👨👩👧 Meet my parents ❤️ CrossBread's Declan Fay⛪️
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Bonjour!
I have been dragging my parents into my interests my entire life—from horseback riding to swimming to film making and Gak. I have actually worried about having my own child and being forced to like the dumb things they like. But my parents were always down, embracing my obsessions as their own. And now I have dragged them into podcasts. I forced them to subscribe them to Podcast The Newsletter, I quiz them on its contents, and I push my favorite shows on them every day. I can say they are both podcast lovers now, and nothing makes me happier than when they tell me about a new show they discovered, or that they liked something I recommended to them. They do like some of the stuff I send them, but they also are developing their own likes and dislikes.
I asked them to send me a list of their five favorite shows. Because they are my mom and dad, starting now I will think of these shows as Mom And Dad Shows. Maybe your mom and dad will like them, too. Forward this email to them if they aren’t already obsessed. If they can’t be convinced to listen to podcasts by you or me, maybe they can be influenced by Brian (you can read more about him here and Cookie (read more about her here.)
DAD PODCASTS (by Dad)
I never realized this, but I needed podcasts for my whole life. I need them because I want to hear everyone’s story. Now I know that I will never run out of hearing amazing stories. Fortunately, I subscribe to Podcast the Newsletter, so I have a lot of help finding new stories.
Dan Carlin: Hardcore History Be prepared for 4 hour discussions of the Persian, Greek and Roman armies, then glide along through WWI and WWII. Surprisingly, you will seldom be bored, even if you think you already know the stories…you don’t. Carlin brings it all to life.
How Neal Feel I can only agree with about half of what Neal Feels and how Binky Thinky, and their relationship discussions are mostly atrocious, but I look forward to the podcast every week for pure entertainment.
The Bill Simmons Podcast Mostly, I listen during the NFL season, because at day’s end each Sunday, Bill and Cousin Sal give a game by game assessment every game. Their takes are mostly accurate and often funny. It is the opposite experience of the ridiculous sports talk radio fiascos that are everywhere. It always nuanced with thought provoking takes.
Questlove Supreme The range of guests is unique, the detail amazing, and Amir is by everyone’s account a modern music historian. I do miss the roll call since they aren’t together in the post Covid-19 world.
All Others I can’t possibly list just one more. I love Broken Record, My Year in Mensa, You Must Remember This, Ear Hustle, People’s Party, WTF, Conan, The Three Questions and assorted short story and crime pods.
MOM PODCASTS (by Cookie)
I am late to the podcast party and just catching on to how much fun it is.
For the past year or so I’d try, halfheartedly, to get interested in a podcast, but at first, it seemed more like a chore. It was like trying to finish that boring book in time for book club. Then my daughter Lauren was telling me, offhandedly, about one of her clients, Derek Hayes, and his podcast Monsters Among Us. On that one, people call in with paranormal experiences that they’ve experienced, and I could not stop listening. You might think that it’d be a bunch of crackpot stories from people with tinfoil hats, but it’s not. I’m not sure that I believe everyone’s story. But I believe that they believe them, and that maybe they weren’t visited by a demon, but SOMETHING weird happened to them.
From there I found Stories With Sapphire, also full of the supernatural, this is a little more in depth and poignant. Sapphire Sandalo, shares stories, interviews, and poems and her soothing voice makes them eerily inviting.
By now, I was in the habit if listing to podcasts, and so I decided I needed to expand my horizons and try something without ghosts and night terrors. I don’t remember how I found it (Lauren likes to remind me that I should have known about it, from her newsletter), but I happened randomly upon a very famous podcast, In The Dark. My mind was immediately blown away by Madeleine Baran’s carefully told account of a child abduction in 1989. I’m a big fan of true crime, but I quickly learned that this was much more that an ordinary true crime story. After a quick binge listen of the 9 episodes I was left to rethink practically everything about our society, our laws, and our law enforcement. I listened to season 1, The Abduction of Jacob Wetterling, and I am told Season 2 is just as good, but it is about Curtis Flowers, on death row and tried six times for the same crime. I need to get up my courage for that one because it sounds so sad and I am still a little traumatized from Jacob Wetterling.
I’d been wanting to revisit the Watergate story, so I went looking and found Slate’s Slow Burn and its super fun/horrifying account of “what he knew and when he knew it.” If history weren’t repeating itself in so many alarming ways today, listening to season 1 about the scandal that brought down Richard Nixon might have been an actual rollicking good listen. Those who did not live through it must think that it’s a story that’s been exaggerated. This is a cautionary tale for our times and should be required listening for all Americans.
Finally, I have to mention the Dateline podcast. Nobody does true crime better, or at least in the way I like hearing about it. Starting with the crime, the investigators, the suspects, the prosecutors, the verdict, and everything in between, Dateline tells the story in a consistently satisfying way.
xoxo lp
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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
CrossBread’s Declan Fay
Declan Fay is a comedy writer/director/podcaster. He recently co-created and co-wrote the scripted comedy Mockumentary musical podcast, CrossBread with Chris Ryan and Megan Washington. Follow Declan on Twitter here.
How did the idea of CrossBread pop into your brain?
I’ve always liked stories about peculiar insular little worlds, like the show I co-wrote on Comedy Central, Ronny Chieng: International Student, which is all about international students at an Australian University.
For CrossBread, initially I had an idea about two siblings who were opera singers and suggested it to my friend Chris Ryan who is an opera singer, and he told me he had worked as an opera singer for twenty years and no one is interested in opera singers, in fact one of the quickest ways to get people to walk away from you at a party is to tell them you’re an opera singer. But he liked the idea about two musical siblings, and we started talking about growing up in a christian youth group, and the weird christian youth bands that would play at christian youth camps. The got an idea this group should be hip hop. So in the space of one conversation we got from opera singers to Christian Hip Hop.
How did you structure the script? I assume it's like writing a movie script, but also very different because you can't rely on visual cues.
The very first draft I wrote like a TV script and our producer Tom Wright (who was John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman’s producer on The Bugle podcast when they first started), read it and said, so you realise that a listening audience can’t hear when camera zooms in, or a listen to a tracking shot. So we had to completely bend our minds to writing it for audio. But then it becomes very freeing because if you’re filming a tv show and need a death metal concert with a crowd of five thousand people, it’s incredibly difficult and expensive, and will also cause your production manager to have a heart attack, but for audio you just put a bunch of reverb on the microphone and then edit in the sound of five thousand people cheering and get in a guy who’s really good at screaming. In that way it was tremendously liberating.
What advice would you give to people hoping to start a fiction show? They're tough to sell, I know.
That’s a bloody good question. Tell the story only you can tell. And tell a story that you really want to tell. So even when the screen is blank on your laptop and you can’t think of something funny/dramatic to happen, you’ll keep coming back to it because you want to tell the story. It’s too hard to make something and not love the story you want to tell. Also try to find good people to work with, people that make you laugh and think, and that make you a better writer/performer/person. (That sounds like I’m giving a speech at a Christian youth group now, or a Ted talk.)
How did it feel when all of the episodes were released? When the series was over, I was sad. Were you?
We’d lived with it in our heads for over a year when it came out, so I was quite relieved when it came out. A few days after it was out I realised I’d never actually listened to it like someone would listen to it as a podcast, with headphones on. So I went for a walk and listened to it like a listener and just burst out laughing, because it suddenly existed on it’s own. Then I burst into tears. Just because it was such a long process and it finally existed in the world. (Okay now this really does sound like a speech at a christian youth group).
What podcasts do you listen to?
Democracy-ish, Pod Save America, Reply All, Wind of Change, I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, Radiolab, Rivals, Dissect, Thought Spiral, Broken Record, Human/Ordinary, 1993 - The Greatest Season That Was.
Women in podcasting are constantly getting criticized for their voices. What is your relationship to yours? How would you describe it?
That’s shit house that women are picked on for their voices. It does feel like there is so much extra scrutiny on women in the media, what they wear, how they sound, what questions they ask, whereas a guy could roll out of bed and fart into a microphone and people think that’s okay. I’m okay with my voice, although it’s quite nasally and I know it annoys people (although a sound guy once told me it cuts through at a certain frequency that can be harsh on the ear), but I’ve often been criticised for my laugh. When I worked at a commercial radio station (the kind of station that plays Foo Fighters, followed by Red Hot Chili Peppers, followed by Foo Fighters) I was always being criticised for my laugh and told me it sounded fake on air, and that it hadn’t tested well with listeners (although they never quite explained exactly how they tested it with listeners, were people just locked in an room and forced to listen to my laugh for hours?). Then I started second guessing my own laugh, and thinking should I laugh here, or should I not laugh, and then I’d tell myself not to worry about it and in the very act of trying not to worry about it, I was worrying about it. Luckily I don’t work at that radio station anymore which is a win for everyone, because they don’t have to hear my laugh and I don’t have to listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Are there any rules you think all podcasters should adhere to when creating a show?
Just make something you love. Take time to find your voice. And enjoy the process of finding your voice. And take time to find the show. And let the show reveal itself to you slowly (God now I sound like a new age therapist giving an astral travel workshop). Scripts are very rarely great straight away, you might write a whole draft and there might be one line that reveals what the show is for you, then go back and rewrite the whole thing based around that line. You can drive yourself a bit mad on structure and format if you think too much about, just start writing and it will gradually take shape.
Are there too many podcasts?
No. Although it’s kind of annoying when the commercial radio stations throw together highlight packages of bits from their shows and then clutter up apple podcasts. It’s like if there’s a cool party, and then a bunch of rich kids show up making a lot of noise and being dicks, it kind of kills the vibe.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
In Italy, it’s easier for me to get Italian citizenship than many Black people born there. Italy doesn’t have birthright citizenship like the United States does, so if your parents aren’t Italian citizens when you’re born, then neither are you. When you’re 18, you can apply for citizenship, but this offer expires when you’re 19. This emboldens Italy to be a racist country that many Black people cannot possibly feel like they belong to. This itself is outrageous (the episode has some powerful interviews with Black Italians) and The United States of Anxiety’s The Laws of Soil and Blood reminds us that this scenario isn’t very far away for the US. Trump has said he could end so-called birthright citizenship with the stroke of his pen. This episode gets super personal and offers a history of both the US and Italy that I didn’t know about.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Rough Translation ran the story (from El Hilo) of 53-year-old Orlando Pimentel, who fled Venezuela for Ecuador because of the country’s economic crisis last September, along with millions of other Venezuelans. But when COVID hit, he realized he had to get home. The trip did not go as Orlando had planned. How he got there is a modern day Odysseus-like story spanning 1,300 miles and three countries. It feels like a myth and Orlando sounds like a legend, but his story is just one amazing example of the incredible things people are doing every day, for their safety and freedom, before COVID and now.
🎙️Phyllis Lyon was a lesbian activist and trailblazer who died in April at the age of 95. In her final years she had developed dementia but refused help of any kind. Lesbian, queer, and trans people in her San Francisco community tricked her into letting them into her home to care for her, under the guise of getting her to teach them about LGBTQ history. It’s the sweetest trick every played. Listen to KALW’s Caring For Lesbian Icon Phyllis Lyon, With Love And Deceit. (I heard about this episode listening to Outward, Slate’s LGBTQ show.)
🎙️I loved, loved, loved this episode of Bridget Todd’s There Are No Girls on the Internet, #DisabledAndCute, which features Keah Brown, who created the #DisabledAndCute movement but is having a hard time retaining any credit for it. If women think they have a hard time on the internet, they should listen to what it’s like to be a Black, disabled, queer woman. This episode goes bigger than the internet, highlighting many of the injustices disabled people face, from representation to being considered fully, happy people. It’s not hard to find these injustices, they are so blatant, it’s kind of like we aren’t even remotely concerned with righting them. This episode will change the way you think about disabled people. And you’ll get a new girl crush on Keah. She’s positive throughout. And despite everything, she says she loves Twitter. (“A dumpster fire where lots of stuff that you love is inside the dumpster.”)
🎙️Endless Thread does a great job of digging into Reddit for interesting stories, and this one is a doozy. Randonauts refers to a group of people who use random, quantum-generated coordinates to go on real-life adventures, and before each adventure is set, the randonaut makes a *secret* intention for what they will find. Many of the encounters, it turns out, feel purposeful and not random at all, and often eerily close to the secret intention set. One story recently popped up about three teenagers who were taken to the site of two dead bodies in a suitcase. Their intention had been travel, as in the thing you do with a suitcase. THE EPISODE WOULD HAVE BEEN ENTHRALLING HAD IT STOPPED THERE, but this leads to an interesting discussion with psychiatrist Ralph Lewis about coincidence and why we often assign meaning to random things. (It actually has to do with evolution.) So are Randonaut coordinates really random, or is this some sick marketing ploy? (I don’t think it is a sick marketing ploy, but isn’t it fun to think about?)
🎙️Charles Lane’s Everytown is a story of one town, Southampton, New York, trying to kick out an entire community of immigrants by closing the places they work for the rich people who live there. The story takes place in one of the richest towns in the country, but The Hamptons is a microcosm of immigration problems happening all over the US. What happened in Southampton shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows its history. In 2005, the Shinnecock nation filed a lawsuit against the state seeking the return of 3,500 acres near the tribe’s reservation, and billions of dollars in reparations for damages suffered by colonial land grabs, and in 2006, the court ruled against the tribe. But I’m not one of those people who know the history. Living in New York City, this isn’t the Southampton that I hear about—I hear about the glamorous parties, beautiful homes, and celebrity sightings. This is the one we should know about.
🎙️The Ezra Klein Show focuses a lot about societal problems happening in the news, but what about the news itself? Margaret Sullivan (former chief editor of the Buffalo News and public editor of the New York Times, and now the media columnist for the Washington Post) talks to Ezra about the crisis in local news, a threat that is increasing at the same rate as climate change. Margaret explains what a world without local news will look like and proves that it’s something many of us take for granted. Listening to Margaret put story to the numbers—American newspapers cut 45% of newsroom staff between 2008 and 2017 and from 2004 to 2015, the U.S. newspaper industry lost over 1,800 print outlets to closures and mergers. It seems too late to try to bring local news back. This is a discussion about whether or not it can be saved, what our options are, and the very important things local news does for communities. Local news helps communities understand themselves in a way that national news cannot.
🎙️Jason Gots is doing a strange, cool thing with his “experimental variety show” Clever Creatures. On each episode, Jason takes one random word and from it creates a story, a song, and has a conversation with someone about it. The latest episode with David Sedaris is all about taking creative risks and possibly getting cancelled for them. I’m a liberal snowflake who thinks there are certain things you shouldn’t say, certain jokes you shouldn’t tell. But that’s not a limit David puts on his writing, and I enjoyed hearing his perspective as he walked Jason through his process. Notice David did not sign the Harpers open letter THAT I CANNOT STOP TALKING ABOUT. David says what he wants to say and doesn’t feel silenced. Listen to this episode to hear how he deals with any backlash he receives.
🎙️I will say this for the millionth time, in case you haven’t heard me say it before: If you’re hesitant to listen to audio fiction, start with The Truth. It was my gateway into fiction, and it’s so solid, digestible, and good, the acting is always fantastic, and I think it can convert you, too. (And then go listen to CrossBread.) After The Hum is about two sisters who meet a dangerous figure and are put to the test trying to survive in a dystopian future. I’m not sure this piece would have struck me so much had I not been self-quarantining for more than four months. But at the center of this story is a longing for connection as a way to fight loneliness and despair, something I think the whole world can relate to right now.
🎙️BTW if you are interested in MAKING fiction, check out this free resource on fiction podcast production from Multitude, which fully documents the production of their show NEXT STOP. (From idea generation, to working with script consultants, to casting union and non-union actors, to production and post-production, timelines, templates, real budget numbers and tips.) I appreciate this transparency from Multitude so much. Podcasting is the wild west, and I love it when podcasts share what they know to help each other. It’s something that’s gotta be done if we want to protect art coming from independent artists working on smaller budgets. (HOWEVER, big companies should use these numbers as a jumping-off point to fairly compensate audio professionals at all stages of the production process!) God Bless.
🎙️Nu-Metal is bad (IMHO) but that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting. What was once a way for privileged white men to get out their rage with a mix of aggressive metal, rap and pop (think Limp Bizkit,) is now being taken back by women who are using the genre to sing about sexism, capitalism, and other social issues. Switched on Pop talks about the artists like Poppy and Grimes, who are digging into Nu-Metal to fight the patriarchy. Pop star Rina Sawayama explains that she doesn’t take metal as seriously as the Nu-Metal blasters of the 90s, and that tracks—her rage seems to be laced with a sense of humor, lightness, and fun. A WINK, if you will. But it’s kind of ironic, because the issues she and her feminist Nu-Metal friends are signing about are actually issues that are serious. Listen to The Women Reclaiming Nu-Metal to hear how this genre has changed over the decades and about the women leading the way.
🎙️A few weeks ago I wrote about enjoying the story of Suzy Favor Hamilton, who was featured in an episode of Hall of Shame. Suzy’s story of mental illness is puzzling, but an episode of Tremendous Upside pushes the fog away, a bit, by talking to Suzy herself. On Tremendous Upside, Women's Basketball Hall of Famer Chamique Holdsclaw interviews athletes who are willing to be open about their mental health issues. It’s such a service to unearth these hidden stories. You can hear about Suzy and wonder, “what the fuck was she thinking?” or you can listen to Suzy tell you what the fuck she was thinking. It’s heroic.
🎙️Mary Trump was on The New Abnormal to talk about her family and new book Too Much and Never Enough, giving mind-blowing insight into her Uncle Donald, the troubling reason why he chugs Diet Coke and doesn’t sleep, and hysterical commentary on her racist grandfather Fred, the family patriarch who got arrested by a Ku Klux Klan rally. (“That story surprised me, not because my grandfather wasn’t antisemitic, he was, but because he would spend time doing something other than making money.”) I have listened to pundits, journalists and podcasters talk about Trump until my ears bled, but the stories Mary shares belong in their own category.
🎙️Did you know that Donald Trump has been mentioned in more than 200 rap songs? This episode of Waiting on Reparations takes this tiny fact and uses it to explore the connection between hip-hop, racism, and politics and the impact rappers may have had on the rise in Trump’s power. Dope Knife and Linqua make it clear that they’re talking about rappers and not hip-hop in general, and they go through some rap lyrics that both embrace and reject Trump. Some of Trump’s machoism aligns with a rap culture, and rap music is political. The two have more in common that you may think.
🎙️Ugh. This episode of Snap Judgment—first-hand accounts from incarcerated people inside San Quentin—is so good and heart-breaking. COVID is stressful for everyone, but listening to these people talk about trying to protect themselves in an impossible situation made me want to reach through my headphones and pull them out of prison, into my home. You end this episode feeling like we don’t treat prisoners like people. Like we don’t care if they live or die, or that they deserve to be in danger. I can’t think of any scenario more horrifying—being locked in a cell, wondering who a deadly virus will get to next. It if was a movie, people would say they don’t like scary movies and that the story is too intense to watch on screen. But we have to hear these stories. We have to listen to them. We have to.
🎙️I don’t know who needs to hear this, but my favorite artist of all time, Todd Rundgren, was on Questlove Supreme, and it’s the most musically in-depth interview I have ever heard with Todd. Amir gets Todd to tell stories about his albums and songs I’ve never heard before. (Amir’s brain is a musical encyclopedia.) Amir seems GIDDY to talk to Todd, which thrilled me. They really get to nerd out about the teensy details about music production and engineering. Amir takes his time going through Todd’s career, and it’s a fascinating look into the mind of a wizard, a true`star. If you don’t know Todd and have no idea what a genius is, listen to the first 30 seconds of Blue Orpheus. You’ll get it in 30 seconds.
🎙️Once Upon a Time…In the Valley tells the story of Traci Lords, the O.G. hardcore porn star, real name Nora Kuzma, who entered the industry as a 15-year-old and was busted (or saved?) by the FBI before her 18th birthday for being underage. This podcast does a great job interviewing Traci and the people in her orbit, painting Traci both as a victim and a fierce woman in control of her agency. Was the porn industry taking advantage of her, or is it the other way around? It’s a real-life psychological thriller/porno-noir mystery/feminist tale.
🎙️Jack Rico and Mike Sargent, two national film and culture critics, have launched Brown & Black, a really smart, inviting chat show that gives a completely different perspective on pop culture. They’re examining race through entertainment and media, two things that I’m obsessed with reading about, that are incredibly white. Start with George Lopez On George Floyd, Cultural Identity And The Power of Comedy.
🎙️Remember last week when I was going crazy about not remembering where I heard that Margaret Cho story about loving podcasts? Because I am a podcast psychopath, I found it.
🎙️I love you!