All One Song: A Neil Young Podcast

Our guest this week is legendary guitarist Bill Frisell. In the 1980s, he served as ECM Records’ in-house guitarist, and he’s been hard at it ever since: partnering with John Zorn for a long series of unclassifiable records, playing alongside Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Vic Chesnutt, and many more, all while making his own records, which blur the lines between jazz, avant-garde, country, surf, blues, and gospel. His latest is called Valentine. It’s out now on the Blue Note label, and it finds him in a trio setting, joined by Thomas Morgan on bass and Rudy Royston on drums. It features Malian folk, standards, and originals, and it’s as deft, nuanced, and emotive as you might expect. Bill joined me early on a Saturday morning to discuss the record, his friendship with the late Hal Wilner, his deep listening practices, and telepathy. If you enjoy, please share with your friends. They can hear Transmissions wherever they get podcasts. And if you want to take your support a little deeper, check us out on Patreon.     

Our guest this week is Jerry David DeCicca. Perhaps you know him best from Black Swans, or maybe some of the great albums he's produced by so called "outsider" songwriters like Ed Askew, Larry Jon Wilson, and Chris Gantry, among others. Since 2014, he's been putting out great records under his own name. His latest is called The Unlikely Optimist And His Domestic Adventures. Jerry describes it as “an anti-Hallmark ode to positivity." Who couldn’t use some positivity this year? In advance of its release on October 16th, Aquarium Drunkard correspondent Chad DePasquale joined Jerry to discuss Texas, his pets and social services work, and of course,  Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, which JDD idiosyncratically reviewed for Aquarium Drunkard. 

Our guest this week on Transmissions is Jerry Williams Jr., but if you know your musical cult heroes, you probably know him by the name Swamp Dogg. Since the early '50s, he's lived as a true record man—writing songs, producing artists, self-releasing music, and putting out major label flops that have gone on to achieve lost classic status. He’s always walked the line between R&B and country, making a joke of the music industry’s intentional segregating of white and black audiences. He managed Dr. Dre early on, and he's been sampled by Kid Rock and Talib Kweli. The country pop classic, Don’t Take Her (She’s All I’ve Got)?” He co-wrote it.    The line where Jerry ends and Swamp Dogg begins is transitory. In the early '70s, after a career of singing under his own name, Jerry needed Swamp Dogg to serve as an outlandish avatar who could satirically tackle societal mores. His provocative jokes about civil rights and politics earned him hangs with Jane Fonda and the anti-war crowd and put him afoul of J. Edgar Hoover and the Nixon administration.   These days he puts out records on Joyful Noise. His latest is called Sorry You Couldn’t Make It, and it pairs him with producer Ryan Olson, Bon Iver, Jenny Lewis, and the late John Prine, who sings “Memories” and the beautiful “Please Let Me Go Round Again.” Over the many years, Swamp Dogg has embraced auto-tune, twang, and ambient flourishes. He’s a world class adapter, a weirdo hero who refuses to yield to expectations, sometimes at the expense of good taste, but remember: it’s never Jerry doing the offending, that’s Swamp Dogg. Let that be your content warning: this episode contains language some listeners might find objectionable.    Need more Swamp? Check out his 2013 Aquarium Drunkard interview.   This week’s episode was written and produced by Jason P. Woodbury and Michael Krassner, Andrew Horton edited and engineered. Justin Gage, executive producer. Video production by Jonathan Mark Walls. Imagery by D. Norsen and Heavy Hymns.    Does Aquarium Drunkard make your listening life better? If so, you can support us through Patreon. Help continue to produce mixtapes, podcasts, radio shows, audio visual presentations, interviews, features, and much more. 

Our guest this week is Chris Forsyth, guitarist, bandleader, composer, and DIY lifer. His studio albums evoke the punk psychedelia of Television, balancing ‘70s rock grooves the loose, exploratory feel of the Dead. But as good as his studio LPs are, it might be live recordings that best showcase his sound. His latest is called First Flight. On it, he’s joined by guitarist Dave Harrington, drummer Ryan Jewell, and bassist Spencer Zahn on stage at Nublu in New York City on September 20th, 2019.    Who knows how long it will be before we can safely cram into a room to take in some live jams, but in the meantime, the 40-some minutes of First Flight should help those missing the thrills of unexpected and immersive live music. Forsyth joined Transmissions to discuss his roots, time spent studying with Richard Lloyd of Television, and his motivations in opening a DIY space in Philadelphia, Jerry’s on Front.    Does Transmissions make your listening life better?  Help us continue doing it by pledging your support via our Patreon page. Doing so will get you access to our secret stash—including bonus audio, exclusive podcasts, printed ephemera, and vinyl records—and help us keep an independent publication going. 

This week on Transmissions, we're joined by songwriter, Dr. Dog drummer, and noted Twitter personality Eric Slick. His new album of classic pop songcraft is called Wiseacre. Best known for his work with Dr. Dog and his wife, songwriter Natalie Prass, Wiseacre was inspired by the golden-hued melodies of Harry Nilsson, Haruomi Hosono, and a general '70s gloss. It's a deeply personal record, one that explores contentment and domesticity, as well as unpacking no small amount of personal weirdness and trauma.   Eric joined Aquarium Drunkard contributor Ben Kramer—you might know him from Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard’s The Tonight Zone, as featured on the Adult Swim live stream to get into it all: how his marriage to Prass influenced the lyrics of the record, how his meditation practice informs his songwriting, and what it's like to get into a real songwriting groove. 

On Mama You Can Bet, her new album under her Jyoti alias, Georgia Anne Muldrow embraces her jazz roots. Born and raised in Los Angeles, her parents were immersed in the city’s jazz community. Her father Ronald Muldrow worked with Eddie Harris; Rickie Byars-Beckwith, her mother, worked with Pharoah Sanders. And there’s the matter of her spiritual lineage: the Jyoti name was bestowed upon her by Alice Coltrane at her ashram. “I’ve had many experiences in that woman’s force field, and I’ve never forgot any of them,” Muldrow says, discussing how Coltrane’s work felt like “music from her home planet.” Mama You Can Bet leans into Muldrow’s jazziest tendencies, incorporating two remixes of works by Charles Mingus, whose influence is palpable. But Muldrow is her own creation, and her love of electronic funk, ambient, and hip-hop colors and shades the album. Ahead of what would have been Turiya Alice Coltrane’s birthday  on August 27th, Georgia joined Transmissions host Jason P. Woodbury via Skype to discuss the new record, the West Coast jazz tradition, and maintaining a long running creative partnership and independent label with her husband, Dudley Perkins.   Mama You Can Bet is available wherever you get music August 28th.    This week’s episode of Transmissions was written and produced by Jason P. Woodbury and edited by Andrew Horton. Executive producer Justin Gage. Art and imagery by D Norsen and Heavy Hymns. If you dig what we do at Aquarium Drunkard, share our podcasts, features, interviews, mixtapes, radio shows, and sign up for our Sidecar newsletter. If you wanna take your support a step further, head over to Patreon and look us up. We appreciate it. Music heard in this episode includes “Mama, You Can Bet” and “The Crowrie Waltz” from Mama, You Can Bet (SomeOthaShip Connect).    One more note: On August 29th, get to your favorite independent record store to get your hands on our vinyl release with ORG Music, The Lagniappe Sessions Vol. II. 13 performances from your favorite artists covering songs they’re inspired by on beautiful clear vinyl. Listen to the entire album now at Aquarium Drunkard. 

Our guest this week practically invented kosmische guitar. As a member of Neu!, Harmonia, and an early incarnation of Kraftwerk, Michael Rother's fluid, emotive playing helped define the sound of krautrock, as the music came up out of Germany's avant-garde underground in the late '60s and headed for the cosmos in the '70s. In 2019, he released of Solo, a multi-disc boxed set that documented the first part of his solo career and on September 4th, the Forst-based guitarist and composer follows that collection up with Solo II, which includes 1983's Lust , 1985's Süssherz und Tiefenschärfe, 1987's Traumreisen, 1996's Esperanza, 2004's Remember (The Great Adventure) and a brand-new album, Dreaming, which finds him returning to the spaced out pastoral drift of his classic albums. He was kind enough to join us on Transmissions to discuss his musical youth in India, his days as a conscientious objector, his collaborations with Klaus Dinger, Roedelius, Moebius, and his experiences with younger musicians who were inspired by his sound, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth.

Our guest this week is Colin Dickey, author of The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession With The Unexplained. Bigfoot, UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, phantom islands like Atlantis and Lemuria…the paranormal haunts our collective imagination. In his new book, Dickey smartly explores the lore woven into these topics, and along the way, he describes the way occult literature, pulp magazines, pop culture, and media myth-making influences and shapes our perception of these damned subjects.  It’s a book packed with ideas, but easy to read, thoughtful, good humored, and sharp. Dickey determinedly engages with the currents of nationalism, colonialism, hucksterism or outright ill-intent, and racism that often accompanies these topics. This stuff is no longer confined only to the fringes. With the weirdness of our age getting ever weirder, the need to know how to navigate the strangeness is clear and present. Colin Dickey steps up to the task with your host, Jason P. Woodbury, this week on Transmissions. 

Since the late '90s, Phil Elverum has remained at work on one of the strangest and most beautiful discographies in independent rock. As The Microphones, he created genre-defining records like 2001's The Glow Pt. 2, which has been hailed by critics like Heather Phares, who praised its "kaleidoscopic sounds...pastoral folky ballads, playful symphonic pop, and gusts of white noise," and Elverum's "strangely hymnal lyrics." In 2003, he abandoned the name The Microphones and embarked upon a series of records under the Mount Eerie moniker. They not only retained that sense of spaciousness, but greatly expanded it, incorporating the influence of black metal and extended song lengths. In 2016, Genevieve Castree, and illustrator, musician, and cartoonist, and also Phil’s wife and the mother of their daughter Agathe, passed away from pancreatic cancer. Phil recorded a set of harrowing, beautiful, and extraordinarily human albums about the experience, including A Crow Looked at Me, Now Only, and Lost Wisdom Pt. 2, recorded with Julie Doiron. Along the way, he married actress Michelle Williams and moved to New York City, though that relationship has ended and he and Agathe are back in the Pacific Northwest these days. It’s hard to sum up Elverum’s story, but in a weird way, that’s kind of what he does on his new record, The Microphones in 2020, which features one, 44-minute long song. It’s his first time using the Microphones name since 2003, and to hear him express it, it’s kind of an album about identity. While it’s no less autobiographical than his recent records, it’s a step in a different direction, temporal poetry about transience and the way a person becomes a different person—but somehow, it's also how they stay the same person. Once again, we’re dabbling in paradox and contradiction. Elverum created a film to go along with it, in which he displays decades worth of personal photographs, occasionally brushing them from the frame, where they are replaced by new images. And that’s where we find Phil: in the midst of trying to figure out how time shapes and creates us, and how we shape and conceive of time. This week on Transmissions, he opens his (virtual) door and invites us in to discuss the new album, personal history, identity, and Weird Al.

This week on Transmissions, we’re joined by songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Jenn Wasner. She had planned on spending a fair amount of 2020 on the road playing guitar, keys, and singing with Bon Iver, but instead she’s spending it in a manner probably familiar to readers: watching TV and drinking coffee, thinking about the potential end of the world. But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t kept busy: this week, her duo with Andy Stack, Wye Oak, releases its new EP No Horizon, a collaboration with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. And she’s got another EP out too, the recently released Like So Much Desirefrom her solo project, Flock of Dimes. Both projects are great showcases for her progressive songcraft, which pairs oblique and exploratory lyrics with swooning avant-pop. Wasner has never settled comfortable into just one mode—scanning through her discography reveals folk, synth-driven art rock, and guitar epics—but her inquisitive, intricate lyrics serve as a throughline.  She joined us to discuss the role of imagination in creating the future, staying sane, what’s keeping her company on the turntable, working with Justin Vernon’s Bon Iver collective and what she’s learned from producing singer/songwriter Madeline Kenney.