This Is Your Afterlife

Bindu Poroori is a warm, deep, brilliant writer, performance artist, and singer whose creative practice can't be summed up tidily. She's in a band called Do the Needful, and her time hosting Salonathon made her the live performer she is. We bonded over our approaches to performance and the struggle to make political art that is authentic to us, so much so that there will be a whole bonus episode w...

Devin Bustin is not just a poet, songwriter, musician, and, gulp, minister (official title: Director of Spiritual Growth and Students). He's one of the most influential people in my life. Listen to us plumb our shared evangelical Christian history, the possible different functions of doubt in our lives, our shared love of poetry, and the entry of recovery into our lives. Content warning: going pro...

The snap of a good jerky stick. The taste of very wet eggs. Venturing off alone to see art. Performing as a Neo-Futurist . Annie Share enjoys her life! It's a skill she's cultivated through a careful selection of little treats. Content warning: yearbook enemies, wanting to die young and riding your bike, imaginary friend Gerald Oliver Dickens (G.O.D.), solo adventures, breakfast food preferences....

Brad E. Rose is a musician, podcaster, music writer, label owner, graphic designer, and dad, and we talk about his motivations beneath and for all of that. Content warning: COVID, parenthood, legacy, the undertow, extremely metal Capsula Mundi alternative, Terry Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air. If you believe in This Is Your Afterlife and want fun bonus episodes, become a patron for $5 or $15/mont...

Is this the first ever Twitch streamer guest on This Is Your Afterlife? I believe it is! But comedian Case Blackwell (from sketch group Cigarette Sandwich) is much more than a streamer. I've known him a while, and I was surprised by most of our conversation. Take a listen to hear a brilliant silly guy get vulnerable. Content warning: ALS, dementia, parents dying, masculinity, shedding layers of an...

When I saw musician Maria Jacobson (the creative force behind Fran) was starting a new podcast called Godless—asking guests, "Do you believe in God?" and all the other questions it encompasses—I knew I had to have her on This Is Your Afterlife. So here she is! It's a warm, fun, easy convo about hard stuff, just like we like it. Content warning: anxiety, mom with cancer, climate crisis, Gnostic Gos...

Second City and Matt Damon Improv's Phylicia McLeod sits down with me to hash out how to deal with strict Christian parents whose idea of what's best for you is different than yours. Content warning: dead sibling, alcoholism, Pentecostal childhood, playing Lil Boosie/Boosie Badazz at your funeral, presence as the solution to boredom in paradise, masturbating in the staircase at work? If you believ...

When everyone went scrambling to therapy during lockdown in 2020, what did the therapists think? Find out in this sweet and intimate conversation with Nick Turner, aka the experimental ambient musician Tyresta. I've had lots of musicians who are in Nick's orbit as guests, but he's the first one to really delve into the music-making process, so this could be a good intro to thinking about a genre t...

Beneath the singing, performing, and party organizing, Anna De Ocampo Kain sees themself as a facilitator. I get to the bottom of how the pandemic has changed her career plans to explore my own anger about it. Content warning: seeing a dead body, dead friends, vocal hemorrhage, Lyme disease, storefront opera, funeral karaoke, rejecting institutions where you're not wanted, radical hope. If you bel...

Comedian, writer, and artist Julie Mitchell and I get on like gangbusters in this episode that easily could have gone twice as long. The whole conversation felt like unhinging a release valve for me, despite taking on one of my toughest challenges yet as a host: Julie has a definitive coma moment, but it's too raw and unresolved for her to go into detail. How do you talk about a moment that change...

The Fuubutsushi collection is complete! Chris Jusell, the ambient jazz band's violinist, joins me to jump down all the pop culture rabbit holes our brains present us as we try to get to the bottom of why Chris says he wants to take up as little space as possible. 'Cause does he really? Btw, I forgot to mention the Pigeon patrons on Patreon in my intro, so here they are: G, Barry Fontenot, Shubha S...

"All the perfections are left in," I say in the intro to this perhaps-greatest-ever episode of the podcast, and yes, I meant "imperfections." But I enjoy the mistake, so it stays in, which is fitting for an episode I've minimally edited so that you can experience it as close to how I did as possible. And fitting for an episode in which legendary experimental/ambient musician and hospice chaplain J...

Does Pinko editor Max Fox have a thing with posthumous projects? We explore Max's relationship to death by talking about his work editing his friend Chris Chitty's book, Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System. Content warning: suicide, dead friends, anxiety, legacy, Accountability, history is real, gay communism, Amphitheater of the Dead, having sex in nat...

Mark Richardson (former Editor-in-Chief at Pitchfork, current rock and pop music critic at the Wall Street Journal) tells me about his tendency to help others rather than himself, being pushed into following his dream, and keeping a grasp on the substance of that dream. Content warning: anxiety, cancer, dementia, parents dying, Christian heaven sounds nice, part-time job with health insurance, dif...

After 20 years in prison, C. Fausto Cabrera is free. Six weeks post-release is quite a time to talk about transformation, and here we go. Content warning: prison, anxiety and depression, social death, not being a victim, dry room, Keats' negative capability, doing party drugs and getting lost at sea, beets and boiled eggs. If you believe in This Is Your Afterlife and want fun bonus episodes, becom...

Chaz texted me, "it’s pretty nice to be reciprocal fans dave." I texted back, "It’s so nice! Such a well of comfort and inspiration." Chaz is the third of four members of ambient jazz band Fuubutsushi who I've had on the podcast. And his solo-and-friends recordings as Lake Mary are divine. Enjoy this exploration of his artistry, pains, and loves, which is also the beginning of our friendship. Cont...

Neo-Futurist Abby Pajakowski joins me for an in-person episode from my kitchen, and we get real specific on their hell, a party game, and the exact ways in which a single night in bed can change your life. Content warning: anxiety, depression, someone slowly approaching with a gun, Antz, mailed cremains, glorious limbo, losing your religion and it's chill. If you believe in This Is Your Afterlife...

Perfect This Is Your Afterlife guest alert! Aaron Weaver is a comedian who's been thinking about spirituality maybe his whole life? He shares the tools he's picked up recently for being present and staying in his body. Those are buzzwords, but we get specific. We also talk a lot about Aaron's friend, Kenny DeForest, an excellent comedian and amazing person who was killed by a car in December 2023...

Zach Peterson wants to be the Butthole Surfers of comedy. Next step: release his new special, A List of Wet Celebrities, this Thursday, January 25! Content warning: anxiety, OCD, dead parents, Burger King panic attack, sobriety, success, Neil Young, cigarette heaven, Rick Rubin's "The Creative Act," John Prine's "The Tree of Forgiveness," outsider art, avoiding sour grapes. If you believe in This...

Surprise! It's another installment of TIYA REMIXED, in which I re-edit classic interviews from the archives as refreshers for fans and great introductory episodes for new folks. Dylan Rodriguez is a founding member of Critical Resistance, an organization that for decades has provided leadership and resources in the movement to abolish the prison industrial complex. As importantly, he's a down-to-e...

Alejandro Salinas may or may not be a death doula, but he's definitely a vampire. Content warning: even more death talk than usual (incl. dead dad), ice cube as reincarnation metaphor, bird eye contact, why goths are tall, dying practice. Patreon supporters make This Is Your Afterlife possible and get awesome bonus episodes. Become an Afterhead at patreon.com/davemaher . Follow Alejandro on Instag...

Tyler Parker (The Ringer) wrote a damn novel! A Little Blood and Dancing is a technicolor Oklahoma revenge story, and I was so stoked to talk to an old friend from Chicago improv about the transition from performing comedy to writing fiction. Content warning: Christian music, wanting to record your own audiobook, what hell would do to your vocal cords, accepting you're not too good for Minions. Pa...

Friend, TIYA superfan, and This Is Your Aftershow cohost Claire Favret returns to the main feed for our annual New Year's Special episode. We celebrate our years of minimal and no resolutions, and we answer a series of New Year's reflection questions Claire is pretty sure came from Simi Botic of Movement Unmeasured. Content warning: YOU DON'T NEED RESOLUTIONS TO DO THINGS, relationship to the word...

Comedian, sex worker, and writer Daniel Shar directed my first one-man show, Dave Maher Coma Show. The experience changed everything for me creatively and turned us from acquaintances into full-blow friends. Shar is so creative and funny, and he produces work as efficiently as a Comedy Terminator. Content warning: mom's death, breakup, porn career, surprise Beyonce fandom, this is absurd, evolving...

John Michael is my solo play-creating peer, independent art comrade-in-arms, and throwing-humor-at-heavy-subjects brother. I talked to him in my kitchen a couple weeks after seeing his most recent show, Spank Bank Time Machine, at the Neo-Futurist Theater. It's a new TIYA classic. Content warning: drug overdose, mental illness, weird bits, giddy laughter, Narcan, toxic friend representation, traum...