo Bhagavate Vāsudevāya" or "Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha". Those last two start with the syllable "Om", and indeed some people prefer to just use that syllable, repeating a single syllable over and over again until they reach a state of transcendence. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude" ("na na na na na na na")] We don't know much about how the Beatles first discovered Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, except that it was thanks to Pattie Boyd, George Harrison's then-wife. Unfortunately, her memory of how she first became involved in the Maharishi's Spiritual Regeneration Movement, as described in her autobiography, doesn't fully line up with other known facts. She talks about reading about the Maharishi in the paper with her friend Marie-Lise while George was away on tour, but she also places the date that this happened in February 1967, several months after the Beatles had stopped touring forever. We'll be seeing a lot more of these timing discrepancies as this story progresses, and people's memories increasingly don't match the events that happened to them. Either way, it's clear that Pattie became involved in the Spiritual Regeneration Movement a good length of time before her husband did. She got him to go along with her to one of the Maharishi's lectures, after she had already been converted to the practice of Transcendental Meditation, and they brought along John, Paul, and their partners (Ringo's wife Maureen had just given birth, so they didn't come). As we heard back in episode one hundred and fifty, that lecture was impressive enough that the group, plus their wives and girlfriends (with the exception of Maureen Starkey) and Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, all went on a meditation retreat with the Maharishi at a holiday camp in Bangor, and it was there that they learned that Brian Epstein had been found dead. The death of the man who had guided the group's career could not have come at a worse time for the band's stability.  The group had only recorded one song in the preceding two months -- Paul's "Your Mother Should Know" -- and had basically been running on fumes since completing recording of Sgt Pepper many months earlier. John's drug intake had increased to the point that he was barely functional -- although with the enthusiasm of the newly converted he had decided to swear off LSD at the Maharishi's urging -- and his marriage was falling apart. Similarly, Paul McCartney's relationship with Jane Asher was in a bad state, though both men were trying to repair their damaged relationships, while both George and Ringo were having doubts about the band that had made them famous. In George's case, he was feeling marginalised by John and Paul, his songs ignored or paid cursory attention, and there was less for him to do on the records as the group moved away from making guitar-based rock and roll music into the stranger areas of psychedelia. And Ringo, whose main memory of the recording of Sgt Pepper was of learning to play chess while the others went through the extensive overdubs that characterised that album, was starting to feel like his playing was deteriorating, and that as the only non-writer in the band he was on the outside to an extent. On top of that, the group were in the middle of a major plan to restructure their business. As part of their contract renegotiations with EMI at the beginning of 1967, it had been agreed that they would receive two million pounds -- roughly fifteen million pounds in today's money -- in unpaid royalties as a lump sum. If that had been paid to them as individuals, or through the company they owned, the Beatles Ltd, they would have had to pay the full top rate of tax on it, which as George had complained the previous year was over ninety-five percent. (In fact, he'd been slightly exaggerating the generosity of the UK tax system to the rich, as at that point the top rate of income tax was somewhere around ninety-seven and a half percent). But happily for them, a couple of years earlier the UK had restructured its tax laws and introduced a corporation tax, which meant that the profits of corporations were no longer taxed at the same high rate as income. So a new company had been set up, The Beatles & Co, and all the group's non-songwriting income was paid into the company. Each Beatle owned five percent of the company, and the other eighty percent was owned by a new partnership, a corporation that was soon renamed Apple Corps -- a name inspired by a painting that McCartney had liked by the artist Rene Magritte. In the early stages of Apple, it was very entangled with Nems, the company that was owned by Brian and Clive Epstein, and which was in the process of being sold to Robert Stigwood, though that sale fell through after Brian's death. The first part of Apple, Apple Publishing, had been set up in the summer of 1967, and was run by Terry Doran, a friend of Epstein's who ran a motor dealership -- most of the Apple divisions would be run by friends of the group rather than by people with experience in the industries in question. As Apple was set up during the point that Stigwood was getting involved with NEMS, Apple Publishing's initial offices were in the same building with, and shared staff with, two publishing companies that Stigwood owned, Dratleaf Music, who published Cream's songs, and Abigail Music, the Bee Gees' publishers. And indeed the first two songs published by Apple were copyrights that were gifted to the company by Stigwood -- "Listen to the Sky", a B-side by an obscure band called Sands: [Excerpt: Sands, "Listen to the Sky"] And "Outside Woman Blues", an arrangement by Eric Clapton of an old blues song by Blind Joe Reynolds, which Cream had copyrighted separately and released on Disraeli Gears: [Excerpt: Cream, "Outside Woman Blues"] But Apple soon started signing outside songwriters -- once Mike Berry, a member of Apple Publishing's staff, had sat McCartney down and explained to him what music publishing actually was, something he had never actually understood even though he'd been a songwriter for five years. Those songwriters, given that this was 1967, were often also performers, and as Apple Records had not yet been set up, Apple would try to arrange recording contracts for them with other labels. They started with a group called Focal Point, who got signed by badgering Paul McCartney to listen to their songs until he gave them Doran's phone number to shut them up: [Excerpt: Focal Point, "Sycamore Sid"] But the big early hope for Apple Publishing was a songwriter called George Alexander. Alexander's birth name had been Alexander Young, and he was the brother of George Young, who was a member of the Australian beat group The Easybeats, who'd had a hit with "Friday on My Mind": [Excerpt: The Easybeats, "Friday on My Mind"] His younger brothers Malcolm and Angus would go on to have a few hits themselves, but AC/DC wouldn't be formed for another five years. Terry Doran thought that Alexander should be a member of a band, because bands were more popular than solo artists at the time, and so he was placed with three former members of Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a Beach Boys soundalike group that had had some minor success. John Lennon suggested that the group be named Grapefruit, after a book he was reading by a conceptual artist of his acquaintance named Yoko Ono, and as Doran was making arrangements with Terry Melcher for a reciprocal publishing deal by which Melcher's American company would publish Apple songs in the US while Apple published songs from Melcher's company in the UK, it made sense for Melcher to also produce Grapefruit's first single, "Dear Delilah": [Excerpt: Grapefruit, "Dear Delilah"] That made number twenty-one in the UK when it came out in early 1968, on the back of publicity about Grapefruit's connection with the Beatles, but future singles by the band were much less successful, and like several other acts involved with Apple, they found that they were more hampered by the Beatles connection than helped. A few other people were signed to Apple Publishing early on, of whom the most notable was Jackie Lomax. Lomax had been a member of a minor Merseybeat group, the Undertakers, and after they had split up, he'd been signed by Brian Epstein with a new group, the Lomax Alliance, who had released one single, "Try as You May": [Excerpt: The Lomax Alliance, "Try As You May"] After Epstein's death, Lomax had plans to join another band, being formed by another Merseybeat musician, Chris Curtis, the former drummer of the Searchers. But after going to the Beatles to talk with them about them helping the new group financially, Lomax was persuaded by John Lennon to go solo instead. He may later have regretted that decision, as by early 1968 the people that Curtis had recruited for his new band had ditched him and were making a name for themselves as Deep Purple. Lomax recorded one solo single with funding from Stigwood, a cover version of a song by an obscure singer-songwriter, Jake Holmes, "Genuine Imitation Life": [Excerpt: Jackie Lomax, "Genuine Imitation Life"] But he was also signed to Apple Publishing as a songwriter. The Beatles had only just started laying out plans for Apple when Epstein died, and other than the publishing company one of the few things they'd agreed on was that they were going to have a film company, which was to be run by Denis O'Dell, who had been an associate producer on A Hard Day's Night and on How I Won The War, the Richard Lester film Lennon had recently starred in. A few days after Epstein's death, they had a meeting, in which they agreed that the band needed to move forward quickly if they were going to recover from Epstein's death. They had originally been planning on going to India with the Maharishi to study meditation, but they decided to put that off until the new year, and to press forward with a film project Paul had been talking about, to be titled Magical Mystery Tour. And so, on the fifth of September 1967, they went back into the recording studio and started work on a song of John's that was earmarked for the film, "I am the Walrus": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] Magical Mystery Tour, the film, has a mixed reputation which we will talk about shortly, but one defence that Paul McCartney has always made of it is that it's the only place where you can see the Beatles performing "I am the Walrus". While the song was eventually relegated to a B-side, it's possibly the finest B-side of the Beatles' career, and one of the best tracks the group ever made. As with many of Lennon's songs from this period, the song was a collage of many different elements pulled from his environment and surroundings, and turned into something that was rather more than the sum of its parts. For its musical inspiration, Lennon pulled from, of all things, a police siren going past his house. (For those who are unfamiliar with what old British police sirens sounded like, as opposed to the ones in use for most of my lifetime or in other countries, here's a recording of one): [Excerpt: British police siren ca 1968] That inspired Lennon to write a snatch of lyric to go with the sound of the siren, starting "Mister city policeman sitting pretty". He had two other song fragments, one about sitting in the garden, and one about sitting on a cornflake, and he told Hunter Davies, who was doing interviews for his authorised biography of the group, “I don't know how it will all end up. Perhaps they'll turn out to be different parts of the same song.” But the final element that made these three disparate sections into a song was a letter that came from Stephen Bayley, a pupil at Lennon's old school Quarry Bank, who told him that the teachers at the school -- who Lennon always thought of as having suppressed his creativity -- were now analysing Beatles lyrics in their lessons. Lennon decided to come up with some nonsense that they couldn't analyse -- though as nonsensical as the finished song is, there's an underlying anger to a lot of it that possibly comes from Lennon thinking of his school experiences. And so Lennon asked his old schoolfriend Pete Shotton to remind him of a disgusting playground chant that kids used to sing in schools in the North West of England (and which they still sang with very minor variations at my own school decades later -- childhood folklore has a remarkably long life). That rhyme went: Yellow matter custard, green snot pie All mixed up with a dead dog's eye Slap it on a butty, nice and thick, And drink it down with a cup of cold sick Lennon combined some parts of this with half-remembered fragments of Lewis Carrol's The Walrus and the Carpenter, and with some punning references to things that were going on in his own life and those of his friends -- though it's difficult to know exactly which of the stories attached to some of the more incomprehensible bits of the lyrics are accurate. The story that the line "I am the eggman" is about a sexual proclivity of Eric Burdon of the Animals seems plausible, while the contention by some that the phrase "semolina pilchard" is a reference to Sgt Pilcher, the corrupt policeman who had arrested three of the Rolling Stones, and would later arrest Lennon, on drugs charges, seems less likely. The track is a masterpiece of production, but the release of the basic take on Anthology 2 in 1996 showed that the underlying performance, before George Martin worked his magic with the overdubs, is still a remarkable piece of work: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus (Anthology 2 version)"] But Martin's arrangement and production turned the track from a merely very good track into a masterpiece. The string arrangement, very much in the same mould as that for "Strawberry Fields Forever" but giving a very different effect with its harsh cello glissandi, is the kind of thing one expects from Martin, but there's also the chanting of the Mike Sammes Singers, who were more normally booked for sessions like Englebert Humperdinck's "The Last Waltz": [Excerpt: Engelbert Humperdinck, "The Last Waltz"] But here were instead asked to imitate the sound of the strings, make grunting noises, and generally go very far out of their normal comfort zone: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] But the most fascinating piece of production in the entire track is an idea that seems to have been inspired by people like John Cage -- a live feed of a radio being tuned was played into the mono mix from about the halfway point, and whatever was on the radio at the time was captured: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] This is also why for many decades it was impossible to have a true stereo mix of the track -- the radio part was mixed directly into the mono mix, and it wasn't until the 1990s that someone thought to track down a copy of the original radio broadcasts and recreate the process. In one of those bits of synchronicity that happen more often than you would think when you're creating aleatory art, and which are why that kind of process can be so appealing, one bit of dialogue from the broadcast of King Lear that was on the radio as the mixing was happening was *perfectly* timed: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] After completing work on the basic track for "I am the Walrus", the group worked on two more songs for the film, George's "Blue Jay Way" and a group-composed twelve-bar blues instrumental called "Flying", before starting production. Magical Mystery Tour, as an idea, was inspired in equal parts by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the collective of people we talked about in the episode on the Grateful Dead who travelled across the US extolling the virtues of psychedelic drugs, and by mystery tours, a British working-class tradition that has rather fallen out of fashion in the intervening decades. A mystery tour would generally be put on by a coach-hire company, and would be a day trip to an unannounced location -- though the location would in fact be very predictable, and would be a seaside town within a couple of hours' drive of its starting point. In the case of the ones the Beatles remembered from their own childhoods, this would be to a coastal town in Lancashire or Wales, like Blackpool, Rhyl, or Prestatyn. A coachload of people would pay to be driven to this random location, get very drunk and have a singsong on the bus, and spend a day wherever they were taken. McCartney's plan was simple -- they would gather a group of passengers and replicate this experience over the course of several days, and film whatever went on, but intersperse that with more planned out sketches and musical numbers. For this reason, along with the Beatles and their associates, the cast included some actors found through Spotlight and some of the group's favourite performers, like the comedian Nat Jackley (whose comedy sequence directed by John was cut from the final film) and the surrealist poet/singer/comedian Ivor Cutler: [Excerpt: Ivor Cutler, "I'm Going in a Field"] The film also featured an appearance by a new band who would go on to have great success over the next year, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. They had recorded their first single in Abbey Road at the same time as the Beatles were recording Revolver, but rather than being progressive psychedelic rock, it had been a remake of a 1920s novelty song: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "My Brother Makes the Noises For the Talkies"] Their performance in Magical Mystery Tour was very different though -- they played a fifties rock pastiche written by band leaders Vivian Stanshall and Neil Innes while a stripper took off her clothes. While several other musical sequences were recorded for the film, including one by the band Traffic and one by Cutler, other than the Beatles tracks only the Bonzos' song made it into the finished film: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "Death Cab for Cutie"] That song, thirty years later, would give its name to a prominent American alternative rock band. Incidentally the same night that Magical Mystery Tour was first broadcast was also the night that the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band first appeared on a TV show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, which featured three future members of the Monty Python troupe -- Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Terry Jones. Over the years the careers of the Bonzos, the Pythons, and the Beatles would become increasingly intertwined, with George Harrison in particular striking up strong friendships and working relationships with Bonzos Neil Innes and "Legs" Larry Smith. The filming of Magical Mystery Tour went about as well as one might expect from a film made by four directors, none of whom had any previous filmmaking experience, and none of whom had any business knowledge. The Beatles were used to just turning up and having things magically done for them by other people, and had no real idea of the infrastructure challenges that making a film, even a low-budget one, actually presents, and ended up causing a great deal of stress to almost everyone involved. The completed film was shown on TV on Boxing Day 1967 to general confusion and bemusement. It didn't help that it was originally broadcast in black and white, and so for example the scene showing shifting landscapes (outtake footage from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, tinted various psychedelic colours) over the "Flying" music, just looked like grey fuzz. But also, it just wasn't what people were expecting from a Beatles film. This was a ramshackle, plotless, thing more inspired by Andy Warhol's underground films than by the kind of thing the group had previously appeared in, and it was being presented as Christmas entertainment for all the family. And to be honest, it's not even a particularly good example of underground filmmaking -- though it looks like a masterpiece when placed next to something like the Bee Gees' similar effort, Cucumber Castle. But there are enough interesting sequences in there for the project not to be a complete failure -- and the deleted scenes on the DVD release, including the performances by Cutler and Traffic, and the fact that the film was edited down from ten hours to fifty-two minutes, makes one wonder if there's a better film that could be constructed from the original footage. Either way, the reaction to the film was so bad that McCartney actually appeared on David Frost's TV show the next day to defend it and, essentially, apologise. While they were editing the film, the group were also continuing to work in the studio, including on two new McCartney songs, "The Fool on the Hill", which was included in Magical Mystery Tour, and "Hello Goodbye", which wasn't included on the film's soundtrack but was released as the next single, with "I Am the Walrus" as the B-side: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Incidentally, in the UK the soundtrack to Magical Mystery Tour was released as a double-EP rather than as an album (in the US, the group's recent singles and B-sides were added to turn it into a full-length album, which is how it's now generally available). "I Am the Walrus" was on the double-EP as well as being on the single's B-side, and the double-EP got to number two on the singles charts, meaning "I am the Walrus" was on the records at number one and number two at the same time. Before it became obvious that the film, if not the soundtrack, was a disaster, the group held a launch party on the twenty-first of December, 1967. The band members went along in fancy dress, as did many of the cast and crew -- the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band performed at the party. Mike Love and Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys also turned up at the party, and apparently at one point jammed with the Bonzos, and according to some, but not all, reports, a couple of the Beatles joined in as well. Love and Johnston had both just met the Maharishi for the first time a couple of days earlier, and Love had been as impressed as the Beatles were, and it may have been at this party that the group mentioned to Love that they would soon be going on a retreat in India with the guru -- a retreat that was normally meant for training TM instructors, but this time seemed to be more about getting celebrities involved. Love would also end up going with them. That party was also the first time that Cynthia Lennon had an inkling that John might not be as faithful to her as she previously supposed. John had always "joked" about being attracted to George Harrison's wife, Patti, but this time he got a little more blatant about his attraction than he ever had previously, to the point that he made Cynthia cry, and Cynthia's friend, the pop star Lulu, decided to give Lennon a very public dressing-down for his cruelty to his wife, a dressing-down that must have been a sight to behold, as Lennon was dressed as a Teddy boy while Lulu was in a Shirley Temple costume. It's a sign of how bad the Lennons' marriage was at this point that this was the second time in a two-month period where Cynthia had ended up crying because of John at a film launch party and been comforted by a female pop star. In October, Cilla Black had held a party to celebrate the belated release of John's film How I Won the War, and during the party Georgie Fame had come up to Black and said, confused, "Cynthia Lennon is hiding in your wardrobe". Black went and had a look, and Cynthia explained to her “I'm waiting to see how long it is before John misses me and comes looking for me.” Black's response had been “You'd better face it, kid—he's never gonna come.” Also at the Magical Mystery Tour party was Lennon's father, now known as Freddie Lennon, and his new nineteen-year-old fiancee. While Hunter Davis had been researching the Beatles' biography, he'd come across some evidence that the version of Freddie's attitude towards John that his mother's side of the family had always told him -- that Freddie had been a cruel and uncaring husband who had not actually wanted to be around his son -- might not be the whole of the truth, and that the mother who he had thought of as saintly might also have had some part to play in their marriage breaking down and Freddie not seeing his son for twenty years. The two had made some tentative attempts at reconciliation, and indeed Freddie would even come and live with John for a while, though within a couple of years the younger Lennon's heart would fully harden against his father again. Of course, the things that John always resented his father for were pretty much exactly the kind of things that Lennon himself was about to do. It was around this time as well that Derek Taylor gave the Beatles copies of the debut album by a young singer/songwriter named Harry Nilsson. Nilsson will be getting his own episode down the line, but not for a couple of years at my current rates, so it's worth bringing that up here, because that album became a favourite of all the Beatles, and would have a huge influence on their songwriting for the next couple of years, and because one song on the album, "1941", must have resonated particularly deeply with Lennon right at this moment -- an autobiographical song by Nilsson about how his father had left him and his mother when he was a small boy, and about his own fear that, as his first marriage broke down, he was repeating the pattern with his stepson Scott: [Excerpt: Nilsson, "1941"] The other major event of December 1967, rather overshadowed by the Magical Mystery Tour disaster the next day, was that on Christmas Day Paul McCartney and Jane Asher announced their engagement. A few days later, George Harrison flew to India. After John and Paul had had their outside film projects -- John starring in How I Won The War and Paul doing the soundtrack for The Family Way -- the other two Beatles more or less simultaneously did their own side project films, and again one acted while the other did a soundtrack. Both of these projects were in the rather odd subgenre of psychedelic shambolic comedy film that sprang up in the mid sixties, a subgenre that produced a lot of fascinating films, though rather fewer good ones. Indeed, both of them were in the subsubgenre of shambolic psychedelic *sex* comedies. In Ringo's case, he had a small role in the film Candy, which was based on the novel we mentioned in the last episode, co-written by Terry Southern, which was in itself a loose modern rewriting of Voltaire's Candide. Unfortunately, like such other classics of this subgenre as Anthony Newley's Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, Candy has dated *extremely* badly, and unless you find repeated scenes of sexual assault and rape, ethnic stereotypes, and jokes about deformity and disfigurement to be an absolute laugh riot, it's not a film that's worth seeking out, and Starr's part in it is not a major one. Harrison's film was of the same basic genre -- a film called Wonderwall about a mad scientist who discovers a way to see through the walls of his apartment, and gets to see a photographer taking sexy photographs of a young woman named Penny Lane, played by Jane Birkin: [Excerpt: Some Wonderwall film dialogue ripped from the Blu-Ray] Wonderwall would, of course, later inspire the title of a song by Oasis, and that's what the film is now best known for, but it's a less-unwatchable film than Candy, and while still problematic it's less so. Which is something. Harrison had been the Beatle with least involvement in Magical Mystery Tour -- McCartney had been the de facto director, Starr had been the lead character and the only one with much in the way of any acting to do, and Lennon had written the film's standout scene and its best song, and had done a little voiceover narration. Harrison, by contrast, barely has anything to do in the film apart from the one song he contributed, "Blue Jay Way", and he said of the project “I had no idea what was happening and maybe I didn't pay enough attention because my problem, basically, was that I was in another world, I didn't really belong; I was just an appendage.” He'd expressed his discomfort to his friend Joe Massot, who was about to make his first feature film. Massot had got to know Harrison during the making of his previous film, Reflections on Love, a mostly-silent short which had starred Harrison's sister-in-law Jenny Boyd, and which had been photographed by Robert Freeman, who had been the photographer for the Beatles' album covers from With the Beatles through Rubber Soul, and who had taken most of the photos that Klaus Voorman incorporated into the cover of Revolver (and whose professional association with the Beatles seemed to come to an end around the same time he discovered that Lennon had been having an affair with his wife). Massot asked Harrison to write the music for the film, and told Harrison he would have complete free rein to make whatever music he wanted, so long as it fit the timing of the film, and so Harrison decided to create a mixture of Western rock music and the Indian music he loved. Harrison started recording the music at the tail end of 1967, with sessions with several London-based Indian musicians and John Barham, an orchestrator who had worked with Ravi Shankar on Shankar's collaborations with Western musicians, including the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack we talked about in the "All You Need is Love" episode. For the Western music, he used the Remo Four, a Merseybeat group who had been on the scene even before the Beatles, and which contained a couple of classmates of Paul McCartney, but who had mostly acted as backing musicians for other artists. They'd backed Johnny Sandon, the former singer with the Searchers, on a couple of singles, before becoming the backing band for Tommy Quickly, a NEMS artist who was unsuccessful despite starting his career with a Lennon/McCartney song, "Tip of My Tongue": [Excerpt: Tommy Quickly, "Tip of My Tongue"] The Remo Four would later, after a lineup change, become Ashton, Gardner and Dyke, who would become one-hit wonders in the seventies, and during the Wonderwall sessions they recorded a song that went unreleased at the time, and which would later go on to be rerecorded by Ashton, Gardner, and Dyke. "In the First Place" also features Harrison on backing vocals and possibly guitar, and was not submitted for the film because Harrison didn't believe that Massot wanted any vocal tracks, but the recording was later discovered and used in a revised director's cut of the film in the nineties: [Excerpt: The Remo Four, "In the First Place"] But for the most part the Remo Four were performing instrumentals written by Harrison. They weren't the only Western musicians performing on the sessions though -- Peter Tork of the Monkees dropped by these sessions and recorded several short banjo solos, which were used in the film soundtrack but not in the soundtrack album (presumably because Tork was contracted to another label): [Excerpt: Peter Tork, "Wonderwall banjo solo"] Another musician who was under contract to another label was Eric Clapton, who at the time was playing with The Cream, and who vaguely knew Harrison and so joined in for the track "Ski-ing", playing lead guitar under the cunning, impenetrable, pseudonym "Eddie Clayton", with Harrison on sitar, Starr on drums, and session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan on bass: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Ski-ing"] But the bulk of the album was recorded in EMI's studios in the city that is now known as Mumbai but at the time was called Bombay. The studio facilities in India had up to that point only had a mono tape recorder, and Bhaskar Menon, one of the top executives at EMI's Indian division and later the head of EMI music worldwide, personally brought the first stereo tape recorder to the studio to aid in Harrison's recording. The music was all composed by Harrison and performed by the Indian musicians, and while Harrison was composing in an Indian mode, the musicians were apparently fascinated by how Western it sounded to them: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Microbes"] While he was there, Harrison also got the instrumentalists to record another instrumental track, which wasn't to be used for the film: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "The Inner Light (instrumental)"] That track would, instead, become part of what was to be Harrison's first composition to make a side of a Beatles single. After John and George had appeared on the David Frost show talking about the Maharishi, in September 1967, George had met a lecturer in Sanskrit named Juan Mascaró, who wrote to Harrison enclosing a book he'd compiled of translations of religious texts, telling him he'd admired "Within You Without You" and thought it would be interesting if Harrison set something from the Tao Te Ching to music. He suggested a text that, in his translation, read: "Without going out of my door I can know all things on Earth Without looking out of my window I can know the ways of heaven For the farther one travels, the less one knows The sage, therefore Arrives without travelling Sees all without looking Does all without doing" Harrison took that text almost verbatim, though he created a second verse by repeating the first few lines with "you" replacing "I" -- concerned that listeners might think he was just talking about himself, and wouldn't realise it was a more general statement -- and he removed the "the sage, therefore" and turned the last few lines into imperative commands rather than declarative statements: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] The song has come in for some criticism over the years as being a little Orientalist, because in critics' eyes it combines Chinese philosophy with Indian music, as if all these things are equally "Eastern" and so all the same really. On the other hand there's a good argument that an English songwriter taking a piece of writing written in Chinese and translated into English by a Spanish man and setting it to music inspired by Indian musical modes is a wonderful example of cultural cross-pollination. As someone who's neither Chinese nor Indian I wouldn't want to take a stance on it, but clearly the other Beatles were impressed by it -- they put it out as the B-side to their next single, even though the only Beatles on it are Harrison and McCartney, with the latter adding a small amount of harmony vocal: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] And it wasn't because the group were out of material. They were planning on going to Rishikesh to study with the Maharishi, and wanted to get a single out for release while they were away, and so in one week they completed the vocal overdubs on "The Inner Light" and recorded three other songs, two by John and one by Paul. All three of the group's songwriters brought in songs that were among their best. John's first contribution was a song whose lyrics he later described as possibly the best he ever wrote, "Across the Universe". He said the lyrics were “purely inspirational and were given to me as boom! I don't own it, you know; it came through like that … Such an extraordinary meter and I can never repeat it! It's not a matter of craftsmanship, it wrote itself. It drove me out of bed. I didn't want to write it … It's like being possessed, like a psychic or a medium.” But while Lennon liked the song, he was never happy with the recording of it. They tried all sorts of things to get the sound he heard in his head, including bringing in some fans who were hanging around outside to sing backing vocals. He said of the track "I was singing out of tune and instead of getting a decent choir, we got fans from outside, Apple Scruffs or whatever you call them. They came in and were singing all off-key. Nobody was interested in doing the tune originally.” [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] The "jai guru deva" chorus there is the first reference to the teachings of the Maharishi in one of the Beatles' records -- Guru Dev was the Maharishi's teacher, and the phrase "Jai guru dev" is a Sanskrit one which I've seen variously translated as "victory to the great teacher", and "hail to the greatness within you". Lennon would say shortly before his death “The Beatles didn't make a good record out of it. I think subconsciously sometimes we – I say ‘we' though I think Paul did it more than the rest of us – Paul would sort of subconsciously try and destroy a great song … Usually we'd spend hours doing little detailed cleaning-ups of Paul's songs, when it came to mine, especially if it was a great song like ‘Strawberry Fields' or ‘Across The Universe', somehow this atmosphere of looseness and casualness and experimentation would creep in … It was a _lousy_ track of a great song and I was so disappointed by it …The guitars are out of tune and I'm singing out of tune because I'm psychologically destroyed and nobody's supporting me or helping me with it, and the song was never done properly.” Of course, this is only Lennon's perception, and it's one that the other participants would disagree with. George Martin, in particular, was always rather hurt by the implication that Lennon's songs had less attention paid to them, and he would always say that the problem was that Lennon in the studio would always say "yes, that's great", and only later complain that it hadn't been what he wanted. No doubt McCartney did put in more effort on his own songs than on Lennon's -- everyone has a bias towards their own work, and McCartney's only human -- but personally I suspect that a lot of the problem comes down to the two men having very different personalities. McCartney had very strong ideas about his own work and would drive the others insane with his nitpicky attention to detail. Lennon had similarly strong ideas, but didn't have the attention span to put the time and effort in to force his vision on others, and didn't have the technical knowledge to express his ideas in words they'd understand. He expected Martin and the other Beatles to work miracles, and they did -- but not the miracles he would have worked. That track was, rather than being chosen for the next single, given to Spike Milligan, who happened to be visiting the studio and was putting together an album for the environmental charity the World Wildlife Fund. The album was titled "No One's Gonna Change Our World": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] That track is historic in another way -- it would be the last time that George Harrison would play sitar on a Beatles record, and it effectively marks the end of the period of psychedelia and Indian influence that had started with "Norwegian Wood" three years earlier, and which many fans consider their most creative period. Indeed, shortly after the recording, Harrison would give up the sitar altogether and stop playing it. He loved sitar music as much as he ever had, and he still thought that Indian classical music spoke to him in ways he couldn't express, and he continued to be friends with Ravi Shankar for the rest of his life, and would only become more interested in Indian religious thought. But as he spent time with Shankar he realised he would never be as good on the sitar as he hoped. He said later "I thought, 'Well, maybe I'm better off being a pop singer-guitar-player-songwriter – whatever-I'm-supposed-to-be' because I've seen a thousand sitar-players in India who are twice as better as I'll ever be. And only one of them Ravi thought was going to be a good player." We don't have a precise date for when it happened -- I suspect it was in June 1968, so a few months after the "Across the Universe" recording -- but Shankar told Harrison that rather than try to become a master of a music that he hadn't encountered until his twenties, perhaps he should be making the music that was his own background. And as Harrison put it "I realised that was riding my bike down a street in Liverpool and hearing 'Heartbreak Hotel' coming out of someone's house.": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Heartbreak Hotel"] In early 1968 a lot of people seemed to be thinking along the same lines, as if Christmas 1967 had been the flick of a switch and instead of whimsy and ornamentation, the thing to do was to make music that was influenced by early rock and roll. In the US the Band and Bob Dylan were making music that was consciously shorn of all studio experimentation, while in the UK there was a revival of fifties rock and roll. In April 1968 both "Peggy Sue" and "Rock Around the Clock" reentered the top forty in the UK, and the Who were regularly including "Summertime Blues" in their sets. Fifties nostalgia, which would make occasional comebacks for at least the next forty years, was in its first height, and so it's not surprising that Paul McCartney's song, "Lady Madonna", which became the A-side of the next single, has more than a little of the fifties about it. Of course, the track isn't *completely* fifties in its origins -- one of the inspirations for the track seems to have been the Rolling Stones' then-recent hit "Let's Spend The Night Together": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Let's Spend the Night Together"] But the main source for the song's music -- and for the sound of the finished record -- seems to have been Johnny Parker's piano part on Humphrey Lyttleton's "Bad Penny Blues", a hit single engineered by Joe Meek in the fifties: [Excerpt: Humphrey Lyttleton, "Bad Penny Blues"] That song seems to have been on the group's mind for a while, as a working title for "With a Little Help From My Friends" had at one point been "Bad Finger Blues" -- a title that would later give the name to a band on Apple. McCartney took Parker's piano part as his inspiration, and as he later put it “‘Lady Madonna' was me sitting down at the piano trying to write a bluesy boogie-woogie thing. I got my left hand doing an arpeggio thing with the chord, an ascending boogie-woogie left hand, then a descending right hand. I always liked that, the  juxtaposition of a line going down meeting a line going up." [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] That idea, incidentally, is an interesting reversal of what McCartney had done on "Hello, Goodbye", where the bass line goes down while the guitar moves up -- the two lines moving away from each other: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Though that isn't to say there's no descending bass in "Lady Madonna" -- the bridge has a wonderful sequence where the bass just *keeps* *descending*: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] Lyrically, McCartney was inspired by a photo in National Geographic of a woman in Malaysia, captioned “Mountain Madonna: with one child at her breast and another laughing into her face, sees her quality of life threatened.” But as he put it “The people I was brought up amongst were often Catholic; there are lots of Catholics in Liverpool because of the Irish connection and they are often religious. When they have a baby I think they see a big connection between themselves and the Virgin Mary with her baby. So the original concept was the Virgin Mary but it quickly became symbolic of every woman; the Madonna image but as applied to ordinary working class woman. It's really a tribute to the mother figure, it's a tribute to women.” Musically though, the song was more a tribute to the fifties -- while the inspiration had been a skiffle hit by Humphrey Lyttleton, as soon as McCartney started playing it he'd thought of Fats Domino, and the lyric reflects that to an extent -- just as Domino's "Blue Monday" details the days of the week for a weary working man who only gets to enjoy himself on Saturday night, "Lady Madonna"'s lyrics similarly look at the work a mother has to do every day -- though as McCartney later noted  "I was writing the words out to learn it for an American TV show and I realised I missed out Saturday ... So I figured it must have been a real night out." The vocal was very much McCartney doing a Domino impression -- something that wasn't lost on Fats, who cut his own version of the track later that year: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Lady Madonna"] The group were so productive at this point, right before the journey to India, that they actually cut another song *while they were making a video for "Lady Madonna"*. They were booked into Abbey Road to film themselves performing the song so it could be played on Top of the Pops while they were away, but instead they decided to use the time to cut a new song -- John had a partially-written song, "Hey Bullfrog", which was roughly the same tempo as "Lady Madonna", so they could finish that up and then re-edit the footage to match the record. The song was quickly finished and became "Hey Bulldog": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Bulldog"] One of Lennon's best songs from this period, "Hey Bulldog" was oddly chosen only to go on the soundtrack of Yellow Submarine. Either the band didn't think much of it because it had come so easily, or it was just assigned to the film because they were planning on being away for several months and didn't have any other projects they were working on. The extent of the group's contribution to the film was minimal – they were not very hands-on, and the film, which was mostly done as an attempt to provide a third feature film for their United Artists contract without them having to do any work, was made by the team that had done the Beatles cartoon on American TV. There's some evidence that they had a small amount of input in the early story stages, but in general they saw the cartoon as an irrelevance to them -- the only things they contributed were the four songs "All Together Now", "It's All Too Much", "Hey Bulldog" and "Only a Northern Song", and a brief filmed appearance for the very end of the film, recorded in January: [Excerpt: Yellow Submarine film end] McCartney also took part in yet another session in early February 1968, one produced by Peter Asher, his fiancee's brother, and former singer with Peter and Gordon. Asher had given up on being a pop star and was trying to get into the business side of music, and he was starting out as a producer, producing a single by Paul Jones, the former lead singer of Manfred Mann. The A-side of the single, "And the Sun Will Shine", was written by the Bee Gees, the band that Robert Stigwood was managing: [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "And the Sun Will Shine"] While the B-side was an original by Jones, "The Dog Presides": [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "The Dog Presides"] Those tracks featured two former members of the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck and Paul Samwell-Smith, on guitar and bass, and Nicky Hopkins on piano. Asher asked McCartney to play drums on both sides of the single, saying later "I always thought he was a great, underrated drummer." McCartney was impressed by Asher's production, and asked him to get involved with the new Apple Records label that would be set up when the group returned from India. Asher eventually became head of A&R for the label. And even before "Lady Madonna" was mixed, the Beatles were off to India. Mal Evans, their roadie, went ahead with all their luggage on the fourteenth of February, so he could sort out transport for them on the other end, and then John and George followed on the fifteenth, with their wives Pattie and Cynthia and Pattie's sister Jenny (John and Cynthia's son Julian had been left with his grandmother while they went -- normally Cynthia wouldn't abandon Julian for an extended period of time, but she saw the trip as a way to repair their strained marriage). Paul and Ringo followed four days later, with Ringo's wife Maureen and Paul's fiancee Jane Asher. The retreat in Rishikesh was to become something of a celebrity affair. Along with the Beatles came their friend the singer-songwriter Donovan, and Donovan's friend and songwriting partner, whose name I'm not going to say here because it's a slur for Romani people, but will be known to any Donovan fans. Donovan at this point was also going through changes. Like the Beatles, he was largely turning away from drug use and towards meditation, and had recently written his hit single "There is a Mountain" based around a saying from Zen Buddhism: [Excerpt: Donovan, "There is a Mountain"] That was from his double-album A Gift From a Flower to a Garden, which had come out in December 1967. But also like John and Paul he was in the middle of the breakdown of a long-term relationship, and while he would remain with his then-partner until 1970, and even have another child with her, he was secretly in love with another woman. In fact he was secretly in love with two other women. One of them, Brian Jones' ex-girlfriend Linda, had moved to LA, become the partner of the singer Gram Parsons, and had appeared in the documentary You Are What You Eat with the Band and Tiny Tim. She had fallen out of touch with Donovan, though she would later become his wife. Incidentally, she had a son to Brian Jones who had been abandoned by his rock-star father -- the son's name is Julian. The other woman with whom Donovan was in love was Jenny Boyd, the sister of George Harrison's wife Pattie.  Jenny at the time was in a relationship with Alexis Mardas, a TV repairman and huckster who presented himself as an electronics genius to the Beatles, who nicknamed him Magic Alex, and so she was unavailable, but Donovan had written a song about her, released as a single just before they all went to Rishikesh: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Jennifer Juniper"] Donovan considered himself and George Harrison to be on similar spiritual paths and called Harrison his "spirit-brother", though Donovan was more interested in Buddhism, which Harrison considered a corruption of the more ancient Hinduism, and Harrison encouraged Donovan to read Autobiography of a Yogi. It's perhaps worth noting that Donovan's father had a different take on the subject though, saying "You're not going to study meditation in India, son, you're following that wee lassie Jenny" Donovan and his friend weren't the only other celebrities to come to Rishikesh. The actor Mia Farrow, who had just been through a painful divorce from Frank Sinatra, and had just made Rosemary's Baby, a horror film directed by Roman Polanski with exteriors shot at the Dakota building in New York, arrived with her sister Prudence. Also on the trip was Paul Horn, a jazz saxophonist who had played with many of the greats of jazz, not least of them Duke Ellington, whose Sweet Thursday Horn had played alto sax on: [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, "Zweet Zursday"] Horn was another musician who had been inspired to investigate Indian spirituality and music simultaneously, and the previous year he had recorded an album, "In India," of adaptations of ragas, with Ravi Shankar and Alauddin Khan: [Excerpt: Paul Horn, "Raga Vibhas"] Horn would go on to become one of the pioneers of what would later be termed "New Age" music, combining jazz with music from various non-Western traditions. Horn had also worked as a session musician, and one of the tracks he'd played on was "I Know There's an Answer" from the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Know There's an Answer"] Mike Love, who co-wrote that track and is one of the lead singers on it, was also in Rishikesh. While as we'll see not all of the celebrities on the trip would remain practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, Love would be profoundly affected by the trip, and remains a vocal proponent of TM to this day. Indeed, his whole band at the time were heavily into TM. While Love was in India, the other Beach Boys were working on the Friends album without him -- Love only appears on four tracks on that album -- and one of the tracks they recorded in his absence was titled "Transcendental Meditation": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Transcendental Meditation"] But the trip would affect Love's songwriting, as it would affect all of the musicians there. One of the few songs on the Friends album on which Love appears is "Anna Lee, the Healer", a song which is lyrically inspired by the trip in the most literal sense, as it's about a masseuse Love met in Rishikesh: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Anna Lee, the Healer"] The musicians in the group all influenced and inspired each other as is likely to happen in such circumstances. Sometimes, it would be a matter of trivial joking, as when the Beatles decided to perform an off-the-cuff song about Guru Dev, and did it in the Beach Boys style: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] And that turned partway through into a celebration of Love for his birthday: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] Decades later, Love would return the favour, writing a song about Harrison and their time together in Rishikesh. Like Donovan, Love seems to have considered Harrison his "spiritual brother", and he titled the song "Pisces Brothers": [Excerpt: Mike Love, "Pisces Brothers"] The musicians on the trip were also often making suggestions to each other about songs that would become famous for them. The musicians had all brought acoustic guitars, apart obviously from Ringo, who got a set of tabla drums when George ordered some Indian instruments to be delivered. George got a sitar, as at this point he hadn't quite given up on the instrument, and he gave Donovan a tamboura. Donovan started playing a melody on the tamboura, which is normally a drone instrument, inspired by the Scottish folk music he had grown up with, and that became his "Hurdy-Gurdy Man": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man"] Harrison actually helped him with the song, writing a final verse inspired by the Maharishi's teachings, but in the studio Donovan's producer Mickie Most told him to cut the verse because the song was overlong, which apparently annoyed Harrison. Donovan includes that verse in his live performances of the song though -- usually while doing a fairly terrible impersonation of Harrison: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man (live)"] And similarly, while McCartney was working on a song pastiching Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys, but singing about the USSR rather than the USA, Love suggested to him that for a middle-eight he might want to sing about the girls in the various Soviet regions: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Back in the USSR"] As all the guitarists on the retreat only had acoustic instruments, they were very keen to improve their acoustic playing, and they turned to Donovan, who unlike the rest of them was primarily an acoustic player, and one from a folk background. Donovan taught them the rudiments of Travis picking, the guitar style we talked about way back in the episodes on the Everly Brothers, as well as some of the tunings that had been introduced to British folk music by Davey Graham, giving them a basic grounding in the principles of English folk-baroque guitar, a style that had developed over the previous few years. Donovan has said in his autobiography that Lennon picked the technique up quickly (and that Harrison had already learned Travis picking from Chet Atkins records) but that McCartney didn't have the application to learn the style, though he picked up bits. That seems very unlike anything else I've read anywhere about Lennon and McCartney -- no-one has ever accused Lennon of having a surfeit of application -- and reading Donovan's book he seems to dislike McCartney and like Lennon and Harrison, so possibly that enters into it. But also, it may just be that Lennon was more receptive to Donovan's style at the time. According to McCartney, even before going to Rishikesh Lennon had been in a vaguely folk-music and country mode, and the small number of tapes he'd brought with him to Rishikesh included Buddy Holly, Dylan, and the progressive folk band The Incredible String Band, whose music would be a big influence on both Lennon and McCartney for the next year: [Excerpt: The Incredible String Band, "First Girl I Loved"] According to McCartney Lennon also brought "a tape the singer Jake Thackray had done for him... He was one of the people we bumped into at Abbey Road. John liked his stuff, which he'd heard on television. Lots of wordplay and very suggestive, so very much up John's alley. I was fascinated by his unusual guitar style. John did ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun' as a Jake Thackray thing at one point, as I recall.” Thackray was a British chansonnier, who sang sweetly poignant but also often filthy songs about Yorkshire life, and his humour in particular will have appealed to Lennon. There's a story of Lennon meeting Thackray in Abbey Road and singing the whole of Thackray's song "The Statues", about two drunk men fighting a male statue to defend the honour of a female statue, to him: [Excerpt: Jake Thackray, "The Statues"] Given this was the music that Lennon was listening to, it's unsurprising that he was more receptive to Donovan's lessons, and the new guitar style he learned allowed him to expand his songwriting, at precisely the same time he was largely clean of drugs for the first time in several years, and he started writing some of the best songs he would ever write, often using these new styles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Julia"] That song is about Lennon's dead mother -- the first time he ever addressed her directly in a song, though  it would be far from the last -- but it's also about someone else. That phrase "Ocean child" is a direct translation of the Japanese name "Yoko". We've talked about Yoko Ono a bit in recent episodes, and even briefly in a previous Beatles episode, but it's here that she really enters the story of the Beatles. Unfortunately, exactly *how* her relationship with John Lennon, which was to become one of the great legendary love stories in rock and roll history, actually started is the subject of some debate. Both of them were married when they first got together, and there have also been suggestions that Ono was more interested in McCartney than in Lennon at first -- suggestions which everyone involved has denied, and those denials have the ring of truth about them, but if that was the case it would also explain some of Lennon's more perplexing behaviour over the next year. By all accounts there was a certain amount of finessing of the story th