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We asked and y’all delivered! We got 56 responses to the Confession Call!
It wasn’t easy to choose just one winner…so we chose two! “Good Advice” by Other Vessels and “Otherside” by Her Mana. Later this month the winners will come into Studio 1A to record their songs. After that, both will be featured as KUTX’s Song of the Day.
You can hear these songs in the latest episode, along with some of our other faves. You also listen to these over on SoundCloud playlist.
Check it out here: https://soundcloud.com/user-391695375/sets/confession-call-5-finalists.
Thanks so much to everyone who submitted a song.! We’re going to do another Confession Call again in the summer, and then again in the fall and winter. We love this experiment in community and creativity and we can’t wait to hear what you write next!
Song Confessional is a listener-supported production of KUT & KUTX Studios in Austin, Texas.
You can support our work by becoming a sustaining member at supportthispodcast.org
The full transcript of this episode of Song Confessional is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
Walker Lukens: Hey, this is Walker Lukins, and you are listening to. Song Confessional. The only podcast where anonymous stories from people just like you are turned into new original songs by some of today’s best songwriters. On this podcast, you’re not gonna hear just one song inspired by an anonymous story you’re gonna hear.
Like almost a dozen because this is confession. Call,
Speaker 2: call, call, call, call, call, call, call, call, call, call, call, call, call. Call. Call. Call. Call. Call, call,
Walker Lukens: call. I’m sitting here with my favorite little side of the space time continuum. Tell him your name.
Zac Catanzaro: What’s up everybody? This is Zach Kenza.
Walker Lukens: Zach, uh, how are you doing today?
Zac Catanzaro: You know, pretty good. I’m well. I, I should be less tired considering we haven’t done this in a while. I should be like, ready to go fully rested, but. I’m tired. Yeah.
Walker Lukens: Thursday’s a hard, it’s Thursday, right?
Zac Catanzaro: It is Thur. Yeah. I mean, you gotta check in. It’s that kind of week. It is Thursday.
Walker Lukens: It’s a hard day to find the energy for things.
If you don’t have something to be like jacked about, I actually can’t even finish this. Then it’s just a hard day to be jacked, I think in general.
Zac Catanzaro: Well, we’re a little jacked ’cause we’re back doing this podcast.
Walker Lukens: We are. So this is the confession response episode. For those of you that missed the first half of this, you’ll appreciate it a lot more if you go back and listen to part one where we.
Play a confession. We open it up to the public and the public submit songs. So we did that already. We got 56 songs
Zac Catanzaro: insane. I mean, I, the first time we did this, I think we squeezed out about eight. Then, you know, it’s gone steadily up.
Walker Lukens: Yeah, it has.
Zac Catanzaro: Last time we had over 20, but over 56 was like, we were kind of blown away.
So thank you all for submitting and participating. It’s like we definitely could not make this episode without that.
Walker Lukens: So there were actually 60 submissions. Four didn’t include a song, whether they didn’t understand the contest, forgot to put the file in there. I’m not sure. I followed up with every single one of them via email and didn’t get a response from those people,
Zac Catanzaro: you know, down to 56.
Walker Lukens: So we’re down to 56 of the 56, I believe. I believe four of them. We’re just little sneaky fucks who thought they could just submit one of their own songs and we wouldn’t know the difference.
Zac Catanzaro: You can kind kind of tell, you can tell a song that’s been flushed out, really flushed out. Yeah. You know, it’s like we get good submissions on people that actually are following the prompt, but sometimes like, okay, well the words are like maybe relevant.
Kind of if you’re stretching.
Walker Lukens: Yeah, well, well
Zac Catanzaro: or not at all. And the song sounds really good
Walker Lukens: there. There was one fellow, what was his name? You, you liked the song? Jevon.
Zac Catanzaro: Jevon, yeah, Jevon. It was great. It was a great song.
Walker Lukens: He Jevon submitted a song and Zach, or, you know, we have to listen to these several times, ear early run through was like, I like this Jovan song.
And I listened to it and I was into it too. It was a little hard to make out the lyrics. And then I looked in the submission form. And he also had submitted a music video that he’d made for it and I checked the music videos from months before and then I read the lyrics and it’s about drunk driving in Tennessee,
Zac Catanzaro: but Jevon good song and music video.
Walker Lukens: Yeah, it was really cool. You almost had us jevon so, okay, so, so we had about, you know, yeah. Four, let’s say that we’re sneak sters
Zac Catanzaro: and then the the weird 2026 Easter egg of, yeah. Is it ai,
Walker Lukens: which I think for sure won.
Zac Catanzaro: We’re pretty positive about one of ’em.
Walker Lukens: Yes.
Zac Catanzaro: On the fence for another one.
Walker Lukens: Yeah. So, okay, so, so that’s 50 songs then.
Zac Catanzaro: Yeah. Incredible.
Walker Lukens: Before we listened to all these songs, what was this confession about? Even?
Zac Catanzaro: I really like this confession, obviously, you know, you guys that have been listening to this podcast, you know, that Walker and I like to, uh, talk about our dead dads and we had a confessor come in, tell the same and he was.
So like light and matter of fact about it and just, just like an acceptance of like, yeah, this is super normal. And it’s also super normal that I still talk to my dad and he visits me in my dreams. Yeah. So maybe that’s why he is so nonchalant. Yeah. Because he didn’t really lose his dad. His dad’s still in his life, still giving him advice.
Yeah. Still visiting him in his dreams, but he’s cryptic, which is kind of funny.
Walker Lukens: Well, and, and his dad was like totally accepting of the fact that he was dying and was like, Hey, I, I’m almost out. I have some, some things to tell you,
Zac Catanzaro: which is really beautiful
Walker Lukens: and so rare.
Zac Catanzaro: And then he used this phrase that really stuck with me.
Just he, he said. While his dad was transitioning to death.
Walker Lukens: Mm-hmm.
Zac Catanzaro: Which is a phase of life that is very specific.
Walker Lukens: Yeah.
Zac Catanzaro: And you are going through massive changes and it isn’t, it is a point after whatever you’re battling, like the battle is over. Mm-hmm. And you are transitioning to death. And I think a lot of people don’t really recognize that moment for what it is.
Walker Lukens: Yeah.
Zac Catanzaro: And both. The deceased and the confessor recognized it for what it was in a really beautiful, special way.
Walker Lukens: It’s also, I think, a cool confession because, um, along the lines of what you’re saying, there’s not this sense that their relationship is over or that their understanding of one another is final.
Yeah. It’s still evolving after the dad has died, and so I think it teed up the songwriters
Amy & David: mm-hmm.
Walker Lukens: To, to. Talk about that a lot. It, it’s a big theme of a lot of these songs where basically it’s like, yeah, now my dad just speaks in old English at night when I’m sleeping. Like,
Zac Catanzaro: what a
Walker Lukens: coop.
Zac Catanzaro: And, and that he’s, you’re still carrying with him, with you on your journey.
Whatever that journey Yeah. Holds for you. It’s like that, that grounding is, is there, it’s there forever. And so it’s, yeah, it’s really cool insight.
Walker Lukens: Okay, so the first song we, we wanted to talk about is called Farewell but Not Goodbye. It’s by Alex Hartley, a singer songwriter here from Austin. He’s a pianist.
I think that the thing we gravitated to initially was just that immediately in the song there’s a tensiony chord.
Zac Catanzaro: Yeah. It’s like the third chord he plays where the first two feel like a progression that you’ve heard a million times. Yeah. And you’re gonna expect it, and then it’s just, Nope. Instant left turn.
Walker Lukens: Definitely. And. So, you know, you go into the, you go into this experience, you’ve got okay guy’s name and farewell, but not goodbye, which is, which is not exactly, um, avantgarde poetry. And then you start hearing someone play piano and then you get this weird chord.
Zac Catanzaro: Mm-hmm.
Walker Lukens: And it’s cool because it’s sets the scene for a song that, that I think does a great job of describing.
That relationship you have with someone you love after they pass, so, so he says, leapt into my dreams and spoke in ancient rhyme while musing on his words. I carry him inside Farewell, but not by, it kind of gets at the thing we were talking about, which is you’ve moved on. Mm-hmm. But we’re still, we still have an evolving understanding.
The confessor and his deceased dad. Mm-hmm. You and whoever you’ve lost.
Zac Catanzaro: In a way, it almost feels like classical poetry too. Yeah. ’cause it is, it is like the, it’s words that we can all understand that rhyme well yet have deep meaning. And then the way it’s like, it is simple to understand, but the juxtaposition of those weird chords.
Walker Lukens: Totally.
Zac Catanzaro: I, it’s just really fun. I really enjoyed it.
Walker Lukens: To your, to your point of this being like formal kind of old poetry, I mean, that is how the song is written. It’s, it’s. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6 verses. Um, anyway, we loved it. This is farewell, but not goodbye by Alex Hartley.
Alex Hartley: Farewell But Not Goodbye
Walker Lukens: This, uh, this next song we’re gonna listen to, it’s by Bryce Clifford and Brother Superior. Although, and, uh, not a knock, I’m pretty sure it’s just Bryce Clifford, uh, brother Superior is a fictitious band. Um, Zach, you, you had this song on your list, like why, why is this guy on your list?
Zac Catanzaro: This one was definitely on my list.
It might’ve been, you know, close to the top of my list. Um, felt like an early B side arcade fire with a bit of pavement style vocals and a little Jeff Tweedy emotion. Uh, and it was just like, it was very simple, well executed. Um. Or at least I thought it was very simple, but it was still well executed.
Walker Lukens: Yeah.
Zac Catanzaro: And then I found out it might not have been so simple.
Walker Lukens: Yeah. So, so Bryce Bryce, um, submitted this and then he, um, he wrote me a message on Instagram. I’m gonna count the seconds it takes me to scroll through this message. 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5. Okay. So there’s five Second scroll. Um, at an adult pace. I’m just gonna read you this message from Bryce.
Zac Catanzaro: I think it’s worth reading it because brother, we feel you.
Walker Lukens: Yeah. Walker. Hey, I mean, hey. Pleased to write to you. This might be unconventional or maybe happens all the time. I submitted a song at 11 hour last night, literally 11:50 PM I think I’m hoping the producer mixer hat in you will allow me, grace me with submitting a different mix of the same performance.
I really ate shit on the mix I submitted. It’s awful. I think you can relate that my ears were fried after working on the song yesterday morning till night. No eating, no breaks, just straight ahead and ran out of time to have fresh ears to mix it. The main thing was the vocal was buried. New mix here sends up Google Drive link.
I took the task seriously, and I take the rules seriously. I think this doesn’t break the rules because it’s the same performance, nothing different except the mix. So I’m asking that you use the new mix of the tune In this one, I take out all the dumb ass shit like Cassio. Okay. Next message. Oh, I didn’t know that.
Insta has a limit on text characters. Continuing my thought in this one. I take out all the dumb ass shit like cassio beats that just don’t, that just weren’t lining up and so much kitchen sink crap that didn’t need to be in there. I really connected to this guy’s story. My dad is still with us, but age is setting in.
Hard to imagine losing him. Dug into that feeling. Now I’m really pleased this all went down. Whatever happens, it’s another new song. So I’m grateful that you extend this offer to everyone, your hand of putting songwriters to the task. Something awesome about having that deadline just squashes the juice out of dormant parts of hearts.
Love and thank you bc. Okay, sweet note. Uh, I wonder if he’s still my friend on Instagram or if he, because he got what he wa he unfriended me. I’m not sure he sent that at 3:59 AM I respond Friday morning at 9:40 AM Hey man, send it to me in an email. He hearts it. Five days later, he sends it to me in an email.
Zac Catanzaro: And I have a feeling that he didn’t eat or sleep for those five days too. Bryce, I love the manic energy. This is maybe one of the best behind the scenes look of what songwriters are like.
Walker Lukens: I it, you know, it’s hard to underestimate how much you need a deadline to get shit done. I super, super relate to this.
So. Just for some context here. Bryce submitted Mix five on Wednesday. On Tuesday or so, so Thursday he sent me this message. He finally sent it to me on Tuesday. It was mix eight.
Zac Catanzaro: I love that he wasn’t trying to hide it too. He was just
Walker Lukens: definitely
Zac Catanzaro: not a mix eight. You know? You know what I’ve been going through?
Walker Lukens: He could have titled it whatever he wanted. He left it in there. Uh, we loved the song. That’s the thing. We really loved it. Zach didn’t know any, any of this back and forth, we had any chance to connect, and he, he chose the song independently. I think it’s a great song and we’re happy, uh, to play you Cryptic Sage Advice by Bryce Clifford and Brother Superior.
Bryce Clifford and Brother Superior: Cryptic Sage Advice,
Walker Lukens: My favorite, uh, bit from that song was the, the, the verse that’s, I was not one for spiritual belief. Love is biochemical and death was grief. I asked where I would run for that. Cool and cryptic stage advice,
Zac Catanzaro: lyrics go hard on this one,
Walker Lukens: man. Definitely they go hard. Uh, and uh, I totally hear what you’re saying.
It’s got a. Arcade Fire B side or demo thing.
Zac Catanzaro: Mm-hmm.
Walker Lukens: Like it’s just a win and regime. She’s playing keyboard. He’s been acoustic going for
Zac Catanzaro: it. That’s good. That’s definitely how I, how I could hear that one.
Walker Lukens: Yeah.
Zac Catanzaro: This next one is from. An artist that I’ve never heard of before, but I’m absolutely gonna figure out what the hell else they’re doing because it was one of the weirdest, most interesting submissions I think we’ve ever gotten.
It’s by, uh, a duo named Amy and David. The song’s called Ascension, and I would say this song. For me, the reason it ended up on my list, it also ended up on your list. Yep. It also ended up on Elizabeth McQueen’s list. We’re all weirdos. One, we gotta put that out there. Yep. We’re weirdos. We like the weird.
Walker Lukens: Yep.
Zac Catanzaro: But for me it was like, I think that the approach was so interesting that it was like the sound and feeling. Matched the story rather than a lyrical telling or even a lyrical relation to the story. It’s the vibe, the vibe of the story, the you, you feel something in your core.
Walker Lukens: Let, let’s, let’s let him hear it.
Amy & David: Ascension,
Walker Lukens: to your point, I mean, the feeling of the music is I think new astral playing vibe in the confession, which is the, like I still have a relationship with my dead dad is just evolved.
Zac Catanzaro: Mm-hmm.
Walker Lukens: Uh, and it, and, and the other thing that I didn’t notice the first few listens but did when I checked their submission was it has one lyric that they repeat.
Mm-hmm. Which is, come find me. I’m still here prepared to see. Prepare for me,
Zac Catanzaro: which at the same time literally does tell the story. Yeah. In those two sentences.
Walker Lukens: Totally.
Zac Catanzaro: It tells the story and the whole feeling is ethereal and haunting and there’s like Gregorian chant vibes and it’s just like. It, it’s just, it is just really cool, really unique, kind of a curve ball that I didn’t see coming.
Walker Lukens: I could be wrong, although I don’t think I am, but, uh, these guys are not a band because in their submission form they have two independent press photos and their social media handles are two separate things. I think they just got together to make this for our project.
Zac Catanzaro: Well, you need to keep doing it because you’re making some weird, cool music that I want to hear more of.
Walker Lukens: It’s really difficult to adequately express, uh, how many songs and good songs we got for this
Zac Catanzaro: really great ones. I mean, we, you know, we struggled to pick just six to feature on this episode.
Walker Lukens: We, yeah, I mean, I think we could have, we could have easily made an album, so we sort of did. We just, we sort of did.
If you look in the show notes, you’ll see a link. To a SoundCloud, uh, playlist. I mastered it so it will sound okay. Um, of our, our favorite 12 songs, uh, included in there is a song from a, uh, a group. Called Rage Disco. It’s um, the singer from another confession call, I don’t wanna call him a finalist, but we featured their song.
It’s The Band Is Noise Devoid. We featured their song in the last confession Call This Rage Disco Tune is very sick. It, it reminds me of this like. Kind of like if Nico made a techno record
Zac Catanzaro: Yeah.
Walker Lukens: Cool. In the early eighties, but decided that any tempo above 100 was banned.
Zac Catanzaro: Mm-hmm.
Walker Lukens: And uh, only about sad things.
Zac Catanzaro: Hell yeah.
Walker Lukens: So there’s a track by Rage Disco. There’s also a track by Jomo Edwards.
Zac Catanzaro: Yeah. Which you might know from Jomo and the Possum Posse. Uh, AKA guy on a buffalo, which 15 years ago I was definitely passing that music video around to all my friends thinking it was one of the funniest things I’d seen on the internet.
Walker Lukens: Jomo, I mean this as, as like a, a true compliment, but there are some folks, uh, on the song confessional team who kind of unaware of your, your band and your history and everything. And they thought it was AI because your recording was so good. And so like clean and topical.
Zac Catanzaro: Yeah, yeah. Liter. Literally it was the debate and we’re like, no, we like know this guy’s
Walker Lukens: real.
No, we, we know him. No, he’s a real dude. Uh, so I hope you take this as a compliment. His track is also included on our Confession Call album, which you can listen to in the show notes.
Zac Catanzaro: And then we had, uh, another submission from the winner, the previous winner.
Walker Lukens: That’s true. Summer sleep. Who you might recall, uh, won our last confession call episode.
Um, he submitted another song for this, uh, uh, an industrious fellow. He is,
Zac Catanzaro: he’s really good, really talented. Another great song. No surprise there.
Walker Lukens: It, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s on the, the playlist so you can listen to it. But it had my favorite lyric, I think, um, of maybe any of the songs. If I had to single out a lyric, it was, this world needs a good man more than a man needs it all.
Zac Catanzaro: So on point in today’s world, preach it wide and far.
Walker Lukens: That’s like a fucking Bruce Springsteen lyric.
Zac Catanzaro: Yeah. Truly like, sell it, sell it to Bruce,
Walker Lukens: sell it to the boss, man. He’s, um, he’s still important, but his songs are slipping. I’ll just say it. We honestly just couldn’t choose one winner.
Zac Catanzaro: So for the first time, what did we do?
Walker Lukens: We, we have two winners.
Zac Catanzaro: We have two winners, so congratulations, winners.
Walker Lukens: And part of the issue with choosing one winner is that we all, every single person who weighed in on the songs liked both of these songs.
Zac Catanzaro: Yeah. They made the entire song confessional teams. These two artists were in our top fives and we don’t talk about it before we submit our top fives.
After everybody listens independently. These two were on everybody’s list.
Walker Lukens: Our first winner is a, uh, a duo called Hermana. Some of you might know that Hermana is half of Lay Line, a band that we love and have featured on song Confessional,
Zac Catanzaro: which is why we thought about maybe not. Yeah. Featuring this song, it was like, is this, is this disqualifying?
Is this nepotism? But turns out it’s a really good song.
Walker Lukens: It’s just so fucking good this song.
Zac Catanzaro: So apparently you’re just a winner.
Walker Lukens: Yeah. So Emily, uh, from her who submitted this song, uh, it’s, man, it, this song is like such a grower. It starts with this Spanish esque, uh, flamenco guitar thing. And then it just builds into this incredible, beautiful chorus
Zac Catanzaro: and, and one of the, I think one of the prettiest harmonies of any of the songs that was submitted is just an absolute flawless harmony in that chorus.
Walker Lukens: Man, I just really love when a song pulls off this kind of move where it’s a, it’s a descending chord progression the whole time. So you’re, you’re starting on the one and you’re just walking down, you know, it, it, it feels kind of Latin. Mm-hmm. Um, it also reminds me of like English folk, like, you know, led Zeppelin, BEO, I’m gonna leave you.
Zac Catanzaro: Yeah, totally. Yeah. It’s like that, that cross section between Latin and Celtic.
Walker Lukens: Exactly. Some sort of weird, uh, folk thing. And then this chorus is the definition of a major lift. Mm-hmm. Like literally a major key lift. It’s so triumphant. It feels so good. Kate’s harmonies are so beautiful. It it like. I really like wrote this song off, uh, on my first pass of listening to like 50 of these.
And it just was one of, one of the tunes that was living rent free in my brain. Mm-hmm. And I was like. We gotta fe we gotta feature this song.
Zac Catanzaro: And it’s a, it’s a very catchy chorus that is an earworm and it’s beautiful and you just, you just wanna put it on repeat.
Walker Lukens: A as you know, our, our winner, uh, they get to record a version of this in Studio one A with Jake Pearlman and the KTX team.
I’m so excited to see what Her Mana does, uh, in a more formal studio context with this song.
Her Mana: Otherside.
Zac Catanzaro: I guess this brings us to our final winner. Um, this is a band that has been on my radar for a little while. I think I’ve tried to go to at least two shows and failed to make it both times. So I’ve never actually seen them live, but it was, I was really excited when I saw their name come into the submissions.
So a group called Other Vessels, the song is called Good Advice. Um, it’s another one that just has the most perfect chorus. Absolutely beautiful chorus.
Walker Lukens: It, uh, I think the technical term for this is song.
Zac Catanzaro: Yeah, you can write that one down.
Walker Lukens: That, that this,
Zac Catanzaro: this just a real nice song.
Walker Lukens: That’s just a real nice song.
Uh, man, the lead singer Miranda. Absolutely gorgeous voice.
Zac Catanzaro: Yeah. Giving, giving me really like Smoky Casey Musgraves kind of vibes in this track. Mm-hmm. Especially once the chorus comes in.
Walker Lukens: Yeah.
Zac Catanzaro: Um, yeah, really great voice, really beautiful songwriting.
Walker Lukens: It’s, uh, it’s one of the only, I would say it’s the only song to mention a Star Wars character that I like.
Zac Catanzaro: I didn’t even catch that.
Walker Lukens: A first line of the song.
Zac Catanzaro: What did she say? What did I what? What did I miss?
Walker Lukens: It’s you’re sort of like Obi one Kenobi.
Zac Catanzaro: Uh, I did hear that and then forgot about it. ’cause I got lost in the beauty of the song.
Walker Lukens: Damn. Bigger man than me. Well, here you go.
Other Vessels: Good Advice, you let. Nobody’s
Walker Lukens: I gotta say, I mean. That’s a nice recording.
Zac Catanzaro: It is like, it doesn’t have to be rerecorded ’cause it sounds that good.
Walker Lukens: It really does. I would love to know more about how they, how this recording came to be. Um, real tasteful drumming. If I find out that this is a logic pro,
Zac Catanzaro: it could be drummer. That’s the only thing I’ve been wondering.
Like, man, it sounds really good. There’s. A couple moments that it feels live, but I know you can do that in GarageBand where you’re
like,
Zac Catanzaro: no, don’t be super repetitive. Be 2% random.
Walker Lukens: For, for those of you that are, are not following this in Apple recording software, you can have a, a virtual drummer. Um. It’s been, it’s a, it’s been there for a decade, but it’s gotten, it’s gotten better.
Real good.
Zac Catanzaro: It’s gotten really good. It’s trying to put me out of a job,
Walker Lukens: truly. Uh uh, but that’s all to say that this is just a gorgeous recording and we love the tune. I can’t wait to see what other vessels does, uh, live in Studio one A.
Zac Catanzaro: Thank you all so much for all of your submissions. There was so many other good songs that we weren’t able to talk about.
Um, we’re gonna do this again. Please keep submitting.
Walker Lukens: Yeah, I mean, we’re gonna do this every quarter, uh, this year. So you’ve got, you’ve got three more times to participate in this if you’re a songwriter. And, uh, three more times if you’re just a listener who appreciates the incredible talent just hidden away all over this country.
Um, it’s cool. It’s so cool to me that we get. Submissions from people who find us on Substack or who love KUT from all over the world, honestly.
Zac Catanzaro: Yeah. We don’t take it for granted. It’s very special and we, we really do thank you all for being a part of this.
Walker Lukens: This podcast is produced by me, Walker Lukens, Zach Catanzaro, Jim Eno, Aaron Blackerby, Tate Donovan, and Elizabeth McQueen.
It is distributed by KUTX. If you’ve got a story for us, you can. Head over to the Long Center in Austin, Texas and tell us yourselves in our permanent confessional booth. You can also send me an email and we can set up a time to talk. If you like this podcast, you can support us by sharing an episode with someone you know would like it.
You can also support us by following us on Instagram at song confessional.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
