Hrishikesh Hirway Returns to His Own Music, Fifteen Years After His Last Album

Hrishikesh Hirway released In the Last Hour of Light in late spring, ending a stretch of almost 15 years without a full album of his own songs. The last appeared under the name The One AM Radio. For anyone who knows him only as the host of Song Exploder, the gap might be a surprise. Hirway’s voice, so central to a podcast that has musicians unpack their own tracks piece by piece, has been absent from a proper recording of his own.

The delay, he says, came down to writer’s block. Not a lack of ideas, but a loop of self-judgment that made it hard to finish things. Over those years, he didn’t stop working. He scored films, series, and a video game, wrote podcast theme songs, and kept a hand in through remixes. The 2022 EP Rooms I Used to Call My Own signaled some thawing.

Still, the podcast can overshadow his identity as a musician. Days after the album came out, a visiting artist’s publicist saw his home studio instruments and asked if they were just for looks. Hirway recalls the moment as jarring, given the intense process he’d just been through to release this music.

In the Last Hour of Light comes from that process. The songs carry memory, warmth, and a certain patience. Hirway will bring them to the stage with A Concert and Conversation, a tour that pairs performance with interviews featuring friends like Adam Scott and Jason Mantzoukas. On June 3, the project gets a nod at Tribeca Festival, where it’s the first music album to receive an Official Selection and Tribeca Laurels. It’s a different setting for a podcast host who more often guides others through their creative decisions, now letting his own work stand without the filter of explanation.