The Overlook with Matt Peiken

Want to know what’s happening with McCormick Field, Thomas Wolfe Auditorium and the Western North Carolina Nature Center? My guest has the answers.

Chris Corl is General Manager and Director of Commun…

Asheville is very much a music town—not just for musicians, but also for fans, as evidenced by the six record stores dotting the city. As we approach the annual Record Store Day, April 20, we talk wi…

Downtown business owners, workers and residents spent a lot of 2023 imploring Asheville officials to get a handle on crime, trash and vagrancy. All along, many were pressing to take matters into thei…

D. Tyrell McGirt says his career path was blazed as a 10-year-old in Greensboro, when his mother signed him up for a lifeguarding class. He ran parks and recreation departments in Alabama, Arizona an…

Seventy years ago, Black Mountain College was a petri dish for experimental art, sound and performance. It was also the birthplace of so-called “happenings”—events where practitioners strived to tran…

Middle housing is all the rage in planning and urban development circles—that is, duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, clusters of homes with no garages but maybe a shared park, in walkable neighborhoods…

The Buncombe County District Attorney’s office prosecutes dozens of cases every week, from capital murder to trivial infractions. But DA Todd Williams seems at least a bit frustrated by the public’s …

Barbie Angell is a poet and storyteller, children’s book author and emcee. Threading all of it, she’s a survivor. She’s candid about the range of abuse she experienced throughout her youth, and a qua…

If the nonprofit world awarded medals for bravery on the battlefront, the counselors and volunteers for the SPARC Foundation could be the most decorated in Asheville. SPARC works with people who’ve c…

Just last week, Asheville City Schools voted to merge Montford North Star Academy into Asheville Middle School. The move will reduce the district’s $4.5 million budget shortfall by as much as half, b…

Chris Jehly says he used to mock artists who painted the natural landscape. At the time, he was a graffiti artist inspired by BMX and metal music. Since his move to Asheville, he’s become one of the …

Watch any of his performances or study his visual art, the easy takeaway on Edwin Salas is he's one disturbed artist. And how could he not be?

When I profiled him in 2019 for Asheville's public radio …

Last year, the North Carolina Department of Transportation began the process of claiming properties through eminent domain for the widening of Interstate 240 and construction of the I-26 Connector. R…

Noah Bendix-Balgley is a revered violinist—concertmaster with the Berlin Philharmonic and a soloist who performs with orchestras internationally. He’s also a native of Asheville.

I talk with him about…

This is the second of two episodes recorded from the Feb. 20 Asheville City Council candidates mixer at Citizen Vinyl, thrown by the Asheville Downtown Association. You'll hear my short conversations…

Three seats on Asheville’s City Council will be filled in November’s general election, but to get there, we need to first get through a small-stakes primary. I say small stakes because of the seven c…

Andrew Jones of the Asheville Watchdog is so busy covering Mission’s past, present and future, he has nine bylined stories about the hospital so far in February alone. I talked with him just yesterda…

The North Carolina primary election is March 5 and early voting is already underway. But the Republican supermajority in the stage legislature has passed laws making voting more difficult.

My guests t…

It should surprise no one that Asheville and other parts of Western North Carolina have become launching pads for a nascent industry of psychedelics. What is surprising is the recent state-sanctioned…

Dewayne Barton is an artist, activist, social entrepreneur and voice of vision—all from the vantage of uplifting his Burton Street community. 

He escaped the scourge of crack cocaine while growing up …