Maxwell's Kitchen

The Maxwell’s Kitchen intro started with a guitar, an iPhone, GarageBand, and a lot of free time during the beginning of COVID.

When I first started the show in early 2020, I had only recorded a handful of episodes and still had not figured out the music, graphics, or overall identity.

Then everything shut down.

I started playing guitar more, came up with a fingerpicked part I liked, recorded it into GarageBand, and kept building from there.

In this episode, I walk through how that one idea turned into the Maxwell’s Kitchen theme song.

We get into multitrack recording, double tracking, chord progressions, melody, recording parts in different octaves, GarageBand effects, distortion, stereo panning, and how I decide where different sounds should sit in a mix.

The whole song was built one piece at a time on an iPhone.

There was no studio and no grand production plan. I just kept playing the original part on repeat, improvising over it, recording whatever worked, deleting what did not, and eventually ending up with something that sounded finished.

It is part songwriting story, part beginner recording breakdown, and mostly an example of how much you can make with simple gear if you are willing to keep messing with an idea long enough.

More Maxwell’s Kitchen:

https://maxwellskitchenpodcast.com

Jason Conley entered the juvenile system at 13 and spent much of the next three decades cycling through juvenile detention, county jail, federal prison, state prison, addiction, release, and incarceration again.

In this episode, Jason explains how that cycle started.

He grew up around drugs, alcohol, domestic violence, and instability before being removed from his mother’s home and placed into the juvenile system. From there came group homes, alternative schools, juvenile detention, and eventually juvenile prison.

By the time Jason became an adult, incarceration already felt normal.

He talks about his first adult robbery case, drug use inside jail, meth and heroin addiction, repeated arrests, federal gun and drug charges, and eventually serving a long sentence in the federal prison system.

Jason describes life at USP Leavenworth, prison politics, racial divisions, high-security yards, violence, solitary confinement, and the strange way prison can teach people how to survive inside while making it even harder to function outside.

After release, he continued struggling with drugs and eventually returned to prison again in Oregon.

The turning point came at Oregon State Penitentiary.

Jason found his way into college classes through Chemeketa Community College and discovered that education gave him something prison had rarely offered before: a reason to imagine a different future.

He talks about earning college credits while incarcerated, learning to question the values and identity he had carried for years, and eventually making school part of his recovery after release.

Jason is very open about the fact that change was not immediate. There were relapses, more trouble, treatment, sober living, and a lot of rebuilding.

That is what makes this conversation work.

It is not a simple story about prison making someone better or one moment fixing everything. It is about how childhood trauma, addiction, incarceration, identity, education, and recovery can become tangled together over decades.

More Maxwell’s Kitchen

https://maxwellskitchenpodcast.com

Aaron Draplin has built a career around graphic design without treating the work like it has to be precious.

He is the founder of Draplin Design Co., co-creator of Field Notes, author of Pretty Much Everything, and a designer whose work has crossed Nike, Chris Stapleton, snowboarding, restaurants, record merch, posters, logos, books, typefaces, and plenty of smaller projects he simply thought would be fun to make.

In this episode, Aaron talks about what actually makes design good, why context matters before calling something bad, and how much of professional creative work comes down to handling people.

We get into client feedback, compromise, knowing when to fight for an idea, and knowing when to get paid and move on.

Aaron also talks about money in a way creative people usually avoid.

He explains why getting out of debt gave him more freedom, why he stopped chasing certain big corporate jobs, and why success for him is less about status than being able to help family, work with friends, and say no when a project is not worth the trouble.

Then there is the path that got him there.

Aaron talks about washing dishes in Alaska, factory work, pizza jobs, snowboarding, buying his first computer, learning design software, going back to art school, working at a snowboarding magazine, returning to Portland, working at Cinco, and eventually going independent.

Field Notes grew out of the same mindset.

It started as something Aaron made for himself and friends, then turned into an actual company.

That leads into a bigger conversation about the difference between waiting for someone to hire you and simply making the thing you want to exist.

Along the way we talk about Nike, Adobe, Chris Stapleton, Tenacious D, Bob Dylan, Jack White, Foo Fighters, the FedEx logo, album packaging, concert merch, typography, simple design, public speaking, and why the people doing the least glamorous jobs are often the ones keeping everything moving.

Aaron’s career is successful by almost any normal measure.

The more interesting part is that he still talks like a guy who is amazed he gets to make stuff for a living.

More Maxwell’s Kitchen:

https://maxwellskitchenpodcast.com

Megan Diana grew up inside music, but it took her years to figure out what she actually wanted to do with it.

She started with classical piano, added French horn, choir, theater, and competitive swimming, then entered college thinking music might become the obvious path. Instead, her twenties turned into a long stretch of trying different versions of a creative life.

Megan studied music at Portland State, considered musical theater, moved into apparel design, and eventually went to New York, where she worked at Pure Food and Wine years before the events later featured in Bad Vegan. For several of those years, she barely played music at all.

What finally brought her back was the realization that singing, playing piano, and performing still felt more like her than anything else she had tried.

After returning to Portland, Megan began singing again, started writing her own songs, and gradually stopped thinking of music as something that had to fit the rigid classical world she grew up in.

Then one night she saw a cellist performing on a Portland street corner and thought about how much she wanted to do the same thing.

The problem was obvious: she played piano.

That ridiculous logistical problem eventually became Piano Push Play.

What began with one piano pushed onto 13th and Burnside grew into a Portland public-art project that rescues old upright pianos, transforms them with local artists, and places them around the city for anyone to play.

Megan talks about how Piano Push Play grew, why access to music matters, what happens when strangers gather around a public piano, and why she has resisted turning the project into something bigger just for the sake of growth.

We also get into classical training, perfectionism, songwriting, fashion, New York, TEDxPortland, performing, creativity, and the strange way all the detours in Megan’s life eventually became useful.

Her story is a good reminder that not every creative career makes sense while you are living it.

Sometimes the wrong turns are the part that gives you the thing worth making.

Useful Links

Piano Push Play
https://www.pianopushplay.com/

Megan Diana on Bandcamp
https://megandiana.bandcamp.com/

Megan Diana on Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/artist/3jtb4SRwzhhMRYd6wqNuxu

More Maxwell’s Kitchen
https://maxwellskitchenpodcast.com

The Earwig 22 learned art by looking at walls.

Growing up in Mesa, Arizona, he became fascinated by graffiti before he really understood what it was. One painted piece behind a school stuck with him enough that he kept trying to redraw it, studying the colors, shapes, and lettering until graffiti gradually became his version of art school.

He started painting around 12 or 13 and never really stopped.

In this episode, Earwig talks about the decades of drawing, spray painting, murals, characters, lettering, and repetition that went into developing his style. We get into the difference between graffiti and street art, the unwritten rules inside graffiti culture, why skill still matters, and how Portland’s graffiti scene changed as more people began painting during the pandemic.

But the art is only one part of the story.

Earwig talks openly about an extremely difficult childhood, abuse, drug addiction, serious health problems, sobriety, relapse, therapy, and how making art became one of the few things that consistently gave him somewhere to put everything he was carrying.

He also explains the story behind the name The Earwig 22, which grew out of a frightening childhood experience and later took on another meaning during a major health crisis when he was 22.

We talk about turning art into a living without allowing money to dictate the work, working on murals and commissions, mentoring younger graffiti writers, respecting local businesses, and why he would rather help somebody improve than simply complain about bad graffiti.

Earwig also gets into the physical craft of spray paint: line control, color, repetition, confidence, improvising when something goes wrong, and why a mistake can sometimes become the most interesting part of a piece.

By the end, the conversation comes back to something much simpler than graffiti politics or artistic recognition.

Make more.

Get better.

Enjoy being here while you can.

Useful Links

The Earwig 22 on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/theearwig22/

Portland Street Art Alliance
https://www.pdxstreetart.org/

More Maxwell’s Kitchen
https://maxwellskitchenpodcast.com

What does an 8-year-old think adulthood actually looks like?

According to my son Lenny, you become an adult at 26, an old man at 38, and a grandpa somewhere around 58.

This is an eight-minute conversation about money, work, houses, cell phones, kids, Jordan 1s, and the very questionable economics of childhood.

Lenny explains why being a kid is better than being an adult, why adults have to work so much, what children actually need, and how much a regular person supposedly earns in a year.

His answer: about $5,000.

A normal job, however, pays around $50 an hour.

A non-cheap house costs about $1 million.

There are some holes in the math.

We also establish that seven might be the peak age for being a kid, nine is apparently the correct age to get a cell phone, and children are one of the main reasons adults have no money left.

Most of the episode is me trying to understand Lenny’s version of the world while he eats chips and confidently explains adulthood to someone who has been doing it for a while.

Then, right at the end, the whole thing gets unexpectedly sweet.

I tell him I want him to know something.

Before I can finish, he says he knows I love him.

Then he tells me I’m his best friend.

That part aged better than his financial advice.

Useful Links

Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/btWcHb9z36E

More Maxwell’s Kitchen
https://maxwellskitchenpodcast.com

Why is “Little Black Submarines” by The Black Keys so good?

For me, it starts with the chord progression.

One of the things I love about music is that nearly every song we hear is built from combinations of the same 12 notes. Those notes become chords, those chords become progressions, and somehow musicians keep rearranging the same basic ingredients into songs that feel completely different.

“Little Black Submarines” is a great example.

The foundation is simple. Dan Auerbach builds the song around basic guitar chords, but the arrangement gives them a huge amount of emotional weight. It starts quietly with acoustic guitar and vocals, then gradually opens up until distorted electric guitar and Patrick Carney’s drums completely change the physical feeling of the song.

That contrast is a big part of why it works.

In this episode of Why Is This Song So Good?, I break down the progression, structure, dynamics, and loose performance style behind “Little Black Submarines.” I also play through the song to show how those pieces fit together in practice.

What I like about The Black Keys is that the music rarely feels like it is trying to impress you with technical difficulty. The playing serves the song. The chords are familiar. The structure is understandable. The power comes from timing, feel, dynamics, and the way the arrangement grows.

The first half of the song teaches you the progression quietly.

The second half makes the same ideas feel enormous.

That is the part I wanted to understand.

Useful Links

The Black Keys
https://theblackkeys.com/

“Little Black Submarines” Official Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k8es2BNloE

Watch My Breakdown on YouTube
https://youtu.be/nSahSKdS5vo

More Maxwell’s Kitchen
https://maxwellskitchenpodcast.com

“Little Black Submarines” was written by Dan Auerbach, Patrick Carney, and Brian Burton.

Neil Bradley has spent most of his life taking complicated things apart to understand how they work.

That started with early home computers.

Neil got a TRS-80 when he was nine, learned BASIC and assembly language from books, magazines, and other people who knew more than he did, then eventually landed at Intel in 1989 answering technical-support calls.

From there, things escalated.

He wrote software that nearly got him fired, attracted the attention of Intel engineers, moved into test engineering, and built a career around understanding both software and hardware.

That background became extremely useful when Neil and several partners eventually bought Ground Kontrol, the classic arcade and bar in downtown Portland.

In this episode, Neil tells the story of how Ground Kontrol evolved from a small arcade that also rented videos and hosted shows into a much more focused business built around classic games, pinball, newer indie titles, drinks, and nostalgia.

We talk about buying the business, moving it into its downtown Portland location, deciding which games belong on the floor, and what it takes to keep arcade machines running decades after many of their original parts disappeared.

Neil explains how Ground Kontrol repairs old circuit boards, fabricates replacement pieces, uses 3D printing when necessary, trains younger technicians, and approaches the constant problem of maintaining machines that were never designed to survive this long.

He also talks about surviving the pandemic, arcade economics, free-play nights, management, and why he believes good managers should function more like helpers than bosses.

Then the conversation takes a completely different turn.

Neil is also a classically trained pianist with a long history in electronic music and recording. We get into MIDI, synthesizers, vinyl, digital audio, Pink Floyd, Rush, Depeche Mode, industrial music, recording studios, and why loving music production does not necessarily mean you want to make it your career.

Neil also tells the story of attending recording master classes with Alan Parsons and getting to work with multitrack recordings while watching Parsons explain how he builds a mix.

By the end, the arc makes more sense than it did at the beginning.

Computers, Intel, arcade machines, synthesizers, recording studios, and pinball repair all come from the same place.

Neil likes figuring out how things work.

Useful Links

Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade and Bar
https://groundkontrol.com/

Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/SzEMVI2Hm8k

More Maxwell’s Kitchen
https://maxwellskitchenpodcast.com

“Chartreuse Triplet” is a short original acoustic guitar piece I wrote around 2010.

I recorded this version on April 19, 2011 in my apartment in Gresham, Oregon. It is just me and a six-string acoustic guitar tuned to Open C.

Tuning: C G C G C E

I have always liked open tunings because they force me to approach the guitar differently. Familiar chord shapes stop behaving the way I expect, open strings start interacting in new ways, and I end up finding sounds I probably would not have found in standard tuning.

That is basically where this piece came from.

There is not a complicated story behind it, and this is not meant to be a tutorial. It is simply an old performance from the archive and a snapshot of what I was writing and playing at the time.

Watch the original recording on YouTube
https://youtu.be/dPBtz1CSdBE

More Maxwell’s Kitchen
https://maxwellskitchenpodcast.com

Mark Gamba came to politics through a career spent photographing the world.

Before serving as mayor of Milwaukie, Oregon, Mark worked as a professional photographer on assignments for National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Outside, Men's Journal, and commercial clients. He says seeing environmental changes firsthand, including glaciers retreating and coral reefs struggling, eventually pushed him toward public service and climate policy.

In this episode, we talk about Oregon politics, housing affordability, homelessness, campaign finance, transportation, Portland's form of government, renewable energy, building codes, and why public problems that sound straightforward become incredibly difficult once politics, money, and competing interests get involved.

Mark explains why the low pay attached to many elected positions can limit who is realistically able to serve, how rising housing costs affect working families, and why he believes government structure matters when cities try to solve problems that cross multiple departments.

Climate change runs through much of the conversation. We get into congestion pricing, public transit, electric vehicles, nuclear power, offshore wind, solar energy, and the decidedly less exciting but potentially enormous impact of insulation, better windows, and stronger energy standards for buildings.

Then the conversation takes a completely different turn.

Mark tells the story of building a photography career before digital cameras took over, preparing himself for difficult assignments by learning scuba diving, climbing, kayaking, and other outdoor skills. He talks about shooting for National Geographic and Sports Illustrated, balancing editorial work with commercial photography, and photographing hammerhead sharks in the Cocos Islands with just 36 frames available underwater.

It is a conversation about politics, climate, cities, photography, money, and what happens when someone who spent years documenting the world decides he wants to try changing part of it.

Useful Links

Mark Gamba
https://www.markgamba.com/

Mark Gamba Photography
https://www.markgambaphoto.com/

Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/mYqH3YlbGbA

More Maxwell’s Kitchen
https://maxwellskitchenpodcast.com