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Tickets and Conscience
Season 5 Episode 505
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Today I want to put two names in the same frame—Joan Baez and Taylor Swift—not because they sound alike or have the same values but b…
5 months, 3 weeks ago
Enduring Stones
Season 5 Episode 504
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In a recent episode, we spent time with a man who changed popular culture and then became a warning about what fame, isolation, and a…
5 months, 3 weeks ago
The Beatles Blueprint
Season 5 Episode 503
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I’d like to begin, not in Liverpool or Hamburg or Abbey Road, but in an American living room—mine, and millions of others—on a Sunday…
5 months, 3 weeks ago
The Elvis Trap
Season 5 Episode 502
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Today we’re stepping into complicated territory.
Not a personal hero of mine.
Not a composer whose scores I pore over, or a bandleader …
5 months, 3 weeks ago
Rock’s Rough Architect
Season 5 Episode 501
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Before we talk about charts and riffs and influence, I want to begin with a memory.
Years ago, I saw Chuck Berry live at the Paramount…
5 months, 3 weeks ago
Creative Inheritance
Season 5 Episode 500
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Birthdays - as well as the 500th episode of a podcast - are times that generally you might want to slow down and look at the past, t…
5 months, 3 weeks ago
West Side Stories
Season 4 Episode 499
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Leonard Bernstein played piano from age 10, and attended Boston Latin School and Harvard University. So he studied music theory befo…
5 months, 3 weeks ago
The Sinatra Method
Season 4 Episode 498
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Today, we’re going to begin in Hoboken, New Jersey, walk through the apprenticeship years, and then trace how partnerships, heartbrea…
5 months, 4 weeks ago
Multimedia Pioneer
Season 4 Episode 497
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Today's episode is the first in a look at several dozen musicians who lived after 1900, roughly in chronological order. And let me e…
5 months, 4 weeks ago
Precision & Passion
Season 4 Episode 496
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Merci, Monsieur Bartley. I was born in 1875 in the little town of Ciboure, in the Basque country of southwestern France. My father wa…
6 months ago