The Third Story with Leo Sidran

Imogen Heap has to put her daughter to bed, then she can talk about what she’s been working on. She can tell you about her latest single, “Last Night Of An Empire” which she released on December 9th. Coincidentally, that’s also the day she launched The Creative Passport, a verified digital ID for Music Makers. In fact, December 9 has always been an auspicious day for her. It’s her birthday and “everything is just a little more special on that day”.  While her daughter sings herself to sleep in the next room, Imogen talks about creating the Mi.Mu Gloves that she invented for her own performances before developing them for commercial use. “They are the world's most advanced wearable musical instrument, for expressive creation, composition and performance.” As the night unfolds, she’ll tell you about her app (ImogenHeap.app) where she connects regularly and directly with her fans (self proclaimed “Heapsters”), sharing song demos, weekly live stream concerts, works in progress, and casual conversations about herself and her life. She’ll explain that she’s building her own artificially intelligent bot called Augmented Imogen.  She’ll remind you that she also owns a recording and performance facility called The Hideway built in an 18th century house in East London, which you can visit any time via an Oculus compatible virtual reality tour. That sums her up: she’s a traditionalist in some ways, she plays instruments, writes melodies, and cares about the creative craft. But at the same time she’s a futurist, constantly looking for new areas of technology and distribution to explore.  Even though it’s now close to 11pm where she is in England, and you’ve been talking for nearly 2 hours, she’ll gladly relive some of the major moments in her storied career “I’ve just done so many random things,” she says. Like making her first record I Megaphone when she was a teenager; forming Frou Frou with Guy Sigsworth and their unlikely post-factum success; writing the song “Hide and Seek” and being a witness to its many lives; working with Taylor Swift and with Jeff Beck; and composing the music for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child which opened in the West End before moving to Broadway.  Imogen has the kind of dizzying energy that truly creative people possess. She’s ready to build the team, to engage with the crowd, to share the experience. But first she just has to put her daughter to sleep. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.imogenheap.app  

Just hearing the name Boz Scaggs evokes a feeling. It’s a hip, laid back, soulful, approachable feeling. It’s a southern thing. But it’s a San Francisco thing too. He is, as his most recent record proclaims, Out Of the Blues. But he’s played his share of rock and roll, r&b, and even jazz too.  When Boz hit it big in the late 70s with his record Silk Degrees, he was already knee deep in the swamp, with a half-dozen solo records to his credit, and plenty of pavement behind him too. He says, “I woke up every day for 10 years with a list as long as my arm of things to take care of.” Until the success of that album, despite recording for the biggest labels in the world, he never had a manager. But he was determined, and with each new record he climbed just a little further up the mountain, searching for the next thing.  In fact he always thought of himself as more of a searcher or a traveler than he did a musician. “Music was my ticket,” he says. Maybe that’s why he has been known to take extended hiatuses from recording and touring. For example, he spent most of the 80s staying home in San Francisco, and avoiding the intensity of the road. (Although he did supplement a little by opening a club called Slims in San Francisco, where he has lived since the 70s.) Still, he concedes that much of his life has been spent chasing that feeling that can only be found on stage. He tells me, “It’s the most wonderful sensation that there is. It’s magic what we do. It’s magic, what we feel. We are chosen, we get ahold of that live wire and we never want to let go.”  Here, he is in turns philosophical, rhapsodic, nostalgic, and matter of fact about the 1960s, his solo career, success, ambition, rhythm sections, songwriting, performing, getting older, and what he’s reading today. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.bozscaggs.com  

Eric Harland thinks about time. He thinks about taking time, he thinks about giving time, and he thinks about sharing time.  He’ll tell you: “Time is a joint effort. It’s everybody at once. You want to talk about synergy, alliance, brotherhood and sisterhood? Just watch people getting together and having to play time. So much shows up in that. There’s so much judgement, so much blame. But then you get to these points of surrender and ecstasy. Something wonderful happens because you went on this journey together. It’s so revealing and it’s so fulfilling.” Eric Harland is one of the most in demand jazz drummers of his generation. He has played with everybody. Betty Carter, McCoy Tyner, Joe Henderson, Michael Brecker, Terrence Blanchard, Wayne Shorter, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Esperanza Spalding, Taylor Eigsti, Julian Lage, Robert Glasper, Joshua Redman, Dave Holland, Chris Potter, Charles Lloyd, John Mayer, and on and on and on. He has appeared on over 400 recordings, and continues to appear at the top of critics’ and readers’ polls. Plus he once played a solo so intense that it sent my wife to the hospital.  Here he shares his incredible story of growing up in Houston and how he came to weigh 400 LBS by the time he was 16 (he eventually lost the weight in college), attending the Manhattan School of Music, becoming an ordained minister, living with singer Betty Carter (“not like that”), learning from legendary mentors,  and exploring “time”.  He also shares his thoughts on practice, community, natural wine, and what you can learn about a person by how they drive. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

When record producer Rick Beato posted a video on YouTube of his 8 year old son in a dizzying demonstration of perfect pitch, complex harmonic understanding and a general fluency with the building blocks of composition, he had no idea just how big an impact it would have on his life. Already in his 50s, Rick had decades of experience invested in his career in the record business. Five years later he is a full time YouTuber - his channel “Everything Music” has over 2 million subscribers - and has made nearly 800 videos, on subjects including Ear Training, Music Production, Improvisation, Scales and Modes, Film Scoring, Music Theory and Composition, Perfect Pitch, and Guitars. For curious musicians, music students, and music appreciators in the YouTube generation, Rick’s channel is simply part of the furniture, something you probably have come across one way or another. But despite being a very public facing teacher and generator of ideas, there is not so much information about him. If you watch his videos then you know that he lives in Atlanta, but that he’s from the Northeast. He went first to Ithaca college, then to the New England Conservatory, and then in his early 20s he actually taught at Ithaca College, at first his students were only a few years younger than him. If you watch the videos, then you know his kids a little bit, you know his friends, you know his interests, you know his life. Still, he walks a fine line between a kind of exhibitionism - which is a necessary evil of being a public figure - and the arms length of a teacher. We talked recently about his personal journey, how he organizes his time, what motivates him and what inspires him, teaching “high information” music to children, making a living on YouTube, staying fresh, and walking the line between telling the story and being the story. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.rickbeato.com

Billy Martin (also known as illy B) is many things. He's a visual artist, a filmmaker, a teacher, a builder, a composer, a record producer... But if you know his name, chances are it's from his band Medeski, Martin and Wood, a project he’s had for 30 years now along with bassist Chris Wood and keyboardist John Medeski.  Billy refers to his artistic approach as playful and he is committed to the idea of play and experimentation in art. He is also totally serious about what he does, he’s a serious thinker, and he takes enormous care with what he does and how he does it. He might be playing, but he’s not messing around.  A lifelong student, his path has been somewhat self directed. He spent his formative musical years taking lessons at the Drummers Collective in New York, where he came in contact with a group of musicians who would shape his music and his career, and got what he calls “the inside stuff”. Notably, he refers to drummer and composer Bob Moses as one of his primary mentors.  He made a documentary film 10 years ago with another one of his early teachers, Allen Herman. That movie, Life On Drums, is a series of discussions between Billy and Allen intercut with solo drum performances by both of them. We spoke recently about how field recordings influenced him, the power of sincerity in music and in life, the importance of staying curious and being playful, what he calls the “world music view”, how “when you’re experimenting there is no such thing as perfection,” the similarities between music and visual art, why Instagram is such a useful tool for self expression, and much more. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon and following the podcast on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

As Andres Levin will tell you, even he has trouble explaining his career and life in a succinct, organized, bite sized way. He’s a record producer, bandleader, filmmaker, composer, philanthropist, New Yorker, Venezuelan, Jew, funk practitioner, latin soul ambassador, big picture guy with a granular understanding of the mechanics of the business for over 30 years.  Andres grew up in Venezuela, a child of immigrants (an exile baby, he calls himself), Jewish, his father is an electronic musician. But in middle school he ended up spending time in North Carolina where he connected with black culture and music. After heading back to Venezuela for high school he ended up moving to Boston and then New York for two years of college. But quickly he left school and started assisting the legendary producer Nile Rogers. So before he was 25 he had worked on records for the B-52’s, Chic, Chaka Khan, CeCe Peniston, Tina Turner, even Eddie Murphy.  Then he started thinking about how to apply his already not insignificant experience to Latin music, and produced a series of groundbreaking and genre defying records that would impact modern Latin music (Los Amigos Invisibles, Aterciopelados, Ely Guerra, Marisa Monte, and his own band Yerba Buena to name a few). He has had some notably lengthy creative relationships with the likes of Arto Lindsay, David Byrne and the singer Cucu Diamantes. For more than 15 years, he has spent at least half his time in Havana, and is deeply enmeshed in the Cuban scene, both as a musician and a culture broker - he organized the first TED conferences in Havana, and works as a liaison for foreign projects on the ground in Cuba.  He tells me that he spent much of 2020 quarantining in an apartment in Havana, operating his international business from an island that is notoriously disconnected from much of the rest of the world. That’s how he ended up, after three decades of being the guy behind the guy, writing and singing the song “Ode To Quarantine” and then filming a kind of retro futuristic post apocalyptic video for his love song dedicated to the virus.  We talked about where he is, how he got there, how long he plans on staying, and where he’s going next. Along the way we also talk about learning how to produce, being comfortable in any room, programing synthesizers, eating sushi all day, and when to turn up the kick drum.

Raised by a god-fearing mother and a Black Panther father in the mecca of progressive politics, singer, rapper and entrepreneur Rexx Life Raj's music perfectly articulates the beauty and struggle of being a young black adult in 2020.  His voice is soulful, buttery, sweet even. At the same time he’s very real, very honest and confessional, unpacking all of the tragedies and successes of his own life and those around him.  He’s sensitive in his approach musically and lyrically - his vibe is not aggressive even when the subject matter is uncomfortable. At the same time, he’s a big guy. He played Division 1 football at Boise State before committing to music full time.  Raj is prolific and seems to be constantly making videos and releasing singles. One recent single from earlier this year was  called Tesla in a Pandemic about he got a new car this year. He uses that image to meditate on the world around him, friends who have not been so lucky or successful, his youth and his parents.  His new EP California Poppy 2 came out recently. Incidentally that is also the name of his new line of Cannabis products. We talked just after it was released about growing up in Berkeley, discovering the world from the back of his parents’ delivery van, managing success & guilt, diversification, finding the lane, building a brand, traveling around the world and giving back to his community.

Duncan Sheik’s career has not followed a straight line. After studying semiotics at Brown University, he emerged in the mid 1990s as a pop singer songwriter with his hit “Barely Breathing”, and quickly revealed himself to bend toward more literate adult oriented rock. He continued to make records and land himself on the charts but also began exploring composition for film and theater.  The success of 2006's Spring Awakening, a hit rock musical that featured Sheik’s score (and which won the Tony for Best Original Score as well as a Grammy for Best Musical Show Album) planted him firmly in the world of Broadway. He has continued to write for theater, often collaborating with poet and playwright Steven Sater.  Over the years he has explored electronic music, folk music, and enjoyed covering songs by his favorite writers, many of whom were influential to him as a boy.  His new record Live at the Cafe Carlyle, a small format live concert was recorded in the pre pandemic playground of the upper east side, back when people gathered together unmasked and unconcerned to experience something collectively. The record in many ways is an encapsulation of his career - it includes some of the most famous songs from his artist and composer lives, as well as some of his favorite songs by other songwriters.  We talked recently about his career, his songwriting, technology in music, how becoming a father has influenced his work, his life in Covid and what it means to release music in these strange and trying times, and what exactly is semiotics anyway.

Johnny Brennan was a wise cracking kid from New York who had a natural gift for doing voices and making up characters. First, he did it to crack up his family. When he started recording the prank phone calls that he made to try out his characters in the real world, he made tapes for his brothers. At the time, he was “hanging off of buildings, doing construction.” His friend Kamal Ahmed got involved and the duo would eventually call themselves The Jerky Boys. Those original tapes started circulating, being passed around at college campuses and among musicians. The Jerky Boys became one of the most bootlegged acts in the world, before ultimately signing a proper record contract (their first record was on Atlantic Records) and going on to sell millions of copies of their prank call collections. They made a movie, did commercials, became famous, launched careers, and created classic characters. Then the Jerky Boys stopped making new recordings and the two friends went their separate ways. Johnny became a voice actor, notably voicing characters on the animated comedy Family Guy (the creator of the show, Seth McFarlane, was a huge fan of the Jerky Boys). Now, after over 20 years without a new record, Johnny Brennan is back with a new Jerky Boys record.  We talked recently about how he developed his characters, why his career was an unexpected success, the role of improvisation in his calls and how he knows when it’s a good one, what makes a classic skit (hint: it involves what he calls “catchphrases up the ass”), how the world has changed since he first started and why this was the perfect time to launch a comeback. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast https://www.jerkyboysstore.com/

There are times when the right song reaches us at the right time. Sometimes it’s a brand new song. Sometimes it’s a classic. Sometimes it’s something you’ve heard a hundred times before but the stars align just right, and you hear it with fresh ears. Other times, it’s like a bolt of lightning out of nowhere. During these recent Covid months, the song “Things” by Louis Cole has been one of those for me that just makes sense.  Louis is a prolific multi instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, arranger, video maker, surrealist, funk monkey, producer and personality. Despite his extensive output as a solo artist, with his band Knower, and as a guest with others, he is slightly reclusive and still somewhat of a mystery.  After more than three years of attempting to set this up, Louis and I spoke recently to talk about where he came from, what he’s doing now, and where he hopes to go. Along the way he touched on writing “nostalgic music that feels almost like a memory of something that never happened”, overcoming fear, being a better person, staying up late into the weird part of the night, “insanity music”, money, honesty, humor, the problem with 100bpm, YouTubePoops, and what Nate Wood, David Binney, Bob Mintzer, and Jack Conte have to do with any of this. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast https://louiscole.bandcamp.com/