Strong Songs

Strong Songs is a music-analysis show with a simple premise and a great deal of patience. Kirk Hamilton takes a single piece of music and listens to it closely, out loud, until the reasons it works are laid out on the table. The order matters. Context comes first: who made the song, where it came from, how it was recorded, and why that background changes what a listener hears. Then the song comes apart into chord movement, arrangement decisions, the jobs individual instruments are doing and the way parts hand off to one another. Direction is a favorite organizing idea, whether that means where a melody climbs, how an arrangement fills space or how a song changes shape over time. The vocabulary is real, but it comes with explanations, and a plain reaction to a record can sit right beside a careful passage on harmony. Detours into live versions, old videos and adjacent artists turn up often, and they usually find their way back to the song at hand. Season 8 was announced as a 'second helpings' season, returning to artists and bands from the early years for a second episode each, with Toto's 'Rosanna' named first. The feed has a second mode, too. Between seasons Kirk runs interviews, and while those episodes lean more on conversation, the curiosity about how music gets made stays the same. Jazz pianist Peter Martin, who spent the 90s and 2000s as a sideman with artists including Betty Carter and Joshua Redman, talks about coming up through the Suzuki method, how the 90s jazz scene differed from today's and the players who influenced him, from Wynton Marsalis to Kenny Kirkland. Plenty of his playing is heard along the way. Jad Abumrad, who spent more than 20 years making Radiolab, looks back on the years behind a series and on the music theater projects he took on after announcing he was handing Radiolab off. Leigh Sales, the Australian TV personality and author who was an early champion of the show, swaps favorite TV themes with Kirk, getting as granular as the chopper sound and melancholy guitar at the start of the MASH theme. The Bob Dylan episode with Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell starts from a frank admission: despite listener emails asking for more Dylan, the artist has always sat a little outside Kirk's musical world. Part of that conversation weighs a film about Dylan and the way it makes his move to electric at Newport the story's one big conflict. Ruth Moody, a friend of Kirk's and one-third of The Wailin' Jennys, stops in with the group to talk about songwriting and the songwriters they love. Their name, as it happens, started as a play on Waylon Jennings. The show runs on listener support through Patreon, which Kirk describes as the only way he earns money from it. Start with the song episodes to hear the core method; the interviews are where the same ears meet other musicians and media figures.