Talkhouse Podcast

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast, our guests begin as strangers and end their conversation as family: It’s Pamela Adlon chatting with Tegan and Sara Quin. Adlon has had an incredible career over the past 40 or so years; no matter what your pop culture diet, she has probably sneaked into your consciousness one way or another. Maybe you have vague memories of her character on The Facts of Life from the early ‘80s, or perhaps her roles on Californication and Louie in more recent years. Adlon has also had an incredible shadow career doing voices in animated shows, where she’s best known as Bobby Hill on King of the Hill. But perhaps the culmination of all that fantastic work is Better Things, the show that Adlon created, executive-produced, starred in, and let’s face it, gave birth to. Better Things just concluded its fifth and final season, and it stuck the landing so well. It’s one of those shows that hits that rare mixture of funny and true—and it definitely struck a nerve with the other half of today’s Talkho

For our first brand new Talkhouse episode of 2023, we’ve got a short but great chat with three guys from the rollicking Australian rock scene: Ambrose Kenny-Smith, Jack “Cool Breeze” Crowther, and Elliot “Dr. Love Wisdom” O’Reilly. Yes, they have excellent names, and so do their bands. Kenny-Smith is part of the super-prolific King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, which since coming together in Melbourne in 2010 has released an incredible 23 albums—three of those in October of 2022 alone. The band has built up a manic following along the way, building up a whole universe—people call it the Gizzverse—of characters and sounds that range from extended rock jams to jazz to microtonal exploration. If you’re not already familiar, there’s no perfect place to start, though last year’s Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms, and Lava is accessible in its own way. In addition to non-stop touring and recording with King Gizz, Kenny-Smith also leads another band, The Murlocs, which put out their sixth album, Rapscallion, just

Happy Holidays. While we're on break, we'd love to share with you a recent addition to the Talkhouse Podcast Network, Noble Champions with Santigold. This episode originally aired on Nov. 7, 2022, and is titled "Questlove, Angela Yee and Tunde Adebimpe." Subscribe to Noble Champions with Santigold. In this episode, Santi rallies her longtime friends Questlove, Angela Yee, and Tunde Adebimpe, who are fellow artists, industry insiders, and cultural critics, to try to tackle the question, 'What exactly is Black Music?'. They discuss complex issues like what happens when you step out of the genre box - specifically when Black artists are making music that’s left outside the 'Black Music' box, who built the box, and what’s the bigger impact of caging in or boxing out music and the artists that make it? All this while geeking out about some of their favorite seminal recording artists like Bad Brains, Nina Simone, Fela Kuti, The Last Poets and more.

Happy Holidays. While we're on break, we'd love to share a preview of another podcast on the Talkhouse Podcast Network, Craig Finn's That's How I Remember It. This episode originally aired on Sept. 1, 2022, and is titled "Adam Duritz (Counting Crows)." Subscribe to That's How I Remember It. Adam Duritz is my guest on this week’s That’s How I Remember It and I am quite psyched about it. Adam is obviously the singer and songwriter of platinum selling band Counting Crows, and has been making thoughtful and great music for decades now. I met Adam when Counting Crows took THS on tour in Europe/UK in 2009 and was so excited he agreed to do this. We talked about how the details matter so much in songs, each of our first trips to Asbury Park, loving Christmas music, that dog., last year's fantastic Counting Crows EP, bootlegs, and the way that light attaches to a girl. That’s a wrap on season one of That’s How I Remember It; we’ll be back with season two before long. Listen, subscribe, and keep your eye on this spa

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a pair of guys who don’t know each other well, but who’ve crossed paths a few times over the years—most recently at the Desert Daze festival, Nick Allbrook and Josh Conway. Allbrook is the frontman of the Australian psychedelic rock band Pond, which is sort of inextricably linked with another Australian band, Tame Impala. Allbrook was actually a member of Tame for years while also playing with Pond—which includes some current members of Tame Impala. But Pond, which has been around about as long, has built a sound of its own, much more hard charging than that other band, and released a whopping nine albums of frenetic, fun, fuzzy rock. If you’ve never heard the band, their album titles give a hint as to what they’re all about, from Corridors of Blissterday to Man It Feels Like Space Again. Pond’s latest album has a much simpler title, it’s called 9, and among its fantastic tracks is this one, “Lights of Leeming.” Josh Conway is a huge fan of Pond, though his own ban

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast, we’ve paired the frontmen for two gruff-sounding, kinda scary noise-rock bands, but who as it turns out are a couple of sweethearts: David Yow and Andrew Falkous. David Yow began his music life in the Texas band Scratch Acid, which built its own legend before burning out in the mid-1980s, and then took his maniacal presence to The Jesus Lizard. That band built a following in the next dozen years both for its confrontational music and for Yow’s intensity in their live shows. You’d often find him drunk and half-naked, howling into the faces of stunned crowds. First you were scared, and then you loved it. The Jesus Lizard benefited from the grunge explosion in the mid-1990s, but they were always too weird and scary for the mainstream—even when they got an inexplicable major-label deal with Capitol. (You know, home of the Beatles.) The Jesus Lizard split in 1999, but have reunited a few times since then, with demand for Yow’s insanity peaking every few years. There hasn’t been a

On this week's Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a lively conversation between two guys from different generations and geographical backgrounds, but some similar stories and experiences: Titus and Angelo Moore. Angelo Moore is the legendary frontman of the legendary punk-funk-ska-soul-etc. band Fishbone, which has been a frequently mutating unit since 1979. Fishbone were peers and friends with a who’s-who of that era’s Los Angeles scene, including Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction, and plenty of others, and they’ve been a huge influence on innumerable bands over the years. It hasn’t been the straightest journey, and there’s a pretty great documentary about the band that came out about 10 years ago called Everyday Sunshine. In addition to fronting the band, which still plays shows worldwide, Moore has embarked on tons of other projects over the years, releasing music as both Dr. Madd Vibe and with a group he calls the Brand New Step. Beyond that, he’s been touring as a vocalist with a David Bowie tribute tour

On the latest episode of the Talkhouse Podcast, the creator-star of Hulu’s Ramy, comedian Ramy Youssef, talks with Dina Amer, whose debut feature as writer-director, You Resemble Me, is in theaters now. The film is a lightly fictionalized, emotionally resonant portrait of Hasna Aït Boulahcen, a radicalized Muslim who Amer covered as a journalist in 2015 when Boulahcen was implicated in the Paris terrorist attacks. In an engaging, wide-ranging conversation, Youssef and Amer – fellow Egyptian-Americans who have been friends for years – talk about the personal nature of You Resemble Me, the major deal Dina turned down, Spike Lee’s take on her doing the film her way, casting a “hot” actor as a terrorist, and much more. 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.

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got the Scottish singer and songwriter behind some of the catchiest songs of the past two decades along with the super producer who helped bring those songs into the world: Fran Healy and Nigel Godrich. Healy is the singer, guitarist, and chief songwriter of the band Travis, which really broke big with 1999’s The Man Who, scoring mainstream hits with songs like “Why Does it Always Rain on Me” and “Turn.” They’ve since created a deep catalog that numbers nine albums. But for today’s purposes we’re going to concentrate on 2001’s The Invisible Band, which Travis is giving a belated 20th birthday celebration for at the moment, including a US tour that starts this week. It can be difficult to follow up a massive success like The Man Who, and Travis turned once again to Godrich to help them chart the proper course. It wasn’t the beginning, but rather the continuation of a long and fruitful relationship. Check out “Sing” from The Invisible Band. Godrich, by the time Invisible B

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a pair of singer-songwriters who don’t sound much alike, but who’ve traveled similar paths and have similar outlooks on life—oh, and who did a duet earlier this year—Frank Turner and KT Tunstall. Turner is a sort of folk-punk troubadour who’s built an incredible catalog and following over the past couple of decades from his home base in England. Like his hero Tim Barry of Avail or even Billy Bragg before him, Turner infuses truly catchy songs with a punk spirit, and he’s made a career buoyed by the fact that he never stops moving: He’s always on tour—including a recent “50 States in 50 Days” run—and always making new music. Not even the pandemic could stop him, though obviously it slowed down the live performance. During lockdown, Turner recorded his ninth album, a sort of back-to-basics affair called FTHC, which of course stands for Frank Turner Hardcore. Check out “A Wave Across a Bay” from that album, which was written as a tribute to Turner’s late friend, Scott H

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a musician and an actor who also both happen to host their own podcasts—do they let just anybody do that now?—Rhett Miller and Busy Philipps.  Miller is best known as frontman and primary songwriter for the Old 97’s, a band that’s celebrating its 30th year together in 2022 and which is at least partly responsible for the phrase “alt-country” coming into existence. But don’t hold Miller responsible for lazy genre tags: He has written literally hundreds of incredible songs that transcend any pigeonhole you might want to shove him in. In addition to a dozen Old 97’s records, he’s also put out eight solo albums, and he tours regularly both on his own and with the 97’s. All that and, like I said, he’s got a podcast: Wheels Off features Miller in conversation with other creative folks, talking about creativity—kinda like the chat you’re about to hear! Before that, check out “Go Through You,” from Rhett Miller’s new solo album The Misfit. You can see why Miller has won some

This episode originally aired on December 16, 2021. We’ve hosted some incredible Talkhouse Podcast conversations in 2021, and for our final brand-new episode of the year, we’ve got two people responsible for some of the best records of this year: Julien Baker and Aaron Dessner. Baker released her third album, Little Oblivions, back in February, and it’s a doozy. Expanding her sonic palette massively, Baker delivered her powerful, vulnerable songs with much bigger sounds. That might have felt like a gamble, but it paid off massively—she produced it herself and pushed herself into new spaces. Dessner is of course a founding member of the National, with whom he’s played for the past 20+ years. While his main band slowed down over the past couple of years, Dessner has been operating at hyperspeed. He was one of the main co-writers and producers on Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Evermore albums. He won an Album of the Year Grammy for the former, and was nominated for five more Grammys for the latter. He somehow also

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a pair of singer-songwriters who’ve taken interesting names for what are essentially solo ventures: Kevin Sullivan, aka. Field Medic, and Kristian Matsson, better known as the Tallest Man on Earth.  Matsson has been making music as the Tallest Man since about 2006, winning fans both with his largely spare, Bob Dylan-like songs and his incredibly forceful live shows. Though he’s from Sweden, Matsson is definitely influenced by the American folk tradition, especially on his early records, like the classic 2008 debut Shallow Grave. He’s since released a handful of excellent albums, and in this conversation with Kevin Sullivan, he drops some hints about a new one that he’s really excited about to be released in 2023. In the meantime, the Tallest Man on Earth just released his first all-covers album, and though he downplays it a little bit, it’s pretty amazing. It’s called Too Late for Edelweiss, and on it he covers songs written by everyone from Hank Williams to Bon Iver

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a hardcore legend and a fierce Ukrainian bandleader who recently worked on a record together: Walter Schreifels and Eugene Hutz. Hutz is the founder, chief songwriter, and energetic frontman of Gogol Bordello, which has combined elements of punk, folk, Eastern European, Latin, and myriad other types of music for the past 20+ years. It’s a remarkable career that’s taken Hutz from his birthplace, Ukraine, to places as far flung as Vermont, Brazil, and New York’s Lower East Side. He’s also had forays into the film world, collaborated with everybody from Madonna to Primus, and gotten crowds jumping at pretty much every festival you can think of. The war in Ukraine has naturally been on Hutz’s mind, and he’s organized benefits and spoken up loudly about it this past year. At least one song on the brand new Gogol Bordello album addresses it directly. Speaking of that record, Solidartine, and Hutz’s penchant for collaboration, it was produced by Walter Schreifels. Check out

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve gathered three guys for a very focused discussion about one of the year’s most exciting horror movies: Ti West, Tyler Bates, and Tim Williams. Ti West is a director who’s made his name with a string of what I guess you’d call indie-horror movies—though I’m not sure that does justice to the kind of auteurist vision he has. With films like The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, he revealed a truly singular style. He tried his hand at a Western with the wild and wooly In A Valley of Violence in 2016, but returned to his horror roots this year with a pair of movies filmed back to back: X, which came out in March, and its prequel, Pearl, which is just hitting theaters now. For these two movies, which both star Mia Goth, West hooked up with indie powerhouse A24, which as you’ll hear in this chat, made a big bet on these two films—and since this chat took place, have now committed to a third in the franchise. If you like creepy, stylish horror, definitely check them out. A

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we have a pair of French electronic music pioneers who recently teamed up alongside a DJ who’s been responsible for some of the most exciting production of the past 20+ years: Braxe and Falcon with A-Trak. Alan Braxe and his cousin Stephane Quem—aka DJ Falcon—are legends of French house music going back decades: Braxe was one-third of the trio Stardust alongside Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter. They famously released just one song in 1998 before splitting up, but “Music Sounds Better With You” is a classic of the genre. Falcon’s biggest claim to fame might also be Daft Punk adjacent: He co-wrote and co-produced their song “Contact,” from 2013’s Random Access Memories. And though they’ve obviously been acquainted forever, Braxe and Falcon only recently came together for a project, and it’s pretty amazing. Their debut EP, Step By Step, includes a killer title track with an appearance by Panda Bear. Braxe and Falcon will make their live debut in November with two U.S. shows, one in

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast, we’ve got a conversation between two young performers who are just this week starting a huge tour together: Marcus King and Neal Francis. King is a blues-rock prodigy who, at 26, already has a lifetime of music under his belt—both as leader of the Marcus King Band and, more recently, as a solo artist. Though he wasn’t alive for the 1970s, King clearly has an affinity for that decade, with nods in his music to players like Jimi Hendrix and ZZ Top. He’s earned a huge following over the years, which makes sense since he’s been gigging since his teens. King’s first solo disc, 2020’s El Dorado, earned him a Grammy nomination, and for the brand new Youngblood he once again hooked up with producer Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. It’s a scorcher. Check out a little bit of “Hard Working Man” from Youngblood, from a recent performance on Jimmy Fallon's show. Neal Francis is similarly enamored of 1970s sounds, though he leans more toward the funk and soul sides of things. Francis was in

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a couple of fantastic songwriters from the indie-rock world: Kenny Becker and Doug Martsch. Martsch I’m guessing our listeners will know as the chief songwriter and sole consistent member of Built to Spill, the band that made Boise, Idaho famous. Built to Spill has been an ongoing concern since the early 1990s, releasing a ton of great albums at a fairly leisurely pace, including stone classics like There’s Nothing Wrong With Love and Keep it Like a Secret. The Built to Spill lineup has mutated a bunch of times over the years, and that’s never been more true than for the genesis of their latest album, When the Wind Forgets Your Name. Writing and recording the album was done with members of the Brazilian band Orua, but the latest live lineup features Martsch alongside a pair of incredibly talented young women from up-and-coming bands: Prism Bitch’s Teresa Esguerra and Blood Lemon’s Melanie Radford. They bring a new energy to this storied band. Check out the hilarious

New from Talkhouse: Join Björk in conversations with collaborators about her sound experiences. In the podcast you’ll learn about the moods, timbers, and tempos that vibrate through each album. Subscribe at: https://pod.link/bjork

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve paired a couple of friends who recently worked together on an incredible project: Ethan Hawke and Hamilton Leithauser. Ethan Hawke you surely know as the Academy Award-nominated actor in a million great films, from Reality Bites to Training Day to Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy to 2018’s First Reformed. Hawke is also a writer and director, and the impetus for today’s conversation is his six-part HBO Max documentary The Last Movie Stars. The series tells the story of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, both their personal lives as a married couple and their professional lives as two monumental actors of their generation. Far from a typical documentary, The Last Movie Stars uses archival footage alongside dramatizations of interviews featuring current movie stars. It even gets a bit meta, with Hawke revealing some of his process during the series via Zoom calls with contemporaries. It’s a fascinating way to tell this incredible story. Another way that Hawke brought this s