Episode 676
J. Kenji López-Alt, Ann Powers, and Khatumu
Celebrated chef J. Kenji López-Alt schools us on the food history of teriyaki, nachos, and broccoli cheddar soup; music critic Ann Powers unpacks her latest book Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, which explores the musician's life and career, while addressing her own feelings about tackling the legend; and singer-songwriter Khatumu dispels the rumors that she was an "industry plant," before performing her song "allergy season."
J. Kenji López-Alt
Award-Winning Chef and Author
J. Kenji López-Alt is a renowned chef, food scientist, and culinary innovator best known for The New York Times best seller The Food Lab and his scientific approach to cooking. A James Beard Award winner and the former Serious Eats culinary director, he currently co-hosts The Recipe podcast along with Smitten Kitchen's Deb Perelman and is on a mission to visit and review every teriyaki shop in Seattle.
Ann Powers
Music Journalist and Author
Ann Powers has been a music critic for more than thirty years, working for NPR, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and other publications. In the decade she has worked with NPR, she has written extensively on music and culture and appeared regularly on the All Songs Considered podcast as well as news shows like All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Her books include a memoir, Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America; Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music; Piece by Piece with Tori Amos; and most recently, Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell.
Khatumu
Singer-Songwriter
Khatumu is a 23-year-old alternative folk singer-songwriter whose breakout hit "Hunting Days" went viral on TikTok, sparking a cult-like fanbase and even attracting Redditors who mistakenly dubbed her an "industry plant." The success of the track led to her signing with Bright Antenna Records, which she released her 2025 EP free therapy with, as well as headlining shows at venues such as Mercury Lounge in New York City. No stranger to the stage, Khatumu’s musical journey also includes a world tour with the famed Yale Whiffenpoofs, the world’s oldest a cappella group, with whom she performed over 300 live shows. Drawing inspiration from artists like Phoebe Bridgers and Dijon, Khatumu's sound blends sweet harmonic vocals with indie folk instrumentation and kickass songwriting.
Show Notes
Best News
Elena’s story: “Nuns go viral for beatboxing and dancing on TV”
Luke’s story: “Teen jumps in to help Burger King coworkers on his graduation night and is rewarded with big donations”
J. Kenji López-Alt
Kenji shares that Toshihiro Kasahara, also known as Toshi, invented Chicken Teriyaki. You can still find him cooking at Toshi’s Teriyaki Grill in Mill Creek, WA.
Kenji’s co-hosts a podcast, The Recipe, with fellow author and chef Deb Perlman.
Kenji’s latest book is The Wok: Recipes and Techniques.
Live Wire Listener Question
What’s a word that you struggle to spell?
Ann Powers
Ann’s latest book is Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell.
Ann gives a shout-out to her friend and fellow music writer, Gayle Wald.
Ann references several Joni Mitchell biographical books, including: Joni on Joni: Interviews and Encounters with Joni Mitchell by Susan Whitall; Will You Take Me As I Am by Michelle Mercer; and Reckless Daughter by David Yaffee.
Luke cites American Jazz legends Wayne Shorter and Charles Mingus.
Khatumu
Khatumu performs her song “allergy season.”
Her first EP free therapy is out now!
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Elena Passarello: From PRX, it’s Live Wire! This week, J. Kenji López-Alt.
J. Kenji López-Alt: Hers is mostly broccoli, seasoned with a little cheese. And mine is basically just like you went to the stadium and like pumped the nacho cheese sauce into it and like garnished it with a floret.
Elena Passarello: Music critic Ann Powers.
Ann Powers: I didn't know if her legend would obscure her as a subject to me. So I actually kind of made that part of the book.
Elena Passarello: With music from Khatumu and our fabulous house band. I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello, and now the host of Live Wire, Luke Burbank.
Luke Burbank: Hey, thank you so much, Elena Passarello. Thank you everyone for tuning in to Live Wire from all over the country. And thanks to everybody for coming out to the Nordstrom Recital Hall here at Benaroya in Seattle. All right, it is no secret that times are tough out there. The news is not great nationally, globally, but we here at Live Wire have the opinion that there are in fact still a few okay things happening here on planet Earth, and we spend most of our week looking for them. Sometimes it takes most of the day, but we find them and we present them to you in a little segment we call the best news we've heard all week. All right Elena what is the best news that you heard all week
Elena Passarello: Okay, Brazilian best news. Catholic best news, sisterly best news
Luke Burbank: Love it. Three for three.
Elena Passarello: We're going to Ponta Grossa, Brazil, where there are two nuns named, I hope I get these pronunciations correct, Marizele Cassiano and Marisa de Paula. They actually work in the community. They work a lot with troubled youth. They work with addiction. And apparently in this part of Brazil, Ponta Grossa, there's a television program called Pai Eterno. And it looks kind of like, remember Church Chat with David Carvey? Oh
Luke Burbank: Oh sure.
Elena Passarello: Kind of like studio lighting and like a little couch and they're holding handheld mics. And so the two sisters are there as guests and they are being interviewed by the host who's a deacon and the subject turns to like religious callings, being called to a certain kind of action for faith and what that feels like. And one of the sisters, Sister Marizele says, oh man, I wrote a song about this. She stands up and she starts singing and then Sister Marisa. Stands up and starts dancing, kind of like pop-lock kind of moves, like she's doing like stepping kick-out, and I was like, okay, and it's very appropriate these hip-hop coded moves because then Sister Marizele starts beatboxing.
Luke Burbank: Nice!
Elena Passarello: Not just going like, poof, pooch, pooh, poooch, poosh. The Deacon host gets up and they start dancing and it is so full of joy and glorious. Like it really is just people moving their bodies in this really happy way. Sister Marizele says that she sees beatboxing as a tool that God uses to reach the hearts of the people we work with. Now they're working with a lot more people now. Sister Marisa, the dancer, does not have Instagram, but Sister Marizele does. I hope I got that right. She now has a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. Thanks to people like Viola Davis, who sent it out. Whoopi Goldberg saw it, and Whoopie Goldberg recently sent out a view that this was Sister Act come to life.
Luke Burbank: Beautiful.
Elena Passarello: So that's the best news I heard this week.
Luke Burbank: That's amazing. The best news that I saw all week actually takes us to Georgia. I'm wondering if you know where this place is. Is it Dacula, Georgia?
Elena Passarello: Dacula, Georgia. Dacula, Georgia? That's in Gwinnett County where I'm from. [Luke: Okay, well.] They were our rivals in high school.
Luke Burbank: Okay, well.
Elena Passarello: What happened in Dacula?
Luke Burbank: It's a very sweet story about your rivals, and specifically about a guy named Mykale Baker. Okay, Mykale Baker was graduating high school and he was in his whole robe and he got some special kind of medal for some academic achievement or whatever. And as he was getting off stage, he got a call on his phone because he also worked at the Burger King and it was slammed. There was like a huge line and his coworkers were like, Mykale, could you get over here, please? So while all of his friends were going and partying, the night of graduation, he was at the Burger King, like keeping the line moving and helping out his coworkers. And a mother of one of the other graduates of the high school came through the drive-through at the burger king.
Elena Passarello: She was one of the reasons why it was so slammed.
Luke Burbank: Exactly. And she noticed that he was still there in his graduation uniform with the little headset on, like, you know, welcome to Burger King. And she just thought that this was such a really sweet thing that this kid did.
Elena Passarello: Yeah.
Luke Burbank: I say kid, you know, anybody younger than me feels like a kid. But and so she thought, you know, I bet you that he could use a little blessing. How about we start a GoFundMe page for him to pay for college or other things that he might need. He was just showing himself to be such a nice young person. The GoFindMe has raised at least one hundred and ninety nine thousand dollars.
Elena Passarello: 199? Wow!
Luke Burbank: 190, you see the headline, the article I have, I crossed out 180K because I checked it right before the show. And it went back up. It's going up, it's at like 199, like this is gonna be $200,000 for this kid and it's gonna be for his education. I don't know what college costs anymore. [Elena: Yeah, probably.] But let's just say it's a very, very good start on things for this kids.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, that's fabulous.
Luke Burbank: Mykale Baker being rewarded for his service to his friends at Burger King, that's the best news that I heard all week. Our next guest is a chef, food scientist, culinary innovator, internet star and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Food Lab. He's also a James Beard Award winner and honestly is pretty much the guy to ask if you wanna know where to get a bagel here in Seattle, which because I'm from Seattle, I can't say the word bagel correctly. He's the co-host of the hit podcast, The Recipe, along with Deb Perlman. We are so happy to have him back on the show. Please welcome Kenji López-Alt to Live Wire. Kenji, welcome back to Live Wire.
J. Kenji López-Alt: Thanks for having me again.
Luke Burbank: The last time you and I were hanging out, it was for my other job, my TV job, and we were driving around South Seattle and we were like checking out different teriyaki spots, which you've kind of become known for really being very thorough in your exploration of the teriyaki food scene here in Seattle. I think at one time you were gonna try to eat at every single place.
J. Kenji López-Alt: I'm still trying to, yeah.
Luke Burbank: Have you gone, since you and I last had teriyaki, have you still been going out and exploring?
J. Kenji López-Alt: I have, I mean, when I started it, I was going to about one per day. And then after a week, I slowed down to a couple per week. Now I'm at maybe one or two per month, but I'm up in the thirties now out of slightly less than 90 places to there's, there's around 90 places in Seattle. And that's not counting like the East side.
Luke Burbank: And like Seattle teriyaki is kind of its own thing, right? What makes it different than things like it you could get in other parts of the country.
J. Kenji López-Alt: Yeah, well, Seattle, I mean, teriyaki, as we know it in the U.S., chicken teriyaki was invented in Seattle by a Japanese immigrant in the 70s. Tosha, you can see he still cooks.
Luke Burbank: I was up at his spot... [Kenji: In Mill Creek.] In Mill Creek and he is there seven in the morning just cutting up chicken and cooking rice and doing it.
J. Kenji López-Alt: Yeah, so he invented the style of chicken teriyaki that we know here. So the chicken thighs that are marinated, sliced a sort of sweet and savory glaze. And that became sort of the, I'm from New York so I equate it to like a New York slice of pizza where you ask someone what's your favorite pizza shop and it's like the one that's down the street for me. Because there's a pizza shop in every neighborhood and so there's a teriyaki shop in every neighborhood and it has all started. With Toshi's place and so the chain, there's a lot of teriyaki shops called Toshi now which at some point were all franchises of his original shop and then eventually they all separated into their own individually owned locations so the Toshis are not related to each other anymore even though some of them have the same logo and the same typeface and everything they're all unrelated to each other and Toshi himself has his place up in Mill Creek now.
Luke Burbank: Is there, I mean, is there a cultural significance to the food, to the folks who are making it, to sort of how it fits into the Pacific Northwest?
J. Kenji López-Alt: Well, I mean, I think like a lot of immigrants, they found the jobs they could, and a lot of that is in food. So that's why there was this proliferation of Chinese restaurants across the country. And you see it still as largely an immigrant-owned and immigrant-run operation. These days, you'll find, I'm going to teriyaki originally Japanese or Japanese-American. Although these days, I find most of them are not actually Japanese-run anymore. There's a lot of. Shops that are Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese immigrants. And oftentimes what you'll find is that there's the the basic teriyaki menu that has your chicken and your gyoza and your spicy chicken. But then there's also gonna be bibimbap or there might be like a general so's chicken or there may be banh mi and pho. And generally those are the things that the people who are running the restaurant that's their food and the teriyaki is there because people expect the teriaki to be there. Nice.
Luke Burbank: When we were out eating teriyaki, I think there was at least two groups of people who approached you to say, oh man, we're fans of your videos and the things, and we kind of look for places that you're recommending and stuff like that. What's it like for you out in the Seattle area when you're, because I watch a lot of your videos where you're sitting, you're set up at a picnic table or something, and you're about to try something. Are people coming up to you and interrupting the filming process? Or are you an object of a certain amount of attention when you go to a place?
J. Kenji López-Alt: Sometimes, I mean more and more increasingly, but you know, it's like a really nice self-feeding cycle. I'm also a self- feeding cycle, but the process itself is a self feeding cycle because the more you share information with people, the more people are like, oh, you should check out this. I was sitting at a restaurant in Eastlake two nights ago and this guy walks past the table as he was leaving, like winks at me and puts a piece of paper down in front of me. And I read it, and it just says, like, check out, oh, I have a picture of it, I can't remember which one, but I wrote it down, but he's like, check out this teriyaki joint, and that's all it said. And so, you know, and so, I get really good recommendations, because the people who follow my stuff also wanna give me advice, and they tend to have tastes that align with mine. And so I get a lot of good recommendations and that makes, I mean, my job, which is just going around eating things that other people cooked a lot easier, yeah.
Luke Burbank: The last time somebody handed me a note in a restaurant and I turned it over, I woke up four days later in Reno with no memory of what had happened. So teriyaki's a much better outcome. It's Live Wire Radio from PRX. We are talking to Kenji López-Alt. We're at Benaroya Hall in Seattle this week. We've gotta take a very quick break, but stay with us. We will be right back. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. We're at the Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya in Seattle this week. And we are talking to Kenji López-Alt chef and food writer and a food personality. I was watching a video on your YouTube channel where you were talking about your sobriety. And I was wondering about the, alcohol and food are often so intertwined. It's this wine with this pasta or whatever. Has now being a person who doesn't drink, has that changed your relationship with food at all?
J. Kenji López-Alt: You know, it was something, um, when I realized I needed to stop drinking. Um, that was one of my concerns. Um, although, you know, alcoholics, when they are trying to quit drinking, they'll come up with many excuses not to, um.
Luke Burbank: It's going to ruin the pasta if I stop having a cask of wine every night.
J. Kenji López-Alt: But you know, it is like an intense part of the industry where both in terms of the idea that when people go out to eat, they are, you know the wine, the drinks are part of that experience and so as a cook or as a restaurateur, you should be knowledgeable in that, which means tasting it. And it's also you know also just the lifestyle, it's like you know cooks and musicians I think tend to drink a lot. But you know, I quickly found out that, in fact...
Luke Burbank: Laugh for reasons we don't understand.
Elena Passarello: There's just a lot of cooks and musicians in this audience, I think.
Luke Burbank: I mean, one of the things that you mentioned in that video, Kenji, was that for you when you really got sober was because of talking to some other people in the industry, other chefs and who were both people who were sober. I have family members that are in the restaurant business who also don't drink alcohol. Do you, I mean it's hard for you to speculate on this, but do you feel like there is some sort of a movement with at least more mindfulness around drinking or sobriety in the food industry?
J. Kenji López-Alt: Absolutely, you know, I think the food industry has changed a lot for the better over, you know, the 25 years since I started cooking in restaurants, both in terms of just care for the mental health of people working in restaurants. The abuse that goes on. I mean, it still happens, but it's a lot better than it used to be. And also in terms the substance abuse. And yeah, there's a a lot of conversation. I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a non-drinker for so long. You know my career has been a series of real lucky breaks, and I chose to go sober at the right time because I don't know if you've had the non-alcoholic beers or gone out to a restaurant recently, every restaurant has a really robust, really good non-alkoholic cocktail program, a non- alcoholic wine and beer program, so it's a real good time to be a non drinker right now.
Luke Burbank: I've been enjoying your podcast, The Recipe, with Deb Perlman. For folks that haven't heard it, what's the premise of the show? I guess it's kind of right there in the title.
J. Kenji López-Alt: You know, Deb came out with a book a couple years ago and she and I have sort of been in similar, in each other's orbits for years because we both started writing recipes online around the same time. And both of us have a, you know, our focus is home cooks, but we have real different approaches to how we bring recipes to home cooks and how we think about developing a recipe. And so yeah, we thought hey, you know, like we should we should do a show because we... We have overlapping audiences. We're trying to solve the same problem, but we're solving that problem in really different ways. And so the premise of the show is that we pick a recipe that we've both worked on, say, like macaroni and cheese. And so then I'll make her version of the recipe. She'll make my version of the recipe. And then we discuss the development process. The idea is to take a peek under the kitchen hood.
Luke Burbank: Oh, there you go. Why did you dedicate an entire episode to broccoli cheese soup? That seemed left field to me.
J. Kenji López-Alt: I mean, people, people devote entire bowls to just melted cheese and broccoli, right? It's no, because it was a real, it was very popular. It's a very popular recipe. Like we both have broccoli cheese soup recipes and our recipes couldn't be more different. They're very, very different from each other. Hers is mostly broccoli seasoned with a little cheese and mine is basically just like you went to the stadium and like, yeah, pump the nacho cheese sauce into it and like garnish it with a floret. But, no, broccoli cheese soup is really popular, you know, thank Panera.
Luke Burbank: Well, that's it. I think that's, they've really kind of moved the needle on America's appetite for...
J. Kenji López-Alt: It was Panera and it was George Bush, the George Bush senior, who when he became president famously said, like, I'm president now, mom, you can't make me eat broccoli. And then I think Campbell's then developed broccoli cheese soup to capitalize on the publicity that that was.
Luke Burbank: I remember when that was an extreme thing for a U.S. President to say. He's not having broccoli.
J. Kenji López-Alt: It's like long for the days of vegetables and tanned soups.
Luke Burbank: Crawl across broken glass to have that be the main political scandal we're dealing with. You also talk on the podcast about nachos and what I was struck by was you were talking about the origin of nachos and I think it maybe goes to sort of credited with being a place in Texas. I had read in the LA Times years ago a totally apocryphal history of nachos.
J. Kenji López-Alt: All these stories are wonderful.
Luke Burbank: About a particular restaurant in LA that Jack Nicholson used to go to and this the woman who was credited as inventing them had been like trying to find something to make for people. This was printed in the Los Angeles Times and I was telling everyone this story that nachos were invented in LA. Does the success that is nachos have many mothers?
J. Kenji López-Alt: These stories are always like somebody who, somebody who's part of the restaurant trying to feed someone when there's apparently no food in the restaurant. Although we ran out of everything. What can we do? All we have is the chips and cheese and beans and everything, exactly what it takes to make something delicious. I'd never heard that story. No, the only story I heard was about Ignacio, nicknamed Nacho, and he invented it because American tourists, I think, were coming to his restaurant. Or maybe this is the Caesar salad story. [Luke: Oh, yeah. Was that in Tijuana?] Someone was coming to this restaurant and he ran out of ingredients and made nachos.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, I heard that too.
J. Kenji López-Alt: Same story with buffalo wings, same story with like onion dip, it's all the same.
Luke Burbank: I was going through some of your older New York Times cooking section columns that just each one I don't want you to feel like you have to give away the milk for free But I did want to ask you some of the things that are posed in these columns for instance the burger that you were Unable to improve the Oklahoma onion burger
J. Kenji López-Alt: Oh yeah, well the Oklahoma Onion Burger is a burger that, like a lot of good food, was born of frugality and so during the Depression in Oklahoma, they replaced a lot of the meat in a burger with a pile of onions. And so in Oklahoma Onion burger, you take a very, very small ball of beef, you put a big pile of thinly shaved onions onto a griddle and then you smash the beef down into it or sometimes the other way around and you let that cook and then flip it over. And what you end up with is these onions that have this kind of. Array of textures and flavors, so the ones that are hanging over the edge get really dark and frizzled, and then you get these kind of caramelized onions that are along the top, and there's these softer steamed onions and a little bit of crunch in the middle, so you get a ton of onion flavor, and not a ton of beef flavor, but it's real...
Luke Burbank: Speaking of onions, and this is the final question, because I'm 48 years old and I still don't know how to do this, what is the best way to cut an onion?
J. Kenji López-Alt: So, I learned how to cut an onion from Jacques Pepin's book La Technique, and he does the classic technique where you split an onion in half, you take off the peel, he always recommends taking off the peel plus one layer on the inside, and then you hold your knife vertically and you make a series of vertical cuts up and down, and you hold the knife sideways and make a couple of horizontal cuts, and rotate it and slice across those. That's the classic sort of. French method how they teach you to do it at culinary schools, then Alton Brown, he recommends slicing radially because onions are radially symmetric, so it makes more sense to slice them radially. So to me, I was like, okay, so which one is actually the best method? So I had a friend of mine build a mathematical model of an onion, and we tested a variety of angles and a variety of slice sizes. As we tested weather, adding a horizontal slice. So basically what we did was we calculated, first of all, the method that would give you the most number of dice using the fewest number of strokes, so the efficiency of the method, and then we also counted the standard deviation of a cube size to tell you how even your dice is going to be. And what we found is that if you take your half onion and you place it on the table and you call the height of it, so the radius of the onion, you call that. You angle your knife at a point under the table, about 0.6 under the table. So if you aim your knife down to there, it's not quite straight up and down, and it's not quite radially symmetric. It's somewhere in between. If you just kind of fudge it somewhere in-between, that is the most efficient way.
Luke Burbank: Is that now how you cut onions, like at home?
J. Kenji López-Alt: I follow my own advice usually.
Luke Burbank: Okay. Well, we're glad to have it because you sure know a lot. Kenji López-Alt, thank you so much for coming on Live Wire. That was Kenji López-Alt right here on Live Wire, his podcast, The Recipe, which he hosts with Debra Perlman from the Smitten Kitchen is available wherever you get your podcasts. Live Wire is brought to you by Powell's Books, a Portland institution since 1971. Powell's offers a selection of new and used books in stores and online at powells.com. You're tuned in to Live Wire. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passerello. Okay, each week on the show, we ask the Live Wire audience a question. And this week we were inspired by an upcoming guest's career as a legendary music journalist. So Elena, what did we ask? The Live Wire audience.
Elena Passarello: We asked them to tell us about the most memorable concert they ever saw.
Luke Burbank: Wow, okay. We actually went out into the audience at a recent live recording of the show to get some answers. Here is what folks said. This was Marcia.
Marcia: Hero was my most memorable. I was a teenager and I went to a Grateful Dead concert and I didn't know the brownies were laced with pot and I slept through the whole Grateful Dead concert. Laid out. So I guess you didn't remember the concert. No, but it's certainly memorable that I didn't remember it.
Elena Passarello: I mean, as far as I'm concerned, that's the best way to experience a Grateful Dead concert.
Luke Burbank: Quite connected with the Grateful Dead, but I know that their fans are legion and they really, really like it, whether they're conscious for the concert or not.
Elena Passarello: I think the Grateful Dead exists on both sides of a person's consciousness, you know? I think they are dream logic, so well done, well done.
Luke Burbank: That's intense. How many brownies did you have before we started recording today?
Elena Passarello: I just stuck like six of them into a smoothie.
Luke Burbank: Just the right amount. Here is a very memorable concert that listener Frank attended at one point.
Frank: I saw Sufjan Stevens at the Aladdin Theater on my 16th birthday, and I was sitting in the front row. He sang the ballad of John Wayne Gacy, Jr., and I had a moment of feeling deep panic that this was an unsafe individual, which was, that's a good performance right there. It was a good show.
Luke Burbank: Unclear how many brownies Frank had consumed before the Sufjan show. Frank's premise is that because he was concerned about what Sufjans Stevens, the singer, was going to get up to that indicated that the performance was actually very good, that Sufjon had him feeling a little bit on edge. Now the song, of course, the ballad of John Wayne Gacy for being kind of on a dark topic, it's a very beautiful song.
Elena Passarello: Yes.
Luke Burbank: All right, Caroline had a memorable concert experience. Let's take a listen to this.
Caroline: I saw James Taylor at Tanglewood, I'm originally from the Boston area, and we had lawn seats, which was lovely.
Luke Burbank: I feel like if you go to Tanglewood at any time, day or night, James Taylor might be there. Just kind of hanging, feels, he might live.
Elena Passarello: Just tangling in the wood, you know?
Luke Burbank: Just hangin' out there, I feel like he might live there. It just seems, it's very James Taylor coded, as the people would say these days.
Caroline: But we very illegally snuck our way into the front row after intermission. And we were feet or inches away from him and Carol King and John Travolta and all these ridiculous people that they brought on stage.
Elena Passarello: John Travolta, he did have a, he didn't have a single, dude, did you know, like, gonna let her in, mmm.
Luke Burbank: John Travolta had a single, I was unaware of that.
Elena Passarello: I feel like everybody in the late 70s, you know, like Lou Ferrigno, John Travolta.
Luke Burbank: Joe Piscopo. Yeah, they all had a Bruce Willis. And they were all at the James Taylor concert in Tanglewood. I have decided at my ripe old age of 49, Elena, I am done sneaking into the better seats than I have at concerts or sporting events. And here's why. I've realized I am unable to enjoy the rest of the performance because of my anxiety around getting kicked out of the place I'm not actually supposed to be. I'm better off just being in my original seats. View obstructed and relaxed.
Elena Passarello: That's right. Have a brownie, stay in the cheap seats, enjoy yourself, Burbank. Just go for it.
Luke Burbank: Alright, thank you to everyone who answered our question about a memorable concert. Our next guest is one of America's best loved music critics, speaking of music. With stints at NPR, the LA Times, and the New York Times, among other places, her body of work, which is writing about musicians, has made her such a legend in her own right that it probably came in handy when she set her sight. On a book about one of music's greatest legends, Joni Mitchell. The result of that project is the book traveling on the path of Joni Mitchell, which Publishers Weekly called a dazzling portrait of a legendary musician. Ann Powers joined us when we were in Seattle at Benaroya Hall earlier this year. Take a listen. Ann Powers, welcome to Live Wire.
Ann Powers: I'm so happy to be here, thank you so much.
Luke Burbank: Can you take me back to the day that you got a phone call from a book editor in New York? Oh, yeah, they said we would love it If you would write a book about Joni Mitchell and you said you had to take a walk around the block to think about it
Ann Powers: I definitely did. I mean, I'm a Joni fan, all of us. I mean, who isn't a Joni fan, right? We've all had our moment. We love Blue, we love Azira. But I looked at, you know, tackling a subject like that, as similar to trying to say, climb Mount Rainier or something. It was very daunting to think about really taking on a legend like that. And I wasn't sure that I wanted to do it. I didn't know. Her legend would obscure her as a subject to me. So I actually kind of made that part of the book, my journey toward figuring out how to take into account what we as fans have made Joni, what the culture has made Joni, and then how she reacted and became the artist she is through that process.
Luke Burbank: I mean, it sounds like in the book that, because you're a music writer, you were of course aware of the impact of Joni Mitchell, but that like, she wasn't maybe your number one just because of some thoughts about her and she had a lot of success early and she sort of looked a certain way and you said you didn't really vibe with that part of her career.
Ann Powers: Yeah, well, first of all, given just my age when I grew up in Seattle, you know, I was a new wave girl, so really like Kate Bush was my pinnacle. But, you know, a thing that happened is when I started on this book, I got into the early Joni records and I suddenly was like, oh my God, Kate Bush took so much from Joni Mitchell and I never realized it. So then I felt kind of bad. So that was part of it. And then also, yeah, you're right. Like, I write in the introduction about how she was daunting to me, partly because of her image, her persona, and, as you say, her looks. I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine, the great Gail Wald. She's also a writer. And I'm like, I can't write about Joni. She's such a prom queen. I mean, she's too, the cheekbones. She's, you know, I get it. Can't relate. She's too beautiful. But what I figured out was she had just the same anxieties and questions about herself that I have. And she wrote that right into her songs.
Luke Burbank: You made the decision to not try to interview Joni Mitchell for this book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because basically it sounds like you were afraid of falling in love with her.
Ann Powers: In a way, yeah, I was afraid of being dominated by her, you know, I just felt like, I know from others, friends of mine, people I know who've written a lot about her, that she's so charismatic. But it's not just that, anyone who writes a biography, once you are connected to your subject, whether it is officially authorized or not, in that way, then it is really their book. But I wanted it to be a book. That was about the world that Joni Mitchell made and the world the made Joni Mitchel. And there are great books out there that are simply interviews with her. There's a fabulous book called Joni on Joni by Malcolm Arone, I highly recommend it. Michelle Mercer's book, Will You Take Me As I Am, David Yaffe's Reckless Daughter, those books exist. So I wanted to do something different. But I will say, I did interview many people around Joni, everyone from David Crosby, RIP, to Graham Nash to. Uh... Johnny's ex Larry Clines so I really like have a lot of research in the book. It's not just me rambling on about my thoughts.
Luke Burbank: Well, no, it's the right amount of that and the right amount of information about this person's life. One of the things that seems to come to light in this book is that Joni Mitchell is maybe not always the most accurate storyteller on the life of Joni Mitchell. [Ann: Yes.] Like for instance, it sounds like she has she had polio as a child Yeah in Saskatoon, Canada. [Ann: Yes.] And credits it with why and how she became an artist.
Ann Powers: In some ways, yes. Her biographer, David Yaffe, really emphasizes that in his book, too, and Reckless Daughter. It's an excellent book, by the way.
Luke Burbank: But it seems like you were a little suspicious about if it actually played the role in her life artistically that she thought she did or that biographers thought it did.
Ann Powers: Yeah, well, as Michelle Mercer, all of us Joni writers, we all hang out in a little club. So anyway, as Michele Mercer has written, Joni already was on the path to be an artist before she got polio. She was interested in, she was interested in dance, she interested in painting, she wanted to write, you know. So I think she was already on the creative path, but what polio, what going through the experience of polio gave her, I think, was this incredible determination. You know, this is the kind of trauma that can make or break a person, and absolutely no judgment on what happens to you after you go through such a trauma, but for her, I think it made her determined to be great. If her life was going to go on, she had to learn to walk again, again. She had an aneurysm much later in life, and that was the third time she had learned to walk. This is one tough woman. And that experience was the beginning of her sense of herself as needing to make a difference in the world, needing to be a genius, a great artist, not just some lady playing in a coffee house on a Thursday night at 7 p.m., you know, but a very important artist.
Luke Burbank: Another sort of big development in her early life was that she was pregnant and she gave her daughter up for adoption and wrote about it in her music including the song Kelly Green.
Ann Powers: Little green, yes.
Luke Burbank: How did that impact her as an artist going forward?
Ann Powers: Well, you know, Luke, I'm also an adoptive parent myself, and I'm very lucky to have an open adoption. My daughter's birth mother, we are close to her. In fact, she's coming to visit us this week here in Seattle. My daughter is coming out, too. So this is a very emotional subject for me. And I want to say, I think only the people involved in an adoptative family can truly speak for that family. But, after she was reunited with her daughter, Joni said, I was hanging out with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock recording a session, and they said to me, something is different about your voice. Your voice is fuller. I mean, this is, this Joni is the doyen by now. She is in mid-life. She said, something in me, a loss, a hole was filled by this. I think the loss and grief you go through as a birth mother, Only a birth mother can speak of it, but it's so deep and so real. And for Joni, that went into her music. There is a kind of a melancholy in her music, and there's a depth in her that is, in part, related to having entrusted her child in adoption. At the same time, the ongoing theme of, like, what does it mean to be a free woman? What does it means to be mobile? What does it mean to... Be ambitious, all of that. This is what women have dealt with so often, and especially in the 60s and 70s, during those days when women's liberation was happening and it's full flower. This was so relevant to her personally, partly because of her status as a birth mother, but also just because she was a young woman at that time.
Luke Burbank: Right, you write in the book about where she fit into and maybe didn't fit into feminism. Would it be second wave feminism, sort of? But the idea that maybe that movement was about going out and gaining equality versus ruminating and sadness. And she was ruminate a lot of sadness.
Ann Powers: Well, the thing about the rumination, I think that's related to another phenomenon of the 70s, which is everybody got a therapist in the 70's, you know, everybody was seeking enlightenment, everybody was into self-help, including Joni. And so she kind of gave us the soundtrack to her inner thoughts. And that was very powerful. Like the if you you know that song, Coyote, for example, you Yeah, you're how the it just goes on and on and on like she nobody can sing that song because like, where do you breathe? And that was partly because she is kind of creating what it sounds like inside of our heads, you know? And how that applies for women at that time, I think, is that women were trying to figure out how to reconcile their desire for intimate relationships, heterosexual women in particular, with men who, you know, maybe didn't value their freedom that much. I'm just saying a few of them might not have. You know, and in a world that didn't value that, and she wanted to figure out that, you know, how can I love and be loved and still be that singular artist I want to be, and move around, you know, and go on the road. And she was that example of that. I think so many people related to that.
Luke Burbank: We're talking to Ann Powers about her book, Traveling on the Path of Joni Mitchell. You'd be remiss if you didn't talk about it in the book, which you do, and we would be remiss if we didn't talked about it here, but... [Ann: I know what's coming.] Yes, you mentioned Wayne Shorter and Charles Mingus, and Joni Mitchell's love of jazz and jazz fusion and her embrace of black American culture, which also showed up in a pretty bizarre kind of... Phase of her life and career where she was regularly performing and showing up in blackface.
Ann Powers: Regularly, but she created a character. So as she told it, one October she was walking down Sunset Boulevard, or was it Hollywood Boulevard in LA, looking for a Halloween costume to go to a party at the home of Leland Sklar, the bassist, and she walks by a black man on the street. They kind of exchanged a flirtatious look, and she felt like she was possessed by the spirit of this man, she said. Ended up putting on a basically dressing in blackface, I would say, or passing as this character, whom she named Claude and later named Art Nouveau. And this character is one that she wore at this costume party, but then later on the cover of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, the album, also twice in film. So you can see it very shortly in the Shadows and Light concert film. There's a tiny moment where you see Claude. And people have written about it in the past. She herself never talks about it at this point, really. Most people who have written about her, talked about her kind of defended it and said, well, as a woman in a sexist world, she could relate to what black men were going through or this is kind of a tribute to people whom she admired. But what I wanted to confront was why did we all accept it? Why did everyone around her accept it, you know? And I didn't really ever come to like a firm conclusion. I had to confront my own complicated feelings about this part of her life. In the end, I think entitlement is very hard to shake. And even if you are, as Joni is, a very, very sympathetic and close friend to her collaborators who are not white, she loves the music, she understands it. It's easy to cross lines if no one is saying, hey, I'm calling you out.
Luke Burbank: That doesn't certainly for you invalidate the rest of the music that she created and art that she
Ann Powers: I think, you know, I'm going to refer to the great Claire Deterrer, who is a fabulous Seattle writer. And she has this wonderful concept in her book, Monsters. The concept is the stain. How do we deal with the artists we love making transgressions that we cannot accept? She says, do not necessarily reject the artwork, but it has a stain, and you have to acknowledge the stain, you have to see it, you to live with it. And that is kind of how I think of it.
Luke Burbank: I'm wondering for you from going from when you got that phone call and you had to take a walk around the block to now on the other side of it you've just been like sort of in this, you know, amniotic sack of Joni Mitchell dome.
Ann Powers: Well, the sack was big because, first of all, I have to tell you, I got really into Jazz Fusion. I wrote a 27,000-word chapter on Jazz Fusion. Nice. Thank goodness for editors, because y'all don't have to read that, but...
Elena Passarello: I feel like anything on Jazz Fusion needs to be at least 25,000 words long in respect for the poor. Just like.
Ann Powers: Just like the songs, right? But I got so into all this obscure stuff around her, too. That was really, that was the beautiful part.
Elena Passarello: But the thing that I would be afraid of, or maybe you weren't, because she wasn't straight down your lane, is after five, six years working with the subject, what do you do when you pull out his thing of summer lawns, or a Joni, like, is it over for you? Oh, no, no. What does it feel like to listen to her now in a casual capacity?
Ann Powers: Oh, I just feel so smart. I know all about it.
Luke Burbank: You gotta be insufferable at a barbecue.
Elena Passarello: Somebody puts Joni Mitchell on, it's like, actually got 30 minutes.
Luke Burbank: That's Ann Powers, everyone. The book is traveling on the path of Joni Mitchell. That was Ann Powers, recorded live at Benaroya Hall in Seattle. You can check out her book, Traveling on the Path of Joni Mitchell, wherever you get your books. All right. We have to take a very quick break here on Live Wire, but don't go anywhere. Speaking of music up next, we'll hear an incredible song from Khatumu. More Live Wire coming your way in just a moment. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passerello. Okay, before we get to this week's musical performance with Khatumu, a little preview of what we are doing on the show next week. We're gonna talk about this very surprising and kind of unexpected project that Dylan Marron did. Okay, he is the guy behind a podcast called Conversations with People Who Hate Me. This is what he did. He found mean comments that were written about him or other people on the internet. And then he called up those commenters, the people that wrote the mean stuff, to figure out what exactly was going on with them, and he found out some really surprising stuff. We're also gonna talk to musician Brittany Davis, who will explain how being a blind person made music their first language, and then we're gonna hear a song from Brittany. That's all next week on Live Wire. This week, our musical guest is a 23-year-old alternative folk singer-songwriter who had a breakout hit, hunting days that went super viral on TikTok. Her EP, Free Therapy, was released this spring, and she's probably maybe the only one-time Yale Wiffenpoof we've ever had on the show, which is the country's oldest a cappella group. She's performed hundreds of times with them. This is Khatumu, who joined us at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon. Take a listen. Hello there. Okay, I have to admit, I spend far too much time on TikTok and I was seeing your music on TikTok. I was really excited that you were gonna be on the show, but it was news to me, talking to the producers, that there were rumors that you were like an industry plant. Do you take that as a compliment?
Khatumu: High praise. Yeah, one of my friends sent me a Reddit post that was like industry plant and I was like, oh my God. So I thought it was funny.
Luke Burbank: You're not part of that pop music, folk music machinery that is Yale whiffin' poof into the pipeline.
Khatumu: I wish you would make my life so much easier if there was a huge budget behind what I do, but there's unfortunately not, so yeah.
Luke Burbank: What was that like with all those performances with the Yale Acapella group which is like a really well-known group and I mean did you learn a lot about music and performing from that?
Khatumu: Yeah, I mean, I thought it was so fun. Also, for people that don't know, it's tenor, tenor baritone bass. So I was singing pretty low in my register and it was like pretty much all guys. But yeah, I learned a lot and harmony is super cool. I don't if anyone here has ever done acapella. College acapellas is crazy.
Luke Burbank: Oh, I would say most of these people have it.
Elena Passarello: It's actually just one big acapella group. They sound amazing.
Luke Burbank: Some of them were just doing it outside the theater for money earlier. Was it like being in the movie Pitch Perfect?
Khatumu: I exactly like it, exactly like yeah.
Luke Burbank: Tell me a little bit about the song we're gonna hear.
Khatumu: So I just graduated in May, and...
Luke Burbank: Congratulations.
Khatumu: Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, and I like dated some guy from Belfast and we broke up and I was very heartbroken. And this was one of the first songs that I wrote and over COVID I got really into songwriting. And the song is called Allergy Season and it means a lot to me and my We all jam it when I'm back in New Haven, it's fun.
Luke Burbank: This is Khatumu on Live Wire.
Khatumu: [Khatumu performs "Allergy Season"]
Khatumu: Thank you very much.
Luke Burbank: That was Khatumu right here on Live Wire recorded live at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland. Their EP, Free Therapy, is out now. All right, that's gonna do it for this week's episode of Live Wire, a big thanks to our wonderful guests, Kenji López-Alt, Ann Powers, and Khatumu. Special thanks this episode to the Hotel Sorrento in Seattle.
Elena Passarello: Laura Hadden is our executive producer. Heather de Michele is our executive director and our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Our Technical Director is Eben Hoffer with assistance from Ness Royster. Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid is our Assistant Editor and our House Sound is by D. Neil Blake. Ashley Park is our Production Fellow.
Luke Burbank: Valentine Keck is our operations manager. Andrea Castro-Martinez is our marketing associate and Ezra Veenstra runs our front of house. Our house band is Ethan Fox Tucker, Ayal Alves, Mike Gamble, Danny Ailey, Zach Domer and A Walker Spring who also composes our music. This episode was mixed by Eben Hoffer and Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid.
Elena Passarello: Additional funding provided by the Oregon Arts Commission, a state agency funded by the state of Oregon, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Live Wire was created by Robyn Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week, we'd like to thank member Joan Cirillo of Portland, Oregon.
Luke Burbank: For more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast, head on over to LiveWireRadio.org. I'm Luke Burbank, for Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire crew, thank you for listening and we will see you next week.
PRX.
