Kyle Meredith

Tim Robbins, Common, Alexandria Riley, Ashley Zukerman, and Jessica Henwick joined me to discuss Bernard’s shot at redemption, the reversal of power inside the Sims marriage, the conspiracy that created the silos, and the question hanging over the entire series: Is it better to live a lie if the truth will destroy you?

Plus new music, classics, news, etc.

6p ET on WFPK. Archives plugged in.

The Mott the Hoople legend told me why great songs still feel like accidents, remembered Hawkins as a “true rock and roll heart,” and explained how Jeff Tweedy agreed to sing on “I Hate Hate” but sent it back covered in guitar without singing a word. At 84, Hunter wasn’t hanging it up. “I’d like to think that I still get lucky sometimes.”

She told me why Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed needed Paula to be volatile, unpredictable, and spectacularly bad at self-preservation. We also got into the way her search for pleasure is used against her as a mother, while the men around her enjoy considerably more room to make a mess without society reconvening the Salem witch trials.

She told me she was “pretty messed up on tour,” which forced her to confront how childhood experiences had followed her into adulthood. We also talked about Charlie Brown as an unlikely mental health icon, recording on a lousy four-track in a garden, and why hearing every mistake made Daniel Johnston’s music feel alive.

David J. Rosen and David Gordon Green told me how Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed grew from “an epidemic of loneliness,” why Tatiana Maslany’s amateur detective needed a camera with curiosity of its own, and how early-2000s electroclash became the soundtrack to domestic dissatisfaction, digital voyeurism, and several extremely questionable clicks.

Callahan told me how marriage and fatherhood reshaped Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, from domestic details and mortality to a song inspired by his wife dreaming about camels collapsing in the desert. “Dreams should be listened to,” he said. “They mean more than anything a mortal could come up with.”

Tom Cavanagh knew the line was funny enough without him climbing all over it. He told me that much of making Acorn TV’s You’re Killing Me with Brooke Shields and Amalia Williamson came down to trusting the scripts and knowing when to stay out of their way. “If you start trying to ornament it, you dissolve it. You can’t overplay it.” Sometimes the actor’s best move is simply saying what the writer wrote.

B-Real told me Cypress Hill’s political fire had only grown sharper after his time in Prophets of Rage with Chuck D and Tom Morello. He also talked about Kentucky’s untapped cannabis culture, Sen Dog taking the lead on Back in Black, recording with Pearl Jam, and why Cypress Hill was still “giving everybody hell” 30 years later.

Judith Light told me that changed with The Terror: Devil in Silver, but the real monster in the AMC series isn’t supernatural. It’s a health care system that discards people once they become inconvenient. “People are no longer held as human beings,” she said. “Until you tell the truth about something, you cannot fix it.”

Plus new music, classics, news, etc.

6p ET on WFPK. Three’s good company.

That was Brandi Carlile's way of explaining By The Way, I Forgive You, and it turned into one of the more memorable conversations I've had about what forgiveness actually asks of us. We talked about how becoming a parent rewired her empathy, why politics became impossible to separate from her personal life, and how the songs she wrote as a teenager still "haunt" her because, in her words, "We don't change. We just collect realizations." It's one of those interviews where the album is just the starting point.

Kimiko Glenn wasn’t joking. While telling me about her debut EP Modern Dance, she said every song came from a real relationship and every new one somehow topped the last in all the wrong ways. That led us into a bigger conversation about dating, emotional intelligence, why too many men are taking relationship advice from other men instead of listening to women, and how turning what she calls her “diary” into music has been both terrifying and freeing. It’s funny, brutally honest, and surprisingly hopeful, even when she’s threatening to write album-length warning labels about exes.

Plus it’s my first day back after trotting around London, Paris, and Belgium for a couple weeks. New music, classics, news, etc.

6p ET on WFPK. Customs cleared the playlist.

He told me he was trying to find his people, not everyone, and that live music still feels like the closest thing he knows to church, minus the wars and the merch-table piety. The whole thing came back to randomness, magic, bad odds, good rooms, and knowing when the demo already had the thing you spent months trying to improve.

#JackAntonoff #Bleachers

Plus new music, classics, news, etc.

6p ET on WFPK. It’s got pep.

She also got into the depression crash after Stranger Things ended, the fear of never working again, and the scarier business of actually being known by another person. “I didn’t know how to accept being seen so fully,” she said. The album, as she put it, wants to be “a little guidebook on how to give up and be loved.”

#MayaHawke #NewMusic