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THE SONIC ROAD PODCAST
The stuff that doesn't make it to YouTube.
What's up everybody — Beau here.
Episode 35 is one I'd been looking forward to for a long time. It will be available Tuesday July 7th, 2026 on Youtube, Spotify, & Apple Podcasts, but you guys here at the newsletter, always get the inside scoop first. So here it is.
I got to sit down with Jadd Shickler, the founder of Blues Funeral Recordings, the director of Magnetic Eye Records, and the singer of Blue Heron. If you've been listening to the show, you already know how much the music from his labels ends up in these conversations. So getting the guy behind it all to walk me through his entire journey, from a kid taping songs off the radio to running two of the best labels in heavy music, was a real treat.
But what stuck with me most about this conversation wasn't the history, as great as it was. It was the philosophy underneath all of it. Jadd runs his labels on passion first, business second, and hearing him lay that out reminded me exactly why I started this podcast in the first place. So let me get into it.
Jadd's whole story really starts with an older brother and a stack of cassettes.
He's about my age, and like a lot of us, his gateway wasn't the radio — it was a sibling bringing home something cooler than what everyone else was being fed. In his case it was an older half-brother, eight years his senior, coming back from college in New York in the mid-eighties with tapes of stuff you couldn't hear anywhere in New Mexico where Jadd was growing up. New wave at the time — Depeche Mode, New Order, Alphaville. Not heavy at all. But that's not the point. The point is the idea it planted in his head. There's music out there that nobody's trying to sell you. Somebody has to actually go find it and bring it to you. And it wasn't just different, it was better than the stuff on the radio and on MTV.
That single idea ended up shaping his entire life. Jadd described how it lived right underneath everything he took in from then on — not just music, but movies, comics, books, all of it. The constant hunt for the thing that not everybody knows about, the thing that's actually better than the popular thing but somehow flying under the radar. And if you've ever been that person in your friend group, the one always digging for the record nobody else has heard yet, you know exactly what he's talking about.
The Wild World of the Van Gogh Truthers
In 1990, after years of practicing medicine and reviewing Van Gogh’s case history via his hundreds of letters, Arenberg published a paper in JAMA diagnosing Van Gogh as suffering not from epilepsy, as the artist’s physician claimed a century earlier, but from Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear affliction that can cause vertigo, of which Van Gogh complained, and tinnitus, a persistent ringing in the ears. Ménière’s, to Arenberg, could better explain Van Gogh’s decision to slice off his ear. After retiring, in 2017, Arenberg recommitted himself to studying Van Gogh and became convinced that art historians had made an even more alarming mistake: Van Gogh had not committed suicide. He’d been murdered.
Read the article for free on Air Mail, a lively digital read for the world citizen, with stories both foreign and domestic that you won’t find anywhere else, written by some of the world’s finest journalists.
His path through music mirrors a lot of ours. Ninth grade he's a Depeche Mode and New Order kid. Tenth grade he discovers Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. Eleventh grade, grunge hits, and suddenly it's Alice in Chains and Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. What got him about grunge was the same thing that got a lot of us — that these bands just did not care. They weren't crafting an image or trying to live up to somebody else's idea of cool. They were doing their own thing and they didn't care who approved. As Jadd put it, they don't care, and they're great. That combination was irresistible.