The Show On The Road – Lucy Rose

As host Z. Lupetin travels across the UK this month, we bring you Lucy Rose – a talented singer/songwriter who grew up in the same lyrically fertile plain as Shakespeare. She has made albums filled with twisty tales of sharp-tongued, black-hearted people searching for redemption, and navigating the rough rivers of supernatural sorrow that refuse to let us go as we grow up.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

On her newest No Words Left, Rose has gone back to her roots a bit, forsaking the glossy Brit-pop direction toward which some of the powers-that-be wanted to push her, peeling back her sound to reveal just the thorny, pure fruit inside. The result is intense. Interlocking singing conversations in the tone of a toothy, hushed scream, she questions our relationships with ourselves — and maybe even God — to find who we really are behind the suffocating velvet gauze of our multiple social media personalities.

The Show On The Road – Robert Ellis

This week, Z. Lupetin speaks with Robert Ellis, the restless, tuxedoed, Texas piano-man who has paired his fleet-fingered, high-humored, “jazz in an Austin roadhouse” keys playing with machete-sharp lyrical turns of phrase — all backed up with his smile-through-the-apocalypse country-rock band.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTSMP3

Ellis has gained a beloved international following all the while creating a persona that is half the tender brilliance of early Billy Joel, and half high-hatted, Southern huckster who might tell you a story that will make you cry one minute, and then steal your watch when you’re not looking the next.

Z. met up with Robert Ellis on the road together in the Netherlands.

The Show On The Road – Charlie Parr

This week on The Show On The Road, Charlie Parr — a Minnesota-based folk blues lifer who writes novelistic, multi-layered stories that shine a kaleidoscopic light on defiant, unseen characters thriving in the shadows all around us.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Parr has a new record with only his name on it, and it isn’t shiny and perfect and commercial and catchy. It’s him. It’s pure Charlie Parr and maybe that’s enough. He hasn’t moved to LA or Nashville; he’s stayed in the cold grey north of Minnesota, because that’s his home. Take a second wherever you call home right now and listen to his episode — and his new record. You might hear something different every time.

The Show On The Road – The Lone Bellow

This week, Z. Lupetin speaks to the founding trio of one the most respected and sought after folk-rock bands in the country, The Lone Bellow.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Their hedonistically heavenly harmonies have lifted them from playing tiny bars around their founding home base of Brooklyn, New York to adoring audiences at venerable venues like Red Rocks Amphitheatre, the Apollo, and The Ryman Auditorium, in their new home of Nashville, Tennessee. The Lone Bellow have a rapport that is intimate, hilarious, and — when it calls for it — deadly serious. The band is full of so much heart and genuine insight that you can’t help but lean in and listen.

The Show On The Road – Anna Tivel

This week, Anna Tivel – the Portland-based singing poetess who builds mountain ranges of rhymes with her colorful, impressionistic perspective of a world still shrouded in endless beauty and mystery.

LISTEN: APPLE MUSICMP3

Anna Tivel is one of those folk singers who is passed between friends and long-time listeners like a secret talisman; a tiny gemstone that you polish in your pocket when you need a reminder that the earth is vast and the smallest things you pass on the side of the road are beautiful if you look at them from the right view.

As soon as the needle hits the wax on her latest record The Question, Anna’s hushed, sharp-edged voice begins slicing angular verses that build and build until the words flow out in blinking mini movies that sear themselves on your eardrums and then are gone in a flash. It’s like she’s a sonic cinematographer waiting for the scene to be shot in our minds.

The Show On The Road – Leslie Stevens

The Show On The Road is back with cosmic California country singer-songwriter, Leslie Stevens.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTSMP3

Host Z. Lupetin speaks with the deeply intuitive songwriter and cosmic country singer. On her much-awaited solo album, Sinner, Stevens has been creating viscerally vulnerable songs that, with her shimmering voice, seem to ache right through the speakers.

The Show On The Road – Dylan LeBlanc

This week Z. speaks with Dylan LeBlanc, the lithe Louisiana-born roots ‘n’ roller who has one of those once-in-a-generation, ghostly-lilting voices that doesn’t seem of this time or place.


LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

His newest record Renegade, produced by Dave Cobb, makes it clear LeBlanc has grown up a lot in the last few years. It’s a big, snarling, cinematic, banger of a record; part spaghetti-western dust storm, and part hook-filled, ’60s AM radio sunshine.

This is our last episode of the summer season, so have a listen with a cold drink under the sun, and let Dylan’s voice transport you. Where? It’s up to you.

The Show On The Road – Jamie Drake

This week, Jamie Drake: a Southern California-based singer/songwriter who transports listeners into a vibrant, technicolor world with her deeply vulnerable fingerpicked ballads and thorny, theatrical story songs.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTSMP3

Have you ever wondered what would have happened if Carole King wrote epic musicals on the moon? Listening to LA’s magical songstress Jamie Drake will provide a clue as to what that would sound like. She writes songs with a certain old Hollywood glamour to them, and after a decade of helping other people write and sing, she got signed — and has an insanely lush record, Everything’s Fine, coming out in September.

Her new single, “Redwood Tree,” is out on Friday.

The Show On The Road – Peter Rowan

In this episode, host Z. Lupetin speaks with Peter Rowan, the affable elder-statesman of roots music, who was there at the crucible beginnings of bluegrass and has joyfully jaunted across a plethora of folk music styles over the course of his five decade-long career.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

These days, despite it getting harder for him to get around, he’s still on the road constantly, and you can see him at Telluride Bluegrass Festival, Red Wing Roots, Rockygrass, and wherever young folks and old folks are still gathering around whatever stew folk music is cooking these days. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear Peter set up outside in the sun with his Free Mexican Airforce Band to perform a sweet Tejano tune under the trees.

The Show On The Road – The War and Treaty

This week, Z. shares a conversation with The War and Treaty.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS

In just a few short years, the rapidly rising folk-soul duo has gone from playing high school auditoriums to opening for Al Green at Radio City Music Hall, singing with Mumford & Sons in Nashville, and recording with Emmylou Harris. In the process, they have put together one of the hottest touring bands tearing through the US.