461 episodes listed below
Musicians talking through the work beneath the songs.
Broken Record treats music as lived experience, not just finished product. Artists talk through albums, influences, injuries, family history, studio choices, and the strange moment when a song finds its audience.
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Broken Record is a music interview show with a craftsman’s patience. It does not rush artists toward neat conclusions. Instead, it lets them trace the path from a private experience to a public song, often through memories, studio choices, influences, and small moments of recognition. Recent conversations show how wide that frame can be. Jessie Ware talks about making Superbloom after illness and loss, and about turning a hard year into music that sounds joyful. Patrick Watson reflects on a vocal crisis and the playful decision to build a record around many guest artists. Charlie Puth brings theory down to the piano, showing how gospel chords keep finding their way into pop. Tommy Emmanuel’s episode lingers on impossible guitar technique, but the deeper subject is how performance can give people relief from ordinary strain. Rodney Corral’s story moves through Nashville, church music, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, and the emotional force of hearing Willie Nelson record his songs. FKA Twigs brings a more experimental current, linking dance music, mixed-race identity, bodily autonomy, and the elusive timing of culture. The show also makes room for archival and biographical detours, including a Big Lives episode on George Michael and cultural figures. Its best moments come when a guest names the exact pressure point: a damaged voice, a new confidence, a harmonic habit, a stage memory, a song that returns years later through social media. The tone is warm and informed. The detail is musical, but rarely exclusionary. Broken Record works for listeners who want to hear artists think aloud about why the record sounds the way it does. It is fan-minded without being starstruck. It treats pop, country, orchestral music, electronic R&B, guitar performance, and legacy rock as different routes into the same question: what has to happen before a song feels true?
Made for: For listeners who like artist interviews grounded in process, memory, and musical detail. It especially suits people who care how albums are made, not only whether they became hits.
What sets it apart: The show favors concrete craft over celebrity chatter, often returning to a chord, injury, collaboration, studio choice, or performance memory as proof. Its range is broad, but the questions stay close to the music.
Music and storytelling meet on Broken Record, where artists across genres and generations sit down to explore the joy, chaos, and vulnerability of creating—and what it means to devote a life to music. From legendary icons to groundbreaking new voices, each episode captures artists in conversation sharing the inspirations and experiences that shape their craft.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Musicians trace the choices, pressures and personal shifts that shape their songs, performances and changing relationships with their own work.
Broken Record gives musicians enough room to connect the work on record with the lives that produced it. Conversations with Ben Bridwell, Conor Oberst, Rodney Crowell, FKA twigs and Tommy Emmanuel move easily between writing and performance, with interviewers asking for the…
This is where artists tell you what happens before the song sounds inevitable.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Tommy Emanuel links precise guitar technique to the simple promise of giving an audience a break from life.
Tommy Emanuel's morning guitar routine gives this Broken Record episode its cleanest entry point: virtuosity starts with the small, practical act of getting the hands moving.
A patient, feeling-led conversation about Rodney Corral's childhood, craft, and the musical inheritance behind his songs.
Rodney Corral's story gives the episode its center of gravity, moving from a hard Houston childhood and church music to the unlikely force of seeing Hank Williams at age two.
FKA twigs traces the club experiences, cultural timing and artistic independence behind her evolving idea of pop.
FKA twigs considers what happens when an artist's work catches up with the culture around it. Speaking hours before collecting her first Grammy, she ties that question to her own career, rave culture and the development time artists once enjoyed, with David Bowie as her…
Ben Bridwell revisits the breakthrough debut, the rock bottom that followed and the voice he still struggles to hear.
Ben Bridwell revisits Band of Horses' debut with little nostalgia to soften the edges. Twenty years after making Everything All the Time with producer Phil Eck, he hears a musician still finding his way: too restrained, short on breath and uneasy about the amateurism he once…
A brisk, context-rich case for 1984 as the year pop, MTV, and the charts locked together.
1984 lands here as a pivotal pop year, with music television and the charts beginning to reinforce each other in plain sight. Chris Molanphy follows that feedback loop through MTV's steady rotation of Michael Jackson, Prince, Donna Summer, and Lionel Richie, then shifts to The…
Conor Oberst reflects on inspiration's strange timing, from quiet perspective to sudden political anger.
Broken Record's conversation with Conor Oberst settles on the uneasy space between raw feeling and finished songwriting. Oberst talks about music as a mystery, with the songs he values most arriving less by command than by timing.
Big ideas under real-world pressure.
Fast takes for messy mornings.
Westeros adaptation talk with book-reader nerves.
A raw notebook on work, AI, and taboo culture.
An interview with Labi Siffre about his career, music, and philosophy of honesty over commercial compromise.
Host Justin Richmond interviews musician Conor Oberst about his lengthy career, from starting at age 14 to his latest album 'Five Dices, All Threes'.
Chris Molanphy explores why 1984 is often called the greatest year in pop history, analyzing eight key factors from the disco backlash to MTV's peak.
An interview with Sublime's new lead singer Jacob Knoll and original members about the band's history and their upcoming album.
Adam Duritz discusses his mental health struggles and dissociative disorder with Leah Rose on Broken Record.
Jessie Ware explains how “Superbloom” turns age, sensuality, confidence, and artistic identity into album themes she discovered through writing and sequencing songs.
Bruce Ellum interviews Patrick Watson about his new album Uh-Oh, recorded after a vocal crisis, and his career journey.
This episode of Big Lives explores the life and legacy of George Michael through rare BBC archive interviews.
Charlie Puth discusses his new album 'Whatever's Clever', his songwriting process, and the influence of gospel chords in pop music.
This episode features a discussion about Chris Robinson and the Black Crowes' 2026 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nomination, interspersed with ads for iHeart Radio and Airbnb.
Tommy Emanuel, on Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond, traces his guitar style through Chet Atkins, Stevie Wonder, Paco de Lucía, and Lenny Breau.
Rodney Crowell says Willie Nelson was "closer to childhood" on "Banks of the Old Bandera" than Crowell was in 1999.
FKA Twigs tells Elizabeth Day that performing before 80,000 people triggers “fight or flight,” which she reframes as excitement.
Broken Record interviews Band of Horses frontman Ben Bridwell about the 20th anniversary of Everything All the Time, recorded with producer Phil Eck in 2005.
A special Giving Tuesday episode of The Happiness Lab podcast encourages listeners to donate to GiveDirectly through the Pods Fight Poverty campaign to fight extreme poverty and boost their own happiness.
Malcolm Gladwell explains why he frequently consults linguist John McWhorter to understand the origins of people's accents and speech patterns.