Categories
News Podcast

Ep. #200: Daniel Lanois

Daniel Lanois is a world-renowned musician, songwriter, and producer who splits his time living between Ontario and California. A multi-Grammy winning producer who has had a vital influence on key records by Bob Dylan, U2, Emmylou Harris, Peter Gabriel, and Neil Young, Lanois is also a pioneer of ambient music and one of the finest songwriters in Canada. His latest album is 2014’s Flesh and Machine, an adventurous record of processed instrumentation, which is available via Anti- Records. He performs solo at the Hillside Festival on the weekend of July 24 and here, Daniel and I discuss his studios in Los Angeles, Toronto, and Jamaica, the through line between early collaborations with Brian Eno and Flesh and Machine, manipulating and processing conventional instruments to create wholly new sounds, Brian Blade is a hell of a drummer and a dear friend, Daniel’s motorcycle accident in which he broke 10 bones, a Canadian motorcycle club, “The End” and “Beautiful Day,” conveying information via music and/or lyrics, plans to play a rare solo show at Hillside, planning for the workshop with Nels Cline Singers and Elaquent, ambient music as a term and communicating with Brian Eno about playing a show together, Bob Dylan and the swamp, making Time Out of Mind, the night Dylan came to his house to play him every song from the sessions that yielded the album Shadows in the Night, Dylan’s voice, steel guitar excursions, the song “Iceland,” and then where will I be?

Related links: daniellanois.com hillsidefestival.ca vishkhanna.com

Listen, subscribe, rate/review on iTunes.

Categories
News Podcast

Ep. #199: Rhys Darby

Rhys Darby is a talented stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and ex-soldier in the New Zealand Army who currently lives in Los Angeles. Best known for playing the well-meaning but inept band manager Murray Hewitt on the HBO show Flight of the Conchords, Darby has shown remarkable range as a vocally and physically dynamic film and television actor, in his own stand-up specials, and in his bestselling 2008 novel , This Way to Spaceship! He brings his latest stage show, I’m a Fighter Jet!, to Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival on July 22 and 24 and here, Rhys and I discuss shooting an episode of the new X-Files in Vancouver, digging holes in a forest, hush hush, on-set injuries, long-term promo, New Zealanders and Canadians have a lot in common, rugby might be over emphasized, leaping and parents and breakfast, I’m a Fighter Jet! and Top Gun, sheep rescues,  climb a single mountain, rocket retrieval, worried about Indonesia, joining the army and getting into show biz, John Clarke and Billy T. James and Monty Python and Rowan Atkinson, Michael Winslow and noises, doing stand-up on Letterman, what’s up with Flight of the Conchords coming back, missing but also transcending Murray, doing a new TV show called Wrecked on TBS, figuring out Montreal, and our meeting was finished.

Related links: rhysdarby.com hahaha.com vishkhanna.com

darby_610x400-01

Listen, subscribe, rate/review on iTunes.

Categories
News Podcast

Ep. #198: Nigel Chapman of Nap Eyes

Nigel Chapman is the visionary singer and songwriter for a Halifax band called Nap Eyes. Featuring members of the neato band Monomyth, Nap Eyes released their debut album this past March and it was recently reissued in Canada on You’ve Changed Records and elsewhere via Paradise of Bachelors. The record is called Whine of the Mystic and has prompted Nap Eyes to go on tour, including stops in southern Ontario between July 15 and 18. Here, Nigel and I discuss sitting in a park in Boise, Idaho, the Gipper, the American geographical landscape, being a technician in a biochemistry lab at Dalhousie University, a G protein-coupled receptor called the apelin receptor and recent research on its mysterious impact on the human body, messenger cells, how this major scientific breakthrough might impact Nap Eyes songs, microcosms and big pictures, “No man needs to care about another man’s hair,” external judgment, social dynamics and skills, lonerism and friendship, Dookie by Green Day, content and intent, conversational thoughtfulness, I enjoy the work of Bob Dylan, assessing the Mighty Northumberland, the fine people of Monomyth, details about the yet-to-be-released and relatively quieter new Nap Eyes album that has a title that only some people can know about, the media, outside of the lab, tour dates, the Nap Eyes song “Delirium and Persecution Paranoia,” and then it was nap time.

Related links: youvechangedrecords.com/artists/nap-eyes/ vishkhanna.com

Nap-Eyes-Polaroid-2-web

Listen, subscribe, rate/review on iTunes. Now available via AudioBoom.