Podcast Review: Broken Record (Pushkin).

I’ve been hoping to write a review of a podcast for some time, but recently thought it would be best to write about a single episode that I found compelling in and of itself, rather than just endorsing a particular podcast series.

However, I haven’t found that much time for listening to a lot of podcasts lately (especially since I don’t commute to work anymore), and in general have found that when I do, the quality and my interest in the topics from episode to episode tends to vary a great deal within any given series, even with some of the best and most informative news series I’ve found, such as Ezra Klein’s The Ezra Klein Show (New York Times News), Chris Hayes’ Why Is This Happening? (MSNBC), and Rachel Maddow’s recent MSNBC podcast history, ULTRA, about an earlier radical right upsurge in our national history.

Despite my intention to focus on a single episode of a series for my first podcast review, then, I was surprised to realize that I am now most eager to share a review of an entire podcast series, rather than a single episode. Of course, it too has the same problem of inconsistent topics and variable interest-levels as any other series with many episodes, but at least with this one, it’s pretty easy to guess which episodes you want to hear just by looking at the list of people interviewed.

This podcast series from Pushkin, which I have listened to on a number of recent airline flights, is called Broken Record. It is a collaborative effort of the popular writer Malcolm Gladwell, the famous music producer Rick Rubin, longtime Canadian journalist and New York Times media critic Bruce Headlam, and NPR arts reporter and show producer Justin Richmond.

The format and purpose of the podcast series is very simple. In various combinations, one or several of the four hosts conduct in-depth, often fascinating personal interviews with individual popular musicians.

In many cases, the interviewer(s) bring not only their own extensive knowledge of the music and arts industries and communities, the work of the artist being interviewed, and their own individual expertise and enthusiasm to bear, but also sometimes personal relationships, shared history or real friendships with the artists, which shapes the tone of the interview and the questions they ask.

This is particularly evident in interviews conducted by Rick Rubin, whose wide-ranging career in music production has put him in the studio at some point, working with many of the major artists he now interviews. I previously reviewed McCartney 3-2-1, a video documentary of Rubin interviewing Paul McCartney in a spare and darkened recording studio. The Broken Record podcast interviews he conducts have a very similar flavor, without the video aspect, as he goes in-depth with the artists into the music creation process, the history, the stories and the emotions of the musicians when they were creating their epic tunes.

Rubin also appears prominently in Somewhere You Feel Free, the Tom Petty YouTube documentary I just reviewed this morning, both as a contemporary commentator and also in the archival films from the Wildflower recording sessions era, in which he was present in his role as a music producer. He’s really like the Forrest Gump of music producers of our times, because of the vast range of the types of successful music and musicians he’s recorded and produced, which makes him an outstanding and well-informed interviewer for these sorts of conversations.

Of course, Malcolm Gladwell is also a skilled and often-intriguing podcast host and conversationalist. He has his own long-running podcast on Pushkin, Revisionist History, in which he uses the same style of counter-intuitive thinking and probing common to his bestselling books to re-examine major historical situations that we all think we understand, but maybe don’t. He is also a big fan of music, culture and the arts, so his enthusiasm and constant curiosity shine through in his Broken Record interviews.

Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond are less well known to a mass audience than Gladwell and Rubin, but they also prove to be smart, enthusiastic music fans with great interviewing skills and the ability to relate easily to their subjects. In other words, it’s an all-star team of hosts.

If this sounds appealing, I suggest you find the series wherever you get your podcasts, and then peruse the episode list going back several years, to see which of your favorite musicians and artists have been interviewed.

One nice thing about this podcast is that the recency of the interviews isn’t nearly as important as it would be, for example, with a current-events or news-related podcast. You can listen to interviews from six months or two years ago, and they’re still fascinating even now, particularly since the conversations are frequently retrospective and historical in nature. These podcasts will hold up and remain interesting for a long time.

The thing I like the most about the series and the interviews is the nature of the discussions. In all the ones I’ve heard, you feel like you’re listening in to a rich, informative and very friendly conversation between real down-to-earth people, discussing topics, music and histories that are very personal to them, although frequently part of legends, careers and lives lived in the glare of spotlights and their celebrity.

During the past few flights I’ve taken, I’ve heard lively and revealing interviews on Broken Record with Jackson Browne, Neil Young, Michael Stipe (lead singer of R.E.M.), Stevie Van Zandt (Bruce Springsteen’s friend, E Street Band guitarist and actor), and a particularly interesting conversation with blues guitarist, singer and songwriter Bonnie Raitt, which made all that otherwise monotonous airline flight time go by so much more quickly.

I had also first heard much of the news about the Tom Petty Wildflowers album anniversary re-release last year (with all the supplemental recordings, discussed in today’s other review) from an excellent interview on Broken Record. That episode also was conducted by Rick Rubin, proving that these podcasts can be an excellent source of breaking music news and trends in the industry as well as merely historical and retrospective pieces with aging stars.

There are so many more artists’ interviews in this podcast series’ archives, and they’re not just old-time Baby Boomer favorites either. There are plenty of musicians from the grunge era of the 1990s, the first two decades of the 2000s, rockers and rappers, folk singers and R&B artists. You can pick and choose whose stories you’d most like to hear, although I can almost guarantee that you’d be entertained by many of the podcasts, and would learn something new and interesting, even if the interview is with an artist you don’t know very much (or even anything) about.

This podcast series is an excellent way to learn more about popular music, and the musicians who create it, while enjoying listening in to pleasant, friendly and revealing conversations between gifted interviewers and the talented musical stars who are their subjects. Highly recommended.