RiYL

The timing of Sonic Boom could have been better, as far as these things go. The first collection of original Nixons music in 20 years arrived about two months into a country-wide shutdown. In 2018, the band toured for the first time in nearly as long. The group’s breakup wasn’t the most amicable, but it’s amazing how bad feelings can dissolve with a couple of decades between them. For singer Zac M...

In September, “Free Fall” seemed to be everywhere. In her latest long form work for The New Yorker, Emily Flake captured a sense of existential ennui that permeated much of the population six months into a pandemic-driven shut down. It was, one of the cartoonist’s most widely-shared works for the magazine since “Young and Dumb Inside,” which explored her decades’ long love for the punk band, Jawbr...

In September, The Jimmy Chamberlin Complex returned for Honor. The group’s third album found it returning to its core to deliver the manner of improvisational jazz that it sets it apart from most of the drummer’s work. A lifelong musician, Chamberlin is undoubtedly best known as the drummer of alternative rock mainstays The Smashing Pumpkins and fellow Billy Corgan-fronted group, Zwan. But while h...

The timing of An Evening of New York Songs and Stories could hardly have been better. The album arrived nearly six months into a pandemic that completely disrupted the titular city. For a few months there, New York City was the center of the world, in a new and unprecedented way — a matter not so subtly hammered home by the LP’s coincidental September 11 release date. The album is a bittersweet re...

In 2019, The Black Watch Celebrated its fourth decade with a career spanning compilation. The cheekily titled 31 Years of Obscurity was an effort to shine on one of indie rocks most-enduring and unsung bands.  Though “band” is, perhaps, something of a stretch, with John Andrew Frederick serving as both the project’s creative leader and sole constant member. And while relative obscurity has become,...

Decades before “Despacito” arrived, Erika Ender was a hit machine. The Panamanian musician’s compositions have appeared on more than 200 albums, and in 2017, she became the youngest person ever inducted into the Latin Songwriter Hall of Fame. In this conversation, Ender traces an unlikely path to success that includes a stint as a newscaster and the decision to hide her gender in order to breakthr...

What does having a style mean when one’s work is almost exclusively based on recontextualizing the work of others? It’s a question that’s long been at the heart of R. Sikoryak’s art. The New York City artist has been publicly producing work since the 90s, beginning his career as an editor of the legendary comics anthology Raw, alongside some of the era's top cartoonists. Sikoryak's best-known work...

When he first traveled to the Canadian Northwest Territories, Joe Sacco wasn’t looking to book length comic about the Dene people. But to hear him describe it, the cartoonist’s books more often than not have a tendency to take on a life of their own. Sacco is almost certainly best known for pioneering comics journalism that has often taken him to heavily conflicted corners of the globe. It’s a sen...

September saw the release of the Trover Saves The Universe soundtrack. The 31 instrumental tracks were composed for the 2019 game from Rick & Morty co-creator, Justin Roiland. The work finds composer Asy Saavedra outside of her comfort zone. Since 2012, she’s been one-half of the sibling duo, Chaos Chaos — though the band’s work actually stretches back another dozen year. The pair released their f...

The last time Alex Winter was on the show (his second appearance), we discussed his recently launched crowdfunding campaign to produce a documentary about Frank Zappa. With the film finally out five years later, the director joins us again to discuss the process of combing through the legendary musician’s archives to create a portrait of one of the 20th century’s most fascinating musicians. In spi...

A few weeks back I had the opportunity to speak with Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo for TechCrunch . What follows is a more complete audio of a conversation primarily focused on his (relatively) newfound love for coding. Fair warning that it’s not a deep dive into the band’s music, but it’s a fascinating conversation nonetheless, I think.    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informatio...

Ultimately, The Contradictions serves as an important turning point for both its lead character and author — both, coincidentally, named Sophie. For the fictional Sophie (a college student with more than a few common traits with her creator), the road trip is a journey of self discovery. For Yanow, the book finds her hitting her stride as a storyteller and artist. Prior to the publication of her f...

Nearly 20 have passed since the last Semisonic album, All About Chemistry arrived. The band’s third LP didn’t live up to the massive popular success of 1998’s Feeling Strangely Fine, but the charts are a fickle thing. A proper reunion was never a guarantee, in spite of the fact that the trio remained close. The members moved to different cities, found new musical outlets, and, in the case of drumm...

It’s hard to say precisely what semi-retirement means for a standup comic. Kyle Kinane has been tossing the term around for a while — well before this year’s release of his fourth album, Trampoline In A Ditch. Mostly it seems to be involve taking time for himself and generally enjoying life — all good things. Though Kinane is quick to acknowledge that there’s a certain element of semi-retirement i...

There has been no shortage of deeply personal stories during Adrian Tomine’s long, celebrated career in comics. But up to now, they’ve been almost exclusively filtered through a fictional lens, from his on-going series Optic Nerve to 2015’s Killing and Dying. With The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, Tomine finds himself diving head-long into autobiographical work. The book features som...

Unbeknownst to me, Van Dyke Parks is seated at his piano. This fact becomes clear numerous times during our conversation, as he tickles the ivory to punctate points. It’s not as if he requires the tool during the interview. Parks is a raconteur, above all. He seemingly has a story for everything, winding his way through fascinating avenues to make profound points about life, music, politics and ar...

A Brand-New Shade of Blue finds Chris Stamey exploring jazz music in the mold of the cool movement of the 50s/60s. Composed on sheet music, the album was finished with remote recordings amid a pandemic shutdown — a less than ideal scenario for a genre defined by in-person collaboration. The music has spent recent years exploring new horizons, mostly notably with 2019’s New Songs for the 20th Centu...

Released in 2018, American Dharma blindsided its director. Errol Morris had spend decades making some of the universally acclaimed documentaries of all time. This time, however, the press wasn’t having it, accusing the filmmaker of “platforming” his subject, Steve Bannon, or at very least, never pushing back hard enough against Trump’s political strategist. In many ways, however, the documentary i...

With Sun Piano, Laaraji returned to his first instrument. After years of eschewing the keys in favor of something more portable, the New York-based new age music finds himself reconnecting with his first love, in the first of a trilogy of piano records. It’s the electric zither for which the artist is best known. In one of 20th century music’s more charmed tales, Laraaji opened his eyes after an e...

You have 20 years to write your first record and 18 months for your second. For The Ace of Cups, the first part of the equation took roughly two and half times the conventional wisdom, but in 2016, the band finally released its self-titled debut. Four years later, the band has returned with Sing Your Dreams. Like its predecessor, the sophomore record features an all-star lineup of collaborators, r...

When publishers refused to release an updated edition of his 1975 classic of beltway bureaucracy Who Runs Congress over concerns of commercial viability, Ralph Nader did what he often does. He wrote another book. This time, the lifelong political activist took another tack entirely, trading dry political prose for a fable. The book first saw life as How the Rats Re-formed Congress, published on Na...

It should be painfully obvious from the title alone that Anime, Trauma and Divorce is a deeply personal record — and part of Open Mike Eagle’s continued evolution as a songwriter. A good punchline is never more than a track or so away, by the Chicago-turned-L.A. emcee bares his soul on his latest LP in new and sometimes uncomfortable ways. But hip-hop is just one of several outlets for the musicia...

In 2013, Fruits Bats broke up — or at least as close to a breakup as an essentially solo project can come. Frontman Eric D. Johnson was going about it on his own as EDJ. It was a short-lived venture. By 2015, the band was back together. Fruit Bats, it seemed, was too good a thing to let die. After all, the band has recently released two of its best albums to date — The Ruminant Band and Tripper. R...

“Hey There Delilah” was a turning point for Ariel Rechtshaid. The simple, stripped down pop song was a massive hit, putting the musician on the map as a producer. Since that 2006 breakthrough, Rechtshaid has become one of music’s most in-demand names, worked with some of the industry’s biggest names, including U2, Madonna, Beyonce and Adele. His work has also found him working closely with indie s...

Clocking in north of 1,100 pages (when you included the end papers, he’s quick to point out), Reaganland is the final chapter in Rick Perlstein’s massive tetralogy documenting the rise of contemporary conservatism in America through 1980.   The series offer unique insight into a history that feels both intensely relevant to the current moment and impossibly far away. It’s a sometimes-dry and frequ...