Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen teamed up to produce a podcast, they announced on Monday, with the first two episodes available immediately.
Renegades: Born in the USA presents the politician and the rock star reflecting on his origins, music and his “lasting love for America”, according to Spotify, which is presenting the podcast.
Given the recognition of the name of its two hosts, Renegades is likely to be the Obama family’s most recent major podcasting success, following the success of Michelle Obama’s podcast in 2020.
“On the surface, Bruce and I don’t have much in common,” Obama said in a podcast trailer.
“He’s a white guy from a small town in Jersey. I am a mixed race black man, born in Hawaii. He is a rock’n’roll icon. I’m … I’m not that nice. “
Despite these differences, the two formed a friendship after meeting during Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and recorded eight episodes of conversations.
Spotify released the first two episodes of Renegades on Monday, along with a teaser video showing Obama and Springsteen sitting in front of the microphones, surrounded by guitars and recording equipment.
“In our own way, Bruce and I have been doing parallel journeys, looking for a way to connect our own individual searches for meaning, truth and community with America’s broader history,” says Obama in the trailer.
“And over the course of a few days, just a few kilometers from where he grew up, we talked.
“What we discovered during these conversations was that we still share a fundamental belief in the American idea. Not as an act of nostalgia, but as a compass for the hard work ahead of us. “
Spotify hired Barack and Michelle Obama to produce podcasts in 2019 and launched Michelle Obama’s eponymous podcast in 2020. The program quickly became Spotify’s most-heard podcast in the summer of 2020.
The deal with Obama came at a time when Spotify announced a major boost to podcasting in 2019, when it spent about $ 500 million on the acquisition of podcast companies. The platform also signed Joe Rogan, one of the most popular podcasters in the world, with a $ 100 million multi-year contract in 2020, but that deal wasn’t always easy.
Some Spotify employees complained that part of Rogan’s production was transphobic, including an episode in which Rogan interviewed the author of a book called Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, while in October Rogan received Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist from right that has been banned from all major technology platforms, generating additional outrage.