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 sevent...
Jul 22, 2021•1 hr 5 min
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 ar...
Jun 24, 2021•45 min
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 Sharecropp...
Jun 17, 2021•42 min
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 t...
Jun 10, 2021•1 hr 1 min
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 ...
Jun 03, 2021•51 min
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 traile...
May 13, 2021•44 min
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 o...
May 05, 2021•57 min
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...
Apr 21, 2021•1 hr 1 min
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 menti...
Apr 14, 2021•37 min
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 twan...
Apr 07, 2021•1 hr 5 min
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...
Apr 01, 2021•1 hr
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 internati...
Mar 24, 2021•58 min
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 br...
Mar 17, 2021•54 min
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 int...
Mar 10, 2021•1 hr 8 min
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 ...
Mar 03, 2021•54 min
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 career...
Feb 24, 2021•1 hr
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. Nearl...
Feb 17, 2021•1 hr 2 min
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 wor...
Feb 10, 2021•42 min
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 ...
Feb 03, 2021•1 hr 9 min
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 s...
Jan 27, 2021•1 hr 6 min
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 albu...
Jan 20, 2021•1 hr 10 min
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 holid...
Dec 23, 2020•49 min
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 mu...
Dec 16, 2020•1 hr 3 min
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...
Nov 11, 2020•1 hr 18 min
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 h...
Oct 28, 2020•1 hr 15 min
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 w...
Oct 21, 2020•1 hr 11 min
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 backd...
Oct 14, 2020•1 hr 16 min
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 hidde...
Oct 07, 2020•1 hr 14 min
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 “...
Sep 30, 2020•1 hr 14 min
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 ...
Sep 23, 2020•1 hr 9 min
