What do you do when the gig you do on the side, that off-hours hustle to help pay the bills and keep busy in service of your real work, becomes the thing that attracts acclaim and recognition? Do you lean into the success? Does the side project become your life?
Hrishikesh Hirway did not expect he would become a podcast guy, but the show he created and hosts, Song Exploder, took off, winning awards and making the leap to becoming a Netflix series. Then came other podcasts—maybe you know him from The West Wing Weekly, or as Samin Nosrat's buddy from the show Home Cooking.
Yet all along the way, Hirway still felt the gravitational pull back to his original love of music as a singer/songwriter. This past spring, he released In The Last Hour Of Light, his first full-length album in 15 years. "The most central part of me is this music. It's my primary identity, and it's the thing that I am most passionate about and have been doing before I ever started making podcasts," Hirway said. "It's taken me a long time to get back here."
In this week's episode of Try Hard, Alex talks with Hirway about the challenges of dividing time with your creativity, how he rediscovered his artistic process, and how he approached his new album in different ways.
Try Hard is also available wherever you find podcasts: RSS here, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. You can subscribe to Try Hard and other Defector podcasts on our YouTube channel. The transcript to this week's episode can be found here.
