🧈 Biscuit spirit 🐍 whippin' Indy 🥇 the worst podcast 🦃 toenail veganism 🍽️
🍭 👂I saw a man in the park whipping alone 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, September 9. Why on earth would you open email with “toenail veganism” in the headline? What is wrong with you, you fucking sicko? Anyway, in case this newsletter is too long, I’ve been waiting for this biscuit for a long time, a hilarious face-off between the archeologist vs gigolo communities here, maybe the only good celebrity interview podcast here.
Have a nice weekend.
xoxo lp
p.s. Want to advertise here? Fill out this form or let me know.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Meklit Hadero
Meklit Hadero is an Ethio-American vocalist, songwriter and composer, known for her electric stage presence and innovative, deeply personal Ethio-Jazz songs. Her music has made her a star in her home country of Ethiopia, and most recent album was named amongst the best records of the year by Bandcamp and The Sunday Times UK, climbing to the top of the iTunes, NACC, and European World Charts. She is the host of Movement, a podcast, radio series and live show that tells stories of global migration through music.
Describe your podcast, but use the format of a Hollywood logline.
Maybe “Parts Unknown” meets “Tiny Desk.” It’s music discovery meets larger cultural context.
This new season of Movement with Meklit Hadero is a bit different from Season 1. I feel like you’ve unlocked your combined superpowers as a musician, culture curator, storyteller and activist. What’s your origin story as a podcaster? Further, what was the cause for the shift in format?
I came to this work in 2017. The genius producer Julie Caine is the one who brought me me and Ian Coss together to develop the show. It took us a while to find a home, but we’ve been super happy with our broadcast partnership with PRX’s The World, all while releasing episodes on our feed as well.
The shift in format came because I wanted to be more active in telling personal stories as part of the show. Music and migration is deeply personal to me as an Ethiopian- American, Ethio-jazz singer songwriter. And throughout my career, I’ve grounded myself in telling bigger stories together with other artists than I am able to do by myself. So it all made sense. Also - We were super lucky to snag Megan Tan as our senior editor and she has helped so much in developing the concept of Season 2.
You also have a new EP out Ethio Blue, the storytelling and instrumentation are just as rich in sound as the stories heard on your podcast. How do you tap into your “artist brain” vs. your podcast “host brain” when you are creating? In some ways I’m sure they are related - but can you break down the differentiation (For instance how do you prepare to go into the studio to record music, versus recording an episode of your podcast? OR How does researching play a part in both? OR How does intention strike you for either?)
I think the place where they are connected is really through the process of listening. There’s this funny thing that no one tells you about being a musician. Learning to listen and hear differently, more subtly, with bigger ears… it’s as much a part of the artist journey as being able to produce exactly the sound you want with your voice or your instruments. Interviewing is like that as well. Not only are you spending time listening to the music of the artist that you’re about to talk to, but within the interview, you’re listening for the inflection in their tone, you’re trying to figure out when there is more of a story underneath what they’re saying. Then, you ask follow-up questions that unleash unexpected moments. It’s the same as when you’re listening to a bandmate improvise. When they hit an electrifying phrase, your head turns on its own and you make the stank face, and they feed off that and dig deeper. Both are a conversation. And when people know they are truly being listened to, they open up. All that said, performance itself is super different than the process of interviewing. On stage, my job is to be completely free and go into a dream. I have to bring the audience into that dream with me so we can feel something ethereal together. in an interview, I’ve got to know what the next question is and we’re trying to get to. It’s more earthbound.
What does “home” mean to you?
Home is a process home. Home is a journey. Home is the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Home is really a poem. It’s not easily definable, but everyone’s trying to find it.
You shared a beautiful story about moments with your grandfather and how you both were able to communicate in joy without words; how does your family and upbringing have an effect on your work on Movement with Meklit Hadero?
A lot of my creative work has been based in life on two sides of the hyphen, Ethiopian-American. I’ve talked a lot about that throughout my journey. Especially the experience of coming to the United States as a refugee in my youth. But I think the other important thing about this podcast is that it’s really born out of love. I have an enormous amount of love for the music and the cultural power coming out of immigrant communities. I wanted a space to share that so that I could shine that love out into the world and create new ways of feeling and hearing our way into belonging.
You get to time travel back to speak to your younger self, but you only have a 30 second window, what would you say?
Trust your instincts. Music is as magic and as important as you think!
You’ve spoken on TED stages, at the UN, at various institutions and universities around the globe, what is the one message that you carry with you no matter the platform, and why?
It’s not one message, it’s a few. There are more than this, but for now…..
Music is an ancient technology that we have for bringing people together. We should be using it with more intention.
Cultural power is necessary for building new narratives, as well as for finding our way through the multiple intersecting crisis were all facing.
The world is a musically alive place if we are listening.
Sonic joy comes from opening your ears to sounds from all over the globe. In other words, decenter western (musical) traditions.
A little rapid fire…
Favorite Country to visit? Come on now, Ethiopia!
Favorite food? Peaches
You get to listen to ONE album on a deserted island for eternity, what is it? Songs in the Key of Life
Top 3 podcasts in your queue right now? Wiser Than Me, How to Survive the End of the World, Object of Sound.
Most memorable concert? Lord that’s a hard one! Mark Cary at the Red Poppy Art House in 2007. He’s a genius jazz pianist and I spent the whole concert crouched behind the piano taking in the physical vibrations of the instrument. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a musical experience like that. It was remarkable. But obviously there are too many to name.
You get to put together a super band, who’s in the crew and why? Easy, that’s my band. They are literally the best ever!
Mp3 or vinyl? Why? Vinyl. It just sounds better.
Tell us more about Meklit’s Movement Immigrant Orchestra…
This project is more than a podcast. We also have live performances and community building initiatives. We bring immigrant musicians together in the bay area, where I live, as well as across the United States. We are building solidarity between immigrant communities and making sure that sharing cultural power with each other is at the center of this project. The best way to do that with musicians is just to play together. So we made a platform for that and the Yerba Buena Gardens festival invited us to share that platform with others.
If the person reading this interview leaves with one thing today about Movement with Meklit Hadero (or Ethio Blue), what’s the THING?
We are answering a question. What do global movements of people sound like… and we are shining that love for our own communities out into the world and to each other. The soundtrack to a radically diverse world is bumping.
Where do you see your podcast expanding to after this season? Are more in-person lives on the way? Tell us something that we don’t know yet.
Next year, I’ll be a visiting artist at the Stanford Institute for diversity in the arts and I’m super excited to be bringing together immigrant musicians with policy and advocacy organizations on campus and beyond. We are modeling what it might look like for immigrant musicians, who are incredible storytellers, to be more core to advocacy campaigns for rights and justice for immigrant communities. This project goes deep!
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Comedian/writer/actress Akilah Hughes is going back to her small hometown of Florence, Kentucky to try to get them to change the high school mascot from a confederate general to a biscuit, and she is bringing her microphone along for her new show Rebel Spirit. When I first listened to the trailer (it feels like centuries ago, I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time) I realized it checked so many boxes of things I love. It’s got a real mission, it’s journalism but it’s funny but it’s making a real point. We’re living the story with Akilah, she’s using original footage. It’s ridiculous but also not. And then I started thinking about the biscuit as a mascot, and that checks a lot of boxes, too. As Akilah points out, everyone loves biscuits, and they are harmless and vegetarian. They’re southern. The word “biscuit” is the same number of syllables as “rebel” so the cheerleaders don’t have to change their chants. So maybe it’s not ridiculous at all, and in this crazy world, the most sane thing I’ve heard all year. And the podcast feels like a gift I do not deserve. I hope there might be a season two about Billy the Bullet, the mascot of my alma mater, Gettysburg College. Because get it…war = killing people? (I used to call him Benny and people would actually get so pissed off, as if that was the worst part.) How I found it: The trailer was featured on Apple Podcasts a zillion years ago and I have been waiting for it ever since.
notes
✨DCP partnered with Barometer to create the first Black Podcast Coalition, a collective of influential networks and shows targeting a sizable Black audience. Learn more here and email your questions info@dcpentertainment.com.
✨Read End of Year Marketing Essentials in Podcast Marketing Magic.
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Rip Current in her newsletter and podcast.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Weight For It returned for season two with an episode that felt very homemade, and I mean that in the best way. Maybe “made with heart” is a better way to say it. It felt like a good storyteller was sitting down to perfectly tell a story exactly the way he wanted to tell it. That’s not as common as I wish it was. The story Ronald Young Jr. is telling in this kick-off episode starts with winning three Ambies for season one of Weight For It (I was in the audience cheering him on) and then rewinds to just a little before, when he finds out that his mother is dying. Ronald calls his sister Marilyn to talk about what was like losing their mom, but really how death and dying make people, and the people in their orbit, lose or gain weight. And here is where he (god he always does this, it’s one of the many reasons this show is so good) admits something we don’t always hear people say: that even when his mom was dying he wished he was losing weight instead of gaining it. Even in that moment he couldn’t quiet that voice inside his head. When his mother was dying she was losing weight, and so was his father. While his dad managed to remain within the “congratulatory, complimentary threshold of weight loss,” his mother got too thin. Until she was gone completely, and Ronald was shopping for caskets realizing that when it’s his time to go, his family will have to pay extra for a larger casket. (The stress of being fat follows you not until the day you die, but after.) Weight gain and loss is not a moral issue, but it can be a sign that something is very wrong if you go outside that threshold either way. If we can go back to what I was saying at the beginning, how this felt like a story told the way Ronald wanted to tell it, I must point out that Ronald’s sister was an important voice here, as was Ronald’s mother. Ronald had recorded conversations with her before she died. I remember not long ago listening to Ronald on the Dear Prudence podcast, where Prudie (Jenée Desmond-Harris) asks her guest to give a piece of unsolicited advice. Ronald said: “Video and audio record your loved ones. Do it all the time. Do it as much as you can because the one way that I feel like my mom is still alive is through video and audio recordings that we took of her when she was here." It’s one of the many reasons this episode was so good. Listen here.
How I found it: I subscribe.
🎙️The Heart has a new, hard and beautiful series called “Great Love: Gaza Monologues Revisited,” a collection of voices from Gaza, within Palestine, and living in diaspora who are piecing together their lives in different ways. It’s The Heart. The audio and structure are wonderful. And like much of what The Heart makes, it’s challenging. This is not an easy listen. Narrators have all chosen monologues from Ashtar Theatre’s The Gaza Monologues, which was written by kids going through the war in 2010. But that’s really only an entry point into getting to know these people better and hearing real audio of their lives. I kept wanting to ask these narrators if they would have ever imagined they could survive what they’ve been through, because I’m not sure I could. Three of the people we hear from are med students who fled Gaza and are trying to finish their education in Cairo. The schools in Egypt require them to start all over again and pay double, and all scholarships for refugees exclude people fleeing from Gaza or the West Bank. (We hear from Kaitlin Prest just how impossible it is to support people in Gaza.) So Mermaid Palace helped to create a scholarship for the students’ tuition fees, living expenses, and medical and personal care. Contribute here. Kaitlin spends quite a bit of time listing ways to slice one thousand bucks out of our lives. (Give up five fancy dinners!) (Again, contribute here. If 75% of everyone who read this newsletter gave $11 they’d be 1/3 of the way to their goal.) Everyone is struggling how to talk about this war, I haven’t found a way that isn’t absolutely horrible. I guess it doesn’t surprise me art like this an answer. Kind of. In one interview, Kaitlin says, “The chorus of the show is why? What the fuck?” I’d start here.
How I found it: I subscribe.
🎙️I turned on an episode of Pop Culture Debate Club (two mega-fans try to convince Aminatou Sow that their at-odds opinions on something pop-culturey is right) because I liked the episode title: “Worst American Abroad: Indiana Jones x Deuce Bigalow.” Past episodes have been about the best housewives franchise or Lifetime movie, and I was really excited to hear a silly debate about fictional characters. When I heard who the guests were I wondered why the episode title buried the lede—David Gborie (from one of my favorite shows All Fantasy Everything and on the side of Deuce Bigalow) and Solomon Georgio (had a podcast called The Squeeze but is better known for just being a great guest on everything and on the side of Indiana.) This wasn’t really a contest, David came actually defending Deuce, whose only crime seems to have been breaking hearts and putting female pleasure first. But I was cackling the whole way through this exploration of the archeologist vs gigolo communities. In the end, wow. Indiana Jones suuuuucks if you think about it too much, which if you want to enjoy the franchise you shouldn’t. This wasn’t a debate but who cares it was the hardest I’ve laughed listening to a podcast in awhile. Listen here.
How I found it: I subscribe but clicked on the episode because of the title.
🎙️Ear Hustle launched season FOURTEEN with an episode talking to incarcerated people who feel more comfortable inside prison than outside of it. I got the sense this is something more common that we realize. Someone they interviewed said that even though the food was bad, it was there and not something he had to think about, and in prison he was able to read books all day pursue a degree. It’s a vibe. If you’ve been in prison for awhile, the fast-changing outside world can seem insurmountably insane and impossible to keep up with. But before I could get too depressed about that, Nigel started talking to someone about what it means to be comfortable vs institutionalized on the inside, and how some of us on the outside are probably institutionalized too, in our own lives. (The guy reading all day found a way to be comfortable.) That was a moment I had to sit with for awhile. Am I comfortable or institutionalized in my own life? This episode had me going from thinking about people who return to jail because to them the streets are worse, to how I practice my own freedom in my everyday life and whether or not I totally have it. This was a beautiful little punch of an episode and it sounds like there are tons of good episodes coming in this season. (Nigel and Earlonne tease episodes about how people in San Quentin are voting and an episode about the last memory they had before they got locked up.) Listen here.
How I found it: I subscribe.
🎙️On Search Engine, PJ Vogt asked Annie Lowrey, a vegan whose beat at The Atlantic is, among other things, animals and our interesting relationships with them, how to “get a toenail in the door of caring about compassionate food consumption.” What’s the biggest bang for your buck if you don’t want to go full vegan? I absolutely love this question, because vegetarianism and veganism has a huge marketing problem that often just makes people feel guilty or full of hatred or like a failure if they can’t fully commit. Anne is an interesting kind of vegetarian, more concerned with what happens to animals before we kill them than the fact that we are actually killing them. Annie brings up a ton of interesting points, illustrated by stories about turkeys being thrown from planes and the complicated reason that really sick cows are giving us milk. I don’t see how you could listen to this and not think about the way you eat and maybe change something. I mean, everyone has their reasons for eating what they do. I haven’t eaten meat or fish in about 32 years and it’s because I don’t want to kill things. When I was nine I wasn’t worried about my choloesterol or global warming. In the last year I started eating oysters for a reason that Annie outlines. For her, eating beef and oysters make more sense than eating dairy. So for the millionth time I’m questioning my choice to eat dairy. I think these lines we draw, what we decide is right or wrong, are so fascinating and this episode will get you thinking about that. Listen here.
How I found it: I subscribe.
🎙️I’m pretty obsessed with Leena Norms and her No Books on a Dead Planet, where she reads books about the climate crisis so we don’t have to. I love to read, love love love. But my precious time with books is not going to be spent thinking about about rising oceans and greenhouse gas. So I appreciate this show. Plus Leena is a delight, I’d love to hear what her second podcast would be, because I’d listen to that, too. Usually she talks to people about these books, but she did a mini episode with just her sweet self about Should We All Be Vegans? by Molly Watson. It sounds like an interesting book because of the fonts alone. Paragraphs are set in type of different sizes depending on their importance, so you can blow through it for a deep dive or skim. It’s making learning about veganism easy, and this podcast episode about it is making learning about it even easier. Leena goes through lots of fascinating facts about veganism plus a friendly approach about how to, as PJ put it on Search Engine, “get a toenail in the door of caring about compassionate food consumption.” Leena has a great IG post about that here. Listen to No Books on a Dead Planet here.
How I found it: I think it was featured on Pocket Casts once?
🎙️I rarely, rarely rarely listen to celebrity interview podcasts. I surprised myself turning on The Worst Podcast, hosted by Alan Zweig. (I had never heard of Alan Zweig.) I claim to know a lot about podcasts but had no idea that Kattie Laur (Pod the North) and Julie Shapiro (Audio Flux) are producers, and hearing Kattie’s voice was a delight. She’s there to spring the guest on Alan without any preparation. I’m not sure he’ll always know who his guests are, but it doesn’t matter. I usually don’t like it when people who claim to know anything about podcasts start one, but in this case it’s endearing. Alan isn’t asking pretentious questions, he’s asking people to tell him the worst things that have happened to them. He’s not trying to be funny, but he is. In the hands of someone different this wouldn’t work. By not trying too hard to be the perfect host and actively trying to be the worst host, Alan is proving to be a great host. (A lot of this is because Kattie and Julie are great.) This doesn’t feel or sound like a regular celebrity podcast. The first episode is with Paul F Tompkins and Janie Tompkins (someone who, in a cringe-worthy moment that is not edited out, Alan calls “the wife”) and it’s one of the least bullshit conversations I’ve heard on a celebrity interview podcast ever. Alan asks some good questions, some of them are about how to have a good podcast, and there is even a reference to The Littlest Hobo, which is a television show we just don’t talk about enough. Listen here.
How I found it: I subscribe.
🎙️Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!’s Mike Danforth and Ian Chillag are bringing back How to Do Everything, a call-in show which originally ran from 2011 to 2016. (It’ll have its own feed but will also run in the Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! feed.) They’ll be answering listener-submitted questions, kind of weird questions (for episode one they go to a woman’s house with some sort of smell detector to find out if she smells bad.) They seem to be questions that we don’t actually need to know the answer to, until we think about them too much then we absolutely do. Mike and Ian were also the hosts of one of my favorite new shows in the last few years, In the Scenes Behind Plain Sight, and while the content is totally different, the tone is the same—Mike and Ian do not veer away from awkwardness. They steer into it. Awhile ago, when Ian was soliciting questions to answer for this show on one of his social media accounts, I said I wanted someone to explain how to fold a fitted sheet because I don’t think it can be done and that anyone who says they can do it is a filthy stinking liar. The fact that this wasn’t addressed in episode one is all the evidence I need to know I’m right. (Still would love to hear them cover that topic.) Listen here.
How I found it: Press release.
🎙️When I wrote about season three of In the Dark, I wrote about it because it was newsworthy that In the Dark was back and because I had listened to the first episode, which was good. So that review was like “In the Dark is back and the first episode was good.” At this point I have listened to seven episodes and I can write about it differently, I can say that it’s one of the greatest investigative seasons of anything I’ve heard. Madeleine Baran has done the work to get thorough reporting of an incident that happened almost 20 years ago, jaw-dropping tape, and classified documents and photos released that reconstruct everything we thought we knew what happened and go against nearly everything the marines said on this day that twenty-four civilians in Haditha, Iraq were murdered in their homes. More than just explaining this terrible morning and the anguish of the family left behind and finally pinning down the people responsible for these war crimes, this season of In the Dark is letting us in on the callousness of the marines and how war made them see the people of Haditha as less than human. Listen here.
How I found it: I subscribe.
🎙️After listening to Toby Ball review true crime for Crime Writers On… every week, often twice a week, I have come to depend on him for his taste, his sense of humor, and the interesting way he sees things. He is thoughtful and has a lot of empathy. His new show, Rip Current, is about a slice of history that is approximately seventeen days long and 90 miles apart that took place in California, September 1975. During this time two women (who were not in cahoots in any way) tried to assassinate President Ford. One of the women was Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a member of the Manson Family. The other one was a 45 year-old housewife who infiltrated San Francisco's violent radical underground working undercover for the FBI. Rip Current is a focused look at this pretty nuts time in our history in general, as well as an investigation into these two women and what brought them to try to kill the president. Listen here.
How I found it: Toby emailed me.
🎙️I love you!
📦 From the Archives 📦
[From August 17, 2020] 🎙️I relistened to an amazing episode of Invisibilia over the weekend—The Problem with the Solution. (When I interviewed Hanna Rosin, she mentioned it was her favorite episode.) It begins with producer Lulu Miller, who talks about her sister’s health problems, and her family’s ardent desire to fix them. But what if the solution of the problem comes when you don’t try to fix it at all? In parallel, Lulu visits a town in Belgium with a unique approach to this problem—people suffering from mental illness are placed in the homes of strangers. The idea is that strangers are better at taking care of us than our own families because they are less invested in making us “better” or “normal” and are instead truly focused on our well being. Lulu has an incredible revelation about how her family handled her sister’s mental illness, and a heart wrenching conversation with her father, who breaks down into tears. The Belgium town’s non-solution solution makes sense to them, in hindsight. And it makes the whole family reevaluate what Lulu’s sister needed from them.