In my last update, I linked to a lot of my recent stories based on interviews that I’ve done.

Here are full transcribes of a couple of my favorites from the bunch.

Toad the Wet Sprocket’s New Constellation was without any question, one of my favorite albums of 2013. You know, you get nervous when one of your favorite artists/bands makes a new album after a long time away. I’m not one of those “don’t ruin the legacy” kind of guys who just wants a band to go out and play the hits, but at the same time, I manage my expectations appropriately. New Constellation is as good as any of the albums that Toad put out back in their heyday and perhaps even better. If you haven’t heard it, stop what you’re doing and go listen!

It was a lot of fun to talk music with Toad frontman Glen Phillips. I’ve tried to set something up to talk with Glen a few times in the past to talk and it never came together. I’m really glad that this time it happened — New Constellation provided the perfect forum for us to have a conversation at long last.

Speaking of a long time coming, it was such a pleasure to get the chance to interview Huey Lewis. The roots of this conversation date back to December of 2012 when I got an email asking me if I’d be interested in speaking with Huey about the 30th anniversary of the classic album Sports. For various reasons, it didn’t happen (I got the final “it’s not gonna happen” email in August) and I was pretty bummed.

When Huey booked a show here in the Cleveland area, I saw my opportunity to take a second shot at having a conversation and once I got him on the phone, it’s pretty clear that we could have talked for a long time. As it is, we spoke for nearly 50 minutes. When I moved to wrap up (being mindful of the fact that we had been on the phone for almost an hour), he said “Oh, you want to get going — that’s alright, I’ve been talking for quite a while.” He told me to come backstage and say hi.

I definitely took him up on that offer and when we met up, he was very complimentary of the interview and said “You know, a lot of the interviews I do can be pretty rough. Yours was good — you knew your stuff.”

All of the above is a long-winded way of saying that the conversation was a lot of fun — it goes in some interesting directions, I think, including some chatter about how he came to work with Stan Getz on the Small World album — it’s a good story.