Music in this episode:
Louis Armstrong - “What a Wonderful World” (1967)
Louis Armstrong - “Hello, Dolly!” (1964)
Louis Armstrong - “When The Saints Go Marching In” (1938)
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong - “Dream a Little Dream of Me” (1950)
Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven - “Melancholy Blues” (1927)
Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five - “Hotter Than That” (1927)
Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five - “West End Blues” (1928)
Jimmie Rodgers - “Blue Yodel No 9” (1930)
Hoagy Carmichael - “(Up A) Lazy River” (1930)
Louis Armstrong - “Lazy River” (1931)
Louis Armstrong - ‘When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” (1931)
Louis Armstrong & the Mills Brothers - “Old Folks At Home” (1937)
References:
Charles Hiroshi Garrett - Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Centur (https://www.ucpress.edu/books/struggling-to-define-a-nation/paper)y (2008)
Charles Hersch - “Poisoning Their Coffee: Louis Armstrong and Civil Rights (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3235397)” (2002)
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4 Sept 2026
A tribute to Dolly Parton
Music in this episode:
Dolly Parton - “Traveling Man” (1971)
Dolly Parton - “Jolene” (1973)
Dolly Parton - “9 to 5” (1980)
Dolly Parton - “Travelin’ Prayer” (1999)
Dolly Parton - “Marry Me” (2001)
Dolly Parton - “Stairway to Heaven” (2002)
Dolly Parton - “Don’t Think Twice” (2014)
Dolly Parton - “Purple Rain” (2023)
References:
I include excerpts of a couple of interviews with Dolly. There’s this one:
and this one:
I also include an excerpt of this excellent Paul Thompson video about the bassline in “Traveling Man”:
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26 Aug 2026
AI slop and musical creativity
Music in this episode, not counting my Suno output:
Fleetwood Mac - “Dreams” (1977)
Thelonious Monk - “Round Midnight” (1968)
Cordelia’s Dad - “Montcalm and Wolfe” (1998)
The Bee Gees - “Stayin’ Alive” (instrumental) (1977)
Catherine Sikora - “The Knowing of Sums” (2016)
Ethan Hein - “The Knowing of Sums remix” (2020)
The Velvet Sundown - “Dust on the Wind” (2025)
Neil Young - “Out on the Weekend” (1972)
Koji Kondō - “Super Mario Bros Underworld Theme” (1985)
References
I refer to Margaret Boden’s 2004 book, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (https://www.routledge.com/The-Creative-Mind-Myths-and-Mechanisms/Boden/p/book/9780415314534).
I also refer to a study of a songwriting class that quotes a student talking about the difference between musicians and artists. You can read that study here:
Dweck, J. (2023). Children as songwriters: The social-emotional benefits of songwriting in the elementary grades (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1321103X231189387). Research Studies in Music Education, 46(2).
Here’s the interview with Mikey Shulman where he says that people don’t enjoy the process of making music.
Here’s my summary of the research on the learning impacts of LLM use:
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