🎙️Incredibly Thorough Podfest Review🎸Dear Young Rocker’s Chelsea Ursin🤘
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Bonjour!
Last weekI flew to Orlando to attend PodFest. I met my mom there so that we could go to Disney World, too, but my Disney World time kept on encroaching on my conference time and I did not end up attending a single second of the conference. So oops, lol. (I’m sure PodFest was fantastic.)
I don’t have any podcast news since I did not attend the conference. But something unusual happened in Disney World.
My mom and I love The American Adventure in EPCOT. (I think we are the only people who feel this way.) I don’t consider myself a particularly patriotic person, but this attraction really brings out the God Bless America in me. I sit there, hearing the story of America and watching the montages, thinking about how hard people have worked to make our country what it is, and how we must continue to sacrifice to make it even better, how we can’t let go of the dream we want America to be. I CRY each time and I think the American Adventure theme song should be our national anthem. I thought I might have similar feelings seeing The Hall of The Presidents, an attraction in The Magic Kingdom that I haven’t experienced since I was five. The Hall of the Presidents tells a short history of the American presidency and then goes through the list of all of our presidents, giving each one, represented by an animatronics, the spotlight. I was prepared to see Donald Trump in there. (When he was in the spotlight, I lightly “booed” but most people were applauding.) Although some people didn’t think he should be allowed into the attraction, I think children should be subjected to seeing the result of our huge collective fuck up. We can’t erase our past. But sitting there as the attraction went through old white man after old white man…many of them, in a row, named James, made me think about how goddam mediocre many of them were. (Can we stop acting like Thomas Jefferson was great?) There were so many women and people of color and people of other others who would have been great presidents. But they never even had a chance. And pretty much still don’t.
I started to get very angry and could feel rage building inside of me. I went into The Hall of the Presidents in my usual good Disney mood. I was having a great day with my mom. But I left with a dark cloud over me. My jaw was clenched, I was silent. As we were walking, my mom asked me, “are you okay?” I felt guilty that I was acting off, and I couldn’t figure out why. “I think I’m just cold?” I said. “Okay,” my mom said. After a few minutes I said, “actually I think I’m just people watching, I’m really focused on looking at everyone.” “Okay,” my mom said. But thirty minutes later when I realized my jaw hurt and I had a huge headache, I realized that my anger had been spurred by The Hell of the Fucking Presidents. (This was right after our miserable Super Tuesday, by the way.) “I think The Hall of the Presidents is just pissing me off,” I told my mom. “That’s what I was thinking,” she said. “I was waiting for you to realize it.” TBH it wasn’t even the Trump animatronic that did it. It was being struck by how boring and depressing it is that for hundreds of years we have thought that old white men are the best people to lead our country.
Then my mom looked into my face. “Lauren, your eye is all fucked up.” I had bursted a blood vessel in my eye. The Hell of the Presidents caused me to burst a blood vessel! I was physically damaged just thinking about the patriarchy. If you’ve been down about the direction our country has been taking, know that I AM THERE WITH YOU, physically struggling, and that this stress is REAL, and manifesting in our bodies. We are all under so much pressure right now, so much is unknown and scary. I’m trying to remember the message from The American Adventure, that Americans before us have suffered and sacrificed to overcome things that seem insurmountable. And we can do it again.
I don’t have to tell you that the rest of this week has been terribly shitty, getting shittier every day. God Bless America and God Bless The World. I hope you can find a podcast or two to lift your spirits. I know they have been lifting mine.
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word!
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Dear Young Rocker’s Chelsea Ursin
Chelsea Ursin is the creator of Dear Young Rocker. Follow her on Twitter here. Follow Dear Young Rocker on Twitter here.
One of the many reasons I love Dear Young Rocker so much is there isn't anything quite like it. How did you come up with the idea?
Thank you! I think the reason it’s different is the same reason my music and basically everything I make is kinda different. I’m one of those people who spends way more time creating things out of my own weird brain following my own instincts more than I do closely studying the works of others and learning the “right way” to do things. I’m a weirdo loner who doesn’t really care for following the rules and my work reflects that. I didn’t listen to many podcasts or try to figure out how they were made before I decided to make one of my own, because I hadn’t been exposed to them yet.
Here’s the story: I finished my MFA in Creative Non-Fiction in 2015 and my thesis was a book-length memoir called “Bass Player.” The idea was to tell my story of growing up an alienated angry kid who could have ended up going in a lot of bad directions but who instead found rock music and playing in bands as a release for difficult feelings and a way to connect to other people. The story’s goal was to emphasize the importance of creative and physical outlets for adolescents, especially non-males who can end up being labeled crazy or troubled if they act out rather than being given something to channel that. Boys who act out aggressively are ‘boys being boys’ and given football or wrestling or a drum kit while girls and others can be quickly and unhelpfully labeled crazy or problematic and learn to keep it in and hurt themselves in the process. I knew my story would help others who had felt alone in their difficult feelings as kids and who found solace in music.
I worked very hard on the book but couldn’t get it published because I’m not famous and publishers don’t want to pick up memoirs by non-famous people. (Real book agents and editors told me that I didn’t have enough of a “platform”). This made me feel bad about myself - who was I to think I could have published a memoir? But something burned in me deep down because I had a mission. One of the whole points of my book was to show that women who aren’t famous musicians, who just play in bands on nights and weekends, are a real group of humans and how meaningful, or even how life or death playing music can be for some of us, even if it’s just seen as a “hobby.” How it helped many of us survive difficult times with mental health in our teenagedoms and how alone we felt in that because there’s so little representation. I was depressed for years thinking that the only way I’d get this thing that I’d spent 3 years and 70k on out to the world and start my writing career was to somehow, in addition to all that time and effort, find a way to also get internet famous first? But I was working my butt off trying to pay my rent and loans in Boston - working four jobs as an adjunct professor / barista, living with five roommates at 30, so I didn’t have time to think about it.
I started volunteering and then eventually getting paid to do some copy-writing and admin stuff for this NPR children’s science podcast Wow in the World while I was still doing those other four jobs, and after that first exposure to podcasts and writing a script for them, I had this epiphany. I thought man, I know a tiny bit about recording and editing audio, and I know how to write… I bet I could make a podcast. I remember standing in this college library on a spring day when there were no students in the building at all and I just started jumping up and down. My book! My music! I will make my book and my music get married and they will have a baby and it will be a podcast! You don’t have to convince anyone to publish a podcast you can just put it out there yourself! It will be like an old radio show with sound effects and music working together literally and metaphorically! I had no idea what an RSS feed was and probably couldn’t name more than three podcasts yet, plus had no idea yet that audio drama or creative independent podcasting even existed, and although I played music I’d never scored anything. I didn’t even know how much I didn’t know at that point but I didn’t care. I felt a fire and real purpose in my life beyond just pay the damn bills and feed your cat for the first time in a while. I had wanted to help people with mental health issues through music and writing.
I had even strongly considered a second Master’s in Music Therapy but knew there was no way I could afford it and had almost given up on the idea of being useful to the world in that way. I had found the solution to so many things at once in Dear Young Rocker. And then it became itself. I found a format for my story where instead of trying really hard to explain music and how it makes me feel and hope it translates, I could actually use music to make other people feel what I felt. I could actually recreate the sounds of myself learning instruments and making my first songs and put them right in it. Also unlike in a regular book memoir that needs an editor’s approval, I felt I had room to experiment so I added in a full letter to my younger self in each chapter hoping it could be valuable advice for teens that is empathetic toward what they’re going through and understands how everything really does feel like life and death at that age. I wanted to answer to that, and validate it, instead of talk down to them like a regular grownup might. It’s what I wished someone had told me at that age rather than the “get over it, stop being so sensitive” advice I had been given.
So all together I guess it’s a combo of a musical audio memoir produced in a sort of audio drama style (yet non-fiction), plus an advice show. Choosing my category was really hard!
You have to be so proud—you started a show independently that was good enough to get the attention of Double Elvis. What advice would you give to other podcasts who have a dream of doing this?
Number one: Don’t bother imitating others. There’s plenty of new ground to be broken and people are hungry to find those who are doing so. Think of it as a grand creative experiment and enjoy the heck out of it and care about it -- that’s the only way you’ll be able to push yourself through the hours of work you’ll have to do. Even if your thing ends up not-perfect and very blatantly DIY like mine, if your heart's in it, and it stands out, it will eventually get noticed. Think of how many kinds of book markets there are and how few of those have been translated into narrative audio. You don’t have to make another true crime show! Memoir is still a budding one with plenty of room. YA Romance… period horror… spelunking drama... whatever…. think of any creative book or TV show you like and make the podcast version. There’s so much room in the pool and unlike books there’s not enough out there yet for anyone to say “you can’t do that.” I have no idea if anyone else has done exactly what I’ve done in the way I’ve done it both artistically and in a business sense, and so you can do it a whole new way too. New kinds of contracts can be written for new kinds of ideas. So number one and a half is to remember there are no rules of either what kind of thing you make or how it can be in the world.
Two: Just go out and meet people. I know how hard it is. I am an extremely shy person who says awkward things to people I barely know and I usually need a full week to stop going over and over what I said to who and how dumb it was. I actually take medicine when I go to networking events so that my hands don’t shake too hard, but when I started my show I forced myself to attend a minimum of one every two weeks. I had no idea what or who I was looking for or what to say. I didn’t even understand how podcast networks work or that agents and management and PR are just as big of a part of podcasting as they are in books and music -- but then what and who I needed found me because I was out there. Just be yourself and leave your house and if you live somewhere without a physical podcast community find it online. Also understand, I worked for a full year on this thing, traveled all over and met hundreds of people in real life and online and went into debt before being noticed, so don’t get discouraged too quickly. The audio community is the most supportive wonderful place of fellow art nerds I’ve ever gotten the honor of sometimes being a part of, so it will be worth it.
Can you tell us about the music on Dear Young Rocker? Are these songs you wrote now, or are they actually from Young Chelsea?
Real high school band songs! I re-recorded new versions trying to be as close to originals as possible, but I don’t have recordings for all of them so they may be slightly different. The theme song I wrote fresh for the show but people tell me it sounds like my current band Banana.
What is your biggest goal for Dear Young Rocker? Why did you make it?
To make anyone who has ever felt weird, alone, or left out for something intrinsic about themselves and found solace in music feel seen and connected to others. Especially kids. If I can make one kid stop hating themselves for five minutes and start developing empathy for others which in turn helps their own mental state then I’ve accomplished my goal. Of course I want to help as many people as possible though. I had a difficult internal struggle over whether or not to stay independent. I was spending upwards of 30 hours a week on top of my jobs on this because I did the writing, hosting, editing, production, music composition and recording, and the sound design of this heavily produced show all by myself (never mind the admin stuff that comes with it). It was something that was giving me no monetary return, the opposite actually, and I didn’t have time to craft a Patreon campaign and then market myself enough to get it to actually help me. If I had had a good paying job that could support me while doing this I might have stayed indie. (Or I might not have been able to find the time to make the show at all. Teaching college means you have weeks of unemployment and weird hours.) But I wanted to move toward a career in immersive narrative audio (that was my secondary goal with this show) since teaching Intro to College Writing was barely keeping me alive and had no chance of upward mobility or health insurance from what I could tell... and applying to podcast jobs was also going nowhere since I wasn’t able to take on an unpaid internship and wasn’t blessed with the foresight to have gotten a radio journalism degree. I felt totally locked outside of that insular world. Even though I knew I had what it took to make a good production, that I had the talent to actually push the boundaries of narrative audio, no one believed me enough to hire me to do it for them, and as an unknown creator I couldn’t get in a room with podcast networks myself to pitch it as an original show for them, so I needed to show the world by just doing it myself and putting it out independently. So wanting to get into the audio field professionally, combined with my main goal of wanting my show to reach as far and wide and help as many people as possible is how I ultimately decided that whatever burdens being pitched to a network might strap me with, I needed to do it and I needed help doing it. Double Elvis came along and offered to represent me and a few months after they told me they were pitching me to a mysterious very large network, I found out my first season would be re-released on iHeart. I had to get my message to as many kids as possible and this distribution agreement they got for me would make that happen. From the messages I’ve received, I already know the show is making a difference.
💎BTW💎
🎙️It was so much fun to send out a community thread post on Friday. Thank you to all who participated! (You can still participate. There are LOTS of good recommendations in there.) I’m going to start sending these out every Friday. My hope is that you all jump in with recommendations, and that we’ll all get a big list for us all to dive into over the weekend. The first show I tried from the recommendations was Big Moby Dick Energy, a show that is going through Herman Melville’s MOBY DICK. I have never read this book, but it’s one of my dad’s favorite, so we are listening together. We started with episode one, where host Talia Lavin and her guest David Roth read the first paragraph of the book, which truly is beautiful, and then move onto Chapter 1, "Loomings." I might never read MOBY DICK but I feel committed to make it through this podcast with my dad.
🎙️Skye Pillsbury (of Inside Podcasting) recommended listening to Partners, Hrishikesh Hirway’s new show made in partnership with Mailchimp and Radiotopia. (I already listen to Hrishhikesh’s Song Exploder, which I love.) Partners is conversations between partners who tell the story about how they make it work. I LOVE MY BUSINESS PARTNER and think that what we have is magic, so I was clinging to the words of Rachel Bloom & Aline Brosh McKenna (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) and Samin Nosrat & Wendy MacNaughton (Salt Fat Acid Heat) to hear about how they weathered the ups and downs or creating something great together. The Samin / Wendy story was particularly interesting. Samin was a fan of Wendy’s artwork and sent her a gushy email, begging her to work with Samin!
🎙️TH Ponders mentioned that in all the chaos of the Coronavirus he has found comfort in Risky Or Not, a weekly podcast about everyday risks from germs. It’s not an alarmist show, more bursts of intelligent, light conversations about whether or not we should be worried about out of date ravioli, eating a banana when the skin has split, or using hand dryers. (It really validated my feelings that we should never use hand dryers. Especially now. Oh god, everyone. Please use paper towels.)
🎙️But there is an alarmist show I love to death, The Alarmist, and I got some Coronavirus relief with the episode about The Carnival “Poop Cruise” disaster. (Who’s to blame?) In 2013, Carnival's Triumph ship was stuck at sea for almost a week due to an engine fire. Human waste was flooding the halls, there was no A/C or running water and limited food, and there were 5 working bathrooms for the 3K+ people aboard. The Triumph was given the nickname "poop cruise" because passengers were forced to shit in bags (kindly enough, provided by Carnival.) Some idiot in charge decided it’d be a good idea to have an open bar, which made a bad situation worse. This episode ends up being a story of survival, and what we do in extreme situations. Kind of like now! What will we all do to survive the pandemic? No open bars, please!
🎙️I got to preview Cat People, a podcast from Lit Hub (the whole series is out today) and I’m incredibly excited about it. Hosted by Rachel Nuwer and Peter Frick-Wright (one of the producers of Bundyville,) Cat People is a four-part miniseries podcast that examines the strange relationships people have with big cats (we have a BIG problem) and the legal loopholes that have made America home to an astonishing number of captive tigers. This is such a fun subject and the show boasts a solid journalistic approach and excellent production. I will be savoring each episode, and though I’ve only heard one, I already wish there were more.
🎙️The hottest bod in town is Bodies, a KCRW show that reveals complicated stories behind medical mysteries. I have always loved this show (it’s one of those “listen to the episodes more than once” shows) and the first episode of season two was so good and got me so excited about what’s to cum. I have made two terrible puns in this paragraph, please execute me. Think about the shame and fear your own body forced upon you as a teenager. Now imagine that as an awkward teen, your sexual arousal was so heightened you couldn’t kiss your mom, wear jeans, or go down a slide. Angie tells the story of the shame and fear her Uncontrollable Orgasms subjected her to. At the beginning of the story my heart and brain were exploding, thinking about how unsurmountable this must have seemed, how terrible it would be to live a life avoiding people and normal human experiences. But fortunately, Angie finds a way to understand these experiences, and it kind of makes you realize…whatever weird shit you are going through, there’s probably an answer or solution. If you are willing to put in the work.
🎙️I am listening to Cool Mules on pins and needles, it has been awhile since I have been so enthralled with a story. It’s a six-part podcast series, hosted by Kasia Mychajlowycz, that introduces us to Vice editor “Slava P” who convinced young people to smuggle nearly $20 million worth of cocaine into Australia. He says it was all in the name of journalism, the government doesn’t agree. Lots of people are now in jail, including Slava P, who agreed to recording before he was sentenced, an unusual choice and one that did not sit well with his lawyers. It’s clear with these interviews that Slava P wants fame, and he’s getting it now, in all the wrong ways. This podcast seems to be his last chance. (He’s not doing himself any favors.) Despite the fact that Vice insists it wasn’t company policy to do lines of coke in the bathroom, and that smuggling drugs was frowned upon, the podcast is also an exploration of its shady practices. (Like not sufficiently paying writers.)
🎙️The latest episode of Invisibilia, The Confrontation, starts out so strangely—a man breaks his wife’s favorite bowl and she passive aggressively places it on their dining room table with the crack facing where the husband will have to see it every day. The husband turns the crack toward the wall, the wife turns it back to where he can see it, and they go back and forth like this for months. The episode is all about what happens when we are afraid to say out loud the things that are actually making us angry. After the strange bowl story, we are introduced to an intense summer program in Boston that gets kids to approach their deepest, most difficult thoughts about race by confronting them head on, with full honesty. A lot of the kids in the group end up saying things they wouldn’t usually say to kids of another race. (Like “fuck white people.”) It’d be an earth-shattering experience for adults, but these are kids. I’m not sure how I feel about the program, it makes me uncomfortable in the best way. It makes me afraid. It makes me obsess about how I communicate my own anger about things from cracked bowls to racial injustice in my own life. I wrote down this quote: “Feelings are great if you can move through them.”
🎙️I had to press pause after the first few minutes of the last episode of this season’s Family Ghosts just so I could sit and say to myself, “fuck this is good!” Family Ghosts usually presents non-fiction stories, but The Faith Exam episode is a bit experimental. The story begins with Andrew Chugg, who found some tape recordings in his family home. The story on this episode is fiction, based upon the real tapes he found. The recordings are of his relative Julian, who was making the recordings for her pastor. Through making the recording, she discovers a decades-old secret about her uncle. BTW I just finished a book that makes me think about this podcast, THESE GHOSTS ARE FAMILY, by Maisy Card. (It’s not just because the words “family” and “ghosts” are in the title.) It’s all about a family with deep, disturbing secrets, and how these secrets impact everyone over generations.
🎙️Frances Mcdormand hosts an excellent episode of The Kitchen Sisters telling stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians. Mcdormand takes us through The Hiphop Archive at Harvard, the Pack Horse Librarians of Eastern Kentucky, the Lenny Bruce Archive, and the Internet Archive. These are all stories about people protecting our history, our knowledge, and our culture. But they each take a very different look at how that can be done.
🎙️Ghosts in the Burbs is BACK! What a gift. Host Liz Sower is a former Wellesley Children’s Room librarian, and you can tell by listening to her wonderful stories. I always feel like I am five years old, sitting on the floor on the library floor, listening to someone tell me spooky stories. And it always feels like Halloween.
🎙️What I Wore When is a show that interviews influential women about what they wore during a pivotal moment in their lives and why it mattered. Many of the guests choose the dress they wore to the Oscars, or something they wore to the audition that landed them their big gig. But the more normal an episode is, the more I love it. (Like Justine Harmon’s What I Wore When I Went To My Best Friend’s Funeral episode.) The Beth Ditto episode is my favorite. Beth talks about the outfit that she wore when she was ten and realized her style was something that defined her. It’s adorable and relatable. She also talks about what it’s like to be fat in the fashion world and what fashion companies are missing. The episode took many turns and I loved every bit of it.
🎙️Did you know that mushers on the Iditarod are allowed to run with guns, specifically in the case they stumble upon a moose that tries to murder them and their dogs? And they are allowed to kill the moose, or any other “edible game animal,” but they must gut it before moving on? And that no musher is allowed to pass another musher in the process of doing this? You have to stop and help? I bet you didn’t! And this is the kind of information you are missing if you haven’t been listening to the Iditapod. You’re also missing an interview with the first transgender musher, musher fashion reviews, dramatic weather updates, fascinating sled facts, and stories that take you along the twists and turns of the race. (Like the legendary musher who had to drop out for health reasons, or the man who has been allowed to race in place of his wife, because it is in the best interest of the dogs who have been training to run.)
🎙️When Dear Young Rocker begins, Chelsea is in high school, and as I have mentioned before the stories are so oddly specific and speak to me so strongly that I have worried that Chelsea was living in my brain as a teenager, reporting upon everything going through it. As the episodes progress, we grow up with Young Chelsea, now she is in college, and Young Chelsea’s experiences and thoughts are so close to my own, the feeling that Chelsea has hacked into my brain is getting stronger. I’m starting to worry that the final episode will just be a live stream of my current thoughts. That would be terrifying for so many people.
🎙️On Crooked’s new Hall of Shame, Rachel Bonnetta and Rachna Fruchbom take us through some of the biggest scandals in sports. Marathon Madness (The Rosie Ruiz story) is an episode I couldn’t press play on fast enough. Rosie Ruiz boldly cheated in the New York City Marathon and then Boston (someone literally caught her taking the subway to the finish line.) This has got to be one of my favorite sports scandals and the episode was shocking and fun to listen to. Loved the chemistry of the hosts, and can’t wait to hear more.
🎙️Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend had a great interview with Paul Reubens, AKA Pee-wee Herman. Paul is such an underrated comedian and I think it’s so unfortunate that he was blacklisted by so many people for doing something extremely harmless, especially in comparison to what so many other men in Hollywood have gotten away with. (Would love to hear someone interview him about THAT.) I haven’t heard loads of episodes with Paul, so it was fun for that reason, and also because the conversation was very silly and loose. Things fucking suck this week. If you love Pee-wee, listen to him talk to Conan.
🎙️Every time I turn on Imaginary Advice (“a miscellany of stories, written and presented by Ross Sutherland”) I have no idea what I’m about to experience, and I love it. It’s kind of like how I absolutely love a Saturday when I have no idea what time it is, if it is 11am or 4:30pm. It feels like freedom, I feel untethered to the world, like I am on an adventure. I felt this same excitement listening to Horse Facts, which is just a bunch of lovely facts about horses. It was especially comforting because it’s the opposite of the terrifying news we’ve all been assaulted with everywhere we turn.
🎙️Death By Dying is the crime show for people who just love great audio storytelling, but aren’t quite sure they’re down for traditional true crime. (See: me.) The stories star the obituary writer of Crestfall, Idaho, who goes above and beyond his job as journalist, investigating the strange and mysterious deaths he’s writing about. The best part of this show is the cast of colorful characters. Each of them could have their own podcast. This show is creepy and the stories are well-told. I feel like a kid reading good Encyclopedia Brown books or something.
🎙️Before there was Rachel Dolezal, there was Grace Halsell, and Code Switch has the story of this polarizing woman. In an effort to understand the black experience, Grace underwent vitiligo treatment pills to help darken her complexion and travel throughout Harlem and Mississippi (for like two days) in 1968, passing as a black woman, to write a book, Soul Sister. Grace was trying to be empathetic, hoping she could speak to white people about the black experience. But she totally missed the mark. That didn’t stop her from writing other books in the same vein like Bessie Yellowhair, where she posed as a Navajo, living on a reservation, and working as a domestic for a white family. But this Code Switch episode is all about how we fall short in our efforts to live a life in another person’s skin, especially when there are people living the actual experiences who are more than capable of documenting them.
🎙️My client Kim Potts (author of THE WAY WE ALL BECAME THE BRADY BUNCH) was on Tach Van Sickle’s A Very Brady Podcast, and it’s so much fun to listen to. Nobody knows The Brady Bunch more than Kim. Tach had me on his podcast, also! I talk about a crazy episode, The Possible Dream.
🎙️I love you!