Talkhouse Podcast

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a pair of songwriters separated by a generation, but united by a serious dedication to the craft: Carl Newman and Liam Kazar. Carl Newman—aka. A.C. Newman—is best known as the gravitational center of The New Pornographers, the lark of a supergroup that he started back in 1997 but that quickly found great enough success that it became his main gig. As you perhaps already know, the band also features the prodigious talents of Neko Case and Destroyer’s Dan Bejar, though Newman does the vast majority of the songwriting. The band’s latest album is 2019’s In The Morse Code of Brake Lights, but as you’ll hear—maybe for the first time?—in this conversation, they’ve spent part of the pandemic working on a new one. If that’s not enough, the band’s classic debut Mass Romantic has just been reissued on vinyl, and in November and December the New Pornographers will do a tour on which they perform both that album and 2005’s Twin Cinema in their entirety. Newman has also been s