Kreative Kontrol

Gregory Uhlmann is here to discuss his lovely solo debut album, Extra Stars , the lives he’s led in Los Angeles and Chicago, what it was like to be a student at CalArts, getting into blues and jazz music and music making thanks especially to his dad and his brother Evan, being a big Hanson and Backstreet Boys fan at one point, key venues from the past and present that fostered his musical communit...

Ani DiFranco returns to discuss her new book, The Spirit of Ani: Reflections on Spirituality, Feminism, Music & Freedom , her involvement in establishing the Buffalo, New York arts hub known as Babeville, which is where I last saw Shellac play a show, why Buffalo was fertile ground for an aspiring musician, what prompted her to write this book with Lauren Coyle Rosen, the evolution of her posi...

Buck 65 makes a rare reappearance to discuss his excellent new album, Do Not Bend , musical brevity, Joe Pernice inspiring him to start an insightful Substack , writing jokes and stories that wind up as rhymes, befriending the late great Biz Markie and hanging out backstage at a Beastie Boys show, meeting Lou Reed but being low key about their creative kinship, acquiring the four-track he once use...

Buck Meek is here for a talk about his charming, confessional new album, The Mirror , coming up in Wimberley, Texas and people’s misconceptions of the Lone Star State, the vibrancy of transient college towns, how his grandmother’s death and caring for his grandfather galvanized his family and inspired aspects of The Mirror , writing songs about communication, teaching, language, speech, parenting,...

Brendan Canty , Joe Lally , James Brandon Lewis , and Anthony Pirog return for a Valentine’s Day discussion about Deface the Currency , the excellent new album by The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis , what led them into a studio with engineer Don Godwin fresh off of some tour dates, the noisier, aggressive aspects of this record, social currency and community-building in music, the significanc...

Sahan Jayasuriya is here to discuss his book, Don’t Say Please: The Oral History of Die Kreuzen , loving living in Milwaukee, benefitting from the reverence that artists like Beastie Boys and Nirvana exhibited for their own influences and favourite musicians, discovering that people like Neko Case, Matt Sweeney, Dave Grohl, and David Pajo all love Die Kreuzen as he was writing a book about them, w...

During Family Day in Canada, my wife and kids and I gathered around our kitchen table to discuss our shared experience watching all nine episodes of The Beatles Anthology documentary series. Please enjoy two parents and their 14- and 11-year-old children reflecting upon what we learned and liked about the Beatles, including who loves John, Paul, George, and Ringo the most. One correction: contrary...

Elizabeth Nelson returns to discuss the Paranoid Style and their new album, Known Associates , life near Washington D.C., a recap of our recent discussion about the Replacements’ Let It Be reissue, a brief overview of American paranoia, her penchant for wordy lyrics and how that impacts her as a singer, some of her favourite sincerely humorous songwriters, Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” and Bob...

Michael Longfellow is here to discuss life as a lazy student and his creative writing academic pursuits, how and why he got into comedy and music as a kid, growing up with different step-parents and step-siblings and what his kinfolk think about him making jokes about them specifically, why he’s uncomfortable being compared to Norm Macdonald but why he reminded me of Norm when he was on Saturday N...

Brian Raftery is here to discuss his excellent new book, Hannibal Lecter: A Life , the Burbank Burger King from Back to the Future , what exactly prompted him to explore the origin story and pervasiveness of Hannibal Lecter, his mysterious and seldom-interviewed creator, the best-selling author Thomas Harris, why people love fictitious and apparently also real-life antiheroes, a rundown of the his...

Lance Sampson from Aquakultre returns to discuss his new album 1783 , the time I saw him request and receive chicken wings while performing on-stage and why his friends and family often engage in their own version of Hot Ones , how his research about the history of African Nova Scotia or Black Nova Scotia led him to write songs, why he engaged in this research initially and what he learned about h...

Julia Steiner from Ratboys returns to discuss their new album, Singin’ to an Empty Chair , processing the death of comedy legend Catherine O’Hara, writing songs inspired by her first experiences in therapy, working with producer Chris Walla and songs that combine session work at a rented cabin with those recorded at Electrical Audio , Steve Albini’s drum sound, anxiety, dogs, and Indiana Jones, ou...

ER Jurken returns to discuss his wonderful new album, To Be Continued , topical and timeless songwriting, political satire and comedy on late night tv talk shows, the band Wilco playing Ed’s song “Let Go the Coat” through the P.A. at their shows after they’ve left the stage, getting over a prolonged bout of writers’ block, why several of his new songs invoke travelling, key inspirations like Neil...

Trevor Shelley de Brauw from Pelican is here to discuss the band’s album, Flickering Resonance , our history of working together because of his role in music publicity, the city of Chicago’s music dynamism, a brief foray into North Carolina farming, how guitar teachers underestimate Ramones songs, seeing significant shows at Fireside Bowl as a teenager, the antagonistic antics of Tusk, where Pelic...

Brydon Crain, Adam Sipkema, and Penelope Stevens from Motherhood are here to discuss their January 2026 shows in the Canadian Prairies, their latest album Thunder Perfect Mind , university courses, music school, and religious studies, spiritual and musical communities, Penny’s time in Vietnam and observations about communism, the story of Motherhood, how I think my son is trying to be better at li...

MC Taylor from Hiss Golden Messenger is here to discuss life in Durham, North Carolina and the time he spent in San Francisco, California, the Grateful Dead and Dead Kennedys, why he was so fascinated by the American South, he decided to move there 20 years ago, his love for the Band and the motifs in their music, if his academic background in American studies, folklore, and history offers him muc...

Paul Myers is here to discuss his new book, John Candy: A Life in Comedy , how the actor and producer Ryan Reynolds helped him get from a Boston event about the documentary, John Candy: I Like Me, to an Edmonton book event within 24 hours and in style, the fortuitous connection between the documentary and the book, which were made independent of one another but released around the same time, a Mye...

Lisa G and Lisa Marr from cub are here to discuss the 30th anniversary vinyl edition of Come Out Come Out , the significant year in culture that was 1995, being pegged as “cuddlecore” in a time where labels and preconceptions were being shaken off on the regular, not identifying as men in a predominantly male underground music community and how some fans treated cub, vinyl records and the pros and...

Sohrab Habibion and Johnny Temple are here to discuss the book, Plenty for All: The Art of Rick Fröberg , how they each met and got to know Rick and how this book came to be, the role the late Rich Jacobs played in this project, how this book and the zine that’s part of the deluxe edition might surprise Rick’s fans, the story of Akashic Books and why Sohrab thought it was the perfect home for Rick...

Chris Brokaw , Ken “Bundy K.” Brown , Curtis Harvey, and  Doug McCombs are here to discuss III , the first album by Pullman in 25 years, what inspired Pullman to explore acoustic guitar sounds in the late 1990s, the positive but also harsh critical reception their first two albums, 1998’s Turnstyles & Junkpiles  and 2001’s Viewfinder received, how Tim Barnes joined Pullman and also h...

Mark Medley is here to discuss his remarkable new book, Live to See the Day - Impossible Goals, Unimaginable Futures, and the Pursuit of Things That May Never Be , our experiences at writers’ festivals, questions I have about how book publicity works and whether or not some publishers promote their authors and books, what inspired him to write this 10-chapter book of case studies about people who...

Tim Midyett from Mint Mile returns to discuss andwhichstray , what recent Silkworm reunion shows have been like, the throughlines between songs he wrote in that band about mortality, connection, and community and his most recent Mint Mile material, how fortune enabled him to make one more record with his late friend Steve Albini, who engineered andwhichstray in France during the second last record...

My son, who is 14, and I discuss our top 10 albums of 2025, along with several honourable mentions. Each of us mostly highlighted records the other wasn’t all that familiar with, and other members of our family make background or brief appearances on this episode as well. All in all, these are some eclectic lists, so we hope our music recommendations help you in some way! Featuring music produced...

Dave NeSmith and Drew Ringo from Sleepytime Trio are here to discuss Memory Minus Plus Minus , their current music community involvement, the Guelph house show they played and the ice cream tricycle Drew rode around on that day, the significance of bands like Hoover, Shotmaker, Fugazi, Slint, and Drive Like Jehu, making hip-hop music and getting into shoegaze, why kids can’t be blamed for the tech...

Friendly Rich returns to discuss his latest album, The Birds of Marsville , his Brampton, Ontario pride, completing his PhD in music education and becoming a doctor, what having a giant beard might mean, playing the artistic and comedic long game, learning more about Marsville, the eighteenth-century researcher C. Smalloochi, and the orchestrion’s capabilities as a musical instrument, getting into...