The Third Story with Leo Sidran

David Maraniss has a motto: go there. What he means is that when he's researching one of his books, whether it's a biography of a person or the history of a place and time, he believes that in order to fully understand the story, he has to go to the physical location. Not, like, just for a weekend. He really goes there. He moves in. But there's another meaning behind the phrase "go there". He moves in, not only to the space, but also to the nuance, subtlety, complexity of a life, of a time, of the history, sociology, feeling of his subject. He gets totally obsessed. He says he can't write a book about something if he's not obsessed with it. Fortunately, throughout his career, he has managed to get obsessed with plenty. He's written many celebrated biographies including books about Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Vince Lombardi, and Roberto Clemente, and books about social, political and cultural importance (like Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed The World and They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America 1967 among others). Often his books appear on best seller lists. David has been affiliated with the Washington Post for more than forty years as an editor and writer, and twice won Pulitzer Prizes at the newspaper. His new book A Good American Family is both a continuation and a departure for him. It tells the story of his own family and is framed around an event that happened in 1952 when David's father was called before HUAC (The House Un-American Activities Committee) and outed as a Communist during the Red Scare. Those who were called to testify and didn't cooperate by naming other Communists were blacklisted, and that's exactly what happened to his father. But the book also examines much larger issues around that event, including the ongoing question of what it means to be and who is American, the influence of extreme ideologies in the 20th century, and the ways in which mental health and personal tragedy are handled in families. We talked about his general process & approach, the techniques he uses, and the values that inform his work. For example, he says at one point that he believes that "all creative arts are in some sense dependent on magic". We also considered the role of the press in America, traditionally and how it's being tested in today's political climate. Like much of David's work, this episode is both timely and timeless. Who informed his values as a journalist? What does it mean to be a nonfiction story teller? Where does he feel most at home? When is it time to go swimming? Why is the lost art of letter writing so important to historians? Can we really ever really know what someone else is thinking? It's all here. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

Musician, singer, writer, producer, philosopher... Ben Sidran is a hard person to define. He belongs in multiple categories, or none at all. He says that his main focus throughout a career that began 50 years ago has been to document what he saw, felt, and heard, by way of various "idioms" (including performances, interviews, essays, recordings, etc.). That's why he sees himself primarily as a journalist. Or at least, he sees what he does as a form of journalism. I've been engaged in a series of conversations - one long conversation really - with Ben Sidran since before I could really talk. We often pick up where we left off days, weeks or even years earlier, on any number of topics. So to conduct a formal interview with him is almost impossible for me. There's simply too much history between us, because I know him so well, because we've been over it a hundred times before, because he's my dad. We're more comfortable co-hosting, discussing, debating, having more open ended conversations. In fact, he has even co-hosted some episodes of this podcast with me (Welcome To Copenhagen, Newport Jazz, The Election, What It Felt Like In Paris, and Remembering Tommy LiPuma). And we've worked together on musical projects since I was a boy. I'm proud to have produced his most recent records, toured and performed with him for over 20 years. We always just called it jamming. "Let's jam," we'd say. On the occasion of his 76th birthday I decided to try for a more classic kind of long form interview. I wanted to know, how does it feel to be 76? Does it live up to his expectations? How has the world changed for him? How has he changed in the world? Of course, the conversation takes plenty of turns and twists, but we somehow managed to stay on task and the episode is a lot of fun. Here he talks about falling in love with bebop as a young boy, counter culture in the 1960s, jazz as a form of journalism, how to get paid like a musician, his proudest moments, writing a misunderstood rock and roll anthem, getting to Carnegie hall, facing fears, and what he learned from his heroes (including Phil Woods, Art Blakey, and Mose Allison). As a special birthday gift gift to him, I wrote this song and published the video this week as well. It's a song about continuity, about memory, about desire, about family. I think it's the most personal song I have ever written. https://youtu.be/FMwZ8zUgFy4 Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify! www.third-story.comwww.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.bensidran.comwww.leosidran.com

No matter what Richard Julian is doing, he "just wants it to be awesome". As a songwriter, he says he was arrogant before he probably deserved to be, and in fact that it "took years to get beaten into the submission of humility." That may be so, but along the way he wrote some pretty fantastic songs. His album Slow New York (2006) helped to put him on the map and place him squarely in the center of the musical scene from which Norah Jones had emerged a few years earlier. In fact he and Jones still have a country band together, The Little Willies. But, as he tells it, he was already 15 years into a music career by then, a veritable veteran of the New York songwriter scene, a practiced in the art of "making something out of nothing, taking blood from a stone", which is how he describes songwriting. So maybe it was just a matter of time before Julian decided he needed to step away from the city he sang about so often, and disappear into the Bywater in New Orleans. Pretty soon he was writing songs like "Die in Nola" about his newly adopted town, and how he had no plans to leave. But leave he did, heading back to New York. He landed in the Bed Stuy neighborhood in Brooklyn, bought a building (he says, "I'm the only guy who ever bought a building with no money") with his friend Arthur Kell, and opened Bar Lunatico, a music venue, bar and restaurant. In this textured, rollicking, mezcal fueled conversation recorded on a hot summer night in Brooklyn, Richard tells the story of how "a blue collar boy from Delaware" came to be one of the most celebrated songwriters of his generation in New York, watched some of his friends get famous and others get lost, and end up negotiating the ever shifting Brooklyn demographics as a club owner in Bed Stuy. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify! www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.third-story.com https://www.barlunatico.com/

Just when you think you know all there is to know about Donald Fagen, he surprises you. There are legendary stories, traded like playing cards in chat rooms, fanzines, and merch lines. Along with his musical partner, the late Walter Becker (who passed away in 2017), Fagen has influenced countless musicians, producers and songwriters by setting the gold standard in record production and arrangement with his band Steely Dan. This is known. There are the solo records, including The Nightfly, which was nominated for seven Grammys and which continues to be one of the best sounding records ever made nearly 30 years on. This is known. Much is known about Donald Fagen and his work, it's true. But much is still left to be revealed. Stage fright, a general aversion to appearing on television (he and Becker lacked the "large heads" and "swaths of cheek" that they felt necessary to really make it on the small screen), and nearly 20 years with no touring created a mystique that endures to this day, despite the fact that they've toured regularly since the mid 90s. So Donald can surprise you. He does it not by telling you what happened, but rather what he thinks about it. Or more to the point, how he thinks about it. He tells you that Steely Dan has "more in common with punk than with the confessional California singer songwriters" that they were often compared to. He tells you why Stravinsky was a precursor to funk music. He tells you what's postmodern about his music, why making his first solo record was so personally disruptive to him, how he falls asleep, when he decided to finally grow up, and who he never wants to see again. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify! www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

As a younger man Joey Dosik thought he might make a contribution on the saxophone. He loved playing basketball and playing piano too, and he had a sweet, soulful singing voice. But if you asked him he probably would have told you that he was going to be a jazz sax player. That's what took him out of LA and to the University of Michigan. Sometimes the stars align and the right people show up in the right place at just the right time. Later on we realize that something special was going on, but in the initial moment it's just what's happening. In Joey's case, he ended up at Michigan with a cohort of other talented, multifaceted musicians (former Third Story guest Theo Katzman, for example). Somewhere along the line, he realized that he needed to sing! Today Joey is best known for the soulful, romantic songs that he sings with the band Vulfpeck as well as on his solo recordings (he released both Game Winner and Inside Voice in 2018). His Game Winner project ended up merging his two great loves, music and basketball, into a conceptual collection of songs that are surprisingly compelling even for non sports lovers. Inside Voice also operates on two levels, as a classic sounding record that he describes as "deep, sexual, but also kind of silly". In fact it's the sense of humor in his writing that keeps his work fresh and modern. As Joey tells it, he's interested in both honoring and transcending his references. Here Joey talks about maintaining the balance between classic and modern, working with Vulfpeck ("we look up to one another"), the value of practical application, what's so great about Italian vowels, why basketball is good practice for life, why he never throws away a creative idea, and how he keeps his saxophone chops up. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

Singer, songwriter and pianist Ben Thornewill started his band, Jukebox The Ghost, with two friends in 2003 when he was in college at George Washington University. "From day one we were just kind of making it up," he says. He adds "It's the same three members from the very beginning and everything is a series of great compromises." Not that there's anything wrong with that. He says, "It tends out to work out to something that defines who we are." The power pop trio features piano, guitar, and drums. Their songs are clever, catchy, poppy, joyful, sometimes dramatic, and often tinged with elements of classical and even musical theater. As he tells it, "We are the exception to the rule because we have all been making a living as a band for over a decade...there's only three of so we don't have to pay for a bass player. A bass player would have bankrupted us a long time ago." I met Ben earlier this year during the first of a series of solo shows he was doing, alone at the piano. He made a point from the stage of talking about how part of what he was doing was improvising but rather than doing it in a jazz or blues idiom, he was doing it using more classical cadences. The open and outward embrace of classical music into contemporary pop was intriguing to me. We talked about what it means to be successful, maintaining a productive and creative life, the existential crisis of coming off the road, putting in the work, introducing classical elements into pop music, and the importance of Bourbon to Kentuckians. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

When the 73 year old performer Andre De Shields accepted his Tony award last night for his role as Hermes in the hit Broadway show Hadestown, he began with these words: "Baltimore, Maryland are you in the house? I hope you're watching at home because I am making good on my promise that I would come to New York and become someone you'd be proud to call your native son." In this conversation, recorded in 2014, he tells the story in detail about growing up in Baltimore (he calls himself "lucky number nine"), a career spanning five decades "on the precipice of the abyss" (i.e. as a performer) and the secret to his longevity: "I exercise vigorously, I eat judiciously, and I pray constantly." The interview originally appeared as Episode 12. Visit http://www.third-story.com/episode-index to hear that and all the other episodes with members of the creative class. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

Eli Reed took a trip. It started in a Boston suburb with a cheap suit and a paperboy cap. He took his suit, cap and guitar to Clarksdale, Mississippi. He stayed there just long enough to become a local musician. They called him "Paperboy" because of the cap. Then he headed up to Chicago and pretended to study sociology at the University of Chicago. While he was pretending to study, what he was really doing was looking for old records to play on his radio show, and becoming the minister of music at a church on the south side. After a while, he went back to Boston. Then he turned 21. What was it like to be a Jewish suburban kid living in the deep south, playing in black church in Chicago, singing soul music? Eli tells me "The juke joints and the black church are the most accepting and welcoming places I've ever been. They loved having me there because I wanted to be there and I loved them." In his early 20s. Eli "Paperboy" Reed started making records that sounded like they could be from another era. He wrote soul music, sang with a sweet and powerful voice, and performed with a frenzied energy. He found an audience and had success, especially in Europe, and started to ride the "album cycle" life of writing, recording, touring, rinsing and repeating. His stylized, soulful songs were licensed (a lot) for use in TV and film, and he was on the way up. Eli "Paperboy" Reed says that "authenticity is a trap." But he also says, "If you're not thinking critically about your work you're not doing it right. And be adamant about what you like and don't like." And he clearly walks the talk. Eli is incredibly thoughtful and has clearly considered the choices and the work that he's made. "Stand behind your choices," he says. "Be present with it. Be interested." Before he was 30, he had become a record industry veteran, signed and dropped by both Capitol and Warner Bros., without a recording contract and and wondering what to do next and where to turn. In this episode, he tells the story of where he turned. Along the way, he talks about surviving in the record business, standing behind your choices, grappling with ambition, whether or not an artist's career fully belongs to them, and reaching the age where you're not new anymore. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

If Melissa Clark is in your life already, then she needs little introduction. Maybe you have one of the 40+ cookbooks that she has authored. Maybe you've made one of the recipes from her New York Times column "A Good Appetite", watched one of her cooking videos online, seen her on the Today Show, as a guest judge on Iron Chef America, or heard her as a guest host on The Splendid Table radio show. If you're one of these people, then you may already consider Melissa Clark to be a kind of honorary member of your family already, someone who helps you decide what to eat (and when), how to prepare it, and why you should feel good about it..because you can do it. Or maybe, like me, you don't really cook very much. Maybe, like me, you only recently discovered the creativity, assurance and enthusiasm of Melissa Clark when your wife went to India for three weeks and left you in charge of feeding yourself and your child. Maybe you had a small breakthrough while watching Melissa demonstrate one of her recipes in an online video and it helped you understand that cooking is a true act of creation. After having such a breakthrough maybe you, like me, started to think about how cooking is like making music. Rhythm & balance, tradition & innovation, style & concept, practice & intuition, intention, improvisation… it's all there. A recipe is a kind of composition, and a meal is a kind of concert. And maybe, just maybe, in that small moment of catharsis, you reached out to Melissa Clark for an interview to explore this idea. Whichever kind of person you are, Melissa Clark is there for you. She started out hoping to be a writer of "early modern female focussed romance novels" but discovered that all of her best images were about food. She says, "Every story, every color, every simile was about food." As she tells it, Melissa had the good fortune of starting out as a writer on the internet before anyone was actually reading on the internet. "There were no food writers when I started out. No one was talking about the experience of cooking." We got together to talk about managing the commercial realities of writing and marketing recipes ("I feel like I am constantly walking on that line"), making friends with your ingredients ("the anchovy is my bad boyfriend"), dealing with anxiety ("my way of coping with it is to be very very busy"), falling in love with your teachers, what makes food a way that we can change the social structure of the world, why deadlines are lifelines, how much of her personal experiences to reveal in her writing, and when to walk away from the cookie dough. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

Anya Marina was the hottest DJ on the hottest radio station in San Diego. She had a natural, direct and conversational way of talking on the mic that made her a perfect fit for FM radio, she was a witty improviser, and she was fearless in the face of celebrity. Plus from an early age, she loved comedy and had even considered a career in comedic acting. She could see her life laid out ahead of her. The only problem was, it wasn't the life she wanted. So she walked away from her career in radio for the career she knew she needed: music, what else? She started releasing her songs independently before signing with Chop Shop, a label that specialized in finding high profile syncs for their artists in an era before "sync" was a word people in the business really thought about. Her music, intelligent, infectious and hooky songwriting delivered with delicious restraint, found its way to popular TV shows and movies including Grey's Anatomy, Twilight: New Moon, and Gossip Girl. She moved. From San Diego to LA. Then she moved again. From LA to Portland. Then she moved again. From Portland to New York. She was busy, in writing sessions, pitching songs for her publisher, developing her career as both a singer and a co-writer. She continued to release music. (I co-wrote and produced a song on her 2016 release Paper Plane). She could see her life laid out ahead of her. Again. And she thought: now's the time to bring it all together. Maybe she didn't think that. How could I know what she thought? But whatever was going on in her head, she created a web series (Anya Marina: Indie-Pendent Woman) in which she stars as a singer songwriter in New York named Anya Marina. The series, a mockumentary style sendup of a self absorbed pop singer, gave Anya the chance to bring all her original loves together, music, acting, improvisational performance, and keeping company with the odd celeb. So, is this the life Anya imagined for herself? We got together recently to talk about how her Russian mother never taught her how to say the word "water" correctly, why she's committed to "experiencing something together with my audience," what makes her a good storyteller, and that "when a thought becomes an obsession, that's when you know you'll make a change". Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!