WNXP Podcasts

This week for What Where When-sday, we discuss It’s Giving Global’s Cinco De Mayo event at Golden Pony. Taking place on Sunday, the event will feature DJs spinning Latin and global sounds with food and clothing vendors.

The four songwriters and instrumentalists that make up Nashville punk/garage rock band Gloom Girl MFG have only played together for a couple of years, but they've quickly gelled as a group and attracted lots of positive attention for their high-energy live shows. Counted among their enthusiastic local fan base is Cage the Elephant guitarist and producer Brad Shultz, who asked to work with Gloom Girl MFG on the band's first official studio recording, Polycrisis, a six-song EP out May 3. The band joined Celia in-studio to discuss this release track by track.

Everybody’s been talking about how Beyoncé’s new album spotlights Black country and cowboy traditions. But even before she teased that project, author and songwriter Alice Randall had already announced her own book and album, both titled “My Black Country.” Randall’s been lifting up foundational Black country voices for a lifetime, and senior music writer Jewly Hight reports she’s finally being treated as one herself.

This week for What Where When-sday, we discuss Black Opry Presents Three-Year Celebration Honoring Alice Randall at City Winery. The Black Opry has been a platform for black artists and fans of country, roots, folk, and Americana in an industry that doesn’t often offer them the space. They are celebrating their third year by honoring Randall, whose songwriting contributions have been overlooked in that space. Those songs are now being reimagined and performed by Black women for the first time on her album My Black Country and at the City Winery show. Senior music writer Jewly Hight spoke with Randall about the show.

The high-demand 20th Anniversary Transatlanticism and Give Up tour, co-headlined by Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service in celebration of their respective records first released in 2003, has extended into 2024 with a stop at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena on April 29. Death Cab’s founding bass guitarist Nick Harmer, who connected from home in Seattle before tour began, shared some of the “real-life time machine” feelings that have come up in rehearsing and performing the band’s breakthrough record in its entirety.

This week for What Where When-sday, we discuss Earth Day N’ The Hood with Jaffee Judah, executive director of Recycle & Reinvest. Starting as a local community cleanup crew in 2018, the organization’s mission is to provide safer communities and greener environments while promoting sustainability — and using music in the efforts to raise awareness of environmental importance to the next generation.

The songs that make up “Package Pt. 2” from Gustaf are a logical continuation of the powerful debut LP by the NYC five-piece, with more loud, in-your-face punk songs but also some surprising detours into experimental grooves. Gustaf’s singer and lyricist Lydia Gammill shed light on this new LP, WNXP’s Record of the Week, in advance of their U.S. tour, which stops in Nashville May 17 for a WNXP Presents show at DRKMTTR.

This week for What Where When-sday, we discuss OZ Arts’ anniversary bash with Executive and Artistic Director Mark Murphy. Housed in a renovated, former cigar warehouse in West Nashville, OZ Arts is celebrating 10 years with this event on Friday. The evening will be a culmination of the first decade with pop-up performances and visual art installations. Murphy, who worked in the contemporary art space before landing at OZ , says it was the organization’s avant garde approach that drew him in.

In 2012 Katie Crutchfield took the moniker of a creek by her house in central Alabama, the Waxahatchee creek and released the album American Weekend. Where she garnered a good amount of buzz in the blog era for being a songwriter in her early 20’s who was a vividly personal storyteller. “My life was so chaotic. As many people’s in their 20’s are, you know? It was just chocked full of drama. Everything was so intense and melodramatic and every slight or heartbreak was intensely recorded on those records.” Those records resonated, and then in 2020, just before everything happened, she released the album Saint Cloud. 

It’s ease and beauty sound tracked many people’s pandemics and made Waxahatchee a much larger success. It was a record that sounded like an artist no longer trying, but finding their truest self. She’s followed that with Tigers Blood, our Record of the Week on WNXP.

Leeds’ four-piece Yard Act made a massive splash in a crowded post-punk wave with their 2022 debut The Overload. Frontman James Smith was impossible to ignore, and the band’s humorous approach to the genre was a refreshing addition to the established acts leading the scene.

On their follow-up Where’s My Utopia?, Smith’s charisma is still front and center, but a bit more self-reflective, and the agitated guitars have been replaced with synths and dance beats. Co-produced with Gorillaz member Remi Kabaka Jr., the disco-inspired dance-rock album drastically expands on their post-punk minimalism.

Watch Yard Act perform “Petroleum” and “Dream Job” from Where’s My Utopia? as well as 2022’s “Payday” live at WNXP’s Sonic Cathedral here.