American Song

Get in touch! Catching You Up New to the series? Here’s where we are. Episode One was the birth of American radio: a box in the living room that started talking in the 1920s and became the most intimate machine Americans had ever owned. Episode Two was the complicated part. Edwin Armstrong invented FM and RCA buried it. Television took radio’s stars. Black radio, the disc jockey, and rock and roll...

Get in touch! Perseverant. By the time you finish listening to  my interview with emzae, you’ll have a good idea about why I’ve started my introduction like this. Other words also apply. Intelligent. Interesting. Insightful. Inspiring. These words also seem uniquely appropriate for this singer-songwriter from Derby, England. emzae and I met for this interview across the span of one continent and o...

Get in touch! At the start, radio was like the Wild West. Anyone could get on the air, and it was all fair game: preachers, farmers, a quack broadcasting from Mexico. But that was before the networks moved in, before the payola hearings took the records out of the DJs' hands, and ultimately before a single law in 1996 sold the dial to a few corporations. Signal is the story of American radio&...

Get in touch! In 1920, a radio signal was a rumor with electricity behind it — a handful of amateurs in garages and attics, broadcasting into a void nobody had proven was listening. There were no networks, no formats, no rules, because nobody in power had figured out yet that there was anything here worth controlling. That's the world this episode opens in: the accidental birth of American ra...

Get in touch! Today’s episode is an interview with the Southern California based singer-songwriter, Anson Corsair. His remarkably open interview reveals some of the highs and the lows he’s lived through and how he’s processed these events into a growing group of beautiful songs. While American Song generally covers some of the most well-known musicians throughout the canon of popular music, these...

Get in touch! Today on American Song, I’ll introduce you to my friend, A.J. Deiboldt. A.J. is a singer-songwriter originally from upstate New York, now making his music in a small town in the woods of Tennessee just outside Nashville. American Song is a show that celebrates the history, breadth and richness of our country’s music in all its flavors. Writing memorable and sensitive songs in the sty...

Get in touch! New Wave was born in a New York dive bar, then it got on a plane. In England it picked up eyeliner and a synthesizer where its guitar used to be. But somewhere over the Atlantic, in a few very specific places, it also picked up something heavier: a government watching. This is the final episode in our New Wave series, and it's the one where the genre stops being an aesthetic and...

Get in touch! Britain just turned the lights fluorescent. The future arrives every Wednesday now, whether you're ready or not. Picture 1979 England: factories closing, Thatcher cutting glass with every syllable, and a music press so brutal it could make or break a band before the tea went cold. Punk already burned down the house. Now a blond former schoolteacher from Newcastle who sounds like...

Get in touch! It was the late 1970s and early '80s. New York was bankrupt. Akron's tire factories were closing. Regular families were struggling with double-digit inflation. The AIDS epidemic was raging. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the US boycotted the Olympics in protest. John Lennon was assassinated.  And somewhere in the background, always, that low hum — nuclear warheads, pat...

Get in touch! Five hundred million years ago, ( approximately 1977), something extraordinary happened on the floor of an ancient sea. Life — which had spent billions of years as little more than a few unremarkable blobs drifting in the dark — suddenly exploded into every possible form simultaneously. Claws. Fins. Shells. Eyes. Creatures of impossible elegance and alien strangeness, emerging from t...

Get in touch! Part 1 Happy New Year, Everybody! (Even if you're reading this in July....) Across the last five seasons of American Song, we've traveled the arc of American music and listened to some of the greatest songs ever recorded, by some of the best loved artists over a century of thrilling music that changed the world.  But what about all those artists whose music is as good, if n...

Get in touch! Part 2 Happy New Year, Everybody! (Even if you're reading this in July....) Across the last five seasons of American Song, we've traveled the arc of American music and listened to some of the greatest songs ever recorded, by some of the best loved artists over a century of thrilling music that changed the world.  But what about all those artists whose music is as good, if n...

Get in touch! Factories closing, marriages cracking, the glitter of the ’80s hiding a lot of hurt—Part 3 lives right in that gap between the American dream and the American day-to-day. Bruce digs into Darkness , The River , and Nebraska , writing about people who rarely get a mic: laid-off workers, young couples in over their heads, neighbors hanging on by their fingernails. Then Born in the U.S.A...

Get in touch! Part Four is where the story cuts close to the bone. Bruce lets the E Street Band go, stares down his own failures on Tunnel of Love , and writes The Ghost of Tom Joad for the people that some Americans prefer not to see: migrants, the unemployed, the left-behind.  The band reunites, “American Skin (41 Shots)” forces a conversation about race and fear, and The Rising and Wrecking Bal...

Get in touch! Part Five starts with a funeral and a realization: when Bruce's friend and former Castile's band mate, George Theiss, dies, Bruce becomes the last man left from his teenage band. That shock pushes him into Springsteen on Broadway , Western Stars , and Letter to You —projects that ask what kind of ancestor, and what kind of citizen, you want to be when you’re running out of...

Get in touch! Part two picks up in the clubs and dives where Bruce and the band are trying to outrun obscurity. We walk with them through the struggle to get the first records heard, the critics who saw the spark, and the brutal work of making Born to Run : months of second-guessing, endless mixes, and the very real possibility that it might all collapse under its own ambition. We hear about Jon L...

Get in touch! We start the series in 2025, at Springsteen's show in Manchester, UK where he makes a landmark statement about America's "leadership" before we flash back to his formative years. A cramped house in Freehold. A father smoking in the dark kitchen. A kid staring at the radio like it’s a way out and a way in. In Part one, we meet Bruce not as a legend, but as a workin...

Get in touch! For over five decades, Jackson Browne has stood at the intersection of melody and message—crafting songs that speak not only to the heart, but also to the conscience. In an age of division and disinformation, his music feels like a lifeline to an older, more grounded sense of American democratic values—truth, empathy, accountability, and moral courage. This episode dives into Browne’...

Get in touch! In this episode of American Song , we explore the life and legacy of Warren Zevon, one of America’s most fearless and darkly funny songwriters. Known for his biting wit and uncompromising honesty, Zevon built a career chronicling the messier sides of the human experience—addiction, regret, heartbreak, and mortality. From his early days as a struggling songwriter in Los Angeles to the...

Get in touch! You could think of Randy Newman as a musical Mark Twain.  His songs draw up from a range of curiously disconnected observations about life in this era’s America in some of the same ways that Twain’s pen spoke of the America he lived in. Twain’s Mississippi paddlewheels churned the dark waters of that rolling river mixing old and new, sacred and profane and In his songs, Newman is doi...

Get in touch! In this haunting and deeply reflective episode, we explore the music of Bruce Cockburn—an artist who persistently challenges our indifference and urges us to reckon with the moral weight of being human. His songs are not just art; they are calls to awareness, rooted in compassion and fierce clarity. We delve into the global injustices that course through his music: the devastation of...

Get in touch! In these days, when people play fast and loose with truth for the purpose of personal gain at the expense of important things like rights, and even survival, I hope this episode, and the next one help us all regain a little sanity and peace.  Personal Truth takes you on a powerful journey through the birth of the singer-songwriter era, spotlighting artists who didn't just sing a...

Get in touch! By the late 1960’s, folk was beginning to feel “scarred and battered”, so what came next in this tradition was less political, and much more personal. The world was changing politically, socially, and culturally. Some of the new generation of singers and songwriters felt that staying relevant meant they had to move away from folk, towards more personal themes. The ‘70s was the “Me” d...

Get in touch! I t seems like every ten years or so, society experiences a great reset.  The end of the ‘60s was like that.  The idealism and teen-culture of the ‘60’s was ten years older and moving into adult life.  Just like everything else in life that was questioned and re-invented.  Some musicians began pushing the boundaries of what rock music could become.  Across the Atlantic, and as Ian An...

Get in touch! It seems like every ten years or so, society experiences a great reset.  The end of the ‘60s was like that.  The idealism and teen-culture of the ‘60’s was ten years older and moving into adult life.  Just like everything else in life that was questioned and re-invented, some musicians began pushing the boundaries of what rock music could become.  Across the Atlantic, and as Ian Ande...