Fluxpod

Here's the first episode of a new season of Fluxpod! Tom Scharpling is one of the best broadcasters in the world – he's the host of The Best Show, in which he frequently collaborates with his long-running comedy partner Jon Wurster, and the co-host of Double Threat along with Julie Klausner. This is a long and fun conversation that covers a lot of ground – the challenge of recording the audio book version of his memoir It Never Ends, how he and Jon have worked to keep the Best Show fresh for over 20 years, his relationship with Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young's bodies of work, and being terrified by Michael Stipe when he was a teenager in the early '80s. If you love Tom, this will be a big treat. If you don't know Tom... you're still probably going to have a good time with this one.

Just checking in to let you know that a new season of Fluxpod will begin in the first week of June with special guest Tom Scharpling. Tune in! Tell people about the show! Check out the Patreon with all-new miniseries for subscribers! 

This episode features my old friend Daniel Ralston, who talks a bit about his forthcoming podcast investigating the bizarre disappearance of a former member of Iron Butterfly, and then a lot about his experience as a bartender in Malibu. Along the way we talk about Bob Dylan, California music generally, Paul McCartney, and Oasis.

This episode features Ryan and Troy from __antiart__, an excellent new music publication that mainly lives on Instagram. We talk about how they got the blog started, discuss Kanye West and Phoebe Bridgers a bit, and then get into some of their favorite records of 2021 including Arca, Japanese Breakfast, Drakeo the Ruler, Tyler the Creator, JPEGMAFIA, and Genesis Uwusu. 

This episode features Lila Ramani and Bri Aronow of the band Crumb, who discuss the experience of making their excellent new album Ice Melt before and after the pandemic hit, their methods and creative inspirations, and their decision to self-release all of their music. The Crumb songs featured in this episode are "BNR," "L.A.," and "Balloon," all from Ice Melt.

Jesse Hawken of Junk Filter is back for another episode of Danpilled, our sporadically produced Steely Dan series! This episode covers the new live albums plus discussion of the songs "Aja," "Dirty Work," "Razor Boy," "Night by Night," "Your Gold Teeth II," "Everything You Did," "Time Out of Mind," "The Second Arrangement," and "The Goodbye Look."

This episode is an interview with arts critic Douglas Wolk, covering his career as a music critic going back to the early 1990s on through his transition to writing mainly about comics. We discuss his new book All of the Marvels, which he wrote after reading virtually everything Marvel Comics has ever published. Come to get a glimpse into the music media culture of the '90s, stay for some very intense discuss of Marvel through the years. 

This is a segment from my recent POPTOBER miniseries with Chris Conroy in which we discussed U2's maligned and misunderstood 1997 album Pop in great detail. If you'd like to hear the whole series sign up for the Fluxpod Patreon, where you can also find my miniseries on Sonic Youth and Led Zeppelin, with more miniseries to come. 

Recurring guests Molly O'Brien and Chris Wade of And Introducing are back to talk about their recent experiences at two festivals aimed at very different demographics - middle aged rock fans at Riot Fest in Chicago and NYC area teenagers at Governor's Ball in Queens. Artists discussed include Patti Smith, Morrissey, The Smashing Pumpkins, Motion City Soundtrack, Sublime with Rome, Andrew WK, Les Savy Fav, Devo, Machine Gun Kelly, Slipknot, Young Thug, Carly Rae Jepsen, Duck Sauce, and Post Malone.

 

This episode is an interview with Ade Blackburn, the singer of the long-running band Clinic. This conversation gets into a lot of the band's motivations and methods, from the Liverpool group's early classics Internal Wrangler and Walking with Thee on through their new album Fantasy Island.