Rockin' the Suburbs

Rockin' the Suburbs is a rock history podcast that runs on allegiance rather than lecture. Its episodes are less about settling the record than about explaining why a band, an album or one side of a breakup matters to the person talking. Patrick Foster introduces them on behalf of Jim Lanahan, whom he calls his good friend, co-founder and co-host, and he is happy to hand the floor to a guest. The loosest moments are his own. He confesses to emails he missed, deleted or never saw often enough that the mishap has a name, error code Patrick. Even the three-part Thin Lizzy series with Jo Fleischer began as a Saint Patrick's Day idea that sat unnoticed until it found a new occasion. That series shows the format at full stretch. Jo Fleischer is familiar to the show's community and calls Thin Lizzy a favourite band. The series makes the case that there has never been a better time to explore Ireland's Thin Lizzy, a band that went through fifteen guitarists. The story takes in Gary Moore playing Day on the Green in San Francisco in 1979 and then quitting, the Black Rose album sometimes called the band's most Irish, and the path to the last record, Thunder and Lightning, in 1983. Part three looks at what came after, and at where an uninitiated listener should begin. Along the way the conversation reaches for rock journalism, recalling the memoirs of Alan Jones, a journalist in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, and a night-out story that grows blurrier as it goes. The second strand runs under the banner Second Album Syndrome. Its premise is simple: second albums are hard, and the episodes weigh which ones cleared the bar. Steven Routledge covers Radiohead's The Bends, explaining how the band rose to popularity in the UK, before turning to the second album from The Stone Roses and a stop with The Darkness. Patrick sets up that second half by announcing he has a TDK cassette threaded up and ready to play. Noah Crane's contribution reads differently, as a composed personal essay from someone who says he has hijacked the show. It starts with the 1994 Uncle Tupelo split, the kind of breakup where no one gets to be Switzerland, and traces how Son Volt's Trace put him on Jay Farrar's side over Jeff Tweedy's. His case is that Straightaways, released in April 1997 with little fanfare, is a companion to Trace rather than a retread, perhaps the middle of a trilogy completed by Wide Swing Tremolo. He closes on an image of faded summers, railroad dreams and near misses. An episode titled 'The Laughing Hyenas… Live!' is teased with a line about cigarette smoke and spilled beer practically rising from the record grooves. The catalog is deep, so the easiest way in is through a band a listener already cares about.