309: Madison Cunningham
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Madison Cunningham’s new album Ace marks a striking and vulnerable chapter in the young songwriter’s evolution. Not yet 30, Cunningham has already lived through a period of profound personal transformation. She married young, divorced young, and found herself rebuilding her identity in the wake of major change. Instead of retreating, she turned the experience into a meditation on the difference between happiness and contentment. Raised in a large religious family in Orange County, Cunningham began performing in her father’s church band at twelve and was experimenting with alternate...
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308: Theo Bleckmann
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Singer and composer Theo Bleckmann has spent his career between categories - jazz and avant-garde, improvisation and composition, structure and discovery. Born in Germany, he began as a boy soprano and figure skater before discovering jazz and moving to New York to study with Sheila Jordan. Since then, he’s built a singular life in music, collaborating with artists like Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, and Ben Monder. Here he talks about community, teaching, queerness, and the meaning of “a life in music” rather than “a career in jazz.” He also talks about his new album Love &...
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307: dodie
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
British singer-songwriter dodie has spent half her life in public. Long before algorithms and engagement metrics ruled the day, she began posting homemade songs and videos on YouTube as a teenager from Essex. Her soft voice, self-effacing humor, and unfiltered honesty drew millions of viewers who watched her grow up online—sharing heartbreaks, mental-health struggles, and moments of joy in real time. Fifteen years later, that same authenticity anchors her second album, Not For Lack of Trying (Decca / Verve), a project that finds her looking inward with more clarity and balance than ever....
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306: Vera Brandes
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
The Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett is one of the most iconic recordings in jazz history — a completely improvised solo piano performance, recorded in 1975, that became both the best-selling solo album and the best-selling piano album of all time. And yet, the concert almost didn’t happen. The new film Köln 75, directed by Brooklyn-based filmmaker Ido Fluk, tells the remarkable true story behind that night through the eyes of Vera Brandes, the 18-year-old German concert promoter whose persistence and intuition made it possible. Against all odds - and with only a broken, nearly unplayable...
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305: Jacob Jeffries
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Pianist, songwriter, and performer Jacob Jeffries the morning after he played Madison Square Garden with Vulfpeck, reflecting on the surreal thrill of performing in the legendary arena with his close friends, while also grounding the experience in the everyday reality of being a working musician. The conversation traces his journey from South Florida (where his childhood was shaped by Beatles records, summer theater programs like Lovewell, and the absence of a bar mitzvah he later regretted) to his early career with the Jacob Jeffries Band and formative studio experiences with Grammy-winning...
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304: Leonor Watling
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Born and raised in Madrid, Leonor Watling grew up between cultures, the daughter of a Spanish academic father and a British mother who had been raised in Africa. From an early age she was aware of both the fragility and the richness of life: her father was sick for much of her childhood and passed away when she a teenager, just as she began working steadily as an actress. That combination of otherness and awareness shaped her perspective, both on stage and in song. Best known internationally for her starring role in Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, she is one of the most recognizable faces in...
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303: Stella Cole
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Stella Cole went from nearly giving up singing in college to becoming one of the breakout stars of the pandemic era, thanks to her viral performances of American Songbook standards on TikTok. Now signed to Decca and releasing her second full length album It’s Magic, she talks about following her instincts, finding her voice, and turning childhood obsessions into a career.
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302: Ben Sidran at 82
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Every year on his birthday, my dad and I sit down for a conversation. It started when he turned 76, and with a few exceptions, we’ve done it ever since - capturing an ongoing record of where his head and heart are at that particular moment. Over the years we’ve talked about music, memory, politics, travel, the craft of performing, and the art of living. These annual conversations have become a kind of time-lapse portrait: the same two people returning to the mic, but always a little changed. This year, as Ben turns 82, the theme that emerges is that he is “still auditioning for the...
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301: Mary Sweeney Returns
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
In 2018, film editor, producer, writer, and director Mary Sweeney sat down for a wide-ranging conversation about her career — from growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, to collaborating with one of the most visionary directors of our time, David Lynch. That conversation traced her evolution as an artist, her pivotal role in shaping films like Lost Highway, The Straight Story, and Mulholland Drive, and the intimate creative and personal relationship she shared with Lynch. Seven years later, in the wake of Lynch’s death in early 2025, Sweeney returns for a follow-up conversation, recorded in a...
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300: Moses Patrou
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Moses Patrou has spent the past twenty-five years in New York, carving out a unique space as a multi-instrumentalist and bandleader. From early days in Madison, Wisconsin playing hand drums in hip hop bands, to immersing himself in Cuban and Brazilian traditions, to gigging across the city in every imaginable context, Patrou has done it all. During the pandemic, he taught himself to play organ—a transformation that has reshaped his sound and his role in the scene. Here he reflects on the long road behind his new record Confession of a Fool - a soulful and striking record that represents the...
info_outlineJesse Harris belongs to a generation of New York singer songwriters who came of age in the late nineties. He has made over 20 solo albums that walk the line between folk, jazz, pop, Brazilian and art rock. He’s also a much sought after co writer and collaborator who has written songs for and or with many others like Madeleine Peyroux, Melody Gardot, Lana del Rey, and most famously Norah Jones.
Jesse was already well into his career when he met a young Norah Jones on a road trip through Texas and played his songs for her. He had already been signed and dropped from a major label with his band Once Blue (a project he started with Rebecca Martin, and which also featured musicians Ben Street, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Kenny Wollesen), and had already been exploring a space in his songwriting that played in between jazz and pop.
But that chance encounter with Jones, who was still a student at the University of North Texas at the time, was the one that would change the course of Jesse’s career. They stayed in touch and began working together when Jones eventually moved to New York.
Her debut album, 2002’s Come Away With Me contained five of his songs including the now ubiquitous standard “Don’t Know Why”. He also played guitar on the record. Their partnership has endured over the years - Jones and Harris have written together on and off ever since then - but it was that first record that arguably redirected the sound of certain strains of popular music and jazz for a generation.
The success of Come Away With Me also opened new doors for Harris as a solo artist and a composer. Ultimately he started a label (Secret Sun, named after a solo album of the same name) to put out the projects that he produced for himself and others, and recently has been dividing his time between New York and Paris. Jesse is a relentlessly prolific songwriter, someone for whom songs are like air and water; they are simply a fact of life.
Here he talks about Paper Flower, his most recent album recorded in Paris with American and French musicians, his approach to songwriting (“writer's block is a choice”) and production, taking things as they come, confession versus craft, venturing into the unconscious, and whether it is his fate to work with female artists.
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https://www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story