American Song

Get in touch! At the start, radio was like the Wild West. Anyone could get on the air, and it was all fair game: preachers, farmers, a quack broadcasting from Mexico. But that was before the networks moved in, before the payola hearings took the records out of the DJs' hands, and ultimately before a single law in 1996 sold the dial to a few corporations. Signalis the story of American radio's hundred-year fight between the people who wanted to say something and the people who wanted to sell s...

Get in touch! In 1920, a radio signal was a rumor with electricity behind it — a handful of amateurs in garages and attics, broadcasting into a void nobody had proven was listening. There were no networks, no formats, no rules, because nobody in power had figured out yet that there was anything here worth controlling. That's the world this episode opens in: the accidental birth of American radio, before it belonged to anyone. "Hello, World" traces how a scattered hobby became a national voice...

Get in touch! Today’s episode is an interview with the Southern California based singer-songwriter, Anson Corsair. His remarkably open interview reveals some of the highs and the lows he’s lived through and how he’s processed these events into a growing group of beautiful songs. While American Song generally covers some of the most well-known musicians throughout the canon of popular music, these artists are just the tip of the iceberg. Interviews with people like Anson help us appreciate jus...

Get in touch! Today on American Song, I’ll introduce you to my friend, A.J. Deiboldt. A.J. is a singer-songwriter originally from upstate New York, now making his music in a small town in the woods of Tennessee just outside Nashville. American Song is a show that celebrates the history, breadth and richness of our country’s music in all its flavors. Writing memorable and sensitive songs in the style of Chris Whitley, and with historic connections to acoustic blues pioneers such as Ledbelly, S...

Get in touch! New Wave was born in a New York dive bar, then it got on a plane. In England it picked up eyeliner and a synthesizer where its guitar used to be. But somewhere over the Atlantic, in a few very specific places, it also picked up something heavier: a government watching. This is the final episode in our New Wave series, and it's the one where the genre stops being an aesthetic and starts being evidence. In Chile, three teenagers formed a band while Pinochet's regime was still maki...

Get in touch! Britain just turned the lights fluorescent. The future arrives every Wednesday now, whether you're ready or not. Picture 1979 England: factories closing, Thatcher cutting glass with every syllable, and a music press so brutal it could make or break a band before the tea went cold. Punk already burned down the house. Now a blond former schoolteacher from Newcastle who sounds like a cathedral trying to seduce you, a man dressed as three centuries of fashion history simultaneously,...

Get in touch! It was the late 1970s and early '80s. New York was bankrupt. Akron's tire factories were closing. Regular families were struggling with double-digit inflation. The AIDS epidemic was raging. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the US boycotted the Olympics in protest. John Lennon was assassinated. And somewhere in the background, always, that low hum — nuclear warheads, patient at the edge of the light. Into that America walked Blondie, Talking Heads, Devo, the B-52s,...

Get in touch! Five hundred million years ago, ( approximately 1977), something extraordinary happened on the floor of an ancient sea. Life — which had spent billions of years as little more than a few unremarkable blobs drifting in the dark — suddenly exploded into every possible form simultaneously. Claws. Fins. Shells. Eyes. Creatures of impossible elegance and alien strangeness, emerging from the murk and becoming something the world had never seen before. Scientists call it the Cambrian E...

Get in touch! Part 2 Happy New Year, Everybody! (Even if you're reading this in July....) Across the last five seasons of American Song, we've traveled the arc of American music and listened to some of the greatest songs ever recorded, by some of the best loved artists over a century of thrilling music that changed the world. But what about all those artists whose music is as good, if not better, than those "giants", who (but for the fickle finger of fate) never got the massive acclaim ...

Get in touch! Part 1 Happy New Year, Everybody! (Even if you're reading this in July....) Across the last five seasons of American Song, we've traveled the arc of American music and listened to some of the greatest songs ever recorded, by some of the best loved artists over a century of thrilling music that changed the world. But what about all those artists whose music is as good, if not better, than those "giants", who (but for the fickle finger of fate) never got the massive acclaim ...

Get in touch! Part Five starts with a funeral and a realization: when Bruce's friend and former Castile's band mate, George Theiss, dies, Bruce becomes the last man left from his teenage band. That shock pushes him into Springsteen on Broadway, Western Stars, and Letter to You—projects that ask what kind of ancestor, and what kind of citizen, you want to be when you’re running out of time. We follow him into those late-career marathon shows and finally to a 2025 European stage, where he...

Get in touch! Part Four is where the story cuts close to the bone. Bruce lets the E Street Band go, stares down his own failures on Tunnel of Love, and writes The Ghost of Tom Joad for the people that some Americans prefer not to see: migrants, the unemployed, the left-behind. The band reunites, “American Skin (41 Shots)” forces a conversation about race and fear, and The Rising and Wrecking Ball turn grief and economic anger into something like a shared civic ritual. We carry all of th...

Get in touch! Factories closing, marriages cracking, the glitter of the ’80s hiding a lot of hurt—Part 3 lives right in that gap between the American dream and the American day-to-day. Bruce digs into Darkness, The River, and Nebraska, writing about people who rarely get a mic: laid-off workers, young couples in over their heads, neighbors hanging on by their fingernails. Then Born in the U.S.A. turns into a worldwide roar, and politicians try to strip the songs of their doubts and their comp...

Get in touch! Part two picks up in the clubs and dives where Bruce and the band are trying to outrun obscurity. We walk with them through the struggle to get the first records heard, the critics who saw the spark, and the brutal work of making Born to Run: months of second-guessing, endless mixes, and the very real possibility that it might all collapse under its own ambition. We hear about Jon Landau’s famous “I saw rock and roll future” review, the Bottom Line breakthrough, the U.K. trip th...

Get in touch! We start the series in 2025, at Springsteen's show in Manchester, UK where he makes a landmark statement about America's "leadership" before we flash back to his formative years. A cramped house in Freehold. A father smoking in the dark kitchen. A kid staring at the radio like it’s a way out and a way in. In Part one, we meet Bruce not as a legend, but as a working-class American kid learning early what struggle, pride, and community look like. As we follow him into those early ...

Get in touch! For over five decades, Jackson Browne has stood at the intersection of melody and message—crafting songs that speak not only to the heart, but also to the conscience. In an age of division and disinformation, his music feels like a lifeline to an older, more grounded sense of American democratic values—truth, empathy, accountability, and moral courage. This episode dives into Browne’s lifelong journey as both a master songwriter and a tireless activist, examining how his music h...

Get in touch! In this episode of American Song, we explore the life and legacy of Warren Zevon, one of America’s most fearless and darkly funny songwriters. Known for his biting wit and uncompromising honesty, Zevon built a career chronicling the messier sides of the human experience—addiction, regret, heartbreak, and mortality. From his early days as a struggling songwriter in Los Angeles to the unexpected success of “Werewolves of London,” Zevon never stopped grappling with the contradictio...

Get in touch! You could think of Randy Newman as a musical Mark Twain. His songs draw up from a range of curiously disconnected observations about life in this era’s America in some of the same ways that Twain’s pen spoke of the America he lived in. Twain’s Mississippi paddlewheels churned the dark waters of that rolling river mixing old and new, sacred and profane and In his songs, Newman is doing the same thing. He draws from American roots music, Tin Pan Alley, the blues, and orchest...

Get in touch! In this haunting and deeply reflective episode, we explore the music of Bruce Cockburn—an artist who persistently challenges our indifference and urges us to reckon with the moral weight of being human. His songs are not just art; they are calls to awareness, rooted in compassion and fierce clarity. We delve into the global injustices that course through his music: the devastation of climate change, and the brutal legacy of capitalism in the Global South, where lives are often s...

Get in touch! In these days, when people play fast and loose with truth for the purpose of personal gain at the expense of important things like rights, and even survival, I hope this episode, and the next one help us all regain a little sanity and peace. Personal Truth takes you on a powerful journey through the birth of the singer-songwriter era, spotlighting artists who didn't just sing about the world—but cracked themselves wide open to show us their own. Starting in the fertile gro...

Get in touch! By the late 1960’s, folk was beginning to feel “scarred and battered”, so what came next in this tradition was less political, and much more personal. The world was changing politically, socially, and culturally. Some of the new generation of singers and songwriters felt that staying relevant meant they had to move away from folk, towards more personal themes. The ‘70s was the “Me” decade. Instead of drawing from what was happening in the outside world, one group of song-writers...

Get in touch! It seems like every ten years or so, society experiences a great reset. The end of the ‘60s was like that. The idealism and teen-culture of the ‘60’s was ten years older and moving into adult life. Just like everything else in life that was questioned and re-invented, some musicians began pushing the boundaries of what rock music could become. Across the Atlantic, and as Ian Anderson, of Jethro Tull put it, English rockers “were trying to be originators...

Get in touch! It seems like every ten years or so, society experiences a great reset. The end of the ‘60s was like that. The idealism and teen-culture of the ‘60’s was ten years older and moving into adult life. Just like everything else in life that was questioned and re-invented. Some musicians began pushing the boundaries of what rock music could become. Across the Atlantic, and as Ian Anderson, of Jethro Tull put it, English rockers “were trying to be orig...

Get in touch! It seems like every ten years or so, society experiences a great reset. The end of the ‘60s was like that. The idealism and teen-culture of the ‘60’s was ten years older and moving into adult life. Just like everything else in life that was questioned and re-invented, some musicians began pushing the boundaries of what rock music could become. Across the Atlantic, and as Ian Anderson, of Jethro Tull put it, English rockers "were tryin...

Get in touch! Punk may have been born in America, but it had many homes around the world. In every place it went, punk became part of the struggle for social change. Punk's roots are in the blues, music made for expressing struggles and refusing to accept things the way they are. With heritage like this, it should be no surprise that it moved people and shook things up in the powerful ways it did! Join us, as we see how punk expressed the real lives of the people making and list...

Get in touch! America's Punk movement was started on both coasts. Early proto-punks like the MC5 and the New York Dolls were followed by a number of other early iconic acts who played at several New York clubs, including CBGB's (Country Blue Grass and Blues), such as the The Ramones, the Talking Heads, Blondie, and Patti Smith. Meanwhile, LA and San Francisco had a decidedly more political movement propelled by bands like X, The Dead Kennedy's, and Black Flag. These bands ha...

Get in touch! When the dreams and promises you’ve placed your hopes in end up being a mirage, its only human to feel angry. In the mid 1970’s, a lot of teens and young adults found themselves in this camp. The nation’s shift toward a decidedly more cynical era could be heard in anti-war statements such as "War is not healthy for children and other living things" On the equal rights agenda, the demand for black civil rights encouraged a louder beating of the drum as seen in t...

Get in touch! This is the second half of a two-part episode In the late 1960's and early 1970's, Southern rock, a rebellious fusion of blues, rock and roll, and country music, emerged as the defiant cry from the heart of the South. Lynyrd Skynyrd's guitars wailed like banshees, their lyrics echoing the region's resistance to outside finger-pointing and strengthened a determination to preserve their own cultural identity. Never mind the warts and blemishes. The Allman Brothers Ban...

Get in touch! In the late 1960's and early 1970's, Southern rock, a rebellious fusion of blues, rock and roll, and country music, emerged as the defiant cry from the heart of the South. Lynyrd Skynyrd's guitars wailed like banshees, their lyrics echoing the region's resistance to outside fingerpointing and strengthened a determination to preserve their own cultural identity. Never mind the warts and blemishes. The Allman Brothers Band played with improvisations like soaring eagles...

Get in touch! This is part two of a two-part focus on Reggae music. The heart of Reggae music has always been politics and spirituality. In this two part episode, you'll learn about some of the musical and political forces in Jamaica's colorful past that all contributed to the music that we celebrate as reggae today. From Marcus Garvey, the modern-day prophet who had a vision for the black people living in the new world, and Ethiopia's Emperor Hailie Salassie, whose formal tit...

Get in touch! This is part one of a two-part focus on Reggae music. The heart of Reggae music has always been politics and spirituality. In this two part episode, you'll learn about some of the musical and political forces in Jamaica's colorful past that all contributed to the music that we celebrate as reggae today. From Marcus Garvey, the modern-day prophet who had a vision for the black people living in the new world, and Ethiopia's Emperor Hailie Salassie, whose form...

Get in touch! In today's episode, we’re going further up the musical family tree – into the funk. Funk grew in the shade of jazz, soul, R&B, gospel and rock. In time it’s going to give rise to other branches – for instance, disco, and hip-hop. It will influence branches that have been growing for a while already, like rock, jazz, even classical music believe it or not. Funk is growing in some difficult environments, like urban ghettoes. It’s impacted by some...

Get in touch! In this second episode of our third season, we pick up the trail and continue our exploration of jazz rock - a journey we started in episode one. In this episode, we'll take a close look at the amazing work done by three great bands in that genre; Steely Dan, Traffic, and Supertramp. Great songs, and interesting artist interviews abound! Here's what you can look forward to: INTERVIEWS WITH Donald Fagen Dave Matthews Jim Capaldi Dave Mason Steve Winwood Roge...

Get in touch! The first generation of jazz rock musicians had been heavily influenced by some of the pioneering jazz musicians who forged jazz fusion, beginning with Miles Davis. Miles was the first of the great jazz artists to venture into the new, amplified and electronic sounds of 1960’s rock music, and in doing it he recruited a number of very young, incredibly talented, and mostly unknown musicians who became giants in their own right, As a number of jazz musicians embraced eleme...

Get in touch! In today's podcast episode, we pick up our exploration of jazz fusion by looking at the amazing careers and music produced by a number of genius musicians who came out of Miles Davis' bands. We'll visit with Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin and his band, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Joe Zawinul, Jaco Pastorious and the band Weather Report, Chick Corea and his bands Return to Forever and the Elektrik Band. The forces that Miles pioneered and set in motion continued to e...

Get in touch! As jazz musicians started realizing that rock and electric bands were stealing their audiences, Miles Davis, who’s alternately been called most important musician in the history of jazz, the man who transformed jazz, and even the man who changed music itself, took the music in a new direction when he invented jazz fusion. In fact, during his lifetime, Miles didn’t change music just once, he did it five times. Fusion started happening in the late 1960s and early 197...

Get in touch! First of all, Happy Independence Day everybody! I'm so pleased to publish another episode of American Song on America's birthday! Back in America, ever since the plane crash in the winter of 1959 that ended the lives of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, the Big Bopper, American rock and roll had been sort of losing steam. By 1964, it very easily could have just petered out. Certainly, the likes of Frankie Avalon, and post-army Elvis were not going anywhere exciting...

Get in touch! With the big English interest in blues music, suddenly, America’s original bluesmen started hearing about the chance to reignite their careers with English, French and German audiences. Unbelievably, they found themselves welcomed, even celebrated. American Bluesmen like Big Bill Broonzy, after living years in poverty, discovered they could actually have careers in Europe. The Cunard Yanks, and the American Folk Blues Festival were the catalysts behind cultural and ...

Get in touch! England was caught between two cultures: the old order and whatever came after it. The rigid class distinctions between upper and middle classes were disappearing, and government reforms had a lot to do with it. The Conservative Party with their slogan, “Set the People Free,” won the 1951 election, and popular culture began to replace stuffy, upper crust stuff like classical music, opera, theatre, and fine art with mass-market media like radio, movies, and television...

Get in touch! Before the arrival of Colombus and the Spanish, Puerto Rico was peopled by the Taino tribe. They’d called it home – and paradise – for over 1,000 years, having come either from the Amazon river basin, or maybe from the Colombian Andes before they arrived on the island. In our March episode, we talked about the Jones Act – a law made during the Wilson presidency. The chief goal of that act was to help the U.S. shipping industry recover after World War I. I...

Get in touch! In a country based on freedom, equal opportunity, and democracy, you’d think that lessons related to social justice would not need to be re-hashed so often. But that does seem to be our fate. And so, in every generation, we’ve witnessed one group after another struggle to claim their own share of the American dream. Music has had a huge role in raising awareness, unifying people, inspiring empathy, and challenging the status quo in every major social wave of change....

Get in touch! Latin music and 'American' music were once considered to be separate and unique. They had distinctly different properties and music labels managed them differently. But not anymore. Danny Ocean is a singer-songwriter and native of Caracas, Venezuela, and has said “Music is something that transcends beyond any language or nationality…it’s all about being a global artist.” Latin music has become mainstream - it's no longer a 'crossover' genre. Today, Latin culture is ...

Get in touch! In this episode, we shift focus to consider another important cultural vein, brought here by the Spanish, and rising out of the American west and Southwest as well as New York City – and obviously all of Central and South America, Cuba and Puerto Rico. A few things have struck me as I’ve been putting my thoughts together for these next few episodes. Of course, the first thing is that – just like in earlier genres that we’ve talked about – the music we hea...

Get in touch! In our July, 2021 episode on the first generation of folk music, “Folk Music Stood for America”, we talked about how the music was swept up in the major social movements of the day, especially the socialist/ American Communist party movements which gathered speed because of events like the Great Depression and the Dustbowl. The second revival of the 1960’s also had its own causes; the war in Vietnam, Civil Rights, and the Women’s movement primarily. The ‘60s ...

Get in touch! The 1960’s were a period of massive social change and tension all over the country – all over North America in fact - because we have to include Canada, too. The conditions were just right for a whole group of passionate, inspired, and gifted young singers and songwriters to lift their voices. They came from many different American communities; Jewish immigrants, First Nations people, Americans, Canadians, African Americans, Hispanics, Caucasians, from t...

Get in touch! Happy New Year and welcome to season two in the American Song podcast series! It's been a bit since we last got together. I hope you all are doing well. In both the first and second folks waves, many of the musicians were heavily influenced by the times and events that lived in. During the first folk revival, the most important social issues included the Great Depression, and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. In different ways, both of these catastrophes la...

Get in touch! If there’s an over-riding theme across the last several episodes, it is that music can be whatever we say it is. In this third and last episode on this theme, we’re talking about Musique Concrete. It’s the name applied to a one of the most radical descriptions of music ever imagined. Think of this music like you do when you think of abstract, visual art. For instance, Picasso’s Guernica. There aren’t too many people that think of that painting as tradit...

Get in touch! In the world of American art music, Minimalism is another push away from traditional music. It’s earliest beginnings are found in the 1950’s again, with two American composers; Steve Reich (b.1936) and Philip Glass (b.1937). Reich, Glass, and another minimalist, John Adams, were all heavily influenced by mid-century popular music. Together, they’re known as the ‘big three’ in minimalist music. The founders of minimalist music absorbed a wide range o...

Get in touch! The 20th century scientific explosion had been in the works since the Enlightenment, but the rate of change, which had been slow, and adaptable, now came in flashes – like a supernova - and repeatedly, one major wave after another and in ways that dramatically changed our society; instead of having time to gradually adapt and fold these changes into our ordered lives, our lives were forced to conform instead. I hope you’re ready for an adventure, because this episode, an...

Get in touch! Newton’s Third Law of Motion; For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. I mentioned that rock and music was equal parts music and social movement. This was a totally new event for music. In earlier episodes, we’ve seen how jazz was borrowed by the US Government for global PR purposes, and of course, music has always given a voice to the hopes, dreams, hurts, and fears of people everywhere. But this was something totally different.&n...