The 500 with Josh Adam Meyers

Russell Peters has been many things in his life. Breakdancer, DJ, very nearly a chef, and groundbreaking comedian beloved by people all over the world; he's done it all. But no matter where his many interests and achievements have taken him, he's never forgotten his roots as a lonely Anglo-Indian kid growing up in the Toronto suburbs, just catching wind of the strange new music called hip hop that...

Hope can be hard to come by, faith sometimes falters, and love might be fleeting. But as the tender guitar tones and soulful harmonies found in the brighter tracks of Richard and Linda Thompson's 1974 folk rock masterpiece I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight suggest, all three of those qualities are an essential balance to the heartbreaking pain that life has to offer. Comedian, actor and musi...

Bursting through the English pop scene with WHAM!, 24 year-old George Michael went solo in 1987 with the release of the Grammy award-winning album Faith producing seven singles including I Want Your Sex, Father Figure, and the title track finding its inspiration from Elvis and porn, it is decided. When actor Nia Renee Hill first heard Faith in the late '80's she couldn't help but be inspired by th...

In a world of sickening brightness, the best way to stick out is to go dark. That’s why when Christina Pazsitzky was growing up in the San Fernando valley, she sought out the eerily romantic weirdness of the 80’s blossoming goth culture. It’s been many years since Christina donned all black and danced the reckless dance of the lonely to the morose crooning of androgynous new wave. Now she’s a wife...

When life is bleak and times are tough, there's often no choice but to look for an escape through whatever means are available. For Felipe Esparza, who immigrated from Mexico as a child and grew up poor in a crime-ridden neighborhood of east LA, that escape came in the form of watching the likes of Richard Pryor and George Carlin tell jokes and fantasizing of one day following in their footsteps....

Words have power, and if you know how to wield that power in just the right way, you can take the world by storm. That’s why comedians and musicians both can have such lasting impacts, more so than many other forms of creative expression. For a founding member of the new-wave movement like Elvis Costello, the ability to emit dark, brutal honesty through otherwise bright and cheerful wordplay is wh...

Every so often the universe sees fit to gift a person with the ability to keep others desperately clinging to their every word, so enthralled with the details of even the simplest anecdote that all sense of time and purpose are lost, and all that matters to the eager audience is what happens next. It's even less common that two talented orators cross baths in such a brief and spectacular way as co...

Producer, director and actor Peter Billingsley puts the nearly 40 years of boozing, brawling and broken spirits of outlaw country legend Merle Haggard's career-spanning retrospective collection Down Every Road into perspective for the modern era. Much like with the story of America, a look back on the life of outlaw country legend Merle Haggard reveals as much pain and hardship as it does hope and...

Two veritable rebels sustain us in this supremely honest conversation about love and relationships. While stand-up comic Jenny Zigrino bares all on her appearances on Conan and Comedy Central, Loretta Lynn lambasts her long-time husband for every wrongdoing in the book in this, her Greatest Hits album, a classic in the eyes of pioneers looking for historical footholds. For show notes, guest playli...

Good luck trying to pin a label on Baron Vaughn, because he is an artist who has built a career out of defying expectations. Learning from an early age that humor can be both a weapon and a shield, he has carved out a unique identity for himself through his eclectic stand up comedy albums, performances in Netflix's Grace & Frankie and Mystery Science Theater 3000, and creating the series The New N...

The world can be a cold, hard place that suffers no fools and shows now mercy to those in suffering. Few artists have ever been able to capture the dark underbelly of America the way that hip-hop giants the Wu Tang Clan have. And among the supergroup, Raekwon stands out as a master of lyrical storytelling and mindboggling wordplay, to which his 1995 debut solo album Only Built for Cuban Linx is an...

Perception is reality, or so they say. But for an emotionally complex, yet inherently antagonistic public figure like Michael Rapaport, the image and persona people see from the outside doesn't fully plumb the depths of his character. Born in New York City, the actor/director is very much a product of his environment, ever ready to deal out bristling, sometimes caustic arguments, opinions and word...

Actor Tom Everett Scott finds parallels to his own life in the small-town roots and overnight success of Steve Earle’s 1986 debut album Guitar Town. Every so often an artist comes along whose talent, brilliance and charm grab the public’s attention so quickly and so intensely that the person’s sudden elevation to celebrity shocks even them. Such is the case of Tom Everett Scott, who not long after...

Work hard on something you love for long enough and two things are bound to happen: you master it, and you stop caring about anything not directly related to how much you love that thing. If nothing else, that may be the most important lesson Karen Kilgariff has to offer. Starting out as a stand up in the early 1990's, she went on to become the head writer of The Rosie Show, The Ellen Degeneres Sh...

Music industry legend Matt Pinfield lets Josh pick over his encyclopedic brain in this epic discussion of the slightly obscure but sorely underrated 1972 Mott the Hoople release All the Young Dudes. Saying Matt Pinfield knows a lot about music may be the greatest understatement of the century. The former MTV VJ and alternative radio industry titan is not just a walking, talking encyclopedia of mus...

There are fans, there are superfans, and then there are people like Joe List. While Joe couldn’t tell one flannel-wearing gaggle of grunge rockers from another when he first bought Pearl Jam’s third studio album Vitalogy in 1994, no other band would ever strike as emotionally resonant a chord deep within him. Something about the heavy guitars, soaring vocals and lyrics heavily laden with meaning a...

Everyone remembers the first album they ever bought for themselves. For comedy legend Wanda Sykes, it was Earth, Wind and Fire’s 1975 release That’s the Way of the World. And to that 11-year old version of herself, there was nothing else in the world quite like the invigorating funky riffs and uplifting, soulful lyrics of a band making their first dip into the mainstream. Little did she know then...

Cyndi Lauper's debut album title She's So Unusual is nothing short of the perfect descriptor for her looks, the sound of her voice, and the genre-bending compilation of tracks that won her Best New Artist at the 1984 Grammy's. Growing up, Big Jay Oakerson was drawn to her strangeness, and he was not alone. Gwen Stefani and Lady Gaga created careers out of replicating and building upon that oddball...

No one ever really knows for sure where the course of their lives will take them, and punk rock icon-turned-stand up comedian Joe Sib is no different. Joe first fell in love with the harsh sounds and unconventional aesthetic of the punk scene while taking his first ride through a Northern California skate park at the dawn of the 1980's. From then on, he knew that no matter where life took him, tha...

In 1976, the face-painted, leather-clad all-stars of anthem rock band Kiss set the world on fire with their album Destroyer, and like most prepubescent boys of that era, Roastmaster General Jeff Ross found no refuge from the flames. While fate marked young Jeff's early adulthood with illness and the deaths of his parent, he was still able to sit up in his room in his family's New Jersey home, wher...

One of Josh's oldest friends in comedy Chris Porter joins The 500 to relive the glory days of jam sessions past and revel in the high octane blues rock glory that is ZZ Top's 1973 release Tres Hombres. The 500 is a production of Native Creative Podcasts. For show notes, guest playlists, complimentary documentaries and audiobooks about the music, go to The500Podcast.com.  New Song / Artist influenc...

Sinbad, currently starring in 'Rel' Sunday nights on FOX, discusses his love of playing music, compares Albert King bending a blue note to a sweet callback for a comic, and he shares an inside look into his alter ego 'Memphis Red'. Also, the true story of how Sinbad outed Hillary Clinton to The Washington Post and the call from Obama. Then, Sinbad's dog eats some of our equipment, but it was all w...

To kick things off, we take a trip down memory lane - actually we take Richmond Road past Victory Boulevard - and Sal shares stories along the way about his groovy musical upbringing, delivering pizza to Wu-Tang Clan, and his meticulous dedication to preparing fresh playlists each night to set the mood while bartending. Turning our attention to Touch, Sal and Josh both agree Annie Lennox is the fe...

As twin brothers, Randy and Jason Sklar share identical genetic codes. Beyond that, they also share a keen understanding of the nature of songwriting, joke structure, and what it means to be an artist. Utilizing an almost telepathic connection to play their timing and delivery off of one another, the dynamic duo of post-modern humorists have had twice the impact on the world of comedy than any ind...

Gareth Reynolds joins The 500 with Josh Adam Meyers to dissect experimental indie band MGMT's breakout record. Youth, sexual exploration, the banality of modern life: these are all themes that have been explored in countless art forms; so much so that one might expect that MGMT's 2007 debut album Oracular Spectacular would have little to add to the conversation. But that expectation doesn't take i...