American Song

Episodes

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  Independent Artists: A.J. Deiboldt - Nashville, TN 15.08.2026 1h 18m

  Get in touch! Today on American Song, I’ll introduce you to my friend, A.J. Deiboldt. A.J. is a singer-songwriter originally from upstate New York, now making his music in a small town in the woods of Tennessee just outside Nashville. American Song is a show that celebrates the history, breadth and richness of our country’s music in all its flavors. Writing memorable and sensitive songs in the style of Chris Whitley, and with historic connections to acoustic blues pioneers such as Ledbelly, S...
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  Dancing Under Fire: Blood in the Groove — Los Prisioneros, Soda Stereo, D.A.F., and Brenda Fassie 04.08.2026 2h 5m

  Get in touch! New Wave was born in a New York dive bar, then it got on a plane. In England it picked up eyeliner and a synthesizer where its guitar used to be. But somewhere over the Atlantic, in a few very specific places, it also picked up something heavier: a government watching. This is the final episode in our New Wave series, and it's the one where the genre stops being an aesthetic and starts being evidence. In Chile, three teenagers formed a band while Pinochet's regime was still maki...
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  New Wave: The Conquerors - The Second British Invasion, and How Michael Jackson and Prince Broke Down the Walls at MTV 18.06.2026 1h 36m

  Get in touch! Britain just turned the lights fluorescent. The future arrives every Wednesday now, whether you're ready or not. Picture 1979 England: factories closing, Thatcher cutting glass with every syllable, and a music press so brutal it could make or break a band before the tea went cold. Punk already burned down the house. Now a blond former schoolteacher from Newcastle who sounds like a cathedral trying to seduce you, a man dressed as three centuries of fashion history simultaneously,...
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  The New Wave Fun House: Blondie, Talking Heads, DEVO, The Cars, Oingo Boingo 01.05.2026 2h 22m

  Get in touch! It was the late 1970s and early '80s. New York was bankrupt. Akron's tire factories were closing. Regular families were struggling with double-digit inflation. The AIDS epidemic was raging. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the US boycotted the Olympics in protest. John Lennon was assassinated. And somewhere in the background, always, that low hum — nuclear warheads, patient at the edge of the light. Into that America walked Blondie, Talking Heads, Devo, the B-52s,...
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  New Wave — Up From the Ooze (How Kraftwerk, The Ramones, Television, Patti Smith and CBGB - a Twelve-Foot Room on the Bowery - Accidentally Invented the Future) 19.03.2026 1h 1m

  Get in touch! Five hundred million years ago, ( approximately 1977), something extraordinary happened on the floor of an ancient sea. Life — which had spent billions of years as little more than a few unremarkable blobs drifting in the dark — suddenly exploded into every possible form simultaneously. Claws. Fins. Shells. Eyes. Creatures of impossible elegance and alien strangeness, emerging from the murk and becoming something the world had never seen before. Scientists call it the Cambrian E...
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  The Greatest Music You've Never Heard: The Songs of Mark Davis (2) 26.01.2026 1h 6m

  Get in touch! Part 2 Happy New Year, Everybody! (Even if you're reading this in July....) Across the last five seasons of American Song, we've traveled the arc of American music and listened to some of the greatest songs ever recorded, by some of the best loved artists over a century of thrilling music that changed the world. But what about all those artists whose music is as good, if not better, than those "giants", who (but for the fickle finger of fate) never got the massive acclaim ...
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  The Greatest Music You've Never Heard: The Songs of Mark Davis (1) 26.01.2026 1h 5m

  Get in touch! Part 1 Happy New Year, Everybody! (Even if you're reading this in July....) Across the last five seasons of American Song, we've traveled the arc of American music and listened to some of the greatest songs ever recorded, by some of the best loved artists over a century of thrilling music that changed the world. But what about all those artists whose music is as good, if not better, than those "giants", who (but for the fickle finger of fate) never got the massive acclaim ...
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  Bruce Springsteen and the American Reckoning: Last Man Standing 08.11.2025 45m

  Get in touch! Part Five starts with a funeral and a realization: when Bruce's friend and former Castile's band mate, George Theiss, dies, Bruce becomes the last man left from his teenage band. That shock pushes him into Springsteen on Broadway, Western Stars, and Letter to You—projects that ask what kind of ancestor, and what kind of citizen, you want to be when you’re running out of time. We follow him into those late-career marathon shows and finally to a 2025 European stage, where he...
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  Bruce Springsteen and the American Reckoning: Breakups, Ghosts, and Trump’s America 08.11.2025 51m

  Get in touch! Part Four is where the story cuts close to the bone. Bruce lets the E Street Band go, stares down his own failures on Tunnel of Love, and writes The Ghost of Tom Joad for the people that some Americans prefer not to see: migrants, the unemployed, the left-behind. The band reunites, “American Skin (41 Shots)” forces a conversation about race and fear, and The Rising and Wrecking Ball turn grief and economic anger into something like a shared civic ritual. We carry all of th...
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  Bruce Springsteen and the American Reckoning: Darkness, The River, Nebraska, and Berlin ’88 08.11.2025 52m

  Get in touch! Factories closing, marriages cracking, the glitter of the ’80s hiding a lot of hurt—Part 3 lives right in that gap between the American dream and the American day-to-day. Bruce digs into Darkness, The River, and Nebraska, writing about people who rarely get a mic: laid-off workers, young couples in over their heads, neighbors hanging on by their fingernails. Then Born in the U.S.A. turns into a worldwide roar, and politicians try to strip the songs of their doubts and their comp...
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  Bruce Springsteen and the American Reckoning: Born to Run, Bomb Scares, and the Edge of Fame 08.11.2025 41m

  Get in touch! Part two picks up in the clubs and dives where Bruce and the band are trying to outrun obscurity. We walk with them through the struggle to get the first records heard, the critics who saw the spark, and the brutal work of making Born to Run: months of second-guessing, endless mixes, and the very real possibility that it might all collapse under its own ambition. We hear about Jon Landau’s famous “I saw rock and roll future” review, the Bottom Line breakthrough, the U.K. trip th...
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  Bruce Springsteen and the American Reckoning: Freehold to Cherry Hill 08.11.2025 49m

  Get in touch! We start the series in 2025, at Springsteen's show in Manchester, UK where he makes a landmark statement about America's "leadership" before we flash back to his formative years. A cramped house in Freehold. A father smoking in the dark kitchen. A kid staring at the radio like it’s a way out and a way in. In Part one, we meet Bruce not as a legend, but as a working-class American kid learning early what struggle, pride, and community look like. As we follow him into those early ...
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  Lives in the Balance: Jackson Browne and the Fight for America’s Soul 16.08.2025 1h 47m

  Get in touch! For over five decades, Jackson Browne has stood at the intersection of melody and message—crafting songs that speak not only to the heart, but also to the conscience. In an age of division and disinformation, his music feels like a lifeline to an older, more grounded sense of American democratic values—truth, empathy, accountability, and moral courage. This episode dives into Browne’s lifelong journey as both a master songwriter and a tireless activist, examining how his music h...
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  Warren Zevon's Beautiful Wreckage 18.07.2025 1h 30m

  Get in touch! In this episode of American Song, we explore the life and legacy of Warren Zevon, one of America’s most fearless and darkly funny songwriters. Known for his biting wit and uncompromising honesty, Zevon built a career chronicling the messier sides of the human experience—addiction, regret, heartbreak, and mortality. From his early days as a struggling songwriter in Los Angeles to the unexpected success of “Werewolves of London,” Zevon never stopped grappling with the contradictio...
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  God’s Song and Other American Prayers: The Story of Randy Newman 18.06.2025 1h 21m

  Get in touch! You could think of Randy Newman as a musical Mark Twain. His songs draw up from a range of curiously disconnected observations about life in this era’s America in some of the same ways that Twain’s pen spoke of the America he lived in. Twain’s Mississippi paddlewheels churned the dark waters of that rolling river mixing old and new, sacred and profane and In his songs, Newman is doing the same thing. He draws from American roots music, Tin Pan Alley, the blues, and orchest...
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  If a Tree Falls: Bruce Cockburn and the Angry, Necessary Songs Nobody Else Would Write 28.03.2025 1h 30m

  Get in touch! In this haunting and deeply reflective episode, we explore the music of Bruce Cockburn—an artist who persistently challenges our indifference and urges us to reckon with the moral weight of being human. His songs are not just art; they are calls to awareness, rooted in compassion and fierce clarity. We delve into the global injustices that course through his music: the devastation of climate change, and the brutal legacy of capitalism in the Global South, where lives are often s...
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  Save Something for Yourself: Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, and the Art of Radical Honesty 28.03.2025 56m

  Get in touch! In these days, when people play fast and loose with truth for the purpose of personal gain at the expense of important things like rights, and even survival, I hope this episode, and the next one help us all regain a little sanity and peace. Personal Truth takes you on a powerful journey through the birth of the singer-songwriter era, spotlighting artists who didn't just sing about the world—but cracked themselves wide open to show us their own. Starting in the fertile gro...
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  Bob Dylan - America’s Nobel Poet Laureate 23.02.2025 1h 50m

  Get in touch! By the late 1960’s, folk was beginning to feel “scarred and battered”, so what came next in this tradition was less political, and much more personal. The world was changing politically, socially, and culturally. Some of the new generation of singers and songwriters felt that staying relevant meant they had to move away from folk, towards more personal themes. The ‘70s was the “Me” decade. Instead of drawing from what was happening in the outside world, one group of song-writers...
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  The Minstrel and the Symphony: Jethro Tull, ELP, and Progressive Rock's Wilder Shores 16.10.2024 1h 9m

  Get in touch! It seems like every ten years or so, society experiences a great reset. The end of the ‘60s was like that. The idealism and teen-culture of the ‘60’s was ten years older and moving into adult life. Just like everything else in life that was questioned and re-invented, some musicians began pushing the boundaries of what rock music could become. Across the Atlantic, and as Ian Anderson, of Jethro Tull put it, English rockers “were trying to be originators...
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  Close to the Edge: How Yes and Genesis Took Progressive Rock to Its Furthest Reaches 16.10.2024 1h 8m

  Get in touch! It seems like every ten years or so, society experiences a great reset. The end of the ‘60s was like that. The idealism and teen-culture of the ‘60’s was ten years older and moving into adult life. Just like everything else in life that was questioned and re-invented. Some musicians began pushing the boundaries of what rock music could become. Across the Atlantic, and as Ian Anderson, of Jethro Tull put it, English rockers “were trying to be orig...