R_P wrote:

If History is your thing I've been listening to The Rest is History. 2 very entertaining English Chaps that cover topics from America to Asia and all points in between. Worth a try. 

Empires of the past

Dammit, people. This guy is killing it with his in depth research and discussion. You HAVE to be listening to this. Here’s one I finally got to, and it’s amazing. 

Episode 122: “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke

great source of information and inspiration

Biotech2050 Podcast

As a follow-up to my post 8 years ago, I had forgotten to mention Mike Duncan, the one I have definitely listened to the most. Many years ago, I did his History of Rome podcast, and then he only just recently finished his Revolutions podcast. Without a doubt, the best history podcasts out there. I currently do History of Byzantium by another pod caster, but it is decent.

Broken Records, Questlove Supreme, and Song Exploder are the music related podcasts I listen to, but mostly selectively, depending on the guest/subject.

Gastropod and Sporkful for food related podcasts. Gastropod is the better one to me.

Other miscellaneous ones, Twenty Thousand Hertz, Not lost, Smartless, New Nudist Podcast, Naturist Living, and Imaginary Worlds are in the mix.

if climate change is your interest, then check out Dave Robert's podcast called "Volts". His set up is similar as RP in that he operates entirely on contributions from listeners, no commercials, no endorsements, just the podcast. www.volts.wtf

I like theJon Stewart podcast. His writing staff join him at the beginning and end they're insightful and really funny. It's almost as good as the TV he did.

But the king is A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. In each episode he takes one song and contextualizes it, and the artist, and why it plays such a role in the story of rock n roll. Some heavy duty research. Amazing and enlightening.

Excerpt: "Among the pop songwriters of the thirties, forties, and fifties — not the writers of blues and country music so much, but the people writing Broadway musicals and the repertoire the crooners were singing — melisma was absolutely anathema. Melisma is a technical musical term, but it has a simple meaning — it's when you sing multiple notes to the same syllable of lyric. This is something that has always existed since people started singing — for example, at the start of "The Star-Spangled Banner", "Oh say...", there are two notes on the syllable "oh". That's melisma. 

But among the songwriters who were registered with ASCAP in the middle of the last century, there was a strongly-held view that this was pure laziness. You wrote one syllable of lyric for one note of melody, and if you didn't, you were doing something wrong. The lyricist Sammy Cahn used to talk about how he wrote the lyric to "Pocketful of Miracles" — "Practicality doesn't interest me" — but then the composer wrote a melody with one more note per line than he'd written syllables for the lyric. Rather than let the song contain melisma, he did this: <Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "Pocketful of Miracles", with Sinatra singing "pee-racticality dee-oesn't interest me"> That was the kind of thing songwriters would do to avoid even the hint of melisma. And singers were the same. 

If you listen to any of the great voices of the first part of the twentieth century — Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett — they will almost without exception hit the note dead on, one note per syllable. No ornamentation, no frills. There were a few outliers — Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, for example, would both use a little melisma (Holiday more than Ella) to ornament their sound — but generally that was what good singing *was*. You sang the notes, one note per syllable. And this was largely the case in the blues, as well as in the more upmarket styles. The rules weren't stuck to quite as firmly there, but still, you'd mostly sing the song as it was written, and it would largely be written without melisma. 

There was one area where that was not the case – gospel, specifically black gospel. <Excerpt: Rosetta Tharpe, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand">..."

easy listening to robert's storytelling, with a focus on different segment's of his career

A non-RP friend (!) thought I'd like Sound Opinions podcast about the Velvet Underground & Nico album, and I did. Now to get thru the rest of them. It was a pretty smart conversation.

 Lazy8 wrote: 
looks like two-fer

and if you enjoy funny, witty and delightfully poignant 

The Political Orphanage

 Lazy8 wrote:
 

Ah, I think I heard the Malcolm Gladwell via his podcast. Forgot to check this out before...

Rick Rubin's Broken Record podcast. Favorites so far: Malcolm Gladwell and Jason Isbell. A very deep rabbithole.

Also...if you just need comfort food for the soul in these times check out Julie Vallimont's Stars In the Rafters.

i've recommended the pessimists archive before

it's great

so enjoy this talk with reason

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:
 
I'll come back to it, I'm skipping ahead to donut science and cars.

I fell into this one, Farm to Taber, Dr. Sarah Taber talks about farming and goes off into tech, econ, lots of interesting tangents.

For example:

Beepocalypse Nah

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: The Concert

 maryte wrote:

 
These look great. I'd like to listen to more work related things when I'm not at work.

But I just can't anymore.

I'll add the podcast tho, so at least I have it.

 

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:

 
I listen to them all night, like while I sleep

I'm gonna whore it up for my peeps - The Hogg Foundation for Mental Health does regular podcasts.  You can see our most current ones here, but you can also find them on iTunes.