320: Dida Pelled
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Dida Pelled on her latest album I Wish You Would, a blues-focused project recorded with Tony Scherr, Kenny Wollesen, and Sullivan Fortner. Along the way she considers her approach to tradition, identity, and finding a personal voice across genres. And she talks about she discovered the truth about her sexuality, her singing, and the six strings she loves so much.
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319: Emily Cavanagh's Song For You
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Singer, songwriter, and founder of , on music, service, resilience, and finding purpose in uncertain times. In the early days of the pandemic, Emily began calling hospitals with one simple question: “Does anyone need a song?” That question became A Song For You, a nonprofit that has delivered hundreds of personalized songs to patients, families, and healthcare workers. She talks about her Chicago roots, accidentally becoming famous in Ireland, relearning how to walk after a mysterious illness, running away from the altar, and why she says she’s never felt lonely or lost. A warm, funny,...
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318: Michael Leviton and The Tell
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
At his monthly series The Tell, writer and storyteller Michael Leviton brings together performers and audiences for an evening where nothing is scripted and no lineup is announced. At The Tell, audiences arrive without knowing who will take the stage. Each night features four storytellers and two musical performances, unfolding over two sets. The result is a dynamic and unscripted experience where stories can be funny, moving, surprising—or all three at once. Leviton created The Tell as an alternative to more formal storytelling formats. Rather than polished, rehearsed narratives, he...
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317: Janis Siegel and The Scent of Danger
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
When singer Janis Siegel was invited to help produce a Women’s History Month event at the United Nations, everything seemed aligned—until she was told, just days before, that she would not be allowed to speak. She had been flagged for her social media posts. Here she reflects on that moment and what it reveals about a broader cultural shift. Drawing on conversations about jazz, democracy, memory, and fear—and voices ranging from Louis Armstrong to Milan Kundera—this piece explores how authoritarianism doesn’t arrive all at once, but quietly, through hesitation and self-censorship. At...
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316: Ben Sidran - Jazz and Modernism
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
When I arrived in Palm Springs last month, a few days before the concert-lecture I was to play with my father, Ben Sidran, I found him surrounded by months of research notes, trying to wrestle his ideas into something coherent. The performance was part of the Palm Springs International Jazz Festival during the city’s annual Modernism Week, and it grew out of an earlier program we presented at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin. What began as a playful idea about the relationship between architecture and music gradually expanded into a deeper...
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315: Phoebe Katis
The Third Story Podcast with Leo Sidran
Phoebe Katis — a UK-born, New York–based songwriter can pinpoint the moment when her life and career were quietly reoriented. It started with a single direct message. Katis traces her journey from being a young singer-songwriter in England, measuring herself against inherited ideas of success, to becoming part of a global musical community through a series of small, intentional actions — including the DM that led to her first collaboration with Cory Wong, years of touring, a move to the U.S., and a creative and personal life she never could have planned. At the center of the conversation...
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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...
info_outlineFor Joe Henry, truth in songwriting doesn’t come from confession or fact. It comes from presence, from listening, from surrender, from giving shape to the ineffable. As he puts it: “Total presence—that is the code of my road.”
Henry’s road has taken him across both the literal and metaphorical map of American music. Born in North Carolina, raised in Georgia and Ohio, and coming of age in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he grew up suspended between North and South, white and Black, rural and urban. This early sense of duality, of living between poles, helped shape his identity and fed a lifelong curiosity. Alongside his brother Dave, he immersed himself in records, films, and books that would later form the bedrock of his creative work.
Over the past four decades, Henry has become one of the most respected songwriters and producers in American music. His solo albums, beginning in the late 1980s, blend literary songwriting with genre-bending arrangements. As a producer, he’s worked with artists like Allen Toussaint, Mavis Staples, Solomon Burke, Bonnie Raitt, Rodney Crowell, Joan Baez, and Meshell Ndegeocello. He co-wrote Madonna’s hit “Don’t Tell Me,” (she also happens to be his sister in law) and more recently, he’s been collaborating with Jon Batiste.
This year he is releasing three of his classic albums on vinyl for the first time.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Henry discusses his love of character-driven songwriting—an approach influenced early on by Randy Newman and Bob Dylan—and his rejection of the notion that autobiography equals authenticity. “Your factual experience can be disruptive to the truth you're trying to allow to move through you,” he says.
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