This episode originally ran on January 6, 2025 on the Jokermen Podcast. Subscribe to Jokermen. The Jokermen and Josh Tillman discuss creative process, theories of schmaltz, The Beatles, mental health, fatherhood and breakfast, among other things Find more illuminating podcasts on the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Visit talkhouse.com to read essays, reviews, and more. Follow @talkhouse on Instagram, Bluesky, Twitter (X), Threads, and Facebook.
We’re going a little bit country again this week on the Talkhouse Podcast—gotta keep you on your toes—with a pair of Nashville singer-songwriters who share a sensibility, some history, and sobriety, as you’ll hear. One of them, Margo Price, you’ve hopefully heard on the podcast before; the other, Lilly Hiatt, is a first-timer, but you’d never know it. Price was a critical darling right out of the gate, and for good reason: Her debut album, released by Jack White’s Third Man Records, kicked some ...
I’m stating the extremely obvious here, but the music business has changed a bit since I started listening to and even writing about music—in some bad ways for sure, but also in some that are pretty fascinating and welcome. You can complain all you want about lowered attention spans, but social media has allowed a lot of talented voices to essentially skip past all the gatekeepers and get right to people’s ears. Take today’s Talkhouse Podcast guests, Bayker Blankenship and Waylon Wyatt. They’re ...
So picture this: It's 1994. The Pixies had been music-world darlings for half a decade or so, releasing some incredible records before fizzling to a stop. Their enigmatic singer, Black Francis, changes his name (again—his parents named him Charles Thompson) to Frank Black and embarks on a solo career that feels a little vexing at the time. His self-titled debut felt deeply connected to his old band, but for the next one, he struck an even richer songwriting vein: The songs kept coming and they t...
This episode originally aired on September 7, 2023. On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a pair of musicians who create with an air of mystery, but who have a fantastically straightforward chat here: Ethel Cain and Adam McIlwee. Ethel Cain is a character created by Hayden Anhedonia, though one that’s been sort of all-consuming. Anhedonia began releasing music under the name in 2019, finding her sound and her vibe over the next couple of years before releasing the absolutely epic Preacher’s...
One of the pleasures of putting the Talkhouse Podcast together is that the guests often leave their promotional hats at home and just dig into conversations about life, and that’s definitely what happened this week with Matty Matheson and Jennifer Castle. Matty Matheson you’ll surely recognize either as a superstar chef and restaurateur who appeared on a bunch of VICE shows way back when—or if not that then as a star and consultant on the hit TV show The Bear, where he plays the sublimely ridicu...
On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a pair of performers—and also friends—who recently collaborated on a great single: Suki Waterhouse and Ashe. Waterhouse came into the public eye as a model and later an actress, but she’s always had a passion for music: As you’ll hear in this chat, she started recording songs before she had any notion that they might end up out in the world. Her slightly subdued Sub Pop debut came out in 2022, after which she had a sort of unexpected viral hit with an o...
Rising singer-songwriter Andrea Cruz shares how she fell in love with folk music as a young girl in Aibonito. We hear about how the plants, birds and animals of Puerto Rico have shaped the fabric of her work, and the profound ways in which her art connects her to the island she calls home. Hollywood film director Miguel Arteta recalls his colorful childhood in Río Piedras, shares the Puerto Rican role model who inspired him to pursue a creative career, and teases his upcoming project, which is s...
Oscar-nominated screenwriter and playwright José Rivera shares with us his rich memories, both old and new, of his time in Puerto Rico: of spiders, thunderstorms and a deep sense of community in his childhood town of Espino. We hear about the joy of watching one of his plays performed in Santurce alongside the family members who inspired it, and how the island has been a constant source of inspiration that has enriched so much of his work.
The Río Piedras-based comedy band Los Rivera Destino talk about their musical childhoods, how making a music video in Bayamón changed their lives and careers forever, and the extremely unlikely place that has become their source of inspiration. Award-winning author Jaquira Díaz shares how salsa, bacalaítos and coquís defined her time growing up in the east coast towns of Humacoa and Fajardo. We also hear the wild story her grandmother told about aliens in El Yunque, and Jaquira describes the inc...
Legendary actress, singer, dancer and EGOT winner Rita Moreno shares memories of sugar cane, coquís and parrandas during her idyllic childhood in Humacao and Juncos. We hear about her recent trips back with Lin-Manuel Miranda, and how she almost turned down West Side Story because of her loyalty to the island. Dub star innovator Pachy García (aka Pachyman) opens up about growing up in Guaynabo’s vibrant reggae scene, the integral role Puerto Rico plays in his music now that he lives in Los Angel...
On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got two guys with more than a hundred years of music-making experience between them and the endless stories to match: Tucker Zimmerman and Tony Visconti. You’ll be forgiven if you don’t recognize Tucker Zimmerman’s name: The songwriter existed on the fringes of the folk scene in the late 1960s but in spite of acclaim from fellow musicians—including David Bowie, as you’ll hear—he never broke out. That may be because Zimmerman left America for Belgium, where ...
Narrated by Luis Guzmán, Sound Influence: The Art and Soul of Puerto Rico pairs stories from some of the Island’s most exciting musicians, including Los Rivera Destino, Pachyman, and Andrea Cruz, with major artists outside of music, such as Hollywood film director Miguel Arteta, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Jose Rivera, author Jaquira Diaz, and legendary EGOT Rita Moreno. Listeners will get to know Puerto Rico’s incredible towns, cities, beaches, rainforests, mountains, bars, and dance clubs tha...
On this week's Talkhouse Podcast, we’ve got two of what I’m going to call alt-rock lifers, guys with vast catalogs and the stories to match, who’ve ridden the highs and lows over the years and continue to make fantastic music for dedicated fanbases: John Flansburgh and Matthew Caws. Flansburgh is half the core of They Might Be Giants, one of the two Johns—along with Linnell—who started making quirky pop records about 40 years ago. They’ve released nearly two dozen albums, wriggling their way int...
On this week's Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a timely conversation recorded just hours after the presidential election was called, and yes, it was on their minds. It’s frequent Talkhouse alum Julien Baker and her old friend Nick Carpenter, aka. Medium Build. Baker is a powerhouse singer and songwriter who’s best known these days as one third of the supergroup Boygenius—you’ll hear her refer in this chat to Lucy and Phoebe, her bandmates Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers. But we’ve been fans here sinc...
On this week's Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a special episode recorded live just last weekend in New York featuring two artists that appear on an amazingly ambitious new conceptual compilation album called TRANSA, Asher White and MIZU. The album comes from our friends at the Red Hot organization, was conceptualized largely by Dust Reid and Massima Bell, and features more than 100 artists honoring trans and non-binary artists. There are huge names like Sade, Sam Smith, Andre 3000, indie heroes lik...
A preview of the new season of Santigold's podcast, Noble Champions. Subscribe now. Episode 1 with John Jennings and Terence Nance dives into Afrofuturism and the power of human imagination in shaping our future. In a time of global uncertainty, art that envisions a better world is essential. Santi sits down with acclaimed graphic novelist, comic book author, illustrator, and professor John Jennings, alongside artist, filmmaker, and musician Terence Nance (creator of HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness...
Note: This episode originally aired on June 20, 2019. On the latest episode of the Talkhouse Podcast, two good friends, actor-writer-director Lake Bell and singer Santigold, sit down for a long-awaited chat together. The pair are both very busy performers – Bell is hard at work on the second season of her new show Bless This Mess and can be heard in the new animated feature The Secret Life of Pets 2, and Santi recently dropped I Don't Want: The Gold Fire Sessions and just came back from a U.S. t...
On this week's Talkhouse episode we’ve got a pair of talented musicians in a chummy chat about making songs and making a life while making songs. It’s Melina Duterte, aka. Jay Som, and Pascal Stevenson, aka. Fashion Club. Stevenson just released the second Fashion Club album, A Love You Cannot Shake, but it’s different enough than the first that it almost feels like a debut. That surely has something to do with the fact that it’s the first Fashion Club music since Stevenson’s gender transition; ...
I’m gonna call this week’s Talkhouse Podcast a very special episode, since it’s focused on a specific topic and also offers a call to action and hopefully some inspiration for you, the listener. It certainly did that for me, the host guy. Our guests today are frequent Talkhousers Nick Sanborn and Amelia Meath, better known as Sylvan Esso, along with fellow North Carolina musician Libby Rodenbough, who’s played with a bunch of bands, most notably Mipso. These three share a home state, North Carol...
We’ve had legends on the Talkhouse Podcast before, but perhaps none quite as legendary as Pete Townshend, who’s in conversation on today’s episode with a younger band he recently worked with, The Wild Things. It seems a bit silly to offer a short bio of Townshend—after all, you have chosen to listen to a podcast about music, so you’re probably familiar—but here goes: Pete Townshend is the guitarist and primary songwriter of The Who, a band that cracked open the world of rock and roll in the earl...
On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a great chat between two guys who’d never met before: Steve Marion, aka Delicate Steve, and the one and only Reggie Watts. Delicate Steve is one of those monikers that describes both a person and a band, though Steve Marion has been the only constant member over the past 15 years or so. His music is largely instrumental, but you don’t miss the singing since his intricate, emotional guitar lines tend to do the work that a vocalist might otherwise do. His...
On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a couple of guys who are big parts of hardcore’s current wave: Julian Cashwan Pratt of Show Me The Body and Graham Sayle of High Vis. Show Me The Body was conceived when Pratt was still in high school in New York City, enamored of the town’s history of aggressive punk—and that music’s propensity for political lyrics. But Show Me The Body, like other current hardcore bands making waves in the past few years, doesn’t stick with the genre’s typical signifi...
On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a pair of fantastic songwriters in a sweet conversation about craft and life in general: Sima Cunningham and Roberto Lange. Lange has been making fascinating, lovely music under the name Helado Negro since 2009, mixing breezy indie-rock with electronic sounds, frequently with more than a passing nod to his Ecuadorian roots. His sonic world is always inviting, even as it’s sort of otherworldly, and he often matches those sounds with cool visuals—which is...
On this week's Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got an absolute legend of a singer-songwriter in conversation with a guy who’s no slouch himself: Lucinda Williams and M. Ward. Williams has been writing and recording incredible songs since the late 1970s, though she didn’t really break through in a huge way until 1998’s stone classic Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which garnered her the Best Contemporary Folk Album Grammy—her second Grammy—but also some of the most well-deserved critical accolades of that y...
On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got two women from different parts of the planet who share a common heritage and creative outlook: Serra Petale and Gaye Su Akyol. Petale is the guitarist for the multinational band Los Bitchos, which has been creating tough-to-pigeonhole instrumental music for the past seven years. The band’s membership and sound are both truly worldly: Petale is from Western Australia, and her bandmates are from Uruguay, Sweden, and the UK. As you’ll hear, they came toget...
On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a legend of ‘90s-era punk in deep conversation with a songwriter you might be hearing of for the first time: Kathleen Hanna and Jim Andralis. Hanna, of course, was a founding member of Bikini Kill, the band credited with starting the riot grrrl movement and inspiring an incredible number of young women to pick up guitars and claim their place in the rock universe. After Bikini Kill’s initial split, Hanna went on to perform in both The Julie Ruin and Le ...
On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a reunion of sorts, in celebration of a new release of old music: It’s David Pajo, Cassie Berman, and Tim Furnish. These three met in the fertile Louisville scene of the early 1990s. Pajo played guitar in the wildly influential band Slint and went on to play with Tortoise, Royal Trux, Stereolab, and Interpol at various times over the years—he’s currently a member of Gang Of Four. But the subject of this conversation is Pajo’s sorta-solo career, which we...
Hello Talkhouse listeners! Instead of new episode this week, we've revisiting a great chat from several years back between artist/musician/many other things Laurie Anderson and filmmaker Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Black Swan, The Whale, etc.). The reason? Anderson has a new album out in a couple of weeks called Amelia, and it's all about famed aviator Amelia Earhart. If that sounds odd, it probably is, and in the best ways: Anything Anderson touches is worth your time. We'll be back next week with a ...
If you had told 15-year-old me I’d be doing a podcast with today’s two Talkhouse guests, I would have asked you what the hell a podcast was before getting truly excited: It’s Perry Farrell and Daniel Ash. Perry Farrell almost certainly needs to introduction, but here goes: He first found fame as the singer for Jane’s Addiction, a band that bridged the gap between glammy metal and some burgeoning genre called alternative rock, and is pretty largely responsible the latter becoming a thing. The end...
