Show Notes
I can still remember being in high school in the early 90s and having my mind blown by seeing the video for Fishbone’s "Sunless Saturday" on MTV’s 120 Minutes and going to my local record store (R.I.P., Twisted Disque on Jamaica Ave) to get their album The Reality of My Surroundings, and then walking around Queens with it blasting in my headphones, mesmerized by the way they melded genres like ska, funk, punk, metal and more. Fishbone is one of the bands that showed me what was possible, as far as breaking down both genre and racial barriers in music. SO! When I learned that Fishbone were getting ready to release their first full-length album in almost 20 years, their awesome new LP Stockholm Syndrome and that they would be doing interviews, I knew I had to make it happen. It was a blast connecting with Angelo Moore, who is the only permanent member of Fishbone — the only one who has been in the band for its entire 40 year history, while others have left or joined or left and re-joined — for the conversation in episode 125. We talked about his earliest experiences with creativity — he started out pop-locking and street dancing in Hollywood before he started playing music. He wanted to get a keyboard but his dad insisted on saxophone, and thus the seeds for Fishbone were planted. Angelo talks about meeting his bandmates in eighth grade and schlepping on the bus more than two hours each way from where he lived in the Valley to band practice in South Central LA, working up to their first show at Madame Wong’s and eventually scoring a major label deal that turned out to be a mixed blessing. We also delve into the ups and downs of their career, what he remembers about early encounters with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Beastie Boys, and what inspired Fishbone’s new album, which is a true return to form — the sound of a band that has never been afraid to be completely themselves, in all of their bright, brash, political, genre-melding glory. (You might start by listening to the Stockholm Syndrome single "Racist Piece of Shit" to get a sense of the album as a whole.) One caveat: You’ll notice that the audio sounds a little rough. The band had just begun a run of dates on Less Than Jake’s Summer Circus tour, and when Angelo joined our Zoom, he was on the road. Literally. He called while driving himself to soundcheck for a show in Florida. So it was a little more chaotic than the usual interview, with him attempting to navigate while answering my questions. You’ll also hear him stop for a pee break, mid-interview, which was hilarious. Fishbone are on the road through late August and you can get tickets here.
More from LSQ
“I guess I swapped my parents and my family for Bob Dylan,” says Robyn Hitchcock, remembering an evolutionary moment in his creative journey. “I just heard “Like a Rolling Stone” every day for two months as I was going into my teens, it was my kind of bar mitzvah really. My molecular structure was changed over the course of 18 months and by the end of 1967 when I had gone through the change, and I was like a sort of skinny, dark haired version of what I am now I was writing the lyrics and I’d got a guitar. My parents, for their sins, gave me a cheap acoustic guitar. I just took it everywhere with me like a few years earlier I would have taken my little panda teddy bear. I would always go everywhere with a plastic dinosaur in my pocket — I was a very OCD kid who wanted their comfort. And I just replaced that with the guitar and my Bob Dylan records and my portable record player. By the time I was 15 I haven’t consciously decided it, but there was nothing else I wanted to do.” In episode 146, hear the legendary singer-songwriter share more about his love for Dylan, his adolescent musical awakening, connecting with an attraction to art that is absurd or surreal, how he began writing songs and the discoveries that led to his work with The Soft Boys, insights into how his approach to music has changed and how he lets the songs find him, like birds finding seed. We also talk about his new album, The Confuser, his latest memoir, Stranded in The Future, and more! Robyn is on tour in Europe this month. Get tickets here.
“I felt this really compelling amount of nostalgia and I was kind of living in the past, so I thought that maybe songwriting was a way to capture that and a way to protect it, because I felt like it was slipping away -- just... childhood," says Bedouine's Azniv Korkejian, talking about the inspiration for her beautiful new album, Neon Summer Skin. "I felt really sad about it and I started to write with that in mind and it was kind of more than anything kind of therapeutic for me, I understood that I needed to address it because I understood that it was all consuming.” It was such a pleasure to finally get to do this interview with Azniv. We’ve been friends for years, but there was still so much I didn’t know about her earlier life and her creative journey. In episode 145, we delve into that evolutionary stuff: singing along with Mariah Carey’s Music Box as a kid, falling in love with artists like The Strokes and Norah Jones as she got a bit older, working in sound editing for film and TV after college, and eventually starting to perform her own music a little more than a decade ago. And we also talk about the making of Neon Summer Skin and how it helped her process some of the bittersweet nostalgia she was feeling about childhood and the safety of family. Bedouine has a North American tour starting in mid-October. Get tickets here.
“I started writing poems and singing them over instrumental songs I’d made, and I realized that the melody was coming to me as I read them, and I was like, ‘Oh, there’s music in the words!,” says Alex Cameron, recalling how he first discovered his preferred method of songwriting. “The lyric had the melody in it. I didn’t have to come up with the melody and think about which words would fit, I just had to press record and sing the words while listening to the music and the melody’s in there. That’s why I love writing words first.” In episode 144 of the LSQ podcast, the Australian singer-songwriter discusses his impressive fifth studio album, Late To Set, an elevated showcase for his signature style of brooding, witty, character-driven songcraft. Cameron shares insights into his creative philosophies and the evolution of his approach to music. He also reflects on the artists he loved as a kid: Buddy Holly, Nina Simone, Dire Straits, Outkast, Aphex Twin, Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell, the Strokes and more. Alex is on tour in North America in September, and opening for The Strokes in Europe in October. Get tickets here.
Even during the past decade while he was busy with Stranger Things, Finn Wolfhard still has always found time to make music - whether with his teenage bands Calpurnia and The Aubreys, or more recently under his own name, starting with his 2025 album, Happy Birthday, an impressive debut recorded using four- and eight-track cassette. For his wonderful new album, Fire From The Hip, he’s elevated his approach in every possible way, expanding the sonic palette, fidelity and songcraft for a confident collection of indie rock tunes that evoke Wilco and Teenage Fanclub and Faces and of Montreal, among other touchstones. In episode 143 of the LSQ podcast, Finn talks about the making of the album, how he approached it differently from Happy Birthday, and the satisfaction he got from working with a community of artist friends. He also talks about how he first became obsessed with music as a kid thanks to the Beatles and the Ramones. And he shares some details about film he’s working on about The Replacements (based on Bob Mehr’s definitive book about the band), why he relates to bassist Tommy Stinson and a dream he had the other night about frontman Paul Westerberg. Finn is on tour now and has additional dates in the fall. Get tickets here.
This spring, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien released a beautiful and soul-stirring album called Blue Morpho, and in this episode, he shares with great depth and candor what inspired the album, his approach to recording it, and the transformative self exploration required to make it. One of the elements of the project was his desire to capture sounds at 432 Hz, and you’ll hear him explain the idea behind that, right at the beginning of the interview. But from there, we go way back into his history as an artist, to his early childhood listening to Simon & Garfunkel with his mom while she sewed, singing in the boys choir, discovering guitar music and freaking out over bands like The Jam and The Police and The Smiths, and while still a teenager meeting and forming a band with the group of school friends who would become Radiohead. Honestly, this interview is one of those occasions, when I can’t believe what an honor it was to hear from an artist whose music has been so important to me personally, and for him to share about the artists that had similar impact on his life. There’s an incredible story right near the end of the episode where Ed talks about being on tour with Radiohead in the US in 1995, and having all of their gear stolen. So they took a fateful trip to San Francisco to get some new guitars and things, but they only had one audio cassette to listen to during the road trip, and the music that was on it ended up inspiring some of their approach to OK Computer. You’ll have to listen all the way through to find out what was on that tape.