Meena Lohar's podcast

The Marías is a band from Los Angeles, made up of María Zardoya, Josh Conway, Jesse Perlman, and Edward James. They released their first EPs in 2017 and 2018, and their first album in 2021. But then, as you’ll hear, there was a period of a lot of uncertainty around the band’s future. Eventually, their second album, Submarine, came out in 2024, and it was incredibly successful. Stereogum called it one of the best albums of the year, and the band was nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist. But all of that almost didn’t happen. I talked to María...

Leon Thomas is a singer, songwriter, producer, and actor. He’s nominated for six Grammys at this year’s Grammy Awards, including Best New Artist, Best R&B Album, and Album of the Year for Mutt. Mutt is his second album, and I talked to Leon about the title track, which was a breakout hit. He’d already won a Grammy for his work with SZA, but he reached a new level in his own career with this song and this album. I also spoke to David Phelps and Rob Gueringer, AKA D. Phelps and Freaky Rob, who produced the song. ...

My guest today is John Green. John is the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of books including 'Looking for Alaska,' 'The Fault in Our Stars,' 'Turtles All the Way Down,' 'The Anthropocene Reviewed,' and 'Everything is Tuberculosis.' John and his brother Hank Green have co-created a lot of projects together, including their massive YouTube channel, Vlogbrothers, and their podcast, 'Dear Hank and John.' He also serves on the Board of Trustees for global health nonprofit Partners in Health. And when I asked John if there was a piece of music that changed his life, he knew...

Hit-Boy is an award-winning producer and rapper from LA. He’s one of my all-time favorite producers, from “Backseat Freestyle” by Kendrick Lamar, to “Sicko Mode” by Travis Scott, to tracks he’s made for Beyonce, Nas, and the Jay-Z & Kanye album Watch the Throne. So I was really excited to talk to him, and when I asked him which song from his incredible catalog he wanted to talk about, I was really moved by his choice. He picked “Racks in the Middle” by Nipsey Hussle, featuring Roddy Ricch. Nipsey Hussle was a rapper and community activist from LA whose career was cut s...

The band Air is a duo from Versailles, France. Their first EP came out in 1995, followed by their critically acclaimed debut album, ‘Moon Safari,' which was an international hit. Then they made the music for the film ‘The Virgin Suicides,‘ which was written and directed by Oscar-winner Sofia Coppola, based on the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. The movie came out in 1999, and it was Sofia Coppola’s first film. An album version of Air’s score came out in 2000, and it was nominated for a Brit award. Pitchfork put it at number four on their list of the best film score...

My guest today is director Rian Johnson, which is exciting for me, because I’ve been a huge fan of his ever since seeing his first feature film, ‘Brick,' in 2006. Since then, he’s made six more feature films, including ‘Looper‘ in 2012; ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi‘ in 2017; the murder mystery ‘Knives Out‘ in 2019; and his most recent movie, another in the 'Knives Out' series, ‘Wake Up Dead Man,‘ which is already out in theaters, and comes to Netflix on December 12. I talked to Rian about a piece of music that had a profound impact on him, which was the overture to ‘Das R...

Jessie Reyez is a singer and songwriter originally from Toronto. She's won two of Canada's Juno awards, and she's been nominated for a Grammy. In addition to writing her own music, Jessie's been a songwriter on tracks by Calvin Harris, Dua Lipa, Sam Smith, Eminem, and many others. You're probably aware that there are songwriters and producers whose names you'll find over and over again in the credits for big hits; Jessie is one of them. But for this episode, I talked to her about her own song "Goliath." And the day that she wrote that song, she h...

My guest today is Demi Adejuyigbe. One of the things that makes Demi so special is how hard it is to summarize him in an intro like this, because he has so many talents and applies them in so many different ways. He is a standup comedian, with a brand new one-hour special out on Dropout TV. He co-hosted the podcasts Gilmore Guys and Punch Up the Jam. He’s a screenwriter, who wrote on TV shows like The Good Place. He’s famous on the internet for his parody songs, spoofing artists like Will Smith and Lana Del Rey; and...

Clipse was formed in 1994 by two brothers: Gene Thornton Jr, aka Malice, and his younger brother Terrence Thornton, aka Pusha T. From the beginning, they’ve worked with producer Pharrell Williams, originally as part of the acclaimed production duo, The Neptunes. But then, there was a 16 year gap between the third Clipse album, which came out in 2009, and their most recent album, Let God Sort Em Out, which came out in July 2025. This November, they were nominated for 5 Grammys, including Album of the Year. They were also nominated for Best Rap Song, for “The Birds Don’t Sing.” It’s a song tha...

On September 5, 1973, the first and only Buckingham Nicks album was released. It wasn’t a huge hit, but it was how the world was first introduced to the music of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, before they went on to become members of Fleetwood Mac. Their time together in Fleetwood Mac led to some of the best-selling, most critically acclaimed, and most influential albums of all time. Their individual talents, their musical chemistry together, and the ups and downs of their romantic relationship all eventually became legendary. And yet, despite all that, the Buckingham Nicks album went out of print not...

Next week, I’m going to be publishing an episode with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham about the making of the song “Frozen Love,” from their only album as the duo Buckingham Nicks. That song is what eventually led to them joining Fleetwood Mac. So in anticipation of next week’s episode, I thought it would be great to go back seven years and revisit this Fleetwood Mac episode from 2018, about the making of “Go Your Own Way.” I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you’ll come back to hear the Buckingham Nicks episode.-Lindsey Buckingham is a singer-songwri...

"Take On Me" by A-ha is an iconic hit of the 1980s. It came out in October 1985 with an equally iconic music video that helped define the age of MTV. It hit #1 in the US and in countries all over the world. And it's still massively popular today. It currently has over two and a half billion streams on Spotify. So, with all of that, it's easy to imagine that this was all inevitable. But actually, the song took so many steps and missteps before it became the hit that everybody knows. I talked to Paul Waaktaar-Savoy from A-ha, who...

Lady Gaga is a singer, songwriter, producer, and actress from New York. She’s one of the biggest artists in the world. She’s also won 14 Grammys, 2 Golden Globes, and an Oscar. And in March 2025, she released her sixth album, Mayhem. For this episode, I talked to her about a song from that album called “Abracadabra.” She co-wrote it and co-produced it with Andrew Watt and Cirkut, and they recorded it in Rick Rubin’s studio, Shangri-La. That’s also where we recorded the interview for this episode.For more info, visit songexploder.net/lady-gaga.

My guest today is Chef David Chang. He founded Momofuku Noodle Bar in 2004. That was just the start of his incredible career – he’s opened several restaurants, winning awards and Michelin stars along the way, and becoming a fixture in the upper echelon of food. He’s the host of the Netflix shows Ugly Delicious and Dinner Time Live, as well as his own podcast, The Dave Chang Show. For this episode, I talked to Dave about the song “I See a Darkness.” It's the title track on the album by Bonnie “Prince” Billy, aka Will Oldham, which came out in 1999. Later...

Hayden Anhedönia has been making music under the name Ethel Cain since 2019. But it’s not just a band name or a moniker; Ethel Cain is a fictional character, a sort of alter ego that Hayden’s been creating and world building around throughout her albums. The first Ethel Cain album, Preacher’s Daughter, came out in 2022. It ended up blowing up, and it made Hayden the first openly trans artist with an album in the top ten on the Billboard chart. In 2025, she put out the second Ethel Cain album, called Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You. For this...

Sam Fender is a singer and songwriter from the town of North Shields in England. He won the Brit Award for Best Rock/Alternative Act twice. His most recent album is called People Watching, and just like his first two albums, it went to #1 on the UK album charts. To help produce the album, Sam enlisted Adam Granduciel, the singer and frontman of the band The War on Drugs. For this episode, I talked to Sam, and his bandmate Joe Atkinson, about the title track from People Watching, and the long journey that it took to get made, from Sam’s...

My guest today is Jia Tolentino. Jia is the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Paris Review, and more. She won a National Magazine Award for her work at the New Yorker, where she’s been a staff writer since 2016. Her writing covers so many different topics, from Roe V. Wade to the internet to pop culture and music. And today, we’re going to talk about the 1996 pop hit “I Love You Always Forever” by Donna Lewis. For more, visit songexplo...

Melina Duterte goes by the name Jay Som. She’s a singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. She’s released three albums as Jay Som, and has produced, engineered, and mixed each one.Her third album, Anak Ko, came out in August 2019. And in this episode, Melina breaks down a song from it called “Tenderness.”To learn more, visit songexploder.net/jay-som.

Fall Out Boy is a band from Chicago that formed in 2001. Their first album, Take This To Your Grave, was a hit, especially in the punk rock world. When they put out their second album, though, in 2005, that was on a whole other scale. That album is called From Under the Cork Tree, and it went double platinum, and they were nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist. For this episode, I talked to the band’s singer, Patrick Stump, about how they made their breakout hit from that album, the song “Sugar, We’re Goin Down.” For more info, vis...

Gigi Perez is a singer and songwriter from Florida, and at 25 years old, she’s already had so many ups and downs in her music career. She started sharing her songs on TikTok, where they got enough attention that she got signed to a major label deal, but that ultimately didn’t pan out. Soon after that, as an independent artist again, she had her biggest breakout hit, with “Sailor Song.” She released it in July 2024, and it went viral on TikTok. Now, it has over a billion streams on Spotify alone, and it’s a part of her new album, whi...