Lsq

For episode 128, I spoke with the brilliant Mdou Moctar, a Tuareg singer, guitarist and songwriter whose sound combines rock, blues and contemporary Saharan music into songs that range from shreddy and electrifying to beautiful and contemplative, and all the stops in between. I highly recommend digging into his catalog, which is now several albums deep. His latest releases with his band were a pair of interconnected albums: 2024’s Funeral For Justice, which is of the fiery rock & roll variety, and Tears of Injustice, which was released this year and features acoustic versions of the same songs — gorgeous renditions whose sound harkens back to the more sparse style Mdou employed on his early albums, before he had a full band supporting him. During the summer, I connected over Zoom with both Mdou and his bassist, Mikey Coltun, who also produces their albums, and that is the main interview in this episode. But I also had the pleasure of meeting up with the band in person, following our Zoom, to moderate an e

"I got the writing bug very early," says Suede's iconic frontman Brett Anderson. "I was fascinated by the simplicity of what was in front of me: You have six strings, and a limited number of notes, and 26 letters in the alphabet, and all of these things simultaneously mock you and inspire you. And it became a sort of an addiction for me quite early on, trying to search for that song, trying to reach for those chords, trying to write that album, and it still is. I still love it.”In the lead up to Suede’s excellent new album, Antidepressants, which the Guardian has hailed as a “late career triumph,” I had the pleasure of connecting over Zoom with Anderson for a conversation about his creative evolution. One of my favorite things about our interview was hearing him describe his passion for the process of writing and the fact that, even though it can be torturous, it’s ultimately so satisfying. He said that he resonates with the famous Dorothy Parker quote, “I hate writing, but I love having wr

I remember back in the mid 90s when I first got into Elliott Smith’s music and discovered that he also had a band. That band was called Heatmiser, and they were putting out amazing music, as well. A particular favorite for me was their 1996 album Mic City Sons, an album I’ve listened to hundreds of times over the years. And they’ve just released out an expanded 30th anniversary edition via Jack White’s Third Man records that includes demos of tunes from the album, previously unreleased recordings from the sessions, and even a full band version of Elliott’s solo tune “Christian Brothers.” It was awesome getting to talk with Heatmiser singer and guitarist and co-songwriter Neil Gust about the making of Mic City Sons — what went right and what went wrong; by the time it came out they had all but broken up — and also about the making of Heatmiser which was Neil and Elliott and bassist Sam Coomes (also of Quasi), and drummer Tony Lash. We delve into how Neil and Elliott first met as college classmates, initially p

I can still remember being in high school in the early 90s and having my mind blown by seeing the video for Fishbone’s "Sunless Saturday" on MTV’s 120 Minutes and going to my local record store (R.I.P., Twisted Disque on Jamaica Ave) to get their album The Reality of My Surroundings, and then walking around Queens with it blasting in my headphones, mesmerized by the way they melded genres like ska, funk, punk, metal and more. Fishbone is one of the bands that showed me what was possible, as far as breaking down both genre and racial barriers in music. SO! When I learned that Fishbone were getting ready to release their first full-length album in almost 20 years, their awesome new LP Stockholm Syndrome and that they would be doing interviews, I knew I had to make it happen. It was a blast connecting with Angelo Moore, who is the only permanent member of Fishbone — the only one who has been in the band for its entire 40 year history, while others have left or joined or left and re-joined — for the con

Following the recent release of her excellent sophomore album, If You Asked For A Picture, Blondshell’s Sabrina Teitelbaum joins the LSQ podcast to talk about important musical discoveries along her creative path: Falling in love with the Rolling Stones after her parents took her to see them in concert at Madison Square Garden when she was only seven years old, delving into songwriting a few years later, as a way of coping with obsessive-compulsive disorder, going to as many concerts as she could in NYC as a teenager and seeing bands like the Black Keys, Haim and The Kooks, finding inspiration in the lyrical prowess of Fiona Apple and Frank Ocean, and more. Blondshell is on tour now, and through most of the rest of this year. Get tickets here. 

Ben Kweller’s music first stole my heart back in the early oughts when he released his wonderful debut album Sha Sha, and I have been a huge admirer of his work ever since. I’ve also had the good fortune of his friendship for more than twenty years, so it was amazing to finally get together with him for the LSQ podcast. Episode 123 features a deep and poignant conversation with BK about his entire creative history, including his excellent latest album, Cover The Mirrors, which was written in the wake of the tragic death of his teenage son Dorian. In addition to sharing how that tremendous loss ended up inspiring him to reconnect with making music in the innocent way he’d done as a kid, he details what those early creative years were like for him — writing Beatles-inspired love songs on the piano as a little kid, starting his band Radish after hearing Nirvana, hustling to get Radish their first shows at Chauncey’s Place, a local billiards hall in Greenville, Texas, eventually getting rides from his parents to

For episode 122 of the LSQ podcast, I had the pleasure of connecting with the up-and-coming singer-songwriter Uwade, whose beautiful debut studio album, Florilegium, arrived this spring following, truly, YEARS of anticipation from those of us who were first captivated by her voice when we heard her sing on Fleet Foxes’ 2020 album Shore. As you’ll hear, Uwade’s musical influences since childhood span an array of genres including R&B, gospel, choir music, pop, hip-hop, indie rock and more, so it’s no wonder that her own songs are so refreshingly genre agnostic. Uwade is also currently studying for her PhD in Classics, and I was fascinated to hear her talk about how her academic and musical pursuits feed each other. 

“There was always a way that music could speak to me,” says Youth Lagoon’s Trevor Powers. “I was really shy as a kid and I had a lot on my mind that I didn’t know how to get out. And music felt like one of those cheat codes where I felt like what I could say through one song was a lifetime worth of what was in my brain that I couldn’t say any other way.” I was instantly captivated by Youth Lagoon’s music when I first heard it more than a decade ago: Trevor Powers’ plaintive, childlike voice, the dreaminess and heady sonic textures of his music, the candor in his storytelling. In the years since the Boise, Idaho artist’s 2011 debut album, he has continually deepened his ability to make music that soothes and haunts at the same time. His latest album, Rarely Do I Dream, is his best yet, and one of my favorite LPs of 2025 so far. In the conversation in episode 121, Trevor talks about how discovering a trove of old home movies helped inspire the new album, and remind him of the importance of finding the true feel

When I learned that house and dance music legend Crystal Waters has been finishing her first new album since 1997 and was getting ready to share singles and do interviews and therefore might be up for talking with me, I was so geeked.  I’ve been a fan since the early 90s when huge hits like "Gypsy Woman" and "100% Pure Love" were all over the radio, and it was an honor to get to connect with her for episode 120 and a conversation about her songwriting process, how she got her start in music, and why this current creative phase is one of the most exciting in her thirty-plus year career.  Crystal recently shared a great new single called "You & Me" -- a collaboration with the Swedish duo ManyFew -- and she was also recently honored during Miami Music Week at the inaugural Femmy Awards with awards for The Voice of House and the Female Icon Award. And there will be a lot more new music coming from Crystal in the remainder of this year, and live shows, too!

In episode 119, I catch up with Alexis Krauss and Derek Miller, the noise pop duo better known as Sleigh Bells. I have been a massive Sleigh Bells fan since their first few singles back in 2009 — brash, genre-defying bangers like “Crown on the Ground” and “Infinity Guitars” that sounded unlike anything else, combining elements of pop, metal, hardcore, hip-hop and punk. They’ve continued to blow my mind with the leaps they’ve made since then. The three of us are also old friends at this point, and though we’ve done shorter interviews in the past, it was great to finally get to ask them some of the classic LSQ podcast questions about all the shit they were into as kids. In this episode, Alexis talks about what she learned from her experience in a teen pop band, revelations she had at the punk and hardcore shows she frequented during her New Jersey youth, and learning to integrate the diverse parts of her musical voice. Derek describes falling in love with the soundtrack to La Bamba as a kid growing up in Florid

It's a good thing ANOHNI and I decided to leave the cameras turned off for the interview included in episode 118 of the LSQ podcast, because there were moments when she was talking --about her creative process, about using her voice and her music as a survival strategy, about what it felt like to grow up as a trans femme amidst the violence of patriarchy -- that I was nearly in tears, so moved by the way she described her experience. And since crying while interviewing is as cringe as "crying in baseball," it was a relief not to be seen in those moments. It was fascinating to hear ANOHNI's story of discovering her musical spirit as a child, motivated by a desire to reveal feminine emotion and power in a way that she felt her mother was not allowed to, and to learn how she developed her creative process from there. ANOHNI talks about drawing inspiration from artists such as Kate Bush, Boy George, Marc Almond, Alison Moyet, Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Diamanda Galas and more, and how she has lea

On the heels of the announcement last week of a much anticipated new album by indie folk band The Head and the Heart, I’m excited to be able to share the following conversation with the band’s Matty Gervais. This is one of your first chances to hear more about their exceptional new collection of tunes, Aperture, the band’s sixth LP, which will be out on May 9th. There are already a few beautiful introductory singles online now, including the anthemic "Arrow" and the newly shared album opener, "After The Setting Sun." It was a pleasure to connect over zoom with Matty to talk about the making of Aperture and how it heralds a new chapter of freedom and collaboration for THATH. We also talk about some earlier THATH history, how they have benefited in more recent years from band therapy, and his own personal creative process for this new album. And of course we start by delving into Matty’s early life experiences with music, growing up in Seattle during the grunge explosion, falling in love wit

Welcome to season 8 of the LSQ podcast! I’m thrilled to kick off this season with an interview with Julien Baker & Torres, two artists whose music on their own I’ve admired for years: Julien, as a solo performer and member of boygenius, and Torres, which is the musical moniker of the singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott. Last year, they revealed that they had been working together on a country project and they shared a beautiful debut single, “Sugar in the Tank” that I fell in love with instantly. Now there’s an album coming and it’s so good! Send A Prayer My Way, a collection of gorgeous tunes that Julien and Mackenzie collaborated on during the past couple of years, arrives on April 17th via Matador. In the interview, we talk about the inspiration for the project, as well as their respective childhoods, growing up in the South, surrounded by country music and country music culture, and how their relationship with the genre evolved over the years and how it ended up informing the album. We also delve into

I learned a new word during this interview you’re about to hear with ⁠Big Thief⁠’s ⁠Adrianne Lenker⁠ and the deeply under appreciated singer-songwriter ⁠Tucker Zimmerman⁠: Numinous. It means “having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity.” Numinous. That’s how Tucker described the experience of recording the album ⁠Dance of Love,⁠ with Big Thief as his backing band, and the album’s producer. Released in October, Dance of Love is a collection of absolutely gorgeous folk tunes, written and amassed by Tucker over many, many years. It’s beauty derives not only from what is actually on the album, but also from the spirit behind it — of kindred creative souls finding each other, across generations, across international miles, to make something gentle and singular and true. About twelve minutes into the interview, Adrianne tells the story of how she first heard Tucker’s 1980 album ⁠Square Dance ⁠while getting a tattoo in Colorado. She was instantly mesmerized, a

“I’ve always been pretty attached to my dreams,” says singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt. “[Dreams have] consistently been this means of receiving symbolic information that feels important. They do feel somewhat connected — the mental space that I’m in when I’m writing and the way that I feel in certain kinds of dreams. Sometimes you have a dream where it feels very loaded and weighted in this way that you can’t really argue with, and I look forward to those. And sometimes it’s the same with songs, where you just get hit with something and you don’t know where it came from, and it feels like there’s no work involved, like it’s just sort of this thing that is delivered, and then that’s when you get really lucky.”  It was a pleasure to have this conversation with Pratt, whose gorgeous fourth full-length, Here In The Pitch, is one of my favorite albums of this year, and has rightfully been among 2024’s most critically lauded LPs. Given how often folks describe the album as dreamlike or hypnagogic, it was fascinatin

What an incredible joy it was to spend some time talking face to face with one of my all-time favorite artists — Julian Casablancas of The Voidz and The Strokes⁠ — for episode 113 of the LSQ podcast. We met up for this interview backstage at LA’s Orpheum Theater just after The Voidz played a mind-blowing set, including music from their awesome new album, Like All Before You. Although we’re old friends and have done more than a few interviews over the years, this conversation allowed us to touch on subjects we’d never reached in the past. In addition to talking about both of his bands and how their goals have evolved, we discuss Julian’s own development as a songwriter and musician, starting with his teenage years learning to play songs by Nirvana and Green Day on guitar as a springboard for writing his own tunes, how he gained the confidence to begin sharing his music with friends (at one point pretending that his own composition was a Rancid tune, just to see what people thought of it), and how long it took

I kind of felt like I already knew Madi Diaz, even though we’d never met before, when we connected over Zoom this summer for the conversation in episode 112 of the LSQ podcast. That’s in part because we have many music friends in common, and I’ve heard a lot of great things about her over the years. But it’s even more the case because her songs are so beautifully direct and intimate; they give you a really vivid sense of her inner world, with all of its relatable nuances.   You can hear that gift on full display on albums like her 2021 LP History of a Feeling, and even more powerfully on her latest one, Weird Faith, which came out earlier this year, and of which a deluxe edition arrives later this month. In this conversation, we talk about creative experiences that have impacted her since childhood, whether it’s doing laps around her house while listening to her dad play piano, or singing along with Whitney Houston and the Beatles and The Mamas & the Papas as a kid in rural Pennsylvania, or connecting wi

I’ll never forget the first time I heard the music of the iconic noise-rock band The Jesus Lizard — it was more than thirty years ago, thanks to my older brother Michael playing me their song “Seasick,” from the band’s second studio album, Goat, released in 1991 and produced by the legendary Steve Albini.  That song blew my mind. It made me feel like I was actually inside of the tune itself, and that, like the narrator of the song, yowling about how he “can’t swim,” that I was somehow drowning in the music. Not in a scary way — in an empowering, visceral way. It’s a song I still go back to, and that album is one I go back to all the time. It was a thrill to get to ask David about that song, in particular, about working with Albini, and so much more. In this episode, David discusses his earliest creative inclinations as a visual artist, and as a music lover and musician, and how everything changed when he discovered punk rock at age twenty. We also delved into the making of the first new studio album by The Je

Remi Wolf is my favorite kind of modern artist: a young music-maker who truly doesn't give a flying eff what genre names folks might use to try to neatly categorize her sound. Remi knows that, as she once said, "genres are pretty obsolete at this point." She continued (in this interview with Spin): "I think artists are their own genre, where every artist is creating such a world for themselves that they are becoming the sound and the thing." The world Remi has created over the course of the past several years and two full-length albums, including her awesome new sophomore LP Big Ideas, is kaleidoscopic and soulful and trippy and funky and full of humor. I had a blast talking to her about her childhood experiences with music and her own creativity, and how they overlapped with her experiences as a serious athlete who was involved in competitive skiing until music proved to be a stronger calling. We talked about the stuff she heard around the house -- Prince, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin -- a

On the heels of Foster the People's first new album in seven years, their excellent, uplifting and highly danceable new album Paradise State of Mind, hear from the project's creative mastermind about key moments in his musical journey: how he learned to play piano by ear as a kid, and was later inspired to play guitar by hearing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on a kiosk at Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; how he discovered the value of a local music community through his city's metalcore scene; how his dad talked him out of joining the Air Force and persuaded him to move to Los Angeles to pursue his music dream instead; what he learned from the rejection and adversity of his early years in LA; how he overcame the fear he felt after having a hit with "Pumped Up Kicks" that he might not be able to do it again; what it felt like to open for his heroes The Beach Boys; how his songwriting has evolved since then, and more. Paradise State of Mind is out now, and yo