LSQ

“I felt this really compelling amount of nostalgia and I was kind of living in the past, so I thought that maybe songwriting was a way to capture that and a way to protect it, because I felt like it was slipping away -- just... childhood," says Bedouine's Azniv Korkejian, talking about the inspiration for her beautiful new album, Neon Summer Skin. "I felt really sad about it and I started to write with that in mind and it was kind of more than anything kind of therapeutic for me, I understood that I needed to address it because I understood that it was all consuming.”
It was such a pleasure to finally get to do this interview with Azniv. We’ve been friends for years, but there was still so much I didn’t know about her earlier life and her creative journey. In episode 145, we delve into that evolutionary stuff: singing along with Mariah Carey’s Music Box as a kid, falling in love with artists like The Strokes and Norah Jones as she got a bit older, working in sound editing for film and TV after college, and eventually starting to perform her own music a little more than a decade ago. And we also talk about the making of Neon Summer Skin and how it helped her process some of the bittersweet nostalgia she was feeling about childhood and the safety of family. Bedouine has a North American tour starting in mid-October. Get tickets here.

“I started writing poems and singing them over instrumental songs I’d made, and I realized that the melody was coming to me as I read them, and I was like, ‘Oh, there’s music in the words!,” says Alex Cameron, recalling how he first discovered his preferred method of songwriting. “The lyric had the melody in it. I didn’t have to come up with the melody and think about which words would fit, I just had to press record and sing the words while listening to the music and the melody’s in there. That’s why I love writing words first.” In episode 144 of the LSQ podcast, the Australian singer-songwriter discusses his impressive fifth studio album, Late To Set, an elevated showcase for his signature style of brooding, witty, character-driven songcraft. Cameron shares insights into his creative philosophies and the evolution of his approach to music. He also reflects on the artists he loved as a kid: Buddy Holly, Nina Simone, Dire Straits, Outkast, Aphex Twin, Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell, the Strokes and more. Alex is on tour in North America in September, and opening for The Strokes in Europe in October. Get tickets here.

Even during the past decade while he was busy with Stranger Things, Finn Wolfhard still has always found time to make music - whether with his teenage bands Calpurnia and The Aubreys, or more recently under his own name, starting with his 2025 album, Happy Birthday, an impressive debut recorded using four- and eight-track cassette. For his wonderful new album, Fire From The Hip, he’s elevated his approach in every possible way, expanding the sonic palette, fidelity and songcraft for a confident collection of indie rock tunes that evoke Wilco and Teenage Fanclub and Faces and of Montreal, among other touchstones. In episode 143 of the LSQ podcast, Finn talks about the making of the album, how he approached it differently from Happy Birthday, and the satisfaction he got from working with a community of artist friends. He also talks about how he first became obsessed with music as a kid thanks to the Beatles and the Ramones. And he shares some details about film he’s working on about The Replacements (based on Bob Mehr’s definitive book about the band), why he relates to bassist Tommy Stinson and a dream he had the other night about frontman Paul Westerberg. Finn is on tour now and has additional dates in the fall. Get tickets here.

This spring, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien released a beautiful and soul-stirring album called Blue Morpho, and in this episode, he shares with great depth and candor what inspired the album, his approach to recording it, and the transformative self exploration required to make it. One of the elements of the project was his desire to capture sounds at 432 Hz, and you’ll hear him explain the idea behind that, right at the beginning of the interview. But from there, we go way back into his history as an artist, to his early childhood listening to Simon & Garfunkel with his mom while she sewed, singing in the boys choir, discovering guitar music and freaking out over bands like The Jam and The Police and The Smiths, and while still a teenager meeting and forming a band with the group of school friends who would become Radiohead. Honestly, this interview is one of those occasions, when I can’t believe what an honor it was to hear from an artist whose music has been so important to me personally, and for him to share about the artists that had similar impact on his life. There’s an incredible story right near the end of the episode where Ed talks about being on tour with Radiohead in the US in 1995, and having all of their gear stolen. So they took a fateful trip to San Francisco to get some new guitars and things, but they only had one audio cassette to listen to during the road trip, and the music that was on it ended up inspiring some of their approach to OK Computer. You’ll have to listen all the way through to find out what was on that tape.

“Words were always my weapon,” says Genesis Owusu, talking about the love of creative writing he discovered as a child. “Also kind of ironically, conversation wasn’t always my weapon, so I always felt like the truest and rawest and most authentic of myself came out when I was writing stories or poetry. I’ve always loved world-building. Whether that be though a storyline or a soundtrack or a visual, I’ve kind of just managed to find myself in a path where I can create those worlds that I always wanted to create.” The Ghanian Australian artist’s new album, his third full-length, Redstar Wu & the Worldwide Scourge, is easily one of my favorite albums of 2026 — a powerful and genre defying collection of banger after banger. Although his previous records were more allegorical, for this one, he says there was no mincing words, no grand metaphors, nothing to distract from getting across his message that humanity is too divided, and that we need to come together as a community for the betterment of our common good. We also delve into how his love of science fiction and creative writing helped him connect with that world-building instinct, how his older brother - also an artist - inspired him to start making music, how his songs result from epic jam sessions followed by obsessive collating of sounds, and we talked about anime and André 3000 and Uno and much more. Get tickets for his upcoming shows here.