The Show On The Road with Z. Lupetin

Something powerful is in the air. While we may have said that after similar unrest in the past -- after Rodney King in LA, Trayvon Martin in Miami, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and countless others -- something about what is happening now feels deeper, heavier. Maybe it’s actually sinking in.

From host, Z. Lupetin:

I normally try to put out a new episode of The Show on the Road podcast every other Wednesday. This week, that simply wasn’t possible. It was time to stop giving my endless opinions, to stop waxing poetic about harmony, to shut up about finding the meaning in every lyric and just be quiet, listen and learn.

I’ve been lucky to talk with truly amazing Black artists, songwriters and performers in the two years I’ve been creating The Show on the Road. I ask you to go back into our archives and listen to these voices, including Sunny War, Bobby Rush, Birds of Chicago, Dom Flemons, Liz Vice, and The War and Treaty.

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This week on The Show On The Road, we feature a conversation with a Canadian-born paraparetic prince of pop-folk singers, who has jumped through more gauntlets of the modern music industry than almost anyone in his three plus decades of making records, Steve Poltz.

Poltz first hit the scene with the San Diego-based underground punk-folk favorites The Rugburns, then as an accidental hitmaker and MTV video heartthrob with collaborator and friend Jewel, and then as a wild-haired, two hundred shows a year internationally revered solo act. He's put out a baker's dozen of whacked-out, deceptively sensitive, and fearlessly personal albums that have won him devoted audiences from his ancestral home in Nova Scotia to the dance party dives of California to massive festivals across Australia and beyond.

As we are still quite separated during the pandemic, host Z. Lupetin called up Poltz in Nashville to discuss the long and twisty road Poltz has travelled -- jumping from his inspired, most-recent album Shine On back to his childhood in swinging Palm Springs (where he met Elvis and Sinatra), to making $100,000 music videos for his ill-fated major label debut in '98, to nearly dying on stage after substance abuse problems and never-say-no-to-a-gig exhaustion took its toll.

 

We now find him in a more peaceful, purposeful existence in where he is newly married and enjoying making music at home (government orders!) for the first time in decades.

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This week on The Show On The road, we feature a conversation with Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance, two Texans and expert harmonizers who for the last decade have toured the world as Jamestown Revival.

Right before all tours got sent home, host Z. Lupetin was able to hop on the Jamestown Revival tour bus (sorry for the engine hum) to discuss their intimate new record, San Isabel, and their journey from meeting as curious singing teenagers in Magnolia, TX to their move out west and back home again. While their previous record, The Education of a Wandering Man, saw them harnessing the muscular roots-rock that can be heard at their powerful live shows, San Isabel strips everything back to their intimate two-voices-around-one-mic, “southern and Garfunkel” sound that brought them together in the first place -- and has rightfully won them hordes of fans coast to coast.

They say sibling harmony can’t be compared and we’ve had several sets of twin bands on the podcast, but what about soul-brother harmony? If one thing is clear just sitting on the bus and listening to them weave their stories and songs together, it’s that Clay and Chance were born to sing together.

San Isabel was laid down at Ward Lodge Studios overlooking the San Isabel National Forest in Buena Vista, Colorado and often includes the natural sounds of the nature all around them. Give it a listen -- it's peaceful and powerful and raw and maybe just what we all need right now.

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This week on the show we bring you a two part conversation between Z and folk-jazz visionary Kat Edmonson. The first was captured backstage before a show at Largo in LA right before the Covid-19 shut-down, and in the second part Z caught up with Kat during her anxious but creative quarantine in New York City. 

Initially turning heads for her dreamy and futuristic interpretations of great songbook classics like Gershwin’s “Summertime” which have been listened to over ten million times and counting - Kat broke through with her own playful original works a decade ago, self-producing one of Z’s all-time favorite records “Take To The Sky”. She quickly found powerful fans in folks like Lyle Lovett who she toured with wildly and major label releases followed. Kat soon migrated from her home state of Texas to Brooklyn where her elfin chanteuse look and sparkling vintage sound (think Blossom Dearie with some Texan muscle) caught the attention of Woody Allen who cast her in “Cafe Society” - a dream come true for this black-and-white film lover.

Z and Kat sat down to discuss her newest record “Dreamers Do” which may just be the shot of pure cinematic nostalgia we all need right now. Does she cover Mary Poppins, Disney’s Alice In Wonderland and Pinocchio and somehow make them deeply cool, sonically subversive and somehow brand new again? She sure does.  

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For this special episode, your host Z. Lupetin adhered to the strict stay-at-home pandemic orders, recording an intimate phone conversation with Theo Katzman, the Cheshire Cat of soulful pop-rock and one of the most visible members of the mysterious funk supergroup, Vulfpeck.

In January, Katzman celebrated the release of his cheeky, super catchy, unabashedly romantic, and pop-driven new solo album Modern Johnny Sings: Songs in the Age of Vibe and was on a run of packed release shows when everything shut down (you know, because COVID-19). Katzman’s expertly-crafted songs and lilting falsetto vocals have that rare spark that can brighten anybody’s dull quarantine in no time.

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This week on the show, host Z. Lupetin meets up with Joey Dosik, a silky-voiced songwriter and freaky-talented multi-instrumentalist who writes lush, romantic jams that transport listeners to R&B-tinted, old school FM radio gold.

Some listeners may have learned of Dosik's talents with DIY, future-funk ensemble Vulfpeck, led by trickster curator/composer Jack Stratton. Vulfpeck went from making goofy viral videos and recording an album of total silence -- that scared the shit out of streaming giants like Spotify after it rocketed the band to international notoriety and financial success -- to crowdfunding a series of hit funk records and vinyl releases that propelled them to sold out international tours, headlining nights at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, and an unprecedented sold out show at Madison Square Garden (all with no record label in sight).

As we honor and celebrate two lost musical greats this week, Bill Withers and John Prine, it’s comforting to remember that we have constant new waves of amazing artists like Joey Dosik coming up who can honor and further their message. In many ways, Dosik's songs combine the honest earnestness of Prine’s best early work, telling frank stories of family and relationships, with Withers’ deep, church-flavored, down-home groove.

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Right before the whole world as we know it shut down, Z got to talk to Oliver and Chris Wood of the Americana pioneers The Wood Brothers about their renewed musical bond, how they grew up in Colorado jamming with their biology professor dad, and how they just barely missed being bashed by the great East Nashville tornado a month and a half back. When it rains it does pour, it seems.

The conversation happened before one of their last shows on their Covid-19 shortened west coast run. The Wood Brothers’ brand new record “Kingdom in My Mind” is a sweetly funky, ballsy, bluesy and booty-shakingly romantic improvisational masterwork - do yourself a favor and turn it up loud and proud - it will help you groove through the lock-down. If there is anything that’s clear in this deeply strange and unsettling time, it’s that we need music now more than ever.

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To say today’s episode is personal would be an understatement. Your host Z. Lupetin founded the group in Venice Beach, CA over ten years ago with a lucky Craigslist ad that started it all. What started as a clandestine jam group with as many as ten instruments going full blast at an after hours advertising office, the band was soon starting in speakeasies and small venues around LA, with the band eventually recording their beloved live album “With A Lampshade On” at the famed Troubadour in LA and the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.

In 2013 Liz Beebe joined the group and they began touring full time, becoming a powerhouse eight piece band that wowed festivals and stages in over dozen countries, playing over a hundred and fifty shows a year and releasing seven full length records along the way - including their soul-dipped self-titled work from 2017 produced by Grammy-winner Ted Hutt, the co-founder of Flogging Molly.

This week celebrates the release of their most daring work to date - “Is It You, Is It Me” produced by Sam Kassirer (Lake Street Dive, Josh Ritter) and engineered by Brian Joseph (Bon Iver, Sufjan Stephens). The album doesn’t shy away from confronting the powerful political fallouts happening in families and communities around the country - and their emotional rock n roller “Get Rid Of You” pays homage to the courageous kids in Parkland, FL who stood up and demanded gun control measures be taken now - prompting recent glowing write-ups in Rolling Stone and Billboard.

Z was able to gather the whole band around the mic while on the road in New Hampshire - make sure you stick around to the end of the episode as the band shares their intimate acoustic single “Let It Go”.

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This week we feature a border-breaking bluegrass band who came all the way from Buenos Aires to celebrate their folk album of the year Grammy nomination - and before they hit the red carpet, they stopped by Z’s LA living room studio to talk about their unlikely founding and how they’ve created their intoxicating brew of traditional North American and often overlooked South American stringband sounds - Che Apalache.

Lead by a trilingual world traveller, the fleet-bowed fiddler, spitfire vocalist and sonic scholar Joe Troop - the band formed almost accidentally when Joe began teaching curious local Buenos Aires pickers his own North Carolina folk traditions and amongst his talented students, he found three kindred spirits in Argentinians Franco Martino on guitar and Martin Bobrik on mandolin, and Pau Barjau on banjo originally from Mexico. The result has been one of the most unexpected and have-to-hear-this-to-believe it stories in modern roots music - culminating in their brilliant second record Rearrange My Heart which was produced by fan of the band (and guy pretty good on the banjo) Bela Fleck. Lucky for us, they play several songs during the episode!

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This week on the show - Z meets up with a cerebral Texas born roots rocker who has recently struck out on his own, poking one foot in the torn tinsel of a Houston honky tonk and another in a haunted California “Black Mirror” episode set in a tilted sci fi future - Jason Hawk Harris.

While most songwriters hide behind walls and trapdoors of metaphor, Harris isn’t afraid to openly process his recent family traumas and loss on his stunning and aptly titled first solo album “Love and The Dark” released by Bloodshot Records in 2019. Despite his youth, Jason has much to tell us and if this equally sensitive and swaggering sound is where the future of modern country music is headed? We’re in.

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