The most popular episodes of 2023 captured conversations that cut across genres and disciplines, examining how music gets made, why we create, and how art builds connections across time and space.
Speaking of time and space, 2023 was also a year when one of our most popular episodes featured not a musician or artist but a religious studies scholar examining the common patterns in religious mysteries and the UFO phenomenon.
It is gratifying to revisit these episodes and re-experience the growth the podcast was making in quality: sonically, conversationally, and in our bookings. The conversations, covering post-punk politics, cosmic jazz, academic research, and entrepreneurial ventures, remind me of countless informal rap sessions I have had with friends and colleagues. I am so happy to have had these conversations on mic in a way I could share with our listener community.
That Petrol Emotion
2023's most popular episode featured post-punk innovators That Petrol Emotion. Guitarist Raymond Gorman and vocalist Steve Mack joined me to discuss their comprehensive box set, Every Beginning Has a Future: An Anthology 1984-1994. Spawned from the ashes of The Undertones, the Petrols synthesized 80s indie rock, post-punk, garage sounds, dance rhythms, and hip-hop influences into something distinctly their own.
Their story mixes musical innovation with political conviction. Their genre-hopping approach came with a price—mainstream success proved elusive despite a fervent fanbase. As the show notes for the episode explain, their sound defied marketing, while their outspoken politics, "particularly their identification with Northern Ireland and other liberation struggles, made them untouchable and in some cases censored by the mainstream press of the time."
"That Petrol Emotion fits neatly on a record shelf with trailblazers like the Clash or Public Image Limited," the episode notes elaborate, "and you would be hard-pressed to imagine BritPop or the Manchester scene without the path they forged." The band's ability to combine disparate musical influences while maintaining political integrity offers a model of artistic authenticity rarely seen in today's landscape. This explains why listeners connected so strongly with their story decades after their initial run.
Michael Kuelker on the Ozark Mountain Daredevils
In his book, The Ozark Mountain Daredevils On Record: A Narrative Discography, author and educator Michael Kuelker used the band's catalog as scaffolding to explore fifty years of musical history and the deeper cultural context of the Ozark region and the music business itself.
Known mainly for their 1974 hit "If You Wanna Get to Heaven" and their 1975 smash "Jackie Blue," the Daredevils represent something more profound in American music. Kuelker, who also worked as a teacher, writer, and reggae radio DJ in St. Louis, digs into "the music and cultural scenes of the Ozark region as well as the various threads of the music business and cultural industries that the band buffeted against over the years."
We discussed how regional voices translate local traditions into broader artistic languages while maintaining integrity within commercial constraints. This approach to cultural history, examining how place shapes expression, clearly connected with listeners seeking a deeper understanding of America's musical roots.
Michael was someone I had a longtime creative and personal relationship with. He was a scholar of Jamaican music generally and influential vocalist Justin Hinds in particular. I enlisted him to host Wingless Angels: The Podcasts, a four-episode series released in conjunction with a box set and short film I produced, also called Wingless Angels, itself a side project of Keith Richards that Hinds featured in as a singer. Michael passed away unexpectedly in November 2023, making this conversation even more special and bittersweet.
Diana Pasulka
Religious studies professor Diana Pasulka brings a scholarly perspective to subjects often relegated to the fringes in our third most popular episode. Her books, 2019's American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology and 2023's Encounters: Experiences with Non-Human Intelligences, examine how people make meaning from extraordinary experiences, positioning UFO phenomena within religious studies contexts rather than battles between believers and skeptics.
"Religious studies is not about the veracity of any particular religion or religious claim," Diana explained. "Instead, it is about the implications of belief on the believers and the societies they live in." This framework allows for a nuanced examination of how people process encounters with what they perceive as non-human intelligences.
Our conversation explored how media shapes belief systems. Diana mentioned cases where "experiencers who report interactions with crafts or beings that do not look like stereotypical flying saucers or little gray aliens" find their accounts dismissed even within UFO communities because they don't match established expectations. "During the Enlightenment, rationalism and science displaced ideas of enchantment that the world was a place that was enchanted with things ... Everything became devoid of that. And when I look at the world, I see that most people actually live in an enchanted reality." Her insight that interpretive frameworks limit our understanding even of anomalous phenomena connects to broader questions about how humans construct meaning when facing the unknown.
Conic Rose
German electronic jazz collective Conic Rose brought their atmospheric sensibility to our fourth most popular episode. They joined us the week their self-released debut album Heller Tag (Bright Day) dropped, and members Konstantin Döben (trumpet), Johannes Arzberger (keyboards), Franziska Aller (bass), and Bertram Burkert (guitar) detailed their creative process and collaborative aesthetic.
The band synthesizes electronic elements, cinematic jazz, ambient soundscapes, and touches of German art rock into something evocative yet immediate. "Imagine cruising through the streets of the capital city on your bike at two in the morning, alone in the sparse flickering neon light, no one on the road, now and then a fox shyly crossing the road." This cinematic quality stems from their ability to capture sonic environments that suggest narrative without imposing specific meaning.
Their working method mirrors their sound: many compositions begin as improvisations that get recorded, enhanced with additional instruments, and produced. "The band surrendered to inner moods that they could only make audible by playing them. The process was a perfect mixture of intuitive calculation and calculated intuition." I love their balance of structure and spontaneity and electronic processing with organic performance.
Dominic Miller
Guitarist Dominic Miller brought virtuosity and insight to our fifth most popular episode. While known for his three-decade tenure as Sting's guitarist and collaborator (and co-writer of "Shape of My Heart"), Miller has cultivated a rich solo career showcasing his distinctive compositional voice.
Our conversation focused on his ECM Records release, Vagabond, an album characterized by its narrative quality despite being instrumental music. "I've been influenced by Sting's lateral sense of harmony and how he forms songs," Miller explained. "I try to do the same by creating a narrative with instrumental music, which I treat and arrange as songs, with verses, choruses, and bridges. I've absorbed a lot from him about concept and arrangement, as well as concision in telling a story."
Born in Argentina to an American father and Irish mother, raised in the U.S., and educated in England, Miller embodies a global perspective that infuses his music. His ability to synthesize diverse influences and maintain a coherent artistic voice offers a model for navigating today's borderless musical landscape. I enjoyed exploring how his work as a sideman balances supporting others' visions with developing his own creative identity.
Ibrahim Maalouf
Trumpet virtuoso Ibrahim Maalouf brought his cosmopolitan perspective to our sixth most popular episode. Born in Lebanon during civil war and raised in France, Maalouf has created a sound combining jazz, classical, electronic, Middle Eastern, and African influences.
"I was born in a hospital that was being bombed while my mother was actually giving birth," Ibrahim shared, explaining how this beginning shaped his worldview. "Your path is definitely different because you are fed from the first day of your life by the idea that things are not granted, that everything, even freedom ... is not granted." This consciousness of life's fragility informs his approach to music as a unifying force. "Every night when I'm doing a show ... I have thousands of people right in front of me who don't even care what is my religion, what are my political convictions ... They are just enjoying their time all together on melodies, dancing, singing, and that's it."
The conversation explored his complex relationship with his father, a renowned classical trumpeter who escaped poverty in Lebanon to study with Maurice André in Paris. His father's demanding approach to training gave Ibrahim technical mastery while sometimes creating emotional distance. This tension between discipline and expression, tradition and innovation, runs throughout Ibrahim's work, resonating especially in a world increasingly divided by cultural and political boundaries.
The Latest in Music and Tech
Our seventh most popular episode brought together innovators from two companies working at the intersection of music and technology. Adam Hasslert, CEO of Soundation, and Max Goldberg and Steven Segel of Hotdrop shared visions for how technology can enhance musical creativity and discovery.
Soundation's online digital audio workstation at the time served over 100,000 monthly users creating music directly in web browsers. The company focuses on "building the next-generation music software for upcoming music producers with professional ambitions," offering collaborative tools, community features, and learning resources that democratize music production. This accessibility marks a significant shift from earlier eras when production required expensive hardware and studio access.
Hotdrop addresses another technological transformation: how younger listeners discover and share music. Their app facilitates discovery through 30-second snippets easily shared among fans, creating viral opportunities for emerging artists. This approach recognizes how attention patterns have shifted toward shorter-form content while leveraging social connection for music discovery.
The conversation showed how technology continues to reshape music creation, distribution, and consumption by focusing on companies addressing specific pain points in the musical ecosystem.
WAAN
Musicians Bart Wirtz and Emiel van Rijthoven, performing as WAAN (Dutch for 'Craze'), explored creative possibilities at the intersection of jazz, electronics, and improvisation in our eighth most popular episode. Their 2023 release, Echo Echo on Sonar Kollektiv, played a role in spurring my interest in the growing movement of Western European artists dissolving boundaries between composed and improvised music using acoustic and electronic sounds.
WAAN's music speaks to fans of "Floating Points, BADBADNOTGOOD, Ezra Collective or other modern artists making jazz more electronic or electronic music more improvisational." This positioning at the crossroads of traditions creates something distinctly contemporary but also honors the exploratory spirit that animates the best jazz.
WAAN's work demonstrates that traditions remain vital not through preservation but through thoughtful evolution and cross-pollination, a theme connecting many of our 2023 conversations about cultural sustainability in rapidly changing times.
Jesse Colin Young
Folk-rock pioneer Jesse Colin Young brought five decades of insight to our ninth most popular episode, one held in front of a live audience. As frontman of the Youngbloods, Young immortalized the ideals of the Woodstock generation with "Get Together," the international hit that called for peace and brotherhood during the turbulent 1960s.
Recorded at the FestForums conference in Santa Barbara, our conversation explored how Young has consistently used music for community building and social activism. "A pioneer of American roots music for more than half a century," the episode notes explain, "Jesse Colin Young has left a unique mark on the intersecting worlds of folk, blues, jazz, country, and rock & roll." His daughter Jazzie later joined the discussion, showing how musical traditions pass between generations.
The episode tackled artistic authenticity and longevity. Young told of his journey from Greenwich Village coffeehouses to international stardom and how musicians maintain relevance through genuine engagement with evolving social contexts rather than calculated reinvention. His consistent commitment to environmental and social causes illustrates how artists contribute to collective meaning-making beyond recordings and performances.
Janishia Jones
Janishia Jones brought data-driven analysis and personal passion to our tenth most popular episode, discussing her work advancing women of color in the music industry. As CEO & Founder of Fresh 'N Sassy Productions, Jones has created "an ecosystem of safe spaces & established a series of initiatives aimed at empowering women of color in the music industry," including the Pub Royalty Queen Podcast, The Juke Joint Non-profit Foundation, her consultancy Encore Music Tech Solutions, and market research agency A Seat at the Table.
Her 2023 research study, "A Seat at the Table: A Perspective on Women of Color in the Music Business," provided the industry with its "1st data-driven analysis on intersectionality." The work illuminated how racial and gender disparities manifest in music business contexts while offering concrete solutions for creating more equitable opportunities. Jones's decade-long career in the independent sector of the music industry as a data analyst and music publishing expert informs her approach to systemic change.
Jones demonstrates how research, community building, and technology drive meaningful transformation in established systems, a model applicable beyond the music business to other industries (creative and otherwise) facing similar challenges around diversity and inclusion.
In 2023, Spotlight On shined on topics of music, technology, spirituality, and community-building as part of my own search for meaning and connection. I like to think that each episode offers insight into how humans make sense of our complex world.
The unifying element across these diverse voices is authenticity and exploration. Each guest demonstrated how creative work thrives not through rigid adherence to established patterns but through engagement with tradition and innovation. Very powerful stuff.
The 2023 episodes further show how our listeners and guests hunger for conversations beyond promotion or superficial celebration. They seek substantive exploration of how their work emerges from and responds to its context, whether historical, technological, spiritual, or social. By documenting these stories, Spotlight On has the opportunity to contribute to understanding how culture evolves. It is not something we take for granted here.
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Lawrence Peryer
Lawrence Peryer
Lawrence Peryer
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