Talkhouse Podcast

Dylan Tupper Rupert is a music writer, podcast host, and producer in Los Angeles. You might know her as the host of KCRW's Lost Notes: Groupies, or as the producer fka Producer Dylan of Bandsplain. This spring, her new show Music Person is coming to the Talkhouse Podcast Network—where she'll have in-depth conversations with musicians and brilliant people in the greater music ecosystem, and will sometimes maybe even go on an adventure. So here's a sneak peek—Dylan's diary of her week in Austin for South By Southwest.

Tonight on Summer Album/Winter Album: Modern Vampires Of The City. Vampire Weekend. 2013.  Our special guest: Amanda Petrusich of The New Yorker. Jody Avirgan is arguing Winter, Craig Finn is arguing Summer. Craig won the coin toss. He is presenting first. This episode was recorded live at the On Air Fest in Brooklyn. Weigh in and find lots more on Instagram, and clips on our YouTube page. Get in touch through our website. 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.

In this bonus chat, Talkhouse host Josh Modell speaks with the guys behind the great new Summer Album/Winter Album podcast, Craig Finn and Jody Avirgan. After our conversation, stick around for an episode in which they vociferously debate whether Vampire Weekend’s classic Modern Vampires of the City belongs to warm or chilly weather. Subscribe to Summer Album/Winter Album 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.

This week's episode of the Talkhouse Podcast came together by way of my colleague and friend Keenan Kush, who jokingly referred to the music of today’s guests as "Keenan-core." We’ve got a conversation between the duos Kit Sebastian and Pearl & The Oysters. Kit Sebastian came together in London, but their musical (and even geographical) pedigrees are spread much wider. Kit Martin and Merve Erdem, now based in Turkey and France, play music that reflects their locations. Tropicalia and psychedelic pop flirt with an array of other influences to create something that sounds almost out of time. Their latest album New Internationale came out last year on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label, and it adds Azerbaijani and some funk to the mix. Check out the track “Faust” right here. Pearl & The Oysters is also a duo with international roots, having moved from France over a decade ago to Florida, but ending up in Los Angeles. Jazz and Tropicalia also inform their indie pop, and they also ended up on a hip label run by anot

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a pair of songwriters with plenty in common, but who came up on opposite sides of the world: Sharon Van Etten and Nadia Reid. Sharon Van Etten will be very familiar to Talkhouse listeners; we’ve been huge fans of her music from the very beginning, and have followed her—as many of you have—through her early days of more spare guitar songs to the fully fleshed-out music she’s been making in the past few years. Her latest album was Van Etten’s first to be written and recorded with a band, and that band has a name that it shares with her latest album: Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory. Working out songs with her band has resulted in a looser, somewhat more experimental Sharon Van Etten, but it’s still unmistakably her voice and vision, which is to say it’s fantastic. Check out "Idiot Box" from Sharon and the Attachment Theory's new record. Today’s other guest, as you’ll hear, is a friend of Sharon’s from New Zealand, Nadia Reid. Reid has been making music for

On today's Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got one of those episodes pairing an artist you’ve surely heard of, pun intended, with one you likely haven’t, but will. It’s Shirley Manson and Stephen McAll. Manson is of course the singer for the long-running, Grammy-nominated, chart-topping, Bond-theme-performing band Garbage, which hit it big right out of the gate in the mid-1990s. Manson and her bandmates have assembled a varied catalog since, including the biting 2021 album No Gods, No Masters. As you’ll hear in this chat, Garbage is still going strong, working on a new record that goes in kind of a different direction than the last one. Manson has always been a great talker; she even hosted her own podcast for a few years called The Jump, on which she talked with other musicians about the song that provided their breakthrough. She’s a huge fan of music, so it’s no surprise that she was excited to chat with today’s other guest, Stephen McAll. McAll, like Manson, is Scottish—that’s hard to miss—though he hasn’t been

In this new spin-off series of the Talkhouse Podcast, host Nick Dawson introduces a new conversation format by setting out to ask questions that his guests have never been asked before in an interview. On the inaugural episode, he talks with Vera Drew, the writer-director-editor-star of The People’s Joker, one of the most acclaimed and talked-about films of 2024. In this wide-ranging chat, Vera and Nick talk about dreams, shoplifting, addiction, recovery, first love, self-love, self-care, polyamory, anxiety … as well as horny audiences, toxic yoga instructors and idyllic meetings with Elijah Wood and Lilly Wachowski. For more filmmakers talking film and TV, visit Talkhouse at talkhouse.com/film. Subscribe now to stay in the loop on future episodes of the Talkhouse Podcast. 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.

Josh Modell sits down with Transmissions host Jason P. Woodbury to preview the new season of Aquarium Drunkard's podcast, Transmissions. Subscribe to Transmissions Read more at Aquarium Drunkard

If you’re a regular Talkhouse Podcast listener you know that we most often feature musicians on the show, but we’re always happy when creative people in other fields share a chat, too—especially when they’ve had the kind of interesting careers that today’s two guests have. Haley Joel Osment made a permanent mark on pop culture when he uttered the words “I see dead people” in 1999’s The Sixth Sense, made when he was just 10 years old. The line still reverberates today: Just listen to Kendrick Lamar’s "Not Like Us." Osment was nominated for an Oscar for his role as a psychic kid, and he has had a fruitful, relatively low-key acting career since—no scandals, no blockbusters, just a bunch of really interesting work. As you’ll hear in this podcast, he’s fully down to earth about his unusual journey—even ready to find a tiny bit of positivity in the recent L.A. fires, which completely destroyed both his and his parents’ house. He’s chatting here with his actor-comedian friend Matt Walsh, who’s probably best known f

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 new life into country by looking both backward and forward. Since then, Price has released a series of great records as well as a phenomenal memoir called Maybe We’ll Make It. Last time she was on this podcast, Price was talking to former Tom Petty sideman Mike Campbell about a collaboration they did. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, and as you’ll hear in this chat, she’s got new music cooking, though nothing has been officially announced yet. Lilly Hiatt has a famous last name in the music world—her dad is John Hia

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 aspiring country stars from very small towns—Livingston, Tennessee and Hackett, Arkansas, respectively—who found fans—and each other—via TikTok. Both started out playing covers of big hits, but quickly pivoted to writing their own stuff, too. Blankenship has had viral hits with sweet, simple songs like “Tennessee Sunset” and “Maxed Out.” The two of them eventually met up in Nashville, convenient to both, and to the music world, and wrote a song called “Jailbreak,” which lit up social media. Check out that song right he

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 turned into the double album Teenager of the Year, recorded with a crack studio band that included Eric Drew Feldman of Pere Ubu both as a player and producer. Teenager of the Year wasn't particularly well received upon its release 30 years ago, but it has slowly been recognized as a high point in Black's career, celebrated as his masterpiece by those paying the closest attention. It may not get the widespread attention that Pixies' Doolittle does, but the love it gets might even run a little deeper, both from its creat

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 Daughter in May of 2022. The album, a concept collection about the life and ultimate demise of Ethel Cain, skillfully moves through sounds from a sort of Gothic Americana to slowcore to ambient sounds to who knows what, exactly, other than it’s thoroughly engaging. The album was pretty quickly hailed as a masterful debut, and Cain found herself not only the darling of the music world, but with some prominent modeling gigs as well. As you’ll hear in this chat, though, the spotlight has gotten a little bit bright for he

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 ridiculous Neil Fak. Matheson has lived several lifetimes, building a reputation as a wild partier in his youth, which eventually led to a heart attack at just 29—that’s touched on briefly in this conversation. He’s also authored a bunch of super down-to-earth cookbooks, including the great new Soups, Salads, Sandwiches—you can guess what that one covers. Matheson’s connection to singer-songwriter Jennifer Castle goes way, way back. They met working in Toronto restaurants and became good friends over the years: Castle sang

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 older song called “Good Looking.” A second album, the more upbeat Memoir of a Sparklemuffin, came out just a few months ago, and she’s been on tour behind it while also juggling new motherhood. In fact, she Zoomed into this conversation while visiting her movie-star dude in Boston before heading out to play more shows. (You can Google the boyfriend if you must know.) The other half of today’s conversation is Ashe, a Nashville-based songwriter who had a pretty big hit with her 2019 song “Moral of the Story” and another

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 set on the island of birth.

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 incredible sense of adventure she feels every time she explores the island.

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 Angeles, and the “unmistakable breeze” that greets him every time he comes back home to the island.