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Courtesy Jack Stafford

A Musician Who Immortalizes Luminaries Through Songs on His Podcast

Brian Libby

June 12, 2021
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British musician Jack Stafford likens his Podsongs podcast to the end credits of a movie, when the title song plays and keeps audiences in their seats, embodying the spirit of the story they’ve just taken in. On each episode, from his home studio in Italy, he interviews someone he admires—scientists, activists, justice-seekers, health experts, and other luminaries—and uses the conversation to inspire a new song, which Stafford writes (off-mic, with musicians Maurizio Sarnicola, Massimino Voza, and Luigi Falcione) and plays at the end of the show. So far, he’s released around 60 episodes with corresponding tracks that serve as artful, often clever conclusions. The chorus to sleep doctor Michael Breus’s song, for example—“What’s your chronotype, baby?”—stems from a quiz Breus recommends to help determine one’s ideal snooze time; a line in a tune written for game designer Reed Berkowitz, who reflects on the similarities between gaming mechanisms and QAnon, goes, “The longer you play / The greater your role / The further we all go / Down the white rabbit hole.” Each thought-provoking send-off varies widely in style, and accumulates on a public playlist. “When I listen to other podcasts now, and there’s no song at the end, there’s this huge letdown,” Stafford says. “This is basically a podcast with benefits.”

When Stafford began recording Podsongs last summer, he was an under-the-radar singer-songwriter who’d spent years touring the world by bicycle with his guitar, playing shows in people’s homes. But when the pandemic set in, he longed for a new way to connect with people over song, and got the podcast into gear. The tunes cascade out of him. In this year alone, he’s recorded more than 100 original tracks. “The melody is easy—it usually comes to me straight after the interview,” Stafford says. “I try to look for the through-line in someone’s work.” Whether funny, cynical, political, or heartfelt, writing personalized songs, Stafford believes, could catch on among musicians as a new form of expression and revenue, particularly as streaming services continue to offer artists scant compensation. “It’s like being a portrait painter,” he says. “This could be a whole new genre.”

# Podcasts# Music# People

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It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

culture

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.