The Soul Sister Show

Leyla McCalla was playing music on a street corner in New Orleans when the manager of the Carolina Chocolate Drops approached her about joining their band.

"Within a few months I’m in Nashville at Buddy Miller’s studio recording on Leaving Eden, which was their second Grammy-nominated album," she recalls, still in disbelief, on this episode of Soul Sisters recorded at NYC's Chord Club.

Many would be shocked to learn that the red hot sax player in Stephen Colbert's house band is only 23 years old - though Grace Kelly's list of accomplishments is already enough to rival many a veteran.

"Maybe I just have had enough," says Bethany Cosentino, frontwoman of the California band Best Coast and all-around feminist badass to anyone who's been paying attention to women's issues in the music industry this past year.

"One of my favorite things about music is that you can exist as a relatively introverted, quiet, reserved person and then you can hear music or play music and totally step outside of yourself, and all of your inhibitions fall to the wayside," Sleigh Bells singer Alexis Krauss tells us about her experience fronting a band that has defined the modern "noise pop" genre.

We’ve long known that Ana Gasteyer is great at playing musicians – but many would be surprised to know that the former Saturday Night Live star is a pretty damn good one herself.

When Joan Osborne became an overnight sensation with her ubiquitous hit “One of Us” in 1995, no one was less prepared than her. “On the one hand I was really excited to get that kind of recognition,” she says on this episode of Soul Sisters, while admitting that “it was also really difficult just personally” with strangers following her down the street after recognizing her from the song’s music video that played in heavy MTV rotation.

Here she looks back at a life that began in small-town Kentucky, where she harbored the unexpected dream of becoming a Catholic priest, before running off to New York to study documentary filmmaking (“it was like landing on another planet”) and then accepting a dare that would completely turn her life upside down.

In the Magic Hour is the name of bluegrass darling Aoife O'Donovan's new album, and also an apt description of what it felt like chatting with her on this episode of Soul Sisters. Well-known as leading vocalist in the band Crooked Still and her part in the Grammy-winning Goat Rodeo Sessions album, O'Donovan is now thriving in a solo career that finds her harnessing her immense musical talents that first revealed themselves when she knew, at the age of five, that she wanted to be a musician.

The daughter of a Bob Seger saxophonist and a Playboy bunny was bound to have an interesting life, one way or another. But singer-songwriter Victoria Reed carved out a path uniquely her own, a journey that she describes in revealing detail on this episode of Soul Sisters.

With her stunning debut album Chariot just out and an international tour under her belt, Reed looks back on a childhood that included a famous father, a family psychic, a near-miss becoming a Disney star and a philosophy study that drove her into an existential breakdown that gave her all the material she would need as an artist.

Jazz phenom Cécile McLorin Salvant sat down with Soul Sisters a week before flying out to Los Angeles for the Grammy Awards, where she was nominated for - and would win - Best Jazz Vocal Album, for her latest LP For One to Love.

Early into this episode of Soul Sisters, Brandy remarks on the "hundred thousand butterflies" she feels when we remind her of how much success she's had, on the Billboard charts and beyond, in her 20-plus year career as an entertainer. From her lightning hot debut album that she put out when she was only 15, to her Grammy win for the best-selling female duet of all time "The Boy Is Mine," to her legendary work with Whitney Houston in Cinderella and her starring role on Moesha, Brandy has been an inspirational figure for as long as most people under 40 can remember.