Podcast Night at The Indy
Partially Seated
How Long Gone
Jonah Wiener of Blackbird Spyplane
plus musical guest Madeline Kenney
Another Planet Entertainment and The Independent are committed to producing safe events. The City and County of San Francisco has mandated all patrons attending events at The Independent on or after 9/15 are required to show proof of full vaccination (must be 2 weeks past final dose). Masks are also required. For more information, visit our Health & Safety page.
* Policy is subject to change
This event is 21 and over.
$25.00 – General Admission (Advance)
$30.00 – General Admission (Doors)
*plus applicable service fees
All doors & show times subject to change.
How Long Gone feels like when you used to have friends. Assuming your friends were bicoastal elites, Chris Black and Jason Stewart. And they welcomed you to silently join them as they ushered in a parade of guests – playwright Jeremy O. Harris, musician Phoebe Bridgers, actress Hari Nef – to chop it up three times a week. Did you ever laugh with your friends like that?
The guests of How Long Gone come from media, fashion, literature, music, and business – a common throughline isn’t immediately obvious. But each guest – Tavi Gevinson, Mickey Drexler Faye Webster, Bowen Yang, and many more – are tied together after they surrender to the bedrock charm of the show. As the unscriptable rapport between Chris and Jason seeps into the guests, conversations bloom and take on a life of their own. It’s an honest exchange happening. There is a lot of humor, nothing is sacred. It’s revealing, it’s intimate, it’s engaging – it’s everything you want to happen in a real conversation.
How Long Gone is a podcast that was created out of pandemic boredom by two old friends. Chris was in New York and Jason was in Los Angeles. Most of these details remain accurate, but what How Long Gone has become is much more than it was in its infancy. They set out to make a podcast and ended up creating a cosmos instead. As Chris told Vogue, the greatest reward is “creating a universe of interesting and engaging people who just want to come together to have a good time.”
At the end of the day, Oakland-based Madeline Kenney just wants to be surprised. An artist with a rare openness to exploration and an appetite for the novel, her pursuit of music wasn’t always a foregone conclusion, though she’s played piano her whole life. Hers is a path peppered with diversions, in the sense that she lets herself be amused. She’s studied neuroscience, been a dancer, a baker, a visual artist, and yes, a musician, but even that role comes with nearly too many hyphenates to count. But rather than existing as offshoot paths, her many selves are always entangled, encouraging one another. All of it shows up in the songs.
To chart the trajectory of her career from the release of her critically-acclaimed debut album Night Night at The First Landing in 2017 to her now fourth studio release, A New Reality Mind, is to witness a simultaneous evolution and unfurling—her creative precision curing as her musical palette becomes evermore unrestricted and prismatic, stretching to contain the curiosity of her roving mind.
This voraciousness shows up everywhere in her work, from the layered sonic tensions in her music, to the seemingly endless roster of musicians she’s collaborated with. Since releasing Night Night (which was co-produced with Chaz Bear of Toro y Moi), she’s shared music near annually, including albums Perfect Shapes (2018) and Sucker’s Lunch (2020), which were both co-produced with Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak / Flock of Dimes), with whom Kenney also released split EP The Sisters / Helpless (2019). Sucker’s Lunch also featured a cameo from Kurt Wagner, of the perennial cult-favorite Lambchop. Meanwhile, Kenney also finds time to collaborate beyond her own project—she’s lent vocals to multiple Toro y Moi projects, co-produced records with artists such as A.O. Gerber, and directed music videos for Hand Habits, Boy Scouts, and Olivia Kaplan.
Her newest release sees Kenney at the height of her personal creative power. Produced and recorded alone in her basement, the songs on A New Reality Mind pulse with the vibrance of a fiercely inquisitive mind. They’re the result of Kenney’s penchant for wonder and an invitation to look at the world through her continually-searching lens.