The Show On The Road with Z. Lupetin Z. Lupetin

This week, we talk with Kenyan singer-songwriter Ondara, who came to Minneapolis in search of his voice as a young musician, and found a new creative persona which he now embodies called The Spanish Villager. He has since taken audiences by storm, garnering a Grammy-nomination and now returning with a stunning politically-charged new LP.

'Spanish Villager No: 3' is produced by Ondara and Mike Viola (Jenny Lewis, Dan Wilson) with collaborations from Taylor Goldsmith and Griffin Goldsmith of Dawes, Sebastian Steinberg, Tim Kuhl and Jeremy Stacey. While he would still call himself a folk singer like his Minneapolis hero Bob Dylan, Ondara (like Dylan) has gone a bit electric on the new offering, harnessing his massive vocal power with a full band around him.

Ondara’s immigrant journey is truly one for the storybooks, and while he has dutifully paid homage to American folk protest singers in his previous work, the newest 'Spanish Villager' work shows him really finding his own sound, at once sharply modern and steeped in a dark history he can’t wait to mine.

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This week, we call into Minnesota to talk to frontman and lead-songwriter Dave Simonett of the innovative jamgrass pioneers Trampled by Turtles.

Celebrating a new record, 'Alpenglow,' produced by Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, the six-piece band has gone from storming shaggy local bars in Duluth to playing their famously fast roots-n-roll in the biggest venues and festivals in the world.

Twenty years in, Simonett is keeping it fresh by letting masters like Tweedy bring his punky minor chord sensibility to the band’s warm acoustic camaraderie (bassist Tim Saxhaug, banjo player Dave Carroll, mandolinist Erik Berry, fiddle player Ryan Young, and cellist Eamonn McLain round out the group) with standout songs like “Starting Over” not shying away from the expectations that come from recognition and giving your art to the world - with the brightness of the banjo always leading the way.

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This week, we call on an Americana pioneer and a beloved fixture of the Nashville roots-country scene, the always affable Grammy-winner Jim Lauderdale. This year he celebrated the release of his thirty-fifth record 'Game Changer.'

Growing up in both North and South Carolina, as a young man Lauderdale fell in love with country music but took an unconventional path to becoming a sought-after songwriter, harmonist and writer in Music City. He toured in New York theatre productions when he was starting out, and ended up in LA. Even today you can hear the drama in his aching harmony-soaked songs like “Lightning Love” off 'Game Changer.'

While sales and national recognition haven’t always aligned, the “stylistically restless” Lauderdale has played the Opry over 200 times, collaborated on albums with his heroes like the late bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley, written tracks for artists as diverse as George Strait and Elvis Costello, and has accidentally become one of the leading elder-statesman of the Americana movement.

What is Americana exactly? Even Jim impishly won’t say. But it’s that earthy genre-bending sound that has kept his longtime fans coming back for more nearly for decades into his storied run.

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This week, we return to the Crescent City to talk to one of the new leaders of the Grammy-winning Rebirth Brass Band, trumpet player Glenn Hall III who is part of a deep New Orleans musical family.

Rebirth will be coming from NOLA to LA to help headline the inaugural Paramount Ranch Sonic Boom on October 15th. It’s a brand new music festival co-created by yours truly and Dustbowl Revival (along with Tiny Porch Concerts and the Santa Monica Mountains Fund) that will celebrate the confluence of American roots music by bringing together diverse acts like Grammy-winning folk-blues master Dom Flemons, and notable local Southern California-based acts the Eagle Rock Gospel Singers, string-band Water Tower, Cuban group Yosmel Montejo y La Caliente and singer-songwriter Abby Posner.

Set in the green hills of the Santa Monica Mountains, partial proceeds from the fest will go to restoring historic Paramount Ranch which lost much of its western movie sets during a devastating wildfire.

Few bands of any kind can claim an unbroken lineage from their 1983 start. Phillip "Tuba Phil" Frazier, his brother Keith Frazier and renowned trumpet player Kermit Ruffins formed the group out of Joseph S. Clark Senior High School, located in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. If you watched the acclaimed HBO series of the same name, you no doubt heard Rebirth as the brassy backdrop to the city as it constantly evolved and survived traumas like Hurricane Katrina. Members of the Frazier family still join the band on tours.

Glenn Hall III takes us through the fascinating history of the group, describing notable shows like opening for the Grateful Dead, recording with John Fogerty, kicking off the Grammys, and recently joining the Red Hot Chili Peppers onstage.

Their 2022 single “New Orleans Girl” shows how they never stop experimenting, lending their big sound to a hip-hop mashup featuring Cheeky Blakk and PJ Morton.

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This week, we dial into New Orleans for a fascinating talk with master funk-guitarist and songwriter Leo Nocentelli. Discerning listeners may known him as the chief groove-creator behind the legendary group The Meters with Art Neville on keyboard, George Porter Jr. on bass, Zigaboo Modeliste on drums. There is no mistaking his soulful dagger-sharp signature sound leading often-sampled treasures like “Sissy Strut” and “Hey Pocky A-Way” (The Beastie Boys were big fans) - or even his slinky masterful backing of Dr. John’s classic 'Right Place, Wrong Time.' But a new generation are learning of Nocentelli from last year's surprise release of his first and only solo record, the acoustic folk-driven 'Another Side,' which was resurrected and marketed by Light In The Attic Records nearly fifty years after Leo first recorded it.

You don’t usually put your first record out when you’re zooming past your 75th birthday. The story of how 'Another Side' still even exists is quite a yarn (one that Leo goes into great good-humored detail about in the taping) from the master tapes being lost in damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, to a master-copy being found almost impossibly after a storage-unit got foreclosed and the music was traded at a local swap-meet. Hearing him tell it, finding these songs from his younger days, was like finding an essential, lost piece of his soul. The record isn’t polished, but the sense of youthful exploration shines through. He’s searching for his voice in real time.

You wouldn’t think a rock-funk maven like Nocentelli would be inspired by songwriters like James Taylor or Elton John - but in many ways, it was the softer, more yearning, poetic side of rock-n-roll in the early 1970s that intrigued him most when he began writing songs like “Thinking Of The Day” in 1972, wondering if his place in the world, his “tomorrow would ever come.” Other standouts like “Riverfront” told the stories he couldn’t tell while penning the Meters' funky (but often instrumental) dance anthems. With his Meters mates chugging beside him in the studio, he can tell darker, more personal tales about his hard-working friends, like Aaron Neville (who he grew up with in the 7th Ward) and used to haul bananas off the boats in New Orleans to get by.

Nocentelli has had his shares of ups and downs as a lifer who has rode the tempests of the ever-evolving music industry. It’s a “brutal brutal business” he says at one point - and Leo shares that he had to sell some of his favorite guitars to keep going through the years. The song “Getting Nowhere” leans into the sense of helplessness and frustration many talented session players and touring side-men like him went through when royalties and fame and fortune passed them by as others rose to prominence.

Some things really haven’t changed in fifty years. But only a generational talent like Nocentelli could create sparkling guitar backdrops for artists as diverse as Dr. John, Otis Redding and even Jimmy Buffett, and keep his passion long enough to see new crowds packing houses on tours in 2022. It must be quite the feeling to finally be able to perform his own solo work - a half century after the songs first emerged and were almost lost forever.

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This week, we’re back for the fall season with the first face-to-face taping in nearly two years. I was able to catch up with the fearless deep-voiced frontman BJ Barham of North Carolina roots-rock favorites American Aquarium, in the front bar of The Troubadour in LA as his tour was passing through.

American Aquarium’s rawly personal new LP 'Chicamacomico' dropped earlier this year and focuses on the twin losses of BJ’s mother and grandmother - as well as a dark point in his own marriage when he and his wife lost a child. He was already building a room for the little one during the pregnancy when everything changed. While fans have been following the band as a roaring country-tinged rock outfit since they formed in Raleigh around 2006 (the masterful Jason Isbell-produced 'Burn.Flicker.Die' put them on the map right as they thought they would quit), it’s with Barham’s more poetic, stripped down offerings like 2020’s 'Lamentations' and his searing solo work 'Rockingham' that he is breaking new ground. Barham isn’t shy about processing his adoration for The Boss as the preeminent living rock-n-roll intellectual king and there are cuts off the new LP like “The Things We Lost Along The Way” that feel like they could have been recorded in that haunted place alongside 'Nebraska' or 'Darkness on the Edge of Town.'

As a new dad myself who just experienced my wife going through a terrifying birth, BJ’s songs hit me a little harder these days. I can’t think of a country artist today with as big a following from North Carolina to Texas who would center the title track of his record around the unspoken tragedy of a late miscarriage, but Barham pulls it off with a remarkable sensitivity. Like Isbell, Barham notes that his career really began when he got sober and could finally examine the dark corners of his history, his relationships and the fractured history of the south he grew up in.

Though hard to say, naming a record about working through deep loss 'Chicamacomico' makes all the sense in the world. It’s a real place of course, a life-saving station built in 1874 on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and a beach area where BJ and his wife tried to go to blow off steam and forget their sorrows. Now a proud dad to a little daughter (see the cheerful country banger “Little Things”) Barham has learned that in the end, being a father and husband first doesn’t make him less of a hard-working, deep-thinking artist. In fact, it’s finding that balance that has allowed him to write the most powerful songs of his career.

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