Enjoy recent author events, interviews, and bookseller series. Visit our website to learn more: www.skylightbooks.com
Episodes
Friday May 26, 2023
SKYLIT: Alex Pappademas, QUANTUM CRIMINALS
Friday May 26, 2023
Friday May 26, 2023
Fire in the hole! Any major dude will tell you that this podcast is a hit. Were you thinking of skipping? Only a fool would say that! That's pretzel logic.
On this episode, we host king of the world Alex Pappademas as he discusses his new Steely Dan book QUANTUM CRIMINALS with the razor boy himself, Tyler Austin. Hop in your midnite cruiser, turn that heartbeat over again, and hang with Alex as he discusses doing the dirty work with illustrator Joan Lemay and everything and anything Steely! Then do it again, night by night.
If you like this episode, make sure you stop by Skylight Books on May 31st to see Alex live and in person!
Produced by Mick Kowaleski.
Music by Duck the Piano Wire.
Tuesday Aug 09, 2022
SKYLIT: Kaitlyn Tiffany, ”EVERYTHING I NEED I GET FROM YOU”
Tuesday Aug 09, 2022
Tuesday Aug 09, 2022
Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Tuesday May 31, 2022
SKYLIT: Sequoia Maner, ”33 1/3 KENDRICK LAMAR’S TO PIMP A BUTTERFLY”
Tuesday May 31, 2022
Tuesday May 31, 2022
This book takes a deep dive into the sounds, images, and lyrics of To Pimp a Butterfly to suggest that Kendrick appeals to the psyche of a nation in crisis and embraces the development of a radical political conscience. Kendrick breathes fresh life into the Black musical protest tradition and cultivates a platform for loving resistance. Combining funk, jazz, and spoken word, To Pimp a Butterfly's expansive sonic and lyrical geography brings a high level of innovation to rap music. More importantly, Kendrick's introspective and philosophical songs compel us to believe in a future where, perhaps, we gon' be alright.
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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Friday Mar 18, 2022
THE HANDSELL: Jess Williamson
Friday Mar 18, 2022
Friday Mar 18, 2022
Produced by Natalie Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Wednesday Nov 03, 2021
SKYLIT: Erin Osmon, ”JOHN PRINE (33 1/3)” w/ Steven Hyden
Wednesday Nov 03, 2021
Wednesday Nov 03, 2021
Produced by Maddie Gobbo, Lance Morgan, Natalie Freeman, & Michael Kowaleski.
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Monday Jul 26, 2021
SKYLIT: Daphne A. Brooks, "LINER NOTES FOR THE REVOLUTION" w/ Lynell George
Monday Jul 26, 2021
Monday Jul 26, 2021
Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures--a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers. Zora Neale Hurston appears as a sound archivist and a performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer Black feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America's first Black female cultural commentator. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism. She makes lyrical forays into the blues pioneers Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, as well as fans who became critics, like the record-label entrepreneur and writer Rosetta Reitz. In the twenty-first century, pop superstar Janelle Monae's liner notes are recognized for their innovations, while celebrated singers C cile McLorin Salvant, Rhiannon Giddens, and Valerie June take their place as cultural historians.
Brooks is in conversation with Lynell George, and also curated a companion playlist to Liner Notes, which you can listen to here:
Produced by Maddie Gobbo, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Friday Feb 19, 2021
SKYLIT: Clover Hope, "THE MOTHERLODE" w/ Nadeska Alexis
Friday Feb 19, 2021
Friday Feb 19, 2021
Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Saturday Jan 23, 2021
SKYLIT: Betto Arcos, "MUSIC STORIES FROM THE COSMIC BARRIO"
Saturday Jan 23, 2021
Saturday Jan 23, 2021
Music Stories from the Cosmic Barrios is a collection of 150 stories about music from all over Latin America, including music from Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, as well as music from Africa, the Middle East and Europe. The stories were originally broadcast on public radio programs including NPR, The World, BCC, KPCC and Latino USA. The book contains 12 chapters, each chapter follows a specific narrative: music and identity; education, community building, immigration, women's empowerment, adversity, social unrest and violence, instruments, producers, place and nation; the music of Brazil, Cuba music and the diaspora. The book's main focus is Latin American music from across the continent, with an emphasis on the music of Latinos and other ethnic groups in Los Angeles. The book also tells a personal story: the author's constant, tireless search for stories that help explain how complex and diverse humans are and how we share something so special that brings us together: music. This is a 380 page book, each story is accompanied by a black and white photo of the artist - many of the photos by author Betto Arcos.
Arcos is joined in conversation by NPR's Mandalit Del Barco.
Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Wednesday Nov 04, 2020
SKYLIT: Kevin Mattson, "WE'RE NOT HERE TO ENTERTAIN" w/ Mike Foley
Wednesday Nov 04, 2020
Wednesday Nov 04, 2020
Many remember the 1980s as the era of Ronald Reagan, a conservative decade populated by preppies and yuppies dancing to a soundtrack of electronic synth pop music. In some ways, it was the "MTV generation." However, the decade also produced some of the most creative works of punk culture, from the music of bands like the Minutemen and the Dead Kennedys to avant-garde visual arts, literature, poetry, and film. In We're Not Here to Entertain, Kevin Mattson documents what Kurt Cobain once called a "punk rock world" --the all-encompassing hardcore-indie culture that incubated his own talent. Mattson shows just how widespread the movement became--ranging across the nation, from D.C. through Ohio and Minnesota to LA--and how democratic it was due to its commitment to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tactics.
Mattson is in conversation with fellow punk rock historian Mike Foley.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Friday Oct 23, 2020
SKYLIT: Hayley Gene Penner, "PEOPLE YOU FOLLOW" w/ Kathryn Borel
Friday Oct 23, 2020
Friday Oct 23, 2020
Singer-songwriter Hayley Gene Penner's memoir takes a brutally honest yet humorous look at the dark, intimate truths we spend our lives running from. Like a map of beautiful mistakes, Hayley's stories of questionable sexual encounters, artistic aspirations, and emotional abuse trace her coming of age in the music industry.
Hayley explores all her relationships -- from her childhood as the daughter of a celebrity, to the destructive and coercive relationship with her boss, to her encounter with the actor we all know but who mustn't be named -- and brings them together in a series of sharp, touching vignettes. People You Follow straddles the delicate boundary between ethical and unethical behaviour, self-protection and self-destruction, power and weakness, giddiness and despair.
Penner is in conversation with writer, editor and radio producer Kathryn Borel.
Stream "People You Follow," Penner's title track from her upcoming album, here.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.
Monday Apr 20, 2020
Felicia Angeja Viator, "TO LIVE AND DEFY IN LA"
Monday Apr 20, 2020
Monday Apr 20, 2020
We all take for granted how synonymous hip-hop music, which dominates the music charts around the world, is with American culture today. This is a product of Los Angeles rap in the 1980s, argues Felicia Angeja Viator in her compelling new history TO LIVE AND DEFY IN LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America (Harvard University Press). Her book tells a unique story about black LA to explain how and why the region's rap artists, labels, and audiences forever transformed American popular culture.
Viator, who worked for years as a DJ, tells the history of a sub-genre of hip-hop considered so dystopian that it initially struck aspiring Brooklyn rapper and future superstar Jay-Z as "over the top." In the Reagan era, hip-hop was understood to be the music of the inner city and, with rare exception, of New York. Rap was considered the poetry of the street, and it was thought to breed in close quarters, the product of dilapidated tenements, drug-infested housing projects, and graffiti-covered subway cars. To many in the industry, LA simply wasn't hard enough to generate "authentic" hip-hop. The assumption was that defiant black youth music couldn't come from La-La Land. Yet, by the end of the '80s, these self-styled “ghetto reporters” from Compton, South Central, Inglewood, Crenshaw, and Long Beach had fought their way onto the nation’s radio and TV stations, and thus into America’s consciousness. In doing so, they exposed the nation to police brutality, mocked law-and-order crusaders, outraged moral guardians, minted rebel anthems, and demanded that America confront its flaws.
Viator created a Spotify playlist with songs featured in her book. To listen, click here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5SYpeARYAjpIYcKaFww4qP?si=kHi53tSyQmuwWjs4ZCJqtw
Part of Skylight Books' "SKYLIT" series.
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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski
Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.
Thursday Jan 30, 2020
Ian Brennan, "SILENCED BY SOUND" w/ Tunde Adebimpe
Thursday Jan 30, 2020
Thursday Jan 30, 2020
Popular culture has woven itself into the social fabric of our lives, penetrating people's homes and haunting their psyches through images and earworms. Justice, at most levels, is something the average citizen may have little influence upon, leaving us feeling helpless and complacent. But pop music is a neglected arena where concrete change can occur — by exercising active and thoughtful choices to reject the low-hanging, omnipresent corporate fruit, we begin to rebalance the world, one engaged listener at a time.
Silenced by Sound is a powerful exploration of the challenges facing art, music, and media. Ian Brennan delves into his personal story to address the inequity of distribution in the arts and demonstrates that there are millions of talented people around the world more gifted than the superstars for whom billions of dollars are spent to promote the delusion that they have been blessed with unique genius.
Brennan is in conversation with Tunde Adebimpe, a Grammy-nominated musician, actor, director, and visual-artist best known as the lead singer of the band TV on the Radio.
Thursday Jan 23, 2020
Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding, "SWITCHED ON POP"
Thursday Jan 23, 2020
Thursday Jan 23, 2020
Switched on Pop gives readers the tools they need to interpret our modern soundtrack. Each chapter investigates a different song and artist, revealing musical insights such as how a single melodic motif follows Taylor Swift through every genre that she samples, André 3000 uses metric manipulation to get listeners to "shake it like a Polaroid picture," or Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee create harmonic ambiguity in "Despacito" that mirrors the patterns of global migration.
Replete with engaging discussions and eye-catching illustrations, Switched on Pop brings to life the musical qualities that catapult songs into the pop pantheon. Readers will find themselves listening to familiar tracks in new ways—and not just those from the Top 40. The timeless concepts that Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding define can be applied to any musical style. From fanatics to skeptics, teenagers to octogenarians, non-musicians to professional composers, every music lover will discover something ear-opening in Switched on Pop.
Friday Nov 08, 2019
Roshanak Kheshti,"WENDY CARLOS'S SWITCHED-ON BACH" w/ Karen Tongson
Friday Nov 08, 2019
Friday Nov 08, 2019
So much, popular and scholarly, has been written about the synthesizer, Bob Moog and his brand-name instrument, and even Wendy Carlos, the musician who made this instrument famous. No one, however, has examined the importance of spy technology, the Cold War and Carlos's gender to this critically important innovation.
Through a postcolonial lens of feminist science and technology studies, Roshanak Kheshti engages in a reading of Carlos's music within this gendered context. By focusing on Switched-On Bach (the highest selling classical music recording of all time), this book explores the significance of gender to the album's--and, as a result, the Moog synthesizer's--phenomenal success.
Kheshti is in conversation with Karen Tongson, author of Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2019), and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011).
Tuesday Oct 30, 2018
Nadya Tolokonnikova, "READ & RIOT" w/ Shepard Fairey
Tuesday Oct 30, 2018
Tuesday Oct 30, 2018
Feminist artist, political activist, and Pussy Riot founder Nadya Tolokonnikova has written a timely guide to radical protest and provides the words, actions, and inspiration to ignite the power of individuals to passionately resist and proactively plan our way to the change we want to see. In Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism, the revered international activist draws upon her own hard-won wisdom to share her core principles for opposing leaders and governments that threaten to suppress individual rights and freedoms. Cutting through the pessimism, fear, uncertainty, and hopelessness, Read & Riot is an empowering tool for civil disobedience that encourages us to question the status quo, reject the litany of injustices and refuse to let apathy take hold, and above all, to make political action exciting, to be approached with a sense of humor, and an ultimately make it an integral part of our daily lives. Fusing punk and positivity to create a culture of protest that inspires and connects us, Read & Riot includes actions, suggestions, and resources for creating an empowered movement of resistance.
Tolokonnikova is in conversation with fellow artist-activist Shepard Fairey.