KCRW Announces Details for 'Lost Notes, Season Two'

KCRW is pleased to announce details of thesecond season of the acclaimed podcast Lost Notes - a series of music documentaries - launching on April 25, 2019. For season two, Lost Notes welcomes celebrated music journalist and author Jessica Hopper as host and executive producer.

Lost Notes examines untold stories from music history, and, this season, explores the idea of legacy. What can a song inspire in its listeners or its creators, years or even decades later? What happens when a previous generation's art is held to a younger generation's moral standard? Who is obscured by the shadow of an artist's greatness?

"With this season of Lost Notes our aim was to deepen some of the conversations around legacy," says Hopper. "We asked for story ideas from folks who had previously contributed to Lost Notes, as well as writers who I had worked with before, with no particular prompt for what sorts of stories we wanted. Many of them came back to us with stories that were retrospective, and worked to reconcile music's present and its past. This season approaches questions of artistic legacy with openness and real curiosity, and offers up stories that are new and nuanced. These episodes get into whose work, and whose story is considered worth remembering and why. Every episode gives context around the cultural forces that shaped, and in some cases, complicated an artist's career. I'm someone who is fundamentally interested in the stories of artists who have been relegated to the footnotes, so working on this season of Lost Notes has been hugely satisfying."

Lost Notes, season two episodes:

• Fanny were the first all-female rock band signed to a major label; they ruled the Sunset Strip in the 1970s, and they were supposed to be the next big thing. They'll explain what it felt like to be so ahead of their time, then, and how they feel about being recognized for it now.

• John Fahey's guitar playing influenced the sound of the American underground for generations. But how does that legacy change when his story is told by three of the women who knew him best?

• Author and poet Hanif Abdurraqib explores Cat Power's storied album The Greatest.

• Nermin Niazi and Feisal Mosleh, teenage siblings in London, made Disco Se Aagay, a fusion of Pakistani folk-pop and British new wave, in the early 80s. Arshia Fatima Haq tracks down their lost masterpiece.

• A profile of Suzanne Ciani, who balanced her pathbreaking commercial work scoring Coke ads in the seventies with her work as a pioneering avant-garde synth composer.

• The Freeze were an early American punk band. Now, forty years later, two members attempt to reckon with the lyrics they wrote as teenagers.

• In the decades since his death, jazz pianist Billy Tipton has been celebrated as a trans pioneer. Allyson McCabe looks at Tipton's mysterious life with artists he's influenced, to find the ways his story resists any simple telling.

• Jessica Hopper looks at how gun violence has changed the concert going experience, but why so few people in music are willing to talk about it.

The first episode of Lost Notes will be released April 25, 2019. Additional episodes drop every Thursday. The podcast is available for free on Apple Podcasts, KCRW's website and all other major podcast platforms.

A sneak peek of what's to come on Lost Notes, season two, can be heard here.

Episodes from Lost Notes' first season were listed among the best podcast episodes of 2018 by Audible Feast, The Bello Collective, and Indiewire.

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