Yasi Goes Deep

“And Yasi Salek, mid-level-famous podcaster,” said Salek over Zoom, taking a sip from a turquoise Hello Kitty mug. She wore a Smiths T-shirt and big silver hoops, her bob swept off to one side.

To the many fans of Bandsplain, Salek is in fact quite famous — just ask the podcast’s community on Reddit, which bubbles with show commentary like an untamed jug of kombucha. In each episode, she and an expert guest explain the history and significance of, and I’m quoting the intro here, “a cult band or iconic artist.” Since the show began airing on Spotify in 2021, Salek has covered Pearl Jam, The Smashing Pumpkins, Mazzy Star, Radiohead, Insane Clown Posse, Weezer, Tracy Chapman, Phish, My Chemical Romance, and Lil’ Kim, among many others. If you’re seized by nostalgia and want to go deep on your favorite band, or if your music education skipped a certain artist and you’re trying to understand what their deal is, Bandsplain is the best place to start.

The podcast is also an antidote to the brain-torching effects of the short-form video content that now dominates our digital lives. Episodes routinely exceed three (and sometimes four) hours, as the host and her guest — often a music critic or fellow podcaster — probe the finer details of a band’s discography. The show isn’t at risk of slipping into academic overload, though. Salek delivers her forensic research with an easy, self-deprecating sense of humor. In life and on-air, she speaks in a way that’s syrupy and disaffected, with a style of vocal fry that couldn’t have been forged anywhere else but Southern California.

To understand Salek’s success as a podcaster, I turned to Sean Fennessey, host of The Big Picture podcast and head of content at The Ringer, which is owned by Spotify and has been Bandsplain’s home since 2022. He told me that Salek has all the right traits for this line of work: She’s charismatic and engaging, smart and informed, and she has a coherent way of structuring her show and communicating its core idea. But that doesn’t fully explain Salek’s magnetism. “I think there’s also a simultaneous self-aggrandizement and self-sadness, honestly, that is a unique flavor that makes her very relatable to a lot of people,” Fennessey said. “It’s an evident confidence and an evident vulnerability.”

Before Salek arrived at podcasting fame in her late 30s, she lived many other lives. While writing this story, I found it nearly impossible to account for every single job she’s ever had while staying anywhere close to my assigned word count, a task I failed at anyway. “She’s got a colored past,” said the musician Bethany Cosentino, a solo artist and one half of Best Coast, who met Salek over a decade ago through mutual friends in L.A.’s punk and DIY scene. (Cosentino and Jennifer Clavin recorded Bandsplain’s theme song, which swerves hard into Valley Girl elocution and serves as a catchy fuck-you to the haters who have called the host’s voice “annoying.”) But Salek’s ambition was always to work in music.

Salek has vivid childhood memories of driving around in the family Toyota with her mother, listening to Madonna. “For a little girl in the mid-’80s to early ‘90s, it doesn’t get much better than that, in terms of the divine feminine,” she told me. Circa age nine, while being babysat by a family friend’s daughter, she heard “Give It Away” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers for the first time, and a world beyond her mother’s Madonna tapes cracked open. “I was like, What is this?” Salek recalled.

MTV was her gateway to ’90s music culture, including both Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses. When she got a little older, Salek started going to backyard punk shows and music festivals, like the annual KROQ Weenie Roast and Lollapalooza, which was still a touring show at the time. “It can’t be overstated how Alice in Wonderland it was to go to a place full of quote-unquote alternative people,” she said. “It was also really head shop-ass — a part of ’90s culture that people like to forget, where there was hacky sack happening and bongs being sold — but if I could bottle that feeling…”

What was the feeling, exactly? “Like, there’s so much to discover here. There’s so much I don’t know about. And I'm going to love it,” she said. Not long ago, Salek went to see the artist 2hollis at The Echo in L.A. and found herself amazed by the energy of the young crowd, which vibrated with the same excitement she’d felt at punk shows when she was a teenager. “I was like, It’s still here. It’s just not for me anymore — and it shouldn’t be. I’m fucking 43. I should be listening to adult-oriented radio rock-and-roll by The Fray,” she said. (Hours before we spoke, she published a Substack post titled “It’s time to put some respect on The Fray’s name.”)

By the time she was a teenager, Salek knew she wanted to be a music journalist. She loved MTV’s female veejays and Sassy magazine, which published a column called “Cute Band Alert.” “Teen magazines of the ’90s, and specifically Sassy, did a lot of work for dismantling the idea that you couldn’t have expertise while being girlish,” she said. When Salek picked up a copy of Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana in a used bookstore, she found her north star for music writing: “I wanted to do what Gina Arnold did in that book.”

In college at UC Santa Barbara, Salek pursued writing while going to shows and beginning to amass her now-legendary CV, which follows in incomplete detail. The summer before school started, she worked for a shady autograph dealer who had in his possession an Oscar belonging to Judy Garland. Salek landed a much better job at the record store Morninglory Music by showing up with her resume and a mix tape every day until the manager hired her. “You have to ask,” she said, sagely. “The worst thing that happens is that they say no for 15 to 20 days in a row, until you wear down their will to live, and then you get to work at the record store!”

As a student, Salek started writing for the Santa Barbara Independent, a weekly newspaper, covering music and movies. She found newspaper prose boring — too technical, with its focus on good, clean copy. This alone was instructive. “I wanted to write as me,” she said.

After graduating college early, Salek spent a year in San Francisco, interning at XLR8R magazine and working in sales at ABB (Always Bigger and Better) Records, an underground hip-hop label in Oakland. She wrote for Vapors, a “graffiti and lifestyle magazine,” where she eventually became the music editor — “not a difficult or prestigious job.” (She earned roughly $250 a month.) By age 22, Salek had made her way to New York. She worked customer service for an online streetwear shop called Digital Gravel and interned at Complex, the editor-in-chief of which was the boyfriend of a close friend. “I had a little bit of special treatment in the sense that I would go in hungover, sit on his couch, and tap-tap-tap out little stories about sneakers or raw Japanese denim,” she said.

Salek grabbed bylines wherever she could — at Mass Appeal, Inked, Interview — and launched a women’s streetwear e-commerce site called Cultist that carried brands like MadeMe and Married to the Mob. She built out that project while attending business school at the University of Southern California, from which she graduated in 2009. “I’m not a good businesswoman, and [Cultist] didn’t ultimately yield anything,” said Salek, who subsequently transformed the site into a blog. Jobs at Buzznet (“a pop punk-slash-scene website”), the skate company Altamont, and the concert archive Setlist.fm followed.

Amid these professional moves, Salek lived with musicians and went on the road with them, too, sometimes just for kicks and sometimes as a tour manager. The latter isn’t much fun: It’s all sound checks, collecting cash, and making sure people get to the right place on time, with none of the catharsis of expressing one’s artistic truth every night. “Also, this was a real time of partying. I can’t even believe that I got it together enough to collect the money,” she noted.

But sometimes Salek expressed herself onstage, too. Her voice grew very small when she told me that she used to perform stand-up around L.A., having taken classes at Flappers, a comedy club in Burbank. I’m not sure whether she soft-pedaled her delivery because she felt sheepish about her short-lived comedy career, or if she intuited, correctly, that learning another tidbit about her astonishingly full life would break my brain. Either way, I survived, and she shouldn’t have been embarrassed. Cosentino saw Salek do stand-up at a benefit for Planned Parenthood around 2016 and told me that she was pretty good: “It was giving, like, dry Janeane Garofalo vibes. Wildly self-aware and very self-deprecating.”

When Salek gets emails from students asking for career advice, she’s left at a bit of a loss. “I don’t know how to tell you that for 12 years, I just hung out,” she said. And yet all of those jobs in fashion and music, freelance writing gigs, and band tours make sense in hindsight. Salek was developing a 360-degree knowledge of the music business, from the perspective of bands, record labels, music stores, and the press. Through her writing and comedy sets, she was figuring out how to be insightful and funny in public. Today, she has a tapestry of friends in interesting places and a career that benefits from all of those experiences. The Yasi Salek Formula for Professional Success isn’t about mapping out a five-year plan and networking on LinkedIn: “It’s drinking a Sparks on the sidewalk, listening to music, and talking about it.”

In 2017, Salek got a job at Spotify. She was hired to write and conceptualize video concepts for playlists; over time, she began directing videos, too. Three years later, Spotify was looking to develop new shows around a tool that blended music and podcasts. Salek pitched an idea: bands for dummies. She hates the way overzealous fans shame novices for not knowing a musician’s discography, and she envisioned the show as a primer. “Obviously, it’s become something slightly different,” she said, laughing.

At a 10-minute mile, you could run an entire marathon listening to the U2 episode of Bandsplain and still have tape left after crossing the finish line. Salek is exhaustive in her research, spending up to a month learning about a single band. In the evenings, when her eyeballs can bear the screen’s glow no longer, she goes analog with books and sticky flags. All of that information ends up in a massive Google Doc. She refuses to exclude even a morsel of relevant history, lest she need it while recording.

Although Salek lets her perfectionism fly during the prep process, she has learned not to overthink what she says on the show. “More often than not, the first thing that comes into my mind is what lands the best,” she said. “It’s counterintuitive, but I did way worse trying to craft thoughts than letting the Holy Spirit speak through me, if you will. What does the Holy Spirit want to say about the Lemonheads? Here it is. I am simply a vessel.”

Recently, Bandsplain has begun to include the occasional listener mailbag, interview, and newsy episode, as when Ozzy Osbourne died. “It’s extremely hard to sustain, over time, the depth and weight of shows that she’s doing,” said Fennessey. The Ringer is in the bulk business when it comes to podcasting, and leveraging its content strategies and popular conceits, like draft episodes, helps ease Salek’s workload somewhat.

Salek has also begun to guest on The Ringer’s other shows. (She appeared on The Big Picture, for instance, to discuss one of Netflix’s more deranged Christmas rom-coms, Hot Frosty.) “Whenever she’s confronted with a draft, or a list, or a top 10, she initially feigns, like, I couldn’t possibly participate in such a masculine exercise as drafting something. And the second the whistle blows, she’s more competitive than anyone else,” said Chris Ryan, the editorial director of The Ringer whom Salek calls “the Michael Jordan of podcasting.”

Bandsplain may be a Ringer show, but it very much remains Salek’s project. As Ryan put it, “We’re all willing participants in her insane asylum.” He explained that it’s rare for a podcast to so fully reflect the personality and interests of its host; to pay the bills, most shows have to talk about the latest Marvel movie or rank quarterbacks. But rather than sweating the zeitgeist, Salek pursues her own interests and plays to her strengths. Fennessey told me that there are plenty of famous bands that Salek doesn’t feature on the show because she doesn’t feel she’d do a good job. “I really admire that she’s not trying to force it just because it’s something the audience would want,” he said.

Jon Caramanica, a New York Times pop music critic and host of the show Popcast, told me that Salek has a knack for amplifying nostalgia around bands that are no longer at the center of the cultural conversation. “I think a lot of the stuff that she’s excited about is not considered cool,” said Caramanica, who is a close friend. But that’s why Bandsplain is, in fact, cool and rather refreshing. It’s not designed to capitalize on trends. “Her show is predicated on: Do I find this amusing? Do I want to learn about this?” said Caramanica. “And she’s developed quite a rabid fanbase of people who will follow her down those wormholes.”

Despite her world-weary tenor, the evident truth is that Salek goes all-in on her passions. Sometimes that passion is music, and sometimes it’s The RealReal. “I probably spend more time searching for 1997 Prada than I do in the [Bandsplain] Google Doc, if we net it out,” she told me. She’s encyclopedic about makeup, too: Sabrina Teitelbaum, a musician who performs under the name Blondshell, told me that she texts Salek for guidance on which lip combos are worth the money. (Teitelbaum also likes to harvest Salek’s Spotify playlists: “She just has great taste.”) Ryan said that he and Salek became friends almost immediately, in part because of her enthusiasm for everything from movies to London’s burger scene. “She has one of the most vivacious spirits of anyone I know,” he said.

Salek also brings that questing nature to the pursuit of self-knowledge. Besides not wanting to stay out late for open mics, she stopped doing stand-up comedy because it felt like getting up on stage and asking people to like her. “I didn’t want to do that anymore,” she said. Once upon a time, she was “the president of the club of hating myself,” a position she has since abdicated.

I wondered how she got over those self-loathing tendencies — asking for a friend, obviously. “I made great efforts, starting with therapy and continuing onto whatever was available,” she replied. Salek dipped into tarot, meditation, journaling, Marianne Williamson books. (“Every possible entry point into healing.”) She still does morning pages, as popularized by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. “I feel like Yasi is someone who is always trying to transform and become a better or more evolved version of herself,” said Cosentino, who bonded with Salek over their mutual love of therapy.

The quietest Salek got during our two Zoom calls was when I raised the topic of her house. In January, the Altadena home where she’d lived for four years burned down in the Eaton Fire, and with it, a lifetime of priceless band T-shirts, vintage clothing, and physical media. Salek is good at compartmentalizing, but certain thoughts overwhelm her, like the idea of starting a new book collection. She’s a big reader, even outside of her Bandsplain homework. (Her favorite authors include W. Somerset Maugham, Clarice Lispector, Joy Williams, and Eve Babitz.) “I can’t just replace it with one big Amazon order,” she said. Every single day, she thinks about a beloved pair of Junya Watanabe shoes that were destroyed in the fire — Chelsea ankle boots from 2017, in case the brand is listening.

She’s rebuilding her wardrobe now, a process that has made her realize that she’s over the “Row-ification” of the fashion world. She prefers the more daring style of Comme des Garçons, Gaultier, and Margiela. (She loves a good pair of Tabis.) Despite her grown-up designer tastes, Salek finds that she fundamentally dresses the same way she did in high school. She’s all about Levi’s 501s, band tees, Adidas sneakers, cardigans. And that’s fitting: Salek often says that Bandsplain allows her to be a professional teenager. Sure, she goes to bed at 9 P.M. these days, and, yeah, she does love the adult-oriented radio rock-and-roll of The Fray. But chasing her obsessions down a crazy rabbithole just because she can? That’s forever, babe.

Eliza Brooke is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. She is the author of The Scumbler, a weekly culture newsletter.