Transmissions

This week’s All One Song guest is the definition of a multi-hyphenate — your friend and ours, Jesse Jarnow. Jesse is an incredible writer, having penned such essential books as Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America,  Wasn’t That a Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the American Soul, and the forthcoming epic, The Invisib...

Welcome back to All One Song, a Neil Young podcast presented by Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. This week is going to be slightly different. This week, we’re talking about a song that was not written by Neil Young. Nevertheless, it’s a song that is very much a part of the Shakey multiverse: Danny Whitten’s “I Don’t Want To Talk About It,” which appeared on Crazy Horse’s debut LP in 1970. Danny Wh...

Welcome back to All One Song: A Neil Young Podcast. We’re spending the summer talking to some great musicians and writers about their one favorite Neil Young song. Or at least one of their favorite songs. Last week, our guest was Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth — and of course, the conversation went deep into Steve’s memories of Sonic Youth’s tour with Neil and Crazy Horse in 1991, when both bands we...

Welcome back to ⁠All One Song⁠, A Neil Young Podcast presented by Aquarium Drunkard. We’re spending the summer talking to a few of our favorite artists and writers about their favorite Neil Young song. This week, we’ve got someone very special: Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth. Steve spent about 25 years behind the drum kit for Sonic Youth as the band radically redefined and reimagined rock and roll....

Welcome back to All One Song, A Neil Young Podcast presented by Aquarium Drunkard. We’re spending the summer talking to a few of our favorite artists and writers about their favorite Neil Young song.  This week, you’re getting two fantastic guests for the price of one: Meg Baird and Charlie Saufley. Meg first came to my attention thanks to her work with the innovative Philadelphia psych-folk colle...

Welcome back to All One Song, A Neil Young Podcast presented by Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. We're spending the summer talking to a few of our favorite artists and writers about their favorite Neil Young song.  Our guest this week is Jeff Parker, best known as the guitarist for the long-running Chicago post-rock group Tortoise. Jeff  has been on a serious hot streak of late. He’s released awes...

We hope you enjoyed the first episodes of Tyler Wilcox’s All One Song series, but we're back with, well, something different: it’s a bonus Transmissions conversation between Transmissions host Jason P. Woodbury and musician, writer, and podcaster Stephen Coates, host of the Bureau of Lost Culture. This episode also appears today in the Bureau of Lost Culture feed and I can’t recommend checking tha...

Welcome back to All One Song: A Neil Young Podcast, presented by Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. You may have noticed our awesome theme music. No, you’re not hearing some unreleased Neil Young and Crazy Horse rehearsal. You’re hearing Coca Leaves and Pearls, the Philadelphia-based Neil tribute band fronted by guitarist Chris Forsyth and featuring John Murray (guitar), Jordan Burgis (bass), and Jo...

Welcome to the very first episode of All One Song: A Neil Young podcast, presented by Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. Join liner notes author, musician, and Shakey historian Tyler Wilcox and an array of great musicians and writers discussing their favorite Neil Young song, diving deep into Shakey lore and getting personal about this amazing body of work. It’s a series for Neil heads by Neil heads...

All One Song: A Neil Young Podcast is coming this summer from the people who bring you Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. In this deep dive audio experience, liner notes author, musician, and Shakey historian Tyler Wilcox (Pitchfork, Uncut, host of Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard’s Doom and Gloom from the Tomb on dublab) invites musicians/artists/writers to discuss…one single song by Neil Young. Join g...

We close out the 10th season of Transmissions with a special look under the hood with Justin Gage, who founded Aquarium Drunkard 20 years ago in 2005. Initially envisioned as just a place to share cultural recommendations with friends, Aquarium Drunkard blew up as the blog rush began. Suddenly, Gage found himself running a respected media outlet. 20 years later, he joins host Jason P. Woodbury to...

This week on the show, something different: an extra-sized Transmission that’s been locked in the vault for years, a two-hour talk with singer/songwriter Damien Jurado.  Way back in 2022, host Jason P. Woodbury sat down with Jurado in the recording studio at Gold-Diggers in Los Angeles for a career spanning conversation, exploring the stories behind his oracular visions, his history, and his colla...

On the cover of Deerhoof’s new album, Noble and Godlike in Ruin, is an image of the band’s lineup—Satomi Matsuzaki, Ed Rodriguez, John Dieterich, and Greg Saunier—collaged together into one strange visage. Given that the album’s title is drawn directly from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, this cobbled together assemblage makes sense, but it also doubles as a handy metaphor for Deerhoof’s identity as...

Do you ever connect with an old friend and find that, despite however many years it's been, you pick up right where you left off, as if no time has passed at all? That’s sort of what happened between today’s guest, Dean Wareham and producer Kramer in the making of Dean’s new album, That’s the Price of Loving Me. You know Dean from his work with Luna and Dean and Britta, his duo with his wife Britt...

This week on the show, the great Yuka Honda. She’s a New York musician. In the 1990s, she emerged from the fertile New York music underground with Cibo Matto alongside groups like the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, and Luscious Jackson. She’s collaborated with an extensive roster of musicians, including John Zorn,David Byrne, Yoko Ono, Sean Ono Lennon, and her husband, guitarist Nels Cline.  Earlier t...

This week, a return appearance from William Tyler. As a guitarist and sideman, William has worked with the Silver Jews, Lambchop, and other forward leaning acts, balancing a deep understanding of tradition with experimental energy. His own records have found him drifting from Takoma School style finger picking to a zone that hovers in-between krautrock and country; in recent years, he’s expanded e...

That's right, we've got The Dude hisself: Jeff Bridges. This week on Transmissions, he joins us to discuss his new archival record, Slow Magic, 1977-1978. Listening to the record sounds like eavesdropping on the coolest Hollywood party you’ve never been invited to: Bridges and co. sound like they are blowing off steam more than making a proper record, their wild music sound, as Bridges’ frequent m...

This week on Transmissions, a return guest, the great comedian, writer, actor, and podcaster Joe Pera. Joe first appeared here on Transmissions in 2020 alongside his friend and collaborator James Wallace aka Skyway Man, and we've wanted to have him back ever since. This talk is a blast, covering everything from the beauty of Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport to representations of Catholicism in science...

Welcome back to Transmissions and we’re going to start this week’s show with a reading from Jennifer Kelly’s review of the new Mekons album, Horror.  “Things are very bad, but then again, they always have been. That’s Horror’s argument in a nutshell, the 26th album from the legendary Mekons, a Leeds-born gaggle of instigators of punk rock anarchists that has been doing business for half a century...

Call it “brain fog,” call it “attention economy burnout,” call it the dregs of late capitalism: however you label it, Tamara Lindeman has been feeling it. With “Neon Signs,” our favorite song from her 2025 album as The Weather Station, Humanhood—out now on Fat Possum Records—she gives names and shapes to the sense of dread so many of us feel permeating our daily existence.  “I’ve gotten used to fe...

Welcome back to Transmissions, your weekly conversational series from Aquarium Drunkard in partnership with the Talkhouse Podcast Network. This week on the show, a long awaited return visit from Lonnie Holley. The Atlanta artist joins us alongside his manager, Matt Arnett, son of William Arnett, the Southern art curator and collector who brought Holley to the attention of the art world in the 1980...

This week on Transmissions, we welcome the phenomenal writer Lucy Sante to the show to discuss her latest book, I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition. Poetic, slyly funny, and exceptionally moving, the book joins her other classics, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York and Maybe the People Would Be the Times, as a piece of art that straddles the line between memoir, arts criticism...

Welcome back to Transmissions with Jason Woodbury. This week, Steve Lillywhite, a producer who's had as pivotal a role in shaping your host's musical taste as anyone. In this conversation, Lillywhite opens up about working with artists like Dave Matthews Band, U2, Phish, XTC, The La's, Marshall Crenshaw, The Killers, and more. From The Joshua Tree to Billy Breathes, from Before These Crowded Stree...

This week on Transmissions: Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, the duo behind the label and concert series Jazz Is Dead. Founded in 2017, Jazz Is Dead began releasing new work by jazz artists frequently sampled in rap and hip-hop in 2020, including releases from legendary players like Roy Ayers, Azymuth, Gary Bartz, Lonnie Liston Smith, Tony Allen, and more. On January 31st, the duo released...

Welcome back to Transmissions from Aquarium Drunkard. We're kicking off our 10th season with host Jason Woodbury in conversation with Will Oldham, the man behind Bonnie “Prince” Billy, who appeared on the very first Transmissions interview back in 2016. This episode flips a gentle and honest bird to The Big Online Machine: "Some people I think are fully integrated and are just ready to, if not off...