Evan Bartels
The Working Songwriter
Joe Pug
4.9 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2026
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our guest this week hails from Tobias, Nebraska, a town of about 100 people. Evan Bartels is a singer-songwriter who with his 2017 debut, 'The Devil, God & Me,' burst onto the national scene. More recently, Bartels has expanded his audience with the release of his EP, 'To Make You Cry,' recorded after relocating to Nashville and reflecting on a period of personal upheaval and renewal.
Bartels has toured with American Aquarium, The White Buffalo, and John Moreland; he records for MCA/Universal; and he's performed at Mile of Music, AmericanaFest, and the C2C Festival. 'No Depression' calls him "a haunting new presence in Americana," while Americana Highways praises his "unvarnished, soul-bearing songwriting." 'Glide Magazine' notes his "ability to turn bruised experience into stark, resonant beauty."
I caught up with Evan Bartels a few months ago for The Working Songwriter to hear about his musical journey so far.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi and welcome to the working songwriter. |
| 0:16.6 | The show where today's best songwriters come to talk shop. |
| 0:20.2 | I'm your host, Joe Pug. |
| 0:22.2 | Each episode here, we host a distinguished guest, and we ask them to go deep on their |
| 0:27.3 | inspiration, on their process, on the general ups and downs of making a life in music. |
| 0:33.0 | So, whether you're a grizzled veteran, picking out custom chrome trim for your tour bus, or else a scrappy upstart, |
| 0:41.4 | trying to determine whether your Toyota Tercell can make it through a 3,000-mile tour, |
| 0:47.1 | this is your show, because ultimately it is what every writer seeks most, |
| 0:51.8 | an ironclad excuse to put off actually writing. |
| 1:08.9 | Hey, everybody, it's the first Friday of 2026, and we're starting the year with a big announcement. |
| 1:16.3 | The Working Songwriter podcast is going pro. |
| 1:19.2 | After 10 years and over 300 episodes as an independent show, we are joining the podcast network over at the Bluegrass Situation. Bluegrass situation is a media |
| 1:30.2 | organization that much like our program focuses on Roots Music in America, but not to a fault. |
| 1:36.4 | They're not against featuring excellent music and songwriting if it doesn't happen to fall into that |
| 1:41.6 | exact roots music vernacular. |
| 1:48.3 | Partnering with them is going to explode the amount of content we're able to put out, |
| 1:54.5 | take us deeper into publishing video from some of these podcast interviews, and just generally up our game. |
| 1:56.2 | I'd like to thank Amy right now are Jacobs and Cindy Howes over there for developing a vision for where |
| 2:02.0 | this show could go in the next 10 years, and I'm thrilled to join the Bluegrass Situation |
| 2:06.8 | podcast network. This week's show is brought to you by Banzogel. Built by musicians and for |
| 2:12.4 | musicians, Banzugal is an all-in-one platform to build a beautiful website for your music. |
| 2:18.5 | I'm old enough to remember when you had to pay somebody called a web developer to get a website |
... |
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