Stereo Embers: The Podcast

"Backbone" The Australian-born Kasey Chambers has been in this game for a long time. At sixteen she and her family formed the ARIA Award winning Dead Ringer Band, who put out four perfect albums, including Living In The Circle and Home FIres, which won best Country album in 1996. In 1999 she decided to go solo and hit the ground running with her debut The Captain. How did that decision pan out? We...

"A Boot And A Shoe" The Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Sam Phillips has had quite a career. The Glendale-born musician has almost fifteen albums under her musical belt, including The Indescribable Wow, Cruel Inventions, Martinis and Bikinis, Cold Dark Nights and the newly reissued version of A Boot And A Shoe. We'll get to that in a minute, but before we do, let me give you a partial list of f...

"It's Only Rock and Roll" There's a lot to tell about Michael Des Barres, but let's start with the music. In the early '70s, the Sussex-born singer/songwriter fronted the glam rock band Silverhead, who were signed to Deep Purple's label. He decided to try his luck on the West Coast, moving to L.A. and fronting the rock/soul outfit, who were signed to Led Zeppelin's Swan Song Records. In '82, Des B...

"Photograph" Born in Honduras during a military coup, Lily Vakili has had quite a life. Raised on military bases in Thailand, Florida, Puerto Rico and Iowa, Vakili's musical worldview has been formed by the fact that she's been all over the world. Over the course of her fascinating life, she's been a waitress, a dancer, an actress, a filmmaker, a choreographer, a stage director, a human rights res...

"Between Time" When it comes to a life in rock and roll, South African singer/songwriter Steve Louw has had three of them. The inductee to the South African Rock Hall of Fame fronted the band All Night Radio in the '80s and their two albums The Heart's The Best Part and The Killing Floor remain undisputed classics. From there, Louw formed Big Sky and they hit the ground running in 1990, putting ou...

"Dreamweaver" With just under ten albums under their musical belts, the Danish darkwave outfit Trentemøller are one of the most inventive bands around. Led by the Grammy-nominated braintrust Anders Trentemøller, their music is a thoughtful blend of swirling electronica, lashing techno, sweeping synthpop and cinematic ambient soundscapes. Albums like The Last Resort and Obverse were instant classic...

"The Quiver" A poet, a radio host on WPKN and a memoirist, the New Haven based psychotherapist Binnie Klein is also a Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale. Her 2010 memoir, by the way, Blows To The Head, How Boxing Changed My Mind, is a revelation, But let's get back to the poetry. Klein started the indie music collective In These Trees back in 2019 and her friendship with Australian s...

"All You Need To Know" The Vancouver outfit Mossy Ledge got started in the early '90s and by 2001 they had put in the reps, touring across Canada and putting out two excellent albums and two fabulous EPs. With seven years or so under their rock and roll belts, the band was poised to take the next step in their career. Their sonorous blast of soaring indie pop brought to mind a perfect blend of The...

"Hang In There With Me" If you're an artist, you either move West or you move East. In the case of the Pennsylvania-born Amy Rigby, she went east. Landing in New York in the late seventies, Rigby absorbed the music of the city and took assiduous notes about punk rock, indie scenesters and the rhythms of the age. I'm zipping through time here, but if you want to know about Rigby's New York years, r...

"Once Was Gleaming" The California-born Tanner Porter is a composer, arranger, performer, vocalist and songwriter. Her voice is otherwordly and wonderful, and set against her complex orchestral arrangements, it evokes everyone from Kate Bush to Tori Amos. Her debut album The Summer Sinks was a stone cold stunner and her new album Once Was Gleaming picks up where Summer left off, offering a stirrin...

"Top Of The World" The Emmy Award-nominated Mark Bacino is more than just a craftsman of pure pop magic--he's a producer, composer, educator and journalist. I first got on board with Mark's music in 2003 for his brilliant album Million Dollar Milkshake, which was the follow-up to his equally brilliant debut, Pop Job. Since then, he's put out Queens English in 2010 and fifteen years later he's back...

"Reverb & Seduction" The Portland outfit Federale have been one of the most fascinating and inventive bands of the last twenty years. Led by Collin Hegna, Federale have put out a handful of albums whose affecting instrumental cinemascapes, dark country ballads and psych rock excursions bring to mind a version of and the Dirty Three had they hailed from the verdant and moody Pacific Northwest. The...

"Everlasting Love" Plenty of people have gone it alone in music--blues and folk musicians are well-acquainted with being on stage with just a handful of songs and acoustic guitar. But for a new wave artist back in the early '80s, it wasn't a common thing to be a one man band. And Howard Jones was exactly that. In an age where multiple-membered outfits like Duran Duran and Depeche Mode graced the s...

"One Hand Up" Karen Haglof has had many lives--and she's lived them with creative poise and artistic grace. The Minnesota-born musician put herself on the musical map with Steve Almaas in the band The Crackers before joining the indie rock orchestra Rhys Chatham’s Ensemble. From there, and by the way, this is a clumsy expurgate list of Hagloff's accomplishments, she joined the Band of Susans...

"Whitelined" Formed in Barnum, Colorado in the early oughts by pals Ryan Policky and Erik Jeffries, A Shoreline Dream wasted no time in establishing themselves as a band to be reckoned with. No scruffy apprentice years here--albums like Avoiding The Consequences and Losing Them All To This Time were fully formed blasts of bruising guitars drenched in pure sonic muscle. Not only that, but lurking b...

"The Morrison Project" The London-born guitarist and singer/songwriter Billy Morrison has two main components to his life and for the purposes of this introduction, I'm going to tell you about the musical one. The other one I'll let him tell you about because he'll tell it far better than I can. So: the musical one. After playing in bands like Into A Circle and Stimulator, Morrison was recruited t...

“4th of July Special: What's The Point Of A Strawberry?” Well, not counting the fact that they lower your blood pressure, are high in fiber, rich in antioxidants and guard you from cancer, strawberries are pretty much useless. In this wildly discursive 4th of July chat with singer-songwriter Shannon McArdle, the Brooklyn musician talks to Alex about why she’s not into strawberries (or fruit for th...

"Fantastic Day" Formed in 1980 in London, the new wave funk outfit Haircut 100 are one of those bands that tore right out of the gates. A top four single Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl) before even having a record out was a pretty propelling start. That record came in the form of 1982's platinum seller Pelican West, which not only went to #2 on the UK albums chart, it spawned more Top 10 singles...

"A Master Class In Songwriting" Jad Fair is probably best known as one half of Half Japanese. Formed with his brother David in 1974, the Maryland by way of Michigan outift remain one of the more curious entires into the pantheon of rock and roll. Their songs are jagged and battered mini-anthems about broken hearts, monsters and...broken hearts and monsters. As Jad Fair once said, their songs are e...

"Softcore" With over ten albums under his musical belt, Logan Lynn has firmly established himself as a singular and dynamic talent. First of all, Lynn is a musician, writer, producer, filmmaker, television personality, mental health advocate, and LGBT activist. He's worked with everyone from the Get-Up Kids to Portugal the Man to the comic Jay Mohr and his writing has appeared in the Huffington Po...

"Planet Girls" Sponge's new album Planet Girls is a thrilling listen. But here's the thing: it isn't new. Recorded back in 1999, when the band turned the record in to the company, the folks in charge didn't think the material would connect with the current cultural zeitgeist. So what did they do? They shelved it. Big mistake. A dynamic blast of hook-laden power and melodic muscle, Planet Girls bri...

"A Few Good Moments" So: how much of a legend is the Winnipeg-born Burton Cummings? Well, let's just start with these few facts and we'll work our way backwards. He's been inducted into both the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. He's been named as an officer of the Order of Canada and both the Burton Cummings Theatre and the Burton Cummings Community C...

"Detroit Soul" The six-time Grammy-Award winning Don Was' resume has more highlights than a Steph Curry career retrospective. It's just three pointer after three pointer with this guy. The Detroit-born musician, producer, film composer, documentarian and record executive got his start in the high school outfit The Saturns, but his band Was (Not Was) is the one that put him on the musical map. A ki...

"Bloodbrothers" The Bronx-born Richard Blum took his love of wrestling and Catskill Mountains humor and created Handsome Dick Manitoba, the wildly charismatic frontman of the legendary proto-punk outfit The Dictators. Along with his childhood best friend Scott Kempner, Andy Shernoff, Ross Friedman and Stu Boy King, The Dictators tore out of the gate with all the fuel-injected energy of the MC5, an...

"Anniversary" Abigail Lapell is one of the most arresting voices in modern music. The Canadian-born singer-songwriter has been on an undeniable winning streak since her 2011 debut album Survivor. She followed that up with stunners like 2017's Hide Nor Hair, 2022's Stolen Time and her brand new one Anniversary. We'll get to Anniversary in a second but before we do, here are a few things to know abo...