This particular episode is an important one to me, and if you care about authenticity in music, I think it'll be important to you as well.

Country isn't my genre of choice, but I've been making an effort to listen to more of it over the last few years.  To keep it 100, as the kids say, the sound never spoke to me when I was young, and I couldn't see any value for me in that genre.  As I've gotten older, I've learned that country music is a vehicle for Black stories as well, despite what the music industry…

Meet the outrageously talented multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Cherimondis J.   She's a classically trained concert pianist among many other things.  We dig into her music background, her songwriting process, what it's like being a Black musician in the classical world, and the album she put out last year, Dove Archer.  You'll find that Cherimondis thinks very deeply about both music and life, and she has quite a lot of introspective things to say about how her art relates to her life. Why does she…

Ben Monat is an amateur guitar player from Massachusetts.  You'll be able to feel the enthusiasm he has for the instrument in our conversation.  We talk about his wide-ranging influences, how he got started making music more than 20 years ago, and the value of collaboration.

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Ben on Polywork