Interviews

As part of Crosby, Stills & Nash, the British singer-songwriter helped define a West Coast sound. Here, he discusses the influence of Buddy Holly, The Everly Brothers and marijuana on his career, as well as his memoir, Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life.

The songwriter behind the much-beloved "Hey Sandy" returns after eight years with Dear Mark J. Mulcahy, I Love You; Fresh Air tech contributor Alexis Madrigal reflects on the online streaming and DVD rental service's bizarrely personalized microgenres; and a new HBO comedy takes place in the geriatric extended-care wing of a California hospital.

World War II is often thought of as a good and just war — a war the U.S. had to fight. But it wasn't that simple. Public debate was heated between interventionism, which President Roosevelt supported, and isolationism, which aviator Charles Lindbergh became an unofficial spokesman for.

The pop star has a flair for the extravagant, to say the least, but his album The Diving Board is stripped down. He tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross about the "Elton John excess," his fear of sex as a young man, and how Liberace's example encouraged John to make the piano a star instrument.

Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele each have a white mother and black father, and a lot of the jokes on their Comedy Central show are about race. Peele tells Fresh Air that their backgrounds allow them to do characters others would feel uncomfortable doing.

As the brains behind the hip-hop parody group responsible for digital shorts like "D--- in a Box," Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer have produced some of the funniest Saturday Night Live material in recent memory. Here, they talk about comedy, Yo! MTV Raps and adolescence.

Industrial musicals were like Broadway shows, only written and performed for corporate sales meetings or conventions. And as ridiculous as the songs were — "My bathroom, my bathroom is a private kind of place" — they were often delivered by very talented people.

Giordano has been obsessed with 1920s jazz since he first heard it on his grandparents' Victrola. His band the Nighthawks performs the music heard on the HBO series Boardwalk Empire.

David Edelstein says it was a "miraculous year" for movies. David Bianculli says two Netflix shows this year changed the game. Maureen Corrigan says it's just a fluke that 9 of the 11 titles she picked were written by female authors. And Ken Tucker picks his 10 favorite albums.

The screenwriter, producer, director and actor, whose name has become synonymous with American comedy, talks about his penchant for spoofs and his decades-long friendship with Carl Reiner. Brooks is among a handful of people who've won Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards.