For the members of Fugazi, getting together to reminisce is no big deal. They stay in touch. Some of them play together in other bands like the Messthetics and Coriky. And in 2018, bassist Joe Lally revealed that all four Fugazi members still get together to play music in private. But for Fugazi fans, listening in on an interaction between these four people is a monumental occasion. The DC punk band — a hallowed fixture of underground music since the late 1980s, beloved worldwide for their bracingly dynamic records and their pointedly ethical approach to their career — has done basically nothing together in public as a foursome since playing their final shows in 2002. So getting all four of them all on mic simultaneously for a podcast is somewhat of a coup.

The person who made it happen was Vish Khanna. Last year, the Canadian persuaded Ian MacKaye, Guy Picciotto, Joe Lally, and Brendan Canty to assemble on his show, Kreative Kontrol, to discuss the Fugazi documentary Instrument with director Jem Cohen for the film’s 25th anniversary. It happened because Khanna is “tenacious,” MacKaye said. “He was really pushing for it. Because I think, first of all, he’s genuinely a fan. And he’s friends with all of us.” Although MacKaye affirmed that he and his bandmates did not view the interview as some kind of historic summit, he conceded that, for Khanna, “it was a bit of a get.”

“I am tenacious,” Khanna, 47, agreed when we spoke on a video call later the same day, grinning with a mix of pride and bashfulness over being so described by a friend who happens to loom large over the history of independent music.

The Fugazi interview is the kind of fascinating artifact that has become common on Kreative Kontrol, which posts its thousandth episode, an interview with Ty Segall, this week. (The episode is live today for Khanna’s Patreon subscribers and hits the show’s public feed Tuesday.) Over the course of 12 years hosting Kreative Kontrol — and many more before that as a radio broadcaster, print and online journalist, musician, tour manager, and all-around music-scene mainstay — Edmonton-based Khanna has built up the respect and goodwill to land these kinds of guests with regularity. He’s a thoughtful, probing interviewer with an undeniable love for music, and through his deep investment in that world, he has established countless relationships that have led to illuminating conversations on the show.

The late Steve Albini appeared on Kreative Kontrol every year leading up to his death in 2024, including a 2015 summit with MacKaye that became my own first exposure to the show. In 2019, when Silver Jews’ David Berman returned to public life after a decade in seclusion to launch the new band Purple Mountains, he granted Kreative Kontrol his only audio interview before taking his own life. Music luminaries including Iggy Pop, Nick Cave, and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz of the Beastie Boys have been on the show — and, owing to Khanna’s interest in comedy, so have John Mulaney, Roy Wood Jr., Patton Oswalt, and Robert Smigel. The likes of Jeff Tweedy, Allison Russell, Bill Callahan, Circuit des Yeux, Land Of Talk, Will Oldham, Sonic Youth, Andy Shauf, Jim O’Rourke, and the Kids In The Hall have made repeat appearances.

Khanna has become accustomed to reeling in big fish from the worlds of indie rock and comedy. Sometimes it doesn’t work out; for the 1,000th episode, he tried and failed to lock down an interview with David Letterman or Conan O’Brien. But part of the appeal of Kreative Kontrol is that he is willing to speak to anyone who interests him, no matter how famous or obscure. (Full disclosure: That includes me. I recorded an upcoming episode of the podcast with Khanna to discuss my new book.)

“I try to treat everyone the same,” Khanna said. “Internally, I might be like, ‘Oh this Mount Eerie episode’s gonna do well.’” To a point, he does curate the guest list the same way a promoter might aim to put obscure bands together with household names on a playbill; if he has a big-name guest like “Weird Al” Yankovic coming on, he might pair it with a lesser-known figure like Al Tuck in the same week. But the baseline of Kreative Kontrol is an egalitarian ethos similar to what you’d expect from MacKaye or Albini. “We’re all just people,” Khanna said. “In an arts and culture podcast, I think you’re coming to it because you’ve seen the comedy special, you’ve read the book, you’ve heard the album, I kind of want to get to know this person as a human being.”

That philosophy has also led to a flexibility in format. Some episodes have not been numbered, including monologues mourning figures like Albini, Berman, and Norm Macdonald, one of Khanna’s comedy heroes. In a recent upload that appeared in the Kreative Kontrol feed under the banner “All Things Konsidered,” Khanna and his 13-year-old son Levon discussed the new Clipse album Let God Sort Em Out.

Yet Kreative Kontrol has also broken news, like when Spiral Stairs announced a new Pavement song would appear on the Pavements soundtrack. And it’s become a goldmine for behind-the-scenes anecdotes, like when Albini revealed a young Kurt Cobain approached him onstage at the final Big Black show to collect the band’s destroyed equipment — a fact later cited by Nirvana biographers Charles Cross and Michael Azerrad. Oh, and that factoid about how Fugazi still get together for band practice? Lally dropped it on Kreative Kontrol too. Taken all together, the show plays like both an important historical archive and a deeply personal labor of love.

“He’s not just a payola machine,” said Meg Remy of U.S. Girls, another repeat guest on Kreative Kontrol. “It’s a real show, and he’s got great taste. I think he just covers the things that he likes, and that’s the criteria.”

That taste started developing as a kid in the Waterloo Region of southern Ontario. Born in Kitchener, Khanna grew up in Cambridge, where a cousin unlocked something by giving him a cassette compilation of raw, loud, catchy early Beatles hits like “Twist And Shout” when he was 5. “It was like rock ‘n’ roll music, Vol. 1,” Khanna said. He began voraciously reading about music, including “every Beatles book, every U2 book,” and mainlining MuchMusic, the Canadian MTV. He remembers having his mind blown by reading about a tour of Scandinavia when the Beatles had to hire a substitute drummer because Ringo Starr got sick, sparking an epiphany that these godlike figures were normal human beings.

“I became really interested in the world beyond the records,” Khanna said. “I wanted to know more about the people who made them.”

Being a teenager in 1991, “the year punk broke,” opened Khanna’s eyes to a whole world of independent music beyond the Police and Love And Rockets records he’d known as a kid in the ‘80s, with acts like Nirvana and Sonic Youth operating as tour guides through whole new spheres of sound. Becoming a musician (primarily a drummer) further humanized that world. As a teen, Khanna played with future Constantines members Dallas Wehrle and Steven Lambke in a band called Die Octave. When they all made their way to the University of Guelph for college in the late ‘90s, they formed a new act called Captain Copilot.

When that band ran his course, Khanna fell into lots of other groups in Guelph, including the Neutron Stars, and continued to forge connections within the world of indie rock. He took on other music industry roles, such as tour managing for the band Royal City, a gig that led to encounters like performing in Sufjan Stevens’ apartment, staying the night at Ryan Adams’ home, and running merch for a young band called Arcade Fire when they opened for Broken Social Scene and Royal City in Montreal. That show led to Arcade Fire opening for Khanna’s project the Crying Out Loud Choir in their first Toronto appearance. He reviewed Arcade Fire’s first EP for the alt-weekly Echo Weekly in 2003, which Régine Chassagne told him was the first time anyone had written about the band.

His music journalism career had begun in high school, when he and a friend started a “shadow version of the school newspaper,” and continued at the campus newspaper in Guelph. Khanna’s undergrad years also saw his first dabbling in community radio. In 1997, he took a tape recorder to Exclaim!’s fifth anniversary party in Toronto, where he interviewed Sloan and other Murderecords bands. He was amazed when he brought the recordings back to Guelph and his friend played them on the radio. He remembers thinking, You can do that?

“Everything in my trajectory was further humanizing the experience that I thought was super special and alien,” Khanna said. “Realizing everyone was just a person. David Letterman was a person. Conan O’Brien was a person.”

While earning his master’s degree in Guelph in 2001-02, Khanna met Michelle Lobkowicz, who would become his wife. In 2005, they launched a weekly radio show on Guelph’s CFRU, The Mich Vish Interracial Morning Show, which ran for 300 episodes on Wednesdays between 2005-2011, wrapping up when they were expecting their first child. Its guest list reads like a dry run for Kreative Kontrol, with many of the same music and comedy icons appearing in the final months — including one Fugazi episode with half the band in the first hour and the other half in the second hour.

Khanna started noticing that even when he conducted interviews for written articles, he’d get livelier reactions for people when he asked them to pretend they were being recorded for a radio show. He came to prefer the radio format because it allowed him to air out his full conversation with an artist. He was getting good at those kinds of interviews, too — good enough that the CBC, Canada’s national public radio service, brought him on board. Under the tutelage of producer Pedro Mendes, he learned more about how to conduct himself on the air (i.e., with more energy and enthusiasm than most Pavement fans might be comfortable with), as well as many technical skills that would become necessary when producing his own podcast.

Soon enough, that’s exactly what he’d be doing. Khanna spent his early 2010s tenure at CBC Music arguing that the organization’s editorial arm should be doing rich in-depth journalism like Grantland, the ESPN offshoot founded by Bill Simmons, rather than publishing listicles or pivoting to video. By 2013, his position was eliminated, and within months he launched Kreative Kontrol — a pointed choice for a name, borrowed from a song by Hot Snakes, whose frontman Rick Froberg was another friend and frequent interview partner.

At first, Khanna approached the podcast like a news magazine. The debut episode was headlined by an interview with Gawker’s John Cook, who had recently broken the story about Toronto mayor Rob Ford smoking crack. Khanna introduced the pod as if leading into a radio broadcast: “Coming up later on this week’s show, Tyler Francks will be here to discuss the Eden Mills Arts Festival… But first, our top story.” Eventually, as the show evolved, Khanna started to sound less like an anchor reading the news and more like a podcaster easing his listeners into an informal chat.

Along with that evolution has come a distinctive approach to drawing out his guests. Khanna is not afraid to share thoughts, feelings, and experiences from his own life in an effort to get people to open up. The hope is to spark a genuine two-way exchange rather than the superficial patter that can often pass for an interview — and more often than not, it works. “I find him very sweet and earnest,” Remy said. “He gives a lot of himself when he’s interviewing, which allows the person to reciprocate.”

The veteran rapper, journalist, and poet Rollie Pemberton, who performs under the name Cadence Weapon, said he dreads doing interviews but always looks forward to going on Kreative Kontrol. “I feel like I come away with a different understanding of my own work whenever I talk to Vish,” said Pemberton, who won Canada’s Polaris Music Prize for his 2021 album Parallel World. “He is incredibly perceptive in a way that is not common in music journalism. Especially in this era of TikTok and engagement bait and this microwaved music media world that we’re in now, he’s pure depth.”

Khanna is also not above a little poking and prodding. Pemberton noted the influence of Macdonald’s wry comedy on the podcaster’s style. While Remy compared Khanna to the thoughtful and genial Dick Cavett, both MacKaye and Pemberton drew parallels with perhaps the most iconic Canadian music journalist of all, Nardwuar — “a master of getting people off balance,” per MacKaye, and an interviewer whose deeply researched questions tend to make for surprising, enlightening conversations.

For many years, Khanna held down day jobs in radio while maintaining Kreative Kontrol as a side hustle and secondary income. Recently, circumstances have conspired to alter that arrangement. Just before the pandemic, he and his wife decided to move their family to Edmonton to be closer to her parents, and he accepted an offer to work at a local radio station in a behind-the-scenes capacity. He found that job unfulfilling. “Something about the pandemic really made me think, ‘I can’t do this anymore,'” Khanna said. “I can’t pretend to like stuff I don’t like.” From there, he moved on to a branded podcasting role and quickly bristled at that industry’s lack of authenticity.

When Khanna was let go from that company last year, he decided to try making Kreative Kontrol his full-time job. Podcasters make no streaming royalties, and the lucrative deals bestowed upon celebrity podcasters aren’t available to creators at Khanna’s humble DIY scale — facts he regularly points out on the show. So he made a big push to attract Patreon subscribers, putting some episodes behind a paywall and offering perks like monthly prize drawings and access to archival recordings from across his career. His goal was to cover the mortgage and property taxes with podcast profits to supplement his wife’s income. A few months ago, that plan was going well, but lately he’s seen a dip in subscriptions that has made him less optimistic about the viability of Kreative Kontrol as a full-time job.

“Your president is causing economic anxiety among people who subscribe to anything,” he noted, though he was quick to point out deeper systemic problems at the intersection of art, media, and commerce that predate Donald Trump’s affection for tariffs. “I don’t even understand how we’re living this way,” Khanna said. “No one is paying for anything, and we let that happen.”

Still, it’s hard to imagine Khanna ever ending his show, even if he someday takes up a day job again. You don’t make 1,000 episodes of a podcast, mostly as a side hustle, unless you love the work. And Khanna’s passion for this stuff could not be more evident.

“I’m driven to do it,” Khanna said. “I can’t quite explain why, except that it’s the thing I most love doing. And then, ‘Why do I most love doing it?’ is the other question I’ve been asking myself. I think I have been drawn to music and culture for the community building that occurs. And that stems from starting as a person who covered lesser known folks that I really felt passionately about. I really like connecting an audience with a person or entity that I like. I have a compulsion to not keep something to myself. If I’m excited about it, I want to share it.”