Episodes

Daniel Kessler grew up between London, Paris, and Washington, D.C., listening to his older brother’s early UK rock records. He picked up guitar as a teenager, the same day he quit skateboarding, and after moving to New York in the late ’90s, he set out to find musicians serious enough to start a band. In 1997, that band became Interpol and when their debut Turn on the Bright Lights came out in 2002, it helped define a new wave of New York indie bands, alongside the Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a...

Brittany Howard has never been the type to do things quietly. Whether it was fronting Alabama Shakes with a voice that could fill a room and level it in the same breath, or striking out on her own with two solo records that pulled her sound in wilder and more personal directions, she's spent the last decade refusing to stay in one place for long. Now she's back with her bandmates—Zac Cockrell and Heath Fogg— for a new Alabama Shakes album, I Must Be Dreaming, their first in 11 years. And on tod...

In Revisionist History's new season The Staten Island Problem, senior producer Ben Naddaff-Hafrey investigates the story of what was, at the time, the biggest secession movement in the U.S. since the Civil War. The Staten Island Problem reconstructs the battle for New York City amidst the turbulent early 1990s—the rise of Rudy Giuliani, the peak of the homicide rate, young Donald Trump, and the first Black mayor of New York—all through the prism of the city’s Forgotten Borough. At the height of ...

Harvey Mason Jr. grew up steeped in music. His father, Harvey Mason Sr., was half of Herbie Hancock's Headhunters rhythm section and played on countless sessions through the '70s and '80s. After a brief detour through college basketball, Harvey Mason Jr. built his own life in music, starting where a lot of careers do: writing jingles. From there he assembled a production and songwriting résumé that includes Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber, and Beyoncé, along with film work spanni...

My friend W. Kamau Bell has a new show out, Who's With Me?. Known for having conversations about the issues that divide, enrage, and confuse us, Kamau sits down with someone he admires to give them their flowers, ask his most burning questions, and invite his guest to give him and his audience homework on how to make the world a better place. Daveed Diggs joins Kamau to discuss his hip-hop career, parenthood, breaking out with Hamilton, and pursuing creative projects with friends. Kamau gives D...

Melissa Auf der Maur came of age in Montreal's bohemian art scene in the '80s and early '90s, at the very moment that alternative rock was becoming the defining sound of a generation. Through an unlikely chain of events, her band Tinker landed an opening slot for the Smashing Pumpkins, and Billy Corgan, sensing her natural talent on bass, recommended her to Courtney Love. What followed was a turbulent apprenticeship. Auf der Maur joined Hole for the Live Through This tour in 1994, just weeks aft...

Today we're revisiting a conversation with acclaimed British guitarist Johny Marr. Marr started playing guitar as a young teenager growing up in Manchester. When he turned 15 he dropped out of school and moved to London to join the band Sister Ray. A couple years later he would help form The Smiths with Morrissey, Mike Joyce, and Marr’s friend and bassist, Andy Rourke. After The Smiths broke up in 1987, Marr went on to collaborate with an array of different musicians and play in bands like The ...

Joe Jackson showed up in the late '70s UK New Wave scene, all nervous energy and biting wit, with hits like "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" putting him in the same conversation as Elvis Costello and Squeeze. But where a lot of his peers stayed in their lane musically, Jackson kept moving: into the jump-blues swing of "Jumpin' Jive," into the sophisticated, Latin-tinged jazz of Night and Day, and then into classical composition, into a music-hall concept album framed around a fictional Edward...

Ed O'Brien has spent decades crafting some of the most textured, expansive guitar in modern rock. From the fragmented beauty of Kid A and Amnesiac to the experimental layers of The King of Limbs, with the more straightforward muscle of OK Computer somewhere in between, few players have done more to expand what the instrument can do in a rock context. In recent years, Ed has been building a parallel universe, one where he's at the center. It started with Earth in 2020, released under the moniker...

Just before the premiere of Earth, Wind & Fire's new Questlove-directed documentary , the three OGs of the group stopped by Broken Record: vocalist Phillip Bailey, singer and percussionist Ralph Johnson, and bass player Verdine White. Host Justin Richmond will tell you straight up that talking about Earth, Wind & Fire's music feels a little beside the point. It exists on a level that resists explanation — spiritual, emotional, somewhere in the body before it reaches the brain. What the conversa...

The 1960s brings social and political change to the world and to New York City, where a young Johnny Pacheco keeps people dancing with his orchestra and charanga music. The Dominican musician is also going through a divorce and his lawyer, Jerry Masucci, happens to be a fan of Johnny’s music. The two form a music partnership that will forever change music. They call their music label Fania Records. Hosted by Oscar and Emmy-nominated actress and Brooklyn native Rosie Perez and produced by Pulitz...

The New Pornographers have never been easy to pin down. Since forming in Vancouver in the late ’90s, the band became one of the defining acts of the Canadian indie rock explosion. They’re part of a scene that also produced Neko Case, Dan Bejar, and a generation of artists who seemed to operate entirely outside the commercial mainstream. Co-founders Carl Newman and Kathryn Calder have spent more than two decades making records that sound like they arrived fully formed: densely layered, relentless...

Mopreme Shakur is 2Pac's half-brother, a rapper, filmmaker, and record producer living at the intersection of revolutionary politics and hip-hop. He's one of the only surviving members of Thug Life and Outlawz, raised alongside 2Pac in the tradition of Black liberation activism. And now, for the first time, he's telling his own story. His new book, This Thug's Life, is a book about brotherhood, survival, movement building, and the making of a legend. On today's episode Justin Richmond talks to...

Before Hardy was known as the breakout artist who pushed country music into hard rock territory, he was a self-proclaimed redneck from Philadelphia, Mississippi who studied songwriting at Middle Tennessee State University. Since moving to Nashville in 2013, he's written 16 number ones for artists like Morgan Wallen, Blake Shelton, and Dierks Bentley. In 2018, with the encouragement of producer Joey Moi and his label Big Loud, Hardy started writing songs for himself — and it paid off. He's now a...

Recently, we had visionary music producer Robert Margouleff on the show and today we're sharing an excerpt from his new audiobook, Shaping Sounds: Stevie Wonder, DEVO, the Synth Revolution and My Life Behind the Music. In legendary studios like Electric Lady and the Record Plant, Margouleff became a pioneering producer and engineer for artists like Billy Preston, Jeff Beck, DEVO, The Isley Brothers, and David Sanborn. A true sonic innovator, he was an early adopter of immersive audio and surroun...

Robert Margouleff is one of the most quietly consequential figures in modern music — a sonic architect who helped build some of the most innovative and enduring sounds of the last half century. Together with his partner Malcolm Cecil, Robert created TONTO, the world's largest analog synthesizer, and used it to co-produce a string of era-defining Stevie Wonder classics including Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, and Fulfillingness' First Finale. He went on to work with Jeff Beck, The ...

Maya Hawke first became known to wide audiences as an actress — especially through her work in Stranger Things — but she's been quietly building a parallel life as a songwriter of genuine depth. Since her debut album Blush in 2020, she's released four records. Her latest, Maitreya Corso, arrives at a pivotal moment: the album follows her marriage to longtime musical collaborator Christian Lee Hutson, and centers on a fictional persona through who Hawke explores ego, ambition, and the strange la...

In the latest season of Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell is looking at the origins and consequences of mistakes—why we make them, the context in which we make them, and what happens after we make them. Years ago a music producer named Irv Gotti—a hitmaker for Jay-Z, Ja Rule, and Ashanti—was tapped by Sony Music to make a record with Jennifer Lopez. They wanted a big hit. And Irv delivered. But then he made the biggest mistake of his career. Find more episodes of Revisionist History whereve...

The magic of Bruce Hornsby isn't just that he's one of American music's great piano stylists — or that he wrote one of the most unlikely pop hits of the 1980s, a song about racism with two improvised solos that nobody at his label thought should be the single. It's how relentlessly he's kept moving, long after he had any commercial reason to. Hornsby grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, and got discovered playing a steak and ale joint across from the Hampton Coliseum by Mike McDonald. He scored h...

The magic of Dave Grohl isn't just that he's one of rock music's great raconteurs, or one of its greatest drummers and frontmen of the last thirty-plus years. It's the sheer number of lives he's gotten to live within rock and roll. Dave started out drumming for Scream, one of DC's great, underrated hardcore bands, running in the same circles as Ian MacKaye and the Dischord crowd. Then he joined Nirvana and more than made his mark in one of the most consequential bands since the Beatles, and an ...

Wyclef Jean may just be the most wide-ranging rapper, producer, performer, and composer of his time. As the lead producer and MC of The Fugees, he helped craft their 1996 landmark album The Score, one of the best-selling hip-hop albums of all time. The following year he released his debut solo album, The Carnival, which included hits like "Guantanamera" featuring Celia Cruz, and the platinum-certified single "Gone Till November." As a writer and producer for other artists, Wyclef is behind Whit...

Jessie Ware has always moved between worlds. She's a British soul singer who spent the early part of her career making intimate, understated records. Then, in 2020, she released What's Your Pleasure? and morphed into a full-blown disco goddess. The record received widespread critical acclaim, earned Jessie her first top-three album on the UK charts, and was nominated for British Album of the Year at the BRITs. Today Jessie traces that sonic evolution back to an especially ripe creative period in...

Patrick Watson first came to international attention in 2007 when his album Close to Paradise won the Polaris Music Prize, Canada's most prestigious award for a Canadian album. Over the course of his career, the Montreal-based singer and composer built a devoted following through his orchestral pop arrangements, his remarkable voice, and live performances that blend intimacy with a theatric sensibility. Watson's music has found a second life far beyond his core fanbase. His song “Je te laissera...

There are a few artists we wish could've come on Broken Record, people who were sometimes misunderstood or hassled by the press and would have had the opportunity to be heard. One such artist is George Michael. Since that's unfortunately not a possibility, we're doing the next best thing—sharing a preview of a new podcast, Big Lives, and a special episode about George Michael. Every week on Big Lives, hosts Kai Wright and Emmanuel Dzotsi dig into the BBC archive to explore the story behind the i...