Ora Cogan on the politics of 'Hard Hearted Woman,' the hollowing-out of folk tradition, and why her forties have been the best time of her life to be playing music.
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Today, we’re putting The Tonearm’s needle on singer and songwriter Ora Cogan.
Ora Cogan’s music pulls from folk, country, psychedelia, and gothic rock. She holds all of it without flinching, as heard on the fantastic album Hard Hearted Woman, her latest release on Sacred Bones.
Ora has worked as a photojournalist and human rights advocate, and those experiences feed directly into how she thinks about art, resistance, and what the music is actually for. We get into all of that, including her creative process, the long arc of folk music as a living tradition, and why staying soft in hard times is a form of defiance in itself.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Ora Cogan’s Hard Hearted Woman)
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00:00 Introduction
01:13 Living with Hard Hearted Woman after release
03:21 The air quotes around "artist" — and what they mean
05:11 Portfolio careers and art in the real world
05:55 "Honey" and the protest song without slogans
15:33 Zero-sum capitalism and projected fear
18:44 An alternate life: silversmithing, nipple tassels, photojournalism
24:49 Usefulness, fellowship, and measuring nothing
27:17 Art as spell — changing your relationship to pain
29:07 Collaboration and the band behind the name
36:14 Folk music, LARPing as peasants, and what "Katie Cruel" means
45:12 Closing
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Visit Ora Cogan at http://www.oracogan.com
and follow on Bluesky → https://bsky.app/profile/oracogan.bsky.social
Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/oracogan
Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/oracoganmusic
and YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/oracogan
Purchase Ora Cogan’s album 'Hard Hearted Woman' from Sacred Bones → https://www.sacredbonesrecords.com/products/sbr-379-ora-cogan-hard-hearted-woman
Bandcamp → https://oracogan.bandcamp.com/album/hard-hearted-woman
or Qobuz → https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/album/hard-hearted-woman-ora-cogan/cy468vqz5snvp
and listen on your streaming platform of choice → https://oracogan.lnk.to/Hardheartedwoman
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For extensive show notes, links, and podcast information, go to https://podcast.thetonearm.com
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