Music craft, traced back to its source.
Sounds of Berklee treats music as both work and personal history. Its conversations move from jam-band touring and indie production to sonified science, grief-based multimedia art, jazz identity, and musician wellness.
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Sounds of Berklee is a music interview series with a clear editorial habit: start with a lived moment, then ask how the work came to exist. The show is campus-rooted, but not narrow. It follows Berklee students, staff members, alumni, visiting artists, and working musicians into the practical and emotional machinery of making music. One episode places Goose inside a multigenerational jam-band crowd, then turns toward Berklee practice rooms, early influences, and the band's long path to a devoted audience. Another follows Indigo Anson and Chrysalis through childhood performance fantasies, theater, guitar lessons, songwriting fear, and the leap into Boston stages. The show can be intimate. Rae Soule's episode treats grief as something that may need translation, visual art, language, and music to become bearable. It can also be technical without becoming cold. David Ibbett's conversation explains sonification by connecting exoplanet data, waves, water, and musical notes. Production work gets the same careful attention. Sarah Tudson describes the way references, studio tricks, and bodily feeling can make a bright song carry unease. Andrew Sarlo talks about producing major indie releases through people-focused instincts more than gear display. Jazz, too, becomes a question of identity and discipline, especially in Melissa Aldana's discussion of Visions, fear, and achievement. The show also makes room for musician wellness, with Leah Driscoll, Liz Zinn, and Katie Gibson discussing mental health as part of sustaining a career. Across these episodes, Sounds of Berklee feels curious, respectful, and unhurried. It is less interested in celebrity polish than in the moment an artist explains what they were trying to solve.
Made for: For listeners who enjoy thoughtful music interviews, especially those interested in songwriting, production, performance, jazz, indie scenes, and creative education. It also fits artists who want process stories without industry bluster.
What sets it apart: The show connects Berklee's campus world to wider music culture while keeping the conversation grounded in specific projects and lived practice. It lets technical craft, personal history, and larger meaning share the same room.
Listen to the stars of tomorrow…today, as well as Berklee faculty members, alumni, and a few legendary artists, coming to the college as visiting artists.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Artist interviews become practical studies of songwriting, production, musical education and the choices that carry work from an idea to an audience.
Sounds of Berklee follows musicians from the practice room into the studio and onto the stage, with Brian Paris favoring interviews that make creative decisions legible.
Berklee turns the studio door transparent, so you can hear artistic choices take shape.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A Berklee-rooted look at Goose's musical shift and the multi-generational crowd around it.
Goose comes through as a band with a real Berklee tie and a crowd that cuts across generations, but the episode is most interesting when those threads start to overlap.
A theater kid's songwriting path opens into a story about identity, stage work, and a fuller artistic self.
Indigo Anson's episode opens with Brian Paris dreaming up an Oasis reunion, a "Live Forever" guitar solo, and the kind of discovery moment that can change a life.
A composer turns distant planetary signals into music, bringing astrophysics into unexpectedly intimate range.
This single-episode review follows scientific discovery into musical territory, tracking a composer interested in what information can become once graphs and distant signals are heard instead of only seen.
Sarah Tudson traces how borrowed sounds and buried unease can shape an Illuminati Hotties song.
Sarah Tudson's conversation with Brian Paris stays with Let Me Do One More and the question of how a song can borrow energy from other records without losing its own identity.
Erin Barra makes Ableton, prosody, and studio technology feel like tools for creative agency.
Erin Barra frames the digital audio workstation as more than a place to polish tracks. For her, studio technology belongs inside the songwriter's creative toolkit, alongside melody, language, arrangement, and instinct.
Two working engineers, testing home-studio gear by ear.
Real drum-recording talk from working players.
Music craft, from studio floor to screen.
Producers talking shop, tangents and blunt advice included.
Studio craft, argued in practical detail.
Brian Paris interviews Erin Barra, an associate professor in Berklee's songwriting department, about her journey from resisting technology to becoming an Ableton specialist.
This episode of Sounds of Berklee features saxophonist Walter Smith III, a Berklee alumnus who is returning as the new chair of the woodwind department.
Sounds of Berklee’s “Both Sides of Goose, America’s Premier Jam Band” follows Goose from a sold-out Portland, Maine show to a Zoom interview with Rick Mitarotonda, Ben Atkind, and Jeff Arevalo.
Indigo Anson got booked for Boston Calling after singing at Faneuil Hall on their first day as a street performer.
Sounds of Berklee’s "What Does Science Sound Like?" centers on composer and assistant professor David Ibbitt, who teaches in Berklee’s composition and humanities departments.
Sarah Tudzin talks with Brian Paris on Sounds of Berklee about making Let Me Do One More after the label conflict that pushed her to release Free IH first.
An interview with producer Andrew Sarlo about his work on indie albums, including Big Thief and Bon Iver, and his people-focused production philosophy.
An interview with jazz saxophonist Melissa Aldana about winning the Thelonious Monk Competition, her career, and her album Visions.
A conversation about mental health resources and wellness strategies for musicians at Berklee College of Music.
An interview with guitarist and songwriter Buck Meek about his music, tour with Jeff Tweedy, and creative process.
Interview with dancer Ebony Williams about her career and journey in dance.
An interview with Kim Perlack, new chair of Berklee's guitar department, discussing her approach to classical guitar and developing personal style.
This episode discusses a groundbreaking report on women in the U.S.
An interview with opera director Nathan Troop about his production of Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg's experimental opera Hydrogen Jukebox.