On April 23, 2007, Reid Stowe and Soanya Ahmad set out from New York harbor on an ambitious sailing voyage. Their goal was to sail for 1000 days without touching land, carrying all their provisions with them. Reid and Soanya set out to beat the world record of endurance sailing – sailing without resupply – which currently stands at 658 days, held by Australian sailor Jon Sanders. As of this broadcast, their voyage had lasted just under 540 days. In this installment of the “Listening In” series, ...
Apr 07, 2010•7 min
Mary Stack is an amazing athlete who has followed her prowess as a lifter all the way to the Beijing 2008 Paralympics, representing the US proudly. I spent the day with her as she went through her workout routine at the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. She let me in on her playlist for powerlifting, which ends with a rip-your-face-off “So What” by Metallica. For Stack, this song means the waiting is over, there’s no more getting ready, it’s time to get out there and go for gold....
Apr 07, 2010•7 min
Every morning on the Space Shuttle, a song is the first thing the astronauts hear. It is played by NASA Mission Control in Houston to rouse the astronauts from sleep. The songs are chosen for the astronauts by their friends and family, and played on days when they have a special job to do – like take a space walk or pilot a rendezvous with the International Space Station. In the next installment of our “Listening In” series, I checked in with some Shuttle astronauts (including Commander Steve Fr...
Aug 03, 2008•7 min
In this piece, we meet Mulatu Astatke, the father of Ethiopian jazz. A pioneering ‘global citizen,’ Astatke became in 1959 the first African to ever attend the famous Berkelee College of Music in Boston. He played with Duke Ellington in the 70s and has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the US since Jim Jarmusch featured his music in the soundtrack to the film, “Broken Flowers.” Astatke is famous in Ethiopia for modifying the traditional instrument, the krar, so it can play jazz scales. Ameri...
Aug 03, 2008•8 min
Indie rocker Kim Deal from the Breeders crooned from the iPod docked in the operating room where Dr. Atul Gawande and his team were performing a thyroidectomy. Wearing something that looks like a shower cap, and booties over my shoes, I felt like another member of Dr. Gawande’s team, which is made up of several people: the senior resident, the anesthesiologist, the circulating nurse, a medical student and the scrub. “Something of a myth about the way people understand the operating room is that ...
Aug 03, 2008•7 min
Architect Daniel Libeskind listens to a solid block of uninterrupted music in the morning to start his day. “It’s not something of a luxury, it’s almost a necessity. And it’s not background,” says Libeskind. “I don’t do it as the hustle bustle of domestic life and in the background there’s music, I sit down, when I have time, and mostly I do have time early in the morning, just to listen to a piece of music.” In his downtown New York studio, Libeskind and I listened to the music that focuses him...
Mar 18, 2008•8 min
I went to China to see what kind of musical culture I would find among the migrant workers there. I had heard that there is a floating population of over 100 million migrant workers there, mostly from the south and west, mostly coming to work construction jobs in the booming east coast cities. Every year, they ebb and flow, almost to a person returning to their hometown for Chinese New Year. Then, they head to another place, wherever the work is. It is well known that this is a hard, hard life, ...
Dec 05, 2007•8 min
Visual artists listen to music in their studios to get their creative juices flowing, to lose themselves in their world, to focus their energies. Natalie Frank , a great young painter (a mere 27 years old!) let me into her listening process and her creative process in her studio. It turned out to be quite structured and complex and cool. She listens to blues and solo singers and songwriters – like John Lee Hooker, Dylan and Nina Simone – in the personal, imagination-trawling phase when she’s con...
Dec 05, 2007•9 min
Music is a phenomenal way to control your environment – to make a room “yours”. More and more expectant mothers and fathers who want to make the delivery room feel more like home are bringing their music with them. Birthing clinics are starting to feature iPod docks as standard equipment, and parents come in with their “giving birth” playlists ready to plug in. Many fathers who get involved are in charge of the technology – and so we find the new role of “DJ Daddy Doulah” – who is doing what he ...
Oct 02, 2007•7 min
When you go to a major league baseball game these days, it is a highly mediated affair, with video and audio woven seamlessly into the live action. Recently, players have taken to personally selecting their “at-bat” song, that booms through the stadium as they walk out of the dugout and up to the plate. Players get real specific about what they want to hear – often sending a CD up to the control room before the game with a note: “Queue up track 3, 20 seconds in.” I got to speak to some of the Bo...
Jul 22, 2007•7 min
I was watching poker on TV, and I noticed that the players, many of them, had headphones on. I was, like, “Really? You can do that? You can listen to music at the table?” And then I was wondering, “What would a professional player listen to during a high stakes game?” So I went to the Foxwood Poker Classic on the Mashantucket Pequot Indian Reservation in Ledyard, Connecticut. The Foxwoods Poker Classic is a stop on the World Poker Tour – a $10,000 ante No Limits Hold ‘Em Tournament. As the 10 ho...
May 10, 2007•7 min
In this episode of Listening In, we put out a call to Weekend America listeners: “What is a good song for falling asleep to?” In the conversations that ensued, we heard about many different kinds of songs that worked – it wasn’t all Pachelbel’s Canon and whale songs. I sat with sleep specialist Dr. Gerard Lombardo of New York Methodist Hospital , and listened to your responses with him. Listening to songs as diverse as Israel Kamakawiwo’ole‘s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” the Beach Boys’ “Whistl...
Apr 03, 2007•7 min
Sketch by Bill Verplank A piece I produced for Studio 360′s Design for the Real World series airs this week: Thinking Outside the Mouse. It features Bill Verplank , a seminal interaction designer who comes out of the tradition of human factors engineering. Bill worked at Xerox in the seventies as part of the team that brought the Xerox Star, the world’s first commercial personal computer, to market. After periods at IDEO and Interval Research, he is now at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research...
Feb 23, 2007•7 min
A Walkman Busting, iPod Jacking spree in the vast open spaces of Philadelphia’s 30th Street train station, the day after Christmas. Roaming among the crowds of holiday travelers, each tuned to their own holiday music, I tapped into the personal soundtracks of Trevor Keal and David Montañez. Both Trevor and David are Philadelphia natives; their lives couldn’t be more different, their soundtracks, eerily similar and on message for the holidays. Hope you enjoy listening with them as much as I did. ...
Dec 28, 2006•6 min
This October, I got a chance to go to Floyd, Iowa and meet Maurice and Pam Johnson, a fifth-generation husband and wife farm team. I rode with them and their sons, Ben and Andy, while they were bringing in the corn harvest. I went to a field they call Kupers 80, climbed in the cab of the combine with Maurice, and talked with him while we did what he usually does in the cab – listen to the radio. We listened to the Midday Farm Report on the local country station. In the cab of Pam’s tractor, it w...
Nov 11, 2006•5 min
Breezewood, PA is the intersection of two interstates, making a small city in what is otherwise the middle of nowhere. I tapped on trucker Fran West’s cab door at 9PM and asked her for an interview, and she waved me off – her chihuahua, Pinky, in hand – but not before inviting me back to talk at 9 the next morning. Sure enough, when I came back, she was up for talking and listening to music – not in her cab, though. So, we found a quiet spot in the trucker’s chapel at the TA truckstop and she sh...
Oct 09, 2006•6 min
Airing today on Weekend America, my “Listening In” interview with ultramarathoner Dean Karnazes. Dean is now out on the North Face Endurance 50 – he’s running 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days. I ran with Dean in early September in San Francisco’s Presidio for a solid hour as he prepared for the run. Dean is a multitasker when he runs – for example, he dictated his book, “ Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner ,” into a handheld recorder during his famous all-night...
Oct 07, 2006•12 min
Airing on Weekend America, “The Art of the Mix” is look back at the CD Clubs we launched a year ago with Weekend America listeners. The piece focusses on members of one of the clubs, the Penguins. After spending a year together sharing music by mail, members of the Penguins meet each other for the first time on the air, introduced by Weekend America host, Bill Radke. On August 27, 2005, Weekend America aired a piece I produced called “Pass the CD,” a portrait of a New York City CD Club called th...
Sep 23, 2006•8 min
I met Pete Muncie at Bobby’s Idle Hour on Music Row in Nashville. I had heard that you scratch the surface on just about anybody in Nashville and you’ll find a songwriter, so I wanted to test out how true that was. Pete had worked that whole day as a carpenter before getting up there and pouring his heart out in his songs – forgot a few words here and there, but that was OK – and warmed up the stage for a night of song swapping. Later on, the guitar slingers and out of towners rolled and ripped ...
Sep 06, 2006•2 min
Rich Kassirer did a great story about the CD Clubs that were launched by last year’s broadcast of “Pass the CD” on Weekend America. Rich is good friends with Jamie Barth, who joined one of the CD Clubs this year and has been an avid member all year. Check out Modern Acoustic for regular stories about the up and coming acoustic music scene by people who really care about it. Thanks, Rich – hope you launch a club or two with that issue!...
Sep 06, 2006•1 min
“LISTENING IN WITH STEVE GRABLE, TRUCKER: WHAT MAKES A GOOD ROAD SONG?” to air Saturday, July 29, 2006 on Weekend America. Hear the Original Broadcast LOCATION: TA Truckstop, Breezewood, PA – intersection of Interstates 76 and 70 on the old Lincoln Highway, near the Maryland border — In this piece, we’re in the cab with Steve Grable and we get a chance to hear what makes a good road song for him. Grable’s speaks with us over the strains of “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” (Poison), “Is This Love?” (Wh...
Jul 27, 2006•9 min
At his Nashville studio, John Prine and I listen to the recordings that first gave him the idea that he might be able write songs of his own: Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol,” Roger Miller’s “Dang Me” and Hank Williams’ live radio broadcast, “The Health and Happiness Show.” The piece ends with Prine’s reminiscences his father’s birthplace of Paradise, Kentucky and the song he spun from it. Original Broadcast...
May 09, 2006•9 min
“Music and Mardi Gras” begins in New York with Tom Piazza, author of “Why New Orleans Matters,” playing recordings that show us why New Orleans matters to him. Next, we are transported to New Orleans, listening to the same songs with Gregg Stafford on his porch. Stafford is a staunch proponent of New Orleans’ traditional music and occasional bandleader at Preservation Hall. Mardi Gras “Indian” songs elicit their feelings about having a Mardi Gras in the wake of Katrina. The piece features music ...
Mar 19, 2006•8 min
On commercial music radio, it seems Wolfman Jack has been replaced by just… Jack. Features Bruce “Cousin Brucie” Morrow, who went to Sirius after WCBS’s controversial flip to the Jack format. Gideon D’Arcangelo reports. Original Broadcast
Nov 07, 2005•1 min
