314: Keren Ann
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Keren Ann was born in Israel, spent her early years in the Netherlands, and later moved to France. The daughter of a Russian-Jewish father and a Dutch-Javanese mother, she grew up multilingual and deeply aware that identity, language, and place are always in motion. She began writing songs as a teenager and, by her mid-twenties, was already making her living as a professional songwriter — thanks in part to an unexpected collaboration with the legendary French singer Henri Salvador, for whom she co-wrote several late-career songs, including the hit “Jardin d’hiver.” From her debut...
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313: Dan Pashman
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Dan Pashman is one of those increasingly rare people who always wanted to be in radio. His career began at the turn of the millennium as a producer and reporter for NPR, Air America, and SiriusXM. But after six layoffs in under a decade—and an industry in steady contraction—Pashman found himself at a crossroads just as podcasting was beginning to emerge. In 2010, he created The Sporkful, a show he describes as being “for eaters, not foodies.” With a young family in front of him and a decade of false starts behind him, Pashman saw the podcast as his last real shot at the career he’d...
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312: Kurt Elling Returns
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Kurt Elling returns for a wide-ranging conversation about vocation, gratitude, and what it means to be in service of the music. Elling first appeared on The Third Story nearly ten years ago, already one of the most celebrated singers of his generation and still deeply focused on what he calls “the work I haven’t done yet.” Since then, he has moved from New York back to his native Chicago, launched major projects like SuperBlue with Charlie Hunter and members of Butcher Brown, recorded intimate small-group albums in the Wildflowers series of recordings, started his Big Shoulders record...
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311: Cafe Central, Madrid
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
The Café Central, a jazz club located just off Madrid’s Puerta del Sol — Spain’s "Kilometer Zero" — has been going out of business for more than forty years. And now, it finally might. Opened in the early 1980s during Spain’s cultural reopening after Franco’s dictatorship, Café Central became a rare kind of space: part jazz club, part café, part public living room. Bands were booked for full weeks — seven nights at a time — a model that favored musical development over turnover, and community over efficiency. It was never a good business. But it was a great room. For...
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310: Remembering Phil Upchurch
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Guitarist, bassist, composer Phil Upchurch died on November 23, and with his passing the music world lost one of its true “musician’s musicians.” Upchurch played on more than a thousand recordings — from Michael Jackson, Donny Hathaway, Chaka Khan, Curtis Mayfield, and George Benson to Jimmy Reed, the Staples Singers, and countless jazz, blues, and soul sessions. He belonged to the generation that didn’t just shape popular music; they invented it. For my dad, Ben Sidran, Phil was also a friend for over 50 years. They recorded and toured together, shared studios, homes,...
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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...
info_outlineThrowback from 2018.
Mary Sweeney needs some air. “There has to be a flow of fast and slow, and a pause to allow the listener or the spectator to digest and to project their own thoughts.” She thinks I should leave more space in my podcasts, to let it breathe. She tells me this as we sit in the screened in porch behind her summer house in Madison, Wisconsin. As she tells me this, cicadas chirp loudly, as if to underscore her point: “Today’s episode will not be edited! You will not remove us from this moment!”
Mary Sweeney should know. She spent much of her career as a film editor, producer and writer collaborating with David Lynch. Beginning in 1985 with Blue Velvet, and continuing through the 2006 film Inland Empire, her editing credits include Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990), Twin Peaks (1991), Industrial Symphony (1991), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), On the Air (1992), Hotel Room(1993), Lost Highway (1996), The Straight Story (2000), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Baraboo (2009). The relationship with Lynch was productive, fruitful, and nuanced (the two were partners in work and in life for much of that time) and they have a son together.
At the time of this interview, Mary was working as a consulting producer and writer on Matthew Weiner’s series for Amazon, The Romanoffs. She is the Dino and Martha De Laurentiis Endowed Professor of film at USC, where she teaches Graduate Screenwriting Thesis and “Dreams, The Brain and Storytelling.”
Before we had this conversation, Mary cheekily emailed me a list of topics that she would be happy to discuss. They included editing, producing, screenwriting, parenting, Paris, Cairo, pie baking, and the Catholic Church. Guess what we talked about? All of it.
And we also talked at length about living and working in an intensely creative partnership with David Lynch for all those years (both personally and professionally), collaborating with one of the most innovative voices in film, and what’s so great about coming from a big family. Visit the Patreon Page for an extra 20 minutes of juicy conversation that didn’t make it into this edit.
Thanks for listening.
ORIGINAL LINK: https://www.third-story.com/listen/marysweeney
www.leosidran.substack.com
https://www.patreon.com/c/thirdstorypodcast