Fictional Bands Hall of Fame

**Joanna Robinson** (0:05)
Hello, and welcome to House of R. I'm Joanna Robinson, and joining me today, two very special guests. Jessica McKenna is here. Hello. Hrishikesh Hirway is here. Hello. And we are so thrilled to be talking about fictional musical bands. I'm so excited.
Jessica, before we get started, I want to ask both of you, what do you feel like your bona fides are for being here?

**Jessica McKenna** (0:30)
Oh, great. No, that's great.
I think that I exist exclusively in fake music, I would say.

**Joanna Robinson** (0:37)
Yeah.

**Jessica McKenna** (0:39)
I'm like a musical comedian, and most of my music is, I would say, pretending that I know how to be musical, while wrapping itself around to accidentally having to learn a lot about music over the past decade or so. I write music and I improvise music, but really born out of a desire to pretend that I know how to create music.
And then that pretending became true.

**Joanna Robinson** (1:02)
Like, you're living the dream.

**Jessica McKenna** (1:03)
Yeah, you know, it's a real fake it. Maybe, maybe make it. Hey, thank you so much. Thank you.

**Joanna Robinson** (1:10)
And your bona fides.

**Hrishikesh Hirway** (1:12)
I'm a singer songwriter. I put out a bunch of albums over the years and then had a long period when I wasn't putting out anything and making any music, but I started a music podcast called Song Exploder, where I interviewed other musicians about how they make songs.

**Joanna Robinson** (1:27)
Yeah.

**Hrishikesh Hirway** (1:28)
And then I started making music again and now I'm doing both.

**Joanna Robinson** (1:31)
Can you talk about what your current projects, your current album that you're touring for?

**Hrishikesh Hirway** (1:35)
I just put out a record called In The Last Hour of Light.
That's the first album in 15 years. And yeah, I've been touring, doing album release shows, but it's kind of like half band concert shows where I'm playing with my full band, but it's also kind of half a book tour because the album is kind of a memoir and I wanted to treat it like a memoir. So I've also been doing like a book talk style conversation or like a song exploiter style conversation about the making of the album before we play.

**Joanna Robinson** (2:06)
Excellent. Jess, what are you currently working on that you want to tell folks about?

**Jessica McKenna** (2:11)
Currently in rewrites in year six of an original musical. My comedy partner, Zach Reno and I, along with David Wayne, wrote a musical that was originally conceived as a feature and then we decided to pivot it to stage and we did more than a workshop, less than a show.

**Joanna Robinson** (2:31)
It was a show.

**Jessica McKenna** (2:31)
It was a show, yeah. Here in Los Angeles in February at the Chaplin Studios.
Now we're doing some rewrites, re-breaking some songs to, yeah, I guess send it to Broadway. I'm saying it here, so now it'll happen.

**Joanna Robinson** (2:45)
You guys have someone in common between the two of you, Josh Molina, right?

**Hrishikesh Hirway** (2:50)
I tried to get Josh to let me get in to see that show, and I could not get a ticket.

**Jessica McKenna** (2:55)
I'm so sorry.

**Hrishikesh Hirway** (2:56)
It was a hot ticket.

**Jessica McKenna** (2:57)
It was. You should have come to me.

**Joanna Robinson** (3:00)
Now you have the closer hook up. Sounds good. All right. So we're going to get into Fictional Bands and The Vampire Lestat right after this.
This episode of House of R is presented to you by Target.

**Jessica McKenna** (3:13)
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**Joanna Robinson** (3:15)
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**Joanna Robinson** (4:30)