Identified with Nabil Ayers

At sixteen, freshly sober, Moshe Kasher sold ecstasy at raves — greeting customers he recognised from his Tuesday night recovery meeting. On this episode of Identified with Nabil Ayers, the comedian and author of Subculture Vulture unpacks a childhood that explains it: two deaf parents who met at the World Games for the Deaf, a mother who took the boys to Oakland "on vacation" and never went back, and a father whose calendar — found after his death — counted the days to their return in X's that simply stop.

It's a conversation about building a self from borrowed worlds: raised broke in Oakland's hippie disability-rights scene, then shipped to Brooklyn's Satmar community six weeks a year to live as a Hasidic boy — too white for Oakland, too gentile-seeming for Brooklyn, at home in neither; the rabbi who humiliated his own son to teach Moshe that "everybody's stupid" in somebody's language; the bad kids who became his first family, rehab at fifteen, sobriety at sixteen, and the question that followed — now what?; the six subcultures that answered it; shiva as the most perfectly designed system of grief he knows; and the day — one year after his father's death, long-haired and unrecognisable — he stopped trying to stuff himself into his bar mitzvah hat, let his hair down, and walked to temple as himself. "That's when I became a man."

His answer to what family means now, with a daughter of his own: pouring the coins he collected along every one of those paths into her — and letting her choose.

Identified is a series of conversations with artists about the roots of who they are — family, place, and identity — hosted by Nabil Ayers.

00:00 The sober ecstasy dealer
03:42 Two deaf parents & the Thunderbolt
06:15 The calendar full of X's
10:30 Hasidic summers, six weeks a year
14:51 "Everybody's stupid": the rabbi's lesson
16:24 Too white for Oakland, too gentile for Brooklyn
17:15 Sober at 16: now what?
19:51 Subculture Vulture: six universes
22:12 His father's final weeks
24:42 Shiva: a perfect system of grief
28:04 Taking the hat off
31:57 What family means now

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Identified is a podcast series that explores identity, race, culture, and family through personal conversations. Hosted by author and music executive Nabil Ayers, each episode dives into lived experiences that reveal how our backgrounds shape who we are—and how we find belonging.

Nabil is the author of My Life in the Sunshine (Viking, 2022), and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and GQ on themes of race, music, and personal history. He’s also the President of Beggars Group US, co-founder of Sonic Boom Records, and founder of the record label The Control Group / Valley of Search.

Identified brings together notable voices for reflective, vulnerable conversations about where we come from—and where we’re going.

Read more about Nabil:
➡️https://www.nabilayers.com/

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#MosheKasher #Identified #NabilAyers #SubcultureVulture #Family #Identity #Podcast

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August Ponthier came out to the world in an article, messaging their mom the day before it dropped: "I just want you to read it before you react… I hope you can love this about me." 

On this episode of Identified with Nabil Ayers, they trace the whole road there: a nuclear-family childhood in a conservative Texas football town, church school every day, and the "classic recession divorce" delivered in a Baskin-Robbins parking lot at nine years old.

August and Nabil talk about remaking family on your own terms: growing up adultified and alone, learning that your parents are just people; jazz school in Denton — the most music-filled time of their life — then New York in 2017 with less than a month's rent and a contact list built by DMing Sofar Sounds artists from Texas; the sister who always saw them.

 

00:00 "I hope you can love this about me"
01:27 A nuclear family in Texas
02:40 The recession divorce & Baskin-Robbins
06:24 Football town, church school
09:12 "A huge fan of divorce"
10:55 Jazz school, then New York on a month's rent
15:43 Coming out via an article
20:42 The sister who always knew
22:48 Loneliness, Elton John & the record
27:57 "Family is a choice"

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Identified is a podcast series that explores identity, race, culture, and family through personal conversations. Hosted by author and music executive Nabil Ayers, each episode dives into lived experiences that reveal how our backgrounds shape who we are—and how we find belonging.

Nabil is the author of My Life in the Sunshine (Viking, 2022), and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and GQ on themes of race, music, and personal history. He’s also the President of Beggars Group US, co-founder of Sonic Boom Records, and founder of the record label The Control Group / Valley of Search.

Identified brings together notable voices for reflective, vulnerable conversations about where we come from—and where we’re going.

Read more about Nabil:
➡️https://www.nabilayers.com/

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#AugustPonthier #Identified #NabilAyers #ChosenFamily #Queer #NonBinary #Podcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Two days before Thanksgiving, on the night of Thursday's first sold-out headline show at New York's Roseland Ballroom, Geoff Rickly got off the subway to the news that his nana had died, peacefully, in her favourite chair, logged into the band's website. He played the show. 

On this special reissue of Identified with Nabil Ayers, the Thursday frontman traces where he comes from, and why the band became the family he never quite had at home.

00:00 Band as family
01:16 An only child in New Jersey
03:11 Thanksgiving & the Tofurky review
04:06 Interviewing his dying grandfather
06:18 The ancestor who survived on rats
07:51 "Maybe I'm tougher than I think"
09:46 The lost book & the last Rickly
13:18 His nana & the Roseland show
16:15 Latchkey kid: always alone
20:27 What is family? The band.

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Identified is a podcast series that explores identity, race, culture, and family through personal conversations. Hosted by author and music executive Nabil Ayers, each episode dives into lived experiences that reveal how our backgrounds shape who we are—and how we find belonging.

Nabil is the author of My Life in the Sunshine (Viking, 2022), and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and GQ on themes of race, music, and personal history. He’s also the President of Beggars Group US, co-founder of Sonic Boom Records, and founder of the record label The Control Group / Valley of Search.

Identified brings together notable voices for reflective, vulnerable conversations about where we come from—and where we’re going.

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#GeoffRickly #Thursday #Identified #NabilAyers #PostHardcore #Family #Podcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Vagabon has lived in America most of her life, and still feels like she's from somewhere else. On this episode of Identified with Nabil Ayers, she traces why: born in Yaoundé, Cameroon, moved to Harlem at nine when her mother, a lawyer,  brought the whole family along to chase her own ambition, then raised between two worlds in one day: American school by morning, Cameroonian food and language at home by night.

It's a conversation about carrying a place with you: the grandmother who ran the school inside the family compound; the all-girls Catholic school she couldn't wait to escape (and the classmates who now DM her about her music — "you were so mean to me"); the guitar her parents gave her for graduating with honours, and teaching herself on Taylor Swift songs before she knew Joni Mitchell existed; going home after fifteen years to find she could still walk the compound with her eyes closed; the 300-strong group of first-generation Cameroonians in New York who speak like her, joke like her, emote like her; and why the stories of oral-history cultures can vanish in a single uninterested generation.

Her answer to what family means, consistency, is one of the show's best. And then, for the first time, a guest flips the question: Vagabon asks Nabil, and gets the story his whole book is about.

00:00 "I'm from somewhere else"
00:45 Yaoundé to Harlem at nine
04:12 Two worlds in one day
05:48 Her mother's leap
06:51 Catholic school & the ledger of enemies
08:48 A guitar for graduating with honours
11:33 The grandmother's school & stories that skip
13:21 Back home after 15 years
15:00 The 300 Cameroonians of New York
17:30 Family is consistency — and the question, flipped

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This is a special reissue from Season 1 of Identified.

Hrishikesh Hirway has spent a decade getting artists to take their songs apart. On this episode of Identified with Nabil Ayers, the Song Exploder host takes his own story apart instead. Growing up the child of Indian immigrants in a Massachusetts suburb, a food-scientist father, a mother with a master's in literature working at Sears, in a family he describes as "four fourths equals one."

It's a conversation about what happens when the whole fractures. His mother, the family's anchor and storyteller, losing her voice, and the grief he only recognised he'd been accumulating for years; a run of hard autumns since; choosing not to have kids and feeling the numbers dwindle; the guilt of the prodigal son who chose music over medicine; and the first song he'd written in ten years, born from a dream of her.

And through it all, the Thanksgiving his family invented, forty people in a small house, two full meals, and his mother's legendary mango pie, which went on to a New York Times tribute and a Salt & Straw ice cream flavour she never got to see.

His answer to what family is might be the show's loveliest yet: a sectional couch, a Friday night movie, and everyone squished in.

00:00 "Four fourths equals one"
01:04 An immigrant family in the suburbs
02:39 Inventing their own Thanksgiving
07:12 Exeter at 13
09:15 His mother, the anchor
13:49 A shrinking family
16:08 Choosing not to have kids
20:00 Music, guilt & the prodigal son
28:12 The first song in ten years
30:50 Mango pie & Salt & Straw
32:57 What is family? The couch.

#HrishikeshHirway #SongExploder #Identified #NabilAyers #Family #Grief #Podcast

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At the peak of her musical career, Dawn Richard lost her city. On this episode of Identified with Nabil Ayers, the New Orleans-born artist traces where she comes from: born and raised in the Ninth Ward, daughter of a Creole mother from New Iberia and a father who fronted the Allen Toussaint-produced funk band Chocolate Milk, parents who met at 14 and 15 and have been together ever since.

Dawn opens up about being her dad's after-school roadie while he played every wedding and funeral in New Orleans; the blue-haired punk kid raised by strict Catholic schoolteachers; turning down a softball scholarship and marine biology to stay and sing; hustling her way onto an NBA dance team just to sing the national anthem; the $200 gamble that got her from a roach motel in Orlando to Making the Band; and Katrina, the storm that took the family's home, her father's baby grand, and every Thanksgiving since, but not the thing underneath. 

Guest: Dawn Richard
Host: Nabil Ayers
Executive Producer: Kieron Banerji
Creative Studio: Palm Tree Island 

00:00 "I lost my city"
01:09 Ninth Ward born and raised
02:26 The golden child & the punk kid
03:39 Her father, Allen Toussaint & Chocolate Milk
05:11 Her dad's roadie
08:09 A standing ovation & the fork in the road
09:22 The NBA anthem hustle
10:57 Idol, Making the Band & leaving home
19:33 Katrina: losing everything
21:30 "We fight": what family means

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Identified is a podcast series that explores identity, race, culture, and family through personal conversations. Hosted by author and music executive Nabil Ayers, each episode dives into lived experiences that reveal how our backgrounds shape who we are—and how we find belonging.

Nabil is the author of My Life in the Sunshine (Viking, 2022), and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and GQ on themes of race, music, and personal history. He’s also the President of Beggars Group US, co-founder of Sonic Boom Records, and founder of the record label The Control Group / Valley of Search.

Identified brings together notable voices for reflective, vulnerable conversations about where we come from—and where we’re going.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Chad Clark's father was Martin Luther King's lawyer, a man who, as Chad puts it, "changed the 20th century." 

On this episode of Identified with Nabil Ayers, the Beauty Pill and Smart Went Crazy musician talks about what it means to make art in the shadow of that kind of legacy, including the thing he rarely says out loud: he never shared his music with his dad.

Guest: Chad Clark
Host: Nabil Ayers
Executive Produer: Kieron Banerji

00:00 "My dad changed the 20th century"
00:34 MLK's lawyer, the atheist & the reverend
02:57 Why he never shared his music with his dad
03:42 "I was shot at there once"
04:52 The Carter years
06:57 Harlem, Philly & the family line
09:42 A New York childhood
12:03 Arlington, and a hard first
13:36 The questions he'd ask his father now
16:42 "Songwriting equals girls"
17:54 Dischord, Ian MacKaye & the privileged-punk verdict

Identified is a podcast series that explores identity, race, culture, and family through personal conversations. Hosted by author and music executive Nabil Ayers, each episode dives into lived experiences that reveal how our backgrounds shape who we are—and how we find belonging.

Nabil is the author of My Life in the Sunshine (Viking, 2022), and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and GQ on themes of race, music, and personal history. He’s also the President of Beggars Group US, co-founder of Sonic Boom Records, and founder of the record label The Control Group / Valley of Search.

Identified brings together notable voices for reflective, vulnerable conversations about where we come from—and where we’re going.

Read more about Nabil:
➡️ https://www.nabilayers.com/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Brian Aubert of Silversun Pickups doesn't believe in perfect families, just ones where you feel safe and loved. Everything else, he says, is colouring. On this episode of Identified with Nabil Ayers, he traces where that idea comes from: a childhood in Los Angeles shadowed by his mother's brain tumour, she was given six months in 1980, and lived sixteen more years, and summers in Kailua, Hawaii, inside a sprawling "calabash" family where nobody's quite sure who's actually related.

Along the way: the grandfather who drove around Kailua with "Pearl Harbor Survivor 19" on his car, the great-grandmother with hidden whiskey bottles and four husbands, an engineer father "fascinated and terrified" watching his son on stage, the son who draws the band's merch and sleeps through their sets, and why, for a man who performs for a living, family is the one place you shouldn't have to.

Guest: Brian Aubert (Silversun Pickups)
Host: Nabil Ayers
Executive Producer: Kieron Banerji
Creative Agency: Palm Tree Island
 
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Check out our Podcast:
➡️https://linktr.ee/identifiedpodcast

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00:00 The myth of the perfect family
01:33 "Safe enough to be a jerk"
02:30 His mom: given six months, lived sixteen years
04:18 Two sets of grandparents, best friends
05:36 Pearl Harbor Survivor #19
06:54 Gran-Nana Leah & the hidden whiskey
08:24 A math man watches his son on stage
09:41 Nico, the band's youngest artist
14:27 Hawaii: island fever & calabash family
20:18 A place where you don't have to perform

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Identified is a podcast series that explores identity, race, culture, and family through personal conversations. Hosted by author and music executive Nabil Ayers, each episode dives into lived experiences that reveal how our backgrounds shape who we are—and how we find belonging.

Nabil is the author of My Life in the Sunshine (Viking, 2022), and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and GQ on themes of race, music, and personal history. He’s also the President of Beggars Group US, co-founder of Sonic Boom Records, and founder of the record label The Control Group / Valley of Search.

Identified brings together notable voices for reflective, vulnerable conversations about where we come from—and where we’re going.

Read more about Nabil:
➡️https://www.nabilayers.com/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sam and Casey Harris of X Ambassadors never meant to be in a band together. They were two brothers making music separately in the same house, until Casey started sneaking downstairs to jam with Sam's band. 

On this episode of Identified with Nabil Ayers, they trace how brotherhood became the band.

This is a conversation about family as both anchor and choice: growing up in a small upstate New York college town with a film-publicist dad away on sets for months at a time; the acrimonious split their parents hid from them; Sam growing up fast, partly because Casey, the older brother, is visually impaired, and Casey wondering whether they'd be as close if he could see; the raw recent moment of facing their father's mortality; and why being brothers is exactly what keeps the band from breaking up: "we fight, and then we still go on stage together."

Guests: Sam and Casey Harris of X Ambassadors 
Host: Nabil Ayers
Executive Producer: Kieron Banerji
Creative Studio: Palm Tree Island.

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00:00 Anchors: why family is why they play
01:34 Brothers, 20 months apart
02:42 Growing up fast
07:03 A father on film sets, months away
09:00 The split — and staying a phone call away
14:06 Facing a parent's mortality
17:36 Nabil on meeting his own father
19:12 The band they never meant to start
25:15 Fighting, choosing, staying brothers
29:36 What is family to you?

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Identified is a podcast series that explores identity, race, culture, and family through personal conversations. Hosted by author and music executive Nabil Ayers, each episode dives into lived experiences that reveal how our backgrounds shape who we are—and how we find belonging.

Nabil is the author of My Life in the Sunshine (Viking, 2022), and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and GQ on themes of race, music, and personal history. He’s also the President of Beggars Group US, co-founder of Sonic Boom Records, and founder of the record label The Control Group / Valley of Search.

Identified brings together notable voices for reflective, vulnerable conversations about where we come from—and where we’re going.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jon Ronson joins Nabil Ayers on Identified for a conversation about family, fatherhood, growing up in Wales, finding his identity as a writer, and the strange series of events that ultimately led to his new book, The Castle.

Jon traces his story back to Cardiff, where he grew up feeling like a square peg in a round hole. He remembers being dropped off alone at a Specials concert at just 12 years old, pretending to faint so he could get over the barrier, and unexpectedly meeting Terry Hall backstage.

He talks about escaping Cardiff for London, discovering journalism, writing for Smash Hits, The Guardian and Time Out, and the unlikely turn that took him into Manchester’s music scene as the manager of The Man From Delmonte and keyboard player for the legendary Frank Sidebottom.

Jon also opens up about his family: an often-absent father who later apologized, his parents’ award-winning Welsh hotel, an extraordinary family portrait that went spectacularly wrong, his marriage, and his relationship with his son.

And then, there is The Castle...

Jon tells Nabil about waking up to a series of alarming texts from his son after he and his friends had been lured to a mysterious castle several hours outside New York. What happened there eventually sent Jon himself to the castle, which crafted the orgins of his latest book.

Guest: Jon Ronson
Host: Nabil Ayers
Executive Producer: Kieron Banerji
Produced by Palm Tree Island

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00:00 Jon Ronson's Son and the Mysterious Castle
01:25 Growing Up Jewish in Cardiff
03:55 Childhood, Fear and Freedom
04:51 Meeting Terry Hall at 12 Years Old
07:15 Escaping to London
09:18 Leaving Cardiff and Finding Journalism
11:39 Jon's Relationship With His Father
13:15 The Extraordinary Ronson Family Portrait
18:36 Returning to Wales
19:03 Getting His First Break as a Writer
20:18 Frank Sidebottom and the Manchester Music Scene
23:37 Marriage, Fatherhood and Moving to New York
25:21 The True Story Behind The Castle
28:18 What Family Means to Jon Ronson

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.