The Show On The Road with Z. Lupetin

This week on The Show On The road, we feature a conversation with Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance, two Texans and expert harmonizers who for the last decade have toured the world as Jamestown Revival. Right before all tours got sent home, host Z. Lupetin was able to hop on the Jamestown Revival tour bus (sorry for the engine hum) to discuss their intimate new record, San Isabel, and their journey fr...

This week on the show we bring you a two part conversation between Z and folk-jazz visionary Kat Edmonson. The first was captured backstage before a show at Largo in LA right before the Covid-19 shut-down, and in the second part Z caught up with Kat during her anxious but creative quarantine in New York City.  Initially turning heads for her dreamy and futuristic interpretations of great songbook...

For this special episode, your host Z. Lupetin adhered to the strict stay-at-home pandemic orders, recording an intimate phone conversation with Theo Katzman, the Cheshire Cat of soulful pop-rock and one of the most visible members of the mysterious funk supergroup, Vulfpeck. In January, Katzman celebrated the release of his cheeky, super catchy, unabashedly romantic, and pop-driven new solo album...

This week on the show, host Z. Lupetin meets up with Joey Dosik, a silky-voiced songwriter and freaky-talented multi-instrumentalist who writes lush, romantic jams that transport listeners to R&B-tinted, old school FM radio gold. Some listeners may have learned of Dosik's talents with DIY, future-funk ensemble Vulfpeck, led by trickster curator/composer Jack Stratton. Vulfpeck went from making goo...

Right before the whole world as we know it shut down, Z got to talk to Oliver and Chris Wood of the Americana pioneers The Wood Brothers about their renewed musical bond, how they grew up in Colorado jamming with their biology professor dad, and how they just barely missed being bashed by the great East Nashville tornado a month and a half back. When it rains it does pour, it seems. The conversati...

To say today’s episode is personal would be an understatement. Your host Z. Lupetin founded the group in Venice Beach, CA over ten years ago with a lucky Craigslist ad that started it all. What started as a clandestine jam group with as many as ten instruments going full blast at an after hours advertising office, the band was soon starting in speakeasies and small venues around LA, with the band...

This week we feature a border-breaking bluegrass band who came all the way from Buenos Aires to celebrate their folk album of the year Grammy nomination - and before they hit the red carpet, they stopped by Z’s LA living room studio to talk about their unlikely founding and how they’ve created their intoxicating brew of traditional North American and often overlooked South American stringband soun...

This week on the show - Z meets up with a cerebral Texas born roots rocker who has recently struck out on his own, poking one foot in the torn tinsel of a Houston honky tonk and another in a haunted California “Black Mirror” episode set in a tilted sci fi future - Jason Hawk Harris. While most songwriters hide behind walls and trapdoors of metaphor, Harris isn’t afraid to openly process his recent...

This week on the show - Z’s conversation with revered singing songstress and deeply wise wordsmith, Dar Williams. Coming out of the Hudson Valley outside New York City, Williams has released over thirteen albums over a quarter century as one of America’s touchstone folk poets, first bursting out of the famed Lilith Fair folk rock scene in the mid 1990s with contemporaries like Ani Difranco and the...

This week, on the very first episode of 2020, we welcome The Steel Wheels, a Virginia-based band of virtuous harmony masters and savvy stringband experimenters who have quietly put together an impressive body of work for the last decade, corkscrewing their way across the country supporting seven diverse acoustic-based albums and along the way, and gaining gangs of devoted fans from their big-heart...

JD McPherson joins Z. for the final episode of The Show On The Road's 2019 Season. The Oklahoma-born artist makes his own brand of high intellect, dance party-ready Sun Studios-style rock 'n roll and last year, may have recorded one of the greatest original Christmas albums of the modern era with "Socks". While JD McPherson probably never dreamed he would become a new rock-n-roll king of Christmas...

This week, a special conversation with the founder and sonic visionary behind one of the America’s most beloved and underrated roots-and-noise-rock groups, Grandaddy: Jason Lytle. Starting from humble beginnings as a trio of skateboarding friends in Modesto, CA in the early 1990s, Grandaddy put out a series of daring, deeply weird records all produced and written by Lytle that first caught fire in...

On this week’s episode of The Show On The Road, Liz Vice – a Portland born, Brooklyn-based gospel/folk firebrand who is bringing her own vision of social justice and the powerful, playful bounce of soul back to modern religious music. Liz Vice is following a rich tradition that goes back generations to powerful advocates like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sam Cooke, the Staples Singers, the Ward Sisters,...

This week Z. welcomes Madison Cunningham - a gifted songwriter, singer, and guitar slinger who has quickly risen from shy Southern California prodigy to a nationally admired Grammy-nominated major label recording artist redefining what could be a new genre between the fertile plains of pop, jazz and new wave folk music. As the eldest daughter of a big family, maybe Madison Cunningham was always me...

This week on the show, Z. Lupetin speaks with renowned British song collector, sonic interpreter, roots music promoter, and deeply intuitive folk singer Sam Lee. Lee came to music almost by accident after a former life as a wilderness survivalist and nature advocate. Since, he has become one of the leading voices in Great Britain, saving the treasured endemic music cultures that rapidly disappear...

As Z. travels across the UK this month, we bring you Lucy Rose - a talented singer-songwriter who grew up in the same lyrically fertile plain as Shakespeare, who has made albums filled with twisty tales of sharp tongued, black-hearted people searching for redemption, and navigating the rough rivers of a kind of supernatural sorrow that refuses to let us go as we grow up. On her newest “No Words Le...

On this Halloween, The Show On The Road brings you a special re-broadcast of an episode from our first month of shows with the legendary swamp blues singer and guitarist Tony Joe White. Tony Joe White made trance-like country blues with his signature ominous growl and slithering electric guitar for over 50 years. While many only know him for his novelty hit Poke Salad Annie (which was covered by a...

This week, Z. Lupetin speaks with Robert Ellis, the restless, tuxedoed, Texas piano-man who has paired his fleet-fingered, high-humored, “jazz in an Austin roadhouse” keys playing with machete-sharp lyrical turns of phrase — all backed up with his smile-through-the-apocalypse country-rock band. Ellis has gained a beloved international following all the while creating a persona that is half the ten...

This week, Z. speaks with Bonnie Bishop - the fierce singer/songwriter raised in Texas and Mississippi with a powerhouse voice shaped by decades of singing in smoky bars, cutting confessional Americana gems that have won her a Grammy for her songwriting, and gained her a growing legion of fans nationwide. Like her hero Bonnie Raitt, sometimes it takes an artist six records into her late thirties f...

This week, Charlie Parr - a Minnesota-based folk blues lifer who writes novelistic, multi-layered stories that shine a kaleidoscopic light on the defiant, unseen characters thriving in the shadows all around us. Charlie has a new record with only his name on it, and it isn’t shiny and perfect and commercial and catchy. It's him. It’s pure Charlie Parr, and maybe that’s enough. He hasn’t moved to L...

This week, Z. speaks to the founding trio of one the most respected and sought after folk rock bands in the country - The Lone Bellow. Their hedonistically heavenly harmonies have lifted them from playing tiny bars around their founding home base of Brooklyn, New York to adoring audiences at venerable venues like Red Rocks Amphitheatre, the Apollo, and The Ryman Auditorium, in their new home of Na...

This week, Anna Tivel - the Portland-based singing poetess who builds mountain ranges of rhymes with her colorful, impressionistic perspective of a world still shrouded in endless beauty and mystery. Anna Tivel is one of those folk singers who is passed between friends and long-time listeners like a secret talisman; a tiny gemstone that you polish in your pocket when you need a reminder that the e...

This week, Z. speaks with booming country gospel trickster Paul Cauthen. Z. and Paul met up in Nashville after his weird and whacked-out Big Velvet revue, which nearly got shut down for a brawl that occurred on stage at the end. Paul has a way of harnessing his own madness into a dangerous and intoxicating sonic brew that needs to be in your ear holes right now. Start with this episode, and then m...

This week, Matt The Electrician - a kind hearted songwriter and cunning craftsman of smile-inducing folk songs that retain the one thing we might need most in our jackknifed new century: hope. While the artist not known as Matt Sever may still be able to fix the sparking wires behind your walls with his nimble bare hands, he found a line of work even more daring, dangerous, and financially precari...

The Show On The Road is back with Cosmic California Country Singer / Songwriter Leslie Stevens. Z. speaks with the deeply intuitive songwriter and cosmic country singer who has been creating viscerally vulnerable songs that seem to ache right through the speakers with her shimmering voice on her much awaited solo album “Sinner”, which came out in August. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle...