Riyl

Some context before we get started: I met Sam Seder five or so years back when he cohosted a video show in the Air America break room. By then the progressive talk station was on its last legs. Both Seder and cohost Marc Maron had been through the ringer with other programs and had ended up setting a desk directly in front of a vending machine in a radio station kitchen.After the plug was unceremoniously pulled, Seder did what countless abruptly unemployed comedian/radio personalities have since: he launched a podcast. The show borrowed the format, Jon Benjamin-voiced bumpers and title of an Air American show he had co-hosted with long-time friend Janeane Garofalo. Ten years after launching, The Majority Report is still going strong, featuring daily interviews with guests and left leaning political talk that would make many of the talking heads at MSNBC. When sat down at Seder’s downtown Brooklyn studio, the specter of Break Room Live was very much on my mind, thanks in no small part to a the fact that Maron

I would have been more than content to discuss Wild Cat Academy, the New York City second chance high where Lisa Wilde has taught for more than a decade and a half. What resulted from our hour-long conversation, however, was one of the more wide-ranging interviews we’ve run for some time, hitting on subjects like life in the city and juggling, life, family and part-time creative pursuits. And the, of course, there’s the factotum of jobs that factor so prominently into Wilde’s bio, from baking, to the BBC to the teaching gig that gave rise to Yo Miss, a self-published mini-comic turned anthology by our friends at Microcosm Books. Wilde sent me a few issues while I was writing about zines for Boing Boing, and I knew she’s make for a fascinating interview. It took a year or two for us to finally line our schedules up, but when we sat down in the drawing studio of the Brooklyn home she shares with her husband and son, it was well worth the wait. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, the realization that an upcoming guest has recently been on WTF fills me with an immediate sense of dread. Surely Maron has mined this person for all of their conversational juices. Of course, that worry subsides almost immediately when the interviewee is Kevin Allison The former State member has built a second career for himself standing on-stage and not holding back. The Cincinnati-born comedian founded Risk! as a weekly live show in Manhattan, in August of 2009. A few months later, the series grew into a podcast, setting itself apart from myriad other storytelling radio shows and podcasts thanks to some well-known guests and a dedication to Allison’s fearless confessional style. Risk’s explicit mission statement involves guests, “tell[ing] true stories they never thought they’d dare to share in public.” As a frequent Risk storyteller himself, Allison is no stranger to brutal honesty. It’s a great quality in a podcast guest — and one that was happily on full disp

I’m pretty sure I first heard about Jeffrey Lewis through his music. By the time I arrived in New York City, the singer-songwriter was already a veteran of the same Lower East Side antifolk scene that gave the world the likes of the Moldy Peaches. Turns out the guy also makes some really terrific comics as well. And better still, he takes every opportunity available to combine the two forms, as with with a series of comic essays on the songwriting process written for the New York Times, or the year we asked him to perform at Manhattan’s MoCCA Fest in which he combined singing with an easel baring drawings for a lo-fi multimedia storytelling experience. I ran into Lewis once again at this year’s MoCCA comics show and he happily agreed to an impromptu conversation on a scenic Chelsea rooftop overlooking the Hudson. It’s a relatively quick (by RiYL standards) conversation, due to the rapidly dropping rooftop temperatures and Lewis’s need to get back to his unmanned table at the show, but it’s still a wide-rangin

I’m fairly certain the phrase “mommy blog” is tossed around once or twice over the course this interview. I only mention it here as I’m sure it sends up a few red flags, though undeservedly so. For starters, there’s the fact that The East Village Inky predates the phenomenon by at least a decade or so. Ayun Halliday has been producing the pocket-sized, photocopied zine for over 20 years now, having just released issue 55 when we sat down for a chat a local watering hole following the Brooklyn Zine Fest. The series is a breezy and largely lighthearted first-hand account of two artists raising children in the city, told through a series of stories, mini-comics and whatever other assorted odds and ends Halliday opts to include. The Inky also manages to avoid most of the preachy and rose-colored trappings of its successors, which are no doubt a large part of what’s made the long-running zine beloved even amongst childless readers. Despite living in the same metropolitan area, I’ve had a surprising amount of troub

For me, it goes Kids in the Hall, Kurt Vonnegut and punk rock, in that order. I shudder to think what sort of person I might have become had Comedy Central not started airing the Canadian sketch show in reruns right after show during my formative years. KITH presented new frontiers in comedy my tender suburban brain never imagined were possible. And Bruce McCulloch was their poet laureate. McCulloch was the weirdo in a group of weirdos. The angry young man with a penchant gruff voiced, world weary characters and flair for beat poetry, as evidenced by 1995’s criminal underrated comedy record, Shame Based Man. Spending a Halloween chewing on an unlit cigar with half a head of cabbage taped to my skull seemed like a no-brainer in high school, and when I found out that KITH were making a triumphant live show return to New York City, his publicist was the first on my list to receive an overzealous email. When he answered the door to his room, McCulloch gently ribbed the hotel employee for letting the riffraff thro

Jon Spencer is tired of talking about music. Perhaps it’s the fact that he’s been talking about it professionally ever since Pussy Galore emerged from the garages of Washington DC 30 years back. Or maybe it’s because he’s knee deep in the press junket for Blues Explosion’s 10th full-length, Freedom Tower No Wave Dance Party 2015. I met the musician at his practice space, a nondescript spot, located in a lower-Manhattan basement down a dank flight of stair a few days after I managed to catch him during the final show of his five boroughs tour.  It was an explosion ending at a brewery in Astoria, Queens, which found Spencer unraveling and wearing a giant American flag and hanging from a balcony while performing daring feats on rock and roll.  As excited as I am to talk about what I’ve just seen however, the singer really comes alive when the topic of comics arise, as he discusses collaborations with cartoonists like Paul Pope and Tony Millionaire, and his love for the magazine Heavy Metal, whose back page rock

Mark Stewart doesn’t want to talk about music. Least of all his own. A few hours ahead of The Pop Group’s appearance at The Bowery Ballroom in support of their first record in 35 years, he makes that much clear. He’s been talking about for decades. He’s bored. It’s not so much that the musician is a difficult interview as others have suggested, it’s more a matter of figuring out precisely what he wants to discuss. Sometimes finding that out is a simple matter of stopping the interview and asking outright. Tonight it’s politics. “Post-punk secret agents,” as he lovingly puts it. Contemporaries who have managed to find their ways into positions of power to help spread the word of progressive politics. For Stewart, spreading the word of political disarray means harnessing the power of pop culture press. It’s a wide-ranging, hour-long conversation that touches on aspects of global politics, cryptocurrency, popular music and creative inspiration. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Too Much Coffee Man creator became a member of the extremely rare two-timers club, with a second RiYL appearance. Shannon Wheeler was among the show’s original guests early on when the interviews were primarily recorded remotely. When he mentioned that he’d be in New York for work for a few days, it seemed as good a time as any to give the interview thing another shot, this time face to face. In a lot of ways, the interview is the platonic ideal of an RiYL episode, a casual cafe (or, in this case, tea house) conversation that likely would have gone the same way whether or not I’d decided to bring my microphone setup along with me.  Though, for the record, most of my conversations these days don’t begin with a discussion of Ayn Rand — but when Wheeler confided in me that he was attempting to watch the Atlas Shrugged film series, I couldn’t help myself. Also, I’m not sure I’ve talked that much about God in a single sitting in college, but when you put out an abridged adaptation of the bible like God is Disa

Kevin Barnes has a cold. He looks tired, taking swigs of coconut milk from one of those oddly-shaped cartons, but his face is sparkling in the mid-day sun. It’s the first truly nice day in New York City in several months, and we’re jammed into a corner on the southside of a packed Union Square Park. Barnes asked if we could find a sunny spot to speak, so we walked the five blocks up from Webster Hall and now he’s sparkling in the sunlight with the residual glittering of last night’s show, like those teenage vampires of lore. It’s bright and it’s crowd and noisy as the city takes momentary respite from the longest, coldest winter any of us can remember. It’s hardly the ideal spot for frank and intimate conversation about the creation of art in the wake of lost love, but it somehow works, as Barnes and I discuss the Elephant 6 alum’s 13th record, Aureate Gloom and the painful separation from his wife that followed shortly after the release of his last album. It’s an honest and fascinating conversation with an a

Several years ago, I began to notice a pattern emerging. Practically every book of interest I'd pick up at independent bookstores and zine fest had the same logo on the back: a small bicycle gear with a heart at the center. Microcosm had seemingly come out of nowhere to corner the market on things that fascinate me. Joe Biel formed the indie publishing empire out of his Cleveland bedroom in the mid-90s, moving Microcosm to greener Pacific Northwestern pastures of Portland, Oregon in 1999, where the company still remains, along with with a retail storefront baring the same name. After a year and a half of attempting to coordinate an interview, Biel and I finally found ourselves in the same place. He was kindly enough to make a detour to my Queens apartment during a brief stopover in New York following an appearance at bicycle policy convention in Colombia. It's a subject matter than has long been near and dear to the publisher, recently manifesting itself in the form of Aftermass, a documentary exploring Portl

The last time I saw Jean Grae in person, she was giving out free hugs in Union Square. The event was a unique attempting to cope with and have a discussion around the events unfolding in Ferguson. Grae and a group of fellow #TheHugStation attendants were offering a slew of hug varieties off of a lengthy Hug Menu. For the life of me, I can’t remember which variety I settled on, but I’m happy to report that hugging is, in fact, yet another one of her seemingly endless list of talents. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Grae was solely an emcee. She has, after all, issued dozens of records since she began rapping in the mid-90s (included several EPs in 2014 alone). But her ever-increasing portfolio also includes producing, writing, directing and starring in her an online sitcom (Life With Jeanie), writing and recording the audiobook The State of Eh and several live comedy shows like January’s Ghostbusters II ½: The Rise of Winston. And that’s all with the last year.Since 2008, Grae’s mission statement has more

I knew Brooks Wheelan was moving. His PR reps had already alerted me to the fact that the comedian only had a few days remaining before moving on to greener entertainment pastures. And, of course, he hadn’t exactly been quiet regarding his intentions to leave the city after his unceremonious departure from Saturday Night Live (nor anything regarding those unfortunate circumstances).Even still, I wasn’t fully prepared to find his entire life in boxes when I arrived at his soon-to-be vacant Lower East Side apartment. He had one final standup set directly following out conversation, and that was pretty much it for Brooks Wheelman and New York City. All of his worldly belongs were now stashed away in U-Haul boxes, but there were, thankfully, a few beers left in the fridge. We grabbed a couple of beers and sat cross-legged on the floor. In what many might have reflected upon as a moment for regret or solemn reflection the comedian expressed only excited at a new life on a new coast full of unlimited possibilities.

I shouldn’t have been surprised when, in the email lead up to our interview, Vivek Tiwary told me he was pals with former RiYL guest, Mike Watt. When, after the interview concluded, he asked me who I was speaking to next, it also shouldn’t have caught me off-guard that he friends with Alex Winter, as well (who subsequently referred to Tiwary as, “a ray of sunshine” when I name-dropped him during the subsequent conversation). Tiwary has seemingly lived a million lives in the entertainment industry, rising through the ranks of the major label record companies, running a entertainment financing company, producing musicals like American Idiot at the forefront of a new wave of Broadway shows and, most recently, penning the Eisner award winning graphic novel, The Fifth Beatle. Perhaps more so than any other projects, that book was a real labor of love for Tiwary, the culmination of multiple decades of research about legendary Beatles manager Brian Epstein, a figure who perfectly embodied the writers dual fascinatio

While the old adage about truth making for great art certainly applies to standup, the equation can be something of a mixed bag. After all, comedy is often as much about deflection as it honesty, a slight of hand designed to distract from larger, painful and more personal truths. But honesty, it seems, isn’t really an issue for Guy Branum. The comedian, writer, podcaster and  former Chelsea Lately guest deals in truths — largely about himself. As Branum put it in a recent comment about the Trevor Noah Twitter dustup, "Good stand-up comedy cannot be safe; it must shock or surprise an audience. Some comics can do it magnificently with insights about socks, but the best do it with bracing commentary about the stuff that really matters to us." For Branum, such truths are largely internal, tackling obsessions, body issues and coming to grips with his own sexuality, in spite of a less than supportive environment. This quote from his new standup album, Effable, sums the whole thing up pretty nicely. "When my parents

I never knew New York before the war. The towers were gone by the first time set foot in the city. But nearly a dozen years after making the place my home, I have a fundamental distrust for anyone resident who claims not to have a conflicted relationship with the city. Even in my relatively short while here, I feel as though I’ve watched the city undergo constant transformation. It’s to be expected to some degree in a city famous for never stopping, and life certainly can’t exist in a vacuum of nostalgia. But there’s forever a sense that something fundamental about the city is quickly eroding. Jesse Malin is an expert on the matter. The Queens native spent his whole life in the city, and his love of its native sounds is precisely what led him to plumb its depths, diving headfirst into the world of New York City hardcore at age 12, fronting the legendary band heart attack before officially entering his teens. Malin’s musical leanings have mellowed out considerably since Heart Attack’s Hilter Demo, but City has

Flood is my Beatles on Sullivan, my self-titled Velvet Underground record and Run-DMC on MTV. It was the first time I remember being keenly aware that an ever-expanding musical universe existed beyond the confines of the rock and Motown the radio played on the way to and from soccer practice.  It was a strange and idiosyncratic world of misplaced accordions, horn-rimmed glasses and lyrics that only began to take on some semblance of meaning after repeat listens. So I listened, over and over again on the cassette tape a friend had record on, the mystery only deepened by the lack of official art work.  I was in college by the time I realized I’d been getting key lyric to “Particle Man” wrong all these years—singing it at full volume in a car full of people who knew better. The sense of discovery is inextricably linked to the They Might Be Giants experience. It’s a tie that bonds so many of my generation, discovering in those days just before the mainstream adoption of the internet that maybe we weren’t so weird

This one’s going to be a bit different, as you’ve no doubt gathered from the title. It’s a bit of an, as the Who so eloquently put it, odds and sods — interviews that never got their own standalone episodes for a number of reasons, which will be detailed below. Those of you out there who are looking for a place to start in amongst our nearly 100 episodes, I strongly suggest you turn back now. That said, I think there’s something in each of these worth posting. I’m a big fan of everyone featured here, and am happy that these are finally seeing the light of day, in some cases several months after first being recorded. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

One of the real dangers of recording interviews is that plenty can change over the course of a few weeks. One interviewee lost her job of 17 years the week before that conversation was posted. Another didn’t get their show renewed. The news isn’t always bad, however. And in the case of artists like Sara Benincasa there’s a sort of unspoken understanding that five or 10 new project will be unveiled in the interim. The bulk of our hour-long conversation was dominated by Benincasa’s 2012 memoir Agorafabulous (now a newly-released audiobook), which tackles her struggles with agoraphobia, anxiety and chronicles her somewhat accidental early comedy career. Fittingly, we also discussed the ways in which the internet has affective creativity, leading so many to build a career from bits and pieces, rather than plugging away as some singular goal. Benincasa’s Twitter account is a testament to a writer who seemingly never slows down, and as I was readying this interview for a few weeks back, it occurred to me that we re

If I’m being totally honest, it takes me a few minutes to shake the fact that I’m sitting across the table from Bill S. Preston as I unspool mic wires in the kitchen of some stranger’s Tribeca apartment. But if there’s stigma attached to having starred in a number of iconic films at a young age, Alex Winter shed it years ago. The career of the self-proclaimed “showbiz lifer” has been a fascinating one to watch over the years, as he transitioned from child/teen star to respected filmmaker, first through the uniquely absurdist comedic visions of his MTV sketch series Idiotbox and the Troma-esque feature Freaked to award-winning features like 2012’s Downloaded, a documentary detailing the rise and fall of Napster soundtracked by former RiYL guest, DJ Spooky. I caught up with Winter as he was in town filming the culmination of the followup, Deep Web, capturing the trial of Silk Road founder Ross William Ulbricht, which concluded three days before our conversation. Though the director was shockingly at ease despit