0.40.0 - Everybody's Talkin'
Why then is it so hard to find a good podcast about music?
Now, good is a relative term and if you substitute 'good' for 'popular' you can find many popular music podcasts. I'm a music enthusiast, and when I'm not spending the majority of my free media time trying to fit in listening to a thousand albums in a calendar year, I love to listen to podcasts; they are the ideal companion to "I'm doing something else but I don't want to fully keep my attention on it" activities. I've tried at least a dozen, probably somewhere in the region of twenty, music podcasts and regardless of popularity, very few of them have stuck with me for more than an episode or two. Podcasts suffer more than most from an immediate vibe check to know whether its something you'll enjoy. How do you feel about the hosts? The chemistry? What level is the discussion pitched at, is it full of in-jokes and self referential humour where the focus has moved away from the topic and on to how much the presenters love themselves?
Now podcast recommendations are even more contentious because of these factors, so here's my own personal top three music podcasts, the only three to make it past more than a couple of episodes before I moved on.
Song Exploder was the first music podcast I ever listened to, and it's unsurpassed for its ability to have artists render apart the process of creating amazing songs. It's a trove of fascinating insights, from musical inspiration to process to instrumentation; what makes it onto a track, how did it get there, and why does that simple decision elevate the song from 'competent' to 'masterful'. I like Hrishi Hirway's ability to prompt a discussion and then just get out of the way and let the band or the artists talk, before guiding them on to new topics. The willingness, the desire of artists to appear on the show shows the regard in which it is held in the music world. I mean, just look at the musical variety and star quality in just a random sample of 6 different artists who've appeared on the show, its really something. I found one of my favourite albums, Turn Out The Lights by Julien Baker because I listened to her Song Exploder episode about Appointments. It's a wonderful show.
60 Songs That Explain The 90's feels like the kind of show that was designed with me in mind; covering the music I grew up with, taking iconic songs and outlining the backstory to them, putting them into context with the events of the world. What it grew after a few episodes wandering around and finding its feet and its audience was a show where genial and engaging host Rob Harvilla lays out an engaging and personal story from his youth, how the song being covered intersected with his adolescent experiences, sometimes very tangentially, sometimes directly. He's an engaging storyteller and able to find pathos and humour in his recollections and his exploration of the creation and impact of the song he's covering. It's a very effective format, the combination of the personal experience linked with the musical examination of the song in question, so much so that I used it in the original version of this blog in 2017 and my more recent writing this year. Now, I'm not saying Rob Harvilla chomped my style, good ideas can happen more than once, but the overlap between the way I hear and experience and think about music, and the way it's laid out on 60 Songs proved to be enough of a hook to keep me listening every week.
I also love the fact that its a show that has so expansively outgrown the confines of its name - obviously, intended as a limited engagement - and the show is both now significantly longer than 60 episodes, but also is no longer about music from the 90's, but it's still just as engaging.
However, for me personally, in terms of interest, vibe, and a kind of kindred musical excitement, my favourite music podcast is dwarfed in stature by the shows it shares a podium with. While it might not have the size, the scale, the platform of the other two shows, it's got fight, and heart, and it where it counts.
I was introduced to This One Goes To 11 (now also available in video format) by my friend Matt through a convoluted series of events which ended up with him meeting podcast co-host Tyler Esselman in a bakery. A few weeks later, Matt mentioned to me the circumstances behind this chance encounter and told me about this music podcast and how he'd listened to it and enjoyed it. I take recommendations from my friends seriously, so I gave it a try and when I heard the first episode about In Rainbows and learned that this had been host Tyler's first Radiohead album, I worried that listening to this show would make me feel like a withered old corpse as these young, energetic, charming theatre professionals talked about discovering music I'd been listening to for fifteen years at that point.
Fortunately, I stuck with it and soon learned that my fears were unfounded, the conversations were interesting, and the musical palette painted from was more than just a retread of the known classics, the accepted reading list for anyone wanting to call themselves 'a fan of serious music'. Instead, the guests that Tyler and Michael brought on to the show bring with them a genuine enthusiasm for an album that means something special to them, not to the wider musical consensus. Instead of musical luminaries, Michael and Tyler's guests come from all walks of life, and bring with them their own perspectives, but that is the real special sauce which elevates the show to something special for me. As much as I find it interesting to hear from musicians about how they made their songs, what I find fascinating when I listen to an episode of T1GT11 is that the people being interviewed often come from worlds outside of music; they're not 'in the industry', they're not professional critics or executives or performers; they're fans, fans of a certain album, but fans who've sat and thought and asked themselves "why is this my favourite album? what does it mean to me? how can I put into words the influence this music has had on my own experience?".
If you can answer those questions, if you've got the confidence and the understanding and the vocabulary to express that to other people, you're someone I want to talk to, spend time with, get to know, because no matter who you are I know we have something deeply in common, and I find that a comforting moment of human connection and a fascinating insight into how music binds us all together.
While I was putting my list of albums to listen to together, I used a lot of the T1GT11 episode list as inspiration. I made a list of every album they had covered which qualified for this project. which gave me a list of ninety six different albums from the show. So, I thought it would be a fun sub-goal to listen to all of them this year; these final twenty albums in the banner art for this article represent the last few albums I needed to complete the set*
So, I'll give some quick thoughts on each of these twenty albums, but before I do, let me please encourage you to give This One Goes To 11 a chance and some room in your heart. Pick an album you like, you know, or just sounds interesting, and appreciate the enthusiasm and joy that Tyler, Michael, and their guests bring to their discussions. It's really something else.
Thirteen paragraphs before I get to talking about any music at all? Possibly a new record. Let's get into it.
Sometimes I think its possible for a musician to make too much music, and no-one sums that up better for me than Beck who somehow released six albums in five years between 1994 and 1999 and I liked exactly half of them; Mellow Gold (which I covered earlier this year), Odelay and Midnight Vultures are the only Beck albums which exist in my mind, and Sea Change, the sad Beck breakup album is what disconnected me from any of his future output**, so a late-period Beck album like The Information wouldn't have been on my dance card this year were it not for the podcast episode. I'm still not wild about it, but that's almost certainly some residual apathy bleeding through, plus unfavourable comparisons to the albums mentioned above which I've listened to thirty times and I'd listened to The Information once; still sounds like Beck though
It probably doesn't cover me in glory to say I saw Janelle Monae act in Glass Onion before I knowingly heard a note of her music. I knew of her, but I just never took the time to seek her music out until the podcast encouraged me to. She's really talented, obviously; Dirty Computer is a great album, obviously. I should pay better attention is the moral of the story I guess?
Vince Staple's Big Fish Theory is a really solid hip-hop album. Totally got my head bopping all the way through and I put BagBak on my Personal Training Playlist (Rap Version) because it's hype.
The story behind Sibylle Baier's Colour Green is a fascinating one, and a collection of acoustic German folk songs from the 1970's wouldn't make my playlist normally. Its very simple, but also quite hauntingly beautiful. Music for looking wistfully out of a rain-soaked window to.
I was just at the right age to be extremely aware of Madonna's Erotica album and the controversy surrounding it; However, being 16 I was also completely oblivious to the musical component of it outside of the released singles. Listening to an album which features a comprehensive explanation of how Madonna would prefer you go down on her was not something I was prepared for when I was a teenager, and I'm not sure I was prepared for it as a man in my 40's either, but for different reasons. You have to respect her commitment to the concept, and for pushing back boundaries about women's sexuality, but it didn't make me want to go back and listen to it for its musical content.
I love the clarity and emotional weight of Rufus Wainwrights voice. There's a kind of musical theatre aire to Want One; it feels like it could be a jukebox musical if only someone would write the structural narrative to wrap the songs around. I really like his stuff, and I have Folkocracy queued up to listen to in the coming weeks as well.
I was very much an honorary member of the Lillith Fair fan club which meant as well as a copy of Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (which I listened to earlier this year), I obviously also spent time spiritedly singing along to half the tracks on Rites of Passage while somehow oblivious to the queer subtext, and sometimes just text, running through the album. A young woman I once knew put me on game, however, and made the whole thing make a lot more sense somehow. I can't endorse The Indigo Girls' cover of Romeo & Juliet though.
I wasn't familiar with My Morning Jacket before T1GT11 and with apologies to Adam Wesley Brown, for me this album felt like a combination of what I think of as 'car commercial music' (which is more the fault of capitalist advertising co-opting a musical style than the band aiming to make music for car commercials) and store-brand Kings of Leon-esque blues rock. There's nothing offensive on It Still Moves, but didn't grab me in a meaningful way
I listened to Green Balloon by Tank & The Bangas on maybe the last sunny day of summer, in our garden, building some frames for our raspberries while the sun painted the whole world in shimmering gold. Sometimes, you can just feel a moment recording itself in your memory, and I was in a deeply meditative place listening to the chill hip-hop on this album. I can see myself coming back to this album again and again, when the weather is clear and the world feels at peace.
Even before I became a very mediocre drummer, I had a passing interest in Math Rock just because it felt like an inevitable combination of two of my interests, music and Being A Big Nerd. In practice, every time I have listened to variations on the style I end up feeling the same way, which is "that was interesting, I bet it was really fun to come up with. I'm glad I've experienced it, now I'm going to listen to something less fiddly". This was also my experience with Fear Before The March Of Flames and The Always Open Mouth; I can totally understand how you could go very down the rabbit hole on this stuff; I've always kept it at a cautious distance for fear it might suck me in and consume me completely.
There are a subset of albums or bands in the world which I feel like I've just not spent enough time with or found the thing to make it click with me in the same way that it obviously has for other people, and Animal Collective are one of those bands. Feels isn't the album I've listened to the most (that was Strawberry Jam back when Pitchfork made it album of the year), but it left me cold, or rather, searching for the key understanding to make me love it. I'll keep looking.
Van Morrison may have written some well regarded Neil Young Lite songs on Astral Weeks but he also wrote a song about how he thought Brexit was a good idea so he gets no more of my time.
Of all the albums from the T1GT11 catalogue I listened to this year, grae by Moses Sumney might have been my favourite of those I'd not listened to all the way through before. It felt almost unique, a kind of Jazz, R&B and soul fusion that reminded me a bit of The Ambassador in how it made me excited to listen to and hear where it was going next. Another one for the 2026 revisitation list.
Oh, god, Hozier. Every year I watch the BBC coverage of the the Glastonbury music festival, and some time around 2013 they had Hozier performing Take Me To Church in the little studio where BBC DJ Jo Wiley does her piece to camera. I said to Catherine "That song is going to be everywhere in two months" and it turns out I was wrong by about one and nine-tenths of a month because the following week you could not turn on the TV or the radio without hearing it. I'm fully aware Hozier is a beloved artist with a legion of fans but I find it so hard to get past his role in making Stomp-Clap-Gospel, Howl-At-The-Moon songwriting a subgenre which consumed a significant part of our musical landscape and still lurks there. It's just not for me, I know.
By contrast, the low country twang in Noah Kahan's Stick Season (Forever) I find entirely pleasant; there will always be room in my heart for another slightly melancholy young man with a guitar. I'd actually hears Dial Drunk over a year ago, and didn't register this was the same singer until the song kicked in to the latter (extended, parenthesised) part of the album, but it's a banger; it makes me want to find a Karaoke bar with that on the track list.
I grew up in the 80's so I had Smooth Operator and Your Love Is King and The Sweetest Taboo swirling through the soup of music I grew up listening to in the UK Top 40 on the radio or seeing on Top of the Pops; I knew what to expect and Promise delivered exactly that, a chocolate box of sultry soul jazz with an unmistakable voice.
I found Social Distortion to be punk in the same way I think of The Offspring as punk; that is to say, not really, and more a kind of subset of 90's alternative rock where the lyrics are sometimes shouted, sometimes sung, and mostly the tempo is high. Once I got over my "oh, these aren't really punk' shock, and I recontextualised it in my head, I had a good time with this album, but without the nostalgic hook or familiarity from my youth, I fear its destined to remain outside of my regular album rotation for the foreseeable future.
Somehow I ended up listened to not one but two all-spanish-language Reggeaton albums in the last couple of weeks (as I listened to Bad Bunny as well for a future post) and damn if I didn't have a good time doing it. Vibras by J Balvin was just fun, a party in audio form, and it felt like a breath of fresh air in what had been a pretty bad week. Also, I now finally know that Mi Gente is "that song with the vibraphone that goes 'do, dah-dah, dum dum'".
I really like OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES*** by SOPHIE, and it's another album I'd never have found without T1GT11. Is it possible to make sad, danceable indie electronica which somehow veers into prog territory without ever featuring a guitar? SOPHIE thought so, and this album is the proof; it goes to a lot of different places but the whole thing hangs together beautifully.
There might not be a rap album better than Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). There are some which are as good, but I'm damned if I'm going to claim anyone in the world is better than the Wu-Tang. I was taught better than that. This album is the blueprint for some of the finest rap albums ever made, and if you are rap-curious, it might be where I'd recommend you start.
...
OK, that's 20 paragraphs****, 20 albums, which means I've now listened to every qualifying album ever features on T1GT11 apart from a Sufjan album (coming soon when I do all of Sufjans discog), a Bowie album (same as Sufjan) and Graceland which I'll definitely listen to before the year is out, I just haven't figured out when.
Thanks for hanging in with me for the last forty weeks of nonsense, dear readers, and hopefully there will be another article coming next week. Until then.
* I did exclude Funeral by Arcade Fire for reasons I've discussed earlier, but I've done all the rest.
** I saw Beck at a music festival in 1998 and he ended his set by playing a constantly Klaxon over the stage speakers for about ten minutes while he ran around the stage wrapping every mic stand and instrument with yellow 'Caution' tape before leaving the stage.
*** Its been a while since I complained about the NAMING YOUR ALBUM IN ALL CAPS trend so I feel I should restate my position that its stupid but my respect for peoples creative process forces me to include it even when I think it makes the text look ugly.
**** Well, 19 paragraphs and 1 sentence, fuck you Van Morrison.
