Track-by-track album talk with real memory.
That Record Got Me High pairs Rob Elba with guests who bring in a record that has stayed with them. The conversations move song by song, mixing fan devotion with scene history, player talk, lyrical close-reading, and the odd hard-won opinion.
PRESS PLAY
That Record Got Me High is an album-discussion show with a sturdy ritual at its center. Rob Elba welcomes a guest, the guest brings a record they love, and the conversation moves through it track by track. That spine keeps the show grounded. Around it, the episodes roam. A Blur conversation can spend real time on Parklife as a 1994 artifact, then shift into British accents, class codes, Stanley Unwin, the Small Faces, the Who, and the way Damon Albarn borrowed from several older canons at once. The result is not trivia for trivia’s sake. The context keeps pointing back to the songs. A Neil Young episode finds room for synthetic textures, an unflattering snare comparison, lyrics about inner anger, and the strange compliment of an album feeling claustrophobic when played loud in a car. The show is comfortable with records that are messy, transitional, unfashionable, or unfairly dismissed. That helps. It gives the conversations more life than simple celebration would. Guests often bring working-musician or deep-fan perspective, whether the subject is Jeff Beck’s instrumental fusion, Chuck Berry’s reach into the Beatles and Beach Boys, Dot Hacker’s prog-adjacent lyric games, or the bass lines that patrons remember as the real engine of a song. The Patti Smith and CBGB-related material points toward the show’s interest in scenes as much as records. So does the recurring pull toward Miami, New Orleans, London, South Florida, and old club circuits. Elba’s role is part guide, part fellow listener. He sets the table with covers, release context, guest background, and enough personal history to make the room feel lived in. The episodes can include ads, casual profanity, and occasional rough lyrical material, but the editorial function is affectionate close listening rather than shock. It suits people who think albums are best understood through songs, players, sleeves, scenes, arguments, and memory. The pleasure is in the patience.
Made for: For music obsessives who like records discussed patiently, with room for lyrics, players, scenes, production choices, covers, and personal history. It especially suits listeners who prefer conversational expertise over tidy critical verdicts.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its track-by-track discipline combined with loose, historically aware conversation. It can talk charts, accents, sidemen, scenes, and private memories without losing sight of the album in front of it.
Are you a music obsessive? Can you sit down for an hour or so poring over an album you love, digging deep into the lyrics, musical references and 'secret sauce' that makes it so special to you? Then this just MIGHT be your podcast!Each week your host - rock-n-roll lifer and recovering punk Rob Elba - sits down with a special guest to dissect a record that - metaphorically - got them high.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Rob Elba makes close album listening conversational, connecting musical choices with the personal histories that keep records alive.
That Record Got Me High turns album listening into a track-by-track conversation, with Rob Elba and a guest tracing what makes a chosen record hold together.
Blur's 'Parklife' becomes an accent lesson for your inner sleeve-note obsessive.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A track-by-track Parklife discussion that hears British class, accent, and musical history inside Blur's songs.
Blur's Parklife becomes a route into British musical history, with Corey Dubrawa and Rob Elba moving track by track through the album and listening for the class signals, accents, and borrowed traditions folded into its songs.
A sharp, scrappy look at Neil Young's appetite for risk on Landing On Water.
Neil Young's Landing On Water comes through as a record of uneasy collisions: glossy, even cheesy surfaces carrying darker writing, a boys choir casting a near-worshipful light over anger, and a drum sound made stranger by dropping the snare for the whole album.
A focused patron-curated bass segment links New Fast Automatic Daffodils to Brian Ritchie's work on "Add It Up."
Bass sits at the center here as the part of a song that can change its whole charge. The patron-curated That Record Got Me High segment moves cleanly from the wiry momentum of New Fast Automatic Daffodils and Justin Crawford's sturdy bass lines to Breck Lee Durham's case for…
A longtime friendship gives Jeff Beck's Blow By Blow a relaxed, track-by-track hearing.
Peter Slater brings Jeff Beck's 1975 instrumental album Blow By Blow into focus through a warm track-by-track conversation shaped by his long friendship with Rob Elba.
Smitty Supab traces a personal path from Back to the Future to Chuck Berry's The Great 28.
The episode frames Chuck Berry's The Great 28 through the way Smitty Supab found Berry in pieces: movies, radio, cover versions, and later college listening.
A close, human-scaled listen to wordplay, emotional candor, and a complicated release path.
Layla Moheimani and Rob Elba frame the record as something best heard up close, with attention paid to the pressure and play of its language. Their conversation stays with insecurity and isolation, and with the odd intimacy of hearing a line seem to name a feeling the listener…
A focused look at three overlooked local acts and how timing and place can shape a band's reach.
A patron-curated theme gives the episode an easy point of entry: local bands that a few committed listeners felt deserved a wider reach, and the role timing and place may have played in keeping them smaller.
Records worth hearing, reasons worth arguing over.
Annual Songlines Music Awards ceremonies spotlighting global artists, from Afrobeat to sevda.
A high schooler's music diary — Grammys press pass stories to family concert interviews.
Rap verdicts, fight-night takes and wandering movie arguments.
Host Rob Elba introduces a discussion of Pink Floyd's 'Animals' with guest James Cook, explaining the show's approach to guest-chosen albums.
Host Rob Elba discusses the Flaming Lips' album 'Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots' with guest Lucas Ward, an artist and musician from Portland now living in Italy.
The host introduces an episode featuring guests Tate Brooks and Silas Lourenco Lang from the band The Problem With Kids Today, discussing Jon Brion's song 'Meaningless' and opening with Rhett Miller's cover.
Host Rob Elba introduces a music podcast where guests pick records to discuss, and shares an anecdote about coworkers discovering his podcast.
Host Rob Elba presents a patron-curated episode focused on songs by local bands that should have been huge.
Host Rob Elba interviews musician and audio engineer Layla Moheimani about Dot Hacker's 2012 debut album 'Inhibition'.
["That Record Got Me High covers Blur's Parklife with Rob Elba and returning guest Corey Dubrawa, using the album as a track-by-track map of 1994 Britpop.", "Corey is described as a music journalist with more than two decades of work and more than 1,000 bylines, and Rob cites his 2024 books An Ideal for Living and Twelve Tunes from Urban Bohemia, Portland's Musical History and Song.", "The conversation focuses on 'Girls and Boys,' 'Tracy Jacks,' 'Parklife,' 'Bank Holiday,' 'Bad Head,' 'Far Out,' 'To the End,' and 'London Loves,' with Phil Daniels and Letitia Sadier as the main guest voices.", "Rob and Corey set the album against John Major's troubled government, the Charles and Diana split, Madchester, shoegaze, and grunge, then note Parklife's four hit singles, first-place debut, and million-plus UK sales."]
Rob Elba and Rossellini spend the episode on Neil Young's 1986 album Landing on Water, a record Rossellini treats as an underdog rather than a write-off.
That Record Got Me High turns a patron-curated bass episode into a tour of songs where the low end is the main attraction, opening with Rob Elba's 'Big Bottom' setup and the theme 'that bass playing in that song got me high.' Corey Dubrawa makes Led Zeppelin's 'Good Times, Bad Times' the case study, calling John Paul Jones the band's 'secret weapon' and pointing to the 55-second and two-minute bass breaks.
Host Rob Elba and guest Gabriel Rotello discuss Patti Smith's seminal 1975 album 'Horses' and its impact on punk and New York's downtown scene.
Host Rob Elba and guest Tom Lawery discuss Band of Horses' 2007 album 'Cease to Begin'.
Rob Elba and Peter Spirer center Jeff Beck's 1975 album Blow By Blow, a first solo record that reached number 4 on the Billboard 200 and later went platinum.
"Memphis, Tennessee" unfolds a father searching for Marie, and the reveal comes at the end.