How Good It Is

How Good It Is


Latest Episodes

180: Green River
January 18, 2026

Hidy, friends and neighbors. Good to be partnering up with Claude on another podcasting project! This episode is about a song whose title vaguely sounds like the result of a chemical spill, but which is actually a classic piece of rockabilly.John Fogerty

179: Influential Women, Pt. 4–Pattie Boyd
January 11, 2026

Ladies and Gentlemen, the queen of them all.Pattie Boyd was the inspiration for a huge number of songs. Some of them went to the top of the charts, some of them weren’t released as singles, but nearly all of the songs about her are well-known, and

178b–Naptime’s Over
January 03, 2026

Where have I been?Life, Cousin. Life got in the way. A lot of things sidetracked me, and even though I was keeping the feed for this show active, I still had several moments of “Yeah! Gonna get back to it soon!” alongside an equal number of &

178: Influential Women, Part 3–Jane Asher
September 18, 2024

Of all the people in the Beatles’ inner circle, Jane Asher is perhaps the most mysterious.Not because she’s reclusive–far from it, in fact. Jane Asher has spent lots of time on stage and on screens large and small from the time she was

177: Influential Women, Pt.2–Rosanna Arquette
August 02, 2024

In case you haven’t heard, we’re on a little bit of a journey, meeting various women who have had an influence on multiple pop songs. In today’s episode we’ll be visiting Rosanna Arquette.The interesting thing here is that whether

176: Influential Women, Pt1–Renee Fladen-Kamm
July 05, 2024

For the next several episodes, we’re going to take a look at the women who inspired some of the Rock Era’s most iconic songs.There will be six episodes in this series; five of them will concentrate on a specific woman, each of whom inspired m

175: In the Still of the Night
June 16, 2024

After this many episodes, it gives me a moment of “Huh, isn’t that interesting” when I start writing the post for an episode and discover that I haven’t covered a song from that particular year before. In this case, that year would

174: Don’t Fear the Reaper
April 06, 2024

This is an episode I wrote in the Southern Studio, so I may have been in a better mood than usual to write it than I ordinarily am, given the subject matter.When Blue yster Cult first got together, they were a college band from Stony Brook, New York.

173: Wichita Lineman
January 18, 2024

By 1968, Glen Campbell had moved from session musician to a star in his own right. His single “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” written by Jimmy Webb, was a huge hit for him. So when Campbell decided he needed another song, he turned back to Web

172: A World War Two Christmas
December 25, 2023

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate!Today we’re looking at three Christmas songs that are born from the anxieties of World War Two. Two of the songs aren’t direct references to the war itself, but it clearly informed the subject. Themes of