All Your Days

I get to take you into the studio with painter Annie Leist, where she is creating, crafting, coaxing, and evolving. Her new paintings are stunning, and hopefully, in our words you will hear some of what we see together while we’re talking about them. Her show opens on November 19 at the Union Gallery at Wagner College in New York. It couldn’t be a better moment to catch up with Annie, for her story is moving forward at a fantastic pace and, as can be expected, is packed with all the emotions that birthing new art must bring.  

Sam Shaber is in the middle of a resurrection. For years, if you found Sam’s work, you found it via storytelling or her podcast focusing on in-vitro fertilization and women’s health and just and accurate information and access to both. Or you knew her power-pop-punk bands. These were the points of contact. This week we pick up the story, the rest of the story, how she came out of a landmark moment in her career recording an album named ‘Eighty Numbered Streets’ with a Grammy-nominated artist and what happened after that. We also come back to family, talking about her father, who in his lifetime wrote the screenplay of ‘The Warriors’ — a milestone film in several ways. And we at last come to the story of Sam’s mother, whose passing in 2022 changed what had been our plan to have an interview on this show shortly after we’d recorded it. That’s the only “lost” episode, and in this installment, we restore the ideas and central truths of that original conversation. And I’m glad to have it. 

Clips in this episode:

1. Eldorado - Sam Shaber, Eighty Numbered Streets (2003)
2. Happy Happy Happy - The Happy Problem (2008)
3. IVFU with Sam Shaber
4. Silver Linings - Sam Shaber, The Moth StorySLAM (2018)
5. Solitaire - Eighty Numbered Streets (2003)

Sam Shaber is back with the very songs she shelved after those years in the early 2000s, back with ‘Eighty Numbered Streets.’ She’s about to take the album on the road for the first time in decades, playing it front to back in Los Angeles, New York, and elsewhere — and soon she’ll reunite with Shawn Mullins for a concert in Georgia. It’s a critical moment to meet this artist, or meet them again. Please let me introduce you to an old collaborator and friend.

Clips in this episode:

1. Lullaby - Shawn Mullins, Soul's Core (1998)
2. Rain and Sunshine - Sam Shaber, Eighty Numbered Streets (2003)
3. All of This - Sam Shaber, Eighty Numbered Streets (2003)
4. Bare - Sam Shaber, Eighty Numbered Streets (2003)
5. Eldorado - Sam Shaber, Eighty Numbered Streets (2003)

Messengers come in different ways. In April 2022, my messenger came in the form of an old friend, a very old collaborator, an original co-conspirator. His name: Michael Devin. Our very first guest returns. We talk about our present, Michael's new adventures with a new band — The Dead Daisies — and about some recent delving into darker parts of our past ... and, of course, what is next and what tomorrow may bring. 

Clips in this episode:

1. Lock N' Load - The Dead Daisies, Best Of (2023)
2. Hypnotize Yourself - The Dead Daisies, Best Of (2023)

This is the story of how, for me, in August 1990, the movie ‘Pump Up the Volume’ changed everything. I watched the film. I came out utterly changed. This is the story of what happened next. If you’re listening to this show, that proves what I have to tell you is true.

It’s a very great pleasure to bring you new music from Hamell on Trial. He’s our first check-in this week on the show, chatting about a new album, pop music, Tyler the Creator, and what’s next from beside his courtyard swimming pool in Austin. Also, Chef Camille Rodriguez is back from from a chef’s trip to Italy, and this week we hear a bit about what she learned and discovered this summer, out there, back in the world of dishes that will inspire dishes and create new friends. Finally, we get a sneak listen from the rehearsal studio as Jim Infantino preps a live band to take his remarkable ambient electronic album, 'Utopia Revisited,' to the stage at Passim.

Clips in this episode:

1. Hamell on Trial - Pepper Spray, Bring the Kids (2023)

The suicide machine is on; the suicide machine is turning. I know its sound, the sound of its engine: I grew up in a suicide city. I was ten, eleven, and twelve, in a place named Leominster, in Massachusetts, where the suicide machine ran strong between 1984 and 1986. This is the story of what happened back then, and it is potentially the start of a new chapter regarding how we tell ourselves such stories in the present. A heavy episode. Please make choices that are healthy for yourself if these topics are not suitable and safe for you at this time.

Karaugh Brown, our guest from Episode 14 in June 2022, returns with new songs and we get to hear clips of them live from her performance at the Campfire festival on September 3, 2023. A roomful of us got to go along for a journey that evening, to follow Karaugh into new spaces and glimpse what's coming next in her creative work. But where exactly is Karaugh Brown going to in a world of words and music? In this episode, we’re going to find out.

This week’s feature is a Bob Dylan story, the true story of a song and how it came to be, and what it tells us is something important about holding onto things, about keeping them safe, so that we can open little windows like this into a world that might seem far away, but it’s never that far, really, if we have a recording and some electricity to play it. 

In 1998, the staff at a little folk club in Harvard Square had a problem. The issue was Labor Day. Audiences went to the beach and the family cookout. Few came to the cool, dark room just beneath Palmer Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To solve this problem, this attendance challenge, the staff tried something new. They threw a festival. They called it ‘On the Cutting Edge of the Campfire.' Returning to talk to us about the Campfire festival on the occasion of its 25th anniversary is the one person who’s been the absolute throughline of this bigger-than-a-festival story — Matt Smith, managing director of Passim.

Click this link to see the full Campfire weekend schedule, September 1–4, 2023.