“The challenge in that situation, because we hadn’t set a length, is like pulling rabbits out of the hat. Every time you get to your turn, you try and do something different. He does a bit. You go back to your turn, OK, what can I do this time? And it went on a lot longer than I anticipated. I thought we’d do it for like a couple of minutes that’d be it, but no, we explored all the possibilities, you could say.”

This type of playing, the Marillion guitarist says, “demands complete focus and concentration and ‘what the hell do I do next time?’”

The musical exchange is illustrative of Hackett and Rothery’s new instrumental album, “The Roaring Waves,” long awaited by progressive rock fans. Despite the two guitarists’ pedigree and skill set, there is next to no shredding: the music comes in cascades rather than jagged bursts.

Six-string nerds hoping to clock which Steve is playing can pick up on some signifiers, but it’s not as simple as Hackett being placed in your left headphone and Rothery playing in the right.

Hackett says, “We mixed it and we thought, OK, people won’t know who’s necessarily playing, but they’ll probably pick up on the character of each of us. And there are moments when we’re playing together. For instance, on the title track, ‘The Roaring Waves,’ it becomes a slow wall where we are playing complementary parts to each other, but we’re not playing harmony, but we’re playing simultaneously, it seems as if we’re playing around each other, and it’s one of the best moments on the album.

“You’ve got two melodies that are not fighting for supremacy, but you’ve got two that are complementary to each other, but two melodies at the same time. That doesn’t often happen, not within rock.

“It’s one of the natural moments that that occurred spontaneously as we were both being ourselves.”

Four of the seven songs have their roots in a 2017 session at The Racket Club, Marillion’s studio in Buckinghamshire.

“It was just Steve and I at the Racket Club,” Rothery says. “I had my backline and a little setup for Steve there with his small pedal board, and I had my laptop, and I recorded everything in Logic and I was using EZdrummer for some drum rhythms for us to play along with. The first idea we worked on is probably pretty close to what it finished up as, which was the ‘Sandsend’ idea. I had an idea of the feeling that I was after, and I had some chords I thought could work really well, and Steve picked out a melody based on the changes, and I added another two or three different musical sections to it and it just kind of evolved. It was probably the easiest track to come about in that respect. It needed the least work.

“Then something like ‘Pacific Coast Highway,’ again, I’d get a drum rhythm going and I come up with lots of different sort of like jangly kind of riffs. And then, you know, you go away.

“Some of this stuff was on the shelf for a long time, but the good thing about that is you can bring it down off the shelf, and you can play around with it and chop it together in different ways and hopefully finish it with an arrangement that you’re happy with.”

“Pacific Coast Highway,” the bluesy closing track on the record, also features Hackett’s harmonica playing. For context, Hackett mentions his previous harmonica work on his 1994 album “Blues With a Feeling,” which he says was a “kind of silent tribute to Paul Butterfield amongst others, because he was himself paying tribute to other great bluesman. Little Walter, for instance, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson.”

He continues: “I spent time with one chromatic genius, Larry Adler, and asked him about one or two techniques because I used to play harmonica 10 years before I played guitar, 10 years before I touched the guitar. When I was 12, I’d been playing or attempting to play harmonica as a tiny tot, doing exactly what my father did, and then for my fifth or sixth birthday, he bought me a chromatic because he knew that I was dead serious about it.”

“It’s a very expressive instrument,” Hackett adds. “The harmonica at times, if you’re not really keyed into what it is, you might assume that it’s electric guitar, but it’s slightly more trumpet-y when mic’d up and put through an amp. If it’s got an edge on it, it can sound a little bit like a trumpet, a little bit like a brass instrument. Of course, as soon as you overdrive a guitar, you’re sounding a little bit brassy. But Butterfield was the guy who I saw live in 1966 when I was 16, and I saw him with this incredible sound with incredible vibrato. And again, by consulting various people, I learned how to emulate that.”

Nautical themes permeate the record, a notion connected to Rothery’s upbringing on the English seaside. He had brought Hackett on a visit to Whitby, the small Yorkshire village where he spent most of his youth.

“We moved from South Yorkshire, which was like a mining community where I was born, and my grandfather was a miner who also played the banjo and was a keen photographer, which was my other obvious passion,” Rothey says. “But we moved there when I was six to a little village just outside of Whitby called Newholm, which is like a mile and a half from the sea, and then into Whitby itself from 11 till 19 when I moved down to join Marillion. So the sea was always a very important part of my youth.”

One of the oceanic songs, “K-129,” was informed by the story of the Soviet submarine of the same name that sunk. The song is haunted by a pinging akin to a sonar pulse.

“It actually grew from the sequence which is a preset in the Diva software synth and I just sort of set it going,” Rothery explains. “I’d been working with Thorsten [Quaeschning] from Tangerine Dream as well, which probably bleeds through a little bit in that kind of influence really, as well as the music, which again is inspired by Tangerine Dream in ‘Stranger Things,’ that kind of very hypnotic, pulsing, repetitive thing, and then me trying to not do the obvious thing on top of it, and Steve doing a similar kind of approach until we could build up little melodies and moods and flavors that would sort of give it somewhere to go.”

Now that “The Roaring Waves” has washed ashore, an obvious question is will the Steves tour together?

“I think there’s every chance that that will happen,” Hackett says. “At the moment we’ve got wall-to-wall schedules with our own commitments. We’ve talked about the idea of doing perhaps another album, which might be slightly heavier in spirit, and then to have two albums to choose from to craft a stage show from. So I hope that happens at some point. But you know, it did take eight years with this, and that’s not because we weren’t keen on finishing it. It was just that our mutual schedules were so jam packed with live shows, recording schedules, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everything, everything, everything. So some years we were barely able to do more than just say hi on the phone.”

The album, out on the progressive label Inside Out, has found an audience primed for it, debuting at No. 24 on the Official UK Albums Chart. Germans took to the album as well, putting it in the top five of the country’s midweek album charts upon its release, and in the US, it landed on Billboard’s Hard Rock and Independent Albums tallies.

“On YouTube, between Steve’s channel and the record company’s, the comments are just really lovely from people who’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” Rothery says. “Maybe for the real die-hard prog fans, there’s been nothing that they could really embrace for the longest of times, with maybe the exception of Steven Wilson, and that’s not to everyone’s taste. But I think there is that sense of, well, yeah, this is what we’ve been waiting for, two prog rock guitarists doing what they do.”

“I remember early, like maybe in our third or fourth year, we were like, wouldn’t it be great if there was no need for a band like ours anymore? Wouldn’t it be great to write ourselves out of it, like there’s no need for a Pansy Division,” says Freeman, the band’s bassist. “But there still is.”

The San Francisco punk group’s unabashed embrace of gay themes, including explicit and sometimes humorous descriptions of sex, made them trailblazers and earned them fans in everyone from Willie Nelson to Rob Halford, the Judas Priest frontman who said he himself was inspired by Pansy Division to come out.

The band is celebrating its 35th anniversary with US dates, including stops at PhilaMOCA in Philadelphia on Sept. 18 (all ages) and TV Eye in Ridgewood, Queens on Sept. 19 (21-plus).

Ginoli, the band’s singer, guitarist and songwriter, and Freeman chatted with us about Pansy Division’s early days, how Green Day put its own reputation on the line to stand up for them and the challenges of making a new album – and why they think some bands should’ve stopped decades ago.

Has Pansy Division’s role changed as society has changed? Where do you fit in the music landscape?

Jon: It’s not like there aren’t gay bands or gay performers. There’s way more. There was hardly anyone we could point to who was out when we began, which is really the impetus to start the band. But now there are so many people out, so I don’t think you need to know about Pansy Division for there to be a Troye Sivan or a Conan Gray. On the other hand, they’re not rock musicians. I think we wanted to be gay and be a rock band, and these other people are out and gay and singing about relationships in same-sex terms in a more mainstream pop way. I think that’s great too, even if it’s not really to my taste.

How do you feel about the current state of the fight for equality and how does it impact your role as a band?

Jon: I have a happy life, but I’m angry about all these things that are going on in the world, and I know everybody else in our band agrees with that. There’s a backlash and America has a history of backlashes. What was so hard for me was the last time we did an album was 10 years ago, and after we did that album, I had intended to do a solo album, which I still haven’t done. At the time, I was ready to do it. Trump got elected the first time and it was like such a slap. It’s like, oh, you can’t just assume that things are moving forward. Also, how do you write music that isn’t just a topical song that is going to age poorly because it’s about what’s going on in that moment that you’re attacking? And I have not really found an answer for that. And I have so many songs piled up, but it’s like, what do you do? Like what is the right move to make? It’s hard to know what to do except to fight back in a certain way, right? I don’t want to fight back in a violent way. I like to fight back with our music.

We have a few songs that are directly political, but really not many. For us, the political statement is being and doing, rather than having to address this specific issue or that specific theme. So I think when people listen to our band, they get a certain feeling from it, a certain vibe from it, without us having to spell everything out. We spell everything out in other ways.

When you started playing shows as Pansy Division, did you deal with any pushback from clubs or promoters?

Jon: No, it was an easy rise, because of where we came from in San Francisco, the reaction to us was like, oh, I can’t believe it took this long for a band like you to come around. And it wasn’t until we started encountering the big time and a more mainstream audience with Green Day that we had any problems, but we didn’t have many. And I think that’s been true throughout our career. I think by being at a cult level of popularity, we’ve flown below the radar enough so we don’t attract the attention of people who would make life difficult for a band like us.

Green Day invited you to tour with them, then they were pressured to drop you from shows but didn’t. What was it like going through that tour?

Chris: Well, adding a little context to this, our first tour was the year before we went out with Green Day. So we did a little over a month the year before, and I will say that leaving our little region, we were really afraid, or I was anyway, because we didn’t know what to expect. So we were going through the South a little bit and places where we just had no idea what was in store for us. It was quite a growing experience.

Green Day’s got a huge amount of integrity that most people don’t give them because they jumped to a major [label], they were good enough to do that. They had a lot of integrity because, as you pointed out, there were places where promoters would call ahead and go, “Do I need to get extra security” or “What’s going on with this band?” And they would say, “Look out for that opening act.” So there was one place they tried to push us off the bill and Green Day said, well, then we’re not playing. And we were like, oh my God, you know, the fact that they had that kind of ability to say no. That was incredible. And the fact that they used that and said, no, we’re standing up here, we’re taking a stand on this.

Do you remember what town that was in?

Chris: Fairfax, Virginia.

Jon: And I remember the promoter, having a conversation with him saying, “The phone calls I’m going to get tomorrow morning from parents.” This is in the ‘90s. Virginia’s state motto is Virginia is for Lovers. Virginia had a sodomy law which criminalized same-sex behavior. It wasn’t really enforced, but it was there so that they could selectively enforce it. So I said to him, “You know, your state sponsors homophobia. We are giving an opposite message. That’s an important message, especially for teenagers to hear. So don’t give me this crap.”

Chris: Yeah, because he cornered me, because I had to go get paid. And he cornered me in his office and he said, “You know, there are eight-year-olds out there.” And I said, “Well, look, there’s no rating system for bands, but my parents didn’t let me go to any concerts until I was 16. So that’s on the parents.” And take a look out there right now: Green Day, Mike and and Billy Joe, were swapping spit, like hocking loogies in the into the air and catching it and then talking about smoking pot from a bong, I’m like, is that any more appropriate for an eight-year-old? So don’t give me that shit. Your headline act is doing some things too.

As far as new material, you mentioned it has been 10 years since the last Pansy Division record. Are you guys planning to put out more music?

Jon: It’s hard to have a band who live all in different places. I moved to Palm Springs and that at least puts me within an hour and a half of Chris again. But I really didn’t want to make an album by mail. And we haven’t had the time to do an album. I would be open to doing it. I just think it’s going to be really hard to do because we made our best albums when we were out on the road playing the songs live before we recorded them. That’s almost impossible to do anymore. So I, I don’t know. Chris, what do you think?

Chris: Well, I remain hopeful. I mean, in the past Pansy Division albums began with a clutch of songs that Jon would have. He’d go, OK, I’m now at a point where I feel like we could make an album, here are some songs that go together. And then I would kind of write to fit in things that would fit. And Joel the same way. So if we’re going to do something like that, we’ve got to have the other two out and work on a batch of songs in California, and then we would have to make a tour and then play like three songs a night that are new or something, just to sort of air them out. It’s not impossible.

I never want to stop making records. I love making records, but I also am very clear that some bands should stop making records. Like I think Rolling Stones should have stopped at “Tattoo You.” I mean, there’s not been a really good album since “Tattoo You.” So we’re very cognizant of like, OK, well, let’s not put out inferior stuff. And even now I look back at some of the songs that I’ve submitted and I’m like, yeah, that wasn’t the best that we could have done at the time. So I think it’s really important that if we’re going to keep putting out material that it matches and comes up to the level of our past.

Jon: Weput on an album 10 years ago, and I don’t think that many people listened to it, and I think if we put out another album now, that would probably be the case. So that’s inhibiting too. It’s like you do a lot of work and you want to have your, I don’t want to say product, but have your creation, have some attention because you’ve got all these other records already. This is the problem with being a band that would be making their 10th album, which is, what do you do that you haven’t done? Plus, how do you vary it enough to make it so you’re not doing a retread? That is hard, and I think that’s where bands trip up. This is us being rock fans, right, and trying to think about our own band and the way we think about other bands. It’s like, is most band’s 10th album the one that people are going to remember and love? Probably not.

Now he’s released a new album called “Getting There” produced by the R&B and country iconoclast Swamp Dogg. The two have been friends since they first played a show together in Spain over 10 years ago. Swamp, who was an early mentor of Dr. Dre and World Class Wreckin’ Cru, hadn’t produced an album for another artist in more than 30 years, Reed says, as he has been focusing on his own music.

Reed, who will perform at Brooklyn Bowl on Sept. 25, recently chatted with me about making “Getting There” with Swamp Dogg, how family life influenced the record, his first performance at the Grand Ole Opry and why his second stint this Friday represents a step up, and why he thinks pop country’s bad rap isn’t deserved.

Swamp Dogg said about you: “I haven’t heard many white boys who can do what Eli does.” How did it make you feel to hear him say that?

Swamp and I have been friends for a long time, so it doesn’t surprise me when he says things like that, though I find it to be extremely complimentary and satisfying. I’ve been in a lot of situations over the years where I’ve have had people who I’ve respected and idolized really who have said extremely complimentary things about me and what I do, and I feel extraordinarily blessed to have been in situations like that, not only with Swamp, but Roscoe Robinson was a great mentor of mine. I spent a lot of time singing with Otis Clay and people like that. I think that my goal is always to make the music that I want to make, that I love, and if there are people whose music that I have been influenced by or that I’ve come up listening to who appreciate that and understand where I’m coming from and give me those sorts of accolades, you can’t really hope for much more as an artist, you know?

What inspired this set of songs? Where did they come from and how are they interconnected?

You kind of always mine a particular well of where your life at is at these days, and that’s sort of how this came about. I would say that the title song was probably the kind of guiding light in terms of the direction that I wanted the rest of the record to go. You can’t predict how everything is going to shake out. I have a big long list of song titles and as I go through and try to write, try to finish songs the way that they develop, it speaks to kind of my particular mental state at the time.

Tell me about “Like We Used To.”

It’s kind of like all of the songs on the record. It’s about life and family and marriage and being a grown- up. I think it’s about maintaining the relationship you’re in no matter how long it’s been and making a point to remind yourself of why you got into it in the first place.

What else do you like about the album?

I love this record. I’m very happy with all of it. Swamp and I, we have a duet on here with a song that I’ve had for a little while and I’ve always loved it, but I was like, this is not a song that I can do on my own. I played it for Swamp, and he’s like, we got to do this, we got to do this as a duet, and I was like, OK, let’s do it. And then we do this version of “How Can I Forget,” which is the only cover on the album, a Jimmy Holiday song. And there’s acoustic guitar on almost every song on this, I played more keyboards on this album than I played on any album before. Swamp played pretty much all the acoustic piano, but all the electric piano, Wurlitzer and organ I played myself. So there’s a lot of firsts on this. It was extremely, extremely satisfying to make.

You’ll be playing at the Grand Ole Opry on September 18. What was your first time like in 2022?

I mean, fairly epic. I’ve been a country music fan since I was a very little kid. We had country music in my house all the way growing up and modern country. We listened to country radio in my house. I went to Nashville with my dad when I was 10 and went to the Grand Ole Opry, and that has to be [where] the idea of being able to go and sing at the Opry and also to do it on my own terms in a way that I was doing [came from].

I had made this album with Merle Haggard songs so that was kind of my inroad there, but people appreciated it for what it was. I wasn’t trying to do something different than what I do. I’m quite excited to go back and sing my own original songs. I think that is kind of the next step up.

You’ve talked about your love for ’90s country. Who are some of the artists from that era that you like?

I grew up with Alan Jackson and Randy Travis and Clint Black and Martina McBride, like everything that was on the radio. Swamp and I actually really bonded over that. I mean, his song “She’s All I Got” was the hit for Johnny Paycheck then also a hit again in the ’90s for [Tracy Byrd]. I think that my songwriting and my approach to song construction is very informed by that particular era of country music. I mean, I think it’s some of the best songwriting of any era of country.

How do you feel about the current “bro country” debate?

Well, I really like the Ella Langley record. That’s like everywhere right now. “Choosin’ Texas,” it’s a great song. It’s a great country lyric, great country record. People who like to talk shit about modern country music, and by modern, I mean like the past 30 years, [say] well, what about the production? and it’s so cheesy and this and that. It’s like, I don’t really care all that much about the production. I care about the song and the singer, and I think if it’s a good song and a good singer, production could be cheesy. Shania Twain records sound like they’re hair metal, but the songs are great. So I think it’s important to be able to separate that. I’m not a purist when it comes to production. I am when it comes to soul music, but I think country music, you got to kind of meet it where it lives. As far as the current state of country music, I think I’ve always said that at the baseline of country music on the radio or popular country music, whatever you want to call it, there’s at least one out of every 10, maybe 15 songs that’s great, and that’s a pretty high percentage if you get right down to it. Maybe you’ll hear two or three a day if you listen to the radio all day and you’re like, oh, that’s a really good song.

“I came up with the concept after a wine night I had with some girlfriends,” Valentine says in a Zoom call, with no trace of a British accent despite growing up in the UK. “It was just sort of thinking about what had been spoken about throughout the night when the topic of men came up, and I thought it was interesting that everyone sort of had a similar story with a similar through line or commonality. It wasn’t all the same, but it rhymed a little bit.”

She wrote in her iPhone Notes app: “Same font different man” and she texted her lifelong friend, her fellow songwriter Isabella Kensington: “I just thought for whatever reason she would like the concept.”

Valentine enlisted the producer Chedda, whom she had worked with a few times before, because “I think we just had a gut feeling he was the right guy for it. And I came in with a couple references. I had been listening to a lot of hyperpop this past spring, and he sort of started fleshing out the production while Isabella and I wrote the song. He was working on one side of the room in the studio, and we were just writing based off what he was creating.”

In the accompanying music video, the New York-based artist is seen pecking away at a typewriter, wearing a camisole nightgown, sipping wine and watching an old-school TV.

“I love going on Pinterest,” she explains, “and I had seen an old photo of this woman in the 1950s with a typewriter and I loved it. I think a lot of my visuals tend to have a slight retro tinge. I love the ‘90s, and obviously this one leans a little bit more ‘50s, but I love kind of having a nod to the past and something a little bit nostalgic. So even though it was a hyperpop-leaning production, I kind of wanted to still have it, at least visually, to have this nostalgic tinge to it. I also just really liked the idea of juxtaposing this really modern glitchy production with a more nostalgic visual.”

Valentine wasn’t around professional musicians at home as a child, but she was surrounded by music.

“Without putting my parents on blast, I wouldn’t say either of them are particularly musically inclined. Both of them have said to me, ‘We don’t really know where you got your singing voice from.’ But my dad loves to play the guitar, and my mom is from Puerto Rico, so I grew up with some influences from there. And I feel like they both have really good taste in music and I think tried to immerse us in it.”

Early favorite artists included “the divas,” she says: “I loved Madonna. I remember I got an iPod Touch and my mom downloaded a bunch of Madonna songs and I was obsessed with her. She’s iconic. I loved Lady Gaga. Beyonce was a really big one for me, too. I remember I would organize talent shows at my school just so I could sing Beyonce. I’m trying to think who else? A lot of Coldplay. I mean, I remember listening to a lot of Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, my both my parents really liked jazz. And then there’s this artist from Latin America called Juanes, which I remember listening to a lot as a kid too. So it was maybe a little bit of an eclectic mix.”

She says she believes Lana del Rey has been her “biggest inspiration.” “I think she was really the reason why I wanted to become a songwriter, when I discovered her music and her art.” She also cites the Spanish singer Rosalía, Latin Mafia and The Marias, the LA band who sing in both English and Spanish.

Valentine moved to New York to attend NYU’s Clive Davis Institute, where she graduated with a degree in recorded music and a minor in Spanish.

“For whatever reason, I was always really set on going to NYU,” Valentine says. “I think I saw ‘Gossip Girl’ when I was 13, and Blair Waldorf, even though she didn’t like NYU, went to NYU. Through that I discovered that Tisch existed. That was a very monumental moment for me, even though Blair Waldorf rejected Tisch.”

She released her first EP, “Ouch!,” just two years ago, then “Little Miss Optimist” in 2026. She says the deluxe edition, to be released later this year, “sort of feels like the conclusion of the Little Miss Optimist era.” It will include two new songs.

“It’s a different sound from [‘Same Font Different Man’]. I think one of them leans a little bit more psychedelic and the other one’s definitely more indie pop. I think one is more of an extension of the world of Lady Karma, without giving too much away, but I think it sonically and thematically feels like it’s digging further into that world. The other one’s more indie pop, but also I think touches on themes of girlhood and friendship and whatnot.”

She’s performed at noted rooms in NYC such as Baby’s All Right and Bowery Palace, formerly Bowery Electric, and Pete’s Candy Store. On Oct. 2 she’ll play at Purgatory in Brooklyn.

More songs are on the way, possibly as standalone singles.

“My next goal is to hopefully create an album, my debut album. Touring and creating an album are the next two big goals that I have on the docket.”

In the era of streaming and a trend towards EPs, why is making an album a priority?

“Maybe it’s just for me, growing up sort of still in the era where you downloaded a whole album — it wasn’t you’re listening to it on vinyl, but you’re downloading a whole album on your iPod or on iTunes or whatever — I just think it makes me feel maybe a little bit like a little kid, where you get to kind of sit and listen to this body of work and immerse yourself.”   

Photo by Steven Salgado

The Berzerkers were out in full force early in the day ready to rock at Montage mountain in Scranton on Aug. 28. Berzerkus Fest, founded by longtime Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Zakk Wylde, was an all-day affair, with doors opening at 1 p.m. with performances on the side stage outside of the main venue consisting of tribute acts Use Your Illusion, Fan Halen and Bonfire. The last performer at the side stage was Zakk Sabbath, Wylde’s tribute to Black Sabbath, playing songs that included “Children of The Grave,” “Fairies Wear Boots” and “War Pigs.” The outside performance area also had food trucks, a car show and a hot- sauce-eating contest.

The acts in the main venue began with Dark Chapel delivering an exceptional set. Suicidal Tendencies took the stage at 6:05 p.m. with a wild performance that found the band members running from each side of the stage and jumping of the drum riser. This is when the crowd surfing began. The supergroup Down, led by Pantera singer Phil Anselmo of Pantera, was up next. During its last song “Bury Me in Smoke,” members of Suicidal Tendencies came on stage and played the outro. 

The curtain dropped for Black Label Society and the heaviness of Wylde’s guitar playing began with the opening song “Funeral Bell.” After “Heart of Darkness,” Wylde went into one of his most iconic solos from his time with Ozzy, “No More Tears,” then sang the final section of the song. Black Label Society’s set closed out with song “Stillborn,” which included photos of the late Osbourne on the screen behind the band. The main headliner was Lamb of God, the heaviest of all the bands, delivering a 14-song set.

Foster recently released a new LP, “Just Say Yes,” her first since 2024’s “Mileage” took home the Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album. She again worked with the married-couple production team of Tyler Bryant of The Shakedown and Rebecca Lovell of Larkin Poe.

With a new album to promote and a tour about to start that will take her to Café Wha? on Oct. 5, I reached Foster at her home in Austin to chat. Here are some highlights of our conversation.

What does “Just Say Yes” mean to you?

“Just Say Yes” to me right now means saying yes to myself, to my peace, to my time, having time with my family. It started out as a mantra for me to get back into music because I’ve taken a few breaks from music to do other things, take care of life, take care of my mother. Really just to have something to write about, have something to say. Now it’s come to this place where I’ve lived a pretty eclectic life, and hopefully that continues.

But right now it’s about saying yes to things that matter to me, and I think this album really says a lot about that, from knowing when to take advantage of being still, because I had an injury that forced me to be still, and so there’s a song about that. And taking time to be with my family, because this particular lifestyle, being on the road, it can be strenuous. It can test your patience. Being on the road is very physical. You’re lifting equipment and suitcases in and out of cars, and it wore on me. I’m in my 60s now, early 60s, and it’s starting to show, I’ve been doing this since I was a kid. Music. So this album says a lot about that, about the process it takes to do what I do. It says a lot about what I’ve learned about myself and not necessarily where I want to go, but where I’ve been and where I don’t want to go again.

Tell me about the atmosphere around making the record with Tyler and Rebecca.

We recorded at their home. They have a studio on their property, and that was different because the first album, “Mileage,” that we did together was in their house in the basement, and I felt guilty because we were down there pretty late when Rebecca’s trying to sleep because she has tours. But this one, we got together during AmericanaFest, which happens in September of the year, and I recorded two songs that they had started and then I finished at that time, and then I went back in December, basically moved to Nashville for a couple of weeks. And we did the writing process there in their house with their little guy Jesse crawling. He’s walking now, just to give a sense of time. And we just sat around and they let me talk about my life and they were really great about just putting my life into words and into a lyrical form, and then I can basically go from there and just add on to it. It’s like having my own ChatGPT.

What did it feel like to win a Grammy 15 years after you were first nominated?

Oh, I relive that often. It’s such a beautiful thing. It takes me back to being that 13-year-old sitting in my living room, fighting over the TV to make sure that we got the Grammys to watch on TV. My brother even called me, and he says, “Hey, sis, you did it. Remember we used to fight over the TV and when you wanted to watch the Grammys?” That’s where it takes me. That’s what it felt like. It took me back to sitting in the living room in the ‘70s and watching people like Janis Ian, when she won the Grammy for best song, and Roberta Flack, it took me to that.

It’s a beautiful feeling to be validated in that way. Because we are in this association where we all vote for each other. There’s no committee or team or anything. We’re voting for each other. And to be in the mix with a lot of my friends who were in this category, Best Blues Contemporary, that was great, and to hear from everybody. I heard from Shemekia [Copeland], she was up for the Grammy that year too. I heard from Joe Bonamassa. I heard from everybody and it was really great. You know, it’s not really a competition. We’re just out here putting our music out. We’re putting our best out there and then we vote on each other. So it’s really, really validating.

You were also the first Sun artist to win. It wasn’t Elvis or Johnny Cash.

Well, yeah, you just put it there. I don’t even know. I hadn’t even thought about that. Wow. Right. We got Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and the list goes on. It’s incredible. Yeah. That happened, that happened.

You’ve been a part of some great collaborations, like singing with the Allman Brothers at the Beacon, just to name one. Are there any that stand out to you, or interactions you’ve had with some of these folks over the years that are special   to you?

They all are. I run into Warren Haynes all the time. So in fact, he had a kid shortly after I had a kid, and we talk about that. That’s the thing we do when we see each other, we whip out pictures of our babies that aren’t babies anymore. That’s the connection you have after being with somebody and sleeping on the bus and those bunks for months at a time. It all means a lot to me. Running into my buddies Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks. Whenever they’re in town here in Austin, I try to get some tickets and get backstage and get my hug and catch up, and all of it means a lot. Again, validating, knowing that we’ve come through this together all these years. I still remember going to see Susan when she didn’t know me and I didn’t know her, and before she even met Derek. And I’ve been a fan of both of them for many, many years. It’s so cool to run into each other and just be the moms and the aunties that we are. We talk about real life when we’re together. We don’t talk about music much. Derek, I do talk a lot about music with, though. He and I have that same, I don’t know, that same brain stem when it comes to being together. We end up talking about people like Sister Rosetta Tharpe and we talk about gospel music, because if you listen to the way he plays, he plays like someone would sing, right? He plays like a vocalist. And I think that’s my connection with Derek for sure.

The line between the two art forms is at play in both pieces that she has released today: the song started as a poem, and a poem in the book began its life as a song. The poet Maggie Smith, whom Speace calls her mentor, encouraged her to turn the poem called “Bluegrass Highway,” written as part of her MFA thesis, into what would become “Days of Letting Go.”

“I had written it with like a chorus, and she said, ‘Why isn’t this a song?'” Speace says in an interview. “And I said, ‘Because it didn’t come out with music.’ And she said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ But then that night, I was like, let me see if there’s music. And that’s the single.”

The East Nashville-based artist is on the road sharing her poems and music via a tour called The Cardinals: Songs, Stories & Poetry. It will stop at the Loft at City Winery in New York on Sept. 23, Little City Books in Hoboken on Sept. 24 and The Town Crier in Beacon on Sept. 25.

The poetry book is billed as “a lyrical investigation of marriage, divorce, mothering and mysticism told through poems that read like intimate conversations but evoke the complexities of love and loss through the natural world.” Rivers, birds and the US North and South, weather and racism “all come together like birdsong” in “The Cardinals,” a press release declares.

Speace moved around as a child but says “we were always Maryland,” noting that her father is from Eastern Shore farmland, “like super evangelical, not even Baptist — like one-room schoolhouse, no drinking.” She lived in New York for about 20 years, and when she moved to Tennessee, she says, “It took a few years for my feet to settle in, and once it did, I was like, oh, I’ve always meant to live in the South. I’ve got a South thing about me.”

She adds: “I kind of develop an accent sometimes. It’s kind of like when Madonna moved to London and has a British accent. But I have an ear for it. I named my kid Huckleberry, so whatever.”

Asked about the history that informed the Southern tradition of songwriting and prose writing, she says: “There is blood in the dirt here that is barely on the surface. It’s not buried. These trees are marked from lynching and we know it. I mean, I’m saying it metaphorically. This is not that far behind us. My grandmother was alive. My mother was alive when they were lynching people in the South. So that’s just there. And as a white person in the South, you have to grapple with the fact that you’re looking at your neighbors and you’re like, holy shit, not even a hundred years ago we would not be able to live side by side. I mean, we’ve got a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest in town, and he he’s the guy who started the KKK.”

About 20 years ago, Speace was discovered by Judy Collins, who signed her to her label, Wildflower Records. Speace was drinking tequila shots and was joined by Katherine de Paul, a longtime associate of Collins who manages Wildflower, but didn’t tell Speace who she was. Speace’s friend handed her Speace’s demo recording.

Collins and Katherine De Paul, a long-time associate of Collins who manages Wildflower, saw her set at South by Southwest.

Later, “Judy and Katherine showed up at my show in New York,” Speace recalls. “Judy was there and she’s like, I want to sign you and take you on the road with me. And now Katherine de Paul and I have just locked it in that she’s going to manage me.”

In October, “right prior to midterms,” she says, Speace will release a cover of Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” with Garrison Starr, John Fullbright and Beth Nielsen Chapman. She also has a duo with Kenny Foster called The Salt and the Wound. “We call ourselves The Civil Wars without the weird sexual tension. We have the songs and we’re pitching for a producer, so that’s the next music project.”

Photo credit Neilson Hubbard

For Late Again, the nom de plume of Brazilian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Rafael Melo, it’s all part of a collection of tunes he calls “optimistically cynical.”

“I try to explore several topics, from the lack of belonging and craving for human connection — the fact that I am a foreigner living in New York City and all that entails — to the shit show that is the political world right now. I tried to do it in a lighthearted way for many reasons. I think humor is a great mechanism for lowering people’s guards before you share a message with them.”

The lyrics are cloaked not only in humor, but also in hazy, dream-pop textures. He says the confidence he’s gained over the course of making previous EPs, as well as better connections and resources in the music community, have strengthened the foundation needed to make a song like “Every Time I Take Sudafed,” a spoken-word track.

“When you have a melody supporting you, it’s so much easier to say whatever you want,” Melo says. “You have a shield. When you’re just talking into the microphone, it’s like, ‘Oh, am I really gonna wake up in the morning, go to the subway, go to a studio, and turn on a mic to record me saying this specific sentence? Is it really worth it?’ It really makes you vulnerable.

“So I don’t think I would have been able to write a song like this and put it out on the first EP. The other thing I think changed a lot is the fact that, because the project grew so much, I was able to connect with a lot of talented people, like the band that is playing with me on this EP.”

He continues: “I think every time I release something new, it builds up my confidence a little bit. Especially for my first EP — I still am incredibly self-aware, but I guess it was even worse. I’ve been a musician ever since I was 15. I had this little band back in Brazil. We toured, and it was this whole thing. And like most musicians, I had this frustration arc where I realized, ‘OK, I don’t think I could have a comfortable life making the kind of music that I want to make in Brazil, where there’s not really an industry for that.’ So I remember that before I started Late Again, I kind of distanced myself from putting music out there for like five years or so. I had this moment a lot of artists do, but when I decided to move to New York City, I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to take this seriously now. I’m gonna make this work.’

“For the first EP, there was a lot of overthinking. Those songs were sitting there for over two years. And after you start putting shit out there, it just gets easier. I’d say, especially if you pay attention to my lyrics, I have the feeling that I’ve been a lot more honest with myself. And in this EP specifically, I’m trying to experiment with being more bluntly descriptive.”

Melo says “my natural habit is definitely my acoustic guitar,” and during our video conversation he shows me his guitar made by the Brazilian company Giannini. “I’m immediately drawn to bossa nova chords when I pick it up. Whenever I’m sad, I just grab this nylon-string guitar and play, and maybe I’ll try to play myself to sleep or something. I’d say 80 percent of my songs start that way: I have a melody in my mind, and I try to figure out the chords with my nylon-string guitar.”

However, for his last few releases, he pivoted: “I was like, ‘OK, what if I start with a synthesizer this time?’”

“For songs like ‘If You Have a Bridge (I’m Buying),’ I had that sequencer melody in my mind. So I went straight to the synthesizer to record it. It’s one example.”

Melo released the first Late Again EP in 2024, a year before his life shifted with the release of 9 Kings, a video game he made with childhood buddy André Young. The success of the game has allowed him to put more time and resources into his music.

In October, he’ll launch his first European tour with dates in Germany, France, and the UK. On Oct. 28, he’ll play at Gold Diggers in LA before a hometown gig at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn on Nov. 28.

“I’m always trying to write the next special,” he says in advance of his Tall Tales tour that will bring him to the Kirby Center in Wilkes-Barre on Sept. 17 and Town Hall on Sept. 19. “So while I’m doing the old stuff, I’m adding in new stuff and slowly replacing it. After a year or a year and a half, it’ll be a brand new plane.”

The current model is “Live on Short Street!”, the aptly titled special Williams, who was born with dwarfism, recorded at a theater on Short Street in Lexington, Kentucky. It’s the latest example of Williams leaning into his short stature since he got his start when Carlos Mencia, who was making jokes about dwarves at one of his own shows, brought him on stage and eventually invited him to be his touring opening act.

Williams, a WWE fan, recently served as one of the wrestler Danhausen’s “Minihausen” henchmen at SummerSlam, fulfilling a longtime dream. He’s also an accomplished actor, having appeared in shows including “Sam and Cat,” “Mind of Mencia” and “Deadbeat,” as well as movies such as “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues,” and the Christopher Guest mockumentary “Mascots,” where he shares a show-stealing scene with the late, great Fred Willard.

Williams has a podcast, “Heightened Babble,” with JB Ball, who will open the shows in Wilkes-Barre and New York.

“If you want to know what our vibe is, I’d say listen to a few episodes of the podcast, watch the podcast, and if you like it, great. Come on and see us do it live,” he says. “I love doing the podcast, but dude, I just love being a comedian. Nothing compares to it. If you make a TV show or a movie, you don’t have that instant feedback. Comedy, I tell a joke that I wrote that day and I’ll know if it’s funny right then and there. It’s not like, oh, I gotta wait for an editor and special effects and sound dubbing and all. No. Right there. Very simple transaction.”

The comic is also a regular on the roast circuit, including a notable face-off with Joe Eurell in the Belly Room at LA’s Comedy Store as part of the Roast Battle League.

“Here’s the thing about roasts: It’s a roast. So you can’t really be offended or sensitive or say you went too far because it’s like, well, yeah, that’s what the point of the roast is,” says Williams. “But at the same time, some of the old-timey, like the Dean Martin roasts I really like, and some of the other roasts that were on Comedy Central, where you could tell that all the comics are friends, those are the ones I really enjoy.

“There’s something about when you put two people that don’t know each other together and now they’re saying horrific things about each other, that to me is still funny. A good joke is a good joke, but there’s a little bit of the chemistry that is off when it’s people that don’t know each other, or if people are getting mad during the roast and they’re like, oh, he said racist stuff about me.”

Speaking about his roast battle with Eurell, he says: “For those who don’t know, Joe is in a wheelchair. Cerebral palsy. And man, did we go hard at each other. But Joe and I are friends, right? He’s a great guy. He’s a really funny comic. He knows me. I know him. So it was no big deal. He said some horrific shit about me, I didn’t care. And I’m like, oh man, that was a great, that was a great joke. And that’s what I want the roast to be more of, like be friendly with each other so that you can go further.”

To that end, he considers sense of humor to be a matter of taste, and if he doesn’t laugh, that doesn’t mean he dosen’t consider the bit funny.

“There are jokes that I don’t find funny that other people do. I don’t say that it’s not funny. I say, hey, that’s just not for me,” he says. “So a beautiful part about comedy is now there’s so many places, like there’s the world where Nate Bargatze can exist, who’s clean comedy. There’s Jim Gaffigan, there’s Jerry Seinfeld. These are mostly clean comics. And then you can to a Big Jay Oakerson or a Shane Gillis or a Tony Hinchcliffe [show]. There’s so many realms of this that you can go to.”

Gillis, with opening acts including Oakerson and a surprise guest slot by Dave Chappelle, in July hosted the biggest ticketed comedy show ever at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia.

“We are in a golden age of comedy right now,” Williams says. “And I think one of the reasons why is because there used to be gatekeepers, and Shane’s a perfect example on how there are no gatekeepers anymore, because Shane was going to be on SNL, right? And then he got fired before he even appeared on an episode. There was a time where if that had happened, your career is over. You’re screwed. No one’s ever going to talk to you again. You’re not going to get any more gigs. And Shane is just so funny. And we’re living in this time where all the gatekeepers are gone, so he was able to recover and now has the Guinness record for the largest comedy show ever, which is great.”

He notes that he’s cognizant of how difficult it is for some people to come to a show, which is a motivator for him to deliver the goods.

“For a lot of people, times are tough and they may be pinching pennies. I know how much it costs to go see a show. You gotta buy tickets. Oftentimes you got to get a babysitter, pay for parking, pay for dinner, drinks, whatever. I don’t take this for granted. So if someone is willing to pay money to see me perform, I’m going to do my absolute damnedest to make sure they have a good time and laugh their ass off.”

It’s only fitting, then, that when the seven-piece group creates a song, such as the 11 tracks on their new album “Justified,” it’s bit like making a film.

“It’s a script. It really is a script,” SAVNT surmises during a sit-down interview at the band’s hotel in Manhattan. Primary songwriter Thomas Tull, the singer says, “is just like, ‘I know what this guy had for dinner. I know where he goes to work.’ So it’s very much getting yourself in the mindset of this character. And a lot of times there’s real-life issues or topics that we all can relate to. So it’s easy for me to dive into that. And I think because of kind of my musical lexicon, I can kind of choose what I want to color each song with, and it just seems to work.”

The Pittsburgh-based rock band, which blends country, soul and blues in its eclectic but accessible sound, released the song “Pale Horse” and its cinematic music video simultaneously with the album debut on Aug. 21. In the run-up to the big day, the band released the “Justified” title track and “Sinner’s Prayer.”

Tull formed an early version of Ghost Hounds in the early 2000s, and they made a debut album with Nile Rodgers in 2009, before he shifted his focus to the movie industry, forming a production company that backed blockbusters like “The Dark Knight,” “Inception” and “The Hangover.” He rebooted a new version of Ghost Hounds in 2018 and SAVNT joined some years later.

“I started about two years ago, 2024,” he says. “So based on where I started to now, it just feels like … because when I started four months later, we were opening for the Stones, you know what I’m saying? So I was just like, these are the things that dreams are made of. But with that said, going from the Stones to doing this promo run and being able to really headline our own shows and masses of people are coming out, it just feels like we’re continuing to grow in the right direction.”

Joining SAVNT and Tull, who plays guitar, in the collective that crosses generational, racial and gender lines are guitarist Tyler Chiarelli, fiddle player Kristin Weber, keyboardist Joe Munroe, bassist Bennett Miller and drummer Sydney Driver.

SAVNT was born in Brooklyn and moved to Englewood, NJ, when he was 9. He still has family in Flatbush. I inquire about his earliest memory of wanting to be a singer.

“I love this question. First of all, I was singing Sam Cooke around the house when I was like 6,” he says with a smile. “‘Chain Gang’ is my favorite song, but I don’t believe that it was until maybe when I moved to New Jersey that I was singing at my table [in school], and this girl was like, ‘You should sing this song.’ I said, ‘All right, whatever.’ So I got up to the front, sang it. Mr. Brown was like, ‘I think you could really do this.’ Wow. And I never thought about it like that before because I was singing around the house with my mom, so I thought everybody could do it. So I think that was the first time that I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I do want to be a singer.'”

He had never taken vocal lessons until he joined the band, and now he works with one of the best: “Mama Jan” Smith, whose credits include Usher, Drake, Justin Bieber and Jill Scott.

“She’s really been helping me to get into my voice even more, because I think sometimes with a lot of singers, because the talent is already there, we don’t realize like, what’s the intervals? What’s the space between music, things like that,” says SAVNT. “So she’s really diving into that with me, and so within this blues music, this blues-rock music, I can find new notes and different places to take it.”

Ghost Hounds were featured at the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville, with a Donation Corner exhibition that ran from Sept. 13 through Oct. 31 of 2025. It kicked off with a sold-out AmericanaFest event alongside Keb’ Mo’, where SAVNT presented several of the band’s artifacts to the museum, such as his jacket from the band’s “She Runs Hot” video.

“As somebody who’s a huge believer, you pray for these moments. You wish for these moments,” he shares. “But when God does what God does, it just feels like it’s completely mind-blowing. And to know that we are in a museum right now next to Leon Bridges and Lenny Kravitz and Prince, like, how did I get a seat at this table? But I’m thankful for it, you know what I mean? And the fact that they wanted to highlight us as trailblazers in this space, it really is a blessing.

“I think that as a musician who’s been told, in my solo career, who’s been told that you almost have to conform, as soon as people look at me, they’re just like ‘R&B,’ right?, and I’ve never been that. I love R&B music, but there’s so much more in me, and I never wanted to be boxed in. So I get to be a part of a band that doesn’t do that, and the great part about it is that I get recognized for that, you know what I mean?

“So it’s just a reminder to myself and to other people: Just stay authentic and true to yourself because you never know where it could take you.”