The Show On The Road with Z. Lupetin

Robert Ellis is Back - And His New Album Might Scare You May 25, 2023

This week, we bring back an old friend of the show, Fort Worth-based trickster singer/multi-instrumentalist Robert Ellis.

We last spoke in 2018 while we were were both criss-crossing the Netherlands. Then he was in full character as the Texas Piano Man, jumping across the stage between keyboards and guitars with cheeky ear worms like “Topo Chico” and searing Harry Neilsen-esque ballads like “Fucking Crazy,” whipping appreciative crowds into a frenzy. After a long pandemic hiatus, he’s back without his lion tamer white tux, stripping things way back to bring us an achingly intimate trance-lullaby of a new record called Yesterday’s News.

With no jaunty piano to speak of, the new LP uses his tender nylon string guitar and voice as the main storytellers (with upright bass and assorted hand percussion lifting up the songs saturated in delicious tape hiss), diving into the delirium and beauty of being a dad, a husband and an artist who maybe has finally let go of his ravenous ambitions to find a sort of uneasy peace.

As a fellow sleep-deprived songwriter dad myself, the quiet rage and bleary-eyed hope in “Close Your Eyes,” about the long nights spent with a newborn, hit very close to home. Ditto the opener “Gene,” which could be seen as both a moonlit conversation with his young son, but also a fantasy talk with his younger self who maybe didn’t have enough encouragement to just be his oddball self and live his truth. How does he put himself to sleep these days, you ask? He listens to old X-Files episodes… in audio form.

While many things have changed since our first episode with Robert (he now owns and runs a bar-music-venue-studio and is touring much less) his mischievous streak remains (you’ll hear his cackle of laugh pop the mic many times) making us wonder if the lovely title track to Yesterday’s News is both a clear signal of defeat (the relentless capitalist album cycle push is so last century!) and a quiet reminder that Ellis still has so many sharp stories to tell. And this time, you’ll have to lean in close to hear them.

He will be making some appearances at listening rooms and jazz clubs this summer, and I for one am really looking forward to seeing and hearing this new side of Robert’s shapeshifting songwriting in person.

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Durand Jones May 11, 2023

This week, we dive into the revelatory first solo record from rising Louisiana-born roots-soul singer-songwriter Durand Jones.

Wait Til I Get Over is years in the making. While nearly giving up on his dream to be a singer several times, Jones was diligently collecting songs about his upbringing living in his father’s trailer in the tiny Mississippi River town of Hillaryville, his grandmother giving him the confidence to sing (and also dragging him to church), escaping broken relationships and infidelity, his yearning for a connection to a higher power, and how betting on the music and himself was a jubilant radical act that just may be finally paying off.

The lush strings and almost Broadway-ready power of his voice on the opener “Gerri Marie” harken back to a time when artists like Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin were creating cutting edge pop and soul music that could at once get you to hit the streets to protest injustice and woo your new love with total abandon.

Most folks may know Jones as one of the co-lead singers with falsetto-master (and drummer) Adam Frazer of the Bloomington, IN-based throwback "sweet soul” group Durand Jones & The Indications, a project he began out of graduate school (he also plays the saxophone) at The University of Indiana. Starting with their hard-hitting 2018 self-titled record and the follow ups American Love Call (2019) and Private Space (2021),they became a coveted national act and AAA radio favorite, with this writer seeing their biggest show yet, last summer at the Hollywood Bowl in LA. You would be forgiven if you thought the club-ready romantic earworm “Witchoo” dropped in 1971 not in the height of the pandemic - but the unrestrained Chaka Khan-esque vibes are hard to deny. As I told Jones, that tune got me through a very hard time.

While Jones admits he likes to play a certain version of himself on stage - flamboyant outfits and soaring vocal runs are what keep audiences coming back - at home, he’s a much more introspective character who is a big fan of journaling. It’s the quieter, more vulnerable sides of his story (being queer in the Deep South for one,) and the complicated figures like “Sadie" (not her real name) that he renders in full cinematic detail that point to a powerful solo career ahead if he wants it.

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Courtney Marie Andrews Apr 27, 2023

This week, we call into Nashville to speak to one of the preeminent and most prolific singer-songwriters of our time, Courtney Marie Andrews.

Born in Arizona, Andrews first started singing at Phoenix-area karaoke bars with her mom before setting out to see the country in Greyhound busses as a teenager, finding a place in bands like Jimmy Eat World with her signature high-aching voice and talent on guitar and piano. Writing in fiery spurts (she mentions on the taping that thirty new songs emerged just last month), Andrews has put out eight records and counting, beginning with 2008’s Urban Myths and culminating in 2022’s lush and cautiously hopeful Loose Future. “These Are The Good Old Days” finds her trying to be present in a world of relentless distraction and hidden pain – and while the chord changes and harmonies harken back to 1950s girl group vibes, there is always a searching, aching energy roiling underneath.

If you feel like you missed out seeing touchstone genre-defying singers like Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris in their 1970s roots-pop primes, fear not: it can be argued that Andrews is leading the newest wave of honey-voiced performers who just happen to be writing the most honest, heart-stopping work in the expanding Americana universe. Many first heard her with the acclaimed, gorgeously direct Honest Life in 2016 which helped develop her following, especially in Europe, and the mournful and cathartic Old Flowers which earned her a 2020 Grammy nomination for Best Americana Album.

We all go through painful breakups and have to learn how to process the fallout. But what Andrews can do with the thorny moments most of us would want to forget, may be her superpower. “I’m not used to feeling good,” Courtney Marie Andrews sings with a weary smile on “Change My Mind” towards the finale of Loose Future. And yet, as she penned many of these timeless tunes in a small cabin on Cape Cod during the height of the lockdowns, sometimes realizing that you can be happy after all is that big first step that can get your future to start opening up.

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Devon Gilfillian Apr 13, 2023

This week, we feature a talk with genre-leaping singer-songwriter Devon Gilfillian who is back with a remarkable new LP, Love You Anyway. Shapeshifting between danceable southern soul, hip-hop, silky R&B, and AM gold rock n roll, the record isn’t afraid to confront the thorny politics of voting rights and wrongful incarceration while still celebrating a newly revolutionary Black joy.

Raised in Philadelphia and now based in Nashville, Gilfillian was so inspired by socially-conscious soul icons like Marvin Gaye that he used his time in the darkness of 2020 to release two albums: first the fiery Black Hole Rainbowwhich became a critical hit, and then a new take on What’s Going On, which raised funds for low-income communities of color, and provided resources and education around the democratic process.

Taking a cue from the lush production of 1970’s Stax and Motown, the new LP leads with the joyous “All I Really Wanna Do,” inviting us onto a cosmic journey of discovery and continues with the playful, sultry "Brown Sugar Queen," a Prince x Anderson Paak super-sized jam that features rising Swedish pop star Janice.

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The Deslondes Mar 30, 2023

This week, the show is back in New Orleans for a special talk with Sam Doores, one of the talented founders of well-traveled roots-rockers The Deslondes. We dive into their newest LP Ways & Means and how California-born Sam - who plays various instruments from electric guitar to keys, and sings in seven bands and counting throughout the Crescent City - collected many of its slow-burn soul-adjacent songs like "Five Year Plan" while holed up in a storage unit studio squat, questioning his place as an adult with real responsibilities who also happens to be a soul-searching artist criss-crossing our beautiful (or crumbling) almost-post-pandemic world.

Imagine if you will, you walk into a saloon lost somewhere between 1930 and 1975. The band onstage has three distinct lead singers, and the songs feel like hard lived-in tales that could live in a TV western or the soundtrack to Boogie Nights, with vibes that would inspire both Ray Charles and Woody Guthrie, Tom Waits and The Beatles. If you’re confused, good. Algorithms can force music upon you at any time these days and I’ll admit, Spotify wants me to listen to The Deslondes, at all hours. They’re not wrong. If I have one job in this podcast it’s to share the music that lights a fire in me as a fellow songwriter and has me grasping for genre-descriptor straws. I have no idea, clearly, how to describe this band. I will say, songs like “Howl at the Moon” make me feel like I’m somehow still proud to be an American, plying my trade somewhere in the still kind of Wild West.

Starting with their charmingly ramshackle and bluesy self-titled debut in 2015, the band, which formed in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, has always made a point to write democratically and spread songs around to their singers. Sam for one, Dan Cutler (bass) for another and notably the always compelling Riley Downing, whose ancient deep drawl sounds like it should be its own character in Yellowstone - and all harmonize gorgeously together. Downing and Doores also both have duo and solo albums which are lovely, but what they create here in The Deslondes - especially in timeless story songs like “South Dakota Wild One” about Riley’s wandering youth - are special in the way accidental supergroups make music that somehow shouldn’t exist.

It was a pleasure getting together with Sam for a rare in-person chat just off Frenchmen Street. If there’s one thing I love most about New Orleans, it's that it creates new artists that seem to follow the beat of their own drummer, genres be-damned. Give Ways & Means a spin - it might transport you somewhere you need to go.

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Anna Moss (Handmade Moments) Mar 16, 2023

This week, we feature a conversation taped live in New Orleans with Arkansas-born multi-instrumentalist and roots-soul singer Anna Moss, who has criss-crossed the country in recent years with her sonic partner Joel Ludford in their band Handmade Moments.

Growing up as a bathroom-singing nerd playing saxophone in the school band, Anna admits that if she could wield any superpower it might be invisibility. Not necessarily the first thing you think of for an openly political, big-voiced folk festival favorite who has made a name for herself sitting in with some of the biggest names in the Americana scene. A recent collaboration with Rainbow Girls bore especially potent fruit - and if you read my Music That Moved Me in 2022 list you’ll see at the very top was Anna’s thorny "Big Dick Energy.”

Rarely does a song make you laugh and then dance and then follow with a sucker punch about how unsafe many women feel just taking up space in the world. The video also illustrates the song’s deft twist: how women can gang together to mock and minimize the men who for so long have taken away their agency and power. And yet, the song also makes you want to forget it all and just groove to the sexiest flute solo in recent memory. If this is a foreshadowing of what’s to come with Anna’s solo work, call me quite intrigued.

Whether she’s playing crunchy bass clarinet or upright bass, electric or acoustic guitar, or singing with Joel in Handmade Moments or her other jazzy group the Nightshades, Anna is never shy about speaking her mind in her music. Take a listen to Handmade Moments' rapidly rhyming, gorgeously harmonized climate change banger “Hole In The Ocean” which wouldn’t feel out of place in a slam-poetry jam. A song on their forthcoming record End Of The Wars (coming in May) directly confronts Trump’s cult-like status, again not pulling any punches. Want to see an early version of the song played with sax in a cave? Sure you do.

The dangers of the road are not lost on Anna and Joel of course. They were hit head-on during a freak accident on a run in Northern California years back and were lucky to make it out relatively unscathed. She’s trying to keep things a bit mellower these days. It was special talking to Anna in her adopted new home of New Orleans, and the soulful sounds that trickle into her living room on Frenchman Street can be heard throughout the songs she’s working on. Fittingly, a slow burn live track she released, “Slow Down, Kamikaze,” is a great reminder to stop trying to do too much and focus on what actually matters.

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Iris Dement Mar 02, 2023

This week, we feature my conversation with beloved folk firebrand Iris Dement. Born the youngest of fourteen to a singing Pentecostal family in Arkansas and raised in California, Dement released her iconic 1992 John Prine-endorsed debut Infamous Angel and has been creating poetic protest records and warm collaborations ever since (garnering two folk Grammy nominations along the way), culminating in her much anticipated and fiery new LP Working On A World.

Certain songwriters in the folk field will occasionally speak up about injustice or corruption - but with Working On A World, Dement puts the protest front and center: honoring luminaries like Mahalia Jackson, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. and even The Chicks for giving her hope that putting your principles and life on the line will help bend history towards progress and righteousness.

Dement, who is now based in Iowa with her musician and collaborator husband Greg Brown (check out their biting co-write “I’ll Be Your Jesus”), will be the first to say that at times in her wide-ranging career, playing clubs to enraptured but small audiences, she has questioned whether she was doing enough to make a difference. But songs like the epic Dylan-esque take-down “Going Down To Sing in Texas” show that Dement is still at her fired-up best, confronting the Lone Star State's open carry gun laws that put so many at risk, while also spitting in the face of all the wannabe tyrants who shun the very progress she is still hoping to see. In many ways, Working On A World isa hard-won release of pent up energy, created over the course of six years with co-producers Richard Bennett, Jim Rooney and Pieta Brown.

While many of her longtime fans are used to her fearless political confrontations - 1996’s seething The Way I Should and its dark anthem “Wasteland of the Free" demand answers from sexual abusers and government war mongers alike - casual listeners may only know Dement from her playful duets with sonic soulmate John Prine, most notably the foul-mouthed love song “In Spite Of Ourselves.” With a little laugh, she says she’s alright with that too. Life is long and the music, no matter the light or the dark, is equally as powerful.

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Cleve Francis Feb 16, 2023

This week, my talk with self-described folk-country scientist and songwriter Cleve Francis, whose winding fifty year story in music is nearly unparalleled. Few African-American artists had their work heard in the folk boom of the early 1960’s, and while Francis studied to become a heart specialist after leaving the small hamlet of Jennings, Louisiana, the honey-voiced gems he laid down with his guitar in the gorgeous compilation Beyond the Willow Tree are finding devoted new audiences – this podcaster included.

After diving into that encyclopedic collection which showcases his songs from 1968-1970, you can see that Francis’s tastes were vast. Sparsely recorded with his beautifully airy yet powerful voice leading the way, he covers everything from Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement to his loving interpretations of Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, The Beatles and Bob Dylan (his fiery take on “With God On Our Side” is a must-listen). And yet, if you look deeper into his story, you’ll notice that Francis’s real love was for old school country music.

In Nashville, the list of major-label Black stars not named Charley Pride was short thirty plus years ago – and still is. But in the 1990’s, while already a successful cardiologist, Francis took leave of his office in Virginia and jumped on a tour bus to promote his catchy CMT-approved records Tourist In Paradise and Walkin’. Always the trailblazer, he also founded the Black Country Music Association to help find opportunities for up and coming artists who were left out of the Music City limelight.

While he did return to his patients and left Nashville to its devices in the late 1990’s, Francis and his work creating what he likes to call “soul-folk” are thankfully being discovered anew via the wizardry of the internet. I was so personally moved by the open-hearted power of his collection Beyond the Willow Tree that I had to find out more, and I’m so glad I did.

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Rayland Baxter Returns Feb 02, 2023

This week, we place a call to a Tennessee front porch to talk to rock-n’-soul trickster and acclaimed singer-songwriter Rayland Baxter.

He’s our first returning artist on the show for a good reason. Besides being a personal favorite of host Z. Lupetin since his gorgeous, folky debut Feathers and Fishhooks a decade ago, Z. was first able to catch up with Rayland in a Vegas hotel room (where he played through a cigarette pack mini amp) to discuss his deliciously catchy and soulful 2018 record Wide Awake and how growing up around his side-man legend dad Bucky Baxter (pedal steel and guitars for Bob Dylan’s touring band, and countless others) inspired him to make his own playful visions real and to always follow his ear.

But while Wide Awake felt accessible as a funky aural high five, his 2022 offering If I Were A Butterfly is a more challenging, experimental work - think Jackson Pollock filmed through a Super 8 camera after a mushroom trip. He uses archival audio going back to his childhood, sings about goats, demons and his forever yearning to find a love that loves him back in a way that doesn’t seem transactional. The result is a fractured but intimately moving portrait.

I’ll admit, it took a few listens to warm to Butterfly, but after our latest talk, we can see how the ever-upbeat Baxter was processing some pretty heavy adult stuff on this record - most notably losing his dad and two of his most trusted recording partners to sudden ends. He hence did much of the producing himself, laying down the record in an abandoned rubber band factory. “Graffiti Street” shows Baxter at the height of his unique game, writing signature effortless rootsy-rock hooks with a new sense of gravity that never holds the butterfly within him down.

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Melissa Carper Jan 19, 2023

This week, to kick-start our fifth season we call into an organic vegetable farm in Texas to chat with an upright bassist who also happens to be a former New Orleans ace street performer, and singer and songwriter, who sounds like she might have stepped out of a saloon in 1955 filled with the warm echoes of her heroes Hank Williams and Patsy Cline: Melissa Carper.

Is there such thing as a “new nostalgia” movement happening under our noses in the Americana scene? I’m going to say there is, thanks to folks like Melissa. She’s lived several lives as a working music maker in groups like Sad Daddy (“Daddy” being her beloved nickname), Buffalo Gals, and the Carper Family (her folks in Nebraska growing up had a roving band), before collecting her favorite vintage-tinted songs and breaking out with her whip-smart solo debut Daddy’s Country Gold and then 2022’s Ramblin’ Soul, which she penned while working on that vegetable farm with her fiddle player/partner during the height of the pandemic.

The latter record is a celebration of the small victories and tiny glories of taking your hard earned art onto the road, while also pausing to reflect on the important folks she lost recently, like her beloved pup.

While Melissa gets a good chuckle about being called the “Hillbilly Holiday” with her high lilting voice and silky delivery, it’s the impossible pleasure of hearing the lost music of pre-modern country, jazz and blues fronted by a proudly queer bassist lead-singer that almost seems like science fiction when you look at it deeply. Make “new nostalgia” a new genre! Or throw genre right out the window and just turn modern classics like “Makin’ Memories” (one of my top songs of 2022) up nice and loud, however you listen these days.

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Season 5 Sneak Peek Jan 12, 2023

Welcome back, friends. Season 5 is here to help launch us into 2023, starting off with the new old-time sounds of the singing upright bassist who everyone calls “daddy,” Melissa Carper. Plus, the return of the rock-n-soul butterfly Rayland Baxter taped on his porch in Tennessee, and also a fascinating talk with Cleve Francis, a singing heart doctor who once rubbed elbows with Garth Brooks and the big boys in the country pantheon, but was recently rediscovered for putting out a transcendent complication of rare Black folk songs from the late 1960s. Recently Z. Lupetin went down to New Orleans and talked to artists in their studios and living rooms and, as the bandleader of Dustbowl Revival, will continue to bring you newly discovered music he found on the trail from coast to coast. New episodes every other Thursday!

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Music That Moved Me in 2022 Dec 22, 2022

How can I try and summarize the soundtrack to my life this year? Indeed, we are in year three (!) of this endless pandemic and I find I am more and more drawn to pure escapism, fantasy and what I might call the “new nostalgia”? Personally, I don’t go more than a few hours in the day (or during sleep at night) without something on, whether it’s playing on my bluetooth speakers around the house, or in headphones as I walk the dog or the toddler around the neighborhood, or in the car rolling to the next spot.

As I teeter towards 40, I admit I love old school radio - while driving especially - and while most of the year has felt like a bit of a creative slog, I was thrilled to finally launch my own radio show on actual airwaves which you can listen to on Saturday mornings. And as a new dad, I am not ashamed to say that playlists like morning classical chill or sadgirl piano background are what actually got me through.

But what about the songs that moved me? I live for a new song that knocks me out of my reverie: unexpected lyrics, or ripping solos, or funky beats that slap me across the face and make me go, "WHAT. WAS. THAT?" And there are some songs in the list below that surely did that. But does one song sum up a whole year? A year that began with me almost losing my wife to a horrifying rare syndrome while giving birth to our daughter? Of seeing her recover courageously and witnessing my daughter growing like a grinning weed that careens from room to room like a joyful banshee? Or traveling the country playing songs I wrote to sometimes empty or sometimes full theaters or festivals or saloons of happy or heckling strangers? Or talking to dozens of hard-working bands and songwriters with my mic from Nova Scotia to London, from Minneapolis to New Orleans, or right in the front bar of LA’s hallowed Troubadour? How can songs, like short stories, be stitched together to create the novel that is your life?

Maybe one can’t really sum up a year like 2022 with a few songs. But if you are curious about some of the music that did truly move me or make me smile or got me through, this is it! I truly love these tracks. I will always love them. Are all of these safe for your to blast at work? Probably not! But let’s get started.

Songs featured in this episode:

Anna Moss feat. Rainbow Girls, “Big Dick Energy”

The Deslondes, “Five Year Plan” (Ways & Means)

Melissa Carper, “Makin’ Memories” (Daddy's Country Gold)

Seratones, "Good Day" (Love & Algorhythms)

Ondara, "An Alien in Minneapolis" (Spanish Villager No. 3)

Onda Vaga, "Milagro"

Silvana Estrada, "Tristeza" (Marchita)

The Heavy Heavy "Sleeping On Grassy Ground" (Life and Life Only)

The Cactus Blossoms "Hey Baby" (One Day)

Dustbowl Revival "Be (For July)" (Set Me Free)

Monica Martin "Go Easy, Kid"

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The Heavy Heavy Dec 08, 2022

This week, we cross the pond for a talk with rising British roots-rockers Will Turner and Georgie Fuller, who harness the freewheeling sonic spirit of the sixties with a new Brighton-based band they call The Heavy Heavy.

While the British coast isn’t exactly known for its blissed out sunshiny beaches (or as a haven for rock 'n' roll stardom), Will and Georgie decamped there during the pandemic. And through the power of imagination (and production wizardry), they somehow mastered the reverb-y sun-soaked harmonies that Laurel Canyon favorites the Mamas and the Papas and the Byrds brought forth during the summer of love, with their breakout EP Life And Life Only (with a wink to Mr. Dylan), issued stateside by ATO Records.

The response to their Woodstock-flavored tracks like “Go Down River” and “All My Dreams,” led by pairing Will’s roaring guitar and Georgie’s gospel-tinted vocals, has been overwhelming. European tours with label-mates Black Pumas preceded national U.S. TV appearances and their first full run in America. While some could write them off as merely skilled nostalgia-hounds, what Turner has pulled off with his masterful production of Life And Life Only shows an obsessive attention to detail, helping resurrect a sound and, more importantly, a feeling that isn’t stuck in the utopian hippie era, but could be the soundtrack to a more hopeful age that we may just be entering now.

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Adrian Quesada (Black Pumas) Dec 01, 2022

This week, we head down to Austin, Texas where we talk to multi-instrumentalist and renowned producer Adrian Quesada.

Many know him as half of ground-breaking deep soul duo Black Pumas, where songs like “Colors” rose up the charts, taking them from tiny Austin clubs to the biggest festivals in the world, garnering Grammy nods, playing as the theme for the Major League Baseball playoffs and even featuring at Joe Biden’s inauguration. But on his own, Quesada has had a remarkably fruitful 2022, first releasing his Spanish-language debut Boleros Psicodélicos with some heavy collaborators, and in November he brought forth Jaguar Sound, a cinematic instrumental opus that’s one part Daptone R&B groove, one part hip-hop sample jam and one part Morricone vintage score mystery.

Growing up on the border town of Laredo, Texas as a MTV-loving, hip-hop and hair-metal obsessed only-child, Quesada discusses how he used the isolation of the pandemic lockdowns (and a pause in his relentless Black Pumas touring) to begin creating the music that had been living in his head for decades, but never had a chance to be heard. Gems like “Noble Metals” feel like a cross-section between an early dreamy Santana cut and something that could be found in a trippy Japanese animation.

A self-professed “studio rat," Quesada teases at the end of the talk that he’s only just scratched the surface of what he hopes to create. One can only hope that a Black Pumas reunion with charismatic vocalist Eric Burton is in the cards too.

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Ondara Nov 17, 2022

This week, we talk with Kenyan singer-songwriter Ondara, who came to Minneapolis in search of his voice as a young musician, and found a new creative persona which he now embodies called The Spanish Villager. He has since taken audiences by storm, garnering a Grammy-nomination and now returning with a stunning politically-charged new LP.

Spanish Villager No: 3 is produced by Ondara and Mike Viola (Jenny Lewis, Dan Wilson) with collaborations from Taylor Goldsmith and Griffin Goldsmith of Dawes, Sebastian Steinberg, Tim Kuhl and Jeremy Stacey. While he would still call himself a folk singer like his Minneapolis hero Bob Dylan, Ondara (like Dylan) has gone a bit electric on the new offering, harnessing his massive vocal power with a full band around him.

Ondara’s immigrant journey is truly one for the storybooks, and while he has dutifully paid homage to American folk protest singers in his previous work, the newest Spanish Villager work shows him really finding his own sound, at once sharply modern and steeped in a dark history he can’t wait to mine.

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Trampled by Turtles Nov 10, 2022

This week, we call into Minnesota to talk to frontman and lead-songwriter Dave Simonett of the innovative jamgrass pioneers Trampled by Turtles.

Celebrating a new record, Alpenglow, produced by Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, the six-piece band has gone from storming shaggy local bars in Duluth to playing their famously fast roots-n-roll in the biggest venues and festivals in the world.

Twenty years in, Simonett is keeping it fresh by letting masters like Tweedy bring his punky minor chord sensibility to the band’s warm acoustic camaraderie (bassist Tim Saxhaug, banjo player Dave Carroll, mandolinist Erik Berry, fiddle player Ryan Young, and cellist Eamonn McLain round out the group) with standout songs like “Starting Over” not shying away from the expectations that come from recognition and giving your art to the world - with the brightness of the banjo always leading the way.

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Jim Lauderdale Nov 03, 2022

This week, we call on an Americana pioneer and a beloved fixture of the Nashville roots-country scene, the always affable Grammy-winner Jim Lauderdale. This year he celebrated the release of his thirty-fifth record Game Changer.

Growing up in both North and South Carolina, as a young man Lauderdale fell in love with country music but took an unconventional path to becoming a sought-after songwriter, harmonist and writer in Music City. He toured in New York theatre productions when he was starting out, and ended up in LA. Even today you can hear the drama in his aching harmony-soaked songs like “Lightning Love” off Game Changer.

While sales and national recognition haven’t always aligned, the “stylistically restless” Lauderdale has played the Opry over 200 times, collaborated on albums with his heroes like the late bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley, written tracks for artists as diverse as George Strait and Elvis Costello, and has accidentally become one of the leading elder-statesman of the Americana movement.

What is Americana exactly? Even Jim impishly won’t say. But it’s that earthy genre-bending sound that has kept his longtime fans coming back for more nearly for decades into his storied run.

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Rebirth Brass Band Oct 13, 2022

This week, we return to the Crescent City to talk to one of the new leaders of the Grammy-winning Rebirth Brass Band, trumpet player Glenn Hall III who is part of a deep New Orleans musical family.

Rebirth will be coming from NOLA to LA to help headline the inaugural Paramount Ranch Sonic Boom on October 15th. It’s a brand new music festival co-created by yours truly and Dustbowl Revival (along with Tiny Porch Concerts and the Santa Monica Mountains Fund) that will celebrate the confluence of American roots music by bringing together diverse acts like Grammy-winning folk-blues master Dom Flemons, and notable local Southern California-based acts the Eagle Rock Gospel Singers, string-band Water Tower, Cuban group Yosmel Montejo y La Caliente and singer-songwriter Abby Posner.

Set in the green hills of the Santa Monica Mountains, partial proceeds from the fest will go to restoring historic Paramount Ranch which lost much of its western movie sets during a devastating wildfire.

Few bands of any kind can claim an unbroken lineage from their 1983 start. Phillip "Tuba Phil" Frazier, his brother Keith Frazier and renowned trumpet player Kermit Ruffins formed the group out of Joseph S. Clark Senior High School, located in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. If you watched the acclaimed HBO series of the same name, you no doubt heard Rebirth as the brassy backdrop to the city as it constantly evolved and survived traumas like Hurricane Katrina. Members of the Frazier family still join the band on tours.

Glenn Hall III takes us through the fascinating history of the group, describing notable shows like opening for the Grateful Dead, recording with John Fogerty, kicking off the Grammys, and recently joining the Red Hot Chili Peppers onstage.

Their 2022 single “New Orleans Girl” shows how they never stop experimenting, lending their big sound to a hip-hop mashup featuring Cheeky Blakk and PJ Morton.

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Leo Nocentelli (The Meters) Oct 06, 2022

This week, we dial into New Orleans for a fascinating talk with master funk-guitarist and songwriter Leo Nocentelli. Discerning listeners may known him as the chief groove-creator behind the legendary group The Meters with Art Neville on keyboard, George Porter Jr. on bass, Zigaboo Modeliste on drums. There is no mistaking his soulful dagger-sharp signature sound leading often-sampled treasures like “Sissy Strut” and “Hey Pocky A-Way” (The Beastie Boys were big fans) - or even his slinky masterful backing of Dr. John’s classic Right Place, Wrong Time. But a new generation are learning of Nocentelli from last year's surprise release of his first and only solo record, the acoustic folk-driven Another Side, which was resurrected and marketed by Light In The Attic Records nearly fifty years after Leo first recorded it.

You don’t usually put your first record out when you’re zooming past your 75th birthday. The story of how Another Side still even exists is quite a yarn (one that Leo goes into great good-humored detail about in the taping) from the master tapes being lost in damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, to a master-copy being found almost impossibly after a storage-unit got foreclosed and the music was traded at a local swap-meet. Hearing him tell it, finding these songs from his younger days, was like finding an essential, lost piece of his soul. The record isn’t polished, but the sense of youthful exploration shines through. He’s searching for his voice in real time.

You wouldn’t think a rock-funk maven like Nocentelli would be inspired by songwriters like James Taylor or Elton John - but in many ways, it was the softer, more yearning, poetic side of rock-n-roll in the early 1970s that intrigued him most when he began writing songs like “Thinking Of The Day” in 1972, wondering if his place in the world, his “tomorrow would ever come.” Other standouts like “Riverfront” told the stories he couldn’t tell while penning the Meters' funky (but often instrumental) dance anthems. With his Meters mates chugging beside him in the studio, he can tell darker, more personal tales about his hard-working friends, like Aaron Neville (who he grew up with in the 7th Ward) and used to haul bananas off the boats in New Orleans to get by.

Nocentelli has had his shares of ups and downs as a lifer who has rode the tempests of the ever-evolving music industry. It’s a “brutal brutal business” he says at one point - and Leo shares that he had to sell some of his favorite guitars to keep going through the years. The song “Getting Nowhere” leans into the sense of helplessness and frustration many talented session players and touring side-men like him went through when royalties and fame and fortune passed them by as others rose to prominence.

Some things really haven’t changed in fifty years. But only a generational talent like Nocentelli could create sparkling guitar backdrops for artists as diverse as Dr. John, Otis Redding and even Jimmy Buffett, and keep his passion long enough to see new crowds packing houses on tours in 2022. It must be quite the feeling to finally be able to perform his own solo work - a half century after the songs first emerged and were almost lost forever.

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American Aquarium Sep 22, 2022

This week, we’re back for the fall season with the first face-to-face taping in nearly two years. I was able to catch up with the fearless deep-voiced frontman BJ Barham of North Carolina roots-rock favorites American Aquarium, in the front bar of The Troubadour in LA as his tour was passing through.

American Aquarium’s rawly personal new LP Chicamacomico dropped earlier this year and focuses on the twin losses of BJ’s mother and grandmother - as well as a dark point in his own marriage when he and his wife lost a child. He was already building a room for the little one during the pregnancy when everything changed. While fans have been following the band as a roaring country-tinged rock outfit since they formed in Raleigh around 2006 (the masterful Jason Isbell-produced Burn.Flicker.Die put them on the map right as they thought they would quit), it’s with Barham’s more poetic, stripped down offerings like 2020’s Lamentations and his searing solo work Rockingham that he is breaking new ground. Barham isn’t shy about processing his adoration for The Boss as the preeminent living rock-n-roll intellectual king and there are cuts off the new LP like “The Things We Lost Along The Way” that feel like they could have been recorded in that haunted place alongside Nebraska or Darkness on the Edge of Town.

As a new dad myself who just experienced my wife going through a terrifying birth, BJ’s songs hit me a little harder these days. I can’t think of a country artist today with as big a following from North Carolina to Texas who would center the title track of his record around the unspoken tragedy of a late miscarriage, but Barham pulls it off with a remarkable sensitivity. Like Isbell, Barham notes that his career really began when he got sober and could finally examine the dark corners of his history, his relationships and the fractured history of the south he grew up in.

Though hard to say, naming a record about working through deep loss Chicamacomico makes all the sense in the world. It’s a real place of course, a life-saving station built in 1874 on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and a beach area where BJ and his wife tried to go to blow off steam and forget their sorrows. Now a proud dad to a little daughter (see the cheerful country banger “Little Things”) Barham has learned that in the end, being a father and husband first doesn’t make him less of a hard-working, deep-thinking artist. In fact, it’s finding that balance that has allowed him to write the most powerful songs of his career.

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The Cactus Blossoms Jun 30, 2022

On this new episode, maybe we need something soft to counter the hard news many Americans have witnessed this week: so why not dive into the crystalline brother harmonies of Minneapolis duo The Cactus Blossoms, who just put out a lush new record One Day?

Sure, you could write off what Jack Torrey and Page Burkum are creating as simply a loving homage to roots pop pioneers like the Everly or Louvin Brothers with an acerbic modern twist. But with allies like David Lynch (who inserted them into his rebooted Twin Peaks universe) and Jenny Lewis in their corner (she joins them on the bouncy tear-jerker “Everyday”) there is something a bit more biting under the sweet-as-candy close harmonies and hushed acoustic guitars, Wurlitzer and pedal steel.

With a song like “I Could Almost Cry,” you have to dive beneath the aching minor country chords and Hank Williams-adjacent lyrics to find a Beatles Rubber Soul fury roiling underneath. As the soft-spoken mention in this freewheeling talk - what lurks inside many of the songs on One Day isn’t just the story of a broken love affair - but maybe of our slowly-breaking country which Jack and Page see out on the road and try and make sense of anew.

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Mary Gauthier Jun 03, 2022

This week, the show dials into the Nashville studio of one of the most gifted songwriters and empathic storytellers of her generation: Mary Gauthier.

While Mary has become known for her darkly honest tales of overcoming addiction and seeking truth and joy after overcoming her troubled upbringing in Louisiana, she was nominated for a Grammy for her devastating record Rifles & Rosary Beads (co-written with U.S. veterans and their loved-ones) and her new record may be her most surprising and moving collection yet.

Dark Enough To See The Stars, which drops June 3rd on Thirty Tigers, is in many ways an unabashed romance album, celebrating, in her own sardonic John Prine-meets-Anthony Bourdain style, how lovely it can be to find true love and creative joy at long last.

During the pandemic she began performing a weekly stream with her amor, the talented songwriter Jaimee Harris, called Sundays with Mary - and while Gauthier has now returned to the road, the cathartic weekly song sharing show has continued too. Harris helped write the swoon-worthy traveling song “Amsterdam” on the newest LP.

Gauthier’s road to stability and creative contentment was a long one. As she gamely explains in this intense conversation, she made the leap to leave the relentless life of being a cook and restaurant owner (and partaker in too many illegal substances) and devoted herself to songwriting after getting arrested at thirty. Was she an instant hit on folk stages in her then base of Boston? Not exactly. In fact, she couldn’t step on any stage without shaking. But she kept at it and the stories flowed. Early tours with Prine gave her confidence. Her breakout record Mercy Now (2005) chronicles her technicolor debauched early years with the clear-eyed grace of the newly sober, trying to give forgiveness to her troubled family and to herself for making it through. Being an openly gay songwriter, she took early inspiration from her heroes the Indigo Girls who showed her there was a place for a new kind of empowered songwriting, not just for women, but for anyone who wanted to look deeper into what women are experiencing behind closed doors.

If Gauthier has one superpower as a songwriter it’s her ability to empathize with everyone around her - even the troubled soldiers who she teamed up with on Rifles & Rosary Beads. We have way more in common with each other than many may think - overcoming trauma is pretty damn universal. Her book Saved By A Song: The Art And Healing Power Of Songwriting is her most powerful collection of stories and may explain best how her art has evolved in the last two decades, plus on the road.

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Buffalo Nichols May 05, 2022

This week on the show, we talk to a startling new talent placing a gut-punch into the folk and blues scene, the Milwaukee-raised and now Austin-based singer-songwriter Buffalo Nichols.

Growing up learning on his sister’s dreadnought guitar and then traveling widely through West Africa after high school drinking up the sounds of the kora and percussion players in Senegal, Carl Nichols began finding his voice and playing style in the haunting open and minor tunings first heard from bluesmen like Skip James, who he covers in his remarkable self-titled debut collection. Buffalo Nichols, which came in 2021, is a stark departure from what Carl would call the cheery “opinionless beer commercial blues” that has come to dominate the genre. Nichols’ work is often sparse and direct - just a man with his guitar and a microphone. The stories told in standout songs like “Another Man” and “Living Hell” don’t flinch from comparing how the experience of his elders a hundred years ago in the south may not look much different from men like George Floyd dying on that Minneapolis pavement. Is there catharsis or hope in the songs? Are they a call to action? Maybe that’s up to us to decide.

Carl will admit that it can be tricky trying play his songs like the searing album opener “Lost And Lonesome” in loud bars where people may just want to have a good time and not dive into the backroad history of racial injustice and institutionalized police violence. Thankfully his writing doesn't hide behind niceties and the recordings aren’t veiled by sonic artifice - Nichols speaks directly to the isolation and danger of being a young Black man in America and trying to navigate the unease of bringing his stories to an often mostly white Americana-adjacent audience. Even more upbeat numbers like “Back On Top” call to mind the ominous juke-joint growl of John Lee Hooker, bringing us into dimly lit scenes where even late-night pleasure may have its next-morning consequences.

If there’s one thing we learned during this taping, it’s that Carl doesn’t want to just "write songs to make people feel good” - but he does want to tell stories that make the isolated and lost feel less so. Maybe that is the most important function of music truly steeped in the blues tradition: the ability to transform pain into progress. The messages may not be what people always want to hear, but the groundswell rising behind Carl's stark timeless tales is indeed growing. With recent appearances on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts and big time dates like Lollapalooza on the books for the summer, folks will be hearing a lot more from Buffalo Nichols.

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Penny & Sparrow Apr 14, 2022

This week, The Show On The Road is back with an intimate talk with Texas-born folk pop collaborators Andy Baxter and Kyle Jahnke who for the last decade have toured the USA as symbiotic harmonizers Penny & Sparrow.

Their lush 2022 release Olly Olly showcases their unique lifelong friendship and was their first collection where they relied only on each other from beginning to end. There is a field-recording looseness to some of the songs with sounds of nature and a cinematic string section lifting their effortless harmonies throughout. “Need You” could be about lovers re-finding each other in a dark time, or really it could be about Andy and Kyle themselves, reaching out to connect in every tumultuous season of their lives. Indeed they did mention that they’ve probably slept in the same bed more times with each other on tour than with their partners at home.

While they both grew up in religious families, the act of two men, best friends in so many ways, diving into their fantasies and fears like in the sensuous “Voodoo” for all to hear might be considered a radical act, but they’ve been making these kinds of confessions in sonic form from the beginning of their songwriting partnership.. Their standout 2013 record Tenboom started popping up in playlists immediately and their now beloved songs have been streamed nearly 100 million times and counting.

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St. Paul and the Broken Bones Mar 10, 2022

This week, we bring you a conversation with Birmingham, Alabama’s Paul Janeway, frontman of the storied soul and art-pop experimenters St. Paul & The Broken Bones.

While many first learned of Paul as the bespectacled former bank teller and accounting student who went from playing tiny clubs around the south to stalking stages from Red Rocks to Coachella in resplendent sequined robes, howling like a reincarnation of Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett with a bold brass section behind him, it really almost never happened at all. A decade ago, Paul made a throwback soul EP with his longtime collaborator Jesse Phillips and friends as a last hurrah before signing off from the dispiriting quest of getting folks to pay attention to his songs as he tilted towards his thirties. But then the wheels started turning. Folks started packing their shows at the Bottle Tree Cafe (RIP) in Birmingham. Ben Tanner of fellow rising star southerners Alabama Shakes helped Paul make the more polished and kinetic EP Half The City in 2014, and with just a Bandcamp release to start, it began selling like crazy. Like, more than most pop records; one-hundred, then two-hundred-thousand copies. Late night shows and world tours and TV placements and opening slots for The Rolling Stones beckoned. The press couldn’t stop asking: how could a guy like this sing like THAT? Paul was suddenly an unlikely star on the burgeoning Americana circuit. Wells Fargo would have to find another guy.

But as Paul discusses throughout our talk, just creating a soul and R&B revival sound was never his plan. He loves losing himself in art museums, exploring Greek myths and diving into deep space travel, and with more daring follow up records Sea Of Noise (2016) and Young Sick Camellia (2018) creating danceable synth-funk bops like “Flow With It (You Got Me)” and “Apollo” - which also have dark underbellies if you listen closely - the group has become much harder to place, in the best way possible.

This year’s release Alien Coast shows Paul and his crack team of collaborators Jesse Phillips (bass), Browan Lollar (guitar), Kevin Leon (drums), Al Gamble (keyboards), Allen Branstetter (trumpet), Chad Fisher (trombone), and Amari Ansari (saxophone), pushing the envelope even further. The ominous narrator in “Bermejo And The Devil” sets the scene for a dreamy trip into the jagged edges of ancient paintings, intergalactic storms and long lost stories - with quieter standouts like “Popcorn Ceiling” grounding the record in themes much more earthbound - like the feeling of isolation Paul felt after traveling the world from stage to stage and lonely hotel room to hotel room, wringing himself out each night before tireless audiences.

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Keb' Mo' Feb 24, 2022

This week, to help celebrate the end of Black History Month, we bring you an in-depth conversation with Compton-raised blues and roots master Keb' Mo', who has helped preserve the haunting Delta blues of Robert Johnson while also making his own cheerful and slyly subversive R&B Americana for the last thirty years - winning four Grammys along the way. His newest album, Good To Be, was inspired by returning to his neighborhood in LA and rediscovering the community.

Born Kevin Roosevelt Moore to parents who migrated from the Deep South, Keb’ Mo’ shortened his name and began playing in a variety of styles from calypso (he played steel drums) to pop before finding an audience playing guitar in local theater productions, and attracting the attention of Martin Scorsese who featured him in his Blues compilation. His 1994 self-titled debut was a critical and commercial success.

Keb’ cuts a dashing figure onstage and has been featured in numerous films and TV shows, appearing in The West Wing, stealing scenes as Howlin’ Wolf on CMT’s Sun Records, and playing the haunting bluesman Possum in John Sayles’ 2007 film Honeydripper. The Obamas brought him to the White House to play, too. As he mentioned in the podcast, it was being in the presence of Michelle that was his favorite memory of that special trip.

Keb’ Mo’ has especially cherished collaborating with some of his musical heroes like Taj Mahal, Rosanne Cash and recently on his upbeat 2022 LP with Darius Rucker on “Good Strong Woman.” Stick around to the end to hear him talk about hanging out with Bill Withers and remaking the classic “Lean On Me.”

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Allison Russell Jan 21, 2022

This week, we launch season 4 of the show with a bilingual banjo-slinging singer-songwriter originally from Montreal and now based in Nashville: Allison Russell.

After two decades of quietly creating heart-on-her-sleeve roots music in hard-touring groups like Po’ Girl, Birds Of Chicago, and recently the supergroup Our Native Daughters - playing the guitar, clarinet, banjo and singing in English and French - the spotlight finally fell straight on Russell in 2021. With the help of her husband and longtime creative partner JT Nero, she released her visceral debut solo record Outside Child which confronts her traumatic childhood head on.

Rarely has an album struck such a nerve in the Americana community, as songs like “4th Day Prayer” use the slippery soul of Al Green’s best work and Mahalia Jackson’s gospel inspiration to paint in white-knuckled detail how she escaped the abusive home of her stepfather for the graveyards and streets of Montreal. As she tells us in the intense conversation from her home in Tennessee, it was her songwriting hero Brandi Carlisle who went to bat for her (a bold Instagram DM set fate in motion,) helping get her raw, unreleased songs to Fantasy Records. Thankfully, they wanted to take a leap. Even President Obama noticed after the songs began to circulate and he put her ominous radio standout “Nightflyer” on his favorite songs of the year list. The album has since been nominated for three Grammy awards.

While Allison may feel like an “overnight sensation” to those just discovering her on AAA radio, hearing her soaring voice shining on stages from Carnegie Hall, Red Rocks and the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she’s been playing hundreds of shows in small clubs and festivals around the world for twenty-two years and counting. It hasn’t been an easy road, as she often had to her young daughter on the trail with her.

With a new book deal in the works continuing her story where Outside Child left off, there is much more to come from Russell. A champion for the often forgotten victims of domestic and sexual abuse, listening to Russell speak reminds one more of a fiery community organizer than a singer. Did your host try and convince Russell to run for office? Maybe.

Stick around to hear her dive into one of her favorite tracks from the new record, the hopeful clarinet shuffle “Poison Arrow."

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Season 4 Sneak Peek Jan 20, 2022

We’re back! Season 4 is here and we have some very special conversations coming your way. Listen in for a little preview of our upcoming deep dives with Grammy-winners like Keb’ Mo’, newly-risen roots star Allison Russell (nominated twice this year), howling frontman Paul Janeway of soul icons St. Paul and The Broken Bones, longtime folk-pop hero and festival organizer Drew Holcomb, and a special unearthed episode with macabre folk-punk Amigo The Devil. New episodes return every week.

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AHI Dec 17, 2021

To finish out the season, we bring you a talk from Toronto with rising roots singer-songwriter and folk philosopher AHI (pronounced “eye”), who celebrated the release of his acclaimed third full-length album Prospect in November.

Born in Brampton, Ontario, to Jamaican and Trinidadian immigrant parents, AHI (short for Ahkinoah Habah Izarh) didn’t initially plan to pursue music -- and scared his large family of teachers and educators by jumping ship from college and traveling wildly instead with just his guitar by his side. Stints seeing the remote villages in Ethiopia and Trinidad as well as backpacking all across his native Canada filled his songwriting inkwell to bursting. He also began building his family (he has four children who often appear in playful videos), and he isn't shy about saying his wife is his muse and number one supporter. His forceful We Made It Through The Fire came in 2017, with the catchy and tender tune “Ole’ Sweet Day” being streamed nearly 20 million times since.

Becoming a traveler again, this time as a storyteller sharing his ever-growing catalogue (the hooky and politically-charged In Our Time came in 2018) forced AHI to be away from his family for months at a time -- and as the pandemic arrived, his priorities began to shift. Prospect is his most heartfelt and introspective work yet, diving into where he stands as a Black man raising Black boys in a dangerous but increasingly hopeful world. Using booming gospel backing vocals and sweeping church-like reverb behind his warm acoustic guitar and silky voice, a standout like “Coldest Fire” feels like a post-George Floyd reckoning piece as well as a pure poetic pop jam.

Stick around to the end of the talk to hear AHI discuss how he would make vegan nachos for Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr. and Dave Chapelle -- and he ends the show with an acoustic rendition of the sexy “Until You.”

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Brandy Clark Dec 02, 2021

This week, we bring you a conversation with one of Nashville’s supreme songwriters: Brandy Clark.

Born in a logging town in Washington state, Clark started playing guitar at age nine before setting it aside and getting a scholarship for basketball. Music kept tugging her back in though. Reba recorded two of her songs in “Cry" and "The Day She Got Divorced" (like a modern Patsy Cline, Brandy has a knack for nailing a heartbreaker) and she soon found a valuable mentor in Marty Stuart, who helped her make her Opry debut in 2012.

While you may just be learning about Clark’s stellar solo work which mixes old school and witty new school country with some of the tightest pop hooks in the game, Clark has quietly been co-writing for some of country and rock’s leading ladies for years, like Miranda Lambert, Kacey Musgraves, LeAnn Rimes and Sheryl Crow to name a few. But it was with her lyrically masterful, lushly-orchestrated 2020 LP Your Life Is A Record that doors started opening in a whole new way. 2021 saw an extended cut deluxe version drop.

In this unearthed conversation (blame a faulty hard-drive), we go through her darkest breakup songs, hear about her tastiest kiss-offs and discuss her unique perspective of Nashville’s Music Row Boys’ Club.

Don’t miss the end of the taping when Brandy discusses teaming up with her songwriting hero Randy Newman on the cheeky tune “Bigger Boat” and she plays an exclusive acoustic performance.

This episode of The Show On The Road is brought to you by WYLD Gallery: an Austin, Texas-based art gallery that exclusively features works by Native American artists. Find unique gifts for your loved ones this holiday season and support Indigenous artists at the same time. Pieces at ALL price points are available at wyld.gallery

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Hayes Carll Nov 18, 2021

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 anniversary of his first album Flowers and Liquor which he wrote while still in college in Arkansas. His acclaimed follow-up Little Rock (2005) remains one of the only self-released albums to make to #1 on the Americana chart.

Hard-charging years on the road and humble years before, getting by working long nights at Chili’s, Red Lobster and more, made Hayes truly appreciate when his star in the roots circuit began rising. His tongue-and-cheek country kiss off “She Left Me For Jesus” off his breakout major label debut Trouble In Mind (2008) might have shocked mainstream radio programmers, but it brought in a whole new wave of fans who have been diligently following him across the world ever since. KMAG YOYO & Other American Stories came in 2011 and pulled even fewer punches - showing his knack for a devastating hook. "KMAG YOYO" is army-speak for "Kiss my ass, guys, you're on your own."

Some artists may bring their wives into the studio as a cute cameo now and again, but Carll is lucky enough to have artist and sought-after producer Allison Moorer on the home team. Together with Kenny Greenberg, she helped bring out a softer, deeper side of Carll on the newest You Get It All - with the standout heartbreaker “Help Me Remember” centering on his experience watching his grandfather in Texas drift away with dementia.

Maybe the most fun on the new record comes from the rollicking opener “Nice Things” - which reveals why Carll may not be getting on right-leaning pop-country radio anytime soon, while still winning legions of listeners anyway: it’s a countrified conversation between God and her screwed up human subjects on earth... and God is a frustrated (and rightly so) lady.

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The Felice Brothers Nov 11, 2021

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’ve joined roots-pop luminaries like Bright Eyes at venues as storied as Radio City Music Hall - but somehow the gritty, back-alley bar seems like their natural habitat. Ian, James and their longtime quartet (Will Lawrence and bassist Jesske Hume round out the band) returned after years of hibernation to release their daring party-through-the-apocalypse rollercoaster of a new LP From Dreams To Dust in 2021 on Yep Roc Records.

Some bands record at home, or maybe in tricked-out cabins or plush studios, but The Felice Brothers seem to make records that use their unique and often bizarre surroundings as an added character in the band. Their beloved self-titled record, which came out 2008, feels like a gin-soaked saloon party where Hemingway and Lou Reed and Sly Stone would join in on swaying sing-alongs besides a sweat-soaked piano. It was somehow recorded in a converted chicken coop, while their brassy, bizarro-rock romp Celebration, Florida (2011) was recorded in a booming high school gymnasium. “Honda Civic” is a musical-theater-esque favorite, with an explosion at the local Wonder Bread warehouse taking center stage in the narrative. Does any of it make sense? Does it matter?

Their newest work is a more emotional, sonically lush, storytelling driven operation, having been recorded in a church in Harlemville, New York with award-winning mixer Mike Mogis at the helm. Mortality takes the spotlight. Ian Felice is in rare form here, spitting more words and setting more strange scenes per song than most slam-poets or absurdist playwrights. The lead song “Jazz On The Autobahn” has become a staple on Americana radio, showcasing what TFB have always done best: taking their listeners on a white-knuckle ride that has no predicable end or resolve in sight.

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Pokey LaFarge Oct 28, 2021

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 criss-crossed the globe making his own brand of historic-minded, literary-tinged folk blues. Europe, especially, has become a second home. From his fashion sense, to his high-cutting delivery, LaFarge seems like he could have stepped out of a road show with Hank Williams and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and yet, rock luminaries like Jack White saw something deeper than just a player of old-time covers. Opening for White got LaFarge in front of huge crowds, and standout records like the danceable Something In The Water (2015) and the darker Rock Bottom Rhapsody (2020) saw him transition from front-porch country folk to muscular jangly rock-n-soul.

Out on his own from a young age, Pokey began busking to get by and soon teamed up with the South City Three to create his first run of albums in 2009.

If there’s a few things that helped his more uplifting 2021 LP In The Blossom of Their Shade come to be, they may have been falling in love again, rediscovering his faith in a higher power, and taking plenty of power naps during his songwriting sessions. During the pandemic, Pokey also began helping the local homeless community in LA.

Stick around to hear an exclusive acoustic performance of his single “Get It ’Fore It’s Gone”.

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Silvana Estrada Oct 14, 2021

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. Songs from her first EP including the soaring electronic-beat driven “El Guardo” have been listened to over twenty million times and counting - and a collaboration with Mexican roots-rock hero Natalie Lafourcade came last year too.

At only 24, Estrada, the daughter of two instrument makers, is just coming into her own as a songwriter, dipping into her love affairs and private passions with a true clear-eyed poet's pen. Singles off her debut album Marchita for Glassnote Records have already landed to great acclaim, and she’s the label's first Spanish-language signing ever. Look no further than the heartbreaker “Tristeza” for a first taste of her rustic, primordial sound.

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Asleep at the Wheel (Ray Benson) Sep 30, 2021

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 which drops on October 1. The record covers old classics and tells new stories, with spritely cameos from fellow Texans Lyle Lovett and Willie Nelson. Aligning behind Benson’s commanding, deep voice and impeccable song-historian’s taste, Ray has managed what few bandleaders in country music - or any genre - have: keeping a talented rotating band of mostly-acoustic players together from 1972 on, with little break from the road. Willie Nelson and others have long championed their work, and indeed the band had fans in even higher places: on September 11, 2001, the group was set to perform at The White House. Asleep at the Wheel’s story is really one of perseverance and transformation. How did a Jewish kid from the the Philly suburbs end up as a Texas cowboy music icon who toured with Bob Dylan and George Strait (just ask Bob about changing identities), wrote songs and acted in movies with Dolly Parton and Blondie, and became the foremost interpreter of the rollicking music of Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys? Only in America, you could say - but Ray would just tell you that he loves the music deep in his bones, and it’s what he wakes up every day to create and save. One of the most forward-thinking things Ray did from the very beginning was share the mic with a myriad of talented female vocalists, which maybe confused some radio programmers (who is leader of this outfit?) but made the road shows eternally entertaining and unique. That tradition continues. Also featured on the new record are lovely collabs with Lee Ann Womack and Emmylou Harris.

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Sammy Rae & The Friends Sep 16, 2021

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 small. Get a few like-minded musicians in a room, work and work your best songs, try packing out a few local shows, put some radio-ready singles on the internet, do a music video or two. See what happens. But Sammy Rae does her own thing and has done pretty much the opposite. Much like your host of this fine program (who went against all advice and began Dustbowl Revival as an 8-10 piece genre-bending New Orleans-string band mashup in 2008), Sammy has harnessed the open-minded, countercultural energy of Broadway musicals, the slinky funk-pop of the 1970s AM radio and her own rapid-fire poetic style to create a massive sound that could only be made with three singers, two saxophones, and a fearless, seasoned rhythm section. And they all are friends who don’t just treat this as a temporary weekend gig. Too much too soon? Well, ask the packed houses up and down the Eastern Seaboard if they care about playing it safe. Sammy knows the road ahead for The Friends won’t be easy - but so far, the response from listeners has been undeniable. Starting at tiny supportive clubs in New York like Rockwood Music Hall and graduating to the biggest rooms in one of the hardest towns to impress, the group struck a nerve with their debut EP The Good Life in 2018 - with the standout jazzy experiment “Kick It To Me” gaining nearly ten million steams and counting. "Don’t record songs over four minutes long," they keep telling us. "No one will pay attention!" Yet their most listened to track clocks in at nearly seven minutes. What’s the lesson here? For Sammy it’s finally learning to trust her instincts and be herself. Their upbeat EP Let’s Throw A Party dropped in 2021 - and make sure you stick around to the end of the talk to hear how Sammy’s experience as a queer teenager in a Connecticut girl's Catholic school informed their new track “Jackie Onassis.”

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Madi Diaz Sep 02, 2021

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 unlike the rest of us who may try and forget all about those lost love affairs, Diaz does the opposite. She chronicles the destruction of her last relationship with a craftsman’s precision, creating a series of unvarnished, seething, diaristic songs about an ongoing and fractured grieving process. Diaz opens with the gut-puncher “Rage,” which says a lot even if it's under two minutes long. Is it ok to not be ready to move on? To hate that you HAVE to move on? Soon after she’s “Crying In Public” and immediately after that she’s baring her teeth in the standout acoustic single “Resentment” - which was initially covered by moody pop hero Kesha. Does it get brighter from there? Not exactly, but it’s better that way. It could be way off base, but maybe History Of A Feeling is our updated Jagged Little Pill without the pop artifice. Not that Diaz sings at all like Alanis, but a similar hope for heartbroken catharsis weaves its way throughout. Working with Big Thief collaborator and soulful producer Andrew Sarlo surely helped capture the intimate vibe, with certain songs barely needing more than a guitar and her direct, cutting voice. Without an army of synths or the armor of an orchestra behind her, or the security blanket of a band smoothing out the edges, the rawness of the emotion in each song sings out louder. Diaz, who grew up in Lancaster, PA with a dad who had his own Frank Zappa cover band (she mentioned that she indeed had her own teen version) and then later dropped out of Berklee College of Music to hit the road with her own work, has never been afraid to pick at the shrapnel in some of her deepest wounds to create songs that leave their own mark after you listen. She’s put out more atmospheric pop-forward work - like We Threw Our Hearts In The Fire (2012) and Phantom (2017) - for a decade, but this quieter, more personal record feels like she’s finally found her sound. Pulling no punches, Diaz bravely includes songs like “Man In Me” which hints that she lost a long-time partner who also then transitioned. In a way, it was almost a double-loss that left her feeling confused and guilty for feeling angry at all. And yet - when we reach the end of History Of A Feeling, the feeling we get isn’t bitterness or rage any longer - it may be that most elusive of the grieving steps: acceptance. And maybe even forgiveness.

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Hiss Golden Messenger Aug 19, 2021

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 if deeply examining his own faults and features as a father, husband, citizen and artist can help us understand our own struggles during this deeply strange time. Despite the often delicate delivery of his vocal performances, it isn’t a shock to see that Taylor, who grew up in California before heading to the south, did start in the hardcore and punk worlds before he became one of the faces of the Americana resurgence. While a song like “Hardlytown” feels like a jangly lost Basement Tapes take from The Band, Taylor subtly mines his own confusion about how broken our once-ambitious country has become. Why can’t we come together to address climate change, gun violence or systemic poverty? Is he doing enough? While Taylor has been open about examining his own depression and doubt over the last few years, it’s through these songs that we can see a light at the end of the dark tunnel forming. Maybe it’s the personal acceptance of the confusion and helplessness that makes Quietly Blowing It pack such a quiet punch and seem somehow sonically uplifting. During our conversation, Taylor would be the first to tell you that while folky slow-burn songs like “Way Back In The Way Back” seem to exalt the healing power of nature while questioning the broken bureaucracies that govern our unique American way of life (“up with the mountains, down with the system!”) he isn’t trying to make a statement. One thing that we all learned to do during our ongoing lockdowns in 2020 and beyond is to think smaller. We don’t have to change everything from the moment we wake up. Maybe it’s about going within and seeing the world just from the scope of your own neighborhood, your own family, your own green growing hissing backyard. A song doesn’t have to solve it all in one go. Gathering confidence from in his previous standout records Heart Like A Levee (2016), Hallelujah Anyhow (2017) and the Grammy-nominated Terms Of Surrender (2019), it’s clear that while the last few years haven’t been easy for Taylor, he’s reaching new heights creatively. Quietly Blowing It may seem like a defeatist message – but actually its more like laying all the cards on the table. Honesty is freeing. Taylor will be embarking on a rare solo tour coming up, which would be an amazing way to see his intimate brand of songwriting up close.

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The Ballroom Thieves Aug 05, 2021

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 heads and fill rooms when they added Peters and her fierce and poetic singing-style around eight years back. The Queen-meets-Wings stacks of harmonies, gorgeous string arrangements and slam-poetry off-kilter lyrics instantly made them stick out from their gentler rootsy peers. They recorded the beloved harmony-drenched debut A Wolf In The Doorway in 2015 and followed up with their soulful, expansively electric Nettwerk debut Deadeye, which has been streamed over 50 million times and counting. A tasteful covers record followed as they established themselves as international festival favorites. 2020 was supposed to be a triumphant year for the group, but of course that’s not how anything went last year, for anybody. Their playfully experimental and fearlessly political release Unlovely (your host Z. Lupetin’s new favorite record of this fractious era) got buried in the late winter tumult of the new pandemic, forcing the group to call off all touring and shelving all promotion. Holed up at home, the chastened group hoped the world might discover the deliciously angular anthems like “Vanity Trip," “Homme Run” and the epic tempo-jumping opening title track (featuring fellow New England harmony-masters Darlingside) at a later, calmer date. The world has not gotten calmer of course. Earley and Peters had to push off marrying each other and percussionist Devin Mauch had to make the tough decision to leave the group and focus on his art career after a decade sharing stages across the world with his friends. Despite all this, our talk was an upbeat one. The group recently returned to performing live and sold out their hometown venue the Sinclair in Boston with an expanded group of musicians backing their ever-evolving sound. New music is on the way - but in the meantime, give yourself a day to sit with Unlovely: one of the true lost gems of the 2020 musical year.

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Lake Street Dive Jul 22, 2021

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. In 2021, after three years since their last, they celebrated the release of their much-awaited seventh studio album 'Obviously.' Most notable bands are like sunsets: they flash their colors, they create a few memories and fade away. And most groups that attempt somehow to connect virtuoso players in the jazz, roots and rock ‘n’ roll scenes never actually live in the same town and each have a Beatles-esque knack for singing sublime harmony and writing effortlessly killer hooks (see fan favorites like “Go Down Smooth,” “Good Kisser” or their new Tik-Tok earworm “Hypotheticals”) and also have their own solo groups? Maybe they last a few fiery tours and finally disband. And yet Lake Street Dive have become a steady standard-bearer in the nascent Americana world – and only seem to be getting tighter and more creative 17 years in. Founded in 2004 by luminous singer Rachael Price, upright bassist-songwriter Bridget Kearney, high-energy drummer Mike Calabrese, and the recently departed guitarist-trumpeter Mike “McDuck” Olsen at The New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, the group caught new wind and inspiration after adding kinetic keyboardist/singer-songwriter Akie Bermiss in 2017. After months of planning, we finally caught up with Calabrese and Bermiss on the Zoomways to discuss how they are forging a fresh path forward after a tough year and a half away. Make sure you stick around to end of the episode to hear how they meticulously created their knockout a-cappella pop gem “Sarah” which closes out their new LP.

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Menahan Street Band (The Daptone Sound) Jun 24, 2021

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 Jones and Charles Bradley, most don’t know the bandleaders and songwriters behind their intricately arranged works. Guitarist/producer Brenneck has been the secret sauce in helping hitmaker Mark Ronson create the vintage backdrops for crossover stars like Amy Winehouse, while Steinweiss’ slinky drumming can be heard across the Daptone universe, including on Jones, Winehouse and Lee Fields and The Expressions records, not to mention his work with Lady Gaga, St. Vincent and Bruno Mars. For the first time in a decade, MSB – which includes Dave Guy (The Roots), Leon Michaels (The Black Keys) and Nick Movshon (The Expressions) – have reconvened the troops to create their most effortlessly cinematic collection yet: the cheekily titled The Exciting Sounds Of The Menahan Street Band. The album art alone signifies a sensual, intimate evening is ahead to whoever listens. Is the design NSFW? Maybe. Brenneck called into the taping from outside LA and Steinweiss from his studio in New York City. The conservation jumped back to how they formed the group in 2007, how they convinced Bradley to join them in making new music (he had been doing James Brown impression work) and how they find that out-of-body improvisational zen zone which creates the aural moods of mystery and intrigue – showcased best in the reverby Bond-like jam “Starchaser.” A favorite surreal moment that Brenneck mentioned was driving through Brooklyn hearing their song sampled by Jay-Z. For a moment, their horns were blaring from every car radio on the island. While hip hop legends often find their beats and backdrops from classic soul and R&B vinyl, notables like Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, Travis Scott and 50 Cent have mined the funky MSB catalog for years. Sir Paul McCartney also used their services. If you need an instant vibe, they’ve got you. Even in sparkling trumpet-led themes like “Glovebox Pistol,” which clocks in at a minute and eight seconds long, you can see a velvet-boothed, smoke-filled scene unfolding, bringing to mind the lush scores of The Godfather or The Score. Only recently have star backing-bands like The Wrecking Crew, The Swampers, and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section come to be appreciated for creating some of the most beloved songs in the American pop canon, from The Beach Boys and Aretha Franklin, to Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and The Staples Singers. It can be argued that in the 21st century, Brenneck and Steinweiss (and the work of The Menahan Street Band) deserve to be in that conversation. With one listen of The Exciting Sounds Of The Menahan Street Band, you are transported – exactly where, is up to you.

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Robert Finley Jun 17, 2021

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) came in 2017 and in May of 2021, he celebrated the release of the deeply personal follow-up Sharecropper’s Son. As you can hear in the taping, even in his late sixties, Finley is a playful force to be reckoned with and isn’t shy about sharing how faith and music have gotten him through decades of tragedy and hardship. In 2019 he even reached the semi-finals of America’s Got Talent. Growing up in a religious home where blues and soul music was rarely allowed to be heard, Finley worked as an army helicopter repairman and professional carpenter for many years, often keeping his keen musical ideas to himself. He may now be legally blind, but the always-sharp dressed Finley (he loves a snakeskin jacket) was spotted busking on the streets of Helena, Arkansas and the blues-obsessed Auerbach was smitten with Finley’s raw, swampy Jimi Hendrix meets James Brown tone. Both of his critically-applauded releases subsequently came out on Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound, which has become a home for previously unheralded black artists like Yola, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, and Leo Bud Welch.

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Amy Helm Jun 10, 2021

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 proving ground to begin her exploration in creating her own soaring songs in the folk, blues and soul traditions. She waited until she was forty-four to release her acclaimed first solo record Didn’t It Rain, with her father lending his signature earthy drums on several tracks – and this year, she teamed up with multi-instrumentalist and producer Josh Kaufman (Taylor Swift, Bonny Light Horseman) to create What The Flood Leaves Behind, her most emotive and lushly-realized project yet. With her dogs often joining the conversation from her upstate home, Amy dives into her early years trying her hand at singing in New York City cafes, having folks walk out of her folk fest shows because her band was too loud, founding the band Ollabelle, joining her stepdad Donald Fagen’s group Steely Dan onstage, backing up legends like Stax soul artist William Bell and finally reconnecting with her dad in her mid-thirties as he began his late life renaissance, hosting his epic Americana throwdowns called “The Midnight Rambles.” It was being a member of that crack “ramble band” that gave Amy the final push to pursue her own lead voice. While Levon famously struggled with heroine addiction and the foibles of post-Bob Dylan and The Band fame fallout, it was when he got clean and took Amy under his wing that both of their stars began to rise again. You can hear Amy singing on his gorgeous return in 2017’s Dirt Farmer. Becoming more ambitious, Amy laid down her upbeat rock-n-soul-tinged second album with producer Joe Henry in LA with notable players like Doyle Bramhall II, Tyler Chester, and a vocal choir of Allison Russell, JT Nero (Birds of Chicago) and Adam Minkoff. This Too Shall Light was released in 2018 on Yep Roc Records and Amy began to be recognized as one of the most powerful singers touring the Americana circuit. Her newest record was recorded at her spiritual home, Levon Helm Studios, where each ramble still takes place on the weekends. During the pandemic, Helm had a unique idea to keep her creative muscles strong, even when live music gatherings were not technically allowed in public. She began setting up “curbside concerts” for her friends and any curious fans who missed her songs, touring around Woodstock with her guitar, bringing a little joy to her shut-in listeners during New York’s darkest hours. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear her introduce the spiritual opening track of What The Flood Leaves Behind, “Verse 23.”

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CAKE (John McCrea) Jun 03, 2021

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, spaghetti western brass, muscular guitars and spacey synths, and becoming one of the best selling groups of the 1990s and early 2000s, John and an ever-changing group of collaborators have always operated more like a DIY garage band. They produce and record everything themselves and exist outside the music industry spotlight - only putting out their oddball genre-defying work when it’s ready. While you may have forgotten some of their danceable favorites that burned through college and indie-rock radio - with further study, songs like “No Phone” which tackled our toxic relationship to technology (even before smartphones came out) now seem both deeply of, and way ahead of, their time. Critics were often confused by their lyrically dense, subversively political records like 'Motorcade Of Generosity,' 'Prolonging The Magic' and 'Comfort Eagle' - and with their obtuse album art, strange homemade videos, McCrea’s conspiratorial slam-poet frontman delivery and his shaggy Sacramento-based bandmates, it was all quite atypical in the era of shiny studio-created MTV and radio-ready rock. And yet their legions of fans, including our host Z. Lupetin, ate it up and continue to anxiously wait for what’s coming next from the group. After a decade of home recording and environmental activism (with a recent emphasis on combating deforestation) McCrea hints that a new album and a return to playing may finally be in the works.

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Samantha Fish May 13, 2021

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 inappropriate. Two songwriters speaking into one mic at close range? With everyone crammed into a little trailer? No sanitizer in sight? Indeed. And yet as in-person interviews are set to commence and venues are reopening at last, it felt good to remind ourselves what a real Show On The Road conversation felt like. There are no Zoom glitches or quick edits needed here. We talk about favorite restaurants in New Orleans, dream festival lineups, guitar solo self-esteem pep talks, we question if Elvis’s ghost is watching over us as we record – and you’ll notice the sound is not pristine, but maybe that’s the best part. You can hear the squeak of the seats, the grit in the voices before they are warmed up for an upcoming set. There’s a band warming up in the background and you can hear Samantha tuning her acoustic guitar just off mic before playing her favorite forlorn love-song “I Need You More” at the end. For folks who are not familiar with Samantha’s work, she’s been one of the hardest touring bandleaders on the blues and Americana circuit since she started recording out of her hometown of Kansas City a decade ago. She was still slinging and delivering pizzas then, but now she’s an award-winning veteran of various music scenes now, a headliner at music fests from the Crescent City (she played her first Jazz Fest) to jazz and blues gatherings across Europe and beyond. With seven albums and counting under her belt, including her Memphis brass-embellished newest Kill Or Be Kind – and her standout rocker Belle Of The West, (created with Luther Luther Dickinson – which we discuss at length here,) Samantha is proving again and again that she is in it for the long haul. One of the more moving moments of the talk centers on Samantha’s memories of growing up playing the drums and jamming with her musical family. Even then she didn’t see many girls like her taking the lead guitar as their destiny – she had to believe in herself before anyone else would, and here she is. Representation matters and Fish is showing a whole generation of young players that despite Rolling Stone barely mentioning women in their ongoing “greatest guitarists of all time” lists – there are new people who walk and talk and look a little different taking up the mantle of guitar god (or goddess).

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Lera Lynn May 05, 2021

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 member in Season 2. We’ve all had our dark moments during this last year. For Lynn it was figuring out how to put out a new album, which she had painstakingly make herself in isolation (see Springsteen’s moody and homemade Nebraska,) right as her first baby was on the way without any family being allowed to help shoulder the load. At times the burden seemed too much to bear - but what emerged was a touchstone set of songs that unintentionally seemed to pinpoint the exact center of our collective dread - and the flickers of hope of a new beginning that can come out of a such a societal time-quake. Searching reverby rock standouts like "Are You Listening?" seem to be calling out into a void that we never knew we had, perhaps reminding us again how much we need human touch, friendship, family warmth and true soul connection. While we are currently emerging into the light-filled end of this Covid-19 tunnel, it’s important to note that this interview was conducted back in 2020 in the thick of the harshest lockdowns (the taping footage was lost, then finally found) and songs like “Isolation” hit the exact pain point for many artists like Lynn who once thrived on bringing live-music’s unique sweaty joy to strangers in a new town each night. Lynn’s rising calls of “Is anybody out there?” ring like echoes from a very recent bad dream - a dream of course that is still very much a painful reality in many parts of the world. Coming out of the fertile roots rock scene of Athens, GA, Lynn’s earlier records like the intimate and country-inflected Have You Met Lera Lynn? from 2011 and its pop-forward follow ups The Avenues (2016) and Resistor (2017) focused mostly on her endlessly warm and rich voice - and the fury and frustration she was processing growing up an only child of an alcoholic dad. But it was her guest-star-laden LP Plays Well With Others (2018) where Lynn began to realize the extent of her gifted arranging and vocal powers together. Teaming up with a murderer’s row of Americana artists like Shovels & Rope, John Paul White of the Civil Wars and Rodney Crowell, it may be the most high-spirited of her works - like a basement party jam session going off the rails in all the best ways. The tough year at home did make Lynn come to appreciate how far she’s come since those early days - maybe it took a decade of hard-won acceptance and practice to be able to create On My Own without any help from other musicians or producers - and the result is a wonder to hear. Now if she could just play it for an actual live audience. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear her introduce her favorite broken-romance number "So Far."

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Ani DiFranco Apr 28, 2021

This week on The Show On The Road, we bring you a truly inspiring talk with the activist, author, and free-spirited feminist folk icon Ani DiFranco, who just released her lushly orchestrated twenty-second album: Revolutionary Love. Many things have been said about the music Ani DiFranco has created for the last thirty years since she burst on the scene with her fiery self-titled LP in 1990. With her shaved head on the cover, fearlessly bisexual love songs, dexterous guitar work and hold-no-prisoners lyrics sparing no one from her poetic magnifying glass, DiFranco’s persona became almost synonymous with a rejuvenated women’s movement that blossomed in the late-1990’s Lilith Fair moment. And yet she was always a bit more committed to the cause than some of her more pop-leaning contemporaries, who faded away as soon as their hits subsided. Framing herself somewhere between the rebellious folk-singing teacher Pete Seeger and the gender-fluid show-stopping rock spirit in Prince, (who she recorded with after he became a fan,) DiFranco was always just as passionate about raising awareness for abortion rights, ensuring safety for gay and trans youth and bringing music to prisons, as she was promoting her latest musical experiment. She began playing publicly around age ten, and as a nineteen-year-old runaway from Buffalo, NY, she started her own label, Righteous Babe Records, that allowed her to operate free of corporate (and overwhelmingly male) oversight. Indeed, despite gaining a wide international fanbase she has released every album herself since the beginning — as well as championing genre-defying songwriters like Andrew Bird, Anaïs Mitchell, Utah Philips, and others. It was DiFranco’s encouragement that helped Mitchell’s opus Hadestown become a Tony-winning Broadway smash. DiFranco may have been deemed a bit too left-of-center for pop radio, but her beloved 1997 live record Living In Clip went gold. Let’s get something out of the way real quick: was this male podcast host initially a bit intimidated to dive into her encyclopedic album collection after admiring her work from afar and believing the songs were not meant for his ears? Indeed. I grew up with girlfriends and fellow musicians who rocked Ani’s Righteous Babe pins and patches on their jean jackets like they were religious ornaments. What I found during this mind-bending conversation, and after listening to her polished and mystical newest record especially, was that DiFranco has never tried to push away people that don’t look or talk like her — or tried to mock or belittle conservative movements she doesn’t agree with or understand. There is a deep kindness and empathy in her songwriting that I never expected and in her 2019 autobiography, No Walls And The Recurring Dream, she acknowledges how lonely and exhausting it can be trying to fight against a societal tide that doesn’t want to stop and give you space to be who you are. What became increasingly clear during our conversation was that DiFranco wants to make music for everyone. She prides herself on her quirky, multi-generational fanbase — with grandparents and kids, dads and sons, daughters and aunties alike singing along to favorites like “Both Hands,” “Untouchable Face,” and covers like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” at packed shows across three continents. I had my own goosebumps-inducing moment singing with Ani that I’ll never forget. The oldest folk festival in America, The Ann Arbor Folk Fest, once put me on stage to sing harmony on “Angel From Montgomery” with DiFranco at the acoustically perfect Hill Auditorium. I attended the University Of Michigan years earlier and I saw John Prine sing that classic in that same room, and it felt like a full circle moment. Seeing how DiFranco transfixed the crowd that night, and how the women songwriters and musicians offstage especially watched her with such admiration made me want to see what her music — which I had never fully listened to — was all about. If you have a chance, listen to Revolutionary Love start to finish, and stick around to the end of the episode to hear DiFranco read lyrics as poetry.

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Parker Millsap Apr 21, 2021

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 you were a teenager like Parker has, you know a thing or two about how to keep your head when things go off the rails. But it was the forced year-long break during the pandemic that really made him stop and accept how far he’s come from his intense, anxious, folky debut Palisade in 2012 (he released it when he was 19), to his soulful self-assured new record Be Here Instead. What’s clear is we see a relentlessly hard-working performer who no longer has to chase the next gig for gas money, or has to worry if the world will accept his work. Holed up outside of Nashville with his wife, Millsap let the songs do the talking.

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Steve Earle - Revisited Apr 14, 2021

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 group The Dukes, and a commendable fight to overcome his own substance abuse troubles, (not to mention six marriages and counting) Earle watched his talented song Justin Townes Earle go down a similar path - only to lose his fight with depression and opiates, passing away at the age of thirty-eight in August of 2020. With a new intro, we try and honor Justin’s memory and highlight Steve’s haunting newest record JT, where Earle tries to process his son’s passing by recording a collection of his most cherished songs.

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Caroline Spence Apr 07, 2021

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 vocal hero, Emmylou Harris. Growing up in Charlottesville, VA daydreaming to Harris’ signature twangy honey-toned records like 'Wrecking Ball,' Spence admittedly was a bit starstruck when the silver-maned lady herself came on board to sing harmonies on the title track of Spence’s newest LP 'Mint Condition.' It quickly became a critic’s darling and an Americana radio staple nationwide. As a conversationalist, she usually leads with cheerful southern modesty, but beginning with her 2015 debut 'Somehow,' Spence wasn’t afraid to push at country music’s guy-centric boundaries. She brought aboard a talented group of genre-defining collaborators like blue-eyed soul hero Anderson East and folk pop favorite Erin Rae to give the songs new heft. Her follow-up 'Spades And Roses' brought more lush atmospherics to her yearning acoustic stories, elevating the clear-eyed feminine power behind emotive songs like “Heart Of Somebody.” While Spence will tell you she is just furthering the empowered spirit of roots songwriter pioneers who came before her, during this time of high anxiety, her deeply felt love songs like “Sit Here and Love Me” and “Slow Dancer” seem especially fitting, touching on her bouts of depression and her inability to connect with the ones who are trying to help her through. Sometimes sad songs truly do make people happy, and if you’re feeling a bit low, maybe pop on her newest single “The Choir,” about finding your people when you need them most.

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Bettye LaVette Apr 01, 2021

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 in racist and sexist traditions largely turned its back on her. While other soulful song stylists like Sharon Jones, Tina Turner, Mavis Staples and others have seen their status and popularity rise with time, LaVette remains a best kept secret in the nascent Americana circuit, with younger listeners just discovering her remarkable work covering anyone from The Beatles to Neil Young to Billie Holiday. After nearly dropping out of music, her remarkable comeback began in 2005 with a string of acclaimed records - bringing her from half-filled bars to singing “Blackbird” at The Hollywood Bowl with a 32-piece orchestra, being nominated for five Grammy awards, and being inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. One thing you’ll notice immediately is her fiery laugh which punctuates the episode - even when telling the darkest stories like her early manager getting shot and her 1960s hits being recorded by white artists, leaving her versions largely forgotten. Her Grammy-nominated newest LP 'Blackbirds,' produced by legendary drummer Steve Jordan, shows her at her most vulnerable best.

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The Tallest Man On Earth Mar 24, 2021

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 outfits like Montezumas before breaking out with his own dreamier acoustic material - gaining international notice with his breakout solo offering 'Shallow Grave' in 2008. Tours with Bon Iver across North America gained Matsson an adoring audience in the states, where he ended up setting up shop in Brooklyn. Most often performing solo even on the biggest stages, Matsson is known to have seven or more intricate tunings for his guitars and banjos, and with his high, cutting voice and cryptic, nature-inspired lyrics, he has been compared to some of his heroes like Roscoe Holcomb, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon but with a Swedish-naturalist touch. Songs like “Love Is All” or “The Gardener,” while gaining tens of millions of steams on folky playlists, pack quite a punch, often detailing how the cold cruelty of the animal kingdom filters into human life with its many frailties. In 2019, Matsson found his marriage to a fellow Swedish singer-songwriter ending and he holed up in his Brooklyn apartment to write, produce and engineer his newest Tallest Man On Earth LP, 'I Love You. It’s A Fever Dream.' Like Springsteen’s eerie and emotional 'Nebraska,' Matsson's collection is a clear-eyed view of our current state of interpersonal (and even societal) isolations. Standout songs like the warm guitar and echoey harmonica opener “Hotel Bar” - though written before he knew what would happen with our current pandemic - seem to capture the lost closeness and romance of our very recent past, where one could fall in love with a new stranger every night in a new town and think nothing of it. Sequestered in a small house in the middle of Sweden since the world shifted last year, a new Tallest Man On Earth album is sure to be on its way. Admittedly Matsson is going a bit stir-crazy away from the road, but really he’s grateful to be able to have the time to explore and create new sounds without any distractions. A fall tour of the states is in the works (fingers crossed), including an opening slot at Red Rocks joining Mandolin Orange and Bonny Light Horseman.

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The Allman Betts Band Mar 17, 2021

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 banded together to create a new collection of the soaring slide-guitar-centered Gulf-coast rock and brawny road-tested blues that both pays homage to their heady upbringings and forges their own way forward. Even their touring bassist has a familiar name to Allman die-hards: Berry Oakley Jr., whose dad was one of the Allman Brothers' founding members when they formed in 1969 out of Jacksonville, FL. While many groups were stuck at home licking their wounds as the pandemic shut down most touring options, Devon and Duane’s crew tapped into the nascent drive-in circuit, bringing their spirited 2020 release 'Bless Your Heart' to a whole new set of excited fans. Always sticking to their southern roots, they laid down both records at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios with producer Matt Ross-Spang (Jason Isbell, Margo Price, Elvis Presley.) While history is always dancing in the margins of the songs, it’s clear on this second offering that they wanted to create stories that didn’t only reflect their roaring live shows. Standout songs like the soft piano ballad “Doctor’s Daughter” show the group roving in new, more nuanced directions - while “Autumn Breeze” is a pulsing, slow-burn, but features the effortless twin guitar lines that made their dads' work so instantly recognizable. Of course playing in the family business wasn’t always a given for the guys - especially Devon who only met his hard-touring father Gregg at sixteen. Devon first started hanging out with young Duane - then only twelve - in 1989 on the Allman Brothers' 20th Anniversary tour. As he describes in the episode, Devon wasn’t sure he wanted to follow in his father’s hard-to-follow footsteps, but once he sat in on “Midnight Rider“ and the crowd went crazy? It was off to the races. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Allman Brothers' breakout record 'Live At The Fillmore East' - which I grew up listening to on loop with my father. Though Duane Allman died tragically in a 1971 accident before his namesake was born, and Gregg passed away in 2017, their spirit lives on in the Allman Betts’ epic live show - which is already gearing up for the tentative 2021 touring season.

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Low Cut Connie Mar 10, 2021

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 lemonade. But Adam took it to another level when he launched his often twice-weekly vaudevillian interactive web show “Tough Cookies” from a back bedroom in March. Charging around his small home stage like a schvitzing piano preacher, often losing clothing along the way, Adam has learned nearly six hundred covers in the last eight months alone - from Barry Manilow to Cardi B’s "WAP" to Macho Man to an entire Little Richard set, which he performed to honor his hero after his passing. He then interviews anyone from Beyonce’s dad to members of Sly and the Family Stone - in short, it's a rollercoaster every week that you kind of have to watch to believe. Alongside his 2020 LP Private Lives, Low Cut Connie’s heartfelt and sweat-dripping sets have gained him some famous supporters: Elton John for one, fellow New Jersey-born hero Bruce Springsteen for another - and that up-and-coming playlist presenter Barack Obama unexpectedly placed Low Cut Connie’s defiant cabaret rocker “Boozophilia” on his must-listen list. Indeed, this taping - which often showed Adam jumping from his piano to his guitar to play favorites like the Kinks-esque “Revolution Rock N Roll,” initially had to be delayed so he could play an inauguration event for new president and Philly-piano lover Joe Biden. While Adam is basking in some much-earned attention, it hasn’t always been an easy road. He readily admits to scrapping by on side jobs into his mid-thirties, for years playing around dim New York City piano bars as his sequined alter-ego Ladyfingers. If Adam's learned anything during this strange era, it’s that people desperately still need live music - in all its spur-of-the-moment, sweaty glory. One of the more moving stories he tells is seeing groups of nurses in beleaguered hospitals taking a much needed break to watch his livestreams. Much like his hero and patron Elton John, Low Cut Connie’s songs can leap from intimate folk-rock to greasy soul to bombastic musical theater and back with ease - and his relentless spontaneity keeps fans waiting for that he will do next.

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Béla Fleck and Abigail Washurn - Revisited Mar 03, 2021

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 home with their partners, families or podmates (and in Abigail and Béla’s case, two rambunctious kids who can be heard in the taping). The beautiful connection and respect Fleck and Washburn have for one another on stage and at home is on full display during the episode - and if you follow their social media, you’ll see they are truly making the best of this dark downtime. Both could be considered pioneers not just in advancing the banjo into the mainstream - but in creating nuanced multi-lingual world music with an instrument once thought to only belong in front porch jam sessions or in barnstorming bluegrass bands. As we jump into women’s history month - now would be a good time to thank all the hard working moms, grandmas, sisters, aunties, wives, caretakers and creators of all stripes who helped make it possible for your favorite music to exist. We will be back every Wednesday with new episodes.

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Shovels & Rope Feb 24, 2021

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 just a sonic souvenir before they split off again to pursue their barnstorming bar-band solo careers, the human heart and some encouraging listeners had other plans, convincing them to keep creating as a team. They’ve been off to the races ever since - making five acclaimed records of originals starting with the acclaimed O’ Be Joyful and three gritty covers albums with an assassins row of collaborators like Lucius, Shakey Graves, Brandi Carlile, The War and Treaty, and more. Their newest cover project Busted Jukebox Volume 3, which dropped on Feb 5 via Dualtone Records, is a new experiment. You could say it’s an angsty rock record for kids, or maybe it’s an homage to the yearning, defiant, ever-hopeful teenager in all of us. With indie-darlings like Sharon Van Etten sitting in on standouts like the Beach Boys' “In My Room” and Deer Tick joining a rollicking version of the Janis Joplin favorite “Cry Baby” - like a good Pixar animated flick, this collection has just as much to offer Mom and Dad as it does for the kiddos. If you’ve seen them live, you’ll notice that Trent and Hearst often face each other, not the audience; their eyes never seem to leave each other. Almost all their songs, like the award-winning favorite “Birmingham,” include spot-on harmony and intensely-focused unison singing. Somehow they create a blisteringly big sound despite always remaining a duo. Even on the biggest stages, from Red Rocks to their own acclaimed festival High Water Fest (set in their longtime South Carolina home base), they stick to their simple but potent formula. Switching back and forth between jangly and crunchy guitars, humming keyboards and pounding piano, hopping from sweat-strewn stripped-down drum kits to aching accordions, their joyous garage-rock Americana keeps gaining them new fans worldwide. If you’re stuck at home and have kids running rowdily through your house like Michael and Cary Ann do, (this taping had to be rescheduled three times), maybe try turning on Busted Jukebox Volume 3 nice and loud and see what little ones think. Or just put them to bed and rock out yourself! Stick around to the end of the episode to Hearst and Trent present the sweet campfire jam “My Little Buckaroo” featuring M. Ward.

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The Lumineers (Jeremiah Fraites) Feb 17, 2021

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-year-old son, Fraites released a gorgeous instrumental record called Piano Piano this January. Nearly fifteen years in the making, Piano Piano was created at his former home in Denver during the height of the early COVID-19 lockdowns, with his two favorite pianos leading the way as main characters in a story that seemed to unfurl, as his wife would say in Italian, “step by step” - delicately, but with passion. First he used a newer Steinway for the brighter, more forceful tones, and then a warmly creaky creature, that his piano teacher sarcastically named “Firewood,” for the most personal moments. Really, it’s the tiny imperfections that make this solo work shine: when you can hear the bench swaying slightly, when you spot his wife making dinner in the next room as the sustain pedal is pressed into the wood floor, when the aged instrument struggles to hammer out the final notes (but finally does,) and when Fraites and the instrument seem to breathe and speak and cry out, together. While certain smaller songs like “Departure” and “Chilly” are as intimate as fateful field recordings, other standouts like “Tokyo” and “Arrival” are more polished pieces, blooming from that same small space but growing into masterful orchestral widescreen soundscapes with the help of violinist Lauren Jacobson (who often plays with The Lumineers,) cellists Rubin Kodheli and Alex Waterman, and the 40-piece FAME's Orchestra from Macedonia. Fraites was born in New Jersey, where he grew up with Lumineers frontman Wesley Schultz. When they self-released their confessional and warm-hearted self-tilted record in 2012, the two friends never imagined that they would have a chart-topping hit on their hands. Playing the scruffy bars around Denver before their fanbase expanded exponentially and their first record went triple-platinum, The Lumineers soon found themselves headlining international pop festivals, opening for U2 and Tom Petty, placing songs in The Hunger Games and Game Of Thrones, selling out Madison Square Garden (twice) and finally filling their favorite hallowed Colorado venues like Red Rocks. Before the pandemic slowed them down, The Lumineers were bringing their same acoustic spirit to a full-on arena tour coast to coast - showcasing their newest album III. If you’re reading this right now, you’ve probably found yourself singing along to their romantic, stomping ear-worms “Ho Hey” or “Ophelia” or heard them accidentally a thousand times in the last decade, (both have been streamed over 500 million times and counting,) but all of that is paused for now. What a perfect time for a peaceful piano record to clear our heads. As Jeremiah has gained confidence as a sought-after composer, songwriter and unlikely pop performer, he’s given himself the space to finally create the deeply personal record he’s been hoping to share for decades.

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Blind Boys Of Alabama Feb 10, 2021

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 superseded its limitations by bringing its own high-spirited version of jubilee gospel throughout the world. Their music was often the backdrop to the civil rights movement as Martin Luther King JR. toured the south, and Jimmy and Ricky are amazed and grateful that their message was still ringing true during the Black Lives Matter protest movement of the tumultuous last year. While the members of the band have changed through history, the group has stayed steadfast to preserving a kinetic church-based music that doesn’t seek to evangelize, but can bring people of all faiths together. Indeed, watching Jimmy and the other bespectacled members walk with hands on each other’s shoulders into the youthful crowds of adoring festival goers from Bonnarroo to Jazzfest is really something to behold. Their body of work continues to grow. In the last few decades they’ve gamely collaborated with a wide range of secular artists from Peter Gabriel to Ben Harper to Bonnie Raitt, made an album with Bon Iver (the stellar 2013 release I’ll Find A Way) and shrewdly reworked the ominous Tom Waits classic “Way Down In The Hole” which became the theme for HBO’s The Wire. Their newest full length Almost Home, a treatise on morality and mortality, is particularly moving. It features songs written by Marc Cohn, Valerie June, The North Mississippi All Stars and many others - and was the last record that longtime member and bandleader Clarance Fountain was a part of before he passed away. Fountain was part of the group for for nearly sixty years. As Jimmy playfully mentions throughout the conversation, they’ve never let being blind stand in the way of doing what they do best: putting on a show. They’re entertainers at heart and it’s so small feat that they’ve brought a nearly lost form of swinging, soulful (and expertly arranged) gospel from the small southern towns where they grew up, all the way to the White House, where they’ve held court for three different presidents. They’ve won five Grammy Awards along the way. Stick around to the end hear their rich cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released”.

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Langhorne Slim Feb 03, 2021

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 Mansion (just released last week via Dualtone) which is named after the neighborhood in Philadelphia where both of his grandfather grew up. Coming out of a deep creative funk, Langhorne produced a record of many entwined reckonings. A flurry of twenty two diaristic sonic sketches, incantations, and emotive story-songs following, sometimes in real time, his struggle with mental illness, pandemic isolation and sobriety - it is an overall hopeful collection that shows Langhorne may be finally finding his true calling on the other side of the darkness. Sean is never shy about revealing how his mental health and creativity are ever-evolving. Without playing the hundreds of international shows and festivals a year he normally does, Sean had to create at home in a new way. A note his therapist gave him still holds true as he releases his newest record without being able to take his guitar and his trademark worn hat in public to support it: “when you’re freaking out, just play”. Make sure you stick around the end of the episode where he plays an acoustic rendition of “Morning Prayer, joined briefly by his cat Mr. Beautiful.

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The Secret Sisters Jan 27, 2021

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 Bone Burnett. If you’ve ever seen them live, Laura and Lydia are known for their sharp-tongued and story-filled live shows - which, even over Zoom, made them particularly rip-roaring interviewees. After breaking free of a major label hell which sidelined and nearly bankrupted them for a time, the sisters regrouped and created their most personal and pop-forward work yet, the heart-string pulling You Don’t Own Me Anymore (2017) and 2020’s fiery Saturn Return. Both were made with friend and producer Brandi Carlile, and both were nominated for a Grammy. While the last year plus was hard - they lost both grandmothers - there was quite a silver lining: Lydia and Laura each become moms, and have begun to sing their own lead pieces, courageously facing uncomfortable truths about their southern upbringing, calling out the double standards and sexual politics of the music industry, and showcasing their very different experiences as young mothers. With Carlile pushing them to find their own voices, Laura wrote the tender “Hold You Dear” while Lydia penned the more yearning and sardonic “Late Bloomer,” two favorites that stick out after repeated listens to the album. Still, the true beauty of Saturn Return - which they recorded with Carlile's beloved band - may be how Laura and Lydia can split off into new territory and then return together in chills-inducing harmony, as only real sisters could. Stick around to the end of episode for an intimate acoustic performance of “Nowhere, Baby.”

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Bahamas Jan 20, 2021

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) to a to cheerful, mustachioed family man, breaking out as a solo act making squirmy vocal-rich albums like Barcordes that made him a headliner across Canada, once playing recorder in front of Beyoncé at the Grammys, (the best story of the interview) and how he has let his recent songwriting get more personal and introspective during the 2020 upheaval where he was surrounded by his kids during his writing. Big thanks to Podcorn for sponsoring this episode. Host your own podcast? Check out Podcorn for sponsorship opportunities and start monetizing your podcast by signing up here: https://podcorn.com/podcasters/

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JD McPherson - Revisited Dec 23, 2020

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 opinion that McPherson’s equally fractious and festive holiday masterwork Socks is, like Mariah’s holiday opus, a once in a generation record. It’s a record to cherish like a family heirloom, a record about weirdo Santas eating deep dish pizza that you want to play all year long without apology. Put it on, trust us. You need this right now. Thanks for sticking with us. See you in the new year with new episodes!

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Fantastic Negrito - The Show On The Road Presents: Under The Radar Podcast Dec 16, 2020

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 interviews indie songwriters and independent artists, going deep into their childhood memories and the musical milestones that have helped shape their most recent albums. Committed to giving voice to a diverse host of artists, her guests have included Native American Singer/Songwriter Black Belt Eagle Scout, gender non-conforming Ezra Furman who also did the soundtrack for the popular Netflix show "Sex Education", Scottish band Travis, and Caroline Rose who started with an earnest country sound and evolved to electro-pop. The whole series is sound immersive, using archival tape, field recordings and music from the back catalogue of these artists. Under the Radar will be back with new episodes in March, 2021, and has some great guests lined up, including Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips and Emmy the Great, a Hong Kong-born Brit singer/songwriter. Subscribe to Under the Radar wherever you get your podcasts to catch up on their first season and get ready for what's to come in 2021.
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Bobby Rush - Revisited Nov 11, 2020

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 more important than ever to hear from elder statesmen like Rush who was making music during the civil rights movement, met icons like John Lewis and know what’s really at stake. For the last six decades, Rush has been playing his own brand of lovably raunchy, acoustically crunchy and soulfully rowdy blues. Starting from his days as part of the Southern migration from his hometown of Homer, Louisiana, to the south side of Chicago (where he used to have Muddy Waters himself sub in for him when he couldn’t do a gig) Bobby won his first Grammy at the humble age of 83 after creating 370 plus recordings.

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Larkin Poe Oct 28, 2020

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, produced and performed nearly all their own records and EPs themselves, and while they often pay homage to legends like Robert Johnson, Blind Willie Johnson and more modern greats like The Allman Brothers and The Moody Blues, they have also put their own rawboned stamp on stellar ZZ-Top-esque originals like “Self-Made Man” which is also the title of their newest record. While the sisters admit that doing almost everything in-house can be like walking a tricky tight rope, the results have been encouraging. From show-stopping appearances at festivals like Glastonbury, to opening for the revivified touring version of Queen (Brian May is a new fan) to headlining the 2020 Mahindra Blues Festival in Mumbai, India - to snagging a Grammy nom for their hard-stomping record Venom and Faith - one would think that they should keep on following their DIY instincts. Larkin Poe doesn’t plan on taking it easy even though they haven’t been able to tour in 2020 - in November they will release Kindred Spirits, a collection of beloved stripped-back covers. Stick around to the end of the show to hear their acoustic version of Lenny Kravitz’s “Fly Away.”
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Mipso Oct 21, 2020

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 with Libby and Jacob (via Zoom of course) to discuss their lushly orchestrated self-titled record which just dropped last week; and if you walk down 8th Avenue in Nashville this week, you might catch a billboard with their sheepish grins writ large in the sky. How did they get here? It’s hard to find a group where every member can effortlessly sing lead and write genre-bending songs that fit seamlessly on six acclaimed albums and counting in under ten years. Well, maybe the resurgent chart-toppers Fleetwood Mac? Earlier standout records like the breakout Dark Holler Pop, produced by fellow North Carolinian Andrew Marlin (Mandolin Orange,) and Edges Run, which features a veritable online hit in the broken-voiced, emotional “People Change,” show how they appeal to not only folk fest-loving moms and dads, but also their edgier kids who appreciate their subtly subversive turns of phrase and playful gender-ambiguous neon-tinted wardrobe. As Z. found out during his conversation with Libby and Jacob, the band nearly broke up after a series of grueling 150-show-a-year runs, a scary car wreck and the pressure of putting out Edges Run for their rapidly growing fanbase. The forced slower pace of this last year and a half has been a gift in several ways - allowing the group to catch their breath and hole up to write more collaboratively than ever. The shimmering sonic backdrop that the gifted producer and musician Sandro Perri was able to bring to the sessions at the Echo Mountain studio in Asheville really makes the songs feel like they could exist in any era. You wouldn’t be alone if you heard the connection between their honey-hooked newest record with the timeless mellow-with-a-hint-of-menace hits of the 1970s (looking at you James Taylor and Carly Simon) - as songs like “Never Knew You Were Gone” show off Terrell’s gift for gently asking the deepest questions, like where he might go when he transitions to the other side in a “silvery fire,” or the sardonically nostalgic “Let A Little Light In,” which wonders if the soft-focused images we have of the peaceful boomtime 1990s (when Mipso was growing up) could use some real scrutiny. Rodenbough’s silky fiddle work stars throughout - and her courageous, vulnerable lead vocal on “Your Body” may be the most memorable moment on the new work. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear mandolinist Jacob Sharp introduce his favorite contribution, “Just Want To Be Loved.”
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Run River North Oct 14, 2020

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 about immigrant family dramas done masterfully with acoustic instruments and a lush electronic backdrop. Early standout songs like “Growing Up” harnessed their nuanced classical chops and show how large the divide can be between their parents' and grandparents' view of America and how it really is for the new generation born and raised in LA. Gaining notice in Southern California’s coffee shop scene, an unexpected live performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live (thanks to a beloved music video they shot in their Honda) shot the band to national awareness. Non-stop touring began in earnest with their gorgeous self-titled rebrand “Run River North” which got them signed to Nettwerk. It’s no secret that the band is looked up to in the rarely-represented Asian rock and pop communities, and by 2016 Run River North was playing some of their biggest shows to date at festivals in Japan and South Korea. But with the realities of the road hitting hard, in 2018 the group pared down its lineup to what we see today, with founding members Alex Hwang (guitar/vocals), Daniel Chae (guitars/vocals), and Sally Kang (keys/vocals) leading the way forward. The last few years saw the band go independent again, and during the pandemic they have put out a flurry of hooky folk-pop gems, like the subversive “Pretty Lies,” that have them cautiously more excited about the future than ever. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear Alex present his favorite new single “Cemetery” about the off-kilter first date he took his now wife on. Their new full length Creatures In Your Head will drop early 2021.
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Sarah Shook Oct 07, 2020

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 only heard classical composers growing up. As a loner creative teenager trying to process her hidden bi-sexuality, she described hearing Elliott Smith and Belle & Sebastian as revelatory - finally someone felt like her and found a way to share it with the world. But it was after encountering the raw honesty in the songs of Johnny Cash that she found a purpose and a place for her achy-voiced folk songs. With a little encouragement from her longtime lead guitarist, who saw how powerful her presence (and her songs) could be on stage, an openly reticent Shook took the leap and started playing professionally in 2013. She gained national attention with her stellar back-to-back albums Sidelong and Years - which caught the attention of famed outlaw country label Bloodshot Records (they signed her) and sent her on a relentless round of touring around the world. With confessional, lived-in songs like “Fuck Up” and “New Ways To Fail” Sarah is a master of getting to the point - processing her tough transition to sobriety with grace, humor and wit, and much like her hero Johnny Cash, she suffers no fools when it comes to love and its tricky late-night detours. With her signature half-smile, half-grimace candor Shook sings about another love affair gone wrong: “I need this shit like I need another hole in my head.” Stick around to the end of the episode to hear a live-from-home acoustic rendition of her deliciously twangy kiss-off “Gold As Gold.”
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Mt. Joy Sep 30, 2020

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 Byrnes, and Byrnes' flatmate, producer Caleb Nelson, helped create their infectious breakout singles “Astrovan” and “Sheep.” While most rising bands might shy away from writing extensively about addiction; or describing Jesus as a reborn Grateful Dead-loving stoner; or examining generational violence and brutality in Baltimore; with some deeper listening, it’s not hard to notice that Mt. Joy’s bouncy, arena-friendly sing-alongs are admirably subversive and often quite heavy below the pop shimmer. A whirlwind of touring on some of America’s biggest stages followed the resounding streaming success of their first homemade singles, bringing the band from tiny rehearsal spaces and obscurity to the most hallowed festivals in America -- like Newport Folk and Bonnaroo -- and huge white-knuckle tours opening for The Shins, The Head and The Heart, and The Lumineers. By 2018 their joyous, full-throated rock sound had fully gelled with the addition of Sotiris Eliopoulos on drums and Jackie Miclau on keys. Their catchy and confident self-titled record arrived on Dualtone and seemed to go everywhere at once -- with the acoustic-guitar led anthem, “Silver Lining,” surprising the band most of all by hitting #1 on the AAA radio charts. But, as Quinn mentions early on in the talk, by the time the band released their much-hyped sequel record, Rearrange Us, in early 2020, the group of friends and collaborators were fraying at the seams. Relentless time away from loved ones caused breakups that were a long time coming, and trying to match incredibly high expectations had forced the band to ask themselves what they really wanted out of this new nomadic, whiplash life. Thus Rearrange Us dives courageously into darker shadows than its predecessor. In emotional standout songs like “Strangers” Quinn has an achy-voiced knack for pinpointing that exact moment when good love goes wrong -- and how feeding off the endless adoring energy of the strangers he meets in every new town can only sustain him for so long. In a way, the pandemic-forced time off coinciding with their record gaining steam was a blessing in disguise, allowing Quinn and the band to reflect and recharge. But of course, with a feverish fanbase from Philly to LA waiting, Mt. Joy wasn’t about to rest long. If you’re a fan, you may have noticed that they are currently playing safe, sold out drive-in shows across the East coast and Midwest with more on the way.
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Aubrie Sellers Sep 23, 2020

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 to make a EP of beloved covers in the aptly titled World On Fire. In rejuvenating a faded favorite like Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” she takes a song we all thought we knew and twists it around until it seems like a poisonous reverb-zapped revelation that just arrived this week out of nowhere. Aubrie was prepared to make music earlier than most. Often not going to traditional schools, she grew up doing her homework on tour buses, hanging out in green rooms and getting her feet wet on stages in Nashville’s tight-knit country community; you might know her mom as twangy-pop icon Lee Ann Womack, and her dad Jason Sellers had a few chart toppers of his own, writing for folks like Kenny Chesney and playing in Ricky Skaggs' touring band. Sellers made her major label debut in 2016 with the more straight-ahead but tightly crafted New City Blues, and earlier sang on a compilation record with the late Ralph Stanley. But at only 27, Aubrie feels and sounds like an old soul who is less interested in climbing the current country charts with a slick radio hit about trucks, backyard parties and ex-boyfriends, than mining thornier material like her history of anxiety and stage-fright, while harnessing the punky poet outlaw energy that more cerebral songwriters like Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams have become known for. And people are indeed taking notice, as Sellers’ scorching duet with Earle, “My Love Will Not Change,” was recently nominated for the Americana Music Association's Song of the Year. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear an acoustic live-from-home rendition of her tune “Far From Home.”
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Gary Louris (The Jayhawks) Sep 16, 2020

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 was in diapers) clearly has kept a fervent fanbase intrigued; their signature shoegaze-y, electric roots has endured through personnel changes, bouts of addiction, and the upheaval of the music industry that often leaves fading rock and rollers behind. While Louris will be first to admit that for many years he didn’t think it would be “cool” to keep a rock band together this long, he has grown to appreciate the band's defiant longevity. Indeed, their newest collaboration, XOXO, doesn’t show The Jayhawks softening at all, even as they have become respected Americana elder statesmen. Instead it shows off some of their sharpest rock-guitar-inspired records yet -- with tunes like the Uncle Tupelo-, sepia-tinted “This Forgotten Town” staying at the top of Americana single charts for months, getting near-constant radio play nationwide. Seminal Americana records like Smile and Rainy Day Music in the early 2000s finally launched The Jayhawks into international notoriety -- they played late night TV and enjoyed (or endured) packed bus tours across North America and Europe -- but the success was often bittersweet and they never quite tipped the scale like other roots-adjacent groups like Wilco and Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. As host Z. Lupetin discovered while remote recording, Louris can now laugh about an infamous New York Times review of their album Smile that, despite being quite positive, lead with an unfortunate headline noting the band's lack of widespread acceptance: "What If You Made a Classic and No One Cared?" Louris is often cited as leading the charge behind the band's shift from jangly alt-country toward a more catchy, rock-pop sound, but there are plenty of roots still showing -- especially Louris’ noted love of British Invasion rock energy and 1970s AM radio layered harmony. After some years that took Louris away from the supportive twin city hub for other ventures (he was also in supergroup group Golden Smog) the band’s core group of Louris, Marc Perlman, Karen Grotberg, and Tim O’Reagan are now happily back together in their original Minneapolis home-base, grateful to still be creating new rock 'n' roll with a devoted audience that is waiting patiently for touring to open up again. Stick around to the end of episode to hear Louris share an intimate acoustic performance of The Jayhawks' all too fitting new song, “Living A Bubble."
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Nicole Atkins Sep 09, 2020

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 rumblingly ominous and joyously escapist, standout songs like “Domino” make the record a perfectly David Lynch-esque summer soundtrack of an uneasy 2020 scene that vacillates between fits of intense creativity and innovation and deep despair. Toiling below the radar for much of her career, Atkins is finally enjoying nationwide recognition as a sought-after writer and producer; Italian Ice was co-produced by Atkins and Ben Tanner of Alabama Shakes. While some may try to shoehorn Nicole Atkins into the Americana and roots-rock categories, one could better describe her as a new kind of wild-eyed Springsteen, who also mythologized the decaying beauty of New Jersey’s coastal towns like Asbury Park, or a similarly huge-voiced, peripatetic Linda Ronstadt who isn’t afraid to mix sticky French-pop grooves with AM radio doo-wop, '70s blaxploitation R&B and airy jazz rock like her heroes in the band Traffic. If you watch her weekly streaming variety show, “Live From The Steel Porch” (which she initially filmed from her parents' garage in NJ, but now does from her new home in Nashville), you’ll see her many sonic tastes and musical friends gathering in full effect. Italian Ice features a heady collection of collaborators including Britt Daniel of Spoon, Seth Avett, Erin Rae, and John Paul White. After playing guitar and moving in and out of hard-luck bar bands in Charlotte and New York -- many of which that would find any way to get rid of their one female member -- Atkins’ bold first solo record Neptune City dropped in 2007 and three more acclaimed LPs followed, including her twangy, oddball breakout, Goodnight Rhonda Lee in 2017 on John Paul White’s Single Lock Records. Much like the tart and brain-freezing treat sold on boardwalks around the world, Atkins' newest work is a refreshing and many-flavored thing and demonstrates that, in a lot of ways, the show-stopping performer, producer, and songwriter has finally embraced all the sharp edges of her personality.
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Chicano Batman Sep 02, 2020

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 home in LA. In the past you may have seen them at music festivals like Coachella dressing up in matching Mariachi outfits, and crooning in a colorful mashup of Spanish and English on previous standout records like the dreamy “Cycles of Existential Rhyme” and the rebellious “Freedom Is Free”. Their newest work “Invisible People” is their most personal, political and downright danceable release to date. The traditional Mariachi outfits may be tucked away in storage, but their playful vibe remains, even as the musicianship and pop-tightness took a big jump forward. After twelve years of expanding and fine-tuning their sound and finding a devoted national audience, Chicano Batman is no longer the oddball upstart band. While they now focus mainly on English lyrics, they know as songwriters and performers that they’ve become role models for Los Angeles’s vibrant Latin-roots rock renaissance, acting as springboards to a whole new scene that may not have a genre or name yet.
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David Bromberg Aug 19, 2020

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 Elliot and other shaggy troubadour-storytellers, Bromberg’s encyclopedic knowledge of American songwriting traditions made him a coffee-house wunderkind who refused to be pigeonholed in one genre. By the age of thirty, Bromberg was the go-to guitarist for Dylan, Willie Nelson, John Prine and Ringo Starr, and he could be found jamming at dinner parties with George Harrison. A man of many interests and talents, Bromberg actually stepped away from performing for nearly two decades at the height of his notoriety, moving to Chicago to learn how to build and then appraise violins. He became obsessed with identifying the best instruments just by sight, and even opened a respected instrument shop in Wilmington, Delaware called David Bromberg Fine Violins. He returned after twenty two years off the road with the triumphant and Grammy nominated "Try Me One More Time" in 2006, and has assembled an energetic band of friends that continues to join him on his high energy new offerings. Bromberg’s muscular and ever genre-bending 2020 release “Big Road” pays homage to his heroes like Charlie Rich and 1930’s bluesman Tommy Johnson, but also injects heavy doses of swampy rock, horn-heavy funk, and good-humored folk storytelling along the way. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear him play a new acoustic tune called “Buddy Brown’s Blues”.
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Leyla McCalla Aug 05, 2020

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 traditions by introducing them to a new audience with her own powerful creative vision. You may know McCalla as an integral part of two different roots supergroups: the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Our Native Daughters. But for much of the last decade, she has put out heady, ever-surprising solo projects. The latest, The Capitalist Blues, harnesses the brassy, percussive sounds of New Orleans; her previous record, A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey, was also a standout, putting her gorgeous cello-work center stage while also examining powerful Haitian proverbs and Haiti's often-overlooked, tragic history.
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Rising Appalachia Jul 22, 2020

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 latest release, Leylines, mixes the rustic front porch sound of their childhood family jam sessions with a neon-tinted modern backbeat of dancehall electronics and mystical protest. That could have felt incongruous, but somehow these influences mix beautifully with their ethereal, intertwined vocals and darting fiddle-and-banjo runs. While our host, Z. Lupetin, was able to catch up with Chloe for this cross-country conversation, Leah has been marooned in Costa Rica since the world shut down in March and continues to work from there. The sisters and their talented six-piece band have become a beloved fixture at music festivals throughout the United States, but have also played stages in Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, The Czech Republic, Ireland, Scotland, and more. Always looking to challenge the traditional carbon-hungry touring routine, Leah dubbed their group as part of a growing “slow music movement”, and in this episode, Z. talks with Chloe about the time they toured remote Canadian farming islands via sailboat. It’s that kind of intimate and innovative traveling that Chloe would like to return to whenever the COVID-19 shutdown lifts in the coming years. Stick around to the end of the episode for an acoustic version of “Harmonize” from Leylines, and check out Rising Appalachia’s newest single “Pulse,” featuring Dirtwire.
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Dan Reeder Jul 08, 2020

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 uniquely absurdist, harmony-drenched body of work can feel like reading a rich short-story collection in one sitting. His normal routine is to layer lush close-mic’d vocals on top of one another using himself as a conspiratorial choir, sketching tiny but poignant moments from his life and imagination, often repeating a simple phrase again and again like one of his most-listened to tunes “Work Song” which tells us bluntly through gospel claps: “I’ve got all the fucking work I need”. Much more than a one man band, Dan often builds every instrument he plays in his recordings, from steel string guitars, to banjos, drums, basses, cellos, violins, clarinets, and even the computer he records on. This episode was recorded in his garage studio in Nuremberg, Germany, where he's lived with his wife for 30 years. Reeder’s new album may seem intimidating at first. It features a whopping 20 songs (or cinematic vignettes of a sort), but a closer look shows it clocking in at a succinct 39 minutes. Controversial but gentle acoustic offerings like “Porn Song” for instance come in at just under minute long and new favorites like the wide-eyed (but foul-mouthed) piano ballad “Born a Worm” asks the deepest of questions of an indifferent but endlessly beautiful universe in only the way Reeder could, by plainly inquiring about a caterpillar’s mysterious transformation into a butterfly: “what the fuck is that about?” Host Z. Lupetin spoke to Dan right after John Prine passed away from complications of Covid-19, and they spoke about his tours together with Prine and how much his music inspired him through the years. Stream Reeder’s newest “Every Which Way” now.
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Agnes Obel Jun 24, 2020

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 Berlin, Obel’s albums warrant repeat listening, as it’s often hard to know exactly what instruments are playing at any given time. At times the darting, looping piano and quicksilver string work seem like a chamber orchestra, or maybe the songs in “Myopia” are secretly the technicolor backdrop and emotive score to a film that only she sees. It’s been nearly a decade since her transcendent DIY debut album “Philharmonics” put her into many people’s minds (she may not be very well known yet in the States, but she is a gold-record selling underground star in many parts of Europe). This past Spring, Obel was supposed to be playing the expansive Greek Theater in Los Angeles before Covid-19 forced her to stay in Berlin, which for an artist that creates hushed, often lyricless songs you probably can’t dance to, is an impressive leap. Listen to her newest “Myopia” on Blue Note Records.
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Dave Stewart (Eurythmics) Jun 10, 2020

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 records and counting. While most people know him as one-half of the foundational synth-soul group Eurythmics, which he formed with longtime friend and muse Annie Lennox, churning out genre-defying hits like “Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)” and “Here Comes The Rain Again,” that still burn up radio today. Since the 1980s heyday of Eurythmics, Stewart has forged a singularly cosmopolitan career as something of a modern sound collector, both in creating his own bluesy solo work and producing records for a cavalcade of stars like Mick Jagger, Aretha Franklin, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, Joss Stone, and more. He has also been acknowledged as one of the most tireless boosters for AIDS research, even working directly with the late Nelson Mandela to raise money for the cause. His newest musical adventure has him rejoining Louisiana-based blues interpreter Thomas Lindsey for the forthcoming full length Amitié. The striking single “Storm Came” is available now.
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Listen to These Black Voices Jun 05, 2020

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 Wednesday. This week, that simply wasn’t possible. It was time to stop giving my endless opinions, to stop waxing poetic about harmony, to shut up about finding the meaning in every lyric and just be quiet, listen and learn. I’ve been lucky to talk with truly amazing Black artists, songwriters and performers in the two years I’ve been creating The Show on the Road. I ask you to go back into our archives and listen to these voices, including Sunny War, Bobby Rush, Birds of Chicago, Dom Flemons, Liz Vice, and The War and Treaty.
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Steve Poltz May 20, 2020

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 MTV video heartthrob with collaborator and friend Jewel, and then as a wild-haired, two hundred shows a year internationally revered solo act. He's put out a baker's dozen of whacked-out, deceptively sensitive, and fearlessly personal albums that have won him devoted audiences from his ancestral home in Nova Scotia to the dance party dives of California to massive festivals across Australia and beyond. As we are still quite separated during the pandemic, host Z. Lupetin called up Poltz in Nashville to discuss the long and twisty road Poltz has travelled -- jumping from his inspired, most-recent album Shine On back to his childhood in swinging Palm Springs (where he met Elvis and Sinatra), to making $100,000 music videos for his ill-fated major label debut in '98, to nearly dying on stage after substance abuse problems and never-say-no-to-a-gig exhaustion took its toll. We now find him in a more peaceful, purposeful existence in where he is newly married and enjoying making music at home (government orders!) for the first time in decades.
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Jamestown Revival May 06, 2020

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 from meeting as curious singing teenagers in Magnolia, TX to their move out west and back home again. While their previous record, The Education of a Wandering Man, saw them harnessing the muscular roots-rock that can be heard at their powerful live shows, San Isabel strips everything back to their intimate two-voices-around-one-mic, “southern and Garfunkel” sound that brought them together in the first place -- and has rightfully won them hordes of fans coast to coast. They say sibling harmony can’t be compared and we’ve had several sets of twin bands on the podcast, but what about soul-brother harmony? If one thing is clear just sitting on the bus and listening to them weave their stories and songs together, it’s that Clay and Chance were born to sing together. San Isabel was laid down at Ward Lodge Studios overlooking the San Isabel National Forest in Buena Vista, Colorado and often includes the natural sounds of the nature all around them. Give it a listen -- it's peaceful and powerful and raw and maybe just what we all need right now.
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Kat Edmonson Apr 22, 2020

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 classics like Gershwin’s “Summertime” which have been listened to over ten million times and counting - Kat broke through with her own playful original works a decade ago, self-producing one of Z’s all-time favorite records “Take To The Sky”. She quickly found powerful fans in folks like Lyle Lovett who she toured with wildly and major label releases followed. Kat soon migrated from her home state of Texas to Brooklyn where her elfin chanteuse look and sparkling vintage sound (think Blossom Dearie with some Texan muscle) caught the attention of Woody Allen who cast her in “Cafe Society” - a dream come true for this black-and-white film lover. Z and Kat sat down to discuss her newest record “Dreamers Do” which may just be the shot of pure cinematic nostalgia we all need right now. Does she cover Mary Poppins, Disney’s Alice In Wonderland and Pinocchio and somehow make them deeply cool, sonically subversive and somehow brand new again? She sure does.
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Theo Katzman (Vulfpeck) Apr 10, 2020

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 Modern Johnny Sings: Songs in the Age of Vibe and was on a run of packed release shows when everything shut down (you know, because COVID-19). Katzman’s expertly-crafted songs and lilting falsetto vocals have that rare spark that can brighten anybody’s dull quarantine in no time.
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Joey Dosik (Vulfpeck) Apr 09, 2020

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 goofy viral videos and recording an album of total silence -- that scared the shit out of streaming giants like Spotify after it rocketed the band to international notoriety and financial success -- to crowdfunding a series of hit funk records and vinyl releases that propelled them to sold out international tours, headlining nights at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, and an unprecedented sold out show at Madison Square Garden (all with no record label in sight). As we honor and celebrate two lost musical greats this week, Bill Withers and John Prine, it’s comforting to remember that we have constant new waves of amazing artists like Joey Dosik coming up who can honor and further their message. In many ways, Dosik's songs combine the honest earnestness of Prine’s best early work, telling frank stories of family and relationships, with Withers’ deep, church-flavored, down-home groove.
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The Wood Brothers Mar 25, 2020

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 conversation happened before one of their last shows on their Covid-19 shortened west coast run. The Wood Brothers’ brand new record “Kingdom in My Mind” is a sweetly funky, ballsy, bluesy and booty-shakingly romantic improvisational masterwork - do yourself a favor and turn it up loud and proud - it will help you groove through the lock-down. If there is anything that’s clear in this deeply strange and unsettling time, it’s that we need music now more than ever.
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Dustbowl Revival Feb 06, 2020

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 eventually recording their beloved live album “With A Lampshade On” at the famed Troubadour in LA and the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. In 2013 Liz Beebe joined the group and they began touring full time, becoming a powerhouse eight piece band that wowed festivals and stages in over dozen countries, playing over a hundred and fifty shows a year and releasing seven full length records along the way - including their soul-dipped self-titled work from 2017 produced by Grammy-winner Ted Hutt, the co-founder of Flogging Molly. This week celebrates the release of their most daring work to date - “Is It You, Is It Me” produced by Sam Kassirer (Lake Street Dive, Josh Ritter) and engineered by Brian Joseph (Bon Iver, Sufjan Stephens). The album doesn’t shy away from confronting the powerful political fallouts happening in families and communities around the country - and their emotional rock n roller “Get Rid Of You” pays homage to the courageous kids in Parkland, FL who stood up and demanded gun control measures be taken now - prompting recent glowing write-ups in Rolling Stone and Billboard. Z was able to gather the whole band around the mic while on the road in New Hampshire - make sure you stick around to the end of the episode as the band shares their intimate acoustic single “Let It Go”.
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Che Apalache Jan 29, 2020

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 sounds - Che Apalache. Lead by a trilingual world traveller, the fleet-bowed fiddler, spitfire vocalist and sonic scholar Joe Troop - the band formed almost accidentally when Joe began teaching curious local Buenos Aires pickers his own North Carolina folk traditions and amongst his talented students, he found three kindred spirits in Argentinians Franco Martino on guitar and Martin Bobrik on mandolin, and Pau Barjau on banjo originally from Mexico. The result has been one of the most unexpected and have-to-hear-this-to-believe it stories in modern roots music - culminating in their brilliant second record Rearrange My Heart which was produced by fan of the band (and guy pretty good on the banjo) Bela Fleck. Lucky for us, they play several songs during the episode!
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Jason Hawk Harris Jan 22, 2020

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 family traumas and loss on his stunning and aptly titled first solo album “Love and The Dark” released by Bloodshot Records in 2019. Despite his youth, Jason has much to tell us and if this equally sensitive and swaggering sound is where the future of modern country music is headed? We’re in.
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Dar Williams Jan 15, 2020

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 Indigo Girls and gaining a devoted following. She has toured with luminaries like Joan Baez and Patty Griffin, written a book about what makes communities resilient, runs her own songwriting retreats, and has inspired generations of women to fearlessly embrace their creativity, and exercise their limitless potential. Z was able to catch up with Williams in the green room at historic McCabes Guitar Shop before her second show of a sold out weekend. A new album is on the way.
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The Steel Wheels Jan 08, 2020

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-hearted, peace-promoting songs. Taped live at historic Mccabes Guitar Shop in LA, Z. Lupetin gathered the boys around the mic to dive into their boundary-pushing 2019 release Above The Trees, how they once toured on bicycles to spread climate change awareness, and how they survive 15 hour drives to strange shows in Iowa. They end the episode with their gorgeous acapella song “This Year”.
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JD McPherson Dec 18, 2019

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, “Socks” that may be his most impressive feat yet. If you’re deeply suspicious of the capitalistic caterwauling of most modern holiday music on the airwaves (except you, Mariah!) you'll still fall in love with JD’s sarcastic and sweet new collection of holiday originals, which deftly dives into lesser discussed Christmas subjects like broken expectations, inter-family angst, holiday horniness, and hilariously - the myth of why Santa must be grossly overweight to satisfy us myth-loving kids. Give the album a spin as you rock around the Christmas tree or the Chanukah bush, or even better - keep it playing all year long. Back in a few weeks with more episodes!
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Jason Lytle (Grandaddy) Dec 11, 2019

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 Europe, and by the turn of the Millennium, the band found themselves headlining rock festivals like Glastonbury in the UK and crashing late night TV in the US with the cool kids. But Jason wasn’t cut out for traditional cookie-cutter stardom. Grandaddy broke up for six years, and after disappearing into the Montana wilderness, the soft spoken multi-instrumentalist mountain-crazy songwriter kept his devoted fanbase coming back by creating oddly-titled solo records of cinematically rich soundscapes that encircled whacked anti-heroes and telling poetic, campfire-ready short story songs that still make us worried kids feel heard and seen but also constantly keep us guessing. His latest “NylonAndJuno”, which dropped in August on Dangerbird Records, is an experimental instrumental album made entirely with a nylon string guitar and a vintage Roland Juno synthesizer. Zach was able to catch up with Jason before a rare and recent solo show in LA.
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Liz Vice Dec 04, 2019

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, Aretha Franklin, and especially Mahalia Jackson, who was the soundtrack to the civil rights movement. It was Mahalia who pushed Martin Luther King Jr. to tell the assembled masses in Washington, D.C. about his dream. We often forget how much religious music was infused in the counterculture back in the 1960s, and as the BBC mentions in a great article about the era, “The music of the black church was infusing and inspiring the political consciousness of folk music; gospel was no longer just for the religious but the foundation for much ‘60s protest.” And so we bring you Liz Vice — and a little clear-eyed Christmas spirit to usher you into the twinkling darkness of December.
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Madison Cunningham Nov 20, 2019

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 meant to be an old soul. And as a young star on the rise, she thankfully hasn’t had to toil long in dive bars and retirement community gymnasiums, as many new artists do. She has already dazzled on large stages, opening for her heroes like the Punch Brothers, Iron & Wine, and Andrew Bird, all while teaming up with luminaries like Joe Henry to bring her songcraft to a new level. If you have an hour, lock yourself in a dark room and listen to her newest release “Who Are You Now” and forget the failed love affairs and credit card debt and smoky bars of your youth and put your faith in the new generation. We are in good hands, no doubt about it.
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Sam Lee Nov 13, 2019

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 each year. His gorgeously delicate and meticulously researched debut, Ground Of Its Own, shot him from hopeful academic to nationally recognized folk star -- partly by being nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize. Lee has relentlessly worked to save and rejuvenate the ancient melodies and songcraft of Irish and Scottish traveller tradition, Romany rhythms and stories, and connect those traditional melodies to a youthful pop culture that is yearning to know where it came from and where it is going next. His Nest Collective, an "acoustic folk club," gathers artists, authors, dancers and theatrical renegades and puts on shows and events across London - making Sam a rare double threat - as both an artist and a promoter of other artists. His newest release, Old Wow, drops January 31, 2020.
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Lucy Rose Nov 06, 2019

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 Left”, Lucy has gone back to her roots a bit, forsaking the glossy Brit-pop direction that some of the powers-that-be wanted to push her in, and peeling back her sound so that what we hear is just the thorny pure fruit inside. The result is intense. Interlocking singing conversations in the tone of a toothy, hushed scream, as she questions our relationships with ourselves and maybe even God, to find who we really are behind the suffocating velvet gauze of our multiple social media personalities.
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Tony Joe White - Revisited Oct 31, 2019

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 guy named Elvis), he also wrote for Dusty Springfield and Tina Turner, and the likes of Bob Dylan was a fan. Zach was fortunate to speak with Tony Joe at a hotel diner in Hollywood back in September about his storied career as a songwriter, guitarist, and touring musician, a few weeks before he passed unexpectedly on October 24, 2018.

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Robert Ellis Oct 23, 2019

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 tender brilliance of early Billy Joel, and half high-hatted, Southern huckster who might tell you a story that will make you cry one minute, and then steal your watch when you’re not looking the next. Z. met up with Robert Ellis on the road together in the Netherlands.
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Bonnie Bishop Oct 16, 2019

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 for anyone to take notice. And sometimes it takes a painful divorce to create a song that would be recorded by Bonnie Raitt and help Bonnie Bishop win the Grammy. No, Bishop’s life didn’t change overnight - reality is usually much more sobering than the fantasy of winning big in music. But, Bonnie knows she is winning now. Things are really happening - people respect her and the road is moving - and fast. And sometimes that’s the scariest thing of all.
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Charlie Parr Oct 09, 2019

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 LA or Nashville - he’s stayed in the cold grey north of Minnesota, because that’s his home. Take a second wherever you call home right now, and listen to his new record. You might hear something different every time.
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The Lone Bellow Oct 02, 2019

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 Nashville, Tennessee. The Lone Bellow have a rapport that is intimate, hilarious, and -- when it calls for it -- deadly serious. The band is full of so much heart and genuine insight that you can’t help but lean in and listen.
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Anna Tivel Sep 25, 2019

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 earth is vast and the smallest things you pass on the side of the road are beautiful if you look at it from the right view. As soon as the needle hits the wax on her latest record "The Question", Anna’s hushed, sharp edged voice begins slicing sonic film strips of angular verses that build and build until the words flow out in blinking mini movies that sear themselves on your eardrums and then are gone in a flash. It’s like she’s a sonic cinematographer waiting for the scene to be shot in our minds.
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Paul Cauthen Sep 18, 2019

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 move on to Paul's recent release, Room 41.
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Matt The Electrician Sep 11, 2019

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 precarious to set his sites on back in the 1990s: being a roving folk singer. Matt’s been at this a while, he looks more like your cool tatted shop teacher than the next big arena money maker for the major labels -so letting the people who have put him up in their houses and cooked him a warm meal on the road support the music their own way? It’s kind of beautiful. In fact, his sturdy fanbase just lovingly funded his next record, in which he’ll be working on with a producer for the very first time, and that producer is none other than Tucker Martine. He’ll be heading up to Tucker’s studio in Portland Oregon to start the project in October.
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Leslie Stevens Sep 04, 2019

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.
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Dylan LeBlanc Aug 07, 2019

This week Z. speaks with Dylan LeBlanc, the lithe Louisiana-born roots 'n roller who has one of those once-in-a-generation, ghostly-lilting voices that doesn’t seem of this time or place. His newest record "Renegade", produced by Dave Cobb, is out now, and it’s clear he’s grown up a lot in the last few years. It’s a big, snarling, cinematic, banger of a record; part spaghetti-western dust storm, and part hook-filled sixties AM radio sunshine. This is our last episode of the Summer season, so have a listen with a cold drink under the sun, and let Dylan’s voice transport you. Where? It’s up to you.
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Smooth Hound Smith Jul 31, 2019

This week Z. speaks with Smooth Hound Smith, the fiery folk-blues duo from East Nashville who've spread their infectious honeyed harmonies and gritty finger-picked sonic essays all across the continent. Despite being two hilarious humans who got married and share nearly every waking moment together, Zack and Caitlin have never stopped making each other laugh and have never stopped pushing their timeless songwriting to new heights. With their fancy new record "Dog In a Manger" coming August 9, they shine a sharp light on the beautiful worn edges of our country like never before.
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The Slocan Ramblers Jul 24, 2019

This week, Z. speaks with The Slocan Ramblers. This fearless, fleet-fingered string band is adventurously advancing the high lonesome sound of southern bluegrass to great acclaim, and not from the swampy states where it‘s known best, but in a lakeside folk hotbed that has become the cosmopolitan music mecca of Canada - Toronto. Their newest string oddesey - “Queen City Jubilee” - featuring a lovable zombie on its painted cover, was recently nominated for the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy the Juno for traditional roots album, and make sure you stick around to hear each band member doing a musical experiment where Z. asks them to musically respond to a slightly offensive Cards Against Humanity prompt.
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Jamie Drake Jul 17, 2019

This week, Jamie Drake: a Southern California based singer songwriter who transports listeners into a vibrant technicolor world with her deeply vulnerable finger-picked ballads and thornily theatrical story songs. Have you ever wondered what would have happened if Carole King wrote epic musicals on the moon? Listening to LA’s magical maiden songstress Jamie Drake will provide a clue as to what that would sound like. She writes songs with a certain old Hollywood glamor to them, and after a decade of helping other people write and sing songs, she got signed and has an insanely lush record “Everything’s Fine” coming out in September.
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Steve Earle Jul 10, 2019

This week, Z. speaks with Steve Earle. The three-time Grammy Award-winning roots ‘n’ roll poet and revered performer has been releasing fearless, roguish records for nearly four decades, accidentally becoming one of the founding fathers of the thriving Americana movement along the way. Growing up a baseball-crazy son of an air traffic controller in San Antonio, Steve Earle has never quite checked any cliché box or stayed in any lane on the way to his almost mainstream success. Host Z. Lupetin caught up with Steve on his tour bus before hitting the stage at ROMP Fest in Kentucky this past June. Steve has been on the road in support of his recent release, GUY — a tribute to one of his songwriting colleagues and heroes, the late Guy Clark.
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Freddy & Francine Jul 03, 2019

This week, Z's conversation with Freddy & Francine (AKA Lee Ferris and Bianca Caruso), a deeply soulful duo who have been lifting up audiences around the world with their gather-round-one-mic harmonies and been-through-hell-and-back love songs. Z. talks about Lee singing on Broadway and snaking through the gauntlet of substance abuse and Bianca finding her voice after too many years of dead end jobs and giving herself the permission to let her voice lead her as an artist. Check out Freddy and Francine on the road throughout the Summer.
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Greg Holden Jun 26, 2019

This week, Greg Holden - a Scottish-born singer songwriter and pop hitmaker with a series of increasingly personal, poetically powerful and daringly politically charged albums. Greg Holden finds himself in an interesting spot. He’s a major label artist who has taken himself off all social media and openly questions the need for the toxic digital society we’ve trapped ourselves in. His songs Boys in The Street and Hold On Tight have been streamed nearly 26 million times and the acoustic pop blockbuster he co-wrote for American Idol wunderkind Philip Philips has been listened to over a 120 million times, but when you listen to these songs a little deeper, you discover a depth and introspection that is rarely found in mainstream pop music today.
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Richard Thompson Jun 19, 2019

This week, Z. speaks with the British born folk rock rebel and underground guitar icon, Richard Thompson. With his signature grimace that seems to dare you to look at his album covers, his salty slam poet vocal delivery, slashing finger picked guitar style, and imposing black beret which makes him look more like a hardened revolutionary than a kindly grandpa who just turned 70, Richard Thompson is a true icon of rock and folk music.
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Peter Rowan Jun 12, 2019

Z. speaks with Peter Rowan, the affable elder-statesman of folk music, who was there at the crucible beginnings of bluegrass, and has joyfully jaunted across a plethora of ethnic music styles in his five decade-long career. These days, despite it getting harder for him to get around, he's still on the road constantly, and you can see him at Telluride Bluegrass and Redwing Roots and Rockygrass and wherever young folks and old folks are still gathering around whatever stew folk music is cooking these days. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear Peter set up outside in the sun with his Free Mexican Airforce Band to perform a sweet Tejano tune under the trees.
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The War and Treaty Jun 05, 2019

This week, Z.'s conversation with The War and Treaty. In just a few short years, the rapidly rising folk-soul duo has gone from playing high school auditoriums to opening for Al Green at Radio City Music Hall, singing with Mumford & Sons in Nashville, and recording with Emmylou Harris. In the process, they have put together one of the hottest touring bands tearing through the US.
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Chris Shiflett May 22, 2019

This week, a renegade guitar slinger for who has spent 20 years prowling stages around the world with the Foo Fighters and has become a soulful songwriter in his own right -- Chris Shiflett. His new record, “Hard Lessons”, is coming out June 14, and he talked with Z. about the vulnerability of striking out on his own, the whiplash jump from rocking Madison Square Garden one night and a rowdy bar the next, and how growing up with three brothers in Santa Barbara helped him navigate becoming a dad to three young sons of his own. For those about rock, we advise you listen to this man. He’s been to the mountain top and has had to start over more than once, but most of all, he can write Rock 'n Roll songs that make you roll the window down and sing at the top of your lungs.
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Hot Club Of Cowtown May 15, 2019

Z. speaks Hot Club Of Cowtown -- the genre defining Western Swing trio that has quietly crafted over thirteen records, and has traveled a quarter of a century on the road together. On this episode, Z. was lucky enough to record two live performances from Hot Club Of Cowtown, and is there anything better than guitar, fiddle, and bass going full tilt around one mic? Both tunes are included, as well as an enlightening discussion about the scariest hotel room they've ever stayed in, playing together for over twenty years, and what it was like to tour with Willy Nelson and Bob Dylan...on the same tour.
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Jon Stickley May 08, 2019

Based in Asheville, North Carolina, Jon leads one of the most sonically innovative, shreddingly mind expanding, and confoundingly impossible to categorize acoustic groups, the Jon Stickley Trio. Z. spoke with Jon in a hotel bathroom a while back to hear his side of his guitar hero story, plus an exclusive acoustic performance from Jon at the end of the episode.
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Dom Flemons - Part 2 May 03, 2019

In this episode, we get to know a little bit more about Dom personally by calling his mom to get the inside scoop on his upbringing in Phoenix, and Dom talks about his time in The Carolina Chocolate Drops. Be sure to listen to Part 1, which came out on May 1, before tuning into this episode.
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Dom Flemons - Part 1 May 01, 2019

This week on the show, part one of Z's converstaion with Dom Flemons, the Grammy Award winning American songster who has made it his mission to reclaim and rejuvenate the lost acoustic music of the past and bring it whistling brightly into the future. Born in Phoenix Arizona to parents of African American and Mexican heritage, the ever curious young Dominique Flemons went from playing drums in his school band and busking on the streets of Flagstaff with his fingerpicked guitar and neck rack harmonica, to taking a chance that would change his life completely. He scrounged enough money to make it to the Black Banjo gathering in North Carolina where he would meet Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson, and begin seven year run with their groundbreaking African American stringband The Carolina Chocolate Drops. They would go on win the Grammy for traditional folk album, headline festivals and theaters around the world, open for Bob Dylan play the Grand Ol Opry, and burst into the consciousness of young acoustic music hopefuls all around the world, who were tired of the same stoic, hillbilly bluegrass and white-washed old-time songs played over and over around the festival campfire.
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Gaby Moreno Apr 24, 2019

This week, a folk-pop shapeshifter who effervescently sings in four languages and has rocked stages on four continents, Gaby Moreno. Born María Gabriela Moreno Bonilla in Guatemala City, she knew she wanted more as a teenager and journeyed to the USA with that big voice and an even bigger dream. She has since lived several lives inside the dark heart of the LA music business, getting signed to Warner Brothers at 18 and then dropped and signed by Epic Records, only to be dropped again by age 20. Why didn’t she give up and go home? Because the dream was a bit bigger than that. Over the last decade and a half, Gaby has put out a series of sonically adventurous and politically fearless English and Spanish language albums that have created an international fanbase which takes her around the world each year. Hop scotching from early jazz to introspective folk to Dap-King assisted soul, Gaby has been filling concert halls from Berlin to Sydney, winning her a Latin Grammy in the process, setting up a dream collaboration on a new album with Van Dyke Parks, and getting her weekly appearances on NPR’s Live From Here as Chris Thile’s secret weapon. She even helped write the theme song to Parks and Recreation. While she may be multi-talented, she is also among the kindest, sweetest souls to be featured on The Show On The Road. Make sure you stick around for a new song she plays at the end and a short story she wrote on the spot about UFO’s and time travel.
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Rayland Baxter Apr 17, 2019

This week on the show, Z. meets up with songwriter and rock n' roller Rayland Baxter on the road in Las Vegas. Beyond Rayland Baxter's mellow, easy going demeanor, lies a deeply perceptive and sharp as a knife craftsman who takes his songwriting deadly serious. His newest record “Wide Awake” deepens his focus and finds him questioning the very existence of the American dream being bought and sold all around us.
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Rachel Baiman Apr 10, 2019

Fiddler and banjo picker Rachel Baiman calls her mom on this week's episode of The Show On The Road with Z. Lupetin. A Chicago native, Rachel became an Illinois state fiddling champion as a teenager and later went on to form Ten String Symphony with fellow fiddler Christian Sedelmyer. Z talks with her about the gift and sacrifice of making music your life, and how her organization Folk Fights Back has given her and her fellow Nashville songwriters a way to directly challenge the policies of the current Presidential administration.
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Bobby Rush Apr 03, 2019

At 85 years old, Bobby Rush has been playing his brand of lovably raunchy, acoustically crunchy and soulfully rowdy blues for over six decades. Starting from his days as part of the Southern migration from his hometown of Homer, Louisiana, to the south side of Chicago where he used to have Muddy Waters himself sub in for him when he couldn’t do a gig, Bobby Rush, who just won his first Grammy at the humble age of 83, has no plans of slowing down.
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Celeigh Cardinal Feb 27, 2019

This week Z. speaks with the high priestess of Canadiana soul, Celeigh Cardinal. Growing up without having much connection to her indigenous heritage, Celeigh recently reconnected to the vibrant native community in Edmonton and has become a role model for young singers who may never have had the courage to make a name for themselves in Canada’s rich festival and concert circuit. In 2018 she was named the Indigenous Artist of the Year in Western Canada, and she just became the first indigenous DJ to get her own show on CKUA radio which reaches far across the Canadian prairies.
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Bhi Bhiman Feb 20, 2019

Z. speaks with multi-talented songwriter, singer, guitar slinger and activist Bhi Bhiman. For nearly a decade Bhi Bhiman has been diligently crafting poetic protesty earworms with his masterful guitar work and fuzzed out harmony, and all along the way gaining some powerful friends and fans Like the late Chris Cornell who had Bhi sing with each night on tour a few years back. His newest project is called “Peace Of Mind”, and is being released week by week as an interactive political podcast album. He writes about our broken immigration policies, our abandoned mental health system, the continued fight for Women’s rights, voter suppression, and that’s just the first few songs off "Peace Of Mind". Somehow, he’s not preaching at you while he’s doing it. He’s simply putting a stunned smile on your face as you sing along with a renewed faith in the democratic process and freedom of speech.
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T Sisters Feb 11, 2019

This week on the show, Z. speaks with Oakland’s soulful singing T Sisters. For this trio of sisters, singing harmony-rich songs isn't just their full time job, it's a way of life. It’s what they do - and damn do they do it well. Sisters Erika, Chloe and Rachel are harmonic masters. Whether it’s demonstrated in their sassy soulful originals accompanied by upright bass, guitar, banjo and mandolin, or with their delicious vocal-layer-cake covers of Kylie Monogue and Paul Simon hits, family runs deep through our music. T Sisters will be releasing their next EP, "We Are Bound", produced by Oliver Wood (The Wood Brothers) in March of 2019.
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Jordie Lane and Clare Reynolds Feb 05, 2019

This week Australian singer/songwriter Jordie Lane and his Aussie producing/harmonizing partner Clare Reynolds. Jordie has been making dark-hearted, voluptuously verbose folk music with a grinning rock ‘n roll spirit for nearly a decade. While he's just making a name for himself in the US, he's been playing huge venues all over Australia for years, as one of Melbourne's most beloved and respected roots music artists. Have a listen, and then tell your American amigos to give this Aussie kid a shot - you won't regret it.
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The Accidentals Jan 28, 2019

Z. chats with Michigan electric folk trio, The Accidentals. The two leading ladies of The Accidentals met as violin and cello playing high schoolers in Traverse City Michigan where it was love at first jam, and soon after they had the courage to say no to a full scholarship to Berklee College of Music, and have been making records and touring non stop ever since - all before they could even buy themselves a beer. The Accidentals's empowered cocktail of classically infused funky Americana got even more potent when they officially became a trio in 2014 when drummer Michael Dause joined in, and they quickly became precocious Michigan musical celebrities, opening for Brandi Carlisle, Andrew bird, and Rodriguez among others. This momentum got them national attention from a Billboard magazine adored appearance at South by Southwest, and eventually got them signed to a major label before they could be allowed to rent a car. Z. met up with the three of them in a hotel room at the Sisters Folk Fest in Oregon.
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KOLARS Jan 22, 2019

This week on the show, Z. talks to Rob Kolar and Lauren Brown of the theatrical space-rock duo KOLARS. Sure, many husband and wife bands try to stand out in their own way, but Rob and Lauren take it one step further. They’re both multi-talented multi-instrumentalists who create a sci-fi-inspired, jangly, joyful strain of roots rock that sounds much bigger than two people. Sometimes you just have to hear something to believe it.
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Sunny War Jan 14, 2019

This week, Zach speaks with folk blues guitarist and singer songwriter Sunny War. Turns out that while Sunny War was playing her poetic brand of punky blues on the rowdy boardwalk in Venice beach, host Zach Lupetin was living just up the block and walking past her everyday without noticing. She's come quite a long way since those days, having released three albums since 2014, culminating with 2018's breakout, "With The Sun."
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Lindsay Lou Jan 07, 2019

Zach talks with the honey-voiced singer songwriter Lindsay Lou. For over a decade she has been making slow-burning soulful roots music, first with her Michigan band the Flatbellies and now with her Nashville crew that tours under Lindsay Lou. They talk about how she joined the great Americana Band migration from Michigan to Nashville, the nuances of pleasing her punk rock mom with her evolving music, and they try out some new lullabies, because all of their friends are having babies.
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Tim O'Brien Dec 31, 2018

Starting in the late 1970s with the pioneering string band Hot Rize, Tim O’Brien has trailblazed a quietly powerful and influential solo career that includes 16 albums and multiple Grammy awards, writing what many consider to be the new standards of bluegrass music. Now that he’s a bluegrass elder statesmen, O’Brien has made the time to produce albums for a new crop of festival headliners like Yonder Mountain String Band and the Infamous Stringdusters. He’s recorded and toured with Mark Knopfler and Steve Martin, had his songs covered by the Dixie Chicks and Garth Brooks — not bad for the small, bespectacled kid from Wheeling, West Virginia who dropped out of college and headed west with the idea that maybe, just maybe — if he learned enough songs — he could make it.
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The Mammals Dec 18, 2018

Mike Merenda and Ruth Ungar of The Mammals talk to Zach about their devoted activism, big-hearted protest songs, and how songs can still make a difference.
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Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn Dec 10, 2018

For over three decades now Béla has quietly revolutionized how the banjo is played, recorded and perceived - taking it from of the front porches of Appalachia and into jazz clubs, symphony halls and rock stadiums from his hometown of New York City to Uganda and Tibet and back again. Meanwhile, Abigail has forged her own unique path. A fiercely intelligent songwriter and activist fluent in Mandarin, it’s been told she gave up on being a well regarded lawyer in China after a meditation retreat brought her to the realization that the banjo and not the briefcase was her destiny. After meeting at a Nashville square dance (yes that really happened), Béla and Abigail’s banjo explorations became one. Slowly they begun touring and recording together, and that’s where Zach caught up with them, on a rainy Wednesday on the UCLA campus in LA.
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Birds of Chicago Dec 04, 2018

Built around the electric energy of husband and wife duo Allison Russell and JT Nero, Birds of Chicago cook up a special brew of soulful rock n roll and goosebump-raising secular gospel music that is a much needed shot of pure and positive energy. The Show On The Road host Z. Lupetin had them over to his place in Los Angeles a few months back to talk about Allison's wild childhood in Monreal, their slow motion story of falling in love back in the windy city of Chicago, and how they now balance marriage and touring schedules with their adorable four year old daughter in tow. Presented by Nomad Goods.
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Darlingside Nov 26, 2018

Darlingside's Auyon Mukharj is this week's guest. He and Zach discuss his unexpected climb from being an unsure classical violinist as a kid to the height of the current folk music circuit.
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Mandolin Orange Nov 19, 2018

For nearly ten years, Mandolin Orange, the North Carolina folk duo comprising of Andrew Marlin and Emily Franz, have made their quietly powerful, deeply-entwined harmonies sing out from stages from Red Rocks to Newport Folk Fest. Zach talks with Emily and Andrew about how discussing Andrew’s southern family history and politics can be like fighting wildfires around the dinner table - and how Emily’s morning running routine has made her more in tune with each new city she arrives in on tour. Please stick around to end of the show where Andrew and Emily play an exclusive performance of “Wrecking Ball”.
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Front Country Nov 12, 2018

The boundary breaking bluegrass outfit Front Country is this week's guest. They are among the most fiercely intelligent, straight up wacky, and genuinely warm-hearted people playing music on the road today. The Show On Road host Z. Lupetin was initially only going to talk to a few band members for this episode, but this time the entire band got cozy and gathered around the mic for a casual and cool conversation. Song - "If Something Breaks"
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Robbie Fulks Nov 05, 2018

This week Zach talks to Chicago-based troubadour Robbie Fulks. They talk about how he's made his own brand of sharp-tongued country music for over three decades, and how he considers Hank Williams the Shakespeare of American Music. They also discuss how he’s become more fearless and less embarrassed to confront heartbreak and the darkness always lurking in America as he’s grown older.
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Tony Joe White Oct 29, 2018

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 guy named Elvis), he also wrote for Dusty Springfield and Tina Turner, and the likes of Bob Dylan was a fan. Zach was fortunate to speak with Tony Joe at a hotel diner in Hollywood back in September about his storied career as a songwriter, guitarist, and touring musician.
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Shook Twins Oct 18, 2018

The Shook Twins are a psychedelic folk rock band out of Portland, Oregon, fronted by the effervescent twin sisters Laurie and Caitlin Shook. Zach talks to Laurie and Caitlin about their origins as renegade loop artists in Idaho, their process as songwriters, and how loneliness cannot exist when you have a twin sister.
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The Wild Reeds Oct 17, 2018

The Wild Reeds are a harmony-rich folk rock group with three female lead singers based in LA. Zach talks to them about their songwriting sisterhood, how you're supposed to act when you hear your own song being played at a Whole Foods parking lot in El Paso, and the rules of writing brutally honest breakup songs in the #metoo era. Song - "New Ways To Die"
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The Show On The Road Intro Oct 12, 2018

An introduction to The Show On The Road hosted by Z. Lupetin.
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