Strong Songs

Kirk sits down with producer, composer, and master mixer Brian Bender to talk about the state of the recording art.

Kirk sits down for a conversation with singer, composer, and music technologist Imogen Heap.

It's time for Strong Songs to talk about some Strong Covers! On this episode, Kirk tackles four famous covers, comparing each with the original while trying to suss out what makes a great cover in the first place.

Mailbag time! We've got listener questions about Madonna earworms, National piano parts, Breath of the Wild music, online vocal teachers, the French horn, The Lemon Twigs, and much more.

Winter, spring, summer, or fall... all you have to do is call, and Strong Songs will be there with an in-depth analysis of one of the most influential songwriters of the 20th century.

Link it to the world, link it to yourself, link it to your podcast app, because it's time to talk about Muse! Kirk takes a deep dive into not one but two songs off of Muse's seminal 2001 album Origin of Symmetry: "New Born," which kicks the album off with a strong pop-rock approach, and "Micro Cuts,...

The fine folks at WNYC's fabulous opera podcast Aria Code recently reached out about doing a cross-promotion with Strong Songs, and now here we are, running an episode of their show in the Strong Songs feed. If you enjoy it, you should definitely go check out the show - Aria Code is very easy to fin...

The Strong Songs mailbag has gotten pretty overstuffed lately, so Kirk decided to take another crack at it. That means it's time for more of your musical questions! On this episode, we bounce around between the best songs for performing CPR, country music multiphonics, Noname's strung beats, the sli...

If an emotion is too big for talking, you sing. If it's too big for singing, you dance. And if it's too big for dancing, well, you just gotta podcast! Author, podcaster, and video essayist Lindsay Ellis knows a thing or two about outsized Broadway emotions—in addition to her many other pursuits, she...

Mailbag time! Kirk peruses the Strong Songs inbox to answer your questions about jazz drum solos, practicing with play-a-longs, Tame Impala tunes, saxophones with traffic cones, vocal technique, sidechain compression, and several tricky rhythms.