The Best Podcast Interviews of the Year (So Far) -

Nicholas Quah. Podcast Critic, Vulture. Writes the 1.5x Speed newsletter. Creator, Hot Pod. Contributor, Fresh Air. Member, Peabody Awards Board of Jurors.

For a huge chunk of the podcast universe, the interview is the atomic unit of creation. Consider, for example, how the interview podcast isn’t just a massive genre but one of its elemental forms: The biggest and most lucrative pods in the world tend to be interview shows, and it’s telling how many of the celebrities flowing into the medium as hosts often land on interviews as the default format for setting up shop.

Indeed, it’s also informative how the podcast press circuit is very much a thing these days. You may already have noticed this as a listener. Perhaps you’ve had the uncanny (slightly annoying) experience of seeing the same guest pop up multiple times across all of your favorite podcasts in the same week on the occasion of a new book or movie or album to promote, telling more or less the same story in each appearance.

Interviewing, of course, is an art, and there are many factors to consider when mulling over what constitutes an interview that genuinely stands out or sticks in the mind. Sometimes, it’s a flow of conversation that takes a turn toward the interesting and unexpected; sometimes, it has more to do with the interviewer’s questions and how the specificity and uniqueness of that person comes into contact with a guest in a way that produces a noticeable alchemy. And sometimes, it comes down to an interview project being so weird that you go, Sure, why not?

All of those things are on our minds with this list. Here you will find a routinely updated collection of what we feel are standout interview-podcast episodes (and in some cases, entire interview podcasts) from this year — interviews that produce a moment, say something about the genre, or simply satisfy our tastes.

Dead Eyes, “Tom”

Rare is the podcast that finds resolution, and boy, did Dead Eyes pay off. Connor Ratliff’s extended quest to learn why Tom Hanks had fired him from a small gig on Band of Brothers decades ago for having “dead eyes” ultimately culminated in a sit-down interview with the man himself, and the conversation that ensued offers an intriguing, angular kind of catharsis. Not only does the episode provide the best possible realization of the podcast’s themes — over the course of its many interviews, the show has become an extended meditation on the opportunities and versions of life that pass you by and on what your life ultimately becomes — it’s also a thoroughly interesting interview with Hanks, a celebrity who has historically been opaque owing to that famous niceness he’s known for. This speaks volumes about the wonderful nature of Ratliff’s project and the special magic that happens when the history of an interviewer is brought to bear on the right interviewee.

Call Her Daddy, “Jamie Lynn Spears” (Parts 1 & 2)

It should honestly be said that when we’re questioning what it means for an interview to stand out, we are sometimes talking about a sense of spectacle. Indeed, spectacle is crucial to how we remember the big moments from many talk and interview shows of yore. Think Oprah Winfrey, from Tom Cruise on the sofa all the way to “Were you silent or were you silenced?” Or, say, Dakota Johnson’s appearance on Ellen, when an unexpected confrontational moment turned into what might well have been the beginning of the end for DeGeneres. Jamie Lynn Spears’s two-parter on Call Her Daddy from early this year feels like one of those spectacles: The podcast was one of the very few outlets the younger Spears sister used to promote her contentious memoir; she was given the space to lay out her narrative essentially unchallenged, vaulting her deeper into a public spat with the newly liberated Britney. The interview also happened to best embody Call Her Daddy as a project as host Alex Cooper settled into Jamie’s lucrative relationship with Spotify: a moment that marked the podcast’s transition away from its raunchier origins toward something resembling a kind of neo-girlboss Howard Stern for the next generation, complete with a lean toward the politics of fame.

Feeling Asian, “I Was Here the Whole Time (feat. Ke Huy Quan)”

Thanks to his (glorious, glorious) turn in Everything Everywhere All at Once, Ke Huy Quan is out on the press circuit, where he has been given a sustained, long-overdue opportunity to publicly process the extensive limbo that paused his career as a rare working Asian American talent in Hollywood after his run as a child actor in The Goonies and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. With the exception of our fine profile here at Vulture, Quan’s appearance on the Feeling Asian podcast, hosted by Youngmi Mayer and Brian Park, was the one that struck me the hardest. It starts, of course, with Quan being open, frank, and emotional about the struggles he faced trying to find work in show business in the U.S. as an adult. But it’s also about the space Park and Mayer build for him in this episode: gentle, generous, almost a communion. The conversation builds up to tears, a moment of release on the part of both Quan and the hosts, who in some ways represent the generation that came after him.

The Ezra Klein Show, “A Philosophy of Games That Is Really a Philosophy on Life”

Honestly, I haven’t found The Ezra Klein Show to be as uniformly essential listening this year compared with last. Maybe it’s the show, maybe it’s me, maybe it’s some mix of both (these things happen). But I was really taken by this interview with the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, who lays out a way of thinking about the modern world that runs along a deep understanding of how games work, and more specifically, how the mechanics of games have been weaponized by systems all around us to a point where we should probably be a little more suspicious about the values we’re made to hold. True to form for this podcast, it’s a fantastically nerdy, wonky conversation, and Klein is the perfect shepherd for this kind of material. It’s also a reminder about the power of mixing a platform with a particular curatorial eye: I’m not sure how else I would have encountered a conversation quite like this, other than from a podcast like The Ezra Klein Show.

Talk Easy With Sam Fragoso, “Ethan Hawke, Here and Then”

Since Talk Easy made its debut in 2016, Sam Fragoso, a writer and an all-around film person, has built a deep bench of meaty interviews with a striking collection of people. His standard guests are creative types — directors, documentarians, actors, critics, musicians, writers — but as the show drifts deeper into its seventh year, the roster has increasingly included politicians and activists. Fragoso is an excellent interviewer of the Longform variety: He’s well-prepared, accommodating but not overly so, and acutely interested in the inner life of the person on the other side of the mic. A standard Talk Easy experience involves a solid display of verbal scaffolding with Fragoso providing guests a clear path to explore their own thoughts and feelings. There were a couple of standout Talk Easy entries this year (personally, I gravitated toward the Hiro Murai and Cate Blanchett episodes), but Fragoso’s chat with Ethan Hawke on the occasion of The Last Movie Stars is perhaps the clearest distillation of the podcast’s energy. Hawke has always exhibited a generous processing-out-loud presence as an interviewee, and this happens to match Talk Easy’s studied construction. Fragoso leads Hawke through the arc of his life and career — along with a deep reading of a pivotal scene in Before Midnight, catnip for the Before heads out there like myself — all of which eventually arrives at Hawke, still very much a busy actor, reflecting on his progress into older age and what’s left to look forward to.

Object of Sound, “My Anger Is My Friend (feat. Yaeji)”

In addition to writing accomplished books of poetry and prose, Hanif Abdurraqib has made some truly lovely works in the podcast medium. Just pull up Lost Notes: 1980 and Time Machine: The Score if you haven’t already; both are narrative projects that make good use of his literary voice. More recently, Abdurraqib has been hosting the seasonal music podcast Object of Sound, which primarily takes the form of an interview show highlighting his curatorial tastes, though the production occasionally likes to mix things up: A recent example was a delightful audio-collage episode about karaoke. As for the interviews, his chat with Yaeji, the Brooklyn-based Korean American musician, was a fun highlight from this year’s episodes. The conversation weaves freely among various aspects of Yaeji’s creative life, including her different relationships with the English and Korean languages as a bilingual artist and as someone who takes in art. There’s also a particularly compelling spot about the origins of a key motif that drives Yaeji’s upcoming debut album: her anger as a hammer, something to be wielded and viewed as a friendly tool.

Björk: Sonic Symbolism

Sure, Sonic Symbolism doesn’t necessarily qualify as a straightforward entry in a list of interview podcasts, yet the show is structured as a series of interviews with Björk as the subject and hook — and in some ways, if you allow me to be pretentious here, she does feel like her own interlocutor at times in this project. On paper, the podcast features the renowned Icelandic musical artist in conversation with the philosopher Oddný Eir and musical curator Ásmundur Jónsson, with each episode pegged to a different album from her oeuvre. As one would expect from the artist’s historically elliptical nature, Sonic Symbolism can be really tricky to get into, especially if you’re not already predisposed to her work. To begin with, it definitely could have used a better mic, and the conversations are often somewhat obtuse. But just surrender to the thing, man: The longer you marinate yourself in the mood of this whole production, the more it may start to click. You’re catching a glimpse of how Björk sees the world, art, her music, and all that, more or less in her own words, and that’s something remarkable to behold.

The Best Podcast Interviews of the Year (So Far)

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