How We Heard It

If you can find the energy you need to get through every day, how do you do it? A well-balanced diet? A consistent exercise regimen? Regular restful nights? Maybe you need a little boost - like, say, a methodically steady stream of caffeine during the day balanced with diphenhydramine HCl at bedtime? Well, don't forget the power of music. Whether you require a special blast of energy to get throug...

Many of us in the Northern Hemisphere have already had our share of scorching days and steamy nights this summer, and there's only more to come. But rather than take shelter with a cool drink behind blackout curtains, the hosts of "How We Heard It" decided to face the heat head on with a collection of "hot" songs. Some are obvious, some you might have forgotten, and some you may never have heard....

This week on "How We Heard It," your hosts talk about bands and singers they haven't mentioned often on the show but who deserve to have their stories told. For example: How did Lauryn Hill squander the record-breaking fame and adulation for her solo debut so badly that she never released another studio album? Or why didn't Lou Reed's counterpart in The Velvet Underground have anything close to Re...

"How We Heard It" is two years old this week, and Wayne, Chuck and John hope you're having a good time - because they are. Oh sure, they sometimes slip up, say "you know" and "right" too often, lose their way sorting out topics and forget what they're saying now and then. Yet they keep finding their way in sharing lose opinions and hard facts about music, movies and TV from before any of us were b...

In May your "How We Heard It" hosts served an episode of songs about moms in honor of Mother's Day, so it's only fitting that for June they turn out an episode of songs about uncles. Kidding! Of course Father's Day brings about an episode of songs about dads - all kinds of dads. From supportive dads to deadbeat dads, from the doting fathers to the cold fathers and maybe a hot daddy here and there...

Everyone likes to laugh, but not everyone agrees about what's funny. So if something tickles you, don't worry what anyone else thinks. That's the attitude the "How We Heard It" hosts had when they dove into this week's topic: goofy movies we can't resist. There are different kinds of intentionally funny movies, from slapstick to smart humor wrapped in absurd premises. Crude jokes, innuendo, outrag...

If you go looking for songs about the moon, they'll start falling out of the sky. Moon-themed songs are some of the oldest in recorded history as well as some of the most recent to hit the charts. They can be found connected to everything from organized religion to witchcraft, they come from all parts of the planet, and they show up in every genre of music. In honor of the 2026 blue moon, the host...

For the 100th episode of their show "How We Heard It," the podcast team is giving you the music artists who give 100 percent. Musicians are like any other group of workers. Some are tireless - endlessly productive, relentlessly creative or both. Others fill the status quo, doing what might be expected, sometimes a little more and sometimes a little less. Still others are just plain lazy, pushing t...

There are noteworthy changes in every decade of modern music, but the seismic shifts and chaos of the 1990s were unparalleled. Whether it was the music of your youth, your kids' youth, your parents' youth or even your grandparents' youth, most everyone has noticed (either at the time or now, in retrospect) that the '90s were just different. It was the decade that saw Generation X hand over the mus...

The more music you collect - digitally, physically or in a combination - the more you have to keep up with. And let's face it: Most of us aren't as organized as we'd like to be. So if you just keep accumulating music and the years keep rolling by, you can easily lose track of your collection and get disconnected from your memories. This week on "How We Heard It," your hosts take another dive into...

For many of us, our mothers are among the most important, most loving, and perhaps most complicated, people in our lives. And not coincidentally, mothers have been consistently referenced throughout history in most every art form - including music. So with Mother's Day looming, the hosts of "How We Heard It" have chosen to highlight mothers in music. Songs about mothers range from the nostalgic an...

A great song title is like a snappy headline: It grabs you and pulls you in with just a few words. With so much riding on that kind of first impression, you'd think more artists would strive to come up with the best song titles possible. Yet in truth, many artists settle for ordinary and unimaginative titles all the time. That's their loss. This week the hosts of "How We Heard It" reveal some of t...

We have a complicated relationship with rain. We need it to grow our crops, to keep our bodies of water at the right level and to hydrate our own bodies. But just as it gives us life, it can take it away with devastating floods and catastrophic drought. Yet rain is associated with far more than our physical needs. It touches off almost every kind of emotional reaction, varying from one person to t...

Even the best of us have bad days - including your favorite musicians. That explains how top-shelf artists can produce a clunker of a song. We try to forget these songs, explain them away as somebody else's fault, justify them as an important learning moment, and maybe even claim that they aren't so bad when we know they are simply terrible. In this week's episode of "How We Heard It," the hosts d...

Every popular movie has a dedicated group of haters, whether it's the Oscar winner that few people saw, the critical favorite that left everyone depressed or the box-office smash with the formulaic plot and predictable ending. Although the hosts of "How We Heard It" consider themselves big movie fans, they have their limits. So in this week's episode they reveal what movies disappointed them, made...

What would we do without music? It's a question the hosts of "How We Heard It" hated to even contemplate. Would this mean we wouldn't have songbirds? Would we not hear the wind in the trees or the waves in the ocean? What about the rhythm of a heartbeat? Would humans not hum or whistle? Even if those elements were in play, imagine no concerts, no music at games or bars, no music to accompany drivi...

Last week the hosts of "How We Heard It" explored the many reasons people stop listening to new music as they get older. The bottom line: New music speaks to us less and less as we age, our friends stop listening to new music so we don't have anyone to share the experience, we have less time to absorb new music, and our aging brains find new music difficult to process. (Myth: New music was better...

Many of us fall in love with music around puberty and it plays an important part in our lives as we transition into adulthood, get through school and break out on our own. Music helps us shape our identity and bonds us with our friends. It's there when we're lonely or feeling isolated. It's there when we experience infatuations and find love. It consoles us when we lose love or suffer other kinds...

In 2025 the hosts of "How We Heard It" decided to dig through their individual music collections just to see what they would find, and they turned up music they had long forgotten as well as music they didn't even know they had and music they didn't even recognize. And with many of the discoveries came memories of their pasts and realizations about the evolution of music and the changes in their i...

Every song's got to have a hook - or at least it does if you want it to be popular. A song can have the best vocalists, the best instrumentalists and the best lyrics, but unless it has a great hook, it'll never be all that it can be. And unlike words, voices and music, it's hard to articulate how hooks even work; they hit us on a primal level that can't fully be explained. The most common hook in...

It's a question we like to ask but one we usually can't confidently answer: What one album would you want with you on a deserted island? Forget the fact you aren't going to have electricity on a deserted island or any equipment that plays music. Never mind you might spend the rest of your life alone on this mysterious island. Your task is to narrow down all of music to just one album to entertain...

A great love song will warm your heart with its magic, stirring an internal passion that's hard to explain. A bad love song will make you cringe, laugh and/or yawn. And frankly, there are more bad love songs than good ones floating around out there in the music universe. Last year, the hosts of "How We Heard It" celebrated Valentine's Day by shaking out some of the best love songs in modern histor...

Change is inevitable, so embrace it.   OK, maybe it's not always as positive as all that. But change presents opportunity, and even if you dread it, you can usually find a silver lining to the dark cloud.   Music can help with any kind of change. Naturally there are songs about embracing a new relationship and songs about moving on from a bad one. Yet music addresses everything from adopting a pos...

Last time on "How We Heard It," your hosts looked at the top-selling music artists from the 1960s to the 2020s and ranked them, decade by decade. They debated, argued and came to some consensus as they considered all of music's biggest acts from the Beatles to Taylor Swift.   This time around, they decided to rank the best and worst movies that were tops at the box office from the 1960s to the 202...

Like all good music nerds, the hosts of "How We Heard It" frequently advocate for lesser-known acts they think deserve more attention. But Wayne, Chuck and John like to balance the podcast by also talking about the biggest names through the years, and in this episode they talk about the most popular of them all, ranking them against each other. The premise: The guys explore the top-10-selling musi...