Highway Hi-Fi Podcast

If you collect vinyl, you understand the power of tangible, physical media. You know the thrill of finding a new record, staring at the cover art, pouring through the liner notes, and, of course, the disc itself. Holding sound. Looking at the grooves, the labels, the wax. The record is truly a piece of art far beyond the music contained within.  There is perhaps no one who practices this craft wit...

Faced with the prospect of an untimely death, 25-year-old Mary Lambert Swale drew up an unusually specific last will and testament. The daughter of the wealthy English family, Swale anonymously bequeathed to the Anglican Church of Toronto 5000 sterling, an astronomical sum in 1845, to erect a new church. This gift came with stipulations, however. The building must be constructed in the Gothic Styl...

Supergroups are kind of lazy. It’s a lazy term for bands that consist of musicians who have already found success elsewhere. It’s a lazy move for musicians who too often want to become relevant again or make some easy money. It’s a lazy means of promotion for record labels who can just plaster the faces of the band members on the cover. It’s a lazy expectation for fans who are happy enough with ar...

Jandek’s first album, like most of his career, was made with aggressive alienation. Heralded as a master of American DIY, at no point during the first 25 years of his career did he seek attention, press, or notoriety outside his homemade music. No press kits. No live performances. No ambition or self-awareness. All interviews are summarily denied. Prolific in both his obscurity and output, Jandek...

Bruce Springsteen was totally spent after finishing a grueling year long 140 date tour for his massively successful double record The River. Needing a rest, he rented a house by a reservoir in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey. His time spent there allowed him a little bit of respite from life on the road and time apart from the fans. He was able to fully take in and embrace his musical and literary influen...

Isolation causes people to do funny things. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes mad, often both. We're both under the recommended self-quarantine and as we're waiting for this pandemic to hopefully quickly subside. We started thinking about albums that were made while in confinement. Many came to mind quickly. The Rolling Stones recorded Exile on Main Street while holed in France avoiding tax penalties...

Today, we examine the messages that were delivered by seven of the most famous, and some equally infamous, single track records. The emotional tension that went into making them. The strife that went into releasing them. And the waves that were made by listening to them. Each with a message beyond their declaration of musical independence. A jazz composer completely undoing the constraining rules...

Kevin Coyne released over 40 albums in the course of his 35-year career. He would be hailed and championed by the likes of John Peel, Richard Branson, Johnny Rotten, the Mekons, Sting, and Will Oldham. He unceremoniously rejected an offer from Elektra Records to be the dead Jim Morrison’s replacement in the Doors, quipping that he didn’t like leather pants. He wrote scores of songs about the fring...

On today’s episode, we are going to seek to understand the bands who spent hours stenciling runes on their guitars and drum heads, writing lyrics in the Black Tongue of Mordor, and filling their pipes with Longbottom Leaf. The bands that wandered into fame beyond belief and those who were lost to the darkest depths of Khazad Dum. Today’s episode: Tolk-Rock: the musical obsession with Middle Earth....

The holidays are a time of peace, joy, and love. They are also the best time to look around, take a breath, and stop a minute to enjoy all the madness that constantly swirls amongst us. Here at Highway Hi-Fi, our Christmas episode is the show we allow ourselves to talk about some of our favorite stories that are too small for a Turntable Talk, but too good to not share. All of which have nothing t...

In the middle of the century, a collective thirst for knowledge grew around the world. In these new space age times, people had neither the time nor patience for books, tutors, or apprenticeships. Instead they turned to the newest form of mass media for their learning needs...the vinyl record. The turntable allowed unlimited listens in the private and cozy confines of home making it the ideal vehi...

While music is often dominated by songs of love...romantic love, fleeting love, spiritual love, love of place, love of country, love of Waffle House delicacies, there is a dark side to that jukebox coin. An obsession we all have with the darkness. A bleak reality that is as unknown as it is universal. It is riveting, enthralling, and oddly comforting to delve into other people’s tragedies. And hon...

Today, we are exploring the depths of a genre that can be both ghoulishly fun, menacing, and shocking all within the same side of a record. The twists and turns that composers use to enthrall the audience and make their collective flesh crawl.  The orchestral equivalents of Vincent Price whispering sweet nothings into your ear. A left out style of music that has made itself into a viable and influ...

No one man can make a scene. But perhaps one can be an embodiment of it. A representation of what makes a place and its music intertwined. Like his beloved Cleveland itself, the emblematic and occasionally problematic Peter Laughner was on the fringes of the American music canon. A shadowy presence in a shadowy place at the time when rock n roll was dark, smart, and powerful. But that is the thing...

In the late 50s, the streets of Jamaica were alit with music. Bands would bang out jazz and rhythm & blues songs every night, catering to large crowds of people desiring only to dance all night. It was a disco, but outside in the streets, every night of the week, from dusk till dawn, like Mardis Gras and a discotheque crammed into one big outdoor dance-off. However, there was a singular prevalent...

We don’t really stop and think about it that much, but records are pretty damn amazing. A hunk of plastic that can be so powerful that it can bring us to tears, take us back to childhood haunts, or even make friends out of total strangers almost instantaneously. But beyond records being this incredible social and cultural artifact, records are amazing pieces of innovation.  In essence, the basic c...

What is the cost of silence? What part of the human condition is lost or found in the stillness of sound? At some point, our culture seems to have turned its back on reflective quiet, opting instead for an environment that is constantly using stimuli to condition the population to various ends. Even in an era of personal choice, piped-in music is ubiquitous these days as advertisements are embedde...

For the past few episodes, we have been examining the thin line that separates authentic from fraud in rock n roll. The fantastical world-building of Mingering Mike showed how one can create true inspiration and beautiful art even without ever actually making music or having an audience. The deception and tomfoolery of the music industry to create whole phantom biographies and personas as a means...

There truly is a fine line between what’s real in rock n roll and what’s just an act. Judging the authenticity of an art form that at its heart is about transformative performance can be difficult, or worse, can take away from the power of it all. Where does one put the line in the sand beyond which is a total fabrication of aesthetic rather than an honest expression of self as art and music? Furt...

On January 21, 1977, Jimmy Carter pardoned the Vietnam War draft dodgers. This happened the day after Carter was sworn into office and it was this single act ended the career of Mingering Mike Stevens, who was a singer, producer, label owner, and movie director. For nearly a decade, Mike created a career of epic proportions with tenacity, dedication, and precision. According to a website dedicated...

Everywhere you look you are surrounded by dead technology. The car you’re driving, the television you’re watching, the phone or computer that’s playing this podcast. Next month it will be outpaced. Next year it will be outdated. And next decade it will likely be obsolete. Proponents of technology always hail the latest and greatest as the critical next step toward inventive actualization. However,...

A middle-aged lady with a beehive hairdo, cat-eyed glasses, and an orange church dress sits at a piano in the middle of cathedral-like Solarium in the Denver Botanical Gardens. She plays soft, chipper classical music surrounded by families of ferns: Maidenhair, Holly, Horsetail,  Cloverleaf, etc. She is being filmed for Leonard Nimoy´s In Search Of, a television documentary show dedicated to the w...

In 1959, a new radio show hit the Parisian airwaves called Salut les Copains, which translates to "Oh, Hi!" The show couldn’t have been more popular with teenagers. And on that program, there was a feature called “Sweetheart of the week” which featured one female pop singer. Because of the popularity of the show, those singers were all nearly instant hits, however fleetingly it was for most. In 19...

For our mid-century episode, We are going to take a bit of departure from the usual. This podcast started as a way to teach ourselves more about music history and to keep on introducing each other to great songs and stories about those songs. Today is an exploration of why we are obsessed with vinyl and what it means to be a record collector. And for this show, we’ve asked some of you to help us n...

To celebrate our impending 50th episode, we've created a trivia contest for you, our beloved listeners.  For this quiz, we're playing 8 clips. From these 8 clips, we're looking for a phrase, specifically based on the artists, so you don't need to get the song names.  The name of the quiz is "Mixed-Up Confusion" Clues: The answer is based on artists only Use the initials It's an anagram When you th...