Showcase Show Showcase: The Plan

An Interview with Barrett Golding

Barrett Golding has been making radio happen for a quarter-century. He's the creator of HearingVoices, an unorthodox consortium of radio producers that has become one of the most successful radio production groups around, with works often airing on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and many other programs.
HearingVoices also happens to be popular with stations using PRX and, as a result, is the winner of a 2005 PRX Zeitfunk Award for Most Licensed Piece.
These days, thanks to support from the PRX Showcase Show Project, Barrett spends some of his time producing the excellent showcase show The Plan at KGLT in Montana.

PRX:
How did The Plan all come together?

Barrett:
Because I've been a DJ for a while, I know these songs that kind of work together, and some of the songs are spoken word based, like samples, and some of them aren't really songs, they are pieces like what would be on PRX.
Several of us have been playing this sort of stuff together on the local radio station for years now. We've had spoken word elements in the middle of the music shows. When the opportunity came along to create The Plan I thought it would be really nice to focus on that kind of show for just a half-hour, not really too much. Pieces you might hear on PRX with bands that use a lot of sampled voice like Lemon Jelly, The Books, bands like that. Some electronica, some experimental music.
A lot of people that are working with the spoken word in various ways that may sound different if you listened to them separately, but when you mix them together like a DJ would in a set of songs. I think they work well, and need a lot less explanation than you hear on, for instance, public radio, where a thirty minute show might have a one minute intro and tell you everything that you could possibly need to know and what the host was doing that day, and all kinds of extraneous stuff.

I put it together like a DJ would put it on a set. You don't say a lot, you only say what's needed. Maybe at the end you'd back-announce what kind of credits the people who did the works need, but that's about it. I try to keep it minimal.

PRX:
So The Plan is bookended by music shows (on KGLT)?

Barrett:
It's right in the middle of one, yeah. There's two of us who mind the store during this, myself and Joseph Verbanac. He's a web guy for AIR, but he's also a local DJ here and we split that show. Both of us, though we play different music, have folded in spoken word, so it's not too shocking to the listener if all of a sudden a half hour of it is spoken word.

PRX:
How do you go about picking themes?

Barrett:
I've been thinking about this for a long time. I probably have twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty already in my head that I know will make half-hours. Just because I've been listening and collecting this stuff for a long time. I hear more PRX-type radio productions than most people, and I also hear more music-based stuff than most people, and specifically within music the spoken word samples and bands that use the spoken word in interesting ways. Bands that use less lyrical approaches and more samples, I guess, there really isn't a term for it. I've begun calling it "Spoken Weird." I think that's the best so far.

PRX:
What's the particular appeal of spoken word-based music for you?

Barrett:
I'm sure my folks probably didn't read to me enough when I was a kid, and so I was permanently crippled, and I spent the rest of my life trying to make up for that. [Chuckle]
Except that they did read to me, so that theory has holes, but no, I don't know. I just love music, and I've been a volunteer DJ for more than twenty-five years at the local college community station, but something hooked me in radio a long time ago. And that's real spoken word based, and when I began to hear musicians using ideas and elements that a radio producer might use, it just grabbed me and didn't let go.

PRX:
You must've flipped when The Books came about.

Barrett:
The Books were a real revelation, because most of the music that I hear is mainly in the electronica realm and the ambient realm, which is fine, but that can get a little tedious, and then it kind of veers towards New Age, which we call up at the station "newage" to rhyme with "sewage." But The Books came from a whole other Americana folk element I started weaving in, and it was just great to hear that.

And then there's other bands. There's a band called Clothesline Revival that uses old Alan Lomax recordings, John and Alan Lomax recordings from the thirties. And they take these raw a capellas, you know, rural black and white folks singing traditional songs and they put a modern instrumentation on it, which has been done before, but it just hasn't been done well until the Clothesline Revival got around to it. I feel those fit in with what I'm doing on The Plan real well too. Anybody who's using sound interestingly, especially sound with the human voice in it.

PRX:
What is the method for how you stitch the individual pieces together?

Barrett:
The method is just like I do it on the air. First of all, what do I think would come next, not even matching themes. But since these are pre-produced in ProTools, I have the added advantage of trying different juxtapositions and I say the theme, the content of what is being spoken is important, but what's more important is how the end of one matches the beginning of another. Does that sound really cool? Again like maybe a DJ on the air, or a club DJ would do to mix well, because once you've made the mix you can go anywhere.

But over the course of the half hour, I do think about things like art and trying to present more than one, how would you say that? You know, an entire perspective on whatever theme that I'm doing, whether it's race or food or whatever, to travel a little bit. So I think about how over the half hour the story is told, too, by all the different pieces in there, but more what really controls it is how two things sound. How the end of one matches the beginning of the next. If that sounds really cool, because if they sound really cool, usually there's content elements that I hadn't even noticed that happen when I hear them together and I think, "Oh, that was nice."

PRX:
It sounds a bit like making a mix tape.

Barrett:
It's a lot like that, except I do it in ProTools, so I get to try it out a lot more than you might when you're making a mix tape, but yeah, it's a lot like that.

PRX:
How much do you listen to before you're able to fill a whole half hour?

Barrett:
I, right now, don't have that issue. I've been keeping notes for a while, because we also do the HearingVoices specials, and some of the themes in the specials overlap the themes that I might use it in The Plan, so I've been kind of keeping notes, so I have ten or fifteen plans that have just come from specials that haven't happened yet. And then I have another in my head, and even wrote some of it down, of things that go together. The last couple of years, actually this has been in my head, and so I've been keeping a little, just jotting down songs so I don't forget them, because a lot of times there could be just one song on the album that's spoken word based, and I didn't want to forget that, and so I write it down. And boy, I must, I don't have a problem right now, I can go most of this year without really having to drum up much material. Occasionally, there's a theme that I really like, one I'm working on is called Grandma, because I really like Jake Warga's grandma piece, and I know there's a few out there, and I'm not quite at a half-hour, so I've just been keeping my ears open and that has been filled up to a half-hour, I haven't made that piece yet.

So there are a few, not themes, but pieces, I really want to get on there. So I think of a theme that that would work for, and wait around until that fills up. And they have almost all filled up. There's another one, Arabs or Middle-Eastern people speaking, and that's not quite yet full, but I think, again, if I just wait long enough, all I need is a couple of more pieces and that will fill up. Most of them are already over-full. I'm doing one on trains, and I've realized I have more than two half-hours on trains. [Chuckle]

PRX:
Might be time to break out the hour-long special, huh?

Barrett:
Yeah, maybe one day. Half-hour is a nice bite for the listener, it's a nice bite for me, in that it's really easy, it's not as much of a commitment as an hour would be. There's maybe not as much pressure to create a holistic view of a theme in a half-hour that an hour might have.
Right now, people think that half-hours are not suited for the radio because program directors want hours, and that certainly seems to be true, but I think it took on a momentum of its own and now because people believe that they only create hours. But I think, and I'm usually wrong at predicting things, so this is probably wrong, but I do think there'll come a time where half-hours will come back and people will want them. They'll probably match two half-hours, but Theory of Everything is a half-hour, so is Kate Sullivan's Pop Vultures. People coming from, not immersed in the public radio realm made that choice, and I think others will too, and eventually public radio will probably find a lot more places for half-hours.

I believe that the current thought of an hour being the most viable format is true in part because of how long we've believed that. Eventually, stations will begin to use half-hours as soon as they realize that there's enough half-hours that they can easily group.
One of the main problems now is that they do in fact prefer to program in hour slots, and a half-hour doesn't fill that so they have to find another. And so there aren't that many half-hours out there, but there are lots and lots of hours. But that's just because so long, we've believed that the hour format is really the only one that our stations can use. At that point, there were tons and tons of half-hours out there and the research indicated quite rightly that hour was the better format for stations.
I don't think that's true now. I think that because of things like PRX and the web, and the new Content Depot, they pick and choose things are going to be a lot easier for stations. In fact I know that, I've talked to a lot of stations. Not specifically about the half-hour idea, but about how they make their choices and I can see a lot of room for stations, kind of like I pick pieces to make a half-hour, they are going to pick half-hours to make an hour, and feel real good about the mix they've created. When the half-hours are out there, enough choices are out there.

PRX:
I don't want to just drop this on you, but you got a review from PRX Editorial Steve Yasko...

Barrett:
Yeah, I saw that.

PRX:
This was from a review of the Elvis episode of The Plan: "For the most part we hear a lot segments that alternate between the sincere and the exploitative. I just kind of felt that the piece did not treat the Elvis impersonators with dignity."

I want to ask you, why are you exploiting Elvis impersonators?

Barrett:
Because they are the lowest of the low, and really they should be exterminated, and I guess I didn't go far enough in making that point. They have no dignity.

[Chuckle] No, I'm just kidding. I don't think about it like that, and I'm surprised to see that from Steve, because he is a music station, and I'm thinking about The Plan mainly for music stations. If you decide to pursue a theme in a music set, you don't think, "Oh, am I covering all bases?" Or, you know, "Have I presented this point of view?" You just put things together that happen to be on the same thing, that sound kind of cool together. And I hate to be so simplistic, but I am a simple person, and that's what I do. I think most of them create a whole, and particularly in the "Elvis", boy we really went some places. That was the "Kronos Quartet", which is one of the most respected chamber quartets, a string quartet using Elvis impersonators. So I just chose to play that, because it happened to match my theme, and I liked the piece. I just use things I like, I just see if they go together, I don't think a lot about the whole unless I have a lot of options to choose from. I am more worried about, "Does this flow sonically, " than thematically. So he's right, yeah, I didn't give two thoughts to presenting any kind of statement or portrayal, I just chose pieces about Elvis that I think are really cool, whether it's a documentary like, I believe it was Adam Allington that made the cop who does Elvis impersonations, or the Kronos Quartet doing something on Elvis with Elvis impersonators.

And it just so happens that Elvis, you know, that last piece I just love, and it's this wild-ass bootleg recording of Elvis just going off on a reviewer on stage. That's just a little bit of truth that I have, whether I like Elvis or not, that's not why I do the show. I do the show, because I like all the pieces and they happen to be about Elvis, and they sound really cool together in a half-hour.

PRX:
How many pieces do you think are in your brain? How many have you listened to over the years?

Barrett:
Oh, jeez, I've never thought of that, and that really triggered a bad synapse [Chuckle]. Yeah, I don't want to think about that. That's not good for me, that's unhealthy. I'd rather focus on, you know, maybe that's why I develop these themes, to pretend that it's some discrete amount that my mind can handle. No, I don't want to think about that.

PRX:
Steve also mentioned in his review of the Elvis show that "the anger and cuss words at the end are bit over the top and quite frankly, a turn off. That ads to the overall atmosphere of disrespect for the subject." What's your take on swears on air?

Barrett:
Well, that was Elvis cussing, I have no, actually when he was alive, and especially now that he's dead, I don't really have much control over what he says, and the musician who chose to use that is called Go Home Productions, and he's a mash up artist where he puts two things together. Usually it's two songs, but in this case it was a recording from Elvis' live stage over an old, kind of '80s band called "The Farm", kind of a rocking thing. And that's just what Elvis said, and I find it incredibly humorous, and I think anyone who listens to it will be shocked, and awed, and driven to laughter and tears, because it's a hell of a piece of tape, and I'm just glad to let other people hear this thing, because that's who he is. Among other things, that's just one factor of who he was. Maybe he was on drugs, maybe he wasn't. But it's an interesting piece of tape no matter who said it, but since Elvis said it, and I was doing an Elvis show, I thought it was on the perfect side. I guess I disagree with Steve.

As to cuss-words in general, my station is lucky. I like to tell people there are two-hundred-and-forty-thousand words in a large dictionary, my manager only restricts us to one. The f-word is the one we can't use. He really doesn't mind if we use the others and there's no case-law yet that demonstrates that the use of the others is inappropriate, and so we just go with that. We just don't use anything but that. I think even in these I've taken out "s**t."

It's just so easy for me to do a quick fade, and hear what is said, I started this in the HearingVoices specials. Rather than to put out two versions or forget that there's a "s**t" in there, I do a quick fade, and it's really not hard to understand that the word was "s**t", but the word "s**t" is not in there. It's just an "s" and a bit of a "t" at the end. And within the context, so everyone gets everything, I don't have to do anything twice, and nobody's offended. And yeah, Elvis in fact, it's kind of funny, because Elvis does not swear in that thing. But Steve says there are no cuss-words? Hey, not at all. He just, you know, I think maybe "son of a bitch, " he says, which I don't consider a cuss-word. "Damn son of a bitch." Yeah, I don't worry about that.

Now, I don't think the DJ or myself as host should say any of that. I really would object to that, because we can control that, and that's one way to put a limit on how much the FCC is going to get down on us, because they have plenty of reasons to look closely at what college and community radio are doing. So, I don't see any reason that the DJ needs to give them a reason, but if it's within a piece, you know, a music piece, and it doesn't say "f**k," hell, it's fine with me. It's fine with our listeners. But again, I've taken to cut out "s**t" because of HearingVoices, which is a more sensitive audience, you know, the PDs are, well, you know... a wide variety of PDs pick up the HearingVoices special, whereas The Plan is... people who are going to pick The Plan are a little more adventurous crowd, I think.

PRX:
What's the general reaction been to The Plan?

Barrett:
I haven't got much. I've asked a couple to tell me how they folded in, you know, PDs don't get a lot of listener email, they say, "Oh, it sounded great." Which is nice to hear, but not helpful, because I've always suspected that being a producer for so long, and now I'm a producer of a series, and a producer of a series that directly markets to the PD, well through our marketing firm, again that's the HearingVoices specials, not The Plan, which I just put up on PRX, but I think there's things stations know that we producers need to know. Unfortunately, the stations don't know exactly what it is that they know, so we just need to kind of feel around, asking questions when we're traveling. Talk to them, email them, say, "Hey, how's that work for ya'?" and kind of decipher.

You know, this is particularly important with The Plan, because I feel no need to, unlike HearingVoices specials -- I hope it's not a problem that I keep going back to that. I mean, I learned a lot from distributing that -- there I am very willing to adapt that to station needs, because I am producing that very much for the stations. The Plan, on the other hand, I believe is driven by a future public radio that doesn't quite exist yet. And I think it will have room there, and everybody will get it, except for a large part of the people who are currently public radio listeners, and maybe even PDs. But there's a whole other audience out there that doesn't like commercial news, you know, commercial radio. But also isn't very taken by public radio, maybe they listen to the news, but they get a little bored. I know I do.

Unless The Plan pieces are topical, most of them haven't gotten picked up. The topical ones have only gotten picked up by four or five stations. I do absolutely no marketing. I think that if this is going to be a real series later, I'll know a year later. Kind of taking the Car Talk, This American Life approach, and let this thing develop. Because I'm making mistakes that I can't possibly know right now, and PDs probably don't know what they are. Again, I think they, if I could quiz them enough, if they've heard enough of these we'll be able to figure out what they are, but they're not known yet. Chinks need to be worked out, so it's not really a national series, so I don't have to worry, I just do what I do for KGLT, and I've done that a while and the listeners like it.

But if other stations take it, that's just because a place called PRX exists, and it's easy for them to do so. And it's easy for me to offer it to them without really marketing it, I just upload. [Chuckle] So this whole other element, I just got a check from PRX! We've been giving the HearingVoices specials away for free, because we want carriage, that's really what we want. So that we can go to funders and say, "Hey, look, this is how many stations take it," and if we charge, we get less stations. At this point, I think we're still building it.

I don't give away The Plan for free, because PRX gave me a grant, but still it costs me a lot of time above and beyond that, and buying CDs because not all of these CDs that come into the station. So I do charge for that, or you know, I have a standard PRX charge. And I got a check for a few hundred bucks! This thing's only been on the air for a couple of months, and most of that, some of it's stories by HearingVoices producers, but most of it is The Plan money.

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