What Am I Making Podcast

Alex Amen has gotten a lot of mileage from his brief time on the planet. Although he wasn’t born until 1999, Amen has already lived on both of America’s coasts, and explored much of its rugged natural beauty. He has spent time living in a commune, made his home on an island, and even scaled some of the west coast’s most intimidating mountains as a free climber. Amen has packed all of this life and...

Stephin Merrit is one of the most esteemed songwriters alive today. For three and half decades he has been the singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and vocalist at the heart of the New York based band, The Magnetic Fields . The band was formed in 1991 by Merrit and his friend and musical collaborator Claudia Gonson. Over the next five years The Magnetic Fields would release a quintet of exce...

David Lynch is a director known to spark wildly different reactions from cinephiles and movie fans. There are legions of fans who claim Lynch as one of the great American auteurs, and see him as one of the finest filmmakers that the world has ever produced. There are also those that will stand tall and proud to proclaim Lynch a cinematic charlatan, and nothing more than a self indulgent weirdo fil...

Hey gang. Last Monday you may have noticed that we had a double dip on the podcast. At 5:00 am that day, I released a terrific chat with New Zealand indie rock legend, David Kilgour. Later that morning while working in the Sheddio, a technical glitch on Substack caused me to also post a second episode of the day, this time with the legendary Robyn Hitchcock. While the timing on the episode was a b...

Damien Jurado has fully embraced the digital behemoth as a delivery method for his music. In an era when vinyl, t-shirts, and touring are said to be the economic engine for artists, Jurado has doubled down on the value of his own work. In recent years, Jurado, an acclaimed singer/songwriter with an impressive catalog that spans more than 25 years, has taken to releasing his work in a digital forma...

Robyn Hitchcock has been living like an artist since childhood. Born to eccentric, artistically inclined parents, Hitchcock quickly took to drawing, painting, and music. The family lived something of a sheltered life surrounded by music, art and literature, making Robyn’s transition to school social life quite challenging. By his late teens and early twenties, Hitchcock began playing in The Soft B...

David Kilgour and his older brother Hamish formed their band The Clean while they were still teenagers. The pair had fallen in love with the British Invasion sound that roared to life in their earliest years and incorporated it with the punk and new wave sounds happening in the late 1970s. Until their adolescent years, the Kilgours had lived an idyllic country lifestyle filled with long hours in n...

Matt Palka seems to have already crammed more than one lifetime of experience into his 49 years on the planet. Growing up in rural Northwest Ohio, Palka was the youngest child of a pair of historical reenactors and small business owners. Matt’s youth was filled with myriad hours in the great outdoors. He and his siblings were often left alone for long stretches of time as youngsters, free to explo...

Scott McCaughey is a man about town in the world of indie rock. He first leapt on to the scene as leader of the Young Fresh Fellows in the early 1980’s, but that has been far from his sole musical pursuit. Over the intervening four decades, McCaughey has also led The Minus 5 and is a founding member of The Baseball Project along with recent guest Steve Wynn . In addition to that trio of terrific b...

Josephine Maytas and Craig Jones have forged a life together built around rock and roll and the open road. Maytas, a veteran travel writer, and Jones, who is a musician and political economist have spent the better part of the last two decades seeking out the most sacred spaces on the American sonic landscape. Their travels have taken them from the Delta of the Mississippi to the Appalachian hills...

Eric Johnson describes himself as a midwestern mutt. During Johnson’s early years, his family moved around a lot throughout the midwest with stops in Wisconsin, central Illinois, and both of Michigan’s peninsula’s before the family finally settled in the Chicagoland area. By the time Eric reached his high school years, he was dabbling in theater and music. Once he moved into the city from the subu...

Hunter Morris is the kind of musician that has held on to his day job. It is a tale as old as time; a singer/songwriter churns out good work that improves and evolves over time. Yet, he still cannot find a large enough audience in the days of streaming to generate a full time income. So, on most mornings, Hunter Morris heads to work, pulling on a pair of waders and prepping the tackle for his fly...

Andrew Kenny and his bandmates have always been good scrapbookers. They kept tour flyers, set lists, photographs, press clippings, and loads of other ephemera from the earliest days of The American Analog Set. As the band began to work with the esteemed reissue label, Numero Group, these scrapbooks took on an outsized value. The resulting pair of box sets chronicling the length and breadth of the...

Steve Wynn formed his first band, The Light Bulbs at age 9. His second outfit, Sudden Death Overtime got its start while Wynn was just beginning middle school. Eventually, after a series of youthful explorations of a life in music, Wynn formed The Dream Syndicate in 1981. Success came quickly for that band as they found themselves entwined with a burgeoning new psychedelic pop scene in Los Angeles...

Julia Steiner found her musical soulmate the moment she arrived on campus at Notre Dame University. Steiner, already an avid musician and budding songwriterby the time she graduated high school, had already developed a virtual friendship with Dave Sanger on a Facebook Group for Notre Dame’s incoming Freshman class. Upon meeting in person, the pair felt a deep connection and began trading mix CD’s...

You could think of Numero Group simply as a record label, but you’d be missing the point entirely. Sure, with its massive catalog of neary 1,000 releases, it is technically a label, but as their own ideology says, “There is no Numero sound, rather there is a Numero aesthetic.” Ken Shipley and his partner Rob Sevier first began Numero when Shipley lost his job at the famed massive reissue label Ryk...

Morgan Nagler began working as an actor at age 5. For more than two decades she starred in a variety of movies and TV series for a handful of networks. By the time she hit her mid-twenties, Nagler was ready to leave acting behind and take a swing at the songwriting life. She was at first incredibly shy to her songs, keeping them close to her vest. Encouraged by her friends Jenny Lewis and Blake Se...

You can hear the raw and unguarded version of today’s guest when you listen intently to The Bootleg Recordings Of Marshall Crenshaw . This new collection of Crenshaw originals, which was released on Record Store Day of this year, was culled from a trove of work tapes recorded while making his third and fourth albums. These recordings afford listeners and fans the opportunity to hear a host of unva...

Eef Barzelay has seen the peaks and valleys of the music industry. In the course of a lifetime playing music, Barzelay has toured the world as a solo performer and in his longtime outfit, Clem Snide. He has had his songs used in motion pictures, and major TV commercials. He’s written original songs and scores for independent films, while also continuing to tour and release new music regularly. Bar...

Every record is something like a sonic quilt; a pastiche of songs and sonic ideas laid out as a single product. That quilt might be stitched together with mechanical precision or it might have been hand-sewn by a grandmother with shaky hands. The squares of fabric used for our quilt might be of uniform shape, or they could be a collection of misshapen rags. Jason P. Woodbury ’s newest album, Jason...

Jack Rabid was bitten by the drug of rock and roll before he even hit adulthood. Before he was old enough to drive, Rabid was taking the train from Northern New Jersey into the city with friends to soak up the burgeoning punk and art rock scenes happening across Manhattan’s Lower East side. Often, this ragged pack of high schoolers would be forced to spend the night in the city when the trains sto...

There is a rhythm to life in the south that appeals to MC Taylor, the mercurial mind and voice at the center of the band Hiss Golden Messenger. Taylor has come to treasure that slower cadence of life in North Carolina, a place he has now called home for roughly two decades. Growing up in southern California during the 1980s, Taylor was a typical LA kid. He spent his days skating and soaking up the...

Anna Canoni describes herself as a coalholder for the legacy of her grandfather, the late great Woody Guthrie. Anna is the third, and most recent steward in a line of women helping to keep Woody’s work available and alive. Like her grandmother, Marjorie, and her mother Nora, Anna is now entrusted with the whole of Woody’s songs and writings to ensure that his work will be available for future gene...

Bob Andrews fell ass backwards into becoming the touring manager for Uncle Tupelo and Wilco. He’d been working at a drum shop in Nashville and was good friends with Ken Coomer, Uncle Tupelo’s drummer. After a brief meeting with the band, Bob was hired. He went on to manage Tupelo, and eventually Wilco through the initial tours for their 1996 opus, Being There . Undertow began the same year that An...

Growing up in rural Kansas, Robin Hilton took a job in radio as a teenager mostly because it sounded cool. At fifteen, a pair of friends helped him land a weekend slot at a local station, and a career on the airwaves was born. The job came with almost no creative freedom as Robin stuck closely to a color-coded playlist for his weekend shows. Eventually, Hilton left the station for a more lucrative...