by Mary Dolan

Key Change: Rian Johnson

Wagner’s ‘Das Rheingold’

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My guest today is director Rian Johnson, which is exciting for me, because I’ve been a huge fan of his ever since seeing his first feature film, Brick, in 2006. Since then, he’s made six more feature films, including Looper in 2012; Star Wars: The Last Jedi in 2017; the murder mystery Knives Out in 2019; and his most recent movie, another in the Knives Out series, Wake Up Dead Man, which is already out in theaters, and comes to Netflix on December 12. I talked to Rian about a piece of music that had a profound impact on him, which was the overture to Das Rheingold by Richard Wagner.

footnotes:
“Kill the Wabbit”
“La Traviata”
Focus Features
The Brothers Bloom
Opéra Bastille
Ring Cycle
J. R. R. Tolkien
J. J. Abrams
Terrence Malick
Nathan Johnson
Bayreuth Festival Theatre
Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by Alex Ross

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by Tiger Biskup

Episode 304: Jessie Reyez

“Goliath”

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Jessie Reyez is a singer and songwriter originally from Toronto. She’s won two of Canada’s Juno awards, and she’s been nominated for a Grammy. In addition to writing her own music, Jessie’s been a songwriter on tracks by Calvin Harris, Dua Lipa, Sam Smith, Eminem, and many others. You’re probably aware that there are songwriters and producers whose names you’ll find over and over again in the credits for big hits; Jessie is one of them.

But for this episode, I talked to her about her own song “Goliath.” And the day that she wrote that song, she happened to be in the studio with a bunch of other songwriters and producers. So I also talked to Jordan and Stefan Johnson, from the production team Monsters & Strangerz, and Jeff Gitelman, AKA Gitty. Between the three of them, their credits also include songs by Selena Gomez, Maroon 5, Alicia Keys, Mac Miller, and, again, tons more.

When a group like this gets together to write music, they don’t always know if they’re going to be making a song that’s going to get recorded and released by an artist somewhere down the line, or if the song’s going to get recorded at all. But in the case of “Goliath,” what came out was a song that was very personal to Jessie Reyez.

You can buy or stream “Goliath” here.

Illustration by Carlos Lerma.

For a transcript of this episode, click here.

footnotes:
LunchMoney Lewis – co-writer
Miles Julian – trumpet
Drew McKeon – drums
Lisa and BLACKPINK

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by Tiger Biskup

Key Change: Demi Adejuyigbe

“You Only Live Once” by The Strokes

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My guest today is Demi Adejuyigbe. One of the things that makes Demi so special is how hard it is to summarize him in an intro like this, because he has so many talents and applies them in so many different ways. He is a standup comedian, with a brand new one-hour special out on Dropout TV. He co-hosted the podcasts Gilmore Guys and Punch Up the Jam. He’s a screenwriter who wrote on TV shows like The Good Place. He’s famous on the internet for his parody songs, spoofing artists like Will Smith and Lana Del Rey; and for his September videos, where, for years, he made increasingly elaborate videos of himself, dancing to the Earth, Wind & Fire song. And he used the popularity of those videos to raise over a million dollars for charity. He’s also directed several music videos, including one that he made for one of my songs, back in 2022. And for this episode, we’re talking as much about a music video as the song within it. And that song is: “You Only Live Once” by The Strokes.

You can buy or stream “You Only Live Once” here.

You can watch Demi’s new special, Demi Adejuyigbe is Going to do One (1) Backflip, here.

footnotes:
Guitar Hero and Rock Band
First Impressions of Earth (album) – The Strokes
“Red Light” – The Strokes
Warren Fu
Zabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pink Floyd, and Jerry Garcia
“I’ll Try Anything Once” – The Strokes

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