🌪 Missing slippers, soap operas, Paula Abdul "peeing her pants" 💦 Courtney E. Smith 🎸
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Bonjour!
Today is Monday, June 21st. There are 338 days until I go on my next Disney cruise. This week we’re getting to peek into the podcast app and listening life of Shira Moskowitz, co-host of Counter Programming with Shira & Arielle - a pandemic distraction cast where they explore anything with the word count or counter in the title. In her day job, she is a Customer Success Program Manager at Hopin.
The app I use: I'm currently between 3 apps: Apple, Spotify, and Castbox. Apple, because it's what I initially started using (and can't seem to let it go despite its imperfections); Spotify because some of my favorite pods are now exclusively on Spotify (especially Brené Brown); Castbox because they have the best search functionality (and make it easy to look up specific episodes).
Listening time per week: I listen between 7-10 hours per week.
When I listen: I find that I'm not able to appreciate most podcasts when I listen while working so I generally listen while walking, doing chores, or cooking. My daily routine is to listen to a morning pod before I start my work day. I was having trouble squeezing longer daily news podcasts into my routine but I recently discovered The Morning Announcements - a short daily news show which has been a great way to stay informed. In the evening, I usually listen to another show: On Mondays it's Showmance by RomCom Pods, Tuesday is Glennon Doyle's We Can Do Hard Things, Wednesday is Modern Love. Then I have Thursday - Sunday to catch up on all the other shows I've missed.
How I discover: I usually discover new podcasts from advertisements on other shows. I heard an ad for In God We Lust on RomCom pods and immediately downloaded it. My co-host, Arielle, and I did a lot of cross-promotion with other shows because it's such a key form of discovery. I also find podcasts through podcast newsletters, like Arielle's weekly community curated newsletter, Earbuds Podcast Collective (each week I review the email and download all the episodes that sound interesting and add them to my personal Earbuds playlist in Castbox).
xoxo lp
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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Courtney E. Smith
Courtney E. Smith is the editorial director of Hark Audio and the writer and host of Songs in the Key of Death. Follow her on Twitter here.
How was the idea of Songs in the Key of Death born?
Melissa Locker, one of the co-founders of Nevermind Media, who are the company behind the podcast, is a friend I made on Twitter back in 2011 when my book was published (you can see our friendship at its birth in this interview she did with me for The Hairpin back in the day!). When the company was starting up, she asked if I'd like to do a podcast with them. We didn't have an idea in mind, we were just bandying various thoughts around. Then, Dolly Parton's America dropped. Melissa sent me a text after listening to the first episode to ask what happened to the series I wrote about murder ballads when I was working at CBS Radio, because she wanted to email it to the show host — you know that bit he does about pretending not to know what they are and explaining it? Well, when CBS sold their radio assets to another company, they'd taken all our work down (feels wonderful to be useless to a corporation right?). I republished them on my blog after that and Melissa and I started talking about the idea of a murder ballads podcast. We knew true crime is huge and Nevermind is a music podcast company, so it felt like a great fit! Along with the other co-founder, Sean Cannon, we developed the idea together. It was their idea to have artists perform modern versions of the songs, which meant picking songs in the public domain for now so they're all nice and old. I wrote and researched the show, and am hosting it, so the flow, the template of how the stories get told came from me. Sean did an amazing job, along with his editing team, of giving it a soundscape.
How did you decide which stories would be included?
This was really tricky! There is either a lot of factual information about these songs and crimes or not a lot that's confirmable. Knowing that the discourse around murder ballads has been focused on how so many of the ones that stand the test of time seem to be murdered girl ballads, in which women are violently killed or painted as undesirable by men, that I wanted to give voice to those women. I wanted people to have a sense of what their life at the time would have been like and create historiography to explain why people have talked about them and written songs about them that turned out the way they did.
The other tough part was figuring out how much about the song's variations and how it traveled would be interesting. We're straddling a true crime and a music audience and we want to keep the shows interesting for both. For some songs, there are dozens of paths I could have chased down to tell more and more stories, but we aimed to keep each episode around 20 to 30 minutes, so I had to make hard choices. In those cases, there is also an element of the song's original author being lost, usually when it was a Black troubadour who didn't know copyright law. I did my best to trace the songwriting back to the area and possible writers it could have come from and give credit. Music has a long history of white people taking art created by BIPOC without credit and making it into hits, and therefore money, for the biggest audience: other white people. I didn't shy away from talking about that and the minstrel roots of when some songs were popularized.
What did making Songs in the Key of Death teach you about the world?
The deeper I got into researching and understanding the history of murder ballads, the more appreciation I have for the federal government making arts funding a part of the public services it offered after the 1929 stock market crash. The reason we have as much data as we have on a lot of these songs, these pieces of American history, is because of programs created by FDR to keep American artists in work during the 1930s. Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most important authors of the era, kept herself afloat by working for the Federal Writer's Project in Florida and as part of that, she collected versions of songs that include "Delia," which is the subject of our first episode, and explained the slang terms Black people use in a lot of the songs to the extremely white brass at the American Folklife Center. I'd like to see more of that energy coming out of the current administration.
What is your relationship to your voice and how would you describe it? Has your relationship to your voice changed since you started this show?
To be honest, I've always liked my voice. I think it's nice, I know it's soothing. I grew up in Texas and moved back after spending most of my adult life in NYC a few years ago and my accent has returned. It's light, but listening to myself read this podcast, I can hear it. I'm not sure how I feel about that! It becomes a trick to stop critiquing the pod based on how you sound and let other people do that. Sean coached me through each of our recording sessions, which was a huge help. He is an experienced producer and had a whole career in public radio as on-air talent, so his knowledge and direction was invaluable to me. Just the same, when I listened to a rough edit of one episode, I texted him and said I sounded way too excited throughout the whole thing and we were obviously going to have to record it again. When I listened to it again later (on headphones instead of on my car stereo), I had a completely different reaction. It was fine, there were just a few lines that needed a different read. So, in short: it's complicated!
Reporting true-crime can be dicey...how did you handle the material with respect while making the content entertaining?
Now, this is a wonderful question. I am not a huge true crime pod listener and I wasn't super attuned to the space before this. I stayed out of it while I wrote my episodes so I wouldn't be too heavily influenced by anyone else's style. I did know that the extremely old crimes I am talking about wouldn't necessarily be what a lot of the bigger ones were doing. The crime I struggled the most with covering and actually did listen to some podcasts about was the murder of the Lawson family. It's a gruesome story of a father who shoots his whole family on Christmas day in 1929. There was a great investigative pod from a local news station about it and an interview with a controversial author who wrote a couple of hard-to-find books about it. Then I let myself listen to a few pods who talked about it, pods you'd know if I named them. I decided none of their approaches worked for me. Something this heinous couldn't be described totally straight-forward or totally as gossip with jokes thrown in. It really needed historical and psychological context. We know so much more about why people commit that type of mass murder now than we did then. That's important to talk about!
After all my scripts were done, I did some reading on true crime podcasts and listened to a few episodes of some of the most popular ones, which I find to be very dry frankly. I stumbled on the plagiarism conversation that's been happening in the space and found it extremely interesting. Since I come from a background in journalism, having worked at CBS Radio and Refinery29 as an editor, writer, and producer, I take a different view of citing my sources. I always planned to link to my materials in my show notes, but it made me realize I was also analyzing information differently, with more of the criteria for verification that reporters require and that might not be in the toolbox of an amateur starting a true-crime podcast. I ended up adding the major citations to the end of each episode as well, which is a practice I think all true crime podcasters should embrace.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
A recent episode of Ear Hustle opens with a woman inmate looking at a photo of her younger self. She says: “It’s actually a portrait from my shoulders up. One of those posed pictures and I’m making, like, two and I have very bright eyes and I have a nice smile, and it’s really reminding me of how much love I felt at that time. My favorite thing was to ride on Dad’s shoulders when we would go somewhere…This picture reminds me of that. It’s real contentment in my face. Of course I wish for her a different life, you know? A young person. I’m trying not to cry. It’s a good thing to hurt this way.” It is an introduction to the protagonist of this episode, this lengthier than usual episode, the final in this season of Ear Hustle. And Leslie’s story begins to unfold. We learn that she has been in prison for 50 years and that she committed a crime when she was young. It is not until later that it is revealed (this is a spoiler so heads up…) we are hearing from Leslie Van Houten of the Manson murders. I love how delicately this episode was played. The title is not “MANSON MURDERER SPILLS…” because that is not what the story is about, it’s about Leslie as a person, doing her time, trying to get out, living with herself. I attended a live recording of Ear Hustle at the Tribeca Film Festival, where Nigel and Earlonne talked about this episode. (Side note: Nigel was wearing a hot pink pant suit that literally stopped me in my tracks and almost caused me to run into a stack of chairs, she looked beautiful.) This was a challenging episode, they said, because they had to do it all over the phone, which means 50 15-minute long conversations. And you know that actually means like 12 minutes, after all the rigamarole of being connected through the prison phone system. (That’s another thing they talked about…how difficult it is to clear an audio project while hurdling over the prison guardrails.) The reason this story starts so subtly is partially because that is the Ear Hustle style, never what you’d expect and with focus on the humanity and beauty of the subjects. But it is also because Earlonne and Nigel wanted our listening experience to mirror their own experiences getting to know Leslie. That is, in pieces. As their mini conversations unfolded, the gaps of her story began to fill in, and listening, we feel like we are discovering her in this way, too. And the result is not just artistic, it’s impactful. By the time you realize who Leslie is, you know her and have empathy for her, you are comfortable with her sweet voice and hurt for her to get out of prison. But you are jolted into reality once you realize what she has done. Nigel and Earlonne are not saying that she shouldn’t (or should) be in prison, they are inviting us in to get to know her and make up our own minds.
💎BTW💎
🎙️In my hands I am holding a copy of a beautiful book that smells good and looks amazing on my coffee table and is filled with magical things—it’s a guide to launching your own podcast. (lol jk I am typing, you dummies!) NPR’s Glen Weldon has put together NPR’S Podcast Start Up Guide, a plan to turn yourself into an audio storyteller with tips from people like Sam Sanders and producers of What's Good with Stretch & Bobbito, terminology, exercises, and all the how-tos. I almost cannot believe how thorough it is—it answers questions I didn’t even know I had. (I particularly enjoyed being told by Glen Weldon what he wants to see in pitch email subject headlines…and that he actually reads pitches.) If you have a podcast, I know you have a lot of questions about what you are already doing. (Many of you ask me about these questions!) And this book will help you, too. If you want my advice, don’t ask me. Ask Glen Weldon. Or read his beautiful book that seriously looks good on coffee tables and smells good too. Thanks, NPR, for sending me this book. And okay okay I get it, you are all dying for me to start my own podcast, stop being so obvious about it!!! Maybe one day I will.
🎙️I was so excited for the first episode of Truth Hounds that I saved it for Saturday so I could listen to it on Saturday with my husband on 1x speed. And it was…well it was strange, in the best way. Hosts Anna Seregina and Kyle Mizono are two close friends who a) are curious and b) have a lot of free time so they are the perfect duo to attempt get to the bottom of big questions (like in the first episode: why are people always late?) in an incredibly roundabout way. They’re not efficient at getting to the bottom of things, and they aren’t asking experts or doing any sort of research. Or even light Googling. But the journey they take you on in their attempt to solve these mysteries is well-worth the price of admission, which since it is free, I guess means the price of your time. They conduct their own research, answering the question in a way that makes sense to them and probably nobody else. I remember loving Starlee Kine’s Mystery Show, and this podcast is a little like that. (But funnier and less solvey.) One of the many reasons Mystery Show ended, I imagine, is because it was too expensive to be flying Starlee all over the country, getting back-stage passes to Britney Spears concerts. Truth Hounds doesn’t seem to have the same budget, which means this podcast has promising longevity. Anna and Kyle aren’t really solving things, so don’t expect the loose ends to be tied up in any way. The loose ends end up arguably more tangled than they were in the first place. But Anna and Kyle’s wry wit and off-the-beaten-path sense of humor makes this weird show lots of fun. It was worth the wait and I can’t wait for more.
🎙️First, click here. You are looking at the website for FOGO (fear of going outside) a nature podcast hosted Ivy Le, an Asian mom with severe allergies and a total aversion to the outdoors. I think you have a good sense, from this photo, how funny Ivy is as she tries to enter a world so often reserved for straight white men: nature. Ivy isn’t rolling her eyes at nature, she is genuinely interested why it has become such a darling in certain circles. Her enthusiasm for learning (say, how to stop walking into a spider web every time she takes out the garbage) is contagious and she comes at her subjects with full awareness she’s someone who knows nothing about the great outdoors but is dying to know more.
🎙️There’s No Place Like Home is a heist story surrounding one of the most famous props in Hollywood movie history, Dorothy’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. The owner of these slippers (they’re worth millions) donated them to the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, and was angry to discover they had been taken from the museum during the night (and even more angry to discover he was a suspect.) This is the hard-to-believe story of their retrieval (I am not spoiling anything by telling you that and the way they were recovered will leave you dying to know more.)
🎙️If you like The Daily Zeitgeist, which I hope you do, you will love Francesca Fiorentini’s The Bitchuation Room (she was recently on The Daily Zeitgeist,) a weekly caucus of progressive comics, activists and thinkers. Episodes run long (like 80-90 minutes) but each one feels like a flash. Francesca breathes life into depressing news topics like corporations rainbow washing their anti-gay lobbying, Jeffrey Toobin, or Bill Maher's dumb rant about college, and her guests are always incredibly funny. (The latest episode has Matt Rogers and Jayar Jackson of The Young Turks, another one featured Robert Evans.)
🎙️Songs in the Key of Death (from Courtney, above) combines two hot hot topics that don’t often overlap (though you will love it if you are already a fan of Double Elvis’ Disgraceland or The 27 Club)—true-crime and music. Music journalist (and Hark Audio’s Editorial Director) Courtney is taking a look at the history behind the murder ballads we have sung ten thousand times at karaoke. The first episode introduces us to Delia Green, a 14-year-old Black scrub-girl who in 1900 had a very bad Christmas that led to her murder and has served as a muse for everyone from Johnny Cash to Bob Dylan for generations. We have all these songs about her, but they’re all told from the perspective of the killer. And as it turns out, we were wrong about Delia. Meet the real Delia Green.
🎙️Radio Rental is back…sort of. It’s a teaser episode to get us ready for the next season, which I am so ready for. I don’t listen to a lot of spooky horror stuff, but Radio Rental is my favorite. The stories are told from the people in a style that makes you feel like you’re sitting around a campfire, taking it all in. Some of the stories are terrifying, some of them are odd, most of them are unexplainable. Sometimes they are unnerving because of how ordinary they are. This episode contains two stories—the first one has to be one of my favorites. (Although I wrote about Laura of the Woods for the Bello Collective Best of 2019.) It starts dark and gets darker. When it ended, I sat there with my jaw-dropped for a second. And the second is a story of spooky voyeurism. Gut feelings is what ties these two stories together. Also the fact that they nearly made me pee my pants.
🎙️Metaphysical Milkshake is where Rainn Wilson and scholar Reza Aslan tackle the big questions. And to be honest, I was expecting this to be a little meh. This has been done before. But not only was I totally delighted by the hosts, the first episode was around a big question not tackled on every single deep-thoughts podcast—why do humans constantly ruin everything? I had just been thinking about this after listening to a recent Code Switch episode about how we (brands) will manage to exploit Juneteenth by ridiculous marketing initiatives that make everyone hate it, especially since Juneteenth is now a national holiday. Malcom Gladwell is the guest to talk about why we can’t have nice things, why humans are bad at solving problems, and he rants about a few problems that we seem obsessed with fixing (biking) but go about it in the wrong way (making a lighter bicycle when what we really need is a safer one.) This episode was full of ideas and twisty thinking, so I can give this show a huge thumbs up. I was entertained the whole way through and hope Rainn and Reza keep up the good work, with episodes I could not expect.
🎙️Marsha’s Plate, a Black trans podcast hosted By Diamond Stylz, Mia Mix, and Zee, is a place you can go to hear trans people talking in an honest and unfiltered way. On the latest episode they tell a story about being randomly clocked (being read as a trans person) at a bar by a white woman, and what it meant to each of them individually. The best way to try to understand the trans experience is to listen to trans people. This podcast is entertaining (good for some good old fashioned storytelling) but also a tool to become more inclusive in our everyday thinking.
🎙️Tea with Queen and J is so fucking funny—in each episode Queen and J talk about whatever is on their minds. Now this vague sort of description is in general the kind of thing I loathe to see (if I see one more description that says ‘we’re just two guys in our moms’ basement shootin’ the shit’ I’m going to pass away.) But Queen and J are the exception to the rule. What’s on their mind is important and the way they present their humor, their opinions, their candor, and their empathy for people who don’t always get it, keeps me listening every single week. There are a lot of damn podcasts out there, there are few I so religiously listen to. It feels like both the update I need and the mental health break my soul needs. I am aware of my whiteness as I listen and feel lucky I can eavesdrop into their classroom. (If you even listen to one, or even if you don’t, throw them a few bucks or donate to their Patreon.)
🎙️On PEOPLE in the 90’s, PEOPLE’s Jason Sheeler and Andrea Lavinthal called up Paula Abdul for a conversation that is what this show is all about: inspiring you to blast “Straight Up” on repeat on your headphones and dancing around your apartment at 6 o’clock in the morning, basking in nostalgia. Paula talked about working her ass off before “Straight Up” changed her life, peeing her pants while dating Arsenio Hall, and going to bed early with John Stamos because they both were riddled with terrible allergies. In case you are interested Jason has located someone who may get him closer to Fabio, which makes this show not just comfortable but suspenseful.
🎙️Unread is the story between two friends. One, Chris Stedman, the host, the other, his friend Alex, who sent Chris an email one December evening in 2019 that said “when you receive this scheduled email, i will no longer be alive.” The email included a link to a private SoundCloud account with “Alice’s recordings.” This is where the mystery starts. Alice was an anonymous member of a Britney fan forum Alex had met years earlier who maybe is actually Britney Spears? Chris pulls us along on his search for the real Alex and Alice, all the while painting a memorable portrait of the very funny Alex that makes him seem alive.
🎙️I remember being captivated by an Immigrantly episode last year, Raise Your Hand if You’re Racist, with Regina Jackson and Saira Rao, co-founders of Race2Dinner, an organization that allows specifically white women to address their racism through a sit-down dinner party they pay for. (Really recommend that episode. There is a moment that is frozen in my brain—Regina and Saira say that lots of white women often complain how expensive the dinner is.) Saira is back with an episode White Women, Listen Up, and man she just gets white women better than white women do. She scratched the surface of so many things I wanted her to expand on (anorexia is a product of racism and white women’s race for perfection,) which just got me incredibly excited for the book she is writing with Regina, White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Race & How To Do Better. Saira is smart, unapologetic, and is saying the things that are often left unsaid when we talk about race.
🎙️Listen to the most recent episode of I Weigh with Jameela Jamil about men's violence against women, which features viral TED Talk speaker Dr. Jackson Katz. (I know you heard his TED Talk.) I realized there was something jarring about this episode…I was thrown off because I’m not used to hearing a man talk about the way men abuse women!!! That is fucked up!!!! Jameela and Jackson talk about the way we need to restructure language when we talk about it, and how even the best guys are doing the bare minimum for standing up against misogyny.
🎙️The Wild had an episode about orangutans that invites you into one of their nests in Northern Sumatra, and we learn that mothers often set up play dates for their young so they can get some “me time” and that unlike Harry and Sally, male and female orangutans CAN be friends. Part of this almost made me uncomfortable because hearing about their behavior seems like it could be unnecessary Anthropomorphism or Disney-ification but that’s what so incredibly about orangutans—they are incredibly like us. (In Malay, the word orangutan literally means ‘person of the forest.’) One difference: we like to cut down rainforests; orangutans do not. And Dr. Ian Singleton is on to describe the orangutans as refugees, because their homes are often no longer available to them. Chris Morgan’s reporting is so personal and intimate (he just sounds so kind and gentle!)—he shares his own detailed observations and exactly what he was thinking as he discovered the orangutan’s homes, which happened to be on fire. This show also has great audio that makes you feel part of the piece, not just someone hearing a story told to them.
🎙️I swear I’m not trying to turn this into a Daily Zeitgeist review newsletter, but I can’t help but point out, dear podcast nerds, that the venerable Jody Avirgan (This Day in Esoteric Political History, everything) was on the show last week for a spirited conversation about Mitch McConnell, UFOs, and Girl Scout cookies. They actually had a great conversation about an episode of This Day that featured Jill Lepore of The Last Archive, Borat Before Borat, where she brilliantly outlines a recent episode of The Last Archive, Children of Zorin, the story of Valentin Zorin, a Soviet journalist who made a series of documentary films about the United States in the 1970s.
🎙️Re: The Last Archive, there was a fun episode (as fun as it could be) about Rush Limbaugh and his “ditto heads,” how the failure to reinstate the history of the fairness doctrine in 2011 allowed Rush to continue to radicalize his talk radio listeners and shape the conservative movement, and how Al Franken flipped what Rush was doing to create his own platform, which put the two partisan loudmouths at a head. This is a wild and dishy, fast-paced story that makes the United States feel like a comic book. And it tells a story of the media and its impact on our political landscape. My favorite part was hearing a dramatic reading from one of Jill’s book reports when she was 12, which confirms that she was always a whip-smart nerd.
🎙️Decoder Ring is back with a new season and an episode of the story behind a story in the soap opera One Life to Live, which is arguably more interesting than any fictional show the series aired in its 43 years on TV. When Marty Seabrook (played by Susan Haskell) was raped by Todd Manning, it demanded a serious conversation about sexual assault and whether or not a loyal TV audience could find redemption for in someone like Todd. Willa talks to producers, writers, and actors to give a full account of what was going on behind the scenes, and what goes on behind the scenes in soaps in general. Usually with episodes of Decoder Ring, I feel fairly familiar with the topic at hand, but this episode opened a whole new world to me. I see why people used to read Soap Opera magazines and follow the characters like legitimate celebrities. It’s a fantasy world that was broken open with the rape of Marty Seabrook, and on Decoder Ring we get to look at all the pieces strewn about on the floor.
🎙️Okay so white people finally know what Juneteenth is, and we know what the Tulsa Massacre is, but let’s not pat ourselves on the backs just yet. The Tulsa Massacre is not technically over and some stuff has happened in the between years. With Friends Like These invited Carlos Moreno, author of The Victory of Greenwood, on to paint a picture of Greenwood, Oklahoma through 1921 to present day—an event that some say was worse than the original massacre, how segregation is still a harsh presence in Greenwood, and Carlos’ dreams for the future of the city.
🎙️I love you!