Podcast Corner: Digging deep with music podcasts

When it comes to music podcasts, the actual tunes themselves are not essential — the best series discuss around the music. The likes of NPR’s All Songs Considered are more the exception than the rule, more like traditional radio (except with much better music).

There are myriad podcasts that have opened an in-depth discussion of pop that you would never get on run-of-the-mill radio, enhancing the music when you go back to it. Song Exploder has been running since 2014 and sees a different musical act diving deep into the recording of a particular song, telling how the germ of an idea forms into a souped-up, layered, bona-fide hit.

Each act has their own story, usually told over around a 15-minute episode, concluding with the track itself in full. Big Thief recently revealed that ‘Cattails’ was essentially a “one-taker”, while Maggie Rogers discussed the writer’s block she experienced before eventually making ‘Alaska’, and MGMT told of where ‘Time to Pretend’ came from. Chances are Song Exploder has your favourite band talking about your favourite song.

Romesh Ranganathan. Picture: Rich Hardcastle

Season two of Lost Notes discusses a whole hosts of acts you’ve never heard of. The music journalist Jessica Hopper is executive producer and looks at some of the greatest music stories never told.

In ‘Beyond Disco’, two teenagers in 1980s London meld Pakistani pop with British new wave, but the reaction was too eastern for the west, and too western for the east. ‘Teenage Offenders: Reckoning with a Punk Past’ finds two members of a punk band from the 1980s discussing their legacy, with their songs, in hindsight, more offensive now they have children.

What you enjoyed as a teenager may well make you cringe in your fifties.

Switched On Pop is a music nerd’s dream, musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding explaining chord progressions and theory. ‘Lizzo and the end of genre’ is a fascinating recent episode. They also ask ‘Should you care about Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber?’

You might not care about their music, but you’ll understand a little bit more. You might also finally realise Ed Sheeran probably knows what he’s doing to.

You've got to hear this:

Season two of Hip Hop Saved My Life, presented by standup comedian Romesh Ranganathan, began recently, with Mark Ronson and Ireland’s new Hozier, Dermot Kennedy, the first guests.