This week on Riffs on Riffs, Joe and Toby hop aboard Stella Lefty’s “Boston,” a deceptively simple song about what happens when something good shows up and your first instinct is to run the other way.
The conversation starts with the noise surrounding Lefty: accusations of nepotism, comparisons to Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season,” questions about borrowed melodies, and the eternal debate over whether any song can truly be original. From Bruno Mars and Stevie Wonder to Tom Petty, the Chili Peppers and J Dilla, Joe and Toby explore the blurry lines between influence, inspiration and imitation, and wonder whether sometimes we’d all be better off turning on airplane mode and simply listening to the music.
They also dig into the unusual way “Boston” grew from a short social-media snippet into a finished song after listeners responded to it, sparking a larger conversation about the benefits and dangers of letting audiences shape creative work.
But the heart of the episode is the song itself. A lyric about wanting to run when someone is actually treating you well opens the door to self-sabotage, vulnerability and what Toby calls being “scared of success.” From there, “Boston” becomes a launching point for a much bigger conversation about hope as a verb, resilience through struggle, sacrifice, and the things we learn simply by showing up when we’re nowhere near our best.
Plus: terrible dates, pineapple on pizza, mysterious arm name tags, childhood book “borrowing,” TV shows that stayed too long at the party, and a surprisingly passionate defense of the word “courting.”
Sometimes a song doesn’t have to reinvent music. Sometimes a good song is just a good song.
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