Talkhouse Podcast

Jim Adkins and Davey von Bohlen, two old friends whose bands started around the same time, discuss their bands' trajectories, albums, touring, and fatherhood. They reflect on the changing music scene, the challenges in recording their album Woodwater, transitioning from working together on music, their journey to success with the release of Bleed American, and the experience of pursuing a music career. They also share funny stories about Christmas caroling, karaoke competitions, and Guitar Hero.

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a comedian and a musician who recently joined forces to make a music video: Joe Pera and Dan Wriggins.Joe Pera is a stand-up comedian who’s best known as the star and creator of Joe Pera Talks With You, the Adult Swim TV show about the beautifully modest existence of a middle-school choir instructor in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s a show unlike anything else on TV, past or present, and it’s a direct reflection of Pera’s unassuming comedic persona: In other words, it’s hard to tell where Joe Pera the character ends and Joe Pera the guy begins. It’s also insightful, weird, and decidedly sweet. And while the show just finished its three-season run recently, it won’t be the last the world sees of Pera. In fact, he’s in the midst of a stand-up tour right now, and you can find dates at joepera.com. Oh, and he also just landed the role of James Bond, which you can hear all about on his recent Seth Meyers appearance. Seems like kind of a big deal.Yet Pera still has time to help out indie bands like Friendship, whose singer and songwriter Dan Wriggins is the other participant in today’s chat. Friendship is made up of old friends—no surprise there—though the band is actually named after a town in Maine near where they grew up. They’re currently based in Philadelphia, though Wriggins Zoomed in for this chat from Little Cranberry Island, Maine, where he also spent time as a kid. That island is also where Friendship and Joe Pera shot the video for “Hank,” from the band’s brand new album, Love The Stranger. It’s the band’s fourth full-length and first for the always reliable Merge Records. It’s a beautiful record full of straightforward but nuanced observations about life and love. Check out the video for "Hank" right here, which comes up in this chat quite a bit.As I said earlier, that “Hank” video comes up in this conversation, and it leads to Joe and Dan talking about craftsmanship, lobster fishing, and lots more. They talk about touring as a comedy act versus touring as a band, and about how each of them works hard to make their respective art look easy. Oh, and at the end of the chat, Joe finally reveals who his celebrity spouse is, so stay tuned for the whole thing!Thanks for listening to the Talkhouse Podcast, and thanks to Joe Pera and Dan Wriggins for chatting. If you liked what you heard, they’re both on tour—separately—right now. Please follow Talkhouse on your favorite podcasting platform, and check out all the great written features we’ve got on Talkhouse.com. This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan, and the Talkhouse theme is composed and performed by the Range. See you next time!

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast, we’ve got what might seem at first to be an unusual pairing, but that has its genesis in some serious fandom: Taylor Bennett and Matt Johnson.Taylor Bennett is a musician, entrepreneur, and community activist who has helped guide the career of his older brother Chance the Rapper while also busting genres on his own records. Bennett is a restless musician, rarely content to make the same moves twice. He raps and sings, and has proudly been sample-free on his last few records. A few years back, he released Be Yourself, a manifesto of sorts that championed inclusivity and positivity—he also told the world around the same time that he’s proudly bisexual. For this year’s Coming of Age, Bennett once again found inspiration in all different kinds of music, even bringing in some guests from various areas on the musical spectrum. One guest he was particularly excited to work with was Matt Johnson of Matt and Kim, the New York indie duo behind some of the past two decades’ most invigorating songs. Johnson contributed vocals to “Kick Back,” from Coming of Age—check out that song right here.As I said, Matt Johnson is half of Matt and Kim—you can probably guess which half—the life-affirming duo behind one really big hit, “Daylight,” a breakthrough music video that you’ll hear about in this chat, the end-credits song in a Lego movie, and perhaps most importantly, the sort of we-did-it-our-way career that should be the envy of their peers. Matt and Kim have released six albums in their two decades together, and they’ve built a relationship with their audience through undeniably joyous live shows and a sense of gratitude you don’t always see in bands. Their energy is, to use a true rock cliche, infectious, and it’s a big part of their appeal—along with damn catchy songs, of course. The inability to get out in front of his fans has made Matt a little itchy over the past couple of years, which you’ll hear about in this chat.Johnson and Bennett also talk about giant dildos in this podcast, so prepare yourself for that. If that’s not enough to pique your interest, the two also talk about trying to separate the art from the artist, about the real reason to remain independent, and about what it’s like to get completely naked in Times Square in the dead of winter for a video shoot. It’s a lot of fun, and I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I did.Thanks for listening to the Talkhouse Podcast, and thanks to Taylor Bennett and Matt Johnson for chatting. If you like what you heard, please follow Talkhouse on your favorite podcasting platform, and check out our great written pieces and vast podcasting network on this very site. This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan, and the Talkhouse theme is composed and performed by the Range. See you next time!

On this week's Talkhouse Podcast we’ve paired up a couple of old friends and onetime tourmates, Sharon Van Etten and Jonathan Meiburg. This pairing was especially fun for me, since I had the pleasure of putting these two together in a different context many years ago, when I was editor of The A.V. Club: Sharon and Jonathan performed an amazing version of the Tom Petty/Stevie Nicks duet “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” for the site’s A.V. Undercover series. Seeing their faces together brought back that fun memory, and it was great seeing them reconnect.Van Etten is a singer and songwriter who’s been making records for the past decade plus, growing and changing and taking chances in exactly the way you hope truly talented people will. Her amazing early records were quietly intense, very confessional affairs, but she burst from the seams with subsequent releases. In 2019, she released Remind Me Tomorrow, which brought in bigger sounds and colors and an entirely different kind of confidence to her songwriting and performance. She gives partial credit in this chat to producer John Congleton, who was recommended to Van Etten by none other than Jonathan Meiburg. Earlier this year, Van Etten released another incredible album called We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, which puts into intense songs some of the feelings we’ve all been feeling the past couple of years. You know what I’m talking about. Check out “Mistakes” from that new album, and check out Van Etten on the Wild Hearts tour over the next few months, with Angel Olsen and Julien Baker. Today’s other guest, Jonathan Meiburg, is best known in the music world as the driving force behind the band Shearwater, which he started way back in the late ‘90s as an offshoot of his previous band, Okkervil River. But under this name, Meiburg has created a vast and varied catalog that combines his writerly mind with sometimes-moody, sometimes-joyous music. Shearwater just released their first album in six years: It’s called The Great Awakening, and it’s what a lazy podcast host might refer to as a return to form—or at least more austere earlier vibes. Don’t let that six-year gap fool you, though: Meiburg has been plenty busy. He’s got another band called Loma with the members of Cross Record, and they’ve got a third album on the way. Oh, and Meiburg wrote and released an incredible book called A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey, which rolls up history, science, and travel into one really beautifully written piece. (Around Talkhouse HQ, we like to brag that Meiburg has written a bunch of pieces for us over the years.) As you’ll hear in this conversation, he’s already started working on another book. Check out “Empty Orchestra” from The Great Awakening.As you’ll hear, Van Etten and Meiburg are old friends who toured together long ago, but hadn’t seen each other in person until very recently, when Van Etten’s tour took her to Hamburg, where Meiburg is currently living. They talk about writing songs—and specifically about how gibberish can become lyrics, which I always find interesting. Meiburg remarks on Van Etten’s transformation as a stage performer over the years, and they even chat about Sharon’s son—specifically his relationship to the movie Cool Runnings. Enjoy.Thanks for listening to the Talkhouse Podcast, and thanks to Sharon Van Etten and Jonathan Meiburg for chatting. If you liked what you heard, please do follow Talkhouse on your favorite podcasting platform. This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan, and the Talkhouse theme is composed and performed by the Range. See you next time.

This week we’re revisiting a Talkhouse episode that was originally released in October of 2020, when perhaps you missed it because you had other things on your mind. It happens. This one features a great chat between two women at different phases in their careers: Carly Rae Jepsen and mxmtoon. You might recognize mxmtoon’s name from her podcast 365 Days, which is part of the Talkhouse Podcast Network. Speaking of, did you know we have a network full of other great shows, including Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions, Sing for Science, Craig Finn’s brand new podcast That’s How I Remember It, and What Had Happened Was with Open Mike Eagle? We do! Anyway, just before this episode, Carly Rae and mxmtoon had just collaborated on a track called “Ok on your own,” and they dove right into a great conversation about songwriting and much, much more. Check it out, and we’ll be back with a brand new episode next week! To celebrate Carly Rae Jepsen and mxmtoon's rad collab track "ok on your own," we paired the pop stars for what turned out to be a deep dive into the art of making music and learning to thrive in the complicated music industry.In this very warm and insightful conversation, Carly and Maia each share their (very different!) origin stories, and explore both the art of songwriting and live performance. Carly also shares clutch career wisdom.Check it out, and subscribe now to stay in the loop on future episodes of the Talkhouse Podcast. Plus, ICYMI: mxmtoon just kicked off her yearlong podcast project 365 days with mxmtoon in collab with Talkhouse, which features quirky stories from history that occurred on each day, old diary entries and more; it’s really fun, and like eight minutes long. —Elia Einhorn, Talkhouse Podcast host and producer For this week’s episode, Carly was recorded by Nick Theodorakis, and everyone else you hear recorded themselves. Our producer is Mark Yoshizumi. The Talkhouse Podcast theme song was composed and performed by The Range. 

On this Talkhouse Podcast, we’ve got one of those chats that feels like it’s going to lead to something bigger down the road: Jonathan Davis and Danny Brown.Neither of these guys probably needs an introduction, but here goes anyway: Jonathan Davis is the frontman of the band Korn, which basically invented a sound and subsequent genre about 30 years ago. I’m not sure if people still say “nu metal,” but whatever you want to call it, it never really seemed to leave the cultural zeitgeist once it took hold. Korn always seemed to have a wider variety of influences than some of their peers, taking bits and pieces from goth, metal, and hip-hop to make a strange new brew. They’ve released an impressive 14 albums, taking stylistic turns like 2011’s The Path of Totality, which incorporated dubstep and drum-and-bass elements. The band’s latest is Requiem, which was written and recorded during Covid’s enforced ban on touring. It’s a bit of a return to their classic sound, and it’s gotten incredibly positive reviews from fans and critics.Danny Brown is a rapper and, more recently, a comedian who broke out of his hometown of Detroit around 2010, and has released a series of groundbreaking, incredible records that never seem to sit still—just like him. He’s had huge singles and collaborated with everybody from Eminem to Purity Ring to Kendrick Lamar to A$AP Rocky. And though he hasn’t put out a proper album since 2019’s killer U Know What I’m Sayin’, Brown has kept busy making music, making his stand-up comedy debut, doing the hilarious Danny Brown Show on YouTube, and allegedly prepping a new record with the working title Quaranta. He’s described the record as “all over the place,” which makes sense considering Brown’s varied list of influences—one of which is Korn, which is how we got here in the first place. This genesis of this conversation, Davis and Brown’s first, was Brown covering Korn’s classic “Freak on a Leash” live in concert last year.Like I said, this is the first real conversation that Brown and Davis have ever had, and they get along great—great enough that they’re instantly talking about meeting up in person to collaborate at Davis’ Bakersfield, California studio. They get into Korn’s songwriting process, Covid-inspired depression, and how the internet provides the kind of instant rejection you had to work harder for in the old days. It’s a great chat, I hope you enjoy it.Thanks for listening to the Talkhouse Podcast, and thanks to Jonathan Davis and Danny Brown for chatting. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe via your favorite podcasting app, and while you’re already there, go ahead and rate us. This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan, and the Talkhouse theme is composed and performed by the Range. See you next time!

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a pair of musicians who both suffer from the effects of LSD—that’s lead singer disease—Stuart Murdoch and Ramesh Srivastava.Ramesh was and is now again the lead singer and chief creative force behind the Austin, Texas band Voxtrot, which burned bright but maybe too quick in the early 2000s. They released a series of rapturously received EPs and one LP that were beloved by fans of deeply British institutions like Sarah Records and The Smiths. But the band had split by 2010, and Ramesh went on to release a pair of solo albums that didn’t quite have the impact his band did. For a while, he was content to leave Voxtrot in the past, but gathering material for two reissues gave him the spark to get thing going again. The next few months will see the release of both Early Music—which gathers the band’s beloved EPs—and Cut from the Stone, which features rarities and B-sides. And then, like some unstoppable force of nature, Voxtrot will tour the U.S. again. Dates can be found at voxtrot.net. And in case you’re not familiar, here’s a great Voxtrot song called “The Start of Something.”Do you hear a bit of Belle and Sebastian in that song? They’re a pretty clear influence on Voxtrot, and Srivastava met Stuart Murdoch while living in Glasgow in his younger days—you’ll hear about their meet-cute in this conversation. Belle and Sebastian, of course, have had an incredible career over the past quarter century or so. They started life as a school project for Murdoch, a shy young man whose feelings spilled out into his gentle songs in a way that seemed then—and now—to be almost magical. Over the years, Belle and Sebastian developed from a sort of bedroom-pop project to a massive pop machine, while never losing that spirit of playfulness and sincerity that Murdoch has always projected. The band recently released their ninth studio album, called A Bit of Previous. The title is a bit tricky in that it seems to reference the good old days but also Murdoch’s longtime interest in Buddhism, which he explored in greater depth during the pandemic.In this conversation, you’ll actually hear a bit about how both Ramesh and Stuart approach spirituality, both Christianity and Buddhism. You’ll hear how being a “gay brown person” pushed Ramesh away from religion for a long time. They talk about the aforementioned “lead singer disease,” and how that affects everyday life. And we get to hear about a young Stuart Murdoch making his way to the London flat of one of his musical heroes, but then deciding not to actually knock on his door. Enjoy.Thanks for listening to the Talkhouse Podcast, and thanks to Ramesh Srivastava and Stuart Murdoch for chatting. If you like what you heard, please follow Talkhouse on your favorite social channels and check out talkhouse.com for lots of great written pieces, too. This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan, and the Talkhouse theme is composed and performed by the Range. See you next time.

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we’ve got a pair of songwriters who are meeting for the first time, which we haven’t had in an episode in quite a while. Martin Courtney and Tim Darcy.Until recently, Darcy was the frontman of the band Ought, which released three fantastic, brainy art-punk albums from their home base of Montreal—despite the fact that Darcy is, in fact, “secretly American.” Ought split up pre-pandemic but that wasn’t really public news until the announcement of the existence of Darcy’s new band, Cola, which he started just a couple of years ago along with Ought bassist Ben Stidworthy and Weather Station/US Girls drummer Evan Cartwright. Just last month, Cola released their debut album, Deep In View, and it feels like a sort of back-to-basics take on their old band—but still fresh and exciting. Darcy is a guy who takes his lyrics seriously, and though he clearly had a great time making the record, there’s a darkness to it that recalls the best post-punk and trebly art-rock of the past 40 years, from Talking Heads to Parquet Courts.Martin Courtney is the singer and guitarist of Real Estate, the New Jersey-born band that has released five albums of songs that battle gently the urges toward pop-song structure and a slight psychedelic haze. Real Estate had particularly bad timing luck with regard to that worldwide pandemic we’ve all talked so much about over the past couple of years, releasing an album just weeks before the world shut down, resulting naturally in canceled tours and other plans. Instead of diving into another Real Estate album during the lockdown, Courtney decided to take a path of less resistance and record his second solo album. As he jokes in this conversation, most solo albums tend to be an excuse for an artist to indulge their more out-there impulses, but his impulses tend to lead him back toward more structured pop songs. He came up with a killer batch for this record, which is called Magic Sign.Darcy and Courtney hadn’t met before this chat, but that doesn’t stop them from getting into a great conversation: They talk about how podcasts might be boring—and how that’s okay (!?). They get into Courtney’s slight sense of disillusionment with music in general. Then they bring it back to creative desires: They are both guys itching with ideas and ready to get them out to the world. And, as fate would have it, both are going to be touring this summer, god willing. So get out there and see them, but first, check out this chat.Thanks for listening to the Talkhouse Podcast, and thanks to Tim Darcy and Martin Courtney for chatting. If you liked what you heard, please follow Talkhouse on your favorite podcast platform, and check out the great new records by both of this week’s guests. This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan, and the Talkhouse theme is composed and performed by the Range. See you next time!

Hello Talkhouse listeners and readers. We’ve got a special treat for you this week: Instead of the usual Talkhouse Podcast, we’re featuring the debut episode of a podcast called That’s How I Remember It. Craig Finn, as you hopefully already know, is the singer of The Hold Steady as well as a solo artist. He’s got an excellent new solo record called A Legacy of Rentals, and it inspired him to start a new podcast that explores the intersection of memory and creativity. The Talkhouse gang helped him put it together, and we’re happy to present the first episode here. If you like it, which you undoubtedly will, please subscribe! Here it is, the first episode of That’s How I Remember It, featuring Craig in conversation with Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers. Enjoy, and we’ll be back to regular Talkhouse episodes next week!Subscribe to That’s How I Remember It to catch future episodes with Brian Koppelman, Fred Armisen, and many more.

Hello Talkhouse listeners; this week we’re resurfacing a talk featuring a frequent Talkhouse contributor who seems to be having yet another career moment: Michelle Zauner, aka. Japanese Breakfast. You may have caught Zauner and her band on the season finale of SNL, or playing your local theater, or on every playlist worth a dang. This talk, which originally ran on June 3, 2021—around the time the latest Japanese Breakfast album, Jubilee, came out—features Zauner in conversation with Rostam, the musician and producer best known as part of Vampire Weekend. If you like what you hear, there are two more Zauner-led Talkhouse Podcasts in the archives, one with Alex Cameron, and the other with Rachel Goswell of Slowdive.-------- Today’s Talkhouse Podcast started with a little bit of serendipity in the form of album release dates: Both of our guests, Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast and producer/musician/former Vampire Weekend guy Rostam, have excellent records coming out on June 4. They’re also fans of each other’s work, so we figured it made plenty of sense to put them together.Zauner’s album, her third under the Japanese Breakfast name, is called Jubilee, and as you’ll hear in this conversation, it took a deliberate turn toward slightly happier themes than her first two. It comes hot on the heels of Zauner’s first book, a heartbreaking memoir called Crying In H Mart, that deals with her mother’s death—also a theme in her early music—and food, lots of food. It’s a really touching read, and an ideal companion to her musical catalog, which grew in really compelling ways with Jubilee.Rostam is best known as a founding member of Vampire Weekend, and even though he officially left the band a few years ago, he still contributes some songwriting and production work. He’s kept plenty busy otherwise, producing records and writing songs with an incredible array of other artists, from Hamilton Leithauser to HAIM to Clairo. His first proper solo album is the gentle, string-filled, fantastic Half-Light, which came out in 2017, and now he’s releasing Changephobia, which as you’ll hear ditches the string section and brings in a sax, among other things.These two jump right into a conversation that flits around from silly to deep: On one hand, they talk about childhood loves of chess and fencing and the importance of song five on an album. On the other, Zauner gets rightfully annoyed at interview questions she gets that other people don’t, and Rostam talks about being Persian in a band that was sometimes pegged as particularly white. It’s a funny, smart chat. Enjoy.This episode was produced by Melissa Kaplan. The Talkhouse theme was composed and performed by The Range.