The Third Story with Leo Sidran

In a career spanning over fifty years and thirty five records, Ben Sidran has established himself as a philosopher poet. Equally celebrated for his precise, probing writing style as he is for his improvised spoken word jazz raps, he has carved out a truly unique space for himself. The Times of London aptly described Ben as “the world’s first existential jazz rapper,” and The Chicago Sun Times once referred to him as “a renaissance man cast adrift in the modern world.” He is one of a kind. And he is, of course, also my dad. There is no one else like Ben so it’s not uncommon for his fans and followers to search his songs for meaning in times of trouble. When the world is uncertain, many find comfort in the wisdom of his words (myself included!). Some of those songs have become classics among his elite tribe of hipster devotees, like “Life’s A Lesson,” “Face Your Fears,” and “Don’t Cry For No Hipster”. So it was curious when, during the Covid pandemic, Ben chose to make his first ever fully instrumental record in 2022, Swing State. It was as if he had finally run out of words, at least for that moment, and he chose to let his piano tell the story that he was unable to sing about. But those who know Ben well understand that he’s never really out of words, so it was just a matter of time before he began to write again. And last summer he found himself back in a Parisian studio joined by a group of American and French musicians to make what would become his latest record, Rainmaker. In many ways Rainmaker is just another in a long line of Ben’s records - a new collection of songs written in his particular style of hipster philosophy set against a backdrop of easily digestible grooves. On the other hand, he describes the process of making it as “wrestling with the devil.” The accumulation of political, environmental and personal conditions made this particular project resonate differently for him. We spoke recently about the process of making Rainmaker, the stories behind the songs, his belief in the power of humor to help survive adverse situations, how Philip Roth’s retirement from writing affected him, whether or not he thinks retirement is truly possible for an artist, if this is in fact his last record, and what French rapper MC Solaar has to do with any of it. Ben has been featured on this podcast many times, most recently on his 80th birthday last August. On each of his birthdays going back a handful of years we have talked, as well as on various other episodes. If you have heard any of them, then you know that it is always a huge treat to have him, and in fact the episodes with him are among the most listened to and shared on the podcast. www.third-story.com https://leosidran.substack.com/

Shabaka Hutchings grew up between the UK and Barbados. He started playing clarinet as a young boy in Barbados and eventually moved back to England to go to music school in the early 2000s. After college he began a period of working furiously on a kaleidoscopic range of projects and became an icon of the new sound of London jazz, which integrated African rhythms and modes, Caribbean and Middle eastern sounds and was largely danceable. Shabaka himself has never fully embraced the jazz label. While the music is highly improvised, and it owes much to the American jazz tradition, his influences are very broad. Over the course of the past decade, the majority of his touring and recorded work has been with three bands: Sons of Kemet, The Comet is Coming and Shabaka and the Ancestors. In these formations he displayed a fundamental approach to creative practice in different contexts spanning Afro-Caribbean fusion, London dance music club culture and the South African jazz tradition. Part of his signature on the saxophone has been inspired by rappers, and his sound is often evocative of the human voice, conversational, expressive, and rhythmic. A somewhat chance encounter with a flute maker in Japan several years ago led him to develop an interest in the Shakuhachi flute tradition, and during covid he committed himself to the flute. Last year he announced that he would be putting away his saxophone and ending all of his bands to dedicate himself almost exclusively to playing wooden flutes. His latest release Perceive its beauty, Acknowledge its Grace (Impulse!) is his first full length album since making that transition. It’s more meditative, contemplative and introspective than his earlier work. But it’s still clearly Shabaka. The album features appearances by pianist Jason Moran, drummer Nasheet Waits, harpists Brandee Younger and Charles Overton, vocalists Lianne La Havas, Moses Sumney and Saul Williams, string wizard Miguel Atwood Ferguson and percussionist Carlos Niño. I talked to Shabaka earlier this year at Winter Jazzfest as he was embarking on a new adventure, both personally and musically. It was an absolutely fascinating conversation about his own creative development and philosophy, his new record, and why this historical moment is “showing the importance of slowing down, of patience, of contemplation.” www.third-story.com www.leosidran.substack.com/ www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story

Singer Jose James on his new record 1978, his professional and personal journey, the unique demands of being a jazz singer today, why he believes good art should be transformative, how he stays healthy, the creative challenges brought on by happiness and whether or not one needs to suffer in order to make good art. This episode is dedicated to the late saxophonist and vocoder master Casey Benjamin who passed away on March 30th at the age of 45. Casey, a brilliant and influential musician, spent much of his career at the crossroads of jazz and hip hop. I never knew him but I was always very aware of him and a big admirer of his playing. During this conversation with Jose James, Casey’s name came up several times. Given the context of his recent passing, what was originally a set of casual commentaries about Benjamin’s dedication to music and community was transformed into a tribute to him and I am heartened by how much admiration Jose and Taali had for their friend. www.third-story.com https://leosidran.substack.com/ https://www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story

säje, the vocal group made up of singers Sara Gazarek, Amanda Taylor, Johnaye Kendrick, and Erin Bentlage won their first Grammy on Sunday for their arrangement of “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning”. They recorded it with one of the most admired musical minds today, Jacob Collier. And like much of what has happened with so far, that recording was both unintended and totally right, somewhere between the reward for the hard work of talented artists, and magic. The story plays like a dream. One day Jacob Collier stopped by the LA recording studio (Lucy’s Meat Market), where was working on their debut album. One thing led to another and he ended up playing a few free form takes of “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning.” There’s footage of it online and you can see him improvising his arrangement. You can also see his childlike enthusiasm, his playful energy, his request to do just one more take, because he was having so much fun. After Jacob left, the singers in säje built their vocal arrangement around what he had played. It’s a beautiful marriage of improvisation and arrangement, and the result ends up sounding completely inevitable. They contextualized Collier’s spontaneous approach, brought it fully into their world, built a frame for his impressionistic gestures, and then filled in the landscape. This was not their first experience with serendipity. Before was , back when it was just an idea floated by Sara Gazarek in 2018 to put some kind of vocal group together, the four women gathered at a rental house in Palm Springs, California to get to know one another and discuss the possibility of doing something together. They came out of that weekend with a song “Desert Song”, a sound, and the makings of a story. The members of don’t live in the same place (Sara and Erin live in Los Angeles, Johnaye and Amanda live in Seattle), but they started to work as a group, and eventually recorded “Desert Song”. They submitted the song to the Grammy’s - their first song! - and it was nominated in 2020. Eventually released their debut album in 2023. It featured guest appearances by Ambrose Akinmusire, Michael Mayo, Terri Lynn Carrington, and of course Jacob Collier, among others. But at the core of the album was the signature silky sound which is a little hard to define, but very easy to identify. It’s technically challenging to execute - suspended chords and interweaving lines - and very satisfying to experience. They like to say that they ascend beyond their training, and into artistry. We met at a photo studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn late last year and had a beautiful talk about their formation, their journey - from that first weekend retreat in Palm Springs to the release of their first full length album and its subsequent Grammy nomination for Best Arrangement Instruments and Vocals with Jacob Collier for “In The Wee Small Hour of the Morning”, collective lyric writing, managing logistics and juggling four schedules, the emotional space that feminine energy allows, and discovering who they are in public. www.third-story.com www.substack.leosidran.com

Ten years ago, on a bit of a whim, I invited bassist Will Lee to come over to my home studio in Brooklyn to do an interview with me for a new project I was starting: a podcast. A year or two earlier, my friend Michael Fusco-Straub had turned me on to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, and I was totally hooked on the concept of casual long form interviews among peers. At the time Maron spoke almost exclusively to comics, and I thought there might be a space for something similar but focused on music. Although I didn’t have any real experience as a journalist or a broadcaster, I knew I could do it. In fact, maybe more than anything else I’ve ever done professionally, it was the most natural decision I can ever remember making. But the format was a bit of a mystery. Who was I supposed to be? An expert on music? A friend of my guests? I thought maybe we would perform together. Or maybe they would demonstrate something. Or maybe it would be a document of the local scene in New York - in the early episodes I asked my guests “where are you coming from today” and “where are you going after this”. Actually, those are pretty good questions. Maybe I should go back to asking them again. I spent a month futzing with my Will Lee interview, carefully editing each pause and “um”, working and reworking the introduction. I designed a crude logo based on a Google Earth image of my house in Park Slope, and built a website on Squarespace. I posted the episode and sent an email to my friends to explain the new project. I wrote: Since moving to New York nine years ago, I have tossed around the idea of conducting informal interviews with musicians in my studio when they come in to record. Over the years so many great players and singers have shared tremendous insights and history with me, and it seemed like such a missed opportunity not to record it. Of course, everything changes when the “red light” is on, so the question for me became how to maintain that same level of spontaneity and candor in a somewhat more formal setting. Then I sat nervously with a pit in my stomach, not knowing what I had just done. Would anyone like it? Would anyone care? Was I any good at it? Ten years and 268 episodes later, I continue to refine, to tweak and futz, to agonize and scramble to the finish line every time. As I write these words it is 12:30am, and I sit in my darkened studio - essentially an extension of my bedroom - with my wife, Amanda asleep just a few feet away, and our daughter asleep in the next room. That is to say that The Third Story has become an extension not only of my life, but of my entire household. Fortunately the initial nausea has passed but it has been replaced by a constant sense of urgency to get the next episode finished. I have also developed a style, an unstructured but intentional approach to talking to people, in search of a narrative thread in each journey, an attempt to get somewhere together. Sometimes it’s more technical, sometimes it’s more esoteric, sometimes it’s personal. There is no real theme to the show, and there is no real dogma. If it’s interesting to me, the hope is that it will be interesting to others too. The good news about an ongoing show like this one is that there’s always another episode to make, so you can never get too precious about any of them because there will be more. The bad news is the same as the good news: no matter how much time you spend on one episode, or how good it was, you still have to make another one, and you’re probably already behind schedule. The project has become a way of moving through both space and time for me. It provides a kind of structure when I travel - nearly everywhere I have gone over the last decade, I have returned home with at least one interview. Whether talking to Gabriela Quintero in Mexico, Jorge Drexler in Spain, Madeleine Peyroux in Paris, Butch Vig in Los Angeles, Howard Levy in Chicago, David Garibaldi in Oakland, David Maraniss in Madison, or Jack Stratton in...

Trumpeter/composer Keyon Harrold was born and raised in Ferguson, MO to a musical family. He is the son of pastors and one of 16 children. As a boy, a trumpet was placed in his hands, and the rest is history. He moved to New York to study at The New School in the 1990s and became part of a legendary generation of musicians associated with the neo soul movement, including Common, Bilal, Roy Hargrove, The Roots, and Robert Glasper. Harrold is a reliable and sought after player among big acts, and he’s worked with Jay-Z, Beyonce, Rihanna, Eminem, Maxwell, Mac Miller and Snoop Dogg. At the same time he’s a seriously gifted jazz improviser and composer, who was mentored by trumpeter Charles Tolliver, and who was once referred to as “the future of the trumpet” by Wynton Marsalis. He supplied all of the trumpet playing in Don Cheadle’s Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead, playing to match Cheadle’s on-screen performance as Miles. The soundtrack to the film won a Grammy. But while Keyon has enjoyed what might appear to be a charmed career, he has also had a series of unexpected setbacks and heavy lived experiences that contribute to his musical journey. His new album Foreverland is a celebration of his multidimensional career and his sensitivity as an artist, proving that Harrold is a master of channeling his lived experience through his horn. The album features 10 original songs that explore themes of empowerment, positivity, love, loss, and vulnerability. And it’s a family affair — nearly every musician is a longtime friend, including Common, Robert Glasper, Laura Mvula, Chris Dave, Marcus Gilmore, Nir Felder, Randy Runyon, BIGYUKI, Burniss Travis and many others. Here he talks about Foreverland, how a series of losses in his life ultimately led him to make “something beautiful, something positive, something inspiring,” and his reflections on the early days of his career as part of a community of like minded musicians who were “always open.” www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

Singer-songwriter Lau Noah grew up in the small Catalan city of Reus. She left Spain for America a decade ago, at age 19 and never really looked back. She makes celestial, dreamy music evocative of another era, yet influenced by her own very modern story. Lau Noah is both a realist and a magical realist. She is an uncompromising and determined indie artist. She books her own shows, produces her own recordings, and advocates on her own behalf. She has a practical understanding of how to make compelling content, and how to communicate with her fans and her fellow artists. But she also appears to be searching the stars, deciphering her dreams, and following the river in her mind to the next location. Listening to Lau’s music is like watching a river flow. It’s all right in front of you, passing with natural fluidity. But you can never quite locate it, and you can never fully predict how it will move. The best way to experience it is to simply accept that it is flowing and let it wash over you. The river, in fact, is a familiar image in her songs. Lau seems to relate to the river, steady in its unyielding forward motion, unapologetic in its intransigent transience. As a composer, her writing evokes a baroque classicism, her compositions are colored with counterpoint, and often sound like a conversation between Spanish guitar and voice. Sophisticated as she is, Lau is self taught, and actually lists Hannah Montana and Avril Lavigne as two of her primary influences. Her new album A Dos ("for two") is a collection of duets with some of her most admired artist friends, and some of the friends who most admired her. These include Chris Thile, Cecile McLorin Salvant, Jorge Drexler, and Jacob Collier among others. Much of Lau’s access to these people came from posting videos online and letting the internet work its magic. We spoke recently about her artful life, the journey that led her out of Spain and onto the world stage, how struggling with agoraphobia as a teenager helped her to become an artist, why adversity creates community, her adventures in babysitting, being comfortable as the odd one in any situation, and making A Dos.

Ani DiFranco began recording and self-releasing her music as a 20 year old in Buffalo, New York in 1990. 34 years later she is widely considered to be a feminist icon. But in many ways she emerged iconic, fully formed and fearless. A facile lyricist with a biting honesty, she played guitar with a virtuosic, rhythmic style. And she was ahead of her time as an independent artist who owned all her own masters and controlled most of the major aspects of her career. She’s sometimes called the mother of the DIY movement. DiFranco has released all of her albums (over twenty) on her Righteous Babe record label. The label has also put out projects for other distinguished singer songwriters including Andrew Bird, Utah Phillips, Arto Lindsay, and Anaïs Mitchell whose own Hadestown project was first released as an album on Righteous Babe before being transformed into the Broadway hit that it is today. Ani Difranco’s most recent studio album Revolutionary Love came out in 2021. In 2022 she published a picture book for children called The Knowing which she described as “an Ani DiFranco-style lullaby, inviting young readers to ponder the distinction between outer forms of identity and the inner light of consciousness.” And she will join the cast of Hadestown on Broadway in February, playing the role of Persephone, a part she sang on Anais Mitchell’s original Righteous Babe recording in 2010. So it’s both her broadway debut and a fill circle moment. In recent years Righteous Babe has released anniversary editions of Ani’s early recordings. In 2022 she revisited the 1998 album Little Plastic Castle, sharing anecdotes and memories of the making of it on social media, and playing some of the songs live. Her memoir, No Walls and the Recurring Dream, was published in 2019. Here she talks about how she sees her work today (“my job is connecting with people”), her early career (“it was relentless”), avoiding being labeled or boxed in (“I feel like a survivor of labels”), her idea of success (“successful artists are not necessarily the best selling”), raising children in an era of performative identity, practicing revolutionary love and why it’s easier to tell the truth than to hide yourself. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/studios 0:00 Intro 12:00 Interview

brad allen williams is not only a great guitar player but also a serious recording engineer, and someone who understands both the technical and emotional sides to record making. Known for his work with Jose James, Nate Smith and Brittany Howard, he released his album œconomy on Pete Min’s Colorfield label earlier this year. Like all Colorfield releases, œconomy was born from an improvisatory spirit that reflects the label’s mission. Artists show up to the recording sessions with nothing written. They create spontaneously in the studio and then edit, arrange, and develop those improvisations into their record. In the case of brad’s œconomy album, he added string arrangements to his free form compositions and a few virtuosic cameos by drummer Mark Guiliana. This conversation is an exploration of that process and a master class in Memphis music history, a meditation on the merits of music with “layered emotions”, a conversation about the relationship between suffering and art, connecting the threads of noise rock and bebop, specialization vs broad knowledge, the value of vulnerability in music, why he doesn’t capitalize his name, and the journey that led him from Memphis to Los Angeles by way of Southern Mississippi, North Texas, New Jersey, New York, and the moon. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

Pete Min is a recording engineer, producer and label owner based in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles. His label Colorfield Records features artful collaborative explorations with musicians in unlikely configurations. Pete’s studio Lucy’s Meat Market has become one of the most in demand spots for recording among a subset of musical artists with LA ties ranging from Ben Wendel and Larry Goldings to Andrew Bird and Feist. Min started Colorfield Records to pursue a less traditional approach to recording, one that he refers to as “sculpted chaos.” He says, “I want what’s in the subconscious. I don’t want it ironed out. When people are just doing it and it’s coming out, that’s what I’m interested in.” Since launching in 2021 the label has released records by Abe Rounds, Larry Goldings, Mark Guiliana, Sam Gendel, Anthony Wilson, Brad Allen Williams and others. Here Pete Min talks about his early development on the east coast, how moving to Los Angeles gave him the space to reinvent himself musically, and what it means to make art music. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/studios

Siblings Clyde and Gracie Lawrence have been making music together since they were little kids. They say there was never a moment when it switched from something they did for fun to something they did professionally. It has been a long, steady climb for them. Along with the other members of their band, Lawrence, they have been diligently chipping away at a pop music career, growing more popular every year, making music that straddles the line between pop, R&B and soul, and doing it on their own terms. Here they talk about the overnight success that was a decade in the making, running their band like a business, taking matters into their own hands, writing songs with “epic messaging and specificity”, and how their experience as an independent touring band led to real meaningful change in the music industry. Listen to the first Third Story Podcast interview with Lawrence from 2020: https://www.third-story.com/listen/lawrence www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story

Born in Bali, Indonesia, Joey Alexander has been performing professionally since 2013 when he was invited by Wynton Marsalis to perform at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Gala. He was 10 years old. Alexander subsequently moved to the United States with his family and has been touring and recording ever since. Today he is 20 years old and releasing his seventh solo album Continuance. Here he talks about his journey out of Bali and onto the bandstand, what it was like for him to be thrust into the limelight at such a young age, what he hopes for the future, and his new record. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/studios

Bassist and composer Todd Sickafoose shows up in a lot of places: on stage with singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco or drummer Allison Miller, behind the scenes as a record producer for artists like Noe Venable and Anais Mitchell, orchestrating the music for the Broadway musical Hadestown (which earned him both a Grammy for record production and a Tony for orchestration), and as a bandleader. His new record Bear Proof is his first album of original music in nearly 15 years. He describes it as “62 minutes of music for eight musicians.” The sound is evocative, melodically rich, rhythmically intense, and features a unique instrumentation of violin, accordion, electric guitar, acoustic piano, clarinet, cornet, bass and drums. Here he talks about his multifaceted career, Hadestown and the process of putting together a Broadway show, working with Ani DiFranco, Bear Proof, releasing music in today’s world, why bass players make good producers, and how a skin cancer diagnosis influenced his life personally and professionally. www.third-story.com www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

Alan Lightman is a physicist, writer (of novels, essays, memoir and science texts), and social entrepreneur. For this unusual episode, his interview served as inspiration for an original song. Made in collaboration with the Podsongs podcast, this conversation covers his career at the intersection of science and humanities, mortality, success, the cosmos, technology, consciousness, writing fiction, embracing ambiguity, out of body experiences, and the idea that there are no answers to profound questions. Also thanks to everyone who voted for the Signal Awards! We received a Silver Signal award for Music podcast. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/studios www.podsongs.com

Gregory "Hutch" Hutchinson is one of the most highly regarded and highly recorded jazz drummers on the planet. Part of what makes him so special is that he sits at the crossroads of the old school and the new school. He was mentored by old jazz masters like Red Rodney, Ray Brown and Betty Carter. He worked extensively with Joshua Redman and Roy Hargrove, among many other innovative jazz musicians of his generation. He has also collaborated with the likes of Common, Karriem Riggins and James Poyser, all practitioners of a new school rhythm approach, influenced by pioneering producer J Dilla. Hutch is able to summon the spirit authentically from both sides because both are part of his personal truth. But until now he has not been a recording artist. Now, at 53 years of age, after having played with everybody, he is releasing his debut solo record Da Bang, and it is not necessarily what one might have expected. Rooted in the jazz tradition, the album demonstrates Hutchinson's versatility, dynamism, and imagination. It may be unexpected, but as Hutch will tell you, it’s coming straight from the heart, and the songs are as much a reflection of the way he feels as they are of the way he plays. Here he talks about growing up in Brooklyn, playing drums as a boy, his mentors, the importance of personal style and of friendship among musicians, his next phase (“this is Hutch 3.0”) and his favorite drummers. He casually invokes so many names that talking to Hutch is like a master class in the music, and you can feel how important it is to him to recognize the contributions of those who came before him, and to place his own contribution within that context. VOTE FOR THE THIRD STORY for the 2023 Signal Awards: https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2023/shows/general/music www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story

John “J.R.” Robinson is one of the most recorded drummers in history (some say he is the most recorded drummer) . He is the drummer on 20 number-one pop songs by artists such as Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie and Steve Winwood, and has been the drummer on more than 100 Grammy-winning tracks. He was said to be Quincy Jones’ favorite recording drummer. Here he talks about growing up in Iowa, falling in love with “groove music”, his incredible career, the stories behind some of his most celebrated recordings, what it means to have “contemporary time”, and his new band SRT. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

Writer Jake Lamar talks about growing up in the Bronx, his lifelong love affair with writing, moving to France in the 90s, his career as a novelist, playwright, and cultural critic in Paris, and his new book Viper’s Dream, a Jazz Noir crime novel set in the jazz world of Harlem between 1936 and 1961. After graduating from Harvard University, Lamar spent six years writing for Time magazine. He has lived in Paris since 1993 and teaches creative writing at Sciences Po. At age 30, he published a memoir, Bourgeois Blues, in which he evoked his relationship with his father. With it, he won the Lyndhurst Prize. In 1993, inspired by the American writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, he moved to Paris in the 18th arrondissement where he still resides. In 1996 he published The Last Integrationist, a novel of contemporary America, criticizing the pace of racial integration and the omnipresent television spectacle he sees as typical of the United States. He is the author of a memoir, seven novels, numerous essays, reviews and short stories, and a play. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/studios

41 years ago this month, Bruce Springsteen released his sixth studio album, Nebraska. He recorded much of the album on one winter night, sitting on the edge of the bed in a rented house in New Jersey, playing acoustic guitar and singing, using a 4 track cassette recorder. The album would go on to have lasting influence, inspire other works of art including movies and books, and other records. And Springsteen would later muse that Nebraska may be his best album. Four decades later the story of Nebraska continues to be an object of fascination. Among those who obsessed over it was the musician and writer Warren Zanes. Zanes joined his brother Dan's band, The Del Fuegos, at age seventeen. The band toured with ZZ Top, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, INXS, and others during the time Warren was in the band, and also famously licensed one of their songs for a commercial which led to some serious criticism at the time. Warren then went on to build a career as an academic, a writer (including the best selling biography of Tom Petty, 2015’s Petty) an educator (he teaches at New York University) a Grammy-nominated documentary producer, and a musical artist who has released multiple albums under his own name, most recently The Collected Warren Zanes. Throughout it all, he held on to his fascination with Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. He recently published the book Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. Warren and I spoke recently about his own personal journey, his thoughts on stardom, work, The Beach Boys, family, addiction, songwriting, betrayal, college towns, fatherhood, Taylor Swift, working with machines, The Kinks, drummers, Booker T. and the M.G.s, Garth Brooks, artificial intelligence, Joseph Campbell, and of course, Nebraska. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story

When Prateek Kuhad moved from India to New York to study economics, there would have been almost no predicting that he would soon become one of the most popular singer songwriters in India. Prateek grew up in Jaipur listening to Indian pop and Bollywood music, along with a handful of international records that his mother had in the house by artists like Harry Belafonte and Cliff Richards. But it was his experience in America, listening to singer songwriters, Americana and new folk artists like Elliott Smith, Fleet Foxes and Laura Marling that influenced his style. Today, Kuhad performs for tens of thousands in India, and his songs have tens of millions of streams - making him one of the most streamed domestic artists in India. His song “cold/mess” was featured on an episode of Ted Lasso, and was also included on Barack Obama’s favorite music of 2019 list, alongside Lizzo, Lil Nas X and Bruce Springsteen. Kuhad's intimate heart-on-your-sleeve lyricism - in both English and Hindi - have come to define his style. He’s a specialist in earnest, direct and sweet love songs. For example, he released a new single earlier this summer called “Hopelessly In Love” which accompanied a deluxe version of his 2022 album 'The Way That Lovers Do' with eight new bonus tracks. And while he may be India's most popular singer-songwriter (according to GQ magazine), he has been spending more time in New York where, like so many international celebrities before him, he is able to hide in plain sight. He took the subway out to Brooklyn earlier this summer to talk with me about his journey from economics grad student to superstar songwriter, the differences between writing in English and Hindi, the universality of romance music, and how no one was more surprised by his success than him.

For the fifth consecutive year I interview my father on his birthday. This year he’s turning 80 and I surprise him with reflections and anecdotes by friends and colleagues from throughout his career, including Jeff Greenfield, Boz Scaggs, Jann Wenner, Michael Cuscuna, Phil Upchurch, Georgie Fame, Gil Goldstein, Janis Siegel, Jorge Drexler and many more! www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast https://www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story