The Show On The Road with Z. Lupetin

This week, the show is back in New Orleans for a special talk with Sam Doores, one of the talented founders of well-traveled roots-rockers The Deslondes. We dive into their newest LP Ways & Means and how California-born Sam - who plays various instruments from electric guitar to keys, and sings in seven bands and counting throughout the Crescent City - collected many of its slow-burn soul-adjacent...

This week, we feature a conversation taped live in New Orleans with Arkansas-born multi-instrumentalist and roots-soul singer Anna Moss, who has criss-crossed the country in recent years with her sonic partner Joel Ludford in their band Handmade Moments. Growing up as a bathroom-singing nerd playing saxophone in the school band, Anna admits that if she could wield any superpower it might be invisi...

This week, we feature my conversation with beloved folk firebrand Iris Dement. Born the youngest of fourteen to a singing Pentecostal family in Arkansas and raised in California, Dement released her iconic 1992 John Prine-endorsed debut Infamous Angel and has been creating poetic protest records and warm collaborations ever since (garnering two folk Grammy nominations along the way), culminating...

This week, my talk with self-described folk-country scientist and songwriter Cleve Francis, whose winding fifty year story in music is nearly unparalleled. Few African-American artists had their work heard in the folk boom of the early 1960’s, and while Francis studied to become a heart specialist after leaving the small hamlet of Jennings, Louisiana, the honey-voiced gems he laid down with his gu...

This week, we place a call to a Tennessee front porch to talk to rock-n’-soul trickster and acclaimed singer-songwriter Rayland Baxter. He’s our first returning artist on the show for a good reason. Besides being a personal favorite of host Z. Lupetin since his gorgeous, folky debut Feathers and Fishhooks a decade ago, Z. was first able to catch up with Rayland in a Vegas hotel room (where he play...

This week, to kick-start our fifth season we call into an organic vegetable farm in Texas to chat with an upright bassist who also happens to be a former New Orleans ace street performer, and singer and songwriter, who sounds like she might have stepped out of a saloon in 1955 filled with the warm echoes of her heroes Hank Williams and Patsy Cline: Melissa Carper. Is there such thing as a “new nos...

Welcome back, friends. Season 5 is here to help launch us into 2023, starting off with the new old-time sounds of the singing upright bassist who everyone calls “daddy,” Melissa Carper. Plus, the return of the rock-n-soul butterfly Rayland Baxter taped on his porch in Tennessee, and also a fascinating talk with Cleve Francis, a singing heart doctor who once rubbed elbows with Garth Brooks and the...

How can I try and summarize the soundtrack to my life this year? Indeed, we are in year three (!) of this endless pandemic and I find I am more and more drawn to pure escapism, fantasy and what I might call the “new nostalgia”? Personally, I don’t go more than a few hours in the day (or during sleep at night) without something on, whether it’s playing on my bluetooth speakers around the house, or...

This week, we cross the pond for a talk with rising British roots-rockers Will Turner and Georgie Fuller, who harness the freewheeling sonic spirit of the sixties with a new Brighton-based band they call The Heavy Heavy.   While the British coast isn’t exactly known for its blissed out sunshiny beaches (or as a haven for rock 'n' roll stardom), Will and Georgie decamped there during the pandemic....

This week, we head down to Austin, Texas where we talk to multi-instrumentalist and renowned producer Adrian Quesada.  Many know him as half of ground-breaking deep soul duo Black Pumas, where songs like “Colors” rose up the charts, taking them from tiny Austin clubs to the biggest festivals in the world, garnering Grammy nods, playing as the theme for the Major League Baseball playoffs and even f...

This week, we talk with Kenyan singer-songwriter Ondara, who came to Minneapolis in search of his voice as a young musician, and found a new creative persona which he now embodies called The Spanish Villager. He has since taken audiences by storm, garnering a Grammy-nomination and now returning with a stunning politically-charged new LP. Spanish Villager No: 3 is produced by Ondara and Mike Viola...

This week, we call into Minnesota to talk to frontman and lead-songwriter Dave Simonett of the innovative jamgrass pioneers Trampled by Turtles. Celebrating a new record, Alpenglow, produced by Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, the six-piece band has gone from storming shaggy local bars in Duluth to playing their famously fast roots-n-roll in the biggest venues and festivals in the world.  Twenty years in, Si...

This week, we call on an Americana pioneer and a beloved fixture of the Nashville roots-country scene, the always affable Grammy-winner Jim Lauderdale. This year he celebrated the release of his thirty-fifth record Game Changer. Growing up in both North and South Carolina, as a young man Lauderdale fell in love with country music but took an unconventional path to becoming a sought-after songwrite...

This week, we return to the Crescent City to talk to one of the new leaders of the Grammy-winning Rebirth Brass Band, trumpet player Glenn Hall III who is part of a deep New Orleans musical family.  Rebirth will be coming from NOLA to LA to help headline the inaugural Paramount Ranch Sonic Boom on October 15th. It’s a brand new music festival co-created by yours truly and Dustbowl Revival (along w...

This week, we dial into New Orleans for a fascinating talk with master funk-guitarist and songwriter Leo Nocentelli. Discerning listeners may known him as the chief groove-creator behind the legendary group The Meters with Art Neville on keyboard, George Porter Jr. on bass, Zigaboo Modeliste on drums. There is no mistaking his soulful dagger-sharp signature sound leading often-sampled treasures li...

This week, we’re back for the fall season with the first face-to-face taping in nearly two years. I was able to catch up with the fearless deep-voiced frontman BJ Barham of North Carolina roots-rock favorites American Aquarium, in the front bar of The Troubadour in LA as his tour was passing through.  American Aquarium’s rawly personal new LP Chicamacomico dropped earlier this year and focuses on...

On this new episode, maybe we need something soft to counter the hard news many Americans have witnessed this week: so why not dive into the crystalline brother harmonies of Minneapolis duo The Cactus Blossoms, who just put out a lush new record One Day? Sure, you could write off what Jack Torrey and Page Burkum are creating as simply a loving homage to roots pop pioneers like the Everly or Louvin...

This week, the show dials into the Nashville studio of one of the most gifted songwriters and empathic storytellers of her generation: Mary Gauthier.  While Mary has become known for her darkly honest tales of overcoming addiction and seeking truth and joy after overcoming her troubled upbringing in Louisiana, she was nominated for a Grammy for her devastating record Rifles & Rosary Beads (co-writ...

This week on the show, we talk to a startling new talent placing a gut-punch into the folk and blues scene, the Milwaukee-raised and now Austin-based singer-songwriter Buffalo Nichols.  Growing up learning on his sister’s dreadnought guitar and then traveling widely through West Africa after high school drinking up the sounds of the kora and percussion players in Senegal, Carl Nichols began findin...

This week, The Show On The Road is back with an intimate talk with Texas-born folk pop collaborators Andy Baxter and Kyle Jahnke who for the last decade have toured the USA as symbiotic harmonizers Penny & Sparrow.   Their lush 2022 release Olly Olly showcases their unique lifelong friendship and was their first collection where they relied only on each other from beginning to end. There is a fiel...

This week, to help celebrate the end of Black History Month, we bring you an in-depth conversation with Compton-raised blues and roots master Keb' Mo', who has helped preserve the haunting Delta blues of Robert Johnson while also making his own cheerful and slyly subversive R&B Americana for the last thirty years - winning four Grammys along the way. His newest album, Good To Be, was inspired by r...

This week, we launch season 4 of the show with a bilingual banjo-slinging singer-songwriter originally from Montreal and now based in Nashville: Allison Russell.  After two decades of quietly creating heart-on-her-sleeve roots music in hard-touring groups like Po’ Girl, Birds Of Chicago, and recently the supergroup Our Native Daughters - playing the guitar, clarinet, banjo and singing in English a...

We’re back! Season 4 is here and we have some very special conversations coming your way. Listen in for a little preview of our upcoming deep dives with Grammy-winners like Keb’ Mo’, newly-risen roots star Allison Russell (nominated twice this year), howling frontman Paul Janeway of soul icons St. Paul and The Broken Bones, longtime folk-pop hero and festival organizer Drew Holcomb, and a special...

To finish out the season, we bring you a talk from Toronto with rising roots singer-songwriter and folk philosopher AHI (pronounced “eye”), who celebrated the release of his acclaimed third full-length album Prospect in November. Born in Brampton, Ontario, to Jamaican and Trinidadian immigrant parents, AHI (short for Ahkinoah Habah Izarh) didn’t initially plan to pursue music -- and scared his lar...

This week, we bring you a conversation with one of Nashville’s supreme songwriters: Brandy Clark. Born in a logging town in Washington state, Clark started playing guitar at age nine before setting it aside and getting a scholarship for basketball. Music kept tugging her back in though. Reba recorded two of her songs in “Cry" and "The Day She Got Divorced" (like a modern Patsy Cline, Brandy has a...