Reconnecting with my inner metronome

Your permission to lay down and take some alone time to listen

During my month between jobs, I’ve been reflecting on what got me into making audio in the first place.

The way I usually tell that story is I was a year and a half out of college, feeling ill-suited to an organizing job with the Sierra Club. I hadn’t known what else to do with my feelings of restlessness, so I took the LSAT and then applied to law school. And then, I noticed a posting for a reporter at West Virginia Public Broadcasting. With my resume all updated for my recent application spree, I wrote a cover letter. I admitted I didn’t know anything about audio editing or production, but explained I’d studied history, and from organizing, had gotten comfortable making cold calls. They took a chance on me, and I’m forever grateful. (Look at Baby Anna here!)

As soon as I learned enough to get the timing just right between my narration and a soundbite I’d collected, I remember feeling calm in a new way, and this whisper: Oh wow, I’ve found what I’m supposed to do. 

I’ve always thought my audio journalism sprung from the parts of me that follow the news and like to write – and admittedly, also the part that likes to have an audience. But, as of this week, I’m revising that. It goes back further, pre-literacy maybe. I’ve been taking in a lot of music, along with podcasts and news this week, and I’ve realized how much listening, and making audio for listeners, also taps into the the parts of me that also love a good bass line, an unexpected rhythmic transition, or moment of harmony. It’s not just the student government part of me at work here; it’s also the mixed tape maker and live musicgoer who have been hibernating these last few years. 

I like this reframe. It helps me understand how, for me, editing tape feels like a physical process. I hear the pacing of the words, the tones move up and down, and can hear when the ear craves a variation on the pattern. That musicality is also present when I’m interviewing — when I feel the impulse to pause, interrupt with a short but direct question. There’s something deeply rhythmic about it, alongside the relational exchange. Thinking about my work this way helps me get out of my head about it, and invite in more instinct and faith. (I think Meshell Ndegecello would be proud, given our recent exchange on my tendencies to…overthink.)

I told you last week that we would compare notes of our favorite podcast listening in this week’s newsletter, and we are, but I’m also tossing in some other listening that has moved with me this week.

Let’s start with some of your listening suggestions:

• Amanda says: My favorite road trip podcast is Tooth & Claw: True stories of animal attacks. It's the one podcast my husband and I enjoy equally.

• Karen says: Besides DS&M, my favorite podcast is An Arm and a Leg about health care in America.

• Mindy says: “I am a huge fan of Vibe Check”

• Nathanael says: “Tales with TR: A Hockey Podcast…I'll admit I'm a fan of all things peculiarly Canadian, however I think even non-hockey, non-Canuck obsessed folks might find a real life most interesting man in the room worth a listen.”

• Kathleen says: “I love Terrible, Thanks for Asking and their new spin off It’s Going to Be Ok.”

Now, some rec’s from me:

How do you know what you know about politics? Who is served by what you think you know? Who are the enemies and the heroes in your version of our contempt-fueled political polarization? This new series from Theory of Everything’s Benjamin Walker is the perfect companion to the first blasts of 2024 Presidential Campaign coverage. also declares it, he thinks, “the first podcast group biographer ever made.” I listened and was captivated by all the history I didn’t know, and also, proof of how susceptible we are to being totally played.

Another new series that’s gotten me thinking about how media gets constructed is Jess Shane’s Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative. If you are a fan of deeply personal interviews — of say, something like Death, Sex & Money — this is a timely and important critique of the nonfiction podcast industrial complex. Jess examines the power dynamics in the making nonfiction audio, specifically who benefits and who bears the costs of exposure. It picks up on some challenging ethical questions I’ve been chewing on since I read this New York magazine piece last year about the boom in documentary filmmaking. The potential for exploitation is also why I found the tv show The Curse and the new movie May December too cringe-y to sit through without breaks for deep breaths. In this podcast series, Jess creates a totally new approach for story-collecting, where money is exchanged, and you get to follow along that process as the show unfolds.

From my former colleagues at WNYC, there’s a new podcast series reexamining the history of the beginnings of HIV and AIDS, with a focus on broadening the mainstream understanding about which communities were actually initially affected. I loved the way the first episode opened, in very “From Somewhere” fashion, with one woman in one neighborhood in Lower Manhattan. Valerie Reyes-Jimenez recounts the early days of the epidemic and how dozens of people she knew — as many as 75 on her block — died of AIDS, but their deaths were overlooked, because they weren’t white gay men, the community that public health experts and then the mainstream media initially focused on.

I’ve been a long-time fan of Song Exploder. I find each episode to be a satisfying, perfectly crafted capsule about the creative process that has the added benefit of introducing me to new music. A few years ago, Hrishi was a guest on Death, Sex & Money, and then after that, I got to become Hrishi’s friend. Over the last year of so, we’ve had a lot of conversations about inspiration and artistic style, and also about the realities of making a living while making art. So it was really thrilling to get to listen to his latest Song Exploder, which revisits the very first Song Exploder episode from 2013. It’s about the making of a song by The Postal Service, and in the process, and gives us listeners a lens into how Hrishi figured out the making of his now-iconic podcast. 

This not a podcast, but it’s listening that brought me tears and swells of feelings this week. I visited SFMOMA with my kids and good friend Jim last weekend, and The Visitors from artist Ragnar Kjartansson and friends is on exhibit there through October 2024. If you don’t know the piece, which has been celebrated as “the best art of the 21st century,” it a room full of screens, each with a video and sound feed of a different musician in a different room in New York mansion. They improvise and play along together, all in the same big house but in separate places, and the way the music moves between them, in the midst of their sometimes awkward aloneness, is totally captivating. Afterwards, I dug up this 2021 appreciation from The Washington Post, which noted how Covid isolation made the years-old piece newly recognizable and resonant.

A few more listening highlights:

• I finally checked out one of Bobby McFerrin “Circle Songs” at Berkeley’s Freight and Salvage. Together with long-time collaborators, he improvises and sings with the audience. The music was incredible, and also informal and friendly. Highly recommend if you can ever make it.

• At my exercise class this morning, the playlist wrapped up with Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie, and then Wicked Games by Chris Isaak. Hearing Under Pressure made me remember this piece in Slate from years ago, after Bowie’s death, that’s one of my favorite pieces of music writing ever. And Wicked Games? I mean, shew. I just needed a reminder that a song that sexy can exist.

• My younger kid is a fan of rock ‘n roll. A babysitter last summer introduced her to “Welcome to the Jungle,” and it’s been in regular rotation for our family since. We pulled up this live performance of it this week and watched it on youtube together, and watching Axl Rose slink around the stage, my husband muttered, “Man, can you imagine having that confidence?” Watch the video. Truly, it’s an inspiration. 

Looking ahead, I have a little more than a week until I start back working on Death, Sex & Money at Slate. Please send recommendations for what you think I should do with unscheduled weekday time in these last precious days of recharge and leisure.

Until then, let’s all move through the world like Axl Rose this week! 

Anna

p.s. Some of the articles I link to may be behind a paywall for you. If you’d like to read something and can’t, reply and ask for me to send you a pdf. At the same time, let me remind you that if you can, it’s very important to support the mediamakers and journalism you appreciate with subscriptions and direct contributions. When there’s not enough money to pay for the work we rely on, talented people lose their jobs and we lose the stories they could’ve told us.

p.p.s. This particular is newsletter is free. I’ll have more info soon after we get set up at our new home at Slate about how you can financially support Death, Sex & Money as production resumes. Thank you to so many of you who have already asked and offered. I really appreciate it!