Car Con Carne

Car Con Carne is a Chicago-based interview show that treats culture as something made in rooms, cars, venues, restaurants, practice spaces, and backstage corners. Music is the main current. Recent episodes move from Martin Atkins revisiting PiL’s The Flowers of Romance to Scarlet Demore’s growth from basement shows to Lollapalooza, Cult Canyon’s Smoke Tricks, and LATTER’s jarring art-project energy. The format is relaxed, but the questions stay grounded in craft. A record release becomes a way to talk about dogs left in piano demos, cheap resources, favors, studio choices, and why a song should keep one strange sound instead of sanding it away. A band interview becomes a conversation about finding family in Chicago music. Short exchanges carry real weight. The show also has a strong sense of place. Reggie's, Thalia Hall, the Hideout, Mighty Beat Kitchen, Subterranean, Sunwa Barbecue, and Hellsgate Haunted House all become more than locations; they are part of the story being told. Car Con Carne is not only about bands promoting new projects. It is about how people build scenes, survive scenes, remember scenes, and occasionally argue for the strange thing that made them care in the first place. The range can be surprising. One episode talks through Chicago dining with Mike Gebert and an oral history of the city’s culinary scene. Another follows the immersive craft and subculture around Hellsgate Haunted House. There are personal detours too, including health updates and a year-end reflection from James VanOsdol. The show’s looseness is part of its identity. Sponsorship reads, side jokes, weather, parked-car logistics, and venue chatter all sit beside serious talk about community, ambition, aging records, and the work behind creative life. For listeners interested in Chicago music beyond headline summaries, it offers texture. For people who care about how art actually gets made, it offers process. The best moments feel local without becoming narrow: tiny stories, specific rooms, familiar names, and a steady belief that culture is held together by people who keep showing up.