Best Album For

What's the right soundtrack for barreling down a highway in pursuit -- or being pursued -- in your very own General Lee? Dave & Caleb lay out the criteria, buckle in, and gun it to 95 with The Prodigy's Fat of the Land and The Reverend Horton Heat's It's Martini Time! Two albums from a golden era of the 90s when, for one shining moment, electronica and swing music improbably had its grips around our collective i...

Special guest co-host Vince Brackett joins the podcast this week to discuss what it means to “sell out” for a variety of musicians, and the template for popular and highly successful musicians to “reverse sell out” with an album cycle (or more) marked by attempts to be taken more seriously as an artist. Along the way, they unpack the careers of the strangest bands to have ever momentarily hit it big (Primus, Butthole Surfers), arti...

We go deep on a roadmap for getting your kids to rap music, from Sugarhill Gang to whatever is happening in the genre right now. How do you approach conversations about lyrical content, specific life experiences that aren’t our own, and answer questions you never thought you’d have to answer (yikes.) Along the way we talk about A Tribe Called Quest’s timeless masterpiece, The Low End Theory, and Jurassic 5’s rap primer for white pe...

Dave and Caleb welcome in 2024 by naming the best albums for starting a new year. What albums best capture that fine line between eternal optimism and existential dread about what could come? Dave suggests Prince’s 1999, a party album preoccupied with nuclear proliferation in the early 80s, and Caleb brings Jamie xx’s dance party in a jewel case, In Colour. Along the way, they unpack what it was like to first be exposed to Prince a...

Dave and Caleb are wrapping up 2023 with our inaugural top tens of the year, plus loads of honorable mentions and singles. We count it down 10-1 and hopefully introduce you to some of your new favorite music!

Our favorite albums of 2023:

Alex Lahey - The Answer is Always Yes

Boygenius - the record

Bully - Lucky for You

Danny Brown - Quaranta

Jamie Branch - Fly of Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war))

Jamila Woods - Water Mad...

This week we're doing something different, a game we call Let's Make a Mixtape. Our friend Hana Kim joins us as we draft 18 Christmas songs that we're publishing as a playlist you can listen to on Spotify or Apple Music. But there's a twist -- when it's someone's turn, they get to not only draft a song and performer, but also they get to draft where on the mixtape it goes. Merry Christmas!

Hosts: Dave Sandel...

December is here and we’re ready to get in the Christmas spirit! Or Dave is at least. Dave brings Caleb on a magical journey through a season of lights and traditions and a spiritually moving season, while Caleb keeps us grounded in the stress and consumerism of the holiday. But, one thing they can both agree on is that the nostalgia of 1987’s A Very Special Christmas with artists like Run DMC, Whitney Houston, Madonna and U2 can i...

The leaves are changing, the hot apple cider is brewing, the bonfires and bonfiring, and Dave and Caleb are ready to crown the best album for autumn. What are the albums that we pull out for just a few months each year that are elevated by the invigoratingly crisp air and the cozy trappings of fall? Throw on your favorite cardigan and re-discover Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago and Yo La Tengo's I Can Hear the Heart Beatin...

Daylight Savings Time is upon us, and Dave and Caleb are celebrating by choosing albums that sound great at one in the morning. What makes an album sound best in the dark, wee hours of the morning? Dave gets into one of his all-time favorites, Portishead’s trip-hop classic Dummy, and Caleb goes all catharsis with M83’s Hurry Up We’re Dreaming. 

Music discussed this week:

Portishead - Dummy

M83 - Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

Young ...

Halloween is upon us, and after a quick stroll through all things traditions and family policies, Dave and Caleb unpack what makes a song spooky? Is it the song itself, or are the images we associate with it doing half the work? Along the way, they give picks for music that is genuinely terrifying and music that hits the more playful side of the season.

Music discussed today:

John Carpenter's Halloween Soundtrack (1978)

Rob Zo...

Taylor Swift is a global sensation with legions of devoted fans who call themselves "Swifties." Surprisingly, your hosts Dave and Caleb -- a.k.a. two dads in their 40s -- aren't among them. But in the midst of the year of Taylor, we wanted to find our way in. So we enlisted our friend Sydney Bauer, a self-professed Swiftie to give us three records and three weeks to fully take them in, and then guided us through a pro...

If movies like Roadhouse and Fight Club taught us anything, it’s that every bar fight is accompanied by a catalyzing track. Today, two pacifists  take another trip into their imaginations to determine the album that could come on that would make you want to defend someone’s honor (or at least buy groceries a little harder.) Dave takes us to punk’s roots with Iggy & the Stooges’ Raw Power and Caleb dips into 90s angst with The O...

Dave and Caleb hop in their DeLorean to travel back to the year 1966 and decide which album they most want to experience in the time of its release. They talk about the frenzy that surrounded every Beatles release and what it must have felt like to experience your favorite band going in new directions like the Beatles' Revolver. And they imagine being in the audience to experience the power and magnitude of Nina Simone in the y...

They say you can’t go home again, but this week Dave and Caleb make an attempt to as they think about hometowns. The good, the bad, the people, what it means to bring your full grown up self to a place where you are perpetually 17 years old, and importantly, the power of music to become containers for all the parts of your life; songs that mean something to you as a kid and grow and mold with you as you get older, so that they feel...

Dave and Caleb go deep on how they formed their imagination for high school (spoiler alert: Saved by the Bell shows up) and what types of feelings and memories shaped their mindset as they remember entering high school, with all its misplaced promise and unearned swagger and raging hormones. They turn to two bands who uniquely understood the assignment — Blink 182 and the Beastie Boys — and dive into a classic and a little-less-cla...

Dave is joined this week by a special guest, Quentin Coaxum (https://quentincmusic.bandcamp.com). Quentin is a professional trumpeter, composer and teacher in the Chicago area, where he’s performed at the Chicago Jazz Festival and the Pitchfork Music Festival. Dave and Quentin go deep on two very different records they recommend for retreating to woods, including the lush “Sing to the Moon” by Laura Mvula that could accompany you o...

Dave and Caleb make one last splash before summer comes to a close by determining the best album for jumping in a lake with your friends, including a surprise album that neither of them like all that much. Can an album be a 'best album for' if it has 5 killer tracks and a ton of filler? They also discuss why rock music production from the last 20+ years all kind of sounds the same, and how that affects the mood of a party a...

In today’s episode, Dave wants to bring you in on one of his most embarrassing behaviors that began with a brilliant attempt to be cool in high school, and Dave and Caleb attempt to determine what songs you can blast from your car that will, for a brief moment, make sure the high schoolers you are driving by know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are cool. Also, they have an episode-long conversation about 90s hip hop, Kendrick...