What Am I Making Podcast

Michael Schulman started a record label without even intending to. While part of a vibrant scene of bands in the greater Washington, DC area, Michael found himself as a member of a cadre of seven musicians playing in a combination of four different bands. Knowing that the momentum behind these bands and the individual people involved could shift at any time, Schulman sought to document what was ha...

Ian Anderson is nothing short of a legend. As the visionary flutist, frontman behind the famed English band, Jethro Tull, Anderson has been making groundbreaking music for six full decades. Jethro Tull first emerged on to the UK pop scene in the mid-to-late 1960s as part of the enormous wave of bands seeking to find fame in the wake of the massive success of the Beatles and the Stones. Throughout...

Josh Ritter describes making a record as a sonic postcard home from the world of living as an artist. As a performer and singer/songwriter, Ritter has seen a great swath of the world has to offer, and he has lived a life outside the normal confines of modern life. Living as an artist forces one to live a life of openness, and vulnerability. A songwriter’s job is to broadcast myriad often, subtle o...

As a youngster in Little Rock, Arkansas, Ben Nichols wasn’t really sure what to do with himself. His brother Jeff had begun acting in the local children’s theatre at the age of ten, and by high school seemed destined for a life in and around the movies. With an innate curiosity and an eye for literature, Ben considered an English degree after high school, but he failed to find his calling in the p...

In 2017, music writer John McKie sat down to pen an in-depth piece focused on the greatness of Prince’s 1987 album, Sign O’ The Times . McKie describes the finished essay as an honorable failure. It was good enough for the moment, but he was left cold by the uncharted territory not covered in the piece. John longed to trace the path of Prince from his beginnings as an artist through his impressive...

If you have paid much attention to the worlds of indie rock, freak folk, and independent film in the last four decades, it’s likely that you have encountered some of the work of singer, songwriter, and actor Will Oldham. Oldham was born into a Louisville, KY family that was home to a robust record collection, and a deep regard for art and music. As a teenager, Oldham began acting in the Lousiville...

Emily White describes herself as a Music Technologist. Fresh out of college and in the early years of the rise of digital streaming, Emily landed a job at Billboard magazine where she saw first hand the ways that these new technologies were quickly and drastically changing the music industry. She describes her time at Billboard as something like getting a degree in the music business. During her B...

Matt Kadane and his brother Bubba knew they were destined to make music together by the time they had reached Middle School. Growing up in the small city of Wichita Falls, Texas, the brothers were raised in a musical family. Their grandmother was a terrific ragtime piano player. Their father was obsessed with jazz, pop, and the burgeoning outlaw country movement emanating from Austin, Texas. Music...

In 2016, Sarah Kendzior’s family began a series of vacations across the American continent. Sarah, her husband, and their two children embarked on a series of lengthy road trips over several years in an attempt to fully experience the beauty of America; its landscapes, and its people. Kendzior hoped that she could show her children the most beautiful and bizarre places that this nation has to offe...

This week, we are turning the tables at the WAIM podcast as I cede the captain’s chair to become the guest on my own show. My longtime friends and frequent collaborators, Barry and Abigail Hummel of the great Pops on Hops podcast will be de facto hosts this week as they quiz me and my bandmate/dear friend Jeffery Gower about the classic Stick Arounds album Ways To Hang On, about our upcoming tour...

Terra Lopez has been making music and touring for the last fifteen years. She began her career as a founding member of the duo Sister Crayon which later adopted the moniker, Rituals of Mine . Over her career, which included a stop at a major record label, Terra has built an impressive loyal following. Until the Covid outbreak that audience was a viable outlet for her to earn a nice profit regularl...

Rob Janicke grew up in a house where music was always present. To his young ears, music was entertainment, excitement, and enlightenment all wrapped into one big, beautiful sound. He was first drawn to theatrical artists like David Bowie and Ozzy Osbourne, but also quickly began to realize that lyrical content and emotional heft were just as vital as the costumes and shape-shifting personas that h...

“The Brands My Daddy Drank”, the new song from Lansing country duo Deer & Elk , is ostensibly a tune of faded beer brands and childhood memories. While songwriter and singer Jeffery Gower never mentions any specific beer names, those of us in a certain age bracket might visualize a montage of vintage ads from Lowenbrau, Schlitz, Stroh’s and more. The song evokes flickering moments of years long pa...

On Friday morning, I went live on Substack with my pal Seth Werkheiser over at Social Media Escape Club to talk about my massive live album project with The Wild Honey Collective , and oh so much more. What began as a simple chat about the details of my project quickly evolved into a dialogue on the overarching importance of storytelling, and the power of permission. In our conversation, I walk Se...

Chuck Marshall got a Yashica 35m film camera as a gift from his parents and began to tinker with it through his teenage years. Slowly, he developed an eye and a budding talent for photography, until he was 17 and the guitar came calling. Ditching the camera, Chuck dove headlong into learning the guitar inside and out. He longed to play with technical proficiency, speed, and style. He drove his sib...

The idea for Chris Dalla Riva ’s brand new book began as something of a lark. Chris and a friend simply wondered what they would learn if they listened to every number one hit starting with the very first Billboard Hot 100 Chart in 1958. The resulting book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us About The Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves is a data driven look at the history of pop music as we kn...

Larry Crane shares a piece of wisdom in our conversation that has stuck with me since the moment we recorded it. As we were talking about the process of making and releasing records and the idea of how musicians should be compensated for their work, Larry simply said, “Music is not merit based.” It sounds like a harsh statement, but it is completely and totally true. Each of us can likely rattle o...

Emma Swift found her way to Nashville by way of the mid-sized, but isolated city of Wagga Wagga, Australia. In high school, she fell hard for the myriad female singer songwriters that were ascendant in the early 1990s. At university, Emma discovered the world of alt-country, and she began to soak up the artistry of iconic singers like Linda Rondtstadt and Emmylou Harris.  Emma has always appreciat...

Writer Luc Rinaldi first came on to my radar when I noticed the headline for his newest piece in The Walrus. The article, titled The Death Of The Middle Class Musician , is a dire and detailed look at the economic landscape for roughly 99% of artists making music today. Rinaldi begins the piece by focusing on the story of a critically and commercially successful Edmonton rapper known as Cadence We...

Patrick Hicks never expected to become a Tik Tok star. He first opened his account in response to his wife suggesting a 30 day creative challenge; The couple had already produced a short lived podcast together, and while it garnered just a handful of downloads for each episode, it provided a much needed creative outlet. Without that pod as a regular endeavor, Patrick’s partner suggested that perfo...

My guest this week had his life irrevocably changed in the early hours of one morning in 2014. While he slept in his bed, a SWAT team descended upon his home and dramatically swept him into custody for what he describes as a “series of comprises: moral compromises”. While we cannot get into the exact details of his crimes, Mr. Decarceration - whose identity was carefully protected during our chat...

JL Cauvin found solace in humor at a very young age. Growing up in the Bronx with a Haitian immigrant father and a commanding mother, JL’s childhood was filled with love, but was anything but calm. Life at home was volatile, so at a young age, JL began to make his mother laugh as a means of breaking the tension. Humor was a temporary, but effective salve against a life that was, at times, rife wit...

There is a musical moment happening in and around Los Angeles right now. It’s not a revival of the Laurel Canyon days, nor is also it a new iteration of the hair metal craze that dominated the mid-1980s. In fact, this musical moment defies definition and classification because it is wholly unique. Across the greater LA area, young bands have been staging DIY house concerts for their friends, their...

In the early 2010’s, after two decades of writing about music, Carl Wilson became fascinated by why people loved what they loved. As he delved into the anthropology of taste, he set about writing a book on an album by the French-Canadian cultural icon Celine Dion, an artist who is often derided in circles of “serious” music criticism.  Eschewing his own prejudices of Dion’s work, Wilson set about...

Cole Haddon describes living and working in the film industry in Hollywood as a daily life of believing that you are on the verge of winning a sort of lottery. At any moment a script that you’ve written might be greenlighted into a multi-million dollar project. The next big break always feels just one lunch, one meeting, one sympathetic producer away. It is intoxicating, but it can be crushing. Be...