Jesse Cohen Just Wants To Chat With Your Favorite Artists On ‘No Effects’


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Most podcasts are born out of a disproportionate amount of love for a subject, the sort of burning passion about a topic that leads a person to rant into a microphone for an hour or so for an audience of dozens.

Jesse Cohen started his podcast No Effects out of love — for the form, for talking with creative people — but with a healthy dose of hatred thrown in. As a member of Brooklyn indie-rock band Tanlines, he’d suffered through so many bad interviews — “literally hundreds of interviews” where he had to answer “how I got the name of my band” and could feel the person on the other end crafting the narrative of a piece as he spoke — that he wanted to create a space for artists to unwind and really converse away from the transactional world of the music press.

“I’m a huge fan of podcasts and I wanted to create a podcast that, as an artist, I’d want to be on,” he said when I spoke to Cohen over the phone this week.

Cohen is a long-time listener of podcasts, favoring raw and conversational shows like Bodega Boys and Dan Savage’s Savage Love. The idea to do his own podcast where he sat and chatted with a bunch of different creators grew naturally out of his listening habits and Cohen’s love for talking.

“In my band, Eric [Emm] is the singer and I do the banter,” he explained. “I like to talk. This podcast is like my solo album, just 75 hours of me talking.”

Cohen wanted No Effects to be a place where artists could “talk about who they are in their own words” and he goes out of his way to make artists comfortable, travelling around New York City with a mobile recording set-up and meeting them wherever they can talk.

And to hear Jesse tell it, that extra bit of effort to make the artist feel at ease is working.

“I’m not exaggerating. Nine out of ten people have told me afterward that they loved the show, that it’s definitely therapeutic to have this sort of space,” he said. “I know for a fact that it really resonates with the people I have on.”

Of course, the beauty of a recorded conversation is that you don’t have to take Jesse’s word for it. And listening to an episode No Effects, you can hear the warmth of two people who have lived through the same sort of experiences swapping stories.

“That’s also a big part of the show,” Cohen said of the on-air camaraderie between musicians. “There’s a built-in distrust of the press but this breaks through all of that. Even with artists who don’t know my band, that relationship cuts through.”

When I asked Jesse if he’s worried about getting a little too niche, perhaps delving into topics that will only make sense to the two people sitting in the room, he’s not concerned.

“I think the show could be a little bit more inside baseball, to be honest,” he said. “I mean that’s sort of what you sign up for with this podcast. It’s a long, deep dive with an artist in a room for 45 minutes, opening up a window into their life.”

With that in mind, it makes sense that Cohen’s favorite moments on the show — which just started its second season with its 72nd episode– are all ultra-intimate looks into musicians day-to-day lives and not some grabby pull quote. He mentions an episode where he talked to The Geologist from Animal Collective about what it was like to be a dad and get recognized while taking his kids to the park and he shouted out an upcoming episode in which he talked to Fleet Foxes Robin Pecknold about how Pecknold went back to school.

The podcast was born out of a certain distaste for the easy headline and even after 70+ hour-long interviews Cohen doesn’t consider himself a part of the machine that’s looking for good angles and snappy narratives.

“I never wanted to be a member of the press, a music journalist or a critic in any way,” he said. “That’s not something that I aspire to be. I just felt that there should be a show like mine.”

No Effects is out now. Check out the most recent episode — an interview with Laura Marling — here.

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