Send us a text

Today we are stepping straight into four decades of controversy, choreography, and calculated control.

Madonna.

Not just “the Queen of Pop,” but an artist who has treated her own life as a long, shape-shifting performance about power—who gets it, who’s allowed to keep it, and what happens when a woman refuses to sit down, shut up, or age politely.

I’m George Bartley. Let’s begin.

Madonna Louise Ciccone was born August 16, 1958, in Bay City, Michigan, and raised in the Detroit suburbs in a large, strict Catholic family.

Her mother dies of breast cancer when Madonna is only five.

That single loss—mother, faith, home base—echoes under almost everything that follows.

You see it in the Catholic imagery she wears and tears apart, in the recurring themes of abandonment, guilt, and confession. The tabloids called it “blasphemy.” But for Madonna, it’s also biography: a daughter arguing with the Church that shaped her and the God who took her mother.

As a girl, she is a paradox: straight-A student, disciplined dancer, cheerleader, troublemaker. Teachers remember intelligence and defiance. She wants to be seen, but very much on her own terms.

Support the show

Thank you for experiencing Celebrate Creativity.

Send us a text

If you've been following this series of modern day musicians, you may remember a concert I mentioned with the Rolling Stones. It is true that the Stones were able to hold the audience and follow their hands, so to speak. But even before Mick Jagger strut out on stage, the opening act was Stevie Wonder = a living definition of a hard act to follow. If I had just seen his opening act, I could've left knowing that I had seen a great show = but I admit I would've definitely been disappointed at missing the Stones. But there was no question that Stevie Wonder had prepared the crowd for the excitement of Mick Jagger

Today,ΩåΩ I would like to talk about an artist who can fill a stadium with joy using one riff, one chord change, and one impossibly confident note on a harmonica.

That same Stevie Wonder.

Composer, singer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, activist.
A child prodigy who did not burn out.
A hitmaker who refused to choose between romantic love songs and songs that tell hard truths.
A blind musician whose music often seems to see the world more clearly than many of us who use our eyes.

In this episode, I’d like to walk through his background,
the forces that shaped him,
the run of hits that re-wired popular music,
his effects on other artists,
and how his blindness is not a side note, but part of how he developed an uncanny vision for sound, people, and justice.

Support the show

Thank you for experiencing Celebrate Creativity.

Send us a text

Today, we turn to an artist who never seemed entirely earthbound.David Bowie.For some listeners, Bowie is the sound of discovery: that first moment you realize a song, a costume, a performance can make the world feel bigger than the town you’re standing in.

For others, he’s a gallery of snapshots:

Ziggy Stardust in orange hair and stardust makeup.

The Thin White Duke in a waistcoat and a stare like a searchlight.

Jareth in Labyrinth, juggling crystal balls and rewiring childhoods.

And finally, the enigmatic figure of Blackstar, composing a farewell while the rest of us didn’t yet know to call it goodbye.

Tonight, I’d like to walk through Bowie’s life and work in a way that fits this series:

his background,

his influence,

his first appearances in the United States,

and the movies that made him more than “just” a rock star.

Support the show

Thank you for experiencing Celebrate Creativity.

Send us a text

Tonight we turn to a musician whose name has become shorthand for guitar mastery, blues devotion, and, depending on who you ask, the very idea of the rock “guitar hero.”

Eric Clapton.

For some listeners, he is the ultimate guitarist: the Yardbirds prodigy, the “Clapton Is God” graffiti on London walls, the molten solos with Cream, the aching beauty of “Layla” and “Tears in Heaven,” the tasteful bends and vocal-like phrasing that defined what an electric guitar could say.

For others, his legacy is more complicated—shaped not only by brilliance, but by band breakups, addictions, controversies, and changing times.

Today I want to trace how a quiet, art-school kid obsessed with American blues records became one of the most influential guitarists in history, move through the bands that forged his sound, and look at how his work helped define what “great guitar playing” means for generations of musicians.

Eric Patrick Clapton was born March 30, 1945, in Ripley, Surrey, England. Raised believing his grandparents were his parents and his mother was his older sister, he grew up with a complicated sense of identity and a strong inwardness that would later surface in his playing — that mix of control, melancholy, and sudden intensity.

Support the show

Thank you for experiencing Celebrate Creativity.

Send us a text

In this podcast episode, we’ll walk through where they came from, what shaped them, how they crashed into the United States—and then spend some real time inside Tommy: not just as an album, but as a story that refused to stay put, leaping from vinyl to concert halls, movie screens, and the Broadway stage.

Imagine that it is Post war England and you are in West London
Bomb sites are turning into parking lots and playgrounds. Teenagers caught between their parents’ memories of wartime suffering and a new world of consumer goods, television sets, and American rock records.

Roger Daltrey grows up in a working-class family, handy with his fists and tools, assembling his own future piece by piece.

Pete Townshend, the intense, sharp-nosed kid, is surrounded by music early—his parents are professional musicians—so the idea of a musical life is precarious, but not absurd.

John Entwistle is the quiet one, a brass-band kid who picks up the bass and makes it sing.

Daltrey starts a band called The Detours. He pulls in Entwistle. Entwistle brings Townshend. They grind through pubs, youth clubs, and dance halls. Then, after a name change detour as the High Numbers, shaped by managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, they emerge with the name that finally fits the impact:

Support the show

Thank you for experiencing Celebrate Creativity.

Send us a text

In this series, we’ve been spending time with artists who didn’t just make hits—they changed the language of modern music.

Today, we turn to a group that took blues, folk, volume, and mystery… and built a sound so iconic that entire genres still live in its echo.

Led Zeppelin.

Not just “loud.” Not just “wild.” Four musicians who fused session-honed precision, deep musical curiosity, and a taste for the epic into something that still feels massive generations later.

Tonight, we’ll look at where they came from, how they rose so quickly, why their time together burned so intensely, and how their shadow still stretches over rock and beyond.

Led Zeppelin doesn’t begin with rune symbols and stadiums.

It starts with working British musicians paying their dues.

Support the show

Thank you for experiencing Celebrate Creativity.

Send us a text

Today we meet an artist who doesn’t blow the doors off with volume or choreography, but with something quieter—and in many ways, just as radical.

A woman alone with a guitar in an open tuning.
A voice that can sound like a bell, a blade, or a diary you were never meant to read.
A songwriter who refuses to keep her feelings, or her harmonies, inside the lines.
But inwardly a mother with empty arms carrying shame that didn't belong to her and grief she poured into songs that people around her could feel even if they didn't know why both sides now Chelsea morning
Joni Mitchell.

In this episode, I want to explore:

Her background: prairie girl, painter, survivor.

Her influences: folk clubs, jazz giants, poets, painters, and her own wounds.

Her effect on music: especially the singer-songwriter era and beyond.

Her life’s arc: including the hidden child, the fame she never really trusted, the experiments that confused critics, the silence, the aneurysm, and the astonishing later-life return.

Because if Hendrix reimagined what a guitar could do, Joni Mitchell reimagined what a song could say.

Small-town skies, big inner world

Support the show

Thank you for experiencing Celebrate Creativity.

Send us a text

Our story begins not with sequins but with a housing project.

Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard both grew up in Detroit’s Brewster-Douglass projects, one of the first federally funded housing developments for Black families. Diana Ross, who grew up nearby, joined that same orbit.

Detroit in the 1950s and early 60s was a complex place:
Automobile money and factory work.
Northern promise and stubborn segregation.
Church choirs, street-corner harmonies, jazz clubs, rhythm & blues, gospel pouring out of radios.

Music wasn’t a luxury; it was a language.
The three girls—at first part of a broader group of friends—found each other through that language. They called themselves The Primettes, designed as the “girl group” counterpart to a rising male group called The Primes (who would evolve into The Temptations).

Support the show

Thank you for experiencing Celebrate Creativity.