In the four years since the release of his debut record Due North, Liam Kazar hasn’t exactly been silent. Be it on stage or in the studio, his contributions to the sounds artists like Hannah Cohen, Sam Evian, Kevin Morby, and Jeff Tweedy are tasteful and distinct. You know you’ll be in safe hands when you see him on stage or in the credits. But this month saw the release of Pilot Light—a sophomore album that couldn’t be further from the stereotypical slump.
Category: The AD Interview
Anna Butterss :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
What does it mean to be a season ticket holder for the music of bass player Anna Butterss? Reserved, front row seats to diverse and experimental music, whether as a founding member of improvisational bands SML and the Jeff Parker ETA IVtet, their own experimental solo work—the latest being 2024’s innovative Mighty Vertebrate—touring band member for Jason Isbell, and first-call, bass-player-for hire. Obviously, there’s no actual subscription available for purchase, but, if possible, it would mean regular access to one of the most exciting musicians working today.
Catching Up With Whitney
It feels strange to have a new Whitney record to become acquainted with against a winter backdrop. Small Talk finds the Chicago duo returning to their breezier sensibilities. Guitarist Max Kakacek and singing drummer Julien Ehrlich join us to discuss its homemade sound.
Songs Belong to Everyone Who Can Sing Along :: Craig Finn on Always Been
The cover of Craig Finn’s latest solo album, Always Been, directly nods to Randy Newman’s 1977 lp Little Criminals. Shot in the same location, on the West 7th Street overpass over the I-110, it presents The Hold Steady frontman posed exactly as Newman is on his classic album. And like Newman’s songbook, Always Been is filled with character studies, a cast of people who aren’t quite sure what to make of their lives and the directions they’ve taken. It also arrives with a book of short stories, Lousy With Ghosts. Finn joins us to discuss the expansive universe he’s created.
John Maus :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Since the mid-2000s John Maus gained a reputation as an arcane conversationalist, whose public dialogues offered as much intricacy as they did enthusiasm, with a philosophical repertoire only matched by his own nervous body language. For this interview we plunged into the specifics of those discourses to try to trace the strange continuities between the continental thought and mystical traditions Maus is enamored with and the postwar pop sound his work inevitably comes to represent.
Carson McHone :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
In her vividly descriptive lyricism, which comes alive across all her albums, but especially on her latest release, Pentimento, Carson McHone is a natural artist. Written on paintings and postcards, McHone deftly utilizes color, texture and movement in these exceptionally compelling and immersive arrangements.
Jens Kuross :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Before recording Crooked Songs, Jens Kuross was making cabinets, teaching children how to play the piano, and having a lot of difficult conversations with himself. After a series of disappointments following the release of his 2020 LP The Man Nobody Can Touch resulted in his return to Idaho to lead a quieter life.
Cate Le Bon :: When You Make Things, You Let Go
Cate Le Bon is an elusive talent, adept at evoking emotional states without fully explicating them, suggesting resonances with other times and places without ever unpacking them. Her latest album, Michelangelo Dying, for instance, has very little to do with the renaissance artist, mentioned in a fragment of “Love Unrehearsed,” and whatever that connection is, Le Bon is uninterested in revealing it. But even so, the piece conveys a fluid, complicated relationship with love and art and longing, one revealed in bits of startling sonic clarity, but also hidden in suggestion, implication and mood.
Whitney K :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Bubble the new LP from Whitney K, like their previous releases, has a hypnotic and languid manner that belies percolating depth, humor and force. Sonically, it’s is their boldest and coherent to date, adventurous but unhurried, segueing smoothly between choogling acoustics and scalded electricity. Ahead of this week’s release of Bubble, AD caught up with Konner Whitney, the group’s center if not its leader, as he prepared for an extensive tour.
Lucrecia Dalt :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Lucrecia Dalt has spent the better part of the last decade crafting some of the most quietly ecstatic sounds in experimental music. The new album by the Colombian-born, Berlin-spun, US-based artist finds her the most content with her own creative process, weaving together the intimate and the vast, the conceptual and the personal, the intellectual and the sensual, with imperative freedom. Recorded in the high desert of New Mexico, A Danger to Ourselves breathes with the expansiveness of the surrounding landscape and her own avant-garde influences while remaining tethered to pop song forms and to the self-centrifugal experiences of love, eroticism, romance, and loss.
Golomb :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
There are several standout moments on Golomb’s The Beat Goes On, a record whose DNA is shaped by traits synonymous with Yo La Tengo, the Velvet Underground and Silver Jews. Each influence is applied conscientiously in these dynamic arrangements to demonstrate the Columbus, Ohio trio’s appreciation for those artists rather than resting on the merits of sonic achievements.
Director Ethan Silverman on AngelHeaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex
AngelHeaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex isn’t a typical music documentary. While it does do what a viewer might expect in terms of using talking heads, archival footage, and critical analysis to tell the story of glam pioneer Marc Bolan and T. Rex, it also presents behind the scenes footage of artists like Nick Cave, Joan Jett, U2, Macy Gray, and many more cutting Bolan’s songs in the studio for the late producer Hal Wilner’s T. Rex tribute album (also called AngelHeaded Hipster). The result is a film that puts his songs at the core. Director Ethan Silverman joins us to discuss.
Vish Khanna of Kreative Kontrol :: “The Creative Motivation Remains the Same”
This week, music journalist Vish Khanna published the 1,000th episode of his long running Kreative Kontrol podcast, a fascinating conversation with the ever-prolific Ty Segall. And while lesser broadcasters might take a few weeks off for a leisurely victory lap, Khanna instead just got to work putting the finishing touches on episode 1,001 (also published this week). Khanna joins us to discuss the milestone.
Catching Up With Adrian Sherwood
While collaboration has been a hallmark of Adrian Sherwood’s storied career, he is currently stepping out on his own with a full-length The Collapse of Everything and an EP The Grand Designer, his first solo efforts in 13 years. We recently connected with him to discuss this new work, his ever-evolving set of studio tools, his history in music and his lifelong commitment to learn and grow.
Ryan Davis :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
We caught up with Davis in the run-up to the release of his new LP New Threats from the Soul to discuss his first band State Champion, the different struggles he faced in making the two albums, the comedy in his songwriting, and more.