This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ?
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - PLEDGE WEEK: “My World Fell Down” by Sagittarius
This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ?
Song Exploder - Fenne Lily – Lights Light Up
Fenne Lily is a singer and songwriter from Dorset, England. She released her first album in 2018, but I didn’t find her music until 2023, when she put out her third album, Big Picture. The album she released in between those two was one that got a little lost in the lockdown, when all her touring plans around it got canceled. All of that plays into the story she tells in this episode, about making her song “Lights Light Up” from that third album. I spoke to Fenne in front of a live audience at WBUR CitySpace in Boston. Coming up, you’ll hear how the song evolved across different versions of demos and then in the studio, where she recorded it with Grammy-nominated producer Brad Cook.
For more, visit songexploder.net/fenne-lily.
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - PLEDGE WEEK: “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum
This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ?
Take This Pod and Shove It - 79: “Pink Skies” by Zach Bryan (plus The Great American Bar Scene)
Want more Take This Pod and Shove It? Consider supporting us on Patreon HERE! (Patreon.com/takethispod)
This week Tyler and Danny share their reactions to Zach Bryan's emotional, character-driven smash hit album, The Great American Bar Scene. How did we like it? How does it compare to his self titled album? Listen to find out!
Follow the link below to keep up with which songs are being added to our Ultimate Country Playlist on Spotify, now including "Pink Skies"
https://tinyurl.com/takethispodplaylist
And on TIDAL!
https://t.co/MHEvOz2DOA
Check out our Patreon!
Check out our new merch store!
Instagram: @TakeThisPodandShoveIt
For everything else click HERE!
Want to create your own great podcast? Why not start today! We use BuzzSprout for hosting and have loved it. So we suggest you give them a try as well! Buzzsprout gets your show listed in every major podcast platform, and makes understanding your podcast data a breeze.
Follow this link to let Buzzsprout know we sent you—you'll get a $20 credit if you sign up for a paid plan, and it helps support our show.
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - ANNOUNCEMENT: Pledge Week 2024
An announcement of this year’s pledge week. To sign up to the Patreon, visit http://patreon.com/andrewhickey
Transcript
Welcome to Pledge Week 2024.
For those who don’t know — perhaps you’ve only recently started listening to the podcast — this podcast is entirely funded by people backing me on Patreon, the crowdfunding site, and so occasionally I’ll do a pledge week, where I remind people about this and encourage people to sign up.
The main benefit you get for signing up to the Patreon, other than the knowledge that you’re supporting an independent creator, is bonus episodes. There’s one of these with every main episode, and sometimes random other ones as well. They’re shorter episodes than the main episodes — I say at the end of each main episode that they’re ten minutes, and that’s how they started out, but often in more recent years they’ve been twenty-five minutes or more, sometimes as long as an hour, as they’ve grown in the same way the main episodes have grown.
These bonus episodes are about artists who for whatever reason don’t fit into the main narrative I’m telling. Sometimes they’re a massively important artist, but one who never interacted much with the rest of the music world and made their own path, and so they don’t feed into the larger story. Sometimes they’re an obscure artist who never had much success at the time but gained a cult following after their death. Sometimes they’re just a personal favourite of mine who I can’t really justify devoting a main episode to. Sometimes they’re someone who made great music but had a boring story that wouldn’t be worth spending a long time over, but I can tell the highlights, and sometimes they’re someone who made terrible music but had a fascinating story. And sometimes they’re people who I would cover in a main episode but who there’s simply not enough information about to tell the story in any detail.
There are lots of reasons for artists being covered in the Patreon but some of the episodes I’ve done for that have been among my favourites.
Anyway, anyone who signs up to the Patreon as a backer for $1 or more gets access to every single bonus episode I’ve done, and continues to get access to new ones as long as they’re a backer.
Now I have to emphasise this time round that that is “for $1 or more”. For some reason known only to themselves, the people at Patreon recently decided it would be a good idea for their crowdfunding site which exists as a way for people to pay artists they want to support, if they put in a compulsory free tier on every account where you pay nothing, and to make that the default that people see. So if you sign up, you see “Sign up for free!” If you sign up for free you won’t get anything.
But if you sign up for $1 a month, you’ll get somewhere in the region of two hundred bonus episodes — and if you want you can cancel right after you download them all, and you’ll have only paid one dollar. I won’t be annoyed at that — that’s the deal here. I know times are tough and sometimes a dollar is a lot. If you sign up for higher tiers, you get copies of most of my old books as ebooks, and new print books when they come out (though it’s been quite a while since a new book came out — the person who was proofing and indexing the next book based on the podcast got sick with long covid and I’ve been having to do that myself while doing my other work, but that should be out sooner rather than later, and you’ll get access to all the past ebooks straight away). People on all tiers also get occasional blog posts from me — gig reviews, occasional updates about my work process, and so on. But the main extra you get is the bonus podcasts.
So for the next five days, tomorrow through Saturday, I’m going to post five of those bonus podcasts to the main feed, to give you a free taster of what these bonus episodes are like. If you like what you hear, you can sign up at patreon.com/andrewhickey — there’ll be a link on the blog post associated with this, as there is with all of the episodes.
And one more thing I need to stress — *only sign up for the Patreon if you can afford it*. My listeners are currently very generous, and I am making a good income from this podcast now. I have to do these pledge weeks to keep the numbers up and make sure new listeners know what’s on offer, but I don’t want anyone to feel like they are under any obligation to pay me a penny. And times are tight enough that many people genuinely can’t afford even a dollar a month.
But if, after you’ve paid your living expenses, helped out any needy friends, given to proper charities, put away something in savings, and all the other important uses for money, you do have a dollar a month or more left over, and you like the sound of the bonus episodes that will hit the feed this week, why not sign up to the Patreon? There’s a lot more where they came from.
Take This Pod and Shove It - Patriotic Country Songs with Joe Mande [REMASTERED]
This week we revisit a favorite topic: insane, pandering, patriotic country songs. Originally aired on July 4th 2022, this episode features comedian Joe Mande (Hacks, The Good Place, Parks and Recreation), who joins us in going down the un-nuanced rabbit hole of unabashedly pro-America country music.
This episode has been remixed and remastered to improve sound quality and include new song clips for context.
Check out our Patreon!
Check out our new merch store!
Instagram: @TakeThisPodandShoveIt
For everything else click HERE!
Want to create your own great podcast? Why not start today! We use BuzzSprout for hosting and have loved it. So we suggest you give them a try as well! Buzzsprout gets your show listed in every major podcast platform, and makes understanding your podcast data a breeze.
Follow this link to let Buzzsprout know we sent you—you'll get a $20 credit if you sign up for a paid plan, and it helps support our show.
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Song 175: “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone Part 2, “My Own Beliefs Are In My Song”
For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “Everyday People”. This episode looks at the whole career of Sly and the Family Stone, from their first rehearsal until today.
Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode, on “Living in the Past” by Jethro Tull.
Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/
Song Exploder - Vagabon – Water Me Down
Last year, Vagabon released her third album, Sorry I Haven’t Called, which I’ve been listening to a lot. So I wanted to revisit an episode that I recorded with her back in 2020, about her breakout song "Water Me Down." The episode also features the voice of Eric Littmann, who co-produced the track. He passed away in June 2021, way too young. Vagabon’s new album is dedicated to him. If you haven’t heard this episode before, I hope you like it.
When Laetitia Tamko started making the second Vagabon album, she really wanted to produce the entire thing on her own. It would be a new sound, and producing was still a relatively new skill to her, but she wanted to tackle it head on, and do it all herself. On this song, though, "Water Me Down," Laetitia actually has a co-producer, Eric Littmann. It’s the one exception to her otherwise entirely self-produced album. In this episode, she breaks down how she and Eric made the song, and why it was worth making that exception.
For more, visit songexploder.net/vagabon.
Take This Pod and Shove It - A Non-Exhaustive Guide to Queer Country w/ Ali Clayton
We hope you'll consider supporting Take This Pod and Shove It on Patreon HERE!(Patreon.com/takethispod)
To round out Pride Month 2024 we are joined once again by the hilarious Ali Clayton, whose new album, Country Queer, you can buy or stream now. Ali joins Danny and Tyler to discuss some of their favorite LGBTQ+ artists in the country world. (There are, of course, many more out there, too!)
Below is a list of who was mentioned in the episode, for your convenience:
- Julie Williams
- Willi Carlisle
- Chely Wright
- Maren Morris
- Brandy Clark
- Brandi Carlile
- Orville Peck
- Brook Eden
- Adeem the Artist
- Allison Russell
- Amythyst Kiah
Check out our Patreon!
Check out our new merch store!
Instagram: @TakeThisPodandShoveIt
For everything else click HERE!
Want to create your own great podcast? Why not start today! We use BuzzSprout for hosting and have loved it. So we suggest you give them a try as well! Buzzsprout gets your show listed in every major podcast platform, and makes understanding your podcast data a breeze.
Follow this link to let Buzzsprout know we sent you—you'll get a $20 credit if you sign up for a paid plan, and it helps support our show.