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Talkhouse

Your favorite musicians, filmmakers, and other creative minds one-on-one. No moderator, no script, no typical questions. The Talkhouse Podcast offers unique insights into creative work from all genres and generations. <a href="https://pod.link/Talkhouse" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Subscribe now</a>, and explore more illuminating shows on the <a href="https://talkhouse.com/category/podcast" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Talkhouse Podcast Network.</a>

Talkhouse Podcast

Podcast

Future Islands Talk with Dan Deacon on the Talkhouse Podcast

Personal Space is a conundrum: indie without a scene, prog disdaining complexity, a dad band without dads. Since they released their debut EP, The Early Universe Was Entirely Opaque, in 2014, the band has been a work in progress, perennially under review. For their official debut, Sam Rosenthal and Henry Koehler joined forces with Alex Silva and Jesse Chevan, recently of Brooklyn smoothcore band Face of Man, to release 2016’s Ecstatic Burbs on Tiny Engines. Ecstatic Burbs showcased the band’s “eccentro-pop” sound and range of influences, from experimental post-punk like the Dismemberment Plan to the baroque pop of The Zombies, and earned the band praise from the Village Voice, Stereogum, and Brooklyn Vegan.
A Lifetime of Leisure, the band’s second LP release, and its first for Good Eye, showcases the members’ development, musically and personally, since Ecstatic Burbs was released. Where Ecstatic Burbs dealt with reconciling the saccharine surreality of a suburban upbringing with the stark realities of life after college, A Lifetime of Leisure finds Personal Space negotiating more thematically complex terrain. The world has gotten a lot darker in the intervening years, and the grooves have followed suit. Like Steely Dan with less glitz, or a mordant Pinback, the 10 tracks on ALOL find the band fretting over downward mobility, preoccupied with ethically sourcing their groceries, and hoping, against hope, that humanity can still find its way to a very chill, socialist utopia.

Personal Space

Music

Celebrating 20 Years of India.Arie’s Acoustic Soul

Across almost 25 years, Michael Feuerstack has built an underground canon of crooked and beautiful songs. Aside from his own song-craft under his name and former alias Snailhouse, his reputation is also as an exceptional collaborator, producer and general facilitator of music. Mike is a core member of Bell Orchestre, producer for Camille Delean, Paper Beat Scissors, and has contributed to countless performances and recordings with the likes of The Luyas, Thus Owls, Land of Talk, Julie Doiron, and many many more. While Feuerstack arranged and recorded his new album Harmonize the Moon completely solo at his apartment in the spring of 2020, the songs that compose it were written over the past couple years, on wanderings and tours as well as at home. He embarked on a slow process of balancing the poetic with the narrative, producing songs that flow naturally instead of adhering too rigidly to established forms. The result is a collection that’s pensive but playful, introspective yet generous, and achingly intimate.

Michael Feuerstack

Three Great Things: Michael Feuerstack

Theory of Ice is a powerful act of world-building and creative sovereignty by Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg writer, scholar, and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. One of the most compelling and important Indigenous voices of her generation, Leanne is the renowned author of Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail); This Accident of Being Lost (winner of the MacEwan University Book of the Year; finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award; named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and Quill &amp; Quire); As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (awarded Best Subsequent Book by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association); and the creator of the album f(l)light which combined complex poetry and multi-layered stories of the land, spirit, and body with lush electronic/acoustic arrangements. 
This new album, Theory Of Ice is the result of an ongoing practice in the poetics and aesthetics of musical relationship, the material originating in written poetry, and worked into surprising, richly organic, song-forms through a collaborative generative process with bandmates Ansley Simpson and Nick Ferrio, producer Jonas Bonetta (Evening Hymns), and producer Jim Bryson.
(Photo Credit: Aaron Mason)

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

In Conversation: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Wares’ Cassia Hardy

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An artist of many disciplines, Alex Somers takes inspiration from all walks of life. His studies in music took him from Boston (Berklee) to Reykjavík (Iceland Academy of the Arts), where he became involved with Sigur Rós. With the famed band, Somers’s role included not just producer but designer as well with his contributions to artwork for albums such as Takk… Alongside frontman Jónsi, he formed duo Jónsi &amp; Alex, who released two albums Riceboy Sleeps (2009) and Lost &amp; Found (2019). As a producer, Alex has lent his talents to works by Julianna Barwick, Gyða Valtýsdóttir, Damien Rice, Amiina, Sin Fang, and Briana Marela. In the decade between Riceboy… and his official debut albums, Somers expanded his audio expertise to film. As a composer, he’s contributed soundtracks for Miss Americana(the Taylor Swift documentary), Honey Boy, Captain Fantastic, the How To Train Your Dragon Trilogy, Aloha, tv shows Black Mirror (“Hang the DJ”) and WGN’s Manhattan, and composed alongside legendary composers such as Danny Elfman (Don’t Worry He Won’t Get Far) and the late Jóhann Jóhannsson. 2021 marks the first time he channels his talents into a project solely his own, a chance to express himself while simultaneously sharing all he’s learned from his partnerships, friendships, and wide-ranging interests.
(Photo Credit: Bella Howard)
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Alex Somers

Alex Somers on His Sibling Musical Careers

Michael Ian Black Talks with Jen Spyra on the Talkhouse Podcast

Chad VanGaalen is a Calgary-based songwriter and producer. His new album, World’s Most Stressed-Out Gardener, is out March 2021 via Sub Pop. 
(Photo Credit: Sebastian Buzzalino)

Chad VanGaalen

In Conversation: Chad VanGaalen and Seth A. Smith

Haley Blais is a Vancouver based singer-songwriter/musician. She’s been DIY-ing it since 2014, turning out song after song of defiant scream-into-your-pillow bedroom pop anthems. Since the success of her 2018 EP Let Yourself Go, Haley has organically earned a considerable online reputation for her self-deprecating, self-loving balladry sung out in operatic crescendos. 2020 sees the release of highly awaited debut Below the Salt via Tiny Kingdom Music.
(Photo Credit: Lindsay Elliott)

Haley Blais

In Conversation: Doohickey Cubicle and Haley Blais

As a band, Lake Street Dive epitomizes democracy in action: the group, expanded into a quintet since touring keyboardist Akie Bermiss officially joined in 2017, share writing and arrangement duties. Their personalities, skills, and wide-ranging taste in pop, rock, R&amp;B, and jazz have long blended together to make an impressively cohesive sound, both sophisticated and playful, combining retro influences with contemporary attitude. For their new album Obviously, the band turned to Mike Elizondo — songwriting collaborator for Dr. Dre and Eminem, producer for Fiona Apple, Mary J. Blige, and more — to help flesh things out and take them in a new direction.
(Photo Credit: Shervin Lainez)

Lake Street Dive

Three Great Things: Lake Street Dive

Talkhouse Weekend Playlist: Jaguar Jonze’s Songs For My Younger Self

Israel Nash’s new album, Topaz, was recorded over the course of about a year in the Quonset hut studio he built about 600 feet from his house in the Texas Hill Country. While musician friends from nearby Austin contributed to the project, Topaz marks the first album Nash has recorded mostly on his own, both taking his time and relishing his newfound access to immediacy, punching the red button moments after an idea hit. The resulting Topaz is a triumphant rock-and-roll experiment, full of fat horns, gospel choruses, swagger, hope, and pain. The meaty rock foundation with touches of psychedelia and skylark folk that fans have come to love are still here, now with a soulful heft that nods to Muscle Shoals and Memphis. Political and personal, Topaz is moody and vast, cohesive and compelling.
(Photo Credit: Chad Wadsworth)