Introducing the Band:
Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) are with guest Andrew Fink. Andrew lives with his wife Lauren and their five children in Hillsdale County, Mich., and is an attorney, Marine veteran, current state representative, and candidate for Michigan Supreme Court. He's on X at @AndrewFinkMI, and his website can be found here.

Andrew’s Music Pick: ZZ Top
No matter how far into the future this show might run, when you stack Political Beats episodes alphabetically, this is the one that always will show up at the bottom. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to turn the spotlight on "That Little Ol' Band from Texas," ZZ Top. Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, Frank Beard. Blues, guitars, and boogie. And, of course, later on, synths, drum machines, and sequencers.

Maybe you're like Jeff and your mental picture of ZZ Top is frozen in time around 1983, when Eliminator was soaring near the top of the charts. We're here to tell you you're missing an awful lot from the band. The entire decade of the 1970s featured album after album of incredible music. There's seriously never a misstep.

Early on, you can hear the influence of and influence on other bands like The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. ZZ Top figures out early exactly who they are as a band and refine, refine, refine until perfecting it (we think) on 1979’s Degüello. Billy Gibbons, the group’s main songwriter, singer, and guitar player, has a style all his own, a unique approach that cuts through each song, even when he’s incorporating the sound of another player.

At the turn of the decade of the 1980s, the band makes what we consider to be a fairly natural evolution. The tones, beats, and rhythms on Eliminator might seem out of place in a vacuum, but not if you follow the contours of the band’s career. Post-worldwide fame and success is a different story, and one we also tell during the course of this episode.

By the way, this is the longest one-part show in Political Beats history, surpassing the U2 show, which actually makes some sense. The feeling here was we wouldn't go quite so long -- otherwise we would have split the thing in half! But once we got going, there was too much fun being had and too many good arguments being made to stop. All for the benefit of you, the listener.

They’re bad, they’re nationwide. And now’s the time to discover the full story of ZZ Top on Political Beats.

Introducing the Band:
Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) are joined by guest Peter Suderman. Suderman is the features editor at Reason magazine. He also writes the Substack Cocktails With Suderman, which is about making better cocktails at home. Find him online at Reason or @petersuderman on Twitter/X.

Peter’s Music Pick: The Dismemberment Plan
The name might sound like you’re in for a three-and-a-half hour barrage of trendily obscure post-punk music with this episode, and you could not be more wrong. Though we’re not going to lie: The first album and a half from Washington, D.C.’s mid-to-late Nineties indie-rock darlings do feel an awful lot like the twitchily inchoate remnants of the Bad Brains/Fugazi regional hardcore scene of the Eighties with a healthy dose of West Coast Minutemen math-rock thrown in as metric ballast. What they quickly settled into around the turn of the century however, with albums like The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified, Emergency & I, and Change, was not just a genre-defining statement of what “indie-rock” was supposed to be about during what we now know retrospectively -- and jadedly -- as “the PitchforkMedia era” of rock criticism, but timeless music that can still get a crowd of downcast nerds to start dancing uncontrollably as they muse about that time they too got ruinously drunk on New Year’s Eve.

It is quite possible that (outside of that one Robbie Fulks episode) Political Beats may be covering its most obscure rock group to date with the Dismemberment Plan. Click now, remedy that, and open yourself to a life of dangerous possibilities.

Introducing the Band:
Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) are with guest Nick Lowe. Nick Lowe is . . . wait, you don’t really need a bio for Nick Lowe, do you? If there’s any questions about who he is, please take the time to listen to our lengthy Political Beats episode with guest Matt Murray.

In an interview that has been months in the making, your Political Beats hosts get the opportunity to spend a little more than an hour with the legendary Nick Lowe. Cards on the table, both of us were a little nervous to be speaking with one of our musical heroes. Nick made it comfortable and entertaining, as if anything else would be expected.

The conversation begins with a discussion about his fantastic new album, Indoor Safari.

The record is a collection of songs from EPs released over the past half-decade or so, many of the tunes re-recorded or slightly changed from the initial versions. These performances are so crisp, so lively. “Crying Inside,” is a perfect example of a top-notch, sublimely written and executed, late-career Nick Lowe song. “A Quiet Place” could be the single best band performance on the album. “Blue on Blue,” would fit in alongside anything on The Impossible Bird and the Bacharach-influenced “Different Kind of Blue,” truly benefits from the full band arrangement not heard on the version found on the 20th Anniversary edition of The Convincer.

As the liner notes claim, “Indoor Safari isn’t a journey back in time -- it’s a journey out of time, to a music that stands the test of any time.”

We begin our chat in the present but quickly move far afield, with discussions about his early career, the thought process that started his “second half” of music (starting with The Impossible Bird), his songwriting techniques, and a few nerd/fan questions near the end. We hope to have asked a few questions that perhaps haven't been asked before.

Be sure to check out Nick and Los Straitjackets live this fall.

Tour dates are here

(Click on "Show All Dates" to see them all.) If you’re out and about, you might see Scot at the Detroit show and Jeff at one of the Chicago shows. After all, we’re big fans.