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In 2013, The Polyphonic Spree released, quite possibly the best album, a decade into their existence — quite the feat for a band many had written off as little more than novelty the first time its 20-odd members took to the stage in matching robes. But, then, Tim Delaughter has built a career out of defying exception. The Spree itself was one of those crazy sorts of what ifs that artists sit around and discuss but rarely ever deliver on: as much a happening as a band, with two dozen members in choir outfits, born out of the dissolution of Tripping Daisy a damaged 90s psychedelic alternative act that recorded a handful of wonderful records that will forever be relagated to the Buzz Bin of history for its sunshine single “I Got a Girl.” Delaughter’s determination is the glue that’s held his deeply satisfying pop experiment together since 2000 in the face of financial strain and all of the other numerous logistical considerations that come with such a massive operation at a time when similarly positioned groups

I first met Glenn Tilbrook two years back in a hotel bar roughly 40 minutes or so outside of downtown Austin, Texas. I was nursing a whiskey after a long day’s work and overheard the older gentleman describing a corporate music gig in a soft spoken English accent. It took me longer than I care to admit that the guy sitting next to me was the frontman of one of the greatest pop group of the last 30 years. I’m also slightly embarrassed to admit that I slipped into interviewer mode a few times during that conversation — and subsequent conversations the following two nights, asking Tilbrook about my favorite Squeeze song, “Up the Junction.” A typically upbeat song musically, the number seems to take an abrupt tonal shift in lyrics roughly halfway through when, seemingly without warning, things shift from white picket fences to alcoholism and broken relationships. “I’d never thought of it like that,” Tilbrook answered. “I’d always just thought it was realistic. Fair enough. And really a pretty solid encapsulation

There are few people around I’d rather sit down and discuss music with for 45 minutes than Greg Cartwright. Beyond the laundry list of excellent bands he’s fronted, from The Oblivians to The Reigning Sound (and the dozens in-between), the Tennessee musician makes no bones about being a huge music fan himself.  That fact has manifested itself in countless side projects like The Parting Gifts with Ettes singer CoCo and records like Dangerous Game, which saw the return of Shangri-Las singer Mary Weiss after a number of decades away from the music scene. Cartwright’s deep love of music affords him an impressive level of insight when it comes to discussing his own output over the years — and almost invariably leads us down all manner of musical rabbit holes in the interim. I sat down with Cartwright backstage at The Bowery Ballroom to discuss his near decision to retiring The Reigning Sound name and the band’s subsequent return to recording with the newly released Shattered, which finds him playing with a number o

In amongst the throngs of costumed chaos that the Jacob K Javits Center on the Saturday of New York Comic Con weekend, we find a reasonably quiet corner to sit down and discuss life and art with Jillian Tamaki — “reasonably,” of course, being a nice way of designated that rare spot where one can talk without shouting. Maybe there’s some metaphor to be explored there about finding oneself in amongst the pop culture sound and fury that is the contemporary comics scene. And Tamaki has certainly carved out a place for herself, rising to prominence in the indie comics and YA scenes with Skim, a collaboration with her cousin, writer Mariko, that landed the duo on all manner of year-end best of lists.  The two Tamakis joined forces again for 2014’s This One Summer, a teenage coming of age story that has once again landed the cousins in critics’ good graces. We had about 40 minutes before Tamaki had to rush off to a signing with First-Second, but we managed to cover a lot of ground, from collaborating to teaching, to

Kevin Seconds is seated next to me on a small bench just in front of the Knitting Factory. As I prep the record and unravel the mic cords, fan after fan approach the singer. Some want autographs, some want to take a photo, some just want to say hello, but all have a story — mostly tales of seeing 7 Seconds way back when. Punk show stories that prove they’ve been there for the band for just as long as the band’s been there for them. Seconds has been living the stories since he was 19-year-old in Reno, one of two groups of brothers who helped bring the nascent hardcore scene to the biggest little city. At 53, he still appears grateful for every one. The band still tours, now and again, when Seconds isn’t putting out solo records or running a Sacramento coffee shop wife his wife, a fellow musician. In the past year, 7 Seconds even put a new record, Leave a Light On — it’s first in nine years. When he gets up on stage, the energy returns, though, granted, not quite the same level as the 19-year-old who started th

I’d spoken with John Porcellino not all that long ago for Publishers Weekly feature discussing The Hospital Suite, the indie cartoonist longest self-contained work to date. Published by Drawn & Quarterly, the book is deeply personal, exploring long standing health concerns that caused Porcellino to be hospitalized numerous times over the years. Toward the end of that conversation, I asked the artist whether he’d be willing to meet up again for yet another interview when his book tour brought him to New York City. He’d only be in town for a couple of days for the Brooklyn Book Festival and would only have a couple of hours to spare, but he happily agreed to devote one of them to sitting down with me in front of a microphone yet again. Porcellino greeted me in the lobby of his Brooklyn hotel a few weeks later in a white t-shirt bearing the visage of celebrity cat, Lil Bub. He recognized me before I recognized him. He looked different than the last time we’d met, when I’d interviewed him on-stage at the Minn

The best interview subjects and the best comedians share a common thread: brutal honesty. There’s a sense that nothing is off-limits in pursuit of the perfect joke or honest answer. Jason Nash, to his credit, is nothing if not honest — often times brutally so. About his career, about his life and, most frequently, about his marriage. In fact, the comedian recently released a movie on the subject — the fittingly straightforwardly named Jason Nash is Married. “The secret to a great marriage is very simple,” Nash sums the whole business up in a voice over at the end of the film’s trailer. “One person eats shit and the other person soars like a bird feeding off the lost dreams of the first person.” Nash and I sat down at the Sidewalk Cafe in Manhattan while the comedian was in the city promoting the film’s video on demand release. And just as one would expect, things got really real. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Two years ago, while on a take a half day off following a photography convention, I ran into Art Spiegelman on the streets of Cologne, Germany. Actually, I spotted his wife first, and it took me a moment to place the familiar face so completely out of context — New Yorker editor and former RAW Magazine partner in crime, Francoise Mouly. I reintroduced myself, having interviewed Art a year or two prior for a HEEB Magazine cover story. Spiegelman nodded his recognition and invented me to a talk his was giving at a modern art museum later that night. Naturally, I obliged. It was one of the more surreal experiences of my comics-adjacent life. What began as a conversation about the cartoonist’s beloved holocaust book Maus, soon transitioned into a slideshow featuring holocaust denial gag strips Spiegelman had drawn, answering then-Iranian president Amedinijad’s call in the wake of the uproar over the massively controversial 2005 Dutch Muhammed cartoons. Watching the German audience crack up at the work offered a f

“Once a bugle stood in the window of a store that sold brass goods.” That’s the first line of The Magical Bugle, a short story written by a young John Darnielle after acquiring an old Royal typewriter for his seventh birthday. It was a line so good his father taught it to his Freshman composition students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Darnielle has, it turns out, been a writer his whole life, and if that first sentence is any indication, he’s been always been a pretty good one.  Since the mid-90s, he's been best recognized as the frontman and sometime sole member of The Mountain Goats, a southern California indie rock outfit defined by the musician’s intensely emotive vocals and narrative song structures that play out like two to three minute short stories. His early career was also marked by lo-fi recording techniques, with songs often taped directly to a cassette boombox. In 2002, Darnielle released Tallahassee, a concept album relating the story of a embittered Florida couple perpetually near divorce. The s

In retrospect, there’s probably not a heck of a lot that we talk about here that Mike Doughty didn’t touch upon in Book of Drugs. His 2012 memoir is candid and rock — everything a rock and roll autobiography should be. As evidenced by the name, the book tells the musician’s tale through a series of inebriated anecdotes, including the rise and fall of his beloved 90s electro-alternative group, Soul Coughing. That’s not to say that there’s wasn’t plenty of good stuff left to talk about when we sat down for lunch at a Brooklyn Diner. Doughty has been keeping busy with his solo career in the years since, including a recent crowdfunded effort that found the singer songwriter reimagining a number of hits from those heady Buzz Bin days. Doughty also plays around the city as much as possible these days, a willingness to perform that has made him a regular on comedy bills all over a city — a challenging but welcoming environment he insists he prefers. In fact, it was a recent appearance performing at a friend’s Greenp

“It’s funny how life can change on a dime.” That’s how Whitney Matheson put it, asking whether I was still planning on running this interview. That’s the downside, I suppose, of stockpiling these interviews, though in my defense, these conversations tend to have a shelf life of a bit longer than month. When the news came out last week that USA Today would be pulling the plug on Matheson’s beloved pop culture column Pop Candy after 15 years, the thought of killing the piece never actually occurred to me. We touched upon some really interesting topics during our conversation in a midtown Manhattan tea shop. And in some ways, it’s perhaps even more important in light of Pop Candy’s end. What really struck during the interview was a conversation about a piece Matheson wrote about Seinfeld, which the titular comedian referenced during an interview with the writer. The essay was part of a larger Pop Candy project exploring the ways in which popular culture effects us on a personal level, with Matheson revealing how

1993’s The Donovan of Trash, just might be Eric Goulden as his most unhinged — which is, naturally, saying a lot for a guy who’s borne the “Wreckless” qualifier since the late 70s. It’s rough and fuzzy — a cardboard box was involved percussion at one point in the process. It’s a sort of lost low-fi, shambolic masterpiece, finally back in print for the digital age, alongside its contemporary, the also terrific Le Beat Group Electrique. The reissues, thankfully, shine additional light on period of Goulden’s career that seems forever destined to take a backseat to the early Stiff Records output that gave the world his best known hits, “The Whole Wide World” and Semaphore Signals. The singer took it upon himself to shed even more with a short US solo tour that capped off with an intimate but sufficiently energetic set at Manhattan’s Mercury Lounge, power through a set on less than pristine instruments older than many of this in attendance. I sat down with Goulden in the short space between soundcheck and showtime

Harvey Danger was one of the last of the Buzz Bin bands, in those waning when major labels were still forces to be reckoned with and MTV rotation was all it took to cement a song’s status as a generation-defining hit. Fresh out of college, the band scored its one major hit with “Flagpole Sitta,” the second track on the band’s debut record, which, all told cost around $3,000 to record.  Through some combination of unpopular choices, one major flub on the part of some crew member for 120 minutes and poor choices from above, the band would never manage to recapture such success, in spite of, quite arguably, releasing two far stronger records before disbanding for good in 2009.  In the days since, Nelson’s seemingly tried his hands at everything, playing keyboards for indie darlings The Long Winters, taking on backup vocal duties for the likes of Nada Surf and Death Cab for Cutie, taking roles in a number of films and writing for Seattle’s alt-weekly, The Stranger.  Last summer, Nelson even returned to songwritin

There’s always been some degree of confusion over what, precisely, constitutes The Beat. Here in the States, the group has long added the word “English” to its name, so as to avoid confusion with the contemporary Paul Collins’ power pop project. In recent decades, things have only gotten trickier as the band’s two frontmen have pieced together their own versions of the group. If you go see The Beat in its native UK, it will likely be the project led by toaster Ranking Roger and his similarly named progeny. Here in the US, lead singer Dave Wakeling retains the name, heading up a revue of the band’s greatest hits, with a few choice cuts from his followup band General Public mixed in for good measure. It’s a strange thing, of course, to hit the road playing decades old songs without the aid of any original members, but Wakeling, to his credit, puts on a tremendous show each night for packed houses, middle aged women inviting themselves on-stage as the opening notes of “Tenderness” ring out during the encore.  Of

A short one this week because, well, Peter Diamandis is a busy guy. Recorded at a financial tech conference in Manhattan, we managed to get 15 minutes alone with the X Prize and Singularity University to discuss what he refers to as “the most extraordinaire time in human history” and the role he’s played in pushing rapidly advancing scientific and technological breakthroughs even further. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It’s a hot one out there today. Come, have a seat on the couch in Julie Klausner’s fancy Manhattan apartment, while we discuss podcasting and writing for television series — and I spend way too much time explaining how I’ve just never been into musical theater. Oh, don’t mind the cat hair. You took your Claritin today, right? I’d attempted to sit down with the comedian for some time — at least two podcasts ago. Not podcast episodes, mind you, entire podcast series. Every time I’d asked, she was either living on the opposite coast in a TV show writer’s room or otherwise knee-deep in some other project. On the upside, however, there’s plenty to talk about. When we sat down, Klausner had just finished filming a TV pilot with Billy Eichner, the Amy Poehler-produced Difficult People about two struggling New York comedians. It’s not autobiography, of course — Klausner seems to be doing just fine. And besides, when she’s searching for a more direct method of venting, she’s always got her weekly podcast How Was Your

Over its 17 year existence, The Moth has shaped the age-old art of storytelling into something uniquely its own, a style as instantly recognizable as any music style or movie genre. And like a great song or movie, there’s something in a perfectly executed Moth story that leaves the listener feeling as though they could never imitate such a perfect feat. Of course, if the organization’s show runners are to be believed, just about anyone with a story and the willingness to be coached by a few professionals can do precisely that. And that, really, is one of The Moth’s greatest attributes: the ability to balance populism with transcendence. In some sense, the podcast’s host Dan Kennedy embodies exactly that, at least the way he tells the story: jobless, furnitureless, recently dumped and newly sober, stumbling into a storytelling night so many years ago.  Until I heard perform the story of a magazine-assigned trip to Indonesia to search for an elusive nine-foot reticulated python on the Moth’s weekly podcast a co

Every time I speak to Peter Kuper, the conversation invariably turns to New York — or, as is often the case, begins there. It’s my own fault. I’ve got this insatiable need to ask fellow residents, artists in particular, what keeps them in the city’s orbit. Kuper is a particularly interesting case study, having left the city — and country — in 2006, for a life in Mexico. It was, as one might, expect, a multifaceted decision to move his entire family down to Oaxaca, in part an attempt to expose his daughter to another language and culture — and certainly leaving the country at the height of George W. Bush’s second term was seen as a net positive for the oft political cartoonist. A few years later, the Kupers found themselves back in New York, but the experience generated, amongst other things, the lovely Diario De Oaxaca, a sketchbook diary chronicling Kuper’s time in Mexico, immersed himself in the area’s stunning counter-cultural murals. More recently, Kuper returned to the book’s publisher, PM Press, in hope

“It’s not usually this crazy,” Lizz Winstead apologizes, greeting me at the door of her Brooklyn apartment alongside two overstimulated dogs. Inside, a small staff helping prepare Lady Parts Justice for its upcoming launch. The site is the latest in a long line of projects that straddle the sometimes treacherous line between comedy and politics.  Winstead’s impressive CV includes co-founding both The Daily Show and the since-departed left-wing radio station Air America, on which she co-hosted a program with Chuck D. and then relatively unknown politics wonk named Rachel Maddow.  In the wake of a series of standup shows throughout the midwest, the comedian opted to focus her political efforts on a primary political cause — on that has been at the forefront of a number of recent news cycles due primarily to unfortunate turns of events. Built with the help of a recent Indiegogo campaign, Lady Parts Justice aims to sign light on the struggles of reproductive rights through a series of well-produced, star-studded

When we sat down in the East Village tenement apartment Hell has occupied since 1975, the conversation turned turned to writing. His aforementioned memoir pretty well covers the years beginning with his birth up through the end of his music career, and as Hell made pretty clear early on in our conversation, he’s not particularly found of being asked the same question twice. Between last year’s I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp and all that goes on between the iconic red and white covers of Please Kill Me, there’s seemingly little about Richard Hell’s relatively short music making career that hasn’t been written. Save for an outing with members of Sonic Youth under the banner Dim Stars, the man who played such an instrumental role in defining the aesthetics and voice of New York City punk had largely retired from the music game by the mid-80s. It’s a tough proposition when speaking to an artist who’s been in and out of the public eye since the mid-70s, and it’s no doubt at least part of the reason Hell seemed