RiYL

“Every once in a while,” James Jackson Toth explains, “you make a record and it feels like the message in the bottle sinking before it gets to the other shore.” Between official Wooden Wand albums, CD-Rs, online releases, records issued as a full band and the occasional under his own name, something’s bound to fall through the cracks every once in a while. But even with the constant flux of musica...

It’s a few days before the opening of her first theatrical performance, and Stoya doesn’t know what to expect. It’s all really new — aside from a few trivia nights here and there, she hasn’t really done much in front of a live audience since some ballet classes as a youngster. She’s committed to trying new things, moving outside her comfort zone for the sake of a new experience. Her first acting g...

In the 60s, he cowrote ”My Boyfriend's Back" and "I Want Candy” and cofounded Sire records with Seymour Stein. But Richard Gottehrer isn’t one to dwell on the past. Six decades on, he’s still a guiding force in the music industry. Over the years, he’s produced Blondie, the Go-Gos, Richard Hell and, more recently, The Dum-Dum Girls. In 1997, Gottehrer cofounded the forward-looking digital distribut...

“When’s this podcast going to air?” Greg Saunier asks with a laugh. “Because the world might be over soon.” The conversation takes a bit of a serious turn toward the end, as we transition from touring with the Red Hot Chili Peppers (twice) to what, precisely, has kept the experimental indie rock band together for 23 or so years. Motivation hasn’t been hard to find — these days it’s everywhere as t...

It’s been a few days since a white nationalist rally resulted in violent outbreaks and the death of a counter protester in Charlottesville, VA. Nerves are still pretty raw, and Dylan Marron has skipped this third week of his limits run podcast, Conversations With People Who Hate Me. It’s a constructive show, in spite of a somewhat cheeky title, but it simply didn’t feel write airing a that sort of...

In the 80s, Glenn Morrow was at the forefront of Hoboken’s burgeoning college rock scene. The musician moved to Jersey while attending NYU and watched as Frank Sinatra’s hometown blossomed into a burgeoning indie rock scene, thanks in no small part to his own pioneering groups, The Individuals and ‘a,’ the latter of which would blossom into power pop darlings, the Bongos. After a few flirtations w...

It’s a beautiful day in Cambridge, MA when we sit down for an interview at a local dumpling shop (his recommendation). It’s all very serene in Harvard Square, a music singing acoustic classic rock songs through a small amplifier. These days, Clint Conley seems about as far from the manic energy of Mission of Burma as is humanly possible. Shortly after the end of the Boston post-punk band’s explosi...

A stint in rehab moved Frank Conniff from New York City to Minneapolis, derailing his standup career for a bit and ultimately kickstarting his career as a TV writer. In the Twin Cities, he met the Mystery Science Theater 3000 team, ultimately joining the show in its second season as a writer, and more notably to fans, mad scientist’s assistant, TV’s Frank. After leaving the show (the only cast mem...

“Right now, I’m in an unchecked creative zone,” Phoebe Bridgers says with a laugh. It’s a sort of cautious half joke, but one that describes her current songwriter state quite well. Our conversation was record a couple of months before the release of her debut LP Stranger in the Alps.  The buzz has already kicked off from high profile outlets like NPR and Paste, but it doesn’t yet belong the world...

Ted Leo balks slightly at the notion that The Hanged Man is a more personal record than previous efforts. He chalks much of the idea up to the media surrounding the self-released record, and his particular candidness in recent interviews. But Leo’s done a lot of living in the seven years since the release of The Brutalist Bricks, and many of those stories manifest themselves in very real and raw w...

The building across the street was on fire the night we sat down to talk. The entire floor smelled of smoke and if you looked out the window, you might have thought the world was coming to an end. It's probably as good a backdrop as any for a interview that quickly shifts into an impending sense of gloom during this age of Trump. Honestly, I can’t remember what was in the news that week, but I’m s...

For Katie Skelly, comics have always been something of side hustle — something she’s never expected or even wanted as a full-time career. During the days, she works at a beloved New York City film house, a gig that gives her front row access to some of cinema’s most impactful work. The influence has clearly bled into her comics work, perfectly exemplified in her new work,  My Pretty Vampire, which...

When Frankie Rose began work on Cage Tropical, she was living in Los Angeles, employed as a caterer — the struggling actor, Party Down kind. Not exactly the triumphant rock start victory lap of the artist who released one of of the best LPs of the best half-decade. But, then, these things rarely work out as planned. But the former Vivian Girls/Dum Dum Girls/Crystal Stilts managed to pull things to...

Every so often, my work obsessions bleed into my extracurriculars, and Annalee Newitz was more than happy to help me geek out about robotics. We sat down a few months back in New York, while she was visiting for Book Expo America, in advance of their first novel, Autonomous. The book tackles questions of civil rights in a world where people own machines that are virtually human, exploring the cros...

In 2014, Manchester Orchestra released Hope, a new album with an identical track listening as its predecessor, Cope, released the same year. The two albums represented dramatically different musical takes on the same songs — the first was the band’s hardest edge record to date, and the second wholly stripped down. The pair of albums was the work of a band looking to shake things up a decade into i...

Here’s a conversation recorded a while back and initially intended for publication. While the story never actually appeared in print, the subject matter was just too interesting to let it languish, so I’m presenting it to you as a bonus episode. Cartoonist Mike Diana is known less for his work itself as the fallout it caused, when he became the first artist in the US to receive a criminal convicti...

Comics are hard — doubly so when you live in a place like New York, where holding down a day job is a necessity. By their early- to mid-30s, most opt to pack it in. It’s not a personal failure or flaw, so much as an admission that the world just isn’t equipped to support its artists, particularly in a field as marginalized as indie comics. A few years back, Julien Fitzpatrick found himself at a cr...

Kate Stables’ Earl of Lemongrab wallet is on the table when I sit down for our interview at Baby’s All Right — so naturally, we spend the first several minutes of the conversation discussing Adventure Time. It was some she discovered independently, but it’s since become a nice source of bonding for Staples and her daughter. Stables happily discusses the ways in which having a child have impacted t...

On the heels of the second issue of Resist, we hopped on the line with publishers Francoise Mouly and Nadja Spiegelman to discuss the free comics protest newspaper. The first issue arrived alongside the Presidential inauguration in January, as a broadsheet process and sequential catharsis. Eight months later, issue two finds the paper exploring similar themes in a world where the reality of Trump...

No Resolution is an album about heartbreak. It’s raw and real, delving into break ups and fears of settling down, topics that Tim Kasher is set to explore even more deeply in his upcoming film of the same name. His directorial debut (soundtracked by the accompanying album) tells the story of an engaged couple breaking up over the course of a New Year’s Eve. For his part, however, the sometime Curs...

Of course Catherine Burns has a good story about getting her current gig. It involves MTV and 9/11 and parents in Alabama who were slightly befuddled that their daughter had moved from a planned career as a documentary filmmaker to something called “storytelling” (“like for children?). The Moth’s long-serving Artistic Director helped shepherd the storytelling event from New York City curiosity to...

When I hit up cartoonist Jim Rugg before a quick three day trip to Pittsburgh, he sent his apologies. He was leaving town the same night I arrived, but helpfully sent along a list of fellow cartoonists in the city. The city’s comics community is a diverse but tight knit one, and the artists will champion their fellow Pittsburghers any chance they get. I’d totally forgotten that Frank Santoro lived...

Before it helped elect a president who teetered on the bring of nuclear war with every subsequent tweet, Twitter was an important testing ground for young comedians, honing their one-liners 140 characters at a time. Ashley Bez will be the first to admit that she owes much of her career to the social medium platform. Through Twitter, she’s found steady work and writing gigs for online magazines and...

Scott Westerfeld didn’t move to New York expecting to become a writer. He’s dabbled in politics, music and software design, but after 18 novels, it’s pretty safe to say that he’s found his calling. Over the years, his work has largely gravitated toward the young adult end of the bookstore, most often dealing with science-fiction themes, as is the case with his best known series, Uglies and the Lev...

Everything is running about an hour late, and the opening band has already started by the time two-thirds of The Coathangers show up back stage for the interview. Complicating things even further, bass player Meredith Franco has a nasty cough. The life of a touring rock and roll band is pretty far down the list things any rational individual would want to do for a could. But it’s already cycled th...