A podcast about lots of interesting topics.
Andrei Tarkovsky made seven feature films, each one a meditation on time, memory, and the sacred. The Soviet authorities censored him, delayed his productions, and eventually drove him into exile. He died of cancer in Paris at 54, convinced that the KGB had poisoned him on set. This episode traces his uncompromising vision from Ivan’s… Read.
Henry Purcell died at thirty-six and left behind music so emotionally direct it still sounds modern. He wrote the first great English opera, reinvented the Anglican anthem, and composed funeral music for a queen that was later played at his own burial. This episode explores Purcell’s extraordinary career at the courts of three English monarchs… Read.
Madonna arrived in New York in 1977 with thirty-five dollars and a conviction she would be the biggest star in the world. Within seven years she was exactly that, maintaining her position through relentless reinvention and surgically precise provocation. This episode traces her rise from a Michigan childhood marked by her mother’s death through dance… Read.
Muddy Waters was recorded on a Mississippi plantation by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. Within a decade he had moved to Chicago, plugged in an electric guitar, and invented a sound that became the foundation of rock and roll. This episode follows Waters from Stovall’s plantation through his creation of the Chicago electric… Read.
The Rolling Stones were marketed as the band your parents should fear. What started as genuine blues devotion became the most carefully managed outlaw brand in entertainment — a billion-dollar empire built on the image of not caring about money. This episode covers the Stones from their early days as London blues purists through drug… Read.
The defining image of Jimi Hendrix was a guitar on fire at Monterey Pop. The reality was a shy, soft-spoken man who practiced obsessively, heard music in colors, and pushed electric guitar technique further in four years than anyone had in the previous four decades. This episode traces Hendrix from Seattle, where he played a… Read.