Tag: BGS Podcast Network

The Show On The Road – David Bromberg

Posted on by Chris Jacobs
This week, The Show On The Road features living folk-blues legend and underground guitar icon David Bromberg.


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Host Z. Lupetin got to speak with the now 74-year-old Bromberg in a hotel room before the pandemic shutdown, prior to Bromberg playing a show at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles back in February, 2020.

Coming out of the fertile Greenwich Village scene on the heels of Bob Dylan, Ramblin Jack Elliot and other shaggy troubadour-storytellers, Bromberg’s encyclopedic knowledge of American songwriting traditions made him a coffee house wunderkind who refused to be pigeonholed in one genre. By the age of thirty, Bromberg was the go-to guitarist for Dylan, Willie Nelson, John Prine and Ringo Starr, and he could be found jamming at dinner parties with George Harrison.

A man of many interests and talents, Bromberg actually stepped away from performing for nearly two decades at the height of his notoriety, moving to Chicago to learn how to build and then appraise violins. He became obsessed with identifying the best instruments just by sight, and even opened a respected instrument shop in Wilmington, Delaware called David Bromberg Fine Violins.

He returned after twenty two years off the road with the triumphant and Grammy-nominated Try Me One More Time in 2006, and has assembled an energetic band of friends that continues to join him on his new, high energy offerings.

Bromberg’s muscular and ever genre-bending 2020 release, Big Road pays homage to his heroes like Charlie Rich and 1930’s bluesman Tommy Johnson, but also injects heavy doses of swampy rock, horn-heavy funk, and good-humored, folk storytelling along the way.

Stick around to the end of the episode to hear him play a new acoustic tune called “Buddy Brown’s Blues.”

The String – Chuck Prophet

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Chuck Prophet is a lifer who at 57 says he’s just getting the hang of it – it being crafty, intelligent songs that feel good even when they’re downers, songs that rock and twang in balanced proportions.


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Since going solo after a decade with the psych garage band Green On Red, Prophet has given us a vast body of work that sits easily on the shelf next to Rockpile, Elvis Costello or Tom Petty. Now he’s releasing a reflective, sardonic and political album called The Land That Time Forgot. From retooling his solo sound to his long partnership with spouse Stephanie Finch, there was a lot to talk about.

The String – Joshua Ray Walker

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Reaction to Joshua Ray Walker’s debut album was as strong and swift as any to come along in country music and Texas songwriting in quite a while. But the Dallas native had been working stages nightly for ten years by the time the world paid attention.


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He was ready to follow up fast and he did so to great acclaim on 2020’s Glad You Made It. This self-assured, thoughtful artist has a lot to say.

Also in the hour, we meet Australian emigre to Nashville Emma Swift, whose new collection of Bob Dylan covers is quite special.

The Show On The Road – Leyla McCalla

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week The Show On The Road features a conversation with Leyla McCalla, a talented, multi-lingual cellist, banjoist, and singer/songwriter.

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Born in New York, raised in New Jersey, and McCalla is now based in New Orleans, where she raises three kids (she often tours with them in tow). McCalla often honors her Haitian heritage, bringing listeners into a vibrant world of Creole rhythms and forgotten African string-band traditions by introducing them to a new audience with her own powerful creative vision.

You may know McCalla as an integral part of two different roots supergroups: the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Our Native Daughters. But for much of the last decade, she has put out heady, ever-surprising solo projects. The latest, The Capitalist Blues, harnesses the brassy, percussive sounds of New Orleans; her previous record, A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey, was also a standout, putting her gorgeous cello-work center stage while also examining powerful Haitian proverbs and Haiti’s often-overlooked, tragic history.

The String – Adia Victoria

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Adia Victoria taps the lineage and resolve of the early Blues queens with a sound made for “the now” on her 2019 album, Silences.

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Victoria’s journey from South Carolina to Atlanta and then to Nashville reads like no other artist of recent memory. She works hard to set herself apart from the institutional trappings of the indie music business. Critically acclaimed and sharply thoughtful, this made for a fascinating and challenging conversation.

Photo credit: Daniel Jackson at Newport Folk Fest 2019 for BGS

The Show On The Road – Rising Appalachia

Posted on by Chris Jacobs
This week on the Show On The Road, a conversation with Chloe Smith of Rising Appalachia. In 2005 she founded this unique partnership with her sister Leah after their relentless world travels finally intersected in southern Mexico, where Leah had started mastering the banjo.

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Growing up in a musical family of traditional string-band players and contra-dance leaders near Atlanta, Rising Appalachia’s latest release, Leylines, mixes the rustic front porch sound of their childhood family jam sessions with a neon-tinted modern backbeat of dancehall electronics and mystical protest. That could have felt incongruous, but somehow these influences mix beautifully with their ethereal, intertwined vocals and darting fiddle-and-banjo runs.

While our host, Z. Lupetin, was able to catch up with Chloe for this cross-country conversation, Leah has been marooned in Costa Rica since the world shut down in March and continues to work from there. The sisters and their talented six-piece band have become a beloved fixture at music festivals throughout the United States, but have also played stages in Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, The Czech Republic, Ireland, Scotland, and more. 

Always looking to challenge the traditional carbon-hungry touring routine, Leah dubbed their group as part of a growing “slow music movement”, and in this episode, Z. talks with Chloe about the time they toured remote Canadian farming islands via sailboat. It’s that kind of intimate and innovative traveling that Chloe would like to return to whenever the COVID-19 shutdown lifts in the coming years.

Stick around to the end of the episode for an acoustic version of “Harmonize” from Leylines, and check out Rising Appalachia’s newest single “Pulse,” featuring Dirtwire.

The String – Chatham County Line

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

With an old-school look and feel, Raleigh, North Carolina’s Chatham County Line started at the dawn of the new millennium in a surge of passion for bluegrass music. Now at 20 years old, they’ve made only one very recent personnel change and refreshed their concept as a post-modern string band with drums.


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Their new album, Strange Fascination, displays far-reaching vision and a warm, cohesive sound, riding on the unique songwriting voice of Dave Wilson. Wilson and co-founding multi-instrumentalist John Teer join host Craig Havighurst for a retrospective conversation, featuring music from their past and present.

The String – Becca Stevens

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Just beyond the fuzzy boundaries of roots and Americana music, we find Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter Becca Stevens – at least, we hope you have found her. With a complex musical language drawn from folk, jazz, classical, and pop, her output is searching, challenging, and ever-evolving.


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A graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts and the New School in New York, Stevens leaps from American public radio to European tours to collaborations with the likes of Jacob Collier, Snarky Puppy, and recently folk icon David Crosby. She is among host Craig Havighurt’s favorite artists working today, so he sought out an interview and was excited and loaded with questions when she said yes. Her newest album is the shiny and electric Wonderbloom.

The Show On The Road – Dan Reeder

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week on The Show On The Road, a conversation with renegade roots songwriter, painter and NSFW self-taught poet Dan Reeder.

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Reeder is rarely interviewed, but has collected a legion of devoted fans after putting out a series of beloved albums on John Prine’s Oh Boy Records – including the much-anticipated new LP, Every Which Way.

For the uninitiated, diving into Reeder’s uniquely absurdist, harmony-drenched body of work can feel like reading a rich short story collection in one sitting. His normal routine is to layer lush close-mic’d vocals on top of one another using himself as a conspiratorial choir. He sketches tiny but poignant moments from his life and imagination, often repeating a simple phrase again and again like one of his most-listened to tunes, “Work Song,” which tells us bluntly through gospel claps: “I’ve got all the fucking work I need.” 

The new album may seem intimidating at first. It features a whopping 20 songs (or cinematic vignettes of a sort), but a closer look shows it clocking in at a succinct 39 minutes. Controversial-while-gentle acoustic offerings like “Porn Song” come in at just under minute long. New favorites like the wide-eyed (and foul-mouthed) piano ballad “Born a Worm” ask the deepest of questions of an indifferent, endlessly beautiful universe in only the way Reeder could — by plainly inquiring about a caterpillar’s mysterious transformation into a butterfly: “what the fuck is that about?”

Much more than a one man band, Reeder often builds every instrument he plays in his recordings, from steel string guitars, to banjos, drums, basses, cellos, violins, clarinets, and even the computer he records on. This episode was recorded in his garage studio in Nuremberg, Germany, where he’s lived with his wife for 30 years. 

Host Z. Lupetin spoke to Reeder right after John Prine passed away from complications of COVID-19, and they spoke about his tours together with Prine and how much his music inspired him through the years. 

The String – Corb Lund

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

With ten albums and 20 years under his belt, Alberta’s Corb Lund is one of the finest and wittiest songwriters working the Western end of country music. The singer is now on his way to legendary status in Rocky Mountain cowboy-inspired songwriting.


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His newest is Agricultural Tragic, a 13-song collection that evokes the characters and colors of his home region. Also in the hour, Henry Hicks talks about Black Music Month and Black Lives Matter. Hicks is the CEO of the National Museum of African American Music, opening this fall in Nashville.