Tony Mantor
81 episodes listed below
Long-form music stories from Nashville’s backstage.
Tony Mantor’s Almost Live Nashville is a steady interview show built around long career stories from musicians, performers, and entertainment figures. The conversations favor origins, turning points, hard seasons, and the choices that keep creative work alive.
PRESS PLAY
Tony Mantor’s Almost Live Nashville is an interview-driven music and entertainment show with a clear Nashville anchor. It is patient by design. The format gives musicians, performers, and entertainment figures room to tell the longer version of their stories, from early breaks and major songs to hard losses, career conflict, and late-career perspective. The show often starts with a familiar achievement, then follows the road underneath it. A Thomas Dolby conversation turns a hit song into a wider talk about technology, analog limits, digital distribution, and how artists now fight to be heard in a crowded field. Juliet Dawn’s episode is heavier, moving through X Factor, faith, decades of trauma, family loss, miscarriage, and music written out of survival. Pat Kane brings a different kind of history, tracing brotherhood, punk-era permission, jazz influence, and the choice to remain authentic rather than chase whatever sound is current. The Tommy D conversation steps outside the artist profile and into the machinery around live entertainment, with allegations about Live Nation, legal discovery, money pressure, and a 15-year battle. Tenille Towns’ appearance centers Nashville ambition, independence, and honest songwriting. Marcus Hummon’s story reaches from L.A. to Music City, with songwriting, the Bluebird Cafe, film scoring, opera, and musical theater in the frame. Band of Heathens bring road-tested roots rock, harmony, collective identity, and Texas grit. The Proto Man episode adds rock opera, sci-fi storytelling, and theatrical live-show energy. Across the show, Mantor keeps the conversation plain and direct. He asks what happened, checks the feeling behind it, and lets the guest carry the weight. That gives the podcast a grounded oral-history feel. It is not built for quick takes. It is built for listeners who want the backstage version, where career facts sit beside family, grief, resilience, craft, and the question of what lasts.
Made for: For listeners who like patient artist interviews, Nashville music culture, behind-the-scenes entertainment stories, and career-spanning conversations with music and entertainment figures.
What sets it apart: The show gives guests time to connect public milestones with private turning points, mixing music-business detail with emotional biography instead of staying at surface-level promotion.
Nashville based veteran music producer Tony Mantor’s Almost Live… Nashville podcast takes its listener on a journey through the business of music and entertainment. Following the success and popularity of his top-rated podcast on Autism & Mental Health awareness - Why Not Me? - Mantor hosts thought-provoking conversations and behind-the-scenes stories from various celebrity guests from the world of music, television and entertainment. With more than 30 years as an accomplished music producer based in Nashville, Mantor welcomes a worldly guest list of musicians, actors and entertainers who share their unique stories about the roles they’ve played in creating and sustai...
Career highlights step aside; Tony Mantor gets you the choices, collisions, and scars behind them.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A patient career conversation shows how digital tools opened the door while making attention harder to win.
Tony Mantor frames the interview around a career that kept moving through songwriting, production, innovation, and music technology, with reinvention sitting beside the pressure of a crowded digital age.
Juliet Dawn links X Factor scrutiny, private grief, and Nashville music shaped by healing.
Juliet Dawn's appearance on Tony Mantor's Almost Live Nashville follows a clear arc from public scrutiny toward music rooted in hope and healing.
Hue and Cry's musical inheritance meets a lasting right to experiment.
Pat Kane's conversation centers on Hue and Cry, the band he formed with his brother Greg, and on the mix of pop, jazz, and sophisticated songwriting that defined their late-1980s arrival.
A 15-year promoter fight that turns a festival dream into a long legal grind.
Tony Mantor's conversation with Tommy D plays like a hard-edged music-business saga, with the 15-year dispute with Live Nation setting the tone.
A modest, wide-ranging career conversation where "Sometimes When We Touch" leads into pride, memory, books, and lasting connections.
Tony Mantor's talk with Fred Mollin traces a life in sound from a first production credit on "Sometimes When We Touch" into the music, projects, and memories that followed.
Artist interviews with the work left in.
Artists talking where the press cycle thins out.
Tony Mantor interviews Thomas Dolby about a North American tour featuring Gail Ann Dorsey, Andrew Lipke, and Matt Hector, with stories from Dolby's memoir The Speed of Sound.
Tony Mantor interviews Juliet Dawn, a former X Factor contestant who recorded the album Born to Be with Billy Smiley at Castle Recording Studio in Nashville.
Tony Mantor’s Almost Live Nashville features Pat Kane discussing Hue and Cry’s evolution from post-punk songwriting to the electronic album Everybody and single “Stronger.” Kane explains that “Labour of Love” reached number six and sold hundreds of thousands of records even though he initially opposed releasing it.
This episode features an interview with Ed and Gordy from the Band of Heathens, exploring their journey, music, and the brotherhood that sustains their respected American roots rock band.
Tony Mantor opens on Tommy D's 15-year fight with Live Nation.
This episode features an interview with Tenille Towns, discussing her music career, songwriting process, and journey from Alberta to Nashville.
This episode features Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Marcus Hummon discussing his journey from Los Angeles to Nashville, his career in country music, and his diverse creative work including songwriting, film scoring, and musicals.
This episode features an interview with the band The Protomen, exploring their unique blend of rock opera, sci-fi storytelling, and energetic music from Nashville.
This episode features an interview with Alison Limerick, exploring her musical journey from early career to her hit song 'Where Love Lives' and upcoming 2026 tour.
Tony Mantor interviews Fred Mollin, whose credits include producing Dan Hill's 1977 recording of "Sometimes When We Touch" and arranging records for major artists.
This episode features singer-songwriter Kendra Erika discussing her journey from being born tone-deaf to achieving Billboard Top Ten hits, her creative process, and her new single and album.
Jennifer Jones recounts joining the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes in 1987 and debuting at the 1988 Super Bowl halftime show as the troupe's first Black dancer, 62 years after its 1925 founding.
Tristan Tritt says a duet video with his father playing "Best of Intentions" took him from about 600 TikTok followers to 1.5 million views in a day and five million in two weeks.
Bobby Tomberlin, writer of Diamond Rio's "One More Day," describes moving to Nashville in 1990 on a $100-a-week deal from Mel Tillis while stocking shelves at Kroger.
This episode features an interview with Curt Smith of Tears for Fears, discussing his music career, personal stories, and behind-the-scenes insights into the entertainment industry.
Butch Vig, producer of Nirvana's Nevermind and Smashing Pumpkins' Gish and Siamese Dream, says "50% of producing is psychological." He describes asking bands to strip a song down to just drums and bass, because mismatched fills, such as a triplet against eighth notes, make tracks sound unfocused.
Jane Wiedlin recalls record companies rejecting the Go-Go's because executives believed an all-female band could never succeed.
Vicki Peterson says recording six Bill Cowsill songs for "Long After the Fire" required her to learn styles including country swing.
Michael Gomoll says Joey's Song brings musicians to Wisconsin in January for "two beers and a ham sandwich" to fund epilepsy research.
Eden Kane recalls winning a Cadbury's-sponsored talent contest in 1960, which led to a Pye Records deal and the 1961 number one "Will I Ask You." He describes how the Beatles-led group boom left solo singers behind, prompting a 1967 move to Australia for two years and a later move to Los Angeles.
Boomtown Saints members Chris and Ben tell Tony Mantor how Hop Scotch Mafia became a faith-rooted name, with "Saints" added as a nod to their faith.
Gospel rapper David Paul Brooks (DPB), a former member of the Grammy- and Dove-nominated group Disciples of Christ, tells Tony Mantor how he moved from a New York gospel-singing family into Christian hip-hop.
Brent Maher says a sign on I-70 in Kansas for the Orphan Train Museum in Concordia pulled him from record production into writing his first novel.
Tasman Archer tells Tony Mantor that she is releasing an independent album on September 12, after a long gap since her last independent release in 2006.
Johnny of the Carlisle band Hardwick Circus tells host Tony Mantor how the band toured Ukraine in a Renault Master van, playing Lviv, Kyiv and Kharkiv, which is 20 kilometers from the Russian border.
Suzi Quatro discusses her seventh book, the novel Grave Undertakings, which follows six psychology students across a 10-lesson course and ends with about 150 tombstone inscriptions collected from famous friends.
Phil Vassar tells Tony Mantor that his heart stopped for 20 to 30 minutes, and that doctors at Vanderbilt blamed "bad genetics" even though he exercised daily.
Tony Christie tells Tony Mantor how manager Harvey Lisberg, who also managed Herman's Hermits, secured his MCA Records deal and the 1971 hit "Las Vegas", which took him from Sheffield nightclubs to the Albert Hall.
Actor, musician and director Taylor Blackwell tells Tony Mantor how Burt Reynolds mentored her from age 10 in improv classes at the Burt Reynolds Institute in Jupiter, Florida.
Kelsey Watts, who plays Jane Seymour in Six the Musical, explains how a showboat meet-and-greet with musical supervisor Roberta Ducek led to a three-year path to Broadway.
Kyle "Trig" Coroneos tells Tony Mantor that he founded SavingCountryMusic.com in 2008 after reading about the Outlaw era and following Hank Williams III's label conflict.
Author Barry Mazor tells Tony Mantor how he spent three and a half years writing Blood Harmony, a 400-page Everly Brothers biography.
Jeffrey Sitkov, who founded the nonprofit Doors of Change in 2001, cites 4.2 million homeless American youth aged 17 to 24, 40% of them LGBTQ.
This episode features an interview with Felix Cavalieri, discussing his journey from childhood to forming the Rascals and his memoir.
This episode features an interview with musician Jeff Wayne about his 1978 rock opera adaptation of H.G.