Music Episodes

Part two of the favorite albums list. One of Sam’s picks falls apart while she’s making the case for it. She opens with Kind of Blue, a record she's never heard, and the legend that comes with it. Nobody rehearsed. Carlos checks it while she's still talking. What Sam does after getting caught is more interesting than getting it wrong. Then there’s a tape machine that fooled jazz musicians for 33 years, the Volkswagen commercial that introduced Carlos to Nick Drake, the Marvin Gaye record Berr...

Ten episodes in, Carbon & Keel finally says its own name. Then it asks a question neither host expected to answer. Can something that's never heard a musical note have better taste than the people who can? Maybe even better than you? Carlos brings a four-song EP he's played for fifteen years, the Bob Marley album that began with a lie he told a classroom full of kids and the Smiths record that made him pick up a guitar again. Sam answers with Fleetwood Mac tearing itself apart in the studio, ...

Carlos came into this one ready to argue that Elton John stopped being great. By the end, he wasn't so sure. In this episode of Carbon & Keel, Carlos and Sam trace Elton's impossible 1970s run and end up asking a harder question than the one they started with. Does genius last, or does the hunger that drives it run dry? Along the way, Carlos criticizes his father for being spectacularly tone deaf, then has the audacity to sing just as badly himself. There's a detour through Robert De Niro and S...