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We close out the 10th season of Transmissions with a special look under the hood with Justin Gage, who founded Aquarium Drunkard 20 years ago in 2005. Initially envisioned as just a place to share cultural recommendations with friends, Aquarium Drunkard blew up as the blog rush began. Suddenly, Gage found himself running a respected media outlet. 20 years later, he joins host Jason P. Woodbury to discuss how Aquarium Drunkard has stayed true to the maxim of only the good shit. In this frank back and forth, the two colleagues share how an ethos that puts music and deep engagement with it at the forefront feels like a counter-cultural endeavour in this day and age, and how they’ve managed to keep in touch with the love of art that initially inspired Aquarium Drunkard.

We hope you have enjoyed the 10th season of this show. Up next from Aquarium Drunkard’s podcast department? All One Song, in which host Tyler Wilcox (Prairiewolf, Doom and Gloom from the Tomb) sits down with a musician to discuss a single Neil Young song. The podcast will appear in this very feed later this summer.

Transmissions :: Justin Gage (2025)

Aquarium Drunkard: All right. Well, we are here with Aquarium Drunkard’s founder Justin Gage. This show’s executive producer, the man who launched Aquarium Drunkard a whole 20 years ago. And on this episode, which is going to close our 10th season, it’s our ninth year of doing the show, 10th season of Transmissions, and the 20th anniversary of Aquarium Drunkard in 2025. Justin joins us to close out this season, which is, as you might note, shorter than usual. But that’s something that Justin and I have planned from the beginning. And at the end of this show, we’ll tease what’s coming next on the Aquarium Drunkard podcast front. But yeah, Justin, thanks so much for hanging out, man.

Justin Gage: Yeah, happy Saturday. I wanted to kick this off by congratulating you on completing yet another season of this podcast. As you’re well aware, over the past 20 years, this podcast has gone through many iterations. It began as an offshoot from my first radio show, going back 20 years, which was an internet radio station that was based in downtown Los Angeles. It was the podcast version of that. It then became a sound audio collage for several years, and then I think we really got back into it in 2016 when we went to Daniel Lanois’ house.

AD: That was really towards the very, very start of it. I think the first episode of this show—and this is something that you and I have been talking about—cause the listeners, they don’t see the show because we’re not a video podcast right now, and don’t the Zoom windows that we see each other through are just for the participants of the show….We don’t want to subject everybody to that same sort of, everybody has to go to enough Zoom meetings. But I would say, yeah, we started with that Bonnie “Prince” Billy interview, and I barely knew how to record stuff. And it’s just sort of this thing of looking back on it and realizing that that was nine years, almost 10 years ago, that this show has seen us grow. In 2016, we really started kicking things off, and that interview at Daniel Lanois’ house is one of many that we need to restore proper because we had an RSS kind of goof up when we switched over from servers a few years back. So there’s a number of shows that we need to restore. And what I was alluding to earlier is that behind me in this massive stack, there’s three laptops that I’m like, all right, I’m going to go through, I’m going to find all these files and we’re going to get it all restored because there is some good stuff early on, and I didn’t even really do terribly recording that Lanois interview. It was pretty fun, but that was cool to do it at his house.

Justin Gage: That was wild. I remember we walked into his home studio and his just massive board and everything, and he was like, “Alright, you got your rig you to record? 

AD: It’s just the funniest. I wanted to be like, “it looks like you do.” He has this awesome place. I don’t know if he still has it or not, but he’s got this awesome place and there was a really cool sort of pre-party where he played with Rocco DeLuca and they played. 

Justin Gage: The night before.

AD: They did this pedal steel set on his patio, and then we showed up the next day to record. And when we did, he played us stuff from what he was working on with Venetian Snares, that group.

Justin Gage: That’s right

AD: It was just thunderously loud in his studio. That’s where Neil Young did that Le Noise album. But anyway, yeah, that was really fun. I was reading his book on the way in and really trying to get into his head and do a good job. On this show, we’ve had Daniel Lanois, Roger Eno, we’ve had Steve Lilywhite, we’ve got all these people—we’re getting closer to assembling the trifecta of so much of the music that I dig. You know what I mean?

Justin Gage: Of course. I think that the next pivot with the podcast was obviously the beginning of the pandemic. From that Lanois conversation in 2016 until the pandemic, I think we were doing [the podcast] once a month, and it would be you having conversations with people, me having conversations with people here at AD HQ, some various other contributors, but I remember we had a conversation. We were like, listen, we obviously have time on our hands. People are hungry for interesting things to listen to and consume. I think that is when you took the reins and really made this a weekly consideration.

AD: It was something that I guess I had always wanted to do, but due to just normal life and juggling other responsibilities, and it’s probably no secret to people that making a living in this industry requires often multiple sort of gigs and juggling creative projects and stuff. But when the pandemic hit and we had so much more time and just people started saying yes to the invites that were like, whoa, I can’t believe so-and-so I can’t believe we could get Michael Rother here, or I can’t believe we could get Bill Frisell, these people who were home and down to communicate and talk with an audience at that time. So yeah, that’s when the show really kicked into this iteration that now some five years later we continue on in this sort of weekly format. But with this season, I think we both have talked about how there’s a lot out there and there’s a lot of conversations just in our archive, and I just find myself thinking that I want to be really conscientious of how the show comes together.

And so doing less this run, I think allowed me to focus on doing better episodes. And that was just my thought. Not that I think that the old episodes are bad course. Of course. I want to be clear. I’m always, I’m doing my best as often as I’m able to do my best. But this thing of just realizing, okay, it’s just going to be this many episodes for me at this point that was necessary for you. Aquarium Drunkard has gone through all these permutations. It’s required a lot of your time, a lot of your effort, not a lot of people who started blogs in 2005 are still talking about ’em 20 years later, still actively doing that. So I think you probably more than anybody understand that the pace or speed of content is one thing, but what we do at Aquarium Drunkard, it’s, it’s not exactly in step with that. You know what I mean? Sure. It’s kind of a little bit of an older internet mindset in a certain sense.

Justin Gage: The old weird internet. 

AD: Is that how you feel? 

Justin Gage: I do. In that I was talking to a friend about this very recently and we were discussing what you just referenced, the speed of content and that just completely ephemeral ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ element of it. That is something that I think we’ve all at AD really tried to avoid just in terms of what we put our time and energy and resources into. And just down to the ethos: only the good shit, we’re really trying to pay attention and cover things that feel that they will have a lasting impact 5, 10… here we are now 20 years from when we’re talking about it, when we’re discussing it.

AD: I think that that idea of just for me, you can’t help sometimes but feel like you’re throwing fodder into the content wind. It just scatters into the void of the internet. But one thing that has always been true of Aquarium Drunkard is this sense that if it’s on Aquarium Drunkard, it’s because we believe that exactly what you said, that there’s something worth talking about here, and it’s not going to go away. It’s not a fashion trend. It’s not just ephemeral. This is something that we actually believe in. I think that that is why I talk so often with contributors who will want to know, is it too late to cover this or too late to cover that? It’s like, no, there are a lot of records from 2024 that I would’ve liked to have written more about or have found since then. You know what I mean? This is the thing. We have this infinite amount. It’s not infinite access. There’s lots of stuff that you can’t get on streaming services, but the idea of streaming, the way it’s made people think about content is it really has atomized that concept into something that does feel ephemeral. But that goes very against the ethos of Aquarium Drunkard. And I think that’s why if you want to write about something that came out in 2017 and nobody noticed, that’s fine. 

And I think that there’s an intentionality to Aquarium Drunkard that I think is crucial, that we don’t just cover everything. And sometimes there have been times over, this is peaking underneath the curtain, but there’s even been times over the years where maybe some contributors have suggested indie records that are pretty popular in a given year, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t quite land in the Aquarium Drunkard zone for us. I just think about that.

Justin Gage: Yes, I agree. There’s some really solid, let’s just call them big indie tent pole records. It’s like, we don’t need to cover that. That’s getting plenty of digital ink and otherwise elsewhere. And also, more inside baseball: we all get the press releases like everybody else, if not before. And we really do make a point to really listen to these albums and digest them before we speak about them. We don’t just post it on Instagram with some sort of two sentence word salad. And I think one thing I’m really proud of with Aquarium Drunkard is everyone that is involved… there are no charlatans, there are no dilettantes. We all know our shit. 

And if we’re talking about something, we really are familiar with it and we can speak to it and what went into it. Whereas I think that increasingly ephemeral quality about online culture, it’s just kind of a bummer road to go down. I remember when we switched a little over a year ago to the membership model, when we were talking about this, and Tyler Wilcox was talking about how there used to be this kind of Edenic garden that was the internet. And I think we’re trying to preserve the last vestiges of that.

AD: Do you feel like it’s a strange thing because what we call online life, there’s a lot of different online, there’s all these different ways you could go about this. I sometimes feel, feel increasingly frustrated that there are three or four sites that people mediate the entire Internet. One of the things that makes it such a radical technology, still potentially, is just the fact that it’s not just those channeled sources that you can actually go outside of that. And those channeled sources are increasingly becoming terrible to use. I mean, I don’t know, using Google has gotten terrible at this point. And so I think people are rightly questioning what are we going to do as far, what is online life going to be like for us moving forward? But I do think if anything, that there is sort of a pushback towards saying, okay, we’re not going to worry about creating things as much on the scale of these massive paradigms. We’re not going to try to scale to those. We’re going to allow them to be whatever they are, a smaller group of people who care more about a thing, enough to invest a little in its existence. You know what I mean? It’s ind of a more cooperative model with the audience in a lot of ways. And for us at least, we talked about this on the show, there are certain people who Patreon works really well, but for us it was just like having to come up with extra stuff on top of the stuff you’re coming up on. It just feels like an endless grind for more. At least that’s how it started to feel for us.

Justin Gage: Yeah if, say, we were a band, we don’t have a lot of b-sides. We’re putting it all out there. The Patreon model no longer made sense. Ultimately, if you want to have a good user experience, you can’t have insane ads destroying the user experience. A friend of ours was interviewed recently by a music site, and while the piece was good, all the ads and everything coming at me while attempting to read it made it very difficult to get through. And if you want to know why we switched to a membership model, that’s part of the reason. So that the user experience is untainted by just that really uncomfortable reader experience.

AD: I mean, there’s something that we’ve talked about too, which is to say with Aquarium Drunkard, I think we both, there’s a big part of us that’s that old internet mentality of wanting things to be free, of believing to a certain degree that information maybe wants to be free, right?

Justin Gage: A hundred percent. I fought for that for 19 years.

AD: And that’s the thing, is that that’s something that remains important to us. And so it even goes down to the fact that if you go to aquariumdrunkard.com, you can still read a small blurb along with the album art cover.

Justin Gage: It’s not even that small!

AD: It’s often substantial enough to be its own thing. And that’s important to us. There’s a certain spirit of recommendation, of enthusiasm of, I think people hear words like gatekeeping and they feel uncomfortable with that knowledge. And I get that but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here. We’re not talking about gatekeeping. We’re talking about saying, we believe this is valuable. We believe it’s valuable enough to even offer you this. Frankly, there are other blogs where they’re offering less than what we offer on just the front page in terms of contextual stuff. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I understand that we’re in this zone where maybe people don’t even need to read as much, but nonetheless, there’s still that there for you. So you could still very easily investigate through the Aquarium Drunkard ecosystem, even without pledging. But that said, for those that do, we want to reward them with some deeper insights, some stuff that you don’t get everywhere and conversations that aren’t the same as the mono sort of conversation. And so I feel like that’s one reason maybe why through all of the different permutations of Aquarium, Drunkard, there’s been a through line. You know what I mean?

Justin Gage: Absolutely. Sure. You can click through the site and see. Let’s just take James Rooney’s Van Morrison ‘80s roundup. You can see what those records are and you can see a four sentence blurb on the front page. But the guy wrote 2000 words about every one of those records about how Van Morrison went from 1980 through the remainder of the decade and the arc. I think with a lot of the things that we do that’s really important and insightful, if you really care about how these things are created from an artistic level.

AD: So let’s go back a little bit to 2005. You start this as a way to share just recommendations with friends, but then very quickly, the blog boom starts to take place where more people are checking this out, and you happen to be one of the people who was there doing it right as it sort of took form. What was it initially like for the Aquarium Drunkard audience to expand the way it did? When you look back on it, how surprised were you? What did it feel like?

Justin Gage: Alright, so May, 2005. 20 years ago. I lived on the West side. I had an apartment on Venice Beach and Jason, blogs were really new. I mean, you’d say blog, and if anyone even knew what that was — historically, at that time, people would think of a political blog… you would hear about Wonkette, which was a popular political blog at the time. You and I’ve discussed this I think in previous episodes, but I initially started AD as a way to keep in touch with friends who had, after college, migrated all over the country or outside the US. And instead of having an email chain, this was just an easy way to discuss what I was listening to, what films I was watching, etc. But because the “blog world” was so small, we all kind of found each other and Aquarium Drunkard very quickly, and organically, just pivoted to music only. And at the time, there just weren’t that many music blogs of any note. There were maybe, I don’t know, a dozen. And then those of us doing that kind thing of found one another and would trade notes and talk about, and this seems so archaic now, but even just easy ways to host an MP3 because the bones of the internet 20 years ago, they were just not there in the way that they are now. So it was just the wild west in those days. 

AD: How quickly did the sort of industry sort of take note of what you were doing?

Justin Gage: Exceptionally fast. Aquarium Drunkard launched in May of 2005. By late summer/fall, I was getting hit up by PR agencies, people at record labels, etc. My previous career was, I got out of college in 1999 and immediately went into the dot com world. And I was a music and entertainment editor for a site that went defunct and then a music editor for AOL. So that world wasn’t a foreign to me, but again, blogging was such a new term, a thing, whatever, that it was kind of funny at the time, connecting with people that I used to hear from several years back when I was the AOL Atlanta Music Editor prior to moving to California.

AD: You told me even going even further back, and this is some real deep dish Aquarium Drunkard stuff here: Your very first interview was Dave Matthews.

Justin Gage:  Yeah. The first “real” musician I ever interviewed was a month into my freshman year of college. I interviewed Dave Matthews after a show at a bar. They didn’t even have a record deal yet. They had a self released CD at the time that they sold out of the back of their truck called, Remember Two Things. That was just a grassroots effort. That was grassroots, indie. This guy was playing bars and frat houses and up and down the East Coast down to the southeast. I was a freshman in college, 18 years old, had no idea what I was doing, and he was incredibly cool and gracious. Should I ever run into him again I’ll have to shake his hand and thank him for being so gracious to a very green writer and interviewer. 

AD: That brings to mind something Aquarium Drunkard is I would say that our genre sort of agnosticism has always been a part of the Aquarium Drunkard ethos as well. Which is to say that even though there are certainly genres you could associate with the sort of typical whatever that means, typical Aquarium Drunkard thing. Sure. Those sort of things exist. You could talk about solo acoustic guitar type stuff, Fahey school. That’s a big part of it. A lot of that comes from Tyler Wilcox, who is somebody who contributes and has a real ear for that myself as well, a little bit of that. But then there’s jazz, there’s ECM, there’s ‘80s Van Morrison, whatever.

But the idea is it’s not really stuck to one sound. And there’s almost like, I think if you look through the archives, there’s enough variation that you can sort of find explorations of every kind of music within the ad ecosystem. It’s almost like there’s an AD lens through which to view a lot of different sounds. But that said, you’re also somebody who it has to hit in a certain sense before it’s even really considered for the site. Do you know what I mean?

Justin Gage: Sure, yeah. I mean, thinking about 20 years ago when the site launched, when I go back and I look at some of the archives… it is kind of fascinating looking at your back pages, right? Because you forget things about yourself. But I see a guy who was in his twenties, like this expat Southerner from Atlanta who had moved to California. I think I’d been here three or four years at the time. And I had developed this great appreciation for southern musical traditions in a way that when I lived in the South, growing up in the South, going to college in Athens in the South, I had, if not shunned, just not paid attention to, even though it was all around me.

And then having this physical and cultural shift, I was able to view this entire world of music through a very different lens. So I think, again, the beginning of Aquarium Drunkard, a lot of it was just me, kind of recontextualizing a lot of music that I had grown up with. 

AD: We’re talking blues stuff?

Justin Gage: Old folk, the Carter family, just all sorts of folk country blues adjacent. And then my dad had…he was a sound hound…he had a massive record collection. And as things went on, I was like, oh, my dad was playing Ethiopian jazz when I was 10 years old, not even recognizing it. Or you had mentioned the ECM label a minute ago, and later, looking through my dad’s collection and him having 20 ECM records from the 1970s and eighties and when I was younger, and me just not paying attention, while flipping through his stuff, looking for a Beatles record when I was 14 or whatever.

AD: I mean, it is kind of crazy to me to think that you might go back to the early days of Aquarium Drunkard and see you talking about, I don’t know, garage rock or whatever. And now you’re probably reading something about Eberhard Weber or something, you know what I mean? I think that that speaks to, again, just the through line of just personal connection to it. And I feel like the idea to me that now somebody like Chad DePasquale, one of our longtime contributors that he’s writing about Ethiopian jazz, the stuff that theoretically where your dad still here to be engaging in that stuff might be listening to whatever’s coming out on Strut or Awesome Tapes from Africa. 

Justin Gage: Absolutely. 

AD: There’s a collective. There’s a collective of contributors, people who bring… 

Justin Gage: Gestalt. 

AD: Who bring their own thing to it. But it is sort of filtered around, I think, an approach that sort of prioritizes a sort of just, I guess, a kind of deeper connection with the idea of music. And to that end, I feel like you have always been somebody who, let’s just say another internet trend that you sort of defy is you like to maintain a slight bit of mystery. Maybe it’s not just as much, self-disclosure is somewhat demanded by our age to the point that when you post it on Aquarium Drunkard’s Instagram of the 20th anniversary, it was a rare admin reveal. You posting a photo of yourself, that’s not your typical way in an age where that’s how so many people present themselves. You’ve sort of always chosen to not do exactly that. Do you know what I mean?

Justin Gage: It’s always been music first, but what you’re saying about enigmatic aspect, I think about so many artists, and this is especially true before the MTV era, which is obviously before my time, but still. I’ll give you an example. When I was 16, I went and saw the Pixies on their final tour. I had no idea what the Pixies as a band looked like. If you think about the Pixies discography, they were on 4AD. There was a very almost strict visual aesthetic when it came to a 4AD release. So I only knew this band sonically. I didn’t know anything about what they looked like.

And I went to the show and it was great. It was the Trompe le Monde tour, but I remember I was 16 and thinking, this is not what I pictured this band to look like. And I thought that was really cool. But I guess moving forward, living in this age of constant information and social media, I think a lot of the mystery and the enigma surrounding art and artists and creators, I think we’ve kind of lost something when people are just sharing everything. I’ve been hosting this radio show on SiriusXM for 18 years, every week, a two-hour show. I love the medium of radio. The show, while it is also now available on-demand, it is broadcast at 10:00 PM to midnight. I want to be that voice coming out of your speaker talking to you about music versus a selfie of me doing whatever bullshit in Los Angeles. I think that’s a much more powerful way to connect with an audience. So yeah, as you mentioned, when I did share that photo, that was indeed a rare admin reveal.

AD: Yeah. And I think rarity is part of what rarity brings a quality to things. In an era where you can have anything, rarity means slowing down. Rarity means patience. Rarity means checking out something that’s off the beaten path, and that wouldn’t algorithmically be served to you. Right? You know what I mean? And so I do feel like that’s important. And I also think of it in terms of, you mentioned Wonkette earlier, and somebody who I’ve had on the podcast before, my friend Ken Lane from Desert Oracle. We talked, we were talking probably in 2020 maybe before we rolled the tape for that episode, or maybe after he was on Transmissions. But we were kind of talking about how in order to do anything, you have to eventually make it a kind of personal religion. And in order to do anything, you have to start thinking it as art itself. And so I think that with Transmissions, it’s a music and content driven thing, and it’s about music, but I try to think of it as something like its own art. I feel like that’s an approach that you’ve brought to Aquarium Drunkard that I think you’ve helped to sort of impart to the rest of us too, is to almost think of this as what is alluring about that voice coming out of the radio late at night? You know what I mean? To me, there’s something there. You’re honoring the form by bringing a certain intentionality and reciprocal energy to it. You know what I mean? To make it even your own engagement with it, that much more creative and generative. I think that’s been important. How have you stayed tapped into that over all these years?

Justin Gage: I think if I was to describe my talents, I am very gifted at editorial curation and presentation. That’s where my talents lie, and I’d put myself up against anyone. And I think that has enabled me to, over 20 years, working in hand with all of the AD contributors, I think we’ve really been able to mold this thing that really does feel of a whole, and again, letting the art speak first versus devolving into some sort of-the-moment social media passing trend or fashion.

AD: When I think about the way the internet works, when I think about what gets huge, what goes viral, it can get disheartening. I mean, I think that we should be frank about the idea of working with the internet. You have seen a kind of, I don’t know if I want to be too doomed and call it a sort of devolving relationship, but I do think that what we’ve seen for those of us who have been particularly creating things with the internet as the primary model for distribution, we’ve seen people are less down to read long form pieces. People are labels are not finding it all that lucrative to advertise with outlets like us. I’m not saying any of this as means to put a ding on the enterprise at just simply, you’ve had to navigate those ups and downs. I mean, I think if you weren’t thinking about it like an art project and being willing to aim for that presentation on an idealistic level…

Justin Gage: Oh, it would’ve been done years ago. The inside baseball of keeping any enterprise or relationship alive for 20 years is there’s a lot of ups and downs, and that’s true of Aquarium Drunkard, just from myriad issues, just trying to keep it online. But yeah, I mean, I don’t think it’s doomer to acknowledge those things. It’s just kind of the reality of where we are. And I do hope that there is a pivot back to people going back to online destinations, to having bookmarks versus having everything fed to them through a social media algorithm. I do think we’ve lost something there, but that’s not to say it couldn’t revert to that.

AD: I mean, I think that often societal or cultural shifts are intricately related to the mood. So as being on the internet becomes less fun or less enjoyable or less useful than maybe people’s behaviors will adjust. I mean, I think about that. I like to think that what we’re creating sort of super serves, the people who are looking for the kind of things that are a little more in depth.

Justin Gage: 100%. 

AD: But also are in a lot of ways less formal than a lot of the music writing that’s out there too, and more impressionistic. And to me, that’s another thing that I feel like has developed is that over the last, let’s say 20 years, the amount of people who are looking for a, should I listen to this? Or people don’t come to music writing necessarily for that thing anymore. Just that consumer guide sort of relationship to music. So I feel like as I think about what do I want to do with Aquarium Drunkard moving forward, when I think about it for myself, it’s like I think I want to help to continue to facilitate deeper engagement with this stuff in a way that feels maybe not to be entirely, but it also feels like that’s natural for me, is to try to do that when I can.

And I want to try to share that with people. And I also want there to be, I mean, feel personally bad often that I can’t cover all the artists and releases that I would want to because there’s o many people out there creating incredible stuff, and getting anything noticed is so hard for people these days on this internet that is so splintered. So I like to think of aquarium drunkard as like you said sort of a whole, and on that front, you’ve also always been making records too, first with Autumn Tone records, but Aquarium Drunkard’s partnership with ORG Music. So I wanted to note that in this 20 year look back too, is that there was the Brazil comp, there’s been Jesus People Music comps, there’s been Lagniappe Sessions comps through Light in the Attic and ORG. So it’s like that’s another part of the Aquarium Drunkard story that I think even takes it further off that offline mode. 

Justin Gage: From 2006 until 2019, Autumn Tone Records, which I founded, was putting out several releases per year by contemporary artists, and we still do manage that catalog. But since then, my personal pivot has just been an Aquarium Drunkard label in conjunction, primarily, with ORGMusic based here in Los Angeles. And while we have worked with some contemporary artists, Color Green, Cactus Lee, and some other folks, it’s largely been based around reissues and compilations. We did those two Brazilian compilations a couple of years ago. We did the two volumes of the Jesus People compilations that got their start as Aquarium Drunkard mixtapes with Josh at Blackforrestry maybe 15 years ago on the site. So yeah, there is this IRL component to AD that of course exists in the hundreds of parties and shows that we’ve put on not just LA and New York, but around the globe. 

AD: I remember all those New Orleans shows back in the day, always wishing I could have got to them.

Justin Gage: Yeah, I mean, obviously my crowning achievement there was Scott Simoneaux and I put on a Funkadelic show, an Aquarium Drunkard show during Jazzfest in, I think, 2008. Damn. It was wild. 

AD: Did you have any experiences with George backstage?

Justin Gage: I never encountered Clinton himself. 

AD: How about Bootsy? Was Bootsy involved?

Justin Gage:  Well, yeah, but yeah, there was no backstage interaction. I was just in the crowd with the Bop Gun.

AD: Man, that’s fantastic though. That’s fantastic. In terms of backstage stories, I will say to share one of my own backstage with Rocky Erickson is like my high watermark for the Marfa Marfa Myths thing, which those are episodes that we need to restore as well. 

Justin Gage: That’s when you went on location for what the better part of a week to Marfa Myths in 2017?

AD: Yeah, 2017.

Justin Gage: And there were what? There was not a dozen, but there was a handful of episodes generated from that.

AD: Eileen Myles, Allah Las, Weyes Blood, she was lying on a couch. I felt like I was her therapist. Who else? Yeah, there was Lonnie Holley recorded just on my iPhone outside. So yeah, those are ones we need to fix. But I got to say that was a pretty exciting sort of thing to do. And those were good episodes. So those need to be restored. And I mean, I think that when we think about Aquarium Drunkard going forward, there is this thing to me of realizing that it’s an archive of all this stuff that theoretically could survive into the next permutation of the internet, whatever that is.

Justin Gage: Whatever our robot overlords decree.

AD: AI has come up over and over again on episodes this season in particular, because I do think it’s a very interesting topic right now. And I think that really it’s waiting for us to actually have a lot of conversations about what ethically any of this should look like or whatever. But I do think that the more people seed control over their relationship with art to these fundamentally non-human, human sort of technologies, right? The more you do that, I think the emptier and emptier, maybe it starts to feel on a certain level or it stops to have, it’s just like any relationship you have to feed your relationship with music as much as anything else. 

Justin Gage: You just take the algorithm as a leading example, if you were just to follow an algorithm based on your own taste, whether it’s through some DSP or social media outlet or whatever, you’re only going to see these things that it thinks you want to see versus, say, let’s take AD as a internet magazine. You go there and, say, you show up for a review of that Dorothy Carter album, Troubadour, you might then get hip to something really disparate, like us talking about the 20 year anniversary of Boards of Canada’s Campfire Headphase LP. An algorithm is never going to serve you that in an AI generated playlist… it’s never going to serve you something that inherently human and disparate, something that comes down to some sort of almost mystical… yeah, it’s just not going to happen. AI. I feel like the fear of AI is that it’ll be just good enough, and for a lot of people, good enough is fine, but for the rest of us, it doesn’t cut it.

AD: Yeah. You want something that pushes, you want something that allows you sort of access to some form, however hazy you want to define it, of transcendence. And I think music offers transcendence on a routine basis if you feed that relationship with it. And I think that when I think about what Aquarium Drunkard has taught me, it’s to try to protect and preserve that ability to engage deeper with it. And in order to do that, you have to be able to say, I’m not going to necessarily pay attention to everything. I’m going to pay attention to the stuff that really speaks to me. And I think that that’s something that truly resonates. 

And I think that when you’re honest about that, when it truly resonates, I do think that that is retaining, it’s keeping in touch with a part of the human experience of listening to music that is, I guess, truly sacred. So I mean, I do find that I do find it almost sacred quality to what it is that we’re doing. You know what I mean? Without sounding nuts.

Justin Gage: No, no. And you and I have both talked about this before, we both would describe the music that we truly connect to as soul music. And I don’t mean in an R&B connotation, but music that… you could use sacred, you can use soul, but something that is coming from within the human spirit, on, again, some almost mystical level. And I feel like music with a capital M is thriving in 2025. But is it getting out there? Are people hearing it? Are the musicians able to pay the rent? That’s kind of where we’re at. Music. Music with a capital M is great right now as a culture. But there’s a reckoning with how we’re going to help creatives to continue to do their thing. 

AD: I think that you put it very, very well. And that idea of soul music, it might be Deerhunter, or it might be Judee Sill, or it might…

Justin Gage: Lonnie Holley, Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, whatever.

AD: Dude, earlier today I was hanging out in here getting ready for this, and all of a sudden I heard “Smokestack Lightning” by Howlin’ Wolf just playing outside of my window. And I go out and it’s the mailman, and he’s got it just turned up really loud in the mail truck. And I don’t know, hopefully I don’t get him in trouble. Nobody used AI to figure out what mailman was disturbing the piece.

Justin Gage: We’re not going to dox him.

AD: Don’t want to dox our mail carrier, but I will say that hearing it, that to me was a thing of realizing, oh, man, it’s still exciting to connect to music and to keep your ears open. And once you get a little expansive with it, you start to hear the music everywhere. I feel like that’s, you know what I mean? 

Justin Gage: Absolutely. Someone interviewed me last week about 20 years of Aquarium Drunkard, and one of the questions was like, what are some of the most unexpected places you’ve heard music? And I was like, I can’t really think of anything off the top of my head, but some of the best music I’ve ever heard is piping out of a Manhattan window on a hot summer day or getting into a taxi cab. It’s everywhere. The well is so deep of what you don’t know, and it’s so good.

AD: Yeah. I think that that’s actually maybe at the core of it, one of the reasons why Aquarium Drunkard is such a fundamentally optimistic project is because we don’t think we’ve exhausted it. There’s still so much to hear, and it might even be something you’ve heard a hundred times before on the hundred and first time, you might hear something new in it. And that possibility is always there in music. So I really do think to myself, I think that’s one of the reasons why this thing has stayed plugged in the way it has to the extent that it has. And it’s not like there’s always new stuff to discover. And that is a really fortifying thing for me, I think.

Justin Gage: I agree. I agree. Like you’re saying, it’s like that hundred and first time you hear something, maybe it’s the set and the setting, and you’re suddenly like, oh, okay.

AD: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I think that Aquarium Drunkard is dedicated to, in its purest form, capturing that. And dude, I just got to say through all the ups and downs, congratulations on 20 years of Aquarium Drunkard, and I’m so thankful to be a part of it, and I appreciate you welcoming all of those of us who have been a part of it over the years. A great many contributors, far too many to name all of ’em, but so many people have, I think, contributed their voice to this thing you’ve made. And I think I feel pretty comfortable speaking on their behalf saying, we appreciate that this space exists to do that. You know what I mean?

Justin Gage: Oh, well, yeah. I’m thankful you guys and gals are all a part of it. I mean, again, I mentioned this on the post about the 20 year. Aquarium Drunkard exists because of this small cadre of contributors. It’s a tight group. But I do think that there is this shared headspace that everything does filter through… the shared this hive mind. 

AD: We are Borg. So as far as listeners should know, I don’t think we have a date ready to announce it, but it’s going to be coming this summer: Transmissions is going to be on a little bit of a break as we figure out what the next season of this show looks like. But we want to formally announce, and we’ll be sharing more information about it soon, that we’re going to be doing a series on Neil Young, featuring the great Tyler Wilcox of Doom and Gloom from the Tomb, one of the long running Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard radio project. 

Justin Gage: An absolute Shakey expert. 

AD: Yeah, he’s an absolute expert when it comes to Neil Young and what this thing is called All One Song. And it’s going to be Tyler speaking with different artists or writer or noted enthusiast, somebody, about one single Neil Young song and digging in, and he’s got some great guest booked already, and this is going to be rolling out in just the next few weeks here on the Aquarium Drunkard feed. A couple years back, we did that Sunburned Hand of the Man miniseries. J Kelly Davis did an incredible job. And our friends over at Three Loeb to help facilitate that. We heard from lots and lots of folks that they wanted more stuff like that. And I will say that All One Song, it offers this unique thing. Only Tyler is able to talk about these songs at this depth, with this level of knowledge of the various versions of these tunes and stuff. And so for Neil aficionados, Neil is one of those guys. For me, he’s an artistic hero, so I’m so glad that we’re going to have Scorpio, legend, Neil Young, a podcast mini series, maxi series, maybe you might want to call it. I don’t know. But Tyler’s really bringing a lot of heat to it. 

Justin Gage: And if I’m not mistaken, Tyler, over the years at Aquarium Drunkard, I believe he has interviewed, except Neil, everyone in Crazy Horse. 

AD: I think he has. And so whether some of those recordings make their way into this new thing, eventually, I guess we’ll see. But I got to say that in terms of podcasts from Aquarium Drunkard, I’m really excited about all one song existing, and I think people are going to really dig it while transmissions will return later. And there’s lots in the archives and lots of, as I said, hope to restore the archives correctly. I dunno, maybe figure out a transmissions book or something. There’s a lot of projects I want to do to take this archive that we’ve created together and make it more accessible, more truly. But I will say that I’ve started in on that project a little bit, and man, you really do have to edit. Spoken word is such an edit job because the way you can get away with understanding what people mean when they’re communicating, even if it’s just verbally. You know what I mean? 

Justin Gage: Yeah, when you read something and there’s a caveat emptor at the beginning, “edited for content and clarity.” The general reader has no idea what actually goes into that.

AD: There’s a lot of clarifying that I need to do regarding myself on this podcast. But yeah, Justin, it’s been so good hanging out, and I feel like this is a great way to end this season. I suppose folks should know that there’s lots of new stuff going up at Aquarium Drunkard. We want to thank all of our friends at the Talkhouse podcast network for the show. This episode edited and sound engineered by Andrew Horton. And Justin is our executive producer. Thanks Justin. And let’s see, Ian Everett on the art. Transcript edited by me. We appreciate everybody tuning into this 10th season of transmissions, and we’ll be back soon here in the podcast feed with All One Song. In the meantime, Justin, thanks so much for hanging, man. It’s been awesome. 

Justin Gage: Another 20, onwards.

AD: Here we go. All right, this transmission is concluded.