transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Every episode of NPR's It's Been a Minute podcast starts with a question about how culture shapes our lives. Are we spending too much on other people's weddings? Is social media bad for your mental health?

Speaker 2:
[00:13] We're here for your right to be curious.

Speaker 1:
[00:16] One big question at a time. Follow It's Been a Minute wherever you get your podcasts. This episode of All Songs Considered comes to you from the NPR Music Podcast, which is your home for all things good and the music verse, including Alt.Latino. That's a show we drop in this feed every Wednesday. And New Music Friday, we close every week with New Music Friday. We've got new episodes of this show, new episodes of All Songs Considered every Tuesday. We did just have this special bonus episode yesterday where we talked with Beck all about his new song, Ride Lonesome. He's back with new music. Be sure to check that out if you haven't already. But I'm kind of burying the lead here because, I mean, Beck is back, but Sheldon Pearce, you're back.

Speaker 2:
[01:00] I am back. It's been a little while.

Speaker 1:
[01:02] It's been a minute. So I don't know how this happens, but I do have a couple other people on, do a couple of theme shows. Next thing I know, last time you were on was into February, which feels like a lifetime ago. On that show, we were talking about our favorite new tracks of the week.

Speaker 2:
[01:20] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[01:20] That's what we're going to do on this episode of All Songs Considered. We're going to update that running list that we keep of the year's best music. A lot of great stuff to add this week, including the new Boards of Canada. My God, we've got a new song from Boards of Canada. It's the first in more than a decade. We're going to play that in a little bit. If we hadn't just devoted a whole episode to the new Beck track, I would have totally played it on this week's show. I actually want to start the show with Jack White, since I can't start with the Beck. Jack White, he dropped a couple of singles just a couple of weeks ago, this is our first new music episode we've done since he dropped these songs. The one I want to play is called God and the Broken Ribs. The other one he released is called derecho de Monico. And again, these came out at the top of April. Both are great, but this one, I don't know, God and the Broken Ribs, I think it rips pretty hard. Man, this just hits so many marks for me, for a Jack White song. Great riff, great wordplay, it's weird. Like, there's so many little weird twists and turns, like there's this moment about a third of the way or so in where he just like slams on the brakes, and there's this kind of strange, super digitized, I don't know if it's a keyboard flourish or how he's even making the sound, then he gets back to the riff. And then there's this little almost jazzy drum fill, an extended drum fill in the middle of it. Man, I love it.

Speaker 2:
[06:27] Yeah, his stuff is so sort of stealthily adventurous.

Speaker 1:
[06:31] Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2:
[06:32] Just because he is such a virtuosic player. I mean, it's funny, we were talking about Beck, and you have at this stage a pretty good sense of what a Beck song is. In the same way, you have a pretty good sense of what a Jack White song is in 2026. You know what he's after, but then when you get into the nitty-gritty of how they are put together, it's like this man is really a master of his craft.

Speaker 1:
[07:00] Yeah, I mean, it's easy to just hear this and think, oh, riff-rock, it's pretty straightforward. It's just him rocking out. It's awesome. But yeah, when you start picking it apart and really tuning in, there's so much wild stuff going on, and lyrically too. I tried to make a list of everything that I think he's talking about in this song, and it's a very, very, very long list. It's like the narcissism that you get from social media, how that fuels narcissism. There's some sort of dystopian future he's imagined where women are made to have more babies. There's something in there about the political discourse around population problems. I don't know. The list just goes on and on, and it's all within just a snippet of a snippet of a snippet of a sentence before he's on to the next point. And then obviously, of course, lots of religious imagery, but it all comes together so well.

Speaker 2:
[07:53] Yeah. There was a moment I kind of like fell off of Jack White in the middle of the solo albums run, where it was like, okay, maybe I've got a sense of what he's doing, and I don't need to tap in as much as I did before. And here we are again.

Speaker 1:
[08:11] Yeah. I'm tempted to say that this is his best work in years, these new couple of songs. But the truth is, I don't know if I trust my perspective on it, because I think I just kind of started listening to other stuff.

Speaker 2:
[08:25] There's so much happening always. Sometimes you just find yourself veering away from an artist who has been really good for a really long time and knows exactly what they're doing. But when you come back to it, it's like revisiting an old friend. You've fallen into a familiarity that feels like super refreshing. That's what I'm hearing on the newer stuff that he's doing now. I'm like, okay, I am ready to receive this again now. And he's as good as he's ever been.

Speaker 1:
[08:52] Yeah. I'm happy to re-dock at the Jack White ship for this one. No word on an album or anything, but this new single, God in the Broken Ribs, very cool.

Speaker 2:
[09:02] I'm going to take us in a similarly dystopian direction for an artist who is on the other end of the spectrum of Jack White, not known for doing the same thing, and makes a left turn into more guitar-focused stuff with this new single. It's the electronic singer and composer, Kelela, and she's got a new song that's called Idea One.

Speaker 1:
[12:57] Yeah, that's awesome. And very unexpected. Well, if you know her stuff at all, you called her electronic artist. What do you guess she is? I guess I think of her as an R&B artist, but it's not.

Speaker 2:
[13:09] Yeah, she straddles the lines between the two. A lot of her work has been about sort of merging those two spheres together in a way that feels very almost dualistic. There is a sense that she is of two worlds when you are listening to her stuff.

Speaker 1:
[13:30] Yeah. The electric guitar that comes in, totally out of left field for me.

Speaker 2:
[13:35] Just unexpected.

Speaker 1:
[13:37] Then there's some really cool synth sounds. It starts off with that little bass line, or I think it's played on a bass really high up on the neck. Then this little gnarled synth just comes in. Very cool.

Speaker 2:
[13:49] Yeah. There's just something really, it grows very gradually. It feels like an iceberg slowly shifting toward you. But then when that guitar really kicks in, it feels like it goes into another gear. The song, she says, was written while she was reading the sci-fi dystopian novel, Parable of a Sower by Octavia Butler, and she was feeling sort of the anxiety of being seen as a truth-teller at a time when it seems like reality is warping around us. Like it's a very weird climate to be a truth-teller.

Speaker 1:
[14:35] Yeah, I was going to ask you if you knew more about what the song is about, because she's someone else, sort of like the Jack White, where there are a lot of ideas going on and she comes at them all from kind of sideways. Never too direct. But like I listened to this song and I thought, man, this could be about anything. This could be a breakup song. This could be a political song. This could be a culture commentary. I don't know. I mean, it works.

Speaker 2:
[14:59] Right.

Speaker 1:
[14:59] But because it's got my gears turning, which is what I love when I listen to music.

Speaker 2:
[15:04] Yeah. I think one thing I really appreciate about it is something I appreciate generally about a lot of the best sort of like subtle protest music, which is that it is not coming at you directly with its message. It is not selling you a sermon, essentially. It is asking you to sort of like feel its vibrational force. I don't think the lyrics on their surface present as baldly political if you are listening to it for the first time and don't have the context of her saying, yeah, this is what this is. But I do think listening to it, you can feel the sense of unease, the sense of tension, the sense of anxiety that is welling up under the surface of this song. And it's impossible for that to not then imprint upon you as you are listening to it. I was feeling before I even got into all of her like context for what this song was, listening to it, I was like, well, I was really feeling it well up in my chest almost. The seriousness of it, the gravity of it.

Speaker 1:
[16:18] So a cool new direction for her, Kelela, the song Idea No. 1, is this like, do you know, have you heard anything about an album?

Speaker 2:
[16:25] I think, I'm looking into my crystal ball and I'm seeing an album in the offing. So I would be on the lookout for a new Kelela in 2026.

Speaker 1:
[16:36] Well, I wanna go to a discovery artist for me. This is an artist that goes by the name Mary in the Junkyard. Are you familiar with Mary in the Junkyard?

Speaker 2:
[16:44] Very, very off the random. This group appeared on the Richard Russell comp. Everything is temporary from last year.

Speaker 1:
[16:52] Oh yeah, that's right. That's right.

Speaker 2:
[16:54] Just sort of like in the margins. That was a sort of like panic moment for me because I heard that song and I was like, how have I not heard of this artist before?

Speaker 1:
[17:03] Well, so they definitely have put some stuff out. They've had some singles and EP's, but they're about to release later this summer their debut album. So you can be forgiven if you don't know more about them, but they're from London and this new album, I'm just kind of starting to dig into those other singles, any piece of stuff. This new album has a song on it called Crash Landing that I've just had on Constant Repeat.

Speaker 2:
[18:17] Like a crocodile. You opened up. And I can take your mask off.

Speaker 1:
[22:44] Yeah, this is another one that just hits so many things that I love, that just that dreamy, sort of other world vibe with a great groove behind it. All the contrast in it is so incredible to me. Just her voice, the singer, Clary Freeman Taylor, her voice, it's kind of got this childlike wonder to it, but then with those drums behind it and that walking bass line, the groove behind it, such incredible contrast. This is, so when somebody first told me about this band, I went from no idea who that is, never heard of them, to this is my new favorite band. Like in the course it took me, you know, like in the five minutes it took me to listen to that song.

Speaker 2:
[23:27] Right. It was so good. Right. I mean, that's why I said, like, I was kind of in a panic when I heard this group for the first time because there is such a sense of lived in this with their music that it feels like they've been doing this for a long time.

Speaker 1:
[23:43] They've got to figure it out.

Speaker 2:
[23:44] Yeah. So you're like, am I out of the loop? Like, did I miss the bus on this? Luckily, if you're hearing this now, this is the exact right time to get on the bus. But I mean, moody British Indie rock is just going to do it for me every single time.

Speaker 1:
[24:01] It's hooky and there's a weariness to it. Like, I love that sort of literary device. There's probably a name for it where you repeat the last word over again, like down, down, down, down. Sort of like it's very, is it Macbeth? Like tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. It's just like this resignation in it, right? Almost a hopelessness, but then her voice, again, that contrast is just kind of magical.

Speaker 2:
[24:28] Even within her own vocal performance, you mentioned this sort of like childlike wonder aspect of it. There is an obvious lightness when she's singing, but she also moves into like a sort of like disaffected, like sigh at various moments in this song. She plays with the idea of what brightness is, what darkness is. And of course, all of that is happening atop this very rich, a sonic backdrop. Like that bass is rich. I just love this song. I hope this whole record sounds like this because it will be one of my favorites of the year.

Speaker 1:
[25:09] Yeah, me too. And it doesn't come out until July. The album it's from is called Role Model Hermit. I don't know if I said that. Mary in the Junkyard, Role Model Hermit is the album, the song Crash Landing, and that album is out on July 3rd.

Speaker 2:
[25:24] I'm going to take us from a new discovery to a prolific artist who just cannot stop going. The great country singer-songwriter, Charley Crockett.

Speaker 1:
[25:37] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[25:37] He's, I honestly feel like he might be underrated. He releases so much music that I think some of it gets lost in the shuffle.

Speaker 1:
[25:47] And also doesn't miss. He's someone else I've said, I think I said that about Beck.

Speaker 2:
[25:50] Unbelievably consistent. And earlier this year, he released a new record. It's called Age of the Ramp. And I want to play the single from that record, which has stuck with me since I heard it. It's called Kentucky Too Long.

Speaker 1:
[29:30] Yeah, this is one I was thinking of playing, too. It's just too good to get this on the show. He's just like, he's got that classic country sound that I really love. It's like somewhere between 40s and 50s cowboy country to maybe 70s outlaw country, like somewhere in that area. Let's Luke Combs more Hank Williams.

Speaker 2:
[29:52] Oh yeah, he's pulling from a lot of classic country history, not just in his sound, but in his characters, obviously.

Speaker 1:
[30:00] It's storytelling.

Speaker 2:
[30:01] Yeah, this is very clearly about, I mean, there's so many outlaws and just like down on their luck grifters that like cycle through his songs. This character has to be one of my favorites.

Speaker 1:
[30:15] I think he's done quite a bit, including he's a bank robber, right?

Speaker 2:
[30:18] Yes, he's clearly a bank robber from out of town. He's come into town to rob another bank, but he's like realized that he set up shop and is going to get himself in trouble if he stays around any longer, but he can't bring himself to leave in time. He gets caught again in the second verse. He's spending time in Big Sandy, and he got to have been pregnant in Kentucky. Everything has gone wrong essentially. But this is just like there's so much life lived over the course of this song.

Speaker 1:
[30:54] Yeah. I mean, I assume a lot of it's just fiction.

Speaker 2:
[30:57] Yeah. Oh, yeah. No.

Speaker 1:
[30:58] But it's like, I mean, in terms of the story. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[31:02] He's not a bank robber.

Speaker 1:
[31:03] But I mean, I feel like so much contemporary country music is more personal, and it's more about like living in a small town. Yeah. It's all I and it's life in a small town and drinking and how you're making it in the world.

Speaker 2:
[31:19] Right.

Speaker 1:
[31:19] And this is more, yeah, just classic storytelling.

Speaker 2:
[31:23] Yeah. Yeah. I also think there's something about this song that feels like it's in conversation with Southern soul in terms of its sound. Even his voice, his vocal performance reminds me a little bit of Bill Withers. And there's also just like something about the performance of himself in terms of like its simplicity. Almost the down home charm of his like leaned back, casual approach to performing the song, even as he is clearly escaping from like the law enforcement.

Speaker 1:
[31:54] Yeah. Boy, Bill Withers is a great touchstone. Like I can't unhear that.

Speaker 2:
[31:57] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[31:58] I totally hear that. And the timbre of his voice too.

Speaker 2:
[32:02] His voice, really, there's something about the vocal performance that you're like, oh yes, that is a very southern, rootsy kind of performance. But he, to his credit, he pulls it into the universe of Charley Crockett's song specifically.

Speaker 1:
[32:19] This isn't cosplay or whatever.

Speaker 2:
[32:22] He, he has built out this kind of cannon for, for the, you just like slot this guy in next to a bunch of guys who have appeared across. I mean, he's released 10 albums in the 2020s.

Speaker 1:
[32:37] Well, yeah, I mean, so you said he was super prolific. I checked here while we were listening. And I, by my math, 16 albums in the last decade, basically, along with a couple of EP's and some other stuff. So this one, Kentucky Too Long, is from the album Age of the Ram, which just came out. So I mentioned Boards of Canada. And for anyone who doesn't know this band, electronic duo, two guys from Scotland, easily the most important, or certainly one of the most important and influential electronic music groups of all time.

Speaker 2:
[33:14] Absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[33:14] I mean, hardly anyone comes close. Like, if you want to get into electronic music, you haven't really, start with Boards of Canada.

Speaker 2:
[33:20] This group is very important to your most annoying friend. And that person is me.

Speaker 1:
[33:26] I thought you were going to say Otis Hart, because Otis Hart is so dead. I mean, they've had Boards of Canada landmark albums, starting with their debut, came out in 98. It's been a long time since we've got new music from them. Their last album came out in 2013. It's called Tomorrow's Harvest. But you know, these guys, they love a good mystery. They love to lay low, hold their cards close to the chest. So like their absence has only made people more curious about what's going on and what's coming next. So then like a couple of weeks ago, fans of the band started getting VHS tapes in the mail, I guess because they were like on the band's mailing list or had ordered merch or whatever. And they were, it's not much on the tapes. It's not like it was an explanation or a text or anything. It was just kind of cryptic static and images and whatnot. Then posters started showing up with more abstract imagery in different cities like London and New York. Then at the end of last week on their YouTube channel, Boards of Canada released a new song. It's called Tape 05. And with all of this sort of, I guess you would call it hype, all this mystery that's sort of like, oh, what's happening? What's happening? Are they gonna, you get a song like this, you think this is gonna need to be very, very good. And it is, it's incredible. Tape 05, we'll listen to it. We can talk more about it after we hear it. So, Sheldon, if you're at Boards of Canada to stand, what do you think?

Speaker 2:
[38:04] I love this song so much. Honestly, it feels like maybe the most atmospheric thing they've ever done. I mean, the YouTube comments for this video are filled with so many touching tributes about the passage of time. People being like, I lost somebody who was really into this group in the time that they were away, and now listening to them makes me remember that person more fully. Somebody being like, I was an addict when I discovered this. Music on walks and in my journey to get clean, this group was important to me. It feels like all of that time is built up across the three minutes that this song is playing. There was also a really beautiful comment that was like, Artemis II brought this back from the dark side of the room.

Speaker 1:
[38:58] I mean, it is very celestial. It is very, I mean, that's the thing. It's so beautiful. But to your point, yeah, lots of little movement and textures to it, but also they have this way of making it sound really big. Yeah. You listen to it and it feels like the whole universe is opening up.

Speaker 2:
[39:13] The scope of it is incredible. I hope this means that there's a record.

Speaker 1:
[39:18] I mean, so I'm calling it a new song, but the truth is, if you didn't know the song that appeared on YouTube, there was no yet.

Speaker 2:
[39:25] It's not on streaming anywhere.

Speaker 1:
[39:27] Not on streaming, no announcement, no statement, comments, nothing. I've reached out to some people. I've tried to get some answers and clarity and just getting radio sets, total silence. Band still hasn't said anything about it. So I'm hearing it as a new song, at least, and whether or not there's a new album, we also don't know that. I will see if you go to their website. There's a little box for you to, and this is all that's on the website, there's a little box for you to enter your email address and it says, register for first access, which I immediately did. First access to what? I am assuming a new album, but I don't know. We really don't know.

Speaker 2:
[40:07] If nothing else, I appreciate it as a transmission from a group that has been long dormant. It feels like the beacon light coming back on, showing signs of life on another planet. It's like, okay, we can connect with this group again soon, hopefully.

Speaker 1:
[40:23] Boards of Canada, again, the song Tape 05 from who knows what. What universe? But Sheldon, I know you've got one more that you want to play.

Speaker 2:
[40:33] Yeah, I'm going to go out on another electronic duo, though, of a very different stripe. The Canadian group Purity Ring, Corrin Roddick and Megan James. It's kind of crazy to think that this group has been around for a decade.

Speaker 1:
[40:49] Has it been that long?

Speaker 2:
[40:51] Shrines came out 2012. It's been a while.

Speaker 1:
[40:54] It's been more like 15 years.

Speaker 2:
[40:56] Almost 15, yeah. I think of one of the defining electronic groups, bridging the gap between that space and rap production. But they've steadily grown lighter over the course of their run. Last year, they released a self-titled album that was a concept record about fictional RPG inspired by video games from The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy franchises. They've got a new song that I think is maybe their lightest song ever.

Speaker 1:
[41:28] Oh, wow.

Speaker 2:
[41:29] I think their music has historically been pretty weighted and dense. But this really opens up. It's almost ethereal in the ways in which it feels buoyant and playful. It's some of my favorite. I mean, I'm a big Purity Ring fan. But it's a really exciting sound from them. I would love to hear them exist in this space way more.

Speaker 1:
[41:54] So did you say the name of the song? It's Lemon Lime, right?

Speaker 2:
[41:58] Lemon Lime.

Speaker 1:
[41:58] So we'll go out on this. And Sheldon Pearce, thanks as always. Always a great hang.

Speaker 2:
[42:03] Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 1:
[42:04] All right. It's All Songs Considered from NPR Music.