Originally recorded: April 6, 2017

Shots have been fired! The battle for Russia's representation to be able to participate in Eurovision rages on between Russia and host country Ukraine. This is getting ugly, folks! Plus, T-Hat notices something while listening to the radio. Kyo and T-Hat debate Italy as the favorite to win this year (Kyo detests "Occidentali's Karma," and you'll hear why in this episode). Finally, we count down the top ten songs according to the "My Eurovision Scoreboard" app. Enjoy this episode!

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This episode is JAM PACKED! First off, T-Hat scored an interview with the gracious Jimmie Wilson (representing San Marino this year). You'll hear that plus the controversy surrounding the Russian entrant, Julia Samoylova. Last but not least, you'll hear the last batch of our first listens!

Music:

-- Valentina Monetta & Jimmy Wilson, "Spirit of the Night" (San Marino)

-- Isaiah, "Don't Come Easy" (Australia)

-- Blanche, "City Lights," (Belgium)

-- Salvador Sobral, "Amar pelos dois" (Portugal)

-- Artsvik, "Fly With Me" (Armenia)

-- Svala, "Paper" (Iceland)

-- Julia Samoylova, "Flame Is Burning" (Russia)

-- Kristian Kostov, "Beautiful Mess" (Bulgaria)

-- JOWST, "Grab The Moment" (Norway)

-- Martina Bárta, "My Turn" (Czech Republic)

-- IMRI, "I Feel Alive" (Israel)

-- Dihaj, "Skeletons" (Azerbaijan)

-- Robin Bengtsson, "I Can't Go On" (Sweden)

-- Demy, "This Is Love" (Greece)

-- Brendan Murray, "Dying To Try" (Ireland)

-- Tijana Bogićević, "In Too Deep" (Serbia)

-- Fusedmarc, "Rain of Revolution" (Lithuania)

Wow, there's been a lot of news and song releases since we last spoke to you. We'll be covering all of that and more in this SUPERSIZED episode.

Songs...

France - Alma - "Requiem"

Italy - Francesco Gabbani - "Occidentali's Karma"

Germany - Levina - "Perfect Life"

Spain - Manel Navarro - "Do It For Your Lover"

Moldova - SunStroke Project - "Hey, Mamma!"

Austria - Nathan Trent - "Running On Air"

Croatia - Jacques Houdek - "My Friend"

Ukraine - O.Torvald - "Time"

Latvia - Triana Park - "Line"

The Netherlands - O'G3NE - "Lights and Shadows"

Malta - Claudia Faniello - "Breathlessly"

Hungary - Joci Pâpai - "Origo"

Poland - Kasia Moś - "Flashlight"

Slovenia - Omar Naber - "On My Way"

Denmark - Anja Nissen - "Where I Am"

Cyprus - Hovig - "Gravity"

Romania - Ilinca ft. Alex Florea - "Yodel It!"

Estonia - Koit Toome & Laura - "Verona"

This is a special episode here on the ESC USA Podcast. Here, we give our live takes on this year's Semi-Final Allocation Draw.

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This episode was recorded over the Superbowl weekend as we catch you up on all of the things that we've missed during our break.

-- We introduce you to the announced entries from: Albania, Belarus, Finland, Georgia, Switzerland, and United Kingdom (plus two entries that have been announced but have not released the official song online yet: Montenegro and Cyprus).

-- We take a look at the history of voting points throughout the entire duration of the ESC (taking us all the way back to the very first competition).

On this episode, Kyo and T-Hat count down their favorite "guilty pleasures." We put that in quotes because there's a case for any Eurovision entry to be a guilty pleasure. Even ABBA's "Waterloo" could be considered (SPOILER ALERT: Not on this countdown). Plus we take a look at the infamous four way tie in 1969, and a little bit of how the scoring changed after to try and prevent that again. Finally, we open the lid of the garbage can we'd like to call, "Eurovision's Worst Losers."

As the title suggests, our journey to the ESC 2017 in Kiev, Ukraine starts with this episode. Not only do we introduce ourselves to you, we go over our Top 5 ESC entries of all time. Plus Kyo and T-Hat take you through the history of the ESC and we critique the BBC documentary, "How To Win Eurovision." How dare they put Blue in a corner? :)

(We did have some audio issues that will be taken care of by our next episode in two weeks)

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