Ahead of new episodes of Cover Story (dropping very soon!) we bring you one of our favourites from season one.

Singer and rapper Ziggy Ramo and musician and broadcaster Alice Keath look at Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ – a political anthem just vague enough to apply to the US civil rights movement, the Velvet Revolution, Perestroika, and in some cases seemingly nothing at all.

When was the last time you gathered around a piano to belt out showtunes with friends or strangers? Marie's Crisis Cafe is a beloved New York City sing-along piano bar that's been bringing musical theatre lovers together for decades. The bar is popping up in Melbourne and Sydney and we'll meet resident pianists Kenney Green-Tilford and Adam Michael Tilford who'll perform a couple of showtunes live.

Fritz Hart (1874 - 1949) was an English composer, conductor and teacher (and critic, poet, novelist and painter), a friend of Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was active in Melbourne (and Hawaii) in the first part of the 20th century. He composed a great deal of music, including no fewer than nineteen operas, but is these days better known for his teaching work, his students including Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Margaret Sutherland, Linda Phillips and Esther Rofe. Hart's biographers, Peter Tregear and Anne-Marie Forbes, join Andy to discuss this flamboyant, not to say rakish, figure in Australian music.

Wardaman and Yanyuwa woman Dr Shellie Morris AO grew up speaking English in her adopted family, but has since gone on to learn over 20 First Nations languages. Her new album Singing For Our Little Ones is in Warumungu, and it's a collaboration with Elders in Tennant Creek as well as the local recording studio and a whole bunch of musicians. Shellie's cultural advocacy and leadership recently earned her a Red Ochre Award for Lifetime Achievement, and she's back on The Music Show to talk about why music is the perfect tool to preserve languages.

Many bands include 2 or 3 guitars, but Tim Brady's latest project has one hundred of them. The Canadian composer and guitarist recently premiered 100 Guitars at Brisbane Festival, where local ensemble Topology was bolstered by 100 guitarists—a mix of professionals, casual players and complete newbies. Tim talks to Andrew Ford about the pulling off such an ambitious performance, the changing role of electric guitar in new classical music, and doing something a lot of composers are daunted by: writing for a string quartet.

Post-post-modern chanteuse Meow Meow returns to The Music Show to talk about The Red Shoes, the third show in her series of Hans Christian Anderson adaptations. She goes into both the music and the research behind the show, including the revelation of a Danish ballet dancer whose "feet ran away with her", that may have inspired the tale. 

Alto saxophonist and composer Tessie Overmyer has released her debut album as bandleader, Tidelands. She explains to Andrew Ford why she composes music on guitar, the headspace you need to be in to improvise, and how The Goodies influenced this record. 

The Red Shoes is at Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney 4 Oct - 9 Nov, and at Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne 19 Nov - 6 Dec

Tessie Overmyer's Tidelands is out now via ABC Jazz. 

Willie Nelson first encountered the song Red Headed Stranger in the 1950s, working as a DJ at radio station KCNC in Fort Worth TX. It was a jaunty number, sung by Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith and His Cracker-Jacks, about a less-than-jaunty subject. The stranger of the title rides into town on “a raging black stallion” leading a second horse, a bay, that had belonged to his dead wife. He meets a woman who tries to steal the bay and shoots her. Willie not only played the song on his radio show but sang it himself. Eventually, he made an album to provide the backstory the song so desperately needed. Red Headed Stranger came out in 1975 and marked a new beginning for Nelson. 

On the album’s fiftieth birthday, country singer songwriters Tami Neilson and Henry Wagons join Andy to listen to, and talk about, why it's one of the greatest country albums ever made.

Neko Case's dazzling voice and kaleidoscopic band sound have developed slowly and assuredly over her 30 year recording career in what she calls "country noir", and her latest album Neon Grey Midnight Green is the latest instalment. She joins Andy to talk about the way her voice has changed over the years, her adoration of unconventional guitars, and the surprising literary inspirations behind her songwriting.

The legendary upright bass player Danny Thompson has died at the age of 86. His music spanned folk, rock, jazz and blues and over his career he played with the likes of John Martyn, Nick Drake, Donovan, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel and Richard Thompson (no relation). He was also a founding member of the band Pentangle, which is one of the subjects up for discussion in an archive interview from The Music Show in 2007. 

Laura Bowler is often described as a "composer, performer, and prevocatrice". That may be the perfect combination for "deconstructing" Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which she's done and is getting its Australian premiere for Ensemble Offspring's 30th birthday concert. She joins Andy to talk about her relationship to Schoenberg's original work, the "extractive" process of wrapping your identity up in your art, and what live electronics bring to her music.

The Big Idea is a monodrama - a sort of micro-opera for one voice - and it's the work of composer Matthew Shlomowitz and philosopher/librettist Vid Simoniti, and it's being performed by Rubiks Collective with singer Lotte Betts-Dean for Rubiks' 10th birthday. It's a story about a character on the brink: "a new idea blossoms, a life unravels, and we witness the tantalising chaos in between". The chaos is rendered in a shapeshifting ensemble that switches from samba, to Scandi-jazz, to Romanticism, to old school Broadway. Matthew and Vid join Andy to talk about how philosophy and composition meet in their collaboration. 

And Neko Case makes the case for her top book of the 21st Century. Vote for yours in Radio National's Top 100 Books now.

Go Back and Fetch It: Recovering Early Black music in the Americas for Fiddle and Banjo is a new book, a collaboration between Carolina Chocolate Drops founder Rhiannon Giddens and music writer Kristina Gaddy. They both join Andy to talk about what they've uncovered. 

Ensemble Kaboul is an Afghan ensemble based in Europe, and they're headed to Australia to collaborate with Van Diemen's Band on Where Everything Is Music: the Persian music of Afghanistan meeting the baroque. Rubab player Khaled Arman sketches out the region and its musical history and tabla player Siar Hashimi talks about this music as the food of the soul, coming from a nation under a regime that has banned all music. 

Adalita and Marty Brown join Andy to talk about their new supergroup with Mick Harvey and Mick Taylor - they're called Bleak Squad and with a history of playing with Magic Dirt, the Bad Seeds, Dirty Three as well as with artists like PJ Harvey and Clare Bowditch, it's a quartet with some serious power. A moody, charismatic guitar band - the likes of which you don't hear that much these days - Adalita and Marty join Andy to report that the kids are, in fact, listening to guitars, and explain how four big personalities have unified so well. American percussionist Steven Schick returns to The Music Show, and to Australia: he's here to play a series of concerts and masterclasses at the Australian National Academy of Music. He's been playing professionally for about fifty years and he talks to Andy about the repertoire that he's helped expand in that time, and his second career as a conductor.Plus Laura Bowler gives us her pick for the Top 100 Books of the 21st Century. Vote for yours at the Radio National website!

Bleak Squad are playing in Sydney, Queenstown and Melbourne in October. Find the details on their website. Their debut album Strange Love is out now. 

Music in this program:Title: RebondsArtist: Steven SchickComposer: Iannis XenakisAlbum: Percussion WorksLabel: ModeTitle: Lost My HeadArtist: Bleak SquadComposer: AdalitaAlbum: Strange LoveLabel: Poison City RecordsTitle: Blue SignsArtist: Bleak SquadComposer: Adalita (lyrics), Marty Brown (music)Album: Strange LoveLabel: Poison City Records

Title: Safe as HousesArtist: Bleak SquadComposer: AdalitaAlbum: Strange LoveLabel: Poison City Records

Title: Bone AlphabetArtist: Steven SchickComposer: Brian FerneyhoughAlbum: Born To Be WildLabel: Newport Classic

Title: AequilibriaArtist: Steven Schick, International Contemporary EnsembleComposer: Anna ThorvaldsdottirAlbum: AequaLabel: Sono LuminusThe Music Show is made on Gadigal and Gundungurra Country

Technical production by Ann-Marie Debettencor

The Mary Wallopers are in Australia, far from their hometown of Dundalk in Ireland's County Louth. They're a raucous, political band with a folk/punk inheritance from bands like The Dubliners and the Pogues. Charles Hendy, who formed the band alongside his brother Andrew, is Andy's guest.

We welcome Yorta Yorta/Yuin composer and soprano Deborah Cheetham Fraillon back to the music show to discuss the release of Eumeralla, A War Requiem for Peace on ABC Classic. This powerful requiem, sung in Gunditjmara dialects by Indigenous and non-Indigenous choirs and soloists, commemorates the brutal Eumeralla War of the late 19th century fought between Gunditjmara people and colonists in South Western Victoria. Deborah is also singing in Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time with Sydney Philharmonia Choirs at The Sydney Opera House on Saturday September 13.