Tag: Zach Lupetin

The Show on the Road – Robert Finley

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week on The Show On The Road, we journey to northern Louisiana for a unique conversation with sprightly blues and southern rock singer Robert Finley, who began making music in his cotton-growing family in the 1960s, and has been rediscovered and empowered through his remarkable partnership with Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • SPOTIFY • STITCHER

Finley’s funky and cheeky comeback album, Goin’ Platinum (which sounds like a lost Motown gem), came in 2017. In May of 2021, he celebrated the release of the deeply personal follow-up, Sharecropper’s Son. As you can hear in the episode, even in his late sixties, Finley is a playful force to be reckoned with and isn’t shy about sharing how faith and music have gotten him through decades of tragedy and hardship. In 2019 he even reached the semi-finals of America’s Got Talent.

Growing up in a religious home where blues and soul music was rarely allowed to be heard, Finley worked as an army helicopter repairman and professional carpenter for many years, often keeping his keen musical ideas to himself. He may now be legally blind, but the always-sharp dressed Finley (he loves a snakeskin jacket) was spotted busking on the streets of Helena, Arkansas and the blues-obsessed Auerbach was smitten with Finley’s raw, swampy Jimi Hendrix meets James Brown tone.

Both of Finley’s critically-applauded releases subsequently came out on Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound, which has become a home for previously unheralded Black artists like Yola, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, and Leo Bud Welch.

(Editor’s note: Read BGS’ recent interview with Robert Finley here.)

 

The Show on the Road – Lera Lynn

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week on The Show On The Road, we bring you a deep dive with silky-voiced, southern gothic-folk songwriter Lera Lynn. Lynn has recently gained notoriety for her mysterious and lushly cinematic sound, as heard on her haunting 2020 LP, On My Own (on which she writes, produces and plays every instrument on each song) and in the music of HBO’s True Detective (produced by T-Bone Burnett) — she became a cast member in Season 2.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • SPOTIFY • STITCHER

We’ve all had our dark moments during this last year. For Lera Lynn it was figuring out how to put out a new album, which she had painstakingly made herself in isolation (see also: Springsteen’s moody and homemade Nebraska), right as her first baby was on the way without any family being allowed to help shoulder the load. At times, the burden seemed too much to bear, but what emerged was a touchstone set of songs that unintentionally seemed to pinpoint the exact center of our collective dread — and the flickers of hope of a new beginning that can come out of a such a societal time-quake. Searching, reverb-y rock standouts like “Are You Listening?” seem to be calling out into a void that we never knew we had, perhaps reminding us again how much we need human touch, friendship, family warmth, and true soul connection.

While we are currently emerging into the light-filled end of this COVID-19 tunnel, it’s important to note that this interview was conducted back in 2020 in the thick of the harshest lockdowns (the taping footage was lost, then finally found). Songs like “Isolation” hit the exact pain point for many artists like Lynn, who once thrived on bringing live-music’s unique sweaty joy to strangers in a new town each night. Her rising calls of “Is anybody out there?” ring like echoes from a very recent bad dream. A dream, of course, that is still very much a painful reality across this country and around the world.

Coming out of the fertile roots rock scene of Athens, GA, Lynn’s earlier records — like the intimate and country-inflected Have You Met Lera Lynn? from 2011 and its pop-forward follow ups The Avenues (2016) and Resistor (2017) — focused mostly on her endlessly warm and rich voice and the fury and frustration she was processing having grown up an only child of an alcoholic dad. But it was her guest-star-laden LP, Plays Well With Others (2018), where Lynn began to realize the extent of her gifted arranging and vocal powers together. Teaming up with a murderer’s row of Americana artists like Shovels & Rope, John Paul White of the Civil Wars, and Rodney Crowell, the album may be the most high-spirited of her works — like a basement party jam session going off the rails in all the best ways.

The tough year at home did make Lynn come to appreciate how far she’s come since those early days — maybe it took a decade of hard-won acceptance and practice to be able to create On My Own without any help from other musicians or producers. The result is a wonder to hear. Now if she could just play it for an actual live audience. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear Lynn introduce her favorite broken-romance number, “So Far.”

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

The Show on the Road – The Allman Betts Band

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week on The Show On The Road, it’s a rock ‘n’ roll family affair with a special conversation with Devon Allman and Duane Betts, two guitar-slinging sons of the iconic Allman Brothers Band who formed their own soulful supergroup: The Allman Betts Band.


LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • SPOTIFY • STITCHER
With their 2019 debut record Down To The River, Allman and Betts — who took turns playing alongside their revered dads Gregg and Dickey as teenagers — finally banded together to create a new collection of the soaring slide-guitar-centered, Gulf-coast rock and brawny, road-tested blues that both pays homage to their heady upbringings and forges their own way forward. Even their touring bassist has a familiar name to Allman diehards: Berry Oakley Jr., whose dad was one of the Allman Brothers’ founding members when they formed in 1969 out of Jacksonville, FL.

While many groups were stuck at home licking their wounds as the pandemic shut down most touring options, Devon and Duane’s crew tapped into the nascent drive-in circuit, bringing their spirited 2020 release, Bless Your Heart, to a whole new set of excited fans. Always sticking to their southern roots, they laid down both records at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios with producer Matt Ross-Spang (Jason Isbell, Margo Price, Elvis Presley). While history is always dancing in the margins of the songs, it’s clear on this second offering that they wanted to create stories that didn’t only reflect their roaring live shows.

Standout songs like the soft piano ballad, “Doctor’s Daughter,” show the group roving in new, more nuanced directions — while “Autumn Breeze” is a pulsing slow-burn, but features the effortless twin guitar lines that made their dads’ work so instantly recognizable.

Of course playing in the family business wasn’t always a given for the guys — especially Devon, who only met his hard-touring father Gregg at sixteen. Devon first started hanging out with young Duane (then only twelve) in 1989 on the Allman Brothers’ 20th Anniversary tour. As he describes in the episode, Devon wasn’t sure he wanted to follow in his father’s hard-to-follow footsteps, but once he sat in on “Midnight Rider” and the crowd went crazy? It was off to the races.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Allman Brothers’ breakout record Live At The Fillmore East, which I grew up listening to on loop with my father. Though Duane Allman died tragically in a 1971 accident before his namesake was born, and Gregg passed away in 2017, their spirits live on in the Allman Betts Band’s epic live show, which is already gearing up for the tentative 2021 touring season.

Photo credit: Kaelan Barowsky

The Show on the Road – Mipso

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week, we feature one of the leading roots-pop bands working today: Mipso. An affable and endlessly-creative quartet formed in Chapel Hill, NC, they are made up of fiddle player Libby Rodenbough, mandolinist Jacob Sharp, guitarist Joseph Terrell, and bassist Wood Robinson.


LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • SPOTIFY • STITCHER • MP3

Despite the anxious mood of their swing-state home base, it’s quite an exciting time for Mipso. Host Z. Lupetin was able to catch up with Libby and Jacob (via Zoom of course) to discuss their lushly orchestrated, self-titled record which just dropped last week; and if you walk down 8th Avenue in Nashville this week, you might catch a billboard with their sheepish grins large in the sky.

How did they get here? It’s hard to find a group where every member can effortlessly sing lead and write genre-bending songs that fit seamlessly on six acclaimed albums — and counting — in under ten years. Earlier standout records like the breakout Dark Holler Pop, produced by fellow North Carolinian Andrew Marlin of Mandolin Orange, and Edges Run, which features a veritable online hit in the broken-voiced, emotional “People Change,” show how Mipso appeals not only to folk fest-loving moms and dads, but also their edgier kids, who appreciate their subversive turns of phrase and playful gender-ambiguous, neon-tinted wardrobe.

As Z. found out during his conversation with Libby and Jacob, the band nearly broke up after a series of grueling 150-shows-a-year runs, a scary car wreck, and the pressure of putting out Edges Run for their rapidly growing fanbase. The forced slower pace of this last year and a half has been a gift in several ways — allowing the group to catch their breath and hole up to write more collaboratively than ever. The shimmering sonic backdrop that gifted producer and musician Sandro Perri was able to bring to the Mipso sessions at Echo Mountain studio in Asheville really makes the songs feel like they could exist in any era.

You wouldn’t be alone if you heard the connection between the honey-hooked newest record with the timeless, mellow-with-a-hint-of-menace hits of the 1970s (looking at you James Taylor and Carly Simon). Songs like “Never Knew You Were Gone” show off Terrell’s gift for gently asking the deepest questions, like where he might go when he transitions to the other side in a “silvery fire,” or the sardonically nostalgic “Let A Little Light In,” which wonders if the soft-focused images we have of the peaceful, boomtime 1990s (when Mipso was growing up) could use some real scrutiny. Rodenbough’s silky fiddle work stars throughout –and her courageous, vulnerable lead vocal on “Your Body” may be the most memorable moment on the new work.

Stick around to the end of the episode to hear mandolinist Jacob Sharp introduce his favorite contribution, “Just Want To Be Loved.”

Photo credit: D.L. Anderson

The Show on the Road – Listen to These Black Voices

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Something powerful is in the air. While we may have said that after similar unrest in the past — after Rodney King in LA, Trayvon Martin in Miami, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and countless others — something about what is happening now feels deeper, heavier. Maybe it’s actually sinking in.

I normally try to put out a new episode of The Show on the Road podcast every other Wednesday. This week, that simply wasn’t possible. It was time to stop giving my endless opinions, to stop waxing poetic about harmony, to shut up about finding the meaning in every lyric and just be quiet, listen and learn.

I’ve been lucky to talk with truly amazing Black artists, songwriters, and performers in the two years I’ve been creating The Show on the Road. I ask you to go back into our archives and listen to these voices. — Z. Lupetin, host

Sunny War


Discover a young, deep-voiced folk/blues artist like Sunny War, who overcame a troubled past with drugs and being unhoused in Venice Beach to create a series of critically acclaimed records that have brought her to festivals and venues around the country.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Bobby Rush


A sonic elder statesman, Bobby Rush came north from Mississippi during the great migration to work in the heyday of the Chicago blues and soul scene with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Rush has been making brashly funky and fearlessly sexy songs for decades, finally snagging his much-deserved first Grammy at the age of 86.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Birds of Chicago


Based in Nashville by way of Chicago by way of Montreal, Birds of Chicago are centered around the powerful chemistry of husband-wife duo JT Nero and Haitian-Canadian banjoist and clarinetist dynamo Allison Russell, who gives every audience chills when she sings about her fallen ancestors. How she is not an international star astounds me. You may have seen her newest creation as part of the African American, female banjo supergroup, Our Native Daughters with Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, and Leyla McCalla.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Dom Flemons


If you need to go back in time and educate yourself about Black cultural history (which you do), listen to our double episode with the great American songster Dom Flemons, who came up in the renowned Black string band Carolina Chocolate Drops. Of course, he has since struck out on his own to become a sought after, roving ethnomusicologist and music historian. His newest Grammy-nominated record brings us back into a forgotten world of Black cowboys, who don’t get the credit they deserved in helping settle the West.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Liz Vice


If you’ve been having a crisis of faith and need a little musical medicine, Liz Vice’s episode is the ticket. Vice grew up in Oregon singing gospel music with her family and aiming to be a filmmaker. Her career as a songwriter and performer blossomed with homemade, deeply felt, deliciously soulful and social-justice-forward records (examining her faith and our ever-evolving relationship to a higher power). We recorded in an old church in LA, and her renewed version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” is haunting.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

The War and Treaty


Finally, if you need a shot of pure, joyous harmony and unabashed rock ‘n’ roll spirit, our episode featuring The War and Treaty is exactly what you need. They show us how music can be a healing tide to rise all broken ships. How it can be a force for good, bringing now power-couple Tanya and Michael Trotter together against all odds after Michael came back from a trauma-filled tour of duty in Iraq and needed a way to reenter society and share the songs that had been brimming in his heart for decades. Hearing them sing together, how they complete each other totally, is all the hope I need right now.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

 

The Show On The Road – Steve Poltz

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week on The Show On The Road, we feature a conversation with a Canadian-born paraparetic prince of pop-folk singers, who has jumped through more gauntlets of the modern music industry than almost anyone in his three plus decades of making records, Steve Poltz.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Poltz first hit the scene with the San Diego-based underground punk-folk favorites The Rugburns, then as an accidental hitmaker and MTV video heartthrob with collaborator and friend Jewel, and then as a wild-haired, two hundred shows a year internationally revered solo act. He’s put out a baker’s dozen of whacked-out, deceptively sensitive, and fearlessly personal albums that have won him devoted audiences from his ancestral home in Nova Scotia to the dance party dives of California to massive festivals across Australia and beyond.

 As we are still quite separated during the pandemic, host Z. Lupetin called up Poltz in Nashville to discuss the long and twisty road Poltz has travelled — jumping from his inspired, most-recent album Shine On back to his childhood in swinging Palm Springs (where he met Elvis and Sinatra), to making $100,000 music videos for his ill-fated major label debut in ’98, to nearly dying on stage after substance abuse problems and never-say-no-to-a-gig exhaustion took its toll.
 
We now find him in a more peaceful, purposeful existence, where he is newly married and enjoying making music at home (government orders!) for the first time in decades.

The Show On The Road – Theo Katzman (Vulfpeck)

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

For this special episode, your host Z. Lupetin adhered to the strict stay-at-home pandemic orders, recording an intimate phone conversation with Theo Katzman, the Cheshire Cat of soulful pop-rock and one of the most visible members of the mysterious funk supergroup, Vulfpeck.


LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

In January, Katzman celebrated the release of his cheeky, super catchy, unabashedly romantic, and pop-driven new solo album Modern Johnny Sings: Songs in the Age of Vibe and was on a run of packed release shows when everything shut down (you know, because COVID-19). Katzman’s expertly-crafted songs and lilting falsetto vocals have that rare spark that can brighten anybody’s dull quarantine in no time.

The Show On The Road – Joey Dosik (Vulfpeck)

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week on the show, host Z. Lupetin meets up with Joey Dosik, a silky-voiced songwriter and freaky-talented multi-instrumentalist who writes lush, romantic jams that transport listeners to R&B-tinted, old school FM radio gold.

LISTEN: APPLE MUSIC • MP3

Some listeners may have learned of Dosik’s talents with DIY, future-funk ensemble Vulfpeck, led by trickster curator/composer Jack Stratton. Vulfpeck went from making goofy viral videos and recording an album of total silence — that scared the shit out of streaming giants like Spotify after it rocketed the band to international notoriety and financial success — to crowdfunding a series of hit funk records and vinyl releases that propelled them to sold out international tours, headlining nights at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, and an unprecedented sold out show at Madison Square Garden (all with no record label in sight).

As we honor and celebrate two lost musical greats this week, Bill Withers and John Prine, it’s comforting to remember that we have constant new waves of amazing artists like Joey Dosik coming up who can honor and further their message. In many ways, Dosik’s songs combine the honest earnestness of Prine’s best early work, telling frank stories of family and relationships, with Withers’ deep, church-flavored, down-home groove.

 

The Show On The Road – The Wood Brothers

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Right before the whole world as we know it shut down and they shortened their West Coast tour due to COVID-19, host Z. Lupetin spoke to Oliver and Chris Wood — Americana pioneers The Wood Brothers — about their renewed musical bond, how they grew up in Colorado jamming with their biology professor dad, and how they just barely missed the great East Nashville tornado earlier this month. When it rains it does pour, it seems.


LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

The Wood Brothers’ brand new record, Kingdom in My Mind, is a sweetly funky, ballsy, bluesy, booty-shaking, and romantic improvisational masterwork. Do yourself a favor and turn it up loud and proud — it will help you groove through the lockdown. If there is anything that’s clear in this deeply strange and unsettling time, it’s that we need music more than ever.

The Show On The Road – Dustbowl Revival

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

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.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

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.”