Career stories with the side roads left in.
Fascination Street favors casual biography over polished profile. Guests talk through early breaks, creative habits, career pivots, and strange details, while the host keeps the room loose with jokes, tangents, and blunt follow-up questions.
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Fascination Street is a long-form interview show with a casual, biography-first shape. It is interested in how people became the people sitting across from the microphone. The guest list is broad, but recent episodes cluster around music, film, acting, and public-facing creative work. A punk bassist can lead into technique, Primus fandom, and the decision to study audio engineering. A Don McLean throwback can deliberately step around the most over-explained part of American Pie and spend time on other songs, new projects, remasters, documentaries, a play, and a movie. B.J. Thomas arrives through chart history, Grammy recognition, and the long afterlife of Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head. Taylor Shore brings the conversation through Tunisia, Lastry, solo releases, lyrics, Spotify, and the host’s enthusiasm for specific songs. Herb Alpert’s episode turns on creative instinct: music that transports, records that feel good, and the discipline of sounding like oneself instead of an influence. D. B. Sweeney’s conversation moves from Broadway Joe memories to acting choices as specific as using bourbon scent to help play a scene. The Dr. Drew throwback is more topical, touching homelessness, psychiatric hospitals, addiction, prostate cancer, and media work. The show’s texture comes from the host’s informal steering. Questions are plainspoken. Tangents stay in the edit. Personal stories and playful reactions sit beside practical career questions, so the interviews feel more like a room conversation than a formal profile. The show is strongest when a guest has lived through enough turns to make the small details matter. It suits listeners who like career stories with names, places, songs, projects, odd production facts, and occasional rough edges. It is not trying to be sleek. That is the point.
Made for: Best for listeners who like relaxed long-form interviews with musicians, actors, filmmakers, and media figures. It especially suits people who enjoy career origin stories, creative-process talk, and specific pop-culture memories.
What sets it apart: Fascination Street often avoids the obvious headline and follows the more personal thread instead. Its loose structure makes room for song requests, throwback revisits, practical craft talk, and the kind of odd detail that formal profiles usually trim away.
Fascinating People, Fascinating stories. If you're like me, you love to find out how people got to where they are in life, what makes them tick, some of their hurdles, and what made them think they could do it. If so, then join me every Monday as I 'take a walk down Fascination Street' and get to know the stories behind people from every walk of life. "Streetwalkers" include: actors, authors, directors, musicians, pop culture icons, social activists, athletes, screenwriters, comedians, artists, podcasters, CEO's, and even an astronaut! New episodes every Monday, and sometimes a bonus one too!
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Fascination Street turns musician interviews into candid conversations about technique, influence, performance nerves and the personal standards behind a creative life.
Fascination Street gets musicians talking about the choices beneath a performance. The host asks Ryan Sinn about bass technique, influences and audio engineering school, then follows Wyatt Michael from discovering crooning to handling nerves and forgotten lyrics at weddings.
A capful of bourbon in an actor's hair: your cue that the conversation will go beyond the credits.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Bass talk about feel, restraint, and Primus.
This episode spends most of its time on the practical side of bass playing, with the Ryan Sinn conversation circling Primus, influence, and the idea that not every song needs to become a long burst of sparkle notes.
Herb Alpert turns an unanswered trumpet question into a warm case for records that carry listeners somewhere.
Herb Alpert's easygoing conversation turns a question about the trumpet at the end of B.J. Thomas's "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" into a small, revealing portrait of artistic instinct.
Loose, funny actor talk that peaks with memory, craft, and a bourbon-in-the-hair anecdote.
Fascination Street lets the DB Sweeney conversation settle into memory and craft talk without forcing the pace. The strongest stretch comes in the Broadway Joe story under the lights of Times Square, the regret of not getting a photo, and the bourbon-in-the-hair anecdote that…
A loose, funny return turns Golden, residual checks, and film deals into grounded industry shop talk.
Nick Leisure's return to Fascination Street frames Golden through the practical, often ridiculous economics of making and releasing movies. Charlotte Kirk's question about his first residual check gives the episode its cleanest laugh: $0.85 for a quarter, after distribution and…
A drag-racing figure looks back on the race-day moments that made the sport feel close, fast, and personal.
Dina Parise’s first pull toward drag racing comes through as a set of vivid trackside memories: a car launching down the strip, the speed, the mix of machines, and the sense that a ticket could bring a fan unusually close to the action.
A focused musician interview about crooning, performance pressure, Sinatra, and The Voice.
Wyatt Michael's shift from rock-band frontman to crooner gives Fascination Street a clean center: a singer figuring out where his voice belongs.
Don McLean sets American Pie aside for a fiery Garth Brooks story and a substantial Empty Chairs performance.
Fascination Street returns to Don McLean for a throwback episode that sidesteps the usual American Pie mythology and finds its center in a different memory.
Joe Wong interviews drummers and musicians about craft, history, and the working musician's life.
Lij Shaw interviews producers and engineers about mic technique, mixing, and studio business.
Ian Shepherd and working mastering engineers dig into Atmos, loudness wars, and vinyl cutting.
Co-hosts Ed Thorne and Paul Third dissect mixing, mastering, and studio gear with working engineers.
This throwback episode features music legend Don McLean on the 50th anniversary of 'American Pie'.
Host Jeremy Swift interviews Wyatt Michael, a jazz crooner he discovered performing a Sinatra tribute in San Antonio.
This episode features director Paul Feig discussing his new psychological thriller film The Housemaid, reflecting on his career, and catching up on recent years.
This episode features actor Geoffrey Blake discussing his film and TV projects, residuals, teaching younger actors, and sharing entertaining stories from his career.
Eric and Eliza Roberts discuss their lives as actors and their marriage in this interview on the Fascination Street podcast.
This episode features an interview with Kevin Brewer, a mindset and weight loss coach, discussing his journey from Navy service and government work to overcoming health issues through weight loss and stem cell treatment.
The episode opens with sponsor copy.
This throwback episode features an interview with music icon Don McLean, focusing on his career beyond 'American Pie' and his recent projects during the COVID pandemic.
This episode features filmmaker J.R.
This throwback episode features an interview with Grammy-winning, multi-platinum recording artist B.J.
This episode features an interview with musician Taylor Shore, discussing his background growing up in Tunisia, his musical journey with the band Lastry and solo project, and insights into his songwriting and recent releases.
Herb Alpert says his signature sound began when he stopped copying Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis, and he is the only musician to hit number one as both vocalist on 'This Guy's In Love With You' and instrumentalist on 'Rise'.
DB Sweeney sits down for a relaxed, biography-first conversation.
Nick Leisure is back on Fascination Street.
Fascination Street revisits Dina Parisi, the 2015 IHRA Pro Mod champion known as the Spicy Meatball, and she links Long Island ice skating to a 3,000-horsepower Cadillac named Stella.
Host Jeremy Swift interviews crooner Wyatt Michael about his musical journey, Sinatra tribute performances, and experience on The Voice.