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 ...
Sep 16, 2020•58 min
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 Lync...
Sep 09, 2020•1 hr 16 min
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 mat...
Sep 02, 2020•1 hr 10 min
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 song...
Aug 19, 2020•1 hr 27 min
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...
Aug 05, 2020•59 min
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 ...
Jul 22, 2020•1 hr 24 min
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 collectio...
Jul 08, 2020•1 hr 21 min
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 ...
Jun 24, 2020•57 min
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 Eurythmi...
Jun 10, 2020•1 hr 38 min
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...
Jun 05, 2020•19 min
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 ...
May 20, 2020•1 hr 12 min
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. ...
May 06, 2020•1 hr 6 min
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...
Apr 22, 2020•1 hr 2 min
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 everyth...
Apr 10, 2020•1 hr 18 min
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...
Apr 09, 2020•58 min
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 Brot...
Mar 25, 2020•59 min
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 an...
Feb 06, 2020•1 hr 26 min
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 ...
Jan 29, 2020•1 hr 8 min
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” relea...
Jan 22, 2020•1 hr 18 min
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 Pat...
Jan 15, 2020•1 hr 1 min
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...
Jan 08, 2020•50 min
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 ...
Dec 18, 2019•50 min
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...
Dec 11, 2019•1 hr 20 min
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 movemen...
Dec 04, 2019•58 min
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 di...
Nov 20, 2019•1 hr 8 min
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 fr...
Nov 13, 2019•50 min
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...
Nov 06, 2019•1 hr 12 min
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 w...
Oct 31, 2019•56 min
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 sto...
Oct 23, 2019•1 hr 5 min
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 re...
Oct 16, 2019•43 min
