Creative origin stories with sharper edges.
Beginnings is an interview show about how creative people first learned to imagine, perform, write, play, and survive. Andy steers musicians, comedians, actors, directors, and other creative guests from career origin stories into stranger territory: family, control, politics, therapy, grief, work, and identity.
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Beginnings is an interview show about the prehistory of creative work. Its central concern is not just what artists made, but how they became the sort of people who needed to make it. Andy brings on musicians, comedians, actors, directors, and other creative guests, then looks for the childhood scenes, early communities, jobs, losses, tastes, fears, and accidents that shaped them. The conversations often start in ordinary places. Record stores matter. High school jobs matter. A mediocre dinner, a late-night recording session, a sick pet, or an industry worry can become the opening door into something larger. The show has a loose, associative feel, but the curiosity underneath it is very precise. Andy tends to ask about control, identity, differentiation, shame, therapy, emotional language, and the moment when a hobby turns into a private survival system. With Julia Steiner of Ratboys, songwriting becomes a way to think about chaos and grief. With Amelia Fletcher of Heavenly, music opens into belonging, self-definition, and the pull of a scene that keeps calling someone back. With Mort Burke, comedy and adolescence sit beside alcohol, depression, anger, and the difficulty of learning how to name feelings. The Big Harp conversation lingers on work, touring, creative partnership, and the comfort of feeling like oneself onstage. Even when the guest is the draw, the deeper attraction is the movement from biography into self-explanation. Beginnings is also plainly situated in the present. Its introductions can fold in war anxiety, labor negotiations, anti-trans policy, political despair, and a grim joke before turning toward the episode’s guest. That edge gives the show a live-wire quality. It can be funny and bleak in the same minute. It can be tender without pretending the world is fine. The result is a long-running archive of creative people thinking out loud about how imagination forms under pressure. For listeners who like interviews that leave in the detours, Beginnings has the pleasure of a conversation discovering its real subject as it goes.
Made for: For listeners who like artist interviews that move past career highlights into childhood, identity, therapy, politics, grief, and creative compulsion. Best for people comfortable with digressive, candid conversations that mix humor with heavy subjects.
What sets it apart: Beginnings stands apart by treating artistic biography as emotional archaeology. Instead of polishing guests into neat career narratives, it follows small memories and stray anxieties until they reveal how a person learned to make things.
We all know the stories of how creative people get into the business of creating for a living, but how did they start using their imaginations in the first place? On the Beginnings podcast, writer and performer Andy Beckerman asks well-known and on-their-way-up comedians, musicians, writers, artists and thinkers about their earliest creative acts, their formative childhood experiences, and how they've developed both creatively and emotionally over the years. Beginnings is part therapy, part philosophy and almost all fascinating (95% according to FDA studies).
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Andy traces musical practice back to childhood memories, emotional turning points, first instruments, and the experiences that made creativity feel possible.
Beginnings follows creative lives backward, with Andy asking musicians how childhood experience, early taste, and emotional survival became working habits.
A kid shoved onstage at a pizza parlor is your cue to wonder where a musician begins.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A warm Big Harp conversation about work, partnership, and the quiet ease one musician finds in performance.
This single-episode review treats Big Harp's story as a working life, not a polished origin myth. Stephanie and Chris are placed first as romantic and creative partners, with Andy sketching the band's recorded path through White Hat, Chain Letters, and Runs to Blue.
A grounded conversation about songwriting as a way to process fear, grief, and control.
Julia Steiner of Ratboys shapes a Beginnings conversation with Andy into a clear meditation on songwriting as a way to work through fear, grief, and the small measure of control a person can claim.
A candid conversation about how music became Amelia Fletcher's identity and something she could not quite leave.
Amelia Fletcher's memories of entering a music community give Beginnings its strongest thread: taste hardening into identity. Andy's questions move from school to the pressure of standing apart, and Fletcher answers with a clear, unshowy candor.
Political urgency gives way to a candid, personal talk about drinking, shame, and learning to name feelings.
Beginnings opens in political alarm, with Andy warning that Kansas is demanding trans residents hand in their driver's licenses and urging support for the trans continental pipeline.
A childhood shove onto a stage becomes the thread that holds the episode's creative origin story together.
Beginnings finds its pull in small, telling moments that trace a creative life before it has a name: a child pushed onto a Shakey's Pizza stage, a first try at "Here Comes Peter Cottontail," guitar lessons from a draft-dodging hippie, and sixth-grade Jesus Christ Superstar.
Kishi Bashi traces movement, metal-show memories, and the fragile appeal of live performance.
Beginnings follows Karu Ishibashi, aka Kishi Bashi, through the early moves and musical detours that helped shape his sense of identity. From leaving Seattle at five to growing up in Norfolk, he frames change less as drama than as something he learned to live inside.
A musician interview that widens into craft talk and changing taste.
Beginnings frames musicality as something that spills well beyond music, into graphic design, photography, and filmmaking. The conversation moves cleanly from Les Paul and Jeff Emmerich to how lenses shape what gets noticed, including the shift from treating wide angle as the…
Indie film, minus the fantasy fog.
Screenwriting craft, career reality, and working process.
Practical craft talks for working creators.
Science, sideways and sharply told.
This episode of Beginnings features an interview with director Seth Gordon, exploring his creative journey from architecture to documentary filmmaking.
This episode explores the creative origins of musician Hannah Frances through a reflective interview that connects personal artistic journeys with broader historical and social themes, including a discussion of Dorothy Thompson's 1941 Harper's article on who becomes a Nazi.
This episode of Beginnings features an interview with Dan Wriggins of the band Friendship, exploring his creative origins and artistic journey.
This episode of Beginnings interviews comics writer Jason Aaron about his creative origins and career, including his start through a Marvel contest and award-winning work with Vertigo.
This episode features an interview with comics creator and illustrator Brian Blomerth, discussing his background, early work for Vice and musicians, and his book series on 20th-century psychonauts starting with 'Bicycle Day' about the discovery of LSD.
Midnight has Andy whispering.
Andy opens in the car.
Andy opens Beginnings by introducing Stephanie Drutten and Chris Senseney of Big Harp, whose third album Runs to Blue is out on Saddle Creek after White Hat in 2011 and Chain Letters in 2013.
This episode of 'Beginnings' features an interview with John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, exploring the origins of creative people.
This episode features an interview with musician and producer John McEntire of Tortoise, exploring his creative origins and musical journey.
This episode features an interview with Zach and Jeffrey from Fatal Farm, exploring their origins as comedy directors and creators of sketch videos.
The host Andy introduces the show about creative origins and shares personal reflections on the entertainment industry's challenges, including WGA negotiations and mood struggles.
Andy opens with a drift, moving from crime syndicates and the Epstein files to the idea that real change often begins at the local level before settling into where a creative life starts.
Amelia Fletcher returns with Heavenly's Highway to Heavenly after a 30-year hiatus, released last week on Scapwax.
Beginnings opens with Andy talking about Kansas and the demand that trans citizens hand in their driver's licenses.
Andy opens from Los Angeles and immediately gets into the mess: torrential downpours, power outages in different parts of the city, a two a.m.