Nabil Ayers

This special edition episode is an interview with Carl Newman, the primary songwriter, singer, and guitarist of The New Pornographers. This conversation is focused on his songwriting process and working with Neko Case and the rest of his bandmates to flesh out his compositions. The band's new record Continue As A Guest is out now, and the band will be touring throughout the year.  The songs featured in this episode are, in order, "Continue As A Guest," "Firework in the Fallen Snow," "The Bleeding Heart Show," "Really Really Light," "Pontius Pilate's Home Movies," "Cat and Mouse with the Light," and "Angelcover." 

This special episode is a nice long interview with Will Sheff, a musician best known as the songwriter and frontman of Okkervil River. We talk about his new album Nothing Special, which is his first record under his own name, and why he decided to step away from the Okkervil River name. We get into some fairly deep stuff about music and creativity in this conversation; I think you'll enjoy it whether you know Will's music or not. All of the songs in this episode are from Nothing Special except for the first song, which is "Mary On A Wave" by Okkervil River.

This episode features Billboard journalist Eric Renner Brown, who has spent a lot of the past few years covering the concert industry for Pollstar. We talk about his experience of covering the industry through the chaos of the first phase of the pandemic, and what's been happening since things have mostly resumed in the current phase of the pandemic. If you subscribe to the Fluxblog Patreon you can hear a tangent we went on about the current jam band scene with a focus on Goose, Billy Strings, and Dead and Co. this coming weekend.

This episode features Louie, the host of the Pop Pantheon podcast. We talk about the show and his history as a DJ and along the way go off on tangents about several pop stars including Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, and Rihanna. If you love pop this episode is for you!

This episode is a marathon of all four episodes of FLOPUARY, a miniseries meditation on the concept of flopping by myself and Molly O'Brien of And Introducing. The miniseries was previously behind the paywall on the Fluxblog Patreon and originally came out in February of this year. We cover a lot of interesting ideas in this one, I'm really proud of it and excited for more people to hear it. In addition to getting deep into philosophical matters we go deep in discussing some specific artists including Madonna, Katy Perry, Elton John, U2, George Michael, and Taylor Swift. 

Everyone's favorite sporadically produced and confusingly released Steely Dan podcast is back! This time Jesse Hawken and I are joined by the writer Carrie Courogen to talk about recent Dan shows, the whole Aimee Mann thing, a recently unearthed Dan cover of Joni Mitchell, and a bunch of classic songs including "Deacon Blues," "Glamour Profession," "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," "My Old School," and "Green Earrings." We also discussed "Barrytown," but that clip will only be available to Fluxblog Patreon subscribers.

This episode features Brian Hiatt, the host of the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast and one of the most prolific features writers in the history of that magazine. In this conversation we talked about his long career at Rolling Stone, how he approaches talking to some of the most famous people in the world, and changes in what people want from artist and celebrity profiles through the years.

This week’s episode features Briana Cheng, an A&R for 4AD and owner of the artist management company B4. We talk about what she does, how she works with new artists, and how high personal stakes put her in the position to take working in the music industry very seriously from a young age.   There’s some clips of songs by artists Briana works with through this episode, here are the titles in the order they are played:   Tkay Maidza “Cashmere” Hawa “My Love” 27delly “No Complaints” Velvet Negroni “Wine Green”

This episode features Karina Longworth, creator and host of the long-running film history podcast You Must Remember This. In this conversation we talk about her current ongoing series Erotic 80s/90s, the formative influence of Madonna, MTV's The Real World, art school, the fallout of the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial, and her approach to curating history.

This episode features Nabil Ayers, president of the Beggars Banquet label group and author of the new memoir My Life in the Sunshine. We talk about the book, which is largely about his complicated relationship with his biological father, the musician Roy Ayers, and also get into his extensive experience in the record industry.