Episode 186: The Final Episode

Just wanted to say goodbye properly. I can't do this anymore. I tried and I failed. I couldn't finish this story. Sorry if you were waiting on me to do so. I was too. I gave podcasting a go for nearly 10 years but I'm done. Thanks if you listened.

Episode 185: My Friend Luke Steele

Almost 20 years ago, Luke Steele emerged as one of the great modern eccentrics of Australian music. An ebullient personality (one was a spider, one was a bird), he started the decade as a scrappy underdog and ended it as one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Who else could get to that kind of …

Episode 184: My Friend Ben Lee

Few could have predicted that the scrawny Jewish kid with the guitar in Sydney's eastern suburbs would go on to conquer the world. Hell, even fewer could have predicted his second-ever gig would be opening for Sonic Youth. Still, that's just how Ben Lee's career has unfolded - just when you think y…

Episode 183: My Friend Gretta Ray

When then-triple j breakfast hosts Alex Dyson and Matt Okine decided to surprise Melbourne singer-songwriter Gretta Ray with news she'd won a competition through the station’s Unearthed initiative, they did not head to her place of work. Nor did they go to her place of residence. Instead, they ende…

Episode 182: My Friends Sly Withers

Lonely and dreaming on the west coast, Jono Mata and Sam Blitvitch both aspired to be the guitar heroes they saw on their screens at an impressionable age. With Sly Withers - both men's first in-earnest band - they were able to achieve something far greater. With their open, honest every-man take o…

Episode 181: My Friends STUMPS

Much like the inner rings of a cut-open tree, there are a surprising degree of layers to Sydney trio STUMPS. Although they boast a confident, extroverted frontman in Kyle Fisher, he had never actually even so much as sang a note on stage prior to the band's formation in the late 2010s. Their rhythm…

Episode 180: My Friend Charlie Collins

Charlene Bailey has lived a life of reintroductions. A promising country upstart in the heart of Tamworth, the singer-songwriter got her start as a child prodigy in a family band. She later emerged as a prospective indie-pop darling in the big smoke of Sydney and Los Angeles, helming Tigertown for …

Episode 179: My Friend Hachiku

Growing up outside of Cologne, Anika Ostendorf had lofty but headstrong ambitions to get into the world of music. She ended up there, but not in the way her younger self may have initially expected. As Hachiku, Ostendorf has forged a career in the indie pop world that has seen her charming, kitschy…

Episode 178: My Friends Palms

There are few intergenerational figures in a music scene that sees bands come and go on a weekly basis. Chief among those that are, however, are Al Grigg and Tom Wallace. Best friends since college, the pair first played together as part of 2000s indie wunderkinds Red Riders, before transferring th…

Episode 177: My Friend Dylan Baldi (Cloud Nothings)

It's an increasingly-common modern story. A project born out of a bedroom, a dorm room, a laptop, a loose collection of ideas, shifts from the micro to the macro. Few of these stories, however, have carved out such an intense niche as Dylan Baldi's noise-rock vehicle Cloud Nothings. Initially servi…