All Your Days

Our guest is Lynn Gilbert, a massive contributor to 20th-century portrait photography — her photos of sculptor Louise Nevelson became the face of the Venice Biennale in 2022 — whose 1981 book of photos and essays, ‘Particular Passions,’ became a significant document of second-wave feminism. Lynn, with virtually no professional portfolio at the time, somehow brought together luminaries and unknowns to create her monumental book, cataloging some of the most important well-known — and unknown — persons of the time and movement. Her subjects included Gloria Steinem, Margaret Mead, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Julia Child, Lillian Hellman, Barbara Walters, and more. A beautiful and generous figure in my own small story, it is my sincere pleasure to bring part one of this wide-ranging conversation with Lynn to you this Tuesday, a deep look at a life lived behind the lens.

Please welcome the legendary Lach to your ears. Lower East Side/Edinburgh artist and producer and presenter, novelist, BBC radio host — you name it, he's probably done it. We go super deep into the history of anti-folk in NYC and the world, but that's just the surface of the thing. Memory, dreams, visions, heartbreak and triumph, life and death, love and letdowns — it's the very DNA of this little podcast, and few guests have hit so many of the notes. You're in for it. Clips in this episode: Crazy House (1988 version) - Lach, NYC's Fortunes 13 (2015)Holy Days - Lach, Lach Live at ABC No Rio, NYC, 1980's (2017)The Edie Effect - Lach, Contender (2015)Effect A Change - Lach (2015)New York ≈ Hoboken - Lach (2017)

Sam Shaber is in the middle of a resurrection. For years, if you found Sam’s work, you found it via storytelling or her podcast focusing on in-vitro fertilization and women’s health and just and accurate information and access to both. Or you knew her power-pop-punk bands. These were the points of contact. This week we pick up the story, the rest of the story, how she came out of a landmark moment in her career recording an album named ‘Eighty Numbered Streets’ with a Grammy-nominated artist and what happened after that. We also come back to family, talking about her father, who in his lifetime wrote the screenplay of ‘The Warriors’ — a milestone film in several ways. And we at last come to the story of Sam’s mother, whose passing in 2022 changed what had been our plan to have an interview on this show shortly after we’d recorded it. That’s the only “lost” episode, and in this installment, we restore the ideas and central truths of that original conversation. And I’m glad to have it. Clips in this episode:Eldorado - Sam Shaber, Eighty Numbered Streets (2003)Happy Happy Happy - The Happy Problem (2008)IVFU with Sam Shaber Silver Linings - Sam Shaber, The Moth StorySLAM (2018)Solitaire - Eighty Numbered Streets (2003)

Sam Shaber is back with the very songs she shelved after those years in the early 2000s, back with ‘Eighty Numbered Streets.’ She’s about to take the album on the road for the first time in decades, playing it front to back in Los Angeles, New York, and elsewhere — and soon she’ll reunite with Shawn Mullins for a concert in Georgia. It’s a critical moment to meet this artist, or meet them again. Please let me introduce you to an old collaborator and friend.Clips in this episode:Lullaby - Shawn Mullins, Soul's Core (1998)Rain and Sunshine - Sam Shaber, Eighty Numbered Streets (2003)All of This - Sam Shaber, Eighty Numbered Streets (2003)Bare - Sam Shaber, Eighty Numbered Streets (2003)Eldorado - Sam Shaber, Eighty Numbered Streets (2003)

One night in the late 1990s I walked up to a big black door under a tattered green awning, and I walked through that door, and I was in a room. I was at a crossroads. I was a kid with a guitar, and I was about to meet a man named Geoff Bartley. I’ve seldom respected an artist and a host and a curator of a room the way I respect Geoff. He’s our guest on the season closer of ‘All Your Days,' and for the first time, I have the privilege of learning where this man, this musician that critics and producers and artists have described as “one of the most under-recognized musicians alive today,” this award-winning fingerstyle player, this picker, this poet, this bluesman, this maker of a space that was essential to the songwriter scene in Boston and Cambridge came from, what he meant to do, what he achieved, where he has been and where he is going tomorrow. A must. A deep and soulful talk.

Please meet Timothy Mason. There is probably no one more consequential in terms of my awakening artist’s mind in the 1990s. There was no early room in which I discovered or started to practice art that was not either produced by Tim or for which he was not in some way materially responsible. Nothing that followed would have played out the same way. This one is a catch from the deeper waters, the personal depths. We’re swimming with the tides of the cosmos in this one: the story of a person who created a network of stages and performance venues across geography and time, bringing luminaries and future luminaries together in places unlikely or spaces imperiled — all the while practicing his own craft as a poet and performer striving to channel voices and experience both inside and outside the human condition. 

Back in the early 2010s, I met a man named Rafat Ali, who’d just co-founded an online travel news company called Skift, and he gave me an assignment. And that changed everything. In my journey, Rafat has unlocked incredible next steps and new chapters, but we’ve never really talked to each other about his journey, the whole thing, from India to Indiana to New York and many circles opened and closed along the way. Culture shock, climbing the cliff face of a career in writing and journalism, triumphs, injustices, escapes and narrow passages, fearlessness lost and found again. This is Rafat’s story and it’s a great privilege to have had such a deep and generous conversation. Many lessons within. Spend some time with the mind of Rafat Ali. You’ll be glad you did.

This week our conversation turns to Africa with the brilliant Gift Kiti, who has been building water resources and a crucial health clinic for the people of Kashani, Kenya, since 2017. I've been fortunate enough to be along for parts of Gift's journey, thanks to The Resolution Project, and in this episode, 'All Your Days' unpacks the nature of a project that is materially changing lives but that has also come with prices, costs, lessons and revelations for all of us

Some songs and their writers get to you by degrees. Some creep up on your consciousness, a verse here, a chorus there. Others land on your world in a song. That’s all it takes. It’s not a lot, and then it’s everything. In this episode, songwriter Randy Kaplan and I talk about the moment his song “Slow Eater” landed in my world, and then we unpack a lifetime of incredible moments, from Los Angeles and coming up with luminaries like Dan Bern and Andras Jones to a career on TV, including ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ scenes with Jennifer Aniston in ’Ferris Bueller,’ and more. And that’s just scratching the surface.Clips in this episode: Slow Eater (Randy Kaplan, ‘Boyish Hips’) - 1997 Tootsie Roll (Randy Kaplan, ‘Perfect Gentleman’) - 2004Crushed Berries (Randy Kaplan, ‘Miraculous Dissolving Cures’) - 2001Shampoo Me (Randy Kaplan, ‘Five Cent Piece’) - 2006Mosquito Song (Randy Kaplan, ‘Five Cent Piece’) - 2006 Candy Man Blues (Randy Kaplan, ‘Shake It and Break It’) - 2019Beauty and the Beast (‘Snow’ d. Gus Trikonis) - 1989Ferris Bueller (‘Without You I’m Nothing' d. Steve Dubin) - 1990I’m Not Hungry (Randy Kaplan, ‘Boyish Hips’) - 1997Live Tigers (Randy Kaplan, ‘Boyish Hips’) - 1997Angel Eyes (Frank Sinatra, ‘Sings for Only the Lonely’) - 1958Sad to Be Happy (Randy Kaplan, ‘Songs for Old Lovers’) - 2011Volunteers (Randy Kaplan, ‘Miraculous Dissolving Cures’) - 2001 

The second part of our conversation with the topical songwriter David Rovics. Part one traced the evolution of a political mind to the moment when tragedy undid the shackles of expectations and set David on his path. This week we follow what happens next, the collapse of the college circuit that supported activists throughout the later 20th Century, the implosion of the CD revenue stream and the rise of an atomized social-media-driven culture. Clips in this episode:Today in Charlottesville (David Rovics, ‘Ballad of a Wobbly’ - 2018)From Kabul to Khartoum (David Rovics, ‘ Living in These Times’ - 2001)Operation Iraqi Liberation (David Rovics, ‘The Commons’ - 2007)Somewhere on Spotify (David Rovics, ‘Songs for Today’ - 2019)Israeli Geography 101 (David Rovics, ‘Meanwhile in Afghanistan (Solo Acoustic) - 2019)David Rovics is a Nazi (David Rovics, ‘David Rovics’ YouTube - 2022)I’m a Better Anarchist Than You (David Rovics, ‘The Commons’ - 2007)