RiYL

This isn’t the first time this has happened, the realization that an upcoming guest has recently been on WTF fills me with an immediate sense of dread. Surely Maron has mined this person for all of their conversational juices. Of course, that worry subsides almost immediately when the interviewee is Kevin Allison The former State member has built a second career for himself standing on-stage and n...

I’m pretty sure I first heard about Jeffrey Lewis through his music. By the time I arrived in New York City, the singer-songwriter was already a veteran of the same Lower East Side antifolk scene that gave the world the likes of the Moldy Peaches. Turns out the guy also makes some really terrific comics as well. And better still, he takes every opportunity available to combine the two forms, as wi...

I’m fairly certain the phrase “mommy blog” is tossed around once or twice over the course this interview. I only mention it here as I’m sure it sends up a few red flags, though undeservedly so. For starters, there’s the fact that The East Village Inky predates the phenomenon by at least a decade or so. Ayun Halliday has been producing the pocket-sized, photocopied zine for over 20 years now, havin...

For me, it goes Kids in the Hall, Kurt Vonnegut and punk rock, in that order. I shudder to think what sort of person I might have become had Comedy Central not started airing the Canadian sketch show in reruns right after show during my formative years. KITH presented new frontiers in comedy my tender suburban brain never imagined were possible. And Bruce McCulloch was their poet laureate. McCullo...

Jon Spencer is tired of talking about music. Perhaps it’s the fact that he’s been talking about it professionally ever since Pussy Galore emerged from the garages of Washington DC 30 years back. Or maybe it’s because he’s knee deep in the press junket for Blues Explosion’s 10th full-length, Freedom Tower No Wave Dance Party 2015. I met the musician at his practice space, a nondescript spot, locate...

Mark Stewart doesn’t want to talk about music. Least of all his own. A few hours ahead of The Pop Group’s appearance at The Bowery Ballroom in support of their first record in 35 years, he makes that much clear. He’s been talking about for decades. He’s bored. It’s not so much that the musician is a difficult interview as others have suggested, it’s more a matter of figuring out precisely what he...

The Too Much Coffee Man creator became a member of the extremely rare two-timers club, with a second RiYL appearance. Shannon Wheeler was among the show’s original guests early on when the interviews were primarily recorded remotely. When he mentioned that he’d be in New York for work for a few days, it seemed as good a time as any to give the interview thing another shot, this time face to face....

Kevin Barnes has a cold. He looks tired, taking swigs of coconut milk from one of those oddly-shaped cartons, but his face is sparkling in the mid-day sun. It’s the first truly nice day in New York City in several months, and we’re jammed into a corner on the southside of a packed Union Square Park. Barnes asked if we could find a sunny spot to speak, so we walked the five blocks up from Webster H...

Several years ago, I began to notice a pattern emerging. Practically every book of interest I'd pick up at independent bookstores and zine fest had the same logo on the back: a small bicycle gear with a heart at the center. Microcosm had seemingly come out of nowhere to corner the market on things that fascinate me. Joe Biel formed the indie publishing empire out of his Cleveland bedroom in the mi...

The last time I saw Jean Grae in person, she was giving out free hugs in Union Square. The event was a unique attempting to cope with and have a discussion around the events unfolding in Ferguson. Grae and a group of fellow #TheHugStation attendants were offering a slew of hug varieties off of a lengthy Hug Menu. For the life of me, I can’t remember which variety I settled on, but I’m happy to rep...

I knew Brooks Wheelan was moving. His PR reps had already alerted me to the fact that the comedian only had a few days remaining before moving on to greener entertainment pastures. And, of course, he hadn’t exactly been quiet regarding his intentions to leave the city after his unceremonious departure from Saturday Night Live (nor anything regarding those unfortunate circumstances).Even still, I w...

I shouldn’t have been surprised when, in the email lead up to our interview, Vivek Tiwary told me he was pals with former RiYL guest, Mike Watt. When, after the interview concluded, he asked me who I was speaking to next, it also shouldn’t have caught me off-guard that he friends with Alex Winter, as well (who subsequently referred to Tiwary as, “a ray of sunshine” when I name-dropped him during t...

While the old adage about truth making for great art certainly applies to standup, the equation can be something of a mixed bag. After all, comedy is often as much about deflection as it honesty, a slight of hand designed to distract from larger, painful and more personal truths. But honesty, it seems, isn’t really an issue for Guy Branum. The comedian, writer, podcaster and  former Chelsea Lately...

I never knew New York before the war. The towers were gone by the first time set foot in the city. But nearly a dozen years after making the place my home, I have a fundamental distrust for anyone resident who claims not to have a conflicted relationship with the city. Even in my relatively short while here, I feel as though I’ve watched the city undergo constant transformation. It’s to be expecte...

Flood is my Beatles on Sullivan, my self-titled Velvet Underground record and Run-DMC on MTV. It was the first time I remember being keenly aware that an ever-expanding musical universe existed beyond the confines of the rock and Motown the radio played on the way to and from soccer practice.  It was a strange and idiosyncratic world of misplaced accordions, horn-rimmed glasses and lyrics that onl...

This one’s going to be a bit different, as you’ve no doubt gathered from the title. It’s a bit of an, as the Who so eloquently put it, odds and sods — interviews that never got their own standalone episodes for a number of reasons, which will be detailed below. Those of you out there who are looking for a place to start in amongst our nearly 100 episodes, I strongly suggest you turn back now. That...

One of the real dangers of recording interviews is that plenty can change over the course of a few weeks. One interviewee lost her job of 17 years the week before that conversation was posted. Another didn’t get their show renewed. The news isn’t always bad, however. And in the case of artists like Sara Benincasa there’s a sort of unspoken understanding that five or 10 new project will be unveiled...

If I’m being totally honest, it takes me a few minutes to shake the fact that I’m sitting across the table from Bill S. Preston as I unspool mic wires in the kitchen of some stranger’s Tribeca apartment. But if there’s stigma attached to having starred in a number of iconic films at a young age, Alex Winter shed it years ago. The career of the self-proclaimed “showbiz lifer” has been a fascinating...

“All the bull**** of the music industry dying,” Brian Rosenworcel explains, his passion drowning out the din of the packed Manhattan bar, “all the babies, all the egos, nothing really matters except the fact that we’re honing in on a classic pop album.” The babies, incidentally are his own, the drummer’s primary focus in the half-decade since the last Guster record. Maybe it’s the beer speaking, b...

Art Bell will forever hold a special place in my heart. Coast to Coast was a mainstay as I drove late at night to fill in 3AM slots at my college radio station. The show opened up the true potential of late night radio for my sleep addled brain, strange night dwellers relaying stories of encounters with werewolf spirits and unidentified flying objects. In its own way, Welcome to Night Vale capture...

I’d have been content to spend the whole time talking about Thelonious Monk. There’s a picture of the composer wedged in one corner of the home office located in the lower of Vijay Iyer’s Harlem brownstone. But while he invariably comes up over the course of the conversation, there’s far too much ground to cover to spend too much audio card space dwelling on the matter. And you get the feeling, si...

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant isn’t as easy book. As the title implies, in deals in topics few are equipped to candidly discuss: family, aging, mortality. But long time New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast valiantly marches headfirst into a memoir of her parents’ decline armed with humor, insight and desk full of watercolors. The result is one of the best comics of 2014. I met Chast in a...

The phrase “those who can’t, teach” runs through my head pretty consistently when I sit down in front of a blank page in an attempt to flex some creative muscles. It’s the curse of the critic, the curator, the teacher — anyone on the outside looking in who assumes their work, perhaps rightfully, will be subject to that added level of critique when they finally unleash it on the world. That, no dou...

I feel a bit bad entering the hotel room. There was a bit of a miscommunication on timing, and Legs McNeil is clearly quite comfortable lying in bed watching Law and Order. It’s an episode he’s already seen multiple times, a fact he lets be known by rattling off the entire plot in a couple of quick sentences, so he’ll be able to give me his undivided attention as Detective Briscoe successfully app...

The list of people I’ve cohosted ska shows with is a short one indeed. It’s like going into battle with someone, really — a battle that trades the gunfire and mortar of trench warfare for song request from teenage Reel Big Fish fans, but a battle nonetheless. It’s the sort of experience that forms life-long bonds. Our careers have taken divergent paths since then — both of us eventually coming to...