Over the years we’ve talked about music, memory, politics, travel, the craft of performing, and the art of living. These annual conversations have become a kind of time-lapse portrait: the same two people returning to the mic, but always a little changed.

This year, as Ben turns 82, the theme that emerges is that he is “still auditioning for the role of myself.” We talk about what it means to keep creating, to stay curious, and to hold on to your sense of fun as the outside world speeds up and your personal world contracts.

Ben is, as always, the consummate jazz philosopher. “History is what we make of it and what we live every day,” he tells me. “We’re all feeling pain, and you can’t deny it. [...] But the response to pain is something separate from the pain itself. And in that distance between the pain and the response to pain is where our work is.”

He shares stories from his days hosting NPR’s Jazz Alive and later Sidran on Record, explains how he came to be the first person to record Billy Joel’s “New York State Of Mind,” reflects on maintaining the outsider’s perspective, and weighs in on the latest curveball: AI-generated music.

If you’ve been following this series of birthday talks, then this is a great addition to the canon. If this is your first one, welcome - you’re dropping into the middle of a conversation that’s been going on for years, and will, I hope, keep going for many more.

In 2018, film editor, producer, writer, and director Mary Sweeney sat down for a wide-ranging conversation about her career — from growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, to collaborating with one of the most visionary directors of our time, David Lynch. That conversation traced her evolution as an artist, her pivotal role in shaping films like Lost Highway, The Straight Story, and Mulholland Drive, and the intimate creative and personal relationship she shared with Lynch.

Seven years later, in the wake of Lynch’s death in early 2025, Sweeney returns for a follow-up conversation, recorded in a Paris hotel room nearly to the day of the original talk. While she has grown and evolved in the intervening years, she is also, unmistakably, in the process of mourning. This new conversation captures a deeply human moment: a woman navigating the complexities of grief, memory, and creative identity after the loss of a longtime collaborator and partner.

Sweeney reflects not only on the legacy of her work with Lynch, but also on her ongoing life as an artist, mentor, and teacher. She speaks candidly about the challenge of being defined by a past she helped create, even as she seeks to shape new stories. There’s a tension between wanting to move forward and being drawn back to moments that shaped her — and a palpable vulnerability in her willingness to explore that contradiction publicly.

Paris itself plays a quiet role in the conversation — a place of reflection and ritual that has become part of Sweeney’s life in recent years. The setting adds to the emotional texture of the interview: past and present gently overlapping in a city known for memory and reinvention.

If the first conversation served as a kind of time capsule — a snapshot of a creative life at a particular moment — this follow-up serves as both an epilogue and a revision. It expands the story, complicates it, and deepens it. In the language of film, it might be called a director’s cut: longer, more revealing, more personal.

Ultimately, this episode is about how stories are shaped, reshaped, and sometimes reclaimed. About how we carry our experiences forward. And about how, even in the face of loss, we find ways to keep creating — and keep becoming.

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www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story

Moses Patrou has spent the past twenty-five years in New York, carving out a unique space as a multi-instrumentalist and bandleader. From early days in Madison, Wisconsin playing hand drums in hip hop bands, to immersing himself in Cuban and Brazilian traditions, to gigging across the city in every imaginable context, Patrou has done it all. During the pandemic, he taught himself to play organ—a transformation that has reshaped his sound and his role in the scene.

Here he reflects on the long road behind his new record Confession of a Fool - a soulful and striking record that represents the culmination of a lifetime in music - and what it means to make a defining statement at midlife. Patrou talks about the house fire that nearly took everything, the influence of his father (a piano player who named him after Mose Allison), and the difference between being a sideman and stepping into the spotlight.

“There’s a certain point where the music has to come through your experience,” he says. “It has to filter through your life.”

Today, on the ocassion of the 300th episode of The Third Story, there is no better person to talk to than Moses Patrou.

www.third-story.com
www.leosidran.substack.com
www.wbgo.org/podcast/the-third-story