Songs Out Loud

“The Big One” is a reflection about forecasting fear that cannot be known. There’s a story about an earthquake. There’s invented open tunings, and open hearts, there’s crying in bed at night in the woods of a military base. There’s a multidude of studio musicians, artful scoring and arranging, and a smart, eager protagonist ready to face her fears. This song, along with a few favorites on Lizzie Weber’s new album Fidalgo, goes supe...

The 442s did something special last month. They removed the precious from a genre widely endangered by pretense. Yes, they’re a chamber band: a folk-leaning classical and jazz hybrid. But their new album can accompany a Mother’s Day brunch just as well as a 4-20 afterparty. If you wanna hear John Denver, you will. If you wanna hear John Cage, you will. Need some Praire Home Companion vibes? Have a seat. Busta Rhymes? Travis Barker?...

On Halloween weekend 2022, a small group of us gathered in a lounge above The Royale Food & Spirits to hear Stan Chisololm deconstruct his single “Smitten.” Later that night, Stan would play an all vinyl DJ set. To help set the scene, you might picture Stan sitting on a black leather couch wearing the Bjork swon dress from her Academy Awards appearance in 2001 back in her Vespertine days.

[“Hi I’m Stan aka 18andCounting…”]

[Theme...

Retro Champ is a heavy metal singer and MC who’s 2022 EP No Mercy is the third such release since 2019. “Truth” is one of the heaviest songs on the album, which he recorded with producer & songwriter Ben McGuiness. For this episode, I received seven instrument and vocal groups from that song’s multitrack session and talked with Retro about his creative process. In addition to the stem files, he shared two voice memo files from ...

Kevin Koehler is a multi-instrumentalist singer and songwriter as well as live sound engineer and owner-operator of Lucy SoundLab. When he’s not playing guitar for the rock band iLLPHONICS, Kevin writes and performs under the name Obviously Offbeat. It was July of 2021 when he released an album of folk-inspired indie rock & pop music. The song “A Conversation With God” is from that album, “Infinite Will”, and for this episode, ...

Tree One Four is a reggae rock jam band with two albums to their name. Their most recent album, 2021’s Exhilarama, solidified the band’s official lineup. And just so you know, the song we deconstruct on this episode references personal struggles with depression. Like many artists, guitarist, singer and songwriter Brad Millabeats finds utility in songwriting when dealing with life’s hardships.

For this episode, Gabe Usery at Encaps...

Guitarist Daniel Horrell aka “Monkh” epidimizes the hustle of a modern musician. His band Monkh and the People rocks funky R&B on big stages and his solo stuff grooves just as hard - even when it’s just him and an acoustic guitar.

He’s got a playlist on Soundcloud of thirty three guitar hooks like “Monkh 144BPM G#m Lead 3” for producers who might be browsing, and his latest single is a minute long track for sale as an NFT on O...

The dramatic new single from Katarra Parson finds the singer/songwriter self-producing alongside a familiar roster of fellow musicians. Together, they explore a tension and release format that delivers dopamine rush after dopamine rush. With Andrew Gibson on drums, Tilton Yokley on bass, Joey Ferber on guitar and Jahi Eskridge on trumpet, “Loathe A Rose” escalates something that begins as an easy, latin, groove-based piano-jazz num...

Things got serious for Daemon after moving back to St. Louis from Los Angeles in 2016. Since then, his music has landed alongside everyone from Bernie Sanders to DJ Shadow. His brand new single “Turn The World Around” was released last week and is featured in the XBOX exclusive open world racing game Forza Horizons 5. For this episode, we’re going back to 2017 for a deconstruction of his song “With The Gang” co-written and produced...

Beth Bombara writes, records and performs folk rock with the backing of three other musicians, one of whom she’s actually married to. Since moving to St. Louis in 2017 she’s accumulated seven albums including 2019’s Evergreen. Ideas for songs on this album originated in part from time she spent at a cabin in Colorado, which is where we’ll begin rebuilding this song. For this episode, Beth supplied two personal phone recordings and ...

Looprat is a jazz & hip hop collective made up of musicians, producers and emcees who write and record music in a wide combination of members - almost a dozen total. Their name pays homage to their University City origins and their style celebrates the diversity they’ve found together. For this episode, producer & emcee Nate King aka “Nat King Flo” supplied eighteen files for their track “Still Saucin”. It’s number fifteen (out of ...

The 7 current members who makeup the Midwest Avengers are equal parts treble clef and comic book, skate park and gospel choir, drumline and beat box, headbanger and hip hop. Their latest single “Love On Fire” started off in rehearsals as a funky little messing around diddy and became a full blown rap-rock centerpiece after it just sort of clicked for everyone. For this episode Alex Saint Cin, at Lighthouse Studios, gave me every la...

Brian Owens sings soulful Motown inspired R&B songs with his band the Deacons of Soul and his community outreach centers around giving underserved youth the opportunity to experience music making. His latest album shares cowriting credits with some of them but for this song we’re going back to twenty seventeen when it was Brian Owens that did the learning -- from none other than Doobie Brother substitute vocalist turned full time l...

Dan Rubright is a jazz guitarist and composer who plays and records with various St. Louis based ensembles - his latest collaboration released an album called Dan Rubright Group and features nine original compositions with fellow musicians bassist Chris Turnbaugh, pianist Nick Schlueter, and drummer/recording engineer Steve Davis --who wasn’t able to get the stems for the recording, but Dan happily handed over a bunch of practice r...

Leponds is the musical creation of artist Lisa Hudei. In this episode we’re taken on a ride through the making of her song “The Hollywood Baby” from her most recent album “Lean To” from 2019. It features the same imaginative and expressive songwriting and performances that earned her past two albums (2016’s “Heat” and 2018’s “I Was Dancing With My Dream Team”) universal praise. Our talks were taken from two separate recordings I h...

The new single from alternative rock band Foxing was released approximately ten days before it was released. It was about two weeks ago the band began retweeting recorded renditions of their new song by fans who hadn’t heard the song yet --because it hadn’t come out yet. But, we found out, the song’s chords and lyrics could be uncovered by completing a round of clever text-based gameplay on the band’s album release site.

I didn’t k...

The funk, soul and hip-hop fusion band iLLPHONiCS are aligning with moon cycles in 2021 to release new music written during the pandemic. The song "Kobe" illuminates the late basketball legend Kobe Bryant's inspirational affect on the band who idolized him in their youth as an example of excellence and achievement. In this episode, emcee Larry “Fallout” Morris and keyboard/backup vocalist Keith Moore examine lyrics and personal con...