Billy Strings will appear on the next episode of the WTF with Marc Maron podcast, set to premiere on Thursday, May 16th. The conversation with comedian Marc Maron will mark Strings’ first major interview since he appeared on This Past Weekend with Theo Von, another comedian’s podcast, back in February.

Though this will signal Strings’ first appearance on WTF, the bluegrass guitarist has previously been a topic of discussion in Maron’s studio. Strings’ fishing buddy and occasional musical collaborator Les Claypool flew himself down to WTF in October to discuss a wide range of topics like buying pot from Metallica’s Kirk Hammett in high school and the album he’s been working on with Billy Strings. While fans have been patiently salivating for a taste of what kind of prog-grass stew these two are cooking up, Claypool didn’t exactly inspire hope for a speedy release when he confessed that whenever he and Billy have gotten together to record they just end up fishing instead.

Claypool did at least reveal, “It’s some sort of grass record. … It’s whatever you can imagine the mesh of these two worlds would be. But it is twangy, I call it a twang record.”

After rocketing onto the national stage post-pandemic with his first-ever Grammy win and a follow-up album Renewal, Strings hit the press circuit for interviews with The New York TimesRolling StoneNPR, and other national news organizations. Since then, he has steered toward less mainstream outlets and either dived into the weeds with fellow musicians like Cory Wong or Sonora Guitar Intensive, or gone the opposite direction and talked to outsiders like comedians Marc Maron and Theo Von. Maron gives the best of both worlds as he is also a guitarist—though not to the level of Billy Strings—but is familiar enough with the craft and the pressures of live performances (both in comedy and in music) to garner some insightful conversation.

One of the OG podcasters who launched his program in 2009, Maron has interviewed everyone from then-President Barack Obama to Keith Richards along with generations of legendary comedians, directors, writers, and more. He is known to do minimal research ahead of an episode, resulting in a genuine conversational style of interview where he often dives deep into a guest’s early life and the experiences that shaped who they became.