The Third Story with Leo Sidran

Just when you think you know all there is to know about Donald Fagen, he surprises you. There are legendary stories, traded like playing cards in chat rooms, fanzines, and merch lines. Along with his musical partner, the late Walter Becker (who passed away in 2017), Fagen has influenced countless musicians, producers and songwriters by setting the gold standard in record production and arrangement with his band Steely Dan. This is known. There are the solo records, including The Nightfly, which was nominated for seven Grammys and which continues to be one of the best sounding records ever made nearly 30 years on. This is known.

Much is known about Donald Fagen and his work, it's true. But much is still left to be revealed. Stage fright, a general aversion to appearing on television (he and Becker lacked the "large heads" and "swaths of cheek" that they felt necessary to really make it on the small screen), and nearly 20 years with no touring created a mystique that endures to this day, despite the fact that they've toured regularly since the mid 90s.

So Donald can surprise you. He does it not by telling you what happened, but rather what he thinks about it. Or more to the point, how he thinks about it. He tells you that Steely Dan has "more in common with punk than with the confessional California singer songwriters" that they were often compared to. He tells you why Stravinsky was a precursor to funk music. He tells you what's postmodern about his music, why making his first solo record was so personally disruptive to him, how he falls asleep, when he decided to finally grow up, and who he never wants to see again.

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As a younger man Joey Dosik thought he might make a contribution on the saxophone. He loved playing basketball and playing piano too, and he had a sweet, soulful singing voice. But if you asked him he probably would have told you that he was going to be a jazz sax player. That's what took him out of LA and to the University of Michigan.

Sometimes the stars align and the right people show up in the right place at just the right time. Later on we realize that something special was going on, but in the initial moment it's just what's happening. In Joey's case, he ended up at Michigan with a cohort of other talented, multifaceted musicians (former Third Story guest Theo Katzman, for example). Somewhere along the line, he realized that he needed to sing!

Today Joey is best known for the soulful, romantic songs that he sings with the band Vulfpeck as well as on his solo recordings (he released both Game Winner and Inside Voice in 2018). His Game Winner project ended up merging his two great loves, music and basketball, into a conceptual collection of songs that are surprisingly compelling even for non sports lovers. Inside Voice also operates on two levels, as a classic sounding record that he describes as "deep, sexual, but also kind of silly". In fact it's the sense of humor in his writing that keeps his work fresh and modern. As Joey tells it, he's interested in both honoring and transcending his references.

Here Joey talks about maintaining the balance between classic and modern, working with Vulfpeck ("we look up to one another"), the value of practical application, what's so great about Italian vowels, why basketball is good practice for life, why he never throws away a creative idea, and how he keeps his saxophone chops up.

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Singer, songwriter and pianist Ben Thornewill started his band, Jukebox The Ghost, with two friends in 2003 when he was in college at George Washington University. "From day one we were just kind of making it up," he says. He adds "It's the same three members from the very beginning and everything is a series of great compromises."

Not that there's anything wrong with that. He says, "It tends out to work out to something that defines who we are." The power pop trio features piano, guitar, and drums. Their songs are clever, catchy, poppy, joyful, sometimes dramatic, and often tinged with elements of classical and even musical theater.

As he tells it, "We are the exception to the rule because we have all been making a living as a band for over a decade...there's only three of so we don't have to pay for a bass player. A bass player would have bankrupted us a long time ago."

I met Ben earlier this year during the first of a series of solo shows he was doing, alone at the piano. He made a point from the stage of talking about how part of what he was doing was improvising but rather than doing it in a jazz or blues idiom, he was doing it using more classical cadences. The open and outward embrace of classical music into contemporary pop was intriguing to me.

We talked about what it means to be successful, maintaining a productive and creative life, the existential crisis of coming off the road, putting in the work, introducing classical elements into pop music, and the importance of Bourbon to Kentuckians.

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When the 73 year old performer Andre De Shields accepted his Tony award last night for his role as Hermes in the hit Broadway show Hadestown, he began with these words: "Baltimore, Maryland are you in the house? I hope you're watching at home because I am making good on my promise that I would come to New York and become someone you'd be proud to call your native son."

In this conversation, recorded in 2014, he tells the story in detail about growing up in Baltimore (he calls himself "lucky number nine"), a career spanning five decades "on the precipice of the abyss" (i.e. as a performer) and the secret to his longevity: "I exercise vigorously, I eat judiciously, and I pray constantly."

The interview originally appeared as Episode 12. Visit http://www.third-story.com/episode-index to hear that and all the other episodes with members of the creative class.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

Eli Reed took a trip. It started in a Boston suburb with a cheap suit and a paperboy cap. He took his suit, cap and guitar to Clarksdale, Mississippi. He stayed there just long enough to become a local musician. They called him "Paperboy" because of the cap. Then he headed up to Chicago and pretended to study sociology at the University of Chicago. While he was pretending to study, what he was really doing was looking for old records to play on his radio show, and becoming the minister of music at a church on the south side. After a while, he went back to Boston. Then he turned 21.

What was it like to be a Jewish suburban kid living in the deep south, playing in black church in Chicago, singing soul music? Eli tells me "The juke joints and the black church are the most accepting and welcoming places I've ever been. They loved having me there because I wanted to be there and I loved them."

In his early 20s. Eli "Paperboy" Reed started making records that sounded like they could be from another era. He wrote soul music, sang with a sweet and powerful voice, and performed with a frenzied energy. He found an audience and had success, especially in Europe, and started to ride the "album cycle" life of writing, recording, touring, rinsing and repeating. His stylized, soulful songs were licensed (a lot) for use in TV and film, and he was on the way up.

Eli "Paperboy" Reed says that "authenticity is a trap." But he also says, "If you're not thinking critically about your work you're not doing it right. And be adamant about what you like and don't like." And he clearly walks the talk. Eli is incredibly thoughtful and has clearly considered the choices and the work that he's made. "Stand behind your choices," he says. "Be present with it. Be interested."

Before he was 30, he had become a record industry veteran, signed and dropped by both Capitol and Warner Bros., without a recording contract and and wondering what to do next and where to turn. In this episode, he tells the story of where he turned.

Along the way, he talks about surviving in the record business, standing behind your choices, grappling with ambition, whether or not an artist's career fully belongs to them, and reaching the age where you're not new anymore.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

If Melissa Clark is in your life already, then she needs little introduction. Maybe you have one of the 40+ cookbooks that she has authored. Maybe you've made one of the recipes from her New York Times column "A Good Appetite", watched one of her cooking videos online, seen her on the Today Show, as a guest judge on Iron Chef America, or heard her as a guest host on The Splendid Table radio show. If you're one of these people, then you may already consider Melissa Clark to be a kind of honorary member of your family already, someone who helps you decide what to eat (and when), how to prepare it, and why you should feel good about it..because you can do it.

Or maybe, like me, you don't really cook very much. Maybe, like me, you only recently discovered the creativity, assurance and enthusiasm of Melissa Clark when your wife went to India for three weeks and left you in charge of feeding yourself and your child. Maybe you had a small breakthrough while watching Melissa demonstrate one of her recipes in an online video and it helped you understand that cooking is a true act of creation.

After having such a breakthrough maybe you, like me, started to think about how cooking is like making music. Rhythm & balance, tradition & innovation, style & concept, practice & intuition, intention, improvisation… it's all there. A recipe is a kind of composition, and a meal is a kind of concert. And maybe, just maybe, in that small moment of catharsis, you reached out to Melissa Clark for an interview to explore this idea.

Whichever kind of person you are, Melissa Clark is there for you.

She started out hoping to be a writer of "early modern female focussed romance novels" but discovered that all of her best images were about food. She says, "Every story, every color, every simile was about food." As she tells it, Melissa had the good fortune of starting out as a writer on the internet before anyone was actually reading on the internet. "There were no food writers when I started out. No one was talking about the experience of cooking."

We got together to talk about managing the commercial realities of writing and marketing recipes ("I feel like I am constantly walking on that line"), making friends with your ingredients ("the anchovy is my bad boyfriend"), dealing with anxiety ("my way of coping with it is to be very very busy"), falling in love with your teachers, what makes food a way that we can change the social structure of the world, why deadlines are lifelines, how much of her personal experiences to reveal in her writing, and when to walk away from the cookie dough.

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Anya Marina was the hottest DJ on the hottest radio station in San Diego. She had a natural, direct and conversational way of talking on the mic that made her a perfect fit for FM radio, she was a witty improviser, and she was fearless in the face of celebrity. Plus from an early age, she loved comedy and had even considered a career in comedic acting.

She could see her life laid out ahead of her. The only problem was, it wasn't the life she wanted. So she walked away from her career in radio for the career she knew she needed: music, what else? She started releasing her songs independently before signing with Chop Shop, a label that specialized in finding high profile syncs for their artists in an era before "sync" was a word people in the business really thought about.

Her music, intelligent, infectious and hooky songwriting delivered with delicious restraint, found its way to popular TV shows and movies including Grey's Anatomy, Twilight: New Moon, and Gossip Girl.

She moved. From San Diego to LA. Then she moved again. From LA to Portland. Then she moved again. From Portland to New York. She was busy, in writing sessions, pitching songs for her publisher, developing her career as both a singer and a co-writer.

She continued to release music. (I co-wrote and produced a song on her 2016 release Paper Plane). She could see her life laid out ahead of her. Again. And she thought: now's the time to bring it all together.

Maybe she didn't think that. How could I know what she thought? But whatever was going on in her head, she created a web series (Anya Marina: Indie-Pendent Woman) in which she stars as a singer songwriter in New York named Anya Marina. The series, a mockumentary style sendup of a self absorbed pop singer, gave Anya the chance to bring all her original loves together, music, acting, improvisational performance, and keeping company with the odd celeb.

So, is this the life Anya imagined for herself?

We got together recently to talk about how her Russian mother never taught her how to say the word "water" correctly, why she's committed to "experiencing something together with my audience," what makes her a good storyteller, and that "when a thought becomes an obsession, that's when you know you'll make a change".

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

Sophie Auster grew up in a house of writers (her father is Paul Auster, and her mother is Siri Hustvedt, both acclaimed authors). For Sophie, the creative process always "was quite normal". As she saw it, "artists are everywhere." So it was somewhat inevitable that she began a creative career when she was a child, first as an actress, then as a singer and songwriter.

Her latest record, Next Time took her to Sweden to work with producer Tore Johansson. Sophie describes the songwriting on the project as an exercise in "archetypes of men and women depicted in the culture."

We met recently to talk about what it was like to grow up in a literary household, starting her career at a young age, confronting and overcoming insecurity, holding herself to a high standard, and what it means to be a "jewegian".

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

Kassa Overall will tell you, "I love being the first thing of a thing. It's one of my favorite things."

Kassa will also tell you that grew up in the cut. Between two kinds of music. Between two neighborhoods, in Seattle, that were "actually divided and separated". He related more to the black neighborhood that he lived in, but he went to school mostly with white kids. "Looking back on it now I realize we're all from the same stuff" but at the time it felt like he was in the middle of two worlds.

In fact, Kassa Overall will tell you a lot of things. That's because Kassa Overall is a lot of things. Drummer. Rapper. Producer. Taker of cold showers.

As a drummer, he says "I had the old cat thing. Even though I was a young cat, I had something on drums that none of the other young cats had." That's how early on he caught the attention and found work performing with a formidable list of artists, including Christian McBride, Donald Byrd, Vijay Iyer, Wallace Roney, Ravi Coltrane, Gary Bartz, and many more. He also spent several years as a key member of pianist Geri Allen's Timeline band and works regularly with trumpeter Theo Croker's ensemble.

As a rapper and producer, Overall has collaborated with Brooklyn-based hip-hop outfit Das Racist, is a member of the duo Kool & Kass with former Das Racist member Kool A.D., and has DJ'ed with The Late Show with Stephen Colbert's house band, Jon Batiste & Stay Human.

And apparently Kassa is in the midst of a Wim Hof cycle of breathing and showering in cold water. That's not really as important as the rest of the biographical story, but it does give you a sense that the guy is working on it at all times.

Overall kept his hip hop / electronic identity separate from his jazz-self for a long time, thinking that it would be a stretch to bring all of those influences into one project. "I limited myself," he says. But ultimately he relented and made his latest solo album Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz, a startlingly cohesive array of compositions and production styles representing Kassa's diverse skillset.

In our conversation he talks about the intersection of jazz and hip-hop, the importance of getting "comfortable with being bored so you can get better at your instrument", the relationship between great drumming and the sounds of nature, how growing up far away from the "scene" gave him a strong sense of personal identity, and what it takes to be a "cat who is going for it".

Along the way, he discusses the influence of many of his collaborators and teachers including Vijay Iyer, Mike Ladd, Arto Lindsay, Roy Hargrove, Billy Hart, and Elvin Jones.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!

Guitarist Cory Wong wants you to know that "smooth-jazz" is not a dirty word. At least not as he sees it. That's why he started referring to himself as the "millennial smooth jazz ambassador".

Cory comes from Minneapolis and got his start working with many of the great Minneapolis funk musicians who worked with Prince; they showed him the ways of the funk. It's a deep and very special legacy. Cory is an infectious performer, with incredible energy and positivity on stage.

One night a half dozen years ago, some young musicians from Michigan were on tour in Minneapolis and had a night off. Somebody told them to go check out a band called Doctor Mambo's Combo (Cory happened to be subbing for the regular guitar player that night).

Something special happened that night. Maybe it was a full moon. Maybe it was destiny. Maybe it was beshert. By the time the concert was over, Cory had connected with a group of people who would have a big impact on his life and career: Jack Stratton, Theo Katzman, Joe Dart & Joey Dosik of Vulfpeck.

Today Cory is best known for his work with the band Vulfpeck. Their YouTube videos have made them into funk-celebrities, and now they sell out all over the world. It's a completely independent, gorilla style operation, which is why it's so extraordinary that in just a few short years Vulfpeck has built up enough of a following to be able to play for larger and larger audiences. (Later this year, for example, they'll play Madison Square Garden in New York.)

In our conversation we tell the story of what happened when Cory met Vulf, how the first encounter went, and subsequently how Cory's life and career were impacted. Cory explains how his concept of "letting rhythm be take the lead" developed after he connected with Jack Stratton of Vulfpeck.

We also get severely sidetracked talking about saxophonist Dave Koz, legendary Minneapolis drummer Michael Bland and bassist Sonny Thompson, Los Angeles phenomenon Louis Cole, mandolin master Chris Thile, playing with the Fearless Flyers.

Cory's own solo project has grown recently as well. He has released a series of records and videos, and tours regularly with his band of Minneapolis groove assassins. In late January he played a sold out show at the Bowery Ballroom in New York.

The next night, we had this conversation, in which he talks about coming up in Minneapolis, playing with Vulfpeck, disrupting smooth jazz, commanding the grid, letting "rhythm take the lead", the YouTube effect, the power of a good story, and Thai massage.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes and consider supporting the podcast on Patreon! And now you can also listen to the podcast on Spotify!