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Look, as much as someone might want to be the next big best-selling author or pop music hit-maker, not everyone can be a flourishing artist. For those who want to know how creative types perfect their crafts and find success, podcasts offer an opportunity to listen to behind-the-scenes accounts of everything that went into some of the best stories and songs around. (If you pour yourself a drink, plug in your earbuds, and sit across from a cardboard cut-out, it's like swapping pro tips over a beer!) And for those who want to move beyond the storytellers they already love, there are podcasts out there for learning about creative processes that are a little harder to understand: using séances to inspire abstract paintings, and people who do their everyday jobs as beauticians, dominatrixes, and barbers like they're making art.
Do you react to a modern art gallery with a Farnsworthian “whaaa”? Don’t write off Magritte’s pipe or Calder’s mobiles just yet. Meet Tamar Avishai, the art history buff you wish was next to you as you stare blankly at a white canvas with some splotches of paint on it. In each episode, Avishai picks out a painting at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, interviews a stymied passerby, and explains the process and the history behind the work with an enthusiasm we only wish we could find in stuffy museum audio tours. Start with the episode on Piet Mondrian’s “Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue”—Avishai can make even abstract squares into a good story of establishing order after the destabilization of World War I. Listen Here
What time does a bail bondsman get to work? How about a 747 pilot? Or a professional pie-baker? In Working, Jacob Brogan interviews people about how they spend their days, and finds a surprising number of them who see their craft as a kind of artistry. Working has a few excellent industry-specific series: Check out the episodes on the horticulturist and director of correspondence at the White House, or the upcoming series on jobs threatened by a Trump presidency. But get started with an early episode about Eric Aleman, a barber who sees his work as an art, providing therapy and fades to the residents of Sunset Park, Brooklyn for the past 15 years. Listen Here
The song you play on repeat when you’re walking home lived through many iterations to make it to that final cut. On Song Exploder, composer Hrishikesh Hirway asks musicians to explain the process behind a song, from generating ideas to killing their darlings. The best episodes offer you behind-the-scenes glimpses for songs you already love, so pick your favorite artist and listen: Blonde Redhead, Joey Bada$$, Toro y Moi, Björk, and many, many more. Or if you just need a place to start, try the episode on “Time to Pretend,” where Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden of MGMT explain the how they used dorm room synths and druid capes, and made a hidden reference to ABBA’s "Dancing Queen." Listen Here
Unfortunately, the best, weirdest details of a reported story—the parts you’d want a friend to tell you at the bar—often don’t make it to the pages of a magazine or the best-seller list. So buy yourself a cocktail and listen to Longform, where storytellers from publications, books, and podcasts, including Ann Friedman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Ira Glass, explain how they work. They can write a kicker in their sleep, but these writers procrastinate and doubt themselves just like the rest of us. The next time you read something you love, check Longform: Odds are, one of the three hosts did too, and you can listen in on that conversation about what didn’t make it into the last draft. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of back catalog to get through: Try George Saunders talking about his short story collection Tenth of December, living kindly, and dealing with anxiety. Listen Here
So you’re sick of museum audio tours, and you’ve already taken Art History 101. Luckily, there’s still plenty of contemporary art to confuse even the most open-minded among us. The first season of SFMoMA’s Raw Material interviews artists about the ways they work with the unknown: séances, palmistry, chaos magick. Artists who choose ayahuasca ceremonies as artistic methods or inter-dimensional beings as muses need to offer an explanation—and on Raw Material, they certainly do. Start off with “The Vibration,” where Terence Koh explains a chapel he built for bees, and composer Nat Evans explains how he improvises music with biological rhythms. Listen Here
