The Show On The Road with Z. Lupetin

This week, we get on the horn with renowned Texas-born singer and deeply observational songwriter Hayes Carll, who is celebrating the release of his seventh LP, the atmospheric country-tinted You Get It All. While some may just be discovering Hayes’ lived-in songs which are often spun with dark humor (he admits John Prine and Jimmy Buffett were early inspirations), next year marks the twentieth an...

This week, we call into the Catskills of New York for a deep conversation with James Felice: accordionist, pianist, songwriter and co-founder of fun-house-mirror Americana group The Felice Brothers.  James started the band with his brothers (poet lead singer Ian) and percussionist Simone in 2006 as a busking folk pop experiment with a literary rebel streak within the subways of New York City. They...

This week, we bring you an in-depth dive with vintage roots-n-soul excavator and beloved Illinois-born songwriter Pokey LaFarge. With his trusty guitar on his lap during the talk, taped in his LA breakfast nook, we go through the making of his funky and cheerful new LP In The Blossom of Their Shade. For the last decade and change, Pokey LaFarge (born Andrew Heissler in Bloomington-Normal) has cris...

This week, to help celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, we bring you conversation with a rising star in folklorico-pop hailing from Veracruz, Mexico: Silvana Estrada. Currently on her first tour of the United States opening for Rodrigo y Gabriela, Estrada has already made a name for herself in Mexico, renown for her deft finger-picking on the Cuatro, and her ever-bending, darting vocal mastery. Song...

This week, we bring you a half-century-spanning talk with the Grammy-winning ringleader of one of American roots music’s most durable and iconic bands, Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel. The episode is a celebration of their fifty years of diligent song collecting, Western swing camaraderie and epic genre-spanning collaboration - and features first listens of their new record Half a Hundred Years...

This week, we talk to Brooklyn-based bandleader and jazz-roots singer extraordinaire Sammy Rae, who for the last four years has barnstormed the country with her kinetic octet The Friends. Look, when you’re young and inspired, you drop out of college, you’re waiting tables and you think about starting a jazzy pop band - most people (as well as common sense and basic economics) tell you to start sma...

This week, we go on a deep dive with Madi Diaz, a sought-after Nashville-based songwriter who may have dropped among the most devastating and powerful break-up albums of the decade with her newest LP History Of A Feeling, a searing debut on Anti- Records. If you’ve made it to the doldrums of your mid-thirties, you’ve probably had your heart broken once or thrice. Diaz is no exception, except unlik...

This week, we dial into North Carolina for a comprehensive conversation with Grammy-nominated songwriter MC Taylor, who for the last decade and a half has created heart-wrenchingly personal and subtly political music fronting the acclaimed roots group Hiss Golden Messenger. With his newest release Quietly Blowing It, Taylor continues to tell stories that are at turns hopeful and devastating – as i...

This week, we bring you an intimate conversation with avant-folk instrumentalists and songwriting team Martin Earley (guitar, vocals) and Callie Peters (cello-vocals) - the driving forces behind New England’s The Ballroom Thieves. Beginning as a hard-traveling duo, also featuring longtime percussionist Devin Mauch, over a decade ago at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, the band began to turn hea...

This week, we bring you a conversation with members of the internationally loved soul-pop pioneers Lake Street Dive. Starting out as jazz nerds storming local folk festivals and tiny rock clubs around Boston, they’ve since become a well-oiled touring phenomenon, headlining Red Rocks, touring Europe, playing late night on Colbert and Kimmel, all while never settling into an easily nameable genre. I...

This week, we bring you a rare conversation with the braintrust behind the brass-forward instrumental supergroup the Menahan Street Band: Thomas Brenneck and Homer Steinweiss. If Tarantino and Scorsese ever needed a custom-made 1970’s greasy soul soundtrack, MSB might be the perfect choice. While the timeless Daptone Records sound has gone worldwide thanks to breakout stars like the late Sharon Jo...

This week, we journey to northern Louisiana for a unique conversation with sprightly blues and southern rock singer Robert Finely, who began making music in his cotton-growing family in the 1960s, and has been rediscovered and empowered through his remarkable partnership with Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys. His funky and cheeky comeback album Goin’ Platinum (which sounds like a lost Motown gem) ca...

This week, we place a call into Woodstock, NY, where we speak to a respected singer, songwriter, sometimes drummer and beloved daughter of Levon Helm of The Band: Amy Helm. Growing up in the home of two working performers (her mother is singer Libby Titus, who wrote songs covered by Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt) wasn’t always the easiest for the introspective Helm, but it gave her a fertile pro...

This week, a rare career-spanning interview with the ever-curious frontman, activist and rock hitmaker John McCrea, who founded one of the most beloved and yet misunderstood bands of our time - CAKE - in Sacramento in 1992. Despite putting out unlikely ubiquitous radio hits like “The Distance,” “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” and “Never There” featuring the signature combo of dry speak-singing, spaghett...

This week, we jump in our podcast time machine for a face-to-face (remember those?) interview with the acclaimed blues and roots guitarist and singer-songwriter Samantha Fish. Now based in New Orleans, the pod caught up with Samantha at the Sugar Magnolia Music Fest in Mississippi before the world shut down – and to be real, until recently, the very idea of airing this interview seemed inappropria...

This week, we bring you a deep dive with the silky-voiced southern gothic-folk songwriter Lera Lynn, who has recently gained notoriety for her mysterious and lushly cinematic sound, as heard in her haunting 2020 LP On My Own (on which she writes, produces and plays every instrument on each song) and in the music of HBO’s True Detective (produced by T-Bone Burnett), on which she also became a cast...

This week, we feature a conversation with one of the rising stars in our current roots music renaissance: a gifted Oklahoma-born singer-songwriter who grew up in the Pentecostal church and creates a fiery gospel backdrop behind his tender then window-rattling rock-n-roll voice: Parker Millsap. When you’ve been touring hundreds of days a year down southern backroads from Tulsa to Tallahassee since...

This week, a special rebroadcast of our conversation with the three-time Grammy award winning roots n roll poet and rogue founding father of the thriving Americana movement - Steve Earle. The conversation was recorded outside Romp Fest in Kentucky on Earle’s tour bus. Remember when we could do stuff like that? After nearly four decades of relentless recording, international touring with his loyal...

This week, we feature a conversation with one of most admired and sharp-witted singer-songwriters in the fertile Nashville Americana scene, Caroline Spence. A sought-after lyricist who mines her own vulnerabilities and lovelorn past to tell delicately crafted story-songs, her voice seems to always hover angelically above the page, bringing to mind new-wave country pop heroines Alison Krauss or her...

This week, we feature an intimate conversation with beloved soul and R&B singer Bettye LaVette. Covering her remarkable six decades in show-business, we dive deep into her beginnings as a Detroit hit-making teenager during Motown’s heyday (her neighbor was Smokey Robinson), to her early career touring with Otis Redding and James Brown, and the hard times that followed as a music industry steeped i...

This week, we take the show to the countryside of Sweden for an intimate talk with Kristian Matsson, poet-songwriter and masterful acoustic multi-instrumentalist who has released five acclaimed albums and two EPs over the last decade and a half, performing as The Tallest Man on Earth. Growing up in the small hamlet of Leksand, a three hour trek from Stockholm, Mattson was in rowdier indie-rock out...

This week - it’s a rock-n roll-family affair with a special conversation with Devon Allman and Duane Betts - two guitar-slinging sons of the iconic Allman Brothers Band who formed their own soulful supergroup in 2019 - The Allman Betts Band. With their debut record 'Down To The River,' Allman and Betts - who took turns playing alongside their revered dads Gregg and Dickey as teenagers - finally ba...

This week, we call in to Philadelphia for a conversation with the highly-theatrical pianist and tireless, much-adored performer Adam Weiner, who for the last decade has gained a cult following around the world fronting his soulful bizarro-rock outfit Low Cut Connie. Some artists have retreated into obscurity during the pandemic shut-down; some have made turned lemons into personalized live-stream...

This week, we’re bringing back a favorite episode featuring banjo heroes Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn. We caught up with this well-traveled roots music super couple a few years back on a tour through LA (back when live music was a thing). As we reckon with the one year anniversary of the music industry’s full shutdown, most touring artists and songwriters find themselves still sequestered at ho...

This week, we celebrate the newest record by Charleston’s hellion harmonizers Shovels & Rope, with a new conversation with the married co-leads Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst. You’d be hard-pressed to find two harder-working singer-songwriters than this prolific duo; and that was before they got together to record their honey-voiced self-titled first album over a decade ago. Thinking it was jus...