The Breakdown – Jim & Jesse, ‘The Jim & Jesse Show’

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Season 2 of The Breakdown continues with an in-depth exploration of Jim & Jesse McReynolds’ 1975 live album, The Jim & Jesse Show.

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Bluegrass and Japan are like peanut butter & jelly – it might not seem the most obvious match up, but boy, does it work. Patrick and Emma talk to Jesse McReynolds, one of the oldest living Opry members, about Jim and Jesse’s 1972 trip to Tokyo – and the awesome live album it resulted in.

Season 2 of The Breakdown is sponsored by The Soundtrack of America: Made In Tennessee. Visit TNvacation.com to start planning your trip.

The Breakdown – Dolly Parton, ‘The Grass Is Blue’

Season 2 of The Breakdown has arrived! Fiddler Patrick M’Gonigle and music journalist Emma John uncover bluegrass music one iconic record at a time, premiering with an in-depth exploration of Dolly Parton’s Grammy and IBMA award-winning album, The Grass Is Blue.

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In the heart of the Smoky Mountains, Emma gets to interview Dolly herself, who explains that bluegrass is so important to her that she risked it all to release her groundbreaking 1999 record. Of course, we’re glad that she did – who else knew that Billy Joel would go great with banjo?

Season 2 of The Breakdown is sponsored by The Soundtrack of America: Made In Tennessee. Visit TNvacation.com to start planning your trip.

The Shift List – Arthurs Nosh Bar – Montreal

This week on The Shift List, our first of three episodes from the great and wintry city of Montreal with Arthurs Nosh Bar, a cozy breakfast and lunch spot serving Jewish classics, including menu standouts like crispy schnitzel served on thick-cut challah or a latke smorgasbord featuring organic gravlax, fluffy scrambled eggs, and caviar.

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Opened in 2016, Arthurs has garnered praise from Bon Appetit, Goop, and Canada’s Globe and Mail, and it all started with owners Raegan Steinberg and her husband, Alex Cohen.

The pair sat down with The Shift List amidst the hustle of Arthurs staff wrapping up service in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon to talk about everything from the playlist they prepared for the birth of their daughter Freia to the personal and professional journey that led them to open Arthurs Nosh Bar.

The String – Marcus Finnie and Mabel Pleasure

The String sits down with a musical family that’s come from Memphis to Nashville and contributed to a brighter Music City.

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Marcus Finnie is one of Nashville’s most admired drummers, with a background spanning gospel, roots, pop and jazz. Mabel Pleasure is a lifelong Hammond organ player who rocks Sunday morning church services and the occasional R&B gig. And she’s also Marcus’s Mom. Marcus has a new album as leader of his jazz band. Mabel is about to make her lifelong recording/singing debut on album. And we talk about much more besides.

The Show On The Road – Dustbowl Revival

This week on the show, a very special finale to our winter season, featuring a group of world-traveling, folk-funk adventurers that have been catapulting American roots music into the 21st century with their exuberant melding of string and brass band traditions and their white knuckle, award-winning live shows. It’s Dustbowl Revival.

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To say today’s episode is personal would be an understatement. Your host Z. Lupetin founded Dustbowl Revival in Venice Beach, CA over ten years ago with a lucky Craigslist ad that started it all. What began as a clandestine jam group with as many as ten instruments going full blast at an after-hours advertising office soon moved to speakeasies and small venues around LA, with the band eventually recording their beloved live album With A Lampshade On at the famed Troubadour in LA and the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.

In 2013 Liz Beebe joined the group as they began touring full time, becoming a powerhouse eight-piece band that wowed festivals and stages in over a dozen countries, playing over a hundred and fifty shows a year. They’ve released a total of seven full-length records along the way, including their soul-dipped, self-titled work from 2017, which was produced by Grammy-winner Ted Hutt, co-founder of Flogging Molly.

This week celebrates the release of their most daring work to date, Is It You, Is It Me, produced by Sam Kassirer (Lake Street Dive, Josh Ritter) and engineered by Brian Joseph (Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens). Z. was able to gather the whole band around the mic while on the road in New Hampshire. Make sure you stick around to the end of the episode as the band shares their intimate acoustic single “Let It Go.”

The Show On The Road – Jason Hawk Harris

This week on the show, Z. meets up with cerebral, Texas-born roots rocker Jason Hawk Harris, who has recently struck out on his own, poking one foot through the torn tinsel of a Houston honky tonk and another through a haunted, California Black Mirror episode set in a tilted sci-fi future.

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While most songwriters hide behind walls and trapdoors of metaphor, Harris isn’t afraid to openly process his recent family traumas and loss on his stunning (and aptly titled) debut solo album, Love & The Dark, released by Bloodshot Records in 2019. Despite his youth, Harris has much to tell us and if this equally sensitive and swaggering sound is where the future of modern country music is headed, we’re in.

The String – Michael Doucet

Fiddler, singer/songwriter, bandleader, and folk music scholar Michael Doucet is synonymous with Beausoleil, the neo-traditional Louisiana band he co-founded forty-plus years ago.

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Still, Doucet relishes collaborations. His upcoming album with a new band, L’acher Prise, is a real Americana hybrid. The Compass Records release is Cajun at its core, but full of ideas from four other musicians a generation younger than he is. We talk about his legendary career in roots music, dedicated to rediscovery and reclaiming of a marginalized culture that made Louisiana the special place that it is. Also on this episode, the legacy and music of Warren Storm with musician, author, and record producer Yvette Landry.

The Shift List – Justin Cucci (Root Down, Linger, Ophelia’s) – Denver, CO

Justin Cucci sits down with The Shift List. A mainstay of the Denver food scene, Cucci tends an ever-growing list of both homegrown and high concept restaurants, including Root Down, Linger, Ophelia’s, El Five, and more.

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A New York city native, Cucci grew up revering the chefs and culture at the Waverly Inn — a West Village dining institution that was owned and operated by his grandparents as a kid.

About the same time, Cucci started playing in bands, and continues to do so to this day. He opened Root Down, his first restaurant in Denver, over a decade ago, transforming the building from a gas station into a neighborhood restaurant with a cult following that serves globally-influenced seasonal cuisine with a focus on organic, natural, and locally-sourced ingredients. Root Down features two onsite gardens, which not only provide seasonal vegetables for the restaurant, but for its sister restaurants, Linger and Ophelia’s. There’s even a Root Down at Denver International Airport, one reason to book a long layover in the city.

Cucci has infused music into the culture and business of all of his restaurants — each one of their business entities is named after a Steely Dan song, for example, and you’ll find out what each of them are soon. This episode has plenty of Steely Dan, so yacht rockers rejoice.

The Show On The Road – Dar Williams

This week, Z. Lupetin’s conversation with revered singing songstress and deeply wise wordsmith, Dar Williams.

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Coming out of the Hudson Valley outside New York City, Williams has released over thirteen albums across a quarter century as one of America’s touchstone folk poets, first bursting out of the famed Lilith Fair folk rock scene in the mid 1990s with contemporaries like Ani Difranco and the Indigo Girls and gaining a devoted following. She has toured with luminaries like Joan Baez and Patty Griffin, written a book about what makes communities resilient, she runs her own songwriting retreats, and has inspired generations of women to fearlessly embrace their creativity and exercise their limitless potential. Z. was able to catch up with Williams in the green room at the historic McCabe’s Guitar Shop before her second show of a sold out weekend in Los Angeles. A new album is on the way.

The Show On The Road – The Steel Wheels

This week on the very first episode of The Show On The Road in 2020, we welcome The Steel Wheels, a Virginia-based band of harmony masters and savvy string band experimenters who have quietly put together an impressive body of work over the last decade, corkscrewing their way across the country supporting seven diverse, acoustic-based albums. Along the way they’ve gained gangs of devoted fans of their big-hearted, peace-promoting songs.

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Taped live at historic Mccabe’s Guitar Shop in Los Angeles, Z. Lupetin gathered the boys around the mic to dive into their boundary-pushing 2019 release, Over The Trees, how they once toured on bicycles to spread climate change awareness, and how they survive 15-hour drives to strange shows in Iowa. They end the episode with their gorgeous acapella song, “This Year”.