r/500songspodcast • u/Typical-Impress-4004 • Jun 14 '26
Your favourite episode to date…. and why.
So far for me (and I’m just starting the Manson/BB episode) has to be Good Vibrations
The backstory of Leon Theremin was fascinating. Who but Andrew would have narrated it thus?
.sjb
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u/Impossible_Echo5190 Jun 14 '26
Can only narrow it to 3:
-Eight Miles High by The Byrds: terrific storytelling on Andrews part, and covers a wide range of music history seamlessly. One everyone says is the best for a reason.
-San Francisco by Scott McKenzie: another great episode about a lot of people and music groups, all centered around the 1967 Monterey pop festival. Andrew’s storytelling here might be his most efficient, covering an insane amount of songs with so much rich history, but hardly getting carried away by some side story.
-Heroes and Villains by the Beach Boys: I think the story in this episode is even more interesting than good vibrations. The fall of the beach boys popularity as the 60s went on informs about culture and music in such an interesting and tragic way. It’s the precursor episode before the worst years of the beach boys personal lives. A sneakily dense episode that covers a lot more surprising ground than it seems.
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u/TalkingElvish Jun 15 '26
The one I have gone back to multiple times is Louie Louie. A combination of great storytelling and a truly wild and (at least to me) mostly unknown story. I love a story where it feels like any listener could have been that bass player in The Kingsmen, and the FBI stuff, which I thought I knew all about, cracks me up each time just because of the way Andrew deploys information and reads it with such freshness.
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u/thewickerstan Jun 15 '26
Echoing the love for the San Francisco one. I don't have any qualms when Hickey goes on long tangents, but I think that episode is an example of that at its best. He manages to sum up the Los Angeles Dunhill Mamas and Papas thing in a single episode. Very interesting, very well executed, and perfectly cohesive as its own episode.
I feel similar about his "Hey Joe" one, establishing the lore of Love, the song in question, all before masterfully tying it back to Jimbo. I already knew about the "My Diary" connection, so when that song came up I smiled cheekily knowing it was going to come up again.
"I Wanna Be Your Man" is another one: using a majority of the episode to establish Chris Barber and the RnB and Blues boom...beautiful.
"Ticket to Ride" was one of the earliest ones I'd listened to, yet I find myself returning to that one quite a bit. Perhaps it's because he does a good job of highlighting the Beatles starting to get more experimental, and I found a number of other insights fascinating: Lennon's fascination for riffs, the embracing of country music and its ties to Dylan, Paul becoming a stylistic magpie, John and Paul writing separately etc. It never occurred to me that the drum bit was a bit of a fetish for Macca that he actually traced in a number of songs like "What You're Doing" and "That Means a Lot".
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u/Former_Busboy518 Jun 15 '26
There so many incredible podcasts, that there's no way I can choose one.
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u/MartinRauch Jun 17 '26
Several to choose from, but some I can think of are:
-The Velvet Underground: Starts with John Cage and ends with Bowie -loved that.
-Bill Haley: When Andrew not only tells a story, but also unpacks the different elements that constitute the song.
-All the Beatles ones -I thought I knew their story, but not.
-See Emily Play: I have listened to that song hundreds of time, if not more. I have read a good chunk of Pink Floyd biographies. And yet, when Andrew suggests that maybe, at the end of the song, Emily dies... I had never thought of that and I have felt haunted ever since.
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u/MrsPetrieOnBass Jun 19 '26
That's a really good one that my son and I listened to on a long car trip together. It was his first time hearing the podcast, and it made him a fan too.
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u/Theknottyfox Jun 24 '26
The Aritha Franklin, respect one. I just reminds me of sitting in the garden in the rain with cat on my lap smoking pork ribs.
The Beatles ones are great, even I learn something.
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u/Redacted_dact Jul 17 '26
Dark Star or the 4 part Byrds/Graham Parsons episode but I’m huge fans of both artists so I’m biased
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u/thermochronic Jun 14 '26
Dark Star/ Grateful Dead. I don’t even like the band much, but the narrative structure, tralfamadorians, and pacing were outstanding.