Soundcheck

Songwriter, guitarist, bestselling novelist, former nurse, and the mastermind behind The Mountain Goats, John Darnielle delivered an April surprise: a boombox album of songs. As he writes on The Mountain Goats Bandcamp page, "pandemics call for wild measures" - and this was one thing he could do to offset the cost of a cancelled spring tour. The album was inspired by the Pierre Chuvin book A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, and recorded with his trusty boombox to cassette, with stories - "told in beautiful, unnerving, specific detail because he is a very good writer" (John Hodgman, 2012.) John Darnielle shares the story of making said boombox record while in quarantine, and a brand new song from his porch in North Carolina. 

Watch: "Last Gasp at Calama"

Watch: "The Great Gold Sheep" 

Songs for Pierre Chuvin by The Mountain Goats

You might have heard the weepy twang of Nashville-based Luke Schneider playing pedal Steel with Margo Price, or more recently with Orville Peck. But Schneider has just released a new record of experimental and dreamy drone music for the end of the world, called Altar of Harmony. No matter how unrecognizable it might sound, this is ambient atmospheric music made with only the pedal steel guitar (a 1967 Emmons Push/Pull pedal steel guitar, to be precise), and processing (shout-out to Electro-Harmonix pedals.) Luke Schneider joins us from the Third Man Records Studios to play some of these hypnotic and meditative creations. 

Set list: "anteludium," "mundi tuum est," "Billie’s Song"

English singer-songwriter and podcaster Jessie Ware's profile has grown very quickly into stardom in just a few years. With her new album, What's Your Pleasure?, due this June 2020, we revisit a studio visit from 2014, on the release of her second album. Written in three different cities - -New York, Los Angeles, and her home in London- Jessie Ware's Tough Love showcased Ware's skill as a songwriter and singer, while maintaining her South London charm amid the spotlight. 

In a conversation with host John Schaefer, Ware gives some behind-the-scenes stories about making Tough Love -- from collaborating with Miguel, to writing a song with Ed Sheeran in 30 minutes, to hanging out with Benny Blanco's bulldog and eating, a lot. 

John Cale made rock history as a founding member of The Velvet Underground in the 1960s. He's also a composer, singer, songwriter, and record producer. He's long been a part of the musical avant-garde, working with the first of the so-called minimalist composers, and later with people like Brian Eno. He sings and can play guitar, bass, keyboards and viola. 

Cale dropped by with his band in 2012 to perform songs from his album Shifty Adventures In Nookie Wood and to talk about his days with The Velvet Underground and working with Andy Warhol. 

Violinist, singer, keyboardist and drummer Emily Wells is a producer and composer capable of producing a full band sound; her series of “symphonies” turned her voice and live-looped violin, drums, percussion, and effects into a one-woman orchestra. In 2019, she released her swirling and dramatic chamber-pop collection, This World Is Too _____ For You, complete with a string quintet and French horn. Now, Emily Wells has revisited some of those grand cinematic songs on her latest record, In the Dark Moving, which she recorded last summer as a project to hear the essence of those songs stripped down to voice and guitar.

With Nina Simone on the wall of her home studio, Emily Wells joins us to share these songs in their most elemental form, along with a new song written this March - “I’m Numbers.” 

The songs of singer Janka Nabay (aka "the Bubu King") mix a regional folk music from his native Sierra Leone called bubu with the high-octane sounds of Brooklyn's vibrant Afropop scene. Bubu music has found new fans in the indie rock community thanks to its driving rhythms and psychedelic guitar riffs. Janka Nabay and the Bubu Gang's record En Yay Sah is both political and highly danceable, while revamping some of the classic bubu sounds. In this in-studio visit from 2012, Janka Nabay and the Bubu Gang play songs from the 2012 record in-studio, and explain some of the sociopolitical messages within. (Note: Nabay passed on in 2018.) 

Ol' Blue Eyes. The Chairman of the Board. Frank Sinatra has been called a lot of things—not all of them flattering—but there's no denying his stature as a true American icon. 

Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney turns his lens on the singer for the film, which came out in 2015, in time for the singer's 100th birthday. Sinatra: All Or Nothing At All chronicles the unlikely rise of the kid from Hoboken, through his peerless celebrity years, and centers around Sinatra's 1971 "Retirement Concert" in Los Angeles. (Sinatra would make his "return" to performing a scant two years later.) Gibney tells Soundcheck host John Schaefer that the film uses loads of rare interview audio to make Frank "the undependable but very charming narrator of his own story."

And what a story. The four hour film captures the man's many contradictions, from the mob-fraternizing playboy who was friendly with the Kennedys, to his progressive ideas about race relations.

"I was interested in this character who came from a rough and tumble place, and actually stood for a lot of pretty important things," says Gibney.

Through it all, it's the songs—and their sometimes sweeping, sometimes understated performances—that best tell the story of Frank Sinatra.

"In the great moments of his career—the Capitol years are really my favorite—he is embodying those songs, he is a character who’s grown up with America, with all its contradictions. So to me he’s a tremendously important historical figure."

Sinatra: All or Nothing At All (2015), is available on Amazon Prime.

The NY-based indie-pop duo Overcoats latest, 'The Fight,' was birthed in March 2020 - the "before times." They preview a benefit online festival, called The Fight For NYC,” which they've curated and are playing in, and share new songs from the record. 

Courtney Barnett's songs are wild, shaggy and wordy, mixing witty, mundane, and sometimes heartbreaking observations with devastating self-assessment. And with a sound rooted in the slack jangle of the late 1980s and the early 1990s, Barnett delivers plainspoken lyrics and roll off the tongue as if she's thinking them up on the spot. You can hear that in her break-out song "Avant Gardener" or in "Pedestrian At Best," from  2015's superb album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, in which she spits off a list of personal insecurities and internal monologues to an former love. 

Watch the Australia native spotlight songs from Sometimes I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit in a live session from WNYC's Greene Space. - Michael Katzif

Vocal artist, comedian, actor, beatboxer, musician, and bandleader Reggie Watts is versatile and unpredictable. But to watch him do his thing live, is even more extraordinary. He's masterful at looping layer upon layer of beats and rhythms, melodies and countermelodies, entirely with his voice, to create a dense and soulful, hip-hop-infused sound. And his hilarious lyrics seem to be pulled out of thin air, improvised with impossibly quick wit. Watch Reggie Watts demonstrate his brilliant skills in an improvised performance in studio in this 2014 performance from the archives.