The Show On The Road with Z. Lupetin

This week, host Z. Lupetin talks to one of the founding members of beloved folk-rock hitmakers The Lumineers - drummer and pianist Jeremiah Fraites. After following his heart to Italy, Jeremiah dialed into the podcast from Turin - his wife’s hometown. Alongside juggling duties as co-songwriter and performer in one of the most successful acoustic groups of the last twenty years and raising his two-...

This week on the show, to help honor Black History Month, we bring you a conversation with members of the foundational gospel group The Blind Boys Of Alabama - including longtime singer Ricky McKinnie, and beloved senior member Jimmy Carter who has been with the group for four decades. Formed in the late 1930s with talent discovered at the Alabama Institute Of The Negro Blind, the troupe has super...

This week, a wide-ranging conversation with the peripatetic Pennsylvania-born confessional folk songwriter Sean Scolnick, who for the last fifteen years has become the troubadour truth-teller of the Americana circuit, amassing a devoted following performing as his many-hatted, impish alter-ego: Langhorne Slim. Host Z. Lupetin caught up with Langhorne to discuss his much awaited new LP Strawberry M...

This week, Z. talks with Laura and Lydia Rodgers, Grammy-nominated songwriters and preeminent harmonizers from Muscle Shoals, AL, who for the last decade have recorded as The Secret Sisters. First breaking through with their warmly-vintage, vocally-entwined self-titled record in 2010, they’ve toured the world relentlessly, while recording with a who’s who of Americana royalty like Dave Cobb and T...

To launch season four, we bring you a special cross-continent episode with acclaimed Canadian singer and guitarist Afie Jurvanen, known as Bahamas. Born in Ontario and now residing in Nova Scotia, Z. caught up with Afie from LA to discuss his playful and powerful newest record Sad Hunk - how he’s transitioned from brooding globe-trotting guitar wiz (he first became known as Feist’s right hand man)...

We made it to the end of 2020. To counteract the darkness of the longest days of the year, here is a special rebroadcast of our holiday show with Tulsa’s talented rocker and accidental new king of Christmas: JD McPherson. Much like the cosmic conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn which twinkled in the city sky last night (it only happens once every eight centuries or so), it is this podcast’s opi...

This week we're bringing you an episode from another podcast we think you’d really like. It’s called Under The Radar Podcast and this episode features the fantastic Oakland-based artist Fantastic Negrito. Under The Radar is a monthly music podcast with host and producer, Celine Teo-Blockey. She's a music journalist who writes for the longtime indie music mag, also called Under the Radar. She inter...

This week we bring you a special rebroadcast of our episode featuring living blues legend Bobby Rush. Why now? Well this week he turns 87 and while he may be older than your harmonica-playing grandpa, he’s still going very strong. Bobby dropped his 27th studio record Rawer Than Raw this year and was nominated for a Grammy for good measure. As we react to the historic 2020 election results, it is m...

This week, we finish off this season with Larkin Poe, a powerful Southern sister-act that has been wowing audiences around the world with their transformative take on Southern blues and cagey slide-guitar driven rock n' roll. Taking inspiration from their frontiersmen-inspired family who often build and make everything themselves, Rebecca and Megan indeed took DIY to a new level: they have written...

This week, we feature one of the leading roots-pop bands working today: Mipso. An affable and endlessly-creative quartet formed in Chapel Hill, NC, they are made up of fiddle player Libby Rodenbough, mandolinist Jacob Sharp, guitarist Joseph Terrell, and bassist Wood Robinson. Despite the anxious mood of their swing-state home base, it’s quite an exciting time for the band. Z. was able to catch up...

This week, a cross-freeway conversation with a daring electro-roots outfit born and raised in the San Fernando Valley of LA: Run River North. Z caught up with frontman and lyricist Alex Hwang to discuss how this group of Korean-American friends came together nearly a decade ago (they then called themselves Monsters Calling Home) and found a waiting fanbase who eagerly embraced their emotive songs...

This week we catch up with acclaimed roots-rocker Sarah Shook. For most of the last decade, Sarah has been making cut-to-the-bone country music of her own aching outlaw variety - first with her early band The Devil and now with her seasoned group of sensitive twang-rock shitkickers - The Disarmers. Homeschooled in deeply religious seclusion around upstate New York and North Carolina, Shook largely...

This week a conversation with songwriter and singer Matt Quinn of jangly-pop phenomenons Mt. Joy. Much like host Z. Lupetin’s group Dustbowl Revival, Mt. Joy began thanks partially to some Craigslist kismet. After Quinn took the leap from PA to LA and reconnected with fellow guitarist Sam Cooper (who he used to jam with at their high school in Philadelphia), the band found their bassist Michael By...

This week on the show, we catch up with a rising star in boundary-bending country and take-no-prisoners rock n roll - Aubrie Sellers. What have you been doing since the pandemic hit in late February? Somehow Aubrie has managed to release both a striking new LP of twisty guitar-drenched originals in Far From Home (collaborating with her roots rock heroes like Steve Earle) while also pushing herself...

This week on The Show On The Road, we feature a conversation with Gary Louris, co-founder and leading songwriter of longtime Americana favorites The Jayhawks -- who launched out of Minneapolis in 1985 and celebrated the release of their harmony-rich 11th studio album, XOXO, this July. Any band that has managed to stick together for a generation (their self-titled debut dropped when host Z. Lupetin...

This week on The Show On The Road, a conversation with Nicole Atkins, a singer/songwriter  out of Neptune City, New Jersey who has become notorious for making her own brand of theatrical boardwalk soul.  The Show On The Road host Z. Lupetin fell in love with Atkins' newest, harmony-rich record Italian Ice, which came out spring 2020 and was recorded in historic Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Both rumblin...

This week, The Show On The Road features a conversation with members of LA’s Latin roots-rock heroes Chicano Batman. The band came together in 2008 and is comprised of Eduardo Arenas (bass, guitar, vocals), Carlos Arévalo (guitars), Bardo Martinez (lead vocals, keyboards, guitar) and Gabriel Villa (drums). Host Z. Lupetin was able to catch up with Bardo and Eduardo while they sheltered in place at...

This week The Show On The Road features living folk-blues legend and underground guitar icon David Bromberg. Host Z. Lupetin got to speak with the now 74-year-old Bromberg in a hotel room before the pandemic shutdown prior to Bromberg playing a show at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles back in February, 2020. Coming out of the fertile Greenwich Village scene on the heels of Bob Dylan, Ramblin Jack...

This week a conversation with Leyla McCalla, a talented multi-lingual cellist, banjoist, and singer/songwriter. Born in New York, raised in New Jersey, and McCalla is now based in New Orleans, where she raises three kids (she often tours with them in tow). McCalla often honors her Haitian heritage, bringing listeners into a vibrant world of Creole rhythms and forgotten African string-band traditio...

This week on the Show On The Road, a conversation with Chloe Smith of Rising Appalachia. In 2005 she founded this unique partnership with her sister Leah after their relentless world travels finally intersected in southern Mexico, where Leah had started mastering the banjo. Growing up in a musical family of traditional string-band players and contra-dance leaders near Atlanta, Rising Appalachia's...

This week on The Show On The Road Podcast, a conversation with renegade roots songwriter, painter and NSFW self-taught poet Dan Reeder. Reeder has rarely has been interviewed, but has collected a legion of devoted fans after putting out a series of beloved albums on John Prine’s Oh Boy Records - including the much-anticipated new LP “Every Which Way.” For the uninitiated, diving into Dan Reeder’s...

This week, a conversation with renowned Danish pianist, experimental composer, and atmospheric-folk songstress Agnes Obel. Recorded high above Hollywood in the famed Capitol records building (Obel was recently signed to Blue Note Records), host Z. Lupetin takes an intimate tour of her newest work “Myopia”, which shows Obel at her most personal and aurally fearless. Born in Copenhagen and based in...

This week on The Show On The Road, we feature an intimate, long distance talk with British-born super producer and new wave songwriting titan Dave Stewart. Stewart grew up obsessed with Delta blues, but also with the futuristic beats and dancehall magic found in synthesizers. He somehow fused those two worlds into an indelible body of work that has won him a Grammy and sold over 100 million record...

Something powerful is in the air. While we may have said that after similar unrest in the past -- after Rodney King in LA, Trayvon Martin in Miami, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and countless others -- something about what is happening now feels deeper, heavier. Maybe it’s actually sinking in. From host, Z. Lupetin: I normally try to put out a new episode of The Show on the Road podcast every other W...

This week on The Show On The Road, we feature a conversation with a Canadian-born paraparetic prince of pop-folk singers, who has jumped through more gauntlets of the modern music industry than almost anyone in his three plus decades of making records, Steve Poltz. Poltz first hit the scene with the San Diego-based underground punk-folk favorites The Rugburns, then as an accidental hitmaker and MT...