Riyl Podcast

A weekly podcast featuring long-form cafe conversations with artists, musicians, comedians, authors and other creative types.

04/19/2025

When Willie Nelson suggests you record an album of his songs, you do it. Amy Irving and the country legend met on the set of 1980’s Honeysuckle Rose and remained close ever since. Irving features on the album’s soundtrack, despite a latter turn as Jessica Rabbit’s singing voice, a music career was never on her radar. Her solo debut, Born In a Trunk,, arrived 43 years after her musical debut, laying to rest any doubt that the Carrie star was simply acting as a singer. As she’s opted to slow down on the acting front, Irving is experiencing a successful second career, with the April 25th arrival of her new LP of Willie Nelson covers, Always Will Be.

04/12/2025

Abyss is a dark, heavy album for a dark, heavy time. A journalist in a former life, Anika never shies away from the bleakness. The Berlin-based singer made a point of recording her third solo record with minimal overdubs, in a bid to capture the immediacy these the songs require.

03/30/2025

Vladimir Nabokov's 1951 memoir, Speak, Memory, opens with a quote describing life as the content between two dark eternities -- the before and the after. Though teaming with potential existential dread, the quote is a hopeful one for Luke Lalonde. The sentiment inspired "Mean Time," the first single from Born Ruffians' forthcoming LP, Beauty's Pride. It's a celebration of the moments that happen between the voids, a hopeful outlook the singer attributes to the recent birth of his son.

03/22/2025

Polar is as much an exercise in world building as it is a classical album. Icelandic pianist Gabríel Ólafs describes a lifelong desire to score films. In the meantime, he’s making his own. The new record combines worlds defined by his compositions, narrated by work from science-fiction author, Rebecca Roanhorse. It’s fascinating latest chapter from one of the most exciting new voices in classical.

03/16/2025

Since its debut at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Paying For It has garnered rave reviews from critics, drawing comparisons to fellow comic adaptation, Ghost World. Based on Chester Brown’s beloved 2011 work of the same name, the film centers around Brown and a fictionalized version of Sook-Yin Lee, the director who also happens to be his real life ex. Brown joins us to discuss the memoir, drawn from his own experiences with s*x workers. We also discuss 2016’s Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus and the recent loss of his longtime friend, cartoonist Joe Matt.

03/06/2025

One thing you should know about Lloyd Kaufman is that he isn’t dead. The introduction to Mathew Klickstein’s new interview collection is very adamant about this. The Troma founder was certainly well enough to engage in an hour-long conversation about the early days of indie filmmaking, Michael Bay and making transgressive art amid a second Trump administration. Besides, at very least, the man needs to make to the end of August to see the Toxic Avenger’s triumphant return to the big screen.

03/03/2025

At 17, Duke Amayo moved from Nigeria to U.S. for a football scholarship at Howard University. Despite his study, a career in medical illustration wasn’t in the cards. After making his way to Brooklyn, he landed a role as the frontman of beloved Afrobeat band, Antibalas. Amayo set out on his own, after nearly a quarter-century with the band. The musician released Lion Awakes in January, an eclectic solo album dedicated to his "shamanic medicine woman” grandmother.

02/23/2025

Recorded over the course of two years, Anything At All is, fittingly, about slowing down. Denison Witmer finds beauty in domesticity. It’s a meditation on mindfulness, fatherhood and even banal. Witmer’s 11th album is also a collaboration, birthed from a songwriting session with long-time friend, Sufjan Stevens, who also came on as producer.

02/02/2025

“I am edging away from apathy,” Chuck Ragan bellows, “I am drifting away from the dark. The rain has got my mind in motion.” The stanzas that open Love & Lore, the latest from the Hot Water Music frontman, feel strangely appropriate as we speak. Ragan is a few days out from dealing with a flooded basement, courtesy of torrential rains. It’s a consequence, perhaps, of living in a land of rivers near the California/Nevada border. There is, however, no place he’d rather be. When he’s not touring, the musician works as an in-demand river guide, spending days off nearby, fly fishing.

01/26/2025

Music is, at once, a vector for connection and escape. Chuck Prophet found both, as at a bar in San Francisco’s Mission District. Cumbia, a popular dance genre born in Columbia, pulsates through Wake the Dead. Forty years into his professional and on the other side of a battle with stage four lymphoma, the album finds the Bay Area musician with a new musical lease on life.

01/19/2025

Following the release of Tank and the Bangas' Grammy nominated The Heart, The Mind, The Soul, singer Tarriona “Tank” Ball returns to the show. The three-part collection presents a new side of Ball for those only familiar with the Bangas' joyful New Orleans funk. Prior to her time as a music star, Ball sharpened her lyrics as a rising star in the world of poetry. The album follows the 2021 release of her first poetry collection, Vulnerable AF.

01/05/2025

What does “maturity” mean for a rock band? The answer is, perhaps, a bit easier to answer when you’ve been together since age 18. For Naked Giants, it means grown up things – getting jobs, starting families. It’s not necessarily fodder for a band’s young punk days, depth of subject is in an important part of growing up as a band – and having a fanbase that grows along with you.

12/19/2024

Mighty Vertebrate hits different. In a world of sound a likes and slow burns, Anna Butterss' latest solo record makes itself known from immediately out of the gate. The album is as eclectic as it is fresh -- unsurprising, given the musician varied career, performing as the bassist for Jason Isbell's group, performing along side Phoebe Bridgers and Jenny Lewis, and serving as one fifth of improvisational group, SML.

12/12/2024

During our conversation, FIDLAR frontman Zac Carper reminds me of band’s acronym, F**k It Dawg, Life's a Risk. Spontaneity has been a driving force throughout the band’s 15-year existence, but time comes experience and – hopefully – a bit of reflection. Surviving The Dream -- the band’s first record in five years – offers up that introspection, into work. Life and Carper’s recent bipolar diagnosis.

12/06/2024

Released in September, Dirt On My Diamonds Vol.2 finds Kenny Wayne Shepherd doing what he was put on Earth to do. With eight tracks spanning a collective hour, it's a tight set that packs a punch, while expanding the songwriting depth that has been a fixture at this stage of his career. Thirty-four years after signing to a major label at age 13, the guitarist has delivered staying power matched by few others in the industry.

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