The Walter Martin Radio Hour airs Sunday nights at 8pm on WEXT 97.1/106.1 upstate NY. New episodes appear every other Friday on this Substack and update on all podcast apps.
This week’s episode is all about the coolest instrument out there. The badass of the band. The instrument with the most direct access to our guts: the drums.
I’ve always sensed that all the best drummers are guided by a system of beliefs of some sort—a sort of artistic philosophy that informs every whack of the snare and every stomp of the hi-hat. So today we’re going to investigate some of those philosophies as we listen to a handful of my favorite drummers pound their way through a handful of great songs.
I’m a drummer at heart and as a songwriter I have spent decades obsessing over drum parts—writing beats and grooves and trying to figure out how to make songs have a unique boogie. That is to say, I think about this stuff a lot.
I had tons of fun in this episode trying to articulate some of my deepest (darkest) thoughts about drumming. It was difficult to keep a lid on my emotions so please forgive some occasional yelling and my possible overuse of the words ‘incredible’ ‘fantastic’ ‘wonderful’ ‘thrilling’ ‘out-of-control’ etc. I’m hopefully getting a thesaurus for Christmas.
ALSO! Every Monday, I’ve been releasing (for paid subscribers) lengthy playlists of great music — mostly stuff that’s relevant to the current episodes of this (free) radio show. It’s called Music for Your Week.
The radio show will always be free but if you want to support this project, receive these playlists, other music recommendations and all the stuff I’m going to be sharing soon, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s very cheap so join if you can, or give it to someone as a gift!
Thanks!
-walt
If you have any thoughts or questions or anything that you’d like me to play and respond to on the air send me a (brief!) voice memo to info@waltermartinmusic.com and I’ll hopefully get it on an upcoming show.
As always, I don’t do any prep research or Googling for these shows, I just use information that’s either in my head or on the record sleeve in front of me. So please enjoy some occasional old-school imprecise information. And please send me any corrections, comments, questions, requests or complaints.
You can add the podcast version of this radio show to Apple podcasts from my Substack and it’ll update weekly (that’s what I’d do).
Episode 18: Drums & Drummers