Podcasts about saddle creek

Pat & JT recap the wild storms that swept through Omaha last night. Tornado sirens, floating dumpsters, confused reporters, and drivers with flashers on for no reason. They break down local news chaos, and why Saddle Creek turns into a river. Then it's on to Club Shay Shay's sudden shutdown, Gen Z slang nobody understands, and the science behind why left-handed people (like Pat & JT) are basically superhuman mutants. Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode! Also follow up on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram This is another Hurrdat Media Production. Hurrdat Media is a podcast network and digital media production company based in Omaha, NE. Find more podcasts on the Hurrdat Media Network by going to HurrdatMedia.com or the Hurrdat Media YouTube channel! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As Cursive gear up to release their new album Devourer, lead singer Tim Kasher joins us us on the BrooklynVegan Podcast. Throughout our hour-long conversation, Tim talks about classic Cursive records, the Omaha/Saddle Creek scene he came up in, his thoughts on being associated with emo (and covering At the Drive-In at Bonnaroo's Emo SuperJam), continuing to discover new music and art at middle age (he just turned 50 on August 19, happy belated!), the new album, and more. He unpacks some of the hopeless, apocalyptic, state-of-the-world themes on Devourer, talks about bringing cello back into the fold on the past few Cursive albums after abandoning it for many post-Ugly Organ years, and he talks about why Cursive were excited to team up with Run For Cover Records for this new album, following several albums for Saddle Creek and two on their own 15 Passenger label.   -   The BrooklynVegan Show is brought to you in part by DistroKid, a service for musicians that allows you to easily upload your music to all major streaming platforms. You can get 30% off of your first year's membership by signing up at distrokid.com/vip/brooklynvegan.   -   Theme music by Michael Silverstein.

In this episode of The Lazy CEO Podcast, host Jim Schleckser welcomes Mark Cabrera, the CEO of Saddle Creek Logistics. Mark has been with Saddle Creek for over 20 years, starting as CFO and taking over as CEO a few years ago. He shares insights into managing a family business, the logistics industry's challenges, and the importance of innovation. Mark explains Saddle Creek's operations, which span 33 million square feet across the US, employing about 6,000 associates and operating a fleet of 500 trucks. The conversation highlights the dynamic nature of the logistics industry, including labor shortages and the need for innovation driven by escalating labor costs and demographic changes. The discussion also delves into Saddle Creek's approach to employee development and succession planning, emphasizing the importance of internal promotions and training programs. Mark credits the company's strong culture to its founder's values and the intentional efforts to maintain these through storytelling and leadership behaviors.

The Bonefish boys have returned with a new interview with Young Jesus, the project of John Rossiter—and his collaborator, multi-instrumentalist and musical guru Shahzad Ismaily—about the new album The Fool, out now via Saddle Creek (19:00). Topics discussed include confronting shame, cold emails, permaculture, Kanye West, Denis Johnson, canine olfaction, and self belief. The boys also discuss "Vampire Tongues," the new Avey Tare & Panda Bear track (5:00), as well as offering some album recommendations of their own in the second installment of Bonefish Recommends (08:12)"Summer" by PubEinsjäger und Siebenjäger by Popol Vuh Listen to The Fool by Young Jesus.Follow us on Patreon and Instagram. 

In the latest episode of Columbia House Party, hosts Jake Goldsbie and Blake Murphy make Conor Oberst the third member of the CHP two-time subject club, exploring Bright Eyes' 2002 album Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground. Find out more about Saddle Creek's epic early-2000s run as a label, why the hosts think Bright Eyes was so influential as a thread between folk eras despite often being classified as emo on this week's podcast. Sick of hearing all the ads? Subscribe to Soda Premium on Apple Podcasts to get rid of them!Come join the Patreon family for bonus episodes, mailbags, show notes and even more goodness: https://www.patreon.com/columbiahousepartyFollow @ColumbiaHP on Twitter! While you're there say hello to @BlakeMurphyODC and @JGoldsbie. If merch is your thing, be sure to check out the store: http://bit.ly/chpmerch Or reach out to the show and say hey: podcast@columbiahouseparty.com If you enjoyed today's show, please rate Columbia House Party 5-Stars on Apple Podcasts.See you next week for an all new episode of CHP.

John Rossiter of Young Jesus joins me to talk about their new album on Saddle Creek out May 24th, and we get deep into some thought provoking NBA theories and the state of the game today. Plus, he does a little Build-a-Band with some past Bulls players.   ---- 2024 Half Court Sessions are live with San Fermin: https://www.youtube.com/@indiebasketball Bon Iverson hats and Lift Yr Skinny Fists t-shirts available at http://www.indiebasketball.com Get Indie Basketball exclusives on Patreon! http://www.patreon.com/indiebasketball Join the conversation on Discord: https://discord.gg/HJaDNwxSbe Instagram | YouTube | TikTok Theme music courtesy of Empty Heaven. Outro courtesy of Mother Evergreen.  

The pandemic was still stalking the world when we recorded this episode, so you'll have to bear with the sound quality. It's decent, mind, but recorded remotely. Anyway, this was, until recently, our only flirtation with a Saddle Creek artist so we thought it fittings to bring this one out of the vault. We do talk a little about the label, Bright Eyes and Desaparecidos but not at any real length. We do go down the well on Cursive in a big way, though. So, enjoy!

It's time to spotlight Trademark Founder Terry Montesi. In this insightful episode with Kevin Kessinger, Trademark's new President and COO, Terry shares his journey from the Memphis grocery business to groundbreaking retail and multifamily developments in Dallas Fort-Worth and beyond. Discover what sets Trademark apart – a commitment to building a legacy that is not just financial. Plus, Terry reflects on lessons learned from transformative projects, like Market Street Woodlands and Saddle Creek, and discusses the future of real estate. Leaning In is published every month. Subscribe to stay up to date. Links: Trademark Property Topics: (00:00:00) - Intro (00:00:52) - Introducing Kevin (00:02:40) - Terry's journey into Real Estate (00:04:44) - Starting Trademark and reflecting on the company (00:08:10) - Business and leadership philosophies (00:17:10) - Reflecting on past projects (00:25:31) - Pipeline and new initiatives (00:27:00) - Retail is back! (00:29:58) - Market fundamentals (00:33:36) - Headwinds (00:36:56) - Acquisitions and growth (00:38:03) - Partnering with Trademark (00:39:27) - Philanthropy (00:41:56) - Terry's passion (00:43:47) - The #1 takeaway from the episode (00:44:58) - What attracted Kevin to Trademark

In this chat, we get to meet Lizzie Powell, the lead singer, guitarist/multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, general jack-of-all-trades of indie rock band Land of Talk. Lizzie and I get deep into the newest Land of Talk record, Performances, which is just out on Saddle Creek. We talk aboutart and creativity, their goals for this record (and beyond), weirdness in music, the almost-defiant attitude that drive a lot of their recent work, Twins Peaks, doggos, and more. We even get a little meta on your butts and talk about the very show that Lizzie is on, which gave me a nice chance to express my profound gratitude for everyone who's agreed to come on and everyone who's listened. (That's you, by the way.) It was such a fun time, and I think you'll really enjoy it. Thanks for listening.

In celebration of the deluxe edition of Cursive's DOMESTICA, we take an in-depth look at how the record was made. Following the breakup of the Omaha band, Slowdown Virginia, Tim Kasher reunited with his former bandmates, Matt Maginn and Stephen Pedersen, to start a new project called Cursive. They brought in drummer Clint Schnase and released their first 7 inch on their friends' label, Lumberjack Records, which later became Saddle Creek. Two full-length records followed, but when THE STORMS OF EARLY SUMMER was released in 1998, the band had already called it quits. Kasher had gotten married and moved to Portland, Oregon for a fresh start. As his marriage fell apart, he returned to Omaha and decided to reform Cursive. Pedersen had left for college at this point so Ted Stevens of Lullaby for the Working Class took over on guitar. Feeling like they had to make up for lost time, Cursive quickly put together an album's worth of songs and entered the home studio of A.J. and Mike Mogis to record the album over nine days. In this episode, Tim Kasher describes his vision of a concept album about a failed relationship that took inspiration from his recent divorce. With songs written from the perspective of both the male and female characters in the relationship, Kasher was writing in a fictional style but couldn't help but include elements from his own life. When the album was released in 2000, Saddle Creek wrote a bio mentioning Kasher's divorce that impacted the overall perception of the album, which Kasher still maintains is not a “divorce record.” From an attempt at being evenhanded in the storytelling to the Mogis brothers production skills to taking inspiration from the films, Eraserhead and Rosemary's Baby, to a lifelong journey of understanding metal to fans asking Kasher for relationship advice, we'll hear the stories around how the album came together.

Tim Kasher returns for a special episode about The Good Life's Album of the Year. We talk about Zooming with Conor Oberst on bad wifi, his upcoming tour, his high school band March Hares opening for 311, Tim's Red Hot Chili Peppers horoscope theory, Inmates, early 2000s Saddle Creek albums about substances, Cursive, debauchery and heartache, Tim loves musicals, I get a little emo about the seasons, Vanessa Carlton, Ryan Fox's slide guitar, creating albums in a world made for songs, The Good Life's website SEO, and what next? JOIN: patreon.com/afterthedeluge -- Tim: https://www.instagram.com/timkasher The Good Life: https://thegoodlifemusic.com/ Me: ⁠https://twitter.com/routinelayup⁠ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/afterthedeluge/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/afterthedeluge/support

This week, hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot share some new music that's flying underneath the mainstream radar - buried treasures! They'll also hear selections from their production staff and bid farewell to The Smiths bassist Andy Rourke. Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9T Become a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvc Sign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnG Make a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lU Send us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah  Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops   Featured Songs: feeble little horse, "Tin Man," Tin Man (Single), Saddle Creek, 2023The Beatles, "I Get By (With a Little Help From My Friends)," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967Tombstones in Their Eyes, "No One to Blame," Sea of Sorrow, Kitten Robot, 2023African Head Charge, "Microdosing," Microdosing (Single), On-U Sound, 2023Evangeline, "Mystic," Fuzzy, Fourteen One Four, 2023Juliana, "Narices Frias," Narice Frias (Single), MUN, 2023Ye Vagabonds, "Blue is the Eye," Nine Waves, River Lea, 2022Draag, "Demonbird," Dark Fire Heresy, Draag, 2023Louise Post, "Guilty," Guilty (Single), El Camino, 2023The Greeting Committee, "Can I Leave Me Too?," Dandelion, Harvest, 2021Cafuné, "Tek It," Running, Aurelians Club, Elektra, 2021Durand Jones, "Lord Have Mercy," Wait Til I Get Over, Dead Oceans, 2023Vanessa Tha Finessa, "Top Notch," CURRENT, babygirl123, 2023Gabe 'Nandez, "Pangea," Pangea, Pow, 2023Sphaèros, "Possession," POSSESSION, Pan European, 2020The Smiths, "This Charming Man," The Smiths, Rough Trade, 1984The Smiths, "Barbarism Begins At Home," Meat Is Murder, Sire, 1985Chuck Berry, "You Never Can Tell (1964 Single Version)," You Never Can Tell (Single), Chess, 1964Support The Show: https://www.patreon.com/soundopinionsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join our PATREON for bonus episodes.  This week we have the host of the After The Deluge podcast Justin Cox on to talk about the divisive Bright Eyes record "Lifted or The Story is in the Soil so Keep Your Ear to the Ground". In this episode we also discuss: can I get a goddamn timpani roll?, Jackson Browne is not Van Morrison, podcast origins, anti-vaxxers, Paul Simon, The Offspring discography, Orcas Island, Killer Whales against capitalism, facebook fan groups, your art saved my life, Tim Kasher, The Hard Times, Todd Fink, skipping opening tracks, one sided 7”s, Dead Oceans and the Saddle Creek split, Ted Stevens, the kissy bitch drama (again), Evan Dando, Jawbreaker, Flea, W, and so much more. // Follow us at @danbassini, @mysprocalledlife, @routinelayup and @runintotheground.  Listen to our RITG Mixtape Vol. 12 Best of 2022 here.

Feeble Little Horse - Tin Man from the 2023 album Girl with Fish on Saddle Creek. Pittsburgh quartet Feeble Little Horse formed three years ago during the pandemic lull but have exploded since dropping their 2021 debut full-length Hayday. They're on the verge of releasing its follow-up, Girl With Fish, via Saddle Creek, a perfect home for their slowcore brand of noise pop. Out June 9th, we've so far gotten three tastes of Girl With Fish, “Steamroller,” “Pocket,” and our Song of the Day “Tin Man.” Starting with a mathy guitar line directly inspired by Slint's incredible “Breadcrumb Trail,” a rush of feedback roars in as frontwoman Lydia Slocum delivers her trademark deadpan vocals about a vapid, emotionless manipulator. “Took him apart and I found nobody/But when I dent you, I end up bruised.” “The song is about people who use sadness to control your actions because they know you will sympathize,” Slocum says of the song. “Oftentimes when these people are investigated there really is not much inside them, they just use emotions to get what they want out of other people. I have my qualms with this sort of person.” “‘Tin Man' is one of the songs that represents a new style of writing for us as a group,” explains guitarist/co-songwriter Ryan Walchoski. “This song went back and forth through Google Drive links, trying to come up with the best iteration of the song that we were all happy with; vocals recorded, scrapped and re-recorded, drums scrapped and re-recorded, the chorus at one point was completely different.” Feeble Little Horse will be touring the US starting in June, with a date in Seattle on Wednesday, July 5th at Barboza. Watch the video for “Tin Man" and read the full post at KEXP.org.Support the show: https://www.kexp.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Shalom - "Happenstance" from the 2023 album Sublimation on Saddle Creek. Brooklyn-based, South Africa-raised artist Shalom had been playing bass in bands while in New Brunswick for college, and working on home-recorded solo songs on the side, when she was discovered by producer Ryan Hemsworth. He invited her to contribute to his collaborative project Quarter-Life Crisis, which led to her being signed with Saddle Creek Records, who released her debut album Sublimation earlier this year.  On today's Song of the Day, the Brooklyn-based, South Africa-raised artist sings of her "need to evaporate and receive validation at the same time," displaying a raw vulnerability against a dancey beat.   “The record is an introduction to me as a songwriter,” she says in a press statement. “I think it shows my versatility, but really, it's me being really honest, earnest, and naked. You can see my bones on this record. I'm okay with it though, because I've got to get it out.”   Read the full story at KEXP.orgSupport the show: https://www.kexp.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join our PATREON for bonus episodes.  This week we go to the movies and talk about the documentary Spend an Evening With Saddle Creek. We discuss: our recent successes, our man Dwid, home improvement tales, moving is the worst, storage wars, having A+ neighbors, Andrew is a picky eater, Charly Bliss scene report, Market Hotel, dance punk, the Obersts', 1619 House, Lullaby for the Working Class, The Faint, Todd Fink the hornball, pollen, Tim Fucking Kasher, I don't want YOU to love ME anymore, the overlooked Saddle Creek bands, we need more documentaries, and so much more. // Follow us at @danbassini, @mysprocalledlife, and @runintotheground.  Listen to our RITG Mixtape Vol. 12 Best of 2022 here.

I talk to Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes about Jackson Browne, emo, being a child among the Saddle Creek teens, showing ambition in a slacker scene, Pitchfork reviews, a wild story behind “Soul Singer in a Session Band," his songs making sense to him but maybe not to you, Conor's media diet, listening to audiobooks about feathers, do people pay too much attention to politics now?, AI and Chat GPT, The Faint being ahead of their time, could he write “First Day of My Life” on command?, long songs and “Let's Not Shit Ourselves,” using SAT words in lyrics, that perfect Waxahatchee record, the next batch of companion EPs, opening for Paramore at the Emo Fest, that cancelled Houston show, writing songs to impress Tim Kasher, Todd Fink and Ted Stevens, leaving Saddle Creek, how to get into the band Superchunk, what does Conor Oberst think of 311?, Rage Against the Machine vs. Limp Bizkit, Down in the Weeds, feeling like The Beatles on the Wide Awake tour... not so much on the Digital Ash tour… and then we meet his dog Petra and say goodbye! Support the pod/get the zine: www.patreon.com/afterthedeluge Follow Justin: twitter.com/routinelayup Follow Bright Eyes: twitter.com/brighteyesband --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/afterthedeluge/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/afterthedeluge/support

Indigo De Souza- “Younger and Dumber” from the 2023 album All of This Will End on Saddle Creek On today's Song of the Day, Asheville, NC-based artist Indigo De Souza reflects on the insecurities of her youth. The track serves as a sneak peek to her forthcoming full-length, All Of This Will End, which will be released April 28th via Saddle Creek.  In a press statement, she shares: “Younger and Dumber” is a flood beam of my emotional and spiritual human experience. My growing up defeated by a world brutally littered with trash, violence and grief, and somehow finding beauty, purpose, and boundless love existing in the same place. This song felt really emotionally intense for me when I wrote it. I was sitting in my house and it kind of flowed right to me as if it had already been written by some other force. A lot of the lyrics are a nod to the idea that your experiences make you who you are. I endured some heavy darkness and dysfunction when I was a teenager. But if I hadn't been through those things, I wouldn't be who I am now. When you're young, you don't know any better, but you learn from your experiences, and then you become somebody who's been alive and learning. It's also about how heartbreaking that is; to start as a child with vivid curiosity, innocent imagination and joy, and for the world to end up being kind of brutal to be a part of. This song is a love letter to everyone's inner child. No one can prepare us for how insane it is to be alive. How many times we will have to rise from the ashes and what courage it will take. De Souza directed the song's accompanying music video, as well as co-designed the costumes alongside her mother. Of the clip, she says: I took psilocybin for the shoot. I have a very specific way of dancing when I'm on mushrooms. The movements feel like electricity rising up from the earth through ancient networks of mycelium. It feels like the trees and plants are moving my body for me and I am just surrendering. It feels so clear to me now more than ever, how important it is to unabashedly embody my truest spirit. Because I am not special, and I'm fleeting, and it feels like it's my purpose to help mobilize others to come home to themselves. To wake from our societal sleepwalk and consider the importance in creating deep connection within community and relationships. To find a preciousness in the time we have and the earth we're nourished by. To see nature in all its primordial magic, as something to learn from and grow with. Something to protect. Read the full story at KEXP.orgSupport the show: https://www.kexp.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's March so time for our first Now Playing episode of 2023. This time Colin has chosen Saddle Creek records' 2003 compilation Saddle Creek 50 featuring Bright Eyes, Rilo Kiley, Cursive, Azure Ray, The Faint, & More to coincide with its 20th Anniversary this month. Tracey has chosen Glasgow alt rock band Cloth's self titled 2020 debut record, And Ian has chosen ambient legend Brian Eno's most recent record FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE from last year.Listen to Saddle Creek 50 here - https://open.spotify.com/album/5czFIe96e39kNJfVl1D8cH?si=VtIOy4yyQBeMsTGfifmeIQListen to Cloth here - https://open.spotify.com/album/1wjACzJBtfygdPfQbTAwQi?si=wlkh3iKzRI6D35wo3-JMAwListen to the Eno record here - https://open.spotify.com/album/1fsGRseH9xCUSiO1MDSB7W?si=BL_KMxNfTT-Ib3fwKNRyFAAs always, if you enjoy the music please consider supporting the artists by buying their records etc.Hosts - Ian Clarke, Colin Jackson-Brown & Tracey BRecorded/Edited/Mixed/Original Music by Colin Jackson-Brown for We Dig PodcastsSay hello at www.facebook.com/wedigmusicpcast or tweet us at http://twitter.com/wedigmusicpcast or look at shiny pictures on Instagram at http://instagram.com/wedigmusicpcast Part of the We Made This podcast network. https://twitter.com/wmt_network You can also find all the We Dig Music & Free With This Months Issue episodes at www.wedigpodcasts.com

Hutch Harris (The Thermals) and Brett Newski (NEWSKI) discuss A.I. taking over art, the bizarroness of the art museum scene, collaging, and finding the balance of art and commerce.  More on Hutch: https://hutchharris.bandcamp.com/ If u enjoy the pod please support: https://www.patreon.com/Newski NEWSKI ON TOUR: 3/29 - YPSILANTI, MI - Ziggys 3/30 - HAMILTON, ON - Mill's Hardware 3/31 - TORONTO, ON - Horseshoe Tavern 4/1 - ELORA, ON - Elora Brewing Co 4/2 - BARRIE, ON - Queens Hotel 4/6 - STEVEN'S POINT, WI - UWSP Dreyfus Center 4/7 - MILWAUKEE, WI - Anodyne Walkers Point (early 7p) 4/8 - MANITOWOC, WI - Sabbatical Brewing 4/12 - CHICAGO, IL - Golden Dagger 4/13 - ST PAUL, MN - Turf Club 4/14 - APPLETON, WI - Appleton Beer Factory 4/21 - COLUMBUS, OH - Rambling House Series 4/22 - YOUNGSTOWN, OH - Westside Bowl 4/23 - PHILADELPHIA, PA- Krobath Concert Series 4/26 - NYC - Bowery Electric (early 6pm) 4/27 - DEWEY BEACH, DL - Fort Ishu House Show 4/28 - WASHINGTON DC - Pearl St Warehouse 4/30 - RICHMOND, VA - Hardywood Brewing 5/3 - ORLANDO, FL - Will's Pub 5/4 - ST AUGUSTINE - Sarbez 5/5 - WEST DESTIN, FL - Rock by the Sea Fest 5/6 - WEST DESTIN, FL - Rock by the Sea Fest 5/7 - COLUMBUS, MS - Sunstroke House Music (early 6p) 5/20 - HAVANA, IL - Havana Songwriters Fest (solo)   5/23 - SEATTLE, WA - Fun House 5/24 - BEND, OR - Old St Francis School 5/25 - PORTLAND, OR - The White Eagle 5/26 - PORT ANGELES, WA - JFFA Festival  6/2- MARSHFIELD, WI - Hub City Days 6/17 - SHEBOYGAN, WI - Three Sheeps 6/23 - CEDAR RAPIDS, IA - Newbo City Market 6/30 - BARABOO, WI - Tumbled Rock Brewing 7/1 - MADISON, WI - Terrace at Memorial Union 7/12 - GOSHEN, IN - Goshen Brewing 7/15 - GRAND RAPIDS, MI - Founders 7/16 - THREE OAKS, MI - Acorn Theatre 

Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcast platform and sign up for the patreon! Thanks for listening! Adam Cayton-Holland (www.adamcaytonholland.com) is a national touring comic who has appeared on Conan, The Late Late Show with James Corden, Comedy Central Presents, @midnight, The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail, Happy Endings and was named one of Esquire's “25 Comics to Watch,” as well as one of “10 Comics to Watch” by Variety. Do the math. That means fifteen comics fell through the cracks. Adam was not one of them. Along with his cohorts in The Grawlix, he created, wrote and starred in “Those Who Can't,” which aired for three seasons and is available to stream on HBOMax. The Grawlix also host a podcast, “The Grawlix Saves the World,” which is available everywhere. His albums, “I Don't Know If I Happy,” “Backyards,” “Adam Cayton-Holland Performs His Signature Bits,” (voted one of Vulture's Top Ten Albums of 2018), “Semblance of Normalcy,” and “Hot Takes,” are all available on iTunes. “Adam Cayton-Holland Performs His Signature Bits” is also available on vinyl through the record label Saddle Creek. Adam's writing has appeared in McSweeney's, The New York Times, Esquire and The Atlantic. His first book, Tragedy Plus Time, is available everywhere.

Black Belt Eagle Scout - Don't Give Up from the 2023 album The Land, The Water, The Sky on Saddle Creek. Three years after the release of her sophomore record At the Party Wtih My Brown Friends, Katherine Paul unveiled the new Black Belt Eagle Scout single "Don't Give Up." The song is a dreamy, emotive gift to her Indigenous Swinomish, WA community, where over a melancholic guitar melody she hushedly touches on mental health awareness and the importance of connection to the land in the healing process. Paul wrote the song over the course of two years, starting in 2020 at a songwriting residency in Coast Salish territory before the pandemic and finishing in November 2021 while attending the same residency again. She had this to say about the song: “'Don't Give Up' is a song about mental health awareness and the importance that my connection to the land plays within my own mental health journey. Spending time with the land and on the water are ways that strengthen my connection to my ancestors and to my culture. It helps heal my spirit and is the form of self-care that helps me the most. The lyrics “I don't give up” mean staying alive. I wrote this song for me but also for my community and anyone who deals with challenging mental health issues to remind us just how much of a role our connection to the environment plays within our healing process. At the end of the song when I sing, “The land, the water, the sky,” I wanted to sing it like my late grandfather Alexander Paul Sr. sang in our family's big drum group—from the heart." Black Belt Eagle Scout is embarking on a tour in February, with a date in Seattle on Wednesday, February 15th at Neumos. Watch Black Belt Eagle Scout's KEXP in-studio performance from 2018 and read the full post at KEXP.org.Support the show: https://www.kexp.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week we hang with A Great Big Pile of Leaves drummer/producer Tyler Soucy to talk about the sophomore Hop Along record Painted Shut. We also discuss: fleeing NYC, the peloton zoom prop, chocolate croissants, avocado opening discourse, our worst injuries, wedding photography, our first self-censorship, the AGBPOL fanbase, booking fomo, fan tattoos, Tyler delays progress, Hop Along is a real rock band, Frances' storytelling, our recent on repeat records, the Saddle Creek legacy, the Desaparecidos, 70s drum tones, and breaking the Asbury Lanes stage. // Follow us at @danbassini, @mysprocalledlife, @tylerjordansoucy and @runintotheground. Listen to our RITG Mixtape Vol. 10 here and our Best of RITG playlist here.

Michael Tedder is culture writer who's written for Stereogum, The Ringer, Esquire, Uproxx and many more. We talk about early 2000s Bright Eyes shows in Florida, war, emo-bashing, making a 70s record, flawed voices, Conor writes his big hit, Saddle Creek 50, Michael's coffee mug, Top-3 Saddest Horn Parts in Indie Rock History, Sufjan Stevens, Michael builds the Bright Eyes MySpace Music page live, "At the Bottom of Everything" to kick things off, Emmylou Harris & Jim James bring the HARMONIES, for Zoomers The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Bright Eyes are about the same, When We Were Young Festival, "Lua" is perfect, “Meeee— eeee—,” how long till Taylor Swift covers “First Day of My Life?,” Michael's new book (Top Eight, How MySpace Changed Music) comes out in Aug 2023 and can be preordered now. Michael Tedder: https://twitter.com/mtedder Justin Cox: twitter.com/routinelayup Patreon (extra shit and a Bright Eyes zine): patreon.com/afterthedeluge --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/afterthedeluge/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/afterthedeluge/support

Disq - "Cujo Kiddies" from the 2022 album Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet on Saddle Creek. Wisconsin-based quintet Disq are releasing their sophomore record Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet this Friday two years after dropping their debut Collector. Our Song of the Day and the album's lead single “Cujo Kiddies” emphasizes the band's ability to craft eclectic art rock but is also a deeply personal song for vocalist/bassist Raina Bock. In a lengthy statement, Bock had this to say about the song: “I wanted to make a song that sounded like a freight train full of clowns and silly toys, barreling through the dark, observing and taking note of the various gloomy landscapes of my brain (without dwelling too long or taking any of it too seriously).I wrote the first half of ‘Cujo' from deep inside the hole of substance abuse and loneliness. The song was meant to function as a blueprint for how I wished my reality could look. Six months later, sitting in an ocean of boxes all packed up for what would be my fourth time moving that year, I wrote the second half.The experience inspired what I hope to be my lifelong approach to songwriting going forward… To write songs not with the goal of reflecting on where I am at a given moment, but as a tool to pull myself out of the way things are and toward the way I'd like them to be.I wrote ‘Cujo Kiddies' for nobody else's ears but my own, so while it is now making its way out into a strange world where I am not the only living person on earth, I truly from the bottom of my heart hope you all enjoy— but if you don't, rest easy in knowing that it is no skin off the author's back either way. This song has already done everything I could have ever hoped it would.” Disq will be in Seattle on Tuesday, December 6th to play Barboza with opening support from local band Sea Lemon. Watch the official video for other Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet single “The Hardest Part” and read the full post at KEXP.org.Support the show: https://www.kexp.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Casey's friend played this album on repeat until he enjoyed, so he wanted to share it on Blenderstyle. In this episode we review the album Wet From Birth by the Faint.BlenderattackFollow/Subscribe:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/blenderstylePodcast: https://blenderstyle.buzzsprout.comBlenderstyle Merch: https://blenderstyle.square.siteInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/blenderstylemusicFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/blenderstylemusicWebsite: http://blenderstyle.netListen to The Faint - Wet From Birth and let us know what you think.Youtube Music: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_k3OLyCdbi_YAubLeJBLdq-s-HoHyJjer0Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/41ZdJIZqQvwlcf939RDQlPApple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/wet-from-birth/22944695Blenderstyle Hosts: Casey, Matt, NathanKeywords: The Faint Reaction, Wet From Birth Reaction, Alternative#thefaint #wetfrombirth #albumreview #thefaintreaction #wetfrombirthreaction

Today we welcome Tim Kasher, again! He's been on prior as a guest talking about his entire career and also was included in volume 2 of the Anthology of Emo book series, now we dive even deeper. This time we dive into the absolute classic “Domestica.” Released in June way back in 2000, this album released posthumously, really was an evolution of their last two records and started to almost restart the band out of chaos and unrest. The album, rumored to be about a divorce, as you will hear, is close but also far away as well. Tim was generous was his time to dive really deep into the album, cover, and every single track. Including some about Braces, a short lived band that was a 3 piece that you'll hear on the reissue. Enough of me talking, this album is a shade over 30 minutes but we'll spend the next hour to let Tim tell us all about “Domestica.” I hope you enjoy. Reissue is available via 15 Passenger.

Todd Fink is the lead singer of The Faint, a vital and important band that grew up alongside Bright Eyes in those early Saddle Creek years in Omaha. We talk about touring with Bright Eyes on the Digital Ash tour, life in Joshua Tree, the Desert Oracle, creative Saddle Creek bands, going electronic, masterful Mogis production, keeping imperfections, me having Covid, Todd's parents didn't love young-kid squealing Conor but Todd saw his talent, the Fevers & Mirrors radio interview and Pitchfork review, Conor's and Bright Eyes' writing and recording process, what's next for The Faint, Recapitate Headwear, and Tim Kasher's early encouragement. At 53:00, I'm joined by a few of the After the Deluge Patreon supporters to talk about this record and some select tracks. The voices you'll hear are Reed, Per, Jon, Lyzi and myself. We dig into specific Digital Ash tracks, moments, and lyrics. Extra shit and a Bright Eyes zine! patreon.com/afterthedeluge Todd Fink: instagram.com/toddthefink Justin Cox: twitter.com/routinelayup --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/afterthedeluge/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/afterthedeluge/support

In the latest episode of Columbia House Party, hosts Jake Goldsbie and Blake Murphy make Conor Oberst the third member of the CHP two-time subject club, exploring Bright Eyes' 2002 album Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground. Find out more about Saddle Creek's epic early-2000s run as a label, why the hosts think Bright Eyes was so influential as a thread between folk eras despite often being classified as emo on this week's podcast. Come join the Patreon family for bonus episodes, mailbags, show notes and even more goodness: https://www.patreon.com/columbiahouseparty Follow @ColumbiaHP on Twitter! While you're there say hello to @BlakeMurphyODC and @JGoldsbie. If merch is your thing, be sure to check out the store: http://bit.ly/chpmerch Or reach out to the show and say hey: podcast@columbiahouseparty.com If you enjoyed today's show, please rate Columbia House Party 5-Stars on Apple Podcasts.See you next week for an all new episode of CHP.

In the latest episode of Columbia House Party, hosts Jake Goldsbie and Blake Murphy make Conor Oberst the third member of the CHP two-time subject club, exploring Bright Eyes' 2002 album Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground. Find out more about Saddle Creek's epic early-2000s run as a label, why the hosts think Bright Eyes was so influential as a thread between folk eras despite often being classified as emo on this week's podcast. Come join the Patreon family for bonus episodes, mailbags, show notes and even more goodness: https://www.patreon.com/columbiahouseparty Follow @ColumbiaHP on Twitter! While you're there say hello to @BlakeMurphyODC and @JGoldsbie. If merch is your thing, be sure to check out the store: http://bit.ly/chpmerch Or reach out to the show and say hey: podcast@columbiahouseparty.com If you enjoyed today's show, please rate Columbia House Party 5-Stars on Apple Podcasts.See you next week for an all new episode of CHP.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4114831/advertisement

Full episode is live at patreon.com/afterthedeluge -- Todd Fink is the lead singer of The Faint, a vital and important band that grew up alongside Bright Eyes in those early Saddle Creek years in Omaha. We talk about touring with Bright Eyes on the Digital Ash tour, life in Joshua Tree, the Desert Oracle, creative Saddle Creek bands, going electronic, masterful Mogis production, keeping imperfections, me having Covid, Todd's parents didn't love young-kid squealing Conor but Todd saw his talent, the Fevers & Mirrors radio interview and Pitchfork review, Conor's and Bright Eyes' writing and recording process, what's next for The Faint, Recapitate Headwear, and Tim Kasher's early encouragement. At 53:00, I'm joined by a few of the After the Deluge Patreon supporters to talk about this record and some select tracks. The voices you'll hear are Reed, Per, Jon, Lyzi and myself. We go dig into specific Digital Ash tracks, moments, and lyrics in that second section. Extra shit and a Bright Eyes zine! patreon.com/afterthedeluge Todd Fink: instagram.com/toddthefink Justin Cox: twitter.com/routinelayup --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/afterthedeluge/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/afterthedeluge/support

SCBC wants to change the way people think about breakfast. Not only is it applying dinner concepts to breakfast kitchens, but owner Chase Thomsen plans on challenging what is considered "breakfast food." Chase also opens up about his treatment for addiction and mental health issues in 2020, and we discuss why these concerns are so prevalent in the restaurant industry and what can be done to change things.Also follow up on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, AND at RestaurantHoppen.com!Sponsored by Certified Piedmontese. Visit their website, use Promo Code: HOPPEN, and receive 25% off your order!A Hurrdat Media Production. Hurrdat Media is a digital media and commercial video production company based in Omaha, NE. Find more podcasts on the Hurrdat Media Network and learn more about our other services today on HurrdatMedia.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ian Cohen (Pitchfork/Indiecast) and I talk about Fevers and Mirrors, a pivotal moment for Bright Eyes and Saddle Creek. Check out Ian's excellent Pitchfork review of the vinyl reissue in 2012. Also discussed: Dashboard Confessional, Emo (again), long intro tracks to chase off the squares, early Pitchfork, Rolling Stone reviews for old rockers, bands swinging BIG, our embarrassing teenage journals, Steven Hyden's album rankings, is Cassadaga overrated or underrated?, eBaum's World, No Woman No Cry, THAT FAKE RADIO INTERVIEW, Todd Fink's improv skills, and A Song to Pass the Time as the album's epilogue. Extra shit and a Bright Eyes zine! patreon.com/afterthedeluge Justin Cox: twitter.com/routinelayup Ian Cohen: twitter.com/en_cohen --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/afterthedeluge/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/afterthedeluge/support

Cursive's Tim Kasher and I talk about the early days of Saddle Creek and the first two Bright Eyes records, A Collection of Songs Written and Recorded 1995-1997 and Letting Off the Happiness. Also discussed: Antique stores, early Cursive records, 14-year-old Conor, what bound Saddle Creek bands, Emo, the Oberst household, Saddle Creek isn't really a creek, Letting Off the Happiness was monumental, small town music scenes, Tim keeping the Devil away by making art. Extra shit and a Bright Eyes zine for you! patreon.com/afterthedeluge Tim's new record, Middling Age: https://timkasher.bandcamp.com/album/middling-age Justin Cox: twitter.com/routinelayup Tim Kasher: twitter.com/timkasher --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/afterthedeluge/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/afterthedeluge/support

Season two of After the Deluge will go album by album through the Bright Eyes discography, from the basement recordings in Omaha through the pandemic release after a decade-long hiatus, and some real classics in between. I'm Justin Cox and I'll have a conversation with a new guest each episode starting with Tim Kasher on the first two Bright Eyes records, Saddle Creek, and the late '90s in Omaha, Nebraska. For bonus content, ad-free episodes, and a Bright Eyes zine mailed to your home, check out patreon.com/afterthedeluge Follow me here: twitter.com/routinelayup If you came for the Jackson Browne podcast, stick around for this. You might find something new to love. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/afterthedeluge/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/afterthedeluge/support

This podcast is unpaid and survives on donations. You can donate here via paypal www.stephenmbland.com/olas-kool-kitchen or buy merch here olaskoolkitchen.dizzyjam.comOla's Kool Kitchen is a show on KCLA 99.3 FM in Los Angeles, 107.5 andhow.FM, Maximum Threshold Radio, Rock Radio UK, Sword Radio UK, Jammerstream One, Kor Radio, Bombshell Radio, Pop Radio UK, Radio Wigwam, Rock XS Radio, Dirty Chai Radio, Radio Candy Radio, Firebrand Radio and Radio Lantau you can hear more shows here www.mixcloud.com/olaskoolkitchen/Show 4681. Jack White-Taking Me Back-Fear of the Dawn-Third Man Records2. The Linda Lindas – Magic-Growing Up-Epitaph 3. Iceblink-Seared-single--A Secret Brand 4. Te Kaahu-Waikato-single-Theia 5. Tomberlin-Happy Accident- i don't know who needs to hear this-Saddle Creek 6. Double Cheese-Jail Time-The Black Album-Dirty Water Records 7. Losun-Crossroads-single-self release 8. EXEK-Parricide is Painless-Advertise Here-Castle Face 9. Broods-Piece of My Mind-Space Island-Universal 10. SEA POWER-Lakeland Echo-EVERYTHING WAS FOREVER-GOLDEN CHARRIOT 11. Margarita Sierra - Cha Cha Twist-single-Warner Brothers 12. Terry & Jerry- Mama Julie-single-Class 13. Les contretemps-Julia-single-TC 14. Charlotte Cornfield-21-Highs in the Minuses-Double Double Whammy

Despite not setting out to make concept albums 100% of the time, Tim Kasher — leader of influential indie-rock mainstay Cursive — realizes that artwork, connecting songs in post-production, and other methods have made his LP's feel like sweeping, thematic gestures to his fans for twenty-five years. This week, hot off the release of his new solo full-length Middling Age, Tim recalls the days of commercials for albums on television, the importance of beloved Omaha record store The Antiquarium, and his recent stint on the TV game show Chain Reaction. Plus, whether the community aspect of Saddle Creek's heyday could survive today's landscape, and why he's attracted to songs about songwriting.

Indigo De Souza is a musician from North Carolina. Her new album Any Shape You Take is out now on Saddle Creek. We chat about Chris off to Miami and his addiction to airline points, podcasting through the wire, exploring the wilderness and hanging out down at the swamp, spending most of the time stone-cold sober, Indigo's philosophy for living a happy life, making sad music for sad people, the first three records she ever got, opening for My Morning Jacket on a big tour, Mumford Sons vs. Edward Sharpe, Indigo's mom being a freak, growing up with twin sisters, busking as a child, pregnancy kink vs. injured kink, yogurt making, sync talk, she used to love New York, and just how off the grid she'd like to be. instagram.com/indigofaraway twitter.com/donetodeath twitter.com/themjeans --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/howlonggone/support

Adam Cayton-Holland - Comic, Actor, Writer & Podcast Host.Adam is a national touring comic who has appeared on CONAN, Comedy Central Presents, The Late Late Show with James Corden, @midnight, The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail, and more. He has been named one of Esquire magazine's “25 Comics to Watch” and one of “10 Comics to Watch” by Variety. His live comedy albums, “I Don't Know If I Happy,” “Backyards,” “Adam Cayton-Holland Performs His Signature Bits,” “Semblance of Normalcy,” and "Hot Takes" are all available on iTunes. “Adam Cayton-Holland Performs His Signature Bits” is also available on vinyl through the record label Saddle Creek. Along with his cohorts in The Grawlix, he created, wrote, and starred in “Those Who Can't,” which aired for three seasons on truTV & now on HBO max. The Grawlix also host a podcast, “The Grawlix Saves the World,” Adam also is the founder of the High Plains Comedy Festival in Denver. He has performed at comedy festivals all over the world, as well as The Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall. Adam's writing has appeared in the Village Voice, SPIN, The A.V. Club, The New York Times, Esquire and The Atlantic. His first book, Tragedy Plus Time, is available everywhere. He once threw out the opening pitch at a Colorado Rockies game and people have described him as “genial,” and “with decent teeth.” Bobby is joined by Adam to discuss Comedy, Denver, Colorado, Podcasting, Fuck Tabs, Travel, Touring, Bird Watching, Outdoor Edict, Family, Friends, Outdoor Life & much more. Please subscribe or like us on social media platforms for updates on shows, events, and episode drops. Become a Mountain Side Patron Here for exclusive footage.www.TheMountainSidePodcast.comwww.AdamCaytonHolland.comSponsor Linkswww.UnCanna.comMountain Side listeners use Discount code TMS to receive 10% off all Uncanna products!www.ONNIT.comMountain Side listeners use Discount code TMS to receive 10% off ONNIT products!www.Drizly.comAlcohol delivery to your door Mountain Side listeners Discount Here!Other Affiliates Links

Welcome to the Present Age podcast. I’m your host Parker Molloy.Joining me on today’s show is animator and crypto art creator Bryan Brinkman. His work has appeared at places like The Tonight Show, Saturday Night Life, and even Sesame Street. Today, he’s going to teach me a bit about NFTs.Parker Molloy: So, joining me today on the podcast is Bryan Brinkman. Hello.Bryan Brinkman: Hello, Hey Parker.How's it going?It's going very well.So, I wanted to have you on the podcast to talk to you about your art and your work, which I really like and enjoy. And also the one thing that I don't understand, but I want to understand, NFTs. Can you help me understand what an NFT is and how that applies to the art world, basically?I can do my best to try.All right.Because it's an ever-growing description because every week there's something new happening in the space. But just to start out, I would say an NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. Kind of the idea behind it is that you can authenticate digital assets through the blockchain. And so, as a way of storing imagery or content. It's a way of saying, "Hey, I possess this digital asset," and that gives you the ability to trade it and resell it or do whatever you want with it. And so that's kind of the basic idea around what an NFT is, but then what that asset can be is exploding into a million possibilities.Yeah, I was reading something the other day about how people have other applications of the same blockchain technologies. Someone was saying, "Oh yeah, one day we could have contracts and deeds to houses and stuff like that on there". And that's really interesting. And I think that part of the issue is that a lot of people just struggle to understand the concept, because for instance, like in NFT might be something like a video or a GIF, or just a still image. Right?And people might think, okay, well, why would I buy this when I can just look at it anytime I want, I can make my own copy of it. I could just pull up a website that has this on it and look at it. For people who are thinking about trying to kind of explore that space as either a creator or someone who just wants to get involved and support artists. I guess that's another big thing, which I understand that that is definitely one of the reasons someone would want to pay for something as opposed to just looking at it on the internet.I think that's a good question. The first thing that comes to people's minds, when they say it is, why would I pay for JPEG when I can just download it or screenshot it? And I think that same idea can be applied to a lot of art. Why does any art have value? It's because there's a group of people that all agree it has value, and that gives it value.I think you can kind of look at the NFT collectible art market as being similar to what baseball cards were in the 90s. Those cards are printed for probably a penny on a piece of cardboard paper, but the value is whether a lot of people altogether go, "Hey, this Michael Jordan rookie card is worth more than this other card."And so I think it kind of falls into the same thing as that the NFT is just a medium and a canvas for people to create on. And the idea of I could just screenshot that, well, you can't go and sell a screenshot, but you can authenticate that you own the original copy of an NFT and someone will want to buy that.And that's really interesting. And that's a good point. I mean, the only real differences, the fact that there's a physical object to hold onto with, for instance, with baseball cards, which funnily enough, I was recently thinking about maybe getting back into collecting baseball cards because every once in a while, when the world gets too chaotic, I try to pick up a new hobby. So I don't just explode on Twitter or something like that.And a few years back it was comic books. I was like, I'm going to just get really into comic books and that's been helpful. And then it was video games, and it's all these like going back to my childhood kind of things. And so I think baseball cards is the next kind of going down and just looking into the state of that industry right now is really interesting as well. I don't know, I remember growing up and it'd be like, here's this one card, this is the card for this player for this year.And now it's like, “Well this one, if it has a blue border, it's worth more than if it has a multicolored.” And I'm just like, man, it's so complicated now.Well, the sports card, yeah. The sports card industry's kind of changed a lot recently too. I've been looking at like, they have like column like penny cards. When you buy these boxes and they have pieces of jerseys and autographs and all these amazing hand drawn pieces of cards and stuff, they've really upped the trading card game to keep up with kind of the collector mentality in recent years. Which is something I wasn't very aware of until like the past year.Yeah. And just the day I was looking at Topps, the trading card company. They have a section on their website that's now just Topps and NFTs. And it's kind of that same idea of trying to be like, yeah, you can own this rare whatever. And then there are some people who sell like a penguin or something. And I'm trying to understand that. And I don't know, I feel like I'm just like a million years old.No, I think there's, in my mind there's kind of two worlds of NFT collecting right now. There's the art side. And then there's the kind of the collectible side and the collectible side falls into that kind of sports card mentality where there's high volume and there are big communities backing it. And with the penguins, there's 10,000 of those penguins. And so having a feature in the New York Times will give all these people excited and the prices fluctuate, and it falls into more of like kind of a stock market mentality where there's kind of this liquidity to these collectibles. Whereas the art side falls into a slightly different category where it's more of like artists building communities around their work and their style. And that falls into kind of like the auction house world and the New York gallery world versus kind of like the sports card collectors.So there's all these different entry points. And I would say like a lot of the space grew because of a website called NBA Top Shot that came out about a year ago and kind of brought that sports card, collecting mentality into the space. And then all these people did it. They kind of got a sense and they started to wrap their minds around, "Hey, these digital assets hold value". And then they started looking elsewhere. And so that they kind of branch off into what else there is, because I think it was [inaudible] who's an artist in the space. He made a tweet the other day. That was like, "When you used to meet a celebrity, you'd ask for an autograph, but now you ask for a selfie," and that mentality of what has more value to people these days? Is it the digital experience or is it this physical thing you hold? I think that's changing rapidly, especially with video game skins, and how you manage your digital content and video game worlds. For instance, I think translates very one-to-one with NFT world.That's yeah. That's a good point.Kids, these days. They care more about digital assets than putting paintings on their wall. They, they want to show paintings on their phone that they can show their friends.Yeah. And that's really interesting. And I mean, one way I have been trying to wrap my head around that over the past several months. And one thing that I've seen as a criticism of NFTs and just things that involve crypto generally is like the energy consumption of that. But it, everything seems so unclear when it comes to the environmental effect of any of this. Do you have any thoughts on that? I mean, I'm sure you have thoughts on that.Yeah. I mean I think it was around January, after I'd been in the space for a year, that article kind of came out written by this guy named Memo and it was kind of this jarring account of how much energy could be consumed at a maximum amount, if everything travels all these places and burns all this energy. And there's certainly different blockchains that consume different types of energies. And there's these arguments of kind of proof of work versus proof of stake. Ethereum is not the best at it. And they are actively trying to move to this new Ethereum 2.0, that will reduce this all by like 99%, but it's a slow process. So in the meantime, there's a lot of these kinds of like, they call them side chains where people can kind of mint on these layers, two solutions that take up less energy.But after that article came out, a lot of the NFT websites made commitments to offset their carbon emissions. So, I mean I've seen in the six months or so I guess it's been maybe eight months since that article came out, that has been a key point of almost every project is to offset that as artists. I did my calculations and offset it and I've done charities to raise money for that. And so there's a lot of ways you can kind of work towards that in the short term while they're kind of finding solutions in the long-term.And then a lot of artists that really feel strongly about it have moved to other blockchains, like Tezos, there's a website called hic et nunc, which is a very silly name, but I consider it to be kind of like the Brooklyn indie comic NFT site. So there's a lot of really cool art there, that's a lot more affordable and they call it clean NFTs. And so there's a lot of different ways people are kind of working to get around that in the short term, but there is certainly a lot of criticisms that are, I think are valid about Bitcoin and other blockchains that aren't working towards solutions in the longterm.Yeah, that's it, it's one of those things where I feel like the backlash to it was so swift where it was, if you buy an NFT, you're destroying the planet and you'd be like, whoa, I don't think that that is necessarily fair. Just saying that to people. I feel like that kind of scared a lot of people away from like really participating in this as either a consumer or an artist. And hopefully, that kind of over time will-I think the math and the calculations were all based on worst-case scenarios. Looking at it, the idea that miners are only going to consume pure energy isn't necessarily true because they're going to want to be using renewable energy just for their own profits’ sake. And a lot of mining happens on kind of solar power and renewable energy consumption. So I think there was a swift backlash and then people started to kind of understand that minting one NFT isn't the equivalent of an entire day of London's energy consumption. Yeah. So I think people started to kind of look into it, figure out what the accurate amount was. I mean, I had places reaching out to me asking me to help them like figure out calculations. Like I'm not a math scientist, but I can do my best to help, but yeah-“Please animate this and also do a bunch of very complicated math equations for it.”But yeah, I think in the end, I think it's somewhere in between the two, it's not, it's not urgent issue and it's also not a non-issue it's somewhere in between and you have to kind of work towards doing your best to address it as you can.Yeah, definitely. And so one of the things I wanted to kind of ask you about was just all of your other work that you've done over the years. I mean, just looking at your website, you have Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live, Sesame Street, a music video for The Good Life, one of my favorite bands, which is-We're both big Tim Kasher fans.Yeah. That's very, very cool. Cause I totally forgot you did that one, which it's a good video it's for "The Troubadour's Green Room", right?Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that was such a fun one to do because they basically reached out to me and they were like, do you want to do this video? Here's three songs from the new album. And I just kind of sat and closed my eyes and listened to the songs until imagery came about. And they just let me kind of dream up visuals and kind of make something on my own. And so they were very hands-off and they just let me have fun with it. It was a blast cause I'm such a huge fan. I'm originally from Omaha, Nebraska, so I grew up a big Saddle Creek Records fan.I mean, I'm from Illinois, so it's not too far away, but also grew up a big fan of Saddle Creek. Every band that was on there, I would go out and buy their albums as soon as it came out. Any of the bands that Tim Kasher would be in or Connor Oberst or any of the guys from The Faint, all of those bands are so good.I love The Faint, that they were my entry point to Saddle Creek when I was young, seeing those concerts were such a blast. I mean, they still are, anytime they come around town, I try to see them. But yeah, I think that kind of career path I took, I kind of went to school for animation. And then I found work kind of working in advertising and TV. I worked on some animated series, like the Life and Times of Tim, which was this very small, HBO cartoon, but it was a lot of fun to work on. So I kind of did all these paths before eventually kind of working. I worked at The Tonight Show for like eight years, but in my free time, I would try to do music videos. I would try to do posters for concerts. I would do these pop culture, art gallery shows in LA.And I was always trying to kind of like find ways to be creative because it was just like, that's my hobby. That's what I love doing. And then once kind of NFTs came around, it was like, oh, I no longer have to worry about turning my digital work into physical work to sell. This is a perfect platform for me to create animations. And I don't have to make short films for film festivals anymore. I can just make little short things that tell stories. And I found it to be just like the perfect amalgamation of all these things I've been trying to do for years. Cause I mean, I'm going to date myself, but when I was in high school, I was creating little flash cartoons for newgrounds.com, uploading them and then getting excited when people would be like, I like this one or I get upset when they say I hate this one, but it was that same concept where it's been years later I'm still doing the same thing where I'm just kind of making whatever I want to make and then I put it out there and I see what people think.Yeah. And it's really cool. And I love your style just generally speaking. The colors that you use, the really weird-ass kind of... I mean, just on your website under on the crypto page, there's one of the animations is like a person being ripped in half, but it's weird because it's not in this really gruesome way. It's just sort of like, Hey... unzip, zip back up kind of thing. And I just really enjoy that. How would you describe your art style? Also, just anyone listening to this, you can go over to my website, readthepresentage.com and I'll be sure to include some of your Tweets that have your images and stuff in there, so they can see what on earth we're talking about.Giselle Flores recently said I was a conceptual cartoonist, which I thought was very funny and kind of fitting, but I think the concept behind when I joined the NFTs was I had been doing these kinds of gallery shows and a lot of curators and people in the scene kept telling me "If you want to be a successful artist, you have to do the same style over and over because that's what galleries expect you to do when they put you in a show, they want you to do the work that you're famous for, because that's what sells". And I was kind of hated that mentality of like putting yourself into a corner, especially early on in your artistic career. I mean, I was living out in LA shortly after college and I just thought that's the worst way to get stuck in a style like so early.And so when I started doing NFTs, I kind of wanted to break away from that. I saw it as an experimental area to do whatever in. And so my thesis behind my art was I'm just going to stick with a color scheme and then I can do whatever style I want. I can do 3D, I can do 2D cartoons, I can do paintings. As long as they have those colors in it, it all ties together into this overarching style that I can claim to have. And so that's been kind of my through-line, but then that allows me to do dark neon animations or colorful, bright poppy animations.And that was kind of my way of breaking out of that trap of getting stuck, doing the same thing over and over. Even though a lot of artists do that and they make a great living off doing the same thing over and over, I just found it to be a little... I didn't want to get trapped in that too early. But now a year and a half into it, I'm starting to revisit the same themes and visuals and stuff, because now I've kind of developed a style through this experimental journey.Yeah. The colors that you use are just some of my favorites basically, they all work so well together, it is a really neat throughline for so much of your work. And even though, as you were saying, the style kind of shifts around and whatnot. It's always so interesting to learn about something that I just am so totally clueless about. And that's what this is kind of been, which is great.Yeah. And that's kind of the fun of like NFTs is like, I started doing it as just kind of making GIFs, because back when I started the NFT space, you couldn't even upload videos to the blockchain, the technology wasn't ready yet. And so everyone was kind of making these short looping GIFs, because that's how you could get a lot of mileage out of like a 50 megabyte file size limit. And so that's like kind of where I started. It was like, how can I make things? How can you make it loop nicely so that it keeps going, and it doesn't feel like you're only making three seconds of animation kind of stuff, but then over time, you start to get comfortable with that. And then you find new platforms, whether it's, I did a release on a website called art blocks, which is a generative art where you create art entirely with code.And then when people create it, they get a randomly generated piece of art. And so I did that in January and now that's becoming one of the most sought after platforms and styles of art, because it allows an artist to make an unlimited supply of art, but each one's unique. And I think that's a really cool thing that NFTs can do that can't be replicated outside the space very easily. And then also I did a piece for a platform called like async music, which allows you to sell music in a way that the album art changes and the audio changes based on who owns different layers of the track. And so for instance, you could have a band and you, as an owner of the guitar stem, you could change how the guitar sounds in the song. And when people listen to it, they have to listen to the version you choose as the owner of that guitar track. And then that also changes the visuals of the album. And so there's so many cool ways that like, the technology is creating new mediums altogether for like how music and stuff is released.Yeah. That last thing just sounds so interesting to me, it sounds like a total nightmare for artists to have to be like "Here you go, good luck. Let's be what happens with my work", like that sort of thing. But it's really just cool and different. And I don't know I'm always excited to just see new ways to... I hate saying consume, but enjoy, appreciate work and that's so, yeah. Is there, is there anything else that you want to make sure that people hear or anything you want to plug or talk about, or you know, whatnot.Yeah, well, I think as much as I don't necessarily care to talk about the money of the space. There is a lot of pluses for artists and creators to join the space. And one of those is that with the blockchain technology, as a creator, you can use the smart contracts of NFTs to benefit yourself longterm. And by that, I mean, when I sell a piece of art, you sell it for X amount of money, but through the contract, when it resells down the road, you get 10% royalty in perpetuity. And so something I sold for $200 a year ago could resell for thousands and I'll make more on the secondary royalty than I did on the primary sale. And so that incentivizes this kind of ecosystem of collectors and artists to both want each other to succeed because if someone buys my stuff, I want to grow the value for them, and they want to grow the value for me on the secondary.And so this is kind of symbiosis of support. And so the connection with artists and collectors is a lot deeper in this space than it was in the traditional art world where someone would buy my work. I would have no idea where it went. If they sold it on eBay or something, that's their thing and I've no part in that. But in this, I'm very hyper aware of every transaction, because a little bit will funnel back to me at some point. And I want to see the people that support me early on to succeed later on. And so it's a really a wonderful community of people that are kind of supporting each other.Interesting. I had no clue that that was the thing, because that's how I was looking at it with anything art related or related to collecting things. Once it's out of the original artist's possession, it's kind of like "If I pay for this, I'm not supporting the artist, I'm supporting the person who bought this from the artist", but that's different. And that I did not know. So that's interesting.Yeah. It creates a fun, passive income over time as you continue to grow. And it also incentivizes you to sell things at a cheaper rate early on and build up your community of people, because if it grows, then you benefit from that growing longterm. And so it's really kind of a wonderful solution that they figured out with the space. And a lot of the platforms are really good about including that, but it took years. I mean, I joined the space in January 2020, but space has been building for many, many years before that. And the efforts of all those artists pushing for those royalties and the collectors also that supported the artists early on, I've kind of like helped build this platform now that, in the past year has kind of exploded. And so it's been really awesome to see some of these artists that were making stuff three years ago, sold it for $5 seeing itself for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then they get tens of thousands of dollars on that. Yeah, Absolutely. Now, if someone wants to, I guess I'm kind of both ends of this, if someone is like, okay, I listened to this and I'm interested in NFTs as a creator, how do you get started with like, if someone is a total beginner in this space, total novice, where do you go? Because there's so much out there that is just so I don't know. It's just seems it's very, if the crypto feels complicated and that's been kind of my experience in trying to like move things back and forth between wallets and stuff. And I'm just like, I don't even know what the hell I'm doing.Yeah, no, it's definitely tricky. There's a lot more resources now than there was when I started, when I started, I kind of got intrigued because an artist I collected named Killer Acid was putting stuff out. And I was like, what is this? I don't understand what this etherium symbol is. And I kind of spent a couple of weeks kind of Googling and looking at Twitter and kind of figuring out what this all was. Now there's a lot more resources on YouTube and Google, School of Motion has some great articles on how to get started and set up a wallet. The thing I would say is, there is an entry fee barrier now that wasn't there when I started because of etherium and the currency of the space is worth a lot more than when I started. It cost me like $40 to like get started.Now, I think it would cost a lot more. So I would say when I mentioned earlier, like hic et nunc, Tazos, that's a much cheaper way to get started, build a community before you then branch over to like etherium, which is more expensive right now. So I would recommend new artists kind of look at that. Join Discords, start following people on Twitter. Really spend some time looking at the space, seeing what people are buying, because I think the problem we see right now is everyone kind of sees these headlines about NFTs are worth so much money. And then they kind of dive in, they try to sell something that they haven't been able to sell elsewhere. And they're not really creating for the space necessarily. They're just kind of shoehorning in something they've been trying to sell in another form, whether it's like physical or something else. That is tough.New artists, you have to build trust with collectors that you aren't going to just sell something to make a bunch of money and then leave. And that takes time, you have to continue to put out work. So if, if you're a new artist, I would say like create four or five pieces of art that you feel good about selling and then start to see if people like it, see if it's connecting with people, share it. And then you don't even have to mint and pay the money to make it first. You can just put it out there, see if people want to buy it. And then once you have people that are willing to kind of help fund your initial output or... is that the word? Your initial launch, it's a lot more helpful. And there's also some organizations that will help artists with their first mint. I think it's called Mint Pass. I'll send you the link later, but there's a bunch of these kinds of organizations that help artists that can't afford to get started kind of put out their first pieces of art, which are very wonderful resources.Cool, Cool. This has been so interesting to me and just thank you so much for coming out. I'm so glad we were able to finally get this scheduled cause I reached out two weeks ago and then you said yes. And then my world became crazy for a little bit. So I'm glad we were able to make this work.I really appreciate you having me on here. And yeah, if anybody has questions about NFTs or whatever, feel free to reach out to me. I'm pretty available and I'm happy to help some people understand the space because it is confusing. Get full access to The Present Age at www.readthepresentage.com/subscribe

Youtuber Voice: "What's up Anti Nation???!!" *dubstep*It's Ur Boi Troy and Ryguy coming at you with a brisk hour and 10 min of all the best music news and new music. We flame Chet Hanx and Justin Bieber and try to imagine what music festivals will be like without marijuana. Then we talk about new releases from BROCKHAMPTON, SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE and Young Thug/YSL.Follow us on Instagram @__antiart__Songs used: "ALL FUTURES" by The Armed (all rr Sargant House)"THE SERVER IS IMMERSED" by SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (all rr Saddle Creek)

Gretta Cohn is the founder and CEO of Transmitter Media. Gretta's experience runs the gamut of all things audio, from public radio and ringtones, to producing chart-topping podcasts. We discuss her time touring with the band Bright Eyes, being hired as the first production executive at Midroll Media and Earwolf, and starting her own podcast company with only $7,000 of savings. Subscribe to our newsletter. We explore the intersection of media, technology, and commerce: sign-up linkLearn more about our market research and executive advisory: RockWater websiteFollow The Come Up on Twitter: @TCUpodEmail us: tcupod@wearerockwater.com--EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Chris Erwin:Hi, I'm Chris Erwin. Welcome to The Come Up, a podcast that interviews entrepreneurs and leaders. Gretta Cohn:I thought I would take the more productive path, the one where I didn't leave podcasting and I made this decision in December of 2016 to myself and then spent the next couple of months just tucking away money. And when I say I saved money before starting the business, I saved $7,000. Chris Erwin:This week's episode features Gretta Cohn, the founder and CEO of Transmitter Media. Now, Gretta's experience runs the gamut of all things audio. From being a touring cellist with the band, Cursive, to teaching radio workshops at NYU, to working in audiobooks, ringtones, and most recently podcasts. And Gretta's done some groundbreaking work along the way like turning Freakonomics Radio into an omni channel media brand, launching the number one podcast show, Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People and helping build Howl, which eventually became part of Stitcher. But Gretta's career transformed in 2017 when she decided to do podcasting on her own terms. So with only $7000 of savings, Gretta founded Transmitter Media and quickly began producing premium podcasts for clients like, TED, Spotify, and Walmart. Today, Gretta is focused on scaling her Brooklyn based team and creating more, as she describes, beautiful things. Chris Erwin:Gretta's love for her craft and team is so genuine and her story is a great example of how sheer will and passion are the ultimate enablers. All right, let's get into it. Chris Erwin:Tell me a little bit about where you grew up. I believe that you grew up in New York City. Is that right? Gretta Cohn:Well, I grew up in the suburbs, so I grew up on Long Island. My mom is from Queens and my dad is from Brooklyn and there is a sort of mythology of their meeting. My mom's dad was a butcher in Queens and my dad would always tell us that they didn't have toothpaste growing up and he'd go over to my mom's house and just eat. Yeah, they moved out to Long Island after they got married. Chris Erwin:Nice. And what part of Long Island? Gretta Cohn:Initially I grew up on the eastern end in the town called Mount Sinai and then when I was 13 in a very traumatic move at that age we moved to Huntington, which was more like smack in the middle of the island. Chris Erwin:My cousins are from Huntington. That's where they grew up, but then I think they moved to Lloyd's Neck shortly after. Why was that move so traumatic at 13? Gretta Cohn:I think it's that really formative age where you are sort of coming into yourself as a human, as a teenager and I remember writing my name on the wall in the closet because I wanted to leave my mark on that particular house that we grew up in. But then we moved and I made new friends and it was fine. Chris Erwin:Everything is scary at that age. It's like, "Oh, I have my friends and if I move to a new high school or middle school, I'll never have the same friends again." Gretta Cohn:My best friend at the time, Alessandra, never to be talked to or seen again. Chris Erwin:What was the household like growing up? Was there interesting audio from your parents? I mean, I think you mentioned, remind me, your father was a butcher and your mother was... Gretta Cohn:No, no. Those are my grandparents. Chris Erwin:Those are your grandparents. Got it. Gretta Cohn:Yeah. No. My parents were both teachers in the education system. My dad was a teacher his whole career life. He taught shop and psychology classes and computer classes. And my mom ended up being a superintendent of the school district on Long Island. She got her start as a Phys Ed teacher and then became an English teacher and worked her way up to superintendent. The sort of interest in audio they instilled in me and my two brothers extremely early. We all started learning to play string instruments at the age of three through the Suzuki method. Chris Erwin:The Suzuki method? Gretta Cohn:Yeah. Which is like an ear training style of learning music. So you essentially at three years old, you cannot possibly understand how to physically play an instrument and I remember a lot of time spent in those early group lessons just hugging the cello and singing this song, I love my cello very much, I play it every day and crawling up and down the bow with spider fingers, that's what they called it because your fingers kind of looked like spiders crawling up and down the bow and we all started playing string instruments at that age. I played cello and then the brother who came after me played violin, and the brother who came after him also played cello. Chris Erwin:Wow. And did you parents play instruments as well, string instruments? Gretta Cohn:No. My dad loves to say he can play the radio. Chris Erwin:I respect that. Gretta Cohn:I think they are educators, they are really invested in the full education of a person and so I think that they thought it was a good teaching discipline and it certainly required a kind of discipline. I can recall really fighting against practicing because I had to practice probably every day and I would rebel and not want to do it, but it was not really an option and I'm glad that ultimately I was pressed to continue to play because playing music has played such a huge part of my life. Chris Erwin:Clearly. It led you, which we'll get to, into founding a podcast production company and network and so much more. So very big impact. But, I get it. I began playing the alto saxophone in fourth grade and my twin brother was playing the clarinet and it was lessons with Mr. Slonum every week, an hour of practice every day and it was, when you're putting it on top of sports and homework and academics, it's a lot and it's intense and there's moments where you really don't want to do it and it's not fun and then there's moments where you're very thankful for it. And I think a lot of the more thankful moments came later in my life, but if you can get some of those early on, it's meaningful. When you first started playing, did you really enjoy it or was it just like, uh this is what I'm just supposed to do? Gretta Cohn:I remember enjoying it. I remember in particular being able to do little recitals every so often and I know there are photographs of myself in recital that I've seen even recently and there is such a joy in that and I think that showing off something that you've done and your family claps for you, it's a good job. Ultimately, what it feels like to play in a group, in an ensemble, it's pretty magical. I played in orchestras starting in grade school all the way up through college and there is something really amazing about the collective and your part and you can't mess up because it's glaringly obvious if you're the one out of the section of 12 cellists whose got their bow going the wrong direction or the wrong note playing. But it's also really beautiful to play in a group like that. Chris Erwin:Yeah. It's a special team sport, right? You rely on other people and people rely on you. When it comes together, it's an absolutely beautiful event, for you and the audience. Gretta Cohn:Yeah. I also played soccer growing up, speaking of team sports. Chris Erwin:Okay. What position? Gretta Cohn:I was defense. They would enlist me to run around and shadow the most powerful player on the other team. I don't know why, but I remember that. Chris Erwin:I was very similar. I started out as a recreation all-star like a forward and then got moved to right fullback, which is defense. That was my soccer career. All right. So interesting. So yeah, speaking of studying music, I think that when you went to university, you almost went to study music at a conservatory but you ended up going to Brown instead. What were you thinking, because were you going down a path where it's like, "I want to be in audio, I want to create music." What was your head space there as you started to go through advanced education, beginnings of your career? Gretta Cohn:I remember collecting fliers for conservatories. I was interested in conservatory, I think though that as I began to really think about what that would mean, I don't know that I was thinking really broadly, like oh... No one at 17 or whatever really has a full picture of what those choices ultimately mean but I'm glad that I didn't go to music school. I was always the worst player in the best section. So I remember I was in the New York Youth Symphony and I was definitely not the best player in that section, but it was really hard to get in. One summer I went and studied at the Tanglewood Institute in Boston, which is, again, extremely competitive and hard to get into but I was definitely not the best player there. Gretta Cohn:And I think that thinking about what it would mean to devote oneself entirely to that, I had other interests. I wasn't so completely focused on being a performer that it didn't ultimately feel like it would make a lot of sense because I wanted to study history, I wanted... And obviously, you go to conservatory, you have a well-rounded education ultimately, I would imagine, but it's not where I think I ultimately wanted to go. That was not the direction I ultimately wanted to go. Chris Erwin:Yeah. It's a really big commitment going from good to great, but I mean, you are great. You are getting into these elite orchestras but to be the first chair, that's a level of dedication practice that's really tough. It's funny, I actually read a David Foster Wallace article about the sport of tennis and he played and he was very good and I think he could have even gone pro, but he's like, "I'm good, I put in enough hours and I have fun with it, but for me to go to the next level..." He's like, "It's not fun to me and I don't want to do that." It's not for him. So you make a decision and you go to Brown. What's your study focus at Brown? Gretta Cohn:I ultimately was in the American Studies Department, but I had a special sort of crossover with the music department so I took a lot of music classes, I took a lot of American Studies classes which is basically like cultural history, social history, history through the lens of various social movements or pop culture, which I think is really fascinating and I wound everything together so that my senior thesis was about cover songs and the history of sort of copying and the idea of creating various versions of any original work and the sort of cultural history and critical theory lens of it, but also just I selected three songs and I traced their history over time from a performance perspective but also from like, how does this song fit into the narrative of music history? Chris Erwin:Do you remember the three songs? Gretta Cohn:I think I did Twist and Shout. Chris Erwin:Okay. Gretta Cohn:I Shall Be Released and I can't remember the third one. But I had a lot of fun writing it and I really liked the bridging between the music department and the American Studies department. And strangely, there are so many journalists who came up through American Studies. There are several producers on my staff who were American Studies students in college. I think it just gives you this permission to think about story telling in the world from just this very unique cultural vantage points. Chris Erwin:Did you have a certain expectation where you had an idea of what that story was going to be over time or were you surprised and as you saw how the narrative played out with the original song and recording and production and then the covers, anything that stands out of like, "Oh, I did not expect this, but I found this very fascinating."? Gretta Cohn:I don't really remember at this point. Chris Erwin:Sorry for putting you on the spot, it's such a long time ago. Gretta Cohn:The thing was like more than 100 pages and it's probably a door stopper now at my parents house. I remember that I put a big picture of a mushroom on the last page. John Cage wrote a lot about mushrooms and so I wove some of his work into the thesis but this idea that the mushroom takes the dirt and crap and stuff that's on the forest floor and turns it into this organic material, the mushroom. So yeah, I don't remember the specifics. Chris Erwin:Yeah, no. All good. My thesis was on the Banana Wars and that is... It's not even worthy of being a door stopper. That's just straight to the trash. But I did, for a music class, I think I did break down a song by the Sex Pistols. Gretta Cohn:Cool. Chris Erwin:I can't remember specifically which one, but I think I dove deep into the lyrics and I think I was pretty disappointed. I expected to find more meaning and have more fun with it, and I think it was maybe my young mind, I couldn't go deeper than I thought I could. Anyway... So fast forward to 2001 and as I was going through your bio, this really stood out and it hits close to home. You become a cellist for some alternative rock bands including Cursive, The Faint, and Bright Eyes. And I just remember The Faint, I think a song from 2008, The Geeks Were Right. I remember listening to that shortly after college. So tell me, what was that transition going from university to then moving, I think you moved to Omaha out of New York to play in these rock bands? Gretta Cohn:So when I was in college, I continued to play in the school orchestra, but I also met some friends who became collaborators and we would just improvise in the lounge like, bass drums, guitar and cello. And that was really freeing for me. Growing up on Long Island, I had such easy access to New York City and for whatever reason, I was really given a lot of freedom to... I would take the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan and go to concerts all through high school, like rock concerts. Chris Erwin:What was some of your earliest concert memories? Gretta Cohn:Purposely getting to an Afghan Whigs show and planting myself in the front row because I wanted to be as close as possible to the stage. So I used to go to concerts all the time and I was really, really interested in... I wasn't only a person who thought about classical music at all and so I met this group of people and formed this little group together and so I was playing music in college, eventually joining a band mostly with locals in Providence and we became the opening act for a lot of bands that were coming through. Chris Erwin:And what type of music were you playing, Gretta? Gretta Cohn:It was arty rock. Chris Erwin:Arty rock. Okay. Gretta Cohn:Yeah. Some of it was instrumental, but then some of it was like pop. I think one of the bands that I was in was called The Beauty Industry and it was probably a little bit reminiscent of Built to Spill and The Magnetic Fields and a little bit like Poppy. So in that band we would serve as the opening act for a lot of artists that were coming through and through that I was able to meet the folks from Saddle Creek from Omaha, Nebraska. And I didn't know that I made an impression on them, but I did and after I graduated I moved to New York. I didn't really know exactly where I was headed. I got a job working in the development office at Carnegie Hall and I didn't love it. We had to wear suits. And one day the folks from Omaha called my parents home phone and left a message and asked if I would come out and play on a record with them and I did. Chris Erwin:When you got that message, were you ecstatic, were you super excited or were you just confused, like, "Hey, is this real? What's going on here?" Gretta Cohn:Yeah. I think I was like, "Huh, well, that's interesting." Like, "I didn't expect this." So Cursive is the group that invited me out to record. Just sort of like come out and record on our album. And I didn't actually know Cursive. I had met Bright Eyes and Lullaby for the Working Class when I was at Brown, but I hadn't met Cursive and my best friend, who is still one of my best friends was a Cursive fan and dumped all of their CDs and seven inches in my lap and was like, "You need to listen to them, they are so good." So I did and I sort of gave myself a little Cursive education and then I started to get really excited because I felt like there was a lot of interesting potential. Yeah. Gretta Cohn:Moving out there was not an easy decision. It was very unknown for me. I love New York City and I always imagined myself here and I had never been to the Midwest so I didn't know what my expectations were and I didn't... Also at that time Cursive was a fairly well-known band but it wasn't understood that I would move out there and that would be my job, right? I was moving out there to join this community and play in Cursive and do Cursive stuff, go on tour, record records, but at that point there was no promise like, "Oh, I'm going to live off of this." And so I went to a temp agency and I did paperwork in an accountant's office and- Chris Erwin:While also performing with Cursive? Gretta Cohn:Yeah. Yeah. I will also say though, after the first year, things really took off after The Ugly Organ and I would say at that point I was no longer working in the temp office and we were going on long tours and when I came home in between stretches on tour, I was recovering from tour because it's quite exhausting and working on the next thing with the bands. Chris Erwin:Were you touring around nationally? Any international touring? Gretta Cohn:Yeah. National and international. We went all over the States, Canada and then European tour is like often... Cursive was very big in Germany so we would spend a lot of time in Germany, Scandinavia. We went to Japan once. Chris Erwin:What an incredible post university experience! Gretta Cohn:It really, really was incredible. Chris Erwin:Playing music because of a skill that you formed very early on and then working in New York at Carnegie Hall and a job that you weren't too excited about and then you just get this serendipitous phone call. And you started listening to Cursive records in seven inches and you're getting more and more excited and all of a sudden you're traveling the world. That's like a dream scenario. Gretta Cohn:Yeah. It was pretty dreamy. And I think I recognized at the time. I mean, those first tours, we were sleeping on... I had my sleeping bag and we would be sleeping on hardwood floors, end up in like a row and someone's apartment in like Arlington. And I remember some of those first tours internationally, like in Germany, you would play the show and then everyone would leave and they would shut the lights off and we would just sleep on the stage. And in the morning the promoter, like the booker would come back and they would have bread and cheese and fruit and coffee. And it was just this beautiful... But we were sleeping on the stage. Chris Erwin:I mean, you're all doing it together. So it was cool. Right. You just were a crew. Gretta Cohn:Yeah, yeah. It was great. I loved it. I really, really loved it. Chris Erwin:I look at your work timeline between 2001 to 2010, which includes, you're a touring international artist, but then you do a lot of other things in audio. Like you study with Rob Rosenthal at the Salt Institute, do some time in Studio 360, and then you go to radio and then audio books. So what are the next few years? How does this audio adventure start to transform for you? Gretta Cohn:While I was in Cursive, there were other parts of me that I felt needed feeding and so I started writing for the local alternative weekly in Omaha. And I was doing like book reviews and reviewing art shows and doing little pieces, which sort of opened up to me, this understanding that journalism was something that I was really interested in. And while I was still essentially based in Omaha and still, essentially based out of Saddle Creek, I came back to New York for a few months and did an internship at The Village Voice because I just really wanted to sort of start exploring these paths of what would potentially come next. I didn't necessarily think that I was meant to stay in Omaha like for the rest of my life. When I first moved out there, I thought, "Oh, I'll give it a few years. See how it goes and then probably come back home to New York." Gretta Cohn:And then things really took off and so I didn't want to leave. And I was really having a great time and loved it and loved everything that I was doing. And I think that at the time that chapter was coming to a close, it was sort of like naturally coming to a close and I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to do next. I was interested in journalism, I was interested obviously in... still thinking about music and audio although I think I needed a break from music after that time. Like when you're so intensively working on something like that, you just need a minute to let everything kind of settle. Chris Erwin:Yeah. It's all encompassing. Right. You're just living, breathing, eating music and the band. It's a lot. Gretta Cohn:Yeah. So I took a couple of years and started to figure it out. Actually, something that's not on your list is I worked at a ringtone company for a bit. Chris Erwin:It is audio based. So I'm not surprised. So yeah, tell me about that. Gretta Cohn:It was just a job that I got. Actually, looking back now, I think that it was a company that was founded by two classical musicians. They mostly had contracts with major record labels and I remember turning Sean Paul's Temperature into a ringtone in particular. It was just like chopping things into little eight seconds and looping them and mastering them and- Chris Erwin:Were you doing the technical work as well? Gretta Cohn:Not really, you spend time in the studio and so you learn and you pick up things. I wasn't recording the band, but that was the first time that I got my own pro tools set up and so I had my own pro tool setup, like was using it for my own little projects at home, but I was not technically involved with the making of any of the records that was on now, except for playing on them. Chris Erwin:Yeah, you were dabbling in pro tools then pretty early on. Gretta Cohn:Yeah, yeah. I had the original Mbox, which is like this big plastic, weird alien looking object with just like a couple of little knobs on it. I finally got rid of it a couple of years ago. I held onto it for a long time and now you don't even need it. Chris Erwin:So you're dabbling and then I know that you spend time as a producer at The Story with Dick Gordon, North Carolina, and then you went to audio books. Is that when things started to take shape for you of knowing kind of what you wanted to do? Gretta Cohn:I think as soon as I went to Salt to study with Rob Rosenthal is when I knew that that's what I wanted to do. I took a few years after Cursive to kind of reset a little bit and then I started working at the ringtone company and began to have conversations with people about where all my interests collided. Like I loved working in sound, storytelling and journalism were really important to me. I don't think at that point that... There was a whole lot that I was exposed to apart from NPR, This American Life and Studio 360 were sort of the major outlets for audio storytelling that I understood and spent time with. And I just remember having a meal with someone who I don't recall his name, but he's done a lot of illustrations for This American Life and public radio outlets and he was like, "There's this place, it's called salt. You can learn how to do this there." And so I just decided that I was going to step down this path. Right. Chris Erwin:Yeah. And Salt is based in Maine, is that right? Gretta Cohn:Yeah. So I moved to Maine for six months. I was very excited. I got a merit scholarship to go there. Chris Erwin:Oh wow. Gretta Cohn:Yeah, and I basically... There's so many fundamentals that I learned there that I use every single day now still. I think Rob Rosenthal is absolutely brilliant and he has trained so many radio producers. It's insane. Chris Erwin:Of all the learnings from Rob, just like what's one that comes to mind quickly that you use everyday? Gretta Cohn:I don't know that this is one I use every day, but it's one that's really stuck with me, is he really counseled to be really mindful when thinking about adding music to a story. He used the phrase, emotional fascism. Essentially, if you need to rely on the music to tell the listener how to feel, then you haven't done your job in sort of crafting a good story. So like the bones of the story, like the structure, the content, the sort of stakes intention and the character you've chosen, like all of that have to clear a certain hurdle and then you can start thinking about adding music, but if you're relying on the music to sort of create tension or drama or emotion, then you've kind of missed something. Chris Erwin:Yeah. That's very interesting. What a great insight! I like that. Emotional fascism. Gretta Cohn:I'll never forget. Chris Erwin:So after the Salt Institute, what's next? Gretta Cohn:I got an internship at WNYC at Studio 360. At that time the internship system at New York Public Radio was like largely unpaid. I think I got $12 a day. So I interned I think three or four days a week and then I had like two other jobs. Chris Erwin:Just to make ends meet, to make it work. Gretta Cohn:Yeah. I worked at a coffee shop, like most mornings. And then I worked at a Pilates studio many afternoons and on the weekends. So it was like a lot, I was really running at full steam, but I really enjoyed the internship there. And then that was my first real glimpse into what it was like to work in a team to make impactful audio storytelling and I learned a lot there too. The team there was really amazing. Yeah. So Studio 360 was fantastic. And then a friend of mine had found out about this gig at The Story with Dick Gordon. It was a short term contract producer role, like filling in for someone who was out on leave. And I got the job and I moved down to Durham, North Carolina, and found an apartment, brought my cat and worked on that show for a few months, which I think was a pretty crucial experience to have had, which helped open the door into WNYC. Chris Erwin:Why's that? Gretta Cohn:So this was in like 2008, 9 and there weren't like a whole lot of opportunities in the audio storytelling space. Like your major opportunities were at public radio stations and public radio stations were highly competitive. It didn't have a lot of turnover. They understood that they were the only game in town if this was the career path that you were interested in going down. So having had a job at a radio station on staff on a show was such a huge opportunity. I don't know that I was like chomping at the bit to leave New York or move to Carolina, although I loved it there. And I had friends who lived there that I knew from the Saddle Creek community. So it was really great. I moved down there and I didn't have to... I can't recall ever feeling lonely. Right. Like I immediately had this community of people, which was amazing, but that gig was only three months. Gretta Cohn:And so I came back to New York and basically spent the next couple of years banging on the door to get back into WNYC, which is when I went to the audio books company where quite a few radio producers worked. Like that's how I found out about it. There were folks who had passed through Studio 360 or elsewhere. And my boss at the audio books company is David Markowitz, who is now currently working in the podcasting department at Netflix. And he previously was at Pushkin and at Headspace and he... So he and I, although our paths crossed at that moment, because our paths have continued to cross over and over again since that time working together with the audio books company. Audio books wasn't my passion, but while I was there I got the idea to pitch the podcast to the audio books company, which they agreed to let me do. And so I had this outlet to just do a little bit of experimenting and to grow some skills and also have just like an outlet to doing this kind of work that I wanted to be doing. Chris Erwin:Had you ever pitched a project or an idea before to any place that you worked at? Gretta Cohn:I pitched stories to Studio 360, but to pitch an idea for something that had not existed before, no. Chris Erwin:It becomes, I believe, The Modern Scholar podcast, is that right? Gretta Cohn:Yeah. You've done like a really deep research. Chris Erwin:Look, it helps to tell your story. Right. So you pitch, and then you get the green light, which must feel validating. It's like, okay, this is a good idea, but now it's got to be more than a pitch, you had to execute. Was that intimidating or were you like, "No, I'm ready to go I got it." Gretta Cohn:I was ready to go. They had an audio book series called The Modern Scholar. Professors would come in and record like 10 hours worth of like Italian history. And so what I did was just have a one hour interview with the professor who was the author of this series and talk about their work, go into detail on something really specific. I will say at that time that like I applied for a mentorship with AIR, the Association of Independence Radio, they gave me a mentor and I had like a few sessions with him and it was great. Like I had someone... I had an editor, right. I wasn't totally on my own kind of like muscling through. And so he really sort of helped refine the ideas for that show and that was a great help. So I'm lucky that I was able to get that. Chris Erwin:What I'm really hearing Gretta is that you moved around a lot and participated in and developed all these different music and audio communities around the US and even the world from like Omaha and international touring and Scandinavia and Europe, and then the Salt and Maine and North Carolina and New York and more, and I'm sure, as you said, with David Markowitz, that these relationships are now serving you in your current business. So it feels like that was like a really good investment of your time where the networking was great, but you also learned a lot and were exposed to a lot of different thinking and ideas. Is that right? Gretta Cohn:Absolutely. Definitely. Yeah. Chris Erwin:After dabbling around a bit for the first decade of the 2000s, you then go to WNYC and you're there for around six years, I think 2008 to 2014. And you work on some cool projects. You're the associate producer at Freakonomics and you also work on Soundcheck. So tell me about what made you commit to WNYC and what were you working on when you first got there? Gretta Cohn:At the time there weren't a lot of options for people doing this work. And WNYC obviously is an incredible place where really amazing work is done, really talented people. It basically was like the game in town, right? Like there weren't a lot of other places where you could do audio storytelling work in this way. There was a pivotal moment that I think could have gone in a different direction, but I had applied for a job at StoryCorps and I applied for the job at Soundcheck. Chris Erwin:What is StoryCorps? Gretta Cohn:They have a story every Friday on NPR that's like a little three minute edited story and it's usually like two people in conversation with each other. It's highly personal. And they're very well known for these human connection stories. It's I think influenced in part by oral history and anthropology, but it's basically this intimate storytelling. And I did not get that job, although I was a runner up and the person who did get the job is now one of my closest friends. But at the same time was an applicant for Soundcheck and I did get that job. And I think it was... That was the right path for me because I have such a passion for music. Right. My background kind of really led me to have an understanding of how to tell those stories. Chris Erwin:What is the Soundcheck format? Gretta Cohn:It changed over time. But when I joined Soundcheck, it was a live daily show about music and really open, like wide open as far as what it covered. So in any given episode, you could have like Yoko Ono there for an interview, you could have the author of a book about musicals from the 1920s, and then you could have like a live performance from Parquet Courts. So it was really wide ranging and varied and super interesting. And there's so much about working on a daily show that's I think extremely crucial to building up chops as a producer because every single day you have a brand new blank slate, you have to work extremely quickly and efficiently. Working in the live setting can create so much pressure because not only are you keeping to a clock, like the show went from like 2:01 to like 2:50 every day, and there had to be certain breaks and you have an engineer and you need the music to cue in a certain place. Gretta Cohn:And so you're like, "Cue the music." And you're whispering to the host like, "Move on to the next question." You're like this master puppeteer with all these marionettes and it's pretty wild. It's really fun, super stressful. You go off stage and it's like- Chris Erwin:It sounds stressful. Gretta Cohn:You can't fix it. You just have to move on and you learn a lot. Chris Erwin:It feels like something, you do that for maybe a couple of years or a few years and then it's like, ah you need a break from that. It's amazing that people who work in like live video or live radio for decades, like kudos to the stamina that they build up. Gretta Cohn:And that's exactly what happened is I needed a break from it. And that's when I went to Freakonomics. Chris Erwin:Got it. Before we go into Freakonomics, you also helped create Soundcheck into an omni-channel media brand where you were launching video and live events and interactive series. Was that something that had been happening in the audio industry or were you kind of setting a new precedent? Gretta Cohn:Our team was tapped to reinvent Soundcheck. So it had been this live daily show for quite some time and I think that WNYC wanted to reshape it for a variety of reasons. So we were sort of tasked, like we pulled the show off the air and kind of went through this like sprint of re-imagining, what the show could be, how it would sound, what it would do. And actually, I remember that I pitched this video series that was a lot of fun. I can't remember the name of it now, but we worked with a local elementary school and we would have three kids sitting behind desks and we would play them clips from pop songs- Chris Erwin:Whoa. Gretta Cohn:... and they would review them and- Chris Erwin:That's a really cool idea. Gretta Cohn:... it was awesome. It was so much fun. We did a lot of live performances and I started producing sort of like more highly produced segments and storytelling for Soundcheck at that time, because there was more space to try and figure that out. Ultimately, what it turned into was like a daily delivery of a show that I think ultimately resembled the old show in many ways, but it was not live anymore. And there were all these other tasks. I also created a first lesson type series for Soundcheck at that time where we would like stream a new album before it came out and I would write a little review. It was really fun. When we pulled the show off the air and we were tasked with re-imagining it was like a sandbox that you just kind of could plan, which was great. Chris Erwin:It's a wide open canvas that you can paint to how you desire. I get that why you were burnt out after that. So then you change it up and you become an associate producer at Freakonomics and you work with the fame, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. How has that experience? Gretta Cohn:It was great. It was challenging. I think that show has incredibly high standards and there's a particular kind of brain that I think works extremely well at that show. At the time, there were two of us who were the producers of the show, myself, who has this background in music and in production. And then the other producer was an economist who had been freshly graduated from economics school. And so we were this pair and I think what ultimately happened was that where I shown where these like human stories and where he shown was like distilling econ papers into sort of understandable stories. And so I think the two of us together really complimented each other. One of my favorite episodes that I worked on was about the Nathan's hotdog contest and one of the sort of like champs who had come up with a particular system for how to win- Chris Erwin:Dunking them in water and all that stuff. Yeah. I remember watching some of those segments online. In a minute they put back like 47 hotdogs. It was something crazy. Gretta Cohn:Yeah, it's wild. Chris Erwin:After Freakonomics, you decided to depart for Midroll and Earwolf. What was the impetus for that? Gretta Cohn:My time at Freakonomics was sort of like naturally coming to a close. I think that while my strength was in this sort of human sort of storytelling, I think the show needed someone who had a little bit more of that like econ background. And so I started to look around the station at WNYC, of other places where I could land, right? Like I'd moved from Soundcheck to Freakonomics, like what would be the next place for me to go? And I couldn't find it. I spent a little bit of time in the newsroom helping to look for a host for a new health podcast and I had conversations with people around the station about various other shows. I think I talked to the folks on the media and this producer, Emily Botein, who ultimately founded the Alec Baldwin podcast and a host of other really great shows there, but it didn't seem like there was space or a role that really made sense for me as far as like the next step is concerned. Gretta Cohn:At that time, Erik Diehn who's now the CEO of the Stitcher empire was in the finance office, I think at WNYC and he left to go to Midroll/Earwolf. Chris Erwin:I didn't realize he was also WNYC. Bannon was also WNYC who's now the chief content officer over there? Gretta Cohn:Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Erwin:Wow. It was a feeder to that company. Gretta Cohn:Yeah. So Erik Diehn left WNYC and I remember the note that went around, he's going to this company, Earwolf/Midroll. And I was like, kind of filed that away. And then it was probably a few months later that they put a position, they were hiring for a producer. And I sort of leapt at the opportunity. I thought that the shows on Earwolf were awesome. I had not worked really in comedy. Although I think that there's so much crossover in Soundcheck. We really had a lot of license to have basically like whoever on the show, like I booked comedians, I booked authors. Like I booked anyone who had a passion to talk about music, which is like 90% of the world. And so I think that that was really of interest to them. And I had a couple of conversations with Erik and the job was mine. I mean, I went through- Chris Erwin:You make it sound very easy. Gretta Cohn:... a proper vetting and interview process. And there were other candidates, but they gave it to me. And I was really, really excited because I think I was ready for a fresh start and I was ready for something new, something a little bit unknown. I think that I tend to find... Typically, I think if you look over the course of my life, like every few years, I'm like, "Okay, what's the next thing?" And I think that I still feel that way except now I have this entity of Transmitter in which to keep iterating and playing, but I was just ready for the next thing. And it was at that time, a really small company, I was the first New York based employee, like Eric was living in New Jersey. So it doesn't count as a New York employee. There was no office. Chris Erwin:I remember that Jeff Ullrich was the founder and it was bootstrap, didn't raise any venture capital and started I think in the early 2000s, if I remember correctly. Is that right? Gretta Cohn:I don't know the dates, but that sounds right. Chris Erwin:Okay. A little context for the listeners. And Earwolf is a comedy podcast network. So there's a slate of comedy shows and Midroll was the advertising arm of the business that would connect advertisers with the podcasters. But no, please continue. So you're the first New York hire. Gretta Cohn:Yeah. Which was really exciting to me. I was the first producer hired by the company. They had a few really amazing audio engineers out in LA who ran the recordings and they did editing, but there had never been a producer on staff. So it was really this like wide open field. And Jeff at that time, I think had taken a step back from the company, but the moment that I was brought in is when the idea for Howl came into the picture and Howl was a membership subscription-based app that has now turned into Stitcher and Stitcher Premium, it was folded in, into Stitcher and Stitcher Premium. But at the time there was like this real push to create a subscription-based app with like a ton of new material. And one of my first jobs was to work extremely closely with Jeff to figure out what was going to be on this app, who were we going to hire to make material? What producers, what comedians, what actors? There was an enormous spreadsheet, like one of the most enormous spreadsheets that I've ever spent time with. Gretta Cohn:So that was my first task and alongside, which was to sort of from a producer's perspective look at this later shows on Earwolf and start to think about what would a producer bring to the network? What would a producer bring to the hosts, to the way that things were made, to new ideas to bring to the network? And so those two things were sort of happening concurrently. Chris Erwin:The producer role was not defined. You're the first producer there. So it's you coming in saying, "Here's how I can enhance the slate. Here's how I can enhance the content strategy of where we're headed concurrently with we're launching Howl, which needs a lot of content, both from partner podcasters and probably owned and operated and then filling..." So creating a new slate, that's going to fill that. That's going to make people want to buy the membership product or subscription product, which are big questions that Spotify and Netflix and the biggest subscription platforms in the world have huge teams to figure out. And it's like you and Jeff, and maybe a couple more people? Gretta Cohn:There was one developer. Chris Erwin:Wow. Gretta Cohn:It was intense. It was a lot of work. I remember because at that time too, I was the only New York based person. Eric was in New Jersey. I think Lex Friedman came along. He was either already there or came along shortly thereafter, also based in New Jersey. Chris Erwin:And Lex was running sales? Gretta Cohn:Yes. And he's now with ART19, but there was no office. I was working from my kitchen table, much like I do now. It was great. I think what really excited me was like the open field of really sort of figuring out what everything was going to be and it was like off to the races. Chris Erwin:So I actually reached out to a few people that we mutually know to just get like, oh, what are some stories I can have Gretta talk about from the early Midroll/Earwolf days. So I reached out to Adam Sachs who was also on this podcast earlier. He's a childhood friend of mine that was also the CEO of the company when it sold the scripts, as well as Chris Bannon, who I consider one of the most like delightful humans on the planet. I think he was the chief content officer while you were there and he still is now under Eric as part of this new Stitcher Midroll combined empire. And what Chris said is that, like you mentioned Gretta, no office for the first six months and that you were taking meetings, I think in sound booths as well. And that when you finally did get an office, it was so small that you were taking turns sitting down. Gretta Cohn:Yeah. Well, we put our own furniture together. I learned so much from my years at Earwolf that have completely guided and shaped a lot of how Transmitter kind of came into being. Yeah, we put all of our furniture together ourselves in this first office. Chris Erwin:That's good training for you launching Transmitter where it's lean budgets, you're funding from your savings. You probably had to set up your own furniture yourself too. So that DIY attitude persists. Gretta Cohn:Yeah, yeah. And it was exciting. Whereas a place like WNYC is this like well oiled machine, it's also like a big ship that in order to turn 30 people have to be sort of moving things around and like, is the sky clear? There are just like so many little tiny steps that have to be taken to make a decision. Whereas what working at that early stage at Earwolf meant was like you can just make decisions, you just do it. Eric and I went around to see like five different offices. We decided together, "Oh, let's take this one on Eighth Avenue." This is the furniture. All right, let's put it together. I remember walking into the office when the furniture was first delivered and it was extremely dusty and we were wearing dust masks and trying to figure out where's the studio going to go? And it was just really exciting. It's really exciting to sort of pave your way and build something from the ground up. Chris Erwin:I like what you're saying too, is that you can just get things done very quickly. And that's actually one of the things that Bannon brought up about working with you is you guys launched good shows I think in just a matter of a few months or less, like Bitch, Sash and Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People, which was a number one hit on iTunes. And that now making shows like that, if you're at a bigger company with all the bureaucracy and the approvals can take over a year, but you guys were getting stuff done fast, there was no alternative choice. Gretta Cohn:Yeah, we were working very quickly. Chris Erwin:So I'm curious to hear like Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People. That's like an iTunes topper. Was that the first big podcast hit that you had in your career? Gretta Cohn:I would say so. Yeah. I'm trying to remember what if anything came ahead of it, but I'm fairly certain that some of my first meetings after joining the team at Earwolf were with Chris Gethard and working with him on sort of early prototypes of Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People. And he's a remarkable person. He's a brilliant comedian. He's such a good human being. He's an amazing collaborator. And yeah, it was the two of us for a while just, I think the first call that we took, which was sort of just the prototype, the pilot for the show. We're like, "We don't know what's going to happen. Is anyone going to call?" And yeah, I mean, it was really awesome working on that show. And also it was such a departure from the kinds of projects that I had worked on previously, which were extremely buttoned up like very highly produced in the sense that every single step that you took in the process was regimented, right? Like making a Freakonomics episode, making an hour of Soundcheck, thinking about that live daily experience. Gretta Cohn:Like you can't have a minute on the clock that's not accounted for in making those things. And here's a show where we just open a phone line and see what happens for an hour. And it's so freeing to be sort of separated from that regimentation and working with Chris Gethard, I think taught me that you can make something that's really compelling and that's really good. And it was highly produced. Like a lot of thought went into it. There's a lot of post-production, but it didn't need to be the kind of thing where like every single minute of that hour was a line on a spreadsheet. And I love that show. I think that we're all like voyeurs of other people's experiences. Right. And I think it's super interesting the way that people are willing to call and sort of like bare their souls to Chris and working on that show was fantastic. Gretta Cohn:And it was really gratifying and really rewarding when we realized that people were paying attention and they were going to listen. And for that to be one of the first projects of my tenure at Earwolf was great. It was great. Chris Erwin:That's awesome. What a cool story! Bannon even mentioned you work on, I think Casey Holford's Heaven's Gate, which is now an HBO Max series. I think that just came out this week or something, some big projects. All right. So look, in 2015, Midroll/Earwolf sells to Scripps, EW Scripps. Then I think in 2017 is when you start Transmitter Media. I'm curious to hear that after this fun sprint at Midroll and the sale and launching the shows and launching Howl and Wolfpop and all the things, what got you thinking about becoming a founder, which is a very different experience than what you had done for the first 10, 15 years of your career? Gretta Cohn:So after the sale, I think that Adam Sachs kind of offered me the opportunity to reshape my role a little bit. So I had been overseeing the Earwolf shows, developing and producing brand new shows and Howl was in the rear view at that point for me, I believe. I think this is like a classic situation. They're like, "We're going to split your job into two, which half do you want?" And I was like, "This is great." Because it had been a lot to be developing new shows, to have this sort of slate of shows at Earwolf requiring my attention. And I picked the path of new development and that's when they went out and found someone to executive produce the Earwolf network. And in my new role, I needed to build a team and a division. Gretta Cohn:So I had to hire really quickly about six producers to form a team. And there wasn't really a human resources and so it really fell on me to read every application that came in and kind of vet all of the candidates and begin that process of selecting who to talk to. And I probably spent about six months just interviewing. I think that I learned a lot from that process and I think it developed in me like a little bit of an eye for how to spot talent and people that I want to work with, but it also was like supremely exhausting. And at the same time, I think that the company was in a real state of renewal and flux and change following the sale to Scripps, which I think is probably common in any situation where a company is acquired by a company that has a different POV, like maybe doesn't understand podcasting, has its own goals that are separate from what the goals had been at Earwolf. Gretta Cohn:So there were just a lot of strategy shifts that I did my best to kind of keep up with, but ultimately found myself thinking like, "Well, if I were setting the strategy, what would I do? If I were re-imagining sort of the direction that this company was going in, what would I do?" And I looked around and Pineapple Street had been around for a few months, maybe six months. And I went and had some chats with them about sort of like what they were doing and what they wanted to do. And I went over and had a chat with the folks at Gimlet thinking like maybe there would be a place for me there, but ultimately out of my conversations with all of those people, was this kind of clarifying feeling that there was something that I wanted to do and that I wanted to do it differently. I would say it was definitely like burnout that kind of led me to thinking about what I wanted to do next, because it felt like where I was at was like a little bit unsustainable. It was scary. Gretta Cohn:I definitely spent a month sort of quaking with fear on the couch. Like, is this something that I'm going to do? What does it take and what do I need and are there like, long-term consequences that I can't really think of yet? Because I'd always had a job, right? Like I always worked for someone else and enjoyed the freedom, frankly, that that gives you, right? Like you show up, you do the work and then you leave and you can go and take care of whatever. So I just spent a lot of time thinking about it and talking to friends, my close friend who gave me the Cursive records back in the day has run a press, a small press for nearly as long as I've known him. And it's a small non-profit, but it requires the same levels of sort of like entrepreneurship and sort of like- Chris Erwin:Discipline in a way. Gretta Cohn:Yeah. Discipline. That's exactly the word. And so I talked to him a lot about he figured out what he was doing. My brother has had his own post-production business for film for more than five years, so I went for dinner with him and talked about... His business relies on film clients who come to him with a movie that needs mixing and sound effects and sound design. So we talked about that and my husband was acquiring a business. He purchased a retail shop in our neighborhood around the same time too. So there was like a lot of this around me where I had just a lot of conversations about this and I decided to do it. I decided that like the fear was not a good enough reason to not do it. And my alternate path to be quite frank was to leave podcasting because I just couldn't see where my next step was going to be. Gretta Cohn:And so I thought I would take the more productive path, the one where I didn't leave podcasting and I made this decision in December of 2016 to myself and then spent the next couple of months just tucking away money. When I say that I saved money before starting the business, I saved $7,000. Like this is not an enormous coffer of like startup money, but it was enough to pay for an office space and to pay for myself for a couple of months to just see what would happen. And I gave extremely early notice at Midroll and I started to look for clients before I left. So I set it up so that by the time I finally left Midroll in the end of March of 2017 and walked into my office, my new office for Transmitter Media, on the 3rd of April of 2017, I already had clients. So this also gave me that added security of like, "I'm not just walking into this empty pit of like who knows what? Like I have work to do." Chris Erwin:Look, that's just like an amazing transition story, but a couple of things stand out. One it's like double entrepreneur household. A lot of couples that I talk to will say, one will start a new venture business that's risky while other has like W2 salaried income. But your husband had just bought a local retail shop in the neighborhood. You were launching Transmitter Media. So you were smart about mitigating risk of landing of clients in advance. Yeah, it's a lot to take on. And the second thing I heard that I think is really interesting is you felt that there was no path for you to stay in podcasting unless you started your own business. So it's either get out and do- Gretta Cohn:It felt that way. Chris Erwin:Yeah. Get out and do something totally different or commit and go deeper with this incredible network and skillset that you've built up for a decade and a half and start your own thing. You committed to it. And yeah, whether it was meager savings of $7,000, it was enough. And you had the confidence. And I think in the early days, confidence is everything that you need. Tell us about what is Transmitter Media or what was it at that point? Gretta Cohn:Transmitter Media was born as a full service creative podcast company, meaning primarily working for clients who needed podcasts production. And it's really 360 ideation. There's like a paragraph that explains what they want the podcast to be and then we figure it out from there. Like it's quite rare that someone comes in the door and they have like a fully fleshed out idea for a show that has all the episodes outlined and the guests and then this and then that. So it's really starting with a kernel of an idea, figuring out how to make it, what it needs, what's the format and executing it all the way up to launch and continued production. And I think that I saw what Pineapple Street was doing. I respect Jenna and Max from Pineapple Street so much. Gretta Cohn:And it felt like the right model, essentially doing what film production companies do or in a way kind of like what advertising agencies do. You have clients, your clients have a story that they want to tell and as a production company, you figure out how to tell it and how to tell it really well. And I think that for me, having a focus on craft was really important quality over quantity and taking the time to really figure out creatively, what does something need was how I stepped into it. Chris Erwin:Clearly as the industry is growing, in terms of more audio listenership, more brands wanting to figure out the space and still early, I think in 2019, the ad market for audio was like 750 million. So you started the company is like two to three years before that, when you look at the total advertising landscape, which is like over, I think, 600 billion globally. But brands are leaning in, they want to figure it out and you have a knack for audio storytelling, and then you commit. And so who are some of the early clients you work with? I think they were Walmart and Spotify. And what did those first early projects look like and had you had experience working with brands before? Or was it like, "All right, I have a skillset, but I kind of got to figure this out on the fly too."? Gretta Cohn:So it was Walmart, Spotify and TED I think were the three sort of major clients at the very beginning. I hadn't worked directly with brands. I understood working with other media institutions. I understood working with hosts. I also understood developing new shows because that's what my team did at Midroll, Stitcher, Earwolf. Before I left, an entire year of just coming up with ideas and piloting them and throwing them at the wall and kind of running them through PNLs and doing all of that. And so I understood all of that. So we have worked directly with brands, but with Walmart, it was running through an advertising agency full of really great creative people and so we were interfacing more with them. And I think that I learned through them a little bit more about how to work with a client like Walmart. Gretta Cohn:But I think also that everyone we were working with at that time was also trying to figure it out for themselves in a brand new way. So we've now been working with TED for over three and a half years, but at the time the show that we developed with them, WorkLife with Adam Grant, I think was their first sort of step into the sort of slate of podcasts that they have now. They had TED talks daily. It was sort of concurrently like I know what the steps to take and the people that I am making these podcasts for don't, they've never done it. And so I think I learned a lot in those first few projects about how to deliver, how to communicate what we're doing clearly. But it's not like I hadn't already done that before. Like I had the skills, it's just was like refining them and putting them into this really particular box. Chris Erwin:Yeah, just a little bit of a different application. Makes sense. Gretta Cohn:Yeah, exactly. Chris Erwin:When we were talking about having to build a development team at Midroll and Earwolf that you said that you had like a unique sense of how to identify good people. So then you start building your own team at Transmitter and it seems that you've built a pretty special team there. So what was your, like when you think about, if I need great people to make Transmitter a success, what type of people were you looking for and what has like your culture become at your company? Gretta Cohn:I love my team so much. I agree. I agree I think they're really special. I think independent thinkers, people who have a really unique creative spark, people who surprise me. Right. I think that what I learned in doing all this interviews at Midroll was like, I prepare a lot for interviews, kind of much like you prepared for this. I would do deep dives. I would listen to a lot of work from the people who were coming into... had applied for the roles. I also like over the years, there are certain producers who I'll just kind of keep in touch with, or follow their work and be excited by their work and hope that one day they might like to come work at Transmitter. And so I also am really keen on people who have a collaborative spirit. So an independent thinker who's down to collaborate, who doesn't necessarily need to put their fingerprints all over everything and it's like cool if their fingerprints kind of merge with other people's fingerprints and we've got this really sort of group dynamic where we're really, everyone is contributing towards something. Gretta Cohn:And people own projects, people own stories, people own episodes, but ultimately, I think that we have a very collaborative team environment. And we're also a group of people who like to celebrate our successes, even like the teeniest tiniest ones. And so we spend a lot of time like talking about the things that go well and I think that creates a lot of pride in work. And I'm interested in working with people who have that same sense of craft as I do. It's not necessarily about perfection, but it's about doing really good work, making something sound as good as it can possibly be. We have an episode that on Monday I got an email about, saying, "This is in its final edit. I'm not looking for any big edit changes. I'm only looking for a notes on music." And I listened to it and I was like, "Ah." Chris Erwin:Is this from a client? Gretta Cohn:"How did they get editorial note?" Chris Erwin:Yeah, was this a client email or internal? Gretta Cohn:No, it's internal. I have a big editorial note and here's why, and I know that you thought you were almost done, but it's going to be so much better because of this. And typically as a group, we come to that agreement very quickly that it's going to be better and our goal is to make work that sounds very, very good. Chris Erwin:I think that's how you build a great company and also become successful and are fulfilled in that. Like yesterday's win or yesterday's excellence is today's baseline and you just keep upping the threshold. My team calls me out for doing that all the time, but I always say, "Yeah, I hired you guys because men and women, you're incredible and I'm going to hold you big." And that makes for a fun work environment. And it's all in our mutual best interests. So I like hearing you say that Gretta and you just talked about celebrating wins often. What is like a recent win that you guys celebrated, big or small? Gretta Cohn:I mean, earlier today we recorded an interview where the host was in a studio in DC, our guests was in her home under a blanket fort in New Jersey. We had a little bit of a technical mishap before it started. One of the newer producers on our team was managing that. And I know that that could have been a situation where she got so stressed out that she could have been paralyzed by the overwhelming sort of urgency of overcoming this technical mishap, but she was calm and she kept us informed of what she was doing and she figured it out and the interview started late and it went long, but that was fine. And you got to give someone a thumbs up for that. Like that was hard and you figured it out. Gretta Cohn:And another recent win is we are about to launch season two of our podcast, Rebel Eaters Club and we have a promotions team working for us this time, we're making new artwork and we've got the episodes of the season in production. It's just exciting for me when all the pieces start to come together and we're like a month away from launch and it's not done and it will get done. But right now it's just this like ball of energy and that feels very exciting. Chris Erwin:This is your first owned and operated podcast where- Gretta Cohn:Yes. Chris Erwin:... your business has helped create audio stories for a variety of different brands and marketers and publishers and now you're investing in your own IP, which is really exciting. And so what is the general concept of Rebel Eaters Club for people who want to check it out? Gretta Cohn:Rebel Eaters Club is a podcast about breaking up with diet culture. Chris Erwin:Ooh. Gretta Cohn:Yeah. Our host is, her name is Virgie Tovar, and she's sort of one of the leading voices on breaking up with diet culture because it's extremely harmful. It is a huge industry. It's a debilitating thing that is, fat discrimination is something that's like not very often discussed, but such a huge sort of point of discrimination in our culture. And I have learned so much from this podcast, it's funny, it's a weird,

The boys cover their second album from the early aughts - Rilo Kiley's 2004 indie rock gem,  "More Adventurous"! Witness Rob and Nolan make a foolhardy attempt to decipher the lyrics. Spoiler Alert: Nolan passes away!ENJOY music on BandcampSOCIALize on Facebook or InstagramSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/thepapershakers)

In the latest episode of Columbia House Party, hosts Jake Goldsbie and Blake Murphy make Conor Oberst the third member of the CHP two-time subject club, exploring Bright Eyes' 2002 album Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground. Find out more about Saddle Creek's epic early-2000s run as a label, why the hosts think Bright Eyes was so influential as a thread between folk eras despite often being classified as emo, and what we expect to hear from Bright Eyes' new album Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was on this week's podcast.Come join the Patreon family for bonus episodes, mailbags, show notes and even more goodness: https://www.patreon.com/columbiahouseparty Follow @ColumbiaHP on Twitter! While you're there say hello to @BlakeMurphyODC and @JGoldsbie. If merch is your thing, be sure to check out the store: http://bit.ly/chpmerch Or reach out to the show and say hey: podcast@columbiahouseparty.com If you enjoyed today's show, please rate Columbia House Party 5-Stars on Apple Podcasts.See you next week for an all new episode of CHP.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4114831/advertisement

Frances Quinlan - Rare Thing - from the 2020 album Likewise on Saddle Creek.Support the show: https://www.kexp.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stef Chura - Method Man - from the 2019 album Midnight on Saddle Creek.Support the show: https://www.kexp.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hand Habits - placeholder - from the 2019 album placeholder on Saddle Creek.Support the show: https://www.kexp.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Adrianne Lenker - symbol - from the 2018 album abysskiss on Saddle Creek.Support the show: https://www.kexp.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tomberlin - Any Other Way - from the 2018 album At Weddings on Saddle Creek.Support the show: https://www.kexp.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Black Belt Eagle Scout - Soft Stud - from the 2018 album Mother Of My Children on Saddle Creek.Support the show: https://www.kexp.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.