RiYL

As a second generation harpist, Mary Lattimore may have been born to play the instrument. After picking up the instrument at 11 and studying at the Eastman School of Music, however, she began to forge her own path with the instrument. A stint in Philadelphia found the music integrating into the indie rock scene, adapting a traditionally classical instrument to accompany the likes of Kurt Vile and...

As much as anything, Time Between is an opportunity to reflect on a remarkable career. It’s one that found a young Chris Hillman falling in love with country and bluegrass, playing his way up the ranks and landings a gig as the bass player for an up-and-coming L.A. band called, the Byrds.    The musician is every bit as modest in conversation as he is in his memoir. He’ll be the first to admit tha...

Last March, Amazon announced that the Kids in the Hall would be returning to television sketch com after 25 years. The troupe never really broke up — or at least not for long. In the intervening years, the quintet made a movie, toured North America and in 2008, released the miniseries, Death Comes to Town. The new show will return the troupe to the sketch comedy it has been performing since the mi...

In 2017, Josh Radnor entered the music world in earnest with a major assist from Australian indie-popper, Ben Lee. After two records as Radnor and Lee, he stepped out alone for the first time this year with a solo EP. Paired down down 15-17 songs, One More Then I’ll Let You Go is named in honor of a particularly fruitful period in Radnor’s burgeoning songwriting career. It’s a new world for Radnor...

Relative Fiction finds Nicole Georges returning to familiar territory. Eight years after the release of her book, Calling Dr. Laura, the podcast miniseries serves as both a followup and expansion to that deeply personal work. In both, the cartoonist explores the story of a father she grew up believing was dead. Following a tip from a psychic, she discovered the truth about her family and began exp...

It’s a perfect rock and roll story, and Butch Vig swears it’s true. The day that Kurt Cobain died is the day same day he met future bandmate Shirley Manson. Some things are just meant to be, perhaps. It was a profound turning point for the producer’s career. One of the era’s most successful producers going on to form one of the decade’s most popular rock bands, Garbage. These days, Vig continues t...

By most accounts, the heyday of the guitar as a pop cultural force is several decades in the past. But every so often, an artist emerges who breathes new life into the instrument. A musician happy to explore the fringes of her own musical boundaries, Kaki King’s instrument music is consistently fresh and nearly impossible to categorize. Released during the pandemic, Modern Yesterdays finds the gui...

Sixteen years is an eternity in this world. But for Bob Forrest, the time was right finally right for a reunion. A brilliant outgrowth of the Los Angeles 80s punk scene, Thelonious Monster flirted with major label success, signing to Capitol Records for 92’s Beautiful Mess. The group  failed to reach the heights of contemporaries like Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili, finally self-destructin...

Ginseng Roots finds Craig Thompson returning childhood memoir — albeit in an entirely different form. Currently being serialized as mini-comics through Uncivilized Press, the series is as much the story of ginseng cultivation as it is his formative years growing up in rural Wisconsin. It’s a chance to revisit some important aspects of his youth that failed to make it into his epic 600-page book, B...

 “Something I realized after we spoke that I curiously never had noticed before,” Peter Stampfel wrote in an email shortly after our interview, “big similarity that hallucinogens and the Smith Anthology both had on me: I saw that the world was much more strange and much more vast than I had previously thought.” The musician’s own long, strange career has almost certainly had its own profound effec...

“Power, wealth and mental health,” Craig Finn offers a succinct tagline for a hypothetical Open Door Policy movie poster. These themes, among others, including technology, working and inequality under capitalism clearly emerged as the lyrics for the latest Hold Steady record came into focus. To borrow a quote the singer, in turn, borrowed from Joan Didion, “I write entirely to find out what I'm th...

Peter and the Wolves is a lot of things. It’s both memoir and biography, as Adele Bertei recounts her early days in music, while showing an oft-ignored side of friend and mentor, Peter Laughner. The  Pere Ubu/Rocket from the Tombs guitarist gave the musician her earliest break in Cleveland, only to die at age 24, following longtime substance abuse. Back in print, Bertei’s book is an effort to show...

There’s a darkness to Catspaw — something that lurks beyond the innocuous and even adorable title. Culled from an episode of the original Star Trek, Matthew Sweet’s usage is evocative of a certain doom. For an album finished before Covid-19 really took hold, the mood is certainly in keeping with the present moment. Not that things were particularly great prior to the pandemic, of course. Equally f...

A lot has changed in the nearly five years since the the launch of Beautiful/Anonymous — some for the better and many for the worst. Certainly, the need to listen and be heard has only grown stronger during a pandemic that has left many alienated and alone. Earlier this month, host Chris Gethard announced that the Earwolf series will become a TV show, adding a visual element to the long conversati...

The timing of Sonic Boom could have been better, as far as these things go. The first collection of original Nixons music in 20 years arrived about two months into a country-wide shutdown. In 2018, the band toured for the first time in nearly as long. The group’s breakup wasn’t the most amicable, but it’s amazing how bad feelings can dissolve with a couple of decades between them. For singer Zac M...

In September, “Free Fall” seemed to be everywhere. In her latest long form work for The New Yorker, Emily Flake captured a sense of existential ennui that permeated much of the population six months into a pandemic-driven shut down. It was, one of the cartoonist’s most widely-shared works for the magazine since “Young and Dumb Inside,” which explored her decades’ long love for the punk band, Jawbr...

In September, The Jimmy Chamberlin Complex returned for Honor. The group’s third album found it returning to its core to deliver the manner of improvisational jazz that it sets it apart from most of the drummer’s work. A lifelong musician, Chamberlin is undoubtedly best known as the drummer of alternative rock mainstays The Smashing Pumpkins and fellow Billy Corgan-fronted group, Zwan. But while h...

The timing of An Evening of New York Songs and Stories could hardly have been better. The album arrived nearly six months into a pandemic that completely disrupted the titular city. For a few months there, New York City was the center of the world, in a new and unprecedented way — a matter not so subtly hammered home by the LP’s coincidental September 11 release date. The album is a bittersweet re...

In 2019, The Black Watch Celebrated its fourth decade with a career spanning compilation. The cheekily titled 31 Years of Obscurity was an effort to shine on one of indie rocks most-enduring and unsung bands.  Though “band” is, perhaps, something of a stretch, with John Andrew Frederick serving as both the project’s creative leader and sole constant member. And while relative obscurity has become,...

Decades before “Despacito” arrived, Erika Ender was a hit machine. The Panamanian musician’s compositions have appeared on more than 200 albums, and in 2017, she became the youngest person ever inducted into the Latin Songwriter Hall of Fame. In this conversation, Ender traces an unlikely path to success that includes a stint as a newscaster and the decision to hide her gender in order to breakthr...

What does having a style mean when one’s work is almost exclusively based on recontextualizing the work of others? It’s a question that’s long been at the heart of R. Sikoryak’s art. The New York City artist has been publicly producing work since the 90s, beginning his career as an editor of the legendary comics anthology Raw, alongside some of the era's top cartoonists. Sikoryak's best-known work...

When he first traveled to the Canadian Northwest Territories, Joe Sacco wasn’t looking to book length comic about the Dene people. But to hear him describe it, the cartoonist’s books more often than not have a tendency to take on a life of their own. Sacco is almost certainly best known for pioneering comics journalism that has often taken him to heavily conflicted corners of the globe. It’s a sen...

September saw the release of the Trover Saves The Universe soundtrack. The 31 instrumental tracks were composed for the 2019 game from Rick & Morty co-creator, Justin Roiland. The work finds composer Asy Saavedra outside of her comfort zone. Since 2012, she’s been one-half of the sibling duo, Chaos Chaos — though the band’s work actually stretches back another dozen year. The pair released their f...

The last time Alex Winter was on the show (his second appearance), we discussed his recently launched crowdfunding campaign to produce a documentary about Frank Zappa. With the film finally out five years later, the director joins us again to discuss the process of combing through the legendary musician’s archives to create a portrait of one of the 20th century’s most fascinating musicians. In spi...

A few weeks back I had the opportunity to speak with Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo for TechCrunch . What follows is a more complete audio of a conversation primarily focused on his (relatively) newfound love for coding. Fair warning that it’s not a deep dive into the band’s music, but it’s a fascinating conversation nonetheless, I think.    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informatio...