Clarke is a musician and artist whose improvised and mostly unstructured guitar pieces built up from multiple improvised layers create a dreamlike, atmospheric soup of sound. His first solo album "Hear Us Through the Hole in Thin Air" came out in 2020. His next "A Theory of Color," is in the final stages of production now. In 1981 he put together a band that would go on to be notorious in the Texas punk scene called Stick Men With Ray Guns. They were close friends with members of the Butthole Su...
Jul 07, 2025•1 hr 28 min
Lance Wissinger is a speaker, entrepreneur, and political strategist whose life took a turn in 2003 when a car accident with him behind the wheel led to a five-year prison sentence for vehicular manslaughter. While incarcerated, he founded successful programs that empowered fellow inmates through business planning, public speaking, and personal growth. He went on to become an advocate for justice reform when he joined the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition’s successful effort to get Amendment ...
Jun 30, 2025•1 hr 16 min
Dan Mangan is a Vancouver, BC-based musician. Dan has played Jimmy Kimmel Live, Glastonbury, and sold out Massey Hall, as well as scored soundtracks for television and feature film. He is also a co-founder of Side Door, a marketplace platform connecting artists with alternative venue spaces for in-person & online shows. Dan has won 2 JUNO Awards and is thrice Polaris Music Prize-nominated for his work, and has released at least 7 albums and EPs. His latest album, Natural Light, which just hi...
Jun 23, 2025•1 hr 42 min
Phonte Coleman is best known as a founding member of hip-hop group Little Brother , and as one of the co‑hosts of the podcast Questlove Supreme with Questlove. In the late 90s, Phonte met Thomas “Big Pooh” Jones and Patrick “9th Wonder” Douthit and they started making music together as the hip-hop collective, Justus League and released their first album The Listening in 2003. They changed their name to Little Brother and signed a record deal with Atlantic Records and released The Minstrel Show i...
Jun 16, 2025•1 hr 25 min
Joe Harley makes music under his moniker Hotel Life, which signed to 9 Lives Records in 2023. He began playing guitar in the Fort Myers bar scene in 1993 with a number of bands including Potato Gun and Strip Club Moms. Potato Gun played the official grand opening of FGCU in 1997. Joe moved to St Pete in 2000 to be in an original rock band there and then moved back to Matlacha in 2002 where he got back into the local bar music scene and became a highly decorated saltwater fly fishing guide until ...
Jun 09, 2025•1 hr 3 min
Petar Kodzas was born in what’s now Serbia but was, at the time, Yugoslavia. During college, Petar toured and recorded as a lutenist with an early music ensemble; he played over 100 shows at the professional musical theatre, sat in jazz sessions, and performed throughout the former Yugoslavia as a musical ambassador for the international organization Jeunesses Musicales. Petar was also Senior Instructor in Guitar for the Eastman Community Music School from 1997 to 2017, and since then he’s been ...
Jun 02, 2025•1 hr 9 min
Jameson Yingling is a filmmaker, philosopher, and social entrepreneur who's work focuses on existentialism, phenomenology of aging and death, postcolonialism, and ecological interdependence. He is an FGCU and Teach For America alum, and he was a founding partner of the Bonita Springs media company Sugarshack. Right now Jameson is spending time as a guest lecturer at FGCU helping to lead what’s called the Rock of Ages initiative alongside Drs. Maria Roca and Tom Felke. He is the founder of the cr...
May 26, 2025•1 hr 17 min
Desmond Meade is a MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow; a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and having been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine. He's also’s author of the 2020 book “Let My People Vote: My Battle to Restore the Civil Rights of Returning Citizens.” Desmond is President of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition -- the organization that led the successful effort to restore voting rights to some 1.4 million former felons in FL. The amendment passed with ne...
May 19, 2025•1 hr 21 min
Edward “Teddy” Byrne is a Producer and Writer at WGCU on the “Southwest Florida in Focus” TV show team. After earning degrees in Journalism and Psychology from Keene State College Teddy settled in Southwest Florida starting with a job with WINK News. As a Sports Producer there, he had the opportunity to tag along with the FGCU Men’s Basketball team during their epic “Dunk City” adventure to the Sweet 16 in 2013. A trip back to the newsroom led to him becoming part of the NBC2/ABC7 team that spen...
May 12, 2025•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 334
Lainey Schooltree is a musician, comedian, streamer, and former half of the musical comedy duo The Steamy Bohemians . She then formed the solo art rock project Schooltree. When the pandemic hit, she began performing on Twitch and found that live-streaming offered the interdisciplinary playground she'd been after. What began as a temporary pivot became a long-term transformation and these days she captains a spaceship on Lainey Schooltree TV - a live show where she’s an “astro-streamer” assigned ...
May 05, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 333
Joshua Conyers is an Assistant Professor of Voice at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, and a Grammy-nominated Baritone who is known for his captivating performances and recognized as one of the leading dramatic voices of today. He has performed with The Metropolitan Opera, Seattle Opera, Washington National Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, English National Opera, New York Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, and many others. His recordings include the...
Apr 28, 2025•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 332
Bill Bowen is a singer/songwriter/computer engineer who grew up in Fort Myers but headed off to New York City in the 90s, in part to live the big city life and in part to be able to see Moxy Früvous shows. Bill is also the former roommate and Foosball partner of WGCU’s own Mike Kiniry. SONG 1: "Garden Party" released in 1972 by Rick Nelson & The Stone Canyon Band on the album of the same name. 3:45 https://youtu.be/1JK0Z6IdLF4?si=Ehx5EuV6wmldcnhw SONG 2: "The Drinking Song" by Moxy Früvous f...
Apr 21, 2025•2 hr 20 min•Ep. 331
Andrew Lipke is a composer, producer, arranger, conductor, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and educator who has toured for more than a decade with the Led Zeppelin tribute band Get The Led Out and performed as a vocalist with Steve Hackman's Brahms V Radiohead symphonic synthesis ; and he collaborates with World Café Live on music education programs for underserved youth in the Philadelphia area. Andrew has produced and released seven albums of original music spanning various genres; and he has...
Apr 14, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 330
Mickela Mallozzi is host and Executive Producer of Bare Feet with Mickela Mallozzi , a PBS travel series that showcases the diversity of dance from around the world Mickela is a professional dancer and trained musician who had a dream in 2010 about travelling the world with a camera while dancing in the lives of everyday people. Since dreaming that dream she’s collected four Emmy Awards for the show in six seasons, with Season Seven set to release in May. Bare Feet with Mickela Mallozzi airs Sat...
Apr 07, 2025•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 329
Christina Goh is a French composer, poet, and vocalist whose multidisciplinary universe includes digital art, poetry and musical creation. She’s the initiator of a vocal technique for accompanying high range percussion and she’s a member of the Board of Directors of the French Association for Percussion. Christina has performed her music from Indonesia to Canada, demonstrating her vocal technique with unique configurations. Since 2023, the Chanson prize in the historical Jardin de France literar...
Mar 31, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 328
Kim Dunham was born in Pennsylvania but grew up in Michigan. She moved to Connecticut after high school and lived there for about six years before moving to Florida in 1999. Kim’s been working at WGCU since 2019 as part of the membership team. SONGS AND LINKS The original opening 20th Century Fox intro into the original theatrical release of Star Wars in 1977. https://youtu.be/oJguy6wSYyI?si=SRwB09rUgasvWdrI Black Celebration by Depeche Mode - it's the title track of their fifth album release in...
Mar 24, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 327
Madison Morris is a singer-songwriter who focuses on bringing his storytelling nature to light over top of an Americana sound - playing more than 200 live performances throughout the year as a full-time musician. He co-wrote "We're All Still Here" with his wife in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian after they were displaced from their home and lost so much. It was included on the official ballot for Grammy consideration in 2023. The newest single, “Hard Rain”, came out in July of 2024 and was also r...
Mar 17, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 326
Scott Turow is a writer and attorney. He is the author of fourteen works of fiction, including Presumed Innocent , and most recently, Presumed Guilty , which hit the shelves in January of this year. All of his novels have been New York Times bestsellers. His works have been the basis for film and television projects…last year Apple TV+ released an eight-part limited series based on Presumed Innocent, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. From 1978 until 1986, Mr. Turow worked as Assistant United States Atto...
Mar 11, 2025•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 325
Tom Bayles is Senior Environmental Reporter at WGCU. A lifelong Florida journalist, Tom has covered stories in 67 counties, including plenty of hurricanes. Tom covers climate change, biodiversity, water quality and quantity issues, Everglades restoration efforts, endangered and invasive species, beach and coastal issues, and the intersections of global warming and the economy, politics, religion, society, and science. Bayles worked for The New York Times Company in Sarasota, the Associated Press...
Mar 03, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 324
Mary Bichner is an orchestral composer with synesthesia - that’s the neurological condition that allows her to see splashes of specific colors in her mind’s eye when she hears their corresponding pitches. Mary has served as composer-in-residence at The Vasilicos of Santorini in Greece, for which she composed a new string quartet work inspired by the colors of the world-famous Santorini sunset; she served a two-year composer residency at the historic Mount Auburn Cemetery of Massachusetts; she wa...
Feb 24, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 323
Randy Kambic has written hundreds of articles for The Fort Myers News-Press, Southwest Florida Parent & Child Magazine, The Banner, Florida Weekly and now The Naples Press. He compiled a regular weekly section on recreational tennis and golf for the Coastal Life section of the News-Press for more than two years; Prior to that, he working in public relations in NYC for more than 25 years for several agencies and also for Madison Square Garden. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy informati...
Feb 17, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 322
Jeff James is a Director of Professional TTEC Digital - and he's also the author of a self-published children's book called Brainbows: A First Reference Book for Very Young Minds . He describes himself as a music geek who spends his spare time listening to music, playing music (guitar mostly), or exploring music and looking for songs and artists that aren't famous but should be. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Feb 10, 2025•59 min•Ep. 321
Renée Benmeleh is a multi-cultural vocalist, composer, instrumentalist and teacher. She has been joyfully singing Improv, Jazz, World, Ritual, and her own Original music for more than 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s the founder and agile facilitator at Sound Nourishment where she leads monthly classes, workshops, and events. She is also a Drum Circle Facilitator, and a childhood music practitioner. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Feb 03, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 320
Chris Keys has been in the restaurant business for just over 30 years and has spent almost 18 of those years with Melting Pot. He’s been an Owner/Operator of the Fort Myers restaurant since 2018. Before he settled in with Melting Pot, Chris worked with a few different national restaurants that include Checkers, Lonestar Steakhouse, and TGIFriday's. But he says most places he’s worked at were independently owned - including spending 4 years at one called Crowley’s at Stonehenge in North Carolina ...
Jan 27, 2025•59 min•Ep. 319
Judge Michael Cicconetti is a retired Municipal Court Judge who served for more than 25 years in his hometown of Painesville, OH. He gained a nationwide reputation during his time on the bench for handing down sentences that could be accurately described as unique in certain cases. For instance, teenagers who flattened tires on school buses were ordered to throw a picnic for the school children whose outing was cancelled because of their prank. While some may have not exactly approved of his app...
Jan 20, 2025•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 318
Shirlette Ammons is a Durham, NC-based musician, writer, and producer who grew up in rural Eastern North Carolina in an area called Beautancus near the little town of Mount Olive (where they make the pickles). As a musician, Shirlette has released four albums including her latest, called Spectacles which came out in April of 2024. She’s published several books of her poetry, and is currently working on a podcast called “Tending” that explores the stories of Black farmers who were claimants in th...
Jan 13, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 317
Mark Rodriguez is a stonemason who was born and raised and still lives in Sante Fe, NM. Mark is on a very short list of people who have received two double lung transplants. Mark’s experiences and trials have brought him to a place where bringing a message of resilience, perseverance, and great faith has become central to his perspective, which he brings to his work as an author, international speaker, and transformational empowerment coach. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Jan 06, 2025•2 hr 14 min•Ep. 316
Matthew Sabatella is a Hollywood, FL-based musician who performs regularly, both as a solo artist and as the leader of the Rambling String Band. He earned first-place ribbons in the 2019 Florida Folk Festival’s Old-Time Banjo Competition and the 2023 Florida Old-Time Music Championship’s Old-Time Banjo and Singing competitions. Matthew also teaches about America’s music at Lifelong Learning Institutes, including at Florida Atlantic University, George Mason University, Florida International Unive...
Dec 31, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 315
Dr. Mark Schulman is an award-winning pollster and was co-founder & CEO of one of the nation’s largest survey research & polling firms, SRBI. He's has worked with news media, major corporations, foundations, and government. For news organizations he has tracked presidential job ratings, political campaigns, analyzed election results, and probed policy issues. Dr. Schulman served as Time magazine’s pollster for almost ten years and was also on the ABC News Election Decision Desk for many ...
Dec 23, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 314
Dr. Joe Kiniry (Mike's big brother) - is a Principal Scientist at a Portland, Oregon-based technology company called Galois. He’s also the Principled CEO and Chief Scientist of a Galois spin-out company called Free & Fair that works on high-assurance election technologies and services. Prior to joining Galois in 2014, Joe was a Full Professor at the Technical University of Denmark where he headed up the Software Engineering section. He also held a guest appointment at the IT University of Co...
Dec 16, 2024•1 hr 39 min•Ep. 313
