I'm Will Daly. For years I've been on the road playing shows and seeing America through live music.

This summer I'll hit the stage with Season 2 of Sound of Artown.

Ten cities, 12 episodes, every other Thursday.

We explore the live music venues and culture of a new American city with each new episode.

Our tour continues into the kind of venues you want to get to when you land in Detroit.

Providence, Denver, or Seattle.

Listen to Sound of Artown on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

To get to Volker Lehman's compound in the Amazon, you have to really want to get there.

For me, that involved a red eye from Miami to Santa Cruz, Bolivia's biggest city,

then a puddle jumper to a town called Trinidad, a sweaty night there,

and then nine grueling hours in a collectivo taxi, squeezed between farmhands and crying babies,

hammering over washboard rows at 30 miles per hour,

which is about 20 miles per hour too fast.

At last, I got dropped off at Volker's place.

Hello.

It's changed since by visit 12 years ago for our river trip.

Volker's built himself a crazy new house, all-screen, no walls.

A few feet away, there's an outhouse with tree frogs in the toilet,

a workshop with a generator, and a big greenhouse for fermenting cacao.

There's papaya trees and bananas, and a tiny white local chili called Goosa Nita.

It looks like little worms.

They're brutally hot, but Volker munches them like popcorn.

...