Written by Tina Houser
There’s a moment early in the conversation when the old argument surfaces again — the one that keeps getting resurrected like a zombie headline every few years: rock is dead. But then Sass Jordan laughs. Brian Tichy shrugs. And somewhere between the riffs, the memories of Santa Clarita living-room drum takes, and the stubborn refusal to polish away the grit, the myth quietly collapses under its own weight.
Because when you hear what they built together as Something Unto Nothing, you don’t hear nostalgia. You hear combustion.
The project didn’t start as a band. It didn’t even start as a plan. It started the way most great rock records......
Allie Colleen Is the Real Deal: Heartbreak, Horror Movies, and the Kind of Country That Leaves a Mark
Written by Tina Houser
Allie Colleen doesn’t just sing songs. She opens a trap door under the room and lets everybody fall straight into whatever feeling they’ve been trying not to touch. On Press Play Radio Conversations with The Don and Tina, she came in funny, sharp, wildly relatable, and completely unfiltered — the kind of artist who can pivot from Bath & Body Works heartbreak to Michael Jackson devotion to a full-on rant about AI butchering tattoos, all without losing the thread of who she is. And that thread is rare: she’s real, she’s witty,......
Written by Tina Houser
Jet Jurgensmeyer has already lived two careers before most artists finish figuring out their first chorus. Long before he was writing reflective country songs about sunsets, identity, and what it actually means to grow up in America, audiences knew him as Spanky in The Little Rascals (2014) and spotted him across television and film in projects like American Sniper, Adventures in Babysitting, and Last Man Standing. But if there’s one thing that becomes obvious within minutes of hearing him speak on Press Play Radio Conversations with Don and Tina, it’s that acting didn’t shape his voice nearly as much as Nashville did—and maybe even more than......
Written by Tina Houser
There’s something quietly powerful about hearing a familiar news voice step into a different kind of spotlight. For more than three decades, Dan Ashley has delivered the evening news to the San Francisco Bay Area with steady authority. But on Press Play Conversations, Ashley revealed another side of himself — not just as a musician, but as a storyteller shaped by memory, optimism, and a lifelong connection to the emotional pull of great songs.
Ashley’s songwriting lives exactly where you’d expect it to for someone who’s spent a career telling real stories. When the conversation turned to his song “Outside Looking In,”......
Written by Tina Houser
There’s a certain kind of country voice that doesn’t just carry melody—it carries memory. The kind that feels like it already knows your story before the chorus even arrives. When Buddy Jewell sat down with The Don and Tina on Press Play Conversations, what unfolded wasn’t just another career retrospective—it was a reminder of what authenticity sounds like when it refuses to age out of relevance.
Long before reality television turned into a fast-moving conveyor belt of overnight fame, Jewell stepped onto the stage of Nashville Star and didn’t just win—it overwhelmed the moment. He arrived there after a decade of......
Written by Tina Houser
Morgan Myles doesn’t enter a conversation so much as she pours into it — quick-witted, self-aware, emotionally unguarded, and carrying the kind of voice that makes even casual banter feel like the opening line of a great American song. When she returned to Press Play Radio Conversations with The Don and Tina, the exchange moved the same way her music does: funny one minute, bruised the next, then suddenly wide open and soaring.
She was speaking on the eve of her album release, surrounded by the beautiful chaos that seems to follow artists who still insist on making things the hard way — with instinct, obsession, and heart. There were hundreds of......
By Tina Houser
Some artists arrive polished. Others arrive possessed.
Bec Lauder feels like the latter.
By the time Press Play Conversations caught up with Bec Lauder, the frontwoman of Bec Lauder and The Noise was already sounding less like an emerging artist and more like someone in the middle of becoming exactly who she was meant to be. Her album The Vessel isn’t just a collection of alternative rock songs — it’s a messy, magnetic coming-of-age document about heartbreak, self-discovery, timing, and the kind of emotional collisions that leave permanent marks.
And Bec Lauder doesn’t hide any of it.
“I’m the only lyricist,” she says. “My......
Written by Tina Houser
Some bands arrive polished. Autumn Academy arrives real.
When Press Play Conversations sat down with Brandon, Jose, and Cromer, there was no script, no filter — just a band that still believes music should feel something. In a world leaning hard into automation, Autumn Academy stands firmly in the messier, more meaningful space of human creation.
Their discovery story says it all. One TikTok clip turned into a deep dive, and suddenly the songs weren’t just playing — they were landing. Tracks like “Comfortable Grave,” “Another Tomorrow,” “Reset,” and “Burning Up” don’t just sound good......
Written by Tina Houser
The hair is shorter, the jeans a little more lived-in, and the stages swapped from mirrored platforms to wide-open festivals. But the sound? The sound still hits like glam thunder.
Patrick Stone and Richie Onari of Sweet joined The Don and Dean Baldwin in a candid Press Play interview that quickly transformed from a chat into a mission statement. At the center of the conversation? The new single, “Little Miracle.” And from the moment Dean dropped the needle, one thing was clear — Sweet isn’t clinging to nostalgia. They’re evolving the DNA of one of rock’s most underrated juggernauts.
“We wanted to show Sweet thinking in the......
Written by Tina Houser
Savannah Dean Reeves doesn’t write songs so much as she lets them happen to her. They arrive quietly—sometimes as a single word, sometimes as a restless thought looping in her head while she sits alone in her car—and by the time she realizes what’s happening, the emotion has already turned into melody. That instinctive, almost surrendered approach to songwriting is what gives Reeves her edge:C a voice that feels lived-in, a delivery that carries both vulnerability and warning, and a tone that suggests she’s still discovering just how powerful she really is.
On Press Play Conversations, Reeves comes across the same way her music......
