Select Five

Celebrate the sounds of The Town with journalist Liam O’Donoghue, the host and producer of the popular local history podcast, East Bay Yesterday. Liam's show routinely covers the rich and underexplored tales of the East Bay's past, whether it's a deep dive into Emeryville's former "Rotten City" reputation, or a story about the long gone mass transit Key System that pre-dated BART

As the co-host of "Forum" on KQED Public Radio and a writer for the Atlantic, journalist Alexis Madrigal often reports on big ideas and urgent stories that affect the Bay Area and the world. But in his spare time, he loves running, gardening, and 70’s funk and disco. In our latest episode, Alexis talks about a wide-ranging selection of five tunes he holds dear from his past and p

February 2024 marks five whole years since Bar Shiru first opened to the public, and this podcast simply wouldn't exist without the creative partnership of its owners, Dan Gahr and Shirin Raza Gahr. To mark this special occasion, we gathered a few Select Five friends and supporters to the bar and recorded our very first episode in front of a live audience! Listen to Dan and Shirin'

We're honored to kick off 2024 with the esteemed Cheryl Dunye, a world-renowned filmmaker and director of episodic television. Cheryl's work includes the groundbreaking 1996 film The Watermelon Woman, which is part of the permanent cinema collection at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and was added to the Criterion Collection in 2023. She's also directed episodes of The Umbrella Aca

We made it through another challenging year and we couldn't be happier! From forced career changes to grieving the death of a pet, 2023 was a real struggle. But now that it's mostly in the rear view mirror, we can look back fondly at some of the musical highlights that kept us afloat. Brian's Selections: 5. Unknown Mortal Orchestra - "Nadja" 4. El Michaels Affair + Black Thought -

How do you turn a song into a scent? And what does music teach us about scent-making and its history? We take a deep dive into these questions with Saskia Wilson-Brown, whose mission is to disrupt, decolonize, and democratize perfumery. Saskia, who is Bay Area-bred, is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles, a nonprofit art studio t

Get inside the creative mind of music producer and ace remixer Trackademicks! Whether it's putting an amapiano spin on a '90s R&B ballad or mashing up two songs from disparate musical scenes, Track has a knack for weaving tunes from a variety of genres, eras, and tempos into fresh new joints that club DJs crave. In this episode we talk about five of his own remixes, his affinity to

It's time to deepen your disco knowledge with Patrick Lotilla, aka DJ Patrick. As a resident DJ at Bar Part Time in San Francisco, a key team member of Bar Shiru, where he curates records a couple of nights a week, and a co-founder of the Brouhaha party series that brought world class DJ talent to the Bay Area, Patrick is a big presence in the local nightlife scene. And his taste i

OPM, an acronym for Original Pilipino Music or Original Pinoy Music, is a term once used to describe pop ballads and other popular music styles originating from the Philippines starting in the late '70s. Since then, OPM has become a catchall phrase for music of any genre produced by Filipinos from around the world. And it's a subject Eduardo Daza Taylor IV (aka, ET IV) knows a lot

You asked, we answered -- so in honor of Valentine's Day we've got nothing but silly love songs for all your love problems! Inspired by the call-in radio shows of her youth in Barbados, Chef Sarah Kirnon serves up an eclectic stew of R&B and Brit new wave pop classics from the '70s and '80s as dedications to the listeners who submitted questions about their love lives. And since we