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April 12, 2016

This Song: Bob Boilen // Mobley

By: Elizabeth McQueen

Bob Boilen, host of NPR’s All Songs Considered wrote a  new book called “Your Song Changed My Life,”  where he interviewed people about songs that changed their lives. What can we say? Great minds think alike!

Listen as he talks about his own life-changing song —  the Beatles “A Day in the Life,”  which totally opened his mind up to the expansive capabilities of music and art and informed the kind of musician he would become.

Then Austin artist Mobley explores how Kanye West’s “808’s and Heartbreak” showed him how important emotion and vulnerability in music could be and informed the material for his new EP “Some Other Country” which explores his experience of being a black man in America through songs that sound, at first listen, like songs about someone in a bad relationship.

Check out Bob Boilen’s “Your Song Changed My Life”

Check out Bob Boilen’s website where all his music lives

Watch the only existing video of  80’s era Tiny Desk Unit

Watch Mobley’s video for “Solo”

Watch Mobley’s video for “Swoon”

Check out Mobley’s new EP “Some Other Country”

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Listen to the songs featured in this week’s episode.



Episodes

October 17, 2019

This Song: FINNEAS

Singer, songwriter and producer Finneas O’Connell not only writes and produces music with his sister Billie Eilish, but also makes his own music under the name FINNEAS. Listen as he explains why he loved “Holy Sh*t” by Father John Misty from the moment he heard it and how the song helped him expand his ideas of what he could say in his own songs.

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October 10, 2019

This Song: Carrie Brownstein from Sleater-Kinney

Carrie Brownstein explains how “Stay” by Rhianna inspired her to write the last track on Sleater-Kinney’s latest record,”Broken.” 

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August 29, 2019

This Song: Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend

Ezra Koenig, lead singer and songwriter for the band Vampire Weekend, explains why he recently became obsessed with  “I Don’t Think Much About Her No More” by country singer and songwriter Mickey Newbury and explores what it was like to apply country music’s direct approach to songwriting to some of the the songs on Father of the Bride.

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June 26, 2019

This Song: Krissy Teegerstrom on “Mojo Pin” by Jeff Buckley

On the last episode of This Song until the fall, Krissy Teegerstrom, a self-made artist, creative consultant, podcaster, and designer at Featherweight Studio talks about how listening to “Mojo Pin” by Jeff Buckley transported her to a place beyond the real and showed her how to follow her creative intuition.

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June 18, 2019

Black Pumas’ Eric Burton on “(Sittin’ On)The Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding

On this episode of This Song, Elizabeth McQueen sits down with Eric Burton, the lead singer of Black Pumas to talk about what he learned about honesty an connection from Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” and how went  from busking on the Santa Monica Pier to fronting the Black Pumas in Austin Texas.

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June 12, 2019

This Song: Tiarra Girls on “Just a Girl” by No Doubt

Austin based sisters Tori, Tiffany and Sofia Baltierra have been playing as the Tiarra Girls since they were in elementary and middle school. Listen as they describe how seeing the video for No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” influenced them all stylistically and helped them find their voices as young women in music.

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June 5, 2019

This Song: Rhett Miller (rerun)

Musician, writer, and frontman for Old 97’s Rhett Miller launched his own podcast “Wheel’s Off With Rhett Miller” earlier this year.  In it, he talks to artists about what it’s really like to live a creative life. In this 2017 episode, he describes how hearing the Jewish Lesbian Folk singer Phranc perform ‘The Lonesome Death […]

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June 5, 2019

This Song: Strand of Oaks on “Lazarus” by David Bowie

Timothy Showalter, who leads the folk-rock band Strand of Oaks describes how hearing David Bowie’s “Lazarus” at the end of the recording process helped him see how powerful documenting dark times could be.

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