WNXP Podcasts

Before Palehound released “The Clutch,” a rippin’ rock song and the first single off of their new LP, Eye On The Bat, we’d most recently heard the vocals and elevated guitar work of El Kempner as one half of the duo Bachelor. Kempner teamed up with Melina Duterte of Jay Som to form the supergroup and deliver the stand-out 2021 record Doomin’ Sun. But just as the recording of Doomin’ Sun was finished in early 2020, and Kempner hit the road with Palehound to tour their own solo work, the world shut down.

Eye On The Bat, a 10-song collection written around and largely about that holiday break-up, finds Kempner once again excelling at the plainspoken.

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Michael is Killer Mike’s most personal and vulnerable album to date — an audio biography of the nine-year-old Michael Render on the album cover, a boy with a halo and devil horns over this head dreaming about being an emcee and the challenges he would have to go through to get there. From drug dealing in Atlanta on the song “Something for Junkies” to saying his mother, Denise, was dead for the first time on the song “Motherless,” each song on the album serves as chapters in the journey of Michael Render.

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Hip-hop is known as aspirational music. Six One Tribe, Nashville’s largest hip-hop collective, is living its own version of that. The group is working to accomplish what once seemed impossible for the genre they love in the city they call home. Senior music writer Jewly Hight digs into the vibe of TRIBE, our WNXP Nashville Artist of the Month for June.

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“If we hear some old adage or southern euphemism, we expect it to be honest and valuable to us, but sometimes it’s really not,” Jason Isbell says about the song “Cast Iron Skillet,” in which he delivers bits of folk wisdom over acoustic guitar, before giving dark details that counter the presumption of authority in an old saying.

Isbell has been doing that for years with his music, and online presence, and in-person presence. But in Weathervanes, his latest album, he injects it into the characters in his songs, who are proud and strong-willed, but who are also flawed and complicated.

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Joy’All is Jenny Lewis’s fifth solo effort, and her first on the historic Blue Note record label. It’s also her first full-length release since the pandemic. Splitting time between Los Angeles and Nashville, her mostly solitary quarantine experiences gave her a lot to think and sing about in the tunes that make up Joy’All, several of them stemming from a virtual, song-a-day writing workshop led by Beck (with whom she’s touring on the West Coast later this summer).

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Peter One’s story is incredible in itself. Peter is from Africa’s Ivory Coat. In the 1980’s he released an album that was very successful in Africa and had him touring the continent. In the 1990’s he came to the United States to make music, but found himself in a much more stable career, nursing, here in central Tennessee. And in his mid-sixties he released his second album, “Come Back to Me” in May. 

But an incredible music story would be nothing if the music didn't back it up. “Come Back to Me” stands up on it’s own without the story. It’s a warm cup of coffee on a slow Sunday morning kind of record. There is a kindness in his voice that makes you realize why he made a profession out of caring for people. You can hear the softness of his soul.

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The history of Hillaryville, Louisiana can be traced all the way back to the late 1800s. Located along the Mississippi River, the small community was founded by eight slaves who received it as a form of reparations after the Civil War. The stories of green sugarcane, longshoremen on the river, and rice farmers in this deep rural south of Louisiana are passed on generation after generation, including Durand Jones’ grandmother who describes it as “The place you’d most want to live.”

Jones takes listeners on a journey through his views of the history and his own personal experiences on his debut solo album Wait Til I Get Over.

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Pearl & The Oysters Bandcamp bio reads,

“After winning a free trip to the ★Ostreoid Asteroid Resort★ (from whence came their name) on the back of a dehydrated cereal box, a joyous society of galactic gleaners began making music together under the Neptunian moniker: 𝒫ℯ𝒶𝓇𝓁 𝒜𝓃𝒹 𝒯𝒽ℯ 𝒪𝓎𝓈𝓉ℯ𝓇𝓈. ✩ ☾ ❈❖✢❖”

Here we have the real story. Starting with a picklemonger from Brooklyn to two high school students in Paris who bonded over Burt Bacharach and then moved to Florida with two carry-ons full of tiny instruments and made Coast 2 Coast an acid trip of a journey to outer space.

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Indigo De Souza has adopted, and been warmly embraced by, a new community since the making of her 2021 record Any Shape You Take. Her third LP, All of This Will End, is beautifully illustrative of De Souza’s recent shifts: shifts in mindset, in the people from whom she draws support and/or inspiration, and — as a result — in songwriting.

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Initially self-released, Joy Oladokun’s 2020 record In Defense of My Own Happiness was created in pandemic isolation; she doodled her way to emotional, relational and social verities, mainly using the instruments, microphones and software she had on hand. For Proof of Life, she entered into a partnership with Verve Forecast and Republic that didn’t break her of DIY recording habits so much as vastly expand her cast of collaborators and enable her to pursue a wider array of sonic ideas. 

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