All Your Days

Our guest is Lynn Gilbert, a massive contributor to 20th-century portrait photography — her photos of sculptor Louise Nevelson became the face of the Venice Biennale in 2022 — whose 1981 book of photos and essays, ‘Particular Passions,’ became a significant document of second-wave feminism. Lynn, with virtually no professional portfolio at the time, somehow brought together luminaries and unk...

Please welcome the legendary Lach to your ears. Lower East Side/Edinburgh artist and producer and presenter, novelist, BBC radio host — you name it, he's probably done it. We go super deep into the history of anti-folk in NYC and the world, but that's just the surface of the thing. Memory, dreams, visions, heartbreak and triumph, life and death, love and letdowns — it's the very DNA of this little...

Sam Shaber is in the middle of a resurrection. For years, if you found Sam’s work, you found it via storytelling or her podcast focusing on in-vitro fertilization and women’s health and just and accurate information and access to both. Or you knew her power-pop-punk bands. These were the points of contact. This week we pick up the story, the rest of the story, how she came out of a landmark moment...

Sam Shaber is back with the very songs she shelved after those years in the early 2000s, back with ‘Eighty Numbered Streets.’ She’s about to take the album on the road for the first time in decades, playing it front to back in Los Angeles, New York, and elsewhere — and soon she’ll reunite with Shawn Mullins for a concert in Georgia. It’s a critical moment to meet this artist, or mee...

One night in the late 1990s I walked up to a big black door under a tattered green awning, and I walked through that door, and I was in a room. I was at a crossroads. I was a kid with a guitar, and I was about to meet a man named Geoff Bartley. I’ve seldom respected an artist and a host and a curator of a room the way I respect Geoff. He’s our guest on the season closer of ‘All Your Days,' an...

Please meet Timothy Mason. There is probably no one more consequential in terms of my awakening artist’s mind in the 1990s. There was no early room in which I discovered or started to practice art that was not either produced by Tim or for which he was not in some way materially responsible. Nothing that followed would have played out the same way. This one is a catch from the deeper waters, the p...

Back in the early 2010s, I met a man named Rafat Ali, who’d just co-founded an online travel news company called Skift, and he gave me an assignment. And that changed everything. In my journey, Rafat has unlocked incredible next steps and new chapters, but we’ve never really talked to each other about his journey, the whole thing, from India to Indiana to New York and many circles opened and close...

This week our conversation turns to Africa with the brilliant Gift Kiti, who has been building water resources and a crucial health clinic for the people of Kashani, Kenya, since 2017. I've been fortunate enough to be along for parts of Gift's journey, thanks to The Resolution Project , and in this episode, 'All Your Days' unpacks the nature of a project that is materially changing lives but that...

Some songs and their writers get to you by degrees. Some creep up on your consciousness, a verse here, a chorus there. Others land on your world in a song. That’s all it takes. It’s not a lot, and then it’s everything. In this episode, songwriter Randy Kaplan and I talk about the moment his song “Slow Eater” landed in my world, and then we unpack a lifetime of incredible moments, from Los Angeles...

The second part of our conversation with the topical songwriter David Rovics. Part one traced the evolution of a political mind to the moment when tragedy undid the shackles of expectations and set David on his path. This week we follow what happens next, the collapse of the college circuit that supported activists throughout the later 20th Century, the implosion of the CD revenue stream and the r...

Some songwriters, they yearn for a mantle — they strive for the political mark. David Rovics’ songs move musically in the way of the great protesters, singers and poets — the Seegers and the Guthries, Baez, early Dylan, the Anne Feenies and the Alix Olson. I’ve finally had a chance to talk with David. What I discovered, and what fills the next two episodes of this show, is an artist still at...

In the fall of 2002, I turned on a four-track and demo-ed the album I intended to record as a follow-up to my record 'Life Underwater.' A lot of things changed after that. The new season of ‘All Your Days’ starts with the story of lost work and how it was made between the events of September 11, 2001, and the day I switched on the recorder. A portrait of a year marked by fire and death, haunted sp...

Part two of a stunning and wide-open conversation with Melissa Ferrick. From the Spotify class action suit to writer’s block to the revival and reinforcement of a practice to the transformation of a life into one that strives for balance between artist and academic, the podcast is joined again by this incredible voice, one that has been putting in the work since 1991. We pick up Melissa’s journey...

In 1991, nineteen-year-old Melissa Ferrick got a phone call. The caller told her that she was about to open for Morrissey. She had about an hour to get to the amphitheater. And the next day, they sent a car to take her away on tour with Moz. It has been a long time since I last spoke with Melissa. And never before have we spoken to each other about the stories and experiences and details that she...

Chris Chandler is a maker of new things out of two things, out of three things, out of four — one of the world’s consummate collaborators, sharing tracks with luminaries, fusing the verse he inhabits with the chords and choruses of artists such as Dan Bern, Jim Infantino, Peter Yarrow, Anne Feeney and Paul Benoit. I’ve known Chris a bit over the years, and years ago shared stages with him her...

Ted Drozdowski penned what is probably the most important article about my musical work in the whole of my strange little start-and-stop songwriting career. But that's not what this episode is really about. Ted Drozdowski packed his bags and traveled the world and played the blues, and he gets to say that forever. That is part of what this episode is about, and that he is a believer in t...

The sound of John Sinclair giving his poetry to a room is a deep motion, a rumble from some planetary layer. The sound of John Sinclair giving this interview is a hurricane motion, a gale force communication from a past and present that cannot be ignored. His is a story that includes great artists of our time, of his time — the 1960s especially — of a time that feels long ago until you hear t...

Archaeologist and historian Edward L. Bell joins ‘All Your Days’ to talk about his recent book, a history — and a mystery (and he's come the furthest in solving it) — tied to stories of slaves in the Northeast U.S. and what we think we know about bastions of abolition. A lot. Heavy talk. Good talk. Needed talk. Ed and I go back as musical friends as well, and I learn a lot about this person I’ve k...

Walter Geer III is a creative director in the advertising world. In 2018, he approached me with this one specific story, and in this episode, we return to that moment, that project — one that is now ongoing, one that focuses on social justice, equality, ambition, expectations, repercussions, and perseverance. One that's changed Walt's life and changed the lives of people working with words an...

His name is Dhani Jones. He was a middle linebacker in the NFL from 2000 to 2011, from the New York Giants to the Eagles to the Cincinnati Bengals. And that’s only part of the story. Dhani hosts TV shows on The Travel Channel and CNBC, publishes a book about his sport, starts companies and creative agencies and invests in visionary organizations that are shaping the future, all while working for e...

Pamela Means is among the most incisive and insightful describers of injustice and indignation, anger and antipathy — on a level with few others. Her songs create a lens, and in its focus we can call out the racists, the fascists, the homophobes, the horror dealers among us. And yet, Pamela Means is at the same time a writer of love songs, making space for love. This is the story of her caree...

'All Your Days' is back in your ears on February 7. It’s Season 4, and the talks are intense and funny and sad and sometimes angry as I step into the discussion with artists and athletes, poets and ad executives, historians and colleagues and friends — all the creative souls I know who’ve been putting in the work and dealing with the world in which we live.

We start with the Conan O'Brien moment. Songwriter Michael McDermott has been loved by luminaries (Stephen King wrote his liner notes), followed by fans, showcased on the biggest stages, and written about by the widest-reaching publications. Yet, as Michael puts it, he still suffered under a kind of reversal — pleasure over peace, the quick fix over the long game. Join us for the finale of Se...

In a sense, Andras Jones has always lived in a world that overlaps with dreaming. His father was a dream researcher. In the 1980s, Andras starred in ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 4' (he also appeared on 'Saved By The Bell' and in films with Drew Barrymore, Alice Cooper and Jeffrey Combs). All the while, he has been conjuring his own world with a guitar and a head full of clever, funny, angry songs.&n...

Adam Brodsky gives zero fucks. Adam Brodsky cares very, very deeply. This is the dichotomy and part of the genius at the center of Philadelphia's own King of Anti-Folk (though he'd put that crown on your head and mine, just as quickly ... but maybe only if you deserved it). In this episode, Adam and I dig deep into rejection, betrayal, and hard traveling. Plus yelling at Nazis, landing a Guinness...